What I’d done.Hadn’tdone…
The librarian, my final mark of the night, would have gone so much easier if she hadn’t been able to see me. No one ever saw me these days. No one but the kids, and they weren’t my sector anyway. Not anymore.
But the librarian worked with children—something I hadn’t known. Not that I cared.
Butthatmust have been why she’d been able to see me. The influence of her young patrons must help to keep her mind more susceptible to seeing the truth—the reality that everyone else in the world had convinced themselves didn’t exist.
“Grim?” called a familiar voice from within the main chamber, his German-accented words echoing out to me. “That you?”
“Who else would it be, Johann?” I droned with my low and caustic reaper’s voice as I entered the enormous circular chamber. I’d made this exact entrance countless times over the years—the decades. The centuries. It wasn’t so much that I’d lost count. Since this wasn’t a gig I was planning on retiring from—ever—I’d just never bothered keeping track of the time in the first place.
Why bother when, for me, this was it?
“Well, let’s see,” mused Johann even as he kept scribbling away in the pages of his enormous book, feather quill scratching against parchment. “You could have been Flora or Cedric. Could have been one of The Few, too, for all I knew. God forbid you could have been my old friend I wish never to meet again…”
A wizened, white-haired man who had also been here for centuries, Johann sat in his usual spot behind the scribe’s desk that occupied the center of the circular ballroom-sized chamber. A waterfall of snowy hair flowed down his back, while a mystic’s long beard draped his front.
“Demons can’t come to the Netherworld, can they?” asked Pluto, Johann’s annoying-ass raven, in his smooth and lilting Estuary English accent—the question rhetorical. “That’s why we’re here.”
I glowered at the onyx beast currently perched on his ornate bird stand near Johann’s desk, his vapid, brainless head ticking this way and that like he was trying to rattle the two thoughts he had into somethingnotclueless.
Good fucking luck.
“True,” grunted Johann as he continued to scribble, “the fiend can’t enter the Netherworld portals, but that hasn’t stopped him from trying, now, has it? And if there’s one thing I never say… it’s never. Aside from that, when it comes to our corner of the universe, does one everreallyknow who or what to expect?”
He had a point. And maybe I’d forgotten how, in so many ways, paranoiacamewith this… department.
“He’s talking about Mephistopheles,” said Pluto, speaking to me.
Like I didn’t know. Like I hadn’t been here long enough to get the picture better than him. Like I hadn’t punched the demon in question square in his fanged face more than once.
“I told you not to say that name!” bellowed Johann, his voice resounding through the chamber.
Pluto puffed on his perch, spiked feathers frilling out. “Shall I call him Phil instead?”
“Haven’t you ever heard the saying ‘Speak of the devil and the devil shall appear’?” groused Johann. “I can tell you firsthand and perhaps better than anyone… it’s true.”
“But demons can’t come to the Netherworld, can they?” asked Pluto.
Again.
At last Johann looked up from his writing to glower at the bird.
“Grim’s home,” the bird offered.
“He’d be just as useful to you stuffed, you know,” I droned to Johann.
“If only that were true,” he muttered. “We both know I need all the pairs of eyes I can get.”
Johann, once a doctor of alchemy, astrology, magic, and other weird shit, had a famed history with the diabolical. And the very literal demons of his past had led him here.
Tonight, along with robes of red, the doctor wore the fez Flora had brought him from Morocco.
“Quiet night, I hope?” he hedged.
“I had no complaints,” I grumbled, which I supposed was true enough.
Five large and decorative stone vats encircled his station, the swirling, misty, and glowing “waters” of each a different hue.
