Accidentally Demonic (12 page)

Casey threw her arms around Wanda’s neck and squeezed her hard. “I trust you. And thank you. I’m not sure how I would have handled this if not for you and your—your—”

“Paranormal skillz?” Wanda’s question was muffled against Casey’s shoulder. Gripping her arms, Wanda set her from her and smiled, her white teeth flashing in the deep of the night. “It definitely helps to have someone in the know. Now let’s go find out what’s next and how we can make this manageable.”

Clayton was already at the door when a large, very round man opened it with a wide, gleaming white smile. His multiple chains, or swag, as she’d learned it was called in the holding tank, rested beneath two—no, three chins. He topped Clayton by at least three inches, putting him in at least the six- foot-five range. “Yo, yo, yo, Clayton, my brotha! Whass good?”

Clayton gave him a half smile, shaking his hand and pulling him in hard for a quick shoulder bump. “I think it’s safe to say, not a lot is good right now, my friend. Though, I gotta admit, I’m a little green with envy over the levitation.”

Darnell, clad in a large football jersey and baggy jeans, eyed Casey. “Sho nuff. Ain’t nuthin’ good about what’s gone down. That her?” He pointed a burly finger at Casey, giving her a good, hard stare.

“That’s her. Every floating, fireball-throwing inch of her.”

Oh, label, label, label, why don’t you?

Darnell paused for a long moment, taking a lengthy, squinted look at her. The silence between them pulsed with a life of its own, making Casey pause, too. His scrutiny was done in increments until she was left feeling naked and exposed.

Dramatic.

Out of nowhere, Darnell’s eyes opened wide in terror. He held up two fingers in the sign of a cross, backing away with stuttering steps and emitting a terrified wail so loud, Casey grabbed Wanda’s arm, her fingers digging into the material of her jacket. “She’s the devil! Evil, I say—she’s eviiiiil! Eviiiil! Oh, Lawd Jesus—save yourself!”

Oh, Christ. She
was
the devil. All her worst fears on the ride over confirmed, her stomach gurgled and rolled in protest. It could happen, right? If her sister and her friends could be vampires and werewolves, why couldn’t she be possessed by the devil no matter what Clayton had said? What the hell did he know about demons anyway? He was a vampire. Why would possession be any nuttier than what had already transpired?

A warbled chuckle of laughter followed, deep and resonant, and it came from the black, gaping hole of the entrance to Darnell’s building. When he came back into view, he was doubled over with laughter, placing his hands on his ample belly and wiping tears from his eyes with a thick thumb.

Clayton shook his head like he was indulging a small child’s antics. His eyes glimmered in the dark night and it was obvious from his profile that he fought a grin. “Enough, Darnell. She’s had a tough enough time as it is. I need to get this show on the road. It’s late. So let’s hit it.”

Darnell held the door open for them, sweeping them inside a foyer swathed in deep red with only the dim light from an ornate chandelier to guide their way. “No sweat, man. Let’s get it on. Tell me everything.”

As Casey passed this “way too happy to be a demon,” teddy-bear cuddly, large man, he sniffed her. Her gaze shot to Wanda’s in question as Clayton and Darnell turned to climb a long staircase.

“Smell is very important in my world now, sweetie. I can tell a human from a paranormal, vampire from werewolf, in just a whiff. I’m guessing demons can do the same. C’mon.” Wanda motioned, looking up the staircase with determined eyes. “It’s okay. Well, all right, it’s not totally okay, but it beats not knowing, right? So let’s get it over with.” She held out her hand. Casey took it, fighting her fear and instead focusing on the graffiti that lined the stairwell walls.

Big swirls of loud colors bled into shapes that intrigued her, yet she couldn’t identify one as any particular geometrical form.

Clayton and Darnell spoke in hushed tones when they entered Darnell’s apartment with a reluctant Casey and a clearly fearless Wanda in their wake. Pictures of famous rappers hung on Darnell’s walls above a purple velour sectional that took up almost the entire space of floor. The white shag carpet under her feet was cushioned and immaculate.

Darnell slapped Clay on the back, shaking his dark head. “Didn’t I tell ya to stay away from temptation? Now look what you gone an done. So you spilled that shit on her, man? Oooo- wee, and now you say she’s shootin’ fireballs and levitating—
already
? Righteous—a noob, too. Huh.” His perplexed surprise was evident in the crinkle of his wide, heavily wrinkled forehead.

From what Casey could gather, it would seem she’d somehow managed to excel at this demon thing, skipping right through the harder powers to master, such as levitation, and had moved to the head of the class without even trying.

Her parents would be so proud.

Casey’s voice, or maybe it was just the recent occasional trance she found herself in, was almost lost to her. But not quite. “So I’m not supposed to be able to shoot fireballs yet?” was the first question out of her mouth. Not “How can we make these ugly protrusions poking out of my head go away? Or, even, “Are you sure there’s nothing we can do to, oh, I dunno, fix this?” No, she wanted to garner a pat on the back for best novice shot with a fireball.

Darnell rubbed his jaw with fingers covered in shiny rings. “Took me near eight months to get that shit right. Fo real, I musta set fire to half of the Bronx before I nailed that. I don’t even wanna talk about how long it took me to figure out the summoning of vermin thing, and levitating? Shoot. I still get dizzy. Fo sho, you got somethin’ crazy-ass goin’ on. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

Vermin. How four- legged and long-tailed. Casey shuddered. She wasn’t interested in summoning anything but a way out of this mess. According to Nina, there was no way out, and if that was true, it was time to face the music. “I have a question before we get any deeper. Feel free to tell me if I’m being inappropriate.”

“Go.” Darnell nodded, and for the first time, Casey caught sight of his initials shaven into his closely cropped hair.

Gripping Wanda’s arm, her gaze was hesitant, but she met Darnell’s chocolate brown eyes head-on. “Maybe this is too personal. I mean, I don’t know if demons feel uncomfortable talking about their . . . choices. But how—how did—you, you know, become a demon?” Clay had said that sometimes trickery was involved when you didn’t choose the light. Where Darnell was concerned, his reasons would go a long way in making her at least feel a bit less like she’d gone to Genghis Khan for advice on how to be a demon—a
good
one. And not good in the sense that she’d rival demons far and wide when it came to her skills for eval. The kind of good that meant no one would end up chicken-fried.

Darnell stuck his hands into the pockets of his sagging jeans, crossing his high-top-sneakered feet at the ankles when he leaned against the wall for support. His grin was sheepish. “You know who Hank Aaron is?”

Casey relaxed a bit, shoving her hands into the pockets of her coat. “The baseball player?”

His sigh was wistful. “That’s him. Shoulda been me. ’Cept I was a broke-ass baseball player back then—still am. Even now, couldn’t hit a ball if I drove my Escalade straight into it. Just no damn good at the game was all, but I loved it just the same. Long story, but here’s the score. Some dude told me if I signed a piece of paper, I could be in the majors just like Hank. Maybe I could make some money to help out my family. I was poor. Quit school in the seventh grade. I wanted to help out Mama and my sisters.”

Casey didn’t know a whole lot about baseball, but she didn’t remember ever hearing about a Darnell anyone playing baseball who was as famous as Hank had been. She winced in sympathy. “I have a bad feeling things didn’t go according to plan.”

His snort was husky. “Oh, I made it to the majors all right—as a bat boy. I was tricked by that jacked-up muthafucker! ’Scuse my language, but it still makes me hot he took advantage of me that way. Anyway, I got hit in the head with a baseball that took me out. When collectin’ time came, that dude had the piece of paper I signed, all wavin’ it up in my face. Told me I owed him my soul, and now I had to pay that shit up.” His chuckle made Casey’s open mouth snap shut. “S’all good now. I might never get upstairs, but I do what I can to help out a demon in need. Feel me?”

A fist lodged firmly in her stomach, twisting her intestines, increasing a newly found fear. She wasn’t 100 percent sure when Hank Aaron was in the majors—she definitely was no sports aficionado, but she was pretty damn sure it hadn’t been, like, last year. “
When
did you die?”

“1966. Was a nice day to do it, too. Spring training, birds were chirpin’, weather was just fine for practice.” Darnell’s expression grew wistful.

1966. Darnell had been dead for more than forty years. Yet here he was, upright and mobile. Her fingers reached for the outlandish purple velour couch for support. Clayton was instantly at her side, placing a hand at her elbow to steady her, but she brushed him off. “So you’ve been dead for more than forty years.”

“And counting. I didn’t mean to scare ya, but Clay told me you want this shit straight up. So straight up, I’m a demon. It ain’t no thang to me anymore, and I can help you learn what needs to be learned. If you want, that is. I know plenty a demons like me. Dudes who didn’t know what they was gettin’ into. Just ’cause Satan’s got my soul, and I hafta live like this forever, don’t mean I gotta do no harm.”

Clay must have seen Casey struggling and immediately took the reins. His rakishly handsome face, pale in the dimly lit room, held questions. “What does this all mean, Darnell—for Casey? What’s going to happen to her because she’s a demon? This wasn’t something she chose. It was an accident—
my
accident. Nobody asked her to sign anything, and no one made promises to her. Her soul wasn’t up for grabs. So where do we go from here?”

Darnell’s immense shoulders shrugged. “Best I can figure is the blood you spilled on her absorbed into her skin. I told you that shit was toxic, didn’t I? You spill it on a human, and that’s a bad thing. Does some jacked-up shit to ’em. Now, I smell
some
demon on her, but she ain’t full demon.Yer right. She can’t be if she didn’t give up her soul, and I don’t even know if that means she’s got eternal life either. Course, that don’t explain her powers bein’ so strong so soon. Takes a while to learn all that. Might help if you knew what kinda demon that blood you was nursin’ like an expensive Cuban cigar came from.”

Clayton’s head popped up with a sharp motion, his large frame became ramrod straight, the muscles beneath his jacket rippling with tension. “Why?”

“If I knew where it came from, I might be able to figure out what kind of a demon she got runnin’ through her pretty veins. Good demon, bad demon—in between. If she got all those powers in such a short time, musta been some powerful shit you hooked up with. I hafta go with the idea that this is like transference, ya know? Like the blood she absorbed—which, like I said, for a human is bad mojo, kicked her powers up a notch because it came from another demon. Gave her a head start nobody I know had. When you a noob, you gotta learn how to do all the shit she’s already doin’ in just what—twenty-four hours?”

Thirty-one, but what was seven hours among demons? Casey held up a hand, looking to Clay with eyes that had grown grainy. “Okay, so I’m going to assume the blood you had was from a source who doesn’t identify his donors—so I won’t ask. That’s neither here nor there because the point is moot. I’m half demon. End of story, right?”

Darnell’s nod was solemn, his next words, more so. “Yes, ma’am. You in now, whether you like it or not.”

She’d already known the answer, but hearing it was still no less painful. The full impact might take a while to absorb, and maybe she’d have a delayed reaction, but for now, all she wanted to do was figure out what would become of her as a half demon. “Okay. I’m in. There’s no going back. I get it. I won’t try to kid myself into believing this can change. I won’t cry and carry on, though I can’t promise that won’t be something I might contend with at a later date. Right now, this is what I want to know. Where do I go from here? Will I live forever like you?”

Darnell’s shoulders scrunched in indecision. “Can’t say fo sho. You didn’t sell your soul like me. I dunno how that’ll all play out. I could ask around. . . .”

A moment of horrifying clarity struck her. If she lived forever, she’d spend a lot longer single than was right or fair for an average girl like her. How unjust. Damn all eternal life. “So do I just go home and go right on living my life like this never happened until I levitate while I’m in the middle of the House of Hwang’s flaming the joint because they yet again screwed up my order of crab Rangoon, and I’m so pissed I want visible carnage?”

“Hah!” Darnell barked. “That’s somethin’ you gotta learn to control. You’re gonna have mood swings that’ll make the end of yo mama’s birthin’ years look like one of those fancy balls. Those powers you got ain’t for no beginner. That’s why they’re so strong—because you have someone else’s shit. Now all you gotta do is perfect ’em.”

“So being half demon is what made me want to see my sister’s friend lit up like a sparkler on the Fourth of July?”

“Yep.”

“But I didn’t even know I could do it. One minute I was just feeling out of sorts, and the next I was hovering like a Black Hawk while I torched Nina’s hair. Clay said it was the same in the bar. I guess, considering the air the police officer got, I must have been feeling like I did with Nina.”

Clay agreed. “Should have seen it, Darnell. I’d pit her against Tom Brady any day of the week.”

“And how did you
feel
when you did it?” Darnell inquired.

“Like the bitch deserved it.”

She wasn’t the only one who gasped at her harsh words. Wanda joined her, but Darnell laughed again with that deep gurgle. “Boooooyyyy, you got some stank on you. You were mad, huh?”