Pumpkin Spice

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Epilogue: Later that night of the Halloween costume ball

Once upon a time, Old Scratch had a rather unsuccessful trip at Halloween-time. Oh, he'd gleaned a couple of souls and set up several others for future delivery, but as the evening neared an end, he was quite bummed.

The guy he most wanted to corrupt on his trip had slipped through his fingers. To make matters worse, he'd failed to even place in the contest at the costume ball despite being decked out in full devil mode. The judges agreed that he'd "tried for excessive realism but had utterly failed in his attempt." Considering that he was one hundred percent real, he wasn't sure why they thought this so he made a mental note to question a couple of them in detail when they dropped into his abode over the coming years.

During a quick trip into the restroom after exiting the ballroom, he assumed his everyday appearance, with his hair swept back to reveal his prominent widow's peak and sporting his usual goatee and pencil mustache to highlight his black leather biker's outfit and black leather boots. Stepping out of the hotel where the event had been held, he saw it had started sprinkling so he quickly made his way across the street to a coffee shop that was open twenty-four hours a day, making it in the door just as a clap of thunder sounded and the rain started to pour down.

There were a surprising number of patrons for that time of night so he stepped in line and waited his turn, as patiently as his usual impatience allowed, and he moved up to the counter when the barista called out, "Next?"

She said, "Hi, sir, you've been granted a Halloween karma by the previous customer, meaning that your drink has been paid for." She added in a whisper, "Would you like to do the same for the next customer?"

He looked behind him to see two nuns in a whispered conversation, and a brilliant plan of how he might corrupt them formed in his mind. However, as he continued his brief perusal, he noticed how skimpy, revealing even, that their outfits were, with the white nun's top being very low-cut and showing massive cleavage and the lesser endowed black nun with the great legs having her skirt slit all the way to her waist. These were, he suspected, Halloween costumes rather than actual habits and his idea of attempting to corrupt them, while probably fun, would be rather redundant, occurring far too late to be of any real value to his cause.

Turning back to the barista, he said, "No, just give me my coffee. The name's Scratch."

The barista gave a little huff at having the karma chain broken and wrote on the side of the cup before putting it on the counter for her coworker to fill. She then turned to the nuns, Scratch having been completely forgotten.

He took a seat and waited far too long before his name was finally called so he could retrieve his cup. On taking a sip, it was only then, as the cinnamon, the ginger, the nutmeg, and whatever the hell else they put in fucking pumpkin spice hit the tastebuds on his forked tongue, that he realized that in accepting the offered karma, he'd forgotten to order what he actually wanted. He was about to spit it out when the two "nuns'' stopped in front of his table.

The black nun said, "A gentleman who likes pumpkin spice, Sister Bambi!" while the white one grinned and added, "A man after my own heart...or after something anyway, Sister Thumper. Sir, can we enjoy our pumpkin spice with you and then maybe go somewhere else for some, shall we say, spicier fun?"

Bambi with her big cleavage held her pumpkin spice toward him and succeeded in pushing her tits even closer together while Thumper held her drink out similarly, only pushing a leg forward, revealing the tops of her thigh-high fishnets and a brief flash of the skimpiest white lace imaginable over mocha-colored skin where her legs met.

As much as he hated pumpkin spice anything—and even more after the events of the evening—he decided that all work and no play made Old Scratch a pretty dull devil. He thought to himself, Sacrifices, in the right circumstances, can sometimes be a good thing . Sometimes, particularly when pumpkin spice is involved, they're not...but one must be willing to make them anyway.

Raising his cup toward theirs and resisting the urge to gag, he took a big swig of his pumpkin spice latte and then barely kept his face from twisting into something even more hideously evil than usual before giving them a grin. Lying through his teeth on one hand but telling the absolute truth on the other, he said, "Sisters, it definitely won't be a sacrifice to offer myself at your disposal this evening. To a spicy and most revealing Halloween night together."

The End

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Endnotes:

Thank you for reading and for your votes and feedback in the form of favorites, follows, comments, or PMs. All are appreciated.

If you hadn't guessed, a particular product that showed up even earlier than usual this year inspired this story. I was in a wacky mood when I came up with the idea for this so I decided to have fun with it and pull in bits and pieces from a number of popular works. Those that were alluded to but not mentioned directly included Vickie Lawrence's "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia," Charlie Daniels' "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," Marvel's "Ghostrider," "Sympathy for the Devil" by The Rolling Stones, Bambi and Thumper from "Diamonds are Forever" (which Ian Fleming took from the original "Bambi," of course), and a bit of inspiration from my memory of Stephen Vincent Benét's "The Devil and Daniel Webster," though I haven't read that since high school a long time ago.