Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 99935 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99935 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
“Fucking disgusting piece of maggoty shit! I’d punch that nasty face in but it’d probably pop like a pus-filled balloon!”
Almost romantic. But even so, I wasn’t about to let their unpleasantness get to me.
I wasn’t a little kid anymore. What did petty, juvenile insults matter when life was heaping real problems on your head?
Taking a look around, I saw red eyes on top of red eyes. Everyone was a demon, and nearly all of them were holding something I’d never expected to see in hell—cellphones. With as many people were sneering at me, there were just as much kicking back with their feet on the table, messing about with their phones. But I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. If a someone could invent phones in their human life, why wouldn’t they invent it in their afterlife?
I have to wonder what else hell and earth have in common? Besides bullies.
Steeling myself, I raised my chin, stepped fully inside, and shut the door behind me. “Good morning, gentlemen,” I said to raised brows and growing frowns. “I hope you had a good night to go with a great day. I’m looking forward to getting to know you all—”
Something came whizzing at me out of the corner of my eye.
I yelped, shooting back as a plate went sailing through the spot my head had just been in. If that had made contact, it definitely would’ve busted open one of my warts—and my skull.
“What the hell are you rambling about, freak!” shouted the same angry fellow. He stepped out from the line, bringing me eye to eye with an eight-foot-tall behemoth. “Are you mocking me?”
“No,” I cried. “I—”
“He’s definitely making fun of you, man,” someone called, snickering away. “You’re getting dogged out by a walking wart. Pathetic.”
The elephant demon snarled, his red eyes flashing dark with hate.
I likened him to an elephant because he had loose, saggy gray skin; huge, leaf-shaped ears; and two lethal, ivory tusks protruding from his mouth.
But that’s where the similarities ended. He didn’t have a long trunk, kind eyes, or a gentle nature. The demon before me was nothing but muscle on muscle, girth on girth, and anger on hatred. He punched his fists together and sparks—real blinding sparks—shot off his colliding knuckles.
“I’ll teach you to fuck with me.” Growling, he snatched up the collection of steak knives helpfully placed next to the pile of plates he threw.
“Wait, stop!” I bellowed, but it was drowned out.
“Yeah, kill him!”
“Stake him!”
“Aim for his eyes!”
The bloodthirsty hellish crowd screamed and stomped for my death and maiming, curdling my heart to paste.
“What is wrong with all of you!” I bellowed to an unhearing crowd. “Stop this! Stop!”
The elephant demon wound back and flung the knives—all aiming for my head and chest.
I dropped to the ground, hitting the marble painfully, and ripping a furious hiss out of Sabrina as the door opened behind me.
Everything stopped. The shouting, the banging, the stomping, the gleeful sociopathic lust for blood and pain.
Silence fell so fast and sudden, I wiggled on the ground—clapping my hands over my ears to see if I’d lost my hearing, and craning my neck to see what had happened.
Pushing up, I rocked back on my bottom and spun around—looking up at the sight that stole everyone’s attention.
Him.
The same beautiful, evil stranger who stole my patch, and then my room and bed. He towered over me, eye-wateringly resplendent in black pants and a simple black linen shirt... if not for the half a dozen knives sticking out of his chest, shoulders, and cheek.
I clapped my hand over my mouth, gasping at the thick, black ichor seeping from his wounds.
He looked down at the weapons riddling his chest—cocking his head like he was trying to understand how they came to be there. Then his eyes snapped up, and narrowed on the elephant demon.
“No,” the attacker barked. “No, Ronin, no! It wasn’t me, it was him!” He pointed straight at me. “He dared me to throw them. Fucking taunted me saying I didn’t have the balls to!”
My jaw dropped.
“He kept shouting throw them, throw them,” the liar plowed on, “because he knew you were behind the door! The cowardly fuck dropped at the last second because he wanted you to get hit and—”
The now-named Ronin didn’t blink, didn’t shout, didn’t so much as twitch a facial muscle. Lifting his hand, he snapped his fingers, and the demon exploded.
Bursting in a shower of guts, bones, and black blood that splattered the walls, ceiling, the food, everyone in the buffet line, and a shrieking me.
I howled like a banshee—frantically wiping at the foul-smelling blood splattered on my skin. I slapped something squishy away, and it bounced down beside my shoe. One look, and I saw it was a piece of his brain.
Pitching forward, I heaved—nothing—on the floor. An empty stomach wouldn’t let me vomit, but my body kept trying.