DISCLAIMERS & CREDITS: This story started four years ago, and there's no telling whether I can finish it now, but let's experiment, shall we? /// Yes, the demons are starting to channel Edina and Patsy from "Absolutely Fabulous." /// Continuing thanks to my equally fabulous beta readers: Shaun, Mau, Ian, Elles, and Veronica.

FURTHER DISCLAIMER: The Kerrys are not the Simpsons, Mrs. Kerry is not my mother, and none of this is true. Except a few things.

E-MAIL: KSimpson@the-devils-workshop.com

CHAPTER NOTES: If you're too young to remember Alice Cooper and/or his stage makeup, I don't want to hear about it. /// Hell's Kitchen is a neighborhood in New York City. /// The "night in the cemetery" was in That Voodoo That You Do.

CHAPTER 1

One Saturday Morning in September

I remember exactly when the trouble started. The latest trouble, I mean. We were finishing breakfast, minding our own business, when we heard the first scream.

Uncertain, I glanced at Cassie over the arts section. She didn't even look up from the business page. "Just ignore it," she advised. "Vanessa probably broke a nail."

Probably. I topped off my coffee and went back to reading.

But not for long. The second scream was downright scary.

"That one sounded like Monica," I said. "Maybe I'd better see what's going on before they wake up the whole neighborhood."

She checked the kitchen clock, which read just past 9. "Everyone's up by now. They're all out doing Botox or Pilates. Don't worry ab..."

This time, the shrieks were in stereo, and even Cassie began to look doubtful.

I folded the paper and pushed my chair back. "I'll go see."

"If you're not back in five minutes," she said, "I'm calling the police."

"Tell them to bring riot gear."

She smiled, but not much.

There was no telling what you would find when you went to check on demons, especially that month. Monica and Vanessa had been on hair-trigger tempers for weeks, for no good reason that I could see. It had been their choice to move in with us when Cassie moved in; no one was forcing them to stay. No one was forcing them to endure each other's society, either. They'd remodeled the attic as living quarters—Monica's suite at one end, Vanessa's at the other—and until I'd made them take it out, they'd had a moat between them.

They also had enough locks on their doors to stock a small hardware store. Sometimes I could get in; sometimes I couldn't. That morning, though, both doors were wide open.

Mentally flipping a coin, I went to my demon's room first and knocked on the doorframe. "Monica?"

There was a flurry of activity in the bath but no answer.

"Monica? Can I come in?"

Something flushed. Frowning, I went in to see what was wrong.

Just as I stuck my head into the bath, Monica stuck hers out. The surprise made me jump back a step, and not just because we'd almost collided. The demon had on a ratty bathrobe, her hair was a mess, and last night's mascara had gone Alice Cooper on her. Strange. Why would someone as vain as Monica go around looking the way everyone else did first thing in the morning?

"Everything all right?" I asked.

She gripped her hair with both hands and shrieked again. Flinching a bit at the volume, I took another step back. Then I noticed something in her right hand.

"Monica? What have you got? Let me see."

Before she could either comply or zap me, Vanessa stormed in. She was in pretty much the same state as Monica, and she was holding an object just like the one Monica had.

"Look at this. Tell me it's a mistake," she demanded.

I took the thing from her and eyed it critically. What was Vanessa doing with a home pregnancy t...

No.

"Never mind hers," Monica growled. "Look at mine."

Dumbstruck, I held both objects up to the light. Then, to make extra-sure, I took them over to the window to check them by natural light. There was no mistake. I was wide awake, and both sticks were blue.

Cassie almost dropped her coffee when I walked back into the kitchen. "Devvy? What's wrong? You look like you've seen something horrible."

Horrible? That was one word for it. There were many words for it. But horrible was a good one to start with. Silently, I handed her the sticks.

"You're kidding," she said.

I shook my head.

"Where did you get these?"

"From them."

"'Them'? You mean the witches?"

"Demons," I corrected.

She narrowed her eyes at me and then studied the sticks again. "They're blue, Devvy."

"They don't get much bluer."

"Impossible," she said flatly. "How...?"

It was just as well that she couldn't finish the question; I couldn't have answered it. We stared at each other apprehensively.

A few seconds later, the demons straggled in. The fight seemed to have gone out of them; they seemed every bit as stunned—and mortal—as us.

Quickly, I pulled out two chairs, and Cassie poured them some coffee.

"We can't wait to hear this one," she told them. Her expression made it an order.

I'm not sure what was the greater shock: having pregnant demons or having pregnant demons who didn't know how they got that way.

But Cassie wasn't troubled by philosophy; she wanted facts, and she wanted them now. "You've got to know. You can't just get pregnant all by yourselves." Then she remembered who she was dealing with. "Can you?"

Monica bristled. "You'd better not be implying that that...impette and I..."

Desperately, I jumped on that one. "She's not. She wouldn't even think it. That would be too cruel."

Now Vanessa was insulted. "I beg your pardon?"

"Not what I meant." Well, all right, it was. But she didn't have to know that. "I just meant she wouldn't suggest that you couldn't get...dates."

"You're getting really good at euphemisms, sweetie," Cassie said.

I shot her a warning look before going on. "We don't want to know the details. Really don't want to know. But it had to happen somehow, right? We just want to know who, or what..."

"Juan," Vanessa said glumly.

"Who?"

Monica cut in before she could answer. "He told me his name was Jacques. He also told me he was sterile."

"Who?"

"New Orleans, Devvy," Cassie prompted. "That night in the cemetery. Remember?"

"That's not something I'm ever going to be able to forget, is it? I wish you'd give me some credit once in...wait a minute. You mean the biker boy?"

Monica was still giving Vanessa the evil eye but stopped long enough to turn it on me. "He's not a boy."

"I'll say," Vanessa added. "So he told you the sterile thing too,?"

Cassie snorted. "And you believed him? How can you be my demon and not know better? How many thousands of men did I—"

"Let's not go there," I said.

"—hundreds of men was I with? Did you not learn anything from all those...dates?"

"Really don't go there, Cass."

"I'm trying to make a point."

"I don't want to have this conversation."

"You're not having it; I'm having it. What's the matter with you, anyway? You know all this."

"Yes, but it's different now. It's..." Suddenly, I realized that the demons were listening avidly—and smirking. "Cut that out, both of you. You're not off the hook."

Vanessa shivered in mock pleasure. "Oh, goody. I like the hook."

"It's not funny," Cassie told her. "Do I have to explain about birth control?"

At which point the phone rang. Thank God! I practically shot across the kitchen to answer it. "Hell's Kitchen. We're out getting our pitchforks sharpened again, but if you'll leave a mess—"

"Excuse me?"

Fantastic—first a kitchen full of pregnant demons, and now Cassie's mother on the phone. "Sorry, Mrs. Wolfe. Do you want to talk to your daughter?"

She did. Her daughter didn't especially want to talk to her, by the face she made, but she took the call anyway. The demons and I amused ourselves by eavesdropping. Unfortunately, Cassie didn't say anything interesting—or really much of anything at all. She mostly listened. Perfectly understandable, though; that was how it worked when my mother was on the phone.

So Mrs. Wolfe talked, Cassie listened, and we waited. When she finally hung up, she looked a little troubled.

"So?" I asked. "What's up?"

"Lucy."

"What about her?"

"She's pregnant."

Without thinking, I asked, "Again?"

"What does that mean?" Cassie snapped.

"Nothing, sweetheart. Just a question." Just a mistake I'd make sure not to make again. "Congratulations to you too. You're going to be an aunt again."

Vanessa pouted. "She's going to be an aunt? What about us?"

"What about you?" I asked.

The phone rang again. Cassie, still standing by it, shook her head. "Let's call SBC first thing Monday and get an unpublished number."

"Fine. Just get it."

She did. That one was for me. I decided to take it in the living room, just in case Cassie remembered what she'd been talking about before the first interruption.

She finally found me on the roof a half-hour later. "Devvy? What's wrong?"

"What makes you think something's wrong?"

"You're sitting on the roof."

"It's a good place to think."

"About what?"

I didn't answer. Carefully, Cassie made her way over to where I was sitting and eased down beside me.

"Was that call bad news?"

"Yes," I said darkly. "Ryan's pregnant."

She considered. "I don't think your brother can get pregnant."

"You know what I mean."

"But that's good news. Isn't it?"

"I don't want to hear any more good news today, Cass. I'm maxed out. The whole world and half of Hell are pregnant all of a sudden. What's the matter with everyone, anyway? Is something in the water?"

She rubbed my shoulder reassuringly. "It's not in water, honey."

Annoyed, I shoved her off.

"Oh, come on, Devvy. It was just a little joke."

"Babies are little too. But they're more trouble than hornets." I thought about it for a second. "Angry hornets. With radioactive diapers."

"I thought you liked babies."

"Theoretically."

"Well, you'd better get over it. We're going to be up to our ears in nontheoretical babies in a few months."

"You're being awfully calm about this," I accused. "And I thought you didn't like babies. I distinctly remember you saying..."

"Those were other people's. These'll be ours. Well, kind of."

"Ours?"

"Kind of."

"Get that idea right out of your head. I'm sending Monica and Vanessa upriver to spawn. I don't want any part of breeding demons."

"Sleep on it, honey."

"I don't have to sleep on it. I don't..." Something in Cassie's expression rang a few small warning bells. "You'd better not have good news."

Caught off guard, she first looked guilty and then laughed. "Don't be silly."

"What was that look?"

"What look?"

I took her face in both hands and turned it toward me to make sure I had her attention. "You'd better not have asked Marie Laveau for any more favors. If you did, we're getting on a plane this afternoon and going right back to New Orleans."

"I didn't."

"Swear it, Cass."

"I swear it." She kissed me on the bridge of the nose. "Now let's go inside. The last time I saw the witches, they were trying to order Teletubbies DVDs on the Web."

Only the threat of Jerry Falwell DVDs would have gotten me off the roof any faster. Cassie was tricky that way.

(c) 2001 & 2005, K. Simpson

***

SEVERAL MORE DEVILS

K. SIMPSON

DISCLAIMERS, CREDITS, & E-MAIL: See Part 1.

CHAPTER 2

///

By Monday morning, the twitching had stopped, and I could think about other things for whole minutes at a time. But the facts of the weekend were diabolically persistent, never far from my mind and crowding back in every chance they got.

Fact 1: Our demons were pregnant.

Fact 2: Our siblings were pregnant.

Fact 3: Which meant there'd be more of all of them.

There was no hope. We were on the Titanic, en route to the Hindenburg. Even leaving the demons out, we were in for a very long spell of Bad Things. Cassie's family might not be quite as obsessed—they'd been through it three times already with Lucy, after all—but mine was going to be a nightmare.

See, my mother had a little grandmother problem: She wanted to be one. Really wanted to be one. When she got into certain moods, it was the only thing she would talk about.

"All my friends have grandchildren," she'd say. "All my brothers and sisters have grandchildren. Everybody on the obituary page has grandchildren. What's the matter with you kids?"

My brothers and I had long since learned to cope. One Sunday a few years before, we'd all happened to show up for a visit at the same time, so before we went in the house, we synchronized our watches and took bets on how long it would take Mom to say the word grandchild.

Seven minutes.

"You're exaggerating," Cassie said when I told her the story at lunch.

"No, I'm not. It was 6 minutes and 47 seconds by Connor's watch, but he said it wasn't working right. Could've really been 6 and 46."

"Well, you don't have to worry about that anymore."

"No. That's true. I won't. I'll just have to worry about something else. Like Mom calling with progress reports every day." Morosely, I poured more steak sauce on my sandwich. "She'll keep a weight chart on Amy—you just watch. She'll..."

"Honey?"

"Not in public, dammit. What?"

"You're putting steak sauce on tuna."

Startled, I double-checked. "Why didn't you stop me?"

"I thought you wanted to."

"Why would I want to?"

"How should I know? I've seen you put barbecue sauce on pizza."

"It was barbecue pizza!"

"Would you relax? I'm not criticizing. It's not an issue. You could've been having sympathy cravings or something."

"Sympathy cravings?"

"Well, pregnant women eat weird things. Lucy has sardines and peanut butter sometimes. But she usually eats raw hamburger."

Appalled, I pushed my plate away.

"Sorry I mentioned it," she said, not quite half-sincerely. "Let me order you another sandwich, and everything'll be fine again."

"It will not. They'll all still be pregnant."

Cassie sorted through her options. "Well, then, honey, I guess we'll just have to kill them."

"Too many bodies to hide."

"Or cork them up."

"Nightmare of logistics."

She examined me with suspicion. "Don't tell me you're taking this seriously."

"Don't tell me you're not. How are we going to explain demon babies?"

"How have we explained demons?"

"We haven't."

"Exactly."

Goddammit. "Won't work, Cass. We can't hide this. There's an Arabic proverb about that. 'Three things cannot be hidden: love, pregnancy, and riding on a camel.'"

"We don't have a camel," she said.

Then she put catsup on her salad.

///

Cassie

Age 2-1/2

"Honey? Put that down and come here a minute. Mommy wants to tell you something."

Cassie was greatly annoyed. She'd been minding her own business, chewing on that lamp cord and not bothering anybody, and it had been hours since she stepped on the cat, so what did Mommy want now?

"Be a good girl. Come sit on my lap."

She didn't want to be a good girl. Good girls didn't get to have any fun. Tina Louise down the street was good, and she was a big fat pill. Whatever a pill was—Mommy always said it about people she didn't like. Mommy didn't like a lot of people. But then, neither did she. People never did just what you wanted them to do, just when you wanted them to do it, so what good were they, anyway? Defiantly, she jammed the whole plug into her mouth.

"Cassie? Spit that out now, please. Young ladies don't do that."

Oh-oh. Mommy was talking again about what young ladies did, and Cassie hated that. She gave the plug a good chomp, to show Mommy who was boss. But then she remembered that Mommy had been mad about the cat, so she spat it out.

"Thank you, dear. Now come here. I have something to tell you."

"Why?"

Mrs. Wolfe sighed. "Don't start that again, honey. Just come here."

So she did. Her mother scooped her up and settled Cassie on her knee.

"I have wonderful news for you, dear. You know that baby you always wanted?"

"No."

"Well, you're going to get one. We're going to get one. Isn't that exciting?"

No. Cassie wanted almost everything, but not that. Tina Louise had a baby brother, and he was nothing but a pest.

"You might get a little sister," her mother persisted. "Won't that be nice?"

"Why?"

Taken aback, Mrs. Wolfe considered how to answer. Then she decided on the usual solution. "I'll let your father talk to you when he gets home tonight."

"Why?"

"Don't be a pill, Cassie."

Cassie instantly burst into tears. It took several minutes and several more bribes to calm her down. Mrs. Wolfe called her husband at the office and asked him to stop by the toy store—again—on the way home. Good thing they had a charge account.

///

"Cass? What's wrong?"

She jumped a little. "Nothing. I was just thinking."

"I don't mean that. I mean this." I pointed to her salad. "You just put catsup on it."

"Nice try, Devvy. You're just saying that because—" Then she noticed. "When did I do that?"

"While you were thinking. You want to tell me what about?"

"Why?"

As soon as she asked that question, she got that odd look again. Not good. "Just humor me," I suggested.

"It's nothing. Just something dumb. Forget it."

"Takes more than that, Cass. Talk to me."

"I said, it's nothing. I was just remembering the day I found out about Lucy."

Well, that could be anything; her sister was loony. "Found out what?"

"That Mom was pregnant."

Oh. That what. There probably were dark psychological implications, but we were sitting in a crowded deli at 12:30 in the afternoon, and this wasn't the time or the place to get into it. Frankly, I'd be fine if we never did find the time or place to get into it.

So I forced myself to smile at her. "Happens to the best of us."

"Don't be flip, Devvy. How did you take it when you found out your mother was pregnant?"

///

Dev

Age 5

Connor and I were watching cartoons that afternoon. Well, I was watching cartoons; he was eating crayons and spitting up on the living-room rug. I wasn't in the mood for him. It had a been a long hard morning at kindergarten, and the least I deserved was to get to watch Bugs Bunny in peace.

Then Mom came in and shut off the TV.

"Hey!" I yelled.

"That's enough television for one day, Devlin."

"No, it's not!" I was right, too. There wasn't enough television, period. On days when the babysitter came, we watched TV for eight straight hours, and life was good.

"I'll be the judge of that, young lady. Now come sit on the couch with me. I want to talk to you."

"What did I do?"

"Nothing. Just come here."

Nothing? Not likely. I hadn't known the woman very long, but I knew her well enough to know that I would always be in trouble with her. I also knew enough not to disobey a direct order—not when she was in the room, anyway. So I climbed up on the couch next to her.

But not before I gave Connor a dirty look for not being in trouble. He just gurgled and blew spit bubbles at me, the little creep.

"That's better. But sit up straight." Not waiting for me to do it myself, she pulled me up. Then, satisfied, she smiled. "I want to ask you a question. Do you see this top I have on?"

I peered at it. "Yes."

"Do you know why I'm wearing it?"

"Because you're getting fat?"

Wrong answer. Her face darkened. But then Connor started jabbering to himself at the top of his lungs, and she seemed to relax when she looked at him.

"Well," she said, "I suppose this is what I get for having smart kids. You're a little too smart for your own good, though, Devlin. We'll talk about that before you start school next year, all right?"

I shrugged. Who cared about next year when I was missing Bugs Bunny right now?

"That's a good girl. Now let's try again. Do you know why I'm wearing this top?"

"No."

"Because I'm pregnant."

She could have said she was a Madagascar fruit bat, for all the meaning the word had for me. But she looked happy for a change, so I guessed it meant something good.

"OK," I said. "Can I watch cartoons?"

"Don't you want to know where babies come from?"

"No."

Mom was about to tell me anyway, but then Connor spat up all over the rug. Suddenly, I did wonder where babies came from. If I knew, maybe I could take him back.

///

"Hello? Hey, you home?"

Surprised, I saw Heather standing there waving her hand in front of my face. "Where'd you come from?"

"Toledo. Before Dad got transferred here. So what's up?"

"Up?" I glanced at Cassie. "Nothing's up. Just lunch."

"Really? You mean you're really going to eat that?"

It took us both a second to figure out what she meant. Then Cassie covered her salad with a napkin, and I pushed my tuna farther away.

"We were playing Truth or Dare," Cassie lied. "Turns out we're not very good at it."

Heather smiled, but only a little. "Well, yeah. But what besides that? You had the weirdest looks on your faces."

"We were thinking," I told her.

Heather shuddered. "Scary. Just make sure nobody gets hurt, OK?"

"Go away, Heather," I said. "I don't have to be insulted on my own time."

She was about to shove off when someone called her name, and she waved the caller over. It turned out to be a very pregnant woman—and at the sight of her, both Cassie and I jumped.

"Sheesh," Heather said, exasperated. "What's wrong with you two?"

We let the question go unanswered. And we resolved to have a talk with our demons the split-second we got home.

///

(c) 2001 & 2005, K. Simpson

***

SEVERAL MORE DEVILS

K. SIMPSON

DISCLAIMERS, CREDITS, & E-MAIL: See Part 1.

CHAPTER 3

///

Sympathy cravings. Where did Cassie get this stuff? Someday, I was going to have to take her to a lab for analysis; she might be part alien. Having met her family, I couldn't rule that out.

But I was just smart enough not to say so, because she could — and would — say the same about me. So I wrote it off as a Cassieism and didn't think about it again for the rest of the day.

When we got home from work that night, though, there was no not thinking about it. And it turned out to be the least of our troubles.

///

The first thing that struck us was the smell coming from the kitchen. We couldn't place it, but we knew we didn't like it. Cassie grabbed the fire extinguisher out of the coat closet; I got out my cell phone, ready to call 911; and we tiptoed toward the kitchen, braced for the worst.

It was bad enough. The demons were broiling something in the oven, which was open and smoking like a steel mill, and they were using fireplace tools to poke whatever they were broiling. Immediately, I pressed the 9.

"Wait," Cassie said. "The kitchen's not really on fire yet."

Yet. Exactly. I pressed the first 1 and waited.

Then I realized what else was wrong with this picture. It wasn't the refrigerator standing wide open, or the empty pizza boxes in the sink, or even the chocolate syrup dripping off the overhead light fixture; I didn't want to know about that anyway. The problem was them. They were dolled up in vintage-'50s housedresses, fuzzy slippers, and sunglasses, like a demented Lucy and Ethel, and although I never put anything past Vanessa clotheswise, I'd expected better of Monica.

Cassie looked troubled. "Devvy?"

"What?"

"Are we awake?"

I debated whether to dial the last 1 before or after I answered that question. But before I could do anything, Vanessa saw us in the doorway.

"There you are. Welcome home. We thought we'd make dinner tonight. Hungry?"

"Not if you're cooking," Cassie said. "What is that, anyway?"

"Pizza Surprise."

That sounded like a definite threat to me. "What's the surprise?"

Vanessa glanced at Monica uncertainly. But my demon was ignoring all of us; she was busy trying to turn something over in the oven with a poker and an ash shovel.

"Dinner out," I told Cassie.

She didn't argue. We were halfway to the front door when the phone rang.

"I'll get it!" Vanessa said.

Cassie dropped the fire extinguisher, which she'd forgotten she still had, and dashed back to the kitchen. In her hurry, she'd also forgotten not to drop the extinguisher on my foot. I was still hopping around the living room when the doorbell rang.

What was next — blood and locusts? Annoyed, I hopped to the door and slammed it open.

"Hi, Dev," Lucy said.

My first instinct was to slam the door shut again. But I couldn't really, because she was Cassie's sister. So I smiled, sort of, and stood back to let her in.

"Devvy!" Cassie yelled from the kitchen. "Your mother's on the phone!"

"Your sister's in the living room!" I yelled back.

Technically, though, she wasn't; she'd stepped back out on the porch for something or other. Before I could see what, Cassie was at my shoulder, a little out of breath from all that running.

"What's she doing here?" she whispered.

"I don't know. Maybe she'll tell us if we let her in."

"We can't let her in. We've got witches in the kitchen."

If you counted my mother on the phone in there, that would make three of them. You could make a case for four if you threw in Lucy, but Cassie would get mad, so I kept that thought to myself.

"Hey!" Lucy called. "Would you give me a hand with these?"

Only then did we see the mountain of luggage on the porch. I said a bad word more or less under my breath and limped off to find out what Mom wanted instead.

///

They were sitting in the living room having a nice sisterly talk when I came back. They seemed to be getting along — all the furniture was still in one piece, anyway — but Cassie was clearly under strain.

No doubt it had something to do with all those suitcases at the foot of the stairs. She'd deliberately taken the most uncomfortable chair in the room so she wouldn't have to look at them.

"Everything all right in the kitchen?" Cassie asked.

What she really meant was Did you get rid of the witches?, so I said yes. They'd left the kitchen a mess, but they'd left, which was all I'd really wanted.

"Thank G...I mean, good. What did your mother want?"

"A baby shower."

"What?"

"A baby shower. She wants me to throw one for Amy." To Lucy, I added, "My sister-in-law. She's pregnant."

"I figured it out right away when you said 'baby shower,'" Lucy said, "but thanks for clearing that up."

I scowled at her. She was way too much like her sister sometimes.

"What did you say?" Cassie asked me.

"I got about three words in edgewise. They were all 'no,' but she didn't hear them."

Lucy laughed. "Too bad. I'd have loved to see that. Nothing personal, Dev, but I can't imagine you playing shower games."

"Don't even try." Pointedly, I glanced over my shoulder at the luggage and then back at her. "In town for a visit, are you? Stopping off here on the way to the hotel?"

"Actually," she said, "I thought I'd stay here. Under the circumstances and all."

"Circumstances?"

"Nothing much. I just left Michael."

Ah. That explained a lot. I didn't like it, but it explained a lot. The luggage, anyway.

"It's just for a few days, Devvy," Cassie said wearily. "It's the least we can do."

No, it wasn't. Still, Lucy was her sister. And whenever Amy and Jen finally wised up and left my brothers, they'd probably come here too. "Right."

"She can stay in my bedroom."

"Fine." For all practical purposes, we shared a room, but Cassie's clothes and shoes and jewelry had to live somewhere. Also, it looked better to have separate bedrooms, just in case someone's crabby grandmother ever dropped by. We'd never met each other's grandmothers, but we'd established that they were all crabby. Especially Cassie's.

"And we can all go out to dinner tonight."

I was starting to second that when Lucy interrupted. "Naaah — let's just stay here and make something. I'll make something. How'd that be?"

"I'd rather you didn't," I said. "Besides, I'm in the mood to go out."

But Lucy was already headed toward the kitchen, and by the time we caught up with her, she'd seen it all, including the chocolate syrup dripping off the light fixture. (At least, I hoped it was chocolate syrup. But I still didn't really want to know.)

"It's hard to explain," Cassie told her.

Lucy said she bet it was. Then she sighed. "Well, it's not like I haven't seen worse. I've got three kids and a pig of a husband, after all. I'll just cook around it. Want to show me where everything is?"

Reluctantly, Cassie showed her. While they were going through drawers and cabinets, I happened to notice a tray of hors d'oeuvres on the counter. Monica and Vanessa had probably forgotten to take it when they left. As discreetly as possible, I grabbed the tray and headed for the stairs. The demons were probably in their rooms; if not, I'd just leave it for them.

About halfway up the stairs, I realized that I was hungry. There were lots of those little things — pâté of some kind, looked like. They'd never miss one, so I ate one. Then another.

A second too late, I remembered that I hated pâté. And whatever I'd just eaten tasted weird even for pâté.

Apprehensively, I went on up to the attic. Monica was nowhere around, but Vanessa was in her room, sharpening her talons. Seven o'clock at night, indoors, and she still had the sunglasses on. Of course she did. Why wouldn't she? She was crazy.

"You forgot these," I said, handing her the tray.

"Au contraire. We left them for you. Did you like them?"

"Not much. What are they?"

"Cat food on toast points," Vanessa said. "It was Monica's idea."

///

Ten Minutes Later

"So. There you are."

Not wanting to give her the satisfaction, I didn't acknowledge her presence. Monica didn't seem dissatisfied, though; she simply sat down next to me and waited.

I let her wait. The demon tapped her talons on the roof shingles in growing impatience but didn't say anything for a while.

Finally, she couldn't stand it anymore. "Oh, all right, I'm sorry about the cat food."

"No, you're not."

"No, I'm not. But I'm a demon. What do you expect?"

I no longer knew what to expect of anyone, anytime, anywhere and said so. She tossed her head in annoyance.

"You're not as much fun as you used to be," she accused.

Most likely, and mostly her fault. But she already knew that. So I just shrugged.

"I'm starting to worry about you, Devlin. Sitting on the roof again. You're getting to like it up here."

"That's because it's quiet." I gave her a significant look. "Usually."

She didn't take the bait. "This sort of thing isn't normal. It may be a symptom of something. Do you suppose you're just a touch manic-depressive?"

"That's occurred to me," I admitted. "You could be some elaborate form of mental illness. Doesn't explain why Cass can see you, though. And it really doesn't explain Vanessa."

"Nothing explains her," Monica said.

Still riding my train of thought, I ignored that. "There may be a pill of some sort that would get rid of you. There's electroshock, too. Or lobotomy. Maybe they could take out my whole brain, while they're at it. I must've gotten a defective one anyway. How else would I wind up with a mental illness in fuzzy slippers?"

Surprised, Monica checked her feet. "Mistake. I forgot to change those."

"They're a little disturbing on you. But that's probably just as much your fault as it is theirs."

The demon warned me about getting smart with her and then zapped herself. "That's better. Now, where were we?"

"We've already been there. Let's go somewhere else now. Why don't you explain about this pregnancy thing?"

She frowned. "You know where babies come from."

"Not these babies. Or what we're going to do with them when they get here."

"Boarding school," she said.

"I meant right away."

"We'll worry about that in six months."

"I want to worry about it now."

"Don't. You'll live longer."

"Why would I want to do that?" I asked, genuinely curious.

She gave me a narrow look but didn't answer.

"No, seriously. First you; then Vanessa; now Cassie's sister; sooner or later, babies. Give me one good reason not to go ahead and jump off this roof."

"It's only two stories down from here."

"Besides that."

"Stop dramatizing. People have babies all the time."

"You're not people. And they don't have babies in my attic. Why are you here, anyway? Aren't there any halfway houses for single mothers in Hell?"

"I like it here. Besides, it's nice to have company right now."

"Even Vanessa?"

"Even Cassandra. This motherhood thing may be making me sentimental and lowering my standards, of course."

"Forget Cassie. You've got worse problems with that battleax sister of hers. She's probably going to stay here forever too."

"If you ask me nicely," the demon said, "I'll turn her into a hamster for you."

The offer appealed to me more than it probably should have. But Lucy would stay forever then — not to mention that she'd be having baby hamsters. "Just send her home."

"Don't worry. She won't be staying long. Why don't I turn her into a hamster just for practice?"

"Just stay out of sight while she's here. I don't want to have to try to explain you to her."

"To her? What about your brother?"

"What about him?"

She pointed down to the beat-up Jeep that was just pulling into the driveway. I'd have known it anywhere even without the Notre Dame flag; it was Connor's.

"Damnation," I said.

Monica smiled sweetly. "Coming up."

///

(c) 2001 & 2005, K. Simpson

***

SEVERAL MORE DEVILS

K. SIMPSON

DISCLAIMERS, CREDITS, & E-MAIL: See Part 1.

CHAPTER NOTES: The TV show Dev and Connor argue about is "The Weakest Link." The reference was a lot more current when I started this story.

CHAPTER 4

///

I got downstairs in record time but still too late to beat Cassie to the doorbell. When I hit the living room — and skidded, because we'd just waxed the floors — Connor was standing there chatting her up like it was Old Home Week. Mostly accidentally, I almost skidded right into him.

Certainly on purpose, he stepped aside so I could crash into an end table instead.

"Careful, Dev," he said, half-offering to help me up. "You could've hurt the table."

I smacked his hand away. "You could've caught me, you jerk."

"That's true; I could've. But it's all academic now, isn't it?"

"Don't use big words you don't understand. And quit smirking, or I'll tell Mom on you."

He laughed. "Telling on me, at your age. Who's a few coconuts short of a palm tree?"

"Knock it off. I hate that show."

"Who's a few sandwiches short of a picnic? Who's a few pineapples short of a luau?"

"You're a few seconds short of a wedgie," I warned. "Now stop."

Cassie looked disappointed but didn't say anything. For his part, Connor just grinned.

I wasn't in a mood to make up, though. "What are you doing here, anyway? Did they close the zoo and turn you loose? Or did you just sneak out with the pigkeepers?"

"Be nice, Devvy," Cassie said. "He's your brother."

"Through no fault of mine. Did he tell you what he's doing here?"

"No, but — "

"I'm running away from home is what I'm doing here," Connor said. "Jen and I had a little difference of opinion. Nothing serious. Mind if I stay here till she gets over it?"

So. Trouble in paradise. I wasn't surprised, knowing my brother, but the timing was terrible, what with Cassie's sister in the same boat and in the same house.

"What did you do?" I asked.

He looked insulted. "Nothing. Mom started it."

"Connor, for God's sake, we can't blame everything on her." Only almost everything. "What did you do?"

"I told you, she started it."

Cassie was enjoying this a little too much. "Then you'll have to tell us all about it. Don't leave anything out. Have a seat. Put your feet up. Want a beer?"

I was about to suggest that he go to Milwaukee or Munich or Hell and get his own beer when Lucy barged out of the kitchen, and before Cassie and I quite figured out what was going on, they were gaping at each other like lovestruck trout.

Not good.

"Beer, Connor," Cassie prompted.

"I'll get it," he said, still staring at Lucy.

Lucy was still staring back. "I'll help."

Very not good.

"You don't suppose...?" Cassie asked as soon as they were gone.

"No, I don't. We didn't see that. It never happened. Understand?"

She said she did, but we both knew we were both lying.

///

2 A.M.

I couldn't sleep. It was traitorous of Cassie to sleep under the circumstances, and I resented it, but not enough to wake her up. She'd be in a bad mood in the morning if she didn't get to count all her sheep, and I already had enough troubles under one roof.

Take Lucy. If ever a marriage was on the rocks, hers was. It was too late for annulment and too soon for murder, but they were clearly headed for court.

"We were having this baby to save our marriage," she'd told us.

Even Connor knew better than that; he'd rolled his eyes. Lucy just kept going, though.

"He was happy about it. He even went out and bought cigars. I promised we'd name this one Michael, no matter what it is."

I'd wanted to ask whether "it" meant gender or species, but Cassie knew that and gave me a terrible look.

"Everything was fine till he called me fat."

"Excuse me?" Cassie had asked, disbelieving.

"In bed last night. He said I was getting fatter than usual."

Well, that was a felony, no question. Michael was about as sensitive as a dead armadillo. But even a dead armadillo would have known to stop there, and he hadn't. They'd gone on to dredge up eight years' worth of grievances between them, and by the time they were done, they were done. Secretly, I thought it was her own fault for marrying him in the first place, but there was no accounting for taste. Otherwise, no one would get married at all.

I stared at the ceiling for a while, wondering what to do about Lucy, and then gave up and started on Connor.

That was a different kettle of fish. This time, Mom was responsible. She'd been up to no good on the phone again, bothering Jen about grandchildren, and by the time Connor got home from work, Jen was about half as crazy as Mom.

"I don't want kids yet," he'd said when he told us the story. "I'm still a kid. Maybe someday, when I grow up —"

"If you grow up," I'd amended.

" — but not right now. Jen and I agreed on that. No babies till we're both ready. So where does Mom get off getting her all worked up?"

Patiently, I'd explained it to him again: Mom got off wherever she wanted to.

"But that's not fair!"

No, it wasn't. But he knew that. And it was even more not fair that he was here — not to mention Lucy. Soap operas were bad enough on TV.

Worse yet, we had demons in a family way. I didn't want to think about them, though. Really, I didn't want to think at all. It was 2 in the morning; Cassie was out for the count; there was nothing left to do but watch the shopping channel. If that didn't put me to sleep, nothing would.

Then again, it might not be safe to sleep at all; there were too many people in the house who needed watching. I might feel better if I knew exactly where everyone was and what they were doing. So I got out of bed as quietly as possible, grabbed a flashlight, and went to have a look around.

First stop, of course, was the attic. Everything was quiet there; Monica and Vanessa both had their doors bolted shut, and the only light was a faint glow under the door of Vanessa's room, which would be her Donald Duck night light. Situation normal.

Back on the second floor, I checked in on Lucy, who was staying in the guest room. Careful not to wake her, I cracked the door open and swept the light around. She was alone, thank God. She had on a sleep mask, foam curlers, and some bilious-green facial goo — a look that would scare my brother off if he got any ideas. It was enough to scare me off, and I wouldn't have touched her with a telephone pole.

Relieved, I closed the door again and went on downstairs. Connor was supposed to be sacked out on the couch, but he could sleep through anything, so I could watch the Godzilla marathon on Channel 23 if I really wanted.

But he wasn't on the couch. He was in the kitchen, drinking a beer and eating peanut butter right out of the jar. With his fingers. Unsure how to stop it, I watched the awful spectacle from the doorway.

"Don't do that," I finally said.

He looked up, surprised. "Why not? My hands are clean."

"Don't do it anyway."

"You're no fun. Anyone ever tell you that?"

Once or twice. Resigned, I got a bottled frappucino out of the refrigerator and sat down to keep him company. "Since we're both up...," I began.

"Since we are," he agreed.

"You might as well talk to me. What really happened with Jen?"

He exhaled sharply in frustration and pushed the peanut butter away. "I told you; Mom got to her. She wants to have a baby now so Mom'll leave us alone. God, she's getting to be a bat."

"For the sake of your marriage, you'd better mean Mom."

"Of course I mean Mom. How dumb do you think I am?"

I was happily telling him exactly how dumb when Cassie walked in, rubbing her eyes.

"What are you doing up?" I asked her.

Shrugging, she pulled up a chair.

"She'll tell us when she's ready," I told Connor. "You can keep explaining in the meantime. Mom might've started it, but I'll bet you helped it along. So what did you do?"

"I'm hurt, Dev," he said, mock-sadly. "You're my sister, for crying out loud. My favorite sister."

"Your only sister. Quit changing the subject and tell me."

"You'd really better," Cassie advised him. "She won't drop it. She's stubborn."

He smiled. "You think?"

Losing all patience, I got up, went to the phone, and started dialing.

"Who are you calling?" Cassie asked.

Who I should've called in the first place, that was who. I waited until Jen picked up and then handed the receiver to Connor. "Whatever you did, apologize. And make it good. We're going to bed."

Cassie wanted to stay out in the hall and eavesdrop, but I reminded her that we could hear better if we accidentally happened to pick up the phone upstairs. We were on our way to do just that when we heard Lucy's cell phone ring in her room.

"A or B?" I asked.

Then we heard Lucy's end of the conversation. All we could make out was "stupid gasbag," but that was enough to prove who she was talking to.

"B," we said together, and pressed our ears to the door.

///

I'd rather not talk about Connor's catching us at it a couple minutes later. He loved it, of course, and Cassie had a hard time keeping me from unscrewing his head. There was nothing to do but let him join us. That shut him up and made him guilty too, which was as good as the getting was going to get that night.

But it didn't last. Lucy was still screeching on her cell long after the fun wore off for the rest of us, so we gave up and went to bed. Cassie said we'd get the whole story out of her in the morning anyway, whether we wanted it or not.

"I have a theory," I told her when we climbed back into bed.

"It's 3 in the morning, Devvy."

"It's a short theory. I think babies cause insanity."

"Sweetie, you don't have that excuse."

I brooded on that in the dark for a minute. "I'm going to forgive you for that because it's late."

"Oh, good. Now go to sleep."

I tried for a while but still couldn't.

"Cass?"

"What?"

"We're not going to have that excuse, are we?"

"What excuse?"

"For insanity. We're not going to have any babies, right?"

It was quiet on her side of the bed. Too quiet.

"Cass?"

"Not personally. Now go to sleep, or I'll kill you."

I lay awake for a while, considering all the possible meanings of personally. Then I went downstairs to watch Godzilla. They were probably essentially the same thing, but it was easier to think about fire-breathing lizards than babies at 3 a.m.

///

(c) 2001 & 2005, K. Simpson

***

SEVERAL MORE DEVILS

K. SIMPSON

DISCLAIMERS, CREDITS, & E-MAIL: See Part 1.

CHAPTER NOTES: Monica's maternity top is real; my mother got it as a joke at a baby shower when she was expecting one of my brothers. I was 10 and easily dismayed, which is why I remember it. The Lacroix jewelry comes from "Ab Fab," of course. /// The "Queer Eye" reference is to the makeover show "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."

CHAPTER 5

///

Cassie woke me very early — not a job for the faint of heart — and shoved a little cup at me. "Espresso, sweetie," she said.

Annoyed, I shoved it back at her. "I don't want it yet. It's Saturday."

"You need to get up, Devvy. We're not alone. Remember? My sister? Your brother? The witches?" She handed the cup back. "The pregnant witches?"

Well, when she put it that way. I knocked back the espresso in one go and got out of bed, resigned to trouble. "Where are they?"

"Still asleep."

"Must be nice."

Cassie pretended not to hear that. "We need to get a head start on them. Keep them apart. I'll take Lucy and Connor, but you've got to take — "

"No."

" — the witches. "

"No. Why do I always have to take them?"

She tried the charm tack. "Because you're so good at it. You're so good at it, sweetie, that I could watch you do it for hours. Really. You're amazing. I've always meant to tell you that. Should I bat my lashes at you now, or is this working?"

I gave her a bad look and went off to the bath in aggrieved silence.

"I'll make more espresso," Cassie called after me. "It's going to be a bumpy day."

///

After a cold shower, another espresso, and Cassie's promise to make it up to me, I went on up to the attic to do battle. Both bedroom doors were still padlocked, and Vanessa's had acquired a KEEP OUT! THIS MEANS YOU! sign since I'd been there last. But on two hours' sleep, I didn't scare much.

Besides, the smiley face on Vanessa's sign took the curse off it. So I knocked.

"Read the sign!" the demon shrieked.

"I did. Open up, Vanessa."

There was silence on the other side of the door. Then, as I watched, the smiley face on the sign grew two long fangs.

Whatever. I knocked again.

"Sheesh. No sense of humor," Vanessa grumbled. "All right, already. Come in."

The padlocks on the door snapped open. One of them tried to bite me when I took it off, but I threatened to sic Monica on it, which shut it up. Then I went on in.

Vanessa was lying on a chaise longue in a pink dressing gown, drinking something out of a martini glass. It might have been blood, but I decided not to notice. Neither did I comment on the Hello Kitty sunglasses. Maybe it was just as well that Cassie had all the fashion sense between them.

Except for that foul Egyptian-junior-stewardess brooch, of course, but that might have been Vanessa's idea anyway.

"Well?" the demon demanded. "Can't you see I'm busy?"

"Busy doing what?"

"Being pregnant is a full-time job, Devlin. I'm gesticulating."

"Gestating," I corrected. "Or maybe hatching. There's no telling with demons. But we'll talk about that later. Right now, we have to talk about — "

"The intruders," Vanessa said, bored. "Yes. I know."

"They're not intruders. Not technically. They're — "

Monica materialized on the bed. "Invaders. We'd like them gone."

"So would I. But — " Then it registered on me what she was wearing. "Stop that, Monica."

The demon laughed and smoothed the front of her yellow maternity top, which had a large parking meter on it with a red VIOLATION flag. I wasn't crazy about the big gold cross she was wearing, either, but at least that was Lacroix.

"I thought it would amuse you," she said. "Do you not like the color? I could make it black, if you like. But Cassandra's right; you like black too much. I think it's time we 'Queer Eye' you a little. Now, what about the invaders?"

It took a few seconds to take all that in and a few seconds more to decide which part to respond to. "They're not invaders. But they may be here for a while, so you two need to stay out of sight. Comprendez?"

"Why?" Vanessa asked. "We're housebroken." She pulled down her sunglasses a bit to regard Monica over the tops of them. "Well, some of us are."

Monica hissed but let it go at that.

"It's not that," I said. "It's the demon part. We can't have you popping in and out of thin air or turning things into toads around them. That would upset them."

"Good," Monica said.

"Let me finish. And that would upset Cassie, which would upset me. And you don't want to upset us, because we still have a case of those voodoo candles you don't like."

Vanessa covered her stomach with both hands. "You wouldn't. We're pregnant."

"I know. I'm not a monster. But if you get out of line, we've got lots of matches. Are you getting my drift?"

The demons glanced at each other. "Conference," Monica snapped. "Go stand over there, Devlin."

I retreated a few steps and waited semi-patiently while they huddled. I'd lied about the candles, actually; we'd run out of them. But it might be time to reorder, just in case.

Finally, Monica signaled me to come back. "Two conditions," she said.

"Fine. Name them."

"One, you keep them away from us. We don't like the woman."

With heroic self-control, I didn't second that. "We'll keep the attic door locked. What's the other condition?"

"We get breakfast in bed as long as they're here."

"And lunch," Vanessa said, "and tea."

"We fought a revolution not to have teatime, Vanessa. Settle for breakfast."

"On trays," Monica said. "With the good china and silver. Flowers would be nice too."

Vanessa nodded. "And pickles."

"Starting now," Monica said. "We'll have everything in your refrigerator for starters."

"And ice cream," Vanessa added.

"Now," Monica said.

She lay back and patted the parking meter on her stomach, smirking. I decided to really bring them pickles and ice cream, out of spite.

///

When I came back down from the attic the second time, Connor was awake, watching cartoons on the couch in his underwear. I wouldn't have minded except that Cassie was sitting there too.

"Ladies present," I growled, grabbing his jeans off the floor and throwing them at him.

Cassie smiled faintly. "It's all right, Devvy. I've seen boys' underpants before. Not that I really wanted to see your brother's, but — "

"Not the point." I glanced at the TV screen; Mighty Mouse was on. "He didn't do the song for you, did he?"

Connor laughed, but Cassie looked blank.

"When he was little," I explained, "he used to go around the house in his underwear, singing the theme song. I'm not saying it was art, but it had its moments. So he didn't do the song?"

"Dev's not much for performance art. She doesn't appreciate the subtleties," Connor said. "Or maybe she's afraid I'll have a wardrobe malfunction. Would you like to find out?"

Before I could get across the room to kill him, we heard the guest-room door open upstairs. "Cassie?" Lucy called. "Are you up?"

Performance art forgotten, Connor grabbed the rest of his clothes and dashed off to the downstairs bath in a panic.

Just in time, too, because Lucy was already on the stairs. "Yoohoo! Is everybody decent down there?"

"We can't leave them alone together," I warned Cassie.

"We won't," she said grimly. I could see that she was worried about a wardrobe malfunction too.

///

There was no choice; we had to go to the grocery sometime. ("Did you have to give the witches everything in the refrigerator?" Cassie asked.) And we couldn't leave our siblings unsupervised, so one of them would have to come with us. I picked Connor. With four people and two pregnant demons to feed, we were talking serious tonnage, and there was no reason not to let him carry the bags.

While Cassie, Lucy, and Connor worked out a grocery list, I went upstairs and called Jen on my cell, hoping to work out a plan from Column B. But she wasn't quite ready.

"I'm not that mad at him," she lied, "but would you mind keeping him this weekend? I want to stay mad a couple more days."

"You can be mad with him there, can't you?"

She sighed. "Please? Just this once? Some girlfriends are coming over tonight to watch Beaches and bitch about men with me. I need this."

Hell, damnation, and bugger all. She probably did need it, being married to my brother, but I wasn't sure I could stand a whole weekend of him myself.

"Pleeeeeeeeeeease, Dev?"

"Oh, all right. But take him back first thing in the morning, or you'll be talking to my lawyer. Deal?"

She said it was and she owed me one. Privately, I marked down that she owed me three or four, but we'd see how the weekend went.

///

We got a break in the afternoon, when Connor decided he needed to golf. J/J/G had a membership at the fancy country club, and Cassie had gone out with the manager once, so she arranged a pass for him over the phone. Lucy got the sulks as soon as he left, which wasn't a good sign.

Even worse, she refused to call Michael again. She just parked herself in the living room with a bag of pork rinds and a bottle of tequila, watching The War of the Roses, and I was frankly afraid to be in the same room with her. So I called an emergency meeting in the kitchen with my beloved.

"It's only a movie," Cassie said.

"It's giving her bad ideas. She was just yelling at Kathleen Turner to use a bigger knife."

"She's upset."

"No. Really?"

"Sarcasm isn't going to help."

"I don't know why not. I've tried everything else. Is she ever going home?"

"Give her time. She'll miss the kids eventually."

"She'd better miss them soon. Monica and Vanessa aren't going to stay out of sight long. They're going to want the house back."

"Nobody cares what they want."

"You'll care if she sees them. She'll be on the phone to your parents in a heartbeat. And you'll be on your own then, because I'm not having any part of explaining this to your father."

"What's he got to do with anything?"

"He was getting awfully chummy with Vanessa in New Orleans."

Cassie considered that point.

"You have the pictures. And your mother's going to be in a really bad mood when she finds out Vanessa's pregnant."

She considered that point, too.

"Then she'll leave your dad and move in with us. Everybody else does. The next thing you know, Lucy's kids'll be moving in too. And then we'll have all of them to deal with. I give it a week before somebody sets the house on fire."

"I think you're overreacting," she said.

"You don't know for sure. You said, 'I think.'"

"Calm down, Devvy. She'll go home soon. It's not like this is the first time. She leaves Michael every time she gets pregnant."

"Slow learner, is she?"

Cassie was not amused. "She's my sister."

"I know exactly who she is." I was about to add, "That's the problem," but thought better of it. "Just talk to her, would you? We'll have trouble if she stays here."

Monica materialized just in time to hear that. "You always have trouble. It's just a matter of degree."

"Mistress of understatement," I muttered.

The demon either didn't hear or didn't care. "You need to do something about that sister of hers. No class at all. Have you seen what she's eating?"

"Don't get snippy. I heard about the cat food." Cassie told her. "And speaking of no class, where did you get that outfit? And why?"

"I'm not talking to you. But if I were, I'd remind you that you're related to your sister. You could turn out the same way."

Naturally, Cassie resented that. We were all lucky that the doorbell rang right then. At least I was; it gave me a good excuse to abandon the field. Doing my best not to hear Lucy shrieking at the movie ("Run over him again! Aim for the head this time!"), I went to the front door to see who it was.

It was Michael. Worse, it was also Mr. Wolfe.

///

(c) 2005, K. Simpson

***

SEVERAL MORE DEVILS

K. SIMPSON

DISCLAIMERS, CREDITS, & E-MAIL: See Part 1.

CHAPTER NOTES: No offense to Cassie; I've got "My Sharona" on my own iPod. // At this writing, the "Moonlighting" DVDs (Seasons 1 and 2) haven't been released yet, but they'll be out before this story is done. // You probably can't get "The Simpsons" watches at Burger King anymore, which is a pity.

CHAPTER 6

///

Cassie and I liked to think of ourselves as being worldly. Between us, we'd seen just about everything, and it wasn't even the first time we'd seen Michael and Lucy throw food. But it was the first time we'd seen them throw furniture. All I could think of was an old episode of "Roseanne" in which furniture-throwing turned out to be foreplay, and I didn't want that in my house either. So I suggested to Cassie that we give it a miss.

"It's probably safer on the front porch," she agreed. "And your brother should be back soon."

"With golf clubs."

"We'll be armed then."

"Exactly."

"Duck, sweetie," she said.

I dodged a flying pork rind—Mr. Wolfe might or might not have been aiming at me—and followed Cassie out front.

Unfortunately, it was no safer there: Our demons were on the porch. Worse, they had our iPods. I knew Vanessa had Cassie's because I could hear The Knack coming out of her nose.

"I told you not to download that song," I growled at my beloved. "You're supposed to sneer at it."

"Like you didn't download 'We Built This City,'" she growled back.

"Grace Slick was still with the band. That counts for—stop that!" Vanessa was pogoing to the song now.

"She can't hear you, Devlin," Monica said, rather unnecessarily. "I'll smite her for you later, if you like."

"What's wrong with now?"

The demon fiddled with the wheel on my player. A second later, Oingo Boingo was coming out of her nose, and she was pogoing.

Cassie looked at me as though it were all my fault.

"They probably didn't want to listen to your family," I said. "This is probably their subtle little way of saying so. What do you want me to do?"

She thought about it. Then she thought some more. I couldn't blame her. We did have a situation—relatives trashing the living room, weirdly dressed demons bopping on the porch—and even if we could stop one thing or the other, it was a coin toss which to stop first.

"We need a bigger house," Cassie finally said.

///

The one good thing about violence is that you can't keep it up forever. By the time Connor got back, everyone was worn out—including the demons, who had gone back in to take naps. And though the Wolfes were still awake, they were out of gas.

Nevertheless, Cassie and Connor kept the golf bag handy, and I held on to the nine-iron.

"This is the sort of thing that gives family reunions a bad name," I said, contemplating the damage. That included Mr. Wolfe, who had guacamole in his hair, and though I couldn't imagine why Lucy had been eating guacamole with pork rinds, she was pregnant; maybe we were lucky it hadn't been something weirder. "Does anyone want to be introduced, or should we pretend we don't know each other?"

Connor looked thoughtful, for a change. "I don't know, Dev. Do we want to know each other?"

I was about to give him an unwise answer when the nickel dropped in Michael's piggy bank, and before anyone could stop him, he was up on his hind legs and in Connor's face.

"You're him," Michael accused. "You're that guy."

Surprised, Connor took a step back. "Since when?"

Michael advanced on him again. "You're Devlin's brother. Don't try to deny it. You look like each other."

"Hey!" we both cried, insulted.

"That's enough, Michael," Mr. Wolfe said wearily.

"Well, what's he doing here? With my wife?"

"He's not with your wife. He's with us," Cassie said.

There was a moment of awful silence.

"Not like that," she snapped.

More silence. Then Connor started laughing. "This is so great. Jen's going to kill me."

I made a mental note to kill him first. Cassie knew it just by looking, though, and cut me off at the pass.

"Maybe this would be a good time for someone to explain what's going on," she said. "I pick you, Daddy. You can start right now."

"Now, calm down, honey. We came to pick up Lucy," he said.

Lucy, caught finishing the tequila, almost spat it back out. Not that it would have mattered; the rug was ruined anyway. "I told you, I don't want to be picked up."

Michael frowned at her. "Of course you do. You're overemotional right now, that's all. You know how you get when you're expecting. Now let's get you home so Dr. Owen can look at you first thing Mon—"

"I'm just pregnant, buster, not barefoot."

"What does that mean?" he barked.

Oh, for God's sake. Lucy started to give him an empty tequila bottle upside the head for an answer—not a bad one, actually—but Connor stopped her on the backswing.

"This still doesn't explain what you're doing here," Cassie told her father.

"Well, honey, your mother sent me."

"Why?"

He glanced at Michael and Lucy, clearly unwilling to answer. But it didn't take a genius to figure it out. In fact, it only took my brother.

"I bet they've been watching the kids," he said.

Cassie and I couldn't help laughing that hard. Of course that was why. And Connor didn't even know how right he was, because he'd never even met the little monsters. If I'd been locked up with them for two days, I wouldn't have sent Mr. Wolfe after their mother; I'd have sent the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the French Foreign Legion. Or Xena.

"That's right, Lucy. They've got the kids. Our kids," Michael said. "They need you at home."

She bristled. "Are you implying that I'm a bad mother?"

To our horror, Michael answered her.

///

Murder, tonight, in the trailer park.

—Cowboy Junkies

I'd rather not discuss the next half-hour or so. We didn't call 911—one of the neighbors did—but there was no getting around the "domestic disturbance" part. By the time the police left (with Michael), half the neighborhood was out front, watching; the other half was home watching with binoculars. Except that there were no NASCAR hats or cars up on blocks in the yards, it looked like any day in a Blue Valley trailer park. It was one short step to scandal, to ruin, to Jerry Springer…

Dammitall. Cass and I were going to have to move.

"I hope you're happy," Cassie snarled at her sister. "You've wrecked your marriage. You've wrecked this house. You got Michael arrested. And it should have been you."

"Says who?" Lucy snarled back.

Connor, Mr. Wolfe, and I quickly looked away.

"You saw him," Lucy said. "He had that golf club when the cops came."

Cassie was unmoved. "And you had it before we took it away from you."

"Finders keepers, sister."

The light of my life snorted violently. "Finders? You took it away from Devvy!" Then she gave me a very bad look; I knew she blamed me for letting go. But at the time, Michael was about to brain his wife with my "Moonlighting" DVD box set, and I needed both hands to get it back.

"We might have this conversation inside," I said, watching the neighbors watch us.

"She's not getting back inside," Cassie declared. "Somebody throw her in a car. We're taking her to the zoo, where she belongs."

Lucy objected, and it took both Connor and her father to hold her back. "Think of something, somebody," Connor demanded, struggling with his chokehold. "Quick!"

Whereupon they all looked at me. Great. How come I had to think of everything? And in front of the neighbors, too?

"Turn a hose on her!" somebody yelled across the street.

Now, there was an idea.

"Shut up, you jerk!" Cassie yelled back. "That's my sister you're—Devvy! Get back here!"

Yes, a definite idea. It was the work of a moment to turn on the water, and I didn't even have to run all the way back with the hose. It was too bad, of course, that Cassie, Connor, and Mr. Wolfe got a bath, but that was their own fault for standing so close to Lucy.

The neighbors liked it, anyway. So did the demons, who were watching from the roof. I was rather less popular with the four soaking-wet people in my front yard. But Lucy was a fraction more sober, which justified the means. Right?

Well, there was no reason to hang around and find out. I dropped the hose and streaked off down the block. They'd get over it by the time I got back.

I hoped.

///

Later

Order was more or less restored by late afternoon. Lucy was sleeping it off in the guest room; Michael was released to Mr. Wolfe's custody, and the two of them had checked in at a hotel. Connor was sticking around to make sure they didn't come back. Or so he said.

Cassie was more or less speaking to me again too. All it takes with her sometimes is an apology, some jewelry—and a crippling IOU.

"I suppose it's the thought that counts," she said, examining her new watch critically.

I kept quiet, waiting for the rest. I hadn't had any credit cards on me at the time and only enough cash in my pockets to stop by Burger King. Lucky they still had the talking "The Simpsons" watches.

Cassie smiled and pressed the button again. After the twentieth time, Bart, Lisa, and Homer weren't quite as amusing anymore, but of course that was her point. I gritted my teeth and smiled back.

"And it's very sweet of you to let Lucy stay with us," she continued. "For as long as she wants."

"Whatever makes you happy makes me happy, my little passion flower," I lied.

"Of course, it could get crowded around here. With the witches and all." She set the watch off again. "I don't suppose they'll stay out of sight forever."

"You are very wise, Enchanting One."

She set the watch off again. "I suppose it's a good thing I still have that house."

The thought had occurred to me, too. I leaned a bit closer. "Is it, now, O Vision of Loveliness?"

"I think we could make Lucy comfortable there. Of course, someone would be in my debt. Someone who might owe me a romantic weekend. Someone who's owed me a romantic weekend for a while now. " She held the watch up to my ear. "Are you getting this, or should I press the button?"

I winced. "Next weekend all right?"

"Perfect. Now go talk to the witches."

"Why?"

"Make them stay away from Lucy. I don't want them giving her any ideas."

This time, I smiled for real. "Bad enough without them, you think?"

"She's my sister, Devvy."

"On my way, Your Adorableness," I said quickly.

///

Actually, I didn't go straight up to the demons; it was almost their teatime, so I had to make up their trays first. I hoped we could get Lucy moved out first thing in the morning, because the novelty of carrying heavy trays up two flights of stairs was wearing off fast.

So was the novelty of making extra trips. They sent me back down for hot sauce, chocolate syrup, and spray cheese before I rebelled, and even then, they made me make one last trip for marshmallows. Then I had to stand there and watch them feed—not a pretty sight—before they would have speech with me.

"The woman will be gone tomorrow?" Monica finally asked.

"If I have to hook her up on a trailer hitch," I promised. "If I have to rent a dolly."

"What about your brother?"

"Him too. Jen wasn't thrilled that he's staying one more day, but she'll—Vanessa!"

The demon stopped squirting cheese on her marshmallows long enough to glare at me. "What?"

"That's disgusting."

She glanced at Monica, who shrugged and handed her the Grey Poupon. I couldn't watch.

"We'll miss these little private visits, Devlin," Monica said. "But it'll be nice to have the run of the house again. We've missed being part of the family."

"Don't talk like a crackhead. There is no 'family.'"

My demon smiled ominously. "We'll see."

///

(c) 2005, K. Simpson

***

SEVERAL MORE DEVILS

K. SIMPSON

DISCLAIMERS, CREDITS, & E-MAIL: See Part 1.

CHAPTER NOTES: "Tubular Bells" was the theme music in The Exorcist, and Carmina Burana is always in devil movies.

CHAPTER 7

///

Lucy finally got vertical late Sunday morning, not feeling her very best. It was all I could do to keep Cassie from tearing her limb from limb—not because Lucy didn't have it coming, but because it would be more fun when she felt better. As it was, Cassie made a point of talking LOUDER THAN NECESSARY and BANGING THINGS AROUND in the kitchen.

Which was just as painful for Connor and me, because we'd agreed not to leave the two of them alone together.

"You know better, Lucy," Cassie said for the dozenth time. "You know not to drink in the first trimester. Do you want a three-headed baby?"

Lucy rallied enough to lift her head out of her hands an inch or two. "It might be anyway. It's his."

"All the more reason not to drink!" Cassie shouted. "You're already running a risk having any babies with Michael. And you were drinking tequila. You'll be lucky if this one doesn't have fur. You'll be lucky if it didn't eat the worm!"

Connor shifted uneasily in his chair. Being a Kerry, he was used to drama, but things rarely got to Cecil B. DeMille scale in our family unless Aunt Kitty was involved.

"Maybe I did it on purpose. To punish him," Lucy mumbled.

"That's the second-dumbest thing I ever heard. The dumbest was at your wedding, when you said 'I do.' Unless that was to punish him too."

("She's good," Connor whispered. Unhappily, I nodded.)

Lucy groaned but otherwise didn't object. "Are you done? My head hurts."

Smiling evilly, Cassie brought her left wrist—and the "Simpsons" watch—up to her sister's ear. With instincts honed by experience, I stopped her before she could press the button, but it was close.

"That's good, Cass," I said. "You got it all out of your system, and now you feel better. Don't you?"

"I haven't yelled at her about wrecking the living room yet."

"We won't yell at her about that. She had help. We'll just send Michael the bill. They can work it out in the divorce settlement."

Lucy brightened visibly. "Good idea, Dev. Let's get you some really expensive furniture."

The prospect of shopping with someone else's money cheered Cassie up, too. We left the two of them discussing leather upholstery ("Nothing black," Cassie warned) and went upstairs to start packing Lucy's things.

"You know," Connor said, "Cassie's been on the cranky side lately."

"She's a little high-strung."

"Well, yeah, but I mean cranky. Like Jen gets sometimes."

I threw a suitcase on the bed and gave him a severe look. "When you do what to make her mad?"

"Not so much what I do as what I don't do. You know?"

"Knowing you? That could be anything."

"You're going to make me say it, aren't you?"

"Say what?"

Connor sighed. "I mean, is she getting enough?"

"Enough what?"

The silence was deafening. I glanced up again. He was studying his feet like he'd never seen feet before.

"It's not like I'm an expert," he finally said, "but this is how Jen gets when we don't . . . you know."

I was about to grab his T-shirt and make him quit saying "You know" when it finally hit. Instinctively, I took a long step back.

"Like I said, I'm no expert. But maybe Cassie's mad because of . . . that."

"We might be a little repressed in this family if we can't say that word," I growled. "Or not repressed enough, if we're having this conversation at all." More silence. Dammit. "Let me guess. You and Jen aren't . . . ?"

He smiled crookedly. "Not right now. It could cause babies."

Paging Dr. Ruth. "All right, fine, I get it. So you're saying we should—"

"Probably," he said. "Eventually. Maybe even tonight."

"Don't think about it unless you're going home tonight."

"Right after we get Lucy moved."

"I don't trust you. Swear it."

He finished latching the suitcase he'd just filled before he answered. "Don't worry. Yesterday kind of put me out of the mood with her. Know what I mean?"

As a matter of fact, yes. Sometimes I almost felt sorry for Michael. But only almost.

"We were just flirting. Lookee, no touchee. Nothing happened. You don't have to say anything to Jen."

"Say anything about what?"

"Thanks. I owe you."

"So do Jen and Lucy." Reluctantly, I smiled at him. "We may be losing it, Connor. Our ancestors would be ashamed. All this Irish blood, and these gorgeous creatures we live with, and we're just living with them."

"Jen is gorgeous, isn't she?" He grabbed another suitcase. "I must be insane. Let's get this over with so I can get home."

That was his problem solved, then. I wasn't so sure about mine.

///

All right, maybe problem is too strong a word. Cassie and I weren't really having troubles. We weren't arguing except for fun; we voluntarily spent time together; we still liked each other. But it had been a while since . ..

Well, it had been a while. That was no one's fault. Things cool off. And when you're stressed all the time, you need all the sleep you can get. We'd considered making appointments but decided that would take the romance out of it, so we'd agreed to wait for the mood to strike.

We were still waiting. Cassie hadn't complained, though, so there didn't seem to be any damage.

Except that Connor might have been right, for once in his chowderheaded life. There was a subtle difference between Cassie in an ordinary bad mood and Cassie in a real temper, and only a fool would encourage the latter. I knew better. But she had been awfully snappish lately. Could I be missing signals? Misunderstanding hints? Could I possibly be as dumb as Michael?

Great. Now I was insulting myself. Nobody was as dumb as Michael—not even Barney Rubble, who at least had the excuse of really being a caveman.

But I knew I'd better be planning a very romantic weekend.

///

We were about to start moving Lucy when Mr. Wolfe dropped by to counsel and instruct her on Michael's behalf. Not surprisingly, she wasn't in the mood for counsel, instruction, or her husband. So he settled for helping us move her over to Cassie's house and for lecturing Cassie instead—this time, about wasteful use of real estate.

"This is a perfectly good house," he told her. "You can't let it sit vacant. You're throwing away your mortgage payments if you're not living here."

With a rare display of patience, Cassie explained it to him again: The house wasn't vacant; we still stayed here sometimes; we were waiting to see whether our relationship would last through the end of my lease before we made a long-term housing decision.

"It's not big enough for both of us," she said, "and I'm not remodeling unless I know Devvy's going to be here."

He frowned. "How much space do two people need?"

Well, technically, we were two people and two demons, which meant the whole county wasn't big enough, but there was no explaining that to Mr. Wolfe. So she told him a cover story about home offices and a yoga room.

"I still think it's wasteful, honey."

"With all due respect, sir," I said, "you and Mrs. Wolfe have a very large house."

"It's not just the two of us right now. We have the grandchildren."

"Enough room for you without them, then?"

He stopped cold on the stairs, causing Lucy to crash into him with a suitcase—which popped open, showering lingerie everywhere. Hot language followed. I braced for Mr. Wolfe's inevitable sermon on Behavior Unbefitting a Lady; he'd given it a rest at the height of the battle the day before, but there was no reason to believe he'd given up.

But nothing happened. Lucy just kept swearing and snatching up underwear, and her father stared into space.

"Daddy?" Cassie asked. "Is something wrong?"

He blinked a couple of times before he recalled himself. "No, honey, of course not. Everything' s fine." Then he turned a cold eye on me. "Everything's fine at my house, too. Thank you for your concern."

"You're welcome, sir. Glad to hear it."

But it was a lie, and he knew I knew it.

///

Thursday Night

For once, we were both relieved to get back to work on Monday. The stress of the agency was a welcome change from the stress we'd just been through, and though Cassie and I were too tired to do much Relationship Work, I'd promised her the weekend , so it could wait.

Besides. we were still in the thick of everyone else's relationships. Lucy was still in town but finally starting to miss her children, and it was all we could do to keep her from shipping them in. And though Michael and Mr. Wolfe had flown back to Kansas City, they were keeping the phone lines warm. Lucy not being one to keep many emotions to herself, she usually called us right after one of them called her—when she didn't just drop by to brief us in person, that is. It might have been a mistake for Cass to arrange that tradeout for car rental; a bored Lucy with transportation was a Lucy who was over a lot.

Not that things were much more peaceful in my family. Connor hadn't entirely made it up with Jen, from what I heard; Mom had taken to calling with regular bulletins. But Ryan and Amy were fine—perhaps because I'd called him with a list of things not to say to a pregnant lady. In a fit of creativity, he'd also started fretting that Amy was "too thin," which was going over well. That was one marriage we wouldn't have to worry about for a while.

We weren't worrying about the demons much, either. Being pregnant—or whatever they were—was slowing them down; they seemed to spend most of their time in their rooms. "Resting," they said.

I had a bad feeling that it might be calm-before-the-storm time but thought we could all use some calm at any price, so I didn't question them.

At any rate, we made it to Thursday in one piece, which was all I asked. Cassie and I would be leaving the next morning for a long weekend at the lake. It wasn't that we wanted to get back to the land; like Woody Allen, we were at two with nature. But it would be quiet and private there, and the cabin had all the conveniences; if everything went well, we wouldn't be leaving it much.

So we were both in a fairly good mood that evening. Heather had taken pity on us and was entertaining Lucy; the demons were resting; we were already packed. That meant we could have a quiet evening doing nothing. Cassie felt like reading, and I felt like listening to music, so I went up on the roof and stretched out in the hammock.

Of course, Monica had updated the iPod since I'd had it last; I kept pressing Play but only got "Tubular Bells" or Carmina Burana. Whatever. It was going to take more than that to get to me now. Besides which, "Tubular Bells" was restful in places. The better to rest, I closed my eyes and turned down the volume.

Which is why the disturbance disturbed me. At first, I thought it was old Mrs. Greene down the block coming home tanked from bingo again. (That damn American Legion post.) But gradually, the noise resolved into crazed laughter and singing, and the singing into two voices. Worse, unless I'd finally lost my mind, they were trying to sing "White Rabbit."

Well, Grace Slick was with the band in those days, too. But . ..

Then I heard demon laughter from an open attic window. If they liked whatever was going on out front, I knew for a fact that I wouldn't. Reluctantly, I climbed out of the hammock and over the roof to see what the trouble was.

This time, it was two older women—'60s casualties, by the way they were dressed—trying to get out of an old light-blue VW Beetle but not making much progress. Every time one managed to set a foot on the street, she slipped and fell back into the car, which sent both of them into hysterics. Then they'd start singing again. There was no reason to believe that it would ever stop.

"Stoned," I muttered.

Just when they got to the part about the chessboard, I heard the front door slam open. The sound distracted the woman in the passenger seat, and as she turned toward the house, I got a good look at her face in the streetlight.

"Mother!" Cassie shouted.

Mother, all right.

Not quite voluntarily, I sat down hard on the roof.

///

(c) 2005, K. Simpson

***

SEVERAL MORE DEVILS

K. SIMPSON

EXTRA CREDIT: Many thanks to The Artist Formerly Known As Vivian Darkbloom (a/k/a Madame Quilty) for letting me borrow Cyrene. If you haven't read her White Trash series yet, go to http://viviandarkbloom.tripod.com/ thisveryminute.  // "Absolutely Fabulous" gave me a couple of other ideas.

CHAPTER NOTES: Nothing personal against Mr. Eastwood; the movie sucked anyway. // Red hats are the stigmata of the Red Hat Society (a "playgroup" for older women), and Country Club Plaza is a posh shopping district in Kansas City, where Cassie's parents live.

CHAPTER 8

///

You would think that two people who had demons and worked in advertising would be shockproof. You would also think that dealing with our families—which took all the fun out of "dysfunctional"—would have steeled us for the worst.

Stop thinking. There was no making sense of what had just come through our door. I hadn't seen anything so shocking since Clint Eastwood took off his shirt in The Bridges of Madison County.

For her part, Cassie had fainted.

I couldn't blame her. As long as she'd known her mother, and even the last time she'd seen her, Mrs. Wolfe had been Mrs. '50s Housewife, straight out of the sitcoms. Think Harriet Nelson. Think June Cleaver. Think Joan Allen at the start of Pleasantville. The most daring thing she'd ever done, as far as anyone knew, was paint her toenails one summer.

But here she was in our kitchen, straight out of Woodstock Nation. I don't mean just that she was high. She had on a fringed fake-suede poncho over ripped-up jeans, with one whole knee out; she had on a beaded leather headband; she was actually barefoot. And yes, her toenails were painted—in ten different colors.

Who in hell was this?

I was worried about the other woman, too. She'd introduced herself ("Cyrene, man") as an old college friend who was freeing Mrs. Wolfe from the tyranny of convention, but that was no help. Neither was her fashion sense; her paisley granny dress clashed with her combat boots and both with the big American flag on her jean jacket. But I had to admire her nerve with accessories. It had been years since I'd seen those fetish necklaces with the little birds, or Zodiac-sign medallions, or so many turquoise rings, and not even Cassie wore that many bracelets at the same time. She sounded like a one-woman marimba band rummaging around in our refrigerator ("Munchies, man").

First things first, though. Cassie was starting to come around, and apart from caring about her welfare, I needed backup.

Finally, her eyes fluttered open. "Devvy?"

"Sweetheart?"

"Am I awake?"

"You are now."

Something crashed in the refrigerator. There were a few seconds of guilty silence, followed by giggling.

"Devvy?"

"Still here, Cass."

"Is that my mother?"

"I couldn't say. It looks like her."

Cassie closed her eyes again, briefly. "I may have to kill her."

"You'll have to get up first. Let me help you."

Before I had her fully on her feet, the strange woman poked her head back out of the fridge. "Hey, Dylan!"

"Devlin," I corrected, unamused. "What?"

"Got any tofu? Or organic pizza?"

"I don't think they would, Cy," Mrs. Wolfe said. "I saw Cap'n Crunch in the cupboard."

Cyrene considered. "No way. Preservatives."

"I saw Froot Loops too."

"Froot Loops? That's different." She slammed the refrigerator door shut. "Hey, Dylan! Got any organic ice cream?"

///

What followed would have shamed even demons. Cyrene and Mrs. Wolfe found a couple of mixing bowls, divided a half-gallon of Breyer's vanilla between them, and dumped Froot Loops over the top. Mrs. Wolfe threw in some sunflower seeds for good measure ("She's macrobiotic, dear"), and the two of them shoveled it down like there was no tomorrow.

Cassie and I watched from a safe distance, too shocked to stop them. The Froot Loops were Vanessa's (Monica was a Cap'n Crunch woman), so it wasn't like they were doing us out of breakfast, but the weird-food envelope was getting seriously pushed at our house these days.

"I was never like that," Cassie said. "Were you?"

"No." It was more or less true.

"Should we do something?"

"Where would we start?"

She tilted her head slightly, lost in thought. "The car."

"What about it?"

"They probably left their stash in the car. We've got to get it before they do." Sensing my disapproval, she added, "To hide it."

I knew that. But I didn't like it. "When did we turn into narcs?"

"When my mother showed up stoned. How would you feel if it was your mother?"

Bad comparison; Mom had never been stoned a day in her life. That might have been part of her problem, actually. But for a brief, horrifying moment, I got a flash of her in a beret and a Che Guevara T-shirt, yelling through a bullhorn: Off the pigs! It was just how she looked when she found wet towels on the bathroom floor.

Was there something I didn't know about her past? Was there something that would explain why everyone thought I had a temper? Did I want to find out?

Then I glanced at Cassie, who had a more immediate problem sitting at our kitchen table.

"Race you to the car," I said grimly.

///

Cyrene's VW was enough to give us pause all by itself. It wasn't just the big yellow-and-orange daisy decals all over the body or even the welter of bumper stickers (she had two of Back Off! I'm a Goddess!), though I suspected they were all that was holding the old bucket together. It was more the dashboard. For whatever reason, Cyrene had Things glued all over it. Fat bronze Buddha figurines. Rainbow peace-sign stickers. A Cinzano ashtray (for incense). A pod of ceramic whales. Photos of Cheech & Chong.

That folk-art show I'd gone to years before flashed through my mind. There'd been several weirdly decorated cars on exhibit, which might explain this one. Maybe this Cyrene person was a traveling folk artist. Maybe the USA Out of North America! bumper sticker was a Statement. That didn't explain Welcome to San Francisco—Now Go Home or People's Republic of Santa Monica, but art was inexplicable.

Cassie, however, was in no mood for aesthetic contemplation. She was too busy fumbling with the glove-compartment door and muttering about having her whole family committed.

"Don't stick your hand in there blind," I told her. "Let me get a flashlight."

"Fine. Get a can of Lysol too."

"It's just incense." Mostly.

She narrowed her eyes at me. "Do you like it?"

Well, no. Patchouli was a thing you could never really get out of your clothes. But we could do laundry later. Flashlight first.

When I came back from my car, Cassie was poking in the glove compartment with an unburned incense stick. Something was rattling, but that could be anything.

"Shine it there," she said, pointing with the stick. "I hear pills."

Obediently, I aimed the light. Just behind the underwear (no, we didn't want to know) was a big plastic bag. Cassie poked it harder, making it rattle again.

"Just grab it and go," I said. "We don't want a police car coming by right now."

She nodded, swallowed hard, and snatched the bag. Then we hightailed it back toward the house.

But she couldn't wait. She pulled me under a tree, into the shadows, and made me turn the flashlight on the bag.

All right, make that the second-most-shocking thing I'd seen in a while. Cassie said every bad word she knew and stormed into the house.

///

One pill makes you larger

And one pill makes you small

And the ones that Mother gives you

Don't do anything at all

Go ask Alice when she's ten feet tall

—"White Rabbit," Jefferson Airplane

Cyrene and Mrs. Wolfe were doing the Swim to music only they could hear, which was one thing. What was in Cassie's hand was quite another.

"HRT?!?" she yelled.

They stopped dancing. For a second, Mrs. Wolfe almost looked guilty. "It's just a patch, dear."

Cyrene shrugged. "Plus the pills."

"How many?" Cassie demanded.

They both thought. Then Mrs. Wolfe lifted her poncho—and the tie-dyed T-shirt under it—and started counting the patches on her stomach. "Let's see. One…three…two…Ow!"

Her daughter ignored her and ripped off another patch—perhaps harder this time.

"Plus the grass," Cyrene added, "but that doesn't count. What's the matter, Dylan?"

"Devlin. How does grass not count?"

The woman smiled winningly. "It's to get mellow. That HRT can do crazy things, man. You should've seen Lizzie yesterday."

Without waiting to be asked, she launched into a long, convoluted story about red hats and trying to skinny-dip in a fountain at Country Club Plaza, but I wasn't really listening. Lizzie? How could Cassie's tea-serving, Saks-shopping, don't-touch-that-it's-a-family-heirloom mother all of a sudden turn into a barefoot pothead called Lizzie?

". . . told the bourgeoisie to kiss their own asses for a change," Cyrene was saying. "Then we burned our bras. It was a beautiful, beautiful—what?"

"Never mind," I said. "Just never mind. Cass? A word? Outside? Now?"

She was loath to leave our guests unsupervised, and I thought we should stay between both of them and the VW, so we compromised by stepping out on the porch and leaving the front door open.

"What do you think?" I asked.

Cassie glared in the direction of the kitchen, where they were singing again. "I think she's lost her mind. HRT? At her age? She's already been through the Change."

"I meant what you feel like doing about this. Do we let them spend the night here? They're in no condition to check in at a hotel. Or do we take them over to your house and let Lucy babysit?"

"That would almost serve her right. But . . . no. We can't. I don't trust her."

"Then there's the weekend," I said slowly.

She was quiet for a long time. "There goes the weekend, you mean."

"I don't know what the story is here, Cass. We won't get anything straight out of them till they come down, and that could take at least another day. But if your mom's left your dad—"

"Are you kidding? And leave her credit cards?"

"—we can't go out of town yet."

More quiet.

"Cass?"

"It's all hormones," she said, sounding very definite. "Lucy's lost her mind because she's pregnant, and Mom's lost her mind because she's not. Everything's fixable. Right?"

If I'd loved her any less, or if she hadn't been so upset, I might have called her on that. That was a Michael thing to say. Relationships didn't get fixed with a pill, patch, or powder, and she damn well knew it.

But then, I wasn't an expert either, was I?

All I knew was that two couples in Cassie's family had split up and that I wasn't about to make it three out of three. If that meant running Heartbreak Hotel for a while, fine. And if that meant leaving crazy people alone in our houses for a weekend, fine too; we had lots of insurance.

"Right," I said. "C'mere for a second."

"On the porch?"

"You heard your mother's friend. Free yourself from the tyranny of convention, man."

She laughed, and she did.

///

There was one small thing I'd forgotten, though. Two of them, actually, and not so small either. When we went back into the kitchen, Mrs. Wolfe was on the phone ordering pizza, and our demons were sitting at the table with Cyrene.

"Hey, Dylan. Hey, Cher," Cyrene greeted us. Then she turned to Vanessa. "We've got company, man. Roll us another joint."

///

(c) 2005, K. Simpson

***

SEVERAL MORE DEVILS

K. SIMPSON

CHAPTER NOTES: Bob Evans is a chain of “farm-style” restaurants in the Midwest, very popular for breakfast. // Thanks, again, to Vivian Darkbloom for the loan of Cyrene, whose “beautiful healing experience” comes from one of the White Trash stories.

CHAPTER 9

Early Friday Morning

The next thing I remember was waking up on the living-room couch with Cassie, who was either dead or seriously asleep, because she didn’t react when I offered her $100 to get off. Not that I minded splitting a couch with her, but a person has other priorities the very, very first thing in the morning.

“C’mon, Cass—a hundred bucks and brunch out. On me.”

The corpse didn’t stir, but it spoke. “Breakfast.”

“Fine. Let me get up now.”

“Breakfast anywhere I want?”

“Anywhere you want. Now move before we have a situation.”

“Bob Evans,” she said, not moving. “I want fat and cholesterol and sausage gravy on everything. Tell them to add lard. Can I have extra biscuits?”

“Whatever you want, my delicate flower. ”

“And peach cobbler for dessert?”

Finally pushed too far, I shoved her partway off. “Don’t talk crazy. There’s no such thing as dessert with breakfast.”

“There is if you want me to move. I’m starving.”

Come to think of it, me too. I could’ve eaten a moose, with the antlers still on, if we happened to have one in the refrigerator. But why did cold leftover pizza sound even better?

And why did everything smell like incense?

Then parts of the night before flashed back, and I said several bad words that made even Cassie flinch. We were definitely going to have to call in sick to work.

“Don’t say it,” Monica said peevishly. “Don’t say ‘What happened?’ or ‘Where am I?’ What were you thinking last night?”

I raised my head just enough to see her standing at the foot of the couch, looking as though she didn’t quite approve.

“Me?” I complained. “What about you? What about them?”

What about them indeed. Mrs. Wolfe was sprawled in the best armchair, headband and beads every which way; Cyrene had passed out in a nest of pillows on the rug. They both looked like the morning after in Berkeley in the ’60s, and so did the living room. Just around the couch, we were drowning in pizza boxes and empty bottles of Boone’s Farm, not to mention bongs, clips, and papers. All we needed now were blacklight posters and The Doors on eight-track tape.

“This can’t be right,” I said. “We didn’t smoke anything.”

Cassie sat up, finally. “We didn’t have to, Devvy. We got it secondhand.”

“Also from the brownies,” Monica said.

Brownies? I vaguely remembered Vanessa tying on an apron around midnight and threatening to bake something, but surely Cass and I weren’t stupid enough to have eaten it. Unless . ..

“You were stupid enough to drink the wine,” my demon said, reading my mind. “That was my idea. At least you’re used to that.”

I couldn’t remember and decided not to argue, but secretly doubted that even demons could drive me to Boone’s Farm again. Especially not in front of Cassie, who was an even worse wine snob than me. She still wasn’t over the art fair that charged us $5 a glass for chardonnay from a box, and the plastic glasses had only made her madder.

“Go ahead and hurt her if you want to,” Cassie told me. “I’ll be in the bath.”

Sulking, I watched her sprint off to the one downstairs, which I’d been planning to use. Which meant I’d have to go up.

“Vanessa’s in the other one,” Monica reported. “She said something about a nice long bubble bath and no visitors at all. When do I get breakfast?”

I told her what she could have instead—which she said was anatomically impossible, but whatever—and went upstairs to throw the other demon out. It only took five minutes and a promise to buy her breakfast too.

///

Later

My credit card was still smoking when we finally got back. It wasn’t that I begrudged people breakfast; they were our guests, some of them, and they’d pretty well cleaned out all the food in the house the night before, so we’d had to go out. It wasn’t even that I minded buying. But I was a little cranky about paying for all that carry-out on top of it. How could people who’d just hoovered down all those omelets and waffles and biscuits need half a dozen coconut-cream pies to go?

Balefully, I regarded Cyrene over my coffee mug. She and Mrs. Wolfe were already halfway through one of the pies, which they were eating with their bare hands. When had they gotten high again? Or had they just never come down?

“You know,” I finally said, “Cassie and I own silverware. May I offer you ladies some?”

Cyrene smiled winningly. “No thanks, man, but ice cream would be awesome.”

Across the kitchen, Cassie made a small noise that might have been a curse. It was hard to tell; she was deep in a cupboard, hunting for Alka-Seltzer. At least she’d had the good grace to get a stomachache after the cobbler.

For that matter, so had the demons. After all the weird things I’d seen them eat lately, it was almost shocking to see them taken down by legitimate food. They were upstairs in their rooms now, evidently resting; all the flushing had finally stopped, anyway.

This left me as the only functioning and/or responsible grownup on the premises—a scary thought any way you looked at it. Cassie would be fine after the Alka-Seltzer and a nap, ready to help enforce justice again, but that would take a while, during which time I’d be badly outnumbered.

There was only one thing to do. I went over to Cassie—she’d just found some tablets and was busy dissolving them—and tapped her on the shoulder.

“What?” she barked. “You’re not going to say ‘I told you so,’ are you? Because if you are—”

“You’re in no condition to threaten me, sweetheart. Why don’t you go upstairs after you take that and lie down for a while? You might feel better.”

She considered, suspicious. “You think so?”

“It couldn’t hurt. You don’t need to be around that”—I pointed at the spectacle at the kitchen table—“while you’re not well.”

“No, I don’t. But I can’t leave you alone with them. That would be cruel.”

“Well, now that you mention it, I did have an idea about—”

“Besides, you still owe me a romantic weekend. Nobody gets to kill you until after that.”

“—asking Lucy to come over and—” Then I heard the last part. “What do you mean, ‘until after that’?”

“Sorry, honey. I misspoke. Nobody gets to kill you except me.” She raised her fizzing glass. “Cheers.”

There was long silence between us.

“I’m calling your sister to help me babysit,” I finally said. “That includes you. Now go lie down.”

Cassie smiled slightly. “Good luck, Captain Underpants. You’re going to need it.”

///

Lucy had her faults, but she was no fool; she knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to fix her mother’s wagon. So she made excellent time coming over.

“Let me at her!” she demanded before I even had the front door all the way open.

“It’s not just her, remember? She brought a friend. I think this is all the friend’s fault, but you never really—”

“One thing at a time, Dev. Mom first. I’ve been waiting forever for this.”

She was already headed to the kitchen; I had to hustle to catch her. “Not so fast. I said ‘babysitting,’ not ‘payback.’”

“Tough,” Lucy said happily. “See ya.”

This time, I had to use both hands to hold her back. “You want to save some for Cassie.”

“Why?”

“Because she’ll blame me if you don’t, and she’s already in a bad mood.”

This interested her enough to table the vengeance for a moment. “Really? What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing, huh? How many times?”

“For a woman with her own relationship problems,” I growled, “you ask a lot of questions. Nothing at all.”

Whereupon Lucy smiled in a way I recognized—and dreaded—right away. Whenever Cassie did it, trouble followed. “Ah. That ‘nothing.’ That’s different.”

“She told you we haven’t been—?”

“She didn’t have to. Whaddya think I am, blind?”

“It could be arranged,” I promised.

She laughed the laugh of the unthreatened. “Like I said, one thing at a time. Let me go fix Mom’s problem, and then I’ll see about yours.”

Considering the state of her marriage, that was like Paris Hilton offering to stop annoying everyone all the time. But maybe if I let her at her mother, she’d forget about it.

“Go,” I said.

No sooner had I turned her loose than the doorbell rang. Torn between conflicting emergencies—Lucy going up against her mother and Cyrene alone, and a doorbell that might wake Cassie if it rang again—I got the door.

Of course it was Mr. Wolfe. Somehow, I’d known it would be. Silently, I stood aside to let him in.

“She is here, then?” he asked. “My wife?”

I gave him what may have passed for a smile. Half a second later, Lucy started shrieking in the kitchen.

“Follow the love,” I said.

///

There was no point sticking around for the rest. Been there, done that, bored now. I went straight up to the master bedroom to wake Cassie and start packing. Ten minutes later, we were out the front door.

Unfortunately, so were Cyrene and the demons. The deranged hippie woman was leaving us, at least; she was loading her luggage back into her Beetle, babbling to herself about “a bad scene.” But the demons were putting theirs in Cassie’s Beemer.

“She wants to talk to you before she goes, Devlin,” Vanessa said, jerking her head in Cyrene’s direction. “Make it fast. We’ll be in the car.”

Cassie, still imperfectly awake and not well enough to fight anyway, didn’t say anything; she just got in the passenger seat, put her head back, and closed her eyes.

Fine. I could try reasoning with Monica and Vanessa later. First, though, I had to make sure that Cyrene really left. So I walked over to the VW.

“Hey, Dylan,” Cyrene said. “Sit down a minute. Let’s talk.”

“With all due respect, ma’am, I’m not getting in that car.”

“On the hood, man. No reason we can’t catch some rays.”

So I climbed up on the hood, trying not to wonder where it had been, and watched her do the same. For a woman that age wearing twenty pounds of beads, she was surprisingly agile.

“Nice day, isn’t it, Dylan?”

“As opposed to what?”

She lowered her rose-colored granny glasses and gave me a Mother Look—the bad one they teach at Mother School, along with “Because I said so.” No childless person can do it right, which meant . ..

“Don’t tell me you’re a mother,” I said, horrified.

The Look got sharper, and I suddenly remembered about manners.

“Not that kind. I mean—”

Cyrene finally waved it off. “It’s all right, man. My daughter’s girlfriend runs her mouth too. That’s what we came here to talk to you about anyway. Girlfriends. Before we got into the hash and forgot why we came here. Lizzie and me, I mean. Have you got a lot of hangups about women with women?”

The part about the gay daughter got lost when the other part made my head want to explode. “Don’t go there. Never in hell. Don’t even think about telling me you two are—”

“Get real—not us. It can be a beautiful healing experience with another woman, but with Lizzie?” She laughed merrily. “C’mon, man. You know her.”

Yes, I did. For the first time in a long time, I felt a tug of sympathy for Mr. Wolfe.

“I mean, we came here on account of you,” Cyrene said. “Well, partly on account of you and partly on account of that no-fun husband of hers. Squaresville, if you ask me.” Her hands moved absently, rolling an imaginary joint. “We were just sitting around that mausoleum of a house of theirs, talking about old times and old boyfriends and our daughters, and one little jay made him freak.”

“You can’t smoke dope in Mission Hills, lady. Only Republicans have houses that big.”

She didn’t hear or didn’t care. “So I said, ‘Man, we oughta really party, just to show him.’ So we did. And Lizzie said, ‘Cassie’s friend is squaresville, too. We could go show her.’ So we—”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What? She meant it nice.”

That was like saying Hitler did, in my opinion. “I am not squaresville. Are you crazy? I’m in advertising, for Chrissakes. I have an iPod. And nobody says ‘squaresville’ anymore. It’s not . . . groovy.”

“Would you cool it? I said she meant it nice.”

“Maybe you should get to the thing you wanted to talk to me about,” I said, unappeased, “before you say something careless or stupid or insulting.”

Cyrene pondered the meaning of all that. In her eyes, I could see she was thinking Lizzie was right on.

“It’s this way,” she finally said. “You don’t get it.”

“I don’t get what? You’ll have to be more specific. Strange people got high in my house last night, and I might have inhaled someth—”

“You don’t get any of it. Like, what’s your problem, man?” She forestalled my objection by pulling the glasses down again. “You’ve got this yuppie-scum life. You’ve got just about everything you can buy. You’ve got this beautiful girl who loves you, for some reason, and none of it makes you happy. So what’s your deal? What are you waiting for?”

I had no idea what she was talking about. “To do what?”

“To live, man! To embrace it!” She flung her arms out dramatically, nearly whacking me in the face. “All you need is love.”

“Said John Lennon. And some twisted bastard shot him anyway.”

“Got a better philosophy?”

After very long thought, I said, “No.”

Cyrene patted my shoulder maternally—something my own mother had never done. “Let the girl know you love her. And get off the guilt trip, man. Nobody cares.”

I was about to list some of the many people who did care when loud honking started. We both glanced over at the BMW. Vanessa had squirmed over the back seat to honk the horn and was having her hair pulled by Monica for it.

“That’s another thing that doesn’t make you happy,” Cyrene remarked. “Having demons.”

Stunned, I nearly fell off the hood. “How did you know—I mean, why would you think—”

“They told me. I knew it, though. Lizzie doesn’t believe me. She thinks I’ve been smoking marijuana.”

Then she winked, and against my better judgment, I smiled at her. “You have been smoking marijuana.”

“It’ll be our secret, man.”

We watched the commotion in the BMW for a moment in silence. Cassie seemed to be yelling at them now, but she didn’t seem to be having any effect.

“And you think I should enjoy having that around?” I asked.

“Why not? How cool is it to have demons?”

“Are you crazy? They’re demons!”

“Quit going to church in your head, man. You’ll have more fun. You might as well have some.” She gave me a shrewd look. “Unless you don’t want the girl. I don’t think she wants to be her mother.”

And at long, long last, the light dawned.

“Getting it now?” Cyrene asked.

“Getting there.” I jumped off the hood and reached out a hand to help her down. “Thanks.”

“Any time, Devlin.”

Now she got it right? Oh, what the hell. “It’s Dylan, man. Have a safe trip.”

///

(c) 2005, K. Simpson

***

SEVERAL MORE DEVILS

K. SIMPSON

CHAPTER NOTES: “Weird is relative” was the advertising tag line for the original Addams Family movie; I borrowed it in the spirit of Halloween (which was close when this chapter was written).

CHAPTER 10

Still Friday

No matter what cokeheads, six-year-olds, and politicians tell you, you can’t do everything at the same time. Cyrene might have been right about what I had to do, but things were best done in order. The first was to get Cassie and the demons to safety, where they could all recover from their adventure in overeating. That would also give me a clear field for the second thing, which was to get rid of the other Wolfes.

So I parked the patients at Cassie’s house, packed Lucy’s suitcases, and drove back. On the way, I called Michael’s cell.

“She’ll be home tomorrow. Don’t thank me. Just listen.”

He certainly didn’t thank me, but he did listen while I explained about professional house cleaning, babysitting, dinner reservations, and roses. Lots of roses.

“Jewelry would be good, too. It tends to work with her sister. But the most—”

“Why jewelry?” Michael bleated.

“Why not?”

There was nothing but heavy breathing at the other end for a moment. Finally, he said, “Jewelry.” Another pause. “Goddammit. All right. Go on.”

“These things aren’t important themselves; they’re just wrapping paper. Lucy likes wrapping paper, so you get it for her. But the most important thing is what’s in the package. Which is that you love her.” I waited to see what he’d say to that, which was nothing. “I said, you love her, Michael.”

“That’s between her and me.”

“That was before the two of you trashed my house. It’s kind of between you and her and Cassie and me and your in-laws and my brother and a whole neighborhood now. Not to mention the Greenville Police Department. So let’s try this again. You love her. Right?”

More breathing. “I guess. When she’s not being a bitch.”

With great effort, I managed not to laugh. It wasn’t a sonnet, but it was a start. “You might tell her once in a while. And one more thing.”

“I already said all right about the jewelry.”

“Never tell her she’s fat again. Never ever. Do you read me?”

“Why?”

“Because if you do, I’ll make sure you get custody of the kids.”

For a while, I thought the connection had gone dead. “Michael?”

“Tell me that list again,” he said, sounding grim. “Let me get a pen. Maids and flowers and what else?”

///

It was no great surprise to see the neighbors gathered outside again when I got back to the house. The downstairs windows had been open, and the Wolfes weren’t exactly shy quiet types. Superficially, maybe, Mrs. Wolfe behaved better on an everyday basis, but make her mad and all bets were off.

Walking up the drive, I noticed a clump of coconut cream in a forsythia bush; unluckily, it faced the kitchen window. There was no telling where the pie plate was—possibly embedded in someone’s skull. I made a mental note to go over the lawn with a hose later.

“Hey! Are you the cops?” someone yelled from across the street.

I scowled at the yeller. “Do I look like the cops?”

“Want us to call them for you?”

Before I could answer, a whole pie came whizzing out the kitchen window , and the bush bought it again. I wasn’t much for tree-hugging, but I did resent the attacks on innocent plant life.

“If you see a person come out that window next,” I told the neighbor, “call them.”

What was it about Cassie’s family, anyway?

///

The yelling was even louder inside, of course. Carefully, I picked my way through the debris in the living room to the coat closet, where the bullhorn was hidden. Chip, Heather, and Troy had given it to me after a bad meeting with a client too vain to turn on his hearing aids; they’d meant it as a joke, but I’d taken it home as a precaution. Even then, I’d suspected that Cassie’s relatives would come visit and that this might happen sometimes.

Creeping up to the kitchen doorway, I waited until Lucy was on the backswing and then raised the bullhorn.

OK, it wasn’t nice to blow a raspberry through it, but somehow, that said it all. It also made them jump a foot straight up. Mr. Wolfe slipped in some meringue on the way down and hit the floor, which was all bonus.

“Oh, hello, dear,” Mrs. Wolfe said.

I observed the woman coolly. She still had the headband on, but it was down around her nose now, and you could barely make out the tie-dye pattern on her shirt under all the food. As for her hair . . . well, if only the ladies at the Plaza and the country club could see her now. It was too bad that blackmail was tacky and that I didn’t have a camera on me.

As for the “dear” part, I supposed that was because she couldn’t remember my name. Between the pot and the HRT, she was apt to be vague on details for a while.

“Nice to see you alive, Mrs. Wolfe. I wouldn’t have bet on it. Have you had a nice family reunion? Are you ready to go home now and get some nice family therapy?”

“Stay out of this, Dev,” Lucy warned.

“Can’t. It’s my house.” I watched Mr. Wolfe struggle to his feet, slip, and go down again—a pleasing sight. “You know, my family is dysfunctional too, but we’re not anywhere near this messy. If Mom were here right now, she’d run you all through a car wash and give you extra wax. Is there any good reason why you always end up doing this?”

Mrs. Wolfe had tuned out somewhere in the middle of that commentary and was smiling vaguely. Maybe she was listening to Frank Zappa on her personal soundtrack; maybe she’d just been around Cyrene too long and was starting to act like her. Either way, she’d lost radio contact with Planet Reality. So I tried Lucy.

“You’re pregnant, in case you’ve forgotten. Violence might not be so good for the baby. Why did you do it?”

She snorted, wiping coconut cream out of her hair. “Let’s see what you’d do if your mother turned into a dope fiend. It was the only way to get her attention.”

My mother was a dope fiend—she smoked cigarettes— but we could have that conversation another time.

“For your information, Devlin, my wife started it,” Mr. Wolfe said. “I walked in the kitchen, and she threw a pie at my head.”

“She was probably trying to offer you some. She’s forgotten about tableware for the time being. Did you throw it back?”

“It was self-defense.”

I glanced at Mrs. Wolfe, who was still on her own little pink cloud. She might have weighed 100 pounds (not counting the pie filling) and was roughly as dangerous as a gerbil; her daughters had both got the danger from the other end of the gene pool. “Lucky I got here in time, then, sir. You might have hurt yourself.”

“Are you this insolent to your own parents?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir.”

At last, Lucy started laughing. “As in ‘Yes, sir, you asshole’?”

“Of course not. My mother’s family is Southern. They taught me to imply it.”

Which was true, even though I usually just went ahead and said it. Older people were the exception; Grandma had taught me that the hard way.

“They’re both being assholes, if you ask me,” Lucy said. “Mom’s having some bizarro nervous breakdown, and Dad’s acting like she did it on purpose. I don’t like throwing food, but they didn’t give me a choice.”

“You’re getting better at it, honey,” her father told her.

We both stared at him as though his second head were on fire. Disgusted, Lucy wiped more pie filling out of her hair.

“About the nervous breakdown,” I said quickly, before anything else could happen. “Lucy might be right. Your wife was already unhappy, and then that wingnut friend of hers shows up, and the next thing you know, it’s Thelma and Louise without the gun. Has it occurred to either of you that this might not be about either of you?”

Mr. Wolfe frowned. “This is a private family matter. I’ll thank you to—”

“You’re not so good at the ‘private’ part, sir. I’m not sure you’re much good at the ‘family’ part either.”

In the shocked silence that followed, I cursed myself for not thinking: Cassie would be furious that she’d missed this. But now that I’d started . ..

“Strange how nobody’s asked me where Cassie is. She’s not feeling well, so she’s back at her house where it’s safe. Thank you for asking. You’re such a close family that I know you like to do the important things together, like throwing pie at Mommy, but togetherness can be overrated.”

Still, no one said anything. Mrs. Wolfe did start humming, though. It might have been The Who; it might have been Tiny Tim; who could tell? Concerned that she’d start dancing again and slip in something, I sat her down in the nearest chair.

“Let me tell you what you’re thinking,” I said. “You’re thinking I’m an outsider and don’t understand this family. But you’re wrong. I understand all about it. I know why Cassie moved away and why you keep saving these fights up for her. You need a referee. You can’t handle your own relationships. And look who she’s with.”

Mr. Wolfe was starting to breathe as hard as Michael had earlier. “That’s enough, Devlin.”

“You’re right, sir. It’ll do. You have a sick wife and a pregnant daughter with a pig of a husband; you’re busy enough looking after them right now. Not to be sexist, but they’re not doing a great job of looking after themselves these days, and you’re all about the paterfamilias thing, aren’t you?”

Part of me hoped he would throw something at me. I knew he wanted to. If he did, I’d have a matchless advantage: I could tell Cassie.

But he finally relaxed his hand on the pie plate, and the other part of me heaved a sigh of relief.

“Cassie’s sick?” Lucy finally asked. “What’s wrong? Does she need anything?”

Attagirl. Not a sonnet either, but also a start.

///

Back at the Ranch

Cassie woke up around 1, feeling better, but I made her tea and chicken soup before I told her. The demons were feeling better and had some too.

“You said that?” Cassie asked after the paterfamilias part. “I’m taking O Brother, Where Art Thou? away from you, honey.”

“You think I went too far?”

“I didn’t say that.” Pensively, she blew into her teacup. “You’re sure Mom’s OK?”

“Resting when I left her.” I’d checked the three Wolfes into a hotel for safekeeping—after they’d washed up, of course—and had the hotel doctor take a look at Mrs. Wolfe. He’d said she needed rest, which was the least of it. “She’ll be fine. They’ll all be on a plane home first thing in the morning.”

“Why couldn’t they stay at the house?”

“You haven’t seen the house. Don’t worry about it. As soon as you’re settled, I’ll go back over and start hosing it out.”

Cassie sipped her tea, still pensive. “No, don’t. Call a housecleaning service. We’ll make Daddy pay for it.”

“Or Monica and I could do it,” Vanessa said.

Neither demon had said anything for so long, we’d almost forgotten they were there. Surprised, we waited for the rest.

“Are you mad?” Monica asked her. “Didn’t you hear what Devlin said about the forsythias?”

“She got rid of the woman. It’s the least we can do.”

Monica sighed. “Well, yes, there’s that.”

There was that. Cassie didn’t know the demons were talking about her sister, of course; she’d think they meant Cyrene. Not that it mattered. One was as bad as the other.

“Don’t stress yourselves,” I said. “You’re pregnant. You don’t need to be doing industrial-strength spells right now.”

That stopped all conversation.

“Seriously. The kitchen looks like a Three Stooges movie. You don’t have any business trying to clean that up.”

“Did you inhale again?” Cassie asked me. “Even by accident?”

“Not to my knowledge. What’s wrong? Can’t I be sensitive?”

They all said it together: “No.”

“It kind of scares us, Devlin,” Vanessa added.

Whereupon she and Monica had a nice little laugh at my expense. “Fine. Suit yourselves,” I grumbled.

But Cassie wasn’t even smiling. She was staring into her teacup as though there might be a surprise at the bottom.

“Cass?”

“I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“That’s good. It separates you from your family. What are you thinking?”

“You might be right about the nervous breakdown and the family therapy. It might be true.” A faint smile. “It’s occurred to me too. But what worries me—”

“Oh, for love of God, it’s not genetic. If it were, you’d have been crazy years ago.”

“Or living with Devlin would have done it,” Vanessa added helpfully.

“What worries me,” Cassie said, “is that I’m glad you did it.”

Now what? “Somebody had to make them stop. If it hadn’t been me, it would’ve been the cops. Again. And I really don’t want our address on some blacklist down at the station.”

“I mean, they’re my family, and I love them, and I should be mad at you for yelling at them. But I’m not. I’m just glad you love me even though I’m related to them.” She was still staring into her cup. “You do still love me, don’t you?”

“She yelled at your family,” Monica said. “For Devlin, that’s the equivalent of poetry.”

“She was asking me,” I reminded the demon. “And the answer is yes.”

“Oh, goody,” Vanessa said.

When we all pointedly waited for the explanation, she pouted a little. “Well, it means we’re all staying together. I like it here.”

That set off a furious argument about whether anyone liked having her there—Cassie and Monica tended toward the negative—and the energy of it convinced me that they were all back in the pink. So I let them quarrel till they noticed I wasn’t involved.

“Devlin? There are people arguing here,” Monica said. “Don’t you want a piece of this?”

“No, thanks.”

“Why ever not?”

Casually, for maximum insolence, I leaned against the doorjamb. “I’ve had enough family values for one month. With this crowd, of course, it’s more like Addams Family Values, but weird is relative. Now, speaking of relatives, Cassie and I are going to go check on hers one last time, and then we’re going away for the weekend. While we’re gone, the two of you can—”

“We’re going away?” Cassie asked.

At least she was talking to me and not a teacup now. I smiled at her. “I think I was just saying that I love you. And I think you were saying that I owe you a romantic weekend. Think you’re up to that?”

She glanced at the demons, uncertain, and then half-smiled back at me. “I hate to say Vanessa’s right, but this sensitive thing is a little scary. Are you OK?”

“Never better.” Not strictly true, because my house wasn’t always a war zone, but for purposes of what she was asking, I was fine. “We’re already packed. What do you say?”

“I say maybe I still love you too.”

And maybe I owe you one, Cyrene. “You’d better,” I said.

///

Continued in Part 11

2005, K. Simpson

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10