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Lysandra’s office sat in the middle of Hell’s finest vineyard. The twisted landscape that surrounded me was both whimsical and eerie, with the kind of bizarre and unsettling beauty that I only ever saw once back on Earth. My mom had taken me to an art gallery in the city once, and I’d never forgotten it. It might have been the best day of my life, though now the reminders of my momma in this surreal landscape were salt in a wound, more reminders of the life I had lost.
I looked around at the grounds and shuffled my feet as I walked, trying to stall a bit before I had to go interact with the Wicked Witch for the day. Overhead, the sky was a bloody red color, and the boughs and gnarled trees and grapevines surrounding me looked almost black against the horizon. In reality, they were more like a deep purple color. Like the gate, the tendrils and branches curled and reminded me of bony fingers. Everywhere you looked in Hell, you could find something reminiscent of human suffering.
That same concept could be applied to the vineyard’s workers. They weren’t demons, and they weren’t quite humans. Human souls were tortured in all sorts of ways and could be eternally, but sometimes, the shock of it all made them a little… brain-dead, for lack of a better term. Sometimes, it was instantly; sometimes, it was after a millennium, but every few hundred thousand souls or so, there was always a dud. We called those duds zombies. They were unfeeling, unthinking, and incapable of all but one thought. Lysandra, the cunning thing she was, had figured out that you could program that one thought to be “work.”
Hell, much like Dante’s old book would have you believe, was cut into circles. The higher the number, the deeper the circle… and generally, the more fucked-up everything was. Lysandra’s vineyard was in the third circle—gluttony. The vines here provided wine for the rest of the circles, though most of it stayed right here in number three. Gluttony extends to alcoholism, and there were a lot of lushes around.
I kept my eyes on the path. I didn’t like to see the zombies toiling away. They weren’t rotting corpses or anything like that, but colorless pale beings with slack jaws and dead eyes. There was just something soul-crushing about them that I didn’t want to be faced with. Instead, I counted the spider-webbed stones until I came to the center of the vineyard. Outbuildings were scattered throughout the acreage, including Lysandra’s massive plantation-style home, but I liked the gazebo at the center the most. Its wrought-iron framework reminded me of a ribcage, like you were inside a whale skeleton or something. Its roof was overgrown with creeping vines, and a few of the grapevines had escaped the sides of the small lane and overtaken some of the structure, too. The grapes were dark, nearly black, and they hung heavy from the vines like Christmas ornaments. Surrounding the gazebo were a few strange topiaries. They were creepy, but I liked ‘em all the same. Each one had impossible proportions—too long of arms, too small of heads, grinning, massive mouths. You get the picture. They reminded me a little of circus freaks, something I’d always been fascinated with as a kid.
I stopped and inhaled the sweet scent of the grapes. The wind rattled through the gazebo with a sharp, whistling sound. It cut through my leather jacket and ruffled my hair, but I couldn’t feel if it was cold. Temperature didn’t register with me much.
“If it isn’t my favorite little rebel,” a voice purred, ruining my brief moment of peace.
“Lysandra,” I said coldly, then opened my eyes.
“Watch your tone, boy,” she said sweetly, though I knew she was deadly serious. “Remember to respect your elders, or you might not get employee of the month.”
I bit back anything else I wanted to say, taking in the image of my boss, my captor, my mentor. She was gorgeous in some ways, terrifying in others… like Hell itself.
Lysandra’s face was framed by a cascade of raven-black hair that she pinned back with a single ivory shin bone. Supposedly, she’d taken it off of Napoleon, but I’d never been able to verify. Me or Napoleon, I mean. I’d asked him once at a bar in the third circle, but he was sort of a dick about it. Her skin was as pale as moonlight, and upon closer inspection, web-like patterns traced across her cheeks and forehead like delicate, perfect scars. She always wore dark, glossy lipstick, which reminded me of both a blood clot and the deep color of the wine we made.
Her eyes were the most mesmerizing feature—and her scariest. They were huge and completely obsidian. Their gaze was intense, drawing you in like a moth to a flame. It made resisting her impossible and lying to her as well. Having a supernatural boss was one thing, but having a boss you couldn’t hide anything from ever was one of the truest definitions of damnation. Lysandra was always eager to get her hooks in me about something, even the smallest of lies.
But wait… there’s more…
Today, her gown was more like a kimono since a traditional gown wouldn’t exactly fit over her expansive back end. She had a few with different patterns, but the silk was always a deep, blood-red. It nipped in at her impossibly small waist, then ballooned out in folds and curtains of fabric that covered her fat, round spider bottom and dusted the tops of her shining black legs. There were eight in all and covered in a hard, black chitin that was maybe more like a beetle than a spider. They reminded me of fiberglass or the finish on a cherry roadster. If I stood close enough to her, which I almost never dared, I swore I could see my reflection in those endlessly fidgeting, awful legs.
Told you there was more.
She was half spider, half lady, and all bad news.
“Well, aren’t you a pouty little peach today?” she chirped, brightening her tone once more as she scuttled over the cobblestones toward me. I stepped up into the center of the gazebo, where I knew it would be harder for her to get close to me, thanks to the confines of the structure.
“Not exactly in the mood for your games today,” I said. “Let’s just say I’m a little grumpy.”
“Well, patricide will do that to a boy,” Lysandra purred.
I scowled, not letting her bait me into an argument, even though her words stung. She knew my history. She knew what had happened, and still, she insisted on throwing it in my face.
“There are some unexpected developments Topside,” I said darkly. “In… in my old house.”
She clucked her tongue. “Ooh, that’s juicy news. And you know, it goes along with why I called you here.”
“Lysandra, if this is about my quota—” I began, but she held up one long-nailed, thin hand to cut me off.
“You’ve got skills, kid,” she said archly. “Skills some of us would kill to have. It’s time we make more… direct use of them.”
“Meaning what?” I frowned. There could only be one skill she was referring to.
While some souls were zombies, others were bound to thrive in Hell. Some people were born to be tortured, born and bound to be the eternal working man. And some people… some people struck a deal. A deal they didn’t even realize they were making at the time.
I was one of those people.
It just meant that I was able to slip in and out of the earthly realm, which we called Topside, and in and out of Hell. Normally, that sort of thing was reserved for higher beings and reapers, but like I said, I’m a special kind of tortured guy. Back in my day, women sort of went for that brooding, bad-boy thing. I should have used it to my advantage more. Instead, I now used it to reap souls strictly for the vineyard. You see, only the purest souls produce the best grapes, both in taste and the best crop yields, and you can imagine the demand for alcohol in Hell. When a pure soul died, I, along with the few undead associates like me, could slip Topside before a reaper came, take the soul right out from under its nose, and trap its essence in the vineyard. It was a sneaky practice, and it meant the reaper couldn’t take the soul to its proper place in the clouds, but it kept us in business. And it kept up my end of the bargain.
“Lys,” I prodded warily. “What do you mean?”
She plucked one of the juicy grapes from a vine nearby and popped it into her mouth. There was a crunch, like a beetle popping, as she chewed. A line of dark juice dripped from the corner of her mouth like blood.
