Puck looked better when he came out of the bathroom. He smelled better, too. Dan studied him, wondering why the devil seemed so much more presentable. His wiry hair, fluffed out a little, made his horns look smaller. His teeth didn't seem so sharp. His coppery scales seemed both more attractive and less obvious. A shower and a change of clothing couldn't have done all of that.
Janna was smiling. "Puck, I can't believe it's you."
"I feel . . . better," he said. "This is a very kind thing you're doing for me. It's been a long time since I felt better," he added, sotto voce.
Janna glanced at Dan, her eyebrows raised. Dan said, "Well, you'll feel even better after a meal."
The three of them sat at the table. Janna showed Puck the knife, forks and spoons, and took a moment to show him how he needed to hold each.
Then she brought out the food. Puck's brightened demeanor vanished in an instant. "What's all this?"
"Stuffed tomatoes, eggplant parmesan, three-bean salad, and carrot sticks," Janna said. "I thought I'd keep it simple."
The devil stared at the food in dismay. "Don't you have anything that bleeds when you cut it?"
"Meat?"
"Well, turnips don't bleed."
"Ugh! No!" Janna wrinkled her nose. "Didn't Dan tell you I'm a vegetarian?"
The devil gave Dan a cold look. "He forgot to mention that."
"Well, I am. And if I cook, I cook vegetarian for everybody."
"If you'd cooked a vegetarian, I wouldn't be complaining," Puck said.
Dan covered his mouth with a hand. "No, Puck. Funny joke, but not here."
Puck leaned over and whispered, "Who was joking?"
This isn't going to work, Dan thought. He motioned for Puck to sit down, then joined him. He leaned over and whispered in Puck's ear, "This is the food you get. You don't have to like it. Just eat it."
"Did I forget to mention to you that I'm a pure carnivore?" Puck whispered back. "I eat this vegetable slop and it's going to go straight through me and come out the other end looking exactly the same as it does now."
Dan stared at him. The devil shrugged.
"What about cheeses?"
"I can tolerate those, but I much prefer raw meat. The fresher the better."
Dan closed his eyes. It had to figure, didn't it? He told Puck, "She doesn't have any meat. Eat the cheese off of the eggplant parmesan and don't worry about the rest. We'll get something you'll like better on the way home."
Janna instructed the devil on the proper use of napkins (It's what you just used your sleeve for) and silverware (Don't stab, Puck; I assure you that the cheese is quite dead).
Dan and Janna started a conversation—how their workdays went, what sort of things they anticipated for the evening. Puck tried, gamely, to join in. The results were awful.
"I used to have a game I liked to play," he said, when Janna said she really would love to play a set of tennis with Dan.
"Really?" She gave him a smile, the one with the raised eyebrows that Dan always saw as her polite "I'm listening" smile. Puck had quit even pretending to eat. He'd been sitting quietly staring at his plate.
"Yeah," he said. "In Hell, I used to be on chute duty with a couple of other guys and we always had this game. New damnedsouls come in with their Evilness Index stamped on their heads. You know: four fifty-three or seven twenty . . . like that. Some of them come in ready to be devils or demons—you know, pretty high on the food chain—while some are never going to be anything but imps or leccubi or gargoyles. So the other demons and I—this was before I made devil—we'd agree on a number each day, something between two hundred and a thousand; those are the numbers on the Evilness Index that will end you up in Hell—and then we'd go through the new souls and the one that was closest to the number we picked, we'd misfile. This one guy, he'd come in as a first-level devil—his index was about eight hundred." Puck started laughing. "It was the funniest damned thing. He would have been our boss, but we made him into a gargoyle." He was sputtering and thumping his hands on the table by that time. "And gargoyles are gargoyles forever! They can't advance!" Puck suddenly realized neither Dan nor Janna was laughing, and his own laughter died. "See," he said, "it was a practical joke. It was funny. He was all set to be this powerful guy in Hell, and now he's stuck forever being a gargoyle . . ."
Dan kept staring at him, unable to think of anything to say.
"What?" Puck's voice rose defensively. "Are you trying to tell me you don't think that was funny?"
Dan and Janna exchanged glances, and Janna finally answered. "I think you'd probably be better off, Puck, if you didn't tell any more work-related stories until you get a job other people can relate to."
"Oh." He looked down at his plate again. "I see. Your stupid story about an actor saying his lines wrong fifty times in a row was funny, and his stupid story about the caller who couldn't get the joke right and kept forgetting the ending was funny, but my story, which really happened, wasn't funny."
Dan shook his head. "I think you might want to avoid humor until you have a better feel for it."
Puck looked at him coldly. "Yeah. I'll keep that in mind." He gulped the contents of his glass, then looked at Janna. "You mind if I get myself something else to drink?"
"Not at all." Janna pointed to the closed kitchen door. "Right in there. Help yourself to whatever you want."
Dan could tell Janna felt guilty about not being able to laugh at Puck's story. When Puck left the room, she turned to him and sighed. "I think he wants to fit in, Dan, but if he tells stories like that at dinner, no one is going to want to have anything to do with him. He'll never be accepted."
"I know."
A loud crash—followed by a high-pitched yip—erupted from the kitchen.
Janna shot to her feet so fast her chair fell backwards. She ran into the kitchen with Dan half a step behind her.
He froze just inside the door. "Oh, no."
Puck stood in front of the open refrigerator, his neck bulging. One hind leg and a short, ratlike tail hung out of his mouth. As Dan watched in horror, the devil swallowed convulsively and the Chihuahua's hindquarters slipped down his throat like a rat down a snake's gullet.
"He bit me, I bit him," the devil said.