“CADE! Hey, Cade!” I yelled. The curtains in a second storey window flicked open. Bet he’d known I was here the whole time and sent his mom to answer the door like a chicken shit. I mouthed the wordsfuck youand flipped him the bird. Then I looked over at Uko. “Now.”
The box went up like an inferno, a massive fireball with six-foot high flames. It was glorious. I kept my middle fingers up and pointed at his window all the way back to my car.
Uko grinned and practically skipped to the passenger side. “That was fun. Do you have any other ex-boyfriends we should set on fire?”
I laughed as I sped away from the curb. “Not recently. Don’t worry, Uko. That shit is behind me. I’m devoting my life to Twinkies and wine, and swearing off men altogether.”
We hit the freeway, and I realized that I was actually kind of excited. I hadn’t felt this alive in a long time. When had I gotten trapped in the mundane? Waking up next to Cade, having the same boring missionary morning sex, wearing the same smart business clothes to work, seeing the same faces, eating the same food, going to bed at the same time. It was just monotony over and over again.
This right here, a little pyromania and running away to a carnival with a fucking demon? This was living. Was I probably going to be evicted from my apartment when I couldn’t pay my rent? Maybe. Should I be looking for a new job? Definitely. But I could give myself these few days to actuallylive.Maybe Uko and I had more in common than I thought.
Uko seemed content to watch everything stream past out the window, and I studied his profile out of the corner of my eye. He was so damn beautiful. Even in his demon form. Hell,especiallyin his demon form.
His meat suit didn’t really change his physicality so much as it just covered the swirling markings on his skin, hid his horns, and made his eyes less mesmerizing. He still had the same almost inhumanly sharp jawline. The same impossibly high cheekbones. The same nose that sat a little too much to the left, like it had been broken numerous times. The same broad shoulders that I wanted to kiss a path across. The same long, muscular legs.
I dragged my eyes back to the road before I killed us both, and cleared my throat. “So, I thought we’d go down through Memphis. They do some good fried food there and have some great music. We can stop for the night. Home of Elvis, you know? You would have liked him. Pretty sure he died from too much deep-fried food. Well, maybe drugs. Or constipation. It’s all a little fuzzy. But he liked deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and I feel like that’s something the demon of fried food can get behind,” I babbled, filling the silence with nonsense. It was like my self-consciousness had only just caught up with the rest of me and realized that Uko was super freaking hot, and not just because he was a fire demon.
He just stared at me, his eyes watching my mouth like he couldn’t fully comprehend all the drivel coming out of it. I snapped my jaw shut and kept my eyes on the road. We drove for an hour in a silence that eventually became comfortable. Uko had a lazy insouciance, as if his body was just made to be temporary. Maybe it was. What the heck did I know about Hell?
“So, Uko, do you have any siblings?”
He turned his dark eyes toward me, inclining his head. “About three hundred, at last count. They live and die in pretty quick succession.”
I whipped my head toward him. “Three hundred? Your parents must be, uh, active.”
He gave me a sharp-toothed grin, despite the fact that his meat suit made his pearly whites completely mundane looking. “We aren’t born in the way humans are. We are…” He seemed to be trying to find the right word, but I was going to be no help since I knew next to nothing about demon birthing techniques. “Spawned, perhaps? We are all souls waiting around a writhing mass until a body comes up for grabs, and then we fight for it. My siblings are just other inferior demons.”
“So your brother…?”
“A joke. But I guess the demon born before me could be considered my sibling. Although, he is the demon of kale and coffee enemas.”
The laugh that bubbled out of me was so sudden, I hissed like Ernie fromSesame Street. “Are you fucking with me right now?”
He gave me that grin again. “Not unless you pull over.”
Heat flooded every inch of my body until I imagined I was just one giant, leaking pheromone. “Don’t joke about that, Uko. I’m feeling a little raw after Cade.”
Uko huffed, crossing his arms over his broad chest. “We should have madehimthe bonfire in the driveway. There is nothing more impressive than a human torch.”
I squinted at him, trying to decide if he was still joking, but he seemed deadly serious.Well, then.
After my stellar attempt at making conversation, we fell back into silence again. Eventually, I caved, connecting my music to the speakers. Imagine Dragons played over the stereo, and Uko’s eyes went wide with wonder. I grinned widely as the deep, thumping basslines reverberated around my car, and sang along softly as his head whipped around, trying to find the source of the magical music.
I passed him my phone. “Here. You can pick the songs. The little right arrow thing will switch the song.”
Watching him taste-test all the music in my streaming service was the type of simple pleasure people just didn’t get to experience anymore. To see someone form a passion, to decide what they loved and what they hated, was something else. He didn’t like music with no lyrics—we discovered that one after some rousing musical scores. He liked slow, heavy, lazy beats. He didn’t like electronica, but seemed to enjoy modern country and old-school metal music.
We passed hours talking about music and gossiping about bands, with me rattling off suggestions. I taught him how to create a playlist to add the songs he liked so he could listen to them again, and it became the most eclectic thing ever. Patsy Cline sat beside Billie Eilish. Nirvana beside The Beatles. Random indie bands beside pop princesses. I loved it. I was keeping his playlist, even after he returned to Hell.
The first pang of sadness hit me at the idea of Uko leaving. He was merely a distraction, albeit a super hot distraction. But the more I got to know him, the more I liked him.
As we drove through downtown Memphis, I noticed a cheap chain hotel close to Beale Street. I wanted to take him to see some live blues, eat some good food and live in the moment. Maybe we’d hit up a strip club or something. Demons gone wild!
I parked in a garage half a block away, and we walked toward the hotel. Normally, walking in the dark through a parking lot would be an anxiety-inducing walk of terror. But Uko stood close, his body rolling lazily like he didn’t have a care in the world. Though if you stared past his glamor, you could see the coiled violence churning under his skin like the hidden black ink. I was pretty sure he was dying to rend someone limb from limb, and where that small fact should have terrified me, it kind of made me feel safe.
Apparently, I’d killed all the good-sense brain cells with vodka last night.
When we made it to the brightly lit lobby of the hotel, the receptionist’s eyes passed over me with a glazed look and a fake smile. But when they snagged on Uko, her eyes nearly bugged out of her head. Yeah, he was definitely that hot. Like, triple-take hot.
