Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck (5 page)

The teacher smiled despite herself and took off her straw hat, revealing a ratty nest of matted gray hair. “Though the currency is diff’rent down here,” the teacher continued, “the concept is ’sentially the same. The value is in the exchange: an intricate series of bets ’n’ bluffs. The money itself is worthless. But what it represents is priceless.”

Poker Alice shifted her timeworn bulk on her chair with a screaming creak. “Let me put it to you this way, girls.”

She shuffled her deck of cards with uncanny skill. The cards rippled together like twin waterfalls cascading into one. “The Netherworld Soul Exchange, or NSE, is the afterlife-blood of the postmortem economy. It circulates, it feeds, it courses through everythin’ to the persistent throb of its own pulse.”

She dealt a hand before her, and another, facedown, at the front of her desk. “Miss Fauster, play the cards you’ve been dealt.”

Marlo gulped. She was an accomplished bluffer, to
be sure, but as far as cards went, her Go Fish floundered, her Crazy Eights were only somewhat mentally unstable, and her War was positively Swiss. But Marlo could tell by her teacher’s dull glare that she would just have to gin and bear it.

She scooched her desk forward.

“The keys to winnin’ any fortune are discipline, observation, unpredictability, and money management,” the teacher said coolly. “Discipline to wait fer the right opportunity and to keep yer emotions under yer hat at all times.”

Sighing, Marlo gathered her five cards: a King Henry the Eighth, a Jack the Ripper, and three sixes. Even Marlo knew that this was a pretty decent hand. She glanced over her cards at her opponent. Poker Alice was expressionless. It was as if she had Botox injections all over her face.

“Observation,” the grizzled old woman continued. “Most of each game isn’t spent playin’ yer hand, but playin’ yer opponent. Study ’em. Watch ’em. Listen. And use that information against ’em.”

Her eyes bore through Marlo. It was like sitting across from a saggy old X-ray machine. Marlo looked at her hand again. Three sixes: the hand of the beast. The corner of her lips twitched up slightly in satisfaction. Marlo looked up and saw Poker Alice drinking in her face with her creepy eyes.
Great
, she fumed.
I get a decent hand, then smile like an amateur
.

“Unpredictability,” Poker Alice continued. “Changin’ gears, smoothly and without detection. If yer opponent is nervous, be calm—and vice versa. Draw?”

“No, I’d like to keep playing,” Marlo said. Lyon and Bordeaux laughed.

“I kid,” Marlo lied. “Two cards,
por favor.”

Poker Alice shook her head and grumbled. She slid two cards across the green felt tabletop and scooped up Marlo’s discard.

Marlo had, naturally, traded her King Henry the Eighth and Jack the Ripper. But she had no idea she’d pull two queens: Catherine de Medici and Marie Antoinette. Marlo could scarcely believe her luck: she had a
Facts of Life
, or a
Growing Pains
—some terrible old TV show—oh yes, a
Full House!

She fought to restrain her facial muscles. Marlo felt Poker Alice’s stare graze her cheeks.

“I’ll hold,” the teacher said. “That means
I don’t want any more cards.”

Marlo knew she held a winning hand, but poker wasn’t about how much your cards were actually worth but how much everyone
thought
they were worth. So to win, Marlo thought, she had to play the player, not the game.

“Phew,” Marlo muttered. “I’m glad we’re not playing for anything.”

Poker Alice glared at her. “What was that?”

“I mean”—Marlo cleared her throat—“I was saying
I … uh … wish we could play for something, but since we’re not, I guess I’ll just fold and go back to my …”

The teacher smiled, causing her stogie to flare in shared amusement. Poker Alice looked like a bored cat wanting to extend her playdate with a hapless mouse. “To better understand losses and personal bankruptcy, we should be makin this interesting.” The teacher grinned with yellow-brown teeth. “In the event that ya beat me, what would you like as yer winnings?”

Marlo trembled to contain her glee at baiting her trap so expertly. “Well,” she mumbled. “If I were to, um, to win, I’d like to … to teach the class one day,
any way I’d like.”

Poker Alice couldn’t help but laugh. “High stakes, indeed,” she mocked. “If I lose, I get a vacation. Tarnation! Well, I
never
!”

Poker Alice grinned wickedly. “And when—
if-
—you lose,” she continued, “my good fiend Principal Bubb and I could arrange a little student exchange. She could use an assistant, I reckon, after all the trouble your brother stirred up.”

Marlo shivered, though she was clad in several ugly sweatshirts and thermal stirrup pants.
Bea “Elsa” Bubb, Principal of Darkness
. Just the thought of her turned Marlo’s blood into a Type O negative Slurpee. She was in over her thirteen-year-old head, but there was no going back now.

“Lastly, money management,” Poker Alice said smugly. “Only play in games you can afford. You must have a bankroll large enough to weather shifts in the undulatin’ liquid of luck.”

Poker Alice laid her cards out on the table. Each was blood-red, like five fresh gashes. She smiled smugly. “Miss Fauster, here, bet more than she could comfortably lose,” the teacher said. “So, naturally, that leaves her broke, and me looking like a—”

“Full—” Marlo began.

“Fool?!” Poker Alice cut in, aghast.

“No,
full
, you fool, as in
full house,”
Marlo said triumphantly while spreading her cards out on the table.

Poker Alice’s face practically slid off the front of her head. She stared at Marlo’s winning hand in disbelief—the wicked queens, the three ghastly sixes. Jordie, Norm, and Takara whooped with delight, while Lyon and Bordeaux’s mouths dropped open in shock.

Poker Alice chewed on her cigar as the class bell tolled. She huffed and puffed and practically blew Marlo down with a look so dirty no soap known to man could ever hope to clean it off. Her teacher belched out one final, noxious cloud of cigar exhaust.

“Get out of my class—NOW!” Poker Alice roared while fumbling at her waist for a .38 pistol she had left up on the Stage years ago.

And though Marlo knew jack about poker, she
did
know when to walk away and when to run.

5 · THUNDER FROM
DOWN UNDER

BEA
“
ELSA
”
BUBB
dusted her armpit with a can of Secrete Industrial Strength Odorant until the aerosol propellant rattled empty.

She tossed the spent can onto the floor, then clacked hurriedly toward a dangling skeleton that currently functioned as a clothes hanger. Beneath it was a three-headed Pekingese with three wet little noses sniffing the air.

“Snookems,” she cooed down to Cerberus, “would you be Mommy’s whiffle fluff bottom and fetch me my favorite truss?
He’s
going to be here in—
”

Bea “Elsa” Bubb looked up at the motionless clock on the wall, which—being as her lair was in Limbo—
never ticked nor tocked. Still, her clock was at least right twice a day, and the object of her supreme affection—the Big Guy Downstairs himself—was due here at any moment.

Her back hair still in curlers, the principal yanked a purple taffeta dress with bile-green bows from her dressing skeleton.

Cerberus dragged behind him a beige truss and hernia belt, and deposited it at Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s shiny black hooves. She clapped her hands together with appreciation.

“What a good boy my tri-headed prince of puppy-wuppies!”

A pair of claws scraped outside the entrance to Principal Bubb’s lair.

“Forgive me, O glorious Son of Perdition, I’m running a little late,” the principal twittered girlishly as she cinched her truss and reached for the door latch. “I cleared my schedule so the two of us could spend the afternoon together over a pot of animossy-tea and devil’s food …”

She flung the door open, hoping to feast her yellow goat eyes upon her nightmare in shining armor. Instead, there was a tall, willowy blond creature with cold green eyes and a toothy, predatory grin.

“… cheese cake?”

Bea “Elsa” Bubb drooped with disappointment.
Cerberus poked from between her hairy legs and snarled.

“Sounds lovely,” the woman said with a smile as bright and cold as a full moon in January. She extended her slender hand, a gesture that was less “Hello, nice to meet you” and more
“En garde!”

Principal Bubb was at a rare loss for words, which was probably fortunate, considering the words that she was likely to use.

“Lilith Couture,”
the comely stranger said with obvious pride. “Devil’s advocate, Satan’s secretary, Lucifer’s lieutenant, the Archfiend’s aide-de-camp—”

“I get the idea,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb replied.

“And you must be Principal Blob.”

“Bubb
. B-U-B—”

“Of course,” Lilith said, strutting past the principal and into the office as if, in midstride, the room had suddenly changed owners. Bea “Elsa” Bubb stared at the lithe creature’s trendy fashion accessory: an Italian-leather tail cap (made from
real
Italians) with inlaid flint accents that created a mesmerizing trail of sparks as her posterior appendage swayed from side to side.

As Lilith sat in the chair normally reserved for the Principal of Darkness, a wave of anger swept the cobwebs away from Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s brain. “And why are you here, exactly?” she asked.

Lilith put her feet up on the desk. Her hooves were blood-red, lacquered to a brilliant gloss. “To clean up
your mess, dearie.” She grinned, this time with
genuine
pleasure. “An escape? From Heck? If it weren’t shockingly true, it would be almost laughable. And that’s a big
almost
. The Big Guy Downstairs did many things when he heard the terrible news, and I can assure you that laughing’ wasn’t one of them.”

Lilith regarded the look of disappointment draped across the principal’s face. “You didn’t seriously expect that
he
would come …
here?”

Lilith snorted demurely. Her near-skeletal frame trembled with mirth. “Oh, you poor deluded thing.” She smirked, lifting her long legs from the desk and straightening her dress. “As if Lucifer would have the time to drop by your little Netherworld nursery to change soiled, procedural diapers.”

Bea “Elsa” Bubb was furious. Her nostrils flared. The veins on her neck bulged. She even
smelled
angry (an odor akin to musky black pepper). But she fought to restrain herself. Lilith was not one of her charges who could be easily bullied. She held a power and status, at least by association, that the principal desperately wanted. Bea “Elsa” Bubb was
not
going to be sold down the River Styx.

That four-eyed runt Milton Fauster had made her the laughingstock of the underworld. His unprecedented escape had turned an otherwise smooth-running machine into a flaming bureaucratic wreck. So both she and Heck were under “review,” and the principal
would just have to suck it up and
deal
. She should, in fact, consider herself lucky. While the Fauster Incident was something of an embarrassment (okay, make that a
career-crippling humiliation to end all humiliations)
, it had diverted attention from the fact that some glitch, some wrinkle, some heretofore unthinkable boo-boo had sent Milton Fauster down to Heck in the first place. Judging from the size of his file—a Post-it for a misdemeanor crime he didn’t even know he had committed—and the inarguable purity of his soul, Milton Fauster was a do-gooding goody-goody who should be tuning his harp on some cloud, not taking up bunk space in her joyless juvie.

In any case, she would have to humor the flawless, infuriating she-demon who was now, currently, warming
her
chair (not to mention ruining the wide trench in the cushion she had worked so hard to create).

“Penny for your thoughts,” Lilith purred. “Keep the change.”

Bea “Elsa” Bubb smirked. If Miss Couture wanted to play hardball, then she would bring her bat and mitt.

“How droll,” the principal said dismissively “I was just thinking that it must be as busy as, well, h-e-double-hockey-sticks down there for His Unholiness to send someone so unimportant to help deal with our recent …
unpleasantness.”

Lilith’s sneer evaporated. She sat up, hackles literally raised. “I’m practically his right claw,” she hissed.
“Now, I don’t expect us to be Ya-Ya sisters or anything, but it is in
both
of our interests to shovel some cat litter on your doo-doo—and quickly—so I can go back to helping rule the bottomless pit of eternal perdition, and
you
can get back to wiping runny noses and confiscating slingshots.”

The principal’s eyes constricted into a pair of angry yellow slits. This scrawny, rancorous stick of a woman wasn’t going to stand between her and the love of her afterlife. Nor was she going to impede a successful career that had been steadily going down, down, down for time immemorial.

“Of course, Miss Couture,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb replied calmly. “We can start by going through my files.”

Lilith sighed, looking the principal up and down. “I only wish that dirty work wasn’t so …
dirty.”

Principal Bubb looked down at Cerberus, who was faithfully at her hooves, snarling at the bony intruder in their midst.

“Don’t worry, my wittle wuzzle woo,” she murmured as she went to exhume her first crate of files to be scrutinized. “We shall overcome.”

The principal brushed aside the collection of porcelain kitten figurines on her desk to make room for her first stack of files.

Overcome, indeed
, she stewed before absentmindedly sending one cat crashing to the floor. She hovered over the fractured feline.

“Chairman Meow,” she whimpered before flushing crimson with rage.

I’d like to overcome, overpower, and overwhelm one Milton Fauster
, Bea “Elsa” Bubb fumed.
And where exactly
is
that no-bad scab of a boy at the heart of all this aggravation?