Gone With the Minion

by Renee George

  Gone With The Minion

  Madder Than Hell Book 1

  Renee George

  Barkside of the Moon Press

  Gone With The Minion (Madder Than Hell Book One)

  Copyright 2018 Renee George

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the copyright holder.

  Any trademarks, service marks, product names or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement by the author of this work.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and storylines in this book are inspired only by the author’s imagination. The characters are based solely in fiction and are in no relation inspired by anyone bearing the same name or names. Any similarities to real persons, situations, or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Publisher: Barkside of the Moon Press

  ISBN: 978-1-947177-20-8

  Contents

  Blurb

  Acknowledgments

  Gone With The Minion

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Devil On A Hot Tin Roof - Chapter One

  Paranormal Mysteries & Romances

  About the Author

  To save her family, Southern Belle Olivia "Liv" Madder made a bargain with a demon lord and ever since, she’s been haunted...by her three dead sisters, and her own guilty conscience. Every decade, since the deal, Liv has had to find a human willing to bargain their soul with Moloch. If she fails, even once, he’ll not only drag her to Hell, but he'll take her sisters, too. It doesn't mean she can't make Lord Jerkface miserable in the process by removing his lesser demons from the Earthly plane.

  When her latest contracted soul dies before the bargain is sealed, she has less than four days to find another soul or her own agreement will be broken. But Moloch offers her a get-out-of-Hell-free card: steal an old book once owned by paranormal researcher David Jensen. The same David Jensen she fell in love with fifty-six years ago but left to protect him and his family. Then Moloch drops the biggest bombshell: David has died.

  Heartbroken and feeling she has no choice, Liv makes the trip to Sanctum, Missouri only to find David’s grandson has the book. Worse, he’s keeping a mysterious family secret that threatens Moloch, Liv, and her three sisters. What’s a minion to do when her world falls apart? Get Madder than Hell and kick some demon butt.

  Dedication

  For my sisters

  Acknowledgments

  This book has been an idea I’ve been playing with for nearly a decade, and it’s finally come to life! I need to thank a few people for making this story happen. First, my BFF Michele Bardsley, who is not only my critique partner, she is a superhero who I have named Butt Saver, and the butt she saves is mostly mine.

  Next is my sister Robbin, who is always there for me and never lets me down. There are very few people in my life I can say that about, and I don’t know what I’d do without her. My niece Jeanna, who is the fastest reader I know, next to her mom, and always gives valuable feedback.

  I also have to acknowledge all the biblical demonology and mythical demon stuff on the internet, television shows, and movies because all of that inspired the mythology in book.

  I can’t forge to thank my fans and my Rebel Readers for sticking with me and loving my books! I hope you will enjoy the Madder sisters as much as I enjoyed writing them. They were a blast, and Olivia is the kind a woman I want to hang out with.

  Lastly, I need to thank hot, black coffee. Without you, my life would be a lot less energetic, and I would get nothing done.

  Gone With The Minion

  “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

  Samuel Johnson, 1777

  Chapter 1

  It took me two seconds to spot my mark and about half that time for him to spot me. He was on the move. Right out the opened French doors. I could see he was headed toward the garden. Why, oh, why did they always run? I shoved my way through the crowd of monkey suits and silk chiffons with as much grace as I could muster. Not an easy feat considering I was stuffed into the ill-fitting, scarlet-red, mermaid-cut, satin dress I’d…um, borrowed from the unconscious woman in the coat room. A frock more billowy and less mermaid-y would’ve been a better choice for running, but I’d picked this one because it matched my red stiletto pumps and my patent-leather clutch with its removable silver chain. The little purse hung off my shoulder and slapped against my thigh as I wiggled through the crowd.

  I finally made it outside. Freshly blossomed lilacs burst out from the multitude of bushes like tufts of purple cotton candy and sweetened the humid air. I looked over my shoulder and saw that no one noticed, or more likely, cared that I was chasing the party’s host into the lavish garden.

  The three-story mansion was overly ostentatious, even for Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri. The monstrosity, with its marble columns and wrought-iron balconies, reminded me of the plantation a few miles from my father’s modest farm in Georgia, where I’d been born and raised. In other words, the place stuck out like a bedazzled T-shirt at a Sunday morning church service. The owner of the mansion, Carmine Hennessy, was a lobbyist for some major companies in the northwest area of the state, and he was holding a fundraiser for his clients. Also, he wasn’t human—at least not completely—which made him an excellent fit for politics.

  “Stop right there!” I screamed after the fiend. I watched him hightail it around the corner of the eight-foot-high hedge that surrounded the ornamental grounds. Good. The partygoers wouldn’t see me take ol’ Hennessey down. Bless the face-melting heat of the Missouri summer—no one inside would venture outside lest common sweat ruin their designer duds.

  Unlike my attire, the lobbyist’s tailored tuxedo was perfect for hauling ass. The tight red evening dress hugged my knees and made it hard to do much but waddle like a penguin. I tottered around the shrubbery and took an awkward step forward. My heel dipped sideways, and the dewed grass kissed the side of my foot. Ack! My heels! My dearly departed sister Charlotte would be appalled at the treatment of my footwear.

  I saw my target just a few feet away from another turn in the boxed hedge. I had scoped out the whole area the day before, so I knew the landscape. I also knew I couldn’t catch him before he entered the maze surrounding the marble inlay fountain with its ode to Hennessy himself. Yeah. There was a bronze statue of him holding an American flag in one hand and a champagne bottle in the other.

  “I just want to talk,” I lied. “Don’t you want to make a deal?”

  Offering to make a deal to a demon was the equivalent of showering a chocolate addict with truffles. He stopped about twenty feet from me and turned back, his head hitching to one side. “So,” he sniffed. “You’re the Madder. You don’t look like much.”

  I smoothed my dress, and lifted my chin, and poured on my best Southern drawl. “That’s just a mean thing to say, sir. Especially to a lady.” My “a”s sounded like “uh”s, and I dropped the “r” in sir. I was pretty proud of the fact that I’d managed to master the non-regional American dialect over the years, but every once in a while, it was fun to pull out the Southern Belle.

  The demon in the Hennessey suit s
norted, the fear draining from his blue eyes. “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

  I loved when they underestimated me. But I hated when they quoted Gone With the Wind. I dropped the accent. “I’m not Scarlett, and you’re for damn sure not Rhett, so let’s cut the shit.”

  He raised a brow. “You know, now that I see you, I don’t know what all the hoopla's about.” Curling his lip, he sized me up. “You’re kind of doughy.”

  “That hurts.” Actually, it did. I don’t care how old you are, women are women everywhere, and none of us want to be thought of as doughy—he might as well have said thick, or hippy, or FAT. Sure, I had curves—some in the wrong places—and my size D breasts were threatening to spill over the top of the borrowed dress, but it didn’t give this impostor the right to judge. Especially this skinny, short, pale, and balding imposter about to get his face kicked in.

  The “hoop-la” as he called it was the buzz in the underworld about a rogue minion going bat-shit all over demon ass. That rogue would be me, Olivia Madder. Of course, this wasn’t the first time I’d been called “the Madder.” I’ve been tracking demons for more than a hundred years and some change. And while I’m not always successful in sending them back to Hell, I had a seventy-seven percent completion rate. Charlotte would’ve called that bragging, but I called it awesome.

  “Tell me about the deal,” said Hennessey. “It better be good.”

  The deal was that I was going to fry him. Now that he had me good and pissed, it was time to teach this uncouth jerk what all the fuss was about. I bent my knee up until I could reach my shoe and nearly fell over as the dress caught on the stiletto. In my struggle to stay upright, the back of the dress ripped at the seam.

  Hennessey snorted again. “Had I known that stripping was part of your routine, I might not have been so quick to run.”

  “Right. You insulted my curves, but now you want to see them?” With the breeze literally at my backside, but infinitely more room to move, I toed off the other shoe so I could get good balance on the balls of my feet.

  The demon, undoubtedly baffled, raised a brow. “I don’t turn down any opportunity to view the naked female form. Especially given the deficits of my current abode. So, please, do continue bursting out of your clothes.”

  I flipped him the bird with my free hand, before using my other hand to fling my beautiful red stiletto at him. He seemed startled to be the target of a Frisbee-ing shoe—so you can imagine his surprise when the spiked heel pierced his left eye. I was surprised, too.

  I was aiming for his forehead.

  A heel between the eyes wouldn’t kill the demon, but it would paralyze him long enough for me to work the spell needed to drive him from this plane of existence.

  He howled as he toppled onto the well-manicured bluegrass. After a moment, his howls quieted, and he sat up, slack-jawed, and stared at me with his remaining blue eye.

  “You rotten bitch.” He pointed to the red shoe protruding from his face. “Do you have any idea how hard this body was to come by? And now you’ve gone and ruined the freaking eyeball.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I didn’t mean to hit you in the eye.”

  “Apology not accepted.” He grabbed the heel and struggled to disengage it from his face. “I’m sending you the bill for the blood on my tuxedo.”

  I leveled my gaze at the demon — oh, sure, he was in human skin, but you can wrap a pile of dog shit in silk, and it’s still dog shit, if you catch my meaning — grabbed my other shoe off the ground and tried to walk as menacingly toward my prey as the constricting dress would allow.

  I shouldn’t have bothered. Hennessey didn’t even notice. In fact, he was too busy with shoe extraction to realize I was now standing right beside him.

  “What in the name of Moloch is this fucking thing made of?” he yelled.

  Iron dipped in holy water and blessed by a white witch, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. I held up the other shoe and clicked the steel tip of the heel. A fan of barbs flicked out in a golf ball sized circle. I hit the tip again, and they retracted. The stilettos were my favorite, albeit least comfortable, weapons in my arsenal.

  I grabbed the embedded shoe and told the demon, “Hold still.”

  He tilted his head to the right to give me better access. “Thanks.”

  Idiot. It was my stylish footwear protruding from his head, and somehow, he thought I was going to help remove it.

  “Try not to damage the rest of the face,” he ordered. “It’s going to be difficult enough to heal the eyeball.”

  I lowered my head slightly, put on my sweetest smile, and spoke softly. “Don’t you worry, honey,” I said as I swung my right arm in an arc, “a mangled face is the least of your problems.”

  “Wait. What?” He looked up at me just in time to realize my intent. Still smiling, I buried the other heel deep into his forehead. Thud. Crunch. Squish.

  “You suck,” the demon mumbled as his left eyelid froze open and he dropped to the ground.

  I knelt next to him and, in a gesture taken straight from the offended Southern Belle handbook, I slapped his bloodied face. “That’s for your unkind comments about my appearance.” I wiped my soiled hands on the demon’s shirt. The rusty scent of blood mixed with the fragrance wafting from the colorful flowers planted along the hedges. Well, that was certainly a metaphor of my life—beautiful horror.

  All that was left was to send the gored creature back to Hell — once he told me what I wanted to know.

  I’d made friends with an Army interrogator back in the nineties. He told me that when they were trying to find Noriega in Panama, they would grab one of his known associates, a person low on the totem pole and easy to find, and make the guy tell them about the next associate, whom they’d go and find, and make that person tell about another one, and so on until they had the location of the tyrant narrowed down.

  My focus was less goal-oriented. I only needed to know where to find my next demon. I didn’t give a crap about the boss. He was easy to find but impossible to get rid of, so I had to satisfy myself by dispatching all his lackeys. I relied on a website called DemonsAreAmongUs.com. Its forum was filled with quackery from delusional maniacs who blamed demonic possession for every bad thing in their lives, you know, like their local gas station hiking up the price of super unleaded. Sometimes, though, there would be a post that rang of truth, like the awful one I’d read about the demon Lazul.

  Unfortunately, this demon was not Lazul. But he was higher on the pecking order in this particular demonic territory—and he would know where to find the asswipe I really wanted to smite. In Kansas City, Lazul had possessed a young woman who’d committed suicide by overdosing on her antidepressants. She’d been declared dead, and her grieving parents were left alone with the corpse to say their goodbyes. Then the fiend had popped into the corpse, growled obscenities, and yelled, “I am Lazul!” The parents screamed as a demon inhabited their daughter’s body. He escaped the hospital before anyone could figure out what was happening.

  It was the mom’s post, and the particular mentions of rotten-egg smell and glowing red eyes, that sent me after the asshole.

  “That’s just unsavory,” a sweet voice said from behind me, slightly aghast.

  “Indeed,” another voice agreed, but with more interest than disgust.

  “Eww,” the final voice mewled. “There’s goo leaking from his face.”

  I rolled my eyes and looked at the three young women now crouched over my shoulder, one brunette, and two blondes — the twins — decked out in full-on bustles and bonnets. Charlotte was more practical than our younger sisters, so her dress was made from pink cotton edged with tiny white flowers. The twins wore pale yellow and lavender chiffon frocks with matching lace gloves and bonnets. Not even death could force my sisters into anything less than their finest attire.

  “Go away.” I shooed at them. “I’m working.”

  “Now, Olivia,” Char chided, crossing her arms tight against her ch
est. “Is that any way to greet your sisters?” The way she said sisters, sounded like sistuhs.

  “Y'all are a distraction I don’t need at this moment, Char.” I turned the demon’s head and held his left eyelid open with my thumb. “Eliza, you probably don’t want to watch this.”

  My youngest sister was squeamish, but mostly because she had an empathic streak a mile wide. Even as a small child on the farm she’d bury dead mice—much to the annoyance of our barn cats that had killed the critters. I imagined that she would’ve been a social worker or something similar had she lived in this day and age.

  I dug my index finger into the demon’s unmarred eyeball. “Olivia!” Eliza screeched, her skirts swishing as she skittered backward.

  “I told you not to watch.”

  She buried her face in her hands. The eye gave a little squeak when I breached the surface, and fluid seeped out. It was yucky, but trust me, I’ve done worse. After a few seconds of digging, I located the bottom of each heel and clicked the barbs closed.

  “You used to be the epitome of social standard, Olivia.” Charlotte tisked.

  “I used to be a lot of things,” I said. I glanced at her. “We all did.”

  Charlotte’s gaze fastened on the shoe as I pulled on it. “Careful!” she chided. “It took forever to fix those heels the last time you yanked them out of a vessel’s forehead.”

  “I remember.” Considering, I’d done all the work. “I made sure the barbs are closed this time,” I told her.