Page 19 of My Blind Date is a Demon

I shake my head. I don’t want to talk about it, tell the story again. I’ve told it so many times and it doesn’t get any easier. It just compounds the guilt.

“Look, I don’t like fighting with people, okay? You never know what might happen. What if, on her way home…” I get a sinking feeling in my chest. I can’t say what I’m thinking out loud. But what if Cathy is distracted by our fight and gets into a car accident on her way home? What if she dies because of me? I can’t have that on my conscience. I turn the car around and go back to the school.

“What are you doing?” Damon asks.

“I’m going to apologize to Cathy,” I say.

“What? Why?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” I tell him. I park the car in the parking lot and go into the office, taking the cookie jar with me.

CHAPTER 7

DAMON

Beverly quirks an eyebrow at me as I walk into her bookstore, The Book Coven.

“The name of your shop is a little on the nose, isn’t it?” I ask her.

She crosses her arms. “Well, take it up with my ancestors. It’s been The Book Coven for over two hundred years.”

“Hmm,” is all I have to say to that. I go up to the counter and finger a stack of vampire romances. “Humans never change, do they?”

“Hang around a while,” she says. “They might surprise you.”

I laugh. “I’ve been around quite a while already. How much longer will I have to wait?”

“Where is Tamzin?” she asks, ending my benign attempt at small talk.

I motion across the parking lot. “Getting coffee. She didn’t sleep well.”

“I’m surprised you can get this far away from her,” Beverly says, pulling a large old book out from under the counter.

“This is about as far as I can go without feeling the need to run back to her,” I admit. “It is frustrating. She is frustrating.”

“Tamzin is a sweet girl,” Beverly says defensively. “You could have been stuck with much worse.”

“That’s exactly the problem. She’s sweet. Too sweet. And to her own detriment.”

“She’s been through a lot—”

“I know all about her dead husband,” I say, cutting Beverly off. “I only found out about him half an hour ago and I’m already sick of him. How can she stand it? She’s not honoring his memory. Can’t she see that? She’s only hurting herself.”

Beverly gives me a long look that I can’t quite read. She’s not angry or annoyed. More like…intrigued, I think.

“You seem awfully passionate about this,” she finally says.

“It’s my job to torture humans. What is the point if they torture themselves?”

She gets a laugh out of that. “Oh, I see. Are you jealous that Tamzin is doing a better job being her own demon than you could do?”

“I wouldn’t call it jealousy,” I say, leaning on the counter and looking across to the coffee shop. “Maybe pity. But that only makes me angry. She shouldn’t be pitied. I’ve known women like her through the eons, single mothers, working women, women who have led empires. She could be so much more if she would just stop wallowing.”

“That’s hardly fair,” Beverly says. “We all suffer grief in our own way. It’s very easy to tell someone just to get over it, but it is a very different thing to actually do it.”

“Perhaps,” I say, looking back at her and picking at the pages of the book she’s flipping through. “But there must be a way to get her out of this…this funk. To bring her back to herself.”

Beverly threads her fingers together over the book and looks at me again. “Why do you care?”

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