Val stood her ground and held his gaze. She wasn’t going to be anything but cool, calm, and collected. After tomorrow, she’d never have to see him again. Bye-bye, demon-boy.
“No one can resist forever,” he said, his words fierce, as if he was trying to convince himself as well as her.
“Go”—Val’s eyes widened as he came toward her—“away.”
Then he kissed her, hard enough that her lips felt bruised, and moved his hand to the back of her head to tangle it in her long blond hair. Val’s hands were free so she could start fighting against him.
Any minute now.
Why wasn’t she fighting him?
Damn.
Her first human kiss. Right there in her motel room, with a handsome demon who crushed her body against his as if it were going to be the last kiss for either of them. And it was. This was the last time she’d ever kiss him, kiss anybody. She was going back to . . . back to . . .
Where was she going again?
Her lips parted to him, and she felt his tongue against hers as she kissed him desperately, giving in to it totally and completely. She melted against his firm body, wrapping her arms around him, just as he broke off the kiss and backed away from her. Val blinked up at him, feeling dazed.
“See what I told you?” he said, and she could have sworn his voice caught on the words.
“Even you can’t resist me. Till next time, little angel.”
He vanished in a column of fire.
Even as she cursed him, her lips still tingled with the warmth from the kiss. She tried to wipe the feel of him away with the back of her hand.
Evil bastard.
The next morning, after spending the night tossing and turning and subsequently having very strange dreams about herself, Nathaniel, and Barney the purple dinosaur, Val woke to somebody yelling her name. She sat up and stared around the empty motel room. The chicken soup Nathaniel brought had tipped over and leaked out onto the carpet. Crap. The digital clock on top of the television read 11:15 A.M.
Double crap. She’d slept in.
“Valerie!”
She rubbed her eyes and swung her legs out of bed, moving as fast as she could to the door.
She unhooked the chain, turned the lock, and opened it up to peer outside.
Nothing.
Val rubbed her eyes again and stretched into a big yawn, chalking the sound up to her imagination.
Then she felt something rub against her bare foot. She looked down.
It was a rat, whiskers twitching, looking up at her with little black, beady eyes. She screamed, scrambled back from it, and slammed the door shut.
How disgusting! It was enough that she had to deal with the two cockroaches that had set up house in room eighteen the other day, but now the Paradise Inn was infested with rodents?
Add that to the list of things about being human that sucked, she thought. Near the top.
She cracked the door open again and looked out. The rat was gone. She sighed with relief.
“Get back here, you bastard!” a female voice yelled from her right.
A girl in a McDonald’s uniform, no coat, was tearing through the motel’s courtyard, narrowly missing falling into the leaf-covered pool. She held a baseball bat, two-handed, and didn’t look like she was off to the ballpark.
Val recognized her immediately, mostly due to the fast-food uniform since her face was wrapped in a big orange scarf. It was Reggie’s girlfriend, Claire.
Oh no, Val thought. With her current bat-wielding stance she was probably looking for
Reggie, furious about his slight indiscretion. She’d planned to talk to Claire girl-to-girl today and try to help smooth things over before she did anything crazy, but it looked like it might be a bit late for that.
In a way it was good. Any later and Val might have already been gone. This way she could help smooth things over between the two before she and Barlow used the key.
Val slid into her fuzzy pink slippers, pulled a thin green jacket on over her pajamas, and emerged into the bright, but not too cold outdoors.
“Claire,” she called out, but was ignored. Claire had gone over to the small, black Dumpster near the manager’s office and was hitting it with the bat, which made a resounding gong sound each time.
Val pulled the jacket closer to her and, nimbly as she could, made her way over to the woman.
The last thing she wanted to do was get Claire more agitated. She could do without getting inadvertently hit in the mouth with a baseball bat. She stayed back a few feet.
“Claire!” she said louder. “What are you doing?”
Claire’s shoulders tensed, and she stopped banging on the Dumpster for a moment. She turned around, a tense smile in place, breathing hard.
“Hi, Val. How’s it going?”
“Okay. You?”
“Great, just great.”
“So, uh . . . what are you doing?”
She sniffed, and Val noticed her eyes were red. “What does it look like?”
“It looks like you’re beating up the garbage.”
She laughed. “Good way to put it.”
“O-kay. Listen, why don’t you and me go get a coffee or something?”
“Can’t. Have to work. I start at noon.” Her gaze left Val and tracked down to the ground.
“There you are, you little prick . . . trying to sneak away? Ha!”