Naughty Karma

Chapter Twenty-Nine Nightmares in Wonderland

Karma had fallen down the rabbit hole. Only instead of Cheshire Cats she had a she-devil who was not supposed to be able to appear and disappear at will on this plane, and instead of the White Rabbit she had a six-and-a-half foot warlock professing his love. Something was very wrong in Wonderland.

Karma decided to focus on the less alarming of those two developments. She edged around Prometheus until she had a clear view of the maenad.

“How can you be here without being summoned?”

Deuma giggled and wagged her head flirtatiously. “Now that would be telling and a lady never reveals her secrets.”

Prometheus watched Deuma like a man studying a rattlesnake. “She’s ascending to a new level of power.”

Deuma giggled. “Does it show? I think it flatters me.”

The devil rose from the crate and preened, rubbing her hands over her hips. There was a faint glow rising from Deuma’s skin, like paintings of saints and gods. She was hypnotic, seductive and projecting harmlessness so hard the hair on Karma’s arms lifted from the underlying danger.

“I’m so close to perfection.” Deuma sighed, her face falling into an exaggerated pout. “And then my favorite pet warlock decided to try to cheat me out of our bargain. That wasn’t very nice, Prometheus.”

“Forgive me for wanting to live,” he said dryly.

“I don’t forgive.” Deuma’s face flashed to deadly seriousness—a flicker of vicious reality beneath her constant cotton candy veneer, the sight of it all the more brutally chilling for being so quickly masked by another gooey smile. “But I do renegotiate. If you can make it worth my while. And you have been one of my favorite pets.”

Karma’s heart stuttered, doubt surging with the sense that this was it, the moment when her vision would come true. Then reality intruded and she realized how completely different her dream had been from what she was seeing now. Brittany and Rodriguez weren’t even here. There was no summoning circle binding Deuma and time wasn’t frozen. Her dream hadn’t been the truth. From the power radiating off Deuma, she wasn’t likely to have allowed herself to be summoned and bound, so it seemed highly improbable that any part of that vision might have come true. Karma’s doubts had conjured up the unlikely future that most closely matched her fears. She really had seen what she wanted to see. Prometheus loves me. He would never do that to me.

Karma evicted that thought. No time for dwelling on it at the moment. Right now they had to find a way to tempt the semi-deified devil. “We have Bacchus’s Cloak.”

The sinuously moving devil went very, very still. “Do you? My, my, that is a precious find. However did you come by it?”

Karma borrowed a line from her dream. “Does it matter?”

“Not particularly.” She smiled. “Do you know what it does? Never mind, never mind, you’re right, unimportant.” She closed her eyes and shook her head sharply, giving a delicate little shiver. “Tempting, but as it happens, I’m not interested in Bacchus’s Cloak.”

Prometheus conjured a charm to his hand, the gesture eerily identical to Karma’s dream. “Are you interested in this?”

Karma didn’t know what it was. She only knew it gave off a silky gleam of magic and made Deuma’s eyes almost feral with greed.

“Oh, Prometheus, you do have the best toys. But no…sadly, I’ll have to decline.” She smiled, wagging a finger. “You’re trying to tempt me with objects, but they’re just things. Powerful, beautiful things, but they don’t have will. Do you know how a devil gets her power, dear boy? The power to appear unsummoned…the power to keep a man alive after you’ve taken his beating heart…the power to grant unimaginable wishes…where does it all come from?”

“I’d never given it much thought,” Prometheus said expressionlessly.

“Oh, now that’s a lie. You are all curiosity. It’s one of the things I love about you.” She danced closer, graceful and lithe. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? From the will. From my darling little contract signers ceding their free will up to me. Do you think we collect souls for the fun of it? What good is a soul, really? Bothersome things. But the signing, the completion of the contract, that moment when he places his very being into my possession—voluntarily.” She gasped. “What a rush. Contracts are power—not like your silly little magic, but real power. Freedom to move between the planes, coming and going as I please. Not a puppet to be summoned, called up whenever someone wants a she-devil to eat the flesh of their enemies. I’m almost a god now.” Her expression darkened abruptly, thunder gathering. “But that will all go away if one of my contracts breaks. So you see, Prometheus, I can’t let you out of our little deal. Not unless you’re willing to sign an addendum…”

“If you don’t want objects, what do you want?”

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?”

Karma held her breath. She knew what was coming. Deuma would ask for her. It had all been leading up to this…

“I want you, Prometheus.”

Prometheus frowned at Deuma as she pranced and danced flirtatiously around Karma’s office. He couldn’t have heard her right. “What do you mean, you want me?”

“I knew there was something special about you from the first moment you summoned me—drunk off your ass, but so incredibly focused. So driven. So angry. You’re a natural, Prometheus. I’ve been watching you and I think you’d make an excellent devil yourself. Think of the last twenty years as an audition.”

“A devil.”

“You would be my right hand. Making dreams come true—while collecting contracts and bolstering my power. And your own, of course. Your power would never go away, Prometheus, as long as you kept reaping for me. And then, with time, you would develop power in your own right. You yourself could ascend as I have—take on assistants, be a god. Though you did try to betray me.” She kicked the crate containing his drumming heart. “So I think a few years penance is in order. All the power you reap will go to me for the first, oh let’s say, thousand years. That seems fair, don’t you think?”

Beside him, Karma gasped.

“A thousand years of servitude?”

“I wouldn’t be a demanding boss. Think of it as a thousand years of the kind of power you’ve enjoyed for the last twenty. You could even keep your shop—it’s the perfect set up for a devil. Why, the marks would come to you! No summoning necessary.”

He knew from experience that deals with devils were designed to look appealing at the first blush. He’d prepared himself for her to try to tempt him. He just hadn’t expected to actually be tempted. He could go on as he had, indefinitely, with unlimited power. With Karma. It sounded too good to be true. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch. No hidden clauses. I give you back your heart as soon as you sign on the dotted line, saying you’ll come work for me. I like you, Prometheus. I think we’d rub along well together, don’t you?” She batted her eyes, reminding him of how irresistible he’d once found her. But now she seemed obvious and overblown, a caricature of sex appeal.

The woman who had come to define lust stood to the side and slightly behind him, her spine as rigid and unyielding as her morals.

“Don’t,” Karma said softly. “A thousand years, Prometheus. We’ll find another way. You don’t have to do this.” She would never love a devil, but what shot did he really have of her returning his affections anyway?

He could protect her if he was all-powerful. Yes, he’d have to put people into the same situation he’d been in, but he could bite down the taste that left in his mouth. The greater good, right? He’d be screwing strangers over to protect his own—he could live with that.

Deuma conjured a sheaf of papers with a flourish, waving a pink pen with a feather on the end. “Sign on the dotted line and all is forgotten.”

Prometheus thrust out a hand. “Let me read that.”

“Don’t you trust me? You weren’t such a stickler for reading last time.”

“I was drunk last time.”

“I like you drunk. You want a drink?”

A wine bottle appeared in his hand so abruptly he almost dropped it. “No more games,” he snapped. “The contract.”

“Fine, fine, read.” Suddenly the wine was a stack of papers.

“Prometheus, don’t.”

He ignored Karma’s low plea and began to read through the contract. A thousand years was a long time. He didn’t want any surprises. “There are a lot of clauses here.”

“Are there?” Deuma cooed.

The devil’s legalese made lawyer-speak look coherent, but the first few pages looked aboveboard. It wasn’t until he was seven pages in that the other shoe dropped. “What’s this?”

“What’s what?” Deuma asked innocently.

“Clause twenty-seven B.”

“Is that the part about contracts with non-humans?”

“What the hell is Karma’s name doing in here?”

Karma had been leaning against the wall, but now she snapped to attention. “What?”

“Oh that clause twenty-seven B,” Deuma purred. “No need to get yourself all het up. It’s nothing really. I thought after your little declaration earlier, that she would be a good way to seal the deal. Sort of a handshake. Your first task as my employee is to make a deal with your little Karma.”

Karma asked, “What kind of a deal?”

“A loyalty test,” Prometheus growled. “I should have known.”

“Oh, don’t make it out to be a national disaster. Everyone wants something. You get her to voluntarily give up something in exchange for something she wants. But it has to be a good bargain—the juicier the terms, the better the hit when the subject signs. You know the rules. Make it good.”

He should have known. If it seemed too good to be true, it always was. There was no such thing as a win-win deal with the devil. There would be no using his power to protect those he cared about if he signed this deal. He would be a puppet—like Deuma had been for thousands of years. The kind of power he had would only make people think they had been helped—and then come back to bite them on the ass.

Maybe a month or two ago, it would have seemed like an easy choice. A great deal. But things were different now. He was different now. He didn’t want to be a manipulative devil, putting others in the bind he’d stupidly gotten himself into when he was a heartbroken kid of nineteen who knew fuck all about the world. He would feel too bad for the people he was hurting. He’d know he was hurting them.

He wasn’t sure when it had started, but that was who he was now and he couldn’t go back. Sometimes even selfish bastards learned how to feel. Like the fucking Grinch. If he’d had a heart in his body, the damn thing would probably be growing three sizes.

It was almost a shame he’d had his big, love-thy-fucking-neighbor epiphany today. When it was too late to do him any good.

He shook his head. “I’m afraid I’ll have to pass.” Prometheus dropped the contract and it vanished before it hit the ground.

Deuma’s lazy prowl around the room halted abruptly, her flirtation evaporating. “I hope you aren’t actually trying to say no,” she said, the words carrying the icy chill of a threat. “I realize you may want to negotiate different terms, but the fact that you are even in the same room with your heart means I have grounds to execute our previous contract. You don’t really have much room to maneuver. You really should have read the fine print more carefully the first time.”

“One mistake isn’t grounds for another. Maybe it’s about time I got what was coming to me.”

“You surprise me, Prometheus. Where is that survival instinct I love so much? Just because I like you doesn’t mean I won’t kill you.”

A soft pressure on his arm reminded him that he and Deuma weren’t alone. Karma’s voice was low and firm near his ear. “Maybe you should take the deal. I’d give up my magic, voluntarily. At least you’d be alive—”

“It wouldn’t end there. And even if it did, the price is always steeper than you think.” He risked taking his eyes off Deuma long enough to look down into Karma’s eyes. “How would you protect your people if you couldn’t see the risks coming at them? You’d hate not being omniscient, Karma. I can’t do that to you. I told you I would protect you and I will. Even if this is what it takes.”

“I don’t want it if this is what it takes.”

“Listen to her, Prometheus. Listen to the woman you say you love. Would you really be so selfish as to leave her? Just so you can spite me?”

“Not for spite.” For the first time in his life, he was about to do the right thing. He felt an eerie calm. A certainty. Or maybe that was his denial talking.

“This isn’t noble,” Deuma snapped. “This is a child’s nobility. A man does whatever he must to be there for those who need him. This woman you say you love, she needs you.”

“And binding her to you through me is noble?” Prometheus snapped, losing patience with the she-devil’s wheedling.

Deuma’s patience, such as it was, evaporated just as quickly. “Think very carefully about what you say next. I won’t be asking you again. Will you sign the contract or not?”

Prometheus caught Karma’s hand, squeezed it. “No.”

“Fine.” Pure, incandescent anger blazed in Deuma’s eyes and Prometheus had a fraction of a second to realize he’d misjudged. He hadn’t really thought Deuma would kill him. He was no good to her dead. She wouldn’t waste him as a resource.

He’d been wrong. He tried to turn to Karma, wanted her to be the last thing he saw, but he was too late.

The world went white in a blinding blaze of light.