Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 147649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 147649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
She holds the photo out for me to see and I sigh too. Because even though the hallway gods have dressed us up in these ridiculous clothes and turned us human, we are not human in the pictures and we are wearing our usual stuff. Me, shirtless and muscular. Pie in her nemesis outfit, the scarlet-leather bustier pushing her breasts up nearly to her neck. Her horns are dotted with illuminated fireflies and mine are glowing lava orange.
And the pics?
I take the strip from her hand and study them, one at a time.
Fuckin’ adorable. All five of them.
She takes it back, then rips the paper in half.
“What did you do that for?”
She hands the bottom one to me. “I dunno. I just don’t think we should keep our only pictures all in the same place. You keep this half and I’ll keep the other. Just in case.”
I raise an eyebrow at her, ready to ask her what ‘just in case’ means. But she just smiles at me and slips her half of the photo strip into her bosom.
“You do realize you’ve ripped the third picture in half? And that was the sexiest one.”
“If we ever want to look at it, all we have to do is put it back together.”
I smile, kinda loving the whole romantic aspect of what she just did. And then I slip my half of the photo strip into my jacket pocket, feeling pretty good about things. Until I glance up and realize all the teenagers are still looking at us.
I find the Roth kid and sneer at him. “Is there a problem?”
“Yeah.” He steps away from his friends. “Who the fuck are you?” He’s not just talking to me because his eyes dart from me, to Pie, and then back to me. “And what are you doing at our prom?”
Pie steps in front of me and puts up a hand. “We’re just passing through. We were just leaving. Come on, Pell.”
“Pell?” the Roth kid says. And as my name comes out of his mouth, his eyes go very narrow.
“Come on, Pell.” Pie is tugging me now. “Let’s just go.”
She pulls me towards the huge double doors on the far side of the ballroom. We’re weaving our way through the crowd—everyone has stopped dancing and they just stand there on the dancefloor, watching us—when the brightly-colored strobe lights go out and the whole place goes dark.
Some of the girls scream. Some people laugh.
But everyone goes still. Including Pie and me. She and I stop in the middle of the dance floor, only halfway to our exit.
And then the lights come on again, but just one. And it’s centered over us.
And in that same moment, a new song starts playing.
‘Ball and Chain.’
“Ut-oh,” Pie murmurs. “This isn’t good.”
This is not good for many reasons. One of which is that this song won’t be released for another eight years. But the other, more pressing matter is, of course, the person it’s connected to.
Another light comes on, this time up on the DJ stage. And sure enough, there he is.
The devil.
“Welcome to Firefly Nights. Leaving so soon?”
The whole crowd of teenagers begins to murmur. But then, a voice. The Roth kid. “Uncle Eros!” He’s pushing his way through the crowd, but after a few steps, bodies simply part for him like he’s Moses in front of the Red Sea. “They crashed our prom!”
Suddenly, everyone is taking exception to the fact that Pie and I have stumbled into the hallway memory of their dance. They blurt out insults and threats, pressing forward towards us.
I take Pie’s hand and squeeze it. “Don’t panic. We’re outta here.”
“Oh, not before I have a little chat with your woman, Pell,” the devil says. When he says my name, it feels like the room narrows, and shrinks, and there is suddenly just a tunnel of light between him and I and no one and nothing else exists anymore. “Or should I say, my woman?”
There is a tingling in my body that registers as attraction. The eros in him. It works even on a monster like me.
But I’ve been dealing with eros for thousands of years now. I understand the feeling and I have developed ways to fight it. Ironically, the most effective way to deal with an eros is to think about the one that came before. Make the memory of an attraction compete with the emergence of a new one.
So I think of my other caretakers. I cycle through them, concentrating on how they made me feel the first time we met. Stewart, Jonas, Michael, Ignacious, Antonius, Luther, Milo, Odo.
Then Grant.
The devil grunts, sensing his lack of power over me. Frustrated, maybe. But then he turns his attention to Pie. And this is when I realize that she’s leaning forward, like she wants to be closer to the devil and she’s trying to wriggle her hand out from mine.