if he hadn’t disproven that association to her time and time again in fervent, pulsating, speak-in-tongues and curl-your-toes demonstrations of lust and pleasure against her burning flesh.
But that was before. In his magically-engineered facade, he appeared to her as a black-haired, blue-eyed, Italian-American underwear model, sleek, shiny and sinfully lustable. The glamour, and their ensuing hot and heavy relationship, all amounted to an ingenious scam. Jerry was on a mission, and it wasn’t to win her heart. Lucifer had somehow gotten a heads up that Riona was next up on the roster to be vested as the Keystone Witch of the Pure Souls, she figured. Hell dispatched Jerry to assess her corruptibility, and feel her out (feeling her up was just a bonus). At some point, the need for the game evaporated and it nearly cost Riona her life. No one could have predicted that it would be at that particular moment that her powers would manifest, allowing her to walk through a solid wall and escape. It had to be a one in a million chance, right?
Riona actually knew. The chances stood at 3,456,783 to 1. She had been the power ball winner in the supernatural lottery.
Jerry chuckled from across the silent, tension-locked room. “Of all the bars in all the netherworlds, she has to come walking into mine.”
Riona put up a false front of confidence in her best attempts at a bluff. “Why, hello handsome. Fancy seeing you here.”
He took another swig of his beer before gently placing the bottle on the counter and pushing himself off his barstool. With a swagger that still melted her internally, despite the less than desirable exterior she now beheld, she still remembered the delectable ways in which those hips could swing. He made each step golden as he crossed the room. When they stood face to face, that unique mixture of anticipation and disgust only he could instill took up residency among the butterflies in her stomach. Despite the fact that his demon physiognomy was now clear as day, those azure discs that undid her so often during their short-term fling excited her in ways that weren’t proper for a Sunday.
“I take it you’re not here for a drink, so I can only assume this is that long overdue booty call you know you’ve been hankering for.”
Her breath went jagged as his scaly hand reached up and stroked the flushed alabaster of her cheek. She closed her eyes and tried to regain the locus of control. She would not, could not, let him get the better of her.
“What can I say?” she bantered back, opening her eyes, now brimming with code orange vigilance. “Once you go demon, it’s them that you’re needin’.”
“Cute. We should print that up on t-shirts. I know why you’re here, witch,” Jerry declared as he pulled back and sauntered a few steps. Marc and Dee took advantage of his retreat to tighten their formation behind her. “It’s a sort of a rite of passage for you, isn’t it? Your first demon slaughter.”
“How do you know it’s my first?” The self-effacing admission escaped her lips before she could recall it.
“Because you’re making small talk. I’m not Oprah, sweetheart. Despite what you’ve seen in every Joss Whedon fantasy, we’re not exactly the speechifying type. If you had come through those doors and I wasn’t here, you can bet legal money that they’d have you chicken-wired to a mattress out back by now. Probably Thing One and Thing Two, too, because your pillar Pure Souls do happen to be some fine specimens of men...” He shrugged dismissively. “… you know, if you’re into that sort of thing.”
A rustle of cloth made her hope Dee was getting ready to land one squarely on Jerry’s jaw. When she looked back, however, she saw the boiling pot about to blow was actually the not-so-good Father. The very man who had made this whole having-magic thing a pain in the sarcastic ass.
Jerry continued, unfazed. “But how exciting for you! Oh, you should really slow down and savor this. I can already picture you at home later, making up the latest addition to your scrapbook, plastering a severed incubus horn in with silver-foiled borders and fluffy poodle stickers on the side. Tell you what, for old time’s sake, I’ll make the chicken wire optional. I know you prefer to be restrained with leather straps, but I’m negotiable.”
Jerry gave that lustful smirk he had mastered so well during their liaison, the one that always bypassed her