anything, for an hour straight without stopping. Granted, first you had to jam a finger up his-” the Devil stopped short in his reminiscing as he looked back to Jonah, who was doing his best not to appear as appalled as he felt.
Satan, on the other hand, seemed amused by the mortal’s discomfort. “Yeah, you don’t want to know about that. Man, oh man. What I wouldn’t give to go with you. Take a week off, see the sights. Sounds like a laugh.”
“Sounds like a nightmare,” Jonah whispered.
Satan shrugged away the dismay. “Six in one hand, half dozen in the other. But no need to fret, I ain’t got time for such excursions. Hell don’t run itself, you know. Now, what’s next on your little list of requirements? Or are we ready to call this a deal?”
“Um …” Jonah scrambled for possible concessions. It wasn’t often a man had the Devil at his mercy. “Dale’s soul has to stay in one place.”
“It will. Ain’t that a basic rule of hide and seek? In fact, I already have the perfect little hidey-hole picked out. Anything else?”
“You … you … you have to leave me alone. Don’t interfere.”
Clenching the cigar tightly in the corner of his mouth, Satan glared at Jonah, hand over heart, as if aghast at the very idea. “Me? Interfere?”
“You know what I mean. You and your supposed network of spies have to leave me alone. No tricks.”
“No tricks,” the Devil repeated, as he raised his forefingers in a very Boy Scout manner.
“No traps.”
“You have my word. I promise not to interfere.” Satan then lowered his hand, proffering it to Jonah as he asked, “Do we have a deal?”
Jonah stared at the hand of the Devil, knowing what he was about to do was wrong but unable to keep from falling for it. He clasped Satan’s hand—warm and strong and tingling with unspeakable power—into his own—pale and clammy and as limp as a dead fish. Jonah gave Satan’s hand a curt shake. “We have a deal.”
With his blue eyes twinkling in the California sun and a smile so bright that it hurt to look at, Satan said, “Excellent.”
The Devil clutched down hard on Jonah’s hand for a moment too long, and with the extra contact, Jonah picked up the ominous sensation that he had just made the worst mistake of his life. When the Devil finally released his hand, Jonah was already regretting the loss of his own soul, as if it had come to pass even before the seven days were done.
“Then I’ll be off,” Satan said, as he tossed the butt of his cigar to the gravel and pressed it under the heel of his expensive-looking shoes. Pointing the bottle of Dale’s soul at Jonah for emphasis, the Devil added, “You have a long trip ahead of you. I’d suggest getting started right away.”
“Wait a minute,” Jonah said. “What about that?” He nodded to Dale’s corpse.
“What about it? He’s your problem now. But then again, hasn’t he always been?”
Jonah’s eyes widened. “I can’t drag a corpse all over the country for a week while looking for you. What if he, you know, rots?”
“Oh, no, no, no. That’s the fun of the thing. You gotta find his soul before his body turns to soup. That was the deal. You bring me Dale’s body in a week and I return his soul to it.” Satan gasped as he tipped his head to one side and feigned a look of exaggerated surprise. “Did I fail to mention that part?”
The gravity, the truth, the whole of the situation fell on Jonah at that moment. As much as he’d tried to remain in control, as much as he’d tried to make up the rules, as much as he’d determined he would not be tricked, he had, in fact, just been tricked. “Yeah, you kind of failed to mention that part.”
“Sorry,” Satan said with a smile that looked anything but sorrowful. “Must have slipped my mind.”
“I see.” Jonah shouldn’t have been surprised. He expected something underhanded, but this was just wrong. And stupid. “So essentially you want to reenact some road trip
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