“Look, Lew!” Angel cried with undisguised glee as she stepped through the portal and found herself in some sort of arcade. “We’re gonna have so much fun!”

[You know,] the demon replied as the cacophony of noise from the numerous arcade machines combined with the far too loud music blasting from the overhead speakers assaulted Angel’s ears, [when I woke up this morning, a headache was exactly what I thought I needed to make this day worse.]

“You don’t sleep, Lew,” she reminded him unnecessarily as she searched for the token dispenser. “And you don’t have a head to ache.”

[I was being sarcastic. I wonder how your target will die horrifically today.]

“What are you talking about? My job isn’t to cause horrific deaths!”

A kid with mussed hair gave her a brief, quizzical look as she passed by before returning his attention to the beating the 2D sprite of his computer opponent. A few seconds later, his avatar shoved its hand into his opponent’s chest and ripped out a still beating heart, which it held over its head in brutal triumph.

[Look, I’m not saying all of your cases end up dying in bizarre or gruesome deaths, but you’ve gotta admit it’s pretty fucking common. Like that lady last week who fell outta a window into the back of a dumpster truck right when it began to compact and couldn’t be heard screaming because the damn thing was so loud and she fell in headfirst.]

“That was pretty awful, but that doesn’t—”

[Then there was that guy who freaked out when he got too high on those bad mushrooms, broke through the locked roof access at his hotel, and climbed into the water tank only to drown because he didn’t know how to swim.]

“Drugs are bound to cause bad things to—”

[Oh, and can’t forget that surfer gal who got decapitated when—”

“I would really rather not talk about that one, thanks. Still having nightmares about her head trying to call for help…”

[Sure, but you see how it fits the trend?]

“That’s only happened three times!”

[What has?]

“Decap… Decapitut…” she struggled to say as she stepped into line behind two kids who appeared to be siblings. “Uh, beheading.”

The two of them turned to look at her, and up until that moment, she had mistaken them for sisters because of their long hair. Once they were facing her though, she realized the one with their hair in a low ponytail seemed to be a boy. The two of them shared a look, and when the only kid in front of them in line finished with the machine and left, the brother stepped up to feed a ten dollar bill into it while his sister turned back to her and asked, “What’s ‘beheading’ mean?”

Angel paled and in a doomed attempt at misdirection pointed a finger at herself and replied, “Who, me?”

“Yeah. You said it just now, and we don’t know what that word means.”

The machine spat out a card, which the brother held towards the sister in exchange for another ten dollar bill from a pocket in her cargo shorts. For a kid about to play in an arcade, he looked strangely sad as he fiddled with the dispenser again. Angel turned this way and that to check if the children had a parent nearby then leaned in and whispered, “It’s an adult thing. Your mama and papa will explain it when you’re older.”

The sister considered that as she accepted the card her brother handed her, depositing it back into a pocket in her shorts. “We’re twelve, and that means we’re teens. Is that old enough?”

[Ooo, this is rich. Tell ‘em! Tell ‘em!]

Angel hesitated for a moment, but eventually muttered, “Well, I suppose eleven isn’t that far from eighteen…”

[Yeeesssss! This is gonna be great!]

“Beheading is when someone’s head gets cut off, knocked off, pulverized… Pretty much anything that means you’re left with a neck but no head,” she bluntly informed them.

“Awesome!” the sister exclaimed with a laugh. She grabbed her brother’s hand with a “C’mon, let’s go!” then ran off, dragging him deeper into the arcade and out of sight.

Angel watched them leave for a moment before turning back to the dispenser and pulling her backpack around to fish out her money.

[Niiice,] Lew commented approvingly before continuing their conversation where it had left off. [Now as I was saying, you ain’t gonna hear me arguing I’ve never had one of my targets get decapitated, but you’ve had it happen three times in a solar cycle! That is objectively too goddamn often. And don’t even get me started on all of the targets who died because they hit their head on the floor. That’s really hard to do!]

She eventually located a twenty dollar bill and let it slide into the machine. Despite having just watched the twins be given cards not once but twice, she was still caught off guard when the touch-screen display asked her whether she wanted a new card or was loading money onto an old one. “Wait… What about my tokens?”

[The fuck is a token?]

“It’s this coin about the size of a quarter that you use to play games in an arcade.”

[Oh! I’ve seen one of those before. You mean those things they use at casinos?]

“Ain’t never been in a casino, so I dunno,” she muttered as she poked the ‘new card’ button on the screen experimentally. A moment later, a card just like the ones the twins had gotten popped out, and she tugged it free before staring at it dubiously.

“Hey, if you’re done, then step aside,” an older teen behind her complained, startling Angel so badly she jumped a foot off the ground.

“Oh! W-When did you get here?”

“Oh you know, I got here yesterday to beat the line,” he snarked.

“I hadn’t realized arcades were so popular now…”

“Jesus, lady, it’s a joke. Now can you move outta the way? I’ve got things to do.”

Angel scrambled out of the way with a quick, “Sure! Sorry!” and made her way deeper into the arcade while she continued to stare at the piece of plastic in her hands, completely mystified. It looked almost like the card her Mama had used whenever they went to the bank except it didn’t have any raised numbers or letters. While it was certainly true she had seen more and more cards like that being used at the Piggly Wiggly—credit cards, she thought they were called—she wouldn’t have suspected children would be issued cards for purchases!

Lew sighed, and though the sound of a cat hacking up a piece of inadvertently eaten bone after a good rat hunt was a sound seldom heard by mankind, Angel was not most people and immediately likened the sigh to said noise. [Moving on… I don’t think playing arcade games is going to ensure your target goes to hell, kid.]

Lew was not wrong. Angel’s target, a Miss Cassandra Visscher, was presently set to go to heaven but close enough to being hell-bound to warrant a visit from a demon. Angel was well aware of this and chose to avoid the situation while still being nearby in case her target happened to commit a sin at the eleventh hour and needed some last minute assistance getting back into holy territory. She didn’t say as much, naturally, not wanting Lew to get upset about her dereliction of duty, but there was one small problem.

[For fuck’s sake, really?]

She forgot he could hear her thoughts.

[You’re going to let them get to heaven?!]

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied as her eyes alighted on the skee-ball machine and she started that way.

[That’s a lie.]

“No it isn’t.”

[It is.]

“It’s not.”

[It’s not.]

“It is— ooo, you tricked me!”

[I don’t know why I’m surprised that worked on you. Kid, you can’t just give up on the job!]

“Well why not?” Angel asked as she examined the game to try and figure out how to turn it on. “I don’t see why I can’t let things happen naturally.”

[Uh huh. And what if this target was hell-bound?]

“That’s different.”

[Riiiiight. Totally different.]

“It is! In one case they’re going to heaven, in the other they’re going to hell!”

[You know what I meant. You can’t just treat one group of people one way and another completely differently. That’s discrimination! You hummies hate that shit, don’t you?]

Angel glanced down the line of skee-ball machines and watched carefully as a kid slotted the edge of his vertical card in the top of a black rectangle attached to the machine then swiped down, causing a set of skee-balls to drop into the feed for him to throw. She bent over, swiped her card through as well, and pouted when nothing fell into her ball feed.

“I dunno much about all that ‘discrimination’ you’re talking about, but I do know it’s normal to treat some people differently from others. If I’m buying cheese wiz and bananas at the market, I’m not supposed to hug the cashier when I see them, but it’s okay to hug Mama when I get home.”

[Why would you buy cheese wiz and— no, nuh uh, nope, never mind. My point is you’re not giving everyone, uh… equal opportunity to do evil! Yeah, that’s it! You hummies are all entitled to free will and all that jazz, so it’s bad to not give them the chance to do bad things.]

“But you’re not supposed to do bad things!” she argued as she flipped the card to her side and swiped down again. The little light on the slot blinked red once more, taunting her with her failure. “You’re supposed to be nice to people, so they’ll be nice to you back!”

[What the fuck are you talking about?]

“The golden rule!”

[Uh, I’ve heard of the golden calf—that shit was funny, coaxing those idiot Israelites into worshiping a fucking cow—but I dunno about any golden rule…]

Angel flipped the card another time, this time flipping it towards herself and swiped. She failed again, which was notable if one considered there are only four possible combinations for swiping a card vertically and perfectly parallel to a surface against which one is swiping, therefore meaning she had managed to use all three incorrect options prior to reaching the correct choice. Angel had remarkable luck but not, it seemed, where swiping cards for skee-ball was concerned.

“Treat people how you want to be treated,” she quoted as she flipped the card to the side once more and swiped, finally succeeding in making the balls fall down into the feed. Grabbing one and tossing it lightly into the air to get a feel for its weight, she added, “Basically you can’t expect nobody to treat you good if you don’t treat nobody right first.”

[That’s horseshit. There’s, like, a bajillion examples in the Bible of people doing good things to other people and getting screwed over in response. Like those Egyptians that raised Moses as their own only for him to kill a dude, flee then come back because he burnt some bush, and bring about a bunch of plagues before stealing their slaves.]

“I don’t know much about the Bible, but maybe there was a good reason for all of that?” she said as she rolled a ball up the ramp, flubbing the first attempt and only managing to score a 10.

[Look, I love pointing out biblical hypocrisy as much as the next demon, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. You took over my body, so you need to do my job, and that means you need to corrupt people!]

“I won’t!” she yelled as she rolled the next ball, putting far too much force into it and causing it to bounce against the backboard and down into the gutter. “I won’t do it!”

Angel’s declaration to no longer corrupt people was all well and good—an indisputable growth in ethos indicative of an turning point in the arcing journey of a character across the length of a short novel, not that such a thing has relevance here, of course—but there was a bit of a problem. And while yes, it was true this boded ill for our protagonist’s prospects as a demon and begged the question of what backlash she might suffer, it was of more immediate concern with regard to how it impacted poor Timothy, the boy Angel had watched just a few minutes prior to glean the secret of starting the game with her card.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

Timothy, dear readers, had a crush on his classmate Missy, whose birthday was soon approaching. Being a frequent flier here in the arcade, he had noticed several months ago that one of the grand prizes was a large plushie of a unicorn and had vowed he would amass enough prize tickets to claim it in time for Missy’s birthday, presenting it along with a declaration of his undying affection and a heartfelt wish that they might go see a movie sometime. Since making that vow, he had been coming back to the arcade over and over to convert his hard won allowance—the lawn wasn’t going to mow itself, after all, and the litter box for the family’s cat would definitely become foul if not for his deft hand—into prize tickets. Missy’s birthday being tomorrow and his wallet running thin, today was the day of reckoning. He would either succeed in his quest or else suffer ignominious defeat. With only enough money left on his arcade swipe card for one last round of skee-ball and his tickets conveniently amounting to just shy of one payout of a perfect skee-ball game, it was now or never. A sure hand at the refined art of rolling a plastic ball up an angled ramp with a jump at the end such that the ball falls into the 100 point hole, Timothy had not been concerned when he began the game. Alas, he had not accounted for the chance that a strange adult standing nearby might shout without warning. His final roll, the one upon which all of his hopes and dreams rode, bounced off of the plastic encircling the desired hole and fell into the 10 point hole instead. Had the perpetrator been someone closer to his age, he might have demanded they swipe their own card to allow him another chance, but this being not the case, he instead ran off crying.

Poor Timothy. If only he had simply saved up the money instead and used it to buy a similar gift directly, then he might have still suffered the disgrace of discovering Missy didn’t much care for unicorns and would have rather received an RC car instead.

[What the hell is wrong with you?] Lew yelled, bringing us back to the actual plot. [You were just fine with corrupting people a few days ago, and you were only half shit at it! Just keep doing that!]

“I didn’t realize what an idiot I was being!”

[You do realize you’ve always been an idiot, right?]

“I was damning people to hell just ‘cause it’s my job,” she continued, ignoring him, “and I… I didn’t even care until I was supposed to do the same to my friend…”

[Fucking hell, this is about that Krae, isn’t it? I never should have told you about the fucking planet! Am I the only one who remembers that slimy sack of feathers backstabbed you? And it was an optional target! You didn’t have to do jack squat!]

“What matters is Ukka was someone to corrupt at all! And the Krae thought I was dangerous!”

[A goddamn pencil is dangerous if you jab it into one of your squishy hummie eyes! Doesn’t mean you should go around impaling all of them with cold iron! That traitorous douche canoe deserved to die, and it sure as shit deserved to burn for eternity in hell!]

Angel slapped herself across the cheek as hard as she could—which admittedly wasn’t very hard—and proceeded to all but hurl her remaining skee-balls up the slope one at a time, punctuating each throw with her words. “I. Won’t. Do. It. You. Demonic. Jerk!”

[Ooo, ‘demonic jerk,’ huh? That one really hit me in my pride—I doubt I’ll ever recover,] the demon in her head taunted. [Now track down this target and corrupt their ass by helping them cheat to win or something!]

Angel proceeded to not hunt down her target at all, much less attempt to corrupt them. What Lew should have known but had failed to account for wasn’t just her stubbornness but also her propensity for getting distracted. The latter fact was of particular importance in this circumstance given that she was in the middle of a room filled with flashy arcade machines spitting out streams of tickets for doing well. As it so happened, she had managed to score a 100 for all of her remaining rolls at skee-ball, and her cumulative score of 710 points had secured her a king’s ransom in tickets, albeit not enough for poor Timothy to have secured a unicorn that would not have been appreciated nearly as much as a RC car. Angel took her tickets, a system that appropriately matched her memories of the few times she had been to an arcade as a child, and considered what game to play next. There was more skee-ball to be had, but Angel was the sort of person to try one of everything and decided she would try them all before using whatever money she had left over on whatever game she had enjoyed the most.

There are rules of engagement for working one’s way through all the offerings of an arcade, and they are as follows. Firstly, one must play skee-ball at least once. This having already been accomplished as described above, Angel was ready to proceed to rule two. Second, if the arcade has one of those games where a light moves in a circle and the player must press their button when the light is upon their position, then that game should be saved for last or else avoided altogether because it is one hundred percent rigged. No, the narrator is not bitter from wasting too much time on such games as a child, and all suggestions to the contrary may be submitted posthaste to the trashcan where they belong and shall be summarily ignored. Third, if one has a measure of skill where dancing games are concerned, then that game should be played when the most people are nearby in order to maximize bragging rights. However, if one has never played a dancing game or has and is anything less than accomplished in executing sick dance skills, then any dancing games should be saved for just prior to the game described in rule two. Fourth, when in a group of precisely two, multiplayer games should be favored, and one should never throw the game—let the world see you in all of your magnificence, you shiny stallion! Fifth, when in a group of three or more, multiplayer games should still be favored, a means of cycling players should be settled upon between the players that is mutually agreeable, and one should still never throw the game—don’t dim your brilliance, you stupendous superstar! Sixth, while still obeying rules one through five, all remaining, unsorted games should be attempted in alphabetical order if it is an odd numbered day with the opposite being true for even numbered days, unless of course it is a leap year, in which case the aforementioned instructions of rule six should be reversed to add a little spice to the experience.

Angel was technically in a group of two insofar as she had Lew yelling at her in her head about how she was a worthless sack of shit who would never amount to anything, but practically speaking she was flying solo. Being not possessed of any dancing skill and the lone dancing game in the arcade being occupied by the twins from earlier, she proceeded to the crane game. The avid reader may notice this is not in keeping with the rules exhaustively laid out above, and that is in part because Angel did not know the proper rules of working through an arcade—a shame, really—and because one of the prizes inside was a particularly cute and fluffy stuffed owl.

“Ooo! Isn’t it pretty, Lew?” Angel gasped as she rushed over to the machine, only just barely resisting the urge to press her face up against the glass like a child waiting for a candy store to open.

[Fuck my life…]

She pondered that for a moment. “Is that how demons say something is pretty?”

[No. Now go find your target and corrupt them!]

“Nuh uh!” she dismissed as she swiped her card once, twice, thrice, and finally got it right on the fourth attempt, demonstrating both a clear failure to have learned from swiping to play skee-ball and a lack of luck where matters of swiping cards are concerned. “I am getting this owl!”

As it happened, she did not get the owl. That’s not to say she didn’t try though, as she blew the entire remaining balance on her swipe card attempting to obtain it. And then another twenty dollars’ worth of attempts, which was bordering on ridiculous. Yet another twenty dollars followed that, which shot well past ridiculous into truly ludicrous. It seemed Angel had not learned from the example of poor Timothy, not that she had actually spoken to the lad, but that’s just splitting hairs.

“Shit,” Angel swore as the claw of the crane slipped off of the owl for the umpteenth time.

[I want you to know that was excruciating to watch, and I will regret being a part of it for as long as I exist,] Lew dourly complained before more brightly adding, [And hey, look at that, your target still hasn’t died! Maybe you should get on that?!]

Angel sighed and flipped open her Ledger, curious how much time was remaining. It seemed Ms. Cassandra Visscher was due to die in only a few minutes and her balance of good and evil was still leaning ever so slightly towards the former.

“Well, I might as well go find her,” she remarked as she snapped the Ledger shut and tucked it under her arm. “I can’t spend all my money in the arcade, after all!”

[Whatever, kid. Just get a move on, would you? This place is awful, and we’ve been here for hours…]

Angel ducked into the corner of the room to draw a portal, but something peculiar happened when she jumped through. Namely, she fell right out the other side.

She turned around to look at the portal, and sure enough, she wasn’t seeing another location through it like she normally did. She simply saw the wall on the other side. “Uh, Lew? What’s going on?”

[Target’s still here, I guess? I never really made a habit of going to a target’s location hours beforehand, so fuck if I know.]

Angel looked around the arcade but didn’t see the red outline of her target anywhere. Still, it wasn’t exactly a small room, so she circled around the area while keeping her eyes peeled. People were everywhere in the arcade—kids, teenagers, and a few of their parents—but none of them were glowing red. She still had no luck by the time she reached the front desk, and she was starting to get very confused.

“Where on earth could she be?”

[Beats me… You did check the whole place, and I didn’t see the target either.]

“Looking for someone?” Angel startled before turning to look at the person who spoke, the attendant at the desk with the prizes. “I can call them up over the speakers, if you’d like.”

“That would be great!” she replied with a wide smile, not having thought of that. “Thank you!”

“No problem.” Several long seconds of silence passed between them before the attendant awkwardly asked, “Are you, ah, gonna tell me their name?”

“Oh! I suppose that would be helpful, huh?” Angel said with an awkward laugh. “Her name is Cassandra Visscher.”

The attendant picked up a phone on the desk, tapped a few buttons, then said into it, “Cassandra Visscher, you’re wanted at the ticket desk. Cassandra Visscher, please come to the ticket desk.”

“Thank you!” Angel told the man, smiling again a smile as the words replayed over the speaker only to freeze when her Ledger began to vibrate. “Uh…”

[Don’t look at me. I’ve never— wait, hang on a second…]

Whatever it was that Lew was pondering, he didn’t seem inclined to share, so Angel began to idly flip through the index to see if there were any listings about what it meant when the Ledger started to shake on its own.

“Want me to call her again?”

“Hm?” Angel said, the words pulling her attention back to the world outside the Ledger. The attendant was looking at her quizzically, and it took her a second to realize why. “Oh yes! Yes, please give her another call.”

“Sure thing…” he said, sounding less sure of the situation than before. Angel could hardly blame him though, seeing as she was just as confused! “Cassandra Visscher? You’re wanted at the ticket desk? Again, that’s Cassandra Visscher, ticket desk.”

Angel returned her attention to the book and had an abrupt realization—the smoke! Her target had been set to die minutes ago, but there had been no smoke! She hadn’t been an honorary demon for long—a mere decade in human years—but if there was one constant, it was the smoke signifying a target’s death. Black for those who went to hell, and white for those who went to heaven instead. She flopped the pages of the Ledger from left to the right to quickly check the list of targets in the front and stared in confusion at what the Ledger said. Ordinarily there was a list of upcoming clients on the left with the next in line being at the top and a list of recently completed clients on the right, but Cassandra Visscher’s name was nowhere to be found.

[What in the nine circles…?]

“It’s you?”

Angel looked up, the confusion still writ on her face, and found it mirrored in the two people looking back at her. Though perhaps ‘children’ was the more apt term, for none other than the twins from earlier were standing before her, standing hand in hand as they stared up at her.

“Pardon?” she asked, the disarray of her thoughts leaking into her words.

The sister silently looked to her brother, who gulped before quietly asking, “H-How did you… How did you know?”

Angel was getting more and more bewildered by the second. “Know what?”

“Don’t play dumb,” he seethed, anger flaring up in him and vanishing away just as quickly as he retreated back into himself and clutched at his sister’s arm.

He looked to her for support, and she gave him a small, quick smile before turning back to Angel. “How did you know the name Cassandra Visscher?”

Angle nearly dropped her Ledger in surprise and with a quick thought, she reactivated the locator spell that had fallen off when Cassandra Visscher’s name had disappeared from her list of targets. Her eyes widened as none other than the boy lit up red.

[Oh shit, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before!] Lew exclaimed, finally figuring out what the problem had been. [The Ledger can get confused when someone changes their name, like when they get married, they’re avoiding debts, escaping an Armenian assassin—that sort of thing. Might explain why the locator spell couldn’t find the target until now. Still, it’s pretty rare for one to line up with the moment of death, and that doesn’t explain why the hell her name disappeared from the Ledger… Or why she changed her name here of all places, for that matter.]

Angel tried to wrap her head around that. “Well that explains… something, I guess. So you’re Cassandra…” She turned to the sister and asked, “And that makes you…?”

“Anja.” She glanced at her… sibling, who looked very miserable at the moment, then her eyes flicked to the attendant behind Angel before saying, “I think we should have this discussion somewhere else, don’t you Miss…?”

“Angel,” she faintly replied, still trying to wrap her head around what had happened. She glanced around and scratched her head. “Uh, I don’t reckon y’all know somewhere we could go? I ain’t exactly familiar with the place…”

“The food court sounds good to me. How about you, Cassandra?” Anja said with a hint of fiery determination.

“S-Sure…”

“Oh, are we in a mall?” Angel asked, not realizing that, in the twins' eyes, she ought to have known that already. They shared a look as they led her to the doors at the exit but said nothing. “I suppose that makes sense. Ooo, I wonder if they have one of them Orange Augustus places! Ain’t been to one of those in ages!”

“Uh, yeah, there’s one of those,” Anja remarked, shooting her an indecipherable look as they stepped through the shaded doors leading out of the arcade, revealing the food court had been right on the other side all along. “Do you want a drink or something?”

“Absolutely! You two want something too? My treat!”

Anja smirked. “Sounds good to me.”

“You’re not supposed to accept food from strangers…” her sibling remarked, still sounding glum and now a bit suspicious as well.

“She’s not giving us the food, so it’s okay!”

Cassandra leaned in and hissed, “Are you sure?” so quietly that Angel likely wouldn’t have heard but for her sharpened infernal senses. “Lady’s probably on drugs or something! She didn’t even know she was in a mall!”

“Yeah, that’s what makes it awesome!” Anja whispered right back. “C’mon, sis, we’re in the middle of a crowded food court. Worst case scenario, we bail.”

The other sibling’s reluctance melted away. “Okay, just… Let’s just be careful, okay? And weird shit, we bail. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Agreed!” Angel chirped happily, causing both of the twins to stop dead in their tracks and their heads to snap around to look at her in shock. Angel stopped walking as well, and stared right back. “What? You were both saying it, so I wanted to too.”

“How much of that did you hear?” Cassandra faintly asked.

“All of it,” Angel blithely replied. “Good plan, by the way! Mama always told me it’s best to meet someone for the first time in a public place, so they can’t get all freaky-deaky.”

“Uh…”

[You dolt, they were speaking way too quietly for a hummie to hear!]

“Oh, right you are, Lew!” Angel said with an awkward laugh. “Sorry, you two. I hadn’t meant to intrude on your private conversation.”

Cassandra gave Anja a pleading look that quite clearly conveyed she thought they ought to run for the hills right that second, but her sister, who suddenly didn’t look nearly as confident, managed to muster up the courage to ask, “Who is Lou?”

[Three… two… one…] Lew counted down, knowing without a shadow of a doubt exactly how Angel would reply.

“He’s the demon in my head!”

“Bail,” Cassandra quietly begged, clutching at her sister with obvious fright.

Any sense of adventure that had been lingering in Anja had clearly fled in the face of Angel’s reply. “Bail.”

Angel stared after the twins in confusion as they sprinted off, scampering away and out of sight. “Was it something I said?”

[You know it was.]

She shrugged before looking around the food court for the Orange Augustus. “Oh well. All’s well that ends well, right?”