“I’m late, actually.” He stood there in a brown suit and loosened tie, looking both uncomfortable and cautious.

I glanced at my watch. It was 6:10. “Oh, wow, the time must’ve slipped away from me.”

“Must have,” he said before raising the bag he was carrying. “Hungry?”

“Famished.” I looked back at Reyes, who was back to scowling, this time at Uncle Bob. “What about you?” I asked him. “Want to join us?”

“No, thank you,” he said, stepping back into his apartment. A burst of cool air rushed between us with his absence. “I ate at the bar.”

“Okay, well, we can discuss our business for tonight later?” The card game didn’t start until nine, so we had some time to come up with a brilliant plan that would keep us both alive. And hopefully one that would let us keep our souls as well.

I didn’t want a demon supping on my soul.

Uncle Bob’s timing could not have been more perfect. Right as we turned to go into my apartment, Cookie’s date rose in the stairwell beside us. He nodded to us and went straight to Cookie’s door to knock. Uncle Bob stopped in his tracks. He surveyed the man from the top of his neatly trimmed head to the tips of his wing tip toes. It was funny. Kind of. On one hand, I felt sorry for him. On the other, it was his own fault. Cookie wasn’t going to wait around forever. She needed snuggle time.

He turned back to us as he waited for Cookie to answer the door. I winked at him. Barry was an old friend from college. We’d had a couple classes together, including one on jazz appreciation. We’d bonded over the fact that going in, neither one of us was particularly fond of jazz, but we’d learned to love it. Especially the history.

I stepped to my door and turned the knob slowly, taking my time, waiting for Cookie to answer hers. When she didn’t answer immediately, I began to get a little worried. But when she did answer, all my fears dissipated. She looked fantastic. She wore a dark burgundy pantsuit with a cream-colored throw around her shoulders. If that didn’t get Uncle Bob’s attention, I didn’t know what would.

Uncle Bob made a point of speaking to me in a louder-than-necessary voice. He asked me once again if I was hungry.

I chuckled and said just as loudly, “Why, yes, I am, Uncle Bob. Like I said before. But thanks for the recap.”

“Oh, hey, Cookie,” he said, pretending to just notice her. As if his eyes didn’t almost pop out of his head the minute they landed on her. He was so bad at this flirting gig.

Cookie offered him a brilliant smile as she shook Barry’s hand. “Hello there yourself, Robert. I see you brought dinner. I’m sorry I’ll miss it.”

Uncle Bob followed me inside, almost stumbling when I paused at the threshold of my apartment to give him more time. He cleared his throat in embarrassment and said, “I’m sorry, too.”

Barry led her to the stairs, taking her hand as they descended them. Uncle Bob noticed. I thought he would break his neck, trying to watch them walk all the way to the next landing.

“So, what do you know about Dad that I don’t?”

He pulled out two trays from the bag: one with spaghetti and one with lasagna. I dived for the spaghetti before he could get to it.

He shrugged, took his lasagna, and headed for my kitchen table. “I probably don’t know much more than you do. But I’ve noticed a distinct change in his behavior.”

At first I just kind of stared at Uncle Bob, not sure what he was doing. Then I realized he was using a kitchen table for its intended purpose. Weird. “Well, duh. I could have told you that. His bout with cancer and his sudden remission made his telling me he was going on a trip plausible. He said he was going to learn to sail. But Denise seems to think otherwise. What could he possibly be up to?”

I sat beside Ubie at the table. It felt strange. I’d never eaten at my kitchen table. This was an experience for me.

“I hate to make assumptions,” Uncle Bob said as he stabbed at his lasagna. “But if I were to guess, I’d say it had something to do with you.”

“Me? Why me?” I twirled spaghetti around my fork.

“Didn’t you notice how, after going to all the trouble of having you arrested just to try to get you out of the PI business, he seemed to give up pretty easily?”

“I noticed him trying to shoot me. The rest is kind of a blur.”

“I’m just finding everything he’s done lately pretty suspicious. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was investigating something. He’d get like that in the old days. When he was on the scent of something big, he’d get secretive. Defensive. I haven’t seen him like that in a long time.”

“But what kind of case can he be working? What can he possibly investigate? He’s not even a detective anymore.”

He put down his fork and extended me his full attention. That meant he was about to tell me something I probably didn’t want to know. “Let’s just say he’s been asking a lot of questions about your boyfriend.”

I put down my fork, too. “Reyes? Why would he be investigating Reyes?”

“I don’t know, pumpkin. I’m probably wrong. So, Cookie has a date?”

At last. I was wondering when he would bring her up. “Yeah. I think she joined some kind of online dating service. From what I understand, she’s very popular. She has a date every day this week.”

“With a different guy?” he asked, appalled.

“With a different guy.”

After that, Uncle Bob seemed to lose his appetite. He barely touched his lasagna and left with a grim expression on his face. We definitely got him thinking, contemplating what his lax attitude toward a delicious creature like Cookie was costing him. Now I just had to worry about one thing: Uncle Bob’s penchant for investigating. If he figured out what we were doing, he’d disown me. And possibly sell me to a Romanian count.

6

Sometimes I wrestle my demons.

Sometimes we just snuggle.

—BUMPER STICKER

Duff finally showed after Uncle Bob left. He seemed embarrassed, and I wondered if he’d heard what Reyes said about him. That he was bad. But how bad could he possibly be? The way I understood it, if someone was very bad, they went straight to hell when they died. So, no matter what Reyes said, Duff couldn’t have been that bad of a person.

“S-sorry about that,” he said, hanging his head in shame. “I didn’t m-mean to r-run out on you. Reyes and I don’t r-really get along.”

“Reyes and a lot of people don’t really get along,” I said.

I’d made another pot of coffee and was in the middle of pouring when he popped in. I’d need all the energy I could muster to face this Dealer guy. Which was a cool name. Any demon living off the hard-earned souls of humans didn’t deserve a cool name. It was like when the media gave cool names to serial killers and terrorists. They didn’t have the right to anything cool, in my opinion. Of which I had many.

“Reyes told me you used to visit him in prison.”

If I didn’t know that Duff had exactly zero blood pumping through his body, I would’ve sworn he’d blushed. “Oh, th-that. I was just k-keeping an eye on him.”

“Why?” I asked, sitting back at my kitchen table. It was nice there. Homey.

He drew his shoulders in, unable to look at me. “B-because. H-he kept going to s-see you.”

That baffled me more than a little. Flummoxed, I asked, “You mean, incorporeally?”

“Y-yes. He shouldn’t have.”

“Why’s that?”

“B-because he’s n-not a nice person.”

Interesting. “That’s funny. He said the same thing about you.”

His gaze shot up in surprise. “He d-doesn’t know me. He w-wasn’t there.”

This was getting more intriguing by the moment. “He wasn’t where?”

“At my h-house. Where it h-happened. But because of it, they took me away and th-that’s how I m-met Rey’aziel. I didn’t know he was the d-devil’s son when I m-met him, though. He was j-just an inmate. Like me.”