Page 24 of Cookbooks and Demons

“Yeah, sure. Just whenever. Thanks,” Chris said and then was gone before she could say good-bye. Normally, she would have thought that strange, but nothing beat what she was witnessing right before her.

“Rafferty?”

Walking past her overladen table, she went to thekitchen.

Within, it looked like a cooking storm had blownthrough.

Grocery bags leaned on and against the counters, many of them partially empty. Her garbage was overflowing with discarded food containers. There were even more completed dishes lining her counter. And in the middle of it all stood the demon responsible.

He was in his human form, one hand still holding her flat frying pan on the stove, the other holding a spatula. He looked up, blinking at her sudden presence. Then he turned and surveyed the wreck of a kitchen. He seemed to be taking in the same enormity of it all as guilt floodedhis face.

“I … didn’t realize until you came home just now that I might have gone a little … overboard,” he confessed softly.

The pan continued to sizzle, puffing up a burning smell, and he quickly used the spatula to pry up the toasted sandwich he had been in the middle of making. He set it on a waiting casserole dish that he was using as a plate since apparently all the others had been pressed into service, turned off the burner, threw down the spatula and backed up, running both hands over his head. While he was still human, Helena got the impression of Rafferty’s tail flicking behind him inagitation.

He straightened, going all formal like he had on the first night he had cooked for her. Helena could feel the wall he put between them reform as his face went impassive. Then he bowed his head withdignity.

“What are you doing?” Helena asked, bringing her own head down to try to make eye contactwith him.

He sighed exasperatedly. “Despite your words from last night that this is a ‘vacation’ for me, the truth of the matter is that I am a demon under a contract to you, even if that contract is dangerously ill-defined. Therefore, certain rules still apply.”

“Yeah, okay,” Helena said cautiously, not liking where this was going. “And those rules are?”

The outer corners of Rafferty’s eyes squinched like her ignorance pained him. “The rules are that if you do not lay out specifically what I can or cannot do with your energy, it is in my best interest to … ‘run up your bill’ as much aspossible.”

“Oh,” Helena said, her eyebrows shooting up to her hairline. She looked from the demon to the piles of groceries, then leaned back out the swinging kitchen door to take in the feast on her dining room table.

“Uh… I can’t eatall this.”

Chapter 14

The Food NetworkisDangerous

“So you do this on purpose?” Helena asked, leaning back into thekitchen.

“I…” Rafferty hesitated, looking at the door into the dining room piled with the dishes he’d made. The outer corners of his eyes squinched even more, like he wasn’t sure if he was in pain. “No. I didn’t intentionally go out to do this to you on purpose, but it just sort of …happened.”

“How much is this going to cost me?” she asked.

Again, he looked around at what he had done. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I tried to use as much real food as possible.”

“Still, the point of this was to get me on the hook for a meal that I can’t possibly eat all of?” she asked.

“That … is the strategy that could be used in this instance, yes,” Rafferty said.

She arched an eyebrow at him. “Are demons not allowed to lie? Because I would think this would be something that would be beneficial for you to lie about.”

“We can lie,” he said defensively. “ButI’m not.”

“Okay, so if I got this straight, you were just acting like a demon does without really thinking about it, and now I owe you a cosmic debt for your labor because I didn’t say you could not do what you did. But you didn’t do it on purpose. You just weren’t thinking about it and it just came naturally?”

Rafferty pursed his lips together, like he was debating something. “Most of the cooking I’ve been exposed to is either what I already knew or what I can glean when I’m here. Since you left me for the day to my own devices, I did what I usually do.” He gestured over to a pile of books at the end of her extra counter below where she kept her dishes. They were all opened and stacked haphazardly on different pages, some with things stuck in between for quick flip backs, like spoons and her can opener.

“And then…” he continued, once more hesitating.

“And then what?” Helena pressed.

He squared his shoulders to face his judge and confess his sins. “I discovered the Food Networkchannel.”

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