“When you dance with the Devil, you don’t get to pick the tune.” --Unknown

While Yehudiah tried to calm Paula, another hum rippled through the air, a sigh of relief from the universe as another suffering soul crossed between the Planes. The same fuzzy texture clouded the air as a second figure appeared.

“Ricky, you stupid sonofabitch,” said Mara.

Still confused from his transition, Ricky blinked and shook his head, and then stared at Mara blankly. A moment later, he seemed to finally recognize her and angrily blurted out, “Mara? What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Charming as always, I see.”

Ignoring the sarcasm she hurled back at him, Ricky whirled to stare at the mangled, leaking wreck that used to be his Maserati. “My car! I just bought the Goddamn thing. Sonofabitch, it’s totaled.”

Mara rolled her eyes. “Well, you’re a quick one today, aren’t you? Car’s not the only thing totaled there, Einstein.”

“Ricky! We’re dead. We died in the crash,” wailed Paula, who’d managed to regain a modicum of self-control.

“Dead? Bullshit. We had a deal, Mara. A deal!” Ricky turned to stare at Mara and took an aggressive step towards her. She raised her eyebrows sharply.

“Slow that roll, Sparky,” she warned.

“Deal? What are you talking about?” Paula interrupted.

Mara sighed. “Paula. Sweetie. Yehudiah’s explained to you what he is, yes? So, if he’s an angel, logic would dictate that I’m what? Give it your best guess.”

Paula looked at her blankly for a moment before her eyes doubled in size. “Oh my God. Are you the Devil?”

Mara threw her head back and laughed heartily before she answered, “Am I the…? Oh, sweetie, no. I’m not The Devil. Just ‘a’ devil will do.”

Standing straighter, Mara pushed her dark hair behind her shoulders and stared at Paula, something feral and dangerous smoldered in her dark eyes as she relaxed her iron control, allowing a hint of her true nature to shine through. Mara’s eyes turned from deep brown to crimson red, flames dancing inside them, while the red highlights in her hair grew more pronounced. Shadows curled and licked around her ankles, begging for her attention, but when she felt the discomfort between her shoulder blades, her wings thirsting to be released, Mara imposed her will again.

No wings. Not in front of an angel. Never in front of any immortal.

“We had a deal,” Ricky insisted again, but his voice faded and he stepped back as Mara turned towards him, her eyes still flaming.

“We do have a deal, but you didn’t really pay attention when we made it, did you?”

“I did! You said I could have 10 years of being the most famous movie star in the world, and get all the things that go with that. Cars, houses, women…”

“And then what?” asked Mara.

“After the 10 years, you’d come for something.”

“Something?” Mara asked, prodding him to say more.

“Yea, you said something. I figured it would be money and I’d have plenty of that.”

Mara laughed. “Money? I don’t need money. You never made me define what the price was for my help. The something was you, you moron. You.”

“But it hasn’t been 10 years, it’s only been three,” Ricky countered quickly, a whiff of desperation clinging to his words.

“Do you remember what else I said, right before we sealed your deal? I told you that the deal didn’t make you invincible. That if you did something completely stupid—like standing in front of an oncoming train and letting it hit you—that you forfeited your unused years? That I wasn’t going to miraculously bring you back to life simply so you could have the balance of your time?”

“I remember. And I wasn’t doing anything stupid!”

“Nothing stupid? You’re kidding, right?” That question came from Yehudiah and Mara smothered a laugh.

“Ricky,” she said, “you hit 120 in your Maserati while you were completely coked out. I don’t know, call me old-fashioned, but I think that qualifies as pretty fucking stupid.” Mara looked over at Yehudiah and although she suspected that he agreed with her, the angel refrained from additional commentary.

“And even better for me, you took poor little Paula with you. It wasn’t her time to die, you know. She just had the bad luck to agree to give you a blowjob in your brand new toy,” said Mara, continuing with her narration. Paula gasped and blushed, and Yehudiah looked decidedly uncomfortable.

“What? C’mon, what’s with everyone?” Mara rolled her eyes. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being able to give great head.”

“It wasn’t my time to die?” Paula’s voice was barely as squeak.

Yehudiah’s voice was soothing and deep. “No, it wasn’t, not really. All mortals have a day and a time when they are supposed to die, but it doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes the choices you make cause the plan to go awry.”

“You’re probably better off,” said Mara.

“Better off? But what about the life I was supposed to have?” Paula sounded defeated.

“It wasn’t going to be the life you dreamed of,” said Mara. “Yehudiah, we should tell her what she would have been in for if this accident never happened. What her life would have been like with Mr. Movie Star here.”

“That won’t do anyone any good,” said the angel. He looked at Paula. “We should go.”

“Might make her feel better about being dead,” countered Mara.

Paula wrung her hands anxiously, and the angel glared at Mara. Apprehensive, regretful souls were much harder to transition.

“You’re. Not. Helping.” The angel bit out each word.

“Tell me,” demanded Paula.

Mara came over to stand close to Paula, her flames diminishing and her eyes turning back to the deep brown they were before she let the flames shine through. Her voice softened with a touch of empathy. “Ricky here is—well, he was—bad news. If you’d made it to the overlook you’d have gone down on him like you promised, and it would have been great. He would have kept you around for a little while. But he would have gotten you into the coke, and then worse. And when you got too strung out and turned into a liability, he would have cut you loose without a second thought and found his next young thing. You would have ended up on the street doing disgusting things for your next hit, and your family back in Ohio would have spent their days waiting for a call from LAPD telling them you’d overdosed or been murdered.”

“You don’t know that,” Paula whispered, horrified.

“I do know that.” Mara’s voice was a little sad. “Go with Yehudiah, Paula. He’ll take care of you—you really are going to a better place. A lot better than where Ricky is going.”

Mara glanced up in time to see surprise flash across the Angel of Death’s face. Are you really surprised? I’m a devil, Yehudiah, not a monster.

Sirens wailed in the distance. Mara looked at the angel and said, “You should go. She’s seen enough.”

“On that, we are agreed.”

Yehudiah moved to stand next to Paula, but then paused. He cocked his head slightly as he looked at Mara thoughtfully, as if he was weighing a serious decision, and then said, “Peace be with you, Mara.”

“Not easy in my line of work, but I’ll try,” answered Mara.

Yehudiah unfurled his magnificent, white wings. Each feather was touched with a silvery-golden light and he stretched the wings out to gather Paula closer to him. Enveloped by warmth and light, her face moved from awestruck to calm.

“I’m not angry with him anymore,” Paula said to the Angel of Death, her voice tinted with wonder.

“That’s part of the process,” he answered.

“There was a lot more I wanted to do.” Paula’s voice was wistful.

“I know,” Yehudiah said. “Are you ready to go?”

“I am.” There was resignation in her whispered reply.

Mara raised her arm to shield her eyes as Yehudiah’s aura swelled until he and Paula were both lost inside it. In an instant, the glow vanished and they were both gone. The serenity of the moment was ruined by sarcastic, slow applause from Ricky.

“Well, that was lovely. Hope Heaven knows what they’re getting with that little slut. Is this the part where you drag me down to Hell?”

Mara dug her fingernails into her palms, appalled for an instant by Ricky’s callous dismissal of Paula.

“Not quite yet,” she answered in a tightly controlled voice over the whine of the sirens. “We still have a little time here.”

Ricky lit up. “Ha! You can’t take me, can you? Maybe I’m still alive in the wreck. Maybe they’re going to save my ass!”

Any empathy that Paula may have stirred within Mara vanished, and with a feral growl, her hand shot out and she grabbed Ricky by the ear. He screamed and clawed at her arm as she yanked him forward towards the wreckage.

“There! Does that look like you have any hope for resuscitation, you arrogant shit?” she shouted.

Ricky stared at his own body. Strapped in the driver’s seat, it was twisted and broken, his face battered from the air bag. Blood soaked his fancy white shirt from where a piece of metal from the Maserati’s windshield wiper was sticking straight into his neck. As Ricky grappled with his new reality, three police officers and two paramedics rushed onto the scene but it didn’t take long for them to assess the situation and pronounce both Ricky and Paula to be dead.

“Tell you what,” said Mara, “I’m in no real rush. Why don’t we hang out for a bit, so you watch them pry your body out of the car?”

The paparazzi circled the scene, drawn by the scent of carrion and headlines while Ricky watched, horrified, as one paramedic removed his lower leg—which had been completely severed—from the car and dropped it on a plastic mat. He swallowed hard and Mara smiled at him smugly.

“You’re enjoying this too much,” he whined.

“You have no idea. Come on. As much as I’d like to let you watch them yank the rest of your corpse of the car, that’s going to take too long. Time for us to go.”

Mara held her hand up, palm out, and a red glow materialized around her fingers. The light intensified as she spread her fingers and the flames filled her eyes again. A wind no one else seemed to feel swirled her hair as the red energy flowed out from her hand. About 30 feet away from her, it hit something solid, and the energy took on a life of its own. Crackling and snapping it latched on, digging into whatever it had found, creating a flaming rectangular outline. The flames spread to fill the interior, and in a single flash the firestorm disappeared, leaving behind an utterly plain and ordinary white kitchen door sitting in the middle of the grass.

Ricky looked skeptical. “That’s the door to Hell?” he asked.

“You were expecting some cavernous, gaping maw spewing sulfur and brimstone?”

A door hinge squeaked ominously and the door expelled a wave of hot air that rolled over them. Ricky swallowed hard and licked his lips, his eyes darting furtively from side to side. He backed up a step. Mara watched with amusement.

“Going somewhere?” she asked.

“I… I want to renegotiate,” Ricky said to her.

Mara offered him an unladylike snort. “Renegotiate? With what? You don’t have anything else that I want, and you’re dead. We have a deal, Ricky, and you can’t break it.”

“I won’t go,” Ricky blustered.

“Seriously?” Mara’s amusement deteriorated quickly.

“You can’t make me.”

“I can’t make you? What are you, a fucking four-year-old?” Mara snapped her fingers and almost instantly, two bulky devils stepped through the doorway. They looked human, save for their pitch-black eyes and the disconcertingly sharp, white teeth they showed when they smiled. They seized Ricky by the arms and dragged him over to Mara as if he weighed almost nothing. He struggled anyway.

“Bring him,” Mara ordered tersely.

The two demons followed Mara, dragging a thrashing Ricky between them. There was an ominous boom when the door shut and Ricky went limp. The demons continued to drag him in Mara’s wake down a long, austere office hallway. On one side offices with mostly closed doors, on the other side, a seemingly eternal field of identical, beige, high-walled cubicles with soul-sucking fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling. With a nod from Mara, the two escorts dropped Ricky and he crumpled to the floor.

“Now, are you going to walk like a grown up, or do we still need to help you along?” asked Mara.

“I’ll walk.”

Mara dismissed the two demons with a flick of her head. He glanced from side to side. Different demons and devils came in and out of the cube hallways, bustling around with files and laptops. Within the Immortal Planes, the terms “demon” and “devil” were used interchangeably. Devils, however, tended to look very human unless they wanted to deliberately reveal some of their hellish heritage while demons often sported horns, claws, or fangs, and looked more like the monsters that mortals expected demons and devils to look like. There was, however, no hard and fast guideline.

Shouting erupted out of one office. Inside, a large demon dressed in a crisp white polo shirt lunged across the desk at a smaller one, sitting in the guest chair. Dislocating his jaw, the larger demon clamped down on the other and then jerked his head back, and with two gulps, swallowed his flailing victim whole. Now twice the size he’d been, the big demon’s polo shirt strained to hold in the engorged belly and a tremendous, juicy belch erupted out of him.

“What the…” Ricky gasped.

“Not surprising," Mara sighed. “Wayne was on his last warning. He knew what would happen if he got called down to HR again.”

“Called down to HR? I thought you were taking me to Hell?”

“Oh, you’re in Hell, sweetie. This is only a very small part of it. People assume Hell is one fiery pit of blackness. There’s plenty of that, don’t get me wrong—all stereotypes start from a kernel of truth, right? But this is the business end of Hell, and where we start. Paperwork and all that.”

They continued walking, taking lefts and rights until they finally stopped in front of an office door. The heavy brass sign in the center said “Treasurers.” Inside, the office was ornate with dark paneling on the walls and thick, luxurious Persian rugs on the floor. Along the long wall opposite the door were two windows covered with heavy velvet drapes and in front of each window was an enormous mahogany desk. The legs of each desk were magnificently carved into twisted tableaus of debauchery, decadence and sin: naked satyrs entangled with men and women, corrupt souls gorging on wine, and sinners debasing themselves for piles of gold.

The devil behind the first desk was gaunt, with the stern countenance of an older man, save for his soulless coal eyes. His desk was pristine with files neatly stacked, all the same type of pen in the cup, and not a speck of dust to be seen. He wore a dark suit with a narrow tie and tapped away at his computer with thin, elegant fingers.

The other desk had several files stacked up and askew to one side of the computer. On the other side sat an antique scale with two brass dishes to hold whatever was being weighed. The demon seated at this desk was a hulking beast with fangs that protruded up from a jutting lower jaw, the face all the more terrifying for the jagged scar that ran down his left cheek. His small, piggish eyes glittered, and his fingernails looked more like pointed claws.

With Ricky in tow, Mara waltzed up to the first desk. “Hello, Astaroth,” she said.

Astaroth, one of the Grand Dukes of Hell—and Mara’s direct supervisor—finished his entry on the computer and looked down his nose at her.

“Who have you brought us, Mara?”

“I have one Richard ‘Ricky’ Nottingham.”

Astaroth clicked a few times with his mouse and his frown grew more pronounced. “Nottingham, you say? He’s not expected for some years yet. Why is he out of order?”

“He got stupid and cocky. Fast car, cocaine, pretty girl who promised to go down on him. Drove his car straight into a tree.”

An annoyed sigh hissed out of Astaroth’s nose and he stared at Ricky disapprovingly. Finally, after Ricky started to sweat, the skeletal demon said, “Very well. There is space for him?”

“Of course there is. I’m insulted you think I’d be unprepared.” Mara smiled under the Grand Duke’s icy, dead stare until he grunted and looked back at his screen.

“Fine. Get him weighed and make sure you update the database promptly. I don’t want any loose ends once we close the quarter. I will be very unhappy if anyone from my team is on the delinquent list this time.” He handed Mara a file, and dismissed them with a wave of his fingers.

“What does he mean, ‘weigh me’?”

Mara ignored Ricky’s question as she tugged his elbow, pulling him along to the other desk. She smiled up at Melchom as the bulky demon loomed over her. She’d always been fond of him, and as his fetid, dank breath enveloped them, Ricky made an odd noise.

“Do not throw up,” she warned him.

“Hello, pretty Mara.” Melchom said.

“Hello, Melchom.”

“Do you have it?” The enormous devil asked in a rough, gravel voice.

“I will in a minute.” She turned to Ricky with a savage smile. “I’ve really been looking forward to this—man up, because it’s going to hurt like a bitch.”

“Looking forward to wha—AAAAAAGGGGHHHH!”

Ricky screamed in agony as Mara thrust her hand into his torso and started digging around his insides. Melchom leered down, reveling in Ricky’s suffering, knowing that each time Mara moved her hand, Ricky felt as if razors were stripping him from the inside out.

“He held it down before, but I bet if you poke his heart, he will throw up,” said Melchom.

“That seems a bit excessive, doesn’t it?” asked Mara, and Melchom pouted.

As she twisted her hand again, coming shockingly close to Ricky’s heart anyway, she smiled as she found something solid and warm. Slowly, Mara withdrew her fist and Ricky watched—stunned—as the gaping hole in his chest simply closed up and the blood stains on his shirt vanished.

“What the fuck?” he screamed.

Melchom’s response bordered on gleeful. “You’re a disembodied soul now. You can feel pain, you can even bleed, but you won’t ever die no matter how bad it gets.”

“What did you do to me? I feel different,” Ricky asked as he ran his hands over his chest.

Mara opened her fist. Resting in her hand was a black coin about the size of her palm, and it glittered as the light hit it as if a million gold flecks were frozen inside. Bouncing the coin, Mara tested the weight and then handed it up to Melchom who took it between two thick fingers and nodded approvingly. Placing the coin on one side of the scale, he added some square weights to the other before carefully watching the dial and registering a weight.

“Very nice, Mara. This one made the most of his time. A shame he’s here now. The tarnish would have been twice as heavy if he’d been smarter,” said Melchom. He lifted the coin again and carved a circular piece out of the very center with one of his claws. He dropped the now donut-shaped coin into his coffer, smiling when he heard it clink heavily against others, and tossed the central nugget back to Mara.

Catching it, Mara gave Ricky a grin. “Cheers,” she said as she popped the section of black coin into her mouth and swallowed.

For a moment, there was nothing. Then Mara closed her eyes as she felt the coin burn on the way down her throat, and when it reached her stomach, the familiar, invigorating warmth of the tarnish radiated out through the rest of her body. The sigh that escaped her was sated and happy.

“What was that?” Ricky demanded. “What did you take out of me?”

“That was all the tarnish on your soul,” Mara answered. “All souls have power, and that power has value. The more awful things you do in your life, the more tarnish collects on your soul. When I close a deal, and the contract comes to an end, then I bring the soul to Astaroth and Melchom. When I pull all of the tarnish out of you, it becomes that shiny black coin. They judge my success by how heavy the coin is—the heavier the coin, the more valuable it is, and I get a percentage of that power.”

“So, you… benefit from my deal?”

“Well, d’uh. Of course I benefit. That’s what making a deal is all about. Both sides benefit. Why would I make a deal that didn’t have something in it for me?”

“This one. He is not very smart,” Melchom observed.

“No, he’s not,” Mara agreed. “This one is eye candy. I wasn’t interested in his brain when I made his deal.”

The big demon chuckled while Mara took Ricky by the arm and escorted him out of the Treasurers’ office and down another hall. Finally she took a right and stopped at a medium-sized office. Her name was on the plaque outside the door.

“You have an office?” Ricky sounded utterly confounded.

“I do. I’m in sales and acquisitions for Hell, a division of IPI—that stands for Immortal Planes, Incorporated to be precise. I spend a lot of my time on the Mortal Plane—that’s where you used to live—but I do get stuck down here doing paperwork every now and then, so I get the office.” Mara left Ricky in the hall for a split second while she threw the file that Astaroth had given her onto her desk.

“However,” she continued, “Hell actually has layers upon layers. Dante was on the right track with his Circles of Hell idea. But it is so much more than that. There’s plenty of fire, pain and torture, but that’s the funny thing about torment and torture—it’s different for everyone. What is hell for you may not be hell for someone else.”

Out in the hall, Ricky was staring at the opposite wall where there was a shimmering black void. Mara let him gape for a second before she gestured for Ricky to precede her. Sweat broke out on his brow and he took a step back, looking fearfully at the inky, swirling darkness.

“Don’t make me call my minions again. You won’t like what they do this time,” she warned. Ricky took a mincing, reluctant step forward and Mara rolled her eyes in disgust.

“Sack up,” she told him. “The first step is a bitch.”

Ricky screamed when Mara put both her hands between his shoulder blades and shoved, sending him sprawling through the darkness and into nothingness where he plummeted down. Images flashed in front of him. Some were scenes of horrible torture and torment while others were phantasmagorias of his life, all the times he’d lied and cheated. All the times when he’d been a ruthless bastard to get what he wanted. Even worse, he could feel the emotions of the people he screwed over, each one slashing him with a razor edge. He slammed face first onto something hard, the impact making him see stars. A moment later, Mara landed lightly next to him as if she’d just stepped of a porch.

“That sucked,” Ricky moaned.

“Like I said, first step is a bitch. Come on, superstar, we’re almost there.”

Defeated, Ricky followed Mara into another long hallway lined with what seemed like an eternity of identical closed doors on either side. Each had a small window and a brass name plate.

“Another hallway?” Ricky asked.

“Not just another hallway. This is my hallway. This is where I keep every soul I’ve ever made a deal with.”

Ricky moaned in despair when they reached one particular door and he saw the brass nameplate engraved with his own name.

“No one forced you into your deal, Ricky,” Mara reminded him.

His shoulders slumped. “I know. So, what’s my eternal Hell? Flames? Sulfur and brimstone? Ugly women and bad wine?” His attempt at flippant bravado was weak.

“Oh no, nothing like that,” said Mara. “Do you remember when we first met? I asked you what you really wanted, even beyond fame and money.”

“I wanted to be the greatest actor ever.”

“That was the outcome you wanted, but what—deep down—did you really want?” Mara cocked her head slightly. Based on Ricky’s perplexed look, Mara knew the question was beyond his grasp so she opened the door and ushered Ricky into a room that looked like nothing but a grey box.

“Being an actor was the vehicle you chose. You wanted to be extraordinary, to stand out from the crowd. You were so afraid of being overlooked and marginalized. Terrified of blending into the background the way you always did when you were a kid. You wanted to make sure you were never invisible again,” she said.

“I suppose.” Ricky’s words were simple but the tone told Mara her words had hit quite deeply.

“You were so desperate to avoid that fate you were willing to trade your soul away for a taste of it. So here’s your damnation, Ricky.” Mara waved her arm in an arc and suddenly the grey walls were replaced with the hustle and bustle of Hollywood. The sidewalks were filled with celebrities and tourists.

Ricky laughed, “This? This is my Hell? Hollywood? I’m King of this town!” He sauntered down the sidewalk, glancing at the stars beneath his feet emblazoned with the names of all his idols.

From the doorway, Mara said, “Not in this Hollywood you’re not. Here, you’re a no one. No one knows your name. No one even notices you or cares what happens to you. You’re going to be invisible here, Ricky, working menial jobs. A nobody. Forever.”

Ricky spun to face her, eyes wide and chest heaving. “You can’t do this to me!” he bellowed.

Mara wiggled her fingers at him. “Ah, yea, I can. Enjoy eternity.”

She slammed the door, the resounding thud of the bolt-lock echoing down the long hall. And while she couldn’t hear him, Mara knew that on the other side of the door, Ricky was flailing at it with his fists and screaming. She whistled a merry tune as she continued down the hall. On the way, she peeked in at a few of her other deals to see how they were faring with their own punishments.

Chastity LeGrasse, the former homecoming queen, who lied to get whatever she wanted, wasn’t Mara’s most valuable contract, but Mara had been amazed at how short-sighted the woman had been. Chastity had bartered away her soul to be, as she so quaintly put it, “the Queen Bee of my hive.” So, she spent her time dominating her husband and children, and viciously lying about anyone who challenged or threatened her spot as leader of the PTA. Now, locked away in her hellish prison cell, Chastity woke up every day to new situations, compelled to lie, and each time a falsehood left her mouth, it was followed by a spewing fountain of vomit.

As Mara shut the observation window, she shook her head. “You could have been almost anything, Chastity. Anything. But you settled for Queen Bee.”

In the room next to Chastity, a corrupt sheriff from Wichita, who died in 1873, was spending his eternal torment in a more traditional way: pulled apart on a rack, day after day after day. Mara didn’t bother looking in on the sheriff—she wasn’t interested in seeing torn flesh and broken bones, at least not today. Instead, she crossed the hall and peeked in one other window. To fund his own extravagant lifestyle, Edward Boch had stolen millions from his company’s pension fund and gotten away with it, leaving the miners it was supposed help with almost no retirement funds. Inside his room, Edward swung the sledgehammer that had been his companion for the past 50 years and smashed it into stone. He paused, his arms trembling with exhaustion, until a supervisor chewed him out for being lazy. Crying, Edward struggled to lift the hammer again. Satisfied with his misery, Mara closed the window and walked away.

Eventually she came to the end of the hall where a black iron gate barred her way. Beyond the gate was the “real” Hell, or at least what most mortals thought Hell would be like. Jagged cliffs rose higher than the eye could see, all pockmarked with caves filled with fire, pain and suffering, and demons crawled or flew between the levels. Some of the older devils insisted on these kinds of traditional, torturous punishments. They were Hell’s original gangsters and did things with their own special flair, but Mara preferred a more creative take on how best to give a sinner his or her just desserts.

Sometimes Mara found it refreshing to walk the cliffs, but decided to skip her stroll today. Instead, she headed back to her office, glancing once at Ricky’s locked door. She loathed the extra paperwork that came with a premature soul delivery. But Astaroth will be up my ass with a microscope if I don’t update the database. I hate close of quarter, especially at the end of the year. Everyone gets so bitchy about the numbers. And that was a phone call she very much wanted to avoid. Normally, the Grand Duke was very reserved, but year end quotas could be a bloodbath and no one wanted a call from a pissed-off Astaroth.

It took her an hour to get all of Ricky’s files updated and by the time she was done, she was tired of her drab little office and wanted to get back to Hollis City. As she stepped out of her office, Mara nearly collided with Kemm, her biggest rival in the Sales and Acquisitions group. They’d spent years climbing the ranks together, often butting heads and fighting for the same soul. The fact that they detested each other was common knowledge, and a quarter rarely went by without the two mixing it up over something.

Mara smiled at his furious expression. The week before she’d managed to swoop in and steal a client Kemm had been working to close. This corrupt judge was a feeder for a network of for-profit prisons and getting kickbacks for handing out maximum sentences for minor crimes.

“Mara, you bitch,” he growled. “He was mine!”

“Kemm, are you still pissed off about that judge?”

“That was my deal, my soul!” Kemm barked.

“Your deal? Then you should’ve done a better job closing it. You know the rules, everything’s fair game until a deal is sealed,” said Mara. “You snooze, you lose.”

“You knew I was coming back to close him.” Fire began to blaze in Kemm’s eyes.

“You not paying attention isn’t my fucking problem,” shrugged Mara. “I’m not losing my number one status, not this quarter, to a hack like you. Plus, the judge thought my ass was a lot nicer than yours.”

“You owe me, bitch. We’ll see how nice your ass is when I’m through with it. Your office will do just fine. Let’s see how much you like getting fucked, Mara.” The threat in his voice was obvious and Kemm’s eyes turned completely red.

In an instant, Mara’s irises went from dark to crimson. She channeled her dark power into her hands and crouched, waiting for Kemm to attack. She was so intent on anticipating Kemm’s strike, she didn’t see Melchom lumbering down the hall until he dropped his meaty, clawed hand onto Kemm’s head and squeezed. Under the vice-like grip, blood trickled down Kemm’s head and face.

“You will not speak to Mara that way, fool,” growled Melchom.

“I could have taken care of this,” said Mara, relaxing slightly. The swirling black and red balls of demon-fire in her palms disappeared, but her eyes continued to flame.

“I know,” said Melchom with a crooked smile. “But I do not like it when people are rude to you. Do you understand that, Kemm?”

The other demon squealed in pain and tried to nod his head. Finally, the Treasurer let go and Kemm staggered away, listing to one side, finger marks clearly dented into his cranium.

“Doesn’t matter,” Kemm hissed as he looked back, his face a mask of unadulterated malice. “I’m ahead of you in numbers this quarter. Wrecking your chance at the record will be plenty of payback. For now.”

Mara blew him a kiss, but hid her frown. Kemm really was ahead of her on the sales leaderboard right now, and that was a problem.

“You are very pretty with your flames, Mara. You should let them out, wear them more often,” Melchom observed, his rough voice surprisingly soft.

“Outside of Hell, most people don’t feel that way. And here it brings attention I don’t necessarily want, but thank you for the compliment.”

“Then you should spend more time here,” Melchom said gruffly. “Here with us.”

“If I did that, I wouldn’t bring more shiny black coins for your coffers. But I’ll come back soon, you have my word.”

Melchom laughed loudly and it made the walls shake. “A devil’s promise? You are very funny Mara. You make me laugh.” He gave her a remarkably gentle pat on the head and stomped down the hallway.

Mara watched Melchom go and then sat back down inside her office. She let out a sigh and put her head down on the desk. An average devil’s quota was around 50 signed contracts for the year, but for a top performer like Mara, the number was much higher: this year it was 100. She still needed five more, and the clock was ticking. She sat up and rubbed her face with her hands.

“Alright, Mara,” she said to herself. “Get a grip. Focus on the positive. All you need is five more souls, and you hit quota, and you’re not on The List.”

The List was a report given to all the Grand Dukes about which members of their teams didn’t meet quota. No one liked being on The List as it usually meant far too much personal “coaching” from the senior leadership team. Mara didn’t even want to contemplate it, and her manager—Astaroth—was one of the more reasonable Grand Dukes. Her eyes darted to a sticky note on her monitor with a big “625” written on it. That was her real goal.

“That’s the ticket,” she muttered to herself. “Six hundred and twenty-five consecutive quarters of being el numero uno in acquisitions. That would put me one quarter ahead of Grand Duke Baliel’s best, making me one of the top two sales and acquisition agents of all time. After that, I only have to catch Lucifer to be the best ever.”

She took a deep breath. Aside from bragging rights, the number one sales and acquisitions devil was awarded an extra glittering black coin of tarnish, the equivalent of 1,000 souls. An infusion of power like that would make her almost untouchable.

“I have to get my five for the quarterly quota. But after that, I need to be one soul ahead of Kemm. He’s the only thing standing between me and that record.” Mara rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I need a Goddamn drink.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 3