“Oh no,” Dazel said. “Oh no. Nope.”

  “There’s just so much negativity.”

  “Well did you think I would be happy to learn that your father is the King of Hell?!”

  Ashtoreth looked through the treetops, admiring the moon. “Happy for me, maybe.”

  “No!” said Dazel. “Oh no—listen, Your Highness, I had a good thing going back in the Pit of Sorrow!”

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Because it doesn’t sound like the sort of place where good things go.”

  “Everything that happens above the lip of that pit is above my paygrade!” Dazel said. “Everything!”

  “I’m not paying you, though.”

  “Sorry—some more questions,” said Frost.

  Both of them turned to him.

  “And not about the system. I’ll, uh, start with the more obvious.” He looked at Ashtoreth. “Your father is Satan?”

  “No,” they both said at once.

  “Humanity’s dreams only echo reality,” said Ashtoreth. “They don’t perfectly describe it. There’s a King of Hell, but he’s not quite the guy you know. He is sometimes called the Lightbringer, though.”

  “Okay,” said Frost. He looked at Dazel. “And he said you weren’t paying him. So he’s… your slave, or something?”

  Again, they answered at the same time:

  “Yes.”

  “No!”

  “This is his job!” Ashtoreth said. “He can’t die, and while he’s here he gets to acquire power, which is like being paid. I don’t know why he’s so upset—I mean, you’re a police officer, right?”

  “...Right,” Frost said uneasily.

  “So you don’t get to quit in the middle of work one day if you show up to a call you don’t like, right?”

  Dazel cleared his throat. “She ripped me from my home to serve her.”

  “It’s his job!”

  “It wasn’t my preferred vocation,” Dazel said. “Who knows? Maybe I’d have picked royalty… but strangely, I wasn’t given the choice.”

  “Lots of people work jobs they don’t like,” Ashtoreth said. “It doesn’t make them slaves!”

  “Honestly, it sounds like he’s a servant of some kind,” said Frost. “The people on Earth who can’t just walk out of the their jobs are usually working in special circumstances. If your life depended on him, I’d at least understand a little… but so far he seems kind of useless.”

  “Yeah!” Dazel said. “You hear that? I’m no help to you at all!”

  “You said he’s a knowledge demon or something, right? But all he’s done is give the thesis statement for a highschool-level essay on The Hobbit.”

  “Uh, high school?” Dazel asked reproachfully. “Well excuse me, professor. Say, where did you do your PhD?”

  Frost ignored him. “I think you should let him go.”

  “See!” said Dazel. “He thinks I’m a slave too! I told you that you were evil!”

  “I don’t really know the whole situation about employment in Hell….” said Frost.

  “I’m not evil!” said Ashtoreth, crossing her arms.

  “I don’t think you’re evil, Ashtoreth,” said Frost. “From a strange place with terrible morals, sure. But not evil, not from what I’ve seen.”

  “Thank you!” she said. “I think.”

  “But he is useless,” said Frost. “‘Sporadic genre criticism’ isn’t exactly a part of an effective combat force.”

  “Uh, sorry,” Dazel said. “You mean ‘Sporadic literary criticism’. The genre only began in the wake of Tolkien’s towering legacy.”

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  “Literary?” Frost asked, blinking. “Like Cormac McCarthy, you mean? But The Hobbit has orcs and elves in it.”

  Dazel’s hair stood up on end. “I’m sorry, what did you just say? You can call me useless all you want, but don’t you dare stuff Tolkien in the fantasy ghetto, you uncultured swine.”

  Frost looked at Dazel, his eyebrows slightly raised. “Did you just call me a pig, pussy?”

  “Okay, the only person here who’s part animal is me,” said Ashtoreth. “And as previously established, I’m a little bit demonic goat. But you know what? I concede.”

  “Concede?” Frost asked.

  She flashed him a winsome smile. “I concede to your better judgement, Sir Frost. I want to be a good archfiend, and you’re right—I was born and raised in Hell. I’m trying to fight for humans because I like Earth so much more than my own home, but I’m probably still trapped in an infernal’s way of thinking.” She looked over at Dazel. “If you really want, I’ll dismiss you. You can be free.”

  Dazel blanched. “What.”

  Ashtoreth looked at him and fought the urge to smirk. Dazel wouldn’t leave. He’d just learned about her father—he had a position he could play, moves to make.

  She was offering for two reasons. For one thing, she wanted to endear Frost to her—the nicer he thought she was, the more he thought she’d listen to him when it mattered, the more he’d trust her. And she needed the humans to trust her. Hopefully having a police officer on her side would help with that.

  And the second reason:

  I want to know why the arbiter sent you, of all demons, to me, she thought, looking at the surprised face of her familiar. I want to know why you were so insistent on learning my lineage, why you almost make it seem like you have personal experience with archfiends.

  If Dazel knew secrets about her family, if he’d worked for the archfiends once upon a time, that could be incredibly useful to her in the coming war.

  Your move.

  To his credit, Dazel seemed to catch himself quickly. “Tch,” he said, sitting up and raising his nose. “It’s too late for that, princess.”

  “I don’t understand,” Frost said. “I thought you just said you wanted to leave.”

  “Eh,” said Dazel. “I was on the fence about it, really. Mostly I was just upset that as a spirit of knowledge, my input wasn’t even being considered. Then it became clear to me just how little you two know when you came out with all this disrespect toward the arts.”

  “I like the arts,” said Ashtoreth. “You’re the one who’s never watched any anime.”

  “Tch. When I said ‘the arts’ I wasn’t talking about Sword Art Online,” he said.

  “Oh, you think that one’s bad?” Ashtoreth said, grinning. “That’s like, eight video essays worth of content. I’m telling you, Dazel—you could be big.”

  “Ugh. This is what I’m talking about. You had unlimited access to Dostoyevsky and Beethoven, and instead you wasted away in front of a screen listening to someone complain about the Star Wars Hotel for four hours.”

  “That felt pretty specific,” Ashtoreth said, a smile spreading across her face. “Maybe you did the same thing?”

  “No,” Dazel said, looking away. “Whatever. Humans went from Michelangelo to Shakespeare to Mozart to… I don’t know, Kubrick. And then the internet happened and now they’re all obsessed with… I don’t know, with cats that play piano and Logan Paul poking corpses for fun.”

  “Yeah, you were really born in the wrong generation,” said Frost. “And dimension.”

  “Look,” Ashtoreth said. “Can you really fault the cat playing piano for being more entertaining than all those other dead weirdos? I mean, Shakespeare’s collar was funnier than his plays. I like the Ninja Turtles, though, but I didn’t know they came before Shakespeare. Was the cartoon an adaptation or something?”

  Dazel groaned. “This is what I’m talking about! I can at least stay long enough to prove to you two that the rich cultural tapestry which you so blithely wipe your feet on has something beautiful and meaningful to add to every facet of life.”

  “O-kay,” Frost said. “Because right now we’re… killing monsters in video game Hell.”

  “Every facet!”

  “Sure,” said Ashtoreth. “Fine. Have it your way, Dazel. Your party role is now: ‘snob’. At least it’s better than the nothing you were doing before. We should get a move on, though.”

  “I agree,” said Frost.

  Dazel groaned again, but fell in behind her as she set out through the forest once more.

  “Look, I’ve got a lot more questions,” said Frost. “But I think I should start with my last aspect. I got offered [Life] along with [Might]. Since you said versatility matters, I was thinking I’d take [Life]. You seem to have the ‘strong attacks’ angle covered—but you don’t heal, correct?”

  “She heals herself, but not others,” said Dazel. “Pride, remember?”

  “Okay, so I can give first aid to anyone we meet,” said Frost. “The worst that could happen would be that we meet a bunch of people who took the same things, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Ashtoreth. “And four tanky healers doesn’t sound like the worst composition you can think of.”

  “Here we go,” said Frost. “[Armament], [Sacred], [Protection], and [Life]. It says it’s synthesizing… o-kay. I got… [Steelheart Paladin]. That’s my class.”

  “See!” Ashtoreth said to Dazel. “I told you that police were like paladins!”

  “This is exactly what Charlemagne intended, I’m sure,” said Dazel.

  “So my class—” Frost began.

  He never finished. A piercing, pained howl cut through the forest around them, seeming to echo off the trees.

  “That sounded like a creature in pain!” Ashtoreth said excitedly. “Maybe a cinderwolf—it wasn’t human, that’s for sure!”

  “Someone’s fighting a demon?” Frost asked.

  “Uh-huh! It could be a human!”

  “Let’s go.”

  They took off into the forest, hurrying through the areas of low underbrush beneath the trees.

  It seemed Frost would be getting to use his class, and soon.