Karma blinked up at him, shock and something like panic in her wide eyes. Her fingers rose to brush the soft metal of the charm. She opened her mouth and he held his breath. This was it, the moment when she either saved him or sent him crashing down to hell. “I…”
“My, my.” The silky feminine purr sounded behind him. “Prometheus in love. I never thought I’d see the day. How sweet.”
He stiffened and turned, using his body to shield Karma as much as possible as he faced the she-devil across the room. She perched on the crate containing his heart, a snug red dress leaving little to the imagination and showing off the expanse of her crossed legs. She swung one stiletto-clad foot and tapped the top of the box with a long black nail—in perfect time with the accelerating thump of the heart within.
“It’s nice to see you again, pet. Though from the sound of things, you’ve been a very naughty boy indeed.”
She was early. Which meant they hadn’t summoned her. Which meant she was under no compulsion to deal with them. She knew he’d been trying to double cross her and she’d come before the dawn just to fuck with him. They’d just lost home field advantage. They would be playing by Deuma’s rules now.
Inside the box, Prometheus’s heart began to race.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nightmares in Wonderland
Karma had fallen down the rabbit hole. Only instead of Cheshire Cats she had a she-devil who was not supposed to be able to appear and disappear at will on this plane, and instead of the White Rabbit she had a six-and-a-half foot warlock professing his love. Something was very wrong in Wonderland.
Karma decided to focus on the less alarming of those two developments. She edged around Prometheus until she had a clear view of the maenad.
“How can you be here without being summoned?”
Deuma giggled and wagged her head flirtatiously. “Now that would be telling and a lady never reveals her secrets.”
Prometheus watched Deuma like a man studying a rattlesnake. “She’s ascending to a new level of power.”
Deuma giggled. “Does it show? I think it flatters me.”
The devil rose from the crate and preened, rubbing her hands over her hips. There was a faint glow rising from Deuma’s skin, like paintings of saints and gods. She was hypnotic, seductive and projecting harmlessness so hard the hair on Karma’s arms lifted from the underlying danger.
“I’m so close to perfection.” Deuma sighed, her face falling into an exaggerated pout. “And then my favorite pet warlock decided to try to cheat me out of our bargain. That wasn’t very nice, Prometheus.”
“Forgive me for wanting to live,” he said dryly.
“I don’t forgive.” Deuma’s face flashed to deadly seriousness—a flicker of vicious reality beneath her constant cotton candy veneer, the sight of it all the more brutally chilling for being so quickly masked by another gooey smile. “But I do renegotiate. If you can make it worth my while. And you have been one of my favorite pets.”
Karma’s heart stuttered, doubt surging with the sense that this was it, the moment when her vision would come true. Then reality intruded and she realized how completely different her dream had been from what she was seeing now. Brittany and Rodriguez weren’t even here. There was no summoning circle binding Deuma and time wasn’t frozen. Her dream hadn’t been the truth. From the power radiating off Deuma, she wasn’t likely to have allowed herself to be summoned and bound, so it seemed highly improbable that any part of that vision might have come true. Karma’s doubts had conjured up the unlikely future that most closely matched her fears. She really had seen what she wanted to see. Prometheus loves me. He would never do that to me.
Karma evicted that thought. No time for dwelling on it at the moment. Right now they had to find a way to tempt the semi-deified devil. “We have Bacchus’s Cloak.”
The sinuously moving devil went very, very still. “Do you? My, my, that is a precious find. However did you come by it?”
Karma borrowed a line from her dream. “Does it matter?”
“Not particularly.” She smiled. “Do you know what it does? Never mind, never mind, you’re right, unimportant.” She closed her eyes and shook her head sharply, giving a delicate little shiver. “Tempting, but as it happens, I’m not interested in Bacchus’s Cloak.”
Prometheus conjured a charm to his hand, the gesture eerily identical to Karma’s dream. “Are you interested in this?”
Karma didn’t know what it was. She only knew it gave off a silky gleam of magic and made Deuma’s eyes almost feral with greed.
“Oh, Prometheus, you do have the best toys. But no…sadly, I’ll have to decline.” She smiled, wagging a finger. “You’re trying to tempt me with objects, but they’re just things. Powerful, beautiful things, but they don’t have will. Do you know how a devil gets her power, dear boy? The power to appear unsummoned…the power to keep a man alive after you’ve taken his beating heart…the power to grant unimaginable wishes…where does it all come from?”
“I’d never given it much thought,” Prometheus said expressionlessly.
“Oh, now that’s a lie. You are all curiosity. It’s one of the things I love about you.” She danced closer, graceful and lithe. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? From the will. From my darling little contract signers ceding their free will up to me. Do you think we collect souls for the fun of it? What good is a soul, really? Bothersome things. But the signing, the completion of the contract, that moment when he places his very being into my possession—voluntarily.” She gasped. “What a rush. Contracts are power—not like your silly little magic, but real power. Freedom to move between the planes, coming and going as I please. Not a puppet to be summoned, called up whenever someone wants a she-devil to eat the flesh of their enemies. I’m almost a god now.” Her expression darkened abruptly, thunder gathering. “But that will all go away if one of my contracts breaks. So you see, Prometheus, I can’t let you out of our little deal. Not unless you’re willing to sign an addendum…”
“If you don’t want objects, what do you want?”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet?”
Karma held her breath. She knew what was coming. Deuma would ask for her. It had all been leading up to this…
“I want you, Prometheus.”
Prometheus frowned at Deuma as she pranced and danced flirtatiously around Karma’s office. He couldn’t have heard her right. “What do you mean, you want me?”
“I knew there was something special about you from the first moment you summoned me—drunk off your ass, but so incredibly focused. So driven. So angry. You’re a natural, Prometheus. I’ve been watching you and I think you’d make an excellent devil yourself. Think of the last twenty years as an audition.”
“A devil.”
“You would be my right hand. Making dreams come true—while collecting contracts and bolstering my power. And your own, of course. Your power would never go away, Prometheus, as long as you kept reaping for me. And then, with time, you would develop power in your own right. You yourself could ascend as I have—take on assistants, be a god. Though you did try to betray me.” She kicked the crate containing his drumming heart. “So I think a few years penance is in order. All the power you reap will go to me for the first, oh let’s say, thousand years. That seems fair, don’t you think?”
Beside him, Karma gasped.
“A thousand years of servitude?”
“I wouldn’t be a demanding boss. Think of it as a thousand years of the kind of power you’ve enjoyed for the last twenty. You could even keep your shop—it’s the perfect set up for a devil. Why, the marks would come to you! No summoning necessary.”