Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
Even if that had been your point, all along—
Dev was knocked into by someone bumping his left arm.
“Oh! Sorry!” A bubbly young woman dressed entirely in purple smiled at him. “My fault!”
As she kept going, she was one of what had to be hundreds of just-like-her: All around him, women were streaming into the banks of glass doors, in groups, by themselves, in pairs. A lot of them were in various shades of purple, and some had even dyed their hair along the grape spectrum.
Falling into the flow—as one helluva this-thing-is-not-like-the-others—he eventually found himself in an open-air lobby that was so large, it had horizons, the brightly lit concession stands on either end like rising suns. Escalators went up and down to a second story, and there were bathrooms every ten yards, it seemed. Filling the space were long lines before all kinds of tables, purple branded tote bags being given to women who were presenting IDs and tickets on their electronic wallets.
The din of female voices was like being in an echo chamber of birds.
With his head already starting to pound, he hit the nearest escalator and rode up to the second level along with a lineup of buzzing, chattering, fizzy women.
Getting off along with them, he hung back as the stream of attendees zeroed in on sets of double doors that opened into a ballroom-sized event space congested with hundreds of ten-top circular tables. Standing like sentries to a temple, staffers in purple logo’d shirts checked phones for etickets, and then ushered people in.
The brunette woman’s face and the R2E logo were everywhere, all around, on banners than hung from the steel rafters, and step and repeats for photo ops, and signage on every flat surface and all the load-bearing concrete pylons in between.
Heading over to the entries to the event, Dev stared across the sea of tables to the stage down at the far end. Purple walls, purple draping, and screens reflecting all that purple, which would soon magnify the speaker’s face.
Like anybody might have forgotten the damn thing.
“I do not want to be here,” he muttered.
A woman popped in front of him and grabbed his forearm with the zeal of an acolyte. “Oh, the tenets apply to all of us, men included. You’re more than welcome!”
Then she wrapped a purple boa around his neck and kept right on going.
Had he really thought he could avoid this forever, Dev thought as he ditched the feathers.
No, he’d just been hoping he could. But ever since that billboard had caught that freakish wind, this collision course he’d been determined to dodge had been locked and loaded. And if not for Lyric?
He wouldn’t fucking be here at all.
It was only by keeping the memory of her front and center in his mind that he was able to continue. But he didn’t go into the ballroom. He skirted the event space altogether, and went around the corner.
There were a couple of cops—live ones, not the robots—blocking the head of a corridor that paralleled the lateral wall of the ballroom to a fire door with a red glowing EXIT sign over it. Halfway down, a group of people, not in purple but in professional suits and slacks, were clustered around a doorway that was attended by another pair of cops.
The steel panel under that red sign opened.
And there she was.
The face of Resolve2Evolve, the focus of all the attention… the reason everybody had come to this convention center, was in the house.
Except it was all a lie. That was no woman.
That wasn’t even a human.
It was a demon who had convinced all these women that she was not only one of them, but a messenger of their emotional and mental health—and as she stepped out under the galaxy of the ceiling lights far, far above her, he had to admit she glowed.
She was even more beautiful than in the pictures, downright resplendent in the flesh, that long dark hair curling naturally and bouncing with shine, that visage full of health and possessing one-in-a-million perfect features, that body wrapped in a purple dress that accentuated the hips, waist, and bust that needed no help whatsoever.
He could practically smell the Poison by Dior from here.
Valentina Disserte—the name she was going by now, no longer the Devina she’d once been—was talking to the people who were coming in behind her, and as she strode forward in high heels, the marching band of advisers who accompanied her were clearly going to merge with the ones who were already in place and waiting. Meanwhile, her red lips smiled easily as she spoke, and her eyes slanted this way and that, managing to be both authoritative and flirtatious. Motioning with her hands, her red-tipped fingers splayed and closed, to emphasize whatever points she was making.
No jewelry. No watch. No phone, no handbag, no car keys.