Hell Has a Succession Problem

The club had been closed for eleven minutes when Marcel Hart realized something was going to kill him in it.

Not dramatically. No thunder, no swords.

Just a man behind his own bar, counting the till, with the wrong kind of quiet standing in the doorway.

"We're closed," Marcel said without looking up. "Try again at nine."

"Dress code is anything that isn't on fire."

Nobody laughed.

He looked up.

It wore the face of Dennis, a regular. Forties, soft chin, a cheap blazer he wore every Thursday.

Ten minutes ago, Dennis had paid his tab, tipped badly, and wished Marcel goodnight.

Dennis had never stood this still. And Dennis's shadow had never stretched toward the bar when every light in Halo hung over the dance floor.

Halo was the best club in the city, which Marcel considered a personal achievement.

He had named it as a joke, because the Devil's son owning a place called Halo struck him as the funniest thing on Earth.

Tonight it did not feel funny.

"Dennis," Marcel said carefully. "Forget something?"

"Do not use that name." The voice came out layered, like two people speaking at once, one of them underwater.

"He is a borrowed coat. I am only wearing him."

"Right," said Marcel. "The tailoring is terrible, by the way."

He ran the numbers.

Front door, thirty feet, with the thing in front of it.

Staff exit, locked, keys in the jacket on the hook by the walk-in cooler.

Phone on the bar, dead since evening because he never remembered the charger.

And six feet of black marble between him and something that wanted him dead.

Marcel decided the marble was his friend.

"You are Marcel Hart," the thing said.

"Allegedly."

"Son of the..."

"Don't," Marcel said, a little too fast. "The last person who finished that sentence in my club got a bar tab he couldn't pay."

The thing smiled. Dennis's face did it wrong, with too many teeth, none in the right order.

It crossed the floor in three steps that did not look like steps.

The cold arrived before the body did. Every glass on the back shelf began to hum.

Marcel did not run. Running was for people who had somewhere to go.

Instead he took down a bottle of the good whiskey, poured two fingers, and slid the glass across the marble.

"Sit," he said. "You look like you had a long commute."

The thing stared at the glass.

"I do not drink."

"Everyone drinks. Some people just haven't found their poison."

Marcel poured one for himself. "Humor me. It's closing time, nobody's watching, and I'm not going anywhere."

He glanced at the neon clock over the register.

2:04.

He knew the shelf life of a stolen body. His father's people got about fifteen minutes in a human skin before the seams started to show.

Dennis had left at 1:54.

Ten more minutes, he thought. Maybe less.

All he had to do was stay interesting.

"Who sent you?" he asked.

"Those who want the throne empty."

"That's vague. Be specific. Is it the sovereign with the hat?"

The thing's eyes flickered. "Sovereigns do not wear hats."

"Then I need better intel." Marcel sipped his whiskey. "Let me guess. They promised you a title."

"I will be named Warden of..."

"Warden. Wow. You know what the last assassin got? A pamphlet."

The thing's hand twitched on the marble. A thin curl of smoke rose from under its palm.

Marcel felt a flicker of triumph and killed it at once.

Mocking something that could rip out his throat was a delicate art, and he was very much between lessons.

2:07.

"You talk too much," the thing said.

"Occupational hazard. I run a bar."

"You are afraid."

"Obviously. I'm also curious. Why tonight?"

He kept his voice light. "I've been here three years. Why not last Tuesday, when I was alone watching a very sad movie?"

"The heir must be removed before the heir is told."

Marcel's smile slipped by a quarter inch. "Told what?"

"That is not my concern."

"It's a little bit my concern."

Marcel filed the word "told" away in the small, cold place where he kept things he would panic about later.

"Everything about you is my concern." The thing leaned over the marble, and the lights above the bar dimmed.

"I was sent to make this quick."

"Then you're doing it wrong."

2:09.

A crack ran along the thing's jaw.

It was small, a hairline split in Dennis's skin with a sickly red glow underneath, like a coal burning through cheap cloth. The thing didn't seem to notice.

The borrowed skin was failing, right on schedule.

Marcel kept his face perfectly still.

Four more minutes.

"Can I ask you something?" he said. "Professionally. Do you actually enjoy this?"

The thing moved.

It came over the bar without touching it.

One moment it was across the marble. The next it had Marcel by the throat, slammed against the back shelf, bottles raining down around them.

"No more questions," it said.

The air left Marcel's lungs. The fingers around his neck were hot now, and wrong, and getting hotter.

He had been scared before, but never like this.

This kind of scared made every joke in his head go quiet and the exit sign go loud.

He clawed at its wrist and felt the skin split under his fingers. Warmth ran down his hand that wasn't blood.

"Four... minutes," he wheezed.

"What?"

"Check... your jaw."

The thing's head tilted. A new crack ran from its cheek to its collar.

Then the front door chimed.

"Marcel?" A woman's voice, tired and sharp, drifted across the dark club.

"You left the door unlocked again. One of these nights someone is going to walk in and murder you, and I'm not going to feel sorry about it."

Marcel's heart dropped through the floor.

Raven.

Thursday. He had forgotten.

Every Thursday for four years she had come straight from the hospital with takeout, and every Thursday Marcel had pretended he wasn't waiting up.

She came through the dark in scrubs and a wet coat, car keys in one hand, takeout in the other.

Her hair was coming loose from a twelve-hour shift, and she was mid sentence when she saw them.

She stopped.

The bag hit the floor, and pad thai slid across the tile.

Neither of them looked at it.

"Raven," Marcel croaked. "Go. Now."

She didn't. Of course she didn't.

Raven Blackfire had never in four years done a single thing he asked her to.

"Let him go," she said. Her voice shook, but it held. "Whatever this is, let him go."

The thing turned its head toward her, and Marcel felt its grip loosen for the first time.

Mistake.

Marcel had never been so grateful for one.

2:11.

The borrowed skin ran out of time, and the cracks opened all at once.

Light poured out of Dennis's face, his chest, the cuffs of his cheap blazer, a furious red, and the thing screamed in two voices at once.

It dropped Marcel. He hit the floor in a pile of glass.

The thing stumbled backward, clawing at itself. Dennis's skin curled like paper, and ash fell off it in sheets.

"The heir," it rasped, collapsing against the bar. "The Devil's heir. They will never let you refuse."

Then it came apart, and there was nothing left but a smoking blazer and a drift of ash on the marble.

The club went silent.

Even the neon hum seemed to be holding its breath. The only sound was ash settling over broken glass.

Marcel lay on his back among the broken glass, staring at the ceiling, and tried to think of a joke.

Nothing came.

Raven crossed the floor anyway. Four years of emergency rooms will do that to a person.

She knelt beside the empty blazer and pressed two fingers where a neck should have been, searching for a pulse that had never existed.

Her hand was shaking. She pulled it back and looked at the ash on her fingertips.

Then she looked at him.

She had heard every word.

"Marcel," she said quietly. "Who is the Devil's heir?"

For the first time in four years, Marcel Hart had absolutely nothing to say.