Hell Inc. Read online

  "What do I do with it?" he asked me. Wow, demons sure had limited sexual educations. "What can this little square do to protect us?" I snatched the package from him, determined not to allow him to ruin the mood. I ripped open the foil and pulled out the condom. He took it from me, and I wiped the lubricant off my fingers. I waited for him to put it on, but he just sat there. "Remind me of its purpose and what I am to do with it?" I sighed.

  "It keeps me from getting pregnant and - " I thought about how to phrase this without offending him again. "And other people from getting diseases from each other." Levie frowned.

  "I am afraid I am not familiar with its correct use." He handed it back to me. "Why don't you show me?" he breathed, his voice dropping an octave. I gave my bedroom door a glance, but it was mostly closed. The last thing I wanted was the sphinx coming in here in the middle of this. It did seem to mind its manners though, and I figured it wouldn't be a problem.

  I turned back to Levie, who was waiting patiently, and took a deep breath.

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Enjoyed This?

  More Books By

  About the Author

  C.M. Stunich

  Sarian Royal

  Hell Inc.

  Copyright © C.M. Stunich

  All rights reserved. Formated in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  For information address Sarian Royal Indie Publishing, 1863 Pioneer Pkwy. E Ste. 203, Springfield, OR 97477-3907.

  www.sarianroyal.com

  ISBN-10: 1938623096 (eBook)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-938623-12-7 (eBook)

  Cover art and design © Amanda Carroll and Sarian Royal

  Romance Fatal Serif font © Juan Casco

  Where Stars Shine the Brightest font © Brittney Murphy

  Optimus Princeps font © Manfred Klein

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, businesses, or locales is coincidental and is not intended by the author.

  to Cookie

  It's never easy to deal with supernatural creatures, especially when they've got the IQ of a doormat. And the clerk behind the counter wasn't your typical teenage drop out. Nope. This one was a special one. He glared at me with his one eye (which just happened to be lazy and seemed to be staring at the ridiculously bright fluorescent lights above my head instead of at my drowsy face) while I questioned him as to the whereabouts of a very specific item. I was looking for black candles. Spooky, huh? But that's what the newspaper ad had specified and so, that's what I was going to get.

  “Um,” the clerk, who I suspected was probably a Cyclops, mumbled under his garlic scented breath. It was so bad that I actually had to take a step away from him, press my spine against a display of cheap romance novels, and choke back a sob. His breath was so terrible, in fact, that I thought I saw a puff of green float out past his thin lips and join the CFC gasses in destroying the ozone layer. “I think we've got some Glade Flameless Candles in the clearance aisle. They're eggplant purple, but they look black.” I tried not to scowl. The Cyclops didn't know what I needed them for. I thanked him politely and wandered off. Served me right for trying to go to Target for dark arts supplies.

  I found the aisle my halitosis challenged friend had been talking about and stared at the little white boxes with their red clearance stickers. Yeah, I thought sourly, feeling defeated before I'd even begun. That's what the Devil wants, candles without flames. In eggplant. Fantastic. I scooped several of the boxes into my basket anyway and tried to ignore the pixies that were swooping and giggling and pulling my mussy hair. If I swatted at them, if I paid them the tiniest bit of attention, then they would do worse. Had done worse. Focus, attention, belief, it was what made them real. When a girl and her mother sauntered into the aisle, tossing their identical peroxide manes and glaring at my ripped jeans and my faded Shrek T-shirt, they walked right through them.

  The pixies giggled and darted towards their shopping basket, shedding sticky glitter dust all over the white linoleum as they heaved a packet of pens out, twiggy arms straining with the effort, and dropped them on the floor. The mother picked them up absently, hardly noticing what she was doing. I sighed. How nice it would be to live so ignorantly. To not know that anything other than humans walked this world. I squinted my gaze at the shelf and tried not to kick something. It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair.

  But this was why I was doing this. Following the directions in this stupid ad. I picked at my pants pocket until I found the crumbled square of newsprint. As I reread it, I couldn't help but have terrible flashbacks to Brendan Fraser and Bedazzled. But he'd been stupid. He hadn't been clear with his wishes. I would be. I'd rattle 'em off like the best of bureaucrats. The key was to be specific. Very, very specific. I mouthed the words aloud as I walked, swinging my basket and trying to stay positive.

  “WANTED: Souls. Single adults only. We are a professional organization looking for talented persons of marriageable age to enter into a trade agreement. Willing to offer three wishes in exchange for a signed contract. Please contact us at our office by arranging three black candles into a semi-circle in front of a mirror. Anoint with blood. Recite address. Hell Incorporated, 666 Gladiola Lane. This solicitation posted by the Devil. No sales inquiries. Offer ends 08/16.”

  Okay, so it sounded shady and well, just plain bizarre, but I was getting desperate. Two years out of high school had left me with a crappy apartment and a crappier job. I had no friends (except for Erin, but I didn't even really like her), my family was too busy to ever come and see me (and I never went to see them either, I know, I know), and I had absolutely no romantic prospects of which to speak. Well, there was this guy that worked at our local museum, William T. Smidden's Palace of History, that was pretty smoking hot, but I knew I didn't stand a chance. He always had this group of people swarming around like he was the queen bee, buzzing and nodding and kissing his ass. He was young with sandy hair and a strong jaw and pale eyes that shimmered like the aquamarine jewel on my pinky finger. I raised my hand to my lips and gave the ring a light kiss, pretending for just a moment that it was that man's mouth, confident and strong.

  I was so entranced in my thoughts that I forgot about the pixie dust and ended up slipping, rather comically, my legs flying out from under me, worn rubber soles of my shoes parallel with the ceiling for just a moment before I ended up slamming into the floor so hard that I was seeing stars. I knew it was bad because the stars weren't just spots of light; they were yellow and smiling and singing the theme song to My Little Pony.

  The Cyclops I had spoken with earlier raced towards me, red vest flapping, as he pounded over to me and knelt quickly, waving a hand in front of my face and asking a bunch of stupid questions that I wouldn't have known the answer to even if I hadn't just given myself a concussion.

&
nbsp; I waved him away but ended up with the store manager and several rubber necking customers surrounding me, jabbering away, and making my head spin while the pixies laughed and sprinkled more of their sparkling crap over my face and arms. I'd be visible from space for the next week. I groaned and sat up while the manager sweated and mumbled things about lawsuits. I rubbed my head and pointed at my basket, just wanting to get the heck out of there.

  “I won't sue you,” I said, pointing at the candles and trying not to drool. “But can I have these for free?” The manager licked his lips and nodded. This is too easy, my brain tried to convince me. Ask for more. “And do you happen to have any chicken blood?”

  A half an hour later, I was strolling out the automatic doors of the Super Target and mouthing the lyrics to some pop song that I only actually knew half the words to. They hadn't had any chicken blood, but they had given me several containers of chicken hearts. There seemed to be quite a bit of bloody residue sloshing about in the bottom of the Styrofoam containers, so I decided that would count. It would have to. It was getting late, and today was the sixteenth, the last day for me to try the spell.

  I trudged up the rickety, cement steps to my apartment and tried to ignore the permanent smell of moth balls and dog urine that seemed to permeate the dreary hallway. My neighbor, Gene, a lady of questionable age with a sneer as sharp as cheddar and a smell to match, kicked open her door and proceeded to glare at me as I fumbled around with my keys. She always did that. Opened her door and stared at me. I think on some deep level that she recognized that there was something different about me. Sometimes people did. Though they never seemed to be able to get what that was. If only I felt confident enough in my own sanity to share the simple fact that I could see things that they didn't. I sighed and managed to get into the eight hundred square foot shit hole before Gene began shouting. She did that, too, sometimes. But that was only because she was crazy. She shouted at everyone: the super, the PG&E guy, the mail lady. That act wasn't just reserved for me.

  I slammed the door behind me, locked it, handle, dead bolt, chain, always in that order, and headed immediately for my bedroom. If I was going to meet the Devil, I was going to do it in style.

  I found a slinky, skin tight dress as red as a hooker's lipstick, and since I'd bought it used at Goodwill, probably something that had actually been worn by a hooker, and paired that with some black pumps and a quick slash of eyeliner. I grinned at myself in the wavy mirror that hung crookedly on the back of my bedroom door. I was as hot as a book cover bimbo. Perfect. I fluffed my black bob, punctuated by neon streaks of pumpkin-bright orange, courtesy of Punky Colour, and sashayed into the bathroom. I was in a better mood than the day I'd bought my Rabbit Habit, though not by much.

  The candles, once I'd taken them out of eight, stiff, plastic layers of protection and about a dozen twist ties, looked absolutely ridiculous arranged around the edge of the porcelain sink in my bathroom. They flickered weakly, the cheap lights inside dimming and brightening in a pathetic imitation of a true candle. I frowned at them as I opened the plastic top to the chicken hearts. They smelled gamey and a little bit like iron, leaving a heavy, metallic burn in the back of my throat.

  “God,” I choked as I dipped two fingers into the cold, watery bird blood. My spine bucked involuntarily as I rubbed the runny ooze down the side of one candle, and then the next, and the next. Let's just say it didn't get any easier or any less disgusting.

  After I was finished, I tossed the unused hearts into the bathroom garbage can and scraped anything resembling so much as a fingerprint off of my skin in an attempt at cleansing myself. Once I had decided that liquid soap, a squirt of shampoo, and half a travel sized bottle of Purell would just about do it, I was ready to begin.

  I flicked the lights off and grabbed the newspaper scrap off its temporary home on the back of the toilet. I squinted at the words which were incredibly difficult to read in the flickering light and took a deep breath.

  “Hell Incorporated,” I began, trying to pitch my voice low so that it came out as eery and mysterious as possible. “666 Gladiola Lane.” I set the newspaper down on the edge of the sink next to one of the plastic eggplant monstrosities and waited. And waited. And waited.

  Nothing happened.

  “Goddamn it,” I screeched at myself, fighting back tears and gripping the sides of the mirror with a frenzied fervor. “Why do I do this to myself?”

  I had a tendency to get really, really involved in things that most people could tell weren't going to work out for the best. It was one of my special talents. I punched the mirror once, in a juvenile fight of rage, cracking the glass and cutting my hand open along with it. Tiny droplets of red dripped into the sink and swirled down the drain, turning the residual water a pinkish color and staining the edges of the white porcelain.

  “Ah, hell,” I cursed, unaware of the swirling black vortex beneath my feet. “I'm going to need stitches.”

  And then I was falling down a hole, screaming like a B-list actress in a horror movie, until I found myself landing face first onto some terribly itchy, navy carpeting. I pushed myself up quickly, tugging down my dress in the back in an attempt to cover my ass, before taking a look around.

  My exploration ended before it even got started because the very first thing I saw was the demon.

  And he was pissed.

  “Have you ever considered yourself to be lacking in propriety?” asked the demon at the front desk; orange eyes glared at me over wire rimmed spectacles. “I said, how may I help you?” He was drumming his long, red fingernails on the polished mahogany of his desktop and clutching a book in the other hand. I had the feeling that that was at least the third time he'd asked me that very same question. I took a deep breath and blew a puff of hot air out and up in an utterly worthless attempt at getting the hair away from my eyes.

  “Well, can’t you see I’m about to have a panic attack here?” I retorted weakly and wiped the sweat from my brow. The demon shrugged and turned his fiery gaze back to his book. I studied him carefully for a moment. He didn't seem as if he were about to pounce on me. He was situated quite comfortably on one of those ridiculous exercise balls in a horrifyingly bright shade of fuchsia. His wings, which lined his back in two pairs of three, spread out behind him like black shadows, creeping across the white walls from one corner of the room to the other. I continued to stare at him until I was absolutely, one hundred percent certain that I was safe, at least for the moment, and let my gaze sweep the room. Okay, so I was wholly and utterly responsible for bringing myself to this place, wherever the hell (was this really Hell or just a place named after it?) it was, but it couldn't hurt to at least check the room out.

  It was a normal enough office with its row of plastic chairs, outdated magazines, and an excessive array of indoor ficus trees. The one thing that did stand out to me however was a single row of portraits that bordered the beige wall above a small bookcase. I took a step closer and peered at the bright photos tucked inside the gilded frames. They were all snapshots of people being tortured: the iron maiden, the rack, jury duty. I shivered and not because I was cold. Well, I guess that’s what I should have expected to find in the Devil’s waiting room. That and a room temperature that was easily around a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. I fanned myself and cleared my throat, hoping to catch the secretary's attention.

  The demon sighed and set down the novel he was reading. The cover caught my attention immediately – sweaty man chests never really get tiresome to look at. Red alert, I thought, chuckling stupidly to myself. Romance novel! Then my mouth opened, and I started speaking before I could stop myself. “Even demons like erotica, huh?” The demon’s pretty little mouth twisted into a grimace, and his eyes flicked over me once in utter distaste.

  “Humans today have the most incongruous of manners. What is it that you want, human? I’m on my break, and if you’d be so kind as to hurry yourself along so I can finish reading my erotica – ” He rolled the word across his tongue
as if it were toxic, and the corner of his mouth twitched in disgust. “I would be most – ” He paused again, and the next word was more than dripping with disdain. “Grateful.” He may as well have slapped me in the face and said, “Fuck you.” I swallowed hard and reigned in my temper. Arguing with a demon, even a secretary demon, was probably a bad idea.

  “I answered the newspaper ad,” I said instead. It sounded stupid, even to me, but how else could I explain how I had ended up there? However, this startling revelation did little to change the demon’s general attitude of disinterest towards me.

  “I see and how does that pertain to me?” he asked rudely, picking up his book again as if he’d given me all the help that he intended to. Which is to say, none. I clenched my fists and tried to count to ten. I stopped at six since it wasn’t helping anyway, and I was starting to feel like I was going to pass out from the excessive heat. Stupid fucking newspaper ad.

  “You work for him, don’t you?” I asked, irritated but unwilling to engage him in witty repartee. His eyes lifted up from the page for a brief second and met mine before he decided the print was more interesting.

  “Who?” he asked, this time with a touch of amusement in his voice. The damn demon was stringing me along, and he knew it.

  “The Devil,” I said angrily. Now I was getting pissed. “You’re his secretary, aren’t you?”

  In a flash of momentum that I could barely follow, the demon slammed the romance novel onto the desk, cracking the dark polished wood and sending the exercise ball rolling into the wall behind him. His eyes were literally glowing with rage, and smoke was rising from where his hands were pressed into the desktop. The demon’s next words were stilted and indignant.

  “I ... am ... not ... a ... secretary,” he all but snarled at me. “I am an administrative assistant.”

  I blinked slowly at him, my anger and irritation disappearing in my shock at his outburst.