head as if in thought. “Of course, we don’t always burn the damned souls. That’s just one method of torture. There’s also the ice box, the shredder, the spikes and presses, feeding time for the hellhounds, the acid bath, the David Hasselhoff music marathon—”
“All right, all right, got it!” I rubbed my face with both hands.
Behind me, the priest kept murmuring prayer after prayer, his voice breaking.
“Can you at least tone down your demonic impressiveness?” I asked quietly with a nod to the poor cleric at my back.
Or better yet... I turned around and touched the priest’s arm. He jumped and gaped at me, his face a mask of terror.
“Go,” I said softly.
There was nothing he could do to help me, and he didn’t need to stay in a veritable demon’s presence any longer than necessary. He’d already been traumatized enough.
“Go,” I repeated with more insistence.
The priest startled as if waking up from a trance. One more fearful look over my shoulder, and then he turned to run.
Or rather, tried to. He stopped mid-movement, frozen in place as if someone had pressed pause on his personal movie.
“Actually,” the demon’s dark voice came from behind me, “he can do the honors of being witness.”
I whirled around and glared at him. “You’re really into forcing people to do stuff for you, huh?”
He cut me a withering look. “You forced me into this contract. And we need a witness.”
“You can’t make a priest officiate this—” I gestured wildly between us “—for a demon. That’s cruel!”
“First of all, he doesn’t need to officiate. He just needs to witness our vows. Second—you’re pleading with a demon not to be cruel?”
Ugh.
“We need a witness,” the demon went on, “and he’s conveniently here right now. He’ll stand witness for our wedding, end of discussion.”
Delayed emotional reactions are a weird thing. I’d been arguing with this jerkface the entire time, but it was this instance of the word wedding that triggered the reality of what was happening to break over me like a tidal wave. I swayed under the impact, grasped the church door to steady myself.
Wedding.
To a demon.
To live in Hell.
Fuck me.
I’d never wanted to get married—well, not entirely true. Pre-thirteen-year-old me had held hopes for a romantic, grand wedding to the man of my dreams, a notion I had later come to despise as naive and foolhardy. Marriage was nothing but a sham built on lies and betrayal.
It had been eleven years, but the wound still burned as raw as the day I’d sat on those stairs, listening to my mother’s screams, my dad’s increasingly frustrated shouts…watching him drive off, eventually, to live with his other family.
So yeah, the concept of marriage? Something I’d sneered at for the past decade, so sure I’d never make that mistake.
Turned out I’d already made it when I was thirteen and got this whole covenant thing rolling.
Why, oh why couldn’t I have simply played with a standard-issue ouija board, like any respectable teen?
But no, instead I’d dabbled in the kind of real dark shit that made me end up stuck between a rock and a hard place. No matter what I did, I’d end up in Hell. Either as a bride to a cranky demon, or as a damned soul. And if Hell was anything like the mythological descriptions of it... I shuddered.
“Priest,” the demon called out, snapping his fingers.
The miserable cleric moved closer, stiffly and with halting steps, as if—forced to walk against his will.
I felt sick to my stomach.
“Don’t do this to him,” I bit out.
The demon ignored me, instructing the priest how to witness our union.
“Please find someone else.” There, I’d even used the pretty P word.
It was like he didn’t even hear me. I might as well have been talking to a bush.
Well, if this was a taste of the rest of our marriage, it got me fuming already. If there was one thing to which I responded with irrational pettiness, it was being ignored.
“You’re acting like this is a done deal,” I said loudly and crossed my arms.
The demon paused in verbally wrangling the priest into submission and turned to me. “Don’t be silly.” His tone was so condescending that heat rolled through my body in a searing wave of indignation. “The choice is clear. Pretending to still waver is laughable at best. We both know you don’t want to suffer the consequences of breaking the covenant.”
I pursed my lips. “Oh, I don’t know. Seems to me breaking the contract would result in consequences for