Complete at last!
If you're just here for the promised smut, check out chapter 6, 26, 42, 56, 58, 60, 74, 75, 77, & 83. If OCs annoy you, just skip to 58-60, which is a lovely sexy subplot devoted entirely to Rachel and Al. ;)
If you like chapters 1-13, you can read them again from Ash's point of view in "Demon Headgames."
Finally, if you want a quick, more detailed refresher of the events up until chapter 60 or so, you can read a humorous summary in "Ash and Evie in Fifteen Minutes."
Introduction and Summary
This story is a sequel to "The Scar," "Ashes to Ashes," and "The Mark," so you should probably read those first before you dive into this one. But there's a summary below if you don't feel like bothering. Ash and Evie are my original characters, but Al, Rachel, Pierce, Newt, Dali and the rest of the world is that of the Hollows. It's canon up through the events of Black Magic Sanction, incorporating some plot elements from Pale Demon with the intention of making them fairly compatible. (At least until A Perfect Blood comes out this spring…*g*)
Here's a summary of the previous stories:
In "The Scar" we meet Evie, a grouchy college professor who is telling her story of how she got a scar on her face to a student. She and her friends summoned the demon Ash as teenagers, and he kidnapped all of them except for Evie, who escaped through a lucky break. It turns out that the student in question is the grandson of one of the victims.
In "Ashes to Ashes" that student decides to try a summoning of his own, and Evie decides it's time to face her past. The summoning is a disaster, and Evie bids farewell to her lost friends, having realized that she may never know what became of them. She confronts Ash again, who gives her his summoning name, and loses her university job.
In "The Mark," Evie has become well established as a demon summoning consultant. Ash proposes a way he can protect Evie from others of his kind and gives her a modified demon mark. Now he can come running to her aid if she's ever snatched by another demon- and claim her for himself, of course. It provides a deterrence against snatching. Evie takes offense at his method of marking her, and fun stuff happens.
But she continues her dangerous career path, until someone inevitably gets a little too fed up with her and sends three of her demon buddies out to get her. At once. She really doesn't stand a chance. Life as she knew it is over; thus, the title.