“BETWEEN,” said Eve.

And then instead of looking at his reflection in the window, Hardhat was looking at her leathery face. He wheeled backwards and landed on his arse, thrusting the clipboard in front of him, whimpering softly.

“Alright,” he cried. “I played a fair bit of chess when I was a lad, back before they sent me up the mine. I’ll have to take black, though, cause I was never allowed to touch the white pieces, might’ve got coal on ‘em—”

“Quiet,” Eve purred, and he was. She prised the checklist from his hands. “I’ve never seen a human with a playbook before.”

A vein bulged on Hardhat’s forehead; he angled his eyebrows like daggers. When he got up, it seemed to Eve as if he’d doubled in muscle mass, his puffed out chest a chiselled rock.

“I’ve got naught against you sinning, love,” said Hardhat. “You can shove my lads into bottomless pits all you like, and me too, if that’s your inclination. But nobody—NOBODY—touches my clipboard. Not me missus, not me mates, and certainly not level nine demons!”

He fumed there like a geyser. Sweat actually steamed off him.

“No wordplay, even now?” said Eve. “Why does your species have to be so tedious? When are you going to learn that you have to use it… or lose it?”

She turned and, with all the fluidity of a cricket bowler, hurled Hardhat’s prized possession into the abyss.

“No!” screamed Hardhat, launching a fist at her.

“GENTLY,” said Eve, parrying with her pocketbook. Hardhat’s hand, which had thundered along like a freight train down a hill, suddenly felt as if it was pushing through custard. She laughed as he brushed against her cheek at a speed that would prompt most snails to overtake.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“Should have pressed a verb to service there,” said Eve. “Any sort of syllable, really.”

“Right,” yelled Hardhat. “That’s bang out of order. Where do you think we are, a playground? Go and get my clipboard… BACK!”

Lightning thundered, and then the comforting weight of the clipboard sat in Hardhat’s grip. He straightened his helmet and cleared his throat. “Was that you or… quite right, you’ve done a good deed today, miss,” he said. Much like his clipboard, he was a little taken aback.

He opened the van door. “Now I have to get going before that pipe ends up flooding Gaart. Wouldn’t be right for the tourists if we rebranded to a canal city.”

Eve pressed her talons to his throat, her nail-varnish smelling like rusty nails. “So, a Prepositioner?” she purred. “Closed class really is written all over your face. How dull.”

Her pocketbook glowed an emerald green. “You won’t be any fun, and I can’t have you going off and tattling. It’s the void for you, my kitten!”

“Leave off,” said Hardhat. “I don’t do these jobs for a laugh. What’s the point of me scraping by a living without a life? Look. Sod all this human-demon rubbish, fancy going out and grabbing a pint?”

Eve’s laugh sounded like a saw sawing on another saw. “If you want to live, start dancing.”

Then she said “TOYBOX”.

Dark forms sprung out of the ground, cracking it open even further. There were jesters, rocking horses, dolls, chess pieces, even a very confused videogame console, and they pranced around Hardhat, cackling at him and chanting. The toys pelted him with jumping jacks as sharp as caltrops. He blocked as many as he could with his clipboard, but one sliced open his arm.

“Is this how I’m going to die, skewered open by bloody Hasbo and Fischer-Price?” shouted Hardhat.

The plastic people whirled around him ever faster save one, the chess pawn who could only cross one crack at a time. Hardhat had always seen himself in that pawn. Bottom of the societal ladder, he was, biding his time until that big breakthrough, and then he’d have rights, respect, money, the lot—but he’d long buried that dream in soot. Left it underground.

His heart seared in his chest, that vein in his forehead pumped and pumped, and he decided that, just before he died, he wasn’t okay with slaving under an executions company for ten years and never once being given a recommendation for the one thing that would’ve set it all right: a

“PROMOTION,” he bellowed.

The pawn swept off her cloak, changed colour and drew a gleaming sword. Her crown flashed as she charged into the toys’ ranks and cut them down like corn due for harvest.