Chapter 3: Balance Sheet
The palace workshop is the loudest place you've ever been, and you once audited a steel mill.
He brings you there on Tuesday night, through a door in the hotel's basement that wasn't there the day before. One step and the air changes: cold stone, warm machine oil, the smell of hot rubber like a summer road. Then the noise hits you. Presses thumping. Belts whirring. Somewhere, a steam whistle that plays the first four notes of a lullaby, over and over. And everywhere, on every shelf, on every conveyor, in great yellow drifts against the walls like snow: ducks.
Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Ducks in hard hats and ducks in tutus and ducks in tiny suits of armor, ducks rolling off a line with their beaks still soft and steaming, ducks being painted by small mechanical arms with the delicacy of surgeons.
You stop in the doorway. Lucifer stops beside you, watching your face the way he watched it the first day, when you held the accountant duck.
"Well," he says. "This is it. This is where the magic happens. It's mostly ducks."
"I can see that it's mostly ducks."
"I told you it was loud."
It's beautiful. You don't say so. You walk slowly down the main aisle with your hands in your coat pockets while the machines thump around you, and you look at everything, and at the end of the aisle, on a workbench with a lamp and a magnifier, you find a half-finished duck with a tiny clipboard and the start of a pair of gold glasses, and next to it a scrap of paper covered in sketches of somebody's eyebrows. Nine attempts. All crossed out except the last.
He comes up behind you. The noise drops, all of it at once, as if he's put the whole factory on mute.
"I need to ask you something," he says, "and I need you to say yes."
You know what it is. You've known since Monday.
"Lucifer."
"Just put it under 'anonymous.' That's all. One word." He's talking fast, and his hands are moving, and the gold of his eyes has started to run red at the edges. "Nobody has to know. Charlie doesn't have to know. You can say it's some sinner who believes in the cause, some rich guy, I don't care, make one up, you're so smart, you could make one up in your sleep."
"I could."
"So do it. Please. I'll give you anything. I'll give you a palace. I have a spare. It's got a moat."
"I don't want a moat."
"Everybody wants a moat!"
"Lucifer," you say, and you turn around. "I'm going to tell you why I'm in Hell."
So you do. Standing in the silent workshop, among ten thousand watching ducks, you tell him about the six years and the eighteen months. About Gerald Pruitt and the zeros. About how you made his books sing a lie so sweetly that no one ever heard the wrong note. About a boiler on Delancey Street that had been replaced four times on paper, and the families who'd lived in that building, and the winter. About what you did after.
He listens. He doesn't interrupt once, which for him is a feat of enormous physical effort. His hands go still.
"I promised myself," you say, "the night I got here. I will never make a ledger lie again. Not for money. Not for anyone." Your voice wobbles and you let it. "Not even for you."
He's quiet for a long time.
"You stole from a bad man," he says at last, "to give it to people he hurt. And you went to Hell for it."
"I lied first. For a long time."
"Yeah." He looks at the duck on the bench. The half-finished one, with your eyebrows. "Yeah. I get that. I know a little bit about getting sent down for doing what you thought was right." A small, crooked smile. "Okay. Okay. No lies. You're right." He takes a breath. "So what do I do?"
"You tell her yourself."
He flinches like you've thrown water on him.
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because I wasn't there!" It bursts out of him, and the machines on every side of you flicker and stutter. "For years. Decades. Her mother left, and I sat in this room and made ducks and didn't come out, and Charlie grew up and built a whole hotel without me, and every time I've tried to help since, she looks at me like she's waiting to find out what I want for it." He drags a hand down his face. "If she finds out I've been paying for everything, she'll think I'm trying to buy my way back in. And maybe I am. I don't even know anymore." He looks at you, and his eyes are wet. "I just wanted her to have her thing. Without me ruining it."
You step closer. You take the duck off the bench, the unfinished one, and you put it in his hand, and you close his fingers around it.
"Friday," you say. "Midnight. I'll be up there with the books. I won't say your name. But I won't lie for you either." You let go. "What happens after that is up to you."
The lobby is packed on Friday. Charlie's pushed back the furniture and set up rows of folding chairs, and every one of them is full. Angel Dust is in the front row with a bag of popcorn. Husk is at the bar with a bottle and the expression of a man who has made his peace with whatever comes next. Vaggie is standing behind Charlie like a bodyguard. Near the back, in a feathered hat and a dress the color of old blood, sits Rosie, the overlord who runs Cannibal Town, smiling with all her very many teeth, a potential donor who's been very curious about this little hotel. Alastor is beside her, of course. He waves at you.
You don't see Lucifer anywhere.
You stand at the front with your notebook and your laptop and a projector that Niffty found in the attic and cleaned with what you hope was a rag. You put up the first slide. YOU CAN DO IT! says the poster, which you've brought out from your office and propped against the podium for luck. (DO WHAT?) says the Sharpie underneath.
"Okay," you say. "Let's talk about money."
You go through it all. Every line. Angel's snacks, to cheers from Angel. Husk's bar tab, to a long weary groan from Husk. The doors. The vibes. Alastor's electric bill, to a delighted "Oooooh!" from the entire room and a crackle of static from the back row so loud the projector flickers. You do it clearly and honestly and in perfectly straight columns, and the room listens, even the overlords, even Rosie.
And then you put up the last slide.
It's a list of Fridays. Every week, since the hotel opened. Every deposit. Every amount. And beside each one, the same name, because it's the true name of the account, and you will not change it.
L.M. Holdings (Ducks & Misc.)
The room goes quiet. Charlie stares at the screen. You can see her doing the math. You can see her mouth start to shape the letters.
"Who," she says slowly, "is L.M. Holdings?"
You hold her eyes. "That's not mine to tell you," you say. "But I'll tell you this. Whoever it is, they're in this building. And they've been here every single Friday, at midnight, for as long as you've been open."
Silence.
Somewhere in the back, a folding chair creaks.
And then, from behind the curtain that leads to your office, the King of Hell steps out.
He's not in the white suit. He's not in the hat. He's in shirtsleeves, with his hair a mess, as if he's been pacing in a very small room for a very long time. He's holding, in both hands, a yellow rubber duck with a tiny clipboard.
"Hi, sweetie," he says. "So. This isn't what it looks like."
Charlie's face crumples. It goes through about six things at once: shock and hurt and confusion and something so bright it's hard to look at. She takes one step toward him. Then another.
"It's a little bit what it looks like," Lucifer says, and his voice cracks right down the middle. "I'm sorry. I wasn't there, and I'm sorry. I just wanted you to have something that was yours."
Charlie hits him at a run. The hug knocks him back a full step. She's crying, and so is he, and so, horrifyingly, is Angel, loudly, into his popcorn. Vaggie looks at the ceiling and blinks very fast. Rosie applauds, slowly, delighted. In the back row, Alastor's static has gone curiously quiet.
You close your laptop.
He finds you on the hotel roof an hour later. You're sitting on the edge with your legs dangling over the red city, watching the lights, and he sits down next to you without asking, the way he did on the corner of your desk that first day.
"She wants to do a trust fall," he says. "Tomorrow. Big one. Off the balcony."
"Are you going to do it?"
"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I think I am." He bumps your shoulder with his. "Thank you. For not lying."
"Thank you for not making me."
He laughs. Then he's quiet. The red light from the sign below catches his face, the flush on his cheeks, the gold of his eyes.
"I have to tell you something," he says. "And you're going to judge me."
"I'm an accountant. I judge everybody."
"I stopped hiding from Charlie weeks ago," says the King of Hell. "Before the pirate. Maybe before the ballerina. I just kept coming to your office anyway, and I kept making excuses, because the truth was really embarrassing." He takes a breath. "The truth is I like how you look at me. Like I'm a guy who makes nice ducks and not a guy who got thrown out of Heaven. I like your straight columns. I like your eyebrows. I made nine of them." He swallows. "I meant it, on Thursday. When Alastor left. I didn't mean to say it, but I meant it."
You look at him for a long moment. The first sinner. The fallen star. A short, rumpled man with red in his cheeks and his heart in both hands, waiting to find out what you want for it.
You lean over and kiss him.
He makes a small surprised sound against your mouth, and then he kisses you back, carefully, one hand coming up to touch your jaw like you might break. He tastes like apples. Somewhere down in the city, as if on cue, something very large explodes, and neither of you looks.
When you pull apart he's glowing, faintly, a soft gold light around the edges of him, and he doesn't seem to notice.
He reaches into his pocket. He holds out a duck.
It's him. Rumpled shirt, messy hair, red cheeks, sitting in a tiny folding chair with LUCIFER painted on the back. He's holding a tiny duck of his own.
"For your desk," he says. "So you don't get lonely when I'm at the palace."
You turn it over in your hands. You look at him.
"Or," you say, "you could just not go to the palace."
He stares at you. "Oh," says the King of Hell. Then, slowly, the biggest smile you've ever seen: "Oh. Yeah. I could do that."
He takes your hand on the edge of the roof. Below, the city burns, as it always does.
"I'm going to need a bigger shelf," you tell him.
"Madam Accountant," says Lucifer Morningstar, "I'll build you a whole wing."