Page 40 of My Blind Date is a Demon

“But she did say something interesting. She said that the universe has a way of sending us what we need when we need it. Maybe all I needed was a night out with a handsome devil to help me put things in perspective.”

“You think I’m handsome?” I ask.

“Ha-ha,” she says as she walks past me. “Don’t let it go to your horns. Goodnight.” She goes into her room and closes the door.

“Night,” I say like an idiot, now standing alone in the hallway. “Get it together,” I mutter to myself as I go to my own room where my lonely cookie jar is waiting for me. “How did it come to this?” I ask myself. And, I mean, really. How did I, one of the oldest and most powerful of the Dark Lord’s creations, end up trapped in a cheap, mass-produced, movie prop cookie jar in suburbia by a ten-year-old kid, catching feels for her lonely and depressed mom?

I wander to the window and look out over the quiet street, completely dark except for the light of the street lamps. Not even a dog barks. I check my watch and see it’s only eleven o’clock. Eleven! The night is only starting in most places. I should be drinking and dancing and setting my sights on a supermodel to while away the morning hours with.

Ugh, who am I kidding. When was the last time I even did that? The 70s? The 1870s? Probably. Nowadays, the biggest thrill I get is finding an intact Qing Dynasty porcelain flask at a random shop in Hong Kong that I turn around and sell for twenty million dollars at auction. Even that is a once-in-a-human-lifetime event. Honestly, tonight was the most fun I’ve had in many years as well. This whole week has been more of a joy than I ever could have expected. Bella is a delight and Tamzin is… Well, she’s more than mere words could describe. She’s dreadfully dreary, of course, but the moment I pulled a genuine smile across her lips… I felt more proud of that accomplishment than anything else I’ve done in a very long time. True love may or may not exist, but there might be something to what Tamzin said about the universe sending us what we need. Maybe I needed Tamzin as much as she needed me. I needed something, someone, to pull me out of my own funk as well.

I’m about to go to my cookie jar to get a bit of rest before finding out what tomorrow might bring when I see a shadow shift on the lawn. The lights haven’t changed, so a moving shadow isn’t normal. I watch closely and see it move again, closer to the house. It morphs from a formless shape into something more discernable. A humanoid shape. But certainly not human. I blink and go from my perch at the window to standing behind my old friend, the demoness Eisheth.

“Hello, Eisheth,” I say.

Eisheth is smiling before she even turns around. “Hello, Moloch. Or should I say, Damon?”

I shrug. “I have even more names than you. What you call me matters not.”

“Oh, I think your little human family would care very much who is living in their midst,” Eisheth says, looking back to the upstairs window.

“They aren’t my family,” I say, trying to play it cool. But the way she is talking about Tamzin and Bella has me on edge. “What do you want?”

“Is that any way to greet a friend?”

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m just in the middle of a job.”

“But you aren’t doing your job, are you?” she asks.

“What do you mean? Why else would I be stuck in this living Norman Rockwell painting?”

“The Dark Lord is not pleased,” Eisheth says plainly. “You were sent here to do a job. If you don’t do it, the Dark Lord will send someone who can.”

“What, someone like you?” I ask, trying not to show the panic building in my chest.

“You wish,” she says. “You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t send Beelzebub himself after you.”

“He’d call Beelzebub to possess a soccer mom? Isn’t that a bit below his pay grade?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Something about all this doesn’t smell right.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was there when the order came in. But it didn’t come from usual channels.”

“The usual channels?”

“You know how it is. Usually, a human will connect with a demon to make such a request through a ritual or incantation or something. Humans rarely ever connect to the Dark Lord himself nowadays. What human knows how? Those rites are long lost.”

I nod, but I haven’t really thought it about it. Time passes so quickly and yet so slowly at the same time, it’s almost irrelevant. But now that I think about it, I suppose it has been a few centuries since I last received a request from the Dark Lord to take on a possession. Usually, I would be asked by whoever performed the spell. It actually is very strange that even I don’t know who it was that wanted Tamzin to be possessed.

“So, how did the request actually come through?” I ask.

“It was…” She sighs. “Is it even possible? The request seemed to come telepathically.”

“What?” I ask. I can hardly believe my ears. Is this some sort of joke?

“Yeah. That’s what I thought. We were just talking, the Dark Lord and I, when he sort of cocked his head, like he was listening to something. Then he sent for you and gave you the order.”

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