“I’m getting tired of talking to a table top.” His feathers rustled. The air filled with pressure. “Come out from under there or I’ll drag you out.” The pressure increased. “You won’t like that,” he added in a low voice.
His energy, I realized. The thing suffusing the air and raising the tiny hairs on my nape was his power.
I looked around me, panic beating under my skin. A way out. There had to be a way out. But the space under the table offered no escape route. Two sides were open to the room, where the nutcase demon loomed. The other two sides backed up against the wall and the fridge. I was trapped in the tiny kitchen of my newly rented, “efficiency-sized” one-bedroom apartment.
“Can we, like, talk about this?” I ventured, my stomach in knots. “I mean, I know I somehow summoned you and we ended up with this farce of a deal, but—I was a teenager! A minor. I couldn’t even legally buy a car, let alone enter any other contract. Shouldn’t that apply to your kind of deals too? Given that I was a child, this pact should be—”
An invisible force grabbed hold of me and pulled me out from under the table so abruptly that I didn’t even manage to scream. I slid over the carpet as if dragged by a rope, coming to a halt right next to the demon. My head was level with his boots.
“—null and void,” I finished numbly, my gaze traveling up his long legs, over his lean hips, all the way up to that face of angelic masculine beauty.
He really shouldn’t be that stunning as a demon. Or maybe he should? I wasn’t so naive to believe that external beauty equalled inherent goodness, or the opposite. And in a way, it made perfect sense that tempters of humankind would dazzle with aesthetics.
“Age of majority for contracts is a human concept,” the unfairly attractive hell spirit in question said, his expression that of someone inspecting dog shit on their shoes. “The covenant between us is legal and binding.”
I decided I’d had enough of being prostrate on the floor at his feet, and scrambled to a stand, putting a few steps between us. There was no way I could face him at eye level—he towered over me at easily six foot five, and the unceasing pressure of his energy in the air was a constant reminder that he outmatched my puny human strength with whatever demon powers he had. But I wasn’t going to crawl before him.
“I don’t want to marry you,” I blurted out.
“Likewise.” He bared his teeth at me.
“Well—” I sputtered and waved my hands in the air. “Then why are you even here? I don’t want to do this, you don’t want to do this, so let’s just not do this!”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Okay, is there a magic word or phrase I need to say?” I reached out with my hand and intoned in my best Gandalf impression, “I release you from this spell.”
The demon stared at me.
Not a Lord of the Rings fan, then.
“The covenant cannot be revoked. Both parties must fulfill its terms, or suffer the consequences.”
“What? What kind of ridiculous contract is this if I can’t even cancel it?”
“You tell me,” he shot back, fire licking over the obsidian of his wings. “You’re the one who drafted it.”
“I didn’t draft it, I just read from an old book in a mock séance for shits and giggles with my best friend. I didn’t even understand half of it! It was a whole lot of mumbo jumbo that sounded cool and occult and seemed like a fun thing to do on a Friday night.”
His left eye twitched.
“Maybe there’s—”
“I don’t,” he interrupted with a snarl, “have all night. You will get what you need and follow me to Hell.”
He moved closer, and I held up one hand.
“Wait. Just...hold on for a second. Why do I need to come with you? I mean, if this…covenant says we must marry, we could just, like, live separately? I’ll be here on Earth, you’ll be in Hell, we’ll be married in name only, and everyone will be happy!”
His eyes widened, and he pressed a hand to his cheek. “That would be brilliant!”
“Right?” I couldn’t help the smile stealing onto my face. “I knew there must be a way ar—”
“If the covenant didn’t explicitly say we had to live together,” he cut me off, losing the pretense of surprised excitement with every