Page 10 of Cookbooks and Demons

Helena had to take a step in to grasp the glass. “Uh, thank you.” But she didn’t leave. Instead, she screwed up her courage and brought the glass back, stepping up beside the creature in herkitchen.

Heat, or some sort of wrong energy, seemed to radiate off of him but that also could have been her imagination. She couldn’t say. “I’m actually all good with the wine drinking,” she said and set the wineglass into the water to disappear under the fresh suds.

He grunted, then retrieved it back out of the water. His hands had changed, reverting back to the dead-grayish skin and long black nails he had before. She gasped again, realizing she stood next to the demon in all his glory once more, no longer glamouring himself as the caterer. His black nails clicked against the glass as he turned it over to go at the inside with her rose pink bottle brush.

Fascinated, she watched him rinse the glass out under a fresh stream of water and then set it upside down on one of her dishtowels on the counter over the dishwasher. The juxtaposition of the supernatural creature doing a perfectly mundane thing seemed to keep her mind from cracking into a million pieces.

“Are you going to watch me the whole time?” he asked, his voice rumbling next to her. She looked up his bare arms to his head with the elegant black horns arching like ram’s horns.

Swallowing, she backed away and went into her towel drawer to get a dry one. Turning back, she took in his full body, now no longer covered with anything resembling clothing. Just his full moon and the string of the front leather apron. The crack down the middle was covered by his tail, which maintained that strange grayness of skin until about a foot down it when it morphed into blackness. The tip of his tail had the typical triangle devil tail …thingy, and it swung back and forth in a little contented arc near the ground, like a cat. His wings were tucked tight against his back so he could move easily. Otherwise, the other disturbing aspect to him was his too thin frame, highlighted by what she could see of his ribs with their deepgrooves.

She commented on none of this but came up on the other side of him this time to grab one of her wine glasses and start drying it. He didn’t comment on her helping him or do anything tostop her.

“Thank you,” she said, three dry glasses later, “for such a good meal.”

“It tasted good?” he asked, a longing in his voice.

“It tasted amazing,” sheconfirmed.

He nodded, not looking at her, a complicated expression on his face, like a mix of satisfaction and regret.

“So… you do this a lot?”she asked.

“I’m not going to take your soul,” he said instead of answering.

That made her flinch, like she had been caught sneaking a cookie. “Oh, well that’s good,”she said.

“I mean, not unless you want me to,” he added. “I don’t know how much you know about demon summoning, but there are other ways to deal withthe cost.”

Her mind jumped to a million things that she had either heard or imagined. “Honestly, I don’t even know how I did it this time. Don’t suppose I can just return you without paying since I didn’tmean to?”

He shook his head. “Sorry. I performed the service, and it’s not me that gets paid, but the cosmic debt. I used as little of it as possible, though. Tried to make what you already had work. So it won’t betoo bad.”

“Cosmic debt?”

He sighed. “You can think of it like magic, I guess. Demon magic. I used as little aspossible.”

“But you did have to use some?”

Now he looked down at her with narrowed eyes into slits of starlight. “I made a three course dinner with dessert on no notice. For nine. Believe me, I performed miraclestonight.”

She giggled at that, which surprised her. But it also made him less scary, so she leaned into it. “I guess I did leave you with adisaster.”

He’s just anormal caterer who helped me out of a jam. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine.Some part of her started to believe it.

For a momentat least.

Beside her, he drained the water, rinsing away the suds again, having finished the last wineglass. He then plucked up the one she had finished drying, reaching around her with his long arms. He picked up all but the one still in her hand, spacing each between his equally too-longfingers.

A tremble rolled down her spine, the same wrongness she got from licking a battery. Then he was gone, moving to her cupboard where she kept her liquor and the various glasses required for proper liquor drinking. When he opened it with his tail, she saw that the inside had been organized.

Shocked, she opened another cupboard where she kept her pantry items. Instead of the different series of cans and glass bottle thrown in haphazardly, they were stacked neatly with the labels facing out. She opened the cupboard below it, and the boxes where she kept her cereal along with one sad box of oatmeal and her various sides that she never made were lined up as well andordered.

“How did you… when did you have time to do this?” she asked, opening her dishes cupboard to find the same thing, bowls and plates sorted and rearranged so that everything actually fitproperly.

“Don’t worry. I’m not charging you for it either. I just couldn’t stand it,” he said, grabbing up the dishcloth to rub at a spot on the last glass before puttingit away.

“So you used … demon magic as well?” she asked, looking around at the deeply spotless counters and the floor devoid of the standard pile of dirt in the corners that she could never quite get.

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