“Man, you guys were brutal!” Adam belched into my ear as we manually disassembled Charlie’s drum set. Although Charlie could have disassembled it just as fast as he had assembled it on his own, we weren’t about to push our luck.
Before our set, Rick had turned his back from the stage for only a few seconds. When he turned back our drummer, whom he had not seen enter the green room, was leaving it and sitting down at a drum set that hadn’t been there moments before. We started our set on time, so he hadn’t complained, but as someone who had probably been working in live music longer than Travis or I had been alive, that was the first time he had seen anything like that. No need for him to see it happen twice in the same night.
“Thanks!” I replied, too ecstatic to even take issue with Adam’s breach of my personal space.
“Don’t talk to him,” Charlie hissed, “Everyone here will probably think you’re talking to yourself. I say probably…” he began to raise his voice, “…because we’re at a show with a bunch of metalheads, and there’s an off-chance one of them will be brutal enough to see and hear the perpetually hammered moron breathing down my frontman’s neck! Or see and hear one of the hammered moron’s thousands of idiot friends!”
Charlie didn’t seem to be following his own advice very well.
“Yeah, the thousands of idiots who saved your butt,” Adam muttered, “Okay, Charlie, whatever you say. I’ll be over at the bar with the rest of the guys.”
“What do you mean ‘rest of the guys?’” Charlie asked before turning to look at the bar and promptly clapping his hand to his forehead, “Oh no.”
About fifty ghosts were already at the bar, trying to cop free drinks. Most of them were unsuccessful, since their hands simply phased through the taps, bottles, and glasses they tried to grab. However, a couple were already starting to get the hang of being ghosts. As Charlie watched in horror, Sean lifted a can to his mouth, only for the contents to spill all over a living patron’s head.
“Hey!” the patron shouted, “Who poured a beer on me?!”
At the same time, Neil shotgunned a beer. Although he didn’t spill it on anyone, he completed his successful shotgun by attempting to flatten the can against his forehead. I’m sure his skull would have been thick enough to perform this task had he possessed a tangible one, but since he didn’t he ended up flattening it against someone who did.
“Aah!” the metalhead screamed, “Someone mashed a can into my face!”
The two victims of paranormal events flailed around in shock until they bumped into each other.
“You’re dead!” the first one said, wiping his long, beer-soaked hair out of his face.
“You want some of this?!” the second one challenged, wiping the blood from his.
“And just think,” I said as the victims started trading blows, “Imagine how good the ghosts’ distraction you actually asked for before our set must have been!”
“Don’t remind me,” Charlie grumbled.
“Look on the bright side,” I replied, “Between this fight and the three bands that still have to play after us, you should have plenty of time to explain where you’ve been for the past three weeks before they announce the winner!”
Charlie sighed as he mimed throwing something behind his back. The drum set and our amps silently flew off the stage, almost too fast for me to see them move.
“Don’t worry, I put them all back in the green room. It’s not like anyone saw,” he said in response to my shocked expression, “I guess you’re right. Let’s go somewhere a little more quiet. Travis! Let’s go!”
Travis had vanished from the stage when we finished our set almost as quickly as Charlie’s drums. I was too amped on adrenaline to notice, and since Charlie ended up whisking most of the heavy stuff away it didn’t matter that Travis didn’t help. However, now that I was ready for Charlie’s explanation and the adrenaline was wearing off, I followed Charlie’s eyes to find Travis in a corner away from the commotion, talking to a blonde girl about our age.
As Charlie and I made our way for the exit, I again had to shout at Travis to get his attention.
“Uh, can’t it wait?” Travis glanced over his shoulder at us, like we were an inconvenience, “I’m kind of in the middle of a conversation here.”
The nerve. Don’t get me wrong, it was adorable that Travis was talking to a girl that wasn’t his sister for the first time in his life. Ordinarily I’d have been more than happy to let him get his mack on, but the band took precedence. Especially when that band’s drummer returned after three weeks of being MIA as a body part-fog-cloud with thousands of rambunctious metalhead ghosts.
“You’ve got a cell phone,” I replied dismissively, “Just get her number and call her later.”
Before we could exit the venue, we ran into a familiar face. Obviously Purple Hair had given us a ride to The Rusty Nail, but I hadn’t realized she had stayed for the concert itself.
“H-Hey P-I mean Ms. Hemway-Fischer!” I stuttered.
She wasn’t even looking at me. She and Charlie were locked in a staring contest. Eventually Charlie broke the silence with “Erica, it seems I misjudged you.”
Without breaking their staring contest, Purple Hair cooly replied, “Charlie, I haven’t misjudged you at all.”
Charlie nodded his head and shrugged his massive shoulders as if to say “that’s fair” before making his way for the exit. As I began to follow, Purple Hair stopped me.
“Eric, as someone you threatened with both firing and imprisonment, I am the last person who should care about your well-being. That said, I’m still your guidance counselor. And as your guidance counselor, I implore you to think if you really want to associate yourself with him. Especially given everything you’ve learned.”
I looked back at her and said “Thanks, Ms. Hemway-Fischer. I’m about to learn a whole lot more.”
–
Charlie found us an old decrepit picnic table covered in leaves and debris on the far edge of a public park. “Can’t risk a recruit overhearing us in a more crowded place,” he said.
“Alright, Charlie,” I said, “Time to spill. Who are you? What are you? Where have you spent the past three weeks?”
Charlie closed his eyes and took a deep breath, “I am Chernobog, the Black God. The earliest memories I have are about fifteen hundred years ago. I went from a minor, unknown deity to the most powerful and feared god in an entire pantheon over the course of a few centuries.
“But about a thousand years ago, I heard of a new god who was progressively winning more followers. At first I didn’t think of him as much of a threat; how could he be a god when he was best known for his gruesome death? Gods should be known for the gruesome deaths they inflicted upon others, like I was! However, as the years passed, I found myself continually losing followers to this new god. It turned out there was something appealing in having your god die for you, as opposed to your god demanding you die for him. Who would have thought?
“As my followers left me, so did my power. The minor gods of my pantheon were no help, content to be canonized as saints in the new god’s religion. I was beginning to fear this was the end, until a group of gods from foreign lands whose followers had also left them approached me with a proposal. Despite losing their followers, they had not perished. Instead, they had joined forces. They explained how we, as gods, occupied our own realms separate from the mortal realm. In their weakened states, they merged their home realms with each other to counter the power of the new god.
“After a few centuries, the new god appeared to have taken all our followers and the lands they inhabited. But the mortals themselves hadn’t changed much. They were still tempted by promises of fame, wealth, power, the usual crap, especially when they were told they didn’t have to earn any of it. The old gods and I may have been weakened, but we still had more than enough in the tank to grant a local government position here, a hot wife there, and so on. All we asked of our mortal disciples was their servitude in death. For gods like us, it was a small time investment. However, for mortals who thought getting rich by making something others would want to buy took too long, death was too far away to matter. Regardless of their age or the state of their health, none of these mortals believed they were going to die.
“Once they inevitably died, it was time to fulfill their end of the bargain. Their souls joined us in our realm, which we had started calling the Other Place. There they fueled the one who recruited them, making the recruiter more powerful, allowing him to promise even bigger rewards to his future recruits.
“I may have felt nothing but disdain for the mortals, but their free will? That was something. Some of them actually put that free will to productive use, becoming powerful, wealthy, or successful all on their own. But most of them used it to sell their souls to us. Eventually our recruits consisted of academics, generals, government officials, and even kings. Anywhere someone could gain influence, power, or control over others, there were people without the talent or work ethic who wanted it anyway. We got it for them. They grew to outnumber anyone who gained influence on their own. Just as I had become the most powerful god in my pantheon, I quickly became the most powerful recruiter in the Other Place.
“But our success, and my success in particular, was not without its drawbacks. As we continued to merge with more realms, adopted more gods left homeless by the new god, and recruited more mortals, the Other Place required a ‘restructure.’ First, we categorized our mortal recruits into different tiers; the more ambitious the soul, the more power it gave its recruiter in death. Each ‘tier’ then got its own team of recruiters dedicated to recruiting that specific type of soul. Then each team got its own ‘recruitment manager.’ Then the recruitment managers got their own bosses in the form of upper management. Before you knew it, we had a mergers and acquisitions department, a black magic support department, a CEO, an IR department…”
“IR department?” I interrupted.
“Insider Resources,” Charlie answered, “That’s what we began calling ourselves, the insiders. The new god may have influenced the mortals from ‘on high,’ or whatever, but we were really running the show from inside their institutions. Of course, the new god’s holy men had another word for us: demons.”
“But you’re a metalhead recruiter, right?” I asked, “Are you saying there’s power in being a metalhead as well?”
Charlie threw back his head and let out a deep, booming laugh, “Did I offer you anything for your soul?”
“Well, no,” I stuttered, “But Travis and I thought that since you were a metalhead recruiter…”
I paused and looked at Travis to back me up, only to realize he had been texting someone the entire time. I punched him on the arm.
“Ow!” Travis said, “I was listening, ever heard of multitasking?!”
Charlie, getting frustrated by our antics, continued without answering my question, “As the most successful recruiter in the Other Place, you’d think I’d be prime material for management and even upper management when some of the other insiders planned this ‘restructure,’ right? Well, it turns out you tend to deal with a lot of sore losers when working with ex-pagan gods. Although the insiders who designed the restructure were successful recruiters to be sure, none of them individually came close to me. But together, they overpowered me, placing themselves in management and upper management positions, and leaving me recruiting petty tyrants in local government.”
“You mean even as you recruited people by giving them unfair advantages, you got screwed over by demons who didn’t recruit enough people, so they gave themselves an unfair advantage instead?” Travis asked.
Okay, maybe he had been listening.
“The irony is delicious, isn’t it?” Charlie replied, “The whole ‘restructure’ somewhat backfired on them later on, but it accomplished exactly what they wanted at first. I wasn’t about to let it stop me, though. If recruiting petty tyrants was what it took to get to the top, that’s what I was going to do. I worked my way up from the bottom. By the late ‘80s, I was about to be promoted to the highest-tiered recruitment team when upper management announced another ‘restructuring.’
“I had already heard of the media and politicians accusing rock and roll bands of slipping prayers to Satan into their records and selling their souls for fame and fortune. We insiders used to laugh at that stuff. It was all true, of course, but the media figures and politicians making these accusations were just as guilty of doing the same. However, by the late ‘80s, something had changed. These new extreme metal bands weren’t just slipping subliminal messages about Satan into their records, they were explicitly extolling him. Band members and their fans alike were promising their souls to us en masse! But here’s the twist: none of the insiders were asking for them.
“These bands didn’t want fame or fortune. They were playing incredibly abrasive music that most people couldn’t stand. The only people buying their records were burnouts with poor social skills, terrible hygiene, and no instinct of basic self-preservation. These metalheads weren’t selling their souls because they had any kind of higher ambitions, they were doing it because their favorite bands made it look cool!”
Both Travis and I opened our mouths to correct Charlie on that string of wrong and unfair stereotypes before we looked at each other. I was still covered in bruises from my most recent run-in with Jeff Hennessy that I had instigated. Travis’s bruises had barely faded from the run-in before that. Both of us had trespassed on private property on multiple occasions, skipped class, stolen, lied to our parents, assaulted someone, blackmailed someone, and had a gun pulled on us. Maybe Charlie had a point.
“Okay,” I began hesitantly, “But we still never sold our souls to you like your other recruits, like you said. How did we get those rashes on our shoulders?”
“I’m getting there,” Charlie replied, “When we started receiving all these idiot metalheads’ souls in the afterlife, upper management got an idea. Just like before their first ‘restructure,’ they weren’t exactly keen on me recruiting their highest-tier prospects. So instead, they ‘promoted’ me to trailblaze my own new team: the metalhead recruitment team. There was only one problem: since metalheads were unambitious, antisocial losers who sold their souls for free, said souls were practically worthless. And since the managers were ‘promoting’ me to start my own department, they kindly relieved me of the commission I had accumulated, leaving me virtually powerless. Since the metalheads gave up their souls for free, the managers reasoned I didn’t need any unnatural powers to recruit them. However, in their ‘generosity,’ they did give me one ability: I now had complete control over anything musical. They argued that was more than enough to teach any aspiring metal musician to start his own band and reach a modicum of success. As long as the musician agreed to rehearse with me regularly and make a real effort to improve at their instrument, he would be considered my ‘recruit.’ That’s what got him my symbol on his shoulder.”
“Psssh,” Travis scoffed. I turned to him in shock. Charlie was revealing that we had been this close to eternal damnation in exchange for guitar lessons, and Travis was laughing under his breath about it.
“What’s wrong with you?!” I asked him.
“You had no leverage!” he exclaimed to Charlie, “There was nothing guaranteeing we would have sold our souls to you once we made it big! We could have been like ‘Thanks for the lessons, but we’ve decided to take the band in a different direction, so you’re fired.’”
Charlie, glaring back at Travis, grumbled “You’re right. That was the extent of the power upper management gave me as a metalhead recruiter. I just had to hope the musicians I trained would sell their souls to gain notoriety in the scene. A few musicians burned me, it’s true. I remember each one of their names. But take a look at the photos of some of your favorite bands next time you get the chance. Many of them might try to hide it with shirt sleeves or tattoos, but once you start seeing my symbol you won’t be able to stop.”
“So the managers stuck you in a dead-end job where they knew you wouldn’t cause trouble, and you just accepted it?” I asked, “What happened to beating them at their own game? What happened to becoming the most powerful demon in hell?”
Charlie grinned, “You’re sometimes brighter than you look, Eric, despite continuing to use the same terms the rest of the mortals use when you should know better.”
It was nice to see Charlie hadn’t lost his talent for flattery in the past three weeks.
“Of course I didn’t accept upper management’s new ‘restructure!’ But I needed to make them believe I had. They knew better than to call the ‘restructure’ another dead-end to keep me in my place, so they gave me a quota of metalhead souls to recruit. If I hit it, they told me they would ‘consider’ me for a more dignified promotion. They were even nice enough to count fans of the bands I recruited as my ‘referrals’ if they sold their souls. However, my quota was in the six figures, which I’m sure they thought was more metalheads who would ever exist. This ‘music’ was just a bunch of screaming. Surely it had to be a passing fad, right?”
Travis and I looked at each other and shared a triumphant smile.
“Let me be clear,” Charlie said, “The insiders have nothing but contempt for you mortals. They think of you as puny, pathetic, scum who only exist to serve them. It’s almost impossible for their opinions of you to get any lower.”
Our smiles started to fade.
“Until you metalheads came along and proved them wrong! Several decades later, not only do you continue to listen to the same awful music, you compete with each other for who can make it worse! You downtune lower than the band before, your screaming becomes more unintelligible, your logos become more illegible, your blast beats get so fast they may as well be a continuous, sustained note. And despite your substance abuse, reckless moshing, and abysmal mental health, you’re still somehow able to turn more people on to the genre before your own untimely deaths! It’s uncanny!”
Travis and I had stopped looking at each other and were now scowling at Charlie.
“Don’t look like that, guys! You metalheads were a lifesaver. I was still able to beat upper management at their own game!”
“Glad to be of service, Charlie,” I replied, barely hiding the snark in my voice, “How’d that work out for you?”
Charlie’s expression darkened, “Well, I was beating them at their own game. Until three weeks ago when I threatened your guidance counselor. I was only a few hundred souls away from meeting my quota. I knew if I could get you shredding, you’d easily rack up enough fans for me to meet it. So when your guidance counselor jeopardized that, I got a little carried away. If I had threatened anyone else, I may never have vanished. Or maybe the exact same thing would have happened. Either way, it turned out Erica, or as you call her, ‘Purple Hair,’ had a history with the insiders. And not a positive one, if you can imagine that.”
Travis and I rolled our eyes as Charlie chuckled.
“She told Principal Porter about what happened, thinking I was a teachers union recruiter, Porter told her actual teachers union recruiter, the teachers union recruiter alerted Other Place upper management, and upper management sent the enforcement department to arrest me. Although I was planning on upper management trying to get out of their promise should I have met my quota, I didn’t expect them to do it when I still had a few hundred souls to go. At the time, I was pretty angry with myself for being caught off guard, but I guess it turned out to be for the better.”
“How did they catch you off guard?” I asked, “What happened?”
Charlie sighed, “Well, since I knew Purple Hair wasn’t a teachers union recruit, I figured it would have been safe to threaten her. The rules said only other insiders’ recruits were off limits, right? Well, conveniently, no one had told me about the new rule against interfering in higher-tiered prospects. Since metalheads were the least valuable type of soul, that effectively put every other prospect off-limits.
“However, it surprised me just how out of my league teachers turned out to be. Power-tripping teachers are as old as human civilization, but apparently their value really shot up a couple centuries ago because of a Prussian model or something.
“Once the executives got word of me threatening Purple Hair, they sent the enforcement department, the Other Place’s police force, to the mortal realm to arrest me and bring me back to the Other Place. Once I was there, they held me on trial for trying to poach higher-tiered prospects.
“Here’s where it gets interesting; the usual sentence for something like this is stripping the offender of their power from their recruits and demotion to a lower-tiered team. The council, what you would call ‘judges,’ stripped me of my power, but when it came to my demotion it got complicated. Since upper management had already effectively demoted me to the lowest possible team as a metalhead recruiter, the council didn’t have anywhere to put me. After taking a long recess, they finally came up with a solution: I was to be confined to the metalhead sub-realm.
“Each recruitment team has its own sub-realm to contain the souls of their respective recruits from which they draw power. Since I was the one responsible for putting all the metalhead souls in the Other Place, the Council figured this would be something akin to a cop doing time in the same prison as the criminals he put away.
“Just as the souls are tiered by power, so are their sub-realms, one within the other, with the least powerful in the first sub-realm and the most powerful in the last, most secure sub-realm. At least, that’s how I thought the Other Place was ordered. Until they took me to the very ‘bottom,’ so to speak, to reach the metalhead sub-realm.”
“Hold on,” I said, “I thought you said metalhead souls were virtually worthless. Why was their sub-realm at the ‘bottom’ of h-the Other Place?”
“Believe me, I was just as confused as you are now,” Charlie replied, “When they threw me in the metalhead sub-realm, I expected the worst. Instead, you metalheads proved the insiders wrong again!”
“Proved them wrong how?” I asked.
“As low as the insiders’ opinions are of mortals and metalheads especially, they never expected them to give me a hero’s welcome to their realm of eternal torment that I put them in!” Charlie exclaimed.
“They what?!” Travis and I both exclaimed in unison.
“Yeah! Those morons thought eternal damnation was ‘wicked metal, bro!’” Charlie said in a stereotypical American accent, “It consisted of nearly everything they already enjoyed doing in life, like inflicting pain upon themselves and each other, but without all the non-metal poseurs they couldn’t stand. Well, sort of. If you asked any of them they’d still say they were the only ‘true’ metalhead in the metalhead sub-realm.
“But there was more to it than that. Despite the council stripping me of my power, I felt more powerful than ever. It practically crippled me at first, I was so blindsided. When I regained my senses, something clicked. You know how only the people I wanted to see me at school could? Or how I showed up seemingly out of nowhere? Or engulfed Porter’s entire office?”
“Probably the same way you appeared in our green room just now,” Travis said, “Except you toned down on the reality-warping the other times.”
“Well, yes, sort of,” Charlie replied, “But those weren’t powers the executives gave me as part of my commission. There’s no way they’d have given me abilities like that. I only started to notice them when I met you two. I couldn’t explain why until they put me in the metalhead sub-realm and I was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of brutal souls.”
“Brutal souls?” I asked, raising an eyebrow in skepticism.
“That’s what I said,” Charlie shot back, “The rest of the insiders may not have high opinions of metalheads, and they’re not necessarily wrong, but metal music is undeniably brutal. For people whose identity revolves around this music, their souls have to be brutal as well.”
“And just by being in their presence they gave you power?” Travis asked, “So why did upper management view them as practically worthless to recruit?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out myself,” Charlie answered, “But here’s my best guess: upper management only views power-hungry souls as a commodity. The higher the ambition, the more valuable the soul. Since the highest ambition of the average metalhead is how many head injuries he can sustain in a mosh pit without losing consciousness, upper management values metalhead souls very little. But since brutality used to be the path to power before you mortals bureaucratized, exposure to it must have given me all the power I needed.”
“So can other d-insiders also gain power simply by being in the presence of brutal souls?” Travis asked.
“I doubt it,” Charlie grinned, “Because I just fought my way through every single sub-layer of the Other Place to get back to the mortal realm with the help of those metalheads’ souls. Not only did they give me the power to open gateways between sub-realms, they allowed me to destroy every insider who stood in my way.”
“But you said the metalheads thought being in ‘hell’ was cool. Why would they want to break out?” I asked.
“Because I told them it would be a brutal adventure, which it was,” Charlie answered, “Sure, their time in ‘hell’ would come to an end, but not before they got to help me, a metalhead ‘demon,’ slaughter a whole bunch of other ‘demons.’ Travis, that’s how I can tell you the other insiders weren’t getting any power from the metalheads. Most of them didn’t even stand a chance against me.”
I was simultaneously shocked and unsurprised that that gang of idiots found entertainment in watching Charlie rampage through hell killing demons…okay, it did actually sound pretty brutal when I stated it like that.
“But that ‘reality-warping’ you mentioned wasn’t me, not directly anyway,” Charlie continued, “That was from the gateway the metalheads and I took to get back here, the mortal realm.”
That must have been my “dream world.” No kidding, did I get a glimpse of the Other Place? I saw hell? Awesome!
“What makes you different?” Travis persisted.
“What?” Charlie grunted, “I just explained to you I spent the past three weeks breaking out of another realm of reality and you want to know what makes me different?!”
“Yeah, you just explained this entire bureaucratic process for how insiders gained power, just to conclude that you accidentally discovered another way to gain it that only applies to you. Of course I want to know what makes you different!”
“And why would this ‘council’ sentence you to be confined to the same place they put the souls that gave you power?” I asked, “If upper management has been trying to screw you over since day one, this seems like a lousy way to do it.”
“Okay, maybe you boys have a point,” Charlie said, “I wish I could tell you what made me different. It was as much a surprise to me as it was to you. Despite some things you may have heard about ‘gods’ or ‘demons,’ I am not omniscient. None of the insiders are. Do you know how many miscommunications happen in a bureaucracy as small as your own school? Now imagine a bureaucracy that formed as the result of several mergers and acquisitions of different pagan pantheons over the course of centuries. That’s the Other Place. I absolutely believe upper management is trying to screw me over, which is why they keep the brutal souls as far from me as possible in the lowest sub-realm of the Other Place. But the council must have missed the memo. That’s why I said the ‘restructure’ backfired on upper management.
“If you still don’t believe me you will soon. I’m what they call a ‘rogue demon’ now. Upper management’s gonna send the entire enforcement department to the mortal realm to capture me and put me somewhere even worse. You think they’re just going to let this one go? I made fools out of them to our entire society. Our historians will probably pinpoint my escape as the beginning of a new era in the Other Place’s history. They may even consider it an era unto itself. It may have only been three weeks to you, but time passes slower in the Other Place. It was considerably longer for me.”
However long it was for him, it had to be enough to make his eyes look older when he was already at least fifteen hundred years old.
“We’ve got to get ready,” Charlie urged us, “I was hoping I had been gone long enough to show up in time for the Lamashtu concert, but even without it, your brutality has increased by leagues since I was arrested. Our set we just played amplified it even further. I’m going to need every bit of your brutality, because we’re at a major disadvantage when it comes to prep time. The longer it takes for the enforcement department to show up, the worse they’ll be.”
“Sounds more like a ‘you’ problem,” I said.
Travis looked at me like I had punched an old lady.
Charlie grinned, “What makes you say that?”
“They’re after you, aren’t they?” I replied, “We agreed to let you back in the band, not defend you from a demon police force bent on revenge. I’d hate to lose you again, but we can always boot up the drum machine if we have to.”
Charlie kept grinning as he shook his head, “You’re right, Eric, they’re after me. But remember what I told you about the rules we insiders follow? You two are no longer my recruits. You’re not even prospects. That means you’re fair game for any insider. If you two act as my power source, what’s the most obvious way for the enforcement department to cut my power?”
“You’ve got those metalhead ghosts, don’t you?” I objected.
“They’re peanuts compared to you now,” Charlie responded, “Sure, they may have helped me break out of the Other Place, but I was the one leading the charge. Meanwhile, you guys had to cut it all on your own. The combined brutality of their souls doesn’t even add up to a sliver of yours. Not to mention I have no control over where they go or what they do now that we’re back in the mortal realm. No, you two are my only real source of brutality.”
Travis and I looked at each other just in time to see the blood draining from each others’ faces.
“Oh come on, guys,” Charlie protested, “Being scared is not going to help you! I can feel your brutality dropping by the second right now! You’re the ones in control, here. I’m at your mercy. So if you think I’m lying you can call my bluff, but I won’t be much help to you when I’m stuck in another sub-realm of the Other Place and you’re dead.”
The blood returned to my face, and then some. This…this…thing had disappeared for three weeks, came back when we had learned to do without him, made us think we were in charge, canceled our obligations to him, yet we were still somehow doing his bidding!
Charlie grinned again, “Ah, anger. Wrath, even. That’s much better. Channel that energy, you’ll need it.”
“You said you were planning on upper management trying to get out of their promise to you,” I grumbled through clenched teeth, “What was your plan?”
Charlie checked his watch, “Well, would you look at the time! Sorry boys, I’m still a little gateway-lagged. They should be announcing the winners of the Battle of the Bands at The Rusty Nail any minute now! Let’s go!”