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Twelve
The rest of the fight was beginning to die down, thanks largely to the two archangels and Cerberus. The three worked in tandem like a super-charged celestial trio, making short work of any demons who were stupid enough to challenge them. Cerberus was chasing down the last few, wielding a fly strip in each hand like nunchucks.
A few of them popped out of the humans they had been inhabiting of their own accord, vanishing downwards in a puff of sooty black smoke as the bodies collapsed on the ballroom floor in piles of gross brown goo.
“They’re defecting!” she shouted. “They’re escaping back to Hell!”
“Let them go,” Raphael called, sounding bored. “Their sojourn to the human realm was short-lived.
“Nice pun,” Mike congratulated him, impressed.
“It wasn’t a pun,” Raphael frowned.
“Okay,” Mike said, smirking.
Cerberus leaned forward to inspect the mess on the floor, wrinkling his broad nose. “This is actually disgusting.”
A loud pounding on the main doors to the ballroom made everyone jump. The doors tried to swing outward, but someone had bent a metal chair leg into a pretzel shape around the handles to prevent anyone from leaving the room.
“Police!” a rough voice bellowed from the other side. “Open this door or we’ll break it down!”
“That’s our cue,” Death announced.
“Everyone!” Cerberus called, abandoning his pest-control nunchucks. “This way!” He marched over to the wall and created a portal, ushering the remaining celestials through it as quickly as he could. Bunny had never been so happy to see the Lobby as she was in that moment.
“Well that was an adventure,” she sighed with relief as soon as the portal was closed behind them.
“Best conference we’ve had in a millennium,” Cerberus told her with a wink, causing everyone to turn and look at him incredulously.
“What about the demons?” Death asked Raphael.
“We sent as many home as we could while we were out and about,” the sour-faced angel shrugged, “but there are still quite a few on the human plane.”
Bunny held up her hands, shifting them like she was weighing invisible fruit. “And by ‘a few’, you mean…”
Michael dropped the bomb. “A few thousand or so.”
“Not many then,” Bunny replied sarcastically.
“There’ll be an inquiry,” Raphael warned. “Possibly mediation. If the Soul Dealer was behind all this, then we know who would have been behind the Soul Dealer.”
“Just when I thought he couldn’t get any stupider,” Roberta sniffed from behind her desk. She pulled out a pump bottle full of something that looked like hand sanitizer out of her top drawer, squirted some onto her hand, and then passed it around.
“Who?” Bunny asked, happy to be ridding her hands of any shadow residue. Just thinking about the Soul Dealer gave her the heebies.
“The Big D,” Michael replied, without even a hint of humor, sarcasm, or just plain irony.
Bunny thought about whether or not she should laugh. “I’d ask if you mean who I think you mean,” she said, “but frankly, I’m fresh outta fucks and I need something stronger than coffee.”
She threw them all a tired smile and began to walk toward one of the huge marble columns in the hope she could make a portal to take her to her apartment.
“Hey, Bunny—hold up!”
She turned to see Death jogging her way. Mist swirled around the bottom of his black peacoat, and she paused as he approached.
“Hey,” she said, not knowing what else she had to say at this point. She was tired, sore, hungry, and really felt like she could sleep for a hundred years straight herself, conference or no.
“Hey.”
