Page 1 of Client from Hell

One

Some risks were worth taking.

Had I been wise, I wouldn’t have set the Devil’s house on fire. Had I been smart, I would’ve covered my tracks a little better. Could I even prevent the Devil from discovering who had struck a match and burned down his pretty little mansion? I’d cast every practitioner spell I knew to disable the security system without triggering an alarm, using ensorcelled scraps of paper to take over the alarm system’s job and imprint a looping video on the feed, creating the illusion nothing had changed at the property while I took my time destroying the cameras.

The trick to dealing with the evil nasties of the world involved not getting caught. I could only hope I’d taken enough steps to avoid detection. While I had my doubts, I refused to falter.

Some risks were worth taking, and the Devil deserved to have his house torched. Had he minded his own damned business for once in his eternal life, his problems wouldn’t have come knocking at my door. Technically, it hadn’t been a door. I didn’t know what the hell they called the flimsy barrier separating the audience in a courthouse from where the accused, the accuser, the attorneys, and the rest of the legal folks sat, but I couldn’t help but think of it as a gate meant for toddlers.

The Devil reminded me of an unruly toddler with a temper problem, although most little children didn’t erupt into flames when annoyed.

It wasn’t my fault his daughter had gotten into legal trouble, and it certainly wasn’t my fault he had wanted to take care of the matter personally.

I checked my box of matches to discover it was empty, and I tossed it into the burning bushes, which did a good job of igniting the startlingly flimsy exterior of his mansion.

The next time, the Devil would remember the details—and hire someone to put a better veneer on his Georgia property, one a little less likely to go up in flames at the first introduction to a match. Then again, the gasoline I’d helpfully splashed along the exterior helped a little with its inclination to burn.

Whistling, and well aware the Devil would catch me within ten minutes of realizing someone had been brave and stupid enough to torch his house, I dumped the remaining gas tanks into the flames. Thanks to a little practitioner trick I’d picked up for the sole purpose of committing an act of arson, they would be reduced to ash in a matter of minutes, leaving no evidence they’d been made of plastic.

While I’d already screwed a few things up on the covering my tracks portion of my arson adventure, I tossed a few papers inscribed with warding runes into the fire. They vanished in a flash of blue light and green smoke.

Instead of a blonde-haired woman with glasses, any attempts by lesser divines and scryers would result in a dark-haired man, also with glasses, someone who’d earned the Devil’s ire over some idiotic dispute.

It would take an angel—or the Devil himself—to pierce through my illusions. The angels would assist the Devil if he asked, but he wouldn’t. The Devil would view his torched home as a challenge and seek to solve the mystery without cheating.

If he acted true to form.

He might, or he might not.

The Devil cheated when he wanted, but he also loved mysteries as much as he adored his little cupcake of a daughter. Witnessing her attempts to rid the Earth of him through strangulation in a courthouse would be one of my cherished memories until the end of my life, which I predicted would occur within ten minutes following the Devil discovering who’d gotten tired of his shit and gone after his Earthly possessions. The case, which had devolved into the defendants—the Devil and his daughter—feuding without a care in the world, had put me in the line of fire.

As the pair had turned the court into a circus, the judge had thought it would be wise to have the promising young attorney-in-training practice questioning witnesses and the defendants.

When I’d gone to the courthouse, I’d been there to be seen and not heard. Questioning witnesses to prove the Devil or his daughter hadn’t done the crime would forever annoy the hell right out of me. Why hadn’t someone requested an angel to put an end to the nonsense rather than subject the court to their madness?

Most of the time, I liked Judge Andretti, so I couldn’t justify burning down his house. The Devil, however, deserved a little fire in his life.

I’d seen more about his true self than I wanted, which should have been hidden from the eyes of mortals behind the same sort of shroud angels used, or so the limited information I’d been able to scrounge up claimed.

The Devil’s appearance coupled with my unwanted ability to spot the shimmering shroud at the courthouse confirmed I ran out of time.

It would have been a kindness if I’d been wiped out of existence rather than been made aware of the curtain of energy blanketing the Devil and keeping those around him safe from instant death. For me, instant death would have been a mercy.

It no longer mattered. I turned my attention back to my work. As far as arsonists went, I considered myself to be a generous one. I’d waited until everyone in his eclectic family had left the premises, including their menagerie of weird pets, which included cats, fish, a few birds, and some dogs.

I suspected the dogs had a hellish origin, as at least one of them had multiple heads.

As far as I could tell, the Devil’s wife ruled over them all with an iron paw; I’d witnessed her take on the form of a snow leopard while planning my act of evil.

The angel in me made it difficult to be truly evil, the demoness in me lacked the spine to do much about my angelic tendencies, and the human in me had taken over and overruled the forces of good and evil battling within me.

I still couldn’t figure out where I’d gotten so much angelic and demonic DNA; my parents appeared to be human. My grandparents also appeared to be human. Everyone I knew in my family appeared to be human.

Yet somehow, genetically, I passed for the child of a triad without being a child of a triad.

One day, I might ask my parents what the hell was going on—or corner my grandparents and ask them a few questions regarding their parentage.

Then again, it didn’t matter. I was out of time. The Devil would get me or the cancer would, and with nothing to lose, I figured the Earth owed me a favor for poking the divine with a sharp, fiery stick. I’d go out with a bang, but it beat suffering through the prophesied six months to a year I had left to live.