The Devil's Intern (4 page)

“Patrick has the IQ of a peanut.”

“Why are you writing Patty Lloyd’s name down?”

“Because she works in the library, so she must be smart.”

“And the fact that she looks like Marilyn Monroe has nothing to do with it?”

Medusa and I continue to bicker for another fifteen minutes. I’m so weak from lack of food I can barely grip my pen.

“I hope Septimus lets us see the Viciseometer,” says Medusa. She was playing with the combination of the safe; now she’s spinning in a circle in Septimus’s chair. “Just imagine all that power. You could do anything.”

“It does sound seriously cool. I wonder what Septimus is going to do with it.”

“What would you do with it, Mitchell?”

“Get myself a plate of fries and a triple cheeseburger. Then I’d go back in time and repeat the order a million times.”

Medusa throws an empty soda can at me. She’s a lethal shot, especially when I’m the target. It bounces off my nose and then lands in the recycling bin.

“Pack it in, Melissa!” I yell. I rarely call her by her real name, but I’m getting annoyed. I can feel my shoulders starting to seize up with tension, and my head aches from where I’ve been grinding my back teeth. Another hundred years and I’ll have magenta eyes and dentures.

“You have no vision, that’s your problem, Mitchell,” says Medusa. She jumps off the chair, grabs my pen, and writes down fifteen names in quick succession. They’re inspired choices and
exactly the kind of people Septimus is looking for. Medusa is wasted in the kitchens. I don’t know how I got this job ahead of her. She’s so smart, sometimes my head hurts just trying to keep up.

“Thanks,” I mumble.

Medusa grabs my hands and pulls me up. I’m at least a foot taller than she is, yet sometimes I feel really small in her company. Today is one of those days. My hands are hot and sweaty and covered in ink. Totally gross, but she doesn’t seem to mind.

“Do you know what I would do with the Viciseometer?” Medusa asks. She isn’t meeting my eyes; her concentration is fixed on interlocking our fingers in some kind of game.

“Go back in time and get stretched out on a rack to make you taller?” I suggest.

It was meant to be funny, and she does smirk. I still get a punch to the stomach, though.

“I would do what every devil would do, stupid.”

“And what would every devil do?” I ask.

She lets go of my hands, although I find I don’t want her to.

“I would change my death, of course.”

Medusa helps me finish the list of twenty names, but now my head is buzzing. Is it really possible to change your death? Or even better, go back in time and stop your death completely? Now,
that’s
a thought I’m not going to shake easily.

Everyone looks without seeing in Hell. It’s just the way it is. Every steaming, dark corridor is a crush of people. Some are crying; some are screaming. Most are silent, and that’s just as depressing. Everyone is trying to get somewhere, all the while knowing they can’t ever leave. Devils are buffeted and jostled as we search for our next source of food, our one reminder that we can do something other than work. I don’t even like the burger bar that Medusa and I are now heading toward, but it’s the nearest food stand to the CBD. Because I’m young and tall, I can push my way through more easily than most. Medusa follows in my slipstream, holding tightly to my T-shirt so we don’t get separated. Back on earth the same distance would take five minutes; less than two on my skateboard.

Here in Hell it takes over an hour.

“So tell me more about the Viciseometer,” I say as we fight our way through the crushing crowds. We’re meeting our other two friends, Alfarin and Elinor. We’re running very late, which means there may not be any food left after Alfarin has been let loose on the place. A cause for concern if ever there was one.

“What’s going on, Mitchell?” asks Medusa thickly. She’s chewing
four pieces of gum. Her first attempt at a pink bubble ends when I pop it all over her face.

“I just want to do a thorough job for Septimus, and I think it’s important that I know everything there is to know about the Viciseometer, that’s all.”

“Kiss-ass.” Medusa is annoyed at me because now she has gum in her hair. Her curls are wild today. The humidity and heat of Hell wreak havoc on everyone’s hair, mine included. Even though my blond hair is cut short, there are times when I look like an albino hedgehog. Today Medusa’s hair makes her head look ten times bigger than normal.

Alfarin and Elinor are already sitting down at a table in the burger bar. It’s littered with empty boxes and greasy wrappings. Their gleaming red eyes shine across the room as they wave us over. When I think about the amount of food we consume, I have to thank the Highers for decreeing that the dead don’t gain weight. Can you imagine how much worse Hell would be if everyone was fatter? We’d be in a state of permanent sweaty gridlock, although Medusa could stand to gain a few pounds, especially on her elbows. A nice bit of padding for when she punches me.

Alfarin, son of Hlif, son of Dobin—new introductions always get the epithet—has been dead for a thousand years. He’s a Viking prince. He’s shorter than me, about five feet ten inches, but his bulk almost matches his height. He’s also younger than me in alive years because he died during his sixteenth winter, but everyone thinks he’s older because he’s like a man-mountain. Alfarin has this funny accent, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the
Terminator
movies, and half of his face is covered with a long, golden beard that Medusa and Elinor like to braid with beads. And he totally lets them! Alfarin worships Elinor with a passion, but as clingy as she is with him, she
just wants to be friends
. The phrase every guy loves to hear.

Elinor Powell died in the Great Fire of London in 1666 when she was nineteen. While official records placed the number of deceased in single figures, the truth is many of the dead were
simply incinerated as the medieval city burned. There were no bodies left to count, and Elinor became one of the forgotten dead. There are a lot like her here. Every disaster, natural or otherwise, causes a flood of dead refugees. Terror in life just becomes terror in death. Elinor is the eldest of six children. Two of her brothers are also in Hell: Michael and Phillip, although they don’t bother with Elinor much because she’s a girl. Their loss, my and Alfarin’s gain. We assume the other three siblings—John, William, and Alice—went Up There, but Elinor never stops looking for them. She was killed on her nineteenth birthday after the blazing roof of her home collapsed on top of her.

That has got to suck. It’s bad enough dying when you’re young, but to croak on your birthday is just sick. We get to the table. Medusa and Elinor immediately hug and giggle. Alfarin and I bang knuckles.

“Dude.”

“My friend.”

I think you’ll agree our greeting is cooler. It has nothing to do with the fact that if Alfarin were to hug me, my bones would be pulverized into mush.

I grab the last remaining burger on the table and cram it into my mouth.

“We saved it for ye, Mitchell,” says Elinor. She lowers her voice and leans forward. “We had to. They’ve run out of food.”

“What!” I exclaim. “What do you mean, they’ve run out of food?”

The food in Hell is sourced from the living, by any means necessary. The Devil sees nothing wrong in the living going without to keep order in Hell. Famine and plague are not acts of Up There, as some people and insurance companies would have you believe, but instead are acts of The Devil.

And Hell never runs short.

Medusa shushes me.

“The kitchens are having problems with their sourcing,” she
whispers. “There are just too many devils to feed, so they’re delivering fewer supplies and meals to the rest of Hell. . . .”

“So much for everything ending when ye die,” says Elinor sadly.

I stare at her. The oldest in our group doesn’t look well. Elinor’s skin is pale and it has a greenish tinge. She is so pretty, though. Long red hair falls all the way down her back, and she has a smattering of freckles around her nose. Like those of all of the devils who have been in Hell over four hundred years, her irises flame with a bright red fire. When Elinor is not biting her nails, she will nervously paw at the base of her neck. She’s doing that now. The back of her neck is like her security blanket.

“How was the ball?” asks Alfarin, changing the subject. “Did my Viking kin bathe in the entrails of the heathen Saxons?”

“It was all right, I suppose—”

“Oh, listen to you trying to be all cool,” interrupts Medusa. She leans over the table toward Alfarin. “Mitchell danced!”

Elinor squeaks like a mouse. I think she’s laughing. Alfarin just shakes his head as his bushy eyebrows join in a frown.

“Tell me it isn’t true.”

“Medusa made me.”

“Dancing is for the womenfolk. Men drink beer and fight.”

“Hey, you’ve been on the end of Medusa’s fists. It was either dance or end up in Hell’s casualty unit.”

“What was the music like?” asks Elinor, biting her thumbnail. “And what did everyone wear? Did they like yer dress, M?”

Medusa and Elinor have taken to shortening each other’s names. So Elinor is now
El
, and Medusa is now
M
. I keep waiting for them to shorten my name, and the second they do I will shoot them down in flames. You know my first name is Mitchell. Not Mitch, or Mitty, or, Hell forbid, Chell. My name is Mitchell. Mitchell Johnson in full. No middle name—my parents didn’t see the point.

I like my name; it’s succinct, strong, masculine. But I know it’s only a matter of time before Medusa and Elinor start calling me M.J.

Just the way my mother did.

She got everyone calling me that when I was little. I liked it at first, but after a while it started sounding babyish so I asked people to stop. And everyone agreed—with the exception of my mother. I was always her M.J.

Only now do I realize I should have appreciated that a bit more than I did.

So I never want to hear the name M.J. in Hell. That’s a part of me that will always live. In Hell I’m just Mitchell Johnson. Four syllables and nothing more.

My
no maudlin thoughts
policy isn’t working out too well. I think learning about the Viciseometer has put me a strange place. I’m now hovering between this new existence and the longing for what has been snatched from me. I try to force a smile at my three friends. Medusa is stroking my back; Alfarin’s face is so furrowed his bushy eyebrows are in danger of disappearing under the folds of skin on his forehead; Elinor has just gone the color of raw rhubarb.

Is it always so hot in Hell? Of course it is; I see the heating bills. They’re one of the reasons Septimus is so worried. Hell is on the verge of bankruptcy, and with so many new devils arriving, the cost of running the Afterlife is insane. Right now The Devil’s moods swing from deliriously happy to just delirious. We’re approaching the end of the financial year, when The Devil goes through the budget with the finance team, and let’s just say the last time they met, the furnaces in Hell weren’t fired by wood and coal that day. Then all that melted dead flesh and bone ended up breaking the furnace and that just incurred more costs. Everyone on the budget team was put back together and healed, but it was a mess that made even Septimus puke his guts up. And now my boss is under pressure to stop the dead . . . .

And then it hits me. This is Septimus’s plan. He’s going to send a team of devils to the land of the living with the time-traveling device. They’re going to stop future devils from becoming . . . well,
devils. With fewer dead, the costs will go down. It’s like downsizing, before a person is employed.

Septimus is a genius.

“Mitchell, Mitchell.”

Medusa has stopped stroking me like a puppy and has resumed slapping me between my shoulder blades.

“He looks very hot,” says Elinor.

“But not in a way that is attractive to the peasant women of Ye Olde England?” asks a nervous Alfarin.

“For the billionth time, Alfarin, El doesn’t
like
Mitchell like that. He’s way too feminine for her,” answers Medusa. Every word is matched with a thump on my back. “El wants a real man, with muscles, don’t you, El?”

Elinor is blushing so furiously I’m amazed she hasn’t combusted. She mumbles something about being thirsty and races off to buy some drinks with the few Hell coins left on the table.

“The peasant Elinor is as glorious in movement as one of the Valkyrie,” sighs Alfarin. “Why, if I were to steal but one kiss from those delicious red lips, I would gratefully remove one of my own arms and present it to Thor himself as an offering of my thanks.”

“I think El would probably settle for flowers and chocolates, Alfarin,” says Medusa. “Less messy.”

“You should also think about not calling her a peasant, Alfarin. Girls don’t dig that sort of thing.”

“And what would you know what girls like, Mitchell?” says Medusa with a smirk. Her pretty pink eyes are wide with interest. “You’re hardly Casanova.”

“Well, apart from the fact I don’t know who Casanova is, I can tell you I am way more successful with the ladies than you give me credit for.”

“Our friend Mitchell is quite correct, Medusa,” says Alfarin. “You do him no honor to doubt his manhood in such a way. Why, just seven moons ago, the buxom wench Erin Fenshawe swooned
on top of Mitchell and had to be pulled away from his lips by my great-aunt, Dagmar.”

I nod emphatically at Alfarin’s defense of my . . . what did he call it? Manhood?

“Oh, please,” says Medusa dramatically. “He was having an allergic reaction to the feathers Erin had stitched onto her sweater. She thought he had died—again—and was trying to do CPR on him. If that girl had a brain cell she’d be dangerous.”

Elinor reappears with four large sodas. I down mine and then Medusa’s in quick succession. I need the sugar rush to help calm my frayed nerves.

Frayed nerves? Where the Hell did that phrase come from? I’m turning into an old woman. What is wrong with me today?