Page 12 of Client from Hell

Diana glanced up from her meter to regard me with a frown. “Why not you?”

That was a different approach, one I’d never had to answer before. “Well, the cancer is fairly problematic. The last I checked, it could be months before my immune system recovers. I’ll be getting sick often until then.”

“Two weeks at worst, but that’ll be because Lucifer will step in once the hospital has the research data needed for your treatment. They won’t be able to follow your progress long-term, but the work he’ll do with you can be acquired for a pittance from an angel, which the hospitals will hire to give cancer patients the best chances following extensive but successful chemotherapy. The angels don’t take every case, of course, but they’ll step up when they feel someone has gotten the short lot in life. You have gotten the short lot in life, so Lucifer is riled up. To him, we’re just babies, and we should be enjoying our childhoods still. And yes, he is a bastard, and if he doesn’t think you’re having enough fun, he will give you toys. The less fun he thinks you’re having, the more absurd the toys become. Last week, he gave my fiancé building blocks with letters on them and a hint he needed to go back to the basics on what it means to have fun.”

I raised a brow at that. “I’m accepting gifts of LEGO to be delivered at least once a week, and the more complicated the set, the happier I’ll be.”

“He has rules for those.”

“What? There are no rules with LEGO!”

“You have to play with your sets. He will bring children over if he does not think you’re playing appropriately.”

“What’s the point of building a set if you don’t play with them?”

Diana shrugged. “I haven’t figured that part out myself, but those are the rules.”

“Some rules do not bother me. Those rules do not bother me.”

“Then you’ll fit right in. There is the matter of Lucifer’s schedule.”

“Hit me with it.”

Diana set her meter aside long enough to fetch a thick envelope filled with papers, which she handed to me. Inside, I found a printed copy of the Devil’s schedule, which accounted for every minute of his day for two weeks. To my amusement, feeding Darlene was scheduled in most days of the week, and the days she wasn’t scheduled in, there were notes that Lucifer wanted to rile her up and she was to be distracted when she’d normally be fed. Distractions included bringing over the children of their various nieces and nephews, arranging tea with Him in the high heavens, and scheduling meetings she needed to attend but Lucifer did not. To my surprise, Lucifer rarely spent more than an hour or two of each day working with the fucking assholes. “Fucking assholes?”

“The souls in need of an alignment change. Right now, his schedule in the dungeons is light at His request; Lucifer’s been a little crabby lately, mainly because of the current workload.”

I waved the papers. “According to this, the only time he sleeps is if he happens to have successfully tended to his wife’s every need and she’s napping. That can’t be healthy, can it?”

Diana laughed. “He has all of the powers and abilities of an incubus, so he recharges when he’s feeding his wife. The better a time he gives her, the better he feeds. He can also sustain himself on regular food, but that tends to make him grouchy. Sleep isn’t something he technically needs much of, but he usually gets an hour or two a night. Darlene latches onto him after she’s fed, and he hates disturbing his sleeping kitten. After about two hours, she’ll roll over him, wake him up in the process, and he has a chance to escape. We find ways to be flexible with the schedule if she doesn’t let him go. It depends on her hunger levels. Having seen other incubi and succubi, someone meddled with Darlene and gave her a rather restricted diet consisting only of Lucifer. Regular food is something she enjoys, but it doesn’t sustain her much. I suspect He is the culprit. He made her seed and cultivated her from the very beginning, and Lucifer tends to be voracious—and needs to be able to pamper and nurture someone. For all he’s the Devil, a surprising amount of his angelic tendencies survived his fall.”

Goodness. “She just eats for show, then?”

“She eats because she likes it, but essentially, that’s correct. Most succubi don’t have her issues. They can go decades without sexual energy, but it leaves them in poor health. We don’t know what would happen to Darlene, and we don’t want to find out, thus the schedule. She’s held out from feeding for a month or two at a time, but let’s say Lucifer had his hands full once she caught him. And before you get upset, that was a situation of her own making, so don’t feel sorry for her. I’ve been told I will mind my own business if she tries another stunt like that, too.”

I reviewed the Devil’s schedule again. “On the average day, how much of this list actually gets done?”

“With your contributions, we’re hoping we can get almost everything handled. To begin with, you’ll be accompanying him to all of his meetings, taking notes, and tracking any oddities you locate during his conversations in the contracts, and so on.” Diana gestured to the briefcase. “I have a list of oddities we’ve already identified, but we’re hoping another pair of eyes will be able to catch more.”

I wondered what constituted as an oddity, although I could make a few guesses on what was needed of me in contract form. “Oddities as in someone attempting to mask illegal activities? I had an entire class dedicated to how companies attempt to use loopholes to bypass the law.”

“Yes, those sort of oddities. This is outside of your schooling level, I know. Frankly, it’s outside of mine. You’re actually ahead of me. I have no formal college education, so we’ll both be learning as we go. Lucifer’s attorneys are flummoxed, because we know there are people making use of loopholes, but they’re having trouble finding them, too. We’re hoping by having someone dedicated to tracking them and general research we can get down to the bottom of the problems plaguing us.”

I had questions, but I suspected until I signed a lot of paperwork, I’d get no answers. “Dr. Lakset said this would be a paid internship. What can you tell me about the offer?”

“Well, I can tell you that Lucifer is going to scrap the entire offer he put together upon meeting you, and he’ll come back with something else, probably in the morning.”

I referred to his schedule for the day, which had given him time specifically to meet me. Someone had labeled me as Intern Supreme, a title I found to be amusing. “Who made this label?”

“He did. He has a twisted sense of humor. Do yourself a favor. Think about what nickname you would like, make sure it sounds all right with ‘my little’ prefacing it, and come to terms with that becoming part of your life. He’ll use your name some of the time, but when he wants attention, he will use your nickname to annoy you.”

“I’m adding twenty thousand to the bill if I have to put up with that.”

“Trust me, make it yearly, demand a salary, and get every benefit you can worm out of him. Before I leave, I’ll set up a tablet for your use, hook you up with an email address, and email you with research information you can go over along with your test results. The meter is taking its sweet time going through your results, so it might be a while before I have something useful for you. The tablet has a cellular plan, so if your phone isn’t sufficient, you can use the tablet to make calls and use the internet.”

“I have the phone somebody got for me.” I could only presume the phone had come from Lucifer.

I had not expected the Devil to be the kind to give somebody a phone without pestering the recipient for everything he needed.