Hell Has a Succession Problem

Three Jokes

"Don't move."

Raven's voice had changed. The tired woman with the takeout was gone. This was the other one, the one who ran toward ambulances.

She was on her knees beside him before Marcel could sit up.

"I said don't move."

"You said it nicely," Marcel croaked. "I just wasn't listening."

"Look at me."

He looked. A penlight clicked on and swept across his eyes, left, right, left.

Her hand was steady. Her breathing wasn't.

"Follow the light. Good. Can you swallow?"

"Technically."

"Marcel."

"It hurts. A lot. Is that the answer you wanted?"

"It's the first honest one you've given me tonight."

"I told you to run," he said quietly.

"I know."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because you were on the floor." She said it like it was obvious. "I walk toward things, Marcel. It's how I'm built."

She tilted his chin up with two fingers and went very quiet.

He knew what she was looking at. He could feel it, a ring of heat around his throat that throbbed with every heartbeat.

The penlight moved slowly across his skin, the way she studied a scan she didn't want to understand.

"This is a handprint," she said.

"Is it a good one?"

"It's a full-thickness burn, and it's already sealed. No blistering. No swelling. The edges look like glass."

Her voice dropped.

"Marcel, there are six fingers."

He didn't answer. He had felt all six.

Raven sat back on her heels and studied him for a long moment.

Her eyes went to the glass on the floor, the cuts on his forearms, and finally the ash on the bar.

"What happened here?"

Marcel did what he always did.

"Gas leak," he said. "Old building. Very dramatic."

Raven stared at him.

"Or bad ice. My supplier's been sketchy lately."

Her jaw tightened.

"Or performance art. Dennis has been wanting to expand his range."

The silence that followed was the loudest thing he had ever heard.

Raven stood up slowly, like someone choosing not to throw something.

"Three," she said.

"I have more."

"I know you do. That's the problem." Her voice was very even.

"Four years, and a man just turned to ash in front of me, and you still hand me three answers instead of one."

Marcel opened his mouth.

"Don't," she said. "Don't make it four."

He closed it.

Raven crossed to the bar. She pulled a pair of gloves from her coat pocket, because of course she carried gloves, and crouched beside the blazer.

"Stay there."

"Where would I go?"

"I mean it."

She turned the blazer over with two fingers. Ash drifted out of the sleeves.

"No bone," she said, half to herself. "No teeth. No hair. Nothing a body leaves behind."

She rubbed a pinch between her fingertips. "It's still warm. It smells like struck matches."

She tipped a pinch into a sample vial and capped it. Of course she carried those too.

"Raven..."

"I'm trying very hard to stay a doctor right now." She didn't turn around. "So I'm going to say the rational things out loud, and you're going to let me."

"Okay."

"Carbon monoxide. Hallucinations. A chemical agent. A man with a rare reaction to something he ate."

"Raven."

"Or I'm having a stroke on your floor, and you're not even here."

Marcel pushed himself up against the bar. His ribs protested.

"You're not having a stroke."

"Then give me a better theory."

He couldn't. Not one that would survive her. That was the awful part.

Her hand paused on the blazer.

Something small had slid out of the inside pocket. A gold ring, plain and worn thin on one side.

Raven picked it up.

"Dennis wore this every Thursday," she said quietly. "He tapped it on the bar when he was nervous."

Marcel felt the whiskey turn to lead in his stomach.

"Where is he?"

"I don't know."

"That was a person."

"I know."

"Was he in there when it..." She stopped. Started again. "Was he alive?"

"The ones who wear people usually take them from the dead," Marcel said slowly. "Usually."

"Usually."

"I don't know, Raven."

She closed her fist around the ring.

It was the first time all night she had looked afraid for someone who wasn't him.

Marcel looked at the empty blazer and wondered who had been wearing whom.

Dennis had tipped badly and talked about his daughter's piano recital. Marcel had never once asked her name.

"I should call the police."

"And say what? A man burned up in a nightclub and left his jacket?"

Marcel kept his voice gentle. "They'll find ash, a ring, and me with a handprint on my neck."

"That's not an answer."

"It's a reason."

She looked at the ring. At the blazer. At the dark front windows, where the streetlights bled through the glass.

"Not tonight," she said at last. "But I'm keeping this."

She slid the ring into her pocket.

Then she went behind the bar and took out the first aid kit without asking. Four years, and she knew exactly where he kept it.

"Sit."

He sat on the nearest stool.

She cleaned the cuts on his forearms in silence. The antiseptic stung, and he didn't flinch.

Her fingers were careful on the burn, laying gauze over it like it might break.

"You should be in an ICU," she muttered.

"I'm a very good patient."

"You are the worst patient I have ever had."

She pressed down the last strip of tape. Her hand lingered there for half a second longer than it needed to.

"He said heir," she said, without looking up. "He said they would never let you refuse."

"Raven..."

"Refuse what?"

"A job offer," Marcel said.

Her hand stopped.

"That's four."

He winced. "I'm working on it."

"Work faster."

He almost told her then. The words sat in his mouth, heavy and strange. My father is the Devil. Say it fast, like pulling off tape.

Instead he said, "Do you want tea?"

"Marcel."

"Right. Not helping."

Only then did he notice her hands trembling, now that there was nothing left to do with them.

She stepped back and stopped in front of him.

Close enough that he could see the exhaustion under her eyes, and the fear she was holding down with both hands.

"Tomorrow night," she said. "After my shift. You tell me everything."

"Raven, it isn't that simple."

"I don't need simple. I need true. Not three jokes. Not a charming deflection."

"Give me a week to figure out how to say it."

"You've had four years."

"And if I can't?"

"Then I walk out of here, and I don't come back on Thursdays."

The words landed harder than the hand on his throat.

He had stared down something with six fingers tonight. This was worse.

"That's not a threat," she added, softer. "It's a boundary. I'm tired of being protected from my own life."

Marcel had a hundred answers ready. Every one of them was a joke.

"Tomorrow," he said.

"Tomorrow."

She gave him one long look. Then she picked up her keys, stepped over the broken glass, and walked to the door.

At the threshold she stopped beside the ruined takeout and looked down at it, a small, absurd casualty.

"That was the good pad thai," she said. "Tell me the truth, and I might let you replace it."

"Lock it this time," she said.

The bell chimed behind her.

Marcel stood alone in the wreckage of his own club, bleeding a little, with six burned fingers around his throat and a promise he had no idea how to keep.

Where did a man even start, when the truth was that his father was the Devil?

The whiskey he had poured for the thing still sat on the marble, untouched.

He drank it anyway.

Then he went to lock the door.

His hand was on the deadbolt when he heard it.

Upstairs, in the locked office above the dance floor, something creaked.

The soft, unhurried sound of someone settling into his chair.