by Louisa Lo
“Hey, Leonard,” Gregory greeted the man reading the text, forcing him to look up at him. There was a power in saying someone’s name and I was glad to see Leonard responding to it.
Leonard was the bookkeeper of the Book of Life and Death, which recorded the activities of all souls in existence, physically live or dead, supernatural or otherwise. The Book kept track of the estimated arrival dates of sinners in Hell, the expected duration of their torment, and where they were headed after the punishment was through—the cleansing fire of reincarnation for mortals, or a possible return to their old lives for the supernaturals.
The data in the Book were ever-shifting as every choice a living person makes took them closer down one path or another. Everything from the decision to cheat in an exam, to pocketing a tiny screw from the hardware store instead of coughing out the required twenty cents, set the stage for the next round of choices and the round after that, which eventually determined a person’s eligibility for Heaven or Hell. Leonard’s job was to keep track of Hell’s occupancy status based on all these variables.
A monumental task for such an unassuming slip of a man. His legions of assistants, like Tatus, the tall man behind him, were only ever trusted with manual tasks such as filing and miscellaneous note taking.
“Megan. Gregory.” Leonard’s eyes were clear once he looked up from the Book. He glanced at Boyce. “This is faster than I expected.”
“Thank you.” I beamed at the compliment. As concerned as I was about the jobs from Hell taking up too high a percentage of our total business activities, I was nevertheless pleased that Leonard was impressed with our work. For one, he was our way in to meet the ever-elusive Lucifer. Secondly, what vengeance demon, mercenary or otherwise, didn’t like to be told that they’d done an efficient job?
Leonard glanced at Tatus, and the latter rang a small silver bell. A pair of guards materialized. They were both muscular and nearly naked, with a piece of cloth over their loins, which made them look like a cross between a stripper and a romance novel cover model. I heard that the higher rank you got, the more clothes you’d be allowed on the job. I wonder what the guards looked like at the grand entrance of Hell, which was rumored to be a place of super glam.
"Guards, can you take our prisoner back to his punishment? He has"—Leonard wetted his thumb with his tongue and flipped through the pages of the Book—“two years, five months, eleven days, and fifteen hours to go on Level One. After that he will be eligible for early parole.”
Looking at Leonard causally reading someone's fate off the Book of Life and Death had always given me the creeps. To know that there was a database out there keeping track of all the good and bad things people did in their lifetime, which in turn determine the amount of time they might stay in Hell, was unsettling to say the least. I dreaded what the Book might say about me, and about my family and friends, especially since a lot of us were against the Absolute Good. If the Book followed the same “naughty or nice” standard as the Council, then we were so screwed. Just because Hell used me as a hired gun didn’t mean it wasn’t my eventual destination. Maybe it even made it more likely.
One of the guards waved his hand, removing the fire prison while the other took out a piece of yarn and wrapped it loosely around Boyce’s wrists. I’d learned over the past months not to underestimate the fragile looking thread. It was more powerful than ten Unbreakable Cuffs.
Speaking of Unbreakable Cuffs, it was time to remove mine. I reached toward Boyce, knowing that I—the rightful owner of the cuffs—could release the locking mechanism with my touch. But the guard on the left beat me to it. And by that I meant he waved his hands over the cuffs, and the darn thing just fell off Boyce’s wrists and into the guard’s open palm. Then the guard handed it back to me.
My jaw sagged. I looked at Gregory and he shrugged. How the guards could pull that off, I would never know, but it must be an inborn talent for the servants of Hell or something. I couldn’t help but wonder what other things we might get blindsided by if our friends here ever turned on us.
Boyce hadn’t even left the room when Leonard’s gaze started drifting back to the Book of Life and Death like a moth to the flame, his mouth gaped as he lost himself in it again.
Tatus gave a discreet coughed, and Leonard looked up again, seeming almost surprised by the continued presence of Gregory and me. He blinked rapidly a few times. “Oh, right. Well, thank you for your help. The fee will be transferred to your account within the next twelve hours.”
Having prompt payments from Hell was never the issue. It was what other hidden costs this working relationship might carry that kept me up at night.
Chapter Two
Complicated
Gregory and I teleported to the front of the duplex I shared with Rosemary, my human roommate, on the west end of Toronto. Whenever we returned from Hell, we always traveled to the same destination first even if we were to split afterward.
I would love to say that was done because Gregory was a romantic and wanted to escort me to a safe place before taking his leave, but the truth was he did it for business reasons—some spirits were known to be able to hitch a ride back from Hell, but their ability to do so decreased drastically if the traveler wasn’t alone. Something about multiple people being able to ensure that all the blind spots were covered during teleportation.
The last thing we wanted after returning a fugitive to the Underworld was to provide passage out of there for another one. Leonard, ever the accountant, would probably consider it a wash and refuse to pay us for our work.
I cleared my throat after my feet landed on the front steps of the duplex. “So, er, that went pretty well."
"Yes, it did," Gregory agreed.
Awkward silence, in which we shifted our gaze everywhere except each other’s eyes.
“I’m sure Leonard will call us when he’s got something else,” I said finally.
“He will.”
Silence again.
Now that the responsibility of delivering the target was over, my mind veered to how Gregory held me in his arms earlier, something he hadn’t done since that night three months ago. We’d been careful about avoiding physical contact with each other ever since then.
Under the waning sun, the sharp angles of Gregory’s cheekbones made the contours of his face even more defined. His long-limbed body, usually relaxed with confidence, hunched with hesitation. His midnight-blue wings were only half-extended, as if they, too, weren’t sure what the next move was.
If I didn’t know better, I would say he was as confused and conflicted as I was. But Gregory wasn’t exactly the contemplative and tormented type. I must be reading what I want from the situation.
Steeling myself to keep things light, I swallowed and said brightly, “Alright then, I'll keep Marv with me for tonight and let you know if anything comes up."
My comment had the desired effect. Gregory grimaced. “I wish you wouldn’t call the Phone by that ridiculous name.”
Marv, aka the Phone, was for the 24/7 vengeance hotline we set up for the business. We usually took turns holding onto that little communication device through the night. A few weeks ago I decided to rechristened it to Marv, which stood for Mercenary Assistive Response for the Vengeful. It was way cooler than its old name.
“You should be glad I’m not calling it Vermin.” I smirked.
“Vermin?” he raised his eyebrow.
“You know, Vengeance Emergency Response Management Initiative, with the ‘n’ from the word ‘initiative’ forming the last letter of the acronym.”
“Marv it is,” Gregory said quickly, probably hoping to discourage me from coming up with more names for the little gadget. “Anyway, I reprogrammed it so it doesn’t make that chirping ringtone if you don’t answer it within a minute. Your roommate won’t be disturbed again.”
“Thank you.” I dropped my cocky act and said gratefully. Always the optimist, Rosemary really thought that those abandoned eggs up in the nest under her bedroo
m window were still capable of hatching, though we were well past spring. I didn’t need her getting excited by mistaking the chirping for the sound of baby birds only to be bitterly disappointed.
Gregory looked like he was going to say something else, then stopped himself. Without a further word, he took Marv out of his pant pocket and handed it to me. The little device, which fit right into the palm of my hand was warm to the touch, and I tried not to think about Gregory’s body heat that was just right next to it.
I ducked under the porch as Gregory teleported away, and opened the front door to the divine smell of pot roast and grilled vegetables. My stomach rumbled in anticipation. At least no matter how my day went, I could always count on a hearty meal at the end of it.
"I'm at the back. Come on out, Megan!” The distant voice of Rosemary, my roommate slash chef extraordinaire, called.
I walked through the living room and kitchen and stepped out onto the deck. A setting for two was laid on top of a yellow tablecloth, with a small vase of fresh cut daisies on the side. Rosemary was in the middle of pouring homemade lemonade into two glasses. In the center of the table were two large covered pots.
“Just in time for dinner." Rosemary smiled, uncovered the pots, and started spooning vegetables and pot roast slices onto the plates. A petite blond with a round face, my roommate was a culinary student who could bake like a team of angels and cooked like a temptress from Hell. I was so, so lucky to have found her. “I made chocolate molten lava cake for dessert."
And I officially didn’t deserve her.
I just had to be glad that I had the metabolism of a supernatural, or I wouldn’t have been able to fit through the front door, let alone catch any fugitives, with the way Rosemary had been feeding me. She called it experimentation, I called it Heaven.
Unfortunately, Rosemary also had a nosy side. “Hey, was that Gregory I saw walking you home?"
Living with me meant that Rosemary was bound to witness something supernatural at one point or another, be it catching me in the act of casting a spell, or seeing me talking to Sassy, my feline shade. Rather than dealing with these incidents on a case-by-case basis, I’d placed a perception filter on her to help her mind ignore things that it couldn’t understand. That meant that she didn’t actually see Gregory and I teleport onto the property, or him teleport away. All she saw as she peeked out of the window was him walking me home, then leaving.
"Yeah, that was him,” I replied.
“Gregory, your business partner?”
“Yep.” I told her Gregory and I had started an event planning business together. It explained all the weird hours I kept, and it was true in a way—we planned events in which people got sent back to Hell.
“Uh-huh.” Rosemary studied my face like I was an expensive restaurant dish she was trying to reverse-engineer.
“So how’s the canning going?” I asked quickly. “Are you onto the grape jelly now? When is the peach batch ready?”
“The peach will be ready in another week. I'm already halfway through the grape jelly and started on the raspberry jam.”
“That’s a lot of new stuff to sell.” Rosemary ran a side-business of jams, organic fragrance, and soap products, not to mention really awesome dog biscuits.
“I’m only keeping half. We’re running a bake sale at the shelter next week. Why not tempt them with some jam when people are going to be buying breads and buns?” Rosemary got herself an extra portion of pot roast and offered me the same. I obliged. "Looks like I'm going to have tons of leftovers tonight. You should have asked your business partner to stay for dinner. I told you before that he’s welcome to, remember?"
I should’ve known that Rosemary wouldn’t be so easily deterred. Someone who created baklava from scratch by methodically building one sheet of phyllo over another twenty times over, without them drying out or sticking together, wouldn’t have given up so easily.
Though my roommate had met Gregory briefly several times, I’d always managed to get her away from him before she could extend any dinner invitations. It would be just like her to grill him over a delicious meal about the state of things between Gregory and I, and that would’ve just killed me with embarrassment.
“Er, he's busy,” I lied.
“That’s what you said the last three times. You didn’t ask him, did you?” She narrowed her eyes at me.
“It’s…complicated,” I admitted. What an understatement.
“What's so complicated? He’s single. You’re single.” Rosemary stopped the forkful of meat that was halfway to her mouth. “Wait, he's single, right?”
I nodded. “As far as I know.” Whatever the reason that made Gregory step away, at least I knew it wasn’t because he had a girlfriend back home waiting for him—the essence of cheating had a distinctive flavor to it, and as a vengeance demon, I would’ve been able to detect it, and I didn’t, either during or after the kiss.
“Then what’s the problem?” she persisted.
“As I said, it’s complicated.” I envied the human in front of me. She could choose whomever she wanted as a mate. There was no weird vengeance chemistry, or the misread of such vengeance chemistry, for her.
“Just drop it, okay?” I begged Rosemary.
My roommate must’ve heard the weariness in my voice. She chewed on her lips. “Sorry. I just keep seeing how your eyes light up every time you mention him and I thought…never mind. Here, these came in for you today.”
Rosemary hurried into the kitchen, picked up a stack of letters from the counter, and handed them to me.
“One from U of T, one from Election Canada, and one from Ontario Health.” She commented, “I betcha that last one is a health card renewal notice. I just got mine done last year. The lineup wasn’t too bad, but the picture was horrendous.”
With her perception filter, Rosemary only saw what she was meant to see as a human being. The three letters were actually from the University of Demonic Studies, Election Vengeance, and the Department of Vengeance Health, respectively.
The fact that they got the letters delivered here, my address on the human plane, rather than to my parents’ house, was in itself a bad sign.
I was glad I was a super-fast eater and had already polished off the main course, or I would've surely lost all appetite.
The letter from the University of Demonic Studies confirmed my withdrawal from the Faculty of Arts and Vengeance, and that for the time I’d spent there, with three completed school semesters, two tuition hikes, and an GPA of 3.7, they were granting me the transferrable course credits of…zero. It would be like I’d never attended a day there.
I clutched the paper so hard my fist was shaking. Rosemary shot me a worried look.
I tried not to let it get it me, to tell myself that this was such a small matter in the grand scheme of things. But dammit, I earned those credits fair and square. I’d slaved over the school works, pulled all-nighters for the midterms, and almost gotten killed over my first co-op assignment.
I didn’t deserve to be treated as if I was expelled. I walked away voluntarily, and they were pretending that I left in disgrace.
The letter from Election Vengeance informed me that since I wasn’t living, going to school, nor engaging in eligible employment on the vengeance plane, I wasn’t qualified to vote in the upcoming mayoral election.
Eligible was the operative word here when it came to the employment status. I worked plenty, just not in a legitimate, Council-approved sense.
Not that I cared about the mayoral election—all the candidates had pretty much the same platform—but it would be nice to be able to not exercise my right to vote.
The letter from the Department of Vengeance Health was not about the renewal of my health card at all, but the cancellation of it altogether. They cited the same reasons as Election Vengeance. Then, to put a cherry on the top, attached to the letter was a bill for the annual checkup I did two weeks ago.
A bill. They’d sent me a freaking bill. Nobody said anyt
hing about refunding my tuition, but they took the time to create an invoice for my annual Flap test—like a human Pap test but for my back where my wings were stored.
Three letters. Three fallouts from the fight against the Council, aka the Greys.
What do you expect, Megan? You denied their chance to annihilate most of the population in existence.
True enough.
“Are you alright?” Rosemary’s words pulled me out of my reverie. If my frowning roommate could sense supernatural powers, she would’ve been able to feel the sudden energy spike in the air resulting from my anger and ran the other way. I forced myself to take a few deep, calming breaths.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” I reassured her. “How about that dessert?”
Sometimes the only thing a girl can do was dig into her chocolate molten lava cake, then move onward.
***
I was helping Rosemary put away the dishes when the doorbell rang.
“I wonder who that is?” Rosemary frowned as she wiped her hands on the dishcloth and hurried out to the front door.
“Could it be Jordon?” I asked. Rosemary’s boyfriend was a regular fixture here—whenever he wasn’t working two jobs on top of volunteering at the local animal shelter.
“No, he’s working tonight.”
I stayed put and wiped down the kitchen counter. I suppose I could use magic to do it, but I found the manual labor calming.
Not to mention, I was a bit stingy on magic use, especially with the three letters reminding me how unpredictable life could be. Better save up some power like humans would with blue chip stocks.