Chapter 9
She tumbled onto something that reminded her of cheap industrial carpet. It had the same texture and same plasticky smell, but while the pattern was as hideous as one might expect, it shifted under her hands in a way that left her dizzy and nauseated.
She climbed to her feet cautiously. Lucareoth stood with his back to her, patting his horns. His clothes were somewhat less sleek than she’d remembered. “Oh thank the father-eaters, it worked. Now if I can just—”
He turned around and saw her. His eyes widened. “Oh no. No, no, no, this is worse.”
Morgan looked around. It wasn’t that big a room, with dingy beige walls and a plasticky table and no windows.
Illumination came from the ceiling without a need for fixtures, but the irritating buzz of badly installed lighting still whined at the edge of her consciousness. There was no trace of the portal.
She looked at Lucareoth with trepidation. “We’re in—”
“The Plane of the People, yes,” he said. “What you call the Infernal Plane. What the Earth are you doing here?”
She winced. “The portal sucked me in. We must have messed something up.”
“You said it would work even with your magic-blindness!”
“It did work, didn’t it? You’re here!”
“So are you!”
“Yes, I realized that!”
“And that is a huge problem!”
“Yes, I realized that, too!” She slapped the wall in frustration. The wall shivered and she pulled her hand back. “What’s wrong with the walls?”
“Someone hasn’t paid the bill recently enough,” he said.
“What do you mean?” She put a hand out more cautiously.
The wall wasn’t quite solid under her palm.
It had give, like a waterbed. The ugly beige felt less like a solid and more like really strong surface tension.
If she pushed hard and fast enough, she might break through entirely.
She didn’t want to know what was beneath the surface.
He sighed. “This office isn’t real. It’s a construct.”
“Constructed of?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.
“Bent light,” he said. That wasn’t so bad. He continued. “Powered by human souls.”
There it was.
“You power things with souls here?”
“You have no idea how lucky your plane is,” Lucareoth said, rubbing his horns. “The amount of magical energy you have, lying around to be shaped and channeled by anyone with the will to do so. It’s a luxury. It’s made you soft.”
She took an involuntary step backward. “Are you going to eat me?”
“Of course not! I would never eat you!” He paused.
“Someone else might. I honestly don’t know if that would work.
I mean, you’re right: it’s why we eat each other, because there’s so little magical energy here, and souls being born is one of the few ways it enters our plane.
But it’s the differential that really makes human souls worth capturing—something about the binding promise to cross the planar barrier lets us arbitrage the difference.
I don’t know if I really get it—I’m not a theoretician, I’m just a salesman. ”
“Sure, just a salesdemon. Never mind you’re all using souls to power everything.”
He crossed his arms. “And you’re using petroleum until your atmosphere cooks you all alive.”
“That’s not the same thing!” Except, in the long run, from a moral perspective, was it really that different?
“I don’t suppose you have any way of connecting from here back to my plane?”
“We can’t cold-call, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said. “We have to wait for someone on your side to reach out. Inbound sales only.”
“Then how did humans figure out to call in the first place?”
“Do I look like someone who paid that much attention in history lessons?” he asked. He gave her a half-smile only slightly tinged with panic. “My guess? Someone on your side wanted something really, really badly. Bad enough someone on my side could hear them. You humans want so much.”
“What did you do before that?”
“I dunno, what did you do before the petroleum thing?”
She supposed the demons could give up souls as easily as humans could de-carbonize cold turkey. And would probably be about as willing. “It’s not like I work for Halliburton.”
“Assuming that that’s a petroleum company, sure, but someone has to. The lights in your apartment turn on when you flick the switch.” He shrugged, looking uncomfortable and defensive.
“And it was the job you could get.” She still hated it, but she lived with a lot of things she hated.
Who would possibly call this plane on her behalf, let alone be willing to pay a price? Maybe if her mother noticed she was gone. And visited the apartment, which she hadn’t done since Morgan moved in. And did it before Gisele cleaned up the evidence.
No, she was going to have to get out of here herself. Somehow. Unlike all the souls already here.
Her throat felt tight. “They just… stay here? Until they’re used up?”
“The souls?” Lucareoth paused. She got the sense he hadn’t given it much thought before.
“They kind of vibrate. Remember how I was talking about the differential? Magic is easier to do on your side of the barrier. So the more we’ve done on your behalf on your side, the more potential energy there is when the Deal completes and the soul is yanked to ours.
And the stronger it vibrates. Helps if they’re unhappy, for some reason.
Sometimes they get made to do painful and repetitive things.
Sometimes they simply get stuck in a lightbulb and zapped periodically. ”
“And you can use the vibrations to power stuff.”
He nodded.
“What happens when they clear their debt?”
“They kind of blip out. I guess they go to wherever your souls usually go after you die.”
Morgan’s father talked to ghosts on the other side of the Veil on a regular basis, which had always made Halloween extra weird at their house.
Not everyone became a ghost. And some ghosts got tired of haunting things.
All they would ever say about all the missing people, the ones who weren’t ghosts at all, was that they’d decided to continue on “Beyond.” So maybe this was less like being eaten and more like some kind of indentured servitude.
It was still horrible.
“You haven’t done anything on my behalf, and I haven’t promised you anything. Does that mean I’m free to go?”
He rubbed his horns again. “Morgan, I wish… I really wish I could say yes. But I have no idea how to get you back home.”
“But I’m not valuable here,” she checked to be sure.
“You can’t be put in a soul vessel, you’re still in your body,” he pointed out. “And you didn’t bring any differential with you to arbitrage. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t delicious.”
She sucked in a breath and pressed herself against the wobbly wall. There wasn’t even anywhere to hide.
“Not to me!” he said quickly. She was startled; she hadn’t been hiding from him. It hadn’t even occurred to her to consider him a threat, and she wasn’t sure when that had changed. “But I can’t promise anything about my coworkers.”
“Could you disguise me? Like yours, but in reverse?” Maybe she would look fetching with scales and horns. But then, Lucareoth had been gorgeous in both forms. So she would probably make a dishwater demon. Dishwater was better than delicious.
“The budget’s for making Deals, remember?”
“And now we’re on the wrong side for that.” Shit, shit, shit.
“OK. OK, we can do this,” Lucareoth said to himself. “No one is looking for me, so we’ll hide here in the conference room until everyone’s gone for the day, and then we’ll… sneak… somewhere. My boss! Bel’aliol’s office has a whole set of books on the shelf. One of them has got to be useful.”
She swallowed, trying to get her mouth to produce saliva again. She sat on one of the molded chairs, whose texture felt subtly wrong but still creaked like cheap plastic.
The door opened.
A head peered in at waist height: Morgan managed to restrain herself to a jump and not a shriek. The compound eyes took up most of the face, with a tiny, incongruously delicate pair of lips beneath. Feathery antennae like a moth’s rose from farther back on the owner’s skull.
“I booked this conference room two days ago, you need to wrap whatever this is up. You’re already three minutes late.
You always do this, Lucareoth,” the new demon said peevishly.
Then she did a double-take. “Lucareoth? Where have you been? Bel’aliol’s been complaining about you disappearing without filing your leave paperwork for days. ”
Then the demon saw Morgan. The antennae, which had been gently waving, probing the air currents, froze in shock. “Is that…? Lucareoth, what did you do?”
“Hi, Niseraz,” Lucareoth said, all his insouciance fled. “This is Morgan.”
Niseraz stepped the rest of the way into the room.
She had translucent, veined wings that vibrated even when half-folded behind her, and two pairs of three fingered-hands, both sets of arms crossed angrily.
Her fingernails had been painted a pearly pink that reminded Morgan of the cheaper polish in the cosmetics aisle of Duane Reade.
“Well, this puts a new light on your mystery disappearance,” Niseraz said. “I suppose you think you’re above the rules.”
If she’d had lids on her eyes, Morgan guessed the demon would have narrowed them.
“Nis,” Lucareoth said, his hands open, pleading. “We’ve always been friends.”
“We’ve never been friends,” Niseraz snapped. She cocked her head. “You want to protect her? Seriously? What can you offer?”
Morgan sucked in a breath. She’d seen coworkers blackmailed before, but never so fast or so blatant. Probably because most people were smart enough not to show their needs so publicly, but poker faces were clearly useless here. No wonder Lucareoth spent so much energy repressing desire.
And his desire was apparently to protect her.
“You’ve always wanted my stapler, it’s the Good Stapler,” Lucareoth said quickly.
Niseraz made a rude noise. “Or I can just wait until after Bel’aliol eviscerates you.”