“He saved my life,” she said from beside him. She’d wrapped her arm in his, but every time he moved, her incorporeal limb slipped through. She linked her arm again and continued. “About a year ago. I’d… had a rough night.” She brushed her fingertips over her right cheek, giving me the impression her rough night involved at least one punch to her face.
My emotions did a one-eighty. My chest tightened. I fought the concern edging to the surface. Tamped it down. Ignored it the best that I could.
“I’d been roughed up pretty bad,” she said, oblivious to my disinterest. “He came to the hospital to take my statement. A detective. A detective had come to see me. To ask me questions. I figured I’d be lucky to get a patrol officer, considering… considering my lifestyle.”
“Here you go, hon,” Mr. P said, passing me a twenty. He folded up the rest of his bills and pocketed them as I punched a few buttons on the cash register, then began pulling out his change.
“It was the way he talked to me. Like I was somebody. Like I mattered, you know?”
I closed my eyes and swallowed. I did know. I had become acutely aware of the nuances of human behavior and the effect it had on those around them. The smallest act of kindness went a long way in my world. And there I was. Ignoring her.
“I cleaned up after that. Got a real job.”
She’d probably been ignored her whole life.
She laughed to herself softly. “Not a real job like yours. I started stripping. The place was a dive, but it got me off the streets, and the tips were pretty good. I could finally put my son in a private school. A cheap private school, but a private school nonetheless. This man just —” She stopped and gazed at him with that loving expression she’d had since she’d popped in. “He just treated me real nice.”
My breath hitched, and I swallowed again. When I tried to hand Mr. P his change, he shook his head.
“You keep it, hon.”
I blinked back to him. “You had coffee and ate two bites of your breakfast,” I said, surprised.
“Best cup I’ve had all morning. And they were big bites.”
“You gave me a twenty.”
“Smallest bill I had,” he said defensively, lying through his teeth.
I pressed my mouth together. “I saw several singles in that stash of yours.”
“I can’t give you those. I’m hitting the strip club later.” When I laughed, he leaned in and asked, “Want to join me? You’d make a killing.”
“Oh, honey, he’s right,” the stripper said, nodding in complete seriousness.
I let a smile sneak across my face. “I think I’ll stick to waiting tables.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, his grin infectious.
“See you tomorrow?”
“Yes, you will. If not sooner.”
He started toward the exit, but the stripper stayed behind. “See what I mean?”
Since no one was paying attention, I finally talked to her. Or, well, whispered. “I do.”
“My son is with his grandma now, but guess where he’s going to school.”
“Where?” I asked, intrigued.
“That private school, thanks to Detective Bernard Pettigrew.”
My jaw dropped a little. “He’s paying for your son to go to school?”
She nodded, gratitude shimmering in her eyes. “Nobody knows. My mama doesn’t even know. But he’s paying for my son’s schooling.”
The tightness around my heart increased threefold as she wiggled her fingers and hurried after him, her high heels eerily silent on the tile floor.
I watched her go, giving Mr. P one last glance before he turned the corner, wondering for the thousandth time if I should tell him about the demon coiled inside his chest.
2
Alex, I’ll take The Slightly Less Traumatic Life for $400.
—JEOPARDY! CONTESTANT
It was thick and shiny and dark, the creature inside Mr. P, with razor-sharp teeth and claws that could rip through a chest in a microsecond. A niggling of recognition tingled at the back of my neck. I’d seen something similar before, but I didn’t know what it was. Not really. I only called it a demon for lack of a better explanation. What else would enter a human body and lie dormant? As though waiting to be awakened? As though waiting for its call to arms? And what would happen to Mr. P when that call came through? My only reference was the fact that I knew, probably from movies or literature, that demons could possess people.
Mr. P didn’t seem particularly possessed. Then again, how would I know? Maybe demons were really smart and knew how to behave themselves in the human world. But the one inside Mr. P seemed to be sleeping. It lay coiled around his heart, its spine undulating, flexing every so often as though stretching. And I thought tapeworms were horrifying.
I checked on Cookie’s customers, explained that anytime a patron is accosted in the Firelight Grill, their lunch is on the house, then went to check on her. But not before one last scan of the area outside. The billowing clouds from the otherworld, as I called the second dimension, were roiling and churning. A storm was coming, another one like the night I woke up, all fierce and savage, but that wasn’t what I was looking for.
As pathetic as it sounded, I was looking for tall, dark, and deadly. Another force that was fierce and savage. He came in every morning for breakfast as well as every day for lunch. And, apparently, for dinner as well. Every time I’d come to the café in the evening – because I had no life – he was here, too. A bona fide three-meal-a-dayer.
We had several three-meal-a-dayers, actually, and we had some drop-dead lookers in the bunch, but the regular I both feared and salivated to see was named Reyes Farrow. I only knew that because Cookie ran his card one day and I peeked at the name on it. Where others exuded aggression, deception, and insecurity, he literally dripped confidence, sex, and power. Mostly sex.
Admiration was not my immediate reaction to him, however. The first time I saw him and realized he was something else, something dark and powerful and about as human as a fruit basket, I fought the urge to make my fingers into a cross and say, “I think you’re at the wrong address, buddy. You’re looking for 666 Highway to Hell Avenue. It’s a little farther south.”
Thankfully, I didn’t, because in the very next instant, when my gaze wandered up his lean hips, over his wide shoulders, and landed on his face, I was dumbstruck by his unusual beauty. Then I was all, “I think you’re at the wrong address, buddy. You’re looking for 1707 Howard Street. It’s two blocks over. Key’s under the rock. Clothing is optional.”
Thankfully, I didn’t do that either. I tried not to give out my address, as a rule. But he had a prowess about him, a feral bearing that tugged at my insides any time he was near. I kept my distance. Mostly because he was bathed in fire and a billowing darkness. The kind that sent tiny shudders of unease through my body. The kind that kept me from getting too close for fear of being burned alive.
Of course, it helped that he never sat in my section. Ever. Probably a good thing, but I was starting to get a complex.
He hadn’t come in that morning, though, and that fact had me a little more down than usual. Tormenting Cookie would lift my spirits. It always did.
I spotted Kevin, one of our busboys, through the pass-out window and asked if he could keep an eye on things for me while I took five. He waved, his mouth full of Sumi’s incredible banana pancakes, then went back to his phone.