"But I have a quota to hit, and as you can see, that's not going well for me." He pulled his hand out, holding a stack of pages with dense printing between his claws. "There it is," he muttered. He snapped the case closed and set it aside.
"Well, I'm sorry to hear you are having such trouble, I guess?" I said.
My mother had raised me to be polite. I guess that extended to demons too. She hadn't ever specified them as an exception to the politeness rule. Arzal ignored me and produced a pen from somewhere. I say pen, but it was probably more accurately a quill, made with a large black feather. Maybe a
raven's? I'm not really up on my quill knowledge.
He licked the end with a forked red tongue and began filling out his paperwork. I sat quietly next to him, content to watch the moving pictures and listen to the fuzzy sound without paying attention. Usually, my brain doesn't stop moving. It is always in search of something interesting. If there was the mental equivalent of a treadmill, my mind was constantly on it.
That's not to imply that I'm some sort of genius astrophysicist. More like a hamster on drugs. I'm usually thinking about something dumb like dragons or laser
beams. Or about that time I congratulated a woman who wasn't pregnant.
But my brain had decided it was time to take a breather for once. The old thought box had kicked its shoes off and was lounging on the couch. It was a nice feeling. I was starting to see the appeal of alcohol.
"Let's see, initial here," Arzal murmured to himself. "DW, DW, and DW." Each time he said my initials, he made a mark on his paperwork, and I felt a weird tingling in my fingers and toes. It was a faint electric kiss,
the kind you feel a millisecond before you shock yourself on a doorknob after walking on a shag rug with your socks on.
"Wait, what are you doing?"
"Dylan Walker," Arzal said, ignoring me and signing the bottom of a piece of paper with a flourish. But Arzal didn't say my name. His
mouth moved, but I heard my mother's voice. We all have a true name—anyone can call me Dylan, and I'll know that they probably want to talk to me—but when your name is said a certain way (usually by your parents), it grabs you as though someone reached through your chest and squeezed
your heart with their bare hands.
I felt that same jolt, but magnetized by a thousand—no, a million times. My skin felt too tight for my body. Pins and needles flared everywhere. Not as if my leg or arm had fallen asleep, but as though every part of my being had. Dimly, I was aware of the sound of the tequila bottle shattering as I
dropped it from my stunned hands. I don't know how long it was before I could think straight.
It might have been five seconds or five minutes. When I came back to myself, Arzal was almost done packing away everything in his weird briefcase.
"What the hell was that?" I asked angrily. My heart was racing. I had a.terrible feeling that I knew the answer. Arzal froze for a second, bloodred shoulders hunched away from me. If he wasn't a demon, I'd have said he was scared of me. He turned back to face me, his glowing smile replaced with a stony expression.
"Like I said, you seem nice, but I've got a quota to hit. I'm in between a rock and a fiery place. Best of luck. I hope you enjoy your life, I really do. We will see you in about ten years."
He stood up, briefcase nowhere in sight, and turned to walk away. It was at this moment I realized he was naked.
Thankfully, his lower half was covered in a dense black fur. But I was still far closer to demon butt than I ever wanted to be. I couldn't believe what was happening. This was against every rule I had ever read about in supernatural stories.
"Are you kidding me?" I asked. I leapt to my feet and glared at the retreating demon's back. This was for two reasons: partly because I was furious, but also because I wanted to get my face farther away from demon-butt altitude.
It was so weird with the tail and the fur and everything. "Did you literally commit, like…" I frantically sought for a word to express what
was happening. "Soul fraud?"
Arzal turned to face me, his clawed hands clasped together in a nervous gesture. "For what it's worth, because I feel awful about the whole thing, I hooked you up," he said.
"You what? What does that even mean?" I shouted.
"You know, I supersized the deal. I gave you the Eddie Bauer edition. You are going to enjoy these next few years, man, don't worry." His freaky white smile returned, and he winked at me. "Trust me, you won't regret it."
"Trust you? Trust you? You are literally a demon who is trying to defraud me out of my soul or something, and you want me to trust you?"
Arzal winced a little bit, and the smile gave up and retreated once more.
"I'm sorry," he muttered again, and then (literally) turned tail and ran out of the theater.
"I am never drinking again," I muttered, looking down at the shards of glass at my feet.
APRIL WAS STILL showering away when I emerged from the theater. I snuck out past the dozing attendant before the movie ended. There was broken glass and tequila all over the floor, and I couldn't deal with that right now. I felt bad, but given the circumstances, not that bad.
The theater was five or six blocks from the Athen apartment I shared with Connor. That is the trick to hiding when you don't have a car. You gotta go far enough to be annoying to find, but close enough that you can amble
back home.