AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter One
Three things went through my mind when the demon shoved me off the roof of the Hotel Beverly:
1) Oh fuck.
2) I hope this is the side with the pool.
3) Goddammit, my hair.
That last one was a real kicker if the answer to the second one was yes. Did demons not respect how hard it was to tame curly hair when it got wet?
No, no they didn’t. Because demons were assholes who only cared about virgin sacrifices and eating people’s faces off. So rude.
The fall was fifteen floors, but it went by in a flash, the lights of the Los Angeles night skimming by me at an unpleasantly high velocity. When I hit the surface of the water, I might as well have been slamming into a concrete wall.
It hurt.
But I was a lot less than I would’ve been if I’d hit the patio.
Thankfully the Hotel Beverly’s pool was known for being one of the deepest in town, and I was still fresh off my most recent healing treatment from work. Otherwise I’d probably be a pool-pancake right now.
I swam to the edge and dragged myself from the churning water, my jacket and jeans weighing roughly a thousand pounds each. A few people milling around at the hotel’s outdoor bar gaped at me, but not a single one of them offered to help.
One of them was kindly filming the entire thing for Snapchat, or whatever the kids were using these days.
I grabbed the phone of a young man standing a few feet from me, his fist to his lips as he stifled a chuckle at my expense, possibly because with my hair this wet I looked like a drowned poodle.
“Hey,” he protested as I plucked the expensive-looking device from his hand.
“I’m going to need to confiscate this.” I then chucked it into the pool, where it made a fun pop noise before sinking to the bottom.
“What the hell?”
“Official government business, no time to explain.” I elbowed past him and through the doors, back into the hotel, leaving a trail of soggy footprints in my wake while I hefted my water-logged bulk to the elevator. Inside, a bellhop with a luggage cart stood next to a sixty-something-year-old woman with a terrible dye job carrying a very tiny beige dog and a very large black Louis Vuitton tote.
She seemed much more concerned about me getting water on her tote than her dog.
“You are soaking wet,” she announced haughtily.
“Yeah, well, you’re too old to wear that hair color convincingly, but you don’t see me casting judgments no one asked for.”
She let out a little gasp, and I punched the button for the roof. I wasn’t all that good at making friends in the first place, and was especially bad at it when I looked like an extra from a poorly conceived Whitesnake music video.
Mostly I was just annoyed that I’d need to buy yet another leather jacket.
This wasn’t even the first time I’d ruined one in a pool.
Perhaps it was time I changed my aesthetic to something slightly more absorbent.
The bellhop and the woman—who hadn’t stopped looking at her blonde hair in the reflection of the mirrored elevator doors—got off at the penthouse floor. I mentally gave myself points for not giving them a cheeky farewell wave.
The elevator continued its way to the employee access floor, where I then bounded up a flight of rickety metal stairs and burst out onto the gravel-strewn roof.
“You know, it’s pretty rude to hurl a lady off a roof like that,” I declared.
The demon blinked at me, then growled, “It’s pretty rude for you not to have died.”
Oh no, hellspawn had learned to use comeback lines. Soon I wouldn’t be the wittiest girl in the West anymore.
I picked up my sword, which had been dropped during my initial kerfuffle with the monster, and which he’d been too stupid not to either throw away or grab for himself, and leveled the blade at him. He laughed at me.
Admittedly, this confrontation hadn’t gone my way the first time around, so I could see why he was so dismissive of my second attempt, but all the same it would have been swell if the bad guys would stop doing the laughing right to my face.
A lady’s ego can only get so bruised.
“If you’d like another flying lesson, I’d be happy to oblige,” the demon said, still chuckling.
“Nah. I’m here to give the lesson this time.”
“And what will you teach me, little one?”
“How to go to Hell.”
Not my best line. And the demon agreed because he rolled his goat eyes at me. “I’ve been there.”
No demons were nice to look at, but this was one particularly ugly son of a bitch. He had three eyes and only slits for a nose, as if one had been there once but cut off. His mouth was full of crocodile teeth, and he walked on goat legs but had the tail of a lizard. Why was it demons always looked like someone had taken various pieces of different ugly animals and jumbled them all together in a weird sort of puzzle?
It could be jarring to see them outside of a possessed body. Which was, by the by, precisely why he was here. The Hotel Beverly was the place to see and be seen by Hollywood’s young elite, and this disgusting mofo was hoping to climb inside one of them and use them to live a debaucherous life of sin, while harvesting all the souls he could worm away from other idiot wannabe stars.
The price of fame was only steep if you cared about the afterlife.
Most of the folks on the patio downstairs cared more about Instagram likes and Teen Choice Awards than their souls.
What a time to be alive.
