Page 182 of Just One Little Bargain

“Surely you can review mine separately,” Krell says, smoothing the front of his suit. “My situation requires perhaps ten minutes. Fifteen if the clerk is particularly slow.”

Tavrik slides one ticket through the hatch to him and the other toward me. Mine reads 5096 in fading red ink.

The overhead board flickers.

NOW SERVING 4813.

“You can’t be serious.” Krell looks down at his number. “Expedite mine.”

“With what authority?”

“My rank.”

“Noted.”

“My relationship with senior management.”

Tavrik dips his pen into a cloudy inkpot, scratches something beside Krell’s case number, then blows across the page. “Also noted.”

“What did you write?”

“Hostile toward queue-management procedures.” Tavrik turns one heavy-lidded eye my way. “And you? Any objections, appeals, special relationships with senior personnel, threats against staff, or other administrative grievances you’d like documented while I have the page open?”

“No. I think I’ll just take a seat.”

He gives me an approving look. “Good choice.”

I cross to the nearest empty stretch of stone bench. A succubus is already occupying the other half, long crimson legs crossed at the ankle while she flips through a glossy magazine titled Infernal Living. She shifts her handbag aside to make room.

Krell gives up on Tavrik and stalks away from the podium with his ticket crushed between two fingers. He takes the bench opposite mine, dropping onto the black stone and rattling the metal armrest. He keeps checking the flickering number board overhead.

Around us, the newly consolidated processing hall churns with supernatural misery. Two rows over, a broad-shouldered shifter with silver fur crawling along his forearms keeps trying to flatten his ticket against his thigh, only for one claw to punch through it again. Somewhere behind me, a banshee has been asked to lower her voice for the third time. The answering shriek rattles the glass of Tavrik’s booth hard enough to make me wince. Apparently, nobody involved in the merger considered whether placing a banshee in a communal waiting room might create logistical difficulties.

At the far end of the hall, a ghost keeps flickering in and out while arguing with an automated kiosk that insists he has no corporeal signature. Each time he phases through the screen in frustration, the machine cheerfully resets and asks him to begin again.

Thirty days ago, I’d have been fascinated by a room containing this many supernatural species at once. I’d have watched every one of them, wondered where they came from, what they could do, and how much of what I’d read about them was wrong. But now my mind keeps wandering back to rain against the windows of Foxglove Inn, old floorboards creaking beneath bare feet, the smell of coffee filling the kitchen while Evie stands at the counter with her hair twisted up messily because she refuses to admit she’s still half asleep. All those ordinary little pieces of a life I didn’t realize I was learning by heart until I was somewhere I could no longer reach them.

But most of all, I miss her.

Hardly any time has passed, yet her absence feels wrong in a way I don’t know how to settle into. I keep thinking of things I’d tell Evie, questions I’d ask, stupid observations that would cause her to roll her eyes before she answered anyway. Then I remember there’s no later waiting for us. No walking back through Foxglove’s door when this is over. Whatever we had has ended, and knowing it was coming has done nothing to ease being without her.

By now she’s probably driving through Brindlewood with both hands strangling the steering wheel, mentally composing a list of everything she intends to say to me should I ever become available for murder.

A commotion rises near the far archway. Three hellhounds round the corner, and conversations falter across the waiting room. Even Tavrik pauses over his ledger long enough to watch them, no doubt calculating how much paperwork an accidental mauling would create.

They’re enormous. Smoke feathers from their black coats in ragged streamers, caught and shredded by their own momentum, while ember-red eyes burn beneath heavy brows. Saliva ropes between their jaws and spatters across the floor, where it lands with an acrid hiss and leaves tiny steaming freckles in the stone.

“Why are those off-leash?” someone shrieks.

The lead hound sees me. Recognition transforms him so completely that it would be comical if he weren’t capable of swallowing a human torso intact. His ears spring forward. The thick plume of his tail begins hammering from side to side with such force that his hindquarters sway behind it.

I drop to my knees. “Mauler.”

He launches himself through the room. A cluster of waiting demons scatters with varying degrees of dignity, while Mauler barrels past, followed by Ripper and Gnasher. All three skid across polished stone as they attempt to change direction without reducing speed.

Mauler reaches me first, shoving his massive head into my lap. The force knocks me off balance, and I grip the fur at his neck to steady myself. I hadn’t realized how badly I needed a bit of familiarity down here until I had three hundred pounds of hellhound trying to climb onto me. They’ve spent more nights beside me than most demons ever bothered to.

I bury both hands in the coarse fur behind his ears. Heat radiates through it, startling after the chill of the stone, and Mauler lets out a cavernous groan that rattles through his chest. The sound is so familiar it hurts in an entirely different way.