Devil's Crossroads: Nic Ward

By Z.J. Cannon

Speak of the devil...

 

So here I am, trouncing an angel as usual at our weekly chess game, when I get the news: God is dead.

 

As the big guy's worst enemy, I should be celebrating, right? Only I had nothing to do with this. My days of rebellion are long over. These days, I'm more interested in living a simple life on Earth—and whoever did this just ruined that for me.

 

Now every demon in Hell is on my case. Lord Lucifer, this is our chance—we need to strike at Heaven while they're weak. Lord Lucifer, the humans are defenseless—we can burn their world to ash. As if I have time to lead a war when I have a date with myself this weekend to try out a new cookie recipe. And sure, burning the humans' cities might be fun, but then what would happen to all the nice restaurants?

 

Worst of all, the one friend I've got has no time for me anymore. He's back to his big-shot angelic duties in Heaven—duties that probably include preparing for war against Hell. So much for our weekly chess games.

 

Not that I care. The devil doesn't have friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Z.J. Cannon
• Release date: Jul 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223123767

Book preview

Devil’s Crossroads

A Nic Ward Story

Z.J. Cannon

© 2023 Z.J. Cannon

https://www.zjcannon.com

All rights reserved

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Devil’s Crossroads

The chess tables weren’t busy this time of year. Most of the humans in the city were at home huddling in front of their heaters, packing on the sweater after sweater until they looked like the snowmen that watched us with their judgmental button eyes from across the park. The rest were hurrying down the sidewalk as fast as possible, hands jammed in their pockets, heads ducked against the wind. But the cold didn’t bother me. Half the reason I’d come up to Earth was to get away from the heat. As for the angel across from me… well, for him, it was either stay here or go home.

Checkmate. I tipped his king over and flashed him a quick grin. That’s three in a row. Maybe if you showed up for our games a bit more consistently, you’d get enough practice to beat me once in a while. Where were you last week?

Not all of us are as lax about our duties as you are. That stick-up-his-ass voice didn’t belong on the body he was currently wearing. He liked to dress up as a goth kid these days. Went by the name of Onyx. With that droopy hair and those depressing black clothes, he looked like he had fallen into a vat of self-indulgent misery and decided to roll around awhile. Which suited him, I supposed. Besides, I liked it a whole lot better than the tech-bro phase this had replaced.

He still stank of angel, though, whatever he was wearing. No amount of—I sniffed, and wrinkled my nose—cedar-and-patchouli cologne could cover that up.

Duties? I raised an eyebrow. Does your boss even know where you are right now? For that matter, has your boss known what you’ve been up to for the past five hundred years?

Onyx—he always insisted I use his ridiculous human names, probably in case one of the big guy’s spies was listening—started setting up the chessboard again. He made me take black, of course. He always made me take black. Not all duties are imposed from without, he said without looking up from his work.

So pretentious. Sometimes I didn’t know why I put up with him. But every time I tried spending time with my own people—self-important pricks, the lot of them—I remembered all over again. Onyx over there was in the same boat as me, at least when it came to how little we liked our supposed allies. I supposed that meant we were stuck with each other.

If only he would get the memo and stop skipping half our weekly chess games. If he would take his head out of his own ass for five seconds and realize these self-imposed duties of his didn’t exist, he might see that I was the only friend he had,