Client from Hell

by R. J. Blain

  “Your dining doesn’t involve a one-way trip to the morgue!”

  “Would you even make it to the morgue if they get a hold of you?”

  I risked peeking over the side at the collection of bloodied and torn lab coats in search of bones. After a few minutes, I spotted a few, and they’d been licked clean. “Some parts would. You could take the shredded ruins of my clothes. They don’t seem to have an interest in clothing.”

  Jonas joined me in staring down at the remains below. “At least masculine apparel. I don’t think any of those workers were women before they became cat food. But if it makes you feel any better, having seen what these labs are up to, they deserved becoming cat food. Reputable labs do not keep lions and tigers beneath the rotting floor of some house.”

  “The Cats of Oak Boulevard could be the title of a kickin’ horror flick, but I do not approve of my status as the co-star of this film.” As few got to say they had a close encounter of the big cat kind, I took a few minutes to record the animals doing their best to get to me on top of the cage. “I came within a foot of death, Jonas.”

  “Yet you’re sitting there recording the cats.”

  “I don’t see you helping me get out of this mess. You opted to call the Devil. I’m stipulating any proceeds from this recording go to my parents, who will surely grieve for my demise at the claws and fangs of hungry felines.”

  “Honestly, you’re handling this better than I thought you would. Sure, you screamed, but honestly? I can’t say I wouldn’t have screamed for the opening act. I mean, they’re lions and tigers, and they’re really hungry.”

  I got a clip of the hungry animals trying to get to my cage along with a clip of the various kittens scattered around the room below. “Do you think they kept some of the people they ate alive for a while before eating them?”

  “I don’t know. I also don’t want to know, but I hope so. These fuckers deserve it. I’ve seen the fallout from the other labs. I will tell you one thing, Sandra. We do not discuss this with Diana. Her cats are rescues from these operations, and she takes this very personally.”

  “I’m taking the high risk of being eaten by tigers and lions very personally, Jonas.”

  With a shrug and snicker, he tested the edge of the Sandra-shaped hole until he found a few intact boards suitable for our combined weight. He reached down with both hands. “When I pull you up, remember I’m far stronger than a human. I can also teleport. I am not going to let you be eaten by any tigers or lions, but you’ll have to trust me.”

  While aware the cage had withstood hundreds of pounds of lions and tigers crashing against it, I eased to my feet in case standing on the cage’s ceiling brought the whole thing down and ended my newly extended life. “I deserve death for this, Jonas. I willingly entered the horror house. It isn’t on Elm Street, but I will forever be cautious of any road named after a goddamned tree.” I clasped my hands in his, wondering how the hell I’d scramble up through the ceiling, which had at least a foot and a half of wood, broken pipes, and other crap lurking in its rotten depths.

  Jonas grasped my wrists and stood straight, lifting me off my feet and up and over the disintegrating obstacle, and turned, setting me down on a more stable section of floor. “One of my first goals is to plump you up so you weigh more than a feather.”

  “Fucking cancer,” I muttered. I dusted myself off, and grimaced at my new collection of cuts, which would inevitably become bruises, which would, in turn, require yet another transfusion from my poor donors. “Do you think Diana is going to kill me when she finds out I am going to need more blood after this? I’m worried she might. I’m creating more work for her.”

  “I suspect Lucifer is hoping you won’t need another transfusion, but I expect you’ll be checked on after we get out of this alive.” Jonas glared at the hole I’d fallen through. “I’m concerned with Lucifer’s opinion of your survivability, especially since he doesn’t misjudge things like this usually. What the hell is a spicy pony with bite? Why does he think throwing you to literal tigers and lions is going to help?”

  “Those questions terrify me, Jonas.”

  “My need to ask them is concerning.” The incubus rolled his shoulders, herded me away from the hole, and pointed in an adjacent room, which had once been a kitchen.

  “I don’t think Lucifer knows what a spicy pony with bite is.” Bracing for the worst, I investigated the kitchen. I could conduct a science experiment on what had been left on the counter. “Is that freezer working?”

  “No. I don’t want to know what’s in the refrigerator or freezer, and I don’t know how long it’s been turned off. Some secrets should never be unveiled. That is one of those secrets. I’m not brave enough to look inside.”

  While the tigers and lions terrified me, I could handle the contents of a dead refrigerator. I tested every step on my way over, grabbed the handle to open the fridge, and tugged it open.

  The stench warned me of trouble, and the body, which had been inside long enough to fall apart, oozed to the floor. While I’d heard about such things in some of the more disturbing legal cases at school, the reality of a corpse in a fridge left me questioning my choice of career field. Jonas gagged.

  I raised a brow, made sure I didn’t step in any bits of the corpse, and checked the freezer.

  According to the decomposing skull collection, the former occupants had murdered at least five people. The size of the skulls implied the people had been adults.

  “I regret I had not taken more forensic science courses right now,” I confessed. “Or forensic archaeology. I can’t even tell what gender these poor bastards were.” The putrid odor of decay, almost sickening in its pervasive sweetness, would leave a mark. I closed the fridge door and backed away, triple checking to make sure I hadn’t gotten any of the victim on my shoes. “The bodies in the forensic courses were a lot fresher.”

  “Maybe the advanced courses use the older corpses?” Jonas pinched his nose closed. “How are you not gagging?”

  “I am not as fragile as the poor little hungry incubus,” I countered.

  “Says the delicate little flower who almost got eaten by lions and tigers. Your screams are rather delightful, but I’d rather you be screaming for other reasons.”

  That caught my attention, and I turned to him. “I thought I was supposed to behave. Commentary like that is not making me want to behave, Jonas.”

  “The hotel room isn’t soundproofed, so you’ll just have to wait until you’re finished with your hormonal therapy. Your organs have to finish healing, too. Please get away from the body. I’m concerned it might get up. We are in Georgia after all.”

  While Atlanta, Savannah, and Augusta had taken the brunt of the unexpected surge of undead, the zombies, vampires, and mummies—and others—had cropped up everywhere Wishing Well had gotten a foothold, including Athens. Everybody knew somebody who had made a shit bargain with the corporation and hadn’t survived, and I counted my blessings only one or two of the students in my classes had fallen prey to temptation.

  Unlike the three cities felled, cleaning up the bodies had been a simpler affair. The quantity of victims had helped with that.

  I tried not to think hard about the dragon who’d handled most of the cleanup—or the key players in the game that’d sent the restless dead back to their eternal slumber.

  It would make looking the Devil in the eyes harder down the road if I acknowledged the role he and his little cupcake of a daughter had played in the destruction of three cities and hundreds of thousands of lives.

  “Fuck Wishing Well anyway,” I said, and as I didn’t want to deal with a zombie on top of the lions and tigers, I gave the body some more room. It didn’t move beyond the expected oozing and settling from its trip to the floor. “I think it’s really dead. I don’t think this is good to feed to tigers and lions.”

  “I applaud your ability to determine human bodies are not suitable for feeding to hungry predators.”

  I giggled at Jona
s’s droll tone. “Except the ones they ate. Those were suitable for feeding to hungry predators. Maybe the raccoons put the body in there at the request of the hungry predators.”

  “I don’t want to think about a bunch of hungry, angry cats having an army of raccoons, Sandra.”

  “It beats wondering who got stuffed into the fridge, and why the killers thought it was a good idea to put five heads in the freezer. Also, you might want to call the cops about that. I’m pretty sure that’s evidence of five murders. In better news, my fingerprints are everywhere, but I’m totally requesting angelic verification I had nothing to do with the tigers, the lions, or the corpses.”

  Jonas examined the floor, tapping at it with his toe until he found a section with a duller thud. “Oh, look. There’s a trap door in the kitchen. How surprised are you, Sandra?”

  I faked a gasp and clapped my hands to my cheeks. “I’m shocked. Absolutely shocked. The horror house has secrets. If we go down there, we qualify as too stupid to live, Jonas.”

  “Lucifer promised we’d survive through this somehow. I don’t think he’s lying, mainly because if I die, his darling kitten, also known as my sister, will mourn my loss for all eternity. He’d be forced to retrieve my seed, he wouldn’t even be allowed to punish me, then he’d have to somehow plant my seed again and engineer me to come back as the charming asshole I currently am, and that is a lot of work. He has opinions about being saddled with too much work. That said, if we go down there, we’ll probably encounter some pain, suffering, and terror in various forms.” After a moment of hesitation, he shrugged. “I won’t deny we might be too stupid to live if we go down there, but I’ve been told by someone with good reason to be honest we won’t die if we go down there.”

  Worrying over Darlene’s reaction if Jonas died might keep Lucifer on the straight and narrow, but could he actually stop a bunch of hungry big cats from killing us? I eyed the trap door, muttered curses, and crouched, discovering the floor had a notch large enough for a finger, which let me lift off a thin veneer. Beneath it, fresh plywood with a pull ring waited for someone sufficiently idiotic to come around and pull it up.

  I counted as sufficiently idiotic, although I struggled with the wood’s weight. Jonas took over, flipping it open on its rusty, creaking hinges. “I want to say I could have handled that, but I’d probably be lying.”

  “You tried, and that’s what matters. Keep trying even if you fail. You’ll get stronger with time, and I’ll take over when necessary.” Jonas peeked into the darkness, and he wrinkled his nose. “Of course, we might die trying to climb down that rusty as fuck ladder. Is this an experiment to see what happens if a cancer patient contracts tetanus? This looks like a probable case of tetanus for both of us.”

  I joined him in peering into the dark hole, which had dim emergency lights illuminating a narrow shaft and a rusting ladder. “This is old. Like this has been here for a decade type old. Or longer. This was here long before this street went to hell, right? Somebody’s been working a lab for a long time. How did nobody notice?”

  With a pained expression, Jonas shrugged. “Mostly, the neighbors mind their own business and don’t care. That’s part of what makes demons like me look like angels in comparison to some humans. Did you know He often views inaction as an equal sin to the action? Fear of being the next victim doesn’t condone allowing someone else to become a victim in His eyes. If being a good and courageous person was easy, everyone would go to the high heavens and rest in peace. But having the courage to stand strong in the face of adversity isn’t easy. It’s much easier to walk away than it is to fight. It’s not nearly as easy to access the high heavens as humans believe. A soul is more likely to go to the equivalent of purgatory, because most souls are neutral. They aren’t good or evil. They just are. They have not done anything deserving of the high heavens, and they have not done anything deserving of the Devil’s many hells. It’s only the extremes that go either way, and those extremes tend to be balanced.”

  Well, shit. “How many souls do you think end up in the heavens or the hells, then?”

  “I would say no more than twenty-five percent either way. The balance is balanced—literally. Half the souls are neutral. We, being the heavens and the hells, take the rest, sort them by severity of extremism, and attempt to rebalance them more towards neutrality. Winning is how we lose this game, Sandra—and the victor is eliminated right along with those the victor defeated. But for there to be life, there must always be good, evil, and everything in between. And for there to be a future beginning, there must always be an end. That is what the universal rules are all about.”

  The religious aspects of life and death always gave me a headache, even when the doctrine Jonas spouted made relative sense. “I should have charged per sermon in my hiring agreement,” I complained. “Should I shroud us now? Are we waiting before we get down there to do it?”

  “I’d wait for the shroud. As for charging per sermon, you can do that if you want. It won’t save you from hearing it.” The incubus muttered a few curses and eased into the hole. The ladder creaked with his weight. “Death is a small thing compared to the humiliation we will face if we can’t handle a single little horror house on our own.”

  “And if we do die in this little horror house? Because that is a rather strong possibility, Jonas. I went to school to be an attorney, not a horror house spelunker.”

  “Don’t you have to be in a cave to be a spelunker?”

  “It’s dark, damp, and filled with monsters. It’s basically a cave. As long as we have to deal with lions and tigers, I get to say we’re spelunking. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Jonas replied.

  “Good. Catch me if this collapses under my weight, please. And if you see any glowing eyes in the darkness, please take me with you when you teleport away.”

  “I like how you assume I’m going to teleport away.”

  “Why wouldn’t you? We’re in a fucking horror house.”

  “Sandra, I’m a demon. It takes a lot more than glowing eyes in the darkness to convince me it’s time to teleport away. But if it makes you feel better, I’ll take you with me if I go.”

  “You know what would make me feel better? Someone who is qualified to tranquilize or capture a bunch of lions and tigers. That would make me feel better. After this is over, yell at me about my complete lack of common sense and remind me that blaming the Devil doesn’t stand in court no matter how satisfying it might be.”

  “At worst, you’re trespassing. It wouldn’t even do more than blip on your record even if you did get charged with something, but hearing you say the Devil made you do it might be worth the fuss of you being put on trial,” Jonas replied, descending into the dark pits of hell—or the bowels of the decrepit house. “This is a closed-off storage room. There are unopened bags of cat food down here. The dry kibble kind. This is not appropriate fare for lions or tigers. If this was what those assholes were feeding them, it’s no wonder they ate their captors. I won’t call filth like them handlers. Darlene calls them fucking assholes. She’s right, these twats are fucking assholes.”

  “I agree. The twats the lions and tigers ate are fucking assholes.” Muttering curses at myself for being foolish enough to trust the Devil’s word on my general survivability, I eased into the hole, swearing even more vengeance for my lot in life. “I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”

  “I’d count on it.”

  Ten

  I don’t know what it means to be properly cuddled.

  So many regrets, so little time.

  In good news, the floor’s collapse didn’t earn me an automatic escort to the afterlife. Jonas had something to do with that. One moment, we fell. The next, I landed on top of him, he’d sprouted wings, and he used his dark, leathery wings to shield me from the debris.

  Transformed Jonas had destroyed his shirt, revealing a muscular chest with enough definition I could lose a great deal of time acquainting myself with every curve and dip in his physiqu
e. My position, with my hands planted on his shoulders, put me in the perfect position to pursue a new plan, one without a single lion or tiger.

  Jonas lifted his hand and covered my lips. “As you can’t see in the dark, there are more large cat predators in cages in this room. They’re alive, but barely. I can also see the freezers, which are on. Some have kittens, which aren’t doing well. I’m confident these are the cats Lucifer wants.”

  Shit. I wiggled on top of Jonas and eased his wing down so I could peek. A faint illumination from the walls near the ceiling offered barely enough light to make out the walls were lined with large cages filled with big cat predators, and the poor things had seen better days, in far worse shape than the lions and tigers who’d tried to eat me. “Oh, those poor things.”

  “It’s a lot different when they’re caged and helpless, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can fly and teleport, so I’ll leave you to feed these poor cats. You’re going to have to get close to them, but hopefully they’re okay enough to accept you tossing meat to them through the bars.” Jonas lurched upright, and I scrambled to stay on his lap. With a low chuckle, he wrapped an arm around me. “I think I see the problem. You’re so starved for human touch and affection it’s manifesting as a heightened sex drive. Give me a hug and get it a little out of your system, and tonight, I’ll make sure you get properly cuddled.”

  I could see myself enjoying a lot of time cuddling, especially if Jonas opted to leave his shirt at home and showed off his wings. “I don’t know what it means to be properly cuddled, so I’m expecting good things tonight.”

  “It’s a plan. Perhaps spicy ponies with bite require a great deal of affection to thrive? Cindercorns are like that. I could see Him following Lucifer’s base plan for his equines when working with you. Despite appearances, He genuinely does like Lucifer and wants him to be happy. Anyway, the cindercorn fillies have been brought up so they simply won’t whine when they want a hug, but they want hugs all of the time, just like their mother. And their mother? Ruthlessly hunts their father because he’s part incubus and she hasn’t gotten the hang of just asking for hugs. Also, she’s a hungry cindercorn, so she might think about asking for just a hug, but then she remembers she is married to her incubus-gorgon-doohickey, and thus he’s taken for a ride because she’s insatiable. I keep thinking about telling Sam, who is the poor, hunted father, that she really just needs a lot more hugs than she’s getting. I figure he likes being hunted and left it at that.” Jonas shrugged, and to my disappointment, his wings disappeared. “I sometimes manifest my wings when I get startled or fall. It wasn’t because I’m hungry.”