by Louisa Lo
“I was helping her,” Boyce insisted.
“Yeah, right.” I waved off his words and nodded at Gregory, indicating that I was ready to teleport whenever he was. He looked around to check for any other human witnesses, found none, and started opening a portal to Hell.
During those few seconds, Boyce went deadly quiet. That should’ve triggered some alarm in me. But I was confident with the Unbreakable Cuffs and my own weakening spell. Probably a little too confident.
Anyway, one moment he was calm and docile, the next he turned around and blasted me with an ice energy that knocked me right off my feet. Then he started running away.
Lying sideway on the hard concrete of the alleyway, I directed every magic I had at the retreating back of my target. With the weird angle and the growing distance, I wasn’t sure how good my aim would be, but a girl’s gotta try, right?
I didn’t have a chance to check if I hit him, because a bone-numbing cold started settling into my limbs. It was a strange sensation, to have my skin sweating from the surrounding heat and my insides getting frostbite. Who would’ve thought a dwarf-giant, from a species known for their brunt force, would know such strong, sneaky magic?
“Megan!” Gregory’s voice sounded like it was from under water. I didn’t have the energy to answer him.
Gregory kept calling my name. One more urgent than the other. Oh, come on, couldn’t he chill? I sure was. All I wanted was to drift to sleep…
Someone was slapping my cold cheeks with scorching hands that came straight out of the oven, hot and relentless. It threatened to tear off the top layer of my skin with the friction. I opened my eyes.
And realized I didn’t remember closing them. That should have scared me, but all I felt was numbness.
Gregory was holding me in his strong arms, his warmth surrounding me. His hair had grown since we started our partnership, and as he leaned down to look at me, strands of brown hair kept falling over his eyes and chiseled cheekbones, giving me the urge to smooth them back with my fingers. With the weakening of my body bringing down my mental resistance, I greedily took in two large breaths of his body scent, which reminded me of clean citrus soap, before I was able to stop myself.
I needed to get a grip. He practically ran away after our first and only kiss. I’d always known that I fell short on the vengeance demon beauty standard—with my wild mud-colored hair, olive complexion, and child-bearing hips, I wasn’t classically lithe and graceful. I didn’t think Gregory would’ve cared, but something turned him off and I had no idea what. My physical attributes were as good a possibility as any.
“Megan, you alright?” His voice tight, Gregory propped me in a more upright position and offered me his hand. “Here, take some of my energy.”
Figuring this wasn’t a time for pride, I clasped his hand and drew his power into me. Gregory didn’t just have the blood of one of the oldest vengeance families flowing in his veins—he was also a powerful vengeance demon in his own right. His power, a rich and potent Earl Grey tea, filled my senses.
Immediately a picture of me being wrapped in a blanket and sitting in front of a crackling fireplace came to mind, making me feel safe and content. It was the perfect imagery to chase away the cold that had sank deep into the core of me.
As rejuvenating as the act of energy-taking with Gregory was, though, it wasn’t as intimate as it was with Esme, my half-sister. With Esme, it was “no holds barred” when it came to her emotions. With Gregory, there was a boundary there neither of us was willing to cross.
I took just enough energy and stopped, before I became too overwhelmed by his essence and got right into wishful-thinking mode. He wasn’t interested in me, and that was that. He’d been a valuable business partner, and I just had to learn to be content with that.
Even if it killed me.
“Thank you,” I said to Gregory rather formally, with no small measure of awkwardness. I got up quickly, desperate for some distance. “Whatever happened to our target?”
Gregory pointed at a space some twenty feet away, and I looked toward that direction. There was Boyce, trapped in a prison made of flaming rods, which nicely cancelled out his ice energy. The garbage cans next to the prison were melted, their contents fused with their grey plastic exterior like gooey ice cream sandwiches under a hot sun.
“Your magic hit the garbage cans,” Gregory said dryly, “and enough energy bounced back onto Boyce to delay his escape so I could imprison him.
So my less-than-perfect aim did manage to find purchase, kind of. Oh, well, as long as the job got done.
Boyce kept trying to touch the bars and kept bouncing back, his hands singeing. He didn’t look very happy about it, as he demonstrated with his endless stream of curse words.
“Go ahead.” I gave him a smug smile. “Make all the noise you want. This whole alleyway is sound and sight proofed from mortals. They see nothing. They hear nothing.”
That was the advantage of choosing the place of confrontation—Gregory and I had set up all the precautions beforehand.
I knew I should rejoice over not losing Boyce, but something was bothering me.
So let me get the sequence of events straight. After I was struck and Boyce was down, Gregory figured out the appropriate spell to offset our target’s ice energy and promptly trapped him with it, then he came to my aid.
All of which was understandable, as the profit and reputation of our business came before the well-being of any individual partner. Totally reasonable.
Then why was it a tiny, illogical part of me wished that his priorities had been slightly reversed? That maybe he would be so focused on my state of being that all else was forgotten, including the escape of our target, once I had fallen?
Because that would’ve been the expected behavior of a solus iungere, a vengeance soul mate. Total devotion and putting that person above all else.
During our one-and-only kiss, I was so sure that Gregory was my true mate. Except he wasn’t. He made that clear when he pulled away as if my skin burned him.
Anyway, I really couldn’t dwell on that. I straightened and briskly walked to one side of Boyce’s prison, and Gregory got to the other side after transforming the garbage cans back to their original state. He waved an enchantment that would allow us to touch the prison bars without harm. Then he opened up a now-familiar cross-dimensional portal. Straight to Hell.
Knowing what was coming, Boyce paled. “No, no, no. Listen, you really don’t want to do this.”
“Don’t want to do what, return you to Hell and collect our bounty?” I pulled back my upper lip. “You know how many all-nighters we’ve pulled in the last few months taking your kind back? I would gladly get this assignment done and over with.”
“And how’s serving Hell working out for ya?” He grit his teeth.
“We don’t serve Hell.” My nostrils flared. “We do business with Hell.”
“Yeah, keep telling yourself that.” Boyce sneered.
I had to admit, Boyce’s comment struck a nerve. Granted, a big part of the reason I wanted to become a mercenary was to build up contacts in the fight against the Greys, aka the Council. There was no contact as big as the Lord of Hell himself. But in the past months it was increasingly looking like he was the only client we had time to satisfy, given the sheer frequency of the prison breaks that were fast becoming the norm. Nobody knew why Lucifer was having a hard time keeping his prisoners in check, but Gregory and I had handled at least two dozen cases, and we weren’t the only mercenaries Hell had contracted.
I was a big believer in not keeping all my eggs in one basket, but it was hard to say no to these assignments—and not only because they were extremely lucrative. It was more like riding on the back of a potentially ill-tempered beast, and it was a lot easier getting on than getting off. Not that our interaction with Hell had ever been anything but professional and civilized, but the devil’s reputation spoke for itself. If the just and mighty Council hadn’t turned out to be such bull, I woul
d never imagine making such uneasy allies.
Not wanting Boyce to sow any more seeds of doubts into my head, I pursed my lips and grabbed hold of a pair of prison bars. Gregory did the same on his side, and together we dragged Boyce through the cross-dimensional portal, prison and all.
We arrived at Hell through one of its service entrances, being the freelance service providers that we were. This reception desk of the Underworld looked like one from a library for rare books, all tall, oversized, and polished dark mahogany wood.
Boyce rattled his prison bars, desperation seeping into his voice now. “Let me out of here!”
We ignored him, and he cursed wildly in an unfamiliar language. It had to be cursing, from its rough sounds and the universally rude hand gestures that came with it.
A small man with a frog’s head and an elf’s body, undoubtedly perched on a high chair, sat behind the desk. He had thick-rimmed glasses and a beer belly, and was bending over a large, thick volume with a fountain pen, making small notes here and there. Even with the ruckus Boyce was making, the man at the desk seemed to have difficulties tearing his eyes from the text to pay us any attention. There was a disturbingly obsessed look on his face as his head remained bowed. A tall, stick of a man stood behind him, holding onto an ink pen and parchment.
“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.
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