Centuries later…

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“Stupid, bloody Devil and his hell-be-damned clauses,” Ysabel grumbled under her breath as she stomped to her Lord’s office.

Receiving his imperious summons – essentially his voice booming from the walls themselves and ordering her to move her sweet cheeks – she immediately began cursing. Lord of the Underworld or not, the man was truly a pain in her ass. Didn’t he know she had better things to do with her time than run when he summoned, like trimming her nails, or washing her hair? Besides, according to the terms of the contract she’d agreed to over five hundred years ago – signed in her still sizzling blood no less – her time as his personal assistant was almost up. Freedom beckoned just around the corner and she couldn’t wait, even if she didn’t have the slightest clue what she would do with all her upcoming spare time. Gardening in the Pit wasn’t feasible. Joining the general populace made her shudder. What did that leave?

No matter. She’d find a hobby. One definite benefit? Not having to answer the devil’s every beck and call. Just a few more days, then I’m free.

Of course, Lucifer didn’t care if their tenure together was coming to a close. The man got sadistic pleasure out of goading her, reminding her that she wholeheartedly agreed to be his personal slave in exchange for revenge. Thankfully, his idea of chores involved the menial kind; phone answering, filing paperwork, customer – AKA damned souls – relations. In other words, mostly clerical work, a small price to pay when it meant that those who had a direct hand in her burning would be punished eternally for their sin. Vengeance tasted beautifully sweet.

Heels clacking on the slate floor – because Lucifer, stuck in the middle ages, clung like a leech to a dungeon/medieval castle theme – she made her way to the throne room where the Lord of Hell liked to rule his subjects, or, as Ysabel liked to call them, Heaven’s leftovers.

When a person died, if they lived an absolutely pure life, free of sin, even the teensy tiniest one, they went to Heaven. Slide across the line into bad, even if you just took the other Lord’s name in vain once, and you were screwed, doomed to an undying life as a damned soul.

Welcome to Hell, where the living conditions went beyond crowded, the jobs sucked, and the pay sucked even worse. It was like living in, well, Hell.

Forget the ash strewn streets and tenement housing. The inconveniences of the Pit paled beside Lucifer, a true prick of a boss. He brought new meaning to the term sexual harassment. Although, she’d cured him of his ass grabbing habit by wearing a skirt braided with tiny silver slivers... Did she forget to mention they were blessed?

Cost her a fortune to acquire seeing as how some demons had to smuggle it from the mortal side, but worth every damned coin when the Prince of Darkness – dressed in his stupid Darth Vader cape – hopped up and down in his office shaking his hand, bellowing.

The video she’d taken, and threatened to post on HellTube, helped her finagle a private suite in the west wing of the castle. Peace and quiet at la–

“Ysabel!” Lucifer’s yodel made her grimace. “I know you’re out in that hall, woman. Stop testing my patience and get your ass in here so I can explain before it happens.”

Explain what? Waving to his shriveled secretary, she swept past the reception area and pulled open the massive door to his office and stepped in. Her heels tapped on the floor as she headed to her boss, who paced in front of a massive carved desk. It should be noted that the magnificent piece of furniture was carved out of bone, the creature to whom it belonged hopefully extinct, given the ridiculous size of the jaw the artist used. As usual, folders of all thickness and colors covered the desk’s gleaming, ivory surface.

Great. More filing. Looks like I’m working late tonight.

The business of selling one’s soul boomed, which meant more work and no raise. I should have joined the minions union.

“About time you got here,” Lucifer said, as he halted his pacing to face her. She paused and waited as he did his usual once over, his eyes lingering on her tits before traveling down. Sure, she could have ruined his enjoyment by wearing something nun-like, but she found more enjoyment in showing him what he’d never have. Besides, Devil or not, a girl liked a man to find her attractive. She cocked a hip and waited for him to finish.

His gaze hit her feet and his brow creased. “Uh-oh. You might want to kick off those expensive pumps of yours.”

“Why?” she asked staring down at her shoes. Ridiculously high heeled, and an eye popping purple, green and blue, meant to resemble a peacock’s feathers, she didn’t care if her toes hurt, or if she didn’t exactly have the slim kind of thighs the shoes demanded. She discovered a fetish for shoes in the eighteenth century, probably because she spent most of her mortal life barefoot. Her collection now numbered in the hundreds and the pair she currently wore were fantastic, stolen from the corpse of a favorite movie star – again, an item that cost her a ridiculous sum to smuggle, but so worth it in her mind.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he muttered enigmatically.

It started with a tickle of her toes that turned into a hot itch. She shifted her weight, wiggling her little piggies. It didn’t help. Her feet ignited. Despite her usual cool, Ysabel shrieked, and it wasn’t very ladylike. “What the fuck are you doing to my feet?” Forget her feet, the flames licked higher, up her bare legs, snagging her short, white skirt – a color worn to annoy her boss – then, her magenta silk blouse. Engulfed head to toe, a living, screaming torch, the moment brought back the nightmares of the way she’d died.

Dammit! It took hundreds of years of reliving that awful moment before she eventually prevailed and put her memories of burning at the stake away. It took only seconds of getting torched, once again alive, to bring it all back.

“Goddamn, donkey fucking, bastard, whoring…” The list of words went on and on, because despite her fiery new look, she remained conscious the entire time. More annoying – though her body survived sans blister and flaking skin, the pain was just as excruciating as she remembered.

White foam hit her in the face, shutting her up. The same soothing cool smothered the rest of her body, dousing the flames. It didn’t take away the ache in her skin, but at least she wasn’t ablaze anymore. She couldn’t say as much for her temper. It simmered, held at bay only because she couldn’t see the object of her ire and feared opening her mouth and getting a taste of the chemicals used to put her out.

“Hold out your hand,” Lucifer said.

She did as told for once and felt a cloth dropped into her palm. Wiping her face first, she opened her eyes and glared at the Lord of the Pit.

For those who’d not met him before – but probably eventually would, because chances were you’d already sinned – the man everyone feared looked like an ordinary business man. Kind of tall at about five eleven or so, with a stocky build and dark hair going silver at the temples. If one ignored the wicked orange fires in his eyes, he would look almost benign. Until he smiled. How he could make something so innocent as the curve of his lips appear so evil, she didn’t know, but she practiced, every night in the mirror, to no avail. She just couldn’t make her apple cheeks and dimple look grim, no matter how she tried.

“What the fuck just happened?” she asked in a tight voice.

“You were on fire,” he calmly replied before turning and heading back to his desk.

Controlling an urge to fling a curse at his back took her a few seconds. Not because holding her temper was the right thing to do but because the jerk possessed a bouncing spellshield on him, kind of like the kids rhyme – ‘I’m rubber you’re glue, whatever you say, bounces off me and sticks to you.’ Ouch was all she had to say on that matter.

“Okay, oh king of observation, I was on fire. Care to tell me why?”

Lucifer shuffled some papers on his desk as she stalked toward him – clip, clunk, on uneven heels – as gobs of extinguisher foam fell off her to the floor. Flicking her gaze down, she shrieked.

“I’m naked!”

“Yeah, I noticed. Nice tits by the way. Did I mention you might want to look into getting some flame retardant clothes?”

Eyes narrowed, she shook her finger at him. “You. Explain. Now. And get me some fucking clothes or Lord of Hell or not, I’m going to rip your eyeballs from your head and shove them where the sun never shines.”

She knew she’d gone too far when his body began to expand and smoke poured from his ears.

“Enough!” he roared, the force of his yell shaking the room. Dust sifted down. “I might have to put up with this kind of attitude from my daughter, but dammit, you work for me!”

“Not for long,” she muttered not in the slightest cowed. Lucifer yelled a lot. Tortured and killed at will too, but, as she’d learned over the years, he respected people with backbone. Of course, he respected it only in private. In public, she smartly bowed and scraped like all his other minions. He did have a reputation to uphold after all. Some lines she knew better than to cross. But alone…she didn’t take shit from anyone. Oddly enough, she got the impression he liked her feisty attitude.

“About the termination of your contract – we have a slight problem.” He snapped his fingers, and using some kind of magic she had yet to decipher, the burnt remnants of clothing, the foam, everything about her mishap disappeared, including the lingering pain. She dropped into a chair, relieved but not wanting to show it, glad for the simple robe he’d conjured that hid her body. Exhibitionism was for those who went to the gym on a regular basis.

“What problem? We signed a deal, Lucifer. In exchange for my soul and five hundred years of service, you were going to condemn all those who had an active hand in making me burn to an eternity of suffering in Hell. Seems pretty straightforward, and according to my contract, those five hundred years are up next Tuesday.”

“Except, we’ve had a prison breakout.”

“And what does a prison breakout have to do with my contract?”

“Hold on to your panties, and I’ll show you. Oh wait, you’re not wearing a pair anymore.” He leered. She growled. He sighed as he muttered, “You are absolutely no fun.”

Reaching below his desk, he grabbed something. The object thumped onto his desk, a green folder thick with paper, and labeled, no surprise, with her name. Slave to the big guy didn’t mean she’d rolled over and turned into a docile mouse once she got to the Pit. In the circles of Hell, it was every man/woman/demon for themselves. And after the way her lover betrayed her, Ysabel clung to her freedom and status like a pit-bull, cursing with magic anyone who stood in her way. It seemed the Lord had kept tabs on her shenanigans.

Lucifer flipped open her file and pulled out from it, in another feat of magic she hadn’t mastered, a yellowed scroll bound in a lock of her hair. He sliced a fingernail across it, splitting the binding and the paper unrolled several feet, revealing line after line of tight handwritten script. He flattened it on his desk, using a pair of paperweights – the skulls of those who dared defy him – to hold down its corners. Ysabel stood and leaned over to verify it, noting her signature: a giant ‘Y’ – the only letter she knew how to draw at the time – the blood having dried into an almost black color.

“Why are you showing me this?” she asked.

“Read sub-clause forty-nine, paragraph C, section VII.”

Her eyes scanned the document, her lips moving as she read, a skill she’d not owned at the time of signing. She’d had someone impartial brought in to read it for her, a powerful witch by the name of Nefertiti. She’d apprenticed under the sorceress for a time after her arrival, but Nefertiti’s brand of magic – sex based orgies for power – wasn’t something that appealed.

Oddly enough, though she’d read hundreds of contracts for other souls, this was the first time she’d actually read her own. The more she read, though, the more she wished she’d paid attention at the time instead of being so focused on vengeance. But then again, impartiality was hard to achieve with memories of her skin flaking off and the imagined scent of her own roasted body making her hungry for chicken.

“If I’m reading this right,” she said slowly, trying in vain to control her temper, “it says that if within my five hundred years of service, should one of the five I bargained to have cursed and sent to Hell manages to escape, then the terms of my employment are extended until the soul in question is caught.”

“Keep reading,” he replied. “And keep in mind, this is a standard contract.”

Eyes flicking back to the document, she read the rest before grabbing the closest paperweight and throwing it at him. “You jerk! The prison breakout was by one of the souls I had damned to an eternity of suffering, wasn’t it? Which means I am going to have to relive the moment of my death, daily, until the soul is caught.”

She couldn’t help bitching. “This is unfair. Why the hell am I being punished? Your lackeys are the ones who slacked on the job. Punish them.”

Lips tight, his eyes glowed in a way that sat her back in her chair, the heaviness of his power pressing on her. “Oh, they are reaping the rewards of my displeasure, fear not. But, enough about them. We need to fix this. If we’re to be free of each other in a week, then you need to get moving.”

“Me?”

“Yes you. You just read the contract. The same way you cursed those people and dragged their souls to me upon their untimely deaths, now that they’re missing, it’s up to you to bring those souls back.”

“Souls? Are you telling me you lost more than one?”

The Lord of The Pit actually looked sheepish. “What can I say? Good minions are hard to come by. Ever since the problems of the past few years with Lilith and that revolt, well, the demon army still hasn’t recovered its numbers yet. And the mortal realm doesn’t make soldiers like they used to. Ah for the days when Vikings roamed the seas and pillaged whole villages. I even miss those feisty Spartans. Now those were some souls with substance and skills.”

Ysabel slapped a hand over her forehead. “I don’t believe this. I’m the one scheduled to catch fire every day until I fix your mistake and you’re giving me excuses and reminiscing? That’s fucking priceless. And just how am I supposed to find and catch the escapees?”

“There are five of them and if you tag them with this pin,” Lucifer slid a metallic box in her direction. “Then they’ll be taken straight to processing.”

“Yay, so I’ve got an easy way to get them back,” she drawled sarcastically. “You still haven’t mentioned exactly how I’m supposed to find them.”

“Don’t you have some witchy method for tracking people?” he asked. “I had the guards collect some of their skin. Of course, I don’t know whose is whose given we wiped it off the lashes after they disappeared, but DNA is still the best identifier.” He smiled.

She glared.

A big sigh left him. “What do you want from me? This wasn’t done on purpose, I assure you. I’d like nothing more than for you and I to be rid of each other. But even I can’t break the contract.”

In that respect, he told the truth. If a person swore an oath in Hell and then signed it with blood, it couldn’t be broken until the terms of the contact were complete. No one knew why, not even Lucifer. It seemed there were more powers out there than just those of Heaven and Hell.

“And if I say screw you and the souls stay free?”

“You will burn, every single day, at the time of your death, one extra minute per day, the pain growing more and more excruciating with each day that passes.”

“Is that all?” she queried sarcastically.

“No.” He bore a serious expression which frightened her more than his words. Lucifer always spoke with a smile – evil smile, naughty grin, provocative leer. She didn’t think she wanted to hear what came next.

“If you don’t bring those souls back, you’ll go mad. Lose your mind. Go completely off your rocker. It’s not pretty. I’ve seen it before. It happened to Bambi’s mother. I had to throw her in the abyss myself. You’ve met my eldest daughter, Bambi haven’t you? Won Biggest Slut in the world five years running, you know?”

Yes, she knew. Everyone knew Bambi. The males all wanted a turn with Hell’s most famous succubus, while the females did their best to keep their men away. While the reminder of Bambi’s skills in the boudoir made her shudder, his mention of the abyss gave her a chill.

What few people earth-side knew was Hell didn’t mean the end of a person’s life, for damned souls at any rate. Once a mortal sinned and died, changing their residential address to Hell, they could technically live forever. Sounded like a great prize, right? Not really. Eking out any kind of existence in the Underworld took a lot of work. Housing sucked. Jobs rated even worse. And forget killing to free up some room or take someone’s spot.

Mortal wounds, while painful to the recipient, couldn’t kill the damned. Nor decapitation or any other torture devised – a great trick that Lucifer used to punish the truly wicked. Only one thing alone could put a spirit to rest. The abyss.

At the very center of Hell, nestled within the spirals of the nine circles, the great gaping hole was where a soul went when they were conquered their fear of the final death. When the tedium of day to day living in the Pit finally got to them, or they’d atoned for their sins, they could make the pilgrimage to the abyss, toss themselves in and, eventually, end up reborn again.

Or so the rumors stated.

Witches bound to Lucifer before death, didn’t quite own their souls – and no one knew where he hid them – so uncertainty prevailed, along with numerous debates, on what would happen to them if they jumped in. She’d rather not find out. But if the pain became too much, would she still feel the same?

Something of her thought process must have been reflected in her face because Lucifer gave her a paternal smile meant to reassure. “I’m sure you’ll manage to capture them before you go nuts. And if not, I know a place that sells straitjackets for cheap.”

She covered her face with a moaned, “Why me?”

“Oh no. Cut the girly crap right now. You know I hate it when women get sentimental. So let’s stick to business. You need to catch those souls or you’re going to be a very unhappy witch, which in turns means I’ll have to listen to you bitching and moaning because you’ll still be working for me. If I can’t get rid of you, it will cut into my golf game. With Mother Earth visiting her tree groves for her spring inspection, I only have a limited amount of time to practice before she gets back and insists we work on our relationship. Blech.” He made a face.

“This is impossible, you know,” she said. “I don’t know how you expect me to find that many souls by myself. Are you sure the burning thing will be that bad?” Actually, even the mention of it brought a shudder. And it was supposed to get worse? She needed to find those souls pronto.

“I’d love to help you, but I’m understaffed.” His big, white toothed grin screamed, ‘I’m lying.’

“I’ve got a video of you doing the Macarena.”

He scowled. “I hate you. You’re just like another pesky daughter to me. Fine. Twist my arm. I’ll give you a tracker to use. But it will cost you.”

She arched a brow.

“Or not. Now get out.”

“In a second. Hold on to your storm trooper boots. This burning thing – how long will it last each day?”

“At precisely eight forty-seven p.m. each day, you will catch on fire.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s two forty seven p.m. or was when I walked in.”

“We’re on Eastern Standard time here. Not Central European. Now, as I was saying, each day, at the time of your death, you will catch fire, reliving the moment. The burning will last one minute the first day, then increase each day by another minute. Anything you wear will burn to a crisp. The good news, though, is that your hair and body will remain untouched, you’ll just feel it. And once the flames extinguish, it might take a few minutes for the pain to fade.”

“That sounds lovely,” she replied, her face twisting in a grimace. “Anything else I should know?”

“Well, it goes without saying that if during your quest to find the escapees you end up on the mortal plane, stay out of sight. Human authorities might get a little weirded out if you catch fire and walk away.”

“I guess I’m shopping for practical clothes,” she muttered with a moue of distaste. She rose from the chair. “Send your tracker to my place in about six hours. I want to get started on this right away.”

“Good luck,” the devil said quietly, and if she didn’t know better, she’d have said he sounded sincere.

Nah. Probably more like morose that they might get stuck with each other past the expiry date on her contract.

Not if she could help it.

But first she needed to go shopping for flame retardant clothes that would go well with soul hunting. Lucky for her, she’d swiped her boss’s credit card, so the sky was the limit. And she had a whole spare bedroom that could handle the extra garments.