Chapter 1: I Owe You One
The first thing Hell did was drop you on a car.
Not into a lake of fire, not before a throne, not in front of a clerk with a ledger and a disappointed face. A car. A burgundy sedan with a dented roof, parked outside a liquor store whose sign said OPEN TIL NEVER in flickering pink. You landed flat on your back on the roof, and the roof folded around you like a cheap mattress, and the alarm went off, and somewhere above you a sky the color of a split plum looked down without much interest.
You lay there for a while. Six years of night shifts teaches you to lie still while your brain catches up.
Here is what your brain had to offer: a stretch of wet highway outside Baton Rouge, headlights where headlights should not be, and a dispatcher's reflex, absurd and useless, to note the time. It had been 2:14 in the morning. You had been twenty-nine years old. You were, it seemed, still twenty-nine years old, which felt like an administrative oversight.
Then you sat up and saw your hands.
They were still yours, mostly. But the skin had gone a soft ashen gray, and your nails had come in black and faintly glossy, and when you reached up to touch your hair you found, tucked into it like a pair of bobby pins, two small curling horns.
"Okay," you said to the car alarm. "Okay. That's fine."
"Fresh one!" someone called, delighted.
There were four of them. They came out of the liquor store in a loose, unhurried line, the way men walk when they've already decided how a night will go. One had a face like a skinned lizard, one had too many teeth, and the tallest had a shotgun and a smile that didn't move his eyes.
"New souls fetch a price," the lizard one explained to you, kindly, as if you'd asked. "Nobody's marked you yet. You're just sitting out here. Like a dropped wallet."
You knew this voice. Not the man. The type. You had spent six years on a headset at the Parish Emergency Communications Center listening to this exact tone come down the line, usually in the background, usually just before somebody screamed. You had learned to hear it under everything else.
So you did the thing you'd always told callers to do. You kept them talking.
"What's the going rate?" you asked.
That threw them. The toothy one actually laughed. "What?"
"For a new soul. Ballpark. I'd like to know if I'm being lowballed." You slid off the roof of the car, slowly, keeping your hands where they could see them, putting the hood between you and the shotgun. "Because if you're going to sell me, I'd like to have an opinion about it."
"She's funny," said the tall one, who was not laughing.
"I'm a delight," you said. "I'm also standing next to a car with an alarm going, which means at some point somebody comes out to see about it, and I'm betting that whoever owns this car is bigger than you."
The lizard looked, involuntarily, at the car.
It was then that the streetlight above you began to hum.
It wasn't the ordinary buzz of a bad ballast. It was a tuning sound: a needle moving across a dial, catching scraps of a dozen stations at once, a horn section, a weather report, a woman laughing in 1927. The light overhead flushed red. Every shadow on the block leaned, very slightly, in the same direction, like grass when the wind comes.
The four men stopped smiling all at once.
"Oh, shit," said the toothy one, very quietly.
"Gentlemen!" said a voice, and it came from the streetlight, and from the speaker over the liquor store door, and from the car radio, which had turned itself on. It was a radio voice in the oldest sense: warm, crackling, pitched to carry over a crowded room, with a little laugh track running underneath it like a second heartbeat. "What a lovely evening for a stroll! And what's this? Accosting a lady on her very first night? Tsk, tsk. Where are your manners?"
He was suddenly there.
One second the sidewalk was empty and the next a tall figure in a red pinstriped coat stood on it, leaning on a microphone stand that looked like an antique and also like a weapon. His hair was red, going black at the tips, and two small antlers branched from it. A monocle sat in one eye. And he was smiling, an enormous smile, the kind of smile that has nothing to do with being happy. His eyes were red as brake lights. Static followed him the way a smell follows a cigar.
The tall man was already raising the shotgun.
It did not go well for him. You saw very little of it, because the radio demon (you didn't know his name yet, but some old animal part of your brain had already filed him under predator, apex, do not run) moved, and the shadows moved with him, and the sound that came out of the streetlight rose into a shrieking feedback squeal that made your teeth hurt. When it was over, the street was empty except for a shotgun lying in two pieces on the asphalt and a single loafer, upright, as if its owner had stepped out of it in a hurry.
The car alarm, you noticed, had stopped.
The demon turned to you. He adjusted his monocle with one gloved finger.
"Well!" he said brightly. "That was invigorating. Are you injured, my dear?"
"No," you said. Your voice came out steady, which surprised you. It was your work voice, the one that had talked a sobbing grandson through CPR on a kitchen floor. It worked in Hell too. "No, I'm fine. Thank you. Seriously, thank you. I owe you one."
The static stopped.
It was the strangest silence you had ever heard. Even in the dead middle of a graveyard shift there's always something, a fan, a fridge, a car going by on the interstate. This was a silence like a held note. The red light above you brightened by a degree. The demon's smile did not change at all, but something behind it went very still and very interested, like a cat that has heard a mouse step on a floorboard.
"Do you?" he said softly.
You replayed what you'd said. You replayed where you were.
"That's a figure of speech," you said.
"Oh, absolutely! Of course it is." He came closer. "And this is a city built entirely on figures of speech, darling. Every soul in Pentagram City is held together by something somebody said once and couldn't take back. You said 'I owe you.' I heard it. And I, for one, am a great believer in the spoken word." He leaned down until the monocle was level with your eyes. "The name is Alastor. And I'm afraid you've just made a deal with the Radio Demon."
The hotel was very pink.
That was the second thing Hell did to you, after the car. It walked you, in the company of a smiling murderer, to a building that looked like a wedding cake had decided to become a castle, with a lit-up sign that read HAZBIN HOTEL and, under it, in smaller and more hopeful letters, a place for redemption!
"Redemption," you said.
"A charming little enterprise," said Alastor. "Run by the Princess of Hell herself. She believes sinners can be rehabilitated and sent upstairs." A crackle, like a needle skipping. "I find it enormously entertaining."
"Is that why you live here?"
"I live here," he said, holding open the door for you with a courtesy so exaggerated it bordered on mockery, "because the coffee is free and the company is deranged. After you."
Inside, a blonde girl with red-apple cheeks and a tuxedo-shirt-and-suspenders outfit took one look at you and burst into tears of pure joy. This was Charlie Morningstar. She had hugged you before you could defend yourself. "A new guest! Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Vaggie! Vaggie, we have a new guest!"
"I can see that, babe," said a slim woman with silver-white hair and an X over one eye, doing math she clearly didn't like. "Who brought her in?"
"I did!" said Alastor.
Vaggie closed her eyes for a long second. "Of course you did."
There was a bar off the lobby, and behind it a large gray-and-red cat demon with wings folded against his back was polishing a glass with the energy of someone who had been polishing the same glass since the Nixon administration. His gaze went from Alastor to your hands, as if he expected a contract stapled to them.
"Aw, hell," he said. "Tell me you didn't."
"I didn't sign anything," you said.
"Doesn't matter." He set the glass down. "You say anything to him? Anything with the word 'owe' in it? Like a dumbass?"
You said nothing. The cat demon, whose name turned out to be Husk, sighed through his nose, reached under the bar, and poured you a shot of something brown without asking. "On the house," he said. "Condolences."
"Husker, you wound me," said Alastor, not sounding wounded.
"I'd like to." Husk pushed the glass at you. "Drink."
You drank. It tasted like a burned barn. It helped.
When you set the glass down, Alastor was standing at your elbow, closer than you'd heard him come. Up close he smelled of old paper and pipe smoke and, underneath, something sharp and coppery you decided not to think about.
"Now," he said. "Terms."
"I figured there'd be terms."
"There are always terms!" He produced, from nowhere, a sheet of heavy cream paper that glowed faintly green at the edges. He did not offer you a pen. He didn't seem to think you'd need one. "Fear not, my dear. I'm not interested in your soul. Souls are a dreadfully crowded market. What I'd like is something rarer."
"Which is?"
"Conversation," said Alastor.
You waited for the rest of it. There wasn't any.
"Conversation," you repeated.
"Every night, at eleven o'clock, you will join me in my rooms for one hour. You'll sit, and you'll talk, and you'll listen to my records." The smile stretched. "I have a rather marvelous collection. And you will answer whatever I ask you, honestly, and I will answer whatever you ask me, in whatever fashion I find most amusing. One hour, nightly, until I consider the debt repaid."
"And when's that?"
"When I say so," he said pleasantly.
Behind the bar Husk made a noise like a man stepping on a tack.
You thought about it. You thought about the four men outside the liquor store and the price of a dropped wallet. You thought about the fact that eleven o'clock had been, for six years, the start of your shift, and that there was a terrible, funny symmetry to arriving in Hell and having somebody hand you back your old hours.
"Fine," you said. "But I'm not lying to you, and I'm not pretending your records are good if they're bad."
Alastor laughed. It was a real laugh, or a very good recording of one; it came out of him and out of the lobby speakers at once, and a studio audience somewhere laughed with him.
"My dear," he said, "I would be insulted if you did."
The paper flared green and was gone.
His rooms were on the top floor and were, impossibly, a swamp. Cypress trees grew up through the floorboards. Spanish moss hung off a brass chandelier. Somewhere out in the dark, beyond the edges of a very nice Persian rug, something large slid into black water. In the middle of it all, on a little island of furniture, sat two armchairs, a side table with a lamp, and an enormous walnut gramophone with a horn like a lily.
Alastor lowered the needle. A clarinet came up out of the hiss, thin and sweet and absolutely ancient.
"Sit," he said, and you sat.
He folded himself into the other chair, steepled his long fingers, and looked at you the way a gambler looks at a fresh deck.
"So," he said. "First question. I've waited all evening for it, and I do hate waiting. Tell me, my dear." The record crackled. "What did you do to end up here?"
You had been expecting it. You'd been turning it over since the car roof. You knew the answer, too. You had known it since the moment you saw the horns.
"No," you said.
The clarinet kept playing. That was the only sound. The static that lived around him, the constant low crackle like a fire in the next room, simply ceased, and in the silence the swamp seemed to lean in.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said no." You crossed your legs. "You get one hour a night. You don't get everything on night one. That's not a conversation. That's a deposition."
Very slowly, his head tilted. Too far. Further than a neck should go.
Then the static came roaring back, louder than before, and with it his laugh, delighted, wild, a whole invisible audience losing its mind.
"Oh," said the Radio Demon, eyes glowing in the lamplight like two coals someone had blown on. "Oh, this is going to be fun."
The record ended. The needle hissed in the empty groove.
And on the wall behind his chair, his shadow, which had been sitting politely in the shape of a man, stood up on its own and began, very slowly, to walk toward you.