Chapter 1: Doctor Bellweather's Redemption Tonic
In life you sold miracles out of the trunk of a Buick, so you know a mark when you see one.
The man at the end of the Hazbin Hotel bar is a mark. He's short, pale as milk, with two round spots of pink on his cheeks like somebody painted him for a parade. White suit, white gloves, a top hat stacked absurdly tall, a cane resting against the stool with a red apple carved at the top. He has been nursing the same glass of something for an hour and staring at it the way men stare at the ocean.
Lonely. Rich. Sad about a woman. You could close this one in your sleep.
You slide onto the stool next to him and set a small brown bottle on the bar between you. The label is hand-lettered, because you hand-lettered it last night, in the laundry room, with a stolen fountain pen.
"Doctor Bellweather's Redemption Tonic," you say. "Restores the soul. Brightens the halo. Two drops under the tongue and you'll feel the light of Heaven calling you home."
Behind the bar, Husk stops polishing a glass. He looks at you. He looks at the man in the white suit. He makes a noise like a cat about to bring something up.
"Fifty souls a bottle," you go on. "But for you, because you look like you've had a day, forty."
The man turns his head. His eyes are gold where they should be white, and the irises are red, and for a moment something enormous moves behind them. Then it's gone, and he's just a small sad man in a hat, blinking at you.
"Does it work?" he asks.
"Absolutely not."
He stares at you. Then he laughs. It comes out of him like a cork from a bottle, high and surprised, and he puts a gloved hand over his mouth as if it escaped without permission.
"You're not even going to pretend?"
"I'm a sinner in a redemption hotel," you say. "Pretending is the whole program. I'm taking a personal day."
He picks up the bottle, uncorks it, sniffs it, and drinks the entire thing in one swallow before you can stop him.
"Hey, that's two weeks of supply..."
"That," he says, smacking his lips, "is cough syrup, cheap rum and, unless I'm mistaken, a little bit of crushed breath mint."
"Wintergreen. For the healing tingle."
"It's disgusting." He looks delighted. He sets the empty bottle down and pushes a coin across the bar, a heavy gold one with a pentagram stamped on it, worth more than everything you own. "I want ten more."
Husk sets the glass down very carefully. "Lady," he says to you, in the voice of someone watching a car roll toward a cliff, "do you know who that is?"
You look at the hat. The apple on the cane. The snake curled around the brim that you had, until this second, assumed was decorative, and which is now very slowly turning its head to look at you.
"Oh," you say.
"Lucifer Morningstar," says the man in the white suit, and holds out his hand. "King of Hell. Fallen angel. Inventor of free will, rubber ducks and, I'd argue, the concept of a hat with personality. And you are the first person in seven years to try to swindle me to my face." His grip is warm through the glove, and much stronger than it looks. "I think I'm in love."
Charlie finds you an hour later in the hotel kitchen, where you are trying very hard to become part of the wall.
"You sold my dad snake oil," she says.
"Technically he bought it. I disclosed the risks."
"You sold snake oil," Charlie repeats, "to the guy who brought the snake." She pinches the bridge of her nose. Charlie Morningstar is the nicest person in Hell, which is a low bar, but she clears it by about a mile. She runs the hotel on optimism and duct tape and a rotating cast of residents who mostly signed up for the free rooms, yourself included. She has never once looked at you like you were a lost cause. She is looking at you like that now.
"Is he going to smite me?"
"What? No. No!" She waves her hands. "He's... I mean. He wants to see you again."
"For smiting."
"For dinner." Charlie's face does something complicated. "He hasn't asked anybody to dinner since Mom left. He barely leaves the palace. He's been staying here since we rebuilt and he mostly just sits in his room making ducks. And then you sell him cough syrup and he comes upstairs humming. Humming! I haven't heard him hum in years." She grabs both your hands. "Please be nice to him."
"I'm never nice to anyone. It's in my file."
"Then be honest. He liked that." She squeezes. "He said, and I'm quoting, 'she's the cure, Charlie, I'm sure of it.'"
"The cure for what?"
But Charlie has already let go and is running toward the lobby, where the sounds of Angel Dust and Vaggie arguing have reached a pitch that means someone is about to be stabbed.
He finds you everywhere after that.
In the lobby, where he appears on the arm of the couch beside you while you're reading, reads over your shoulder, and tells you the ending of the book. In the laundry room, where he catches you hand-lettering a new batch of labels and offers, sincerely, to help with the calligraphy. His is gorgeous. You hate it. In the garden behind the hotel, which is mostly ash and stubborn red thistle, where you go to smoke and where he sits on the bench next to you with a tiny rubber duck in his palm, painting it with a brush no thicker than an eyelash.
"What's this one?" you ask, despite yourself.
He holds it up. It's yellow, with a little white top hat, a pencil moustache and an expression of profound disappointment.
"It's you," he says. "When I drank the tonic."
"I don't have a moustache."
"Artistic licence."
You grab the duck. He lets you. Your fingers brush his glove and he goes very still, the way a wild thing goes still when you get too close, and you realize with a jolt that the King of Hell is nervous. Of you.
"Why me?" you ask. "There are a million sinners in Pentagram City who'd crawl over broken glass to sit on this bench. Half the overlords would sell their own mothers for one dinner with you."
"Exactly." He goes back to his brush, though there's nothing left to paint. "Everyone who talks to me wants something or fears something. Usually both. They bow. They flatter. They tremble. Alastor smiles at me like he's measuring me for a coffin." His mouth twists. "You looked me in the eye and told me your product didn't work."
"Because it doesn't."
"I know. That's the point." He finally looks up at you. "I've been very tired for a very long time. When I talk to you I'm not tired. So I've decided."
"Decided what?"
"That you're going to fix me." He says it lightly, like a joke, but his hands have stopped moving on the duck. "I'll pay you, of course. Name your price. I'll be your best customer. One hour a day, you tell me lies you don't expect me to believe and I'll feel better. A very exclusive tonic."
It is the saddest thing anyone has ever said to you, and you have sold placebo pills to dying men.
"I don't do subscriptions," you say.
His face falls, a little. He covers it fast. He's good at covering. You'd recognize a professional anywhere.
"But," you go on, before you can think better of it, "I'll come to dinner. Once. No charge. And I won't lie to you."
"Not even a little?"
"I'll lie about the food if it's bad."
He beams. It's devastating. It does something to the inside of your ribs that you'd describe, in the trunk of the Buick, as a warm tingling sensation, guaranteed or your money back.
"Tomorrow," he says. "Midnight. I'll send a car." He stands, tucks the brush into his breast pocket and taps his cane against the bench. Then he pauses and bends down, close, so close you can see the faint gold flecks in his red irises and smell him: something like apples left out in the sun and something underneath, older and sharper, like the air after lightning. "I should warn you, though. I don't know how to do anything halfway. I wasn't built for it."
His breath is warm on your ear. Your pulse is suddenly very loud.
"If you're going to cure me," Lucifer murmurs, "you'll have to take all of it."
Then he's gone, in a little twist of red light, and the only proof he was ever there is the duck in your hand with the disappointed moustache, and the heat crawling down your neck, and the fact that you've just agreed to have dinner with the Devil.
You look at the duck.
"Don't," you tell it.
The duck says nothing. It looks disappointed in you anyway.