Page 67 of What Happens at Nightfall

Chapter Nineteen

Belfagor hadn’t meant to unleash the frogs.

It had just been so long since he had possessed a human. The last time had been Venice. Carnival. 1756. He’d felt he’d deserved a vacation after his efforts in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Venice really was everything everyone said it was. The feasting. The fornication. Sliding a dagger home and listening to a body plop into the canal . . . Good times.

But that had been a long time ago. Belfagor tried to make his host body stand up and succeeded only in making it hover three feet off the floor.

The male human goggled at him. “Is she . . . floating?”

“Good Lord,” said the female human. Lord, yes, thought Belfagor, annoyed. Good, no. “It’s Zuul.”

“My name isn’t Zuul!” Belfagor snapped, offended. Too late he remembered he was supposed to be female. He lifted his voice to a mincing falsetto. “It’s, um, human person.”

“Adam . . .” The female person gripped the male person’s arm. “That’s not Ingrid.”

Ingrid! That was it. Why did humans have such unpronounceable names? If she’d been called something normal like Adramalech or Ashtaroth, he would have remembered it.

The female person darted forward, grabbing a salt shaker, and agitating it in Belfagor’s direction, making his human host sneeze uncontrollably, unleashing two more toads and one very confused tadpole.

“Begone!” the female person cried, unscrewing the top of the shaker and flinging a whole handful of the stuff at him.

Belfagor wished they’d stop salting him. He wasn’t a chicken.

Mmm, chicken. It had been a long time since anyone had sacrificed a chicken to him. It had been a long time since anyone had sacrificed anything to him. The injustice of it stung, and so did the salt that demented woman persisted in flinging at him. It wasn’t even good salt, just that fine-grained cheap stuff.

No respect, that was the problem. They couldn’t even stump up for the fancy sea salt to try to expel him.

“You,” he growled, forgetting to do his human woman voice.

It didn’t matter. That ship had sailed. It hadn’t so much sailed as been wrecked on rocks and pulled under by the tides. Ah, that was something else he missed. Wrecking ships and watching the humans flail in the water, pleading for mercy as the current sucked them under. So many memories. He was getting sentimental in his old age, that was the problem. A hundred and fifty years in a glass globe could do that to you. It had blunted his instincts, slowed his reactions.

And who was to blame for that? That Vanderwilt woman—and her Jacinta.

Oh yes. He remembered now.

They might all look alike to him, these humans, but he remembered this one. She was the one who had blown the glass around him. She was the one responsible for his 150 years of solitude.

“You,” he growled again, and this time he backed it up with some flames, just to show he was serious.

Raising Ingrid’s hands—really, so awkward—he called up a cloud of stinging bees, sending them spiraling around the Jacinta.

“Jess!” shouted the man. “Cover your face and don’t move!”

There was a clicking noise as the man turned a dial on the stove, thrusting a catalog into the flame. He advanced slowly on the swarm, holding out the smoking roll of paper.

“Go to sleep, little bees . . . Just rest your fuzzy heads,” the man sang.

A bee, probably annoyed by the music, stung Belfagor’s host body. Another drawback of possession that he’d forgotten. Fine. Belfagor barked a word and the bees turned to ash, leaving the man holding a smoking paper and a very foolish expression on his face.

But he’d distracted Belfagor long enough that Belfagor had forgotten about the woman. It was the woman who was the real danger.

She raised her hands and a rainbow shone between her palms. Suddenly the air, rather than smelling deliciously of fear and frogs, reeked of honeysuckle and roses; it was as loathsomely sweet as the promise of a summer afternoon after a storm.

“Ingrid!” called the woman. “Ingrid, if you’re in there, fight him!”

Belfagor felt it like an ache in his stomach, his host’s suppressed consciousness elbowing him in the gut.

“You there, simmer down,” he snapped, but no. The host was bombarding him with her petty human memories. It was enough to give a demon a headache. “Stop that.”