The Marriage Contract

by Rose Wulf

  Rose Wulf

  Copyright © 2019

  Sample Chapter

  “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  The voice belonged to Gwendolyn’s mother, who’d been deceased for several years. It whispered like a coarse wind against her ear, causing Gwen to shudder and wrap her arms around herself. Wherever she was, she wanted to go home now. But instead, apparently, she was lost in some dark, misty forest in the dead of night. She could barely see and the leaves of the trees rustled eerily in all directions. How she got there she had no idea.

  “Hello?” she called cautiously as she slowly moved forward.

  Only the wind howled in response.

  Gwen swallowed her nerves as best she could, telling herself to stay calm. She’d survived worse, after all. She’d survived a demonic curse designed to kill her on her thirtieth birthday, even. Not to mention being attacked and kidnapped by other demons along the way. Inexplicably lost in some clichéd, creepy old forest? She could totally do this.

  “You’ve outlived your purpose.” This time the voice was her equally-deceased father’s. “Accept it.”

  “Screw you!” Gwen cried to the trees and the invisible voices. “Screw both of you! Complete strangers fought harder for me than you did!”

  “That’s right,” a new, female voice declared from somewhere behind Gwen, her voice like a dangerous purr in the air.

  Gwen’s breath caught in her throat and she spun around, too fast, nearly tripping on her own feet. But all she could see was a distant outline. “Who’s there?”

  “Me? Oh, I’m just a messenger,” the woman said.

  Before Gwen could ask what she meant, the lingering mist in the forest swirled and shot at her as if the mysterious woman commanded it. Suddenly, Gwen couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and a familiar terror gripped her heart as the woman’s voice filled her ears.

  “He’s coming for you, Gwendolyn Manning.”

  Gwen shot up with a scream, sweat coating her skin, her heart slamming against her ribcage. Seconds passed like molasses before she was able to calm her breathing enough to realize it had been a dream. A horrible, haunting nightmare of the worst kind. The kind born of reality. Wiping her hair from her face, Gwen tossed aside her blanket, and the airbed beneath her shifted as she put her feet on the floor. Solid. Cool. Reassuring. She stood, stretched a bit, and fumbled her way to the nearest functioning light switch. It didn’t exactly flood her entire new apartment with light, but it gave her enough to see the room by.

  She’d taken possession of the apartment less than forty-eight hours earlier, so there were boxes in various states of unpacking everywhere. She’d shoved enough of them aside to blow up her airbed in the living room. Her furniture wasn’t scheduled to arrive for another three days, since she’d had to buy all new, and her goal had been to get all the boxed stuff as put away as possible by then. In the meantime, the airbed was literally her only place to sit, let alone sleep. Because she was proud and determined to embark on her new, unexpected future on her own terms, Gwen had refused to allow her well-meaning baby brother to help her unpack. Probably as a result of that, this was her first night truly alone in … she didn’t know how long.

  Gwen moved to her small new kitchen and extracted a bottle of water from the fridge. Eight months. It’d been eight months, give or take a day, since her thirtieth birthday. The day she’d been cursed to die, thanks to her parents. Their voices from the nightmare whispered through her memory and she shivered. “Get a grip,” she told herself, capping the water after taking a long swallow. “It was just a dumb nightmare. They’re dead.” Cowards. Still, she returned to her airbed without turning off the single floor lamp in the corner. “You’re just freaked out because you haven’t been alone in a while,” she told herself. As if she were some needy grade schooler on her first sleepover.

  In her defense, she’d been living with her younger brother, Ben, since surviving her birthday and finding herself in need of an actual home. For a while before that, she’d been under the direct protection of Belle and Kai. So it had been a while. And a good chunk of that time had also been spent being actively pursued by a demon—working, apparently, with an evil Archangel—who wanted her dead. Before her cursed day. For some inexplicable reason.

  Gwen shook herself, forcing the memories aside. None of that insanity had continued past her birthday. Only her survival and friendship with Belle remained of that part of her life. Well, and her shakier friendship with her brother’s ex-girlfriend. Which he knew nothing about. He would so kill me. But those things all assured her life was looking up. She had made it through the worst. A stupid nightmare and a brief transition period of remembering how to adult weren’t going to take her down.

  “He’s coming for you, Gwendolyn Manning.”

  The ominous voice from her nightmare flashed through her just as the confidence settled in and Gwen grit her teeth. It was that bit, really, that had her shaking. She’d had haunting, angry dreams about her parents ever since their joint suicide. But this part was new. A dangerous voice with no face. A voice she didn’t recognize. Accompanied by a not-so-subtle threat. Who was ‘he’? Creed? No, he’s dead. The Archangel? She couldn’t possibly be so important to him. He certainly had bigger problems than one mortal woman.

  “What if…?” Gwen drew a breath at the prospect that had dawned on her. There was an individual she’d wondered about for several years now. Someone whose name, even gender, she didn’t know. Someone who just might have cause to pursue her. The demon who’d stood to inherit her cursed soul eight months prior.

  ****

  “You look even grumpier than usual,” Knox greeted as he stepped from the shadow of a tall building, hands in his pockets. It never meant anything good when Kai called on him in the middle of the night.

  Kai focused his frustrated frown on Knox. “Something reached out from the deep tonight,” he declared. “It didn’t linger long enough to be traced, but it made contact somewhere in this time zone.”

  Stomach twisting, as Knox suspected where this was leading, he asked the necessary question anyway. “Sounds fun. What’s it got to do with me?”

  “I want you looking into it. Find out as much as you can and let me know.”

  Knox arched a pointed brow, unsurprised by the demand. After all, he was the demon working with the angel. What else would he be asked to do? “Seems like it’d be at least equally as effective if you did the legwork on this. Especially if it’s time sensitive.”

  Kai narrowed his eyes on Knox. “I’m still searching for Uriah. Isabella doesn’t want me putting that on pause without actionable intel.”

  Knox sighed dramatically. “What do all those other angels do, exactly? Sounds like it’s just you, Isabella, and your lapdog—me.”

  “We all have jobs,” Kai said. His eyes flashed briefly and he added, “Go fetch.”

  Knox had to look away lest he lose his sight as Kai took flight. When the rush of crushing, purifying power faded, Knox blinked the spots from his eyes and cursed. Of all the damn assignments. Someone big had woken up down below and naturally, Kai wanted him to investigate. Where the hell was he even supposed to start? Just find a demon with more mouth than brain and get him talking. One way or another, he’d learn something. Even if he had to take a few punches along the way.

  ****

  Having struck out on gossip at the first two hot spots he’d tried—LAX and California’s reigning party school—Knox decided to widen his search parameter and hit the Strip. If a demon can’t find a secret in Vegas, there isn’t a secret to be found. So he strolled around, picking out a few random targets, making sure to keep from looking like he was searching for anything specific. Until he finally found what he’d been looking for. The demonic equivalent of Dumb and Dumber, stirring up a scene around a craps table.

  The unlucky mortal man they’d clearly set their sights on had just bet his last chips. He smelled of cheap whiskey and there was a spark of desperation in his eyes.
The man really was a prime target for a quick sale. Perfect.

  Knox took up position at an angle where the twins wouldn’t see him—not without deliberately looking, at least—and watched as the dice fell. The idiots weren’t even trying to control the outcome, relying solely on the poor man’s bad fortune. Which made it all that much easier for Knox to lift his whiskey to his lips and simultaneously influence the dice in another direction. As the die shifted direction, the twins’ vociferous cries of impending sympathies died in their throats. All eyes watched with varying degrees of shock as the pair of dice miraculously landed where they needed to to keep the man from going broke. Despite his shit luck.

  The man let out a cry of triumph while the twins were struck speechless beside him. Knox deposited his mostly empty glass on the other side of them and clapped a hand on Thing One’s shoulder. “Do you boys need me to show you how this is done?”

  The demon glanced toward him and his curiosity turned quickly to anger. “Traitor.”

  “I prefer the term ‘opportunist’,” Knox replied. He offered a deliberately nonchalant shrug and added, “I see a chance to get myself on the winning side of a situation, I take it. What can I say?”

  “Hey,” the previously oblivious twin said as he joined the conversation. “What’s the idiot doing here?”

  Knox chocked on an honest laugh. Grinning widely, he said, “I’m sorry, it’s just hilarious when either of you morons calls someone else an idiot. You know you’re the laughing stock of Hell, right?”

  “That’s rich,” the first brother said, turning properly to face him. “Coming from Hell’s Most Wanted.”

  The light dawned in the other brother’s eyes. “Hey, Arn, we could get some serious cred if we take him down!”

  That’s right, stupid. Come at me.

  Arn rolled his eyes. “Forget ‘cred,’ Biff, think about what the bounty on this bastard is. We’ll be rolling in it!”

  I can’t believe they’re still using those stupid names… “Wow, cred and money are worth more to you than souls? And you call yourselves demons?” In his peripheral vision, Knox noticed one of the passersby finally overhear a piece of their conversation. It was always amazing to him how much a person could say in public without being overheard.

  Arn and Biff—who, rumor had it, had originally thought he’d been naming himself ‘Buff’—looked back at him. “Huh?”

  Knox indicated their previous target, who was collecting his winnings, having obviously opted to tap out while he was ahead. “You wanted him, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Biff said, “but he won…”

  Knox barely resisted the urge to smack his own forehead. “No, you moron, I made him win. Because even between the two of you, you’re too dumb to consider making sure he loses.” He watched as it dawned, slowly, on them that he’d stolen their soul.

  “Biff,” Arn said, his voice low and finally angry, “let’s get him.”

  “I wanna tear off his ugly head,” Biff declared. Only then did they step toward him, apparently literally intending to attack him right there on the casino floor.

  The woman nearest Knox jumped back, startled, and shrieked. Garnering more attention. And while Knox didn’t generally care about such things, he didn’t need word getting out that he was searching for information from his own kind. Again. So he ducked just enough to let their momentum take them over him, into his own shadow, and opened that shadow to allow the three of them to fall into it. Removing them from the casino and any nearby prying eyes.

  Knox landed on his feet a few alleyways over, the idiot twins tumbling out behind him in a bundle of arms and legs. “Wow, do you always suck this bad? Or is this an off-day?”

  “So you caught us off-guard,” Arn snarled, finding his feet and rolling his shoulders. “We still outnumber you.”

  “So?”

  “So that makes us stronger than you,” Biff said, cracking his knuckles like a classic high school bully. “You know, double the power and all that.”

  Knox exaggerated the realization on his face. “Oh, right. ’Cause all demons are created equal—and definitely stay that way—and all that garbage. I forgot.”

  “Yeah,” Arn said, taking a step forward before pausing. “Wait, no. Well, not all, all. I mean, you know. Like Satan’s offspring are stronger because they’re, well, semi-Satan, right? But the rest of us, yeah.”

  Biff scratched his cheek. “Well, then there’s Trix—”

  “She’s just meaner than us, idiot. That’s all,” Arn interrupted harshly.

  There. That was something they didn’t want him to hear. Which made sense, because while most everything Arn had said as to ‘why’ had been a mess, Arn’s point about Satan’s direct offspring being typically stronger than the average demon was still accurate. And widely known. But this ‘Trix’ whoever was a new player. He didn’t know any demon—male or female—who had a name that sounded like that.

  “C’mon, guys,” Knox called. “We’re pretty much all meaner than you.”

  Arn scoffed. “Says the angel boy.”

  Knox narrowed a glare at them. “You better have the steel to back that up.”

  Biff started snickering. “Heh, poor angel boy,” he teased. “He got all in and he messed it up for nothing!”

  “Excuse me?” That comment threw him. Normally, he’d blow off a nonsensical statement from either of them as just their usual stupidity, but since he was looking for something he didn’t know about, he couldn’t afford to.

  “Shut up, Biff,” Arn snapped. “It ain’t done yet. Let him cry when she’s dead.”

  “Oh, right,” Biff said with a nod.

  Knox rolled Arn’s words around in his head. There really wasn’t anyone he’d cry over—hadn’t been in a couple of centuries—so who could they be referring to? What could they think was significant enough to get him worked up like that? What had Biff said … he’d gotten ‘all in’ and ‘messed it up’ … and whatever that was, now the pair thought he’d cry when ‘she’ was dead. It wasn’t much of a secret when, and how, Knox had gone ‘all in’ with the angels. But after that—no. He’d just messed up the twins’ attempt at capturing a soul. Above basically all else, that was the kind of thing demons valued. In those terms, and especially related to when he’d joined the angels, he had ‘messed it up’ from a demonic perspective. By helping the angels save the life and break the curse of the human woman Gwendolyn Manning.

  Which could only mean that now she was being targeted all over again. Probably, ultimately, by whoever had held her contract originally.

  “Fuck.”

  Arn and Biff smirked at him. “Scared now, huh?” Idiot A said.

  “He should be,” Idiot B added.

  Knox ground his teeth. Yeah, this was bad. He’d known for a while that whoever held that contract was big trouble. Based solely on the fact that he’d never been able to figure out who they were. So if they’d reached out directly, or even through a close minion—maybe this Trix—that probably fit the power Kai had sensed. He couldn’t keep wasting his time with these two ass-wipes.

  “Sorry, guys,” Knox said, letting his irritation show. “I don’t do scared.”

  The twins exchanged glances. “You will when this is over,” Arn declared. The pair sprinted forward, still opting for the physical strategy.

  Without a twinge of guilt, Knox summoned the dark energy around him and shaped it into one long, curved, bladed weapon. “Oh, it’s already over.” Once again, it was their own momentum that did them in. Only this time they weren’t going to be getting back up.

  Knox didn’t spare them a backward look as he took himself to Northern California. The last he’d heard, and it had been months, Gwen had been staying with her baby brother. He knew where that was, as he’d found her and Kai there before. So that was where he’d look first.

  End of sample chapter

  www.evernightpublishing.com/burning-midnight-by-rose-wulf

  />
  Rose Wulf, The Marriage Contract