Philo says I should tell people what I look like. I’m not tall, but I’m not short. I’m not skinny, but I’m not fat. I’m not hot, but I’m not ugly. I get mistaken for people I’ve never met when I walk down the street. I can disappear in a crowd without even trying. My name is Timothy Kovak, and I’m the photo that comes with the wallet.

Philo says demons are lazy and hate to read, so they are likely to pick up the second part of my confession without reading the first.

So, briefly, I come from an ancient family of evil wizards. One of my ancestors sold his soul to a demon in the Late Middle Ages and gave him the souls of his children. Any time a male of the Kovach bloodline is born with the capacity to use magic, they inherit a giant magic encyclopedia and are expected to partner up with a six-hundred-year-old succubus named Lydia.

I was supposed to spend my life killing people for her Master, but I was able to use a few tricks to teach myself magic faster than he expected and turn the tables on him. It was a very close fight, and I got really damn lucky, but I won, and returned to Earth with a demon girlfriend, a redneck sidekick, and a mentor who had almost tried to kill me.

I was more than half in love with a beautiful young witch who had saved my ass and taught me how to be a hero, but she didn’t know about the demon, and if her mom found out, she would likely kill both of us.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you I’m dead. This is part two of the confession I’m writing for Azael, the Angel of Magic, who claims dominion over any soul that dies while tainted by Taltorak - that’s the name of the big magic book - which contains the spirits of a thousand mages who also sold their souls to demons in exchange for the power inside it.

At the time I’m writing this, I don’t know if I’m going to be imprisoned in the book or if the angels will send me straight to Hell when I’m done. I’m writing these words on a glorified word processor in the basement of a condemned high school, essentially haunting it as I try and keep my fingers solid enough to hit the keys.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Being a ghost sucks. In Purgatory, my soul feels just like a physical body, but on Earth I really am a spirit, and walking around as a spirit is hard fucking work. It takes a tremendous act of will just to move around the room. I could phase through the door easily enough, but my soul is tethered to the laser printer in the middle of the room, giving me barely enough rope to sit in the computer chair.

I haunt this room every night and print two copies of whatever I manage to write - one for the angels, one for the demons. An Imp and a cherub swoop in to grab the printouts and change the paper. The cherub has no sense of humor, and the Imp has a little too much.

Philo is a degenerate smart-ass piece of shit, and he seems to take pride in recounting how many times he’s been squished, spiked, chewed, or mangled by angry Masters over the years, although he refuses to tell me how old he is.

Turns out there are two kinds of Imps in Hell - terrified new arrivals used as messengers and errand boys, and really smart old ones who think fast and talk a mile a minute. Philo is the latter kind, constantly making sarcastic remarks in an exaggerated 20c accent, like a 1940s detective chomping on a phantom cigar.

Philo says Imps can go pretty much anywhere and be ignored, since no one considers them a threat. Imps can infiltrate anything because an older Imp can impersonate a younger one in two seconds by changing their skin color and pretending to be menial labor.

Imps can also change Masters any time they want, because no Master in Hell would admit to being upset that one of his Imps is gone. Steal a guy’s First Girl out of the harem and you’ve got a real problem. Wars have started over shit like that. But nobody’s gonna admit to missing an Imp, even a really smart one.

As a result, you never really know who any particular Imp is working for, and you never know where they’re gonna turn up.

Philo claims to have worked for a hundred different Masters during his afterlife, going all the way back to Satan and Lilith. But he’s such an inveterate liar, there’s no way to know for sure.

He says he was sold to Baalphezar and told to spy on him by his previous Master, who he had been sent to spy on by a previous Master, who he had been told to spy on by a previous Master, and so on, until nobody could remember who his real Master was.

But somehow, all these old Masters still liked him, and they were always happy to receive information from him. Everybody knew it was generally safe to act on tips from Philo, because everybody assumed he was sharing secrets at the request of some higher-ranking lord.

To hear him talk, you would think Philo was stage-managing half the wars in Hell, playing factions off against each other at the orders of Satan himself.