Page 3 of Devil Bound
I groaned and stomped away to one of the empty tables, where I plopped into a chair.Lucifer chuckled while I did my best to ignore him, turning my attention to the fortune cookie that was still whole in its wrapper.
I was hungry enough to not care what anyone thought about me devouring the damn thing, so I did.I crunched down on the last of it, doing my best to ignore the Devil placing a complicated order where he substituted several things for several other things.The fortunes in these cookies were all bogus anyway, but I turned my attention to the tiny piece of paper in the hopes of ignoring the Devil.
Life is like licking honey from thorns,the fortune read.
I stared at the paper, then tore it into even smaller pieces.
“Did that cookie to anything bad to you?”asked the Devil.
I looked up to see him standing over me, his own fortune cookie in hand, smiling even as he covered me in the shadow of his broad shoulders and wide chest and—
Lionel Hawkes, get a fucking grip.Immortals are not for fucking, period.
“I think my pizza is almost ready.”
“Are you planning on eating alone?”
“Yeah.People do that.They eat alone all the time.”
Lucifer shrugged.“And sometimes they eat together.”
If I didn’t keep my eyes on his immortal ass, this guy might just eat me.It was bad enough that I now owed him money, worse that he knew who I was.And he had run into me in this area of the city, which was potentially even worse still.
“Do you live around here?”I blurted out, my subtlety gone like the windows and wallpapers in the burned-out house.
Lucifer frowned.“Nelly, you know where I live.I just told you my address, don’t you remember?”
“I don’t have fucking amnesia, I’m just not a walking compass.I don’t know every road in this city.”
“Hmm.”
He tore the wrapper of his cookie off without looking.He was looking at me instead, sort of in a concerned way.Maybe he was waiting for me to realize I didn’t know my name and had no idea where I was.If so, boo-hoo.
“Has anyone told you that you smell of foul flames and burned things, Nelly?”
That actually made me self-conscious.I wasn’t a stranger to getting smells on me.Dead people could get smelly, and I was fine with it so long as I could give them a voice, but there were always other people; the living kind.On days like this one, being among other living people really sucked, and I recalled fondly the calm and peace I’d had on the shore of the river with the dead zombie on top of me, pre-devilish intervention.
Lucky for me, the server called my order.I was up in a flash and squeezed around Lucifer to grab my food and hightail it out of there.
“I’ll pay you back ASAP, Lucifer,” I said, more or less running out of that pizza place I wouldn’t ever set foot in ever again.
2
Lucifer
Almost four years ago, later.
Thenecromancerwasescapingme.That was a libido-crushing realization, especially after I had worked so hard to run into him again.
I walked into the warzone that was Trony’s and my home with a few boxed pizzas in my arms.There were large paint buckets or something in the hallway, and I had to step over those.I made my way past the kitchen to where my alleged sex throne had stood on its humble pedestal.Trony had taken a sledgehammer to the pedestal, which felt a little bit extreme, even for an angel.
“Trony!I brought food.”
I followed the thunking of her heavy work boots to the rooms at the other end of the house.The walls there were coming down to create a wide-open area suitable for all kinds of fun, and finally, finally, there’d be room for an indoor Jacuzzi.The angel met me in a plastic-covered scene that would make any forensic-minded serial killer salivate.
“What do you mean, you brought food?”she asked.
I held up the warm pizzas.“These.”
