The morning sun set over the horizon, the city in the distance providing a pitch black set of spires along a golden skyline, the smog hanging over it sort of smudging the image and giving it a ghostlike quality.

I was standing on the back porch of my grandfather's house, a little hair o' the dog in my morning coffee (never hurt grandad) I just had the whole damn pot sitting next to me, so I didn't have to walk away from the setting sun while I sipped.

The air was chilly today, a whisper of the coming autumn on the breeze, I absorbed every last ounce of this moment of normalcy, this time of peace in my world of chaos. This porch was a safety, it was my home, and it was my childhood. This was where cookouts where family set aside their differences and enjoyed the scent of charcoal and burgers, to drink too much and talk too loose, and I drew it all into myself, as if I was trying to squeeze every last good vibe I had on this porch into myself, to try to shove out the horrors of yesterday.

My wireless landline started ringing, looking down at it, I saw a number I recognized, but not from good times. I sighed as the good feelings started to flow out of me, threw a second shot into my coffee cup, topped it off, and picked up the phone. "Rodney Wakefield" I said as I sighed.

"Rodney! You son of a bitch! What in god's holy name where you doing at a murder scene!?!" Ahh yes, Charlie.

Charlie was my cop, and I was his regular, when I was still punching addiction demons, he would show up whenever someone saw me that shouldn't have, and he would tell me off, make a show of dragging me away to his car, and then would do me the service of driving me back home to the overpass homeless encampment. You could hear the Hispanic family history from the gravel in his voice.

"Hey Charlie, I wasn't expecting a beat cop to be interested." "That's because I got promoted to Detective yesterday dipshit, and it just had to be YOUR case as my first."

"Congrats are in order Charlie, sorry my case is the one you were stuck with, here's to the next one being a serial burglary." I raised my coffee cup in a salute and downed it, even though he couldn't see. "Are you drinking?"

"No I am having my morning coffee, if I was drinking, my phone would have been off." Not that I carried a cellphone to turn off in the first place.

"For fucks sake Rodney, this isn't good man! You are going to be in deep shit if they figure out it was you, and I am going to loose my damn job if they find out I have been hiding that information, I need this job, we just got a new house with my bonus."

The "We" there was his wife and two daughters, he was a good man with a good family, and he didn't deserve the headache.

"Listen, Charlie, I'm sorry, I am being a dick, it's been a rough couple days. First I saw a corpse, then I stock-smacked an addiction demon in the face after having a gun pointed at me, my own gun. I'm being an ass, I'm sorry."

I looked at the pot, and the Jack, there wasn't much of either left. I decided against Jack, still had to stay sharp, so I went instead for just the last of the coffee in the pot. Drinking the now warm coffee, I sat in silence for a minute, Charlie still choosing his words, I heard conversations and talk on the other end of the phone, maybe he was talking with some subordinates or something.

"Look." I finally heard him say "I have an idea, I will talk to the chief, he will probably flip out when I suggest it, but you would be fine if we took you on as a consultant."

I coughed on the coffee "Consultant?" a few more racking coughs "You want me as a consultant? Like, a psychic consultant?" "I don't want you for shit Rodney, but I also don't want to see you behind bars for a murder you didn't commit, you don't have much choice here."

"Charlie, I punch demons in the face, I'm not a fuckin' wizard from Chicago."

"And I punch criminals in the face, but I am talking to a demon summoner over the phone, who was just seen sprinting from the scene of a murder. Again, you don't have much choice here."

I looked out at the city again, the sun was under the buildings now, and some of the night sky was being cast back by the glass windows before being swallowed up entirely by the light pollution. The view was great but my mood soured as I replied "Fine, you're right, I don't have a choice. Thanks Charlie, I know you are taking a risk here."

"I'm willing to take a little shit from the boys to keep you on the streets, it's safer with you on them than off them, I gotta get going, lay low today alright?"

"Thanks Charlie, see you later." I replied, and ended the call. Charlie was a good man, probably the only guy in the force who believed me, and believed in me. A genuinely good person in a city full of weirdos, demons, homeless and assholes. I guess the Cabbie was alright.

I downed the last of my coffee, and picked up the phone as I walked back inside. "Hey man, the hell was your name anyway?" I said to the cab driver as I called him over, the night was young, and I had shit to do. I geared up, fresh 12 gauges loaded with rocksalt and silver shot at the ready and Chekov at my hip, I walked out front to wait for the cabbie.

When he finally arrived, Levon was his name, I slid into the back seat. "Ey Neo, where you gotta go?" The Jamaican asked as I buckled in. "St. Paul public library." I replied "Gotta do some research." "Dey open this late?"

"Ohh yeah, I used to go there all the time, mostly to get out of the rain. Never met a more well read group of people than a bunch of homeless dudes, Library's got bathrooms, heating, computers, books, and sometimes the nice librarians will give you some cookies and hot tea, other times they will beat you over the head with a broom until you leave, you can tell if the nice librarian is in from the scent of Oolong tea on the air."

"Ya know, I didn't always used to be a cab driver." He said then, "I used to run homebrew rum from one side of Jamaica to the other, always liked the feel of a wheel under my hands."

"That's cool, but why the sudden change of subject?"

"You always got cool stories Neo, gotta let me have a few."

"I guess."

"There was this one time, a boy rolls up to me and says..." He told me stories about his time in Jamaica, how he used to run homemade rum, how he was once a getaway driver for the leader of a criminal gang over there, and he told me about the Creole language they speak in Jamaica, officially its english, but the way they talk isn't just a funny accent as it turned out, it was a whole ass language of its own.

Again, what felt like minutes went by, as the hour long drive from my place to St. Paul proper melted away under Levon's tales of rum running and adventures in his home country.

Eventually we pulled up to the Library, and I instinctively looked at the steps for any bums, nobody there, so the Nice Librarian, or at least one of the nice librarians (I was sure that Nanna Esther the cookie librarian wasn't working anymore) was currently in. I walked into the front doors and sure enough, the smell of homeless body odor, barely covered by dollar-store deodorant, old books, and oolong tea filled my nostrils. It was a nostalgic smell, and it made me feel kind of nice to be in here.

The library was one of the few places I could go when I needed a safe place to be, and there were more pleasant memories here than unpleasant ones, which is more that I could say for most public spaces. I walked over to the tea cart, poured myself a cup of it, and sipped a little as I began diving through the shelves.

My time on the streets gave me a true appreciation for the old Dewey Decimal, and I began pulling books from shelves and placing them on the cart in front of me as I walked, looking for anything to do with old occult symbology. I would swing by one of the computers as soon as one was open, a couple of nerds were hanging around one of them, by the subject of their conversation it was doing calculus classes.

As I walked, eyeing the shelves the whole time, I didn't realize someone was in front of me until I bumped right into them.

"Oh, shit, sorry." I said reflexively, looking up at a young woman, wearing clothes that made her look thirty, tweed jacket, tweed skirt, all plaid, and a pair of round glasses without lenses perched on her nose. Her hair was brown and neatly brushed, and she looked kinda cute.

She nearly dropped the pile of books she was sorting, and looked up at me as she said "Its quite alright." She spoke with a familiar accent, like northern wisconsinite mixed with a drop or two of the queens english.

After collecting herself, she saw the massive pile of books on my cart and said "Good lord, doing a bit of light reading are we?" I took a glance down at the stack as I said. "A wise old woman once told me, that a smart man takes many books on a single subject from the shelves, while a foolish man takes only one. Because the smart man knows that most of the books are lying, and the only way to find the truth, is to read them all."

"That sounds like my grandmother." She replied. She gave me a smile as she walked along, continuing to sort books out along the shelves.

Holy shit. I realized then, Esther's granddaughter was one of the nice librarians, and she was hot! And I just waxed philosophical at her instead of just saying hi, goddamn it Rodney.

I contemplated trying to talk to her again, but realized the moment was gone, and that I had bigger fish to fry than try to pick up a girl, even a nice one whose grandma was basically the mother figure of a whole generation of homeless....

I sipped my tea, I don't even like tea, but being here always makes me want a cup.

I moved my cart laden with books over to the computers, the kids were still there doing their math homework, images of frustration and annoyance plastered on their faces, as I started taking books from my cart and trying to choose the first one to study.

The kids, seeming to long for something to distract them, saw my massive pile of tomes and my long black coat and short black hair and must have decided not to mistake me for some standard street emo as my clever disguise was meant to provoke, and instead they started to approach me.

"Heya mister, what's with the getup?" said the first one, a skinny black kid with a mild toothy lisp, the other one was a fatter white kid who wore a lot of green and had orange hair and freckles. In short, two walking stereotypes. "Damn that's a lotta books." Said the other one.

Being as I had already spent my one philosophical quote, without looking up at the two of them I said "Lots of books to study, need to cross-reference, find information, that kinda thing."

"Why not just use Google?" the fat kid asked "Because the computers are all being used." I turned a page and gave them a look as if I was wearing an imaginary set of shades "Unless you two are volunteering?"

"God yes." The black kid said "We could really use a break from all this math."

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"I thought the stereotype of kids in a library was that you liked math?"

"Sir, do you like math?" The fat kid asked again.

"Not really no."

"Nobody really does, except for the extra weird kids. Nerds don't just do math anymore, and half of us have ADHD or worse, least that's the boat im in." The black kid replied again.

"And I'm just here to compare notes and copy off him. I'm not as smart as he is."

"Alright, lets see if you can help me out here then. You guys know anything about ancient religions? Pagans?"

"A lot actually." It looked like the fat kid was giving the black one the lead on this, I should really have gotten their names, feels bad just calling them "The fat one" or "The black one" I would learn later that the black kid's name was Woby at least.

"What do you know about the Valknut?"

"It's an old Norse symbol, its a symbol of Odin, and death, it was left at his sacrificial sites and was sometimes carried by priestesses." He looked it up on the computer as he spoke, showing me an image of the thing.

"Bingo, that's the one. Anything else on it?"

"Well, there is some rather sketchy people from a really sketchy part of the pagan community that have used it as a racist symbol."

"Huh? Pagans? Racist? Aren't they supposed to be chill and peace loving and shit? I know quite a few satanists, and they seemed pretty decent."

"Yeah, those folks are what you call "Astaru." They follow old norse gods and goddesses to this day, and they are pretty chill. Wotanists on the other hand..."

That sounded familiar, and I was reminded of that King I bummed a quarter off of. The kid continued. "Wotanists are white supremacists basically, blonde hair, blue eyes, white skin, purity of blood." The kid made a sour expression "A whole religion of racists."

"Okay, one last question, what sorts of rituals and stuff were performed by the old Norse? Not the Wotanists, the actual Norse."

"Rituals to Odinn were mostly beheadings. Some were more ritualized with a careful stab through the chest, I wouldn't be surprised if someone went for the eye, considering Odin was a one-eyed god, though considering they usually sacrificed Thralls, their slave caste, it would probably be blasphemous to make a slave look like the god... Anyway. Their punishments and stuff reserved for criminals and prisoners of war were also ritualistic, and violent. One, that might have been anachronistic, was the idea that someone would have their small intestine cut out, tied to a tree, and then forced to walk around that tree at spear point."

"Ugh, bro that's nasty." The fat kid looked disgusted "Not even the worst part." Woby replied "The worst punishment was the Blood Eagle. Which was where they would cut open the victims chest and back skin, reach in through the back, and cut the ribs open along the spine, pulling out the lungs, resulting in a fleshy pair of wings formed from the lungs and connective tissues coming out the back."

The fat kid looked like he was about to puke, and I wasn't feeling too hot myself. Woby was getting a little too into this description of gruesome horror, and I got the sense this was something he might have looked into a little too much. "Anything the Vikings did that wasn't horrible murder?"

"I mean, yeah, they had a fascinating culture, I can totally talk about it for hours..." he was suddenly cut off by someone calling from the front of the Library "Woby! Come on dear, bring your friend, its time to go home."

"Shit, gotta go, see you mister! Good luck with your pagan research!"

That kid provided me with quite a lot to chew on, there was a whole pagan religion of white supremacists? Seriously? Pagans?

Most Neo-Pagans are some of the calmest, level-headed, genuinely decent people you will ever meet. Even Satanists are remarkably cordial, although some of the traditionalist ones got on my nerves, always asking me for demon summoning services for stupid or dangerous reasons. The dumbest ones were people asking me for fortunes, as if a Clairvoyance demon would give me actual information about the actual future instead of some nonsense riddle that only makes sense in the moment.

But for there to be a group of people who worshiped Odin purely because all the Aesir were blonde haired and blue eyed? I felt bad for the Astaru, one of their symbols was stolen by assholes. And despite the fact I still was only able to see it in my mind's eye above a gore-soaked bed, it was still a cool looking symbol.

I really hope some Klan wannabes don't take the five-pointed-star as their symbol next, or I would have a lot of awkward questions to have to answer.

I continued my research throughout the night, wondering where the hell Lassie was, he probably had enough information to get back to me.

If he wasn't back by tomorrow I would call him up again, just to check in.

----------------------------------------

Hell, is not what you think it is. But it also is exactly what you think it is. Beyond the bland grey walls of my cubicle where hundreds of thousands of other cubicles exactly like mine, doing exactly what I was doing, typing away at a computer, looking through text messages and sending information to the bosses about what methods could be used to ensure the soul was captured. Hell, at least for those of us at the bottom, is a pyramid scheme.

I sat there, staring at a computer screen, that had a little 'XP' bar sitting at the top of it, in front of an inbox flooded with text messages, waiting to be graded and nudged to be more sinful, building the scaffolding for some other demon above me to grace me with a small portion of the soul he claimed for himself. I knew that above me, thousands of circles up, were the original seven of Dante's day, but I had never seen them. Sure we have access to a 24 hour stream of the old river of fire, but why would anyone step away from their soul quota and risk missing out on a promotion? One of those that were said to come, but never really did.

Surrounded by my four grey walls, with four other cubicles next to me, on and on and on for hundreds of thousands of miles of office space, I stared at my screen. whiling away the seconds. Wondering how long it was going to be before Rodney called me back...

Nothing can survive this far down for comfort, its too cold, The "0th" circle is what we called this place, it is so far away from God's light as to be colder than even the circle of Traitors, nothing warm can remain here, coffee cannot survive this far down, food freezes solid and looses flavor entirely, the only things down here that can remain to give us demons of the minor sins any sense of comfort, was Tobacco. It tasted good, didn't affect us the same as it did humans, no chemical addictiveness, just a pleasant flavor profile, and smoking makes us look cool without the risk of cancer.

I was reminded of my Tobacco just then, and reached for the can of Wintergreen in my little pocket dimension, bamfing it back into existence, running my clawed nails along the outside of the can, resisting the urge to tap it against my index finger, an all too familiar sound down here, to try to keep anyone from knowing I had some. Opening a can of chewing tobacco in this circle of hell was like opening a container of Tic-Tac's up top, everyone wants a piece.

As I opened the container, a whiff of the smell escaped the can before it flash-froze, and I heard the keyboards of the two cubicles nearest mine stop. Shit.

"XiXi?" Ugh that insufferable nickname "You're back? Got called up top?" ugh that insufferable "Uncle Tony" Italian American accent that sounded fake, most folks didn't call him by his true name, most mortals and some immortals couldn't pronounce it, instead we just called him Dave. He was a Fraud demon.

"Called up top? Poor dear, did you at least find an unbaptized to claim?"

The other demon speaking was a lady we called Starr, she sounded like a sweet scottish nanny. She was a demon of Coddling. And what she was asking about was if I was seeking out some SIDS baby or unbaptized suicide that I reached before a Death Angel showed up to claim the soul. Demons down here have a bad work culture, they think going to the surface just means less souls for you, less souls for you means a shorter lifespan.

"You both know well that I refuse to take an easy soul." I replied to her, a sour feeling in my gut as I realized I was going to have to give up a good portion of my chew. I need to start asking Rodney for extra, the fact that I had to eat one whole container just so I could get any before being sent back was utterly miserable.

"Come on XiXi, you must be almost outta souls by now, you're gonna die at this rate, slide us some snuff, we can keep you going."

"A fourth of a soul for a fourth of a can." I said as I knocked the puck of chew out of the canister, and started breaking it up.

"Highway fuckin' robbery!" cried Dave.

"Deal, I might even buy two quarters off of you dearie." I saw her wispy cloud-like shape emerge from her side of the cubicle, and hold her equally wispy three-fingered claws over to my desk. I placed two quarters of the chew into her hand.

"Fine. Fuck these things are getting pricey." Dave finally said as he held a greenish ooze coated five fingered hand down from his stall over to mine.

I heard a little *Ding!* from my computer as my soul quota went up nearly a full soul.

I silently begged for Rodney to call me in early, as I sadly munched on my quarter of the chew, and reached out for my keyboard to start filing away text messages, and earning barely a decimal point of souls at a time as I did so.