With an irritated grunt, Lilly rubbed the screen of her iPhone against her thigh to clear away the Dijon mustard that had dripped from the corner of Thomas’ overfull mouth.

“Jesus, man, you’re a fucking Neanderthal. Eat with your mouth closed.” She grumbled.

“Whatcha lookin’ at mum?” He asked around his food.

She sighed and shook her head. “I’ve gotta go into the hospital today and try to track down those records. And stop calling me ‘mum’ you’re older than I am.”

“Oh right, the corruption thing.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then licked it clean. “Look at you, fighting the good fight. Stickin’ it to the man. Do you deep throat yet?”

Lilly rolled her eyes. “You’re a pig,” she grabbed a slice of his toast off his plate and dipped it in his egg.

“Hey!”

“Hey yourself, you were meant to provide breakfast for me too remember?” She held an imaginary phone up to her ear and spoke in an exaggeratedly deep voice “Oh you gotta come round Lil. Naaaw you won't be late for work. Come on, we got nachos and I’ll make breakfast.” She shook her head. “Should have known better.”

“Hey, if you weren’t here, hanging out with us, you might end up” he looked around as though searching for something terrible, “with some, I dunno, some accountant or something. A boring ass white as snow straight-laced-”

“Human?” She asked with a raised eyebrow. “There’s nothing wrong with normal guys, Thomas. God knows I could do with spending time with at least one person who isn’t actually a denizen of the underworld!”

“Underworld? How dare you talk about Frankston that way!”

She couldn’t help laughing and patted him on the back as she stood. “I gotta go. I left the rest of my nachos in the fridge.”

“You’re a Goddess,”

“I know. Don’t fuck anyone to death this week, okay?” She said flippantly.

Tom rolled his eyes. “I haven’t done that in centuries. Which reminds me we only got up to like, the 1300s last night,”

“I know, I know, trust me I keep a note of where we're at. One day I’ll write a book.”

“No book!” Three voices said firmly in unison. John and Cain were still in their rooms but had obviously been eavesdropping.

“You know for a pack of demons you guys are a bunch of wusses.” She stuck her tongue out and shut the door behind her.

“One of these days, she's going to get us into trouble,” Thomas muttered to himself.

“What’s the alternative?” Cain asked as he came out of his room in his Australian flag boxers. Thomas opened his mouth but the look on Cain’s face silenced him. “Don’t even joke about it, don’t even think it. We do not hurt Lilly.”

“I know, I know.” Tom slid his slipper off and threw it at his brother who had stolen a sausage from his plate. “HEY! Everyone get the hell away from my breakfast!”

Traffic sucked in town in the middle of the day so Lilly took the tram. It was free once you got inside the city circle and she liked people watching through the windows as they rattled their way around lines. Finding out that her best friends were demons had turned regular old people watching into a biblically themed game.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

If granny over there on the corner is a demon, what kind is she? What might her real name be? When was the last time she raised some hell? She’d only seen John change once, and that was moving heavy furniture, so she didn’t have a lot of points of reference, but what she lacked in information she made up for in imagination. She was still playing the game in fact when she walked through the front doors of the hospital admissions building and started to look for some way to sweet talk herself access to their accounting system.

If she hadn’t been so observant it’s possible that the man in the expensive suit may have slipped right by her. He was the kind of attractive Lilly had always been wary of. The kind that suggests he was used to getting what he wanted and didn’t much care whether you wanted to give it to him. When he told a nurse he was ‘Mr. Abraxas’ she did a double-take at the name.

‘Abraxas’ had been in the stories the guys had been telling her. Thomas and Cain had been around since almost three thousand years BC, but John was much older, he remembered all the way back to the beginning and Abraxas was a name he spoke with a certain degree of fear.

Lilly followed him through the double doors and hugged the wall around to the left. The entire building smelled of disinfectant and artificial citrus, but as she breathed slowly through her mouth she realised that it wasn't the 'hospital' smell that made her feel so ill. She looked down at her bare arm and saw her hairs standing up and her flesh goosebumped in the lukewarm air. There was a hum around her that she couldn't hear. A vibration she couldn't feel, and it set off every sensory alert her body had, without actually telling her anything.

At the end of the corridor, she stopped and positioned her camera so that it could see through the large window into the next room, and she could watch what was happening on the swivel LCD screen. Inside was some kind of neonatal intensive care unit with incubators, strange machines, lights and humidicribs. All of these were empty, bar one. In it lay a baby of average size wrapped in standard hospital blankets and wearing an ID bracelet. Abraxas and a doctor stood over the crib.

"Will she live?" Abraxas asked.

The Doctor nodded, "Absolutely. She's not receiving any medical interventions at all," he reached down and opened the baby's blanket. "She's perfectly healthy."

"And the mother?"

"Ah," the Doctor looked uncomfortable. "She's been told the child didn't survive. You were right," he looked at Abraxas, "she accepted the story and didn't ask for the body."

Abraxas smiled. "I can always pick 'em."

"What are you going to do with her?"

One of Abraxas' eyebrows raised in amusement and he regarded the Doctor calmly. "Better perhaps not to ask questions you don't want the answers to. She'll serve her purpose, that's all that matters, and you'll be paid." He stroked the baby's head with one long-fingered hand and Lilly gagged at the cold feeling his expression gave her. "I'll take this one to go. Wrap her up. I'll finalise your payment."

He was already on this phone as he wandered from the intensive care unit into the lobby area where the nurses' desk was. Lily watched the Doctor as he stood perfectly still and stared down at the baby. On an impulse she couldn't explain Lilly slipped in through the other door and boldly looked right at him. The Doctor opened and closed his mouth when he noticed her, but he said nothing. Her expression told him clearly she'd heard everything, and she knew enough... She took one step forward, he said nothing. Then another. The Doctor only watched, his expression tormented and torn until Lilly stood opposite him beside the crib. Slowly she reached in, bundled the blanket back around the baby and lifted her from where she lay.

"He'll kill me." The Doctor said as she settled the baby in her arms.

Lilly looked at him and said nothing.

"There's nowhere for me to run," he said more to himself than to her.

"So what will you do?" She kept her eyes on him, so it was plain as day when a tear escaped his eye and rolled down his cheek into his grizzled beard.

"Give you as long as I can," he said after a pause. "And pray."

Lilly backed away as the Doctor grabbed another blanket and put it in the crib in a bundle such that there could have been a baby in it. Once she was out the door he walked calmly to a panel and hit a large orange button. Claxons sounded and the doors locked. The Doctor went back to stand by the crib and looked down into the empty blanket. Lilly didn't wait to see what Abraxas would do.

The Doctor sighed to himself and raised his eyes from the crib. Across from him stood a tall, handsome man in a plain suit with bright red hair and calm grey eyes. He did not precisely glow, but as the Doctor looked at him he perceived that perhaps there was something in the air around him. Not light, but something physical, as though there were more to this being than his flesh... He opened his mouth to ask but closed it again as Abraxas began to hammer on the locked door. Across from him, the being reached over and put on hand over the doctors where he maintained a white-knuckled grip on the edge of the crib.

"It won't hurt." The stranger said.

The Doctor could only nod and a moment later the room was engulfed in flames.