Page 5 of Hellfire & Bowties
“What the fuck?” Luc said for the tenth time that day.
“Language,” Peter said.
“Can I talk to the Big Guy?” Luc said, ignoring his censure. “This is clearly above our pay grade.”
“I’ll let him know to call you as soon as he’s back.”
“Where the Hell is he?” Luc asked.
“Watching the Olympics. You know how it gets with prayers around this time, and ice-skating is first on the program. He hasn’t slept in days.”
“Shit,” Luc said, getting reprimanded again swiftly. “Just… tell him to call me as soon as he can.”
“Will do. Have a celestially wonderful day,” Peter said before hanging up.
Luc put the phone down and looked at Oren, who was blinking those wide green eyes at him.
“Well, I have bad news and… more bad news,” Luc said.
“I’ll take the bad news then,” Oren said.
Luc admired his composure in the face of it all.
“Apparently, you’re not on their list either. And the Big Guy won’t be back for another couple of weeks at least.”
“So…?” Oren looked confused.
Luc pinched the bridge of his nose again. “We’ll have to find a spot for you while we figure out what to do.”
Luc held Oren’s stare as best as he could, which was hard because a wild binder chose that moment to slide from a file cabinet to his right and smacked him right in the head.
Seriously.
Fuck today.
2
Oren
So…
He was in Hell.
Totally not how he’d thought his day would turn out when he woke up for work that morning. He’d had a new outfit he was super excited to wear, it was Friday, which meant the last workday of the week, and Sharon had said she’d be bringing in cake because her daughter had just had a baby. A chocolate cake.
It was supposed to be a nice, relaxing, chocolate-cake-tasting day followed by a weekend of sitting in his pajamas in front of the TV, binge-watching any documentary he could find. Oren had been looking forward to it. He’d been planning on alphabetizing his library and redoing his wardrobe since he’d gotten new clothes, too.
Instead, he’d walked to the bus station, boarded his bus, and halfway to work he’d felt a very familiar painful pang in his chest. It didn’t stop.
Until his vision went blurry and then completely dark.
And now he was in Hell, where he didn’t belong, and if anybody asked, he agreed with Luc—life had already dealt him a really bad hand, what with the heart condition and the dying young thing. He didn’t think he deserved to be in Hell as the cherry on top of a very shitty, dust mite-flavored sundae.
Hell, apparently, looked exactly like Oren would have imagined it: messy and overheated, with very bad lighting, stuff everywhere, and people screaming. There were little pools of lava bubbling way too close to where people were supposed to be walking, and pitch-black holes all over the floors. It was menacingly large, the screams echoing off roughly carved walls.
It should have been terrifying.
But… Oren always ran a bit cold, so the heat didn’t bother him. He was used to being alone, so the cacophony of voices felt comforting. And the messes around him felt like projects he wanted to dig into.
