Chapter 24
She choked. “He’s coming here?”
“No, we’re going there. It turns out that if there’s a free demon on each side, opening a portal is a lot easier.”
“Like him ordering us a car service from Hell.” She didn’t want to do this. Maybe they could claim they couldn’t find whatever the material components of the spell were. “What do you have to do?”
“When he’s powering it, not much.” Luke clasped her hand and then said a single throat-shredding sentence.
With a puff of brimstone, the portal opened right under their feet.
She tumbled through noxious darkness that was becoming distressingly familiar in the way of her least favorite subway stations.
They landed in a pile. She was certain that Bel’aliol had chosen which geometric plane to anchor his portal through the metaphysical planes specifically to result in this lack of dignity.
They weren’t even in his office—they’d been dumped in what looked like a dingy reception area.
The demon at the front desk was on a call and ignored them.
She took a bite of some kind of meat still on the bone, and chewed it, heedless of the smacking sounds she had to be making into the phone.
“—and then he says to me, no baby limbs in the refrigerator, I’m on a diet.
Can you believe that? Just because he’s on some fad diet doesn’t mean the rest of us are. ”
Morgan groaned and disentangled herself from Lucareoth, who had reverted to his true form upon crossing planes. One of his horns was poking her, and not in the fun way.
“Fine, let’s get this over with,” she grumbled and started for the door into the office. Worst return-to-office mandate ever.
“You can’t go in there without an appointment,” the demon at the desk spoke up.
“We have an—” Lucareoth started, but the demon at the desk held up a cloven hoof. It was impressive that she’d managed to even balance the phone, although her ram’s horns did seem to make a good brace for the top.
“Hold on, Erekekek-Maurice, I gotta put you on hold. Yeah, dropped right out of the ceiling, all stinking of Consumable Souls,” the reception demon said, snapping another tendon like bloody chewing gum. “IDs, please.”
Lucareoth sighed and handed over something that looked like an obsidian shard. Morgan fumbled out her driver’s license. The receptionist stuck out a tongue, and kept sticking it out until it had extended a good foot and a half from her mouth, before running it delicately along Lucareoth’s shard.
“Sign here,” she mumbled around the tongue with ill grace. She looked at the flimsy piece of plastic in Morgan’s hand. “What kind of ID is that? If you don’t have actual ID, I’m going to have to call security.”
“I’ll sign her in as a visitor,” Lucareoth said hastily.
“I still can’t accept that as a form of ID,” the receptionist said, snapping yet another tendon. She raised a hoof to punch a button on the phone.
“Bel’aliol is expecting her!” Lucareoth said, looking panicked and grabbing Morgan’s hand.
“Fine,” the receptionist said, giving him an irritated look. “But you’re responsible for her.”
“I already am,” Lucareoth said. He squeezed her hand reassuringly and she tried for his sake to be reassured.
But at least they were waved in.
Within the maze of cubicles, a similar level of panic was unfolding. As above, so below indeed. The crocodile-headed demon trundled out from one cubicle, carrying the kitchen cauldron in both hands, with a large polearm awkwardly propped over one shoulder.
“Lucareoth!” she said in surprise, fumbling the polearm so the bottom slid down between her ankles.
“What are you doing?” Lucareoth asked, a little incredulous.
“Getting ready for the war,” the crocodile demon replied, trying to shift the cauldron so she could pick up the polearm again. “Isn’t that why you’re back?”
“I don’t know, Bel’aliol summoned me. Us.” Lucareoth looked her up and down. “What does the blood steamer have to do with it?”
“Oh. Uh. I thought it would be safer out of the kitchen. If we’re invaded.”
Morgan wondered how long it would take her coworkers to notice.
“Lucareoth!” It was the tarantula demon, all four hands clutching four separate hand axes. The crocodile demon seized the opportunity to scurry off, nearly tripping over the polearm. “Of course. And I don’t suppose you filled out the interplanar forms this time, either.”
“Bel’aliol didn’t give me time. Are we really being invaded?
” Lucareoth looked around. In the next cubicle down, someone had wheeled the copier to block off the entrance to their cubicle, forming a little barricade.
He moved slightly in front of Morgan, putting himself between her and his armed coworker.
She didn’t think it would help, but she appreciated the thought.
“Well, we’ve been doing team-building exercises involving weapons practice all week, so yeah, I should say so,” the tarantula said.
What was his name? Xe’hel’thir. Morgan would have called his tone waspish except that seemed racist. “Maybe if someone had filled out the right forms, none of this would have happened. I’ve got six hundred and sixty-six spawn to feed, I don’t need this right now. ”
“You can’t blame this on me,” Lucareoth protested.
“Can’t I?” Xe’hel’thir looked like he would have liked eyelids so he could have narrowed his eyes properly.
He did try to cross his arms, but tangled the axe handles with each other.
“Somehow your name keeps being around more than you are. I thought you were supposed to be stopping House Valefar over on the Plane of Consumable Souls.”
“I’m trying,” Lucareoth said.
“No, you’re dragging a Consumable Soul around like a lunchbox,” Xe’hel’thir countered.
“And broadcasting how much you want to keep her safe instead of hitting any of your KPIs. Thanks for that, by the way. At least the 360-degree review will be easier this year with a target the whole team can get behind.”
“I’ve got a plan,” Lucareoth said stubbornly. “But first I need to find out what Bel’aliol wants.”
“Probably your head on a platter.” Xe’hel’thir twirled an axe experimentally.
It slipped out of his hand. He tried to grab it with his other hand, and his other hand, and his other hand, but each hand already had its own axe.
Morgan and Lucareoth leapt backward. The axe bobbled.
The demon yelped. The axe head buried itself in the cubicle wall next to them.
A shriek came from the far side of the wall.
A cloud of bees rose up angrily, swarming together over the wall.
“Do you mind?” a thousand humming voices chorused. “That influx of souls blew our prepayment assumptions, now the entire tranche’s average life is shorter than the original estimate, and I need to recalculate the financial projections by the end of the day.”
Morgan had very briefly dated a guy working in mortgage-backed securities, before deciding that his endless bond-math lectures weren’t worth the steak dinners.
This sounded like how he used to complain about when people successfully prepaid their mortgages and didn’t owe as much interest. Except these weren’t mortgages, it was an influx of souls…
“Holy shit, are you talking about the tsunami in southeast Asia last week?”
“Is that what happened? It’s really inconvenient to have so many souls’ contracts cut short, they need to stop doing that. Point is, we already lost two hours to the siege warfare lunch-and-learn, Niseraz ate my direct report, and now I have to finish this all by myself. Stop screwing around!”
Xe’hel’thir looked around, embarrassed, and turned his humiliation on them. “Go off to Bel’aliol, and we’ll see how smug you are then. Oh, and better make sure you don’t run into Niseraz.”
“What’s wrong with Niseraz?” Lucareoth said cautiously.
“Let’s just say she’s taking ‘take no prisoners’ to new heights,” Xe’hel’thir chuckled. It would have sounded more nonchalant if he hadn’t also been tugging ineffectually at the embedded hand axe.
They almost made it. A foot or two short of Bel’aliol’s door, someone called out for them to halt.
“Get to the war room,” Niseraz barked. “Bel’aliol’s about to rally the troops.”
“We’re rallied,” Lucareoth sighed. “That’s why we’re supposed to be in his office, for the rallying. Also, since when did we change the name of the conference room?”
The moth-headed demon had a flak helmet jammed onto her head, her delicate antennae sticking out of holes that looked hand-drilled. “When we started making battle plans to outflank the competition. Where have you been?”
“Trying to prevent the war, thanks so much for asking,” Lucareoth snapped.
“Why the Earth would you want to do that?” Niseraz demanded. “We’ve finally got a chance to get back at the Valefar bastards for San Francisco.”
“Wasn’t San Francisco more than a hundred years ago?” Morgan ventured.
“Yeah, and it sucked. They ate my fiancé, the assholes. Now it’s time to settle up accounts.
” She looked at Morgan with a withering disdain that easily jumped the species barrier.
“If I were you, girlie, I’d scuttle back to your home plane.
Your boy here doesn’t have the killer instincts it takes to survive. ”
Morgan had had enough. “You sound like someone tossed The Art of War and the Harvard Business Review in a blender. We were summoned by the head boss, we’re here to see the head boss. Move.”
She pushed past the demon, her bravado already crumbling. She muttered, “Sorry about your fiancé.”
Lucareoth hurried along behind her.
“How old are you?” she asked him in a low voice. If Niseraz had had a fiancé in 1906… was she dating someone who could have put the Regency back in Regency romance?
“Uh, in Earth years… carry the three…” He had to pull out his phone. “Twenty-four-ish? I’m the new kid in the office, it’s why I keep getting the crap assignments.”