Devil May Care Read online

I took the time to give her a once over, starting with the Fifties saddle shoes, past the overly thin knees, to her navy blue skirt and her baby pink twinset. If it weren’t for the big hazel eyes and the shiny blond hair hanging down to her waist I’d completely dismiss her. Then again, I knew for a fact that a pair of big eyes and blond hair could get you past a lot of fashion sins. Not nearly as many as big breasts and a killer ass could, but that was beside the point.

  She froze at the sight of me, her eyes wide. She pulled her arm away from Matt’s grasp and I could tell that she was trying her hardest not to gasp and bolt. Not like she’d get very far with Matt standing behind her, blocking her escape, but that healthy survival instinct was there, nevertheless.

  “I didn’t know you had guests over.” She swallowed and I could see sweat beading out over her forehead.

  “He doesn’t.” I gave her a tight smile, bringing my arms up to cover my breasts inside their blanket cocoon. “I live here.”

  “You moved a woman in with you?” she asked, her voice faltering. She tugged at her skirt and glanced at me again, then shuffled her feet and crossed her arms. I wasn’t sure if she was hugging herself to keep from panicking, or if she was trying the old makeshift cleavage routine. I sort of hoped it was the panic—the push-up bra arms never worked.

  “No,” I said slowly. “Nobody moved me in anywhere. This is my place.”

  “Your place?” Her voice had gone high-pitched and sort of squeaky as she moved into the living room and sat down.

  “Matt lives across the hall.” I stood and moved over to the love seat to grab my clothes, trying to figure out the best way to slip them on without exposing more of myself than necessary. I didn’t want to leave the two of them alone together but at the same time I was pretty sure this was one of those situations where a shirt might be helpful in diffusing the tension. “I’m Faith.”

  “Faith?” She swallowed and glanced toward the door again. Damn this was awkward. Talk about a time to be underdressed.

  “If you’ll excuse me for a second?” I jerked my thumb toward the hall and gave her a quick smile, trying for a sort of nonverbal these things happen attitude. Before anyone could say anything else I hurried out of the room and down the hall toward my bedroom, silently cursing my inability to have clothes on at the worst of all possible times.

  I closed the door of my bedroom and leaned back against it, trying to get my bearings. Matt had told me that their relationship had been all in his mother’s head and that Brenda didn’t want him any more than he wanted her, but who said he had the whole story? Girls lie about being okay with the just friends bit all the time. That doesn’t mean we’re ever okay with it.

  Either way, when it came to dealing with your lover’s exes it was always best to follow my sister Hope’s Number One Rule of Demonhood: keep your rivals close enough to bludgeon to death and make sure your girlfriends were on speed dial to help get rid of the body. Lucky me, my best friend was still my roommate for a few more days.

  I slipped on my clothes as quickly as possible and ran shaky fingers through my hair, trying to make it look like less of a rat’s nest. Why was it that I could never have good bedhead after sex? No, I had “recently attacked by a ravaging badger” hair. Oh well, my hair was going to have to wait; they’d been out there alone together long enough.

  I hurried into the living room, trying to act put together and unconcerned, while still feeling back off, bitch at the same time. “Okay.” I stuck my hand out toward Brenda. “Let’s try this again. I’m Faith Bettincourt. Matt’s landlord, neighbor, and more demonic half.”

  “You’re a demon?”

  “Um, yeah.” I didn’t want to ignore the obviously demonic elephant in the middle of the room so I let my horns curl up slightly.

  “Oh my goodness.” She fondled the silver crucifix hanging from her neck. Amateur. Next she was going to get out the holy water.

  “Those don’t bother me.” I motioned to her necklace. “I won’t burst into flames or anything at the sight of it.”

  “Oh.” She swallowed. “That’s good. I think. I’d always heard that demons cower at the sight of the true God and that’s why you would never wear religious symbols. The touch of a holy object causes you unendurable suffering.”

  “Nope, sorry.”

  “Well.” Matt looked between the two of us. “If we’re done with the formalities, can I ask the obvious question?”

  “What exactly is in tofu that makes it so spongy?” I smiled at him and hoped it would break the tension.

  But he ignored me and turned to face the other woman. “Brenda, how in the name of Heaven and Hell combined did you find me?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I didn’t come looking for you if that’s what you’re worried about.” She looked…guilty was the best word I could think of to use. Not I’m Hiding Something From You guilty. More like I’m Embarrassed and Did Something Stupid guilty. I knew that guilty pretty well. I lived it on an almost day-to-day basis.

  Which meant she was probably telling the truth. I can admit that I wanted her to be lying so that I could turn her into a ruffle covered throw pillow and donate her to a nursing home for fat old ladies to sit on, but she wasn’t. She was an honest to Alpha refugee from the Angale so I had to muzzle the crazy girlfriend part of my brain that was advocating kicking my lover’s sort-of-ex to the curb to be eaten by lesser demons and be nice. She was alone and scared and I couldn’t let her almost-past with Matt keep me from helping her. Besides, I sort of had to respect her for walking her ass out of an angelic army’s version of Crazy Town.

  “Brenda.” Matt sat beside me, running a hand through his hair. Before he could say anything else I nudged him in the ribs and narrowed my eyes at him in warning. Whatever it was she’d done to land herself on his—my—doorstep, she didn’t need him giving her grief about it now. He gave me an annoyed look and I raised an eyebrow at him in a silent signal to lighten up already. He shook his head and tried to plaster a smile on his face. It didn’t help. “What happened?”

  “It’s not fair.” Brenda pointed at him, her eyes glowing a brilliant gold that was almost identical to Matt’s when he was channeling angelic power. “You just left. You and Tony both did. Then Levi. You decide that the life we live isn’t enough and you took off, leaving the rest of us behind to deal with…things.”

  “By ‘things’ you mean Matt’s mom?” I hoped to make him realize he wasn’t the only one the lunatic tormented. I had some experience with bullies—I’d grown up with Hope and Tolliver for older siblings—and if Brenda had bolted to get free of Matt’s mom I could sympathize. No matter how much the jealous bitchy part of me said otherwise.

  “Not just her.” Brenda twisted her fingers together in her lap. “Everyone at home kept staring at me and pointing. Whispering behind my back. Talking about how I wasn’t able to keep you. No one let me forget that I wasn’t enough to make you happy.”

  “So you’re here and it’s my fault?” Matt frowned first at Brenda and then at me, his shoulders tense.

  “You and Tony—neither one of you even thought that I might hate it there as much as you did!” Brenda pointed at him. “You didn’t care that when you left it would be a scandal and I’d be the one who was blamed.”

  “Brenda, I thought we’d discussed this.” Matt reached for her hand. “It wasn’t you, it was me.”

  “Well, why shouldn’t it be me?” She jerked out of his grasp. “Why should it only be the men who get to flee your mother’s wrath? Who says I can’t make my own decisions? I’ll be punished the same for my crimes. Your mother will assign me to hard labor like she would any man. So, if I’m going to take the same punishment, why is it okay for you to risk yourself for a better life but I can’t?”

  Oh shit. Apparently, Miss Arranged-Marriage had decided to buck the gender roles that the Angale had developed and gone rogue. Even with her unfortunate sweater set and headband combination, I had to admire her take-charge attitude.

>   “So you ran off?” Matt asked, his voice sharp and his eyes blazing. “Then you went straight to Tony?”

  “Where else was I supposed to go?” She threw her hands in the air and I could smell the waves of anger coming off of her like super sugary taffy with just a hint of cold syrup. Not the healthiest anger I’d ever smelled but considering her upbringing I wasn’t surprised to find that her anger had a nice dose of emotional repression mixed in. “What would you have me do? I had nothing but the clothes on my back and some money I managed to snatch from the church office before I ran. I couldn’t survive alone.”

  “When you take off you’re supposed to stay low for at least six months. Contact no one. Didn’t Tony tell you that before you hatched this harebrained scheme?” Matt leaned forward so they were almost nose to nose.

  I slapped his arm lightly. The girl was alone, scared, and had most likely gotten her older brother caught up in something bigger than all of us. The Angale were not the type to handle dissention within the ranks by their foot soldiers with any semblance of grace. They were hardcore, in their own angelic army sort of way, and they didn’t tolerate opposing viewpoints. They also had access to explosives and were willing to use them. Matt’s brother Levi had gone on a car-bombing spree last month that had destroyed Matt’s car and, more importantly, my Dad’s Lamborghini.

  “I didn’t tell Tony what I was doing. I saw a chance and I ran for it. The wall between our realm and the mortal world surrounding us was thin. No one was around. So I snatched what cash I could and ran. No one even noticed.” The cold calculation in her eyes still gleamed, even as she tried her best to look weak and girly for him.

  “What did you do next?” I asked.

  “I ran all the way to Biloxi and found a bus station. I knew Tony was here in Pittsburgh because of the little clues he dropped when he called to talk to me and Mom. So I bought a ticket to here and then I spent all but twenty bucks on bus tickets for other people, just to throw your mother and the rest of her soldiers off my scent if they come looking for me.”

  I frowned. For someone who had run on the spur of the moment she had thought her plan out pretty well. She was never going to be James Bond stealthy or anything, but she wasn’t doing badly for someone who was supposed to be thinking on the fly. “What did you do with the other tickets?”

  “I gave them away to the homeless people at the bus depot. They were all so grateful and it did my heart such good to show them simple Christian charity.” She touched her crucifix again and gave me a smug smile.

  “I’m sure everyone else was bowled over by your generosity as well.” I tried not to think what it would have been like to ride next to some homeless guy and his stench all the way to Detroit. Or even worse, L.A.

  “So you showed up here, and let me guess…” Matt rested his elbows on his knees, dropping his head into his hands and shaking it in disbelief. “You didn’t call your brother from a payphone. Did you?”

  “Why would I do that? It was much simpler to open myself up to the Celestial Powers—”

  “You told them exactly where you were.” Matt abruptly stood, looming over her like one very pissed off parental unit. I knew that look—I’d been on the receiving end of it for a good portion of my adolescence. “You put yourself and your brother in danger. You’ve put me and Faith in danger, along with her family.”

  “Her family?” Brenda looked at me, her eyes filled with curiosity. “How have I endangered the denizens of Hell? Unless you have a portal here the Angale can’t access the Kingdom of Darkness.”

  “Her sister and brother both live in this building. Her parents—well, it doesn’t matter where her parents live—but it’s closer than the Grey Lands. You’ve brought the Angale down on all of us and put them at risk. You have to go.” Matt turned so that he almost completely blocked me from sight.

  “Matt.” I tapped his hip, motioning for him to quit hiding me behind his back like a pilfered cupcake until he stepped aside. “You’re over-exaggerating.”

  “I am not. She only came here to tell us because her brother is missing and she needs a place to stay.” His eyes were filled with anger and more than a little fear. “She’s put us at risk. You’re at risk.”

  “Tony isn’t missing.” Brenda slumped back in her seat. “He’s on the run. For all I know it could be panic on his part. No one from the Angale has contacted us. But when he saw me at the door last night he flipped out. I need someone to help me. To take care of me. I had no choice but to come here.”

  “What did Tony do when he saw you at the door? I mean besides panic.” Matt sat beside me, wrapping an arm around my shoulder.

  “He invited me in and let me sleep in his room, but when I woke up this morning he was gone. He left a note on the kitchen table that said he’d paid the rent for the month but he wasn’t coming back.”

  Her brother sounded like a gem. I tried not to roll my eyes.

  “Sounds like he overreacted,” I said. “Like some other male Angale we all know.”

  “He was playing it safe.” Matt scowled at me. “If my mother knows where Brenda is she’ll come after us. She’ll run all of us to ground. There will be nowhere to run, nowhere to escape to once she’s here.”

  “But she can’t find you here, you said so yourself. No one thinks a nephilim is crazy enough to live in a building infested with demons. It would be suicidal. We’re one big black power signature that masks all your little efforts at goodness and light. A demonic smog cover.”

  “No offense, but if one barely legal second-tier nephilim can find me this quickly then we’re all exposed,” he said. “And you’re not really smog…more like a light haze of air pollution.”

  I gave him a smile and tried to ignore the way my tummy rumbled at his praise. Now was really not the time.

  “I didn’t track you from your power. I got your address off Tony’s computer monitor.” Brenda shrugged. “It was on a Post-It note about where to forward your mail. It had your name, address, phone number, and email on it. Then I got on the Internet and looked up the bus schedule. You’re only five stops apart on the same bus line. I might have grown up in a compound filled with nephilim, but even an idiot can manage that.”

  “A Post-It note?” Matt rubbed his eyes before pinching the bridge of his nose. “Am I the only person here who takes our security seriously?”

  “Oh quit being so melodramatic.” I nudged him with my shoulder. “She just told you that she can’t find you by tracing your powers. That means, if you’re both here then no one will notice her, either. Think about it. Dad’s already caused four meteorological incidents and they’ve only been living in Pittsburgh two weeks. The trick is for everyone to sit tight until we can find somewhere else for Brenda to start over.”

  “Excuse me?” Brenda asked, her voice high pitched and reedy. “What do you mean somewhere else?”

  Matt shook his head, red patches creeping up his neck toward his face. “You’re out of your mind if you think she’s staying here. She’s going straight back to the bus station. I don’t care where she goes after that.”

  Obviously he was still in the mood to be dramatic about this.

  “Come on, Matt!” I said.

  Brenda had made a mistake. It happened. The last thing she needed was him riding her ass about it while working on his Best Actor in a Melodrama nomination. I mean really, what good was this doing?

  “No.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me up. Giving Brenda a pointed look, he hauled me into the main bathroom and slammed the door. “It is not safe for her to be here. Not safe for us. Not safe for the mortals who live near us. This is a bad idea.”

  “She’s a young woman who’s lost on her own. You told me yourself that people from the compound don’t know how to live in the real world. That’s why only you and her brother have managed to stay rogue in the history of like…forever. We can’t turn her away.”

  “We can’t let her stay.”

  “Why not?”

  “She w
ill lead my mother, and my mother’s army, straight to us. They will come straight here. No stops. No consulting a map. She will find Brenda and there will be nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. No escape.”

  “So you’re saying your mom is like Lisa at a shoe sale looking for the last pair of size-nine stilettos?”

  “Way more dangerous than a shoe sale.” Matt grabbed my shoulders and looked me in the eye, as if that would make me see things his way.

  “You weren’t with Lisa last year at the Black Friday sales.”

  “Faith!”

  “Brenda has to stay in our building. She can sleep on your couch.” I gave him my best “it’s going to be fine” smile. Even though I would much rather send her upstairs to bunk with Hope. And I would if it weren’t for the fact I didn’t trust my sister to not recruit her to the Doing Hope’s Evil Bidding to Skirt the Alpha’s Ban on Hope-Related Mischief cause.

  “Faith, she was the girl I was contracted to marry. You really want her on my couch?”

  “I trust you to do the right thing.” I wrapped my arms around his waist and did my best to swat away the image he’d just put in my mind of the two of them. I was trying to sound like a good, supportive girlfriend, even if he was making that hard for me right now. “You told me yourself that she means nothing to you, so I have no reason to worry.”

  He kissed the top of my head. “It’s much more fun when your partner has a dark and twisted imagination. That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to let my ex-girlfriend sleep on my couch. For all we know she could decide to have her wicked way with me one night when I least expect it.”

  Crap. He was being a loving, supportive guy. He was an angelic being, and evil anywhere but the bedroom made him uncomfortable, so I did my best to minimize my bad deeds. Now I was stuck playing the supportive sweetheart to his ex. Sure she was nice, but that didn’t mean I would be opposed to turning her into an ugly lamp while we tried to find a way to deal with the chaos she might have unleashed.

  “Oh please.” I tried to sound completely okay with the situation. I could be a sweet girl when I wanted to be. The problem was it gave me indigestion. “She’s a tiny thing. A strong wind would knock her over. You could protect yourself from her roving hands if she decided to make a play for you. Besides, can two nephilim have a wicked way with each other? Or is it a good, holy, and entirely church-sanctioned procreation?”