Sympathy for the Devil Read online

  Sympathy for the Devil

  Christine Pope

  Dark Valentine Press

  Contents

  Copyright Information

  About Sympathy for the Devil

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Interlude

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Interlude

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Interlude

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Interlude

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Interlude

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  More Paranormal Romances by Christine Pope

  About the Author

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

  Revised edition copyright © 2014 by Christine Pope.

  Originally published by Pink Petal Books, December 2010.

  Published by Dark Valentine Press.

  Cover design by Book Cover Artistry

  Ebook formatting by Indie Author Services

  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 — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without permission in writing from its publisher, Dark Valentine Press.

  Please contact the author through the form on her website at www.christinepope.com if you experience any formatting or readability issues with this book.

  To be notified about Christine Pope’s newest releases, please sign up here.

  About Sympathy for the Devil

  When God offers the Devil a chance to redeem himself if he can make a woman fall in love with him, Lucifer is confident it’s a done deal…until he meets Christa Simms, the woman hand-picked by the Almighty to be a part of the cosmic wager. If there’s one thing Christa knows, it’s how to recognize Mr. Wrong when she sees him. Between Christa’s sexy best friend, her blundering ex-boyfriend, and a pair of interfering demons with a stake in the outcome, the Devil has…a devil of a time…wooing the woman who can save his soul by stealing his heart.

  Prologue

  Chartres, France, twenty-eight years ago

  The Devil paused on the street outside a café and glanced in the window. God already sat at a table inside, blowing on a cup of café au lait. After stopping to brush some snow from the shoulder of his coat, the Devil entered the building.

  “You’re late,” God remarked, not looking up from His coffee.

  “An unavoidable delay, I assure you.” The Devil waved a waiter over and ordered a double espresso.

  “Sticking to the dark side, I see,” said God.

  “That stuff,” the Devil retorted, pointing a gloved finger at God’s café au lait, “is entirely too frilly for me.”

  God didn’t bother to reply, but instead took a small sip from His maligned coffee and then shut His eyes momentarily. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” He said. “But no matter. We’re not here to discuss coffee, are we?”

  “Hardly.” The Devil drew off his gloves and laid them on the scuffed tabletop. The waiter reappeared and placed an espresso at the Devil’s elbow, then retreated toward the kitchen. Without bothering to blow on the steaming liquid to cool it, the Devil tossed back a healthy swallow, after which he set the cup down on the table and said, “I want out.”

  “Out?” God inquired, in a tone of mild curiosity.

  “Out of Hell. I’m done. Eternity’s gotten to be too long.”

  For a moment God regarded the Devil over the rim of His coffee cup. He sipped again, then put down the café au lait. “Any reason for this change of heart?”

  “The world doesn’t need the Devil anymore. These people can manage quite well enough on their own.”

  God considered that statement for a moment, then said, “Any other explanations for this sudden onset of angst?”

  The Devil drained the rest of his espresso and signaled the waiter for another. “Does it matter? Isn’t this what you’ve wanted all along — for me to come crawling back on my hands and knees?”

  “Penitence is laudable, of course, but balance must be maintained. Hell must have its guardian.”

  “So promote Beelzebub,” the Devil growled. “He’s been grousing about ‘glass ceilings’ and all that lately. I knew I should have canceled that subscription to Inc. magazine.”

  God smiled. “Very well. But I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple.”

  The Devil made a sound of muffled anger in his throat. “What, then?”

  Still smiling, God waited until the waiter had placed another espresso on the table and moved off to take an order from a portly gentleman a few tables away. “To re-enter the Kingdom of Heaven, you must prove that you’re worthy of it.”

  “And how the hell — if you’ll pardon the expression — am I supposed to do that?”

  “Love.”

  “Excuse me?”

  God finished off the rest of His café au lait. “Ah, excellent. Truly the best on Earth. Anyhow, if you can prove that you’re capable of love — true love, not simple lust or infatuation — then you may become mortal, live out a span of years, and die. At that point you should have redeemed yourself sufficiently to return to Heaven.”

  “I have to die to do it?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  The Devil let out an exasperated sigh. “It’s never easy with You, is it?”

  God lifted His shoulders. “How badly do you want to be quit of Hell?”

  “I see your point.” There was a pause as the Devil took a more modest sip of espresso. Frowning, he asked, “Who is this person I’m supposed to love?”

  “Ah, that.” God traced a finger along a particularly deep scar on the tabletop. “She’s just been born, as a matter of fact.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  God lifted an eyebrow. “Typical. If I wanted to make this particularly difficult, I could have made her plain, but — yes, she will be pretty. Not,” God added, giving the Devil a stern look, “outstandingly beautiful.”

  “I suppose it would have been too much to request another Marilyn Monroe or Sophia Loren.”

  “Some of My best work,” God said modestly. “But yes, of course. Nothing like that. Still, she should be pleasing enough.”

  “All right,” said the Devil, after drinking more espresso. “What else?”

  “She must love you for yourself. This means she must know who you are.”

  “I have to tell her I’m the Devil?”

  “Yes.”

  The Devil frowned but said nothing.

  “You will retain all your powers, but you may know nothing of her — nothing more than you would learn from observing her as any mortal man might. It would give you an unfair advantage for you to know everything of her life as you do with other mortals.” God picked up a sugar packet and considered it, then put it back in the wire rack that held its companions. “And you must accomplish your goal in thirty days.”

  “Why thirty?”

  God raised an eyebrow. “It seems a good round number.”

  The Devil looked away, gazing through the window at the town square outside and the bulk of the cathedral that loomed up through the twilight. He asked, �
�But I am allowed to keep my powers?”

  “Up until the time you meet the strictures of our agreement. Then, of course, you will be as mortal as anyone else. Oh, you won’t be cut off completely,” God went on, His voice somewhat amused. “If nothing else, you’ve earned a very good retirement package, but how can you expect to live out your life as a regular man if I allow you to retain your powers?”

  The Devil tapped his fingers on the table, considering. “All right,” he said. “I suppose You have a valid point. So I simply have to fall in love with her, and have her fall in love with me? Then I live my life, go to Heaven, and am finished with Hell forever?”

  “The fact that you used the word ‘simply’ in that sentence proves how little you know about love.”

  “Hmph.” The Devil set his empty espresso cup down on the battered tabletop. “We’ll see about that.”

  “Yes,” God said mildly. “I suppose We shall.”

  Chapter One

  I first saw the Devil when I was six years old.

  Of course, at the time I didn’t actually know he was the Devil. When you’re six, if you notice adults at all, it’s mostly to make sure they’re not about to tell you to stop doing whatever it is that you’re doing. Or maybe you’re reassuring yourself that the adult off on the sidelines isn’t the Evil Stranger in the trench coat who does horrible but unexplained things to small children — you know, the ones who aren’t smart enough to remember that they’re not supposed to talk to anyone outside a small, well-defined circle of family and friends.

  The strange man stood quietly off to one side of the park, watching as I played with Ashley, my then–best friend. I didn’t notice anything particular about him, except that he wasn’t any of my friends’ fathers, as far as I could tell. Ashley and I were playing on the swings, taunting each other to see who could go the highest, and when I was able to focus on the ground once again, he was gone.

  At the time, I didn’t think anything much of it.

  But then he turned up again seven years later. I was at my junior high school’s graduation and had just picked up the fake little diploma they gave out to all the eighth-graders. After I took the piece of paper from the principal’s hand and turned to walk off the platform, I saw the Devil again. I didn’t know who he was then, either, just that he looked vaguely familiar, a dark-haired man, tall, whose features nagged at my memory. By then I’d become aware enough of the opposite sex that I was able to decide I thought he was sort of cute — for an old guy.

  Of course, I had no idea how very, very old he actually was.

  By the time I turned twenty-one, I’d almost forgotten about those two odd little encounters. I’d managed to escape what I saw as the smothering suburbia of Orange County (although UCLA wasn’t exactly Outer Mongolia or anything), and it was on the campus at UCLA that I saw the Devil for the last time. Let me rephrase that — it was the last time I saw him as just an observer.

  I was hurrying to class, late because I’d stayed up most of the night finishing a paper on German Expressionism. Exactly how an in-depth analysis of Murnau’s Faust was supposed to help me with my future as a productive member of society hadn’t been fully explained to me, but at the time getting a good grade on that paper seemed like the most important thing in my world. I almost didn’t see the stranger as I staggered toward the Humanities building, lugging a bulging backpack that was destined to send me to the chiropractor.

  But there the man was, a flicker at the corner of my peripheral vision. I paused — I think I told myself it was to hitch the pack a little farther up on my shoulder before it slid down and dislocated my elbow. Really, though, I stopped so I could get a closer look at him.

  He hadn’t changed. Now, I know there are people in the world who age extraordinarily well. In fact, my mother still looks pretty damn good for her age. But she still looks older than she did when I was six, or thirteen, or even twenty-one. This man looked exactly the same that day at UCLA as the first time I’d seen him some fifteen years earlier.

  My brain churned away at the improbability and then did the most logical thing it could: It told me I was mistaken. He just looks like the person you saw when you were a kid, it told me. How could it possibly be the same man?

  How indeed?

  So I re-shouldered my backpack and continued on my way. Right before I ducked inside the building, I glanced back at the spot where he had been standing, just to prove to myself that my eyes had been playing tricks on me. By then he was gone.

  I felt a little shiver touch the back of my neck, despite the warm spring day. But I had a class to get to and was late, and so I shook my head at myself and hurried on. I didn’t have the time to deal with impossible conundrums.

  Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d gone up and spoken to him then.

  Fast-forward another seven years. During my senior year of college my parents went through a typically messy divorce, and rather than deal with the fallout of the situation, I decided to stay up in L.A. and look for work there. I was lucky enough to land a job as an editorial assistant at a glossy regional magazine. A few years later, the magazine’s copyeditor got an offer he couldn’t refuse from a big-time investment firm downtown that needed someone to oversee the company’s publications and website. So I got promoted to copyeditor and actually had my own office. I was also finally making enough money that I could bail out on my less-than-optimal roommate situation and find an apartment of my own.

  Contrary to popular belief, working at a magazine isn’t all that glamorous. All right, maybe some magazines are glamorous. My editor does get some pretty good perks, but believe me, when the invites come in for movie premieres or store openings, it’s not the copyeditor who gets to walk down the red carpet. No, sir. The copyeditor gets to wait for the editorial staff to write about their glam evenings and then make sure all the commas are in the right place.

  Still, it wasn’t a bad life. My apartment wasn’t anything special, but I liked it because, unlike a lot of places in Southern California (and especially in Irvine, where I’d grown up), it had a bit of history. It was built sometime in the ’40s and had a cute little faux fireplace with a molded plaster mantel, actual crown moldings in the living room, and even a tiny laundry area that allowed me to have my own stackable washer and dryer so I wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of dragging my unmentionables to the laundromat. Unlike most other Angelenos, I didn’t have much of a commute; I’d chosen this apartment partially because it was exactly 2.3 miles from the office, which meant I could get to work in five minutes most days, barring the unforeseen accident or unscheduled “street improvement.” (Which I think is Caltrans code for shutting down lanes on random streets because they feel like it.)

  My love life, on the other hand — well, let’s just say the 500-thread-count sheets I’d bought on clearance the previous summer hadn’t been getting much action.

  I’d been dating this one guy, Danny Koslowski, on and off for about six months. He didn’t seem that interested in having things progress any further, and I didn’t know if I even cared all that much. For one thing, I had a problem with a guy who was staring down the barrel of the big 3-0 but who still went by “Danny.” It made him sound like a five-year-old who should be calling me about play dates, not real dates. Also, he was a computer geek. Now, I don’t have a problem with geeks, per se. I mean, I’d rather have that than a guy who’s sports-obsessed. But after the third or fourth date canceled because he got wrapped up in playing Warcrack — excuse me, Warcraft — I’d begun to seriously reconsider where our relationship was going. If we even had a relationship.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have much of an alternative, and he was so obsessively casual about the whole thing that he made it almost impossible for me to break up with him. Go two weeks without a phone call? No problem. Inquire innocently whether our relationship was “exclusive”? His only answer was a shrug and, “I don’t know — do you want it to be?”

  I think I answered
yes. But what immediately depressed me was that I didn’t have anyone to be non-exclusive with, even if I had told him I wanted to see other people. I almost signed up for an online dating service in a fit of pique, but I came to my senses after recalling some of my friends’ horror stories on that subject.

  “You should do what I did,” my friend Nina told me at lunch one day. We were roommates during college, and we still saw each other a good deal on the weekends. She’d moved back to Brentwood, where she was living in her parents’ guest house rent-free. It was a pretty cushy setup that allowed her to use her salary for important things, like shopping. Also, Nina’s father was a plastic surgeon. It wasn’t as if he needed her rent money to make his mortgage.

  And Nina, irony of ironies, sure as hell didn’t need any plastic surgery. She was part Irish, part African-American, part Japanese, and all gorgeous. I considered myself a moderately attractive person, but if I entered a room with Nina I might as well be invisible for all the attention I got. Despite this, I really did like her.

  “So what did you do?” I asked her, pushing a crouton off to one side of my plate. Damn those carbs anyway.

  “I went bi,” she replied blithely.

  I almost choked on a piece of arugula. “You what?”

  She shrugged. “Hey, it doubles the size of the playing field.”

  But — but — I stared at her for a few seconds, then asked, “So when did this momentous change take place? I mean, I don’t remember you being into anyone except guys during college.”

  “Oh, a few months ago.” Her green eyes, startling against their surrounding milk-and-coffee skin, laughed at me. “I met someone.”

  She met someone? I had to infer that someone was female, or there wouldn’t have been any reason for this sudden switch to the Dark Side. Feeling more than a little uncomfortable, I said, “So all that time we were roommates….” I let the words trail off, not knowing exactly what I had meant to say.