Page 42

Chapter 41

Devils Don’t Cry

SJ

A nother garbage can was being treated to the contents of my stomach.

“Jeez, Boss, you really committed to your bit back there!” Beezle commented as I heaved.

“Yeah, I don’t think she bought it, though,” Bub added.

“I …” I retched again, but nothing came up. With a cough, I wiped at my mouth.

“What I mean is, you wanted her to think you didn’t care,” Bub explained. “Instead, she knows you care, but thinks you’re scared. A big old scaredy demon.”

“Yeah, but she was still mad, and sad … you hurt her bad,” Beezle remarked.

“Your poetry is truly magnificent,” I muttered, then choked on another retch. There was nothing left to come up. “And the method in which I … ended things with her matters not. Let her believe there was no other factor than my own cowardice at play. Playing down the truth was entirely our intention, was it not?”

“Yeah,” the Hounds chorused.

“I just wish she wasn’t so … final about it all, you know?” Bub whined.

“It was supposed to be final!” I snapped, then shook my head. It wasn’t fair to take my misery out on my Hounds. “What I mean to say is, she will be safe from Hellen’s clutches now.”

The Hounds shared another one of those looks. It was as if they were questioning my sanity.

“Will you cease your silent judgement of me? I already feel utterly wretched, as is evidenced by the puddle of sick in the bottom of this refuse receptacle.”

“Yeah, about that …” Beezle began, side-stepping the sour-smelling can. “Why’d you bring us back into the Ratty-Man’s territory?”

I cleared my throat, wincing at the burn of bile. “I … have something I need to set right.” Straightening, I headed for the end of the alleyway and the road we would cross to The Artful Bite. The scrabbling of Hound nails on the concrete behind me ceased as two mice clawed their way up my trouser leg, and over the back of my shirt to nestle inside the collar.

“Boss,” Beezle warned. “You’re not seriously going to undo his reaping, are you?”

“Yeah, I think that’s real bad form,” Bub added. “That was one of the only things Jemma Bliss wasn’t mad at you about!”

“I have no intention of undoing what has been done,” I muttered, striding across the road. A horn blared, and I turned my head to find one of those silent automobiles careening towards me. I leapt out of the way, chest pounding at the final second, watching with wide eyes as the car swerved and almost clipped a streetlight before righting itself. The owner screeched a stream of profanity out the window at me.

“You’re really messed up, Boss,” Beezle’s little mouse voice shook. “I dunno if now’s the right time to be making decisions.”

“I must make this right. I have the power to … to do some good for her, after all the bad.”

They fell into an uneasy silence, their little mousey eyes burning teeny holes in the back of my neck as I pushed through the door and into the hum of the café. The noise slowly died as I weaved my way through the ridiculous rubbish they called furniture. I must have been exuding such an intense aura of malevolence because the silence became so piercing that all that could be heard was my boots on the polished concrete floor.

Thump, thump, thump.

In time to the thumping in my chest.

I shoved my way past the girl serving at the counter. She watched me, mouth agape, as I headed through the kitchen. One of the staff dropped a ladle. The clatter was deafening. But no one stooped to pick it up. They all stared, eyes wide, as I took the corridor that led to the office.

The noise and chatter resumed in an eerie instant as soon as I was out of sight.

“Did you … did you do that, Boss?”

“I do not know.” It certainly hadn’t been intentional. Although it suited my purposes to have no one question my right to come back into the bowels of this shit pile.

“Hey, babe, why’d it get so—” Chad the Ratty-Man’s skin went from dirty beige to the colour of used dishwater at the sight of me. “You!”

I smirked, and this time, I meant every ounce of the sentiment I put into it. No acting was required for me to feel malicious towards this anal pustule. “Me.”

He backed into his office, mouth working in overdrive, but no sound coming out. Fear rolled off him in fetid waves, and I relished it.

“Wh-what do you want? What did you do to me? D-did Jemma send you?”

“You will not speak her name,” I snarled, chuckling as he tripped over his desk chair and went sprawling across his desk, air hissing in and out of him. “You will tell me the name of the professor to whom you presented the work you stole from her.”

“I … I don’t …” he sputtered, scrabbling his way over the desk, falling awkwardly to the floor on the other side. He popped up again, flicking that hideous, greasy hair out of his eyes. “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about! I don’t want any?—”

I slammed my fist on his desk, cracking the timber. “Cease your lies!”

He flinched, sweat beading on his upper lip. He licked at it, his grotty little tongue darting. How had she ever lowered herself to this filth?

How much lower had she gone, stooping to me?

I shook my head. I couldn’t let myself wallow. “You will tell me, right now, the name of the professor who allowed you to cheat, and steal, and ruin the future of a woman who had more artistic talent in her thumb than you could ever hope to have!”

His skin started to take on a greenish tinge. “I … there was no cheat?—”

But I’d had enough of his falsehoods. With a growl, I threw off my human guise. Horns sprouted, my body lengthened … widened.

His eyes bulged, head tilting back to take me in. And then they rolled back in his head, and he collapsed to the floor.

* * *

“Boss! You’re a badass!” Bub gushed. I ignored his little rodent voice, leaning over the unconscious man and running a claw down the side of his face.

“Wakey, wakey.”

His eyes snapped open. A thin scream erupted from him, but I slapped my hand over his mouth before he could make a scene.

“Are you ready to tell the truth now? Or shall I explain what our little handshake deal means for your eternal soul … and how I could quite easily snap this pitifully spindly little neck of yours and send you down where I come from immediately?”

I moved my hand from his mouth to cage his throat.

“I … oh God!” he panted, and the acrid smell of urine filled the room.

“Oh for badness’ sake, did you just piss yourself?”

“You’re the … the Devil!” was his gasped reply.

I shook my head. “Close, but not quite. I’m his son. But for the purposes of this conversation, I’m your worst fucking nightmare.”

“Are you … are you here to take me to Hell?”

I rolled my eyes. “Not unless you fail to cooperate.” When his face slackened with relief, I squeezed his neck just enough to make it difficult for him to breathe. “The name. Now.” I released my grip to let him speak.

“Greg … Gregory Proctor,” he wheezed.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” I asked, my voice deceptively soothing. Chad nodded frantically, blinking back tears. I smiled indulgently down at him. “But we’re not finished yet.”

Gripping the back of his neck, I dragged him to his feet. “We’re going to pay a little visit to Professor Gregory Proctor, and you’re going to tell him the truth.”

“Can I at least change my pants?” Chad whined, but one cold look from me silenced him.

* * *

The taxi-mobile driver was more than happy to offload his passengers at the university. I could not entirely blame him—one of us was exuding waves of malevolence and barely held rage … the other reeked of piss.

“You know, you can’t just barge into a professor’s office,” Chad rambled, stumbling along beside me. “They have office hours when they’re?—”

“Will you stop your prattle?” I rumbled, striding across an immaculate courtyard framed by soaring trees. This place needed some vibrance. It needed Jemma Bliss. I pinched the bridge of my nose.

Devils don’t cry. Devils don’t cry …

“I’m just saying, he won’t?—”

I rounded on him. “He will!” I let just a hint of the devil in me show on my face.

Chad blanched. “Wha-what are you going to do?”

“Yeah, Boss!” Beezle squeaked by my ear. “What are you gonna do?’

I wasn’t entirely sure. This plan was not a plan at all, just a driving urge to make something right for her amidst all the wrongs that she’d been dealt her entire life.

“You are going to convince Professor Proctor to reinstate Jemma, to let her complete her study, and earn her qualification.”

Chad’s ratty little face went slack. “You … I can’t do that!”

I eyed him darkly. “You can and you will. Or …” I ran my thumb across my throat menacingly. “And your soul belongs to me, you smelly little rodent. So death is no escape from the endless torture that awaits you.”

“Oh my God,” he mumbled tremulously, scraping that hideous lock of hair off his face once more. I itched to scalp him, just to get rid of that stupid hairstyle.

I laughed bitterly. “Oh, She cannot help you now.”

From the look on his face, I thought that if he’d had anything left in his bladder to empty, he would have done so, right there, walking towards a large red brick building with big brass letters pronouncing it ‘Fine Arts’.

* * *

Professor Gregory Proctor was exactly the man I’d imagined from Jemma’s story about him. Small, rotund, and pompous. Salt and pepper hair that was combed perfectly. Trousers with a crease down the front and a tie that had a jaunty pattern similar to those I’d seen on the work pyjamas the healers at the hospital wore. He probably thought that made him approachable.

I thought it made him look like an utter twat.

He answered Chad’s limp-fisted knock, his eyebrows raising when he spied his ex-student.

“Oh! Mister Cockburn! What a pleasant surprise. It’s been, what … two years since that alumni exhibition! Goodness, we got a little tipsy on sake together that night, hoho!”

If I wasn’t completely fuming at how friendly these two seemed to be, I would have heartily guffawed at Chad’s surname. As it was, both Beezle and Bub were wheezing under my earlobes.

“Cockburn! You honestly couldn’t make this up!” Beezle choked out. I shifted my shoulder to silence him. The movement caught the eye of Professor Proctor, who lifted his gaze from Chad to me. His bushy eyebrows disappeared up his wrinkled forehead.

“Well, well, well, what a delightful addition to this little surprise party.”

My fingers twitched to choke the life out of this self-important little shit. My expression must have given me away because the smile dropped from his face and his jowls wobbled, his eyes darting back to Chad.

“We should really go inside, Greg,” Chad mumbled. Greg? He was on a first-name basis with this git?

‘Greg’ backed away, a shaky hand ushering us into his office. I took a cursory glance around. No art on the walls, which seemed very strange for an art professor. There were, however, dozens of framed articles. All of them written by ‘G.F. Proctor, Esquire’. All of which seemed to be from art journals. And all of which appeared to be scathing critiques of actual artists.

The hatred I felt for this man was so intense that I felt my human form slipping involuntarily. I forced myself to calm down. Now was not the time to play that card.

“He knows,” Chad blurted without ceremony the second Gregory closed the door. The older man’s shoulders stiffened, and he took his time turning back to face us.

“What does he mean, ‘he knows’?” Bub peeped as my rage began to boil up through my stomach, searing my chest, making me want to roar.

“What are you talking about, Mister Cockburn?” Gregory asked, his tone careful, hesitant. Full of deceit.

I’d had enough. I surged forwards, gripping the collar of his starched shirt and slamming the unfortunate little arse into the wall, rattling all his precious framed articles. The breath squeaked out of him.

“I know that you and ‘Mister Cockburn’ colluded to enable him to steal the work of another student, presenting it as his own and ensuring her expulsion from her course!”

“Urrrrgggh!” he gurgled. I released him enough to let him suck in a lungful of air. “I … I don’t know?—”

I hefted him off the ground again, revelling at the terrified gurgling sound he made, the way his stumpy little legs flailed wildly. “Why do you pathetic little humans continue to lie, even when it’s so clear you’ve been caught out?” Dumping him on the floor, I loomed over him, finally letting go of the human form. My skin darkened, my horns sprouted. “Time for your reckoning, little man!”

“Wha-what are you?” he blathered, scooting away across the floor, scurrying towards his desk. I sighed, striding over and gripping him by his belt, dragging him back out.

“I am the Prince of Hell. And unless you wish to spend your eternity being tortured by my demons in the most … creative … of ways, you will do as you are told.”

Gregory’s eyes darted between me and Chad, his eyelids fluttering frantically. “Is this real, Cockburn? Did you rat me out to this … this fiend?”

Chad’s shoulders slumped in defeat.

Gregory snapped his head towards me, his chins flapping frantically. “He’s lying, I … he threatened me with physical harm if I did not comply with—” He tried to scuttle around me, scrabbling on all fours towards his office door.

I sighed and whipped my tail, wrapping it around his ankle and dragging him across the floor. A thin wail trembled from him.

“I said, you will do as you are told!” I growled, lifting him in the air so he dangled by his ankle. His shirt slipped up, exposing a jiggling, hairy belly. Garbled, terrified sounds erupted from his lips as I dumped him headfirst into the plush chair behind his desk. “Are you ready to comply? Or are we going to continue to play this game where you think you have a choice? I must admit, I’m finding it rather tiresome. Perhaps I’ll just reap your soul now and be done with it.”

His eyes went so round I could see the whites all the way around them. He scrambled to right himself, huddling in his chair. “Wh … what do you want from me?”

I leaned across the desk, my eyes blazing. “I want you to right the wrong you did to Jemma Bliss.”

“I … I cannot … I will lose my position as professor!”

My nostrils flared. “I care nought for your position! I care for the woman you both screwed over. I care that she has a chance to make the life she dreams of, and that requires her to complete her university studies!”

Gregory blinked. Blinked again. “You … you care for that silly girl?”

I slapped my hands on the desk with such force it cracked. “That ‘silly girl’ deserves the opportunities you denied her. Unlike this greasy, talentless little waste of space,” I gestured towards Chad, who was hunched miserably against the wall, “she worked hard, and creatively, and would have been qualified to go on to bigger and better things, were it not for you!”

“But h-he was the one who stole her work!” he protested weakly.

I rolled my eyes. “And you, their professor, would have known it was not his work, and you allowed him to submit it anyway. And then you accused her of stealing his work! And you expelled her from your class, ensuring she could never finish her studies!” Frustration rumbled in the back of my throat. “Take responsibility for your own actions, you pathetic little man!”

Finally, Gregory’s eyebrows dropped, defeat in every line of his bloated form. “Yes. Alright. It was … a misjudgement, on my part.”

A misjudgement? A fucking misjudgement ?

“Reap him, Boss. He doesn’t deserve to get off scot-free!” Beezle hissed.

He deserved much worse than a simple reaping, but I held back. My biggest concern was getting Jemma what she was owed from all of this, and I needed this sad little excuse for a human to make that happen. “And what do you plan to do about it?” I rasped.

Gregory tugged at his tie, his face pallid. “I can … I’ll pull some strings, have her reinstated, all her previous credits honoured. She will need to come back to complete my class, but I can … she will be given preferential treatment?—”

“She will be treated fairly, the same way all your students should be treated!” I warned darkly. “She does not need your charity to excel. She can do that all on her own.”

Gregory’s bottom lip wobbled precariously. “You … you really do care about her, don’t you?”

Something in my chest cracked wide open at his words. Devils don’t cry. Devils don’t cry .

“She is one of the very few things I am capable of caring about.” I swallowed back the thickness in my throat, dragging out a chair and settling into it. “Now, I will wait here until you have made all the preparations required to fix your gross ‘misjudgement’.”

“But that could take hours!”

“I have nowhere else to be.” I leaned back, clasping my hands behind my head. His eyes darted to my horns, black and curling from my hair, and he shuddered.

“Alright,” he mumbled, opening the lid on his computer.

“Can I go now? You don’t need me for this,” Chad whined. I rounded on him, fixing him with a glare full of disdain.

“You move a muscle, and you will find yourself in Hell so fast you wouldn’t even realise it had happened until you were already stripped naked with your body being used as a canvas for a heavy-handed demon using knives as paintbrushes and your blood as his paint. You will wait here, in your wretched piss-pants, until I say you can move.”

Chad slid down the wall, his head dropping to his knees before immediately snapping back up, his nose wrinkled in disgust at his own stench.

I chuckled darkly. “This is no more than you deserve, Ratty-Man. In fact, it’s distinctly less than you deserve.”

“I wish I’d never met Jemma fucking Bliss,” he muttered.

“I can assure you; she wishes she’d never met you either.”

After my pathetic performance today, would she lump me in with Chad Ratty-Man as just another past mistake?

Devils don’t cry.

* * *

Dusk was settling over the city when I emerged from the university. In one hand, I held an official Faculty of Fine Arts envelope, addressed to Jemma Bliss.

“You didn’t reap him!” Bub complained.

“I have all the time in the world to come back for him,” I muttered. “This is more pressing than that piddling little soul.”

We made our way along the street, seeking the red box that I’d been assured was the place to deposit the letter so that it made it into Jemma’s hands. The sidewalks were busy with workers leaving their jobs, seeking sustenance and rest. I, too, needed both, desperately. Today had taken its toll on me far more intensely than I had expected. But ensuring this letter was posted was my priority.

No rest for the wicked. I let out a bitter chuckle. Now, where the Home is this letter thing?

“Excuse me,” I called, approaching an older woman as she passed. “Do you know where I can find a red letter receptacle? I was led to believe there would be one nearby.”

The woman smiled up at me, her eyes widening as she took in my face. “Simeon? Oh my goodness, it is you! How are you? Back from your business trip, then? Jemma’s been missing you like crazy!”

I gaped down at the woman, my chest thrumming. How did she know me? And how did she know Jemma?

“Sally,” Beezle squeaked in my ear. “The nurse from the hospital who took us up to see Jemma and the girls that day.”

“Ah … good evening, Sally.” I made a half-hearted attempt to sound suave but only managed tired and flat.

Sally’s expression turned from delighted to concerned. “Are you quite alright, Simeon? You seem … a bit off.”

“Understatement of the century,” Bub remarked. I shrugged to jostle him into silence.

“Just heading home. It’s been an excruciatingly long day. But I really need to … to deposit this envelope into a red letter receptacle. It’s rather urgent.”

Sally peered down at the letter, and, stifling a gasp, I quickly placed my thumb over the writing so Sally wouldn’t see that it was addressed to Jemma. I could just imagine the inquisition I’d get from the well-meaning busybody if she thought I, the ‘boyfriend’ of Jemma Bliss, was posting letters to her rather than just dropping in at her house.

“Oh, of course! You poor fellow, I can see that you’re utterly spent. There’s a post box just out the front of my apartment building—if you want, I can drop it in for you—save you the hassle?”

I gripped the letter tighter, clutching it to my chest. “It is imperative that I personally see this letter delivered to the … the post box.”

Her expression turned dubious, but she nodded. “Alrighty then, if you head straight here for two blocks and then take a left, there’s one out the front of the library.”

“Thank you, Sally.” I gave a curt nod, turning in the direction she had indicated.

“Will we see you at the hospital again soon?” she called out, stopping me in my tracks. “The girls do not stop talking about you. And Jemma gets this misty-eyed look whenever I mention you to her. She’s very taken with you, you know.”

Devils don’t cry. Devils do not cry!

“I’m afraid my schedule is very busy for the next little while,” I muttered without turning to look at her, too afraid of what she would see in my face. “Tell the … the girls that I miss them very much, and I hope that their art is going well … and their healing.”

I strode off without waiting for her to reply, blinking furiously.

“Guess devils do cry, Boss …” Beezle’s quiet observation was so full of sympathy that I wanted to howl. Instead, I picked up the pace until the red box I was seeking came into view. When the letter disappeared through the little slot, I blew out a long, tremulous gust of breath.

“I guess we do,” I mumbled. Relief flooded me, as much for being able to admit that out loud as for the fact that alongside the library, there was a very convenient dark alley, perfect for conjuring a portal.

I sidestepped into it, heading right to the end, away from the streetlights.

“Time to go home.” I sighed, realising that there would be no rest for me even once we returned to Hell. I had a minimum of a dozen Soul Tokens to manufacture overnight. To placate my monstrous sister.

The portal was slower than ever to expand. Perhaps because of my reluctance to use it. Perhaps because it didn’t head to the destination I so desperately wished it to—the destination that was now forever barred to me.

For the best, I reminded myself, as the portal finally reached its full size, and I stepped towards it.

If I hadn’t been so terribly exhausted, I might have paused when I noticed that the portal edges had a strange, bluish tinge to them instead of the normal magenta.

If my emotions hadn’t been so overwrought, I might have wondered why when I stepped through, it seemed to get brighter rather than darker.

And if my brain hadn’t been filled with regrets about the last twenty-four hours, I might have pondered over the fact that instead of fire and brimstone, the scents that heralded a return to Hell, I smelled that oddly delicious aroma that I’d noticed when the water had fallen from the sky, the evening of Jemma’s first repayment.

But I didn’t do any of those things. I just walked right into the trap that had been laid out for me.