Devil's Kettle

The Pact.

shoulderonthelow365: *Satan... Sorry.

Wolf sent a flood of messages begging him for a spell that would guarantee the success of his band, and Zach, making the second biggest mistake of his life, decided to humor him and sent him a Virgin Sacrificium Sollemne . In retrospect, it was to scare him away from the idea entirely, he figured once he saw he'd have to commit a murder, he'd realize Satanism is not for the kids. He didn't even think this kid really had a real band, he was probably just some basement kid with a few friends fucking around Garageband.

Without ten minutes passing Wolf had deleted all his previous posts and deactivated his account without notice. Zach saw this and scoffed, promptly moving on to adminster the forums without much thought. That oughta scare him, he thought. Fucking noobs.
Then one day, on another lonely Sunday night spent alone in his apartment, he turns on the nine o clock national news; he remembers wiping up the drool of milk by the corner of his mouth with his left palm while holding his blue ceramic bowl of Lucky Charms with his right. He sat down on his single brown leather couch which sinks against his weight and turned up the volume. He clinked his metal spoon on the rim of the bowl.
Ping
Ping
Ping
The screen bulletin with a red background and thick white font read BREAKING: FREAK FIRE ACCIDENT IN DEVIL'S KETTLE. DOZENS DEAD. A female news anchor about thirty years of age with jet black hair cut in a bob, pale red lipstick and in a black pantsuit ruffled the papers on her desk and detailed the gripping news story about how a dive bar in Devil's Kettle (he reckoned that's an odd name for a town but its pretty cool nonetheless) suffered a mysterious fire, claiming the lives of numerous innocent victims--- a black stain upon the angel white of a quiet little town in Minnesota--- he would've thought nothing of it if the reporter hadn't went on to detail how several victims got to survive because an underground indie rock band called Low Shoulder was playing the bar the very moment it caught on fire. The cameraman on scene of the tragedy, background to dozens of firesquad men in their yellow fire suits and red hoses, panned to the face of a man in his early twenties dressed in a Gothic black leather jacket with metal studs all over it, his eyes traced over with black eyeliner. The bulletin switched to read NIKOLAI WOLF, LEAD SINGER HEROICALLY HELPS THE VICTIMS .
Holy shit. Zach thought. It couldn't be.
"And yet it was." a striking female voice pierces the dark car from the backseat--this makes Zach startle, dropping his cigarette on his crotch, it burns a black welted circle through his pants. "Jeeesus fucking Christ!" He turns to see a teenage blonde sitting casually in his brown leather backseat, completely naked. Her long blonde locks are wet along with the rest of her body, the drenched mattes of blonde cover each of her breast, she sits cross legged, covering her crotch. Water drips off of her against the hard leather. Her eyes are a striking blue, they hold an electrifying secret within them.

The songs drones to its end,
You're not coming back
You're not coming back
Until I'm set free
I'll go quiet in the trees.

"God I hate that fucking song." She says.
Zach is shocked to pure silence. When he finally speaks, his voice sounds to him to come from the gaping void belly of a beast thats swallowed him.
"How did you hear me think?"
She cocks her head and smiles a wry grin.
"How do you think?"
Now blood rushes to his flesh, he wakes up to his senses "Get fucking dressed you're a fucking child."
"I'm a fucking demon."
So its true. He thought when she messaged him two weeks ago that she was making all this up, that she was one of Wolf's crazed fans coming to troll the website. Why does he keep doing that?
"Crazed fan, really?"
"Please get out of my head you're really creeping me out. And put some goddamn clothes on okay? Just because its 4am doesn't mean someone won't see us and I'm not no fucking pedophile."
"I don't have any clothes." She says plainly.
"Why are you wet?" Ew. He knows how it sounds.
"I took a swim in the lake." Her voice is cold and almost alien to him. He takes a good look at her face through the rearview mirror and notices a striking glow on her pale skin. She is almost...radiating. And not with something bright and divine, but with something banal, a glow of an ancient visceral darkness.
He doesn't bother to ask her why she's swimming in a lake at 4am in the morning on the coldest nights he's ever lived through. He realizes now he's tired. His cigarette fell onto the driver's matt, long gone. Maybe he should light another one.
"Fine let's drive to a Walmart and get you some clothes." Zach says.
"I know you have a duffel full of clothes in your trunk. I can smell them."
"Okay." Zach feels a wild hysterical laugh stir in his belly which he pushes down, he feels his grasp over his sanity slipping through his hands like desert sand. Desert sand, he's thinking of desert sand in the coldest night of his life. He feels like laughing again so he takes the car keys and pushes open the door and feels an aching whoosh of cold air gush through his thick black knitted sweater and sends ripples of freeze through his ribcage. He walks over to the back of the trunk. He can see the back of her head now through the back window, she stares straight into the rearview mirror and their eyes meet. He untwists from the uncomfortable grip of her glare and fumbles his key to pop open the trunk. It opens with a whoosh of air and droplets of wet dew trinkle down to the black asphalt. His trunk is filled with packs of water bottles, a small red ice cooler with fresh fruit inside, a couple Heineken beer cans, bags of lays chips (he likes the plain salted ones) and a small bag of weed in the far end. He ruffles through the paraphernalia and grabs his black duffel bag, heavy with folded clean clothes. He grabs a beer as well-- he's gonna need it-- and slams the trunk shut and locks it. He props open the driver's door and throws the beer can onto the passengers seat, gets in the driver's, shuts the door then turns to the backseat to plop the duffel bag beside her. The water off her body is now trickling down the floor matts. He feels slightly irritated.
"Knock yourself out and wear whatever you like." He turns back to the car and remembers this time to switch the heat on. The warm air makes him grip upon his sanity tighter, it reverberates through his sweater and thaws his rigid bones. He feels much better. He wants to drink, but he has to drive. He turns the drone of the radio off and puts the key in the ignition. He steals a glare through the rear view mirror and sees her using his cream towel to dry herself down and then wipe the car seat, toss it aside and put on a thick mud brown knitted sweater and off-white khaki pants. He tries to remember, through their messages what her name is, he knows she has some funny nickname.
"Needy's not a funny nickname." She cuts through his thoughts and catches his alarm through the mirror and utters "Sorry."
He turns to her. "Lets make a deal. You stay outta my mind, and I won't lose it enough to help you."
Needy smiles and offers her hand for him to shake. "Deal." He takes her handshake and feels her flesh is hot and stone solid, like an ancient burrying ground in the desert hills.
Hear you go thinking about deserts again, he thinks.
So just like that, Zachary made a pact with a devil in Devil's Kettle.
A surge of hysterical laughter springs up his belly again and he bites his tongue to keep it down, turns to the steering wheel and drives his Mercury off into the darkness with the demon in the backseat.