“You can’t buy souls!”
“I mean, I can. It’s pretty easy, they just have to sign the contract.”
“I mean that I’m not going to let you just damn someone in front of me.”
“But why not?”
“What could you possibly give him that would be a reasonable trade for his immortal soul?”
Lucareoth’s eyebrows furrowed as he thought back. “He didn’t want to sleep in the shelter tonight because last night someone got beat up.”
She sucked in a breath. She had figured he’d wanted booze. Which meant that she had been making terrible assumptions about someone. Maybe she was wrong. But trading your soul to get off the street was still surely a bad move? Did she have the right to make that decision? She wished she knew.
He patted her elbow as if he were trying to make her feel better. “He was happy with the money you gave him. Was it worth a lot?”
Not enough for a hotel room. Maybe she should havegiven him more, except she didn’t have more on her. She tried to stick to her principles. “Not as much as protecting his soul.”
“He wanted to use it for booze,” the demon said casually. “Also, he wanted to grab your butt.”
People were complicated and she hated them all.
They approached the hulking brick tower she called home and entered its tiny courtyard. He watched, trying to not look obvious but clearly fascinated, as she yanked open the first door—there was a trick to it or it got stuck—and then unlocked the inner door in the vestibule. The lobby echoed her footsteps, the tiny checked tiles bouncing the sound off all the hard surfaces that, despite being easy to clean, didn’t get cleaned quite as often as would be optimal.
A choice. She sighed. He was a guest, after all.
“Which sounds less unappealing: seven flights of stairs or the world’s sketchiest elevator?”
“… elevator?”
“Stinkovater it is.” She punched the button, and the doors creaked open, the inner door noticeably trailing the outer. The elevator had an olfactory punch that wasn’t simply urine, although urine was an element. There was an optimistic amount of knock-off Pine Sol, and a funk that was probably some exotic species of mold, overlaid by a sweet smell not unlike floral conditioner. She usually opted for stairs, and congratulated herself on the cardio. Sometimes she made it all the way to the top without having to pause at one of the mid-way landings.
He sniffed appreciably. “This reminds me of my grandsire’s!”
She made a mental note to continue in her policy ofnotincluding visiting the Infernal Plane on her bucket list. “Wait, I thought your parents wanted to eat you.”
He looked offended. “Where I’m from, if a parent declines to eat their spawn, they back them after that. It’s the job of the elder to support the spawn they keep, otherwise it is a waste of resources to raise them.”
Morgan wished her mother saw things that way. She watched his face fall, though, as he thought. She debated letting it go for a moment. She didn’t want to know. He was going to be gone in the morning, and good riddance. But, as his shoulders collapsed in on themselves, she found herself asking gently, “Are you worried they’re going to regret that now?”
He shook it off. “Maybe they would have. But neither one made it through the last reorg, and they left me with enough debts I didn’t have a lot of choice about taking the sales job.”
“I’m… I’m so sorry,” she stammered. Given all the talk of eating people, she guessed that the demon world didn’t have much need for unemployment benefits.
He twitched his shoulders, shaking off any grief like he was shaking off a fly as the elevator doors creaked open. “At least they were together. And they won’t have to deal with this mess.”
When she opened the apartment door, Gisele called out from the kitchen to them. “Ice cream time!”
Anxiety suddenly clawed at her stomach again. She hadn’t thought this part through at all. But Gisele was already coming out of the kitchen, dusting off a perfectly manicured hand on her jeans and extending it to shake.
Lucareoth took it with a dazzling smile. Gisele took a tiny breath.
“Gisele, this is Luke,” Morgan said hurriedly. Already, that little crease was appearing between his eyebrows as he took a second look and opened his mouth. “I need to show him something, we’ll be right back.”
Gisele’s assessing face quickly turned to cynical amusement as she shot her roommate the Look. TheYou’re trying to keep this new person from saying something because you forgot to get ahead of this, didn’t youLook.
Lucareoth only looked confused as she bustled him into her bedroom and shut the door behind them. She didn’t have time to be embarrassed that she’d dragged a demon into her bedroom.
“Hername is Gisele,” she said with great emphasis. “You will use the correct pronouns for her and you will never say another word to the contrary.”
