'Tween Heaven and Hell

'Tween Heaven and Hell Read Free Page A

Book: 'Tween Heaven and Hell Read Free
Author: Sam Cheever
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that
you’re not telling me?”
    He turned to me with a frown. “I don’t know anything.” At a
look from me he raised his hands in a gesture of innocence. “Really. I just
don’t like the sound of this new enemy of yours. You do have a way of picking
up trouble, Astra. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
    As he’d intended, that succeeded in distracting me. I was
very thin-skinned on the subject of my apparent magnetism where evil was
concerned. “Oh, so now this is all my fault?”
    Emo grinned and turned to leave. “I’ll call around and try
to find somebody to come fix the window.”
    As I watched his rotten, scaly, red carcass leave the room
still smiling at my indignant anger, I thought maybe I did see what Myra had
seen. The dirty devil…!
    I stormed out of the office without another word to Emo
except to tell him to put on some clothes. I couldn’t help smiling at the sour
look that crossed his scarlet features at that and it made me feel a little
better.
    I stepped into the flash elevator outside my office door and
slid the floor bar to the basement, where my carriage awaited me. Following a
nearly silent whir, I found myself in the poorly lighted sub-street level
parking area before I could blink twice. I stepped out of the flash and moved
quickly past the dozens of tightly packed, bullet-shaped vehicles that waited,
hovering on wings of air, down both sides of the wide parking aisle. With the
new anti-color law that had been enacted because of pressure by ultra-green
environmentalists, six out of ten of the vehicles in the parking garage were a
paintless silver. I moved to my own, sleekly made Viper air model and punched a
code into the keypad on the fire-engine red exterior.
    I had purchased the vehicle just before the anti-color law
was passed and I was damned if I was gonna buckle to pressure and buy a silver
vehicle. I would run this one into the ground and then buy one on the black
market if necessary. Politically correct I was not.
    The door of my Viper whispered open and I stepped in,
pulling my long, leather coat inside just as the door swung shut from the
pressure of my butt in the seat. “Home,” I stated in an exhausted voice and the
Viper floated away from the concrete floor and swung toward the exit. As the
Viper rose into the cool night sky, I leaned my head back on the black, buttery
leather seat, which was also politically incorrect and closed my eyes in
exhaustion. I’d been going since five that morning, when I’d been pulled from
sleep to go and vanquish a minor demon for a regular client and I still had
work to do.
    At this thought, I set my mind to determining how I was
going to handle the meeting that evening with my new and as yet unseen client.
I’d taken a call the previous week on my office televisual, from a Mx. Deaver,
who claimed to have a devil’s advocate after him. According to Mx. Deaver, who
was a cult preacher, the advocate was pissed off at him in a major way for
running his devil out of the ancient building where Mx. Deaver had set up his
new church. Apparently the devil had been living there for several centuries
and hadn’t been keen on relocating.
    Devil’s advocates, in case you’re not up on devildom’s
career designations, are kind of like lawyers for devils, except that they
don’t follow the same rules that human lawyers follow and they’re harder to get
rid of. A devil’s advocate generally wins a case for his client by killing off
anybody who disagrees with his legal opinion. And the only way to fire him, or
defeat him, is to turn him into atmospheric gas.
    I was meeting Mx. Deaver at the Church of the Twined Hands
that night at nine o’clock. Suffice it to say I was not looking forward to it.

Chapter Three
    Between a Devil and His Hard
Place
    When I was very little, I used to hide from monsters,
    Now I am very big, the monsters hide from me…
     
    As the Viper dropped through the roof of my transpo shelter
at home, I opened my weary eyes

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