Here’s another effort from me. I managed to use black, candles, orange, a cry in the night, racing heartbeats, and the smell of cinnamon. I think I hit ‘em all! 😀 Enjoy!

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Never trust a vampire. Or a werewolf. Or a dragon, a faery, or zombie. But most of all, never…EVER…trust a demon. The uber-evil minions of Satan usually made the devil himself look like a slacker.

So what was I doing in this club on Halloween night, sitting here in my slinkiest black dress, sipping a vodka and tonic, and waiting for Azrael, one of the scuzziest of all Satan’s henchmen, to show up? Good question. I wish I had an equally good answer.

Unfortunately, the man I work for doesn’t care whether things like this make sense. He has his own agenda, and as head of The Bureau (capital T, capital B), he answers to…well… to pretty much nobody. Certainly not to me.

A candle guttered in a round, orange pumpkin on my table. In another minute or two, it would go out. I’d been sitting here since before the busboy came by to light it, hours ago. Drumming my fingers on the table, I was getting antsier by the minute.

I wondered whether the meeting had been Azrael’s idea, or my boss’s. If my boss had requested it, the demon would be perfectly happy making me wait indefinitely. I could still be sitting here at dawn, getting hungrier by the minute. One can only consume so many beer nuts, after all, before starvation begins to look good.

Another hour passed, and I’d had it. I was calling it a night, and chalking this one up to the general sucking quality of demonic humor. I rose, reached for my purse, and then the blonde at the hostess stand let loose a shrill scream somewhere around the decibel range of a patrol car siren. My now-hammering heart slammed into overdrive.

Even before her ear-drum rupturing shriek stopped ricocheting around the room, two things happened. Every candle in the freaking place went out, leaving us all groping in total darkness. And the double glass doors at the front of the club blasted open, flooding it with the familiar reek of higher echelon minions, world-wide: copper, sulphur, and scorched cinnamon.

Subtle, demons were not. And something told me this meeting was about to go straight to Hell. Literally.