Belphegor snickered. “For once, I agree with the angel. Your master might have taught you some neat little tricks, but nothing nearly good enough to protect you from the things you truly need protecting from.”
“I guess you guys are right,” I said, sighing as I slipped into a chair at the table, paging through the notebook. My eyes drifted across a particular design, and I cocked my head, studying it. I lifted my notebook in both hands, holding it up to show Raziel and Belphegor. “What about this one? Do you guys think that this’ll do the job?”
Belphegor’s eyes glazed over with a frightening mix of fury and terror when he saw the sigil in my notebook. Raziel let out his own horrified cry, a keening shriek quite unlike anything I’d ever heard him utter. In a pillar of crimson fire and a flash of golden light, the two entities disappeared, banished from my shitty yet now slightly better protected apartment.
Florian stared at the spots where the demon and angel previously stood, then looked at me. “What the hell was that?”
I showed him the design in my notebook. “Carver’s variation on the Seal of Solomon. Pretty nifty stuff for scaring away infernals and celestials, if only temporarily. I needed a break. Wanted them out of my hair.”
“Won’t they be even more pissed off when they come back?”
“See, ideally, I’ve just bought us enough time to find a way to keep them out permanently. We’ll let Raziel in on a case by case basis – like a stray neighborhood cat – but I’m sure we’ll find something general-purpose to keep the apartment wa
rded for a good little while.”
Florian joined me at the table, watching me look through my notes and helpfully copying out any sigils and glyphs that I pointed out as potentially useful. But not five minutes into our study session, my phone began to ring. I checked out the name on the screen and let out an instinctive groan.
“Ugh. This sucks. We can ward this place as thickly as we like, but that’s not going to stop all of them. I keep forgetting that there are other ways for the entities to bug us.” I raised my phone, showing the screen to Florian. “Look who’s calling.”
Florian furrowed his forehead. “Dionysus? Oh, shit. He must be calling to ask about the wine. Stall him. I’ve only got like ten jars of the stuff ready.”
“Right, right,” I said, taking a deep breath to settle myself, so I’d sound all nice and calm when I spoke to the god of wine. I picked up the call and put it on speaker, pasting the best smile I could muster on my face. Quick tip I picked up from Dustin. They can hear you smile over the phone. “Dionysus,” I said boldly, but not too cheerfully. “How can I help you? Florian says he’s still working on the wine.”
“Oh, this isn’t about the wine,” Dionysus said, his voice high and happy, pretty much how he sounded all the time, anyway. “I’m calling to ask if the two of you would like to make some extra money on the side. Nothing big, you see, but good, honest employment that needs strong arms.”
Florian and I exchanged careful glances, then nodded in agreement at the same time. “You’ve got my attention. Keep going.”
“Excellent,” Dionysus trilled. “Now. Are you any good with construction work?”
25
I didn’t think that Florian and I would be finding ourselves in gainful employment so soon, especially not from an entity. More surprising than that, though, was the job site. Dionysus was only calling us as a favor for someone else from his pantheon. There was a reason Artemis was snooping around the Nicola Arboretum that one night. I should have put two and two together.
Dionysus told us to go to the botanical gardens, and he even had the grace to sound a little surprised when I guessed the meeting place ahead of him telling me. This time we visited in broad daylight, at about ten in the morning. The sun was up, the Nicola Arboretum as pretty in the sunshine as it was at night. Just as lovely, though, was Artemis, goddess of the moon and the hunt, as she waited for us by the little stone statue of a fox.
When the coast was clear, Artemis gestured in the air around us, and a shimmering green portal in the shape of a huge leaf materialized near the statue. She ushered us through impatiently. Florian was a little more enthusiastic about stepping in than I was.
There really shouldn’t have been cause for me to worry. I’d interacted with Artemis in the past, and she fell neatly into the category of entities I’d consider friendly. But new things still made me nervous, you know? Especially when they involved interdimensional travel. I kind of have a sensitive tummy when it comes to that stuff.
But we passed through the portal into Artemis’s domicile, and all of my anxieties, along with the lingering coolness on my skin from the dewy air of a California morning, melted cleanly away. Her domicile was hotter, more humid, just like a vacation on a tropical island. It was really, really sunny, too.
“So I’m the goddess of the moon,” Artemis said. “Big deal. I like to keep things bright in my domicile most hours. It’s nice, you know? Change of perspective. Plus it’s good for all the vegetation.”
And oh, the greenery. Artemis’s home was a jumble of rainforest, tropical jungle, and winter woods, just a mashup of trees, grass, and flowers from wildly disparate corners of the world, as if thrown together by someone with little to no understanding of how climates worked. But that was part of the job, as it turned out.
“You,” Artemis said, pointing at me. “I’ve got some of that modular Swedish furniture sitting around. The kind you build yourself. Just unbox them and throw ’em together.”
I tried not to look so excited. The truth was that I enjoyed working with my hands and building things. I embodied my name better than I actually thought. Plus the idea of it being so plain and mundane and so very humanly normal was hugely appealing to me.
“There’ll be more, actual construction work when you finish,” she added. “Stuff you’ll properly need some tools for. You did bring tools, didn’t you?”
I looked down at myself, blinking. “Dionysus didn’t mention anything about that. I can improvise, unless you want stuff that needs nails in it.” I could probably find acceptable substitutes for most construction tools somewhere in the Vestments, but nails? They would disappear the moment I left, meaning anything we built would just fall into a pile of planks and debris.
“Never mind,” Artemis said. “This isn’t a one-day job, anyway. I’ll give you money for supplies, just make sure to shop for what you need before you come over the next time.”
The hairs on the back of my neck bristled. Next time? There was already a guarantee of a next time. I felt a little silly, being so excited about sawing stuff apart and hammering other stuff together, but again, this was something I could do that didn’t involve slaying demons or hiding from angels. It was a welcome fucking change, I’ll tell you that much. Plus it meant money. I liked money, just as much as I liked having food in my belly, and a bed to sleep in at night.
“And you,” Artemis said, pointing at Florian. “You’re gonna help rehabilitate all the plant life in this dimension.” She gestured beyond the closest thicket of jungle. Past all the green, the domicile was mostly barren earth and empty space. “Anything will grow in this soil,” Artemis said, stabbing her finger down at the ground. “Anything. So go nuts.”