The morning sun set over the horizon, the city in the distance providing a pitch black set of spires along a golden skyline, the smog hanging over it sort of smudging the image and giving it a ghostlike quality.


    I was standing on the back porch of my grandfather''s house, a little hair o'' the dog in my morning coffee (never hurt grandad) I just had the whole damn pot sitting next to me, so I didn''t have to walk away from the setting sun while I sipped.


    "Rodney! You son of a bitch! What in god''s holy name where you doing at a murder scene!?!" Ahh yes, Charlie.


    "No I am having my morning coffee, if I was drinking, my phone would have been off." Not that I carried a cellphone to turn off in the first place.


    I looked at the pot, and the Jack, there wasn''t much of either left. I decided against Jack, still had to stay sharp, so I went instead for just the last of the coffee in the pot. Drinking the now warm coffee, I sat in silence for a minute, Charlie still choosing his words, I heard conversations and talk on the other end of the phone, maybe he was talking with some subordinates or something.


    "Charlie, I punch demons in the face, I''m not a fuckin'' wizard from Chicago."


    I looked out at the city again, the sun was under the buildings now, and some of the night sky was being cast back by the glass windows before being swallowed up entirely by the light pollution. The view was great but my mood soured as I replied "Fine, you''re right, I don''t have a choice. Thanks Charlie, I know you are taking a risk here."


    "I''m willing to take a little shit from the boys to keep you on the streets, it''s safer with you on them than off them, I gotta get going, lay low today alright?"


    "That''s cool, but why the sudden change of subject?"


    "You always got cool stories Neo, gotta let me have a few."


    Again, what felt like minutes went by, as the hour long drive from my place to St. Paul proper melted away under Levon''s tales of rum running and adventures in his home country.


    The library was one of the few places I could go when I needed a safe place to be, and there were more pleasant memories here than unpleasant ones, which is more that I could say for most public spaces. I walked over to the tea cart, poured myself a cup of it, and sipped a little as I began diving through the shelves.


    My time on the streets gave me a true appreciation for the old Dewey Decimal, and I began pulling books from shelves and placing them on the cart in front of me as I walked, looking for anything to do with old occult symbology. I would swing by one of the computers as soon as one was open, a couple of nerds were hanging around one of them, by the subject of their conversation it was doing calculus classes.


    After collecting herself, she saw the massive pile of books on my cart and said "Good lord, doing a bit of light reading are we?" I took a glance down at the stack as I said. "A wise old woman once told me, that a smart man takes many books on a single subject from the shelves, while a foolish man takes only one. Because the smart man knows that most of the books are lying, and the only way to find the truth, is to read them all."


    Holy shit. I realized then, Esther''s granddaughter was one of the nice librarians, and she was hot! And I just waxed philosophical at her instead of just saying hi, goddamn it Rodney.


    I contemplated trying to talk to her again, but realized the moment was gone, and that I had bigger fish to fry than try to pick up a girl, even a nice one whose grandma was basically the mother figure of a whole generation of homeless....


    "Why not just use Google?" the fat kid asked "Because the computers are all being used." I turned a page and gave them a look as if I was wearing an imaginary set of shades "Unless you two are volunteering?"


    Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    "I thought the stereotype of kids in a library was that you liked math?"


    "Sir, do you like math?" The fat kid asked again.


    "A lot actually." It looked like the fat kid was giving the black one the lead on this, I should really have gotten their names, feels bad just calling them "The fat one" or "The black one" I would learn later that the black kid''s name was Woby at least.


    "What do you know about the Valknut?"


    "It''s an old Norse symbol, its a symbol of Odin, and death, it was left at his sacrificial sites and was sometimes carried by priestesses." He looked it up on the computer as he spoke, showing me an image of the thing.


    "Well, there is some rather sketchy people from a really sketchy part of the pagan community that have used it as a racist symbol."


    "Huh? Pagans? Racist? Aren''t they supposed to be chill and peace loving and shit? I know quite a few satanists, and they seemed pretty decent."


    "Yeah, those folks are what you call "Astaru." They follow old norse gods and goddesses to this day, and they are pretty chill. Wotanists on the other hand..."


    "Rituals to Odinn were mostly beheadings. Some were more ritualized with a careful stab through the chest, I wouldn''t be surprised if someone went for the eye, considering Odin was a one-eyed god, though considering they usually sacrificed Thralls, their slave caste, it would probably be blasphemous to make a slave look like the god... Anyway. Their punishments and stuff reserved for criminals and prisoners of war were also ritualistic, and violent. One, that might have been anachronistic, was the idea that someone would have their small intestine cut out, tied to a tree, and then forced to walk around that tree at spear point."


    The fat kid looked like he was about to puke, and I wasn''t feeling too hot myself. Woby was getting a little too into this description of gruesome horror, and I got the sense this was something he might have looked into a little too much. "Anything the Vikings did that wasn''t horrible murder?"


    "I mean, yeah, they had a fascinating culture, I can totally talk about it for hours..." he was suddenly cut off by someone calling from the front of the Library "Woby! Come on dear, bring your friend, its time to go home."


    Most Neo-Pagans are some of the calmest, level-headed, genuinely decent people you will ever meet. Even Satanists are remarkably cordial, although some of the traditionalist ones got on my nerves, always asking me for demon summoning services for stupid or dangerous reasons. The dumbest ones were people asking me for fortunes, as if a Clairvoyance demon would give me actual information about the actual future instead of some nonsense riddle that only makes sense in the moment.


    <hr>


    Hell, is not what you think it is. But it also is exactly what you think it is. Beyond the bland grey walls of my cubicle where hundreds of thousands of other cubicles exactly like mine, doing exactly what I was doing, typing away at a computer, looking through text messages and sending information to the bosses about what methods could be used to ensure the soul was captured. Hell, at least for those of us at the bottom, is a pyramid scheme.


    I sat there, staring at a computer screen, that had a little ''XP'' bar sitting at the top of it, in front of an inbox flooded with text messages, waiting to be graded and nudged to be more sinful, building the scaffolding for some other demon above me to grace me with a small portion of the soul he claimed for himself. I knew that above me, thousands of circles up, were the original seven of Dante''s day, but I had never seen them. Sure we have access to a 24 hour stream of the old river of fire, but why would anyone step away from their soul quota and risk missing out on a promotion? One of those that were said to come, but never really did.


    Surrounded by my four grey walls, with four other cubicles next to me, on and on and on for hundreds of thousands of miles of office space, I stared at my screen. whiling away the seconds. Wondering how long it was going to be before Rodney called me back...


    Nothing can survive this far down for comfort, its too cold, The "0th" circle is what we called this place, it is so far away from God''s light as to be colder than even the circle of Traitors, nothing warm can remain here, coffee cannot survive this far down, food freezes solid and looses flavor entirely, the only things down here that can remain to give us demons of the minor sins any sense of comfort, was Tobacco. It tasted good, didn''t affect us the same as it did humans, no chemical addictiveness, just a pleasant flavor profile, and smoking makes us look cool without the risk of cancer.


    I was reminded of my Tobacco just then, and reached for the can of Wintergreen in my little pocket dimension, bamfing it back into existence, running my clawed nails along the outside of the can, resisting the urge to tap it against my index finger, an all too familiar sound down here, to try to keep anyone from knowing I had some. Opening a can of chewing tobacco in this circle of hell was like opening a container of Tic-Tac''s up top, everyone wants a piece.


    As I opened the container, a whiff of the smell escaped the can before it flash-froze, and I heard the keyboards of the two cubicles nearest mine stop. Shit.


    "XiXi?" Ugh that insufferable nickname "You''re back? Got called up top?" ugh that insufferable "Uncle Tony" Italian American accent that sounded fake, most folks didn''t call him by his true name, most mortals and some immortals couldn''t pronounce it, instead we just called him Dave. He was a Fraud demon.


    "Called up top? Poor dear, did you at least find an unbaptized to claim?"


    The other demon speaking was a lady we called Starr, she sounded like a sweet scottish nanny. She was a demon of Coddling. And what she was asking about was if I was seeking out some SIDS baby or unbaptized suicide that I reached before a Death Angel showed up to claim the soul. Demons down here have a bad work culture, they think going to the surface just means less souls for you, less souls for you means a shorter lifespan.


    "You both know well that I refuse to take an easy soul." I replied to her, a sour feeling in my gut as I realized I was going to have to give up a good portion of my chew. I need to start asking Rodney for extra, the fact that I had to eat one whole container just so I could get any before being sent back was utterly miserable.


    "Come on XiXi, you must be almost outta souls by now, you''re gonna die at this rate, slide us some snuff, we can keep you going."


    "A fourth of a soul for a fourth of a can." I said as I knocked the puck of chew out of the canister, and started breaking it up.


    "Highway fuckin'' robbery!" cried Dave.


    "Deal, I might even buy two quarters off of you dearie." I saw her wispy cloud-like shape emerge from her side of the cubicle, and hold her equally wispy three-fingered claws over to my desk. I placed two quarters of the chew into her hand.


    "Fine. Fuck these things are getting pricey." Dave finally said as he held a greenish ooze coated five fingered hand down from his stall over to mine.


    I heard a little *Ding!* from my computer as my soul quota went up nearly a full soul.


    I silently begged for Rodney to call me in early, as I sadly munched on my quarter of the chew, and reached out for my keyboard to start filing away text messages, and earning barely a decimal point of souls at a time as I did so.