Page 19 of Warmongers and Wands
“Nail polish?” Hadur held up the bottle of bright pink polish.
My eyebrows shot up. “How the hell do you know what nail polish is?”
Oh, yeah. That incredibly old Cosmopolitan magazine.
He shrugged. “Diebin brought me an In Style magazine a few months ago. I know all the spring colors and fashion trends and can assure you that Meghan Markle did indeed wear that Dior dress better.”
Yikes, the man was more in touch with the feminine than I was. “If you haven’t noticed, I’m not really a makeup kinda girl. This shopping trip was a big miss, Diebin. Hope you do better next time.”
“When you’ve been confined to a summoning circle for over two hundred years, no shopping trip is a miss,” Hadur announced. “Everything is an opportunity to learn and enjoy, to expand your horizons just a bit.”
That had to have been the weirdest speech ever, especially since it came from a war demon. “So, you’re going to paint your toenails? Or Diebin’s?”
“From what I could glean out of the In Style and GQ magazines, men do not paint their toenails.” He waved the bottle. “So, I am going to paint yours. And while they are drying, we will play this game.”
I went to protest, only to shut my mouth, forcing a hopefully authentic-looking smile on my lips instead. This guy had saved my life, splinted my broken leg, fed me, helped me pee, got me a hot bath. He was waiting on me hand and foot, pledging to serve me forever—which hopefully included some sexy-times stuff once I wasn’t in so much pain. Outside of the broken leg, this was pretty close to a fantasy experience. If the guy wanted to paint my toenails and play Yahtzee, then I wasn’t going to say “no.”
But first, I had an idea. “Do you think if I wrote a note to my sisters, Diebin could deliver it?”
Hadur frowned in thought. “I doubt he’d know who your sisters were in town, but he could take the note to somebody, leave it on their doorstep, perhaps. Diebin doesn’t like approaching strange humans or anyone else. He had a bad experience fifty-three years ago and would not like to risk being shot again.”
I winced, wondering if he’d just been nicked by the bullet, or whether his deal with Hadur got him some sort of immortality in the bargain. Clearly if the raccoon was a few hundred years old, he’d been given some life-extending benefits, but I didn’t know if that made him bulletproof, or an immortal raccoon, or what.
Either way, this was my best chance at getting rescued. Although at this point, I was less concerned about getting “rescued” and more about making sure my sisters knew where I was and that I was okay. Tearing a page out of the Yahtzee score sheet, I wrote as detailed information as I could about where I’d gone off the road and my current situation, then folded it and handed it to the waiting raccoon.
“Thanks, Diebin. You do this and I promise to cook you up some bacon once I’m back home and my leg is healed.”
The raccoon scampered out the doggie door. I set up the Yahtzee, then watched while Hadur painted my toenails. It was surreal, but then again, the last forty-eight hours had been pretty surreal. The storm. My accident. This sexy demon in the woods rescuing my ass, taking care of me, painting my toenails.
I’ll admit they looked nice. Not that anyone would ever see them since I spent most of my life in work boots or sneakers. Maybe the cat I planned on adopting from the shelter would appreciate the gussied-up toes in the ten minutes my feet were bare in the shower, but that was probably it.
I glanced at Hadur, who was concentrating as he applied the last bit of polish to my right little toe. What would happen when I set him free? If Icouldset him free. It might take a while for me to find the proper way to do that, but it was the least I could do for the demon who’d saved me. Even if he hadn’t saved me, I felt terrible for the guy, trapped here for hundreds of years, his only contact with the outside world whatever Diebin could steal and bring back to him. I know he’d pledged to be mine and serve me, but as erotic as that all sounded, I wasn’t sure how it would play out in real life. A demon sex slave sounded good between the covers of a novel, but he wouldn’t “owe” me anything for releasing him, and it would be horrible for me to expect indentured servitude or slavery in return. I’d set him free, eventually when I figured out how to do it, and he’d probably just go back to hell.
But I couldn’t help fantasize a bit about an arrangement like Cassie had with Lucien. I didn’t know Hadur very well, but we seemed to be hitting it off. It would be nice to have someone to come home to besides a cat. It would be nice to have someone to talk to, to spend the evening with, maybe even to work with me. And sex…sex would be really, really nice.
Yep, I had a wild imagination. A forever-after with a demon was a far-fetched fantasy of my repressed romantic side. The realist in me was thinking I might get a roll in the hay before this guy headed back to hell. Honestly, I’d take it. It was better than nothing.
But that romantic side wanted more. Maybe, just maybe, she’d finally get what she wanted.
Hadur sat back and admired his work, then set the nail polish aside and scooted up to the spot on the bed where I’d arranged the Yahtzee game. I explained how things worked, then we got to rolling.
“So, tell me about being a war demon,” I said as I added up my four-of-a-kind score.
“It’s pretty much like it sounds. When there’s a conflict stirring up, I pop out of hell and check it out. Get things moving. Bring stuff to a head. Once I establish momentum, I head back and let everyone take it from there.”
I frowned. “I’d envisioned you doing the stirring. And seeing things through to its conclusion. Oh, you should try for a full house on that one. If you don’t get it, you’ll still have three twos.”
He eyed the dice, then took my advice. “There is no need for me to do any stirring. Humans are perfectly capable of working up resentment, unfairness, anger, and envy on their own. The job for me is in making sure that doesn’t fester, that they get it out into the open. Sometimes that’s through peaceful means, but mostly it’s through violence.” He rolled the dice. “Yes! You were right. I did get a full house.”
I took the dice while he noted down his score. “So, you’re like the dude who lances a boil,” I teased. “You get the unenviably gross job of making sure the infection gets out and the healing can begin.”
“Sadly, no. Rarely is there healing. Always enough of an infection lingers that I find I’m back in a few generations to do it all over again. Sooner, sometimes.”
I grimaced, taking a chance score on my unsuccessful large straight attempt as I mulled over his words. “So, you’ve been stuck here for two hundred years, but there’s still been wars and conflicts. I would have thought locking you up would stop all that.”
Maybe that’s what the summoning witch had been trying to do? Stop wars? Although confining someone, even a demon, for hundreds of years was a pretty shitty way of achieving world peace.
“I’m not the only war demon in hell. Yahtzee! Yes!” He wrote down the score and passed me the dice. “Even if we were all stripped of our powers or locked away, there would still be conflict. Instead of small, easily solved conflict, there would be war on a huge scale—a devastatingly huge scale. Our job is to bring conflict into the open before it grows into something monstrous.”
