She grabbed his hand and squeezed.
“There has to be some way we can get you out of this, some way we can help you win. Like maybe I go explain the situation to her or talk you up to her or something. If you just let me know who she is I could—” she tried to say. But even before she got to the end part he was shaking his head.
Then he cut her off completely.
“Nope. No. Can’t do that. Can’t say her name out loud. At all.”
“Fine, then write it down.” She scrabbled in her pockets for that pad he’d given her, while he dipped his head to catch her gaze. To stop her, before she went any further down a no-go path.
“You think writing is going to work instead? Honey, therearen’t any loopholes here. There’s noit only counts if youspeakthe words. Hell just doesn’t do business like that. Once an evil way to thwart you has been put in place, once the deal is done and the terms and conditions are set, there’s no getting around it. They sense any contravention of the rules no matter how they happen. Hence me not really technically telling you anything, but brushing up against it enough that you’ve got hellhounds out for your neck. And the more I brush, the more hounds are gonna show up. After a while,worsethan hounds will show up, in fact.”
“So if you actually explain more, the devil rips the roof off and eats me.”
“My dad doesn’t tend to eat people. But yeah, pretty much that,” he said, almost absentmindedly, one hand making a spiral in the air. Then he looked back at her and clocked her dropped jaw, and immediately grasped his mistake. “Did I say dad? Because by that I meant—”
“Oh my god. Oh mygod,” she blurted out. “You’re the son of the devil.”
“I mean, no. Not technically. Not really. Only sort of.”
“So all demons see your unholy father as their parent, then.”
Say yes, she thought at him. And instead he made a noise likeeh. He tilted his head back and forth in so recognizable a way that she couldn’t help marveling over him.Hemight not have thought much of his human skills.
But damn, they were something.
And especially when he was the heir apparent of some place of eternal judgment. “So you’re like the prince of Hell. The prodigal son of one of the most powerful and probably evil beings in the universe. And yet somehow, we’re supposed to win this, even though winning this means you will no longer have to take some Hell throne, you won’t have to fulfill your evil obligations, you can just walk away and be a person and that’ll be fine. Your Satanicfather will be cool with that,” she spelled out, in no uncertain terms. No uncertaingrimterms.
And he couldn’t even tell her no.
“Honestly, I don’t think my Satanic father really thought I’d be able to do it.”
“Oh, I’ll bet. You did a great job of saying without saying how little your family thinks of you. And now it just all makes so much sense. I mean, why wouldn’t you be a disappointment to the ultimate evil being? You actually care about things. You try to do decent things. You’ve been kinder to me than most human men have ever been. You must make your dadfume.”
There, she thought.Now he’ll get it.
And he did, too.
He just almost had a nervous breakdown in the process. At first, all he could do was stare at her as he took in everything she’d just said. Then it seemed to register to him that she’d meant it, that she really thought that he was worth more than whatever his weird family believed him to be, and he stood so abruptly it scraped lines into the linoleum. He put his back to her, hands on his hips.
She reached for him on seeing it. But he batted her away. “I’m fine. It’s nothing. I think I just swallowed a bee.”
“Was the bee crying when you did it because it sounds like something in there is pretty upset. And also making your eyes leak so much that I can see it from right over here. In a way that’s making me want to offer you my handkerchief.”
“Don’t you offer me your handkerchief, all right,” he said, one finger jabbing at her as he did. But he still didn’t turn around. And his voice was very thick now. It squeezed her heart to hear it.
“Okay. Okay, I won’t.”
“And stop looking.”
“I’m already staring in completely the opposite direction toyou,” she said as she kept her eyes on the refrigerator. His kitchen counter. The wall over his sink. It wasn’t hard to do, either—there was a lot of weird stuff to take in on all those things. Magnets that spelled out non-words, as weird as the one on that hat of his. Something that wasn’t water briefly dripping out of the tap.
And she could see there was something in one of the cupboards.
It seemed to be rattling the door. She almost wanted to ask him if she should worry about hellhounds in there, when she realized it was a milk jug with hands. Delightful to her, completely delightful and of course utterly engrossing.
Yet she still desperately wanted to look when she heard him turn to face her. It tested her, even though he was still quiet. He didn’t say anything. He just looked. He looked and looked and looked, until she was sure she could actually feel it.
His gaze on her, soft as newly fallen snow.
