by Louisa Lo
I guess if the hellhounds could drag people to Hell, then they were more than capable of keeping them there.
Gregory and I strode to the hot dog stand nearby, attracted by its heavenly smell. There was just something about carnival food that was as wonderful as they were unhealthy.
Suddenly he stopped in his tracks and steered me away from it, his face tight. “Let’s go check out the other side.”
I dragged my feet. “What’s going on—”
“Would the prisoners whose names begin with the letter E”—the same neutral voice spoke again over the PA system—“please come to Hot Dog Stand 12C and pick up your penises. You’re free to reattach it back to your body for the rest of the day.”
Oh, those hot dogs that were rotating and grilling in their own juices weren’t hot dogs at all.
My food lust toward the carnival food evaporated, and bile threatened to rise up within me once more. The disgust worked on two levels. As a vengeance demon, I’d been exposed to my share of gross retribution. But knowing that someone I’d sent back to Hell might’ve had their penises grilled because of me just made it that much more real.
In a desperate attempt not to puke my guts out, I turned to Gregory and said pleadingly, “Talk to me. Distract me.”
Gregory looked at me, understanding dawned in his eyes. “What have you learned about this section of Hell thus far?”
Good, logical analysis. That I could do.
I took a shaky breath, trying to ignore the screaming of the tormented souls, the gruesome images of broken bodies, and the smell of burnt flesh. “For one, there were people being tormented from all walks of life here. Across all races and genders, supernaturals or otherwise.”
“What else?”
“This whole section is automated. Other than the hellhounds, there isn’t a live agent on site.”
“Live being a relative word here,” he said dryly.
“You know what I mean. The place is run completely by machines.” It was working, my sense of nausea was receding. I didn’t care if Mr. Red Armband overheard us. It wasn’t exactly any unique insight.
“But notice how everything is running at full capacity?” he asked quietly.
Now that he mentioned it, he was right. At most of the games and rides, just like the Ferris wheel, people had to wait quite a long while before they were up again. It was like a typical midway or amusement park in that aspect, except nobody minded the wait at all.
I paced around. “But is this the way things are meant to be run? These machines are so overworked. Do you hear that sputtering sound in their engines? They sound like at any time now they could give up the ghost. I thought the whole idea of having Leonard overseeing the Book of Life and Death is to manage Hell’s occupancy in an efficient manner.”
“Okay, I just got word we’re good to go.” Mr. Red Armband ran to us. “Follow me. We don’t have much time.”
He ran toward the carnival games. We darted around in a haphazard pattern that didn’t make any logical sense. First, we sprinted toward the stand with water guns that spewed acid onto the prisoners, then we turned direction and headed toward a whack-a-mole machine with people rather than moles in their holes. At the last minute we dashed into a giant teacup and rode along in a crimson pond of menstrual blood—yes, it was as gross as it sounded, and smelled worse.
Man, with all the running around, was I glad that I had opted for glamming up my sensible black pumps rather than stumbling around on the fancy silver strapped sandals. I just wished the stink of menstrual blood could be washed out of my borrowed clothes easily.
After three rounds around the pond, we got off and headed straight to the True House of Horrors, which was between the pavilion for a singing competition for people with their throats slit open, and a small stage for an hourly show of Death by A Thousand Cuts.
The entrance of the True House of Horrors was blocked by a chain with the sign Closed for Repair. Mr. Red Armband came to a stop by the chain, lifted it, and waved us in. “We made it. The boss is waiting in there for you.”
Alright, let’s see what fresh hell this was. Literally.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Caretaker
Inside the True House of Horror, in front of a range of distortion mirrors, was a man I supposed must be Lucifer. He was different than what I thought he would look like. Between the Medieval depiction of him carrying pitchforks, and the modern human pop-culture representation of him being ultra-bad boy sexy, the range was pretty broad.
What I got instead was someone not in the extremes at all.
He wasn’t very young or very old. He wasn’t super skinny or overweight. He was no geek, but not a gym rat, either. He was not a bureaucrat, but to call him sexy would be an exaggeration.
Truth be told, he looked like an urban, well-adjusted, friendly-but-not-too-friendly barista, with the dark clothes to boot. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Medium height. Cute, in a boy-next-door kind of way. But not entirely memorable.
But maybe that was the point.
On the contrary, the distortion mirrors behind him were making him taller, shorter, fatter, and skinnier, demonstrating the various forms the devil could possibly take.
“Hello,” he greeted us in a tone that could’ve been used to ask if I wanted an extra shot and cream for my decaf soy latte. “Welcome to Hell. As you might’ve guessed, I’m Lucifer.”
I crossed my arms, then uncrossed them when I realized that I was facing the devil. The devil. It was best to play nice. So I said, “Er, thanks for the invite.”
Not really, but what could I say?
“And thanks for letting me come along,” Gregory said politely.
Lucifer waved his hand. “I expected Megan would want you to come along. Thank you, both of you, for answering my summons.”
There was sincerity in his voice, which was just as confusing as his physical form.
“Summons? Yeah, about that.” Might as well get on with why we were really here. “We know about the wrongfully accused.”
Instead of being flustered, Lucifer smiled. “Wonderful. So what are you going to do about it?”
Taken aback, I blurted, “I’m going to get you to back off. I got a full list of the wrongfully accused and all.”
“No, you don’t. Only partial.” Lucifer paused. “And it isn’t my army.”
Gregory and I looked at each other, our mouths gaped. What the hell did he mean, it wasn’t his army?
Lucifer continued, “That’s why I invited you here. As the Lord of Hell, I’m not allowed to come to you, creatures of the living. I could only ask you to come to me, with the hope that after you found out about the army, you’d want to.”
“How did you know we’d find out about the army?” I asked.
“How do you think Vera found out which mercenaries captured her man?” Lucifer grinned.
Oh crap, just how much of our journey so far had been manipulated by Lucifer?
“If it’s not your army, whose is it?” Gregory demanded.
Lucifer gave Gregory a look.
The Council. Of course. There was no other player big enough to pull everything off.
I resisted a mental palm slap. The jailbreak from Hell didn’t start until I joined forces with Gregory. Could it be that after my refusal to release the Absolute Good for the second time, the army was the Council’s way of upping the game?
It made an awful lot of sense.
If the Council had enough muscle, they wouldn’t need to release an ancient entity to make a whole pile of trouble. What would this mean to my friends and loved ones, who were mostly from one fringe group or another? Would they be forced to go on the run, or end up in concentration camps somewhere?
“I also have to thank you,” Lucifer said as he turned toward one of the distortion mirrors. “For bringing me this.”
He touched the surface of the skinny mirror, and it rippled. A tall man fell out of it, bound in chains made of cotton candy that was unbreakable despi
te his struggling. He glared at all of us, but was otherwise silent.
It was Tatus, Leonard’s assistant and our guy in Hell.
Or maybe not so our guy, after all.
“He’s an agent of the Council.” Lucifer’s eyes chilled. “I’ve been playing dumb for months, quietly trying to figure out how the Book of Life and Death came to be tampered with. My safeguard against prison breaks doesn’t work on the innocent, and they escape easily. I had suspected that the culprit was close to Leonard, and that’s why I asked you to come to the front instead. I had no idea he was already your contact.”
I remembered how at the entrance of Hell, Yelena King stared at the dazzling light bulbs overhead, and her demeanor changed into that of resignation. That must’ve been part of the mechanism that kept people in Hell. But I guess it wouldn’t work on innocents because they honestly didn’t do the crimes. Without that there would be no resignation to their fate. Hence the breakout.
“You used us as bait to lure him out,” Gregory accused Lucifer.
“I believe he got close to you to monitor you to begin with,” Lucifer said. “Then when he knew you were coming to Hell to confront me, he thought he could use the opportunity to figure out how much I really suspected, and I played along. He’s been following you since the entrance of the casino, remaining invisible.”
“But now you managed to ferret him out,” Gregory pointed out.
“My trusted guard took you through the carnival in a pattern that made the traitor easier to detect.”
“Wait”—I put up a hand—“all that dashing around and riding in menstrual blood was meant to get Tatus to reveal himself? There was no social unrest, was there?”
“Of course not.”
And I guess all that talk about asking me to wear something nice was just a ploy to get me to blend in while they whisked me away, in case I was ever spotted. Should a girl be offended about that?
“Tatus is a servant of Hell.” Lucifer's face turned stone cold. His eyes became black and bottomless like a coal mine. I shuddered, reminded again that he was, after all, the devil. “Ironically, that makes his betrayal harder to sense. But being a living creature, your essence wreaked havoc to his perfectly balanced disguise.”
“My true master will rise,” Tatus finally spoke, still struggling against his bind. “You’ll all be punished.”
“The world needs balance,” Lucifer stated. “The pursuit of Absolute Good will destroy that.”
With another wave of his hand, Lucifer sent Tatus back into the mirror. “I shall interrogate him thoroughly soon, but Megan and Gregory, I asked you here because I need your help.”
Lucifer, the Lord of the Underworld, wanted our help? Gregory and I exchanged an uneasy glance.
“I know what the Council really is,” Lucifer said. “And what you have to understand is that this is about more than the vengeance governing body being corrupted by the Greys, on the off-chance that they’ll be successful at their harebrained attempt to call back an ancient entity, or their army. There’s something that’s equally at stake here.”
“What do you mean?” I couldn’t think of anything else just as high stake.
“This is about the health of the entire Cosmic Balance. Do you know what Hell should look like?”
I shook my head.
Lucifer waved his hand, and we were back at the carnival again, except it was almost empty. There were a few people scattered on the Ferris wheel, and a couple on the merry-go-round, but all the lines were gone. The machines, which spewed out hot steam due to overworking on my last visit, were mostly shut down, their engines quiet. Some of the rides and food stands even had tarps draping all over them. Though the whole place was pretty much abandoned, it had a strange sense of peace that its noisier self lacked, like this was the place where punishment, though being dished out less often, actually meant something.
“This is how Hell is supposed to look?” I asked incredulously.
Lucifer lifted his hands to encompass his surroundings. “Hell should never have been at even half-capacity, let alone over-capacity. This has been a chronic problem for a long time now. My workers are overworked, my machines are overworked, and I have to grant early release to many prisoners due to overcrowding.”
“What happened?” Gregory asked quietly.
“Long ago…” Lucifer walked to the hot dog stand and stroke the tarp covering it fondly. “Back when the Cosmic Balance was first created, three followers of Fleur the Trickster—the Father, the Warrior, and the Caretaker—made an arrangement about how to manage the irregularities in their newly created system. The Father would raise the alarm when a person started doing bad things, the Warrior would give that person fair warning, and if failed, punishment, and the Caretaker removes the unrepentant, repeat offenders from the system. The ‘care’ in Caretaker applies to both the protection of the innocents from the wrongdoers, and the personal growth of the wrongdoers before they moved on to the next life. I’m the Caretaker. The Warrior, after many reincarnations, became the modern-day Council. And the Father is—”
“—Santa Claus,” I guessed, remembering the group of golden statues lining the stairs leading up to the front entrance of Hell. Santa was there, and he had a very out-of-character serious demeanor about him.
“Please don’t call him that. He hates that name.” Lucifer winced. “In popular culture he’s been reinvented to be a joke of a man, some jolly old fellow who exists only to hand out gifts. It's insulting to do such a character assassination to one of the early founders of the Cosmic Balance.”
“Is that the Council’s handiwork?” If the three followers of Fleur had worked together, my own vengeance education sure as hack never covered it. Well, they never really gave Fleur due credit, either. Having Santa portrayed as a one-dimensional gift giver sounded like a smear campaign aimed to get people to not take him seriously, and the Council wasn’t above that.
“Of course,” Lucifer confirmed. “Nowadays the Council still purchases the Father’s Annual Wrongdoers’ Development Report for appearance’s sake, but to say that they squander many opportunities to nip wrongdoings in the bud would be an understatement. Mass murderers, weapon dealers, and serial rapists, etc. should have been scared straight at their very first crime, before they even attempt bigger ones, and my realm would be at the capacity it’s supposed to be at. Just as vengeance demons gain their magical credit through the correction of injustice, I receive mine through the repenting of sinners and the protection of innocents. For centuries now I’ve been spending more magic than I’ve gained, with sinners having created too many victims and too set in their ways to change by the time they come to me. That’s why I came to rely on machines for the punishments. This imbalance in the Cosmic Balance hurts everyone and cannot go on.”
Wow, the furthest they’d ever told us in school about the relationship between vengeance demons and Hell was that we should aim to “soften up” the wrongdoers before they moved on to eternal damnation. Nobody told us our job was supposed to be far more in-depth than that.
“Okay, but I still don’t see where Gregory and I fit in,” I said.
“In a way, you’re both children of both worlds, and your experience has given you unique foresight and compassion. The Council was inefficient long before the Greys got to it. I'm talking about the revamping of the entire system. That's what it really needs. We each have a role to play in the Cosmic Balance, and this current state of things is hurting us all.”
I allowed my senses to take over and felt the truth of Lucifer’s words. Yes, the large-scale injustices he mentioned had the Ring of Vengeance to them.
I looked to Gregory to see his reaction. Time and time again I was asking more from him than I’d intended, and I feared I had finally crossed the line. For Hades’s sake, we were literally talking about conspiring with the devil here.
But there was no mistaking the fierce determination in his eyes as he looked back at me. He shrugged with deliberate casualness. �
��Well, on the positive side, we already sealed our fate when we went against the Council.”
I bit down the joy that threatened to mist my eyes, and resisted the urge to run into his arms.
Well, I did join the mercenary life with the explicit purpose of building up contacts in my fight against the Council. I wasn’t planning on reinventing the wheel altogether, but this wasn’t the first day I knew the current system was inefficient. I’d seen unaddressed injustices all my life—starting with my own childhood bullying.
“What is it exactly you want us to do?" I asked Lucifer.
“For now, quietly obtain the full list of all the wrongfully convicted and their counterparts in the Council’s army.”
That could be doable, especially if I was able to get further help from Gran. Hopefully we could figure out a way for her to send me messages that were clearer than that confusing rain raw one.
“I'll take the list you have so far,” Lucifer continued. “And set the innocents aside in an area of Hell where they can stay in relative comfort. We can't afford to return them home right now lest we alert the Council.”
“Wouldn’t they already know, with you capturing Tatus?”
“He won’t remember it after I’m done with him.” Lucifer’s eyes glinted. “And I’ll make it look like I dismissed your claim entirely and sent you on your merry way. Nobody will know that we’re working together except us and those close to you.”
“And what’s the long-term plan?” Gregory asked.
Lucifer said simply, “We bring down the Council, and rebuild it with people who genuinely care.”
Yeah, simple as you please. Bring down the Council. Despite the risk, I found myself drawn to the idea.
“So what do you say?” Lucifer asked.
What could I say? The devil I knew was better than…we all know the rest.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Purgatory
As a gesture of goodwill, Lucifer allowed Gregory and I to observe the transportation of the innocents to their new home. Converted from a garden formerly known as Torture Chamber Section 4A290, it had six interconnecting greenhouses with everything from orchids, cactus, hibiscus, palm trees to ornamental banana plants. Every greenhouse either had a waterfall, a small pond, or a waterwheel. The eternal sunshine, the fragrant of countless flowers and the sound of water made it a tranquil environment, but given what I’d seen at the amusement park, I suppose all those innocent-looking plants could do quite a lot of damage. The cactus went without saying, but also the many blossoms that could be as poisonous as they were vibrant in color.