“I don’t need help.”
“Yes, you do.” Hubrie’s fingers flew over his screen. “All right, I have the personals site open. Tell me what you want written on the ad.”
Duke rubbed his temple to soothe his headache. He didn’t trust a random stranger to help with the sheer volume of his work.
But if he gave Hubrie the ad copy he wanted, the butler would go away and leave him alone.
“Fine,” Duke muttered. “Demon boss seeks assistant to help take a load.”
Hubrie’s eyebrows touched his hairline. “Oh?”
Duke ran the words through his mind, and backpedaled. “Off my shoulders, I mean. Help take a load off my shoulders.”
“Hmmm.” The butler smirked, his fingers tapping rapidly. Then he kept on typing for two full minutes, his tablet out of Duke’s sight.
Duke fought down the unease in his gut. “What are you adding to the ad?”
“Relevant information.” Hubrie paused, leaned back, and read what he had typed. Then he tapped a few more times and grinned. “There. Your ad has been released into the horny wild.”
“What?”
“Nothing!” The butler was suddenly all the way across Duke’s office, at the door. “Gotta go! See you later, have a great day. Bye!”
The door slammed, leaving a silence filled only by the whir of Duke’s computer.
Duke’s unease grew. He tried pulling up some personal ad sites, but he couldn’t find anything that sounded like his own.
He picked up his phone and called Hubrie.
“Yes?” Hubrie sang.
“Where did you post that ad?”
“Where lots of people will see it!”
“Then why haven’t I found it?”
The butler snickered. “Just leave this to me, Hell Master. You will be feeling very... unloaded... soon enough.”
Duke opened his mouth to protest.
Hubrie hung up, and the dead tone filled Duke’s ear.
“Fuck.”
2
THE AD
Nat rolled aroundon the apartment floor, pulling his shirt up his chubby belly. “I’m so hot!”
Next to him, ten-month-old Wanda licked the brown hair stuck to her sweaty face. Nat flapped a flattened cereal box at her to create a breeze.
Like he expected, Wanda giggled. She sprouted a bushy, striped tail too.
“There we go,” Nat said, grabbing an ice cube from the bowl between them. He touched it to her palm; she yanked her hand away and giggled. “At least you seem to like the ice cubes.”
Wanda smacked her hand into the plastic bowl, so the melting ice cubes bobbed in the water. Nat dipped a washcloth into the bowl and patted her down with it; she tried to eat the washcloth.
