Gotcha

Darkly funny, crisply written, and told entirely from the demon's gloriously snarky point of view, "Gotcha!" is a short story that delights in turning the horror genre inside out. It is a story about competence, consequence, and the ancient truth that some people are their own worst supernatural event.  Y-tan-Nar has just finished ninety years of service with the genuinely skilled Goody Goodman and has earned a rest on hell's seventh level. Someone has other plans. Yanked without warning into a church pentagram at midnight by a vicar in a Halloween mask and men's working boots, the demon finds itself bound to the most incompetent witch it has ever encountered in several centuries of supernatural employment. She wants a large black cat, an enslaved congregation, a blackmail operation, and a pay rise. She has no idea what she has actually called up. The demon, ancient, subtle, and deeply unimpressed, decides the fastest route home is through the witch's own ignorance. Playing feeble and performing badly, exploiting every gap in her chaotic command of the old spells, it begins quietly steering the situation toward the only possible conclusion. But the vicar-witch is greedy and careless, and her ambition is opening cracks in the fabric of the world that go considerably higher than a demon of y-tan-Nar's level is authorised to handle.