“Lookie what we have here,” a guttural voiced man said, getting to his feet as his chair legs scraped loudly on the floor. “Fresh meat.”
Slowly, all the men stood up, staring at her with hunger and violence in their eyes.
Kate swallowed hard.
Oh, crap.
“Hello, pretty,” one bull-necked guy said, walking up to her with an icky “serial killer special” smile on his face. He also had a fresh cut on his cheek, like a knife wound or something, which only added to his creepy factor. “Don’t you look good enough to eat?”
Kate reached into her purse, finding the pepper spray in one second flat. She was a cop’s daughter and an Oakland detective’s sister, damn it. She wasn’t going to let a few thugs spook her.
Especially not paper-pushing thugs.
“Seriously? Really? Are you kidding me with this Deliverance bullshit?” She glared at the men approaching, focusing on the one talking to her. “Back off, pal. I’m here to work.”
The guy laughed. “Work?” he echoed, looking her up and down unpleasantly. “On what?”
“Contracts,” she said shortly. I assume. In her usual passive-aggressive and completely disorganized way, Maggie had sent her down here blind.
“They’re a huge mess, completely unproductive,” Maggie had said, her voice dripping sarcasm. “Just the sort of thing a super secretary like you ought to be able to straighten out in a heartbeat, hmm?”
The guy was still staring at her, but some of the other workers were muttering amongst themselves. Finally one guy who must have been seven feet tall stepped forward. He was wiry thin, not brawny like the others.
“We’re already being punished for the last one,” the thin man said to the guy she was now mentally calling Dexter—the guy with the cut face. “We cannot anger the Overseer further. We have enough problems right now.”
Dexter snarled out something in a really weird language—something between German and a hairball.
Thin Guy ignored it. “Come on,” he said to Kate, standing between her and Dexter. “You can sit by me.”
“Dickless bastard,” Dexter snapped. Thin Guy kept walking, and Kate scurried quickly alongside.
“Don’t mind him,” Thin Guy assured her. “Never be alone with him, but don’t worry. I won’t let him hurt you.”
“Thanks,” Kate said, and meant it. Just because she had the pepper spray didn’t mean she thought she was a badass. She wondered if the Dexter guy had some kind of complaints lodged against him. Then she turned to her protector. “I’m Kate. What’s your name?”
“Ah…” He quickly said something that seemed to be mostly consonants, with a little gag at the end. She blinked.
“Okay. No offense, but I’m going to call you Slim, because there is no way I can pronounce that,” she said, apologetic. When he nodded affably, she pushed forward. “So. How do I get started? What are you guys doing here?”
“I don’t know how you get started.” The tall guy looked at her curiously. “I’m surprised that you are on this level at all. Do you know what these are?”
“Um… contracts?” Hence the name?
He didn’t even crack a grin. “Can you read this?”
He handed her one of the documents in the stack. It was surprisingly thick parchment paper, with the words seemingly burned onto it. And the writing itself was odd, like a cross between the angular runic symbols she’d seen at Prue’s bookstore, and the bubbly cursive that she’d seen in the Lord of the Rings movies.
“No. What language is that?”
He looked uncomfortable. “Not a language exactly.”
She frowned, studying it more closely. “This is like a cipher or something, huh? Some kind of code?”
She felt a little tingle of excitement. She’d heard that Fiendish was super-secretive. The newspaper articles had suggested it was something sinister, but she’d assumed it was the usual tabloid bullshit. This would suggest otherwise.
“That’s it,” Thin Guy said, and he sounded relieved. “A secret, ah, code.”
“So, what do we need to do?” Even if it was nefarious, she reasoned, if she couldn’t make sense of it, she couldn’t really feel responsible for it, right?
She shifted uncomfortably in the already uncomfortable metal folding chair. She really, really hoped it wasn’t something terrible—like labor negotiations to hire orphans for a nickel a day or something.
You need the job, Kate.
She felt a little nauseous.
“Since you do not read this, I am not sure how you can help,” he admitted. “We are… looking. For a specific word, on a specific kind of document.”
“Um, okay.” She frowned, doing a quick headcount. “And there are, what, forty of you?”
“Fifty.”
“Okay.” Her brain started whirring, juggling options like Tetris blocks, trying to get a handle on a system for the work. Her uncle used to make fun of her when she got into this mode—but then, the only system he’d ever practiced was one he’d used to bet on horses. “There are like a million pages here. Are they at least in some kind of order?”
He shrugged. “Not that we know of.”
“And where are the ones that are already processed?” she asked, looking around. The whole place was one big, hot mess of paperwork.
He shrugged again.
“Jeez Louise,” she muttered. “This sounds like Maggie all over. You guys are going to be at this forever at this rate. Probably reviewing some of the same documents more than once.”
He sighed, a little, gentle smile on his face. “The work itself is not so bad, really.”
“Stuck in this sunless hole?” she said. “It’s like an icebox in here!”
“Trust me. We prefer it that way.”
“So, I guess I should check in with this Overseer guy,” she said. “He’s your boss, right?”
That smacked the smile right off Slim’s face. “It… might be better if you don’t see him,” Slim said slowly. “He does not particularly like your kind.”
“What? Temps?” She frowned. What an asshole. “You guys are contract workers, aren’t you?”
Slim nodded. “But he has quite a bit more authority over us,” he said. “And he is like us… He comes from where we are from. The Overseer wants us to find the documents, and we are behind schedule. He can be rather demanding.”
“Lotta that going around,” she said, grimacing. “What, does he yell at you?”
“Among other things,” Slim muttered darkly. “We work until we drop.”
Kate’s frown intensified. “How about I take you to lunch,” she suggested, “and you can fill me in on how everything works down here.”
“Lunch?” Slim’s eyes widened. “We’re not allowed meal breaks.”
She stared at him for a long moment, not comprehending. “Are you telling me they’re not letting you eat?”
“It is not so bad, really,” he repeated, glancing nervously over his shoulder.
“Are you kidding me?” Appalled did not even begin to cover it. She dug into her purse. “When was the last time you ate? Or drank?”
He looked nonplussed. “Truly. It’s not—”
“Here.” She pulled out a package. “Sorry. Sometimes I need a sugar rush, and it’s all I have…”
He stared at it for a long moment. Then he looked over his shoulder and tore the package open with shaking hands. He stuffed one cake into his mouth. Then his eyes widened dramatically, and he looked at her in surprise.
“What? You’ve never had a Ho Ho before?”
He shook his head. Then, like a five year old, he smiled broadly.
“I can’t believe your supervisor is letting this happen,” she said, huffing. “Or that the higher-ups are okay with it. Can you imagine what a union would say? I should just—”
“No!” Slim’s look of panic and alarm cut through her self-righteous anger. “Please. Tell no one what’s going on down here.”
“Sure, okay,” Kate r
eassured him. It’s not my business, she reminded herself. How many years was it going to be before she learned to keep her nose out of other people’s problems? “Um… Why don’t you show me what it is you’re looking for, and I’ll see if I can help.”
He nodded, then took a bite of the other Ho Ho blissfully. When he was done, he rummaged around for a blank piece of paper and a pen, then drew a funny symbol.
“That,” he said, when he’d swallowed. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
“All right,” Kate said. “I’ll find one.”
He smiled again, this time more indulgently. “Even if you can read the writing, this symbol is difficult to find.”
She buckled down to it, flipping through the first contracts. The fact that the words all looked similar was a big part of the problem. The really weird thing, though, was every now and then she’d come across a signature in English, sometimes with a thumbprint in dark brown ink.
After a few hours, her eyes were crossing, and she was feeling even more cranky and violent than usual on a corporate temp job.
“This is ridiculous, Slim. You know that.” She rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her palms. “There’s got to be an easier way.”
He shrugged, still blissed out from the Ho Hos. “We do what we’re told.”
She shook her head. “What if you don’t find any of them?”
“We will find them.”
“But if it takes too long…”
He looked worried as her sentence trailed off. “Many of these others don’t understand,” he said in a whisper, nodding at the rest of the men bent over the papers. “They think it couldn’t possibly be worse here than it was, back where we were,” he prevaricated. “But I know the Overseer. I know what he is capable of. He told us his job is at stake—that it will depend on our performance. And I think we’d better find at least one name soon, or it will…”
He paused, that look of panic and fear back on his face.
“. . . be very bad,” he finished softly.
This “Overseer” guy sounded like more than just a micromanager. He sounded like a prime, brutal, abusive asshole.
“You know, I’ve met Thomas Kestrel a couple of times…” Kate said.
“No!” Slim said, then quickly dropped his voice lower when others looked at them. “No. It would only make things worse.”
Kate sighed. She wasn’t going to go narc on this Overseer guy—she didn’t know him, and obviously the guys were scared stiff. That said, she could help them find the names. She might not exactly be a caped crusader, but she knew paperwork, and she knew systems.
Besides, Maggie had just told her to come down here and “fix” stuff. She hadn’t really limited how that stuff was supposed to get fixed.
Kate smiled. More than just paperwork and systems, she knew people.
And one in particular, she thought with a grimace, would probably be just what the situation called for… as long as he kept his hands to himself.
…
“Well, that was an utter failure,” Thomas said with a long sigh.
It was five o’clock when Thomas was able to check in on his little “circumvent Al” experiment. The twelfth floor of Fiendish Headquarters was full of empty offices and conference rooms—and a prison, not that anybody needed to know that.
The I.T. guy he’d recruited was at the desk in one of those unused offices. His name was Pablo Escrima, and he was now passed out, unconscious, face down on the keyboard. The scanner next to him hummed almost sinisterly.
“How long did he last?” Thomas asked Yagi.
The ordinarily composed Yagi wiped at his sweat-beaded forehead with a handkerchief. “Six hours,” he said, putting his suit jacket back on.
“Six hours,” Thomas echoed. “And he got through how many documents?”
“About a hundred.” Yagi poked at the prone man. “He started showing irritability at two hours, psychosis at four. Any longer than six, he’d be dead.”
“We should’ve stopped at four,” Thomas ground out. If he hadn’t been in meetings, he’d have seen it and stopped it earlier. He might have signed his soul to the Devil’s team, but that didn’t mean he had to keep earning bonus cruelty points.
Yagi shrugged. “He’s young; he’ll survive. And he won’t remember a thing.”
“I really wanted this to work. We’re cutting it too close,” Thomas answered. “We’ve got thousands of these documents, Yagi. For the demons to skim through each page, even with fifty of them… It’s taking too long.”
“Al,” Yagi replied. “He’s the bottleneck. As long as he’s in control of them, he’s got job security—and a fifty-year guarantee of a sanctuary from those who would do worse than kill him. He’ll give you just enough to keep you from kicking him out, but he’s not going to allow you the chance to cut him loose too early.”
“He’s that convinced I’m going to screw him over once the names are found?” Thomas asked, shaking his head. “I’ll just sign a contract saying he can stay in the Havens indefinitely, if that’s the case.”
“No,” Yagi said quickly. “You don’t want to give him that kind of power, that kind of protection. You can’t be linked to him. You’re trying to extricate yourself from a bad situation, not saddle yourself with a worse one.”
Thomas leaned against the desk. “Al looks like a really old peanut of a man. All he’s asking for is sanctuary from the guys he’s screwed over—guys like Cyril, I imagine. What do you know that I don’t about this guy?”
Yagi pulled his lips into a tight line. “He’s a demon. Rogue, like his workers, but more powerful because he’s able to create his own construct here.”
“What?” Thomas turned. “You told me he was a consultant. One you trusted.”
“I didn’t say I trusted him. I said he could get us what we needed. And he has. But I would never say to trust him.”
Thomas ran his fingers through his hair, rubbing his scalp distractedly. This was bad. This was really, really bad. “If he’s so dangerous, why is he so afraid?”
“Because he shifted himself here, he’s very frail—he couldn’t construct a warrior body, as most people who conjure up demon forms do. That’s why he looks like a peanut. If he shifts out or tries to rebuild the construct, he’ll be immediately returned to Hell.”
Thomas frowned, feeling a headache brewing as he tried to remember all the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo he’d studied up on. “If he’s powerful, why isn’t he a demon lord himself?”
“I’m guessing he’s working on that,” Yagi said grimly. “If he goes back to Hell, he’ll be hunted by every demon lord who wants him on his team. The fact that Al has made it rogue for this long says he’s very smart. The fact that he’s here at all says he’s powerful. Don’t ever underestimate him. And don’t promise him indefinite sanctuary. Unless, of course, you’re comfortable with a prospective demon lord using your condos as home base for his power-building.”
“Wonderful,” Thomas said, grim himself. “And he was our best option.”
“The scanner idea could still work, however,” Yagi mused.
“Oh? How?”
“Use disposable people,” Yagi said contemplatively. “People that no one would miss. They will inevitably die from the attempts at possession and the insanity that constant contact with full demon script would cause. But we could move through them fairly quickly.”
“No,” Thomas said. “What the hell is a ‘disposable person,’ anyway?”
“Don’t play dumb,” Yagi chided. “It’s not ideal, by any stretch, but we need to be practical. You’ve hired me to regain your soul, and we’ve got one year.”
“There’s another way. We just haven’t looked for it yet.”
Yagi tapped his lower lip with his fingertips. “Your workers wouldn’t get possessed if their souls were signed…”
“No,” Thomas snarled, then forced himself to back down from his knee-jerk revulsion. “I’m not signing anybody.”
“
It’d be temporary,” Yagi said, his deceptively calm voice at odds with the brightness of his eyes. “Once your soul reverts, so would the souls of anyone you had signed. It would be—”
“I said no.” Thomas grimaced. “You set me up with that ‘disposable people’ crack, didn’t you? Trying to sell me on signing a team?”
Yagi didn’t try to deny it. “If you had a pool of souls to draw from, you’d be stronger,” he said bluntly.
“Yeah, and so would the guy who signed me, remember?”
“He’s strong already. A few more souls will be negligible to him,” Yagi pointed out. “But it could be a game-changer for you.”
“Not a chance.” Thomas gritted his teeth.
I don’t care about risking myself. But I’m not dragging anybody else into this. I’m not worrying about anyone else.
Yagi finally backed down, looking disappointed, if not surprised.
“I warned you—hard decisions are coming. This may be one of them.”
“Just clean him up,” Thomas said, staring at Pablo Escrima’s unconscious form. Then Thomas’s cell phone rang. He checked the screen, noticing it was one of the Fiendish vice presidents. “Yagi?”
Yagi paused, one eyebrow quirked.
Thomas took a deep breath. “I’ll think about it,” he said, then answered his phone. “Joel. What can I do for you?”
Chapter Four
That evening, Kate answered her cell phone as she carefully navigated Alameda’s surface streets. Driving wasn’t her strong suit, so she considered ignoring the call, especially since she couldn’t manage driving and checking the cell phone screen to see who it was. Still, she thought it might be her brother, asking where his truck was, so she figured she’d answer it via her Bluetooth. Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, she reasoned—he did store the thing at her parents’ house, after all, and she wasn’t taking the bus to this particular destination. “Hello?”
“You’re going where?” Prue yelped.
Kate gripped the steering wheel tighter as Prue’s voice shrieked through the cell phone headset she rarely used—for just this reason.
“It’s a work thing,” Kate hedged.
She’d texted Prue that she was going to be late, and when Prue had asked the reason… Well, obviously Kate should have lied. Too late now.
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