The light returned to Leathergrip’s eyes moments before Lucifer winked and departed, his host’s body sinking to the floor in a groaning jumble of knees and elbows. I wasn’t worried about the wink being noticed. The senior exorcist was far more fixated on the fact her colleague was dressed only in his underwear on top of a single loose sock, the rest of his outfit being scattered around the living room like the kind of modern art exhibition folk attended less to wonder about the artistic meaning than to wonder what had possessed anyone to create it in the first place. Sometimes it was the devil, it turned out.

“Hi,” I called from the sofa. Tru’s bottle was stashed away in one of the kitchen drawers where it couldn’t be a distraction. “Feeling better? I was worried you weren’t going to stop at the underwear.”

Dismay, confusion and horror warred for dominance over Royce’s expression as the extent of his situation began to register. He made a dive for the back of the other sofa, only pausing to grab the sock, and scrambled for whatever other pieces he could reach without compromising his cover. Leathergrip managed to shake herself out of her stupor and hurried around the room, averting her eyes, to toss the rest into his beckoning hands.

“What in the blazes is going on!” he demanded, only the top half of his face peeking over the furniture. “Are you the client? Did you drug me? Did you?” he asked Leathergrip, eyes widening a little.

She looked wounded. “Of course not. This is the work of the devil.”

“What are you talking about? We were just in the car.”

“The demon,” she growled, eyebrows high enough up to soar through the roof. She looked at me for backup, then made a double-take and seemed to have second thoughts, moving physically away from my side of the room.

Royce peered briefly over the edge of the sofa at me as he wriggled into his trousers. “Sorry about all – demon? You mean the one we were hired for? Is that what you – again, I deeply apologise, sir. This is deeply inappropriate and I swear to you I have no idea how this happened.”

“I’m telling you, it was the demon.” Frustration crept into Leathergrip’s voice. “It ensorcelled us with its vile magics. Time passed while it held us in its malevolent thrall.”

“And I told you I have no idea –” Royce glanced at me and dialled it back. “Tru. You are Tru, aren’t you? I’m so sorry. We’ll get out of your hair as soon as, uh, this – can you refresh my memory about what happened since we arrived?”

I made a show of acting confused. “I hired you to perform an exorcism, as per our arrangement. It was going very well.” I nodded at Leathergrip. “She knows.”

“It was something,” the exorcist mumbled into her scarf.

“Well, it worked. You exploded the demon.”

Royce looked up again in surprise over the back of the sofa. Flashes of blue fabric sailed over the top as he struggled to find the second armhole in his shirt. “Come again?”

“Exploded,” I clarified. “Now that’s what I’m paying good money to see. Got to admit, I was expecting some charlatanry, but there’s no question you’re the real deal. Too bad it was too strong for you.”

“Oh,” said the priest. “No. No no. There’ll be no charge from us today. Absolutely not.”

Leathergrip folded her arms. “That’s ludicrous. We saw it. We defeated it. I’ve never seen anything like it in my entire career.” Again, her eyes passed over me and darted away with some nervousness.

Royce emerged from behind the sofa, a little rumpled but otherwise none the worse for wear. Leathergrip passed him his tie and he looped it around his neck. “And I suppose I just missed this infernal presence, did I?”

I made a clucking sound against the roof of my mouth with my tongue. “I guess so. I realise I can only offer an uneducated opinion here, but I don’t think it liked being defeated.” I pointed at Leathergrip. “It chanted some diabolical speech at you right before you went catatonic. Eyes white. Drool down the chin. I thought I’d have to call an ambulance. Meanwhile, your buddy started yelling about inviting the demon in, then threw his clothes off and ran around the apartment screaming. The neighbours were concerned. I had to tell them it was a wild party.”

The priest’s face darkened. He fiddled in vain with the tie, realised his fingers weren’t obeying his brain and ended up giving up, cramming it into his shirt pocket. “Is this some kind of immature prank? Did you call us so you could make fun of our profession? Is that it?”

“No,” insisted Leathergrip, raising a surreptitious hand to her chin. “It’s true. I told you, I saw it. An archdemon.” She paused, and turned her head in a jittery motion to shoot me a suspicious glare. “I think they both are,” she whispered in a volume that would have been out of earshot if I hadn’t been boosting my hearing. Most sensible thing either of them had said so far.

Her colleague was demonstrating a comparative lack of savviness. “Listen, Neve, I really don’t think -”

“I mean, I have it on video,” I interrupted, holding Tru’s phone aloft. “You should see it.”

After watching the thirty-second clip of the aforementioned running and screaming, Royce backed off, white as a sheet. “You’re the demon,” he accused me. He blinked and looked around, seeming to notice for the first time that the ‘victim’ he’d been briefed on was nowhere to be seen.

“No, I’m a spoilt rich brat taking my first steps into the world of blackmail,” I said, in an effort to give Tru a veneer of plausible deniability. “And if you want to know how I did it, well, you won’t.” I switched the phone off with an audible click. “Back off, don’t talk about this with any of your exorcist friends, and you won’t have to deal with me again.”

Leathergrip stared me down. “We don’t have to,” she said. “Evil never wins. We have the righteous power of God on our side.”

“And I have the power of social media,” I boasted. “Trust me, that’s much more scary.”

Neve bristled, but there wasn’t a lot she could do about it. Unlike her partner, she had something of an inkling of what she was up against. Outgunned, outmanoeuvred and operating in a field most of the world didn’t believe in left her with few options. Without a word she turned and left, Royce stumbling along behind with his shoelaces still untied.

I closed the door behind them and watched them leave from the vantage of the balcony, both of them gesturing in wild argument, then opened Tru’s phone and deleted the evidence.

Now I just had to deal with an upset demon lord.

The soul jar, still lidless, sat on top of the kitchen island next to my surviving textbooks, which I’d fished out of the bin in a stickier condition than when they’d arrived. The pact was still draining my powers, and becoming worse, but I reached out to the naudhiz rune and made up the difference with reserves from the pope. Tru would have been a better target given his exemption from the contract, but I was willing to bet his powers were all that were currently standing between him and a premature trip to the void.

Aware I was burning my way through limited resources, I shifted into mosquito form and dropped through the neck of the flask. Even then it was a tight fit, with two of the sides looming in too close for comfort. Thanks to the rune, it was well-lit, the space shimmering with enough purple to make you forget any other colour had ever existed. It hovered in the centre of the bottle, released from its previously physical trappings to the point where, when I moved around it, it appeared as though I was viewing it from the front from every direction. The effect was disorienting. I settled down on one of the internal walls in an attempt to pretend it wasn’t happening.

Of Tru himself there was no sign. In the absence of anything else, I tried giving the rune a mental prod, and found myself immediately latched onto by a panicked demon lord. Relief battered at me, mixed in with a healthy dose of fear and confusion. No rap verse, for once.

Okay, okay. I’m here, I said, pushing back to keep the deluge at arm’s length. You can calm down.

It was like telling a blizzard to stop snowing. What did you do? Where am I? Why can’t I feel anything?

In stark contrast, the rune continued to bask in its own serene emanations.

Questions were a vast improvement on denial and blame, I thought, and tried to organise my response through the emotional onslaught. To answer your first question, I watched you stupidly get yourself banished. Five-star comedy performance. Lucky for you, you told us you were going to do it. So we were able to intercept before you got stuck somewhere you would have had a harder time coming back from.

We?

I provided him with an image of Lucy as he regularly appeared. I should probably introduce myself properly, I admitted. My name is Loki.

That Loki? The barrage eased off a bit as he digested the information. What about your friend?

We’ll get to him. Small doses for Tru. Well, one large dose of highly explosive exorcism and then small doses. As for your second question, you’re in a, er – I didn’t fully understand the soul jar myself, – sort of weird space designed for capturing things.

Then what are you waiting for? Let me out!

I eyed the fehu rune with some dubiousness. In this state? You’ll just end up where you were originally headed. Which can’t be anywhere good. Which brings us to the answer to your third question, little demon. You’ve been banished. Consider yourself lucky you’re resilient enough to escape death. But your body’s gone. It’s all going to be like this until you can get yourself reconstituted.

There was a very long, despair-filled silence.

Help me, he appealed at last.

It’s what I’m here for, I said cheerfully. Other than gloating. But the sooner you make mistakes, the sooner you can learn from them. As an experiment, I flew up to the rune and stuck a foreleg into it. Energy danced around my anatomy – energy I could shape and use, though doing so at this point felt like a misguided idea. Feel that?

There’s a – yes.

Good. We had a physical anchor point, even if it didn’t follow the usual laws of physics. I’m going to walk you through this, I said, flying back to the interior wall. I doubt you’ll find it exactly the same, but do your best. If we’re lucky, we might even be able to make some changes.

Changes?

Like putting that rune of yours somewhere less conspicuous, I affirmed. Stomach, sole of the foot, under the tongue would be my recommendations. Keep that in mind. Or you could go the other way, give yourself bright blue hair and green skin. At which point a glowing tattoo is going to be the least of people’s questions.

Can we not?

I rubbed my hind legs together. It’s your body. What you do with it is your business. Just giving you some things to think about.

There hadn’t been much call for me to teach anyone shapeshifting over the years, despite all the requests I received on the task system. Mortals simply didn’t have the aptitude, and the people who did tended to already have an intuition for it. On the rare occasions people did need help, it was usually a case of them needing to stop. I doubted Tru would be able to change much at all, but it was more about applying a similar principle to a different situation.

If it was possible.

I leant into siphoning more energy off Grace’s rune, even as each modicum of power I borrowed worsened the fragility of the revolution’s combined safety net, and tried my best to teach a demon lord how to demon.

---

Some time later, I’d managed to get Tru to a state where he could exist outside the soul jar without disintegrating further, and left him to finish regenerating on his own. I’d been away from my cell in Singapore far longer than intended, and had misgivings about what I’d find upon my return.

Things were not going well. Two officers, Neetu among them, were bent over my old body and trying to rouse it, while a third stood by on the phone to what sounded like paramedics. All while under surveillance from Providence. The pact was still holding, but someone was going to have to come up with a convincing excuse to management to explain away what was going on. And between the police attention and the fact I’d drained Grace's reserves dry, I wasn’t capable of changing back in a hurry. I wasn’t sure how I was going to weasel my way out of this one.

If my powers were functional, I might have been able to convince Neetu to occupy the guard for long enough to leave me alone, and I was confident I could distract whoever was surveilling me for just a moment. But I’d used up the remainder of what I’d had just getting here.

It would be alright, I consoled myself, watching the whole thing atop the cell's security camera. The world wasn’t over just yet. I knew how this went. Shitface would arrive, we’d go through the motions, I’d be released on conditional notice… again, and there would be a brief enquiry involving some heavy-handed threats but ultimately amount to people putting my case in the too hard basket. The only difference would be that this time, he was going to have to defend me. He could cover up the whole powers thing and find a way to quash the fallout, just like he’d been doing for hundreds of years, if his earlier statement was to be believed.

Right on cue, a fourth officer knocked on the open door and poked her head into the room. “Word from the top,” she quoted, sounding unimpressed. “Cancel the ambulance. She's got company-sponsored treatment. The representative’s already here.”

In a reaction that warmed my heart a little, Neetu looked outraged by this turn of events. “You can’t be serious,” she snapped. “You can’t just turn away the ambulance. Even killers are entitled to basic healthcare. And this is an emergency.”

“Did you not hear me?” The flat tone in the officer’s voice conveyed a certain amount of practice at being the harbinger of disillusionment. “Word. From. The. Top. Or would you rather explain to the Commissioner why her orders weren’t followed?”

Neetu paled a little. “It’s not right,” she protested, but it was somewhat muted now. At the mention of the Commissioner, the other officers were already backing off, the one on the phone blustering away as he stammered out an excuse four-fifths of the way to an outright lie.

Good old Shitface, I thought, relieved and annoyed. For once I could actually use his help, but it would come at the not insubstantial price of him never letting me hear the end of it.

Except, I realised with a sinking feeling, as the company representative in question walked through my cell door escorted by officer number five, it wasn’t Apollo handling the extraction this time.

It was Themis.

And I was in a world of trouble.