“Yes?” He looked even more confused. “Her desires for how she wants to be addressed are extremely clear.”
“Oh.” She supposed that would be an easy desire to pick up on. Still, she hadn’t expected a demon to follow Gisele’s lead more willingly than a lot of humans. She felt a flash of shame for her entire species, but pushed on to her second point. “She is my very best friend, you will treat her with more respect than you treat me with, you will never ever try to even touch her soul for any reason, or you are out on your ass and I’ll call the Shadow Council myself. You understand?”
“You realize that if you ban me from making a Deal with anyone at all, you’re stuck with me.”
“We’ll get you back without anyone’s souls being involved.”
“You don’t even like your coworkers,” he pointed out, sounding uncomfortably reasonable. “I’m sure some of themwould be happy to stab you in the back for some whatever-Q-L things.”
“We’re not talking about this.” The embarrassment had fallen behind but was starting to catch up. She had a demon. A very attractive demon. In her bedroom. And she’d forgotten to make her bed, which had dark red sheets she knew her skin would look good against and had bought in a fit of optimism and was now deeply regretting. Her ears flared hot. “Let’s go eat some ice cream.”
Gisele, who had seen far too much and responded to things with far more grace than Morgan thought she herself would have been able to summon, greeted their reappearance with only the tiniest eyeroll for Morgan.
“So what brings you to our corner of the island?” Gisele asked, digging into a pint of Van Leeuwen chocolate caramel cheesecake ice cream and pushing a second pint—honeycomb—at Morgan.
Luke had the sense to glance at Morgan.
She sighed. She could try to keep this all from Gisele, but her roommate was like a terrier with a secret. And it was going to be too hard to explain why Luke was crashing on their couch. She needed to give her the truth. “You know the stuff I told you about my family?”
In college, Gisele had often dragged Morgan uptown to be fed by Gisele’s extended family, at least half of whom regularly seemed to turn out enormous plates of mofongo and pernil. Gisele’s family had handled her coming out with only moderate drama, so it had taken months for it to occur to Gisele that the reason the invitations weren’t reciprocated weren’t only because Morgan’s family lived further upstate. It wasn’t until the stray mailing from a chupacabraconservation charity ended up at Morgan’s address by mistake that Gisele started asking questions. It took understanding that the mailing was not some kind of mean joke about Gisele’s Puerto Rican heritage for her roommate to start realizing that Morgan really did come from a different culture. Which was good, because Gisele was the one who ended up procuring all the sushi after the Penguin Incident in sophomore year. It had never even occurred to Fiona.
Gisele paused and gave Morgan her full attention. Which took a lot, when the competition was chocolate caramel cheesecake ice cream. “You mean the… you-know stuff?”
“Yeah, so…” No way for this not to be a bomb. “Luke’s not exactly human.”
Gisele looked far too excited about this information. “Wait, really? Are you a werewolf? I’ve always wanted to meet a werewolf.”
“No, I am not a werewolf.” He looked more amused than anything else, fortunately.
How to put this? She gave up. “He’s a demon.”
“Really?” Gisele raised her eyebrows, impressed. “Like, from Hell and everything?”
“If by Hell, you mean a place all bad human souls go so they may be tormented into eternity, which is ruled by fallen angels from a prissy God, no. We are not.” It would have been more forbidding if Lucareoth hadn’t looked so prissy himself.
“He’s from the Infernal Plane,” Morgan said before this could turn into a lecture on metaphysics. “It’s not the same thing. He’s stuck here by accident, until we can figure out how to get him back.”
“Huh.” Gisele grabbed a spoonful of ice cream as shethought. “I’m guessing there’s a good reason why you’re not asking your parents for help?”
Lucareoth jerked back. “Her dam wants to kill me.”
Gisele paused and looked to Morgan for confirmation.
“Kinda, yeah.” Morgan confiscated the ice cream scoop. Ice cream couldn’t make it worse, at least, and it might help. Her stomach suddenly reminded her that she’d only had wilted salad and a couple of hundred-calorie packs of almonds since breakfast. She grabbed the Tupperware full of the snickerdoodle cookies she’d made a few days before and started building herself a honeycomb-flavor ice cream sandwich.
“Well, shit. Huh.” Gisele tapped her spoon thoughtfully. “Do you eat? Sleep? Shower with water? Any allergies we should know about?”
Lucareoth looked overwhelmed. “I do eat: a lot of the same stuff you do. And sleep. I think our days are almost twice as long as yours, but I guess I can nap? I don’t know if I have allergies, I’ve never been here before, and the water thing is deeply weird but I’m guessing you don’t have hot sand baths so I’ll try to figure it out?”
Morgan tried to contribute. “Do you want honeycomb or chocolate caramel cheesecake ice cream?”
Lucareoth’s eyes flicked back and forth between the two as if he feared choosing the wrong one would summon Fiona. “I… I…”
“You can sense what everyone else wants but you can’t pick which ice cream you like?” Morgan already felt bad for not having thought about any of the logistics. The ice cream hadn’t been supposed to be a trick question. Wasn’t he supposed to be all about desire?
“It’s OK, I’ll give you some of both,” Gisele soothed. She turned back to Morgan. “How are you going to get him home?”
“I have no idea,” Morgan confessed.
