There it was.
“You power things with souls here?”
“You have no idea how lucky your plane is,” Lucareoth said, rubbing his horns. “The amount of magical energy you have, lying around to be shaped and channeled by anyone with the will to do so. It’s a luxury. It’s made you soft.”
She took an involuntary step backward. “Are you going to eat me?”
“Of course not! I would never eat you!” He paused. “Someone else might. I honestly don’t know if that would work. I mean, you’re right: it’s why we eat each other, becausethere’s so little magical energy here, and souls being born is one of the few ways it enters our plane. But it’s the differential that really makes human souls worth capturing—something about the binding promise to cross the planar barrier lets us arbitrage the difference. I don’t know if I really get it—I’m not a theoretician, I’m just a salesman.”
“Sure, just a salesdemon. Never mind you’re all using souls to power everything.”
He crossed his arms. “And you’re using petroleum until your atmosphere cooks you all alive.”
“That’s not the same thing!” Except, in the long run, from a moral perspective, was it really that different?
“I don’t suppose you have any way of connecting from here back to my plane?”
“We can’t cold-call, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said. “We have to wait for someone on your side to reach out. Inbound sales only.”
“Then how did humans figure out to call in the first place?”
“Do I look like someone who paid that much attention in history lessons?” he asked. He gave her a half-smile only slightly tinged with panic. “My guess? Someone on your side wanted something really, really badly. Bad enough someone on my side could hear them. You humans wantso much.”
“What did you do before that?”
“I dunno, what did you do before the petroleum thing?”
She supposed the demons could give up souls as easily as humans could de-carbonize cold turkey. And would probably be about as willing. “It’s not like I work for Halliburton.”
“Assuming that that’s a petroleum company, sure, but someone has to. The lights in your apartment turn on whenyou flick the switch.” He shrugged, looking uncomfortable and defensive.
“And it was the job you could get.” She still hated it, but she lived with a lot of things she hated.
Who would possibly call this plane on her behalf, let alone be willing to pay a price? Maybe if her mother noticed she was gone. And visited the apartment, which she hadn’t done since Morgan moved in. And did it before Gisele cleaned up the evidence.
No, she was going to have to get out of here herself. Somehow. Unlike all the souls already here.
Her throat felt tight. “They just… stay here? Until they’re used up?”
“The souls?” Lucareoth paused. She got the sense he hadn’t given it much thought before. “They kind of vibrate. Remember how I was talking about the differential? Magic is easier to do on your side of the barrier. So the more we’ve done on your behalf on your side, the more potential energy there is when the Deal completes and the soul is yanked to ours. And the stronger it vibrates. Helps if they’re unhappy, for some reason. Sometimes they get made to do painful and repetitive things. Sometimes they simply get stuck in a lightbulb and zapped periodically.”
“And you can use the vibrations to power stuff.”
He nodded.
“What happens when they clear their debt?”
“They kind of blip out. I guess they go to wherever your souls usually go after you die.”
Morgan’s father talked to ghosts on the other side of the Veil on a regular basis, which had always made Halloween extra weird at their house. Not everyone became a ghost.And some ghosts got tired of haunting things. All they would ever say about all the missing people, the ones who weren’t ghosts at all, was that they’d decided to continue on “Beyond.” So maybe this was less like being eaten and more like some kind of indentured servitude.
It was still horrible.
“You haven’t done anything on my behalf, and I haven’t promised you anything. Does that mean I’m free to go?”
He rubbed his horns again. “Morgan, I wish… I really wish I could say yes. But I have no idea how to get you back home.”
“But I’m not valuable here,” she checked to be sure.
