Speak of the Devil Read Online Free PDF Page B

being, but I’m not all that altruistic by nature.
    I decided that instead of brooding on my inadequacies, I’d brood on what Adam had told me this afternoon about Reporter Barbie. Although I’d known I hadn’t seen the last of her, I’d sort of allowed myself to forget about her for a while. Out of sight, out of mind, you know? But now that she was back in the forefront…
    I was halfway to my car, which I’d parked by the curb a little more than a block from Adam’s house, when it occurred to me that if Barbie really was bent on investigating me, she might well be following me around, trying to dig up dirt. So instead of just getting in my car and driving away, I took a moment to regard my surroundings.
    When you grow up female in a big city like Philadelphia, you learn to always be aware of who’saround you. But you also learn to ignore people who don’t register on your threat radar. Sometimes when you see people walking down the street, it looks almost as if each one believes he or she is the only human being around.
    No one had tweaked my threat radar, but then, Barbie wouldn’t. Scanning the pedestrians who were within my line of sight, I searched for any sign of her. No dice. I almost convinced myself to just forget it, but my paranoia was in high gear, so I began examining the parked cars by the sides of the street.
    There were enough streetlights to more than illuminate the streets and sidewalks, but car roofs made great shadows, and if I hadn’t been looking so closely, I never would have seen her. She was nothing more than a patch of deeper darkness in the shadowed interior of a nondescript little sedan, and I might almost have missed her even in my careful sweep if the headlights of another car hadn’t momentarily shone on her face.
    Clenching my teeth, I strode toward the car. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do—after all, as far as I knew, she wasn’t doing anything illegal—but I was determined to get her off my back one way or another.
    It didn’t take her long to realize she’d been made, and I halfway expected her to start her car and zoom on out of there. Instead, she opened the door and stepped out to wait for me.
    I thought of her as “Barbie” because she was petite, blond, and curvy, and her sweetly pretty face still reminded me of some stereotypical vapid cheerleader. However, today she seemed to be going for the Cat-burglar Barbie look: tight black pants, a snug black T-shirt that clung in a way that would make guys’ tongues hang out, and a light black jacket. Her usuallyostentatious blond hair was pulled back into a pony-tail at the nape of her neck, the stray wisps held back from her face by a black velvet headband. All the better to hide in the shadows, I guess, though with her pale skin she probably needed camouflage makeup— or a ski mask—to stay truly hidden.
    I came to a stop in front of her, close enough to make the most of our disparate heights. Of course, this was a woman who’d been willing to go toe-to-toe with a demon, so I wasn’t surprised that she wasn’t intimidated. She was also probably armed—it was a little warm for that jacket tonight, unless she was wearing it to hide her shoulder holster.
    “You look like an extra from
Mission Impossible,”
I informed her, but instead of being insulted, she smiled and shrugged.
    “So it’s a bit of a clichéd outfit. But black works best for nighttime surveillance.”
    “I guess that means you’re not pretending to be a reporter anymore.”
    “I’m sure you’ve already shot that cover story full of holes, so I see no need to insult your intelligence by keeping it up.”
    “Considerate of you,” I said, then wondered what to say next. What did I hope to accomplish by confronting her? I didn’t know, and now I wished I’d thought it out beforehand.
    “For an exorcist, you seem to spend an awful lot of time in the company of demons,” she commented.
    I didn’t know what to say to that, so I decided