Chapter 1 #2
This is getting super weird. “Yeah, I figured.” Is this still part of the job interview, or is he working a personal agenda? Maybe trying to recruit me to his religion?
“When I said earlier that we were a government department, you didn’t ask which government.”
The breath freezes in my lungs. Fuck. Fuck. Is he a foreign agent? Am I being recruited to betray my country?
Why me?
I mean… seriously. Why me? I’m an admin assistant with no social life.
“I didn’t think I had to,” I croak, and he smirks again.
“Relax, kid. We’re operating here with the full knowledge and permission of the US government. Well… those who need to know, anyway. You wouldn’t be doing anything illegal.”
Why doesn’t that make me feel better?
My head is starting to spin. This is… I should have known an “adventurous” admin job was an oxymoron. This has to be some sort of practical joke. Maybe one of those weird reality TV shows?
I stand. “Thanks for seeing me today, but I think I’ll be going now.”
Harold opens his mouth to say something, but I’m already turning toward the door. Two long steps and I wrench it open, my gaze skimming across the open-plan office as I step out and half turn to close the door—
Fuck.
Me.
I freeze. Literally. I can’t move. I can’t even look away. My gaze is locked on the man standing about fifteen feet away—where one of those big dogs was just a second ago.
I’m not insane. I’m not. I’m not hallucinating. I’m not.
But… where did the dog go? And where did the man come from?
A hand clamps firmly on my shoulder, and Harold steers me back into the meeting room and sits me down. He leans on the table and looks me in the eye.
“We’re not human. Species you might call paranormal are real. We have our own government—the Community of Species Government. CSG. And the investigative team you’d be part of works to find people who don’t know they’re not human and help them assimilate with our society.”
I blink. My jaw is still dropped. I’m pretty sure I look unevolved right now, but… did I just see a dog turn into a man?
“What?” Crap, can Harold turn into a dog?
He sighs and sits down. “Are you okay? Do you need a glass of water?”
I screw my eyes shut and take a deep breath. When I open them again, I’m… calm. Calmer than I’ve been for a long time.
“Explain this to me. What’s the connection to religion?” Because he wouldn’t have fumbled around with that if it wasn’t important.
He smiles, a real one this time, looking pleased that I’ve put those two facts together. “God is real,” he declares, “but he’s not some omnipotent being, and not much of that crap in the bible is true.”
“Okay.” I wait.
“One thing you humans got right is that god is a title, not a name. It’s even true that there’s only one god… at a time. God is the head of state of the spiritual plane. The current god is named Malia.”
Wow. God is a woman. Take that and choke on it, you patriarchal fucks.
“Is it… an elected or hereditary position?” I ask faintly, and he nods at me approvingly.
“Neither. It’s… so, magic is real, right?”
“Uh… right.” Holy fuck.
“God is a magically selected position. We’ve been studying the process for a long time, but we’re still not sure how. It just seems that the person best suited to the role at a particular time is invested with the power.”
Wait…
“So there’s no set term of… godhood?” I’m fascinated despite myself.
Harold shakes his head. “Nope. We’ve had our current god for about fifteen hundred years, but there have been gods who only served for a few years. The longest-serving god was— I’m getting off-topic. If you really want to know this, there are some resources I can point you to.”
I nod. I mean, what else can I do?
“So, god is the head of state of the spiritual plane.”
He said that before. What does it mean? “Like… an afterlife?”
He shrugs. “Yes and no. It’s a noncorporeal dimension. If you’re a being that doesn’t need a physical body, you don’t have to die to go there.”
Can of worms, open. I keep my mouth shut to hold in the million questions that want to burst out.
“But most species can’t go unless they’ve shed their physical bodies, so yeah, afterlife works. Or pre-life, since that’s where you’d be before you applied for another stint in a physical body.”
“So reincarnation is real.”
He rolls his eyes. “Of course. An eternal soul is too valuable to waste on a single physical life, and then… what? Sitting around admiring oneself? I don’t know about you, but I’d be bored in a heartbeat.
This is my ninth stint on the physical plane.
I only last for so long before I start wanting the physical stuff again—food.
Sex. Even taking a dump can feel real good, you know what I mean? ”
I nod. Because I do. And also because I don’t know what else to do. Reincarnated because you miss… shitting? Sure. Why not.
I feel like we might be getting off track again.
“So why don’t humans know about any of this?” I mean… surely there should be rumors?
Harold huffs. “Hold on, I’ll get to that. Right, so god in charge of spiritual plane. Now, magic never intended for the physical plane to be split up and governed like this. It invests a leader here, too.”
I turn that over in my mind. “A god of earth?”
“Not quite. God is the title given to the leader of the spiritual plane. The leader of the physical plane is called—”
It clicks. “The devil?”
“Close. Lucifer. The ‘devil’ is a human construct. The current lucifer is a real easygoing guy, likes to rollerblade and do jigsaw puzzles. Now, about eighty-seven hundred years ago or so, there was this human clan leader here on Earth. I forget where exactly. Anyway, this little upstart clan leader broke a treaty or something, and the lucifer at the time was forced to sanction him. He didn’t like that, and being a dickweasel of the highest order, he started some rumors about how the lucifer had been sent to Earth in disgrace, barred from the spiritual plane.
Some other folks who were kind of power hungry and didn’t like that the lucifer wouldn’t let them invade their neighbors jumped all over it, and it snowballed from there.
Within a hundred years, humanity was convinced that the lucifer was an evil being whose purpose was to tempt them into giving up their souls.
What would anyone even do with their souls?
It’s not like a physical body can use more than one, and slavery is impossible on the spiritual plane, so… ”
Is it just me, or has Harold gotten really chatty? What happened to the gruff guy who barely looked at me during the interview?
“So the devil doesn’t want our souls,” I manage, and he looks at me like I’m stupid.
“There is no devil. But yeah, souls not wanted. Anyway, things got kind of ugly then with the species wars.”
I’m so glad I’m sitting down. “The species wars.”
He nods. “Basically, humans against everyone else. It didn’t start out that way.
There were some sub-groups within other species that thought overthrowing the lucifer would be a great way to further their own gain.
” He stops, seems to think about it. “Only the humans really believed that the lucifer was ‘the devil.’ None of the other species fell for that crap. I wonder why?”
Is he… expecting me to answer him? Because I don’t know.
He shakes his head. “Anyway, the species wars started out kind of like an all-out brawl, but then the humans started bringing their religions into it and declaring that all other species were abominations and tools of ‘the devil,’ so after a hundred or so years, it was just humans against the rest of us as we struggled to survive.”
Fuck me. Sometimes I’m really ashamed of humanity.
“I feel like I’m missing something. Didn’t you outnumber us—I mean, humans? If all the species banded together. So why aren’t things the way they’re… supposed to be?”
His smile is sad. “Actually, humans outnumbered us. As a rule, every other high-intelligence species lives longer than humans, but as a balance, we find it harder to conceive, and thus our numbers are fewer.”
Yeah. That sounds about right.
“Things were getting dire, but in the end, magic itself provided the solution. One day, everything went dark, darker than the darkest night, and when the light came back, a new lucifer had been invested and humans had forgotten us.”
“ Forgotten? ”
He shrugs. “I wasn’t there. This is just what I’ve been told.
Our history shows that all our species were granted a small amount of inner magic that day, even those who’d never had it before, to help us hide in plain sight.
But it didn’t seem that the humans were even looking.
And to this day, there have been thousands of times when the truth could have come out—during archaeological excavation, for one—but somehow never does. ”
“That’s why her horns disappeared!” I realize. Yeah, the idea of all of history being a lie we just never noticed is huge, but I’m mostly relieved to know I wasn’t hallucinating.
“Whose?”
I explain, and he nods. “Yeah. This is generally a safe place for us, so we tend to let the glamor go. I forgot to tell everyone there would be a human visiting.”
Which raises an important question. “Uh, Harold… why me? I mean… why hire a human? This isn’t exactly a job that only I can do. And if you hired someone else, you wouldn’t have to explain all this to me.”
His gaze slides away.
Uh-oh.
“Harold?”
“Look.” He chuckles nervously. “It’s not a big deal. I just thought hiring a human might make for a nice change.”
Can anyone else smell the bullshit? Because it sure is thick.
I don’t say anything, just stare at him, and eventually he gives in.
“So, this is where the adventure comes in. The team you’d be assigned to…
they’re good people. They’re just… well, they’re mostly hellhounds.
We generally try not to assign too many hellhounds to the same team, because they can be a bit much in groups.
Rambunctious. I’m not sure how this lot all ended up together, but now we can’t separate them. ”
“ Rambunctious? Like toddlers?” I ask incredulously. “What do you mean, you can’t separate them?” I remind myself again that I actually saw a dog turn into a man, that this isn’t a joke. It’s not.
“They won’t allow it.” He grins suddenly. “I should say we won’t allow it.”
Huh? Oh.
“You’re a hellhound? Hey, if the devil isn’t real, then hell isn’t either. So why that name?”
He rolls his eyes. “Humans were using it as a slur back during the wars, calling us the minions of the devil and all that crap that meant nothing to anyone but them. The species leader at the time had a twisted sense of humor, so she officially changed our subspecies name to mess with them.”
What.
The.
Fuck.
“She… changed your species name… because she thought it was funny? And it stuck?”
“Sure.” He shrugs. “It is kind of funny, you gotta admit.”
I don’t want to tell him that I don’t get the joke. I am, however, beginning to understand why hellhounds might be referred to as rambunctious.
I swallow hard. I wanted a change. A challenge. But dealing with colleagues who seemingly have driven off all my predecessors?
“I’m hoping that by hiring a human, I can convince them to be on their best behavior,” Harold rushes on. “And I think you can handle them.”
“What did they do to drive away everyone else?” Knowledge is power, right?
“Nothing bad,” he hastens to assure me. “Mostly they just got too clingy. Most of the administrators before you had families who objected to always having a hellhound pop in. We tried hiring a few single people, but as a species, hellhounds tend to be overprotective and nosy, so two of them quit when their dating lives took a turn for the worse, and the third couldn’t handle their constant need for attention and reassurance. ”
Hellhounds sound a lot like golden retrievers.
I rub my face and think about it. I really need a change. And, canine colleagues aside, this job is perfect for me. But I don’t know….
“What happens if they drive me nuts too and I want to quit?”
Harold shrugs. “You quit. And I seriously consider killing the lot of them for putting me through another round of recruitment, especially since I have no idea what I could possibly do next.”
Great. I’m the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel.
“No, I mean… I’m human. And now I know about”—I wave my hand—“all of you.”
“Oh. Well, you tell me… what would happen if you tried to tell people?”
Realization hits.
“Exactly. Nobody would believe you except a bunch of nutjob conspiracy theorists. You could take video of your team members shifting, and you’d just be accused of doctoring it.”
“So you’d just let me quit.”
“Yeah. I’d be pissed, because I had to get special permission to even interview you to begin with, but if you wanted to quit, that’s up to you.”
I bite my lip.
He studies me.
I nod. “I’m in.”