Dance with the Devil Read online

  Dance with the Devil

  The Morningstar 2

  Megan Hart

  Copyright © 2015 by Megan Hart

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  * * *

  Chaos Publishing

  P.O. Box 292338

  Dayton, OH 45429

  email: [email protected]

  * * *

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940078-21-2

  cover image credit: Moussa81

  Contents

  Blurb

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Ride with the Devil

  The Resurrected

  Also by Megan Hart

  About the Author

  Blurb

  When the devil starts the music, you'd better get ready to dance.

  Kathleen Murphy has sold her soul to the devil. Fame, fortune, success...everything she's ever dreamed of is hers, and all she has to do is the devil's bidding. When love comes knocking, the last thing in the world she wants to do is involve Jake in her twisted world, but the devil's started up the jukebox and Kathleen has no choice but to learn the steps.

  Preface

  All of this is fiction

  And all of it is true

  1

  Kathleen Murphy had blood on her hands.

  Not much; a drop or two had grimed into her knuckles. A sliver of crimson had gone to brown beneath her fingernails. In the hollow of her wrist, between the tendons and hidden by the tattoo, was a smear of red that blended so neatly with the inked artwork that the only way to see it was to know it was there.

  She knew it was there.

  She would always know it, no matter how many times she scrubbed and scrubbed. She could wash her hands and did, dozens of times a day, sometimes until they became chapped and raw. Sore. And yet she woke every morning with her skin as fresh and unblemished as though she'd come straight from the womb. Every day a rebirth.

  That's what the devil did for her. Among other things -- the wealth, the fame, the success, the adoration. The devil gave her beauty, too. Nary a pimple dared mar her. The fever blisters that had plagued her since childhood? Gone. The lines at the corners of her eyes? Smoothed. That crooked front tooth that had made her smile uniquely her own? Not straight, but no longer quite as jutting and obvious.

  "Beauty," the devil had told her while she looked at herself naked in the full-length mirror and marveled at how her body had changed, "is not perfection. People think it is. Symmetry is pretty, sure. But real beauty, real true beauty, comes from flaws."

  She still had plenty of those. The devil had whittled away the extra jiggle in her thighs and belly but left behind the marks of childbirth. He'd given her higher tits, but not bigger. As with her smile, the difference was so subtle nobody would notice any difference. He'd made her beautiful, but he'd left her far from perfect.

  Now, with the water running hot enough to scald her, Kathleen rinsed and washed and scrubbed her hands free of the blood. She did it matter-of-factly. Without expression. If truth be told -- and wasn't the truth always told eventually, whether you wanted it to remain a secret or not? If truth be told, she was not only without expression, but she'd managed to fold away all residual semblance of emotion.

  She'd long ago learned there was no profit in remorse.

  Her hands clean, at least to anyone who'd ever look, she smoothed her hair. Touched up her lipstick, blowing kisses to her reflection. Powdered her nose. She turned her face from side to side, making sure there was nothing to suggest she'd been sick enough to vomit only a few minutes before. Thinking of that, she pulled a small bottle of mouthwash from her purse and rinsed her mouth, spitting again and again and washing down the foam with water from the faucet. She finished just as the handle to the restroom door jiggled.

  "Just a minute." There. Her voice, steady and calm and reasonable and quiet and firm and soothing.

  Nothing to see here. Nothing wrong. All was well and would always be well, she thought.

  She opened the door to face a bored girl texting on a smartphone who barely looked up at her. The bathroom opened into a narrow, chilly hallway with the door to the back alley on the far end, the entrance to the kitchen behind a Japanese rice paper screen across from it. As the girl pushed past her without a word, Kathleen considered heading out that back door to make her escape, but that would only end up delaying the inevitable. Besides, it would be rude.

  Her sins were many, but deliberately inconsiderate was one thing Kathleen was not.

  "So sorry," she said as she slid back into her seat across from the very nice, very bland, very boring man who'd been waiting so patiently for her. "I got a call from my agent while I was in the restroom. I had to take it."

  "I thought maybe you’d run out the back." He laughed at his own joke. He had a nice laugh. Soft, unassuming. Like the rest of him.

  Oh, how she wanted to like it. And him. But instead, she managed a half smile and thought ahead to the end of the night when she would crush his self-esteem with a few choice words. Her words. She could blame the devil for the saying of them, but not the words themselves. Those she would have to think up on her own.

  Why the Morningstar wanted her to break this man's confidence, Kathleen did not know. She hadn't asked. In the end, it didn't even matter. The devil asked. She did. It was the bargain they'd struck, and one she aimed to keep for as long as she could.

  It was an interminable dinner, during which she ordered the most expensive items on the menu and did no more than take a bite or two of each. And after, her date led her to her car, and they began the awkward dance of would he kiss her there? Would he ask her to continue the date with coffee, a movie, bowling, a quick romp back at his place? He tried for the kiss, as it turned out, which made it all the easier for her to turn her face at the last moment with a grimace of barely veiled distaste.

  "No?" Jim, his name was Jim, asked her.

  "Your breath," she told him. "I'm sorry. It's just...awful."

  That was all it took. Poor Jim, whose breath wasn't minty fresh but certainly ranked higher than the stench of the dead rats that earlier in the evening Kathleen had pulled from the traps in the restaurant's storage room and dumped into the meat grinder while the sous chef in charge of making the gourmet burgers had been mysteriously distracted. Kissing Jim wouldn't have been a hardship. She'd had worse things in her mouth, after all.

  But her words. They were sharp enough to slice. And Jim turned out to be the sort of man who took them to heart. She saw it in the way the light that had been in his eyes all night went out, like a candle extinguished.

  "I'll call you," he said, stepping back from her. No kiss.

  They both knew he wouldn't, but she smiled and nodded. "Great. Thanks for dinner."

  She let her gaze linger on his just long enough to really make him remember her, as if he could ever forget. Then wi
th a small half-wave, Kathleen got into her car, a smoke gray Lexus sedan that she hated but drove anyway because every time she got behind the wheel she could punish herself, just a little bit. She looked in the rear view mirror as she pulled away, but Jim was still standing next to his car when she left the parking lot.

  2

  "They want me to go to Australia to promote the book. What can I say? It's my job." Kathleen sucked smoke in through her mouth and let it sift out through her nostrils. It was a horrible habit, one she'd only picked up just before her divorce, because the smell of cigarettes had driven her now ex-husband insane. She wasn't addicted, though she kept waiting to be. "Callie will be fine with you. Let me talk to her. I can explain."

  "She's in bed, Kath. In case you didn't notice, it's eleven o'clock. Most second graders go to bed early." Derek's voice contained a sneer she could easily imagine.

  Kathleen closed her eyes against the pain of her daughter's face in her mind. It had been a week since the last time she'd seen her, and then only for the afternoon. Two hours in the park while Callie went up and down the slide and told her mother all about her new kitty. Then the two hour drive back to the city. Before that it had been two months since she'd been home.

  Deadlines, Kathleen had explained to Derek. Overloaded with work. Too busy, so busy.

  This was not the truth, though he would never know it. It was a lie she'd told so often, though, that Kathleen could sometimes convince herself it was real. Wordcount, revisions, book signings and craft workshops and lectures and interviews and tours and lunches with her editor and conferences where people lined up with copies of her book clutched in their sweaty palms, some incapable of speaking to her because they were so entranced by the sight of her face in real life instead of on their computer screen. Even people who'd interacted with her online for months and sometimes years were often suddenly struck dumb in front of her. Those were the ones that made her sad -- they weren't friends, of course. They were strangers masquerading as friends. But they were the closest thing she’d allowed herself for a long time.

  "This is my career," she told Derek. "You've never supported or understood it."

  Silence, no denial. There'd been many times that she had lied to him, and many others in which she'd done her best to use the truth to hurt him worse than any falsehoods could. What she'd said now was not a lie, but it hurt her more to say it aloud than it ever could have wounded him.

  Derek made a low noise from deep in his throat. "I hope your career is making you happy, Kath. Because we sure as hell never seemed to."

  Oh, they'd been together long enough for each to know exactly where to strike, and this sliced her right to the very innards of her barely beating heart. "You don't understand."

  "I guess I don't."

  And she couldn't make him. She'd started scribbling half-formed ideas in a notepad taken from the hotel they'd stayed in on their honeymoon. Now she wrote books that hit every list a book could hit. And then there was the writing itself, which had been an escape, a haven, an oasis and never a chore, but now weighed upon her as heavily as any stone.

  If she could convince her ex-husband and herself that those were the reasons she spent no more than a few hours every few months with her daughter, maybe Lucifer would also be convinced. It was probably mortal foolishness to think she could blow smoke in the devil's face. But the thought of him getting near her child was too awful, too horrific, too terrifying for her not to try.

  "Tell her mommy said...mommy said she loves her." Kathleen cleared her throat, not wanting him to hear her voice breaking. Derek wouldn't care. He'd think she deserved to crack and shatter, and he'd be right.

  "Are you drunk?"

  She paused in taking another drag. "...No."

  "Right. Of course not. Not on a weeknight." He didn't believe her, she could tell that from the tone of his voice.

  It might've been a mistake, becoming a drunk in order to make sure her husband would divorce her. It had been the one thing she'd been certain would turn him from her. His horror stories of being raised by his alcoholic grandmother after both parents died while driving drunk had guaranteed that he wouldn't tolerate a wife who liked a three or four martini lunch. That she'd enjoyed falling into the drink hadn't helped much. But just because she liked the brief oblivion booze provided, that didn't mean she had a drinking problem. Like the cigarettes and pills and the occasional hit of something a little less legal, she could put the liquor aside if she wanted to. Still, she'd convinced him of her inability to stop the drinking, and there was no way to un-convince him, now.

  "I haven't had a drink in a week," she told him. That was the truth. The last had been a glass of red wine with the pasta dinner she'd cooked from a bag and eaten standing up while folding laundry at her kitchen counter as she watched reality TV.

  "Oh, wow. A whole week."

  Kathleen stubbed out her cigarette. "Look. I'm sorry I won't be able to take her for my time, but I'll make it up to her when I get back. Or, you could let me take her along --"

  "No. You're not taking her out of the country while you work. She'd spend all day in a hotel room, unsupervised while you do whatever it is you do."

  Her stomach twisted, and she closed her eyes. "That happened once."

  "She was five!"

  With her phone pressed to her ear, Kathleen let herself sink to the cold tile floor of her kitchen, her back to the cabinets stuffed full of shiny pots and pans she'd barely used now that she only had herself to cook for. She closed her eyes and drew her knees to her chest, curling an arm around them to keep herself from shaking. It didn't work. Her teeth tried to chatter even as she clenched her jaw.

  "It was a mistake," she whispered. "I didn't mean to."

  More silence, shorter this time.

  "Yeah, well," Derek said with a sneer she could imagine perfectly, "I'm not going to give you the chance to make another one like that. Next time, who knows what might happen."

  With that, he disconnected, and Kathleen kept the phone pressed to her ear a little longer than was necessary. Then she clicked it off. She'd have thrown it across the room, but then it would break and she'd have to get a new one. She could afford it. She could afford a hundred new phones, if she wanted. But the inconvenience of having to actually order a new phone and set it up was too much for her. Instead, she let it slip it from her fingers to land with a small click on the Italian marble tiles she'd special ordered, because what good was having a pied-à-terre in Manhattan if you didn't have a marble floor to hurt your knees when you went onto them in the night and thought about all the ways you could end your life?

  "You don't want to do that. Not really." The devil's grin writhed with maggots for a second or so before it became nothing more than white, gleaming teeth. Tonight he looked a lot like he had the first time she'd seen him, so long ago in that coffee shop back in the small town she'd left behind. Blond hair, big muscles, straight teeth. Handsome, sort of, if you liked that kind of look. "You have so much to live for."

  Kathleen laughed. She had to, really. When you faced the thing that owned your soul, all you could do was either laugh or scream.

  "Your daughter," the Morningstar reminded her.

  Kathleen pushed herself up off the floor. "My daughter? She will hate me when she grows up, if she has any emotional connection to me at all. I would be lucky if she does hate me, at least it will mean I left some sort of impression on her."

  "Your choice, lovey. Not mine. I've never asked you not to spend time with your little one."

  She gave him a long, steady look and watched the shadows wriggle beneath his skin when he grinned again. She pulled another cigarette from the pack and tapped it before tucking it between her lips and searching for her lighter. He pulled one from his pocket, a silver Zippo emblazoned with an engraved heart and her initials. It would go along nicely with the others in the collection she'd started because she could never find a lighter when she needed one.

  "You should quit smoking, m
y dove, or you won't be around long enough for your daughter to grow up and hate you."

  Kathleen sucked in smoke, long and deep, then blew it out to the side. "We have an agreement. You leave her out of this."

  "You're afraid I'll show up when you're with her."

  "Of course I am! Do you think I want you anywhere near my child?"

  The devil shrugged. "I might imagine you'd be more worried that I'd show up around her when you're not around."

  She went cold at that. "Is that the limit, then? The thing you're going to ask of me that you know I won't be able to do? What will it be? Asking me to give you my child's soul instead of mine?"

  The devil laughed and shook his head. His shadow had horns, though he did not. "It doesn't work that way. It can't. My arrangements are only ever made with the individual. You can't sell someone else's soul, Kathleen. If you could, well, I'd hardly need to go around soliciting them, would I? Everyone who'd ever hated anyone would give me their enemies in exchange for what I can provide."

  "What do you want?" Kathleen said after a moment. "It's late, and I'd like to get some more words in tonight."

  The devil nodded, then tilted his head to one side. "So industrious. How was the date?"

  "Terrible. As requested."

  "Aww, now. Wasn't it worth the free steak dinner?"