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Prompt (inspired by a friend of Oxford's and mine):

"John's Girlfriend from Hell"




THE GIRLFRIEND FROM HELL

Even without looking up, John knew she had come back by the sulfurous smell wafting its way through the room. Well, there went his quiet evening.

“John! Dammit all, pay attention to me!”

Coughing from the smoke, John heaved the sigh of the damned and closed his grimoire. Myrtle was perched in her usual blackened corner. At the moment he looked up, she finished sharpening her horns with a pumice stone and started scowling at her reflection in a mirror fragment on the floor.

“Sorry, lost in my reading. Sorry,” John said, smiling as sincerely as possible. “You look, um, nice. Infernal, even.”

“Nice? NICE? Is that all you can say? I haven’t tortured a soul in weeks, but you don’t know anything about that, Mr. Necromancer-too-busy-to-do-a-summons. Not that YOU care about me,” she sniffed, petulantly biting the head off a passing rat and drinking its blood.

“Now, Myrtle, you know I—JESUS, Myrtle! (Whoops, sorry, sorry) How many times have I asked you not to get blood on the carpet?” He leapt out of his chair, patting at the shag with an ineffectual handkerchief.

Myrtle curled into a ball of flame, crying rivers of molten lava. “*sniff* You care more about that s-s-s-stupid carpet than you care about me!”

“Oh, come now, my little briar patch. This is my last Shag-goth carpet. Do you have any idea how long it took to get?” He stroked the rubbery nap fondly. “Why, this is authentic Old One hide that you’re scorching right now.”

“Things, things, things. That’s all you ever talk about. Once you’d bring me the blood of a hundred innocent virgins. Now it’s all, ‘Myrtle fetch some stupid dragon, Myrtle show me the stupid future, Myrtle cast a hex on this stupid king.’ You take me for granted.”

John muttered a quick ward and gave Myrtle a quicker pat across her membranous wings. “Stop talking rot. Hey, I’m the one who called you, right?” He tried a leer. “Remember our first summoning? The silver knife?” He winked. “The pact of blood?”

Flames roared about her sobbing form. “So I’m just good for that, huh? Magic circles and pacts? What about a me as a PERSON???”

John jumped out of the way as a burning timber fell from the roof. “But, you aren’t a person. Remember?”

“WAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!! I hate you!” Myrtle lobbed an unchristened infant’s skull across the room at him. “I tried to make this contract work, but you don’t care. You aren’t willing to make the slightest effort. Oh, Father in Hell, why oh why did I ever agree to take your soul in Eternal Damnation?”

“Myrtle…..”

“LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!” Flames spread across the floor. Small, dark scurrying creatures screamed in little high voices as they were immolated.

John hopped on top of his Laz-Z-Boy recliner. “So, that’s how you feel, huh? Ready just to call it quits after all these years?”

“What do you care?” she sobbed.

“Just curious,” he said coldly. “I mean, if you want to break up, I want to hear you say that, as far as you’re concerned, it’s over between us.”

“Yes, it’s over, you stupid human!” she sobbed.

There was a long pause, then Myrtle’s red eyes opened wide.

“Whoops,” she said as she vanished in a puff of black smoke.

John moved his chair over to an intact section of the room and opened his book again. “What on Earth was I thinking?” he asked himself, eyeing the page 666 succubus with the relish of a free man