Work Text:
He must have done something wrong. Mispronounced a word in the incantation. Crushed the wrong leaf. Maybe the meat was too lean, or those damn bargain matches! That was probably it. He knew he should have gotten the long wooden ones.
The demon on the counter swung a sneaker clad foot and smiled at him. “Well, are you going to tell me what it is you need help with? Ex-lover to scorn? I’m an excellent torturer. Really quite good at hair pulling. And tic-tac-toe with no clear winner. Oh, and this one time I played the trumpet for four hours.”
“No—you play the trumpet?”
“Not well. That’s why it worked.”
Ben opened his mouth and closed it again. Looked at her, sitting there half on the stove. “You don’t look like a demon.”
She looked down at herself and swore softly before catching herself and frowning at him. “And just what do you think demons look like? What, just because I like pretty things doesn’t make me bad at my job! I’ll have you know I was personally assigned by my progenitor the Prince of Hell—”
“Ah, I see, nepotism. Been there.”
She made a kind of screechy, squawking noise and the lightbulb in the living room lamp exploded.
For the briefest moment, he thought her teeth sharpened, eyes yellowing and what might be wings and horns shimmered at the edge of his vision before disappearing completely. “Oh, pooh! I never manage to hold the glamour. Not angry enough, I suppose.”
“A…happy…demon?”
She shrugged and adjusted the hem of her baby pink tennis skirt, tugging it up her thighs about an inch before crossing one leg over the other and swinging it. He got the barest glimpse of orange no show socks inside her shoes and his eyes traced back up to her knee. “WHAT IS THAT?”
“Hm?”
He pointed.
“Oh! That’s my tail.”
“It’s purple.”
“Isn’t it neat? Took me three centuries to get the color right.” Her nose crinkled when she smiled.
“Oh. Did you just say centuries?”
“Yep,” she said, popping the P sound in a way that should have annoyed him. “So, Solo, Ben (JUST Ben) C., why did you summon a demon?” A deck of cards materialized in her hand and she began shuffling, the movements almost mesmerizing. “Are you ready for a deal?”
“Was that…did you just make a pun?”
She laughed and the cards flew into the air, his kitchen suddenly the win screen on that old solitaire game from his post-college desktop. He groaned, not looking forward to a-lot-more-than-fifty-two pick up, but the demon waved a hand and they disappeared. She hopped down, flashing even more (toned and tanned) thigh.
“Weren’t you wearing a sweater?”
“Hm? Oh yes. Contrary to popular belief, not all of the infernal realm is hot. It’s warmer here than the office, so I poofed it back there.”
“Poofed?”
She did the hand wave thing again. “Poofed.”
He felt the warning tightening of a major headache coming on. “This was a terrible plan. Can we just forget it?”
“Hm, no.” She grinned and crinkled her nose, tail kind of waving at him before winding around her leg like a tattooed ribbon with a heart at the end. She saw him looking. “Keeps it from flipping my skirt up. A real bother that, but Sheila’s got a mind of her own.”
“Sheila?”
“Tail.”
“It has a name.”
“SHE.”
“She has a name.”
“Quite.”
Ben pinched the bridge of his nose. “I just needed to get past the block…” he muttered.
“What, like you need help walking?”
“Not the…writer’s block. I’m on a deadline.”
“You were going to trade your Soul for a book?”
He shrugged and looked away, uncomfortable now that she pointed it out. The demon wandered his kitchen, opening and closing cabinets and rummaging. “Not a single, decent snack. Are you certain you work from home?”
“In the—”
“Oh-ho-ho, what have we here? Jackpot!” she crowed, opening the small corner cabinet next to the refrigerator. Shoving aside granola bars and tossing dried fruit onto the counter, she reached to the very back of his shame-shelf, grabbing a box of crème filled cupcakes and a bag of spicy nacho chips.
She sat at the table across from him, happily crunching (she chewed with her mouth full). “Sho, whash the book about?” she asked around three chips and half a cupcake.
Ben stared, appalled and disturbingly aroused as what seemed to him an unusually long tongue sought the creamy filling at the corner of her mouth.
She tapped the cupcake box against the table. “Hello! Solo, Ben C. I asked a question?”
“I’m starting to see the demon of it all,” he muttered.
“The book?” she demanded, before crushing another couple of chips in her hand and then shoving them in her mouth. He physically shuddered when she wiped her hands on her formerly pristine white shirt, leaving great reddish-orange streaks across her breasts.
[Don’t look at the demon lady’s breasts, Ben, Do. Not. Look.]
He cleared his throat. “Um, it’s a mystery. I…they’ve not been selling as well, and I…” he trailed off with a shrug and watched in a kind of fascinated horror as that tongue of hers scooped the cream from another cupcake.
“You should add more sex,” she muttered, attention mostly on the chips she was crushing inside the bag.
“I don’t think that will—”
The demon turned the bag up and poured crushed off-brand nacho chips into her mouth. “People will love it. Let Detective Ren get laid.”
“I…you…”
“You can have that tip for free,” she said, standing and walking past him, leaning down as she passed to whisper, “Name’s Aurelia by the way, or well, that’s the closest a human throat can manage, but you can call me Rey.”
“What?”
She paused at the kitchen door and the space behind her kind of flickered. He smelled sulfur and smoke and…boysenberry?
“I don’t recommend you summon demons for writing help, most of them aren’t very creative, but if you must, use duck eggs to substitute for quail. Use chicken eggs and you just make a weird omelet.”
She disappeared with a waggle of fingers, but a sheaf of papers floated from the ceiling.
Notes on his currently stalled manuscript, and a telephone number scrawled in what he suspected was pink lipliner.
He wondered if there was a surcharge for dialing hell.