Chapter 29
What was the literal fucking point of any of that?
Was it to embarrass me because I didn’t know how to wrangle these souls back?
Bully for him. I didn’t get embarrassed about not knowing shit I had no way of knowing.
So, I just went all out and decided to make them uncomfortable.
If one of them was trying to get me alone on the mortal realm as a date, that was still an ew for me.
If it was to kill me, I wasn’t going anywhere alone with them and they didn’t know I was a black belt, anyway.
But yeah, I’d go on field trips with Satan or Abaddon because they seemed like they were in the ‘fun uncle’ camp instead of the ‘incest’ camp. And I knew they wouldn’t have a problem with me bringing my new friends.
The other princes were sulking when they got the fuck out of my new mansion, but Asmodeus was seething with rage.
I didn’t trust that guy. I didn’t want to read Lucifer’s private diaries, but Asmodeus was waving some red flags.
Before I voiced those to Satan and Abaddon for help, I needed more information.
But for now, I was going to kill zombies. They weren’t technically George Romero zombies and I wouldn’t get a shotgun or a big knife, but still, I could check it off my bucket list.
“I don’t want to go without my new friends.”
Because seriously, they were a little crazy, but I liked them. Kujo was a nard, but he came with them.
“You don’t have to. My daughter is recovering, so she won’t be able to join, but there’s no reason they can’t. I’m going to have to do your glamour since you don’t know how and don’t have enough magic yet.”
“I want to look like Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters when she goes all Zuul. That was hot”
“That’s oddly specific and not possible. You can’t steal the image of a living person. I can make you look like a lovely midwife who was burned for witchcraft in the Dark Ages, even though she’d never even met me.”
“Dude, that just seems really unlucky.”
“Just put a glamour on her. It’s not that complicated, and she’s going to make it so,” Kujo snapped.
“Consent, numb nuts. Don’t make me dick punch you.”
“Look at me,” Nero said.
Nero shimmered. His horns and tail disappeared, and I was looking at a giant man who looked like a human model. I brushed my fingers across his forehead.
“You’re gorgeous like this, but I prefer you with your actual face, horns and all.”
Celix changed next. His skin stayed dark and his features semi feline for a human, but less cat like than when he wasn’t wearing a glamour. Again, hot as fuck, but I wanted the cat man.
“Again, I wouldn’t kick you out of bed, but I like the original better.”
Kujo was giving me this weird look. I wasn’t going to ask, because if he wasn’t offering something unpleasant, I wasn’t going to bring it on myself.
He didn’t need a glamour because he looked human except for when he brought his wings out.
I knew I needed one because I was supposed to be missing and eventually declared dead.
I was probably going to be around a lot of cops because people were coming back from the dead and all the souls jumping into those bodies were bad people. They probably had a lot of questions.
“Do it but if I’m going to be hanging out with a bunch of deathly hot men, don’t make me ugly.”
“Perish the thought,” Satan said with a small smile.
He waved his hand, and I got a brief case of goosebumps. It was over in a minute. I caught my reflection in the mirror in the entryway and that was freaky. I looked nothing like myself anymore.
“I’m ready. Is there anything I should know?”
“Yes. Heaven isn’t above and Hell isn’t below.
Hell is more like a mirror world to the mortal realm.
If there’s a thin spot in Hell, everyone who escapes ends up in the same place on the mortal realm.
Lucifer had a strict inventory system, and it just got better over time.
We know exactly who is there and what they did.
The system was so good, we know who escapes, too.
I have the list. We know where they popped out.
We just need to find the closest place with fresh corpses.
Sometimes, it’s a hospital and sometimes, it’s a funeral home. This is easier as a team.”
“So, I just say their name and tell them to go back to Hell? That seems too easy.”
“Listen, my kid is one of the best torturers in Hell, but she had a mentor and she’s also been a mentor to other demons.
You do not want to end up here when you die.
Soul possession is unnatural, but it’s always done because that soul has nowhere else to go.
Sometimes, it’s just a ghost, but lately, it’s souls from Hell.
They don’t want to go back, so you’ll have to yell and be forceful with them.
You can get a little dramatic if you want. ”
Oh, I fully intended to get dramatic. Satan promised I’d eventually learn to do this and then put his hand on my shoulder and yanked me through the cosmos.
I hadn’t pooped right since Kujo did this to me in my bathroom, so unless this was like eating extra fiber and I needed to get used to it, I didn’t think I’d be doing this that often when I learned how.
We were in the bum fuck middle of nowhere. I was pretty sure a tumbleweed just blew by. Mom was my horror movie buddy, and it looked like Children of the Corn out here. I didn’t see any type of hospital or morgue nearby. Just a whole bunch of corn. Satan was at least trying to be helpful.
“So, do you feel anything strange?”
“Like some creepy kids are going to come out and sacrifice me to save their crops.”
“Not exactly. What you’re feeling is the unnaturalness of the bodies that are possessed. You’ll want to move towards that. You’ll know them because there’s a slight, sickly glow around them. It’s the soul not being in the right body. Where should we go?”
Fuck me. Children of the Corn was part of the reason I wasn’t all that broken up when I got told I couldn’t have kids. Because it would be just my luck my kids murdered me to appease some deity for a super rare Labubu. I couldn’t believe I was walking towards that feeling.
Nero and Celix were flanking me. I’d always been fairly tall, but both of them dwarfed me.
Nero’s hand brushed mine, and I ended up snatching it.
Yes, I was a strong, powerful woman with a black belt, but right now, I just wanted the big demon to hold my hand.
Nero gave me a small smile and started stroking my hand with his thumb.
There was just something about this demon that calmed me.
The sense of unease was growing as I walked towards the center of town. It wasn’t triggering my fight or flight and it should have been. It felt completely unnatural, and I was walking straight towards it.
We eventually came upon a hospital. This was a small town, so the hospital wasn’t huge. I pointed.
“They’re in there. In the basement. Shouldn’t they be making a run for it? If I just escaped Hell and found a fresh body, I’d get away from the other bad people I escaped with so I didn’t draw attention to myself. Do you get stupid when you die?”
“Not stupid,” Satan grinned. “It’s a corpse.
They don’t jump into it the way you’re thinking.
Some of these bodies are damaged or too frail to move quickly.
They basically have to jump in one or fade to nothing.
Basically, they could escape Hell by ceasing to exist altogether, but they won’t.
Even if they’ve jumped into a powerful body with no damage, they still have to learn how to animate the body because the brain is dead. ”
“Gross.”
“I’ve actually always wanted to go on one of these calls, but everyone thinks since I’m a Cambion, I should go on the Cambion calls,” Kujo said.
“Hrm, there are a lot of demons we’ve pigeonholed and are not using to their potential because of the system we’ve built here. Let me do the talking since I’ve done this before and have the documents.”
We strolled up to the hospital, and I didn’t take Satan for a Supernatural fan, but he whipped out a fairly realistic-looking FBI badge and introduced himself as Agent Osborne. Yeah, if his fake FBI documents weren’t Agent Ozzy Osborne, I was never going to let him live that down.
A very terrified morgue attendant escorted us down to the basement.
“There was a bus passing through town with a college baseball team. They are still trying to figure out what happened, but the bus drove straight into a concrete warehouse in a bad part of town and killed the entire baseball team. They have definitely been dead for the past three days while their school makes arrangements to pick them all up and bring them home. People give me shit about working in the morgue, but it’s usually quiet.
I don’t know what those noises are, but I don’t want to go in there. ”
Was it fucked up that I totally did want to go in there?
Because I did. These were bad people. They died and ended up where they were going to pay for all the shitty things they did.
This was rapists, murderers, dictators, and people who got off on watching other people suffer.
They deserved everything they got, and I’d be damned if they got a second chance in some poor asshole’s corpse.
Yeah, Mom was a horror fan, and it was the eighties, so I was a horror fan when I was practically in diapers. When we walked in the morgue, I could hear moaning and thumping from the little refrigerated slots they were keeping the bodies in.
“Damn. If you kept them here, you could make a killing on haunted houses. That’s creepy.”
“So, the other princes don’t want anyone to know this, but demons can send them back, too. It’s not an angel thing. They like to talk about upper and lower demons, but you all have your own strengths and weaknesses. You can all send a soul back as long as you have their name.”