Page 44 of Cookbooks and Demons

“You should have a pickle or a pear to cleanse your palette,” he suggested as if nothing had happened, lifting up both dishes from the tray for her to choose from.

“Uh, I guess pear,” she said, selecting one of the slices to suck on. “My gosh, this is fun. It’s likea game.”

“That is why the cheese is a whole course all on its own,” her demon explained. “French dining is an art.”

“Just ask a French man,” she teased.

“I told you, I’m not French anymore. I’m notanything.”

“You’re my guide through this world, so it’s not nothing,” she reminded him. “Next cheese, please!” She thrust a finger intothe air.

While he prepared the next cracker, Helena watched him. “Would you ever want to go back to France?”she asked.

“I have. Many times,” he answered neutrally.

“Really?”

“It used to be the only place I would be summoned,” he said. “Then as the world expanded and people traveled beyond their borders and intermixed, the places I would be called to didas well.”

“Until you landed here. In the back of my grandma’s cookbook,” she said. “How … did you end up in the back of my grandmother’scookbook?”

Rafferty looked up through his eyelashes at her.

“Oh you’re not going to tell me?” she accused, recognizing his stoic block tactic.

“I don’t exactly knowhowshe got the summoning spell for me. But the fact that I now know she was your grandma makes a lot more sense.”

“Wait, wait…” Helena said, some things finally occurred to her that she hadn’t realized at first. “My grandma only passed a month ago… Did you…” She swallowed, fortifying herself. “Did you have anything to do with that?”

Rafferty straightened, his face a mask again, his eyesdistant.

“Rafferty, answer me,” sheordered.

“It doesn’t matter what I say. If you thinkthat,then you aren’t going to believe me no matter what I say,” he said simply.

“Why would yousay that?”

“Because I’ma demon.”

Helena huffed a breath. “You know that is getting to be your go-to excuse for everything.”

She waited, pressuring him with her eyes to answer her question, and he resisted for quite a while. To dodge her, he kept preparing the cheese morsels, adding different flavors to the different cheeses, but eventually he ran out of bits to puttogether.

“I didn’t know she was dead until you just told me,” he said softly. “If she did make a deal that failed and was taken, it wasn’t by me. But I don’t actually know and, considering who we’re talking about, Idoubt it.”

“So you didknow her?”

“We had made a deal once or twice, yes,” he said, but he sounded like he was dodging.

Helena wrinkled her nose at that. “Then it is possible to make a deal and not get dragged into hell?”

“Yes, it is,” he said, “Otherwise nobody would takethe risk.”

She thought about that. “I suppose it’s like how casinos let a person win big money occasionally to let the others think it’spossible.”

Rafferty neither confirmed nor denied it, but Helena was pretty confident she was right. “So what did she want from you?”

More of the silent treatment as he picked up one of his prepared tastes and held it out to her.

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