“Argh!” I yelled, lifting up my arms and staring with horrified shock at five long fingers at the end of each of the two arms. “I’m in human form again!”
“You certainly are¸” the perky voice said, a tinge of disapproval sounding as it added, “And you seem to have misplaced your clothes—by the love the saints! Don’t do that again!”
I straightened from where I had bent double to look at my feet, turning around to face the person to whom the voice belonged.
A little woman stood in front of me, one hand clapped over her eyes.
“Fires of Abaddon! I got sent to the midget section of the Akasha? I’m in human form in the midget section?”
An irritated look crossed the woman’s face as she lowered her hand. “That term is offensive, and shows archaic and ignorant thinking. We prefer the term ‘little people,’ not that there is a little person section of the Akasha.” She took a deep breath, then slapped another smile on her face, but this one looked awfully brittle. “So long as you promise never to bend over again when I am behind you, I am willing to overlook the fact that you are without clothing. Let’s see, where was I? Oh, yes, here is a pamphlet that details the Akasha, including a brief history, notable members, and what you can expect over the centuries. Since you look confused, I’ll give you a brief overview of the situation: the Akashic Plain, as it is more formally known, is what mortal beings think of as limbo, although in reality it’s much more than that. Beings of both light and dark natures are banished here for eternal punishment without any hope of escape or reprieve.”
I took the pamphlet she shoved at me. It was illustrated with faces of various beings in perpetual torment.
“The Akasha is governed by the Hashmallim, who are kind of a form of Otherworld police, although they are not bound by any rules except those of the Court of Divine Blood. Are you familiar with the Court?”
“I can’t believe that rotten Butterbutt changed me into a human when she banished me. She did it on purpose, I just know she did. Of all the double-dealing...now what am I supposed to do? I can’t stand around like this,” I said, waving my hand toward my torso. A horrible thought struck me. I looked. “Satan’s little imps! My package! It’s...it’s...”
The tiny little woman gave my package due consideration. “Unimpressive is the word that springs immediately to mind, and I use the word ‘springs’ without any innuendo whatsoever.”
“Aw, man! I’m human with a short-changed knapsack!”
“Sir.”
“What? Oh, yeah, I used to be a sprite,” I said. “I’m familiar with the Court. So when did the Akasha get greeters?”
“A few years ago, when it was noticed that many people arrived here without a clue as to what to do next.” She pursed her lips. “Some people appear to be even more clueless than others.”
“Since this is the ultimate place of punishment, I figured suffering untold torments was pretty much the plan of the day,” I said. “This is horrible. I can’t stay like this until Aisling notices that I’m not in Paris. I gotta do something!”
“That is your own concern, sir. I should warn you that there is no way out except through intervention of the Sovereign, and it’s not likely that it will bother itself with something like a sixth class demon, now is it?” She tipped her head on the side as she beamed at me. “Especially not one that insists on prancing about the Akasha in the nude. Enjoy your eternity here. Ta-ta!”
She turned and picked her way through the rocky, jarring landscape until she disappeared behind a particularly jagged piece of rock that thrust upward out of the earth as if it had burst forth by immeasurable forces.
“I’d like to ta your ta, sister,” I muttered. “Great. Just great. My first day on vacation, and I end up in the Akasha, naked, and in friggin’ human form. Good thing I still have my cell phone. I’ll just call Ash up and tell her she has to summon me the h-e-double hockey sticks out of here.”
I picked up my backpack, and had just extricated the cell phone Aisling gave me for my last birthday, when a herd of five fur and leather-clad phantasms suddenly appeared and plowed right into me.
“Hrolf! Look! A naked demon!” One of them stopped long enough to give me the once over. “What’s it got here, then?”
“Hey!” I yelled when the phantasm snatched the cell phone right out of my hand.
“A demon? ‘Ere? Roll ‘im, Runolf,” another of the phantasm said as they continued to move onward.
“Fires of Abaddon! Give that back! And my backpack! Hey!”
Runolf the phantasm—a ghost that’s been banished and has no hope of ever regaining his or her ghostly self back—stopped long enough to jeer at me. “We’re Vikings, demon. We stop for no man! Or...er...demon. Yar!”
“That’s pirate-speak, not Viking-speak, you idiot!” I yelled as I started after him. Here’s the thing, though—phantasms come from ghosts, right? So they aren’t big in the corporeal department to begin with, and once they’ve been phantasmed, they’re even less on the whole “can touch things in the plain of reality” scale. So while they could zoom around the place like a ghostly Viking blight, those of us bound to physical forms had to fight our way through a landscape that brought new meaning to the phrase “cut the your feet to ribbons.” They were out of sight in a matter of a couple of seconds.
“Ow. Ow ow ow. Ow. Son of a sinner! Now I have a rock shard stuck between my toes!”
I sat down and yelped, leaping up immediately. “What the—ass skewers? This is worse than Abaddon!” I moved over to a spot that was mostly free of sharp, rocky spikes, and plopped down to suck on my sore toes. “Man, this is supposed to be my vacation. Not having fun! I wanna go home.”
“At least you have a vacation,” a voice spoke behind me. “I haven’t had any such thing in...oh, it must be seventy years now.”
I peered over my shoulder, eyeing the woman who perched on a rock behind me. “It ain’t much of a vacation, sister. Who’re you?”
“My name is Titania,” the woman said, giving me one of those sultry-eyed once-overs that nymphs were so known for. “You’re naked. You’re a demon and you’re naked.”
“Yeah, and you’re a nymph. I didn’t know they sent you guys to the Akasha. I thought they just ripped off your wings or beat you with your halo if you did something bad.”
She made a face. “You’re thinking of faeries. They are the wicked ones. If I ever catch that bastard, lying, two-timing Oberon, I shall show him that he can’t just throw me away like this. I have rights, too, you know!”
“Titania, huh? What do your friends call you for short? Titty?” I snickered to myself.
She straightened up and gave me a look that would have melted my guts if I weren’t a demon. “They call me Titania!”
“Gotcha. Wait a sec...Oberon? Titania?” I kicked my brain into high and dug through some old memories. “Midsummer’s Night Dream?”
“Pfft.” She examined a rose-tipped fingernail. “That Will Shakespeare got it all wrong. He said I was a faery. As if! He totally dissed us nymphs, and let me tell you, the nymphood was not happy about that.”
“Yeah, I heard you guys can be kind of...eh...militant,” I said, wondering if she wanted to use those long nails to hit all my scritchy spots. Then I remembered I didn’t have scritchy spots. At least, not in this repulsive form. I glared at my package.
“What on earth are you doing?” she asked.
“Glaring at my crotch. A Guardian did this to me,” I said, mourning the loss of my fabulous doggy form.
She, too, stared at my groin. “She has a lot to answer for.”
“You said it. I wish I could do something to pay her back. Hey! Nymphs! You guys are all militant and badass, right? I could have some of your buddies beat up the Guardian who screwed me over.”
“We prefer the term proactive to militant,.” Titania pulled out a nail file and tended to a fingernail. “And if you had spent your life as underestimated and overlooked as we have been, you’d be proac
tive about making sure people got their facts right, too.”
“I’m a demon,” I answered, carefully sitting down and examining my abused foot. “I am all over underestimated.”
“Anyway, Shakespeare got it all wrong,” she continued. “Oberon isn’t king of the faeries at all. He’s just an advocate for the Court of Divine Blood.”
“Advocate? Like a lawyer?”
“An obscenely vile one, yes.”
“Yeah? So what did you do that you got tossed in here?” I asked.
“Oberon, my former lover, and disgusting lint in the underbelly of the worst sort of beings, decided to dump me, a priestess in the house of Artemis, for a naiad. Can you believe it? He dumped me for a water trollop!” Her expression went from outraged to calculating in a split second. “But he’d just better watch out, because the minute I’m out of here, I’m going to get my pound of flesh.”
“Ew,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “Wait—a human pound of flesh, or meat from, oh, say, the rump of a corn-fed Black Angus cow? Because the latter sounds really good right about now. Especially with a whisky barbecue sauce.”
“If I could just find a way out, I could rally the sisters and we’d have our revenge!”
“On who, Shakespeare? Got news for you, babe. He’s dead.”
“No, not him. Oberon.”
I thought. I always think better sitting down. “Not that I want to rush you, since I’ve got at least ten days before Aisling comes back from her cruise and finds out that witch on two legs drugged her boss just so she could banish me, but I’m a bit confused. I get that boy toy dumped you in here when he was hooking up with a naiad, but how does that translate to you nymphs going to war against him?”
“He’s Oberon,” she said, just like that made sense. When I scrunched up my face in an attempt to figure that out, she added, “He didn’t just have me banished to the Akasha—he had all nymphs banished from the Court in order to curry favor for his own kind.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, dredging up a memory. “I think I remember reading something about that. You guys got run out of town because you were causing all sorts of trouble.”
“We did nothing of the sort. Oberon just made it look like we did,” she said, leaping to her feet and shaking her fist at the air. “He will pay for that! He will pay for...” Her words suddenly stopped.
I lifted an eyebrow in a move just as smooth as the one Drake makes whenever Aisling says something outrageous.
“You’re a demon,” she said.
“You got that right, baby cakes. Sixth class,” I said, winking. “But if you were interested in hooking up with me, I gotta tell you that I’m in a relationship right now with a Welsh Corgi named Cecile. She has the cutest little fuzzy butt you ever did see.”
She stared at me just like I said something weird.
“You’re a demon,” she repeated. “Thus, you can get me out of here.”
“If I could get anyone out of here, it would be me, because I have a score to settle with a conniving apprentice Guardian, but I can’t, so I won’t.”
“Yes, you can. You’re a creature of Abaddon. You can’t be dictated to by the Court. That means you can get out.”
“The Court doesn’t have any say over me, but I’ve been sent here, in a roundabout way, by my demon lord. I can only get out if she summons me, and she’s not going to know what that witch Butterfat did until she gets back and finds out I’m not with Amelie or Anastasia.”
“There has to be another way!”
“Well, yeah, the Hashmallim guarding the door could let me out, but that’s never happened, so it’s not worth thinking about.”
“Oh!” she said, stamping her foot and pointing to a spot in the distance. “Don’t you dare cross me, demon! I will make your life a living hell if you don’t get me out of here!”
“Look, sister, I just said—”
“Do it!” she bellowed.
Thirty hours later I gave in to her gigantic ongoing hissy fit, and headed over to the circle of Akasha, the center of the whole place, where three Hashmallim stood guard over the entrance. It was an ugly spot, like the rest of the Akasha, nothing but sharp jagged rocks with dead-looking scrubby plants that were the same shade of sepia as the dirt.
“Hi guys,” I said as I got up to the nearest Hashmallim. If you’ve never seen one of these guys, they’re Freak City with a capital Freak. They look like something that Jim Henson would have dreamed up after a night of hitting the opium pipe—tall and gaunt figures draped in black, but not really black, some sort of living black that moved and shifted, and oh yeah—they had no faces. Seriously freaky. “How they hangin’? Er...that’s assuming you have any to hang. So, this nymph named Titania and I were wondering if we could get out of Dodge. She’s got some vengeance thing, and I want to give a trainee Guardian what for.”
The Hashmallim didn’t say anything. He just stood there and stared at me. Kind of. If he’d had eyes he would have been staring me down. Then again, maybe he was looking at my package. “Now, I know you guys have rules and everything, so Titty and I—”
“Don’t call me Titty!” came the echo of a roar that rolled down from a nearby rocky hilltop.
“We are happy to make it worth your while, if you know what I mean,” I said, dropping my voice so the other Hashmallim couldn’t hear. “I’ve got a credit card. Well, OK, it’s actually Aisling’s that she lets me use on TV shopping channels, but still, I know her pin number—I can pull out a wad of cash big enough to choke a behemoth. So what’cha say? Shall we talk turkey?”
The Hashmallim stood there and said nothing. The bastard.
By the time I ran through everything that Titania and I could think of to offer as a bribe—up to and including her sexual favors, and a sweater woven from hair brushed from my gorgeous coat—two hours had passed, and we were still no closer to getting out.
“Look, I don’t want to get tough with you. I will if I have to, but you can trust me on this, it won’t be pretty.”
The Hashmallim remained silent, but it was a mocking kind of silence, the kind that just dared me to try him.
So I did.
It took three days, but eventually, the Hashmallim cried mercy, and opened a rend in the fabric of time and space, shoving Titania and me through it.
“Do not return,” it said in its creepy, wheezy voice, then slammed shut the rend. “And do not ever sing that song again!”
“That was brilliant,” Titania said, her eyes giving me a long, considering look. “I would have never thought that singing the same song for seventy hours straight would be enough to break a Hashmallim, but you did it. What exactly was that song?”
“My Humps. Effective, huh?”
“Extremely so. I thought the last time when you wiggled your butt on the Hashmallim and asked him what he was going to do with his junk that he was going to scream. Well done, demon. Very well done.” She rubbed her hands and looked around the busy city street we had been dumped out on. It was Helsinki (per Titania’s request), and although it was close to midnight, there were a surprising number of people wandering around. Several of them gave me an odd look.
“What’s wrong, you never seen a naked demon?” I asked a woman who stopped and stared.
She looked startled and hurried off.
“OK, I fulfilled my part of our bargain—now it’s your turn. You gotta get me to Paris pronto so I can salvage something of my vacation before Aisling gets back.”
“A nymph always honors her promises,” Titania said, grabbing my wrist and hauling me after her down the sidewalk. “But first, revenge!”
Chapter Three
It turns out they have laws in Helsinki about people walking around the city buck naked. Tweny-four hours after I was arrested, Titania bailed me out of jail, and shortly after that we were on a train headed for a small town in the countryside where she assured me her ex would be celebrating
“He always loved this area for juhannus,” she explained as the countrysid
e whizzed past us. It was night, but because of the midnight sun thing that happened in the far north, it wasn’t dark out at all. “We celebrated it here for centuries, so I’m certain he’ll be here. The nymphood is on their way, so we’ll—what’s wrong?”
I squirmed in the seat. “It’s my codpiece. I don’t think it fits.”
She rolled her eyes. “Look, you said you wanted some clothes so you wouldn’t be arrested again, and I got you some clothes. I’m sorry if it’s not what you like, but there’s no time to go shopping for you. We have to get out to the juhannus so we can smite Oberon.”
“Did you have to go shopping at a leather fetish store?” I asked, squirming again so I could adjust the leather thong, that, along with a fishnet tank top and the metal studded codpiece, made up what Titania referred to as clothing. “You couldn’t have gotten me something from the Gap? There wasn’t a Polo store around?”
The look she gave me resembled ones Aisling had been known to send my way. “If you have quite finished, demon, I am trying to explain to you what will happen.”
“You don’t have to, I was eavesdropping when you were on the phone in that leather shop. You called up your nymph buddies, and you intend to blow into your ex’s party and beat the crap out of him. It’s not very complicated.”
“Perhaps not, but it will be delicious,” she said, almost purring. Kind of like how a tiger purrs before it pounces.
“So where does the part come in where you get me to Paris?” I asked, trying to adjust the codpiece. “Man, it’s bad enough I have a sub-standard package. This thing is squashing everything together into one blob. Here, take a look and see if the blood has been cut off to it.”
She held up a hand to stop me from unstrapping the codpiece. “I do not have time to examine your genital blobs. Oberon is a master of manipulation. We must plan our attack down to the smallest detail.”
I sighed and slumped back in the seat, listening with only half my attention as she detailed her plans.
Two hours later we met up in a park with the local nymphs that she had rallied, ready to set off on motorbikes to a campsite located on a small lake in a northern region of Finland.