Meg nearly hung up. She'd counted nineteen rings, and she didn't see any reason to keep trying—but of course that was the moment that the voice on the other end said, "Satco, General Projects Division."
"May I speak to Glopsmear, please."
"Speaking."
"My name is Meg Lerner. I'm a lawyer calling on behalf of a consortium that has heard about your Devil's Point project, and may be interested in investing."
From the other end of the phone, silence. Then, "Devil's Point? But that project is dead."
"You can't get the land. I know. But I think I may have a solution."
"A solution would be worth a lot to me right now." The voice on the other end held an edge of excitement.
"Then when can we meet?"
"Where are you?"
"In Raleigh."
"I mean right now."
"Oh." Meg paused, then told her the name of the restaurant.
"Give me five minutes."
Click.
Meg hurried back to the table. Puck was just sliding into the seat when she got there.
"What did she say?"
Meg smiled at him. "That she'll be here in five minutes. She sounded excited."
Puck's face went slack and looked frightened for a moment. Then he said, "You haven't seen excitement until you've seen what she would do if she ran into me. I'm going to go outside and sleep in the back of your car, Dan. Get me when you're through meeting."
"The door's locked."
"As if that would be a problem."
He reached over and shook Meg's hand. His palm was tremendously hot, his scaly skin not entirely unpleasant to the touch, though certainly odd. "It's been a pleasure. I hope we'll meet again."
"Of course we will," she said to his retreating back.
She turned to Dan, who didn't seem surprised by the devil's hasty retreat.
"He's had a lot of problems with his own kind as well as ours," Dan said. He looked like he intended to go into detail, but he didn't get the chance.
A curling cloud of sulphurous yellow smoke erupted from the center of the room, in between several tables of diners. As people began to shriek and stumble backward, a solid form developed in the center of the smoke cloud. Meg's first impressions were of tremendously long hair that swirled in a cloud of its own, of powerful shoulders, muscled thighs, and enormous, jutting breasts. Her second impression, as the smoke cleared, was of a face that would stop clocks and cause birth defects.
Into the stunned silence, Meg cleared her throat. "Over here," she said, and all the customers went from staring at the female devil to staring at her. She shifted in her seat, wishing that Glopsmear had chosen a less dramatic entrance.
The devil wore a nicely cut gray summer wool business suit with a high hemline and an elegantly draped red blouse and carried a slim, expensive briefcase. Meg felt a moment of envy over that briefcase, but it passed quickly. The envy over those breasts lasted longer. Even at her age, Meg found very little wonder in the Wonder Bra, and still remembered with some anguish her junior high days when the only thing that came between her and her Playtex Cross-Your-Heart was a pair of rolled sweatsocks. Such feelings of inferiority faded, but never entirely died.
On the other hand, she thought with some gratitude, she could look at her face in the mirror in the morning without screaming.
Glopsmear settled into the seat Puck had so recently occupied and sniffed. "I didn't realize they served the Hellspawn here," she said. She didn't have any scales. She looked, in fact, almost human, except for her pale, pale blue eyes, which had those square pupils, and for her mouth, which was twice as wide as any human mouth Meg had ever seen. The mouth seemed to split her face in two, and when she smiled, Meg got a look at teeth that would have sent an orthodontist screaming. Oddly, she reminded Meg of Puck, but not in any way that Meg could put a finger on.
Meg shrugged. "Policies change."
"Indeed they do." The devil opened her briefcase and from it extracted a blue folder about an inch thick and several reduced-size copies of blueprints. "And if we could just get this project off the ground . . ."
Meg and Dan listened in amazement as Glopsmear took them over the planned Devil's Point Amusement Park. Meg studied die list of planned attractions, and realized that nowhere else in the world was there anything similar to even one of them. Devil's Point would be unique, educational, fascinating, fun . . . and it could be the first real draw to turn around North Carolina's ailing economy.
When Glopsmear got to the planned construction details, Meg and Dan looked at each other. "They're going to have to hire human construction companies to do this," Dan whispered.
"And humans who run hotels in the area are going to rack up." Meg considered the influx of international scholars who were going to want to use the library—every book ever written in any language; the paleontologists who would move into the prehistoric areas; the historians who would be able to talk with Julius Caesar and Hannibal and Hammurabi and Queen Elizabeth I in person. And the everyday people who would go there to play. To have fun. To get the bodies they'd always dreamed of.
I might do that, Meg thought I could. Real perfect breasts. Not implants.
She said, "Once we acquire the land and construction starts, you folks might want to consider opening up the company and offering stock."
The devil said, "The problem is the land." She pulled out a plat map of part of Fender County. "This is the piece of ground we want. It's roughly ten miles by ten miles square, and we need all of it, of course. You can see that we've planned to utilize every square inch of the space. There are a few people who live there—we think they'd be amenable to selling. Our big problem comes from the owners of this stretch of land from here—" One talon dragged along a shaded area. "—to here. This is owned by people who aren't interesting in selling at any price."
"Then they're the only people in the state who aren't trying to get rid of property right now. Who are they?"
"You've heard of Forever Wilderness, Inc. ?"
Meg felt her stomach knot. "The private company that buys up little parcels of land and acts like it's saving the universe. I sent them a thirty-dollar donation once and within the year received over two hundred dollars worth of mailings soliciting more money. They have great memes, but their corporate raison d'etre is simply the propagation of their organization."
"So you have met."
Dan raised an eyebrow. "I donate to them."
Meg said, "I'll put garlic around your neck and give you a silver cross to ward them off. They're money vampires."
The devil laughed. "However, they really don't ever give up a piece of ground they've acquired, and they certainly weren't interested in selling to us, no matter how much our project might help the economy."
"Maybe we can work out a barter deal with them. Other land in the state is certainly up for grabs. How much are you willing to pay for the land if my consortium can get it for you?"
"You'll like this," the devil said. "Money is no object. We just want the land."
"Do you have the money now?"
"Our corporate war chest is very, very deep. The answer is yes. Whatever you have to pay to get the land, pay it, and we'll make the deal extremely profitable for you."
Meg reached out a hand and shook with Glopsmear. "When we're ready to do the deal, I'll let you know and we can work out the details then." She looked at the Devil's Point plans. "Would you mind if I took those with me to show to my investors? I think we're much more likely to get total cooperation from the group if they can see what a marvelous project this is."
Glopsmear smiled. Unfortunate, really. It looked like she'd tried to swallow a dinner plate and the plate had gotten stuck halfway down. "Take whatever you need. You know where to reach me."
"You'll be hearing from me soon."
The devil disappeared in another cloud of sulphur, and Meg twisted around in her seat and hugged Dan. "This could save North Carolina," she said.
Dan nodded. "It could. And if we could tie it in with the Great Devil Makeover as one example of the benefits our state will reap from taking advantage of the presence of the Hellraised, North Carolinians should be willing to support it."
"A lot of our success in doing that will depend on how well Puck does," Meg said.
Dan nodded, his expression becoming thoughtful. "If Puck can walk away from Hell and evil, that will make all the difference in the world."