CHAPTER
ONE
Annie
I’d never seen so many men with horns in one place, not even at the Devil’s Ball in Tampa. That was the first thing I noticed: monstrous, cartoonish, jarringly archetypal. The second thing was the heat—pavement shimmering, a dry wind that felt like opening an oven not quite preheated. The bus rumbled away behind me with a fart of exhaust, and I was alone on the sidewalk, duffel at my feet, staring across the road at the fabled Devil’s Throat strip.
Valley of the Damned didn’t have a Welcome to Hell sign, but it had a thirty-foot billboard for Bingo Brides, with a demon in a white tux and a bouquet of pink roses. Kind of sweet, in a way. I wanted to laugh, but my throat felt too tight. Instead, I checked my phone for service (nope), then checked my reflection in the dark glass of the bus shelter. Two-tone bangs still sharp, lipstick immaculate, eyeliner winged and fierce. The Nevada sun lit my cheekbones the way I liked, but I regretted the glossy finish, already prickling sweat beads at my hairline. I shifted my bag to the other hand and stared at the courthouse clock across thestreet, which was stuck at 3:33, hands welded in a perpetual omen. I’m not superstitious, but that still got me.
I crossed Main, half expecting a demon to pop out of a manhole and photobomb my entrance, but the strip was deserted except for a couple of old ladies dragging folding chairs toward the Valley of the Damned Hall, their hair as blue as my favorite lipstick. Even the neon was off, giving the place a sun-bleached, post-apocalyptic charm. But after Tampa, I could handle weird.
Devil’s Throat was a single block of false-front storefronts—saloon, pawnshop, diner, dollar store, jewelry spot, tattoo parlor. My destination was in the last building on the row: the bingo hall.
It sounded like such a joke, like the punchline to a meme. Except I’d bought a one-way ticket to Valley of the Damned because after two years as a nutritionist at a long-term care facility and a decade of dating men who described themselves as “intuitive” (eye roll), I had nothing to show for it except an Etsy collection of weird apology gifts. I needed something real. Or at least, real enough to scare me into wanting to wake up every day.
My last ex was a man named Seth—using the termmanloosely. He was a barista with a demon tattoo and an anime-level fixation on being “bad.” He’d moved into my place after a month, left beard trimmings in the sink, and used my expensive hair masks as lube. When I finally dumped him, he cried, and then asked if he could keep the air fryer. I only said yes because I wanted the last word in what was otherwise a two-year slog of petty, pathetic stalemates.
The morning after, he sat on the edge of my bed, red-eyed and puffy, wearing my old Misfits tee, and said, “You’re the only person who’s ever understood me.” Then he moved out without so much as a backward glance, blocked me on Instagram, andreplaced my number with a demon emoji in the group chat with friends.
I kept waiting for the regret to hit, but regret never showed. Instead, I’d cleaned under my couch for the first time in three years, watched horror movies alone with takeout, and realized I didn’t miss Seth so much as the feeling of being needed, of mattering. He had always made me feel necessary, which I mistook for love. What I actually wanted was someone who made me feel alive.
Which is why I was here, melting in the Nevada sun, about to walk into a stranger’s idea of Hell and win myself a demon husband. No more half measures. No more settling for “better than nothing.” I wanted heat, not a slow simmer, and if that meant getting burned, so be it.
When I pushed through the glass doors, the AC blasted me in the face so hard I almost fell backwards. Not just cold—antiseptic and chemical, stinging the inside of my nose. The lobby was mostly linoleum, a vending machine graveyard, and a mounted bull’s head with glitter-glue tears running down its cheeks. A sign-in sheet and a stack of pens waited on the folding table. A doodle in the margin read, “DO NOT FEED THE DEMONS.” I wrote “Annie H.” and underlined it three times.
The hall itself was Vegas-big, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a dais at the far end. Rows and rows of Formica tables, each with a plastic bottle of ketchup-red bingo markers. I counted at least a dozen demon men in the back row, already in their assigned seats, horns in all shapes and sizes: goat, ram, antelope, devil-from-a-painting. Two had tails coiled like licorice ropes around their chair legs. Even sitting, they looked like a pack of linebackers at a tea party, hunched and tense. The rest of the room was empty, except for a woman in a mesh shirt and high-waisted jeans organizing bingo cards on a folding table.
She spotted me and waved. “Are you Annie?”
I nodded, too dry-mouthed to risk speaking, and drifted over. She was about my age, with dimple piercings and a magenta undercut, and there were black roses painted on her nails.
“I’m Mara, tonight’s designated handler-slash-bouncer. Don’t worry,” she said, lowering her voice, “the demons are way more nervous than we are. They look scary, but they are all here for the same reason.”
"Are you a bride?" I asked.
"Ha! Not unless brides have suddenly started wearing sweatpants and eating cereal at 2:00 p.m. I moved here with my wife five years ago. We just couldn't resist the irresistible charm of the local coffee shop's questionable Wi-Fi and the neighborhood raccoons' nightly garbage raids."
“Lucky them,” I said. “The raccoons, I mean.” If Mara noticed my hands shaking, she played it off with a wink and a shuffle of the sign-up sheets, like she was shuffling a tarot deck that could decide my fate. “How many of us tonight?” I asked, peering into the great linoleum tundra.
“Six, not counting you,” she said. “Plus the usual lineup of demon bachelors, but we keep them separate until the program starts. Safety and suspense, you know? Over there”—she pointed at a round table in the corner, already half-full—“is the holding pen. Come on. I’ll introduce you.”
The other women looked up as we approached. They were nothing like the parade of would-be Stepford bachelorettes I’d expected. One wore a tie-dyed T-shirt that said “Eat the Rich, Marry a Demon,” another had a spiked leather choker and a jacket patched with even more spikes, and another had a bandage on her arm and an expression that dared me to ask her how she’d gotten the injury. Quick glances and raised eyebrows, the instant calculus of potential allies, rivals, and drinking buddies. I was low on social battery, but the tide of nervous energy in the room made me want to match their wattage.
“Hey, you’re new!” said the girl in the tie-dye. On second look, she was not, in fact, a girl at all but a woman with the sort of laugh lines that come from years of being the first to arrive and last to leave at every party.
I introduced myself and got a chorus of names in return: tie-dye was Jules, ex-bartender from Omaha; the choker-and-spikes-jacket was named Lark, and she worked in a tattoo shop in Portland (Maine, not Oregon, “the other one, the one with more ghosts”). The woman with the makeshift bandage called herself Erin and said she was “between gigs.”
Mara snapped the worn clipboard against her palm like a judge's gavel. "Alright, mortals," she announced, eyebrows arched dramatically, "the fine print you should've read before showing up. Rule one: you've got a three-day trial period. Youmustconsummate the marriage in those three days. If both parties agree to continue at the end—and I mean enthusiastic, notarized consent—you're magically bound to a ninety-day marriage contract. No takebacks, no refunds." She tapped her pen against the board. "Rule two: survive those ninety days still wanting each other, and congratulations! You're legally and supernaturally obligated to tie the eternal knot. We're talking forever-ever. Like, outlive-the-heat-death-of-the-universe forever." She grinned. "But hey, at least you get a toaster." No one laughed, not even Jules, who looked like the type to appreciate dark humor. The truth of it pressed down on us like the static before a thunderstorm. I gripped my own knees, and while I tried to project “unflappable party girl” at all times, my knuckles stood out white and obvious.
Mara handed out name tags—sticky rectangles with “HELLO, I’M A BINGO BRIDE” printed beneath a dizzy devil logo. As we affixed them, she hustled us through rules about safe words, emergency contacts, and the “conjugal cooldown closet,” which was apparently stocked with Xanax, bath bombs, andemergency string cheese. She said it like running from a demon groom at midnight was something that happened a lot, and maybe it did.
Jules snorted. “What happens if we want to bail before ninety days?”
“If you break the marriage contract, there’s paperwork, and an exit interview with the mayor, who is, unfortunately, also a demon. This may be a valley of demons, but it is also Nevada. They take contract law very seriously.”
“Is he hot?” Lark asked, deadpan.
Mara shrugged. “I mean, if you’re into politicians with obsidian skin and a tail like a hydraulic lift, then yeah, he’s a total DILF. Personally, I think he cries himself to sleep at night, but who am I to judge?”
