?
“Hmm.”
“Can you tell me your name?” I asked him.
“We went through this.”
“Right, and if you’re Belphegor, I’m Kate Middleton.”
He bowed dramatically. “Your highness.”
“If you don’t tell me your name, I’m just going to make something up, and you really won’t enjoy whatever I come up with.”
“Go for it. You can’t banish me with a name like Justin any more than you can Belphegor. I care not.”
“All right, Harold.”
“Harold.”
“Yes, Harold.” I smiled at him.
“Very well.”
We locked eyes and both knew in that moment that each was as stubborn as the other. Rock, meet hard place. Hard place, meet Harold.
“Now, on the rooftop at the Hotel Beverly, before I brought you here, you strongly indicated you might be of some help to us.”
“Oh sure.”
“So, do you have useful knowledge or demon insight to offer us?” I was praying this guy had anything to make this whole ordeal worth my time, otherwise I would absolutely owe Tyler a coffee every day for the rest of my natural life, and that dude did not drink the cheap stuff.
“I know something you’ll definitely find interesting.” He smiled, and I wished he hadn’t.
“All right, share with the class, then.”
“How does a demon uprising sound? Literal Hell on Earth.”
I blinked at him, then opened the second bottle of water and took a long drink. “I’m listening.”
Chapter Four
Demon uprising.
Sure, it was about as original as casting a pretty white girl to play a concerned doctor on TV, but still, it was the kind of line you didn’t want to take lightly, especially when coming from a bona fide demon.
“Pfft,” is what I said. “You demons are always promising Hell on Earth, but then you spend all your time making little girls throw up on themselves. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t jump straight to the believing-you part.”
“There’s a good reason you humans are so easy for us to control, you know. It’s that you want to believe anything, even when you pretend to believe nothing.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you’re dying for me to be right.”
“But by your logic, I’d be a chump for believing you. Which means you’re lying.”
Harold blinked at me a few times as if only just becoming aware of the context of what he’d said. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Oh my God, you’re so bad at this. Are you new? Like, are you a fresh-out-of-the-lakes-of-fire demon? Are you even third hierarchy?”