Better the Devil You Know Book Four Page 2

  All that mattered was what you did. And one look at Luc told her he would not stop until he saved her from the end. Appropriate, because it was finally here.

  2

  Luc

  Well, wasn’t this… interesting.

  He usually had a far more eloquent mind, but forgive him. He was distracted. Distracted by his deep injuries, and distracted by a certain tingling on his lips.

  Now, Luc shouldn’t have to tell you that he was no stranger to passion. As the Seventh Son of Satan, and the most popular in his father’s house, he didn’t mean to brag, but many an amorous creature threw themselves at him daily.

  This… it felt different, didn’t it? It was more encompassing – deeper. Far more profound. And while that was exhilarating, it was also terrifying.

  Their pact had already been sanctified on his Ring of Satan. He had to protect Maggie. That was a given.

  But now as that connection grew, it sanctified the pact even more.

  By that he meant that the ring would now hold him to protecting her with even greater force.

  Problematic, because both of their rings were cracked. Hence the phone call. The phone call to… shudder – the accountant. You read that right. Luc shuddered before thinking of that dreadful name. Anyone would. Perhaps even his father might.

  The accountant made General Hax look like a fluffy bunny rabbit sitting on a cloud of other fluffy bunny rabbits all eating candy canes and singing children’s songs. Sugary image? Oh, it didn’t come close to describing what the accountant was.

  The accountant… got to decide what was worth it in the end and what wasn’t.

  Often decisions to end wars came down to him and the Devil.

  You see everything in reality comes down to resources, doesn’t it? If you don’t have enough guns and ammo and soldiers to be killed, the war has to stop. If you don’t have enough money, then you can’t buy that fine cigar. And if you don’t have enough resources in your house to protect the most vulnerable, then you kick them out into the cold.

  Luc was at home.

  Maggie was in the library reading. He would’ve rather preferred their location to be different. You know, one with far more cushions, pillows, and mattresses, but he had his own problems to deal with.

  “Can we just get this over and done with?” he muttered to one of his librarian hands. In a pinch, they could also be clinicians. Rather bad ones.

  They were the kind of clinicians who read a lot of books but hadn’t actually done a lot of healing. He should probably have just done what the paramedics had suggested back at the mine site. But he’d been busy dealing with Maggie’s injuries and the accountant.

  Now he needed his wings fixed, his back put back into place, and his ego healed.

  Anything that might help him in his following meeting.

  He tried to cheer himself up with thoughts of how tortured General Hax would be right now, but that was cold comfort, frankly.

  “Ah,” he groaned. “Do you mind?”

  One of the librarian hands scuttled around. It looked at him pointedly. “We weren’t touching you. You seem to have a low pain threshold for a Prince of Hell.”

  He’d magically altered them so they could speak. Required when you were dealing with somebody’s injuries, see. The last thing you wanted was a physician who just dumbly stared at you and did whatever they pleased.

  He tuned in to what the librarian hand had actually said. There was a reason you didn’t usually let them speak too much. They were snarky old buggers. Think of somebody who had read too much, thought a lot of themselves, and ultimately didn’t technically have a personality at all. That was a librarian hand. And that was the same force that presently picked up a scalpel and approached his wings, gesturing far too much.

  He clenched his teeth. He had to get through this. The very last thing he wanted to do was go see the accountant while injured. Presumably the big brute would pull out his ledger, right in it in a scribbled, unreadable hand, then look at Luc right over the top of his glasses with an equally unreadable expression. For everything about accountants was unreadable and unpredictable. They weren’t there to make things explicable, to let you know what they were thinking. They were only there to keep the business running.

  “Just hurry up,” Luc said.

  He had to get all of this over and done with. Then he could, you know, make good on his previous promise and take Maggie to a room that was far more comfortable than the library and with far less inquisitive hands. Sorry. With hands that… darn it. He didn’t have the mental power to think of a truly lascivious example right now. The librarian hand stabbed the scalpel write down between his wings, and he roared out in pain.

  “For the Seventh Son of Hell, you have a very low pain threshold. You should work on that,” the hand told him.

  He reached around with his tail, tried to wrap it around the hand, and went to wrench it in half but thought better a second later.

  He amused himself instead with mental images of Maggie sitting in her recliner, reading trashy urban fantasy novels, in a rather drab cardigan while presumably thinking all sorts of naughty thoughts about him.

  At least that brought a smile to his lips. Good, because he was stabbed again a second later.

  “You scream too much,” one of the hands said.

  “I think you’ll find this is the first time I’ve ever screamed in my life. And I have a very good reason to be screaming. My ring—”

  “The rings? Don’t tell me they really are in danger of cracking,” Maggie said.

  He’d been so distracted by his pain – and indeed, screaming – that he hadn’t heard her walk into the room.

  Regardless of the fact he was currently being operated on by pure imbeciles, Luc turned around. It was a little too fast.

  He threw one of the hands off, and it was just as a scalpel was embedded into his shoulder.

  The hand missed whatever it was meant to be doing, and it struck one of his muscles instead. Far from healing him, it simply injured him even more. He felt his unique blood splash out.

  “Maggie. What are you doing here? Don’t tell me, you can’t wait—”

  She walked over. One of the hands had been thrown against the wall, and it currently jittered there as if it were too shocked to move. She picked it up, dusted it off like it was a small child, and set it on its way with a pat on its thumb. “Are rings aren’t going to crack, are they?” She touched her own ring. It looked overly shined. Luc had to update his previous assessment. Maggie wouldn’t have been in the library reading trashy urban fantasy novels in drab cardigans. She would presumably have been sitting there, checking the ring over and over again, and he understood her angst.

  If the rings broke….

  He smoothed a smile over his face and sat despite the fact there were scalpels all through his back. “It’s fine, Maggie. I will have the power assigned to us that we require to fix the rings.”

  “From the person you called? The accountant, right?”

  “How do you know they are the accountant?” He looked at her pointedly, right between the brows, in fact. She hadn’t asked the Vessel, had she? Because if she’d been communing with it—

  He sat forward on the edge of the metal bench.

  She read his mind and waved her hands in front of her face expressively. “No. This has nothing to do with the Vessel. You’ve just been screaming rather loudly. That’s all.”

  He was flabbergasted by what she said. “Screaming rather loudly? I have not indeed.”

  “You have,” the librarian hand attending to him said as it jumped up, grabbed one of the scalpels, jimmied it out, despite the fact it was stuck in one of his shoulders, and landed with a thwack. “She presumably now knows how terrified you are about going to the accountant and how inferior you feel in his presence.”

  Luc’s lips twitched. “Inferior? I am the seventh—”

  “People of high standing do not need to repeat who and what they are. They just act
as they need to when they need to.”

  His lips twitched. Maybe he would take this librarian hand and throw it down that abandoned mine. It would be a terrible death indeed. Sure, the librarian hand was technically a foul creature, but as he had pointed out, chaos had completely consumed that mine site.

  There would be no coming back… no coming back for John and no coming back for anything else thrown down there.

  Luc straightened, not at the thought of the terrifying death John must have gone through. At the thought that apparently he screamed when he didn’t intend to.

  He still fixed Maggie in the strongest gaze he could. “The visit with the accountant will be simple. There is no way he won’t give us the resources we need to fix our rings. Then it will be business as usual,” he assured her with the kind of smile that said business was for people who were boring. True people played far more than they worked.

  But long before he could shoot her a rather appreciative glance, she crossed her arms, backed off, and propped herself against the door behind her. “By business as usual, do you mean—”

  She was going to say it.

  He now knew Maggie well enough to know what she was thinking and to know what her lips would do a second before they did it. No more time for jokes about kissing. He shot up. His body be damned.

  He wrapped a hand around her mouth and pressed her against the door, but this was not a prelude to a rather dramatic kiss. “For the love of God, Maggie, don’t say it. I’ve now had enough of you trying. It’s time to gag you.”

  “Gag me?” she managed to speak through his fingers. “Luc—”

  “We can’t have you accidentally bringing about the apocalypse by misspeaking now, can we?”

  No, they could not.

  So he locked his hand against her face even harder. Certainly not hard enough to hurt her, but hard enough that he managed to kindle his magic. It might be rather depleted. He might technically need to go to a wellness spa for 2000 years to even have a chance of recovering his old self, but that was irrelevant. For when Maggie was involved, Luc could find the strength he needed to do what required to be done.

  Closing his eyes, letting a muscular twitch drag down the center of his brow until he looked serious, he started to chant magic under his breath.

  It lapped up his body, drawing from the very ground itself. It didn’t just call on the dark, however.

  He’d felt this shift within himself since his last fight.

  He’d never liked being the man who upheld the treaty, but maybe it gave him a unique source of power others could not see.

  Now he drew on that power, drew on it as he wrapped the gag spell all around Maggie’s body.

  It was the equivalent of coddling her up in cotton wool.

  It might not stop the rather clumsy fool from banging into every object in her path, but it would prevent her from thinking and speaking the name Ometa. Would that save her?

  No. But it would buy Luc the time he desperately needed.

  When it was done, he stepped back.

  He shook his hand out. There was far too much residual magic in it. But maybe it looked as if he was trying to get rid of the residual feel of her, instead.

  She’d been slightly wide-eyed and breathless while he’d cast the right. Now her lips twisted together in a peeved move. “Do I smell bad or something?”

  “You smell like pure desire, my dear. You can’t hide your lascivious mind from me. And now, quite thankfully,” he growled, “you can’t call the apocalypse, either. Sit down. Outside,” he said quickly. “I need to—”

  He couldn’t finish the sentence. You see, he didn’t get to decide what he needed to do.

  Today had been a very big day. Many things had gone wrong.

  Now the phone rang.

  Not the phone in his pocket. He’d already claimed another mobile. Oh no. The house phone rang.

  The same phone that was connected straight to his father.

  Maggie might not know this, but the librarian hands did. Every single one of them stood to attention like little soldiers knowing the big honcho was here. And if said honcho found a single boot that was dull or a hair that wasn’t correctly manicured, everything would go boom.

  Luc swore under his breath.

  No more time to make playful jokes with Maggie.

  He pulled back.

  He breathed hard.

  Then he took off in his demon form, melding through the rock above him.

  His magic was still depleted, but that was quite irrelevant. He came to a stop in his office, hand hovering above an appropriately red phone. It wasn’t blood-red – it was fire red. The kind of red you’d get right at the heart of a flame that had been burning for millennia.

  “Here we go,” he muttered.

  He answered.

  “Son,” the Devil said.

  “Father. Is this an appreciative call to thank me for delivering you General Hax, the traitor? Tell me, what have you done to him?”

  “I find myself unavoidably distracted.”

  “By what?”

  “By the approaching Armageddon that will destroy all the three realms and render everything into dust, taking the entire galaxy and handing it back to the chaotic forces of the beyond.”

  As far as things went, that was quite distracting indeed. This wasn’t like constantly having your mind pulled away by pings from your phone. This was the greatest existential threat the universe had ever faced. To not be distracted by it would be to be an idiot. And Luc’s father was not one of those.

  Luc took a small breath. It barely punched his chest out. Then he settled his lips in a straight line. “I have prevented her from saying the name.”

  “And you think that’s somehow going to stop Ometa?” My father spoke with a note of knowing.

  “You speak like you’ve met the man.”

  “Man? Chaotic force, son. Never confuse the two. You might refer to demons as men occasionally, even though that is incorrect, too. But there is nothing further from the truth when it comes to a fundamental original force. Ometa does not have a mind like you or I or some simple human fool. Ometa does not have the same desires. Ometa cannot be tricked. Ometa wants one thing.”

  Luc placed a hand on his brow, flattened it there, then let it drop. “Let me guess. Unbridled destruction.”

  “There is nothing wrong with destruction. That is what we exist to do as denizens of Hell. We break down the old to give way to the new. You understand this as the man who upholds the treaty. However, Ometa understands nothing. Ometa wants to return this great universe to a single point of pure potential. But potential that can never grow into anything. Contracted destruction and contracted creation that are combined together in an ungiving eternity. He doesn’t want life. And he cannot stand minds. Tell me, can you think of an enemy even greater?”

  For a facetious second, Luc’s mind offered a possibility, but he certainly didn’t share it aloud.

  The accountant.

  Luc well knew that there were many denizens of Hell that would share his views of the accountant. There was no one quite as terrifying.

  But his father would not share that view. Or if he did, he kept it close to his chest.

  His father cleared his throat. “You’re clear to do whatever you need to – under the dictates of the treaty,” he said strangely slowly, “to ensure Armageddon does not occur.”

  “But the Church brought this on themselves. Heads will roll at some stage, won’t they, father?”

  There was a long pause. It was the kind of pause that allowed any background sound to make more of itself, to distract you as it went from simple hissing or humming to sounding as if it roared right between your ears.

  The Devil took one breath. He didn’t need to breathe as the greatest denizen of Hell, so let’s say he stole a breath instead. “Son,” his voice drawled, “you have one chance to save the universe. I don’t much care how you do it. But understand this. You are ultimately a creature of Hell, an
d we—”

  “Destroy to fix. I understand, father. And trust me, I won’t be kind to the conspirators of this mess.”

  “Good. Now, I hear you have an appointment with… the accountant.” The Devil paused before saying the word accountant. Luc heard it. And he’d never forget it. Oh well, there went the theory that even Luc’s father wasn’t scared of the accountant.

  “Yes,” Luc said a little too quickly.

  “Do not keep him waiting. You have requested that your rings be fixed.”

  “You will allocate the necessary resources, won’t you? You do understand the importance of saving this universe, right?”

  It was quite a trite thing to point out, considering his father had just charged him to do anything he could to keep the three realms functioning.

  But forgive Luc for losing it when the accountant was mentioned.

  “It will be up to him. You must be sufficiently convincing. If he wants to strike a deal, strike it.”

  With that, without a goodbye, the conversation ended. To be fair, Luc’s father wasn’t known for his conversational skills. He would hardly sign off with a love you and extra kisses.

  Still, it left another ringing note of emptiness in Luc’s skull as he hung up.

  A second later, the phone rang again.

  Luc stupidly answered quickly, thinking it was his father, but then he heard that hiss.

  The hiss of the accountant himself. “I have looked over your request. You will need to meet me to discuss matters. Now.”

  He hung up. Luc didn’t have the time to point out that he was currently injured and needed to go back to being stabbed by librarian hands.

  Cold dread rose through his cheeks.

  His father had all but told him he would have to agree to any deal the accountant made.

  Luc much preferred it when he was in control. He hadn’t been in control since the day he met Maggie.