Free How to Lose a Demon in 10 Days by Saranna DeWylde

He was tall, with jet-black hair and smooth pale skin. He had an immaculate, devilish-looking goatee, and he looked kind of like a vampire, with shoulders to die for. He also looked kind of familiar.
    She was surprised to see him still standing there as the energy faded, but Seraphim prepared herself to strike again. She’d try something more like lightning. Still, it was a shame. Just because she was old didn’t mean that she was dead. She could still appreciate a fine piece of meat.
    He laughed, a rich sound that touched her in places that hadn’t been touched for years. She was tempted to change form, to become the voluptuous seductress and have some fun of her own, but she rather liked wearing the shape of the crone. She could get away with more. No one suspected the grandmotherly type—no one but those from her part of the world, anyway. They could see her coming a mile away.
    “Ah, Sera. I see you don’t remember me.”
    “Should I? And don’t call me Sera. No one calls me that but . . .” She trailed off and almost zapped herself in the mouth as she clamped her power-infused hand over it to stifle a scream. She let the energy dissipate.
    “Is it coming back to you, love?”
    Hades, the onetime god of the underworld, had gotten another job with a spiffy new title in this current pantheon. He was now upper management. In fact, he was the Big Boss. He was what the mortals commonly referred to as the Devil. In her youth, Seraphim Stregaria had shown great power for a mortal. She’d summoned a demon, made her deal, and it was with this very demon. He’d not been so high up back then, had still been a Crown Prince. Even though she’d been a virgin, the laws of nature had been somehow twisted. She’d gotten pregnant with Aurora, Grace’s mother. Then the war was over and Seraphim came to the United States to give her child a better life. She’d never seen the demon again.
    “Nothing from you for seventy years and you think I’m happy to see you?” Power gathered again at her palms.
    “Ah, Sera, girl. Work’s been a bitch. Kept me busy. What can I say?”
    “That you’re a thoughtless bastard?” she offered.
    “That I am.” He flashed her a wicked grin, baring straight, white, and inhumanly lovely teeth. She wanted to knock them out.
    “What do you want?”
    “You.”
    What? He could have knocked her over with a feather. Had his marbles rolled away from him and gotten lost in a fire pit?
    “No,” she said.
    “What?”
    “You heard me. You think you can just disappear and leave me with a child and never ever help me and then—”
    “I did help you. You survived a concentration camp. You came to me a virgin, and you survived with your baby. How do you think you found the way to this Baba Yaga power, hmm? Did you really think it was all by yourself? And why do you think Grace got Caspian?”
    “Because that’s who I told her to summon.”
    “And you think you came up with that all on your lonesome?”
    “As a matter of fact—” Seraphim began.
    “She’s my granddaughter. Of course, I—” he said at the same time.
    Seraphim closed the distance between them, her form growing younger with every step so that she might stand upright and look him in the eye. “Then, why did you let Aurora die?” she whispered with a deadly calm. “You don’t care about your half-spawn. Not mine, and none of them from any of the other women you bred with.”
    “You’re wrong, Sera. Life and death are not in my purview.”
    “You’re the Devil!” she shrieked. “How can it not be?”
    “That belongs to Fate.” He cast his eyes skyward. “Even He doesn’t twist those threads. There are some things that can be changed and some that cannot. Man is the maker of all the evil in the world, I just hold an office. My duties are to test Man, to show him the faces of adversity and horror. Not to kill, not to murder, and certainly not to resurrect. Her soul was gone, Sera. She wanted to go. I can’t put