Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 83353 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 417(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 278(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83353 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 417(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 278(@300wpm)
He also demanded that the servers share their tips with him at the end of the night, even though he was a salaried employee with benefits and the waiters and waitresses were only making $2.15 an hour and had no health care of any kind. So basically, he was stealing from them twice.
People had tried to complain but nobody seemed to care what happened to the overnight shift. Mr. Harvey was the only manager willing to take it, and the owner of that particular Denny’s franchise seemed to think he was entitled to whatever he could get as a kind of bonus.
Anyone would hate a manager like Mr. Harvey, Hanna thought, but she had another reason to dislike him—she could actually see his mean and stingy spirit while the other people working at the rundown Denny’s with him only felt the effects of it.
It was an angry little Imp with a shriveled face and a swollen belly—a Greed Imp, Hanna thought. It clung to Mr. Harvey and sat on his shoulder, its tail wrapped around his throat like a wrinkled rope. It whispered in his ear—a constant litany of, “never enough…need more…get more…you’re entitled…the rest of them are all lazy…that should be yours…take it!”
And the manager listened to it and always did the Imp’s bidding. By now it was so firmly entrenched that it was practically becoming part of him—its wrinkled red flesh merging with his own pasty white skin. Hanna couldn’t look at the ugly thing without a shiver going through her and though she tried to hide it, she was certain the distaste she felt must sometimes show on her face.
Of course, Mr. Harvey wasn’t the only one with an Imp. Lots of people had them—there were Lust Imps, Envy Imps, Pride Imps, Anger Imps—name an unattractive human quality and there was an Imp for it. Some people had more than one—Hanna couldn’t bear to watch a session of Congress on C-span—the lawmakers were crawling with the ugly, evil things. And forget corporate CEOs—they were so taken over by Greed, Pride, and Theft Imps they could barely be seen at all.
Of course, the Imps didn’t cause a person to act the way they acted but they were always out and about, encouraging the lowest and vilest human behavior. And people who kept indulging in those behaviors often attracted their own personal Imp, which clung to them and fed on them like a parasite, encouraging their disgusting actions.
A person with an Imp had what was called a “fatal flaw” in the literature classes Hanna used to attend. Once she had dreamed of becoming an English professor and teaching the literature she loved so much, but her dreams had been crushed by her “Gift”—though to Hanna, it was more of a curse. Having her particular gift was kind of like having a type of Paranormal ADHD—it was impossible to concentrate when the spirit world was constantly interfering in her life.
Seeing the Imps or “Dark Entities” as her Aunt Luna called them, was only part of it. Hanna was also able to see and communicate with the spirits of the dead. Her older sister, Samantha, had this Gift as well—she had a popular ghost hunting show on YouTube where she helped lost and frightened spirits move on to the afterlife. Their Aunt Luna had a smattering of it, as well as the Gift of Divination, which she used to read Tarot cards for people and advise them about the future.
So the Gift ran in their family. But while Hanna’s sister and Aunt were able to use their Gifts to make a living, Hanna’s Gift only hindered her and held her back—that was because her Gift was more extreme than either Samantha’s or Aunt Luna’s.
She wasn’t just able to see and talk to dead people—she could also interact with them on the physical plane. And the same went for the Dark Entities she saw, which Samantha and Aunt Luna and pretty much everyone else on the planet, it seemed, were blind to.
Basically, this meant that Hanna could touch the invisible spirits and entities all around her. And by the same token, she could also be touched by them—they were aware of her and drawn to her—which was how the accident with the hot pot of coffee had happened.
Her shift had started out badly with a big bunch of rowdy college students from the nearby university. They sat in Hanna’s station and ordered multiple appetizers, then bickered over the bill which she’d had to split nine ways. Almost none of them left a tip, so she wound up with five dollars and fifty cents for about two hours of work, because they stayed so long.
It was a disappointing start to a long shift and it didn’t get any better from there. Her next few customers were either no or low tippers, which made Hanna wonder if she was going to be able to make her rent that month. It had doubled recently, causing her to pick up as many extra shifts as she could, in order to afford the crappy little studio apartment on the bad side of Tampa, not far from Busch Gardens.