Delaney groaned with a pathetic whine, rolling to her side. “Why is it that you can’t do? I’m not getting any younger here. You, on the other hand, are forever young. I don’t want to cast stones, but I lost my directions to the Fountain of Youth. I need some sleep here.”
Marcella snorted. Delaney could visualize the delicate flare of her nostrils. “Don’t you all go waving my misfortune in my face there, girlie. It has very few perks—one of them being eternal youth—but if you could get a gander at my demon form, you’d grow a mustache. It’s unsightly. Heinous even. Now, get up, my pretty ghost magnet. We have business to attend to.” Marcella grabbed her by the forearm, pulling her to an unwilling, upright position and propping a pillow behind her back.
Delaney dragged the covers with her, her eyes still closed. “Is there green tea involved in this getting up? Because if there’s no tea, I just know I won’t play well with others.”
Marcella tugged a lock of her hair. “I don’t do domestic, and you know it. No tea. But there is something that might interest you. You can’t see it unless you open your eyes.”
“If you were really my BFF, you wouldn’t make me do this.”
“Because I’m your BFF, I’m making you do this. Open ’em, or I’ll set your curtains on fire with my bad aim.”
Delaney finally laughed, opening her eyes with a slow shift of her eyelids. She snapped them shut much more quickly. “Yippee and skippee. Is that what I think it is?”
Marcella flicked her arm with what Delaney guessed was a French-manicured fingertip. “It is, mi amiga. Now up with you so we can get this over with.”
“Nice coup.”
“Yeahhhh,” she agreed with smug satisfaction. “Even if I do say so myself. Now up, my friend. We have business to attend to.”
“Will it be messy? I can’t afford to clean the carpets this month. The till is dry.” Resentment for Clyde’s séance crashing resettled in her craw.
Marcella’s green eyes captured hers with a familiar gleam in them. “When isn’t it ever messy with me, D? No one knows better than you do, my demon skills”—she leaned in to Delaney, whispering the words—“suck hairy balls, for lack of a better word.”
“That’s a phrase,” Delaney corrected.
She sat back on the bed with a smile. “What-the-hell-ever. Anyway, seeing as I’m all ju got—um, you got, we’ll just have to make lemons out of lemonade.”
“Lemonade out of lemons,” a deep voice over by the radiator in her room corrected.
Marcella slipped off the bed as though she floated on a cloud. Leaning down, she dragged a slim finger over the hard shoulder that was duct-taped to Delaney’s radiator. “Whatever, darling. You Americans and your language are just something I don’t think I’ll ever get used to. Every time I think I get it—I don’t. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think explanations are in order here, don’t you?”
Delaney was off the bed in a shot, stumbling on her sheets, almost falling into Clyde’s duct-taped lap. When the full picture became clear, it made her gasp. Poor Clyde held hostage by a mountain of sticky silver tape. “You captured him with duct tape, Marcella? Duct tape? What about this says securing the bad demon to you? This shows shoddy workmanship, if you ask me, Ms. Demonli cious.”
Marcella gave her long, black hair an indignant swish over her shoulder. “I was in a pinch, okay? He was lingering right here in your bedroom, hovering over your dead-to-the-world body—I had to act fast. Jesus, you’d think you’d at least notice the circle of salt I made around him so he’d be immobilized—just like you taught me. Can you even imagine what kind of freakin’ facial peel I’d have been up against if I had gotten any of it on me?” She shuddered. “Oh, and I think you’re clean out of Morton. We can shop once we rid ourselves of him. But not before we find out what he wants—or more specifically, what Lucifer wants.” Her green eyes narrowed in on Clyde, her full lips tilted in a seductive smile. “Though, I have to admit, the human form he chose is pleasant on the eye, eh, chica?” She glanced at Delaney and mouthed the word meow.
Yeah, like big meow. The hell she’d admit that out loud, no matter how true. But Marcella, sexually charged demon that she was, had no filter from brain to mouth when it came to expressing her sexuality. A hottie was a hottie in her world. They never lasted longer than a night for Marcella, but Delaney had heard the stories. “Hey! Libido check. Forget what he looks like. He doesn’t even really look like that. That’s just some body he chose from a magazine cover or something, and you know it,” Delaney chastised, moving in to examine the job Marcella’d done.