He nodded, arranging the salt, pepper, sugars, and condiments in a neat row.
I thought about our bill and did the math in my head. She was getting about a five-dollar tip. Something told me her troubles began with money. I dug a ten-dollar bill from the savings I kept in my pocketbook and placed it on top of Kaidan’s twenty.
“You know you can’t buy happiness,” he said to me. He was so devilishly handsome that I shivered and cleared my throat. I looked back at our waitress, whose guardian angel seemed to be embracing her.
“Are the guardian angels always with them?” I asked, still watching it.
“Yup. They’re with their humans when they visit the loo... even when they’re having sex.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “You just had to go there.”
“You asked. And don’t worry. They’re way too pure and obedient to be voyeurs.”
It felt disrespectful, talking about the angels like that. I tried to think of another question.
“So the demons who visit people are in spirit form?”
“That’s right. Good thing this is a long trip. I have a lot to teach you.”
He stood, so I followed, just as our waitress came over. She eyed the two bills on the table.
“I’ll get your change,” she said.
“No, it’s yours,” Kaidan purred. He looked at her too long and her colors went from the pale green of gratitude to a rush of red.
“Yes, thank you again!” I said, louder than I’d meant to. “Have a great day!”
I nudged Kaidan’s ankle with my foot and he moved. We walked out into a beautiful Shawnee, Oklahoma, morning with our feet crunching loose pebbles in the pavement.
“This is going to be a long trip if you give girls the bedroom eyes every time we stop.” I tried to keep my tone light.
“Bedroom eyes?” he asked. We were climbing up into his car now. He sat in the driver’s seat and turned toward me. His hair flopped over his forehead, curling up at the ends against his brows. There was no roundness to his face—it was all squared-off edges. But it was those blue eyes that did it for me.
“As if you don’t know what you’re doing,” I said.
“I’m working.”
Hmph. Well.
“That poor girl has had a bad enough day without you filling her head with ideas, too.” I pulled on my seat belt with more than the necessary force and he started the car.
“I think she’s perfectly capable of coming up with ideas on her own. One might think you’re jealous, talking like that, but I can see you’re not. It’s uncanny. You’re actually concerned for her?”
“Why is that so hard to believe?”
“You don’t even know her,” he pointed out.
“It is possible to feel compassion for strangers.”
“She’s gotten herself pregnant out of wedlock,” he said. “She made her own choice.”
“We don’t know her circumstances.”
He followed the signs back onto I-40 west, and I could sense the argument was over.
“Why did you say I’m unwilling to see the demons?” I asked.
“I’d venture to say you’ve not opened yourself to evil. You have to be willing to really see it and accept it for what it is.”
“I don’t want to be open to evil. I don’t even like to watch the news. I know it’s out there, but the details hurt too much—feeling all of those people’s suffering.”
He gave me a quizzical glance. “What do you mean, ‘feeling their suffering’?”
“I’m not always good at blocking their emotions, especially if it’s a big group of people with a lot of dark emotion. I try to push it away, but sometimes it still seeps in, and it hurts.”
“You mean you actually feel the emotions they emit? Not just see it?”
“Yeah,” I said, “don’t you?”
“No! I can only see their colors. Feeling them must be an attribute from your mother.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say to that.
“Wait,” he said, the threat of a smile on his face. “Does that mean you feel lustful every time somebody near you feels it?”
“No, pervo. It’s not like that—it’s more like an unsatisfied longing for something. It’s uncomfortable.”
“Hmm. Too bad. Well, no offense,” he said, “but you’ll need to toughen up a bit. It would benefit you to see demons and know what they’re up to.”
He was right. I knew I would have to deal with it, but right now I was focused on getting information.
“What exactly do the demon spirits do?” I asked.
“They whisper not-so-sweet nothings into human ears.” He drove with one hand. The other hand twirled a pen back and forth between his fingers without much attention to it.
“What do you mean?”
“You know the little voice in your head?” he asked. “The one humans like to call their ‘conscience’?” I nodded. “It’s actually the messages people are receiving from their guardian angels. You see, the demon spirits whisper thoughts into a person’s mind, and the demon thoughts battle it out with the human’s own feelings, along with the messages their guardian angels are trying to instill. The old cliché about a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is not far off. A demon might whisper to a girl that she’s unattractive and unworthy of love. Then he’s gone. His job is done. He moves on to the next victim. The girl’s angel then whispers that she is beautiful and she is worthy, blah, blah, blah. Which do you think she’ll choose to believe?”