by Nazri Noor
Closing the lockbox with a decisive click, she swept a lock of hair away from her face, sighed, then spoke again.
“Listen, both of you. I’m sorry again about how I behaved the last time we saw each other.”
Florian coughed softly into his hand. “You mean when you turned your shop into a nightmare house and attacked us with your entire supply of raw materials?”
I drummed my fingernails on her countertop, narrowing my eyes at her. “You mean when you levitated every needle, pin, and pair of scissors in the place and tried to bleed us to death?”
The tips of Beatrice’s ears reddened, and she huffed, folding her arms. “Don’t make this harder than it already is. Look, I’m sorry, okay? It was a tough decision for me to make, and in the end, I don’t think that surrendering my soul to Arachne would have been the right thing to do. There are other ways to acquire power.”
I rubbed my forearm, exchanging a slightly guilty glance with Florian. “Yeah, well, to be fair, it turns out that Arachne kind of had the right idea all along. The two of you hiding Laevateinn meant that Loki wouldn’t be able to pull off his master plan, which we did end up stopping. In the end, Arachne telling you to keep the sword would have meant just waiting for the boil to pop.” I picked up an invisible pin, then stabbed it downwards, pretending to poke into an invisible abscess. “Me and Florian, we sort of sped up the process and lanced the boil. It was hella messy, but at least it’s over.”
Beatrice wrinkled her nose. “I mean, I feel like you could have used less disgusting analogies, but I see your point.” Then the left corner of her mouth turned up, like she was trying to smile. “And thanks for understanding.”
“And anyway,” I said, trying to perk up the conversation. “Something sort of good came out of it in the end. We got a new pet.” I pulled the teeny tiny cube out of my pocket, rested it on Beatrice’s counter, then leaned in to whisper. “It’s okay, boy. We’re all friends here.”
With a resounding, wooden thud, Box expanded to his full size and clunked onto the table. Beatrice’s eyes went wide – with horror, I thought at first – but she clapped her hands once and gave a delighted squeal.
“It’s a mimic! Where did you find it? Aww, I’ve always wanted one for a pet.” She bent closer, patting Box along the top of his lid. Unlike with Loki, this time he didn’t react by snapping at her fingers.
Florian joined the little love fest, offering his own pats, which Box gratefully accepted. “Long story, but he followed us home, and he’s actually been super helpful.”
“Tell me about it.” Beatrice riffled through her drawers, pulling out a handful of mismatched buttons that Box was only too eager to take as a treat. She smiled as he munched and crunched away. “They’re so good for storage. There’s a reason they look like treasure chests, you know.”
My eyes lit up. “We just found out today. He sucked up a whole pile of treasure, then spat it out again later like it was nothing.”
Beatrice nodded. “They’ve got a bunch of stomachs, and I’m pretty sure a few of them are dedicated just to keeping things. It’s why wizards and dragons love them so much. Oh, and for other reasons, too. They’re arguably better than guard dogs because nobody sees them coming. Like, there’s just no warning. One moment you’re just a cat burglar, standing next to a potted plant. Next minute?” She sliced her hand across her throat, making a rasping noise. “Headless. Decapitated. Dead.”
“Badass,” Florian muttered.
“And they’re really good at detecting other things in disguise, too. I mean, a mimic will easily recognize another mimic, but camouflage is so second nature to them that they’ll also easily spot someone or something that might be under the protection of illusory magic. A glamour, for example, or even a full metamorphic transformation.”
I patted Box on the head. “I admit, that part I didn’t know about. He’s even handier than I thought.”
“Plus,” Beatrice said, feeding him another handful of buttons, “they eat just about anything. Upkeep is so easy.”
Box belched, then licked at her fingers with his huge, horrible tongue. Beatrice cooed again. “Aww. Sweet little baby.”
I let Beatrice and Box get to know each other for a couple more minutes before I broke the bad news. “Listen, I’m glad you two are getting along so well, but we’ve got to be heading back home. We’ll probably want to stop for dinner someplace, too.”
“Ooh. Can I come?”
I blinked at her in quiet surprise. Beatrice Rex looked so genuinely hopeful that I felt like saying “No” would have shattered something inside her. Plus, there was no reason that she couldn’t come along. We were maybe, probably, finally learning to become friends.
“Sure. We’ll help you close up. If there are no objections, I was thinking we could all grab some fried chicken?”
Both Beatrice and Florian hummed noises of approval, and the three of us went around shuttering windows, locking doors, and throwing drapes over creepy, slowly shifting leather goods that may or may not have been still alive. But partway through, Beatrice rushed to her counter, hurriedly sifting through the drawers for something.
I followed her, seeing that there was nothing else around the shop that needed turning down. “What’s up? What’re you looking for?”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you. Someone came by earlier today and left a note for you.”
Florian and I looked at each other and somehow managed to exchange a fair bit of information in that brief glance. We both had an idea who left that note, and neither of us was particularly happy about it.
“The note, and the person who left it. Was it, I don’t know, a woman in a bikini?”
She raised an eyebrow and scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Fine. Then was it maybe a guy wearing a hoodie? Youngish, looks like a teenager. Sort of dresses like a skater.” I lifted my hand out. “About yay tall?”
Beatrice stopped mid-riffle, then looked me dead in the eye. “How did you know that?”
I grimaced. Of course. Belphegor.
8
Belphegor’s instructions were written in just the sort of lazy, half-hearted scrawl you’d expect from someone whose official designation was the Prince of Sloth. And not much about the instructions he left us had been appealing. We still ended up doing a fast food chicken dinner with Beatrice topside in Valero – where else but at a Happy Chicken, another one of Loki’s cholesterol-laden innovations.
Color me optimistic, but by then I thought it was safe to trust her with the note’s contents. Besides, knowing her, she probably snuck a peek at it before handing it over to us, anyway. It wasn’t like Belphegor bothered with an envelope or anything, just a scrap of paper that anyone could have torn out of a notebook.
It was a good thing we brought it up, too. Between bites of chicken and huge, heaping mouthfuls of mashed potato, Beatrice Rex offered what advice she could on meeting Belphegor’s bizarre standards for a communion. She did, after all, give us some help with tracking down Arachne and her domicile. Never mind that Beatrice happened to be in cahoots with Arachne back then. Different time, different place, water under the bridge and all that.
“I’ve got to admit, this is probably the weirdest communion I’ve ever heard about.” A chicken drumstick in her fingers, Beatrice licked her thumbs before continuing, as if the act of doing so was helping her to think. “The only thing I can really recommend is following the instructions precisely. It’s a good thing Belphegor isn’t asking for specific objects or artifacts to sacrifice, or this could get even more annoying. Or expensive, for that matter.”
A quickly cooling hunk of chicken breast waited to be eaten in my hand as I stared glumly down at Belphegor’s note, which I left facing upwards on our table. In the morning, I told myself. We’ll deal with this in the morning. Right in that moment, all I wanted was some crispy fried chicken skin, potatoes, and maybe one or two biscuits. I just wanted to have a good time while I could,
okay?
We finished off our dinner – Beatrice was very meticulous about eating her chicken down to the bone – and went our separate ways. Of course, for me and Florian, that meant heading back to Paradise together, but as we went off to our respective huts, there was still that cloying sense of unease hanging in the air between us.
See, Belphegor’s instructions specifically called for us to show up before nine in the morning, ostensibly because he expected us to put in a full day of work in his hellhole. Plus it didn’t help that the directions he specified for accessing his domicile were so off-putting.
Creepy, to say the least. The entities all had their idiosyncrasies, sure. Arachne liked fortune cookies from Chinese places. Artemis demanded a tithe of cheesy snacks whenever someone approached her for a favor, preferably a jumbo pack of Snacky Yum-Yums, her favorite brand.
Belphegor didn’t ask for anything especially difficult to find, but it discomfited me still. Every communion needed some blood as part of the offering, sure. Well and good. But the Prince of Sloth seemed to be asking for a little too much blood, if you asked me.
The destination? The Beauregard, an ancient hotel in one of Valero’s more, shall we say, weathered districts. Back in the eighties, it was supposed to be something big, the kind of place where you’d spot a movie star if you were lucky, a nice little retreat from Hollywood, not too near to the limelight, but never too far.
These days, as I saw when our rideshare pulled up, it was probably better off condemned. The building’s facade was peeling, paint jobs from maybe the late nineties at most already chipping away. Anything that hadn’t been eroded by time was weathered by, well, the weather, huge, gross streaks of greenish brown trailing from the mouths of concrete gargoyles that, even in the Beauregard’s heyday, couldn’t have possibly looked anything near classy.
“Imagine what this place looks like at night,” Florian said, shutting the door to our car and waving our driver off.
I looked up at the crappy exteriors, all two floors of bad maintenance and neglect, and shuddered to think. When night fell, the Beauregard probably looked like the perfect Halloween haunted house.
“They should rent this out in October. It’s just creepy enough to work.” I stuck my hands in my pockets, my fingers chilly despite the warmth of the day.
I let Florian take the lead as we approached the building. The both of us had packed to be prepared, based on experience from the last time we’d taken on contract work for an entity. Artemis was really chill about us improvising with tools, letting me use a battle-axe from the Vestments to chop wood when I admitted that I had no alternatives. Priscilla was even around to keep us fed and watered. But this was going to be a whole different kind of work environment.
We had no ideas at all about what to expect from Belphegor – whether the demon prince even cared about safety standards and shit – so you can be damn sure that Florian and I came prepared. We both wore jackets over tank tops, so we could shuck or add layers depending on what kind of climate we were going to be up against. We brought an ample supply of bottled water, too, just in case, tucked safely into Box, who was, in turn, tucked safely into my pocket.
Plus, there was that tiny matter of how we were even supposed to access Belphegor’s domicile in the first place. Getting indoors wasn’t going to be fun even the first time around, and I sure as hell didn’t want to think about what Florian and I would have to do if we went out on a lunch break and had to come back.
Our point person was already standing at the grimy double doors, her sallow face peering out of windows that hadn’t seen a good polishing in possibly decades. Despite how rundown the Beauregard was, though, I still fancied the idea of giving the place a facelift better than whatever Belphegor had in store for us.
Frankly speaking, though, the only good kind of renovation the Beauregard could have seen at that point would have involved a wrecking ball and a stick of dynamite.
“Get in here,” the woman said gruffly. She had the face and build of a bulldog, plus the temper to match, her lips clenched around what I had to assume was her fifth breakfast cigarette, considering the rasp of her voice.
The musty, ancient air of the Beauregard hit us like a cloud as we walked in, almost like a palpable wall of old, dead Hollywood history. Yellowing, peeling black and white portraits of fallen movie stars plastered the walls, tilted off-center and probably left that way after some earthquake.
What used to be a deep, rich red carpet was pulling up at the corners, and the brass knobs and railings of the hotel were specked with stains and verdigris, the patina of a once-glamorous place lost to time. Something like deep sadness permeated the building. This used to be a place of lush luxury, of excess, and I understood immediately why Belphegor kept a tether there.
We followed the woman as she waddled up to the counter, where a single key was waiting, attached to a laminated card with a number on it.
“Room 666,” she grumbled.
Of course it was.
“And don’t take the elevator. Don’t work. All the way up the stairs.”
On the second floor, she explained, which hardly made sense, but there we were. Whoever this woman was probably knew who or what she was working for. The Beauregard was clearly out of service, probably only kept open to accommodate the unfortunate, desperate few who needed to come to Belphegor for favors and contracts. She watched us with hard eyes, taking wheezing tokes of her cigarette as Florian and I clambered up the stairs.
Rickety, naturally, and you had to watch your step because they were covered in that same carpet that was coming off the floor in sheets, curling up at the corners. Up on the second floor, the only light came from windows at the far ends of the corridors. Belphegor wanted to keep an active tether, sure, but I guess no one in their right mind would pay to light a whole unused floor, even if it was only for the rare supplicants who made their way up there.
Room 666 was at the far end of the hall, in a dead end that didn’t have windows opening out into the sunlight, which I suppose made sense for the den of a demon prince. The third number six had fallen off its top screw and hung off the edge of its bottom, so that the room number read more like 669. Dangling that way, it swiveled and squeaked as I unlocked the door.
Florian grunted noncommittally, as unimpressed as I was with the rest of the Beauregard, and with the room. It looked like your standard hotel room, just way dumpier from years of disuse, thick cobwebs hanging like great drapes of silk and dust from the ceiling. Thin shafts of light pierced through the grubby windows, the room’s curtains thrown open and left that way by its previous occupants, illuminating the queen-size bed in the middle of the room.
It also lit up the circle drawn on the floor.
That was arguably the newest thing about the entire building, a geometrically perfect circle inscribed in metallic paint, with the bed as its center. Those were the ingredients for a communion, after all: a circle, a drop of blood, and an offering.
“Well,” Florian sighed. “It’s now or never.”
This was the part I’d been dreading all day, hell, since the night before when Beatrice Rex handed us our instructions. The two of us had to get into the bed. Anyone who wanted access to Belphegor’s hell had to start by throwing themselves onto this musty old mattress. The thick layers of dust were not at all encouraging. The bloodstains in its center, less so.
But get in the bed we did. I balanced my duffle bag on my stomach, then raised my hand to the ceiling, clutching my fingers in time around the shaft of a dagger that I’d summoned from the Vestments. According to Belphegor’s directions, no incantation was necessary to enter the domicile. All we needed was the intent, the instrument for bloodletting, and, of course, a sufficient amount of blood.
I hesitated, the knife over my torso. “I’m still not so sure about this, Florian. What if this is a trap?”
Florian placed his hands behind his head, trying his best to relax despite the utter weirdness of it all. “I doubt it.
You’re far more useful to the Seven alive than dead. I’d be more worried about what Belphegor might try to pull on you when we get into the domicile, rather than the process itself.”
“Fair point.” I stared at the point of the dagger, taking a deep breath as my muscles fought the impulse of what I was about to do. “Okay. See you on the other side. Here goes.”
“See you there, buddy.”
Florian’s breathing made the mattress shift, but it was soothing, rhythmic, a reminder of the small, silent patterns of life. He shut his eyes, ready. I sure as hell wasn’t, but now or never, exactly as he said.
I shoved the knife in my heart.
9
I wish there was some way of telling you what happened next without making it sound so awful, but I also wish that I didn’t have to enter someone’s home by stabbing myself in the chest. Whatever happened to a doorbell, or some brass knockers?
No. I very cleanly felt the bite of divine steel as it cut through the flesh of my chest, then carved down into my heart. I felt the agonizing fire of my heart, the vibration of its beating and thrashing running up the dagger’s point, the hilt faintly throbbing in my hand as the life left my body.
I heard Florian’s soft, sorrowful, uncertain whispers as blood flowed in impossible amounts from the depths of the wound in my chest, as crimson red gushed out of me in horrible waves. I saw the sunlight fade and the world around me blur as I died. I heard Florian drowning on lungfuls of my blood as the both of us sank into darkness, into the wet, warm depths of the bed in the Beauregard suite.
You want to know my theory on why an incantation wasn’t required for that communion? That was a lie. Belphegor got exactly what he wanted, the sick fuck. The gurgling noises I made as blood filled my throat, the desperate inhalations of breath I took as my body shut down and died – that was the incantation.
