“What’s wrong?”

“What?” she asked, her voice thin and airy. He was getting to her. “Nothing. I have a case.”

He pressed his lips together and studied her a long moment. When she gestured for him to move, he looked over her head and asked, “Who’s the dead chick?”

“Reyes...” She looked at me apologetically then turned back to him. “That is horridly rude.”

“Um, son of Satan?” he said, apparently referring to himself. “Don’t you want to know what I’m doing here?”

“No.”

Wait, did he say son of Satan?

“I have every intention of kneeing you in the groin if you don’t move,” Charley said, squaring her shoulders.

Reyes leaned in until his mouth was at her ear. “I’m incorporeal at the moment, Dutch.”

She kneed anyway, and at once he was gone. Vanished into thin air. Dark smoke lingered, along with a deep chuckle that faded into silence almost instantly. Charley turned back to me. “Sorry about that. We have a few things to work out. Respect for my clients, for one thing.” She said the last through gritted teeth before heading out the door.

I followed. “Did he say ‘son of Satan’?”

“Yeah. It’s an evil incarnate thing. And, trust me, he wears it well.”

I couldn’t imagine him wearing anything badly.

We stepped into the night air, thick with a syrupy darkness, and yet it didn’t hinder my eyesight at all, besides perhaps muting the colors. But again, the streetlamps darkened the area directly below them. The effect was surreal.

“This,” Charley said, gesturing toward a red Jeep Wrangler, “is Misery. I’m in love with her, but don’t tell my sister. She’s a psychiatrist and would psychoanalyze the crap out of that.”

We climbed in and Charley brought the Jeep to life, turning on the heater with a shiver. That’s when I realized I wasn’t cold. Or hot. Or anything. Temperature, like taste and texture, was apparently lost on me. As we drove down a street I didn’t recognize, I clasped my hands in my lap and asked her reluctantly, “Was he there for me?”

She raised her brows in question.

“The son of Satan. Was he there to take me to Hell?”

After turning into a convenience store, Charley pulled to a stop and shut off the Jeep to give me her full attention. “Listen to me. I promise you, if you were scheduled for the southbound flight, you would already be there and we would not be having this conversation.”

“But, I’ve so obviously sinned.”

“No kidding?” she asked, a teasing smile lighting her face. “Because I’m pretty sure I’ve sinned a few times myself. And according to some religions, I’m about to sin again.”

I blinked and looked around, trying to figure out what she was talking about.

“I’m going to march in there and make myself a mocha latte with whipped cream. Caffeine.

Calories.” She leaned in and whispered, “Unabashed pleasure.”

I couldn’t help but smile back. “Didn’t you just drink a cup of coffee?”

“Well, yeah, coffee. This is a latte. A mocha latte. With whipped cream. So not the same thing.”

She winked then jumped out of the Jeep.

I decided to go in as well.

“And besides, I finished that coffee off”—she looked at her watch—“minutes ago.”

“You make me laugh.”

“And you’re in a convenience store at five in the morning in a nightgown and bunny slippers,”

she said, keeping her voice low.

She was right. I should have had the decency to feel self-conscious. “So, what’s the story with you and that guy?”

“Reyes?” she asked, taking out her cell phone as the machine filled her cup. She opened it and actually pretended to talk into it, I guess in case anyone was watching. “Well, besides being the hottest thing this side of Mercury—I mean, he was forged in the fires of Hell,” she said with a waggle of her brows as she filled a second cup, “he’s something of a pain in the ass.”

“But you like him.”

She put a lid on both cups, stuffed one in the crook of her arm so she could still hold the phone, then headed for the cashier. “If you’re talking about the fact that he makes my innards mushy and my knees weak, then, yeah, I like him.” She pulled the phone to her chest to indicate a break in her conversation and said to the clerk, “We have to stop meeting like this.”

He smiled shyly as he handed over her change. “See you tomorrow night?”

“If you’re lucky,” she said with a flirty wink. She could give lessons.

“You come here a lot?” I asked.

With a shrug, she climbed back into her Jeep. I crawled through the door into the passenger’s seat. “Only every night or so. They have really good lattes. But again, he’s a pain in the ass.”

“The store clerk?”

“Reyes.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t help but wonder what Charley’s life was like. I mean, what kind of being glows in the dark and hangs out with the son of Satan? “So, do you have super powers?”

Turning onto Central Avenue, she offered me a questioning gaze. “You mean, like, can I fly?”

I laughed. “No. Wait,” I said, rethinking. “Can you?”

She laughed that time. “Not unless I’m on some very powerful painkillers.”