Lew could think of many ways to wake up that were pleasurable—that luscious demon from last night came to mind—but a slap to the face and the abrupt awareness of just how badly his head was pounding was decidedly not one of them.
“Ah shit, what the hell,” he groaned. He tried for a glare as he scanned the room to find the offender who had woken him up, but his eyes were far too bleary to properly see anything or pull off the right look. The most he could make out was a blob shaped… well, blob in front of him. “Feels like I’ve gotta stake jammed in my head…”
“If you mean one in the mouth, then I imagine you would know how that feels, wouldn’t you?”
That voice woke him up properly. Lew’s eyes shot open in a panic, desperately hoping he was dreaming or else still high from last night’s wild ride and imagining things, but nope, that was definitely Repugna standing over him. He scrambled to pull himself upright, knocking an empty bottle of vodka off the couch he had fallen asleep on, as he blurted, “Uh, hey there, boss! How are you?”
“Extremely pissed off,” she growled. A dangerous looking glint of fire was burning in the midst of her otherwise pitch black orbs. “You’re late. Again.”
“Whoa now, hey! Don’t get your thong in a twist! Even if I was late—and I’m prepared to argue that point!—it’s not like being a bit late really matters!”
“Three hours!”
“Say what now?”
“You’re three fucking hours late, Lew! And in case you’ve forgotten,” she added, jabbing her finger at the black book on the table next to him, “there’s a reason your appointments have times listed next to them in your Ledger!”
“Riiight,” he slowly said as his hand crept with equal wariness towards it. “Sounds like I better hop to, huh? No sense in being even later, after all! I’ll just be taking this and hurrying along to that first appoint—”
He screeched in agony, the noise akin to two eagles making eggs, as Repugna jammed a serrated dagger through his hand into the wooden night stand. “Listen here, you little shit, and listen good! You fuck up again, and you’re done, got it? I’m not going stand idly by and let you continue to run my team’s numbers down as you blunder around the mortal world with your thumb up your ass!”
“It’s not like you can fire me, so just lay off!”
The dark chuckle that elicited from Repugna wasn’t exactly the sort of reassurance Lew had been looking for. “‘You’re not wrong. The amount of red tape those lazy shitstains in HR set up would take me forever to get through, but I’ve got something far, far better in store…”
She ominously trailed off, prompting Lew to ask, “You, uh, gonna let me know, or…?”
“Fuck off, you limp dicked bastard of a worm! Why in the nine circles are you worried about the punishment when you should be worried about doing your goddamned job correctly?!”
She ripped the knife out of his hand, and the wound sealed right up. That didn’t mean, however, that it hurt less to have the cursed thing plunged through him.
“Now move! Your first appointment’s about to die, and the bitch is still heaven-bound!”
Oh shit! Lew panicked as he snatched up his ledger and scrambled to pull on some clothes. How am I gonna corrupt her with that little time left?!
The runic circle he drew midair was slapdash at best with how flustered he was, but it was apparently good enough, since a portal between the planes tore itself open, revealing a secluded area in the woods.
He leapt through, running towards the only person in sight, and in his hurry, he missed the sadistic gleam in Repugna’s eyes as she produced a tiny glass bottle with a snap of her fingers and let the blood on her knife drip down into it.
“Oh, yes. I’ve got the perfect punishment in mind for you…”
----------------------------------------
Angel sighed as she readjusted the straps on her backpack again. The poor thing was well over a decade old by now, worn down from so much use since she was a kid, but she simply didn’t have the money to replace it at that moment. Sooner or later one of the straps was going to actually give up the ghost and snap in half. She would need to pinch pennies for the next few months and hope to save up enough to afford a new one.
The sun was beginning to hang low in the sky, though it wasn’t quite setting yet. She loved watching the hues of the sun color the landscape below as it slipped away behind the horizon, but she detested trying to get everything together by lamplight. Put differently, she needed to pick a place to set up camp soon, or else she would have to miss one of nature’s greatest shows in favor of putting up her tent, and that would suck.
That was, of course, the moment she heard someone begin frantically running towards her from behind. Now, it wasn’t as though Angel had never encountered other hikers before. There was even that one time someone had actually run by—an ultra marathoner, she believed they were called—but it was still exceedingly rare for someone to be running a trail. More importantly, whoever it was hadn’t begun running until they were actually close to her, else she’d have heard them coming from a mile away.
Angel turned to examine who it was, her hand unconsciously straying down towards the utility knife at her belt, and she blinked in surprise. Then she blinked again. Just for good measure, she rubbed at her eyes—her knife momentarily forgotten—but nope, they weren’t lying.
The humanoid thing running towards her had blood red skin, two horns like a ram’s curling out of its forehead, and a long tail swishing back and forth behind it. On top of all that—and though that alone was already quite notable to say the least, it still bore pointing out the rest of what she was looking at!—it was wearing bluejeans that were clearly on backwards and a button down shirt that only had two buttons done up and both in the wrong place, and its hair was jutting all over the place like kids in an elementary school play with no teacher guiding them to their correct places.
Angel was so shocked by the incongruity of the everything about the situation that she entirely forgot to grab her knife out until the whatever-it-was was upon her.
“Who the hell are you?!”
“Oh hey!” the thing said as it panted for breath. “I’m just huff a simple hiker huff passing by!”
“You’re red.”
“Oh, well huff I did, uh, huff get excited when I saw you huff and decide to run up to greet you!” It wiped at its brow as though it was brushing away sweat, but it didn’t escape Angel’s notice that none of its very, very poorly donned clothes looked even the slightest bit sweaty. “Give it a minute, and I’m sure it’ll pass!”
“I don’t think it will,” Angel pointed out, and she felt quite reasonable in saying so. “You’re, uh, literally red. And have horns and a tail and all that.”
That seemed to startle the creature as it hastily brought its hand up to examine. “Ah shit, I forgot my human disguise!”
That explanation fits nicely, Angel thought. “So it seems. Are you a devil then?”
“Huh? Whoa, no, no, no! The Devil—capital ‘D’!—is the head honcho of operations. I’m just a demon.” The self-proclaimed demon paused as if abruptly noticing something. “You’re not scared of me?”
“Oh no, I am.”
“You, uh… Don’t seem to be?”
“I did pull my knife out in case you were going to attack,” Angel pointed out, once again feeling quite reasonable in saying so.
“Well sure, but you haven’t done anything with it.”
“You haven’t attacked me.”
“You say that like it matters!”
“Doesn’t it?” If this demon is representative of its kind, she thought, then they must be very strange. It’s like he wants me to jab a knife in him!
The demon continued to sputter for a moment, clearly thrown, and Angel further added, “Oh, it seems I forgot to say hello. Hello. My name’s Angel. What’s yours?”
If anything, this line of conversation seemed to put the demon even more off balance, but after a few seconds, it stuttered out, “I’m, uh, Lascivious. Lascivious E. Wormboil, but that’s a mouthful, so I usually go by ‘Lew.’”
Angel nodded in understanding. “My name’s Angela Cherie Kirk, but that’s also a mouthful. Mama always called me Angel, but she might have given ‘Ack’ consideration and never told me.”
“You… You’re a weird one.”
“I’m told that quite frequently, yes,” she confirmed. “I don’t mean to pry, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a demon before.”
“Oh, uh, well, I’m sort of here because you’re… going to die?” He looked tense as he said that, like he expected Angel to fly off the handle. What actually happened is she simply hummed in consideration.
“Are you the one who’s going to kill me? Mama always said some strangers want to do things like that.”
“No!” he actually looked vaguely offended at that. “Demons don’t kill humans—it’s against the Rules!”
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
“The rules?”
“The Rules!” he repeated, shaking the black book clutched in his hand for good measure. “Demons aren’t allowed to do anything that directly impacts a human’s life expectancy! We’re only allowed to interfere in their lives for the express purpose of corrupting them.”
Angel pondered that for a moment. “Mama never took us to church, so I don’t really know how demons are supposed to act. If you say that’s right, I’ll just have to believe you.”
“Well good! If only more humans were as accommodating as you are!”
“Most people aren’t nice,” she agreed, “and I hear a lot of those that are are pretending to be. I’m not very good at telling the difference, so Mama told me to always ask.”
Lew cleared his throat. “Right. Well. So back to the matter of you dying…”
Angel looked startled for a moment. “Oh! You did say something about that, didn’t you?”
“Wha— you forgot?!”
“You were teaching me about demons,” she defended.
“That hardly seems like it matters in the face of your imminent departure from the mortal realm!”
“I just got distracted. There’s no need to be rude about it.”
“Don’t— you know what? Do whatever you want, just so long as it’s bad!”
Angel looked around curiously. “I don’t think there’s a lot of bad things I can get up to out here, I’m afraid. Oh, I suppose there’s getting grumpy when I don’t get my camp set up in time.”
“Wha— That’s not evil!”
“Well, I can’t speak to whether it’s ‘evil,’ but I have it on good authority that I can be quite nasty if I have to set up at night.”
“That’s—”
“Leah and Linus stopped coming with me after the fire pit incident.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Right, you weren’t there! See, Leah thought it best to build a fire pit first, and I said—”
Lew walked right up to Angel and pressed his whole hand over her mouth before saying, “Look, lady, you really ne—”
He was cut off quite abruptly by his own shriek, and the sound reminded Angel of the time she happened to see a pair of eagles fornicating. It was a very distinctive sound, after all.
“You stabbed me?!”
She blinked before following his gaze downward where, sure enough, she had jabbed her knife into his forearm, just shy of his elbow. “It seems I did,” she tried to say, though with Lew’s hand pressed over her mouth, it came out more akin to… Well, that was quite unfortunate. She didn’t have a readily available sound to liken it to, which was a poor show on her part after her brain so readily remembered the eagles. After all, she had only been a little kid at the time!
Lew yanked his hand from her mouth and the knife from his flesh in one fell swoop. “Why’d you go and do that, you crazy bitch?!”
“I thought you were going to kill me.”
“Wha— I just got done saying I wouldn’t do that!”
“In my defense, the likelihood that you were lying seemed high, what with the whole trying to corrupt me business, and you did come at me quite quickly.”
Lew sputtered for a moment longer indignantly, and Angel stared as the gash in his arm knit itself back together. “You’re lucky I can heal through that kind of shit,” he growled, cradling his no longer wounded arm to his chest, “or I’d be a shitload more angry!”
“How’d you do that with your arm?”
“Huh?”
“Your arm was all bleeding and stabbed, and now only your shirt is.”
“Look! Stop getting me off track! You’re supposed to be dy—”
“Oooh, it’s fake blood, ain’t it?” Angel interjected, poking at the blood on her knife with her free hand, as if the substance would give up its secrets after a good, solid jab by a digit.
“No, it’s not fucking fake!”
“Pretty sure it is,” she disagreed as she brought her finger to her mouth to taste it. “Oh. No, I guess it’s real… after…”
Angel trailed off, feeling suddenly and violently ill as Lew screeched, this time in a matter decidedly more like two raccoons fighting over a thrown away biscuit, “You fucking moron! Demon blood is crazy poisonous to humans!”
She fell backwards, which hurt quite a bit more than she would have expected, since she landed directly on top of an oddly pointed and sturdy stick that jammed straight up into her lower back and through her belly button.
That was very inconveniently placed.
“Fuck!! You’re still heaven-bound! Nonono—”
Angel wanted to reassure Lew that didn’t sound so bad, but in truth, the whole dying affair had started so abruptly that the sunset hadn’t even begun, which was a real bummer. She had very much so been looking forward to that. Also, she was foaming at the mouth, so she wasn’t confident she could actually speak at the moment.
“Where’s that goddamned spell?!” She could hear him frantically flapping through pages, but only just barely. Whatever was making that ringing sound was getting awful loud. “Just gotta hope Repugna never finds out I had to… Aha!”
Angel coughed up some blood, and would have laughed at the irony given how this whole dying process began, but gurgling on the non-stop stem of blood pouring out of her mouth kind of put a stop to that. Her vision was narrowing as black began to bleed inward from the edges of her sight, which again, it should be noted, really put a damper on Angel’s plan to watch the sunset.
The ringing and the blackness took over entirely shortly after Lew began chanting in a strange language, and after some amount of time somewhere between one second and the heat death of the universe—probably closer to the first one, if Angel had to guess—the pain, the ringing, the blindness, and the general dying-ness of the whole situation abruptly vanished.
[What. The. FUCK!] she heard Lew say. Somewhat strangely and certainly unexpectedly, however, she didn’t hear him with her ears.
Also, her body was on the ground and beginning to shrivel. You know, that too.
----------------------------------------
“Ha! I knew that ass would fuck up eventually!”
Angel turned to look at the source of the new voice behind her and found another red-skinned person like Lew stepping out of a portal, except this one had horns that jutted out a bit before curving back and upward without forming curls. It also looked like this new demon was a woman if her breasts, hips, and long hair were anything to judge by, but the more Angel thought on that, the more apparent it became that she really ought to ask, what with this only being the second demon she had met.
“Gotta say though, I actually thought it would take at least three or four hummies before the ritual got him. I literally just chewed his ass out! I’d have thought the prick would at least have tried to do better for a bit…”
[Ritual?!] the Lew in Angel’s head said.
“Excuse me,” Angel spoke up, “are you female?”
The demon in front of her sputtered indignantly, and Lew guffawed. [Holy shit, the look on her face! Fucking priceless!]
“Are you blind?!” the demon squawked, gesturing at itself while giving her the stink eye. “Of course I am!”
“I was blind for a bit there, but I seem to have gotten better,” Angel replied, sounding quite pleased. Sight was, after all, integral to properly enjoying a sunset. “Though I seem to sound like Lew now, so I suppose there’s still something weird going on. Oh, and my body’s dead there on the ground. That’s also a thing.”
The new demon’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. Did I really trade that cock-sucking loser for a retard?”
[She says that like there’s something wrong with going down on a rocking dick…]
“The Lew in my head says he resembles that remark,” Angel conveyed as she walked over to the new demon, who she proceeded to kick in the shin. The red-skinned humanoid yelped and gave Angel a literally fiery glare. “Also, my Mama told me that’s a bad word, and I should kick anybody who calls me that.”
“Look, we got off on the wrong foot,” the demon ground out, hopping back a step before collecting herself and straightening out her well cut pants-suit. “Name’s Repugna, and I’m your new boss.”
“Oh, I don’t need a new job, thanks. I already have one at the Piggly Wiggly. Awful kind of you, though.”
Repugna scoffed. “You’re dead kid. That body on the ground? That’s you, remember? Or rather, it was you.”
Angel hummed in consideration as she turned around to look at her body on the ground. “I had thought that was me, but now that I think about it, that don’t make a lick’a sense, unless… Am I a ghost?”
Repugna stepped around her and began to draw a small circle of fire in the air with her finger. Once her fingertip touched where it began, the circle became a mirror, and Angel saw Lew staring back at her.
“Kinda, if you count a possessing spirit. See, that loser Lew was a fuckup of the highest degree, so I bound him with a blood ritual. The moment he screwed up on the job again, the hummie he was supposed to be corrupting would take over. In this case? You.”
“Oh, I see,” Angel replied.“Do you?” Repugna drawled, looking unsure.
“Yup. You didn’t like Lew, so you replaced him with me. You didn’t expect it to be me, and you can’t swap me for someone else very easily, or else you wouldn’t be bothering to explain this at all, since you were pretty upset when you realized it was me. You also seem to expect me to do Lew’s job, so I’m guessing I have to for some reason and/or you’re going to give me reasons to want to.”
[Wha—?]
“Wha—?”
Angel giggled. “Jinx! You two said the same thing at the same time!”
Repugna shook off her surprise first. “That was… surprisingly perceptive, uh… What did you say your name was again?”
“Oh, my manners! My name is Angela Cherie Kirk, but my Mama always called me Angel.”
“For the love of— of course that shit spewing assclown died to somebody named Angel… What self-respecting demon’s name is Angel?”
[Oi! Tell Repugna to go impale herself on that knobby looking branch over there!]
“Lew suggested you masturbate using a stick nearby, but he wasn’t specific enough for me to guess which one. Also, I quite like my name, and I’m a demon now, right? Hm… Not sure if I’m self-respecting though…”
“Listen, kid, I don’t want to hear anything Lew wants to tell me, so just ignore requests like that from now on, got it? Getting back to important matters, here’s the skinny: The ritual I used has given you complete control over Lew’s body. Only way he gets it back is if your track record is worse than his after the next annual review.”
[Shitfucking monkey on a pogo stick, I’m going to be playing backseat driver to this hummie for that long?!]
“Annual review? That sounds unpleasant. When’s the next one?”
A black book materialized out of nowhere in Repugna’s hand, and she flipped it open to a page seemingly at random. “Let’s see… Using your hummie tropical year of 365.2422 revolutions of Earth… Carry the 1… It’s exactly 625.76 tropical years.”
“Oh. I don’t think I’ll live that long.”
[You already forgot you’re in my body, didn’t you?]
“You wouldn’t be able to,” Repugna said with a quirked eyebrow, “but again, you’re driving Lew’s body, and he’s immortal, so you’re all set there.”
“Oh right.”
[Gooooood this going to suck.]
“Everything you need to know is in your Ledger, and I’ve taken the liberty of giving you a light schedule, so you don’t flounder too badly at the start, newbie. Questions? Comments? Existential dread in the face of the end of your life as you knew it and being thrown into a loser’s body?”
[Hey, you frigid bitchsicle, I am not a loser! I’ll have you know—!]
Angel tuned out the continuing rantings of Lew in her head and pondered for a moment. This was all a lot to take in, after all.
“Look, I’ve got a schedule of my own to keep, so let’s pick up the pace. One question: Go.”
Only one? In that case… “Can I get a new backpack? The straps on mine are about to go.”
[Oh for—]
Repugna smirked. “Index is in the back of the Ledger. Have fun, kid. I’ll check in on you in a while to give you an idea of how you’re doing.”
With that said, Angel’s new boss turned and drew a circle of fire in the air that was inscribed with a ring of nebulous, infernal symbols. With a flourish, she completed the cycle, spawning a portal to a beach on the shore of an on fire lake of blood whose sands were littered with umbrellas over towels and lounge chairs.
“TTFN!” she said with a wicked grin and a little wave as her pant suit morphed into what could generously be described as a bikini. She stepped through, and the portal winked away, and with a start, Angel realized it was nighttime.
The litany of cursing that followed that realization lasted the entire time it took her to set up camp.
[‘Quite nasty’ suddenly seems like an understatement.]
Eat a dick!
She could hear the smirk in his voice as he replied, [Yup, that’s precisely what your mouth did last night.]