Chapter Two

“Gary, seriously? I summoned a creature from hell, and your name is Gary?”

We were jammed into Zach’s beat-up Toyota Carolla as he pulled up before the diner. The car was a rusty piece of junk with torn vinyl upholstery, a sprung radiator, and a crack growing in the engine block that was going to be the final nail in the automotive coffin in a matter of weeks.

At least it would have if I hadn’t given it a few of my patented nudges. Now, the rust was slowly fading, the motor was purring, and the odometer was winding backward with each passing mile. In a few days, he’d be driving a restored classic instead of an old shitbox.

Get how this works yet?

“Gary is more of a nickname.” I wasn’t about to reveal the nature of true names to that arcane dunce, “Suffice to say my full name begins with a Ga and ends with a ry with a lot of harsh consonants in between that results in most mortals begging for a soothing cup of herbal tea and a throat lozenge.”

“Ah, okay. Gary, it is then.” Zach put the car into park and killed the engine, looking around nervously. “So how do we do this? The getting me laid part..”

“What do you mean, Zachary?” I loved playing the clueless innocent. “Did your parents not tell you about the birds and bees?”

That act doesn’t fly in Hell, let me tell you. Not at all. So, it’s nice to indulge in a touch of melodrama when I can. Plus, I’ve found it’s great to leave the ball of culpability firmly in the client’s court. That way, they can’t start whining on the day of judgment, crying to Saint Peter about a certain hellspawn who “made them do it” or other similar nonsense.

Sorry, not sorry. If you went to the trouble of dragging one of my kind from the infernal reaches, any incubi or succubi worth their salt is going to make you say, on the official record, exactly what it is you want us to do on your behalf.

“I’m not a virgin. I’ve had sex. Several times.” He hissed, knuckles turning white as he gripped the steering wheel. “But that was before, and this is now. I’m very aware that I’m not a hotshot college league pitcher anymore and… may have let myself go a little.”

“Congratulations on taking the first step on the path to a better you. Honesty and self-awareness is a virtue.” I gave him an encouraging golf clap and nudged his muscle tone and metabolism up a few gears as a reward for personal progress. “There is hope for you after all, and the answer to your earlier question is simple.

“We enter your place of employment. Assess the best candidates for some, shall we say, hanky panky. Then you point out your favorites for me to beguile, glamor, or ensorcell into having crazy, life-changing sex with you as soon as it is convenient to do so.”

“What about, you know…” Zach whispered, leaning in closer. “I wouldn’t want the girl to say I **** myself on them.”

Geez, what a swell dude. He was worried about enthusiastic consent in the event his reputation might take a blow. Check out Kohlberg’s levels of morality sometime because Zachy could be the poster boy for stage two: self-interest.

I barely restrained myself from breaking into a villainous cackle on the spot.

“Don’t worry, Champ,” I told him, winking conspiratorially and raising my hand in a three-fingered salute. “You won’t have any doubts when they are begging for a ride on your cock. Scouts honor.”

“Wait, there are Boy Scouts in Hell?”

“Do you really have to ask?”

“So there’s Stella. She’s one of the waitresses. Super hot, but doesn’t know I exist.” Zach said, staring out into the dining room as he flipped sizzling burger patties. “I call out orders all day, and she doesn’t even make eye contact with me.”

“Stella, gotcha. The young, skinny blonde.”

I was keeping to the sidelines, sequestered in an out-of-the-way corner of the kitchen, only half-listening as I checked emails on my smartphone.

And before you ask–yes, Hell has a corporate plan with a major telco provider, but no, I couldn’t tell you which company it is with. NDAs are a big-time headache, even for us infernals. Simpler to say if I told you which one it was… you wouldn’t be surprised.

The diner was called Daisy’s, and it wasn’t exactly seventies-themed, so much as the place hadn’t seen a change in decor since the summer of love. The once-bright colors had faded with the passage of time, the booths and bartops had seen better decades, and the checker-tiled floor was chipped.

But at least the obligatory Wurlitzer jukebox still worked. It was playing “Hotel California” on repeat, thanks to yours truly.

Daisy’s was a twenty-four-hour eatery located on the highway at the edge of town, serving burgers and fries to truckers and interstate pilgrims alike. Even during the late shift that Zach habitually worked, the diner was fairly bustling with weary-eyed travelers looking to fill their tired bodies with salt-laden calories before continuing their overnight journeys.

My fiendish mind was occupied with cataloging the various mortals present and weedling my way into their fatigued thoughts to rifle through their darkest desires and plant a few sinful seeds of my own.

For instance, there was a quartet of lovely college coeds whose openness to experimentation I was swinging wider than a barn door, and a particularly lonely housewife was eyeing up the pimply busboy with **** interest after a few of my special nudges.

“Hey, are even you listening to me?”

Zach was waving his spatula and shooting me a scowl. With an internal sigh, I pocketed my phone and straightened my posture.

“I’ve heard every word you’ve said and was preoccupied, contemplating our next move.” Another lie, but as I pointed out earlier, I’m already deep in his head. By comparison, normal speech is slow and inefficient. “You want to bang the blonde waitress. That much is clear. Believe it or not, I’ve actually been busy laying the groundwork for precisely that.”

“You have?” Zach looked confused. Ground beef and sizzling cheese began to blacken on the forgotten grill behind him. “How? All you’ve done since we arrived is skulk in a corner, looking bored.”

Talk about ungrateful.

He hadn’t noticed his suddenly clear complexion or the way fat melted off his doughboy body as I gradually restored him to peak physical condition. I’d surreptitiously replaced his bargain bin wardrobe with designer labels, slim-cut to fit his hardening physique, but did I get any recognition?

Even as we spoke, I was already spinning elaborate delusions in Stella’s brain that Zach was, in fact, the cat's pajamas. Slowly weaving a dozen lifetimes worth of lust and a deeply buried passion for him into the fabric of her mental landscape. Not love, mind you. That’s not in my portfolio; more like a blooming obsession with the guy in the kitchen currently talking to thin air.

Oh, did I forget to mention that nobody else could see me?

It’s a basic bit of infernal mind-fuckery but handy at times. It helps avoid awkward questions about the handsome stranger with the horns standing in the background. But if a client wanted to look like a deranged person by addressing my invisible self directly, that was on them.

“By doing what comes naturally to one such as me.” I fought to suppress an eye roll. Zach wasn’t the sharpest knife in the draw; he’s a spoon. “I am currently sifting through Stella’s psyche and tickling all the things that she likes about you to the forefront of her thoughts. Raising your stock, to use business lingo.”

“Wait, she likes me? Never would have guessed it with how she ignores me.”

She really didn’t, and there were countless reasons why.

Stella was a pretty young blonde with a reasonable butt and larger-than-average tits than most girls her age. Barely past her eighteenth birthday, she was already light years ahead of the curve in growing jaded from working a dead-end job and enduring smelly trucker’s leers every day. Her figure was thin but in a way that indicated a lack of good nutrition rather than regular exercise, and her golden hair color came from a bottle.

The fact that Zach found her stunningly attractive spoke more about his rock-bottom self-esteem than modern standards of beauty, and Stella’s opinion of him and the male population, in general, was not a kindly one.

The poor girl had dreams of saving enough tips to ditch this one-horse town and try her luck in the big smoke. The mounting feelings of bitterness and amorphous resentment were strong in that one. She was battling an eating disorder and depression, living on coupons and only scarcely scraping by on her own.

At least she was until I mosey’ed into the picture.

Even as Zach ignored the smell of burning food to stare dumbly at me, I was running through Stella’s mind like a bunch of pissed-off Greeks bursting out of a wooden horse.

A doctor or psychologist could probably explain how neurochemicals in the brain affect human moods and emotions. Pharmaceutical companies are popping out new pills and formulas all the time to alter the soup of serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and endorphins that decide what type of day a person is having.

I don’t need any of that medical mumbo-jumbo. I’ve been doing this job since before bloodletting was considered a revolutionary medical practice.

A hint of a steamy fantasy here, a nudge to her kinks there, you get the idea. Oh, and while I was at it, adding a little symmetry to her face and an extra cup size in the chest was no effort at all.

Okay, a few extra cup sizes. That drab yellow waitress uniform needed filling out. I may have shortened the hemline from knee-length to mid-thigh too. No sense in half-assing the effort. A touch more junk in the trunk, and Stella was really selling the retro outfit.

Don’t worry about it. She’s too preoccupied with fresh, happy thoughts about our boy Zach to notice when her tired old flats gained a three-inch, no, a four-inch wedge heel.

“I promise that she has nothing but positive sentiments towards you,” I reassured him, tweaking the testosterone production in his family jewels and then enlarging those as well. “How about you save those burgers before the smoke alarm goes off?”

“Dammit!”

While Zach rushed back to his grill, I spent some idle time toying with the relationship status of a charming Canadian couple who were spending their summer backpacking across the States. A few mental nudges from me, and they shot from ‘in a relationship’ straight past ‘it’s complicated’ into the downright adventurous status of hardcore swingers.

I couldn’t stop the smile that spread on my lips as their lovey-dovey gazes left each other and strayed about the room—whispering excitedly and pointing as they surveyed prospective participants for an evening's entertainment.

“Order up!” Zach dinged a bell, sliding four plates of overdone cheeseburgers and salty fries onto the pass. “Tables five and nine.”

Stella was there in an instant, practically teleporting over to the little window to deliver him a dazzling smile. That small gap in her front teeth disappeared in a jiffy.

“Thanks, Zach.” She was twirling a strand of her bleached-out hair around a finger, so I fixed that too. Neither of them noticed as it became more lustrous and gained a natural shine. They were engaged in some serious eye-fucking. “Um, are you wearing a new cologne? Something about you today seems extra special.”

I happened to know that my latest client’s preferred eau de parfum was a can of Axe bodyspray, but why spoil the fun? With another nudge from me, potent pheromones were all but oozing from his pores.

Half a dozen female nostrils twitched, and curious heads turned towards the kitchen.

“Nah, just the usual bar of soap and a clean pair of undies,” Zach replied. What a goddamn casanova. Luckily for him, Stella was past the point of caring about small talk. “Don’t you have a break coming up soon? So do I. We could take it together if you like?”

That’s when I smelled it.

The delicious, intoxicating scent of lust wafted through the ether. A raw, unadulterated desire that didn’t care a wit about morality or propriety or anything beyond the carnal need to fuck and be fucked.

For a creature of my hellish ilk, it’s not just bread and butter. It’s French champagne and the finest Beluga caviar. I soaked it up like a desert in the rain.

Oh yeah, that was the primo shit!

“I–I think I’d really like that.” Stella was twisting from side to side like a star-struck teen. Zach was staring right at her enhanced boobage as it swayed heavily inside her tinyfied uniform. I vanished the top few buttons for good measure. “Deidra can watch the till. Meet me out back in ten minutes?”

The surge of arousal in both of them was immediate and heady. They were primed to go buck wild. I drank it all up and rewarded my client with a few extra inches in the trouser department. His fat reserves were running low, but you had to make risky investments to reap larger rewards. I was a dab hand at this game.

Zach would be fine… probably.

“I can’t wait.”

Thank you, dearest reader, for reading my latest chapter. If you want to help support my writing or read advanced chapters, please consider buying me a coffee. Cheers, and happy reading!