Chapter 7

It never rained but it poured. Well, that wasn’t exactly true in Los Angeles, where we got lots of drizzly, misty stuff and not a lot of downpours. But in terms of my personal life, the saying pretty much hit the nail on the head.

That afternoon, one of the sales guy’s PCs went blooey. The editorial staff and art department used Macs, of course — they were pretty much the industry standard for anything on the creative side. But the sales and operations people used regular PCs, and they tended to crap out on a much more regular basis than the Macs did.

So who should show up to fix the temperamental PC? Why, the absent Mr. Koslowski, naturally.

After he was done with his business on the second floor, he slouched his way down to my office, where I was poring over a layout covering the opening of a new art gallery on the Westside.

“Where the hell did you get those?” he demanded from the safety of my door frame.

I looked up from the color laser printout currently occupying my attention. “Oh, hi, Danny. Anything leap to mind about yesterday?”

“It was Tuesday. Who sent you those flowers?”

“Tuesday — very good.” I took off my glasses and rubbed the bridge of my nose. The glasses were just for close-up work; I had a mild astigmatism in my left eye and started to strain after a few hours of looking at ten-point type. “A Tuesday which just happened to be my birthday.”

For a few seconds, he didn’t say anything. Then he muttered, “Oh.”

“Exactly. Thanks for the call, by the way.”

His sandy eyebrows drew together. “What call?”

“The one you were supposed to make wishing me a happy birthday.”

“Okay — okay, I’m sorry. I blew it. I should have written it down in my phone.”

God forbid he should have to think or remember anything on his own. I wondered if he needed the iPhone to tell him to wipe his ass.

Then his frown deepened, and he said, “Thadoesn’t explain where the flowers came from.”

“Well, actually, it does. It was my birthday, and someone sent me flowers. Mystery solved.”

“Who sent them?”

“I don’t have to tell you that,” I replied, my tone a little snottier than I’d intended. But the contrast between Danny’s adolescent behavior and Luke’s — okay, the Devil’s — was almost overwhelming, and I could feel myself rapidly losing my patience. I was sure Jacqui would have approved.

“But — but — we’re dating!” Danny spluttered. “I thought you said we were exclusive!”

“Maybe I made a mistake,” I said coolly. “I mean, what kind of a person in an ‘exclusive’ relationship forgets his girlfriend’s birthday?”

“What kind of girl in an exclusive relationship goes out with someone else on her birthday?” he shot back.

“The kind who doesn’t want to sit home alone,” I said.

That rejoinder sort of pulled the rug out from under him. He opened his mouth, then shut it, looking both angry and embarrassed.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, his tone sulky in the extreme. “Let me make it up to you. Let’s go out Friday night.”

“I can’t,” I said, a little surprised at how good it felt to say the next sentence. Hell hath no fury and all that. “I have a date.”

“With him?” Danny jerked a thumb toward the roses.

A little amazed at how calm I was, I replied, “Yes.”

He crossed his arms. I noticed, as if I was looking at a stranger, how the tie his company forced him to wear had been knotted off-center, how the name tag pinned to his pocket was a little crooked. He was still sort of cute, in a rumpled, geeky sort of way, but I really did wonder in that moment why I’d ever thought I was attracted to him in the first place.

“Are you dumping me?” he asked at last, as if it had taken a long time for the thought to occur to him.

“No,” I said. I reached up to adjust one rose slightly, felt the velvet-soft petal brush against my thumb and forefinger. “Let’s just say that we’re no longer exclusive.”

“Fine,” he retorted, and jammed his hands into his pockets. He turned to go, then tossed an angry glance back over his shoulder. “But don’t think I’m going to give up that easily.”

I lifted my shoulders. What, had he suddenly decided to become the gallant knight, jousting for his lady love? Yeah, right. He might be angry at the moment, but I seriously doubted his emotions had been engaged enough for him to be upset for very long. No, probably all he was really suffering at that point was a case of hurt pride.

“Good luck with that,” I said, then turned back to my layout.

“Right,” he snapped, and slammed my office door behind him.

The feeling of elation I experienced after my emancipation proclamation lasted approximately thirty minutes. Then, as usual, guilt started to set in.

Maybe I’d been too hard on Danny. Some guys just couldn’t remember dates to save their lives. And what the hell had I been thinking, flaunting my next date with the Devil...Luke...whoever...with him? I’d talked as if that relationship actually had some kind of future. How could Luke possibly be doing anything except amusing himself with me for some reason I’d probably never discover?

The door opened. “Stop that,” Jacqui said.

“Stop what?”

She put her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow. “I saw Mr. Koslowski storm out of here earlier, so I’m assuming you finally told him off.”

“I didn’t ‘tell him off,’” I said. “I just told him I couldn’t go out with him Friday night because I already had a date with someone else.”

“Close enough. I’m sure that was sufficient to bruise his poor tender little ego.”

Bruise, and possibly sprain. I didn’t know for sure, because Danny had always been very good at not showing much of what he was feeling...if anything. Certainly, he’d gotten a lot more excited about advancing his character a level in Warcraft than he ever seemed to be about spending time with me.

“Anyhow,” Jacqui continued inexorably, “you putting him in his place is certainly no reason for you to be sitting in here and beating yourself up about it.”

“I wasn’t — ”

“Oh, yes, you were. I saw the look on your face.”

I began to wonder if I should start going around with a paper bag over my head. At least that way, people wouldn’t be able to tell what I was thinking all the time. I reflected that it was a good thing I had never gotten into playing poker, then said, “All right. I guess I do feel a teeny bit bad about it. But I suppose I gave him enough chances to shape up.”

“More than enough,” she said. “So you already have another date lined up for Friday night? I’m impressed. Where’s he taking you this time?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I think it’s supposed to be sort of a surprise.”

Jacqui pursed her lips. “That could be good or bad.”

You have no idea, I thought, but I said only, “True, but at least I know it won’t be dull.”

“Thoughtful and interesting?” she replied. “Hang on to this one, kid.” She shot me a grin and disappeared down the hallway.

Somehow, I doubted she’d be quite so encouraging if she knew who Luke really was. Then again, considering the way men had treated her and so many other women I knew, maybe she would have thought the Devil was a step up.

The funny thing was, I’d never really thought all that much about God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell. My parents both ditched Christianity — “too much guilt,” according to my father — during their college years, and Lisa, Jeff, and I were raised in a cheerfully agnostic family with some slight Buddhist overtones. My mother got more into the spiritual stuff — in a strictly nontraditional way — as she got older, but I’d never been brought up to believe in a fiery Hell or a fluffy Heaven with angels playing harps and all that. I didn’t believe in reincarnation, either, even though my mother swore she’d experienced past-life regression in several sessions with a hypnotherapist. If it made her happy, great, but I wasn’t buying into it.

But to go from that religiously neutral background to facing an entity who claimed he was the Devil and in fact exhibited all the powers that such a supernatural being might actually possess — well, that was enough for me to feel as if my world had been seriously upended. I spent a considerable amount of time when I should have been working that afternoon trying to read what I could on the internet about Lucifer, Satan...whatever. Of course, I got everything from nutcases who swore they’d been possessed by the Devil to scholarly discussions of the linguistic roots of his name, but most of what I read didn’t particularly paint him as a nice guy.

Full of pride, he had rebelled against God and been cast down from Heaven. But if the Devil was supposed to be stuck down in Hell, watching Adolf Hitler roast on a spit or whatever else the Lord of the Underworld did to occupy his spare time, what was he doing buying mansions in Hancock Park and driving me around in a car worth more than a quarter-million dollars? I looked up that little fact, too... curiosity had compelled me to see just how extravagant that Bentley really was.

A cold, sick feeling started to grow in my stomach. I’d already agreed to see him again, and even if I thought I could summon the courage to call things off, I had no way of reaching him. At any rate, he didn’t strike me as the sort of person who would take no for an answer. He’d certainly maneuvered me easily enough into dinner and a promise to go out with him a second time.

All right, look at this logically, I told myself. So you’ve dug up some information about him that’s less than encouraging. It’s all secondhand data as far as you know. He could just be the victim of some really bad press.

Of course, that sort of thinking only made me sound as if I’d swung into serious Queen of Denial mode. Who was I to refute centuries — millennia, really — of folklore and religious beliefs? All I had to go on was the fact that he’d rescued me on my birthday, given me a much more pleasant evening than I could have expected, and then sent me flowers the next day. Not exactly the actions of someone who was supposed to embody ultimate evil, but several of the entries I’d read about Lucifer mentioned that he was the father of deception. This could all just be a really big buildup to some kind of horrible fate.

Jesus — the art assistant — stuck his head in my office door. “Christa.”

I must have jumped about a foot.

“Geez, are you okay?”

“Fine,” I lied, forcing the air back into my lungs. “What’s up?”

He gave me a quizzical look. “You seem a little jumpy.” “I guess I was thinking about something else.” “Something a million miles away, it looked like.”

Maybe even farther than that, I thought. Who knows how far away Heaven and Hell really are?

“Michael wanted to know if you had the layout for the restaurant review in your office. He needs to swap out one of the images.”

I shook my head. “I haven’t gotten it back yet, so it must still be on Roger’s desk somewhere. Good luck finding it.”

Jesus sighed. “Great. If he’s lost another layout — ” And, still muttering to himself, he wandered off down the hallway toward Roger’s office.

Roger McKinley was the executive editor of the magazine. He knew his stuff, and he was a great writer, but he was probably the least organized person I had ever met. Filing systems lasted about five minutes in his office. Story envelopes, layouts, even complete contacts notebooks had been known to disappear into his domain, never to be seen

again. The staff had started calling his office the “Bermuda Triangle.” Of course, since the workflow was mostly electronic, we could always print things out again if necessary. But that meant whatever markups the feature editors might have put on those layouts were lost and would have to be done all over again — not the sort of thing you want to be faced with at the end of the day when you’re just trying to get the hell out of Dodge. Still, somehow we managed to get the magazine out without killing Roger. If it wasn’t that he was actually a fairly likable guy, he would have been marked for death after his first week on the job.

At least Jesus’ interruption had gotten my mind off whatever torments Luke might or might not have had planned for me. In fact, somehow I managed to summon a sort of fatalistic approach to the whole thing. If he really had an inventive and cruel plot in place for my imminent demise, there probably wasn’t much I could do about it. Mortals tended to get the short end of the stick when going up against higher powers, no matter what the movies might say to the contrary.

On the other hand, I didn’t see anything wrong with trying to get a little divine help on my side....