All the Lactaid in the world will not help you
if you eat a pint of ice cream all by yourself
There will be REPERCUSSIONS
And you will suffer those with me
so you better get up here
Ok ok I’m leaving don’t destroy the bathroom
Morgan stretched, her neck cracking. She hadn’t realized how badly aligned it was. No one else was left, not from Zabloom nor any of the other three startups that shared thisfloor of the tech incubator with them. Brad the CEO’s office was dark, but he’d been at some conference all week anyway.
She hadn’t seen Tim, her other half-boss. Officially, he was her actual boss and Kelly was only a dotted line, but that had changed three times in the four months she had been at Zabloom. No one could ever quite decide whether she was supposed to be part of Sales or Marketing for longer than a couple of weeks in a row. But since she was supposed to be part of Marketing this week, she wanted to make sure she got credit for the extra-long day. It wasn’t like she had buy-ready HR executives to offer, but at least she could demonstrate diligence. As CMO, Tim had a tiny glass-walled office like the other C-suiters, which he usually fled whenever possible to the slightly more private phone room tucked back near the fire exit. If she had to be on display like she was in a fishbowl, she probably would have fled, too.
So she’d wave goodnight to Tim and then go home for ice cream and terrible movies. It wasn’t an awful life, really. Not a good one, but it could be so much worse. She could still be at the call center she’d worked in during college. Or shoveling chupacabra shit. Or living in her parents’ basement, while either working in a call center or shoveling chupacabra shit. Making cold calls to cranky executives was still better than any of that.
She stopped by the shared kitchen to stick her mug in the dishwasher, which was noticeably empty despite the pile of abandoned dishes in the sink, as she tried to figure out why she felt so off today. It wasn’t only her mother’s text. Something felt wrong. And had been feeling increasingly so, she realized. Was it the fluorescent lights? Sometimes, when the bulb was about to go, there was kind of a buzzy soundthat made her teeth vibrate. No, the lights seemed fine. The back of her neck itched. Maybe she ate something? An allergy? No, it was more like the outside of her neck: the fine hairs were standing up along the nape.
She rubbed under her collar as she walked down the little hallway.
“I’m heading out,” she called. “Have a good night!”
“Excuse me?” called an unfamiliar voice. A sexy voice. A voice that promised things that Hayley from HR absolutely would disapprove of happening in the office.
She looked in and immediately wished that she had not.
Tim, Chief Marketing Officer of Zabloom and devoted fan of no-longer-cool jam bands, was face down on the desk. One hand had managed to claw his sweat-stained button-down away from his neck, although not enough to slow whatever had stopped his heart. His eyes bugged out, unblinking, from a slightly purple face. The poor guy still clutched his phone with his other hand.
The second occupant of the office stood in the middle of a circle of white powder. Could be flour or sugar or cocaine, but Morgan knew without tasting it that it was salt. Because she recognized the glyphs that had been drawn in Sharpie on the Post-It notes stuck to the carpet circling the ring. Not well enough to write them herself—you weren’t taught those until high school, and the high school she’d ended up at didn’t have Latin, let alone Enochian—but they were familiar enough from her father’s work. They were what brought the occupant of the circle here, while the circle itself was what kept him from deciding to stay.
Which was good, because standing inside the circle was a demon.
2
He looked at her, sulfuric yellow eyes gleaming. He wore a slim-cut charcoal suit, the first suit she’d seen outside the Financial District in years. In place of a smartwatch, he had a heavy silver bracelet set with a disc of what looked like obsidian. No tie; the first few buttons of his creamy shirt were pulled rakishly open to display the fact that the oil-slick purple of his skin went all the way down. He didn’t have hair; his head was covered in tiny scales and crowned with shiny black horns like a baby goat. The scales were the size of her thumbnail on the short crest that crowned his head but shrank in size as they approached his face, so that they were little more than glitter by the time they reached cheekbones that any model would sell their soul for.
Given the angrily lashing barbed tail and the scaly claws poking divots in the carpet, Morgan was pretty sure that that trade was on offer.
The demon opened his mouth. Morgan held up a hand. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to offer,” replied the demon. His voice was a hot fudge sundae licked off salty skin.
“Still not hearing it,” she said, edging into the room,careful to stay well away from the salt. It couldn’t have been an accident, as much as she wanted it to be.Oops, I just happened to trip and drop this salt in a perfect circle and just happened to doodle the exact squiggles to make these glyphs and just happened to gargle the throat-twisting sounds that summoned from an alternate layer of reality a being intent on trading infinite power for my immortal soul.She tried to keep one eye on the demon as she checked Tim’s non-existent pulse. She didn’t know much about medicine or dead bodies. His skin was still warm, which made the whole thing creepier. His eyes were open. In the movies, they always brushed one hand over a dead person’s face, leaving the eyelids closed, but she was pretty sure that the actor closed their eyes themselves when the hand passed over. She glanced up at the demon. He leaned forward, still aware of the circle, but weirdly invested in what she was doing. She gingerly poked one of Tim’s eyelids with a finger, half-expecting him to flinch away. It felt wrong to be poking your boss in the eye. The eyelid did drag down easily enough, but when she took her finger away, it sprang back open a crack, so it looked like he was half-winking at her. She forced down a hysterical giggle and did her best to shut the other eye. It also didn’t want to stay closed all the way, but it was better for him to be looking at the world through slitted dead eyes than boldly staring.
“That’s super gross,” the demon said. He was gawking like he wanted to look away but couldn’t stop himself from watching. “Do all humans do that?”
“Still not talking to you.” She slid the phone out from Tim’s hand—it was still open to the page of instructions. He must have delayed the lock screen so it wouldn’t go to sleep while he was drawing the circles.
Oh, Tim.She’d known the last quarter hadn’t gone well, but she hadn’t realized it was “sell your soul” bad.
“Whoa, dude, great make-up,” Vijay said from the door. “Did you watch a tutorial? Is it, like, a dry run for Halloween or something?”
Morgan’s head snapped up. Vijay’s eyes were bloodshot and he was swaying a little—he must have been up on the roof smoking again and come down the fire stair. Vijay tore his eyes away from the snake-skinned stranger and then noticed the body.
“Awwww, dude. Is he OK?” He moved toward the desk.
Morgan panicked. He was going to scuff the salt: the only thing that stopped the demon claiming them both. “Wait! Stop!”
