Now that made her pause. “So who was?”
Clyde’s eyes held guilt in the way they flitted from her face and focused on something behind her. “Some guy named Clyve Atwell. It was easy enough to change the letters in the name on the file from a v to a d. Like I said, I wasn’t totally above using these demonic powers, mediocre as they might be, to get me the frig out of there. I can’t think of much that would be worse than the punishment I was due for my refusal to attend classes. I’m also not proud of what I did—but this Clyve was a total waste of skin in life. He deserved what he got when I pulled that off.”
“Well, now I’m really dying here, Clyde. What kind of assignment did poor Clyve get that you were supposed to get?”
His next sigh represented a man truly torn—or really good at faking it. “Keep in mind, my original assignment was meant to debase me, humiliate me for not joining the freak show down there,” he hedged.
“And?”
“He’s Paris Hilton’s newest Chihuahua . . . well, he’s possessing it, anyway—for a year. I have a feeling he’ll be wearing diamond-encrusted collars and having his renal glands milked on a regular basis until the punishment is up.”
Laughter bubbled in her throat and spilled out in a burst of snorting giggles. “I can see how that’d be a sentence worse than death. But this also begs the question: did this Clyve with a v deserve what he got? The word according to you, of course.”
Disgust was written all over his sleekly chiseled face. “He was a pig, one of the worst humans to roam planet Earth,” he spat with a flex of his big fist. “A bastard. A vile bastard. Clyve with a v deserved to rot in the pit for eternity. He had a laundry list of criminal activity. A rap sheet so long I’d still be reading it if I wasn’t worried I’d get caught. But the worst of it is, he was responsible for a hit-and-run that killed a kid. A seven-year-old kid.”
Clyde shook his dark head, clearly because of the senselessness of something so tragic. “Never even looked back, the drunk ass. He knew he did it, too, and to this day, no one knows who killed Katie Martin. Except Clyve. He knew he’d snuffed a kid. He made a comment about it that I can’t repeat without the threat of losing my lunch.” Clyde’s last words were riddled with such repulsion even she paused.
A somber moment lingered between them. Delaney reached for her grandmother’s chair behind her, sitting down and gripping the arm that wasn’t charred beyond recognition. If Clyde wasn’t telling the truth, he was damned good at spinning some smack, because a tale like that was . . . vile, unimaginable. “Jesus Christ Superstar,” she muttered. A sharp pain clutched at her heart for little Katie Martin and a family that would never have justice.
“Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, 1970, I believe.”
She raised a bewildered stare at him.
“You said Jesus Christ Superstar,” he offered reasonably, the sudden directional change in conversation appearing completely normal to him. “It was an album, then a musical—”
This demon . . . “Yeah, yeah. Broadway. I got it. Okay, how about we move on? Because if I linger over what you just told me, I’ll never sleep again.”
Clyde cupped his jaw, then ran his hand up and over the planes of his face to scratch his dark head. “Right. Anyway, I switched the files because I knew it meant coming back to this plane or whatever you call it if I did. I need to find out what happened the day I died, Delaney. I was a chemical consultant doing freelance research, for God’s sake. I was about as tame as the Dalai Lama. I wouldn’t hurt someone physically or otherwise. Ever.”
Said the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Maybe. “And how did you die again?”
Everything about his demeanor changed with one sheepish grin. “I wasn’t the most coordinated man . . . I had an accident . . .”