Page 1 of Hexes From Exes

Chapter One

Five men stood in a living room, all prepared to summon a demon to curse their mutual ex-girlfriend.

Chad stood in the center of the room, the undisputed leader of the group of exes. He wasn’t the tallest nor the most handsome, but something about the way he held himself kept people from questioning him. At first, he butted heads with some of the other exes - namely Diego and Fred - but after a few beers the differences were settled. Chad just had to flex his accommodating communication style, a training he’d been forced to go through because of work. Apparently, the way he spoke to his subordinates put them on edge. It made them feel stupid, like they couldn’t do anything right. Chad was perplexed - he spoke to these people that way because they were stupid, and they really couldn’t do anything right. The classes at least helped him to phrase things better, so he didn’t get in as much trouble with HR. It was a moot point; he was the face of his company (some crypto wallet company called KoinSafe). They couldn’t just get rid of him.

Chad was going to lead the ritual; they’d decided on him mostly because he was the one who found the ritual to begin with. It seemed a little sheisty to Diego if he was honest. Diego wasn’t sure how a dude from the nicest part of Scottsdale, Arizona was somehow able to get a ritual to summon a revenge demon, but he wasn’t going to question it. Plus, Diego wanted to be as hands off as he could while still contributing to the ritual. He was okay with cutting his palm, maybe giving some semen, possibly a chant or two…but that’s where it ended. If they had to sacrifice something, he was out. He made that clear, and Chad assured him that nothing that sacrificial was going to happen.

“Apparently summoning demons is a totally normal thing to do,” Chad reassured them. That was last Sunday after the Cardinals game (they lost), where they were finalizing the details of the plan. It’d been a series of smaller meetings that started at a bar in Old Town Scottsdale when Monty and Chad met by chance. Chad was hoping to find some young college girl to take home, and Monty was drinking away his sorrows after a breakup. Monty had no interest in meeting women, and Chad was striking out (he didn’t look like he was in college anymore, and it was really killing his game), and the two somehow fell into conversation.

Monty was a lawyer at one of the biggest malpractice firms in Phoenix. Chad recognized him from the billboards that plastered his face all along the I-10 and I-17.

“Hey, you’re Monty the Malpractice Guy!” Chad said, plopping down in a seat at the emptying bar next to him. Monty grimaced. “I don’t give free advice,” he told Chad dismissively. Thankfully Chad was drunk enough to find that comment funny and not insulting, as it was something that would typically set him off.

“Nah man, I’m not here for advice, just recognized you,” Chad said, motioning the bartender to refill both of their drinks. He gave the bartender a wink, she returned it with a strained smile. “Thanks, sweetheart,” he said, intentionally placing his hand over hers as he took his beer.

“Thanks for the drink,” Monty said.

They chatted in the tangential way that men do. It didn’t take Monty long to spill the reason for his melancholy, he was recovering from a breakup. The woman in question was a smoke show, he said. She had long black hair, curves in all the right places, and she was smart and beautiful. Chad thought it sounded like his ex, a woman who stomped all over his heart. They both thought their dates were going well, the sex was great…but it ended the same way for both of them.

“She said I wasn’t mature enough for her,” Chad scoffed, rolling his eyes. “We went out to a nice dinner, she paid - which honestly she should have, if the bitch was going to break up with me. I just thought it was something special, you know? A woman that could keep up with me at last.”

Monty, who was now three beers deeper than when Chad sat down, nearly sloshed his beer as he agreed animatedly. “Same! I thought it was going great, I was even going to tell my parents about her…but she broke up with me one morning over breakfast. She woke up and made it for me - my favorite, French Toast with cinnamon butter - and said that it wasn’t working. She said I was too hung up on my last relationship and obviously didn’t trust her. Honestly, I was blindsided.”

Chad shook his head, “Damn, these women! We give them too much power!” They toasted to this, and it wasn’t long until the phones came out and social media was pulled up. That’s how they found out that both Chad and Monty were victims of the same woman - Stephanie Porter, founder and CEO of Eternal Beauty Systems.

Diego and Fred knew each other through networking conferences. Diego was in pharmaceutical sales, and Fred sold medical equipment. They travelled in the same circles and were aware of Stephanie, mostly because she was one of the few women in the field. Usually it was a sausage fest, and the conferences and meetings were little more than a frat party excuse for the guys to all get drunk. Stephanie was one of a handful of women who came to these events as a leader. Sure, there were women peppered through other various industries, but they weren’t leaders. They couldn’t own companies; they needed to step away to have kids and stuff.

They’d attended a conference a year prior. They knew each other from various other conferences, they were both from the east coast and felt displaced in the Phoenix heat. They both loved hockey - a sport that Arizona didn’t seem to appreciate since Gretzky left - and bonded immediately over drinks. Fred, it turned out, had dated Stephanie casually a few months prior. He played it off like it wasn’t too serious, but Diego could tell the man still held a flame for the woman. Fred gave Diego the okay to try to pursue her, and Diego did.

It was fun until it wasn’t - as in, Diego thought it was going well, but was shocked when she broke up with him after three months. If he was being honest, he couldn’t recall why they broke up, but he had the distinct impression that it wasn’t mutual. He remembered storming out of her condo and walking two miles to cool his head before calling a rideshare to get home. It never sat well with him, that a woman would break up with him.

Tom…well, Tom was the odd man out.

While the rest of the crew that currently sat in Chad’s living room were all in sales or entrepreneurs of some sort, Tom was a bit of a slog. He was the nebulous sort of guy who had multiple jobs at once and none of them paid well or were particularly permanent. Right now, he was working security for a strip club by night and was a bud tender at a dispensary twice a week by day. He wasn’t big on the details of why Stephanie broke up with him, honestly spending a few days with him plotting the ritual was enough for them to make educated guesses. They were more interested in what she saw in him, to be honest.

It was an odd group of men who found each other mostly by chance, realizing that they’d all been jilted by the same woman. It was purely coincidence that they met up at Chad’s Paradise Valley home the first time, the effect of schedules that just happened to line up and a mutual interest in fantasy sports. Arizona had just legalized online gambling, and it was through a mutual agreement that they all met.

After a few drinks, the topic turned to Stephanie.

After a few more drinks, the topic devolved to “What can we do about her?”

“Do about her?” asked Monty, his eyebrow raised. “You’re sounding like serial killers,” he said with an uneasy laugh.

“Whoa whoa whoa!” Chad interrupted, his arms waving wildly. “No one said anything about killing her. It’s more of like…what if…what if she felt what we did? Like she didn’t even seem upset about our breakup. I don’t feel like I ever really got to know her, but she knew everything about me.”

“Same,” Fred said with a sigh, his eyes turned up to the ceiling as he took a sip of his beer.

“Honestly, yeah, she wasn’t really upset about ours either,” Tom agreed. None of the men made a comment about that.

“What are you suggesting then? An online smear campaign?” Monty asked.

Chad shook his head. “Nah, that’s so undergrad. What was that website when we were in college? The Gross Grotto? It was the one where you could anonymously send in shit about people with their picture?”

“Oh, that fucking site,” groaned Diego, shaking his head. “We would refresh it for hours after every weekend. I was always sure I’d end up on it.”

“I did end up on it,” Chad said proudly. “Three times!”

The laughter died down and the conversation fizzled a little, until Tom spoke up. “I mean, what would we even do - curse her? Hex her like those witches on TV?”