I spent Saturday morning preparing to go to Hell.

I spent the whole of Saturday morning preparing to go to Hell.

In case anyone's wondering, I'm not a religious demon. I'm not even sure who's in charge of sending me on some of my own gigs, let alone who's responsible for the infinite wonders of the Multiverse. I wasn’t going to Hell because I’d got myself in some kind of theological trouble. It was just a kind of gig – well, more like a guest appearance. I hadn’t even been sent out, officially – although I was so sure that the mission would have been approved that I’d got some equipment on expenses.

I was going because there was a rogue demon out there, it was taking victims and it had hunted much too close for comfort. Samantha and the others called it the succubitch, and it did seem to be some kind of succubus. Succubae are supposed to be mindless, but they’re glamour-users and probably shape-shifters, and they’d need a brain to do that right.

This one had taken a job as a nurse and then battened on the patients. At first glance it’s a neat scam, but not even the vampires do it. Humans tend to have really strong feelings about things like that, and once the angry mobs and the vigilantes start prowling about it’s difficult to get staff and there’s nowhere to go in the evenings.

Apart from that, the thing that really mattered was that she’d broken the Lore. There’s much the same set of rules for a whole group of demons – if you invoke them you become the property of the demon concerned, or they take your first-born or something. (Stuff like the first-born rule, or the Queen Clause, quite often means that the government of the demon dimension concerned has got involved at some level, too, but that wouldn’t be the case with a succubus. The succubitch had taken Percy as a nasty combination of bridegroom and dinner. She could have taken him as a long-term mate, too. They’ve got a way of turning a human. )

The point was that she hadn’t had any right to take him at all. I’d checked as best I could, and he didn’t seem to have invoked her, made any form of deal, or given any form of stated or implied consent.

This wasn’t going to be the standard gig. If she hadn’t the brains or conscience to burn from her own feelings about it all I was going to have to call down the famine wind to strip her of magic, age and kill her. I was going to have to do a lot more singing myself than I’d normally do on a gig – and calling the famine wind is blackly dangerous. Normally I just let the music come, but this time I’d done quite a lot of work on that song. It made a fairly substantial scroll that I put carefully into the bag with the packaged energy.

I learned it off, of course, and I found myself repeating a fragment as I dressed for a damned dangerous gig.

you'd no right to break him,
you'd no right to take him,
Your devilment woke you,
he didn't invoke you,
by all of the Lore you have sinned,
Now your magic is forfeit,
your life drains away,
leached by the famine wind.

I stopped myself as soon as I realized. The whole song would be dangerous mojo in it’s own right, done under the appropriate conditions. It wasn’t something that I could rehearse.