“Pending!”
“The same claims,” Milton grunted, “could be made for all pet owners!”
Milton smudged Moses’s padded vest with a sloppy “O.”
Mr. Wilde, showing a rare burst of unrestrained emotion, clapped his hands.
“Touché, Mr. Fauster!”
Moses was furious. “Cats look after themselves!” he seethed. “Not like codependent canines! The Egyptians worshipped them!”
Moses cuffed Milton in the ear with the hilt of his sword. Milton staggered back to the wall.
“Studies show that dogs can sense illnesses in humans!” Milton roared back, slashing at Moses’s sword. “Dogs offer companionship to those who suffer serious health problems!”
Soon, Moses was backed against the Grimnaseum wall, pinned without any means of escape.
“I mean,” Milton panted, “have you ever heard of a seeing-eye cat?!”
Milton knocked the boy’s sword out of his hands. It landed on the floor with a thunderous clatter.
“Excellent job, Mr. Fauster!” Mr. Wilde congratulated him. “Now finish him off.”
Milton, panting, stared at the defenseless boy, crumpled against the wall. Milton shook his head. “He’s not armed,” he said, tossing his pen to the floor. “It wouldn’t be fair. We’ll call it a draw.”
Milton took off his mesh face protector, pinned it beneath his arm, and extended his hand to his rival.
“Good match,” he said.
Moses stepped forward and offered his hand. After a few congratulatory pumps, the boy lifted his hand, balled it into a fist, and brought it down hard on the back of Milton’s head.
Mr. Wilde stalked forward.
“That’s quite enough, Mr. Babcock!” the teacher scolded. “There is nothing as unseemly as a sore loser!”
Moses gave Milton a swift kick in the stomach. He took off his face protector.
“I may be a loser,” Moses said with a wicked leer, “but I’m not the one who’s sore.”
Moses dropped his helmet to the floor and swaggered away.
Mr. Wilde helped Milton to his feet.
“Nice form, Mr. Fauster,” the teacher said. “But you could use a few pointers.”
Milton rubbed his bruised and tenderized chest.
“I think Moses gave me plenty.”
Mr. Wilde gave Milton a sour grin. “The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.”
The teacher’s smile faded quickly. Like a letter that had been ghostwritten in invisible ink.
“If you want to survive the War of the Words, Mr. Fauster, you will have to work on your killer instinct,” he said gravely, “or risk being killed and made extinct at the hands—or mouth, rather—of your sister.…”
18 · WHERE ANGELS
DARE TO TREAD
LIMBO-HECK’S WAITING (and waiting) room for wicked wastrels—was abuzz. Reporters swarmed like flies on hot “scoop,” waiting for Principal Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s latest, most controversial employees to arrive through the sugar-spiked, barbed licorice-choked gates.
The principal stole a look at her reflection in the “PULL IN CASE OF WATER” box in the howlway.
“It’s showtime,” Principal Bubb muttered. “Bea is back. For good. For bad. For always …”
The principal, wearing a dress slit to her garter-snake garters, strutted through the Foul Playground, a wasteland of broken Barbies, shattered Sit’n Spins, jumbled jump ropes, handicapped hula hoops, and G.I. Joes that had long since gone AWOL from anything remotely resembling fun. Boogeypeople (hideous demons dressed as slightly less hideous demons) held the reporters and photographers at bay, waving their mossy green arms and staring down interlopers with their big glowing Cyclops eyes.
Cerberus, Principal Bubb’s three-headed lapdog, savaged a squeaky unicorn toy outside of a Clubfoot House—a ramshackle play structure that listed to one side. The creature swiftly severed the chew toy’s proud horn before turning two of its hideous heads toward the principal as she approached.
Principal Bubb waved to the assembled reporters as she made her way to Limbo’s KinderScare facility for a photo opp.
Just beyond a big, sputtering neon sign blinking KINDERSCARE: WHERE LITTLE KIDS GET BIG NIGHTMARES was a dingy room decorated with grimy handprints and goopy snot smears. A haggard goatlike nanny demon stood over a group of petrified toddlers feigning sleep in their frosted gingerbread coffins.
“Why, hello, wee ones of Limbo!” the principal roared, her booming voice causing a fresh peal of terrified shrieks.
“Um … Principal Bubb,” the teacher bleated. “I was just putting the children down for their nap.…”
“No worries,” the principal said as several photographers followed her inside. “I’ll put them down—you children are hideous. See? That’s a joke. I put them down.”
A bug-eyed demon photographer from Eternity Today magazine trained its camera upon the principal.
“I kid,” Principal Bubb said, primping for the photographer. “I love children … especially with béarnaise sauce.”
An excited mob formed outside the gates. Principal Bubb left the KinderScare facility and clacked through the throng of “me!-me!-media” jackals.
The Gates of Heck opened with a gush of sulfurous steam. Out strode nine creatures—tall, proud beings radiating equal parts majesty and menace—with halos of sizzling flame hovering over their heads.
An angel wearing an eye patch led his commando team of fallen angels into Limbo’s unwelcoming Unwelcome Area. Four lizards in gold lamé suits slithered into a spotlight, crawling across toy musical instruments. The lead lizard shot a heavy-lidded gaze over his Ray-Bans, and crooned into his tiny microphone while his backing band played a smoky jazz ditty.
“If you’ve lived a life so bad, that you drove your parents and teachers mad …”
The one-eyed angel glared at the lizard, his eye like a dark sun trained through a magnifying glass on an unsuspecting anthill. Principal Bubb swiped her fore-claw below her chins.
“Take five, lizards.”
The principal turned to the tall angel, his long raven’s wings tucked tight to his proud back.
“Principal Bubb,” she said, holding out her claw. “Your new boss.”
Flashbulbs exploded as the photographers and reporters got over the stupefying shock of nine hulking celestial outlaws standing before them.
The dark angel smirked from beneath his upside-down horseshoe of a mustache. After an awkward beat, he shook hands with the principal.
“Azkeel,” he said in a snide, smoky voice.
Principal Bubb puzzled over Azkeel’s face.
“Have we met before?” she asked.
“Please, Principal,” Azkeel replied. “Flirting with me is flirting with disaster.…”
“No, it’s just that you seem so—”
“Mr. Azkeel!” a woman wearing white tailored business vestments cried. “Mary Claire Divine with Gabriel’s Horn: Your Daily Blast of Good News. Could you introduce your fellow fallen angels?”
Azkeel gestured to the four once-heavenly creatures to his right.
“Of course. This is Malaku,” Azkeel said, holding out his arm.
A fierce, sculpted angel, shirtless with a shaved head and spikes jutting out from his wrists, sneered. His eyes burned with malice.
“Diabolus.”
A silver-haired woman with bright green eyes, claws, and faint leopard spots covering her neck, arms, and legs smirked.
“Zagan.”
A barrel-chested man with a nose ring, pierced lip, and six links of chain hanging down from his neck like a tie acknowledged the reporters with a jaded gaze.
“Rahab.”
An Asian man with blond hair and earrings, dressed head to toe in black leather, smiled at the crowd.
Azkeel turned to his left. “This is Marchosias.”
A teenage girl with large black wings and flaming red hair nodded shyly to the crowd. She had the gre
enish-gold eyes of a wolf, and when she smiled, a finger of flame leapt from her mouth, licking her black lips.
“Lahash.”
A burly creature wearing a cast-iron hood and a vest sprouting silver blades at the shoulders, spread its splendid red wings.
“Belphegor.”
A woman with translucent hair and dressed in a tight, chain-mail bodysuit slid her large silver sunglasses down her slender nose, assessing the crowd with her pitch-black eyes.
“And Molloch.”
The female reporters in attendance gasped despite themselves at the dark-skinned boy’s beauty. Molloch’s brilliant blue eyes flared like sapphires.
“He’s gorgeous,” whispered Mary Claire Divine.
“Now, Miss Divine,” Molloch sneered, his razor-blade-feathered wings glinting from over his broad shoulders. “Don’t bother trying to get on my good side. I don’t have one.”
Principal Bubb’s taped-on smile began to lose its stick. All eyes were on Azkeel and his cast-out comrades. She was the reason the fallen angels were all here, the most daring hiring coup of all time.
The principal stepped in front of Azkeel. “Now here’s the scoop on the brilliant decision making that led to—” she began before a demon reporter cut her off.
“Willard Glick, Brimstone Beacon: The Nastiest News, Served Un-Easy with a Side of Beacon,” the creature barked. “Mr. Azkeel, why did you decide to become an employee of Heck?”
The dark angel stepped around the principal’s gluteus way-maximus and resumed his place at the front of the pack.
“Excellent question,” Azkeel replied with a cold smile. “If I may speak for my fellow fallen, we have always felt an affinity for the horned and wrathful, the hoofed and spiteful, the tailed and tyrannical … our brothers and sisters similarly forsaken by the Big Guy Upstairs. And when Principal Blubb here—”
“Bubb,” the principal seethed.
“—reached out to us with its offer—”
“Her.”
“—to protect the netherworld’s children, our most precious resource, we jumped at the opportunity. Or swooped, actually. Plus,” Azkeel added with a cruel, thin-lipped smile, “the money was good.”
The principal, quivering with attention withdrawal, stepped in front of Azkeel, extending her arms wide. The drooping flesh draping her arms made her look like a gigantic flying squirrel.
“Behold: Heck’s Angels!” Principal Bubb exclaimed, glaring at her loyal-when-threatened lackeys.
Most of her demon staff broke out in less-than-spontaneous applause.
“Now if you’ll excuse us,” the principal said as she ushered Azkeel and the other eight fallen angels out of the Unwelcome Area toward the howlway. “We have important matters to discuss.…”
“I think that went well,” Principal Bubb reflected as she and the fallen angels entered her Not-So-Secret Lair.
Azkeel turned swiftly on the heel of his boots. “Listen, Principal,” he said, puzzling briefly over Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s mismatched mudslide of a face, “we’re not here as part of your personal publicity blitz. We’re here to further our own interests.”
“Which are?” Principal Bubb spat back.
“Which are of no interest to you at this time,” the dark angel said.
An angry quiet settled in the principal’s high-tech lair of security screens and blinking computers.
Molloch swept the room with his piercing blue eyes. “Nice digs,” he said in his dark, smooth voice. “I could do wonders with a place like this. A foosball table, a pin-ball machine, a medieval rack …”
“That would make for a lovely decoration,” Marchosias said with a soft puff of fire.
“Right,” Molloch replied with a sly grin. “Decoration.”
Azkeel sat in the principal’s chair, putting his boots up on her massive mahogany desk. He reached inside his leather vest.
“Let’s get down to business,” he said, smoothing out a blueprint on the principal’s desk. “Our first official act as Heck’s Angels—a name we find offensive but grudgingly acknowledge as ‘catchy’—is, as you know, to provide security for the upcoming War of the Words. We have obtained a diagram of the venue—the Tower of Babble—which was no easy feat. The technological schematics, I was told, are only available on a need-to-know basis.”
“Who told you?”
“You don’t need to know,” the fallen angel continued. “The point is that Vice Principal Carroll is making quite a statement by getting King Nimrod to host the War of the Words there, after that whole kerfuffle with the original Tower of Babel. It’s like he’s thumbing his nose at The Big Guy Upstairs Himself. That guy is either lionhearted or harebrained. But, of course, you know all of this, having sent the vice principal to Wise Acres yourself.…”
Right, Principal Bubb stewed. My decision completely.
Azkeel leaned back, his hands clasped behind his neck. “In fact, that was one of the reasons why we accepted your offer,” he said. “You must be something of a maverick, swimming upstream from all of the procedural bilge water that’s been clogging up the afterlife like a gas station toilet. Making bold decisions, working around those who stand in your way. And hiring us … wow, however did you come up with that one?”
The principal shrugged her calcified shoulder humps like two elderly camels hitting a speed bump in the desert.
“It just sort of … came to me,” Principal Bubb explained.
Azkeel folded his majestic wings behind him, each perfect pinion meshing perfectly with the other. The effect was somehow both graceful and threatening.
“You may have employed us, but that doesn’t mean we take orders from you,” he said, tucking his finger beneath his eye patch for a quick scratch. “Our arrangement is one of mutually advantageous coexistence. We, your Heck’s Angels, will scratch your back.…” Azkeel’s eye grazed the principal’s lumpy back with distaste. “Figuratively, of course,” he said, rising from the chair. “And you scratch ours. Just between the wings.”
The fallen angels strode toward the door with military precision.
“Sorry to crash your little all-ages purgatorial dance party and run,” Azkeel said, his strong hand gripping the door’s iron handle. “But we’ve got some planning to do. But not to worry: we’ll let you know what we’re up to. We are your dutiful employees, after all. And it’s our duty to protect and to serve: whatever serves us …”
What have I gotten myself into? the principal thought miserably.
19 · HAVING THE LAST LAP
MARLO KICKED HER feet off the edge of a pile of foam mats. She was irritated that Milton had made no move to respond to her alphabet soup note. It was like an olive branch, and she was a dove—or a filthy pigeon, if you were Mack Hoover—extending a message of peace. But no. Milton’s lack of a message must be a message in itself: he had no intention of working together with Marlo, and it was every tongue for itself at the War of the Words.
The goddess Peitho stood with Miss Parker in the Exorcize Area of the Grimnaseum, a dreary corner crowded with barbed trestles and bitter medicine balls.
“Persuasion is another tool in an arguer’s arsenal,” the stunning, shapely goddess said, her voice coiling sweetly in the air like incense.
“But persuading isn’t arguing,” Cookie Youngblood argued.
“That’s a great point, Cookie,” Peitho said with a smile that made you forget who you were, or what you were wanting in the first place, like how you can open the refrigerator and suddenly have no idea what you’re hungry for. “Thank you so much for bringing that up, Cookie: that persuading isn’t arguing.”
Cookie grinned, placated and pleased with herself, though she wasn’t quite sure why.
“Persuasion is a like a velvet hammer,” the goddess continued, her chocolate brown hair piled up on top of her head like a hot-fudge sundae. “It delivers a soft blow, dazing your opponent. It’s different than mere flattery—simply buttering someone up with creamy talk. Persuasion has an end game
. It’s an art. It’s bending people to your will in gentle, invisible steps.…”
Peitho stepped up to Cookie and brushed her finger against the girl’s cheek, which reddened softly under the goddess’s touch.
“It’s like with this sweet girl here … Cookie or whatever,” Peitho purred. “She had an argument that I quickly defused through acknowledgment, repeating what she said to insinuate that I was actually listening, giving the illusion of gratitude in exchange for her worthless opinion, and then using her own name liberally, as there is nothing sweeter to a person’s ears than the sound of their own name.”
Cookie’s smile drooped like a mustache. “Hey … wait a second—”
“But, Miss Peitho, persuasion is easy for someone like you,” Marlo offered. “I mean, you’re the goddess Peitho and so beautiful and perfect and always say just the right thing. Like how you’re here this morning, Peitho, helping us, which is so sweet, by teaching us the art of persuasion. But what do I know? I’m just a grubby dead girl with a tongue like a hunk of spoiled luncheon meat, not a goddess like you, Peitho. I should probably just go back to my bunk and get some sleep, huh?”
The goddess beamed. “Why, thank you, dear! And of course you can go back to your bunk and get some—” Peitho’s brain skidded to a stop. Storm clouds of outrage darkened her sunny disposition. “Why, you—”
“It’s Marlo. Marlo Fauster. That’s my name, and you can repeat it back to me all you want, but it won’t work: I am persuasion resistant. No one can get me to do something I don’t want to do, unless I want to do something I don’t want to do.…”
Most of the other children—save for Cookie Youngblood, who was still smarting from her sweet-talking defeat—smirked back with admiration.
“Thank you, Peitho,” Miss Parker said, stifling a guilty smile. “I think you’ve shown us—whether you intended to or not—that pride can easily short-circuit most anyone’s logic.”
The goddess left the room in a furious swirl of robes and a less-than-ladylike harrumph.
Miss Parker turned to Marlo. She shook her head with gentle surprise.
“I must admit, at first I wasn’t quite sure what to make of you, Miss Fauster,” she said. “You seemed fresh yet not the sharpest tongue in the knife drawer. But now I see that perhaps your cleverness lies in your ability to not appear so. Someone who wears out her opponent through sheer tenacity.”
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