Page 21 of My Blind Date is a Demon

“Fine, fine. The last thing I need is another curse right now.”

The bell above the door rings and Tamzin and another woman walk into the store.

“What’s going on?” Tamzin asks. “Looks like the two of you are about to come to blows.”

“Nothing,” Beverly says. “We were just talking about ways to break the spell that Bella put on the two of you.”

“What have you come up with?” the other woman asks.

“Damon, this is my great-great-great-something-grandmother, Cora,” Beverly says.

I have to clean out my ear to see if I heard her right. “Are you sure? I thought humans aged much faster than that.”

“It’s a long story,” Cora says. “I was a ghost for two hundred years and now I’m here. I’m also a spirit medium.”

“Interesting,” I say, anxious to talk to some of my demonic friends about this development. But I will have to save that for later. “Anyway. Beverly was saying something about finding out who sent me after Tamzin in the first place.”

“It’s one possibility,” Beverly tells Tamzin. “All curses, hexes, spells, have an opposite. And undo button, so to speak. If you can find out who sent Damon after you, we can find out what the counter spell is. Now, that counter spell might be a bit messed up since Bella got in the mix, but we can at least try. It gives us a place to start, anyway.”

“I just have no idea,” Tamzin says. “It can’t be any members of my family. They would never want to hurt me, or especially Bella. But I can’t think of anyone who would hate me that much.”

“How about hates you just a little?” I suggest.

“What do you mean?” Tamzin asks.

“You said no one hates you that much. That would indicate someone out there hates you at least a little bit. Maybe they hate you more than you think.”

Tamzin’s mouth opens and then closes, as if she was going to argue with me and then thought better of it.

“Okay. I mean, I get what you are saying. Someone out there hates me enough to hex me. But it’s not going to be the most obvious suspect, right? I mean, if I knew who it was, I’d be knocking on their door already.”

“So, instead of looking for someone who hates you, just look for someone who…greatly dislikes you? That sounds so lame,” Cora says.

Tamzin thinks for a moment. “Well, there is Cathy.”

“Who is Cathy?” Cora asks.

“The secretary at my daughter’s school. We do not get along. And this chucklehead—” She points her thumb at me. “—made things a whole lot worse this morning.”

“Me?” I ask. “I didn’t do anything. I was stuck in that cookie jar. That was all you.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t want me to go back and apologize.”

I straighten my collar. “And I still stand by that. You shouldn’t have gone back.”

“What happened when you apologized?” Cora asks.

“Not much. She nodded at me and said apology accepted. But she didn’t apologize back for threatening to call CPS on me.”

“Well, if she’s threatening to call CPS, I doubt she sent a demon after you,” Beverly says.

“That’s a good point,” Tamzin says, tapping her lips.

“So, who else is there?” I ask, growing impatient. “A snotty cousin? A frenemy from high school? Another mom at the PTA? Think.”

“I don’t know!” Tamzin exclaims. “I mean, I don’t have a large extended family. I don’t get out much. I barely use Facebook anymore. If I ended up dead tomorrow, I’m sure the police would be like, ‘Well, she has no known enemies.’ They would be just as stumped as I am.”

“The police!” Cora says a bit too excitedly. “Go see Beckett.”

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