I forced my mouth to close and reminded myself that I wasn’t in my dream any longer, and I had neighbors who didn’t need to hear me get myself off.

Keeping my lips firmly clamped, I began to swirl my fingers around my clit. I worked to think about Kyle, the way that his broad shoulders fit into his letterman jacket, or how his brown eyes were always kind. But none of that worked, instead my mind conjured up the image of the clawed hand that had emerged from the mist in my dreams. The fingers of the hand had been long, and as I slid two fingers deep inside of myself I couldn’t help but wonder how they would feel sliding inside of me.

I very nearly made myself come on that image alone, but I made myself stop. I shouldn’t be trying to come to the image of a hand, not when I already had a perfectly good image to focus on.

So, I began to think about Kyle’s caramel scent and how I wanted to be surrounded by the sweetness of it while he whispered how much he liked me in my ear.

I quickened my fingers, sure that would bring me to the finish line, when a different scent started to bombard my senses. I had never smelled anything like it in my life. It was deeper, almost like the smell of old books or rain on the stones of a really old castle. It filled the steam of the shower and surrounded me in a way that reminded me of the mist in the dream.

My fingers moved on their own as I inhaled the scent deeply, and soon I was pressing a hand over my mouth in order to muffle the shout that came along with my second orgasm of the day.

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CHAPTER 3

Sleep for the Devil is not something that happened often. I rarely needed it, and when I did, I wasn’t usually asleep for long. It was more for entertainment value than anything.

No, I didn’t sleep because I needed it, I slept because it let me take a peek at the world above. I never knew what my mind would stumble upon when I slept because time in Hell was... odd at best. Nothing about it was linear, so during any given time I could be popping into a world full of old clothes and carriages driven by horses. Other times, I saw people dressed in tight fitting clothes and driving metal contraptions called cars.

It had never bothered me much, I was just happy for a little taste of the world above.

But now, when my eyes opened, I realized that I’d gotten a little more than a taste of what was going on upstairs. I had actually interacted with someone. The memory of her face was blurry, but as I sat up in my bed, the phantom scent of fresh Granny Smith apples still lingered in my nose and on my tongue.

Glancing at my bedside table clock, which just blinked with the word ‘LATE,’ I flicked the black sheets away from my legs and hurried to get dressed for the day.

When most humans thought of Hell, they would probably think of flaming fire pits and a red guy with bad facial hair. I was fully aware of the caricatures of me that were floating around upstairs, and I was half convinced that it was a practical joke that Gabriel had played eons ago that had stuck.

No, Hell was a lot more organized than that.

“Good morning, Janice,” I greeted my secretary, who was a soul that was stuck in eternal damnation because she had a habit of poisoning her husbands for their life insurance policies. Regardless, she had been a damn fine secretary for almost fifty years, and I couldn’t be poisoned, so it was a win-win.

“Good morning, sir, you’ve got two-thousand-three-hundred-and-twelve files that you need to go through before lunch today. It’s going to be a busy day in Hell.” She greeted me without looking up from her computer as she typed. She had a lit cigarette in between her ruby red lips and every few seconds I watched the tip glow red as she inhaled.

“I’ll get right on that,” I said with a sigh and stepped into my office. My desk was piled high with black manila folders, each containing the information about a soul who needed my judgment.

I sometimes missed the days when I could sit on my shiny black throne while each soul came up and pleaded their case to me.

No, gone were the days of begging good old Satan for reprieve. Max from HR had made sure of that. Max was actually Max Weber, the father of human Bureaucracy.

He had, somehow during his pleading for his soul, convinced me that Hell needed to get organized and that I would have so much free time if only I just streamlined everything.

It had definitely worked, so I had to give him that, but it almost gave me too much free time. My life was, well, boring as Hell.

Now the souls were placed in files that told me about their lives and categorized their good acts, bad acts, and neutral acts in fancy bar graphs and line charts. I could flip through each folder and toss it into one of the boxes which were labeled: forever, purgatory, and heaven.

Most were sent to purgatory to serve out a sentence that was filled with all of the things that they hated in life. For instance, the soul that I was currently reading had spent most of his life just generally being a pill to everyone around him. He had chased away all of his children, friends, and neighbors and had died still sitting in his recliner. It had taken almost a month for anyone to discover his body. He had the potential to work on himself, though, so I tossed his file into the ‘purgatory’ box. He would be given a number and would have to wait until I got to him after lunch to tell him what his sentence was. I was thinking of anger management with a dominatrix, but I was open to other options as well.

The next soul, however, was the soul of a serial killer who had never been caught. His file was tossed straight into the ‘forever’ box. My demons, though Weber wanted me to refer to them as employees, would spend eternity making sure that the soul repented for his sins.

I worked for a long time, losing track as I sorted souls. But even as I read about some of the worst human beings that had made the worst of their time up top, I couldn’t shake the sharp tangy scent of apples that still danced around me like a ghost.

After making it about half way through the files, I finally sat back in my chair with a frustrated huff.

It wasn’t often that my mind connected with someone who was still alive. I could count on my fingers how many times over the last few millennia that it had happened. It usually meant that I was close to being summoned up to Earth.

The only way for me to visit the upstairs was to be summoned by a mortal, specifically an omega.

The last time that it had happened I had been yanked, rather unceremoniously, into a dark cave during the 1800s. Men in red robes stood circled around an omega woman who was tied into the center of a pentagram and her wrists and throat were cut.

The men demanded that I do their bidding. Unfortunately for them that wasn’t how the ritual worked. I had torn them limb from limb, sending their souls straight to Hell.

I wanted to help the woman, but she was already gone, her soul ascending so I never got the full story of how she had ended up in the middle of a pentagram surrounded by some of the biggest assholes of the nineteenth century.

I still wasn’t quite sure how they managed to summon me since there was really only one way to summon the Devil and it had nothing to do with them.

Only an omega could summon me from the depths of Hell. It was the one shining beacon that my father had given me after the Garden of Eden fell. If an omega in heat desired something so much that they used my symbols, the wall between Hell and Earth thinned just enough to let me through so that I could make a deal with them.

I would fulfill their every desire, and they would be a bright speck amongst the monotony that came along with managing Hell.