[26] Not Going 1-15 Next Year

Two weeks passed.

Jay wandered through forests and up hills and along rivers, living off edible plants Olliebollen identified and game Lalum caught in her webs. He spoke little; his thoughts were his own. He went nowhere and encountered nothing.

Castle Whitecrosse continued in an uproar for a few days. Accusations flew hither and thither, but Queen Mallory swiftly grew bored of the hubbub and returned to her own particular interests. Those interests included Shannon, and Shannon—a constant tremor in her fingertips, a constant desire to look over her shoulder—cleaved as close to the queen as the queen allowed, which at times was quite close. The plans for the sewer construction project proceeded, although slower than before, with a less furious impetus on Shannon's part; her eyes darted from face to face during meetings. She often rallied the dukes to establish a search party for her brother, but once the best trackers in the kingdom trailed him to the outskirts of Wode Reft, none determined the venture worth the risk. Meanwhile, Princess Viviendre of California resumed her studies under the tutelage of Prime Astrologer DeWint. By all outward appearances, she was not unsettled in the least, either by the attempt on her life or Jay's departure. But then again, none paid much attention to her, and nobody came calling whenever she decided to spend an entire day shut up in her room with some borrowed tomes, ostensibly for independent research.

The elf, Temporary, got lost.

Flanz-le-Flore petted and stroked her ward, Wendell Noh, as he recovered fully from his injuries. Even so, he was a man of few words, no matter how often she exhorted him to conversation or presented him with her most magnificent entertainments. In a fae realm, time seems to pass differently than outside it; possibly, Wendell was not aware how many days had ticked by in his saccharine sweet dream.

This was Whitecrosse in its natural state, when external forces became unconcerned with altering its inertia. Jay had gone nowhere, for no reason; Shannon went still within the safety of Mallory's embrace; Wendell Noh was ignorant of how much of him wasted away. And the final personage who might break this placid surface tension, who might send Whitecrosse awash in momentum one way or another, found herself utterly overwhelmed by the barrage of preparations Pastor Styles enforced upon her for her upcoming televised sermon. Not simply words to remember or people to meet, but information to learn. He had become aware, without probing, that Mayfair knew very little about the modern world, and so she underwent a crash course in knowledge common to even commoners: Electronics, cars, airplanes, countries, political systems, laws, culture, history, philosophy, psychology. The creatures, vegetables, and geography of the New World. Mayfair attempted to limit the time she spent on these impromptu courses, but the more he fed her, the more she wished to eat. One answer formed three or four or five more questions. This world began to take shape to her, and once part of the form was visible she needed desperately to know the whole of it. Time would pass as it did in Flanz-le-Flore's court, and she would look up to see another day wasted, and her mind pushed to the brink of exhaustion. It left little time to tend to Whitecrosse. Near midnight, her mind overladen with memorized facts and figures, it was easy for that thought to creep in: Well, I'll be sure to get to it tomorrow. She was aware Temporary had gotten lost, and it would take only a few penstrokes to correct her route, but the inert state of the world was convenient to thoughts like these, divorcing her from any need to rush. And sometimes, especially late, as fatigue gripped her and she curled into the warm blankets of her bed, she thought: Perhaps Whitecrosse isn't worth the trouble after all... not when this world is so much richer, so much fuller, so much more meaningful... not when none of them in that world even listen to her at all... or like her.

In the morning, before Styles roused her for a large breakfast and another day of preparations, the urgency of her mission to rescue Whitecrosse returned and she would scratch out a few lines, facts necessarily established prior to enacting her final, bombastic plan to open the vault and acquire the power to transport the world. Then a knock would come at her door, she would need to get ready, and the cycle repeated—inching her closer to her goals in both worlds day by day.

Sansaime watched television. She ate Froot Loops by the box; Avery kept an entire cupboard stocked with them and still had to run to the grocery store often. It was nice, though, Avery thought. Having someone around, someone she could even converse with from time to time—although usually on the topic of whatever program was on. The tranquility, the routine, allowed Avery to recover her nerves from the absence of her children and the lack of any suitable leads after the disappearance of the "Door." Eventually, tired of sleeping on the couch, she let Sansaime move into Jay's empty room. This was the undoing of everything. Sansaime, after a lot of fiddling, figured out how to work his computer. And she began playing his video games. Afterward she spent far less time watching TV and far more time shut up in his room, commanding knights and wizards to wage epic battle against dark lords and dragons, and it was like Jay had never left. Perhaps, though, that too was a comfort.

That covered everyone of importance. Or did it? Wasn't there someone else? Another key figure, with a significant hand in the proceedings? A final person who might, in some unexpected way, shatter this uneasy peace?

The date was Monday, December 11, 2017. Nine days remained until Jay Waringcrane's warranty period expired and his Humanity became forfeit.

"Look. Look—no, look. Listen. It's already a way better deal than what your shitty soul's worth. Take a glance at yourself for a sec. Do ya really think you're worth more than what I'm offering? Do ya?"

Two days earlier the first snow of winter fell and now piles of gray slush dotted the alley. Sickening moistness imbued all. It somehow seeped even through five layers of bundled rag no matter how careful you tried to be. Not cold enough to freeze you solid but cold enough to make you miserable, hands clasped in front of a mouth spewing white breath into the pale morning air.

The man on the ground, though, didn't mind at all. As though this was still springtime to him. He was sprawled across the pavement, half inside and half outside his shoddily-erected tent, his gigantic graying beard bristling halfway down his chest as his chapped lips split into a gruesome smile.

"I want to be a BIG man," he said, "a POW-ER-FUL man." The word stretched. Enunciated. Emphasized repeatedly within itself. He stretched his arms wide. His sooty palms—apparently he didn't consider it cold enough for gloves—spread the confines of his tent. "Put me at the TOP. I wanna eat luxury steaks and lobster EVERY night."

"Again. Your soul's a piece of crap. You don't have it in you to be someone like that. Not even with devil magic. Just not happening. Now what I can do is get you that fancy steak and lobster dinner tonight and every night this week. That's a good deal. That's me going the extra mile for you okay?"

"Powerful. Powerful." Lost in his own dream. The dream more intoxicating than its reality. What would a guy like this even do with power? What did power mean to a man who slept on the street?

Perfidia Bal Berith wore rags of her own. They swaddled her entirely, with a hood pulled low over her face to obscure as much of it as possible. She could not afford the fractional Humanity to alter her appearance so that she looked more human, so this was her next best option. She stood hunched. Her half-healed bullet wound throbbed agony. Liberal wincing let her bear it.

The resilience of devils varied. Satan and the other Seven Princes, those who fell from Heaven, were immortal in nearly every way. They'd once been angels, after all. Most devils lacked such esteemed origins and the correlated perks. They were born from human sin, or generated spontaneously out of Hell's numerous fiery lakes, or clawed their way out of some unlucky succubus' womb. Or maybe one of the Seven Princes crafted them from mud to serve as specialized servants. Most of these lesser devils were no stronger than humans. Some even less so. The Bal Berith "family" possessed somewhat a more Prideful history than that. An offshoot of Second Prince Beelzebub's lineage, they possessed some pretensions to nobility and even got a shoutout in the Bible (Judges 8:33: And it came to pass, as soon as Gideon was dead, that the children of Israel turned again, and went a whoring after Baalim, and made Baalberith their god.) Nobody in Hell gave a shit if you were "noble" unless you had power to back it up, but her distant degenerated claim to fame bought her slightly superhuman resilience, which was, for instance, how she survived having her head slammed by Dalt—twice—without permanent brain damage. And also how she survived being shot.

Still, it'd been close. The pain, excruciating, nearly prevented her from applying the ramshackle first aid necessary to prevent exsanguination. Any human would've died from gargantuan infection had they done what Perfidia did to plug the hole in that egregiously unsanitary sewer.

All that mattered was: Perfidia survived. To continue surviving, she needed Humanity. In her current situation, she simply had to take it on faith Jay remained satisfied in Whitecrosse and that in nine days—on December 20—the rest of his Humanity transferred to her as agreed upon in their contract. Even assuming that outcome, though, she needed to recollect the ten percent Humanity she'd taken up front and then squandered to create the second key to the Door. With her office unsafe and her skin reeking of feces and her more lucrative prospects dry even ignoring those disadvantages, her best bet was homeless duty. She was now homeless herself after all.

"You know," the vagrant before her said, his mind shifting out of the penthouse of his dream, "I was once a cobbler."

"Were you."

"A cobbler makes shoes. That's what I did. I made shoes. Made em real good too. But there's no need for cobblers anymore. They got machines do that now. Betcha never seen a cobbler before, have you?"

"You're absolutely right. Never."

Homeless duty. A devil's last resort. The neediest people with the cheapest souls. If these men and women who slipped between society's cracks ever had more than the minimum singular Humanity it was a miracle. Most of them had less because every desperate devil got the same idea to target them, to make up for quality with quantity. The old man in front of her had 0.75 Humanity. Which meant some asshole already carved out a piece of him in exchange for some small favor. Which meant Perfidia could carve another piece.

"They like machines more than people. You dig? Machines don't think. They just do. Hell, they'd replace themselves with machines if they could. I'd do it too, shit. Just being a little machine making shoes all day without a care in the world. Don't get cold. Don't get hungry. Ain't that the life."

"I could turn you into a machine. Easy."

His eyes drifted. Not in the same direction. Only one looked at her. He was shrewder than he looked, given he feigned ignorance about the whole devils thing despite obviously having done the song and dance before. His mind coalesced on a new point: "We were saying something about lobster?"

Perfidia made a point of sighing. "Two weeks. Lobster and steak dinners. And I'll only ask for three-quarters a soul. How's that?" (Trying to explain to these people the distinction between soul and Humanity was pointless.)

"Half," the man said.

"Bah—fine! Have it your way." Perfidia reached into her collection of patchwork coats and rifled around aimlessly before enough time passed that she could grab the yellowed piece of paper that had always been readily accessible. A contract, simplified. From another pocket she produced a pen and handed both over to the man.

After a few moments mulling over the words, he clicked the pen and signed. One handshake later and the 0.5 Humanity transferred to Perfidia's possession.

A perfect deal. She'd hammed her desperation adequately, given the man reason to believe he was getting the better of her, convinced him to wish low, then aimed high and let him haggle her to a reasonable price. Two weeks of dinner—cheap, cheap, cheap. With food you didn't even have the hassle of finding legal tender like you did with simple money wishes. Even 0.5 could cover it while netting her a modest profit.

That was the essence of homeless duty. Repeat that a good amount more times and she'd piece together the necessary amount to fill in for Jay Waringcrane's missing ten percent. Have his contract go off and that was her quota, with five days to spare before the end-of-year deadline (which was actually on December 25 instead of December 31, because devils liked to be petty like that). After she told the man to close his eyes and produced for him—to his scarcely-concealed delight—his first steak dinner (the others would come to him automatically without her needing to be there), she meandered off plotting her future.

Quota was priority one, but if she could only survive that, then she might be perfectly poised for 2018. If she scrounged enough Humanity to make a second Door into Whitecrosse and a few extra papers to manipulate the goings-on there... Then, assuming Shannon Waringcrane and Wendell Noh were still alive, she could pressure them to make a deal in exchange for their safe passage home. That'd carve a nice portion of next year's quota with enough extra to reestablish her usual business.

Easy. Simple. Straightforward. Sure Perfidia took some serious lumps. Sure she suffered some indignities. Whatever! Only foolish Pride cared about that. Besides, wouldn't seeing Shannon's desperation to escape Whitecrosse rub a soothing balm on that injury anyway? Just recompense for how she and her brutish boyfriend got the better of her. Exactly! Perfidia Bal Berith survived on her own up here over six hundred years and the lot of them would be dust in eighty tops. The truly wily didn't avoid every setback—they bounced back better from each one. Frankly Perfidia felt more optimistic now than she had lounging in the comfort of her office, blunting herself on year after year of easy routine.

If she really thought about it, she only got into quota trouble at all due to Sloth. Here on homeless duty she made deal after deal, put in the work, face to the grindstone. And she could do it. If she could do it for these guys on the streets she could do it with the middle-class white-collar workers who made up most of her clientele. Desperate people inhabited every socioeconomic station, but the white-collar types tried to make it more private. Her advertising model was totally out-of-date. Nobody trusted sketchy ads anymore. Trust, that's what they valued. It was a world of scams and horseshit and people were suspicious. Instead of sitting back in her office, waiting for them to come to her, she needed to go to bars. Meet people. Befriend them. Work a mark for weeks, sniff out what they truly needed, wait for an opportune time, and then offer to help. Innovate. Evolve. Study contemporary con artists, see how they made the magic happen, incorporate their techniques into her spiel. She grew too confident in her business model, thinking that because it worked before it'd always work. But she'd changed before, she could change again. That was the true part of herself she should take Pride in—

"Hey devil lady!"

Perfidia turned, thinking maybe one of her hobos recommended her to a friend, ready to spin her spiel. Instead she frowned. The man emerging out of the steam pumped from a nearby vent—she'd seen him before. One of her previous targets. He shouted her off in a flurry of righteous indignation, spouting half-remembered Biblical verses as a kind of talisman. Even among the hobos you got people like that, people for whom an ideal meant more to them than bread.

"So you're back. What. Come to yell at me again? I got places to go. People to see." Her words sounded casual, but her eyes flitted to better survey her surroundings.

"Unholy abomination!" the man bellowed. Some of these guys just wanted an excuse to make themselves sound formidable. Like her latest target: I want to be a BIG man, a POWERFUL man. "Your cheap magic don't mean a thing, hear me! You maybe impressed my friends, but it don't mean SHIT you got that?"

"Yes, alright, fine. Think what you want." She backed up slowly. Best not to turn her back. Pipes covered the post-industrial fringe of this decrepit corner of Cleveland. Behind their rusted clusters others might lurk, vagrants ready to step out and surround her at a moment's notice. If it was just this man, she'd run if he got aggressive. But if anyone showed up behind and blocked the only other way out of the alley, she could—scramble up that pipe—and through that window.

The man made no aggressive moves. He slouched. His baize-colored coat sagged around his shoulders, gave him the distinct appearance of a scarecrow, with his coarse straight beard the stuffing shooting out at the neck. An ashen, trembling hand reached into one of his innumerable pockets and gripped the stalk of a rolled-up newspaper. With a single underhanded fling the paper rolled to Perfidia's foot.

"Third page. Your devil magic may impress them others, but I know! Oh I know alright. There's a higher form of power in this world. More mighty and magnificent than you could even dream. That paper's proof, devil bitch. Read it and crawl back to Hell where you belong!"

Alright. No planned ambush. Perfidia decided to humor him. Otherwise he'd follow her around haranguing her until she did what he wanted.

Keeping an eye on him, she slowly knelt down and picked up the paper. Who knew what he wanted her to see. Some miraculous event where a fireman saved someone's life, maybe. It could honestly be anything. Some of these guys were bona fide schizophrenics. It might be nothing to do with anything until he embarked on a logically tenuous diatribe to make it make sense in his mind and nobody else's.

Best to react as though whatever it was put the fear of God in her. Cry and snivel and run away once he started to laugh. Let's see. Third page. What do we have here that could—

Her fingers clenched. The long, jagged nails tore through the flimsy material. From the rents, little specks of paper detritus drifted to the ground before a passing gale swept them away in a cyclone.

"Eh-ha-hah. Yeah, that's about what I thought," the man said.

Perfidia's eye twitched. Twitched so rapidly it became impossible to focus on the words in the page in front of her, to read more past the headline of the advertisement printed there in a way meant to make it look like it was an article instead of an advertisement. Her mouth squiggled in a strange way and bent and folded her lips. A wave of perspiration broke on her brow, ice cold in the wind chill.

"Squirm, you Satan. Squirm, knowing there's an Almighty above you that does great things and leads His sheep into the light. I won't ever give you a single shred of my soul even if I were dying in a ditch somewhere, hear me you red-skinned whore? I'd rather choke on my own vomit than grab your hand to get up."

"I have to go," Perfidia mumbled. As though she spoke to someone who cared, to whom those ordinary words mattered. Within the frenzied twittering of her body a sort of calm overtook her and her fingers somehow mustered the dexterity to fold the newspaper back up and tuck it into her coat. All her previous contingencies broke apart. Saying "I have to go" again, she turned her back on the man hurling jeers at her and walked toward the end of the alley.

The rest of what he howled dispersed into the wind. He may have thrown something at her. Or maybe the wind did it. All her various coats and drapery fluttered about her body, her hair whipped about her face. Exiting the alley the rusted existence of Cleveland expanded before her, a rickety profusion of buildings either in disrepair or newly gentrified to an unseemly sort of glory, a futile bulwark against the entropy drifting from a lake with no horizon, a murky beyond where fog and water merged into one conglomerate grayness.

Seeing it all, the edifice of human ingenuity raised against God's own vomit, Perfidia struck a sudden thought: She misread, she misperceived, her memory was fallible. Hurriedly, certain of self-deception, she unrolled the paper again and turned to the third page and this time as she read the printed words she did so with the same rusted calm of the city, a brittle peace within her bones:

WITNESS A TRUE MIRACLE!

This Christmas Season

The Rev. Dwight J. Styles of the Cuyahoga Baptist Church

Invites You and Yours to See with Your Own Eyes

THE MIRACLE OF LAZARUS!

The Faithful MAYFAIR R.L. COKE Shall RAISE THE DEAD

It Is Not a Trick! It Is Not a Fantasy!

GOD IS ALWAYS AMONG US

SEE IT PROVEN ON CABLE TELEVISION!

OR See For Your Own Eyes!

WED 12/13 8:00 PM EST

Followed by a channel to watch it, a place to see it in person, and an email address to learn more and purchase tickets. A strangely low-quality rendition of Jesus, printed as faint as possible to give it the appearance of a watermark, backgrounded the entire affair.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Perfidia let her hands fall and raised her head to allow Cleveland's chill to sweep over her face. A primetime TV spot. That meant Mayfair had already shown off her staff's neat trick at least once, for an exec to put that much faith in her. (The channel wasn't one familiar to her at least, which probably meant it was some evangelical whacko program.)

It meant Perfidia Bal Berith was cooked.

Any action a devil took, on Earth or in Hell, was subject to God's scrutiny. God, ostensibly omnipotent, would and could know any devil's any action at any time, although in practice he either didn't care enough or was willing to turn a blind eye given the whole "Free Will" thing he set up to trick himself into deeming his own works justified. The way God would frame it, devils were his unwitting instruments toward the damnation of humans who chose to forsake him, and so that venerable practice of draining Humanity and magicking up material wealth were things he abided, the way cops abide a whorehouse as long as it turns a good profit. In truth, God was probably just lazy, or else not as omnipotent as he always told everyone. It didn't matter why. Devils could operate under most circumstances without fear of reprisal.

Introducing something into God's world that should not, should never exist? That was a different story. God didn't like anyone fucking up his precious creation. He made Satan spend a few millennia transformed into a snake for that whole business with Adam and Eve. A staff that reanimated the dead? A staff put on TV, a staff known to all mankind, a staff influencing their belief in God outright? It wouldn't be snake form for Perfidia. It'd be smote on sight.

She understood this risk when she let Mayfair through the Door. But she'd lacked better options at the time. Mayfair herself was less of a problem, she was simply a human without Humanity, which wasn't unknown to this world—see the hobo enjoying his steak dinner for instance. The undead Dalt was more of an issue, but given Dalt existed in the world before it might slip God's notice. Perfidia had assumed Mayfair wouldn't come into contact with enough dead people to use the staff much, or would adroitly realize using it would attract unwanted attention. This, though. This!

Oh well! Chalk up another oversight on Perfidia's part! Call her stupid, go on, it's fine. She's calling herself stupid. In retrospect of course that conniving uppity bitch wouldn't settle to lurk incognito. She was a princess, she was an egotist, and more than anything she wanted approval and acclaim. And of course she possessed the Biblical knowhow to slip into the fold of this country's nationwide evangelical sect. Of course!

Why didn't Perfidia consider it! What would she have even done if she did consider it? It wasn't like Perfidia made a suboptimal move. It wasn't! Really! What was she supposed to do, refuse to open the Door and let Mayfair kill her? Risk everything trying to fight Zombie Dalt? The fact that she wriggled out of Mayfair's grasp at all despite her total lack of advantages was an achievement. An achievement! How was she supposed to—how—there was nothing she could have done! It wasn't a mistake, it was bad luck, it was terrible horrible luck. Most people in this country would've called the cops on Mayfair if they saw her make a morgue body stand up and walk around. Anything at any point could have stopped her without Perfidia's intervention. It wasn't fair. It was not fair at all!

So what now. Perfidia faced Cleveland, faced Lake Erie, faced the gray sky threatening a fresh bout of snow, faced the murky God beyond. Guess she died! Guess she waited the next two days and when Mayfair finally caught God's attention with her broadcasted breakage of the world's laws God looked down, spent a literal instant discerning which foolish devil caused this to happen, and turned Perfidia to ash right then and there. Perfidia wouldn't even get a chance to point out the staff didn't actually bring back the dead, it didn't matter. It was something that should never happen in this world, and for God that was all the justification he needed to bust out the lightning bolts.

That's the risk you took, her jeering voice spat. The clever little loophole of creating your own lower-level world so you could do anything you wanted, and cheaply too. In the real world, Humanity costs prohibited changes that fundamentally broke the laws. It'd normally be impossible for even the stupidest, most reckless devil to tie herself up in this sort of bind. So you had that going for you Perfidia! You were the stupidest and most reckless of them all, stupider than stupid.

Maybe she could draw a little Pride in that as she died. Who was the last devil God cared about enough to personally smite? It'd been centuries. The fuckheads down in Hell would remember her name at least.

Perfidia sighed.

She sighed because she knew she'd rather live.

She sighed because she knew a way she could live.

She sighed because she knew what she'd have to do.

Perfidia rolled the newspaper back into her pocket, pulled her rags around her to keep out the growing whoosh of cold wind, and slouched in a direction she'd thought—hoped—she would never need to go again.

She slouched toward the Hellevator.

—

They kept it—where else—in an abandoned factory on the lakeside, one of hundreds in this city that no longer made a thing. Before the factory, back when Cleveland was little more than a frontier settlement, a westernmost expansion into a vast and dark continent, it'd been in the woods. They liked to put it in haunted places, places that put a chill on the nape of a human's neck if they for whatever reason wandered inside, and while it would've been trivial to use Humanity to conceal its existence altogether or at least render it nonoperational to anyone who wasn't a devil, they liked it the way it was, where once every ten or so years some unfortunate soul by pure chance happened upon it and pressed the right (or wrong) button and found themselves plunging into the deepest horror of human imagination. For Hellbound devils such instances were a festive event.

It was just a rusted metal platform set centrally in the barren factory floor, flat and square save for a single narrow pole that jutted up with the controls. When Perfidia arrived there was already another devil. She recognized him, although he was currently in human form.

"Fidi, Fidi, Fidi, if it isn't little Perfidia." He stood off to the corner, shimmying his shoulders out of the trim serge blazer he wore as part of an elegant and refined suit.

"Hello John."

John Verschrikkelijk, or John Miller as he went Earthside, worked as a liaison between the Seven Princes of Hell and the paint company Sherwin Williams, which was headquartered in Cleveland. He claimed to be the one behind the company's nefarious COVER THE EARTH logo, which showed a bucket of blood-red paint being dumped over the planet. While some applauded the brazenness, Perfidia was more of a play-the-Beatles-backward kind of devil. As he folded up the collar of his button-up shirt and undid his tie with careful precision, he said casually: "Heading down to deliver your quota early? Or beg for an extension? Based on how you look I'd say the latter but you've been around enough to know how well that'll go over right?"

"I'm visiting an old friend."

She limped onto the Hellevator platform and looked at the buttons. Simple: Up and Down. Her fingertips rapped the side of the control panel as she waited for John to undress, which he continued to do unhurried and with attention to every quaint detail and accessory on his person. Of which there were many.

He slid out of his shirt, unlooped his belt, sat down to untie and then peel off each of his patent leather shoes, removed each sock in turn, placed everything in neat folded piles on the rotted wood bench under a row of giant blasted-out windows peering into Erie. He removed a shiny silver pocket watch on a chain and placed it on atop his shirt and then removed his pants and undergarments until he stood fully nude. At which point he snapped his fingers and his human disguise dispersed. His skin turned red, his eyes yellow, horns sprouted from his skull, a barbed tail whipped out from above his sleekly toned ass.

"Going down clothes and all Fidi?" he said as he placed his folded articles lovingly into a locker box under the bench.

It wasn't like she was wearing Gucci or anything.

He shut the locker and strode onto the platform, tail swishing as well as something else. "Ready?" she said impatiently and when he flashed her a smile she shot her finger out and pressed the button Down.

The Hellevator began its descent. It did not move particularly fast. A lot of rusty screeching went with it.

Once it was in motion she breathed. That was the hardest step. In a way John being there was good, it'd given her something else to focus on instead of the full meaning of what she was doing. She looked up, saw the small square of gray light receding into the distance, and felt her heart start to thump. But she couldn't show weakness in front of John, leastways because she didn't know if, once outside the rigorous order of Earth, he might try to sodomize or cannibalize or simply strangle her on a whim. He did nothing, only grinned knowingly, then said: "Don't expect me to help you through customs."

She didn't. She stared straight ahead at the wall sliding upward.

The reason she was able to do this—mentally—was because it'd been in the back of her mind for the past two weeks, even before she learned about the stupid stunt Mayfair was pulling. Her plans to fulfill her quota relied on Jay's Humanity coming home, but without access to Whitecrosse, she lacked any way to ensure that happened. Forget about keeping Jay satisfied—he could die at any time for any reason. Whatever happened, Jay's Humanity wasn't guaranteed, and she wouldn't know if she had it or not until five days before the deadline. What would she do then? The thought had been there. It would always be there. It was the last thing he said to her, after all. The safety net. "You're always safe here Fidi." Safe—but at another cost.

A sharp intake of breath. Eyes shut. Focusing on the plan, the future. On correcting mistakes with the best option available to her.

"You seem tense Fidi," John said in a mocking tone. He reached out, possibly to massage her shoulders, possibly to do something else, and she whapped him after only a second of his hand flitting through her rags. He shrugged. "Oh well. If things go wrong at the border take comfort that your good friend Verschrikkelijk will be there to watch your agonizing final moments."

"In fifty years Sherwin Williams won't exist anymore," she snapped. "Then where will you be huh John? Fodder. Fodder!"

John cackled, but they exchanged no more words as the Hellevator descended.

Finally it screeched to its destination with a jolt that disbalanced them both. The wall in front of them parted in two halves and the familiar smell of brimstone swept over them in a tremendous waft. John sniffed contentedly. "Home sweet home!" He strode through the doorway into the customs department that served as the final checkpoint between Hell and Earth. Perfidia wrapped her rags around herself and followed.

Customs spread left and right endlessly but did not go far ahead. Cracked glass cubicles, fanning in infinite order, coalesced around the single small door to Hell proper. Good luck catching even a glimpse through that door until you'd been properly "processed." The faces beyond the cubicles floated phantasmagorically, leering down at the unfortunates seeking entry, willing on any whim to deny it simply to see the misery of the denied. A screen hung from the ceiling showing whose number was next to be called; beside the screen a sign read "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate," plagiarized shamelessly from Dante, who possessed a more creative mind than all devilry put together.

John and Perfidia took their numbers and waited in a zigzagging queue (there were no chairs)—John graciously let Perfidia go in front of him. From speakers overhead calliope music played on loop. Additionally, and nothing in the room told you this, if your feet remained touching the ground for ten consecutive seconds spikes would emerge from the floor and gore you. Every hour a random person in the queue was selected as a "lucky winner" whose prize was to go to the end of the line. About a third of the people in line were actually mannequins. If you were behind a mannequin (Perfidia was, wonderful) you were responsible for pushing it forward every time the line moved. The mannequins weren't alive but they had numbers and if you cut in front of a mannequin on purpose or by accident it was back to the end of the line for you. When a mannequin reached a customs official in his or her glass cubicle, the official took that as cause for a five to ten minute break; after returning, they would "deny" the mannequin entry and send them back to the end of the line.

Perfidia's half-healed wound didn't make the constant hotfooting necessary to evade the funny spike floor trap easy, but luckily the line was somewhat shorter than usual and her number was never named a "lucky winner," so she only spent sixteen hours in the queue. Presumably, this close to the deadline, most devils Earthside were preoccupied scrambling to fill their quotas, which accounted for the briskness.

Now for the hard part.

Perfidia shoved the mannequin in front of her to the first of the three glass cubicles with a customs official and then went to the second in accordance with all proper queue etiquette. The devil behind the glass, absurdly bloated, barely fit in the cubicle with all his or her (impossible to tell) rolls of fat. Presently, s/he was snacking on the severed leg of the most recent sop to fail to pass customs, biting into it like a drumstick as streams of blood splattered onto the ball-like curvature of his or her chest.

"Chmmmpff, snrk, grmph, alright. Name?"

"Perfidia Bal Berith."

"Perfidia Bal Berith," the official repeated in falsetto. "Oh well look at you! Noble blood tastes sweeter they say, but I can never tell the difference."

The official in the cubicle to the left, where Perfidia had pushed the mannequin, lit a cigarette and leaned back in his seat, feet propped against the glass. He was a scrawny guy, particularly in contrast to the whale in the cubicle next to him, which immediately made Perfidia think either Sloth or Envy. She prayed for Sloth. Her official, obviously, was aspect of Gluttony.

"Here to visit family. Bringing nothing with me except my clothes." Perfidia continued to lift and lower one foot after the other in turn; the spike trap minigame didn't stop until you were outside the building.

"You look tasty," Gluttony said. "What if I just had you for a snack instead? It's nice inside my stomach, I hear. That's what they tell me after I devour them—"

"Whooooo wants their cock sucked~?" John cried out, pitter-pattering over to the third window waving his hands flamboyantly to the official with gigantic horns and piercings on every inch of visible skin. The official, nodding and snarling in delight, threw open a compartment in the cubicle and John vaulted through, landing perfectly between the official's spread legs before a series of foul slurping sounds commenced.

"Anyway." Gluttony smacked its lips, kneaded its bloated arms into its corpulent bulk, and forced a liquid belch from the cavernous recesses of its throat, sending strands of meaty matter trickling down its curvature. "What I'm hearing, Miss Bal Berith, is you don't got a legitimate reason to be in Hell at all."

"Noble-blooded bitch thinks she's better than us common folk," the guy in the left cubicle groused. "Airheaded idiot expects things to just get handed her. That's how those highborn fucks think."

Envy. Certainly Envy. Shit.

"My bowels are a better place to be than Hell anyway. You'll have plenty of company there, Little Miss Bal Berith, at least until I shit out what's left of you."

The Glutton tossed the picked-clean femur aside, shifted its cottage cheese-textured folds to make room, and then opened its cubicle's compartment door. A hand shot out with terrifying speed and clamped around Perfidia's entire body, forcing one arm to her side (she managed to lift the other in time) and lifting her easily off the floor toward an expanding black maw. Slobber fell in fat droplets; one particularly ill-placed bead forced her to squeeze one eye shut. The Envy guy watched with a growing grin.

Testament to the doldrum of their job that the two of them could only muster this much excitement for something that so neatly tickled their respective aspects. No aplomb, none of the drawn-out suspense that the entire ridiculousness of the queue was meant to engender.

"You don't want to do that," Perfidia said to the mouth above. "It'll end bad for you."

That was enough for the mouth to close. The Glutton's beady eyes, set deep behind paunches of tissue, drilled down into her with cautious suspicion.

"Don't listen to that come on," the Envy guy said. "She's not worth shit for all her blue blood. Go on, bite her head off! Please, my break's about to end."

For a moment, all was quiet save the sucking sounds emanating from the cubicle to the right.

"Why's that, huh? Why's it gonna end bad for me?"

Perfidia reached to her chest and tugged down the rags there, not bothering to avoid ripping them. They flapped aside, exposing her chest, and without breaking her direct stare into the Glutton's eyes, she extended a finger to point to the triangle of skin just above her breasts. She didn't need to look. She knew what was there and exactly where it was. How could she not? It was etched into her flesh, scarred deep. Over two thousand years had passed and she still remembered the day it was put there, clear as nightmare. She could wear suits or even rags to keep it concealed for decades on end, but she could never forget. And now, coming back to Hell, it was time to at least make some use of it.

The Glutton squinted, as much as its beady eyes could squint without sealing into nonexistence. "Property... of... U.B.B."

"Ya know who U.B.B. is, right?" Perfidia said. "No? Maybe ask your Lustful colleague over there. They're sure to know."

"Who fucking cares?" The Envious opened his own cubicle's compartment, crawling out to spit smoke in the face of the mannequin. "The fact she's some other shitbag's toy just makes it all the better to break her. If you won't do it I will."

Which was, of course, the issue with Envy guys. She kept her gaze level on the Glutton, though, and felt the slight tremor that traveled through his sea of flesh. Without breaking eye contact, the Glutton reached up a knuckle and rapped it against the glass to get the third devil's attention.

"What? What is it?" he said, his hands gripping the top of John's head. "Can't you see I'm busy here?"

"U.B.B.," said the Glutton. "Is U.B.B. someone to fuck with."

A sharp, gleeful cackle mired in an orgiastic grunt cut the sentence halfway into the final word. "Never. Never in a million fucking years! If it's one of U.B.B.'s girls, you pay. You pay upfront or you pay later, I can tell you that! That one's psycho. You don't take what's his."

The Glutton demurred as he let Perfidia down. "Hrrm." It came like a viscous rumbling. "Well. Okay—"

"No! No you can't do this. You can't!" Mr. Envy slithered out of his cubicle, rattling drily. "She must be broken. Beaten, battered, rent limb from limb, ruined past all hope of return. He's not allowed to have her. What could he possibly have done to deserve her? Sitting pretty on his ass, that's all any of them ever do! Here I am, busting my balls off every waking hour sorting the chaff from the riffraff and they only pay me a pittance for it. I gotta pull a second job just to hit quota. You guys know what it's like cuz it's the same for you. We get jack shit. We deserve her! I do at least!"

He appeared incapable of walking; his legs were only for show, welded in place into a permanent seated position so that he needed to pull himself along the vertical slab of glass that formed the cubicle with long, cracked, and jaundiced claws. Perfidia stared him down as he oozed toward her; making a run for it without proper clearance would only seal her doom.

"The way I see it, she's got no legitimate reason to enter Hell. The rules apply to her as much as anyone else and if that U.B.B. chucklefuck wanted to keep her he should've kept a better eye on her. You're mine now sweetheart. I'm taking you home with me. You'll like my place. I've got chains and nothing else. Nothing else until now—!"

The blood-dripping hand of the Glutton reached out and wrapped around the Envious one's sack-like body just before his fingernails seized Perfidia's hair. His thrashing body was reeled back into the Glutton's cubicle and he spewed venom in a lavender arc that struck Perfidia's rags and sizzled before a wide cavity opened between the Glutton's waves of lard: a second mouth. Toothlessly, it sucked what served as its lips around the emaciated form of the other, pulling him deeper even as he kept his gaze riveted on Perfidia.

"Mine! Mine! Let her be mine! Let one thing in this world be miiiiine...!" He sank as though the Glutton's body were quicksand, until only a single flailing hand remained. Everyone in the queue behind Perfidia groaned; this would delay them even longer.

The Glutton rumbled. "Go on. Go already! I'm still salivating just looking at you, so get out before I can't help myself!"

He slammed his fist on a button and the door between the cubicles opened. Perfidia wasted no further words and hobbled out into Hell.

It didn't hit her until her first five steps out the door, onto the sizzling brick bridge over a moat of lava with all of it spread out before her: Hell. How long had it been? She left in the early 1600s and didn't look back—always, she'd paid the fee to have her quotas shipped rather than deliver them in person. Yet it remained as she remembered, even the parts she did not remember. Chief among the familiar non-remembered, spanning the entire façade of the nearest skyscraper, was the gargantuan poster that showed nothing save the face of their Archfiend, Satan, his expression part stern and severe and part confident even to the point of relaxation, his hair now coiffured like a Korean idol but his eyes the same golden glint. Below his visage a single word was printed: BELIEVE.

The island beyond the moat pullulated with structures of every conceivable geographic and historical period, sometimes dizzyingly at odds with each other. The roof of an Edo temple split open to produce, like Athena from Zeus, the concrete protrusion of an art deco tower. A Roman coliseum, fallen into decay, now served as the ground for a rollercoaster that looped and spiraled between its columns; the train rattling down the rails flew off, corkscrewed in midair, and exploded before hitting the ground. On some parts of the island the buildings had been built so densely together that the ground gave way and swept into the lava river, where a few rooftops still floated with tents erected to house squatters. Neon signs competed with skyward spotlights. Animated billboards advertised casinos, love hotels, buffets, opium dens, crack houses. One flashing sign enticed viewers to the nearest cinema to watch a film titled Endless Sleep by "renowned, award-winning director" Prince Belial, Lord of Sloth. The sign proclaimed the film was "twenty-four hours long" and "a perfect way to waste your day." So even the Seven Princes could hop onto bleeding edge human trends like cinema.

"Wowza." Bare feet padded up to her; John Verschrikkelijk, wiping his mouth clean, knocked Perfidia out of her sightseeing. "'Property of U.B.B.' huh. Never woulda guessed you were so well-connected Fidi. Sure, you've got the same last name and all, but that usually doesn't mean anything. How come you never told me you were a succubus?"

"Because I'm not."

"The brand doesn't lie, girlie. Hey! I've got some spare Humanity. Maybe I'll stop by Ubik's tonight and rent you out. Wouldn't that be a gas, huh?"

"You'll be disappointed John."

"Sure, sure. I bet he'll want you to himself your first night back. Well, whatever. Best to keep business and pleasure separate anyway. See ya—or not!"

He sped off. At her same limping pace, Perfidia continued into the city.

No matter how much the devils stole from humanity's latest accomplishments—styles, cinema, weapons of war—one thing in Hell always remained the same: Pandaemonium. The tower, the first thing those fallen angels constructed upon arriving here, loomed high above anything else built. After all, Satan's Pride wouldn't let any other building come close to outshining his glory. A beacon built of crystal, it was always easy to tell where in Hell you were based on its vibrant pillars in relation to you. Nowhere down here could it go unseen. And so, even with much of the landscape changed, even with new roads and roadblocks, Perfidia kept doggedly toward the spot she knew from before. A weak-looking girl like her caught the eye of several unsavory passerby, but she was quick to pull apart her rags and reveal her brand to resolve any incipient confusion. Eventually, her identity preceded her. The imps and cretins whispered among themselves on the street, stealing curious glances her way without regaling her with even a wolf whistle.

She trudged for hours—and then she turned onto a street that despite everything remained alike. The deeper into Hell she got, the less new construction clotted the byways, and this avenue was almost identical to the way it'd been four hundred years prior. Pandaemonium swelled massive to the northwest only a few blocks away.

A lavish road of soft velvet replaced the hard brick upon which she'd trod. The buildings possessed a palatial flair, elegant with the best the Greco-Romans had to offer. A fountain sat square in the middle of the street to prevent speeding and bubbled a frothy opaque liquid instead of water. No signs or gaudy advertisements littered the view; those who came here knew why already. The road tapered to a culdesac and at the end a temple rose, possessed of solemn spirituality. But of course, this was Hell. It was no God worshipped in that temple.

Upon approach, Perfidia's sense of doom returned. Everything inside her had remained relatively calm the long, long journey to reach this point: the Hellevator, the queue, the city. Memory no longer allowed her reprieve, though. As she scraped down the forlorn path the urgent thought gripped her that she could still turn back, she could leave and go home, find some other way to dispose of Mayfair or failing that ignore her entirely, curl up and hide, surely somewhere God's eye could not land upon her, surely somewhere was better than here. Surely the situation was not so dire. To throw away everything—four hundred years free! Four hundred years without even a glimpse of his face. She gripped her flesh through her rags and dug her claws deep to spur her onward. More than the horror of what waited in that temple was the agony of losing, losing again and again and again and again, losing to humans and even nonhumans she herself created. Her Pride suffered enough daggers already. Best to go nuclear, to end it thoroughly once and for all, than to continue to receive cut after cut after cut after cut until she remained a bleeding unrecognizable stump aquiver on the carpet.

She ascended the steps to the golden mezzanine that served as the palace's patio. The arched doorway looked like the cavernous maw of the Glutton in customs, but she focused her thoughts on Mayfair, on Jay and Shannon Waringcrane, on survival. If she died, she died. If she lived, in a hundred years they'd all be dust and she'd still be around to sneer. Longevity was Pride's greatest ally. No triumph, no matter how decisive, lasted forever. This too shall pass. Perfidia, who might linger forever, won thanks to the simple and unrelenting power of erosion.

No more steps left but her pace stayed molassal as she cleared the final stretch to the entrance of a palace that was, like her, "Property of U.B.B." Before the door she stopped for a final time. She breathed in. No turning back. Her hand reached for the silver knocker and—she knocked. A thunderous sound.

For the span of eternity nothing happened. Then, with a grand yet strangely distant boom, the doors opened inward. Her Master stood before her. Her Master, her older brother: Ubiquitous Bal Berith.