Prologue

My name is Andrew Golanov, and I sold my soul to the Devil, and the Devil would agree that I was getting the best half of the bargain. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The day I sold my soul was one of the worst in my life. I had just been fired from my job due to somebody else’s mistake and my roommate moved out when I was gone, so I got home to a half-empty house. To make matters worse, there was an eviction notice on my door. So, I packed up my few portable belongings, my desktop computer, my laptop, whatever clothes were clean and my books. I tossed everything in the back of my little Explorer and left that place behind me.

I wasn’t sure where I was going to go. My sister lived in town, but I wasn’t allowed at her place since her boyfriend and I came to blows the year before, and our parents were almost ten years dead. So, with no place to go, I drove around the city aimlessly until I found myself turning into an abandoned construction site. I sent my sister a text, letting her know about my epically bad day, and hopped out of my Explorer to smoke a joint.

As I was sitting there on the hood rolling the joint, my nose caught something other than the acrid smell of my week. It was a faint smell, one my brain linked to a perfume my grandmother had been fond of, made of crushed Madagascar periwinkles. I turned my head and was shocked to see somebody walking towards me.

My first groggy though as I stuffed the half-rolled joint into the old tobacco pouch I carried my weed in was that it was a security guard, but when she passed through a patch of light I knew she couldn’t be. No security guard would walk around in a nearly sheer latex dress the hugged her body and ended just below her hips. I watched her, entranced, as she passed from shadow to light and back, drawing closer. Even from this distance, it was easy to tell she was naked but for the nighty and a pair of stiletto heels.

When she moved through the shadows, it was always easy to tell that her eyes had a deep red glow to them, as though somebody were holding red lightbulbs behind her eyes.

When she reached the hood where I sat waiting, I was able to get a better look at her. Her shoulder length hair was a straight and a warm black; this close I could see her eyes were, at least in the light, a pale green. Her skin was a flawless alabaster, accentuated by the sheer black nighty that stretched taut across her breasts. While I’ve never been overly skilled at determining a woman’s bust, I had to guess that they were at least a 36D, looking even larger when contracted to her slender, and hairless, build.

“Good evening Mr. Golanov,” were the first words she said to me in a voice made for phone sex, husky and soft, full of the promise of pleasures to come coming from a smile to stop a man’s heart.

“Uh ... hi,” I replied with my usual grand eloquence, something which, if anything, only made the widening of her smile that much more genuine.

“You don’t know me, do you,” she asked, standing there like a wet dream.

I shook my head slowly, not wanting to take my eyes off of her in case she should vanish, or I wake.

Her smile changed to a cute frown at the shake of my head, and I saw, for the first time up close, that red light I had almost convinced myself to have imagined before. “Has the compact been abandoned so soon,” she asked, but I didn’t answer. I had the feeling she was more talking to herself than to me. “Your parents and uncle, where are they?”

“Dead. They died ten years ago next week, in a plane crash.”

“How old are you Andrew?”

“I’m twenty six next June, June 6th,” I replied, curiosity entering my voice.

Her head snapped up to look at me. “Do you have any sibling?”

“Yea, I have a twin sister. Now what’s with the third degree here,” I demanded, sliding off the hood of my Ford. It was only then realized that I stood four inches taller than her.

Chapter 1 »