Happy Ending, Maybe?

This was written for Trifecta’s weekly prompt, and is another entry in Constance’s Story. Enjoy!

They were married on Christmas Eve. Constance had arranged for snow to fall outside the little church, just enough to be romantic, not too much so as to make the streets icy and unpleasant to drive on. She stood there invisibly by the minister’s side, beaming with angelic joy as Amy and Steven said their vows. The whole thing was her doing, after all. She had happily elided the fact that she hadn’t meant for them to get married at all, that she had knocked Amy into the Salvation Army kettle by sheer accident. Constance preferred rather to think of it as serendipity. It had all turned out happily, anyway. Amy and Steven were a wonderful couple, and their marriage promised to be a long and happy one. What could possibly go wrong?

It was a sign of Constance’s inexperience that she didn’t see the peril in asking that question. She also didn’t see the trail of smoke floating in a dim corner of the church. The smoke trail wafted out the door and into the snowy night, gradually materializing into a shadowed form.

The demon was not pleased. Not at all. His superiors weren’t happy either. Amy wasn’t supposed to give anything to the Salvation Army man. She should have been selfish and thought only of herself. That choice would have started her down a long, dark path. It was all beautifully planned. She would have been a ruthless corporate raider on Wall Street, but then her illegal insider trading would’ve been found out by the SEC, and she would just barely escape arrest. From there, desperate for money, she would have used her knowledge of chemistry to sell crystal meth. During an unfortunate incident in a chemical plant, however, Amy would have fallen into a vat and morphed into a horrific green rage monster, rampaging across half the city. Now all of that was in ruins. “I’ll remember you for this, angel,” the demon snarled. “Oh, I will.”