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In the depths of hell, far off from the humans being tortured but not quite as far off as was truly comfortable, the demon Furfur was enjoying a smoke break in the newest addition to the demonic realm. Not many people knew that the room had finally been created, and most were still smoking outside the gates, so it was a rare pleasure that he was alone for once. Just him, a cigar, and the as-of-yet faint smell of varieties of smoke in a dark room under a flickering lightbulb. Even when hell renovated, they’d never fix the lights.
When the door clanked open and the sound of footsteps didn’t follow, Furfur twisted his head to spot Duke Hastur lurking in the doorway, making a noise low in his throat that sounded like a rottweiler meeting its sworn enemy and warning it to stay back. After a second, Hastur made one final growl and stepped inside.
Hastur sneered at Furfur. “You. Got any more photographs to show us?”
“At least I don’t look like I just crawled out of a rotting animal carcass,” Furfur shot back. When Hastur didn’t say anything, merely leveled a glare over at him, Furfur said, “Oh, you did, didn’t you?”
He didn’t gag, because millennia of witnessing hell’s darkest tortures made it nearly impossible for a demon to have a gag reflex, but he did flash a matching sneer. He took a certain amount of pride in his appearance, maybe an unusual amount for a demon, unlike Duke Hastur, who looked this disgustingly messy and dirty on a good day.
“Midday snack,” Hastur growled, lighting his cigarette with a flick of his sparking fingertips. “Haven’t had time for myself in a while, with Lord Beelzebub gone and that traitor Crowley’s little pet back in heaven and planning Satan knows what.”
Furfur bristled. “Fucking Crowley.”
“Pathetic excuse for a demon,” Hastur muttered, blowing out smoke. “I’d kill anything to know why his pet angel left him behind on Earth.”
Hesitating, Furfur said, “Can’t be too hard to find out.”
Hastur spun. “Why would you want to know?”
Lifting his chin, settling in to stand his ground, Furfur said, “If I find out what happened and what Archangel Azirapa—Aziralapa—Azira-whatever is planning, you can get me another audience with the Dark Council.”
Hastur took three menacing steps toward Furfur, and the stench of rot grew. One of his free fingers jabbed Furfur in the chest in the short distance between them; the torn and stained fabric of his fingerless gloves flapped. “I still haven’t forgotten that you stole my handbook.”
“And I haven’t forgotten that you dangled me over the spider pit,” Furfur snapped.
“You took over my most promising pool of humans. I’d been tempting those monks for years, and I would have had them in less than a year.”
“Yeah, well, I had them in two days.” Furfur was aware that it was probably not his brightest idea to goad Hastur, especially with a lit cigarette in his hand (see, again, the spider pit, and the never-ending chasm before that, and the sea of piranhas…), but it did scratch a nasty itch.
Hastur was seething at him, beginning to smoke from places that were not the end of his cigarette, but all he ground out was, “Why would you help me?”
“We both hate Crowley, don’t we? And just think of how the boss would react if we figured out what heaven was planning. Commendations all round.” Shax could never do anything like that; she could barely keep herself from getting discorporated in that shameful little skirmish in the angel’s former bookshop. The only way up now was to swim with the big fish, even if that meant the loathsome Duke Hastur.
“I’ll compete you for it,” Hastur finally said. “You win, I’ll get you another audience. You lose, I’ll stick you in a piñata at a birthday party for thirteen-year-old cricket players.”
Narrowing his eyes, Furfur weighed the risk, considered Crowley’s disturbing and decidedly un-demonic resistance to holy water and balanced it with the absence of one heavenly partner-in-crime, then briefly imagined how painful it would be to get hit by a dozen teenagers with bats.
“All right, deal,” he said.
Crowley wasn’t going to humiliate him this time.
~
Crowley was becoming a fixture in Give Me Coffee or Give Me Death, and despite his constant need for espresso and tea (and the alcohol behind the counter), Nina knew it was only a matter of time before his moods started driving away business.
If Nina gave him tea, he was blessedly quiet—just put his ginger head face down on the table and sort of hung his arms like an understuffed rag doll. Espresso, and he got antsy enough that he usually paced right out the door and disappeared for a while before coming back around closing. Alcohol, like tea, also made him press his face into the table, but it eventually turned him into a weeping mess, muttering about Mr. Fell.
Nina got it. She did. She’d had her fair share of breakups that had led to days and nights spent staring at the ceiling with a bottle of wine nearly empty on the nightstand. Besides, she and Maggie had caused this (well, one very tiny fraction of this), hadn’t they, and at least if Crowley was in the coffee shop, he couldn’t go around causing trouble for the rest of the neighborhood.
Just so long as he didn’t cause trouble in her shop instead.
Tonight, it was late, near closing, and Crowley had already moved on to whiskey, so he was sulking in his typical corner of the coffee shop. Nina would kick him out soon, but she’d been letting him stay for a bit while she closed up for the night.
(Besides, he’d been bringing her new boxes of tea and bottles of alcohol to replace what he’d been drinking, expensive bottles and strong teas that she and Mrs. Sandwich stared at and tried to guess where the hell he’d found, and sometimes she shared a spot of gin with him after mopping and tried to grill him for answers. It hadn’t worked yet.)
The shop’s bell rang while she was reaching under the counter for a fresh stack of napkins, but when she stood, cursing her creaky, aging knees, no one was at the counter. Everyone but Crowley had cleared out for the night, or so she’d believed.
Speaking of Crowley—in the corner, a man in a ratty trench coat and clunky boots was towering over Crowley’s table, arguing with him. On his head...that was a frog, or a toad, or some sort of slimy amphibian that did not belong on a head. Nina had seen a lot of strange things since moving into the neighborhood and getting dragged into Mr. Fell and Crowley’s nonsense, and she had little patience for more.
Before she knew it, a broom was in her hand, cleaning all forgotten.
“Oi!” said Nina, smacking the man—no, demon (had to be)—with the broom from behind. “No frogs in the shop, and no more demons, so get out.”
The demon spun. “You let him in—“
“He doesn’t have a frog, does he? Deal with this elsewhere, another time. Out!” Nina smacked him again, harder, and with a glare, the demon popped out of existence.
Nina stared, bewildered, at the empty air, with no trace of a demon save a faint waft of acrid sulfur. “Can you all do that?”
Crowley merely groaned and dropped his head back to the table.
~
Over the past few years, The Small Back Room hadn’t seen many customers browsing the bins, and even fewer were willing to stay and chat for a bit and make use of Maggie’s encyclopedic knowledge of music history. Mr. Fell had been the most regular, although his taste skewed far older than Maggie’s own preference, but with him run off to heaven (she would never get used to wrapping her head around that, would she?), her days were quiet.
Crowley, for his part, was an…unusual replacement.
He knew his history, that was unquestionable. While Maggie attempted to keep his mind off Mr. Fell, he told her stories of meeting Billie Holiday in 1954, seeing the Velvet Underground in New York in the 60s, seeing Queen’s first gig in 1970 and discussing astrophysics with Brian May.
But when he wasn’t up for talking…he was on the floor in the back corner of the record shop, spinning the most heartbreaking records she could dig up. Maggie wasn’t quite sure how to comfort someone whose partner had run off to heaven—it was complicated enough comforting someone whose partner had merely run off around the block—but she’d cried enough times over Nina to know which vinyl to gently hand to poor Crowley when he slunk in.
Tonight, Maggie had spotted Crowley leaving Nina’s coffee shop as it closed and beelining for the record shop. When he stepped inside, she had looked up from her reading to hand him Elton John’s Jump Up!, and she kindly pretended not to notice the strangled sort of sob when “Blue Eyes” came on.
Despite it being almost closing time, the bell over the door chimed to announce the presence of a greying man with an old-fashioned hairstyle and a fraying sash over a leathery coat.
“I’m closing up in ten minutes,” Maggie warned, eyeing his unusual attire. It was Soho, but he looked familiar, for some reason she couldn’t quite place.
“I’m not here for this,” the man said, flicking his hands at the record bins in confused disgust. “I’m here for him.”
Maggie followed his accusatory finger to where Crowley was lying on the floor like a dead starfish, and it clicked. “You’re one of them—one of those demons.”
“Right you are, love. And so is he.”
“Already knew that, thanks,” Maggie said, stepping round the counter to block the demon’s path to Crowley. “And he doesn’t want company.”
“Hello? Demon,” the intruder said, gesturing to himself as though she should be scared of him just for being what he was. Little did he know that she’d stared down demons before, and they had looked intimidating than him.
“You don’t frighten me—“ Maggie started, but Crowley lolled his head in the demon’s direction and grumbled:
“Come to gloat, Furfur? What do you want?”
“Tell me what happened to your boyfriend.”
“Went back to heaven. Assumed you all would have figured that out by now.”
“Finally decided he was too holier than thou, did he?”
Crowley simply turned up the volume on the record player. Elton John’s voice tried to drown out the demon’s next words.
“Tell me what he’s doing up there,” the demon demanded, his voice rising. “You’re in on this together, aren’t you? Putting on an act? Once a traitor, always a traitor.”
“I’ve had enough of this,” Maggie snapped, trying to force the demon backward. There wasn’t much in the shop to use as a weapon, not without damaging the records, so she steeled her spine and channeled her years of growing up with brothers. “He’s hurting, can’t you see? I won’t tolerate bullying in my shop. So get. Out. You are not welcome here.”
“This isn’t over, Crowley,” the demon warned, then gave Maggie the evil eye before backing into the street and vanishing.
Maggie checked down both sides of the street, then let her gaze linger on dear Nina, still turning out the lights in the coffee shop, before crouching beside Crowley. “You all right?” she asked gently. “Who was that?”
“No one important,” he muttered, turning Elton John’s record back to a respectable volume.
When the bell over the door rang again, Maggie jumped to her feet, ready to lash out again, but she swallowed any acidic words upon spotting Nina leaning through the doorway, smiling and looking straight at her like Maggie had always wished for.
Nina’s clever smile faltered as she spotted Crowley splayed out on the rug and asked, “What’s going on over here?”
From the floor, Crowley mumbled, “Girls night.”
“Girls night is not supposed to be a pity party, or whatever this is.” Nina shot a knowing glance at Maggie and then shut off the record player before they caught secondhand doldrums. “Come on, up you get. Maggie wants to go home, and so do I.”
Maggie sidled up to her as Crowley staggered to his feet. “Do we know where he actually lives?”
Shrugging, Nina said, “I dunno. Figured we’d drop him off at the bookshop and let him be someone else’s problem for the night.”
“Think he’ll be all right?” Maggie murmured, watching Crowley slump away and then hurriedly locking up behind them so she could join Nina in herding Crowley across the street to the bookshop. “Earlier, before you came over, I mean, there was another…demon bothering him. In the shop and everything.”
Nina peered at her in the warm lamplight. “Funny, I had one too. Came right in with a frog on his head.” She gestured to her own head as a demonstration, as though placing a crown.
“Two demons.” Maggie frowned. “Wonder what they’re after? Other than Crowley, of course.”
“Maybe we don’t want to find out, angel.”
Mr. Fell’s odd replacement, Muriel, opened the bookshop’s door, wearing a jumbled assortment of tartan and sweaters. Maggie thought they were sweet, if bafflingly unaware of how the world worked, and she’d been happily teaching them about music: one week classical piano, the next symphonies. One day soon she’d introduce them to Nina Simone.
“Oh, hello!” Muriel said, grinning ear to ear. Just a couple weeks ago they’d been nervous about being entrusted to care for a demon, but now, as Maggie and Nina dropped off the demon in question, Muriel didn’t seem to mind. Maggie suspected the two of them had become quite decent friends—despite his biting remarks and occasionally short temper, Crowley had proven more or less harmless and had been genuinely kind to her and Nina these past couple of weeks. If he hadn’t been, Maggie certainly wouldn’t have let him mope in her shop.
“Keep this one out of trouble,” Nina said with a raise of her eyebrows. “He’s been popular today.”
“I don’t get into trouble,” Crowley whined, and Maggie and Nina both rolled their eyes. Nina gave him a slight push into the bookshop, Muriel gave a cheery wave, and then Maggie and Nina were left outside, alone.
“Do you…want to come over? Tonight?” Nina asked, burrowing her fidgety hands in her sweaters long sleeves. “You know, girls night part two, less depressing. Watch a movie, get all of this“—she gestured vaguely at the bookshop—“out of our heads for a bit? It’s okay if you don’t want to. I understand, maybe it’s too soon—“
Maggie bumped Nina’s shoulder and grinned. “I’d love to.”
“Yeah, okay.” Nina smiled back, looking equally shy, and when Maggie experimented with brushing their hands, Nina wove their fingers together and squeezed.
~
Even though hell actively encouraged it, Dagon hadn’t indulged in a smoke break for years. Centuries, maybe. He had too much work to do to trek all the way outside the gates just for one vice, and there were plenty of others to indulge in instead that didn’t involve so much exercise.
Not until Hastur had offhandedly mentioned the new smoking room (so that was what hell was doing with their limited resources these days…) did Dagon scrounge up a pack of smokes and see what all the fuss was about. Hastur himself was inside, along with wretched Furfur, who kept trying to climb hell’s ladder even after Dagon had humiliated him.
Dagon hadn’t even realized the two of them spoke to each other; he’d once seen Hastur rip into Furfur’s leather coat while Furfur tried to claw the frog off Hastur’s head, and to this day no one still had an explanation for what had caused the brawl. No one really cared, either: it was hell.
“You let the humans push him into the bookshop,” Hastur was growling, his half-gloved fist around Furfur’s sash.
“You retreated because of a broom!” Furfur hissed with sadistic glee. "Don't like getting smacked, do you?"
“Look at you two getting along,” Dagon said, sauntering inside. “Hot gossip?”
Hastur spun and stared at Dagon with his tar pit eyes. “It’s that traitor Crowley and his angel pet. They’re up to something, and I want to know what before he does.”
“But Archangel Michael is in the angel’s bookshop with him,” Furfur added with disgust.
“Michael?” Dagon asked, perking up a bit more. “In Archangel Aziraphale’s bookshop?”
“What’s it to you?” Furfur was sneering, but Dagon was already miracling himself up to Earth. Wherever Michael was involved, that was where shit went down, and Dagon wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to foil the archangel. They’d been on and on about it, over the years, occasionally trading intelligence but mostly lying to each other to foil each others’ plans, and it was much better entertainment than anything else hell had to offer these past couple of centuries. Certainly less harrowing than the traitor Crowley’s trial, and more personally satisfying than generally thwarting heaven.
“—demand that you come back at once,” Michael was saying to what looked like a junior angel. The latter spotted Dagon first and spooked.
“What’s that saying again? The horse one,” the traitor Crowley was saying, one arm thrown over his face. Dagon hated how casual he looked on the archangel’s sofa, in the archangel’s former embassy, probably more than a little drunk on human liquor and taunting Michael as though this was an everyday occurrence. “You can lead an angel to boredom but you can’t make it drink?”
“Er, Michael?” The junior angel frowned and hesitantly pointed at Dagon.
Michael spun. “Dagon,” she sneered with a curled lip. “You are not welcome here.”
“Looks like you aren’t either.” Dagon strolled closer and smiled. “Losing your touch, are you?”
Michael straightened her immaculate blue suit and smoothed her stupid frilly cuffs. “Unless you’re here to get rid of him”—she jabbed a finger at Crowley, who had taken his arm from his eye to look at Dagon, or at least in Dagon’s direction, because who could tell with those ridiculous sunglasses—“kindly remove yourself from this bookshop. This is a matter between angels.”
Dagon started circling the angel, enjoying how Michael—prim, uptight Michael—squirmed and eyed him from scales to boots. “Looks like you’re just removing all the angels, Michael dearest. This one, and where’s the one who owns this place, hmm? Planning something you need them for?”
“Oh, definitely, we’re planning god’s birthday party, how’d you know?” Michael’s face pinched in contempt. “Of course I’m not going to tell you.”
“Hmm. Maybe I’m impressed that you separated both of our collaborating rats,” Dagon said with a small wink. “Maybe I want to know more.”
“They did that to themselves,” Michael said, rolling her eyes. Dagon got a sick satisfaction from knowing that Michael probably hated not being able to take credit. “Quite the heavenly breakup. Guess they realized angels and demons can’t cavort with each other after all.”
“That’s not true!” the junior angel fretted, wringing their hands. “You wanted them out of the way for bloody armageddon—“
“You what?” came from Crowley’s side of the room. He sounded dazed but more than a little angry.
“Muriel! Language!” Michael shrieked at the other angel.
“Really now?” Dagon quirked an eyebrow at Michael. Oh, he loved catching her between a rock and a hard place. “Armageddon,” he repeated slowly. “How fun. We’re ready for round two when you are.”
Sated with that knowledge and with the assurance that Michael couldn’t follow him—and wouldn’t that frustrate the archangel? How delightful—Dagon popped back to hell and to the end of Hastur and Furfur’s smoke break.
“Heaven’s planning armageddon, and Aziraphale and Crowley had a lover’s spat,” Dagon smugly announced to their in turns disgusted and disappointed faces, blocking the doorway back to hell’s maze-like corridors. “Now tell me: what do I win?”