"You know, I do sometimes question your allies," Apoc cut in as Sam was waiting for the nausea to pass so he could Skip again.
"You're just going to linger around like a bad fart, aren't you?" Sam asked.
"I was a ghost when you met me. Little has changed," Apoc said with a shrug where he seemed to lean against an alleyway wall.
"Alright. So illuminate me. What's wrong with my current allies?" Sam asked.
"You saw my memories. You know exactly what is wrong with your current allies," Apoc said, one eye forming to give a very wan look.
"Your problems with Blitz were the spark that started the bonfire, but you had all kinds of kindling stacked up for that spark to land on. You can't blame him entirely for what resulted."
"Maybe I can't. But I can be annoyed very deeply that you're working with him," Apoc said.
"If this isn't helpful, I'm going to start ignoring you, I'm warning you now," Sam said.
"Very well, if my continued attention is contingent upon utility, let me tell you this; Blitz is a fool," he said.
"Everybody knows that," Sam said.
"I refer to a very specific designation of fool. Per Bonhoeffer's Theory of Stupidity, he is somebody who causes harm to others at no benefit to himself. You'd better be surgical in your use of him, because otherwise it will end very messily for you," Apoc said.
"I'll have to disagree with you on that. You're hanging intention atop assumption," Sam turned that piece of prose that Apoc had introduced to him back on its source. "You think because of your one interaction with him, you know him. I can literally see what makes that poor bastard tick. And he's Broken with a capital 'B'."
"So were the people who threw Bonhoeffer into the concentration camp he died in," Apoc said. "They were less people and more automata propelled by slogans and symbols. And whatever symbol it is that propels Blitzø, he will end badly by it all the same."
"For somebody from Heaven, you have so little faith in people," Sam said.
"Only somebody from Heaven could have so little faith in people," Apoc corrected.
"And you fail to see how Blitz is a path that for the grace of chance you didn't walk," Sam said, the nausea faded but now he was in debate-mode and that meant teleportation could wait. Honestly, how had he gotten around before he could just blink anywhere he wanted to? It was so much more convenient! Apoc looked outright insulted a that statement. "He is somebody who was born to the bottom-most layer of his hierarchy, and told from the moment of his birth that nothing would ever come of him, that he would be at best a tiny part of a bigger movement, that his name would vanish into history no matter what deeds he oriented himself toward. Doesn't that sound familiar?"
"Under the name Cullen, I was one of the hands that cast the Leviathans out of the Fields of Heaven," Apoc said peevishly.
"And Blitz was born in a cult that decided he was worthless and branded him as such hours after his birth. You were a cherub that was always in the shadow of others. Metatron during the war against the Leviathans. Raguel during the war against Lucifer. And Cletus when working with C.H.E.R.U.B. They probably didn't tell you that you would never amount to anything, that upon your death you would vanish from history… but I guaran-fucking-tee you felt it.
"Now who's stacking intention onto assumption?" Apoc asked.
"Am I wrong?" Sam asked.
"...If I were a more profane person, I would probably have cursed at you for that," Apoc muttered.
"That's what I figured," Sam said. "Blitz is a hot mess. You were a cold mess. And me? God only knows what I am at this point. But despite that, I can work with this. So either help me and keep your complaints germane, or keep them to yourself."
"You're starting to talk like a proper rebel, now," Apoc said, lips curled into a smile.
"I learned from the best," Sam admitted.
"You alright there, bub?" a ragged looking imp asked him. Sam didn't even know how long he'd been standing there. These conversations were… unpredictable at best.
"No. But thank you for asking," Sam said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a wad of money and tossed it into the frayed hat the imp was pan-handling with, centered his mind, then felt Hell shift around him.
There was the pop, and Sam was in the hallway of the horned building that I.M.P. took as their nest. He didn't get a chance to open the office door, because the tall imp woman came out first. She started at his presence, then gave him a nod and passed beyond, back whence she'd come from. Sam felt awful for her. She hadn't deserved a thousandth what she'd been put through. What child should be forced to have children of her own when she wasn't even old enough to reliably baby-sit them?
There was nothing he could do for her, though. Her problems were between herself, and her children. Including the artificially aged one who Sam could hear rambling on in the office. Sam clapped some more cement dust off of his clothing and then opened the door.
"Did Moxxie get back with the…" Sam began, but was cut off when the portal opened and Moxxie emerged, dragging a large block of concrete behind him. Sam was silent for a moment when the imp finally got it through the aperture, then immediately slumped against the desk, sweating his guts out and wheezing like a ten pack a day smoker. Sam then sighed and tweezed the bridge of his nose. "You didn't need to bring the whole thing."
"You… said that… I had…" Moxxie attempted, but Sam just shook his head. He moved to the block of false-stone and motioned them to step clear of it, before laying his hand on its surface, and willing the temperature to spike upward dramatically. There was a crisp crack that formed around the entire edge of the block, which Sam reached his fingers into and carefully tipped the thing over, rolling it back into the ruins of a country house that the portal led to.
"I only needed this part," Sam said, picking up the etched and marked silver panel that was inside the concrete, hidden in the foundation of the house. The panel was about a meter wide, and had a more complex Soul Jar on it than the ceiling tile, not because it had to hold two souls but because he had to drag them in from a wider area. Without police reports, which were beyond his ability to wheedle from Earth, he had to guess roughly where they were. Magic did not, as a rule, like 'rough guesses'.
Moxxie's wheezing emitted a dismayed hiss, and he was comforted by his wife who gave him gentle 'there there's. It was fortunate in a way that he had been so prudent. If the Jar had been damaged, it might have failed, and the whole rigamarole they'd went through to cage the departing souls of two apparently evil children would have been for nothing.
"Alright. Another stone in the bridge," Sam said, placing the silver panel beside the gyprock one. The souls within were now exactly where and when he needed them. Souls couldn't be 'used up' in a meaningful manner, because the only way to destroy a soul was to first Damn it, then to Purify it. And that didn't release any energy. But the power released by a soul ascending to Judgment? There was a lot of power in that."Now a trickier one. We need some blood. Blood of a whore is easy. I could get that from Angel Dust just by asking nicely. Blood of a madman is also easy."
"Who?" Loona asked, then motioned toward Blitz. "Him?"
"No, he's the blood of a fool," Sam said.
"Hey fuck you too, buddy!" Blitz said.
"Still," Sam said. "Crazy people aren't exactly rare down here. That's not the hard one. The hard one is going to be–"
Loona's phone let out a lacerated scream of pain, and she answered it in the middle of his sentence with a "What is it?"
"Did you just," Sam began.
"Shut the fuck up, this is important," Loona said with a flick of a glare at him. He let his mouth clack closed as she began to pace, listening to what was coming through her Hellphone. Then, she stopped, a stunned look on her face. "Seriously? Gone gone?"
"Do I need to be worried?" Sam asked of anybody in the room willing to answer him. Nobody did.
"FUCK YES!" Loona shouted, her arms thrust into the air in victory. Then she started to do a little dance in the spot. "I ain't got no blood dis-eaaaase, I ain't got no blood dis-eaaaase, FUCK YOU SYPHILIS!"
"Right," Sam said with a shake of his head.
"No, that's great. Thanks. Seriously. And I'll be back around on Sunday, Tex and Tiff are doing a feast," Loona said. Then she hung up, the smuggest look on her face.
"Antibiotics are a wondrous thing, aren't they?"
"You're fucking telling me!" Loona said.
Sam shrugged. "I'm surprised you haven't started smuggling them into Hell. They'd be worth a lot, what with the shambolic state of medicine down here."
"You're saying that as though I wasn't going to already," she said with a sharp fanged grin.
"Right. Congratulations on beating your syphilis. Now, does anybody know where we can find the blood of a virgin?"
"Just stick one of those incel shitters that lands here after a nut-backup related massacre, plain and easy," Blitz dismissed.
Sam shook his head. "Gotta be a willing virgin. Somebody who chose not to have sex, not who got forced not to.
"Ain't that a fuckin' laugh. Lookin' for a virgin in Hell," Blitz said.
Sam turned to the teenager. She shook her head. "Sadly, no," she said. "I would have, had I authority to do so."
"Yikes," Sam said. Moxie and Millie were obviously right out, because Sam was pretty confident that the two of them had cavorted before coming to work today.
"Wait, just people who chose not to fuck? Why not mine?" Loona asked.
"You're a virgin?" Moxxie asked, finally having enough wind for his wheezes to allow some flabbergasted notes. "YOU? Are a virgin?"
"I had a contagious blood disease and I'm only attracted to guys that can catch it! What the fuck did you think I was gonna do, go be a plague rat to the people I like?" she snapped at him.
"You'll do," Sam said, pulling the hellhound's attention back to him. "And I should probably extract it now before you change that."
"Wait, you're just going to bleed me now? What about…" she began, but Sam pulled out a phlebotomist kit he'd swiped while getting ready to bury that silver panel. "I don't like needles."
"A prick now, and you can go enjoy the fact that you're not a plague rat," Sam said.
Blitz didn't look particularly happy at the news that his adoptive daughter had beaten Syphilis.
Almost like he knew what would come next, and was already bracing for it.
And Sam didn't have time to shepherd their social lives. He had a monster to kill, and a lot of steps to go before he could do it.
Chapter 29
Ambition Can Lead Up, Or Down
A smile instantly split Angel Dust's face as he spotted Sam, appearing out of the shadows like the Strawberry Pimp himself. "Hey Sammy! Good to know y'ain't gotten dead yet!"
"And you're looking well yourself," Sam said, sitting down at the table in the ghost-town that had once been home to near a million Sinners. "Is Charlie handling things well? Because I didn't exactly leave in the most... polite manner."
"Oh, she's fine," Angel Dust said. "Not long after you ditched, she got real happy 'bout somethin'. Maybe Vaggie finally found her G-spot. As I sees it, ain't any business a' mine."
"So she's not despondent that I left. That's good," Sam said. He puffed out his breath, his hair and eyes edging down from blue to a more yellowish hue. He then turned to Angel Dust himself. "You're looking a bit more colorful than usual. Let me guess, you got laid within the last hour."
"You can read me like a book, bub," Angel said. And he didn't even need to whore himself. Honestly, without having to spend nine-tenths of his income on nose-candy, he suddenly had so much scratch floating around that he could just fuck for fun. "You look rough, though. You been sleepin' alright? Eatin' enough?"
"Keep that up and I might think you were trying to mother me," Sam said. He snapped his fingers and a carafe of coffee dropped out of nowhere about an inch onto the table top. He poured himself a cup from it. It didn't steam, so it was probably ice cold. "I wasn't lying with what I wrote down. I have something I need to do, and a bunch of useful idiots helping me do it." Sam was silent for a moment, then sighed. "It's not fair to call them useful idiots. Only one of them is actually an idiot. And he's the least useful of them. But the fact is, I don't want to get Charlie wrapped up in this."
"Well, how 'bout I throw in. I owe ya that much from what you done for me so far," Angel said.
Sam shook his head, continuing to drink his lukewarm coffee. "I'm not going to put you in that kind of danger. You want to know why I'm using these particular people? They were already planning on killing Nathan Birch for quite a while. They're in no more harm by my presence then they were without it. I'm not going to drag anybody uninvolved into this. That means you."
"And if I say I ain't gonna just stand buy and watch you get waxed?" Angel asked.
"Then you're going to go home disappointed," Sam said. He knocked back the last of his mug, then poured another. He was silent a moment. "How's Wendy doing?"
"Fuck should I know? I don't keep tabs on everybody," Angel Dust said.
"Fair enough," Sam said. He leaned back. "There is something you could do to help me, to the extent that I'd allow."
"Name it," Angel declared. There was pretty much nothing that Sam could ask that Angel wouldn't see fit to offer. It was by Sam's hand and Sam's plot that Valentino was finally, gleefully dead. No price was too high for that.
"Do you mind if I get a vial of your blood?" Sam asked.
"Exqueeze me?" Angel Dust said, a bit surprised. This wasn't how he figured this was gonna go.
"You'd still say that you're pretty proudly a whore, right?" Sam asked.
"You find a funner way to make your dough, I dare ya," Angel Dust said.
"I need the blood of a whore. Ordinarily I'd say 'don't ask why', but I know you don't care why," Sam said.
"Sounds like you got more of that magic bullshit on your plate," Angel Dust said. Sam just offered a distant nod. "That bad, huh? Why not ask Smiles about it? He knows all kinds'a magical heebie-jeebie-ness."
"If I could just ask Alastor for help in this, I wouldn't have bothered you," Sam said.
"He might be willin'. You and him were closer than anybody else I ever seen. Most people just run the fuck away."
"But not you," Sam said.
"He don't scare me," Angel puffed his chest out.
"He should," Sam said.
"Well he don't," Sam handed over a syringe, and Angel Dust jabbed a vein with the expertise only decades of practice mainlining could imbue. Only this time, it wasn't putting something in, but taking something out. He handed the now red-loaded needle back to Sam. "But seriously, Sammy. Just say the word an' I'll be there with bells on. You know that."
"The fact that you mean that tells me that you're going to have a happier ending than most," Sam said, almost sadly, as he got to his feet and tucked the syringe away. Then he got really grabby, taking Angel Dust's face in both of his hands. "That fear was important. Fear of being the fool makes you want to be wise. Fear of being wrong keeps you from being reckless. And I took that from you. So please, promise me me something."
"What?" he asked, suddenly off his balance.
"Promise me that you won't let your anger lead you to ruin. You deserve a happy ending," he said, breaking off and backing away. "And definitely a happier ending than me."
Before Angel Dust could say boo, the shadows reached forward from the alleyway and draped over Sam, swallowing him whole before they disappeared, leaving Angel Dust all alone in the abandoned cafe.
That would be the last time that Angel Dust spoke to Samuel Scailes.
Sam rubbed at his eyes, flipping through the pages of the manuscript on the Oaths for what had to be the dozenth time today. To call this the most involved work of covenants and spells that Sam had ever tackled was putting it so reductively as to almost mock it. It was alien in a way that nothing else Sam had ever encountered was. A snarl of mysticism and mystery that he just couldn't untangle. And he'd need to untangle it if he wanted to fill in the blanks that Alastor had left behind.
The office was abandoned but for the teenaged wonderworker, and she was asleep under the desk. She seemed incredibly comfortable under there. Almost worryingly so. Sam had of course Looked Within on her when he first spotted her, but as with imps, it was harder to actually concretely pin down what he was seeing when he did so. What he knew was that she was going to forge her own destiny, no matter the personal cost. That people would know her name. How that related to sleeping in a cranny, he didn't yet know.
Sam sighed and rose, starting to walk. He considered just pacing the office, but it was cramped, and his legs needed some doing, so he opened the door to the hall and slipped out. The recording studio across the hall was playing host to a set of Hellhounds recording what was likely blues, by the instruments they were using. And the other offices on the floor had their blinds drawn. With nowhere better to be and a pickle on his mind, he wandered.
Much the same as the imps had been turning screws into nails, Sam was worried that he was doing the same thing. That those weren't nails or screws at all, but un-struck rivets, or worse, unremoved sprues. It was the Parable of the Cave, and he was the poor bastard chained to the floor gawping at shadow-play.
It'd have been so much simpler if he could just tackle this on his own, for himself. But between Alastor's unusually clear warning not to walk this particular path, and the fact that this left him undefended against Birch's compelling voice, he had to interface with the esoteric for others' primary benefit, and his own as a secondary. That didn't bother him, honestly. Especially once he learned that Blitz wasn't going to be a beneficiary of the Oaths. Entertaining though he may have been, Blitz was a broken, and resultingly awful person. Moxxie had a working moral compass, if one aligned to Satan's view of morality... which honestly was shockingly congruent with Sam's own. Millie may have lacked her own compass, but she followed Moxxie's without fail or hesitation. Her own intensely violent nature came second to her love of her husband and willingness to follow his lead. In a way, Sam was envious of them. He'd never loved, or been loved, as intensely as they did for each other.
An entire company of followers, and nobody really being a leader. Blitz might have pointed them in directions, but he didn't lead them. Loona was adrift and directionless, so couldn't lead either. It was a shame. Until she had something she wanted, something she needed, she would continue to drift through her own life just like Sam had while his mortal heart still beat. A living ghost. He started ascending the stairs, letting his feet make his path.
In fact, they were now more united than they ever had been as a company, banded together in a common unity of Fuck That Guy. Birch was incredibly able at making enemies, people whom wished him death but were unable to kill him. Likely even his own 'protectors' fell into this camp. Maelstrom the Hound, an unwilling gladiator sent to die for his master's amusement at his master's whim. Fiona O'Daire, the former Overlord who had thrived for centuries in Hell, who was now subject to horrific treatment that likely broke her down as badly as Valentino had Angel Dust, and in a fraction of the time. And Casper Marquis, stripped of his name for his failure, and subject to any cruelty that Birch could imagine. Only the last inspired no sympathy in Sam's heart.
Marquis had chosen to work for Birch while he was alive. The others were suborned by him. Whatever came to Wretch, Sam would see to it that no mercy was offered to him. He, as none of the others, didn't deserve any.
Sam's wanderings brought him to the roof, which had its door propped open. Sam cocked a brow at that, but passed the portal anyway. Sitting in a plastic chair near the door was a succubus, who was drinking heavily and staring at the skyline.
"Whoever you are, fuck off," the succubus said.
"That shit'll kill you, drinking like that," Sam said. He planted his back against the wall of the roof access a couple of yards from her. "Beelzejuice is some nasty stuff."
"Choke on a sandpaper cock," she said.
"I'd probably set it on fire," Sam said. He turned to her, not Looking Within but still scrutinizing her. She was wearing fairly tame clothing for a Lust Fiend, sweatpants and a hoodie. It still didn't do much to hide that, as a succubus, she was built for sex. There was a strange aura around her, though. One that felt brittle and cold. "What happened?"
"Why the fuck would you care? And why should I tell you, either?" she snapped.
"Because you're drinking alone on a rainy rooftop under a tattered umbrella in Imp City. It doesn't get much lower than this outside of the Abyss," Sam pointed out.
"...I'm hungry," she said.
"Eat something," Sam said.
"Not that kinda hunger," she said. Sam nodded. Right. Succubus. "And I can't... do anything about it."
"Somebody got you on house arrest?"
"Fuck no. I'm famous and I'm rich. I can do whatever I want!" she said, a haughtiness coming to her voice. But it curdled quickly. "It's just... If I go up there... what if she's waiting for me?"
"Who is 'she'?" Sam asked.
She sighed, pulling her knees up to her chest and hugging them tight. "I don't even fucking know."
Sam tried to light a cigarette, but the rain got in the way, so he snapped his fingers and created that ward that Alastor had before karaoke, deflecting the rain away from the two of them onto another part of the roof. He then gave a thought and offered her one as well. It was only then that Sam remembered the obvious, that he didn't need a fucking lighter. He tapped the tip of it with his finger and lit the two of them. "Not used to being afraid of anybody, I take it," Sam said.
"Fuck you."
"That wasn't a no," Sam said. He nodded, staring into the distance as the rain washed the skyline of Imp City. In the distance, you could just barely see the smudge in the sky where Pentagram City emitted its light pollution. Might as well be a world away. "I know all about fear. Crippling, creeping dread, that settles into your stomach like a brick and drags your feet like chains. I spent the last three years of my life with that kind of fear, pretty much every hour of the day."
"You don't know anything about me. You don't know what I've seen," she said, drawing a powerful pull from the cigarette. "You don't know what happened to me."
"I got shot in the gut by a serial killer at the behest of a mad wizard. I had to stagger, stumble and crawl for about a kilometer with two bullet holes in me, and bled out on my own living room floor. I know fear," Sam said.
"Fine. Maybe you do," the succubus said. She gave her head a shake, bitterly staring into the distance. "I used to be... better than this. I used to not care what happened to me. I always knew that I'd have a way out. Even if I had to suck a mile of dick to do it, perks of the job. But then that blonde bitch... I couldn't fuck my way out of that. What can I even do if I can't do that?"
"Are you angry that you failed, or angry that you can't explain why you're afraid?" Sam asked. She shot a glare with viper-like pink eyes at him. "You're used to being in charge. Calling shots. And somebody took that away from you. You don't know how to react."
"Stop trying to dig into my head. You don't know shit about my past," she said, swapping smoke for liquor, then returning to cigarette after a swig that would knock a sailor on his ass.
"So enlighten me."
"Fuck you. The last person I talked about my childhood ended up being a thieving little cretin. Safer to keep those fuckers at arm's length," she said, sullenly and not particularly angrily.
"Hey, I'm probably going to be dead this time next month. What have you got to lose?" Sam pointed out.
"Who'd you piss off?" she asked with a chuckle.
"Lucifer," Sam said. "His Proxy, too."
She stopped, staring at him. "You're bullshitting me."
"Well, I'm working to kill Birch. And that doesn't have a large margin for success. As for the King? He doesn't know it's me, yet. But I've done a lot of time-travelling, and I can't keep it from him forever. Hence my time limit," Sam said. It wasn't even dread that he felt. When Lucifer came for him, he'd do everything in his power to get away. Which was now a fucking lot. But the Morningstar would hound him all the way to the Gates of Heaven to get him, the one place where neither of them could enter.
"Well, I'll drink to you being more fucked than me," she said, putting action to word. "Fine. You wanna know why I'm up here drinking like a miserable little sprite? Because I don't even know if I can keep working."
"Work being?" Sam asked.
"You don't know who I am?" she asked, looking a bit insulted.
"Unless you've tried to kill me since I came to Hell, I don't see how I would," Sam said.
"Pop Superstar Verosika Mayday? The Pink Power-house? I've been playing on human radios for years!"
"I've heard hundreds of shitty 1980's songs from my childhood, but I couldn't tell you every band that played them, even if I heard them again," Sam pointed out. "And my last years... yeah, I didn't exactly have a lot of radios around me. And the ones that did played fucking country."
Both of them shared a gag of distaste at that.
"Damned clever of you, though," Sam said. "You have an entire Orgasm of Omnibi tagging around an industry where you're expected to fuck somebody once and never see them again, thus preventing you from dropping bodies by stealing the years of their life via their dicks and vag'es."
"I thought I was pretty smart when I came up with the idea," she said with a note of pride coming to her face. "My sluts deserve the best. And I gave them the best for a long time," she said, then her face grew downcast. "...how am I going to look after them now?"
"So what's stopping you from going back to it?" Sam asked. "If you've got the skill to actually perform, why not just do a tour and get your fuck on?"
"You wanna see why? This is why!" she snapped her fingers, and a broken and fracturing glamour swept into being on her, one that cracked and sparked and fluttered and failed from moment to moment. It not only utterly failed to hide the fact that she wasn't human, it actually was more unsettling than seeing her raw in her demon form. "Now I'm a used up, prospectless sex-hole who has to dredge the incels and would-be summoners of the world, like my fucking mother!"
The glamour shattered of its own accord to the sound of ice falling into snow.
"I'm worthless," she said.
Sam honestly felt bad for her. Somebody who was so used to being able to leverage hard upon their strength, having their strength taken away from them was especially devastating. Sam knew a runner from high-school who, a year after graduation, got into a car accident and lost one of his legs. With his potential-Olympic ability ripped from him, and the life that he'd seen along with it, he lasted about a year before he threw himself off of a bridge.
"Do you know what the primary romantic fantasy for men is?" Sam asked.
"The fuck? Two women at once, obviously," she said, a scowl on her face.
"I said romantic, not sexual," Sam said. She obviously didn't grok the difference. "Now I can't speak for all men, but I've talked to a fair few of them, and they seem to have a some things in common. For a man, romance is work. It is fulfilling work, but it's still work. It's a crank on a machine that they readily turn day after day, because they value what it makes. What a man wants, deep in his heart, is for one day, that he can take his hands off of that crank, and have it sustain him in return, even if just for a little while. That is the man's romantic fantasy."
"What's your point?" she asked, obviously not amused.
"You've spent how long, now? Giving your 'sluts' a feeding frenzy the likes of which they'd have to fight claw and horn for?"
"About six years, now," she said.
"And don't you think that they'd do the same for you if given the chance?" Sam asked.
"...Why would they? They'll just find another hook-up," she said.
"Have you asked them?" Sam asked. "Have you done the audacious thing and asked your friends if they're willing to help you?"
She glared at him for a moment, then out at the skyline. She drank from her bottle, finding it empty faster than she'd likely wanted it to be. She then had a growl that seemed to dig its way out of her bones, rising out of her throat until she hurled her bottle off of the roof, and pulled out her Hellphone. She tapped twice, and held it to her head. "Hey, Anastasius. Y... no I'm fine. I'm..." she leaned back, as though surprised at what she was hearing. "I..." another long pause, as a woman's voice popped in saying something muffled by a succubus' head. "You don't..."
Another silence. The stunned look on her face was all Sam needed to know that he'd nailed it in one. That was the thing about Hell. Sure, most of the rank and file weren't worth their weight in wasted breath. But those that got close to you, that ran the trials and rough patches, they were something both uncommon, and worth their weight in Angel Satin. And this Verosika Mayday was only now learning that she had developed a cadre of the latter.
Sam got up, finishing the smoke and burning the butt away. The ward he left up, because this woman had a conversation ahead of her, so he gave it about an hour before it came down on its own. And just as before, Sam realized in giving advice that he had to take it himself. He was stymied on figuring out how to work the 37 Oaths. And at the same time, he was ignoring the obvious.
He needed to do something audacious.
This client was being a pain in Blitz's taint the likes of which he ordinarily would have had to just deal with, because clients who had a beef with the living were a scarce resource and I.M.P.s business model really depended on them. Lately, though, he'd had the leverage to be a bit more discerning. A million souls dropped into his lap by the Naugahyde-nutlicker sorted out a lot of problems really fuckin' quick. But still, there had to be income, and to be frank, Blitz got bored with all this 'planning' bullshit that Moxxie and Krieg were doing. Better off up there killing somebody in an effort to kill some time.
"I'm willing to offer four thousand, but that's as high as I can go," the Sinner said. She was an ice elemental, and she made the room fuckin' frigid by being in it.
"You're asking me to kill five people guarded by sixty guards, who have access to a bomb-proof panic room, for four thousand. That's just insulting. I don't cum in a sock for less than five!" Blitz retorted.
"Gross," the elemental said.
"Yeah, he is," Loona idly agreed with the Sinner, as she continued doing things that Blitz knew were going to take her away from him. Talking to her hellhound friends. Making hellhound plans. Leaving Blitz in an empty apartment. Again.
No, focus motherfucker.
"Look, freezer-box," he then chuckled at the pun, to which the elemental looked distinctly displeased, "unless you're willin' to skimp on the targets, or go after 'em over a couple days so they ain't bunched up where they can lock themselves down, this just ain't a four grand job. Fuck, bitch, the last job I did was a one-fucker assassination that was worth seven! So either stop dragging your ass and up your offer or get the fuck out."
It felt good being able to tell Sinners to GTFO. Not good enough to counteract Loona drifting away from him, but it kept the old despair at bay. The elemental's blue lips twisted into a scowl, and she tapped long blue fingernails against her arm.
"Six," she said.
"Now we're gettin' somewhere," Blitz said. Then, before he could continue to wheedle, there was a thunderous knock on the door. All of them turned to it, because it was entirely out of place for the building. There wasn't enough room for that knock to echo, for example. But as they all started to convince themselves that it was a strange delusion, another knock, thunderous as the first. Krieg got up, a frown on her face, and moved for the door.
She swung it open.
And looked up.
At red.
"HELL–"
Krieg slammed the door and ran for the door to the armory, heaving on it with all her might, likely panicking and forgetting it was a push.
Moxxie then opened the door again.
"–Ooooo?" the fuckin' Radio Demon said, looking at the people in the room. Without another word, he stooped past the doorframe and entered the room. "What a charming little piece of insanity you've brought me into. The last time I surrounded myself with this many cretins was when I poisoned Darcy O'Flanaghan back in August of 1930. Oh, what a party that was."
The Ice Elemental looked like she was going to melt. The Radio Demon was standing between them all and any sort of escape. Blitz had his Luger in his hand, but the Radio Demon ignored it, sweeping his red-eyed gaze across the people in the room. Krieg had fallen still, still clutching the doorknob, as though the Beast That Grins' vision was dependent on movement.
"What are you doin' here? Looking for payback for that bullshit back in the Human World?" Blitz demanded.
"Water under the bridge, little fellow," he wafted the notion away. "Somebody was going to kill me that night. You were thrust into the position where it had to be you. No. I'm here as a favor, and to exact some personal revenge."
Sam then entered the room. "Ladies and gentlemen? May I present the foremost expert on the 37 Oaths Upon The Nine Circles," he said. "And the only being in all creation who's already killed Nathan Birch."
You don't understand, friend. This isn't about merit, exactly. It's about hunger. The hungrier they are, the more they're willing to do to kill that hunger. I want them so hungry that they will sell their mother on a street corner. I want them so hungry that they will kill their best friend for a nod. And if they're stupid about how they try to buy our respite, you punish them. As cruelly as you like. Because they're just fucking imps and fiends and worthless God-damned humans. Who the fuck cares about them? But let them think they have a way out. Let them think that ambition can lead up... and it can also lead down.
-Lucifer Magne, during the first Council of Victory.