Description: Chapter One Salt and Silver This is not a long or a complicated story. There''s a Door to Hell in the basement of my diner, right next to where we stack the boxes from food deliveries. It''s really annoying; there''s always mystical crap coming out, and then Ryan smashes everything up trying to get rid of said mystical crap. Blood gets everywhere, lots of demon guts, lots of salt circles and painted sigils. And I put all the replacement food and equipment on my credit card, so you can see how this gets tedious. Not that I necessarily mind having Ryan around-he''s a demon hunter. A guy with big, weird weapons, dark eyes, and stubble. Leather pants, leather duster, beat-up black T-shirt, and a big black cowboy hat he has very carefully explained is a Stetson and not, ahem, "a cowboy hat." In a word: hot. In daylight, on the street, he looks like a poker player coming out of an all- night game, where the stakes were high and the players were rough and he doesn''t quite remember that normal people don''t generally try to hide their thoughts behind a blank face and lowered hat brim. I don''t usually see him on the street, though. It''s always under the fluorescents in the diner kitchen, or under the bare lightbulbs of the basement. Ryan and sunshine and me don''t seem to mix. Forget the poker player thing; to me, he always looks like he''s just finished fighting a war. He hasn''t, though-finished fighting, I mean. I guess he can''t. Ryan''s got a cot in the basement-he has had for the last six years, ever since the Door was opened. (Okay, true confession time: Ever since I opened the Door, me and my two best friends. And yes, it was really, really dumb. We have gotten the lecture, read the pamphlet, and sat through the after-school special. We know.) Anyway. Ryan''s almost always near the Door. Sometimes, if a demon gets past him, he''ll leave to hunt it down. And sometimes he just goes out to, I don''t know, pick up his mail or something. I get kind of nervous those times, though-worried that one day I''m going to go into the basement to get, like, more rice or something, when he isn''t guarding the Door, and end up vamped. Or eaten by a zombie. Or slimed on by a sludge demon. Look, you never know. And it''s not as if I''m getting any perks by Ryan being around (aside from not being dead, I mean). I tried that once-okay, more than once; it was late, I was drunk, and we''d just met over the corpse of something that bled yellow-and he wasn''t interested. Which was fine. Probably better, come to think of it. Ryan, for all that he''s hot, is also a jerk. And I''m not just saying that because he turned me down. Much. I''m not much to look at, I guess. I can see that every day, when I look at Amanda. She''s been my friend since before Mom ran off with her tennis instructor and, coincidentally, with the contents of the family coffers. It was Amanda who actually stuck around and let my father and me sleep in her family''s pool house, got me out of bed in the mornings, and bullied the hell out of me until I got a job at Sally''s Diner. She was even supportive when I kept working at Sally''s, even though Amanda and I are from Long Island and Sally''s is in Brooklyn. (If you''re not from New York, stuff like that doesn''t matter, but New Yorkers know it is a fight to the death between Long Island and Brooklyn.) On the other hand, the problem with Amanda is-well, she has a lot of problems. Her biggest one, I guess, is that she''s a crazy alcoholic who spends a lot of time having sex with inappropriate men to make up for what ever emotional problems come along with having too much money and not enough hobbies. Ryan probably falls into the realm of inappropriate men, and he wouldn''t be the first to pass over me to settle on her. Even when she looks like trash, she looks classy. If she had perfect bow lips, she''d actually look a little like Greta Garbo, because she''s very pointy; she doesn''t, though. She''s pointy and her lips are wide and plump. I kind of envy her lips. She doesn''t appreciate them. I don''t actually know if Amanda''s slept with Ryan. Now, if Stan had gotten down with Ryan, that I would have known about. He''s the only other one who stuck around through the Great Depression of Me. The big problem with Stan, aside from how almost everyone he knows calls him Stan even though his name is Charles, is that he went from being a cute, nerdy, skateboarding geek to being a club kid. Like, he realized he was gay and bam! Or maybe he just watched too much Queer as Folk and thought that was really how gay men were supposed to be because he didn''t know any better. So he spends a lot of time, like Amanda, having too much sex with people-except with Stan, I guess it''s because he''s making up for lost time. And also to find people who won''t call him Stan, which makes sense. The club guys who give him blowjobs in alleys call him Dish. That doesn''t really bother me except for, you know, AIDS, and also that maybe one of those guys is Ryan. Except Stan swears not, and Stan wouldn''t lie about that. So that leaves Ryan: tall, dark, handsome, leather-wearing Ryan, apparently surrounded by people who''d happily jump him, and still finding the Door to Hell a lot more interesting. Here are some important facts about the Door. One: It was Amanda''s idea to open it, not mine. Two: It was a joke. We didn''t even realize we were opening a Door into Hell, because we were super- drunk at the time, and, seriously, joking around. Now that I know what Doors do and how they work . . . well, I never wanted something so bad that I''d open a Door for it. Because three: The reason anyone would want to open a Door to Hell in the first place-with the death, and the blood, and the bioluminescent goo that you can''t actually ever clean off the floor no matter how harsh the chemicals or how many black cats you drive across the stain (and that''s a fun story)-the reason you do it is because the Door . . . gives you things. I don''t know what Amanda gets, or Stan. I barely know what I get. I just know I''m happier now than I was before the Door and Ryan showed up in my life. It doesn''t say much about my life before the Door that probable death is a step up. Not that I''d open one again, or would have the first time, if I actually knew then what I know now. Ryan says that Doors, like the one in the basement, lead to nine hells-or hell dimensions, or just dimensions, it depends on who''s talking and how much they''ve had to drink, and did I mention that there might be more than nine, or less, or maybe pi?-and when a Door is opened, demons try to get through them. Hunters wait on the other side. Sometimes not, though. They''re there when a demon goes through a Door they''re watching, but they can''t be everywhere. What this means now is that when someone pounds on the diner''s metal grate, I wake up. Usually it''s someone pounding at four or five in the morning-either right after I go to sleep, or right before I am supposed to wake up. I always think, for a brief second, that it''s demons knocking down my bedroom door-but it''s usually Stan wanting to sleep off a good time, or Amanda wanting to steal my pillows and ice cream and bitch about her parents. It''s never someone telling me I''ve won a million dollars. To night it''s-Ryan? Last I saw him, he was waving goodnight as he headed into the basement. Now Ryan is waving his Stetson at me from the street below. I open the window and lean out. "What are you doing? It''s four in the morning!" I holler, with no regard for the neighbors. "There''s an animal problem!" he hollers back. He''s got a nice twang in his voice, which gives me a nice twang in my belly. I sigh. Animal problem is code for werewolf. "Then fix it!" I tell him. "Lemme in, Allie!" "Not if there''s still an animal problem!" "Now!" He hits his Stetson against his thigh. I can''t really see his face-the moon isn''t quite full and he''s standing in the one tiny bit of shadow between the floodlights-but if I had to bet, I''d say he looks annoyed. And frankly, if he''s going to keep yelling shit, the neighbors are going to call the cops. Again. So I pull on a robe and trudge downstairs to let him in through the side door. "Ry." I greet him with a yawn. "What happened to your key?" He ignores me. "The Door must''ve opened, because I ran into a werewolf on my way here," he says to me, and strides right past me into the back of the diner, coat flapping and everything. "Sure it did," I say to the door as I close it. "And I''m happy to make a pot of coffee and stay up for the rest of the night and get no sleep and do everything and go everywhere and-" "Stop bitching. I thought I trained you better than to let a werewolf get out of the Door." When I catch up to him, he''s staring down at the line of table salt running in front of the basement door. He won''t find any breaks in it, though-I handle foodstuffs for a living

Please Wait