Kellen’s eyes narrowed, glittering with his dislike for her friend Marcella Acosta. “Was she too busy fighting the bowels of Hell to bother to answer her demon hotline tonight?”
Delaney clucked her tongue in his direction, setting her three-legged wonder aside with a loving pat to the head and rising with a stretch of her arms. “I wouldn’t go knocking the only connection I have to all things demonic, were I you, big brother. Marcella’s helped me more times than I can count. Do you have any idea the kind of help she can be when a demon possesses a lost spirit and is preventing me from crossing them? Not only that, but she’s kept hundreds of those very spirits from making a very bad eternal decision. And you know what I always say—one less freaky-deaky demon in the world is one less future possession in the making. Now get off her ass and lighten up. And no, I couldn’t get in touch with her. So lay off already.” With a finger, she pointed down at her blind dog, snapping her fingers so he’d know to follow her. “Punkin, come with Mommy—it’s time for your insulin.”
She trotted off to the kitchen, breathing a sigh of relief that Kellen had agreed to stay. His beef with Marcella was valid on some levels. She was a demon. But she was a demon who’d made a very bad decision based on foolish emotion versus practicality.
Shit happened.
Marcella had spent a butt-assed long time trying to make it right on this plane. Not that it would ever do her any good. She’d turned her nose up at the Big Kahuna. Major bad juju. That wasn’t something you could ever take back, but take it back she tried each time she helped Delaney convince someone that the demon who had showed up at a crossing—as some occasionally did—and was offering them riches beyond compare and a sea of tanned, toned, naked twenty-year-olds as far as the eye could see, was all just bullshit. You might see tanned, toned twenty-year-olds, but they’d have scales, or snakes writhing on their heads.
No one knew that better than Marcella, and Delaney was grateful for her—even if Kellen thought she was a turbo bitch with an agenda that still remained unapparent to Delaney after ten years of friendship.
She’d be bitchy, too, if what Marcella said about what her demon form really looked like was true. Scales and horns and the like were so far from Marcella’s gorgeous human form. That alone was a good reason to be pissed off.
In Delaney’s opinion, Marcella’d been ripped off, and now she had no hope of redemption. Choosing sides when you left this Earth, and having no guidance from someone like Delaney—especially if you waffled at the wrong moment—was a scary prop.
Yanking open her fridge once more, she dug out the insulin, reaching into the drawer beside it to find the packaged needles she kept there for dog number one. She filled the syringe as Kellen’s chestnut-colored head peeked around the door frame of her kitchen and her pack tore around the corner, screeching to a halt at her feet. Positioning her diabetic pooch in her arms, Delaney injected his meds with a swift, practiced hand.
“Mind if I shower—or is the water still only hot from nine in the morning until ten forty-five?” he joked. His jaw was unshaven, his hazel eyes bleary. Probably from the long hours he put in at his after-school program for gifted children. He was a good teacher. He’d be an even better father, and that made her smile. She just might have offspring by proxy if Kellen ever settled down.
Delaney chuckled, then looked at her microwave clock. “You’ve got, like, eight minutes.”
Her brood stared after Kellen’s broad back, while he hurried off to catch the last of the hot water she’d see until tomorrow. And that reminded her . . . her hands went to her hips, her eyes zeroed in on her “pack.” Hah! Pack, schmack. “Hey, philistines,” she called to them. Five and a half pairs of eyes sought hers. Well, four and a half if you counted out her sightless angel.
Six bodies lined up dutifully as though a treat were in order. “Oh, no, no, no. You guys are in deep doody with me. Wanna tell me what all that cozying up to Clyde was all about? Haven’t I taught you, Grasshoppers? Demons are bad, bad, bad, and there you all were, climbing all over him like he was a mountain of T-bones. You’ve got some splainin’ to do. All of you. Now let’s get some sleep. Off to bed.” She gave them a stern look before flipping the lights off in the kitchen and heading to her bedroom.
The pitter-patter of paws followed closely behind, each of them jumping up on the bed and sniffing the place where Clyde had sat not an hour before with looks of longing on their wee puppy mugs.