Page 75 of Grave Humor

“Should I just grow coffee in our back yard?” The devil glared at the decaying ruins of the house. “Fine. I’ll take care of it. Spots, my darling. I wish to count them.”

“If you want to count spots, you need to earn them. Shoo. I get to play with a weed whacker, and I can’t do that with you in the way.”

The devil spat a few curses at his wife, who waved him off until he teleported away. “He’s so high maintenance.”

That he was.

Blue fire engulfed the house, although no heat washed over us as I expected. I watched with interest as the flames brightened, crackled, and died away, leaving a rather large hole in the ground. Not even the foundation remained, not that there had been much of a foundation anyway. Blue flames belched from a section of the front yard, marking where the septic tank had once been.

The devil reappeared. “You needed a new septic system anyway. You’ll thank me later.”

“I’m thanking you now. Thank you, Lucy.”

“Spots, Anwen. I need my spots.”

“Go calm the locals, and I’ll ask your wife really nicely to relent and allow some spot counting.” Then, as I could be as much of an asshole as his wife when I wanted, I stepped on my toes and patted his head. “You’ll be okay, Mr. Devil.”

“You’re evil,” the devil replied before he disappeared again.

“I think he likes me,” I said, waving my hand in front of my face in an effort to clear the air of the brimstone stench.

“He likes my spots, and he’s just using you to get access to them,” Darlene replied.

“We’ll probably survive. Shall we go teach the back yard a lesson?”

“Absolutely.”

Seventeen

I will bring severe injury to any who try to take a piece of mine.

Darlene liked my weed whacker, and judging from her enthusiastic destruction of every rogue plant to cross her path, she needed more than coffee to get her through the rest of the day. “Hell must be tough. I don’t think those plants are going to bother anyone ever again.”

“It has its moments. It’s been busy lately.”

“I can’t even imagine how hell could be busy, what hell being busy entails, and how that results in you venting through aggressive weeding of my back yard.”

“He asked the asshole to come over.”

“The asshole?” I asked, glancing at Eoghan.

“Not that asshole.”

“Hey,” Eoghan complained. “Why am I an asshole? I haven’t done anything right this moment to earn such a thing. I am very deliberate when I wish to be a most arrogant asshole.”

Nice. He’d been working on his sense of humor. “It’s accumulative.”

“Since when?”

“I decided that right now.” I grinned at him. “And you were truly an arrogant asshole when we first met.”

“There’s a good reason for that,” he reminded me.

Darlene dove for the next section of weeds to be leveled, and I removed the slaughtered weeds to clear space for the blanket and picnic basket. “While true, you about scared a few years off my life.”

“I still won our wager,” he replied.

“If you had spots, I’d say ban him from counting them,” Darlene said, treating the weed whacker like a scythe. “Withholding spots is an excellent tactic. I’m sure you can come up with something. Perhaps freckles?”