by J. C. Nelson
For a moment, I thought he would leap on me and savage me with that mouth full of teeth. Instead, he stepped aside with a flourish, and waved to the door. “Then begone, Marissa Locks. I hope your friends survive your decision.”
I headed for the door, nearly at a run, when a shadow raced under my feet and popped up, just between me and freedom. Malodin towered over me, a piece of paper in his hand. He’d shrunk the contract to a single page.
“Let me go. We had a deal.” I tried to keep the fear out of my voice.
Malodin shook his head slowly. “No, we didn’t. I said ‘Let’s make a deal.’ You never agreed to it. All I want is the quill back. You have no idea how hard it is to find a pen when you need one here.”
I almost fell for it, handing over the pen. What stopped me was the way he held the contract. If I put it in his hand, the tip of the quill would brush its surface. “Fetch.” I threw it over my shoulder.
Malodin flickered, like a video signal glitch, and began to laugh. “Your princess friend needs her prince to wake her. We upgraded your boyfriend’s fire. He’s about to eat an entire strike team of princes, and though he’s going to have a serious stomachache, he’ll be fine. Your fairy benefactor isn’t dead. He’s constrained.”
I knew better than to trust anything a demon told me. “Why are you telling me this?”
“We have a deal.” He held up the contract. A scratch lay across the surface.
“I didn’t sign that.” I looked at the paper, and the line rearranged itself like a grave worm crawling into place. A wave of chills washed over me.
“The quill was in your hand. You moved it. It hit the paper.”
I shook my head. “That’s not fair. You might as well have triggered an earthquake while my hand was near it, or had me sign something else and pulled it away.”
Malodin shrank down to look me in the eye. “I had an earthquake ready, but you made it easy. So we have a deal. You’re now a contract worker for me. Think I’ll call you ‘Hell’s Handmaiden.’”
I ran to the table and seized the quill, which had reappeared in its holder. “I’m canceling the contract.”
Malodin crossed his arms and gave me a doubtful stare. “I would have to sign to cancel, and that’s not going to happen. Any demon who canceled his own contract, the adversary would personally punish. Now get to work, handmaiden. The world isn’t going to end itself.”
I let a moment of anger take over. “I’m nobody’s handmaiden. I used to be an agent for the Fairy Godfather, and I’m not going to bring about the end of the world.” I stepped forward, pushing him back.
Malodin’s eyes lit up with fire and his skin blistered. “You will. I have waited six thousand years for a decent, by-the-book apocalypse. Summon the harbingers, unleash the plagues, and then you will call down the demon apocalypse on your world.”
“And if I don’t?”
Malodin smiled and his teeth shifted to pointed ones like a crocodile’s. “If you default, I get my apocalypse now. I’d rather have a proper one; in fact I’m willing to wait if that’s what it takes, but if you don’t live up to the terms of our bargain, I guess a garden-variety apocalypse will have to do.”
“I’m not going to do anything for you.”
“We will see.” He caught fire, burning into ashes, and the smoke disappeared, leaving only a shining piece of paper, dense with writing I couldn’t even read.
I looked at the paper over and over, but my name still showed at the bottom. Behind me, clerk after clerk tumbled out of stone shells, most of them looking even more bleary than normal.
One of them stumbled up to me. “Dude, am I in hell?”
“Not yet.”
* * *
THE DWARVES WERE waiting for me when I got out of the elevator. Magnus walked up to me and coughed. “Ma’am, if you don’t mind stepping outside.”
The other dwarves covered their noses.
“What?”
“You reek of sulfur,” said Magnus.
I didn’t bother mentioning that I might have accidentally entered into an agreement to end the world. Instead, I thought about the other reason I’d planned on coming down here. “I need you to build something for me.”
Magnus pointed to the door, and I walked out. Outside, he stood upwind of me. “What can I do fer ye?”
“I have a princess friend who got herself into a bit of a coma. I can’t keep her at the hospital, but I was wondering if you could build me a crystal coffin, like in the fairy tales?”
Magnus scratched his head. “Sure we can, Ms. Locks. I’ll need the first million dollars before we can begin work. You can pay the next five million when we finish construction, and I’ll take the last twenty-five million upon delivery.”
My face grew hot and I narrowed my eyes at him. “Seriously? You want thirty-one million dollars for a crystal casket?”
Magnus nodded like some sort of dashboard ornament. “Celestial Crystal ain’t cheap. That’s five percent less than I’d charge anyone else, on account of you helping us.”
“I’ll buy a coffin of my own. How much are the life-support enchantments?”
Magnus went back inside the store and came out with a small gray box. “This here is all you need. You can have it, so long as you go take a bath.”
I left him there on the sidewalk, and headed back to the office.
Seventeen
THE FIRST THING Rosa did when I walked in the front door of the Agency was give me an evil stare. Then she wrinkled her nose. I ignored her and headed to my office.
An enchanter came and stuck his head into my office. “We’re running searches, but I can’t find the source of the poodle leak anymore.” He sniffed, first the air, then his armpits. “Did something die in here?”
I looked at his unwashed hair, the bits of garbage clinging to his robe—a very filthy motel robe—and swore under my breath. Smelling worse than an enchanter put the icing on an already bad day. “How’s the frog-to-prince bit going?”
He glanced down at his feet in a way that didn’t inspire confidence.
I rushed down the hall to the side room where I’d left the enchantress, and from the doorway, raucous laughter echoed out. Inside, naked men lounged on chairs, laughing and toasting each other with wine.
One of them looked up. “Wench, bring me some clothing, or take off yours.” Then he looked at me closer. “On second thought, bring me mine.” The only thing worse than one prince was a room full of them. The only thing worse than a room full of princes was a room full of naked princes. If there had to be an apocalypse, I hoped these guys died first.
The enchantress sat in the back corner, whispering to a man who kept his head down on the table, occasionally looking wildly around the room.
I marched over to the prince who had ordered me around and knocked the wine glass from his hand. “Get your own clothes.” Then I put my foot up in his crotch, resting the heel on a particularly sensitive spot. “And if you ever ask me to take off my clothes again, you’ll get to find out what life is like as a hairy, muscular princess.”
Silence reigned supreme as I left the room. I had a wardrobe staffer bring up bathrobes, and set a contractor to work filling out the princes’ release paperwork. When my room was finally clear, I went back to find the enchantress. She still sat beside the one man. He hadn’t put on a robe. He didn’t even give me a lecherous stare. Sometimes, life as a frog left princes more tolerable, but not exactly functional.
“He won’t talk at all,” said the enchantress. She put a hand on his arm, and he flinched, pulling away.
I slid into the seat beside her and smiled at him. “It’s going to be okay. You can tell your therapist all about how bad it was. She might even sleep with you if you are charming enough.”
He kept his head down. If the chance to bed another unsuspecting woman didn’t get a reaction from a prince, nothing would.
“Sometimes it’s like this,” I told the enchantress. “Might have been a frog for more than a month.”
The man’s head snapped up, and his head twitched as he followed something. I looked, and at the light, a moth fluttered. That’s when I realized what was wrong.
“Might have been a frog his whole life. Did you test them, or did you start transforming frogs into princes?”
The enchantress smacked her head. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
I thought about yelling at her, but I didn’t see any reason to take out my bad day on her. Instead, I hit the intercom. “Rosa, I need you to call down to PetsLoc and order me a gallon-bucket of crickets and the largest heat lamp they’ve got.”
The door to the room swung open, and Mikey stuck his head in. “Ninja dude is on shift now. I’m going to get some sleep—hey, is that brimstone I smell?”
The enchantress smiled at me. “I think it smells lovely.”
“Mikey, could you lead our naked friend down to the shower and put him in it, turn it to about eighty degrees? I don’t want his skin drying out while we figure out how to fix this.”
Mikey hulked past me, grabbed the frightened man around the waist, and hauled him out of the room. Even though I still blamed him for getting used, the wolf had a decent heart and quite a few livers in his private fridge, if memory served me right.
I checked for Beth in the back room, but she wasn’t there. True, if I was forced to end the world in an apocalypse, I might not be too worried about poodles. Then I shut the door to my office, sat down, and tried to make sense of the contract.
I had two immediate problems: The first was that I wasn’t a lawyer. The second, more serious one, was that I couldn’t even read the writing. It looked strangely familiar though. The longer I thought about it, the more certain I became that I’d seen it before.
When it hit me, I jumped to my feet, ran to the door, and grabbed my jacket. I ran down the hall, took the stairs, and jumped into my car.
* * *
WHEN I PULLED up at Ari’s brownstone, I received an immediate reminder of why movie night was always at my place. From the dead tree in the front yard to the swing that rocked itself without wind, the place gave me the creeps.
I got out my spare key and was trying to fit it in the lock when the door opened itself. It swung inward, inviting me.
“Close that door and let me unlock it.” The key established me as a legitimate friend, therefore under the protection of Ari’s lease. With a huff of wind, the door slammed in my face, then swung open and slammed again for good measure. “I get it. You don’t like me.” It stayed shut long enough for me to unlock the dead bolt, then swung open again.
I walked inside, amazed at how the place looked so dreary without Ari to lighten it up. “Hello?” In the corner, a mass of fur the size of a small horse rose and growled at me. “Not now, Yeller. Ari’s in the hospital.” Hellhounds weren’t known for their intelligence, but he curled back up and whined.
“Creepy dead lawyer, you around here? I need to talk.”
A cold trace of dry bone swept across my shoulder. The lich floated behind me, his eyes bottomless pits of darkness. I walked over and sat on the couch.
“Whaaaaaaaaaeeeerrrr,” he wheezed in a spectral voice.
I took out my phone and brought up my apps list. “Hold on. I have a Ouija board app. Should make talking with you bearable.” He drifted over and took the phone from my hand, arctic cold seeping out from his bones. Then he clicked the Home button and brought up instant messaging. Letters began to scroll, since spirits had a lot easier time manipulating electronic impulses.
The phone read, “Where is Ari?”
“She’s in the hospital.”
The lich flared darkness from him like tendrils of visible anger. “Who did it? Please, let it be you.”
“Queen Mihail. She tried to kill us with an apple.”
The lich typed for a moment, then handed me my phone. He floated over to a recliner, then settled down, approximating, as best he could, sitting down. “I was so worried when she didn’t come home,” read the phone.
“You? You were worried about her?” Then I began to giggle. “She tamed you.” It was hardly the first time Ari had tamed a vicious creature.
The lich’s finger bones rasped as he clenched skeletal fists. “Like you have room to talk.”
“That’s not fair. I was demoted and stuck with Ari. I was lonely. You try not having any friends for six years.”
The lich picked up my phone. “I’ve been dead for sixteen years. Cry me the River Styx and go jump in.” Then, after a moment, he added, “Is Ari going to be all right?”
I put my head in my hands. “I don’t know. I’ve got a ninja, a wolf, and an acidic moat monster guarding her, but she’s not safe in the hospital. I’m going to build her a coffin and put her in a dungeon on life support. It’s supposed to be the traditional way to keep princesses safe. Know of any dungeons for rent?”
The lich rose from the recliner and walked to a door. At his hand, the door opened, leading down into a black well of darkness.
“Sorry, I value my soul.” Grimm’s contract didn’t cover the basement.
“Very funny,” said the lich on my phone. “I swear I will not harm you.”
“Look, you aren’t the first thing to try to trap me today. I already made one contract mistake. I’m not going to make another.” I reached into my jacket and pulled out the copy of the contract Malodin had left behind.
The lich drifted over and swiped the contract from me, then spent a minute studying it. The phone beeped again. “You are a damned idiot.”
“I know.”
“You signed a contract with a demon.”
“I know.”
The phone beeped once more, and I was afraid to look. “First, we take care of Ari. Follow me.”
I stood at the edge of the stairway. “I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
“If I kill you, the demons would take it out on me,” read my phone. So I put one hand on the stairway and followed an undead sorcerer down into the seat of his power.
I walked down into blackness like the depth of night. When my feet stumbled at the end of the stairway, I looked back at the distant patch of light. Then the door swung closed, burying me in darkness.
“Hello? Can’t see.”
A pull chain clinked, and a lamp blazed to life in the corner. Then another, and a click as the overhead lights came on. I stood in a basement bedroom. Green shag carpet from the sixties, with dark walnut paneling on the walls. In one corner sat a television the size of a cereal box, and in the other, a recliner.
“I thought this place would be . . . more impressive. Goth-y. Ritualistic.”
“Mama did not approve of me painting the walls black,” said the lich, speaking through the phone.
“You lived in your mother’s basement?” I tried to figure out if he was telling a lie. For regular people, I did pretty well. The lack of skin made it hard to read the lich. “Not that I have a problem with that. Plenty of men live under their mothers. That way, Mommy can take good care of them.”
“Very funny.”
“So why didn’t you remake it into a den of ritual magic when she passed on?” I sat on the edge of the recliner while the lich looked at a shelf of books.
“Mama didn’t die until six years after I did.”
I stood up and looked around. “So where’s the entrance to the dungeon?”
The lich looked at me and waited in silence.
“This?”
It nodded. “This is where I became undead. It’s where I bound my power. Without a contract, I can exercise the full limits of my power here. And I will, if anyone tries to harm Ari.”
At least we agreed on that. A pair of chest freezers lined one wall, with more than enough room for a coffin on top. “I tried to get a crystal case for Ari, but Celestial Crystal is expensive. I was thinking of going with something more basic. I have a life-support module from the dwarves that should turn anything from a cardboard box to a bulldozer into a safe place.”
The li
ch drifted over and with a wave of his hand threw a cloud of papers off the chest freezers.
“Yup, I was thinking about putting the coffin on those.”
He shook his skull. Then with a wave, one of the freezers opened. I came over and looked inside. It hadn’t run in ages. Wasn’t cold, and smelled like tuna and dirty laundry.
“No one will think to look in here,” said the lich. I took the life-support cube from my jacket pocket and looked at it. “This side toward casket,” read the writing on one side. I held it up to the side of the chest freezer, and it leaped from my hand, locking onto the outside. Then metal tentacles grew like vines from it into the chest freezer, and the freezer began to hum. The inside glowed with white light, and a faint scent of roses wafted out.
“Perfect.” I borrowed my phone to call the Agency, then Shigeru, and then Mikey. Once I’d given everyone orders, I went back upstairs to wait.
While I paced the floor, the lich continued to watch me. Everywhere I went, he watched. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Can I help you?”
“You stink. Like brimstone.”
“Can I help you with anything else?”
“Why did you sign a contract to end the world?” The lich floated a little closer.
With a sigh of exasperation, I flopped on the disgusting couch and began to explain. By the time I reached the contract, I swear the lich had a knowing grin. Technically, since he was a skeleton, all he ever did was grin, but I felt a smug grin from him.
“Seriously, you fell for that old trick?”
“You aren’t helping.”
“I’m not the one that agreed to unleash the demon apocalypse. You’re going to make Earth into the equivalent of New Jersey. Completely unlivable.” The lich brought out a few volumes of celestial law and flipped through the pages while he studied my contract.
“I didn’t agree, and I don’t want to do it. The way I understand it, so long as I fulfill the bare minimum in the contract, Malodin will wait. Every second I buy gives me time to find a way out.” I checked my phone, wondering how long it could take to cart a sleeping princess home from the hospital.