A/N: Hey everyone, so I posted about this on tumblr and decided to go through with it. For those of you who read my JackaLu week stories, you'll recognize the first half of this chapter from that. In essence, I needed a story for one of my classes this past semester, and fixed up a fanfic of mine (because I'm lazy). Needless to say, it's been revised like crazy and I know exactly where I want to take this… sort of. More like, I can now see all the places this can go.

So, a little bit of information about this. It's all over the place. We'll just call it an AU for time's sake. I've changed a couple of the relationships (familial and so on) because I'm too lazy to change it back from what I revised for class too much, and I think it'll give interesting dynamics to the story. Maybe.

Actually, it's more of a modern AU with hints of magic shit… I don't even know. Just know it's not the canon Fairy Tail universe! We'll see what I change when we get there.

Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy. This has been revised like crazy and I think it's a whole lot better than the JackaLu week one. (Also, I'll be putting a note in that Stripper chapter to direct people to this story instead, but I won't delete that chapter from the collection.)

Lucy frowned at her faux-marble counter littered with ingredients, double checking to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything. It was the first time in quite a while that she'd had the time to put into making a home-cooked meal. Since her younger brother, Natsu, was off doing god-only-knew what, she was dining alone and fully embracing her ability to cook in yoga pants and a sports bra.

And that was fine with her. In fact, it was nice to have a night to herself. She could eat whatever this weird recipe was that she'd gotten from her new cookbook and binge-watch movies. And not think about her miserable existence without that cheating cockstain of an ex-boyfriend, Dan. Or the fact that her twenty-year-old brother had needed to move into her apartment with only one bedroom to help pay the bills now that Dan was gone.

It was a genius plan for a night in.

The cookbook was mostly just garbled words on old worn pages bound in leather, but this… She was sure it was a recipe. It was organized like one, after all.

So, Lucy went about making her dinner. Everything seemed normal enough, and as she poured two whole cups of salt into the bowl she started to wonder what it would taste like. It called for a pound of calf liver, and while she'd only ever had it fried with onions and ketchup on it, she was feeling adventurous.

Besides, Dan had mentioned something about how she'd let herself go as a reason for his wandering dick syndrome, so Lucy decided to prove his smug self wrong. Mostly by eating healthy. Liver was healthy, right? Well, she thought so, at least, and that had to count for something.

It was while she added a pinch of gunpowder - and thanking the gods that Natsu had given her the adorable measuring cup set that actually had a pinch, so she didn't use too much - that Lucy began questioning what she was doing. Surely, gunpowder wasn't a normal ingredient. She wasn't even questioning why she had gunpowder in her cabinet. It was tucked in the back, and she could only assume that Natsu had put it there for some reason. He'd always had a bad habit of collecting odds and ends, and she'd resigned herself years ago to stop questioning the things he had in his nearly-a-meth-lab, kooky chemist trunk sitting just beneath her living room window. How her apartment hadn't blown up from his insanity was beyond her.

The batter in the bowl started to smoke, first a pale silver that shifted into a gunmetal grey. Lucy screamed and ran from the kitchen, upending the bowl as she went and knocking it to the tile floor.

The building rumbled and she was thrown to the floor in her living room as a loud boom echoed through her apartment. Thoughts of the damages she would have to repair before her landlady could skin her alive had Lucy running back to the kitchen, tears in her eyes from the thick smoke billowing through the doorway.

A pair of glowing, golden eyes cut through the smoke. The screeching of the smoke alarm dulled until she could only hear her pounding heart. Her breath halted when she was able to make out a tall, masculine figure slowly making his way toward her. She shivered as a low growl rippled across her body, feeling as though he was pressed right against her even with several feet between them.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" he snarled.

"Shit," she muttered.

"Who summoned me?"

"Summoned?" That didn't sound good.

He turned to look at the smoke-filled apartment around him, then back to Lucy and her blonde hair tied up into a sloppy bun. "It was you?"

"Well, uh… Maybe, I guess," she said. "I mean, I was kinda sorta… cooking?"

The smoke cleared as he came forward, standing within only an inch of her. Lucy's eyes widened while she looked up at him, instantly honing in on pointed teeth bared in a terrifying snarl. Not just the canines like the vampires in her favorite, albeit smutty, romance novels, but all of his teeth. His eyes didn't seem to glow now that he was so close. She wondered if the golden hair falling in gentle waves down to his bare, lightly tanned shoulders was naturally that color or a really good dye-job. But he was handsome, she realized, in that vicious, I'll rip off your skin in strips and make you watch me eat it, kind of way.

God, she needed serious mental help if something like being eviscerated was looking attractive to her.

Her foot stuttered over the floor as she tried to back away. Every step she took, he followed, until she was pressed against the wall farthest from her front door and his arms, fading from a pale grey at his elbows to a deadly onyx at his fingers, caged her in. The scrape of long black claws on her blue paisley wallpaper, a high-pitched creak just beside her head, sent her unease climbing even higher.

"Cooking, huh?" he hissed. He drew closer until she could feel his fiery breath feathering over her lips. It smelled kind of like cinnamon. "You sure about that?" Lucy nodded, unsure of what else to do. "Where'd you get my book, woman?"

"A bookstore," she whispered, afraid that if she spoke too loud those sharp teeth would really rip her skin off. "It was, um, in the health food section of some indie-hipster mom and pop place. I thought it was…"

"A cookbook." He raised a brow when she nodded again. "Are you always that fucking stupid?"

Lucy scowled and sent her knee soaring up between his legs, sending a breathy wheeze wisping past his lips. "I'm not stupid, asshole!" she screeched while he crumpled to the ground at her feet. She circled around him, making sure her back faced the door so she would have a clear route of escape. If there was one thing she couldn't abide, it was being called stupid. Natsu was the moron, not her. "I thought it was a recipe!"

It had been nestled between some Crossfit-Paleo All-You-Can-Eat-is-Air book that she was sure had been made from recycled newspaper and hippie spit and a Chocolate Lover's Cookbook. She'd taken one look at the leather binding and felt something deep in her gut churning and coiling while her hand had lifted of what felt like invisible, razored strings around her wrist. Once Lucy had grabbed the book, she couldn't put it down, and had simply thumbed through the pages until she found an actual recipe. She'd dog-eared the page and bought it, and two weeks later, here she was with some random guy pinning her to a wall.

She would have been better off with the hippie spit book.

"Where the hell did you learn to kick like that?" he grumbled, coughing as he sat up and holding an arm around his stomach. Why was he holding his stomach if she'd just kicked him in the crotch?

"Tai-chi," she lied. "I'm not a very relaxed person." That was entirely Dan's fault though. Damnit, she wasn't supposed to be thinking about him.

"Yeah," he said. "My nuts can see that."

"It wasn't enough if you're still talking," she muttered. "Why are you here?" More importantly, why wasn't she leaving? Granted, it was her apartment and he was the intruder, but a smart woman would have jumped at the chance to book it. Except when she looked at his eyes, saw the crinkle of a sneer lifting his lip, she realized there may as well have been boulders in her feet. She couldn't move away, couldn't get another step further. And that was just terrifying.

"You summoned me," he said, slumping against the wall.

"Well-"

"Luce, I didn't know you got a stripper!"

She blinked at the familiar sound of her brother's voice coming from the window off to her right, then slowly turned to see him climbing through the parted drapes. That same infectious grin that he'd had since childhood stretched across his face. Even though he was an adult, every time he smiled it was like she was looking at his eight-year-old self again. "What?"

"You've got a naked guy sitting on the floor," Natsu shrugged.

"Maybe he's a prostitute," Sting snickered as they made their way inside. "Your sister's a total perv, man."

"He's not a hooker!" she shouted, rounding on her brother's annoying best friend. Then she paused and looked back at the nameless man still sitting on the floor against the wall. "You're not, are you?"

"... No," the man said.

"See? Not a hooker. What are you doing here, anyway?"

Natsu made his way out of her kitchen with the leftover takeout from the day before that he'd left in her refrigerator. She still wasn't sure how he managed to move so quickly, but he'd been doing things like that for years. She was sure she'd just been looking at him at the window. "I smelled food," he said around a mouthful of cold chicken and lo mein. "And I live here."

"Meaning he knew that you would be cooking since he wasn't around," Sting sighed, already standing back by the window.

It wasn't her fault that Natsu ate as though there was an army of vikings living in his intestines, and she just didn't have the money to feed that on a regular basis. Besides, he acted like a teenager when it came to eating. He loved takeout food.

"Natsu, we're going to the bar in twenty minutes," Sting said, straddling the windowsill. "Why don't you just eat there?"

"Lucy's food is better."

"Get out, you damn leech!" Lucy shrieked. She wasn't even going to lecture them about using the door like a civilized human being this time. God, she hated when Natsu came through the window. There was a perfectly acceptable door in her apartment, and she knew for a fact that they knew it was there because they'd moved Natsu's things in through that damn thing. But she also knew they did it to get a rise out of her.

Instead, she grabbed Natsu's ear and dragged him back toward the window, pushing him out to the fire escape while his best friend laughed and jumped down the ladder.

"You definitely should've smothered him as a kid," the man still in her apartment said.

When she turned to face him, she realized that he was, in fact, naked. And that she'd pretty much forgotten he was there for a minute. How she'd missed the nudity was beyond her. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she'd been downright positive he was going to eat her when he'd arrived.

While she hardly spared his very bare genitals a second glance, she was drawn to the fact that he had matching golden fur extending from just above his knees down to his… Those are paws. They're not feet. Why hadn't Natsu mentioned the furry legs? Hadn't he seen them? She was having a relatively hard time not seeing them, now that she'd noticed the very inhuman appendages.

"Are you gonna stare at me all day, or tell me what you want?"

"Oh!" Lucy turned and grabbed the throw blanket she'd been planning on using while curling up on the couch, then tossed it to him. "Why are you naked?"

She wasn't really sure what he meant by what she wanted, but really, that was a burning question in her mind. And why Natsu and Sting hadn't freaked right the hell out over his furry legs and paws. And how he'd managed to get into her apartment in the first place. But she had priorities, and the reason for dangling man-beast bits getting a cool breeze in her line of sight was most definitely at the top of that list.

"... I was getting out of the shower." Well, his hair did look a little on the damp side.

"What are you, if you don't mind me asking?"

"I'm a fucking demon!" He stared at her with wide, disbelieving eyes as she nodded and came to sit down next to him, all of her previous fear completely nonexistent. "What the hell is wrong with you, lady?"

"Lots of things," she laughed. She had a demon sitting in her living room. Some small part of her was sure this wasn't supposed to be a pleasant experience, that she should be screaming in terror and ripping her hair out while begging him to spare her life.

For some reason, she couldn't find it in her to be scared though. Maybe she'd finally just gone right off the deep end, or maybe she was dreaming. That would explain a lot of the weirdness. Lucy completely ignored the fact that she couldn't remember actually going to sleep though.

"So, what's your name? I can't really call you Mr. Demon."

"Jackal."

She grinned then, extending her hand to him. "Lucy."

He stared at her hand for a moment, then jolted as her light, lilting laugh split the air. She grabbed his clawed hand and placed it in her own, being careful not to let the sharpened tips rip into her flesh. "Do you have any idea what I'm capable of?" he whispered.

"Aside from being naked and making me nearly shit myself? Not a clue." His hand felt nice though. There were no hellish fires lurking beneath his coarse, leathery skin. She couldn't feel millions of devoured souls skittering under his palm. For a demon, he was surprisingly calm. Not that she had much experience with demons in the first place, considering they weren't real. This was definitely a dream.

Jackal grinned, looking at her out of the corner of his eye. "You're funny."

"I'm not joking… I was five seconds away from dumping a load in my pants. Good thing you said what you did. I'm all clenched up, now." Lucy's smile widened when she heard a short bark of laughter from the demon whose hand she was still holding. "So, what now?"

He shrugged. "You summoned me. I'm pretty much stuck with you while you've got my book."

"Oh." She really wasn't sure what she could do with a demon. Maybe sending him after her cheating, shit-stain of an ex-boyfriend would be a good start, but Lucy was sure she should at least get to know who this man was first. "Wanna watch a movie?"

The way he stared at her in complete silence was relatively disturbing. He seemed to stop breathing entirely, to stop blinking. It was creepy as hell.

"Can I have some pants first?" he asked.

Jackal peered around the corner to make sure Lucy was still occupied in her bedroom, rummaging through her brother's clothes. He carefully tip-toed, with a blanket tied around his hips, to the recently cleaned kitchen and grabbed his book from the counter. He couldn't just leave, even though he really wanted to, and he was going to be stuck with her for quite some time because of his idiot dad's rules for book-bound demons.

And it was his job to make sure she understood the rules. Considering he hadn't had anyone actually summon him in nearly a century, Jackal knew he'd need to look through the book to get a refresher for himself. Then again, it wasn't his fault that his summoning usually ended up blowing people up. That was more of a bonus, in his mind.

He brushed the gunpowder off the binding, golden eyes narrowing at the sight of his name printed on the inside cover. Had this Lucy woman looked at it more closely, she would have known his name already. Had she actually taken the time to read anything in the book, like the first page, she would have known it was for summoning a demon.

This book will allow the wielder to summon a beast of Tartaros.

It literally said it. Right there. And even though Jackal wanted to believe she was just a moron, one of the perks of being bound to Lucy meant he could hear what she was thinking. He knew she was intelligent. Mostly. It was just the common sense that she lacked.

He sat back down on her grey corduroy couch and scoffed at the offending fold on his summoning page. Stupid humans and their disrespectful page-folding habits.

"Hey, so Natsu's pants are too small for you to… What are you doing?"

Jackal didn't bother to look at her, and instead stared at the summoning page. Just beneath the needed ingredients were the rest of the instructions. How the caster would need to pour gunpowder in a circle around the offered sacrifice - namely, the calf liver, salt, and garlic - then recite some stupid incantation that praised the demon to be summoned and asked for assistance.

"Tell me something," he said, frowning at the page. "What did you do when you summoned me?"

"I put the gunpowder in and ran when it started smoking."

His frown deepened. That shouldn't have happened. The incantation was crucial. Humans couldn't just summon a demon like himself without it. Jackal's gaze drifted toward Lucy to find her wearing a tank top, most likely to cover herself up a little more, and staring at him. She didn't look like anything other than a human though. He couldn't feel any magic coming from her, so she wasn't a fairy in hiding.

"Why?" she asked. "Did I do something wrong?"

"No," he said. "Just different." Had she said she put the gunpowder in the mixture? That was definitely different. Garlic was supposed to go in it and gunpowder went around it. Maybe that's why she'd lived. Because she couldn't read instructions.

"Lemme guess. I botched it and you're not supposed to have furry legs."

"No," he laughed. "No, my legs are supposed to be like this. It's not important." That was a lie though. This was really, really important. So painfully important that he was already dreading having to go talk to his father and ask how the hell she'd managed to summon him without an incantation or anything else. All because she couldn't read the damn instructions!

Because, contrary to popular belief in the underworld, Mard Geer - who the humans tended to call Satan - really was a dick. At least, he was to Jackal. Probably because he was the youngest of nine kids, and his general lack of circulation in the human realm with his book meant that he didn't bring in enough souls. Or because Mard Geer really only wanted eight kids, and Jackal was - as he'd been told, repeatedly, by the crusty bastard - an accident.

"Anyway," Jackal said, clearing his throat, "I have to show you how to use my book."

"Why?"

"Because you summoned me and I'm bound to you," he said. Jackal felt like he'd been saying that a lot lately. "Which means, until you're dead or you give up ownership of my book, you're stuck with me."

"That's kinda creepy."

Jackal shrugged. It wasn't his place to decide whether it was creepy or not. This was just how it went. "There's rules for what you can and can't do, or order me to do."

"Okay, like what?" He could hear that she was still operating under the assumption that she was dreaming. He already knew it was going to be hell trying to get her to believe this was real. Jackal flipped through a few pages and settled the book in his lap so she could see it as well, then pointed a clawed finger to the text.

"Some of the basics," he said. "You're the only one who can see me as a demon. Everyone else just sees a human. If I'm in a digital picture, I'll look human to even you. Regular pictures, like Polaroids, and anyone can see I'm a demon." He was more than thankful that no one took real pictures anymore. His brothers had gotten into so much trouble for being seen in pictures, and he'd heard time and again about the advancements in human technology that made their lives a whole lot easier.

"That explains Natsu thinking you were a stripper," she muttered.

"You can order me to kill pretty much anyone, including other demons, and especially those stupid asshole fairies."

"Fairies exist?" Lucy asked.

"Yes," he spat. "And no, they don't have wings. Not anymore. They traded them to get a growth spurt." And be human-sized instead of barely breaking three feet tall. "They're everywhere in populated cities."

"Guess it's good I live in Rhode Island, then," she said. His brow furrowed while he looked at her. "No big cities here. And from what I can tell, demons hate fairies. Or, you do. Them not being around will make my life easier."

Jackal nodded and looked back at the book. She was definitely picking it up, he had to hand it to her. And because she was just going along with things, this whole explanation was going to be easy. The last time he'd needed to do this, the man had been so hysterical he wouldn't stop screaming long enough for Jackal to get it all out. Thankfully, that guy took a musket to the face from his wife when she thought he'd gone insane, and Jackal had been able to slip away. He still hated the 19th century because of that.

"I have to protect you," he continued. "But only from dying. Unless you order me to help you otherwise, I most likely won't. So if you're getting mugged or raped or chased down some dark alley by a pack of vicious, rabies-infested hellhounds… I'll just watch until you say something. Or if your mugger, rapist, or the hellhounds are on the verge of killing you, then I'll step in."

"Dick."

He grinned and glanced at her. "I never said demons were the good guys."

"Aren't you supposed to want me dead?" Lucy asked. "I mean so you can eat my soul or something like that?"

"I guess so, but my dad's an asshole who likes to contradict himself."

"I swear to god, if you say you're the son of the devil…"

"I am."

Lucy sighed, the sound heavy as it drifted in the air. "Of course you are."

She still didn't believe him. Jackal knew she would soon. All he could hope was that she wouldn't go completely insane when she realized that this was her reality. "Anyway, you can see other demons as long as I'm bound to you. And humans that have demons bound to them can see that I'm a demon. If you start freaking out over seeing them, they'll realize you can see their demonic form, and most likely try to kill you."

"This really isn't reassuring, you know?"

"You're the one who summoned me," Jackal said. "If you don't like it, just give me back my book and I'll be on my way."

"But you already have your book," she said.

He lifted the book and looked her in the eye. "It still belongs to you. I can't steal it from you and just break the contract. You have to be willing to part with it. It's a whole verbal thing. Unless you're interested in that right now, don't worry about the specifics."

He listened intently as her mind whirred and she mulled over what he was telling her. There was a lot they would need to get through for her to really understand just what he was capable of, and the things she could do with him by her side. If she was smart about it, Lucy could turn things around and have the whole world under her control. Okay, that was a bit ambitious. Maybe just Rhode Island.

He waited though. Jackal wanted her to work it out for herself, to decide whether she really wanted to be bound to a demon. Hell, if she gave up the book right then, he couldn't do a thing about it. He wasn't going to tell her that he couldn't take her soul with him if she relinquished the book right away, because she hadn't sinned using his book yet. All she'd done was summon him, and if Lucy let it go, she wouldn't have to face any of the consequences of having a demon around.

Jackal really didn't want that. He wanted her soul. The pure white light sitting deep in her chest would be delicious to devour. And the longer she held onto his book, the better it would taste once he took it.

"What about… Well, what can you even do?" she finally asked. That was apparently a determining factor for her. What was he capable of and how could she even use his power? That was easy.

"There are two types of demons," Jackal said. "Ones that specialize in certain jobs and ones that have a specific talent. I'm the second kind." He wasn't going to tell her that it was usually only the literal spawns of Satan that had specialties, or that they were the only ones with books to be used for summoning. "All I have to do is touch something and mark it with a curse. After that, I can make it explode."

"... Is that why I needed gunpowder?"

"Maybe." Of course that was why she needed gunpowder. "I'd offer to show you, but I'm pretty sure you don't-"

"You're not blowing up my apartment!"

Jackal scowled and closed the book, then smacked her on the top of the head with it. Just like his father had done to him countless times over the last few hundred years. Luckily, what he'd done was a tap in comparison to the skull-splintering wallops Mard Geer gave him with a bible. The hypocritical ass.

'God, he's so immature! Who hits someone with a book?!'

With a heavy sigh, he opened the book again. He ignored her heavy glare while finding his place in the text once more. "Anyway, I can blow up pretty much anything."

"You're not gonna act like my butler or something, are you?"

Jackal snorted. "No. And once you give me the go-ahead and we finalize the contract, I'm out of here until you call for me." He paused, watching her head tilt with curiosity. "Just because I'm bound to you doesn't mean I have to live here. You call when you need me. Unless you order me to stay here with you, I'm heading home."

"But you said you couldn't leave until…"

"No, I said I was stuck with you," Jackal said. "Big difference." The sudden flash across her mind of some guy named Dan made him want to shudder. Great. Just what he needed. Some scorned woman who was still hung up on a guy, crying to him about how unfair life was. Then again, women like her tended to be a bit vindictive. And if he could convince her… "You know, I could kill him for you."

"What?" Lucy asked, shifting back in her seat.

"Dan." He paused while her mind quickly supplied the background information he needed. "Cheated on you, broke your heart, blah blah blah. I could kill him. You just tell me when and how you want it done. There's no way it'll get traced back to you, either."

"I don't want him dead!"

Jackal simply shrugged and looked back at his book. "Suit yourself."

He had to fight not to smile though, because even though Lucy said she didn't want Dan dead, she was thinking about it in pretty vivid detail. In his experience, humans tended to give in to those darker desires if they could get away with it. She hadn't a clue what he could really do, but if she decided to keep his book, she would find out soon enough.

No matter how much good there was in her, Lucy would use him to commit a sin. And as soon as she did, her soul was his for the taking.