“He lies,” he said. Then he turned away and continued along the path to the mayor’s sprawling mansion. Val watched him go for a moment before she gently picked Reggie up.
“Are you okay?”
Reggie was breathing hard, shaking, and his teeth chattered. “Methinks the demon doth protest too much.”
She frowned deeply at him.“Stop provoking him.”
“By telling the truth?”
“It’s not the truth. He can’t stand me.”
“He’s crazy about you.”
“You’re the crazy one.” She paused as she waited for her flushed cheeks to cool down a bit.
“Besides, FYI, he’s a demon. I’m an angel. Well, ex-angel, anyhow. It doesn’t happen. Got it?
And even on top of all that I’ve only known him for a couple of days.”
“That doesn’t matter. In Trixie’s books, they fall in love at first sight. Maybe you two are soulmates! Oh,” he sighed. “How romantic. Although I think he may have broken one of my ribs.”
Without another word to further provoke Reggie’s ridiculous notion, Val followed behind
Nathaniel as he made his way to the tall front doors of the Playdemon Mansion. She looked around at everything from the well-manicured hedges, to the rolling green lawn, to the interlocked driveway that had a Jaguar, a Mercedes convertible and a Rolls-Royce parked in front of the house. Anything to distract herself from what had just happened.
Nathaniel appeared to know exactly where he was going as he stormed through the grounds.
Val trailed behind him as he bypassed the front door and walked through a vine-covered archway leading to the rear of the mansion. Everything about this place seemed so real to her.
Like on that Miami Vice show with the big, expensive, flashy drug dealers’ houses that had a tendency to blow up at any given moment.
But it wasn’t real, Val reminded herself. None of it. None of the prettiness of it, anyhow. The visual of the gray, jagged rocks flashed in her mind. How did they do it? Keep up the façade so perfectly? Had it always been this way?
The archway led through to the most beautiful pool she’d ever seen. Not that she had much to compare it with the out-of-order, leaf- and snow-covered one at the Paradise Inn. She had seen commercials for high-end resorts in the Caribbean and this pool was torn right out of one of those. Blue, blue water. There were two stunningly beautiful women sunbathing topless. A shirtless man carrying a drinks tray delivered a couple of umbrella-topped cocktails to them.
They laughed and giggled and flirted with him. Beyond the pool she could see the ocean, sparkling like diamonds under the perfect sky.
Oh, and the big, fat slug. She couldn’t forget about that.
Definitely not beautiful, she decided. In fact, it was repulsively ugly reclining on a chaise longue under a large umbrella. She’d recently seen The Return of the Jedi and the slug-
creature immediately reminded her of Jabba the Hutt. Only smaller and a little less sexy.
Nathaniel stopped walking at the edge of the pool and waited for her to catch up. He turned his head in her general direction but didn’t look at her. “Let me do the talking.”
“Okay.”
“No argument?”
“Nope.”
“Good.” Then he looked at her, his gray-blue eyes cautious but currently flame-free, and he forced a smile to his lips. “Remember, we’re supposed to be together.”
She waited for a comment from the peanut gallery, aka: Reggie, but there was nothing.
Smart rat.
“Just one question,” Val said and Nathaniel sighed immediately.
“I knew it.”
“It’s just”—Val lowered her voice—“that isn’t the mayor over there, is it?”
He glanced at the slug. “Yes. Why?”
She shrugged. “It’s just that . . . he seems so concerned with how things look by his house and the rest of the Underworld, why doesn’t he, I don’t know—”
“Use glamour on himself?”
“Well, yeah.”
The corner of his mouth curled up. “He can’t.”
“Why not?”
He glanced at the mayor who didn’t seem to have noticed their arrival yet. “Like I told you before, Mayor Vaille was second-in-command in Hell itself until he got a little too ambitious and power-hungry. Lucifer didn’t like that too much, to say the least, so Vaille was demoted to overseeing the Underworld.”
“The Underworld that looks like Miami Beach.”
He nodded. “Part of the mayor’s punishment was an inability to perform personal glamour.”
“So that means that he can make everything look good except himself?”
“Precisely.”
“He must hate that.”
Nathaniel smiled and shook his head. “Have you ever heard the story of the emperor’s new clothes?”
“Wasn’t that a Disney movie?”
“That was The Emperor’s New Groove,” Reggie piped up. “I have it on DVD. David Spade’s my hero.”
Nathaniel gave Reggie a withering look. “In ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes,’ the ruler is naked but his underlings have convinced him he wears beautiful clothes. He is unaware of his own humiliation until someone points it out to him.” He paused. “The mayor has convinced himself, and no one has argued with him, that he is very desirable and attractive.”
“You’re kidding.”