Page 42 of Client from Hell

While Atlanta, Savannah, and Augusta had taken the brunt of the unexpected surge of undead, the zombies, vampires, and mummies—and others—had cropped up everywhere Wishing Well had gotten a foothold, including Athens. Everybody knew somebody who had made a shit bargain with the corporation and hadn’t survived, and I counted my blessings only one or two of the students in my classes had fallen prey to temptation.

Unlike the three cities felled, cleaning up the bodies had been a simpler affair. The quantity of victims had helped with that.

I tried not to think hard about the dragon who’d handled most of the cleanup—or the key players in the game that’d sent the restless dead back to their eternal slumber.

It would make looking the Devil in the eyes harder down the road if I acknowledged the role he and his little cupcake of a daughter had played in the destruction of three cities and hundreds of thousands of lives.

“Fuck Wishing Well anyway,” I said, and as I didn’t want to deal with a zombie on top of the lions and tigers, I gave the body some more room. It didn’t move beyond the expected oozing and settling from its trip to the floor. “I think it’s really dead. I don’t think this is good to feed to tigers and lions.”

“I applaud your ability to determine human bodies are not suitable for feeding to hungry predators.”

I giggled at Jonas’s droll tone. “Except the ones they ate. Those were suitable for feeding to hungry predators. Maybe the raccoons put the body in there at the request of the hungry predators.”

“I don’t want to think about a bunch of hungry, angry cats having an army of raccoons, Sandra.”

“It beats wondering who got stuffed into the fridge, and why the killers thought it was a good idea to put five heads in the freezer. Also, you might want to call the cops about that. I’m pretty sure that’s evidence of five murders. In better news, my fingerprints are everywhere, but I’m totally requesting angelic verification I had nothing to do with the tigers, the lions, or the corpses.”

Jonas examined the floor, tapping at it with his toe until he found a section with a duller thud. “Oh, look. There’s a trap door in the kitchen. How surprised are you, Sandra?”

I faked a gasp and clapped my hands to my cheeks. “I’m shocked. Absolutely shocked. The horror house has secrets. If we go down there, we qualify as too stupid to live, Jonas.”

“Lucifer promised we’d survive through this somehow. I don’t think he’s lying, mainly because if I die, his darling kitten, also known as my sister, will mourn my loss for all eternity. He’d be forced to retrieve my seed, he wouldn’t even be allowed to punish me, then he’d have to somehow plant my seed again and engineer me to come back as the charming asshole I currently am, and that is a lot of work. He has opinions about being saddled with too much work. That said, if we go down there, we’ll probably encounter some pain, suffering, and terror in various forms.” After a moment of hesitation, he shrugged. “I won’t deny we might be too stupid to live if we go down there, but I’ve been told by someone with good reason to be honest we won’t die if we go down there.”

Worrying over Darlene’s reaction if Jonas died might keep Lucifer on the straight and narrow, but could he actually stop a bunch of hungry big cats from killing us? I eyed the trap door, muttered curses, and crouched, discovering the floor had a notch large enough for a finger, which let me lift off a thin veneer. Beneath it, fresh plywood with a pull ring waited for someone sufficiently idiotic to come around and pull it up.

I counted as sufficiently idiotic, although I struggled with the wood’s weight. Jonas took over, flipping it open on its rusty, creaking hinges. “I want to say I could have handled that, but I’d probably be lying.”

“You tried, and that’s what matters. Keep trying even if you fail. You’ll get stronger with time, and I’ll take over when necessary.” Jonas peeked into the darkness, and he wrinkled his nose. “Of course, we might die trying to climb down that rusty as fuck ladder. Is this an experiment to see what happens if a cancer patient contracts tetanus? This looks like a probable case of tetanus for both of us.”

I joined him in peering into the dark hole, which had dim emergency lights illuminating a narrow shaft and a rusting ladder. “This is old. Like this has been here for a decade type old. Or longer. This was here long before this street went to hell, right? Somebody’s been working a lab for a long time. How did nobody notice?”

With a pained expression, Jonas shrugged. “Mostly, the neighbors mind their own business and don’t care. That’s part of what makes demons like me look like angels in comparison to some humans. Did you know He often views inaction as an equal sin to the action? Fear of being the next victim doesn’t condone allowing someone else to become a victim in His eyes. If being a good and courageous person was easy, everyone would go to the high heavens and rest in peace. But having the courage to stand strong in the face of adversity isn’t easy. It’s much easier to walk away than it is to fight. It’s not nearly as easy to access the high heavens as humans believe. A soul is more likely to go to the equivalent of purgatory, because most souls are neutral. They aren’t good or evil. They just are. They have not done anything deserving of the high heavens, and they have not done anything deserving of the Devil’s many hells. It’s only the extremes that go either way, and those extremes tend to be balanced.”

Well, shit. “How many souls do you think end up in the heavens or the hells, then?”

“I would say no more than twenty-five percent either way. The balance is balanced—literally. Half the souls are neutral. We, being the heavens and the hells, take the rest, sort them by severity of extremism, and attempt to rebalance them more towards neutrality. Winning is how we lose this game, Sandra—and the victor is eliminated right along with those the victor defeated. But for there to be life, there must always be good, evil, and everything in between. And for there to be a future beginning, there must always be an end. That is what the universal rules are all about.”

The religious aspects of life and death always gave me a headache, even when the doctrine Jonas spouted made relative sense. “I should have charged per sermon in my hiring agreement,” I complained. “Should I shroud us now? Are we waiting before we get down there to do it?”

“I’d wait for the shroud. As for charging per sermon, you can do that if you want. It won’t save you from hearing it.” The incubus muttered a few curses and eased into the hole. The ladder creaked with his weight. “Death is a small thing compared to the humiliation we will face if we can’t handle a single little horror house on our own.”

“And if we do die in this little horror house? Because that is a rather strong possibility, Jonas. I went to school to be an attorney, not a horror house spelunker.”

“Don’t you have to be in a cave to be a spelunker?”

“It’s dark, damp, and filled with monsters. It’s basically a cave. As long as we have to deal with lions and tigers, I get to say we’re spelunking. Got it?”

“Got it,” Jonas replied.

“Good. Catch me if this collapses under my weight, please. And if you see any glowing eyes in the darkness, please take me with you when you teleport away.”

“I like how you assume I’m going to teleport away.”

“Why wouldn’t you? We’re in a fucking horror house.”

“Sandra, I’m a demon. It takes a lot more than glowing eyes in the darkness to convince me it’s time to teleport away. But if it makes you feel better, I’ll take you with me if I go.”

“You know what would make me feel better? Someone who is qualified to tranquilize or capture a bunch of lions and tigers. That would make me feel better. After this is over, yell at me about my complete lack of common sense and remind me that blaming the Devil doesn’t stand in court no matter how satisfying it might be.”