Witch Road to Take Read Free

though I
had never ventured above upstairs. It would have been unthinkable
to explore there, especially for me.
    I spent very little time downstairs in Hell,
in fact, as little time as possible. My father was a tyrant, and I
could not stand the smell or the screams when souls were tortured.
Oddly, one wouldn’t think there’d be a smell, but the human portion
of my senses was delicate to my surroundings. My greatest fight
against my father was the fact that he wanted me to work in the
acid pit.
    He denied me the right to work in the
torture pit, which was the easiest of the three. Souls that killed
to protect loved ones spent eternity there.
    Nor would he let me work in the oil pit,
which he used for souls who disobeyed the Halo Man’s rules. Another
job would have been a vacation spot compared to the acid pit.
    No, if Father had anything to say about
it—and he would—the worst of the three pits was to be my lot in
life. Instead of the torture pit or the oil pit, Father wanted me
to handle the acid pit. This was the worst of the three and only
souls who had committed the most heinous of crimes ended up there.
For some reason, my father wanted me to work in that
pit.
    Why me?
    My father’s expectations that I would work
in the acid pit had been a good reason for me to run away from
downstairs. Not that there weren’t other good reasons, but the acid
pit, filled with the most hardened and unremorseful criminals of
all time—including Jack the Ripper and those of his ilk—terrified
me beyond belief. Even though I was the daughter of Satan, it was
beyond my youthful understanding how a human could be that evil.
Half human and half…demon…for lack of a better word, I had always
believed that my human DNA was the softer side of my existence.
Looking at the occupants of the acid pit convinced me that some
humans were worse than most of the demons I knew, including my
father.
    With my back against the wall and my legs
stretched out on my bed, I contemplated how I would approach my
father about my fate. I would be lectured and expected, when I
became an adult, to take up important duties in the family
business—duties that Father would decide.
    There just had to be a way to explain to him
that I was not the kind of girl who thrived on the torture thing.
Although I was his daughter that didn’t mean that I wanted to take
on the family business of administering torture or even overseeing
it done by lesser demons. After all, my mother was a human witch,
and that made me part human. Though Father had always downplayed my
half-humanity, it rose up in me like a Santa Ana wind whose job it
was to whisk away toxins in a polluted environment.
    I dreaded the upcoming confrontation with my
father and began twisting my hair over the side of my right
shoulder because I was nervous. I’d run away from our home in Hell
for three months, and for that three months of absence, I had no
doubt that he would impound me for an equal three-month punishment
for no other reason than for his own personal satisfaction and to
even the score. Three months for three months. Satan wasn’t just
good at his job, he reveled in it and applied his own sense of
justice to all proceedings of Hell as if he was running a
corporation.
    Rules, rules, rules. He was made of
them.
    It was the stench of rotted flesh, from his
dealings in the pit, which indicated my father’s arrival. That, and
the way that he broke my door when he slammed it open, making the
hinges and the deadbolts fly. Father liked to make a dramatic
entrance. It was a given. I was probably on my tenth bedroom
door.
    His smell was going to make me gag and the
force of the broken door slamming into the wall made my metal desk
vibrate. His break-in pierced my ears with so many decibels that my
eardrums thrummed.
    He was fuming, literally, with acrid
sulfurous smoke rising from the top of his head. I was scared. More
than scared, I was completely terrified. When my seven-foot-tall
father stood in