Kenzie Sutcliffe woke up to another normal morning—until a demon popped up in her shower. While trying to get rid of a monster zit, she dropped her acne lotion in the tub. And when fifty bucks’ worth of it swirled down the drain, it freed a demon from his prison portal. A mysteriously geeky-looking demon.
So now Kenzie is saddled with a creature who looks and acts like every other guy she knows—that is, annoying. At least Levi has a job—if you can call it that. He has to stir up envy and jealousy in humans, or he starves. All he’s tempting Kenzie to do is to crawl back into her bedroom and hide there forever. Because no one is going to be coveting her life after this.
This is Erin McCarthy’s first Young Adult novel. Before you start to cry, there are more contemporary novels coming up in Erin’s future. In fact there are many novels coming up from Erin. Sucker’s Bet in January, the 4th book in her Vegas Vampire series. She is working on a follow up to My Immortal. It is titled Fallen and is set to be out in May 2008. Erin says:
It is set in the same world of demons and fallen angels as MY IMMORTAL, and the sin gluttony is the theme for this book. The hero’s nineteenth century flaw of addiction to alcohol and drugs becomes his twenty-first century punishment as every woman he is intimate with becomes addicted to him.
Plus she has a new novella in the October Christmas anthology, AN ENCHANTED SEASON and is working on a new vampire series with Kathy Love. All this does mean we won’t be getting that new straight contemporary romance until early 2009.
Her new Young Adult novel Demon Envy will be out next month. Here is a peek at the first chapter…
Chapter One
Have you ever had such a horrible day that you wondered why your mother didn’t just eat you at birth like a gerbil does and spare you the hassle?
We’ve all had them. I’ve had a lot of them, way more than my fair share if I want to be whiny about it (which I don’t because I try really hard not to be a whiner), but none can compare to the day I accidentally opened a demon portal with my zit cream.
Oh, yeah. I did. Would this happen to anyone else? Probably not. But for me, Kenzie Sutcliffe, it is totally typical. If there is mud to step in, ketchup to squirt on my shirt, or a volleyball to be hit on the head with, I will manage it. What can I say? It’s a gift.
October twentieth started out normal enough: Annoying alarm went off way too early, mother made squawking sounds like a cracked out parrot- it’s late, really late, you’ll miss the bus!- and brother turned my bedroom light on for spite, searing my sleep-deprived eyeballs with fluorescent lighting at six am. Major wardrobe disaster occurred when I discovered I hadn’t turned on the dryer the night before and all my jeans were still cold and wet. Given that no one had done laundry in two weeks because Mom was working on a huge court case, I had finally taken matters into my own hands and stuffed eighty-seven pairs of jeans in the washer the night before- literally every piece of denim I owned. Then somehow had forgotten to turn on the dryer after the transfer of pants from the washer. I remembered to empty the lint trap and add the Snuggle dryer sheet, but forgot to push the pesky little on button.
Picture me in the kitchen in frog pajama pants staring into the dryer as if my retinas could evaporate all dampness: “Brandon! You were supposed to put the clothes in the dryer and turn it on!” It made me feel better to blame someone else even though it was a total out and out lie.
Fourteen-year old brother, milk dribbling out of his mouth: “Bite me.”
Okay, that was fair. Not bothering to pursue a good-natured round of verbal sparring with my brother, which wouldn’t dry the jeans anyway, I ran back upstairs, mentally racing through my closet. Brown cords? Too earthy. Skirt? Too bohemian. Black pants? Too school band concert.
The thing is, I liked jeans, and only jeans. Wearing anything else made me feel like a photo layout in a teen magazine. Toss me a football, give me some shiny gloss and a fan blowing my hair here and there, and I could be the Fall Collection. The only reason I had the brown cords and the boho skirt and the band concert pants was because my mother thought black hoodies were a crime against fashion humanity, and she held out a futile hope that by gifting me with cute coordinates, I would morph into Homecoming Queen destined for an Ivy League pre-law program. Much like herself.
It wasn’t going to happen.
She would have to pass the tiara torch to my little sister, because I was purely Fringe. Not those dangly weird strips on the country-western shirts you see in seventies bar movies, but I mean fringe, as in clinging to the edges of junior class social acceptance. That was me. Never totally out but never totally in either. Just as likely to be included with an enthusiastic invite, or totally forgotten when it came time to pass the word on about a major party. I never knew which one I was getting, and it was frustrating.
But with so many of those offered friendships as fake as the glossy teen catazines, I was constantly waging a war with myself. Who wanted to hang with a bunch of hollaback girls? Or worse, be one. On the other hand, it sucked to spend Friday night at home watching Rent with my best friend Isabella for the nineteenth time. Principles vs. Popularity, the age old question.
With this to debate while I showered, I went into my bathroom and discovered that overnight a giant crater had surfaced on my chin, a red-rimmed, oozing volcanic zit, ready to blow at any minute.
“Aah!” I shuddered involuntarily and reached for my morning acne lotion, the stuff that’s slimy and bleaches the color out of my aqua blue hand towels. Occasionally I wonder if it’s good to put something on my face that can strip color out of cotton- hello, Michael Jackson- but I need all the ammo I can get in the war on bad skin.
Here’s where it got weird. I cranked up my CD player so I’d be able to hear it in the shower. Then I leaned over to turn on the water, open bottle of lotion in my hand, wanting the temp to warm up while I was busy taking on pimple from hell in round one of Kenzie vs. body bacteria. I never even got as far as the faucet. In a move that is Classic Kenzie- questioning the usefulness of all the hours and thousands of dollars spent on dance lessons if I couldn’t even manage to walk without incident- I tripped on the bottom of my huge pj pants and slammed into the wall, dropping the lotion into the tub. It bounced, I winced in pain, and fifty bucks worth of prescription acne meds poured out of the bottle and down the drain.
I grabbed at it, but two thirds were already gone. If the pipes were having problems with pimples, they’d be in luck, otherwise it was a total waste. “Shoot!”
Saving what was left by tipping the bottle right side up, I also grabbed a big glop that was still clinging to the rim of the drain and tried to dribble it back into the opened cap. Okay, I admit, that was kind of a gross thing to do, but the tub was clean, and I was desperate. There was no way my mom would replace lotion that cost such major money just two weeks after I’d gotten it- can’t you just smell the lecture?- and life with increased break-outs was too horrific to contemplate.
Slapping what I couldn’t force back into the bottle onto my crater-covered chin, I turned around to grope for a towel. Unfortunately they were all crumpled up damp and dirty on the floor where I had left them the night before, so I settled for swiping some toilet paper and trying to get the sticky slime off me.
My fingers were starting to burn and itch, which struck me as a bad sign. Like an allergic reaction waiting to happen. Like swelled sausage fingers or nasty rash spreading out in ninety directions. And knowing my mother, that would not be a good enough reason to stay home from school. She’d make me go anyway, and by tomorrow my nickname would be Contagious Kenzie or Rash Girl. Notoriety for a dermatological emergency wasn’t what I was going for, even if I had no interest whatsoever in making a play for Homecoming Queen.
Amber Janson already had that locked up anyway, even if we were only about a minute into our junior year. Barring a major scandal involving loss of her credit card privileges, announcement of a secret drug problem, or a sudden excessive weight gain, there were no challengers to Amber’s dominance of the pack. Do I sound jealous? Yeah, guess what, it’s because I was. Come on, you would be too. Honesty is a virtue and I truly, honestly, loathed Amber. I’m not sure I had a good reason, exactly, since she’d never done anything to me directly, it was just that her life was like Bubblicious gum- pink and bouncy and full of sugar, and mine was a gumball- hard, and totally lacking in flavor.
Wiping the lotion off my fingers wasn’t working at all, and my skin was looking really red and annoyed, and I was beginning to picture myself starring in a future Stephen King novel (she was consumed by a giant rash!), so I reached behind me to turn the shower on so I could rinse. Only my hand hit something hard, something that shouldn’t have been there, something that was not shower wall, not faucet, not empty air like it should have been. And when I whipped my head around to check out what I’d made contact with, there was a guy sitting in my bathtub. Knees up to his chest, he blinked chocolate brown eyes at me.
There was a guy in my tub. A guy. In the tub.
You know what I did, right? I screamed bloody murder like any sane sixteen-year old girl would do when a guy just randomly pops into her shower with zero warning. My mother didn’t raise no fool.
She raised a chicken.
Or at least I tried to scream. Before I got halfway through one, “Aaahhh,” he cut me off by slapping his hand right over my mouth. I did not know he was going to do that. There was no time to react, no time to catch a breath, no time to jerk back, close my mouth or anything, before my face was suddenly covered with guy fingers from chin to nostrils. Not a good feeling. They were smothering and strong and they smelled like… guy. Like salted soft pretzel and skin. Totally disgusting.
