With Tez shadowing Vishnu, I figured a plan for dealing with the latter would soon be forthcoming. It left Hera as the fifth and final unaccounted for target, and I had to admit I was momentarily stumped.

Every minute I spent foraging for answers increased the enormity of the task ahead. The stream of bodies filtering into Rome by now resembled a deluge. According to Grace’s periodic updates, the government had tried to stem the tide but been stymied by the angels, who had extended their ominous replacement of people in uniforms to cover secular law enforcement. The incoming crowds were pouring into the wreckage of the Vatican, fifty thousand strong and rising fast. With them came an influx of traders and suppliers spurred on by the demands of a population buffeted under sudden economic strain.

If all else failed, I could have Tru use his powers to introduce Finance to a thematically appropriate demon lord with no sense of established boundaries. But it didn’t guarantee we’d draw Hera out in particular. Just as likely, we’d find ourselves up against a Security war team. Or a bunch of bean-counters brandishing reality-warping spreadsheet formulas – a threat far more dangerous than it sounded.

It was also possible Durga could take the battle to her. Isolation was more important than location, and being in the office would prevent the others from rushing to her aid. Except Vishnu. Vishnu had to be taken care of first, or it would all unravel in the space between seconds.

It still irked me I wasn’t paired off against Hera. If I hadn’t just seen her trap Tez, another shapeshifter, I wouldn’t have believed she could override my specialisation. Even now, I still felt skeptical. I should have been the perfect match-up.

Rather than force a solution to the Hera problem, I turned to the remaining members of our equation’s third group of five. Two demon lords remained undiscovered. On the face of it, filling the spots would be easy. Less so recruiting people willing to risk themselves in a divine battle under possibly false pretences.

I harassed Tru until he collated the results of the recruitment campaign. Thanks to the absurd amount of money Greed had poured into it, it had already attracted just under a hundred applicants – most of which had arrived since the Deliveries had torn apart the world’s base assumptions and viable employment prospects.

Divine powers didn’t grant me the ability to skim a hundred applications in minutes, but in a surprisingly astute move, Tru had set up a questionnaire to filter them down.

“Which Deadly Sin are you?” I muttered wryly over my housemate’s shoulder as he brought it up on the screen. “I’ve underestimated you. This kind of strategy would throw our HR department into decades-long divides in opinion about appropriate brand image.”

Tru sighed and opened a dropdown list, selecting four of its seven options. The list of results immediately dropped by half. “These are just the available positions,” he said. “And if you filter out the people who didn’t want to give us their contact details…”

Forty-one applications remained. “Any stand-outs?”

“You mean, any that are actually serious?”

“Oh, like you were? We’ll take what we can get.”

Tru made a disgruntled noise. “How am I supposed to know what ‘normal’ is? Half of these are from hopeful actors, and the rest made up shit like drinking the blood of virgins. One’s written in a made-up language and signed ‘Cthulhu’. There’s a lady who thinks she’s applying for a passport. And a guy who attached an ten-page essay on where in Hell he’d put all the politicians.”

I grinned. “Give me the addresses for those three.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Blame Lucy,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder. “He set the criteria. Incidentally, what sin did Passport Lady specify?”

“Wrath,” Tru answered. “She thought it was the feedback survey. She also gave us one out of five stars.”

I could work with that, and proceeded to pick them up: first Passport, plucked from her bed in a row of colourful Norwegian houses. She arrived with me, awake and somewhat distressed, just in time to interrupt the second candidate in the United States.

The stout teenager at the dinner table dropped his fork with a clatter, sending food flying across the room onto the floorboards. In his haste to stand up, he stumbled over his chair, adding to the existing scratches grooved into the timber and bumping both his knees in the process.

“Cthulhu, I assume,” I remarked. I’d dressed with fitting ominousness for the occasion in ornate red and black; coat, waistcoat and boots – the kind of outfit that cost a fortune and was too difficult to mass produce. “It’s time for your interview.”

The other occupant at the table, a dark woman with grey-flecked hair and a round, pleasant face, gave a small cough. She looked like her son. “I think you’re looking for me,” she said, and swallowed.

“Depends,” I stalled, noting the cramped space and cracked walls. “Did you apply to become a demon lord, or are you just covering for butterfingers there?”

Before she could respond, Passport made a break for it, rushing towards the opposite side of the kitchen. “Help,” she exclaimed in halting English. “This is kidnap. She is bad woman. Quick, get police.”

“Oh god,” said the teenager. He stared at the little cartoon sushi making a happy train across her pyjamas, and then at his phone on the table. “Uh.”

I reached over and tapped the table and its contents into my favourite disposal volcano, much to the dismay of Passport. “Not likely. Note that answering questions is a metric I am judging you on for this interview.”

Finding herself now seated at a forlorn gathering of tableless chairs, the mother rose to her feet. “It was me,” she declared. “I thought it was a laugh. What is this? Extortion? A hidden camera show?”

“An opportunity,” I said firmly. “One it looks like you could use.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” said Cthulhu, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear. “This is crazy.”

“Yes,” said Passport, nodding vigorously. “Crazy.”

“Is it?” I asked.

A rasp of motion sounded behind me and I opened an eye on the back of my neck to catch Cthulhu Junior inching towards the rack of kitchen knives. He took one look at it, stopped short, and his wobbly knees got wobblier.

“Look at the world out there,” I continued, putting visions of the Deliveries into both candidates’ heads. “It’s probably about to get worse. So really, this is fine. It’s all comparative. Also, you don’t get a choice.”

Which was how we arrived at the residence of the essayist; a beautiful stone cottage with terracotta rooves and ivy climbing from the ground to the second storey. Fresh herbs filled my nose with fragrance, along with the hint of distant smoke. A single flickering light shone from an upstairs window.

The third candidate turned out to be Vince.

On the one hand, he wasn’t dead, which bode well for the fate of Lucy’s computer security contractors. On the other, he was supposed to be busy supervising them.

The flickering came from five battery-powered candles at the corners of a chalked pentagram drawn precisely over the rustic floorboards. The ruler and chalk sat neatly next to one of the candles in a tin marked ‘infernal instruments’ in commercial label marker.

Next to the pentagram stood Vince’s bed, on which a lump lay centred under a patchwork quilt. Soft snores emanated from it every few seconds. Passport stared at the pentagram and made a choking sound, and Cthulhu simply put a hand over her mouth to prevent something escaping that might have been vomit or might have been laughter.

“How in Siduri’s rehab did you manage to answer the advertisement?” I asked at normal volume, stepping over to the bed. “I was under the impression you’d only recently become aware of the general concept of the internet.”

The lump stirred. “Your maleficence,” it slurred in sleepy Italian. The entertainer pushed himself out from under the covers, joining Passport in the nightwear brigade. “I hoped it would be you.” He blinked several times, staring from one woman to the other. “Are these my rivals for the position? May I prove my worth by cursing them with my lord’s unholy pestilence in relentless pursuit of personal ambition?”

He was wearing a nightcap with a fluffy pom-pom on it. A black one to match the accompanying dressing gown, but a pom-pom nonetheless. As I watched, he tightened the straps around his waist and slid into a pair of equally fluffy slippers. “Definitely not,” I ruled, keeping one eye on the others. “It’ll go through to Lucy’s task list and create a record of our activities on the official task system. They’re supposed to be secret. Why are you even applying? Aren’t you meant to be supervising the analysts?”

“It was very mysterious, O Dark One. One moment they were there, working on the computer, the next – gone. Along with the computers. I notified my lord straight away.”

Casualties of Pakhet’s purge, no doubt. I’d hoped as independents they’d be distant enough to escape notice. I had to admit, the huntress was thorough. “Then you’re lucky to have made it out,” I conceded. “Strange they’d take some in the office and not others.”

Vince made a noncommittal gesture. “To be precise, the whole building vanished. I wasn’t in it at the time. They were all working very hard in there in the name of my liege, and in stressful conditions. The least I could do was fetch them some soothing tea and homemade biscotti in appreciation. Of course, after the building vanished, they weren’t returning my calls. So I went home, cursed the perpetrators with blood sacrifice and had a lovely dinner with my niece.”

Like it or not, these were the most promising candidates. Lucy’s ‘can’t be normal’ criteria was the trickiest part of the whole exercise; I didn’t have more specific information to go on. The one consolation was that at least it didn’t have to be supernatural. I wouldn’t find another Regina at short notice, but most sample pools had at least a few outliers one way or another.

Of course, not all outliers were positive.

Passport fumbled her way to the wall and proceeded to slide down it hands over head, mumbling as she sank into a curl of shaking limbs. She wouldn’t cut it, that much was clear.

“Vince, take care of Cthulhu,” I said. “And by ‘take care’, I mean warm baths and minestrone, not assassinations. You can’t claim I wasn’t clear.”

The elderly man frowned. “It would be my honour. But surely this is a test. Cthulhu is just a story, unlike the true powers prowling the curtains of the unseen.” He stared at the woman through squinted eyes, as if expecting tentacles to sprout any second.

Cthulhu, for her part, stared between the two of us with a expression of mild curiosity. “Ciao,” she verbalised uncertainly.

I crouched to the ground at the level of Passport’s breakdown. “Alright,” I said, switching to Norwegian. “You’re going home. This was a test and you failed it. Unless you’d rather I dropped you off wherever your passport was meant to take you.”

A crack opened in the wall of fingers across her face, and a brown iris peered through it. “You’re Norwegian?”

“Sure. What’s your decision? I’m in a hurry.”

The hands came down from her face, revealing the tear-stained cheeks beneath them. “Rome,” she said. “I wanted to go to Rome for the great miracle.”

I felt my eyebrows rise as I glanced in amusement around the room. “You hardly need a document for that.”

“New restrictions. They’re trying to limit travel. But there’ll never be a chance like this again. They’re saying this could be the holy judgement.”

“Well, then. Down the stairs and out the front door. You’re on your own after that, though. No money, no phone – it’ll be tricky.”

She shook her head, avoiding my eyes. “What does it matter? Every choice I make is the wrong one anyway. I learn from my mistakes and life finds a way to make the lesson irrelevant. I do the right thing, it turns out to be wrong. And never the same twice.” She dropped her head.

I cocked my head at that, her tone giving me pause. It was the kind of easily-dismissed statement an agitated abductee might make out of disoriented, overblown self-pity. Unless you took it at face value, as I was inclined to. Not least because it was a story I’d heard before, and not that uncommonly. Especially in that general neck of the woods. “Hold out your arm.”

“What are you doing?”

In response, I gripped the appendage at each end and pushed up the sleeve until its happy sushi train folded into a gestalt nigiri fusion begging for mercy. Generating a third limb, I scratched a number of runes lightly into the skin.

I thought I felt the dispel take, but couldn’t be sure. If it had, it meant there’d been something there. Very weak at best, but even the lowliest curse could cause lingering misfortune and failure. Not only did victims experience continual setbacks, they’d be written off as laughing stocks. Easier to blame incompetence and stupidity than genuine factors outside their control.

Society had made a taboo of using runes to harm, but that hadn’t stopped some. Back in the day it hadn’t been all that uncommon to find wretches afflicted one way or another from contact with the wrong combination. Proximity was all it took, if the entity who made them was still kicking around. It might even have been hereditary; some past relative’s unfortunate mistake.

“There,” I uttered, dropping the arm. “That might fix it. If not, it’ll heal in a couple of days. And if you have any other runes in your possession, or nearby in general, you should think about defacing them.”

She gave me a long, wild look, although much of it was centred on the extra arm. Ironically, the presence of a curse would be enough to cement her as a viable demon lord. But the head and the heart weren’t there. Not yet.

Vince, for his part, squealed in delight and drew the sign of an upside-down cross over his dressing gown. Cthulhu was shaking her head, also staring at the arm, which I proceeded to shake out of existence.

“I don’t understand,” said Passport, her voice shaky. “Why are you helping me?”

Part of me was disappointed she hadn’t pieced the clues together, but not surprised. I was sure they still taught the myths in schools, albeit only as stories. But stories alone couldn’t overcome a lifetime of conflicting messages. “You were here and I was interested,” I answered. “And where you’re going, a curse won’t do you any good.” I nodded in the direction of the bedroom door. “Downstairs and out. And if you want my advice, I’d stay away from people in uniforms. I’d stay away from the whole thing.”

She blinked at me, and without another word headed barefoot for the door.

“Wait,” Cthulhu interjected. “She’s going out there in the cold, dressed like that? No, no. You’re staying right here with the rest of us.” Holding a hand out, she caught the other woman by the arm and wheeled her back around. “At least until we figure out what’s happening.” This last part was accompanied by a pointed glare in my direction.

“Is she staying or leaving?” Vince prodded me. None of the candidates spoke a common language, which made interpreting tiresome. Sadly, it didn’t rule Vince out for the job, since he’d only need to liaise between Lucy and myself. I couldn’t fault the man’s loyalty, but when it came to following instructions I wasn’t sure he’d perform much better than an excitable squirrel.

“She’s out of the running,” I confirmed, reading in between the lines.

“Well, in that case, how dare you send her outside. Poor little mouse. And with a real spell cast on her by a Great One. The lads will be so keen to meet her.” He made a tutting noise, retrieved the confused woman from Cthulhu, and ushered her down the stairs for what was anyone’s guess, although probably tea.

I looked up at the self-styled elder god, who stared back at me and brushed the remaining dinner crumbs down the front of her sensible dress.

“So,” she said, nodding at the cottage. “This happened. And I’m trying, but I don’t have a good answer for it yet. I guess the most important question is whether or not anyone’s going to get hurt.”

I smiled back and rose to my feet, scuffing the pentagram with my toes in the process. Just a drawing. “Not intentionally. Not by me, at least. Though I won’t pretend it isn’t dangerous out there.”

“I think,” Cthulhu stated, “that’s an understatement. When several world capitals get attacked, one tends to move past ‘dangerous’ into ‘possible beginnings of World War Three’. Do I not look terrified?”

“You hide it well.”

“Practice. I’m a military veteran. Dealing with the depressing side of humanity was my day job. Happy healthy relationships don’t tend to make it far in that world.”

“And now?”

“Whatever pays the bills. That, or the pension. And parenting. If this job is real, what’s the pay like? What benefits can I expect? Am I going to end up with extra arms?”

I raised my eyebrows. “You’re not bothered by the idea of joining Team Evil?”

“Well, are you? Evil?”

“Depends entirely on how you define it,” I said, crashing onto Vince’s bed and rolling onto my back. Engraved timber beams criss-crossed the ceiling, inlaid with carvings of roses. “Search hard enough, and you’ll find someone who’ll tell you you’re a moral failure for any behaviour you can imagine. It’s all about whose standards you break, and how much they disdain you for it. Do I want people to suffer? No. Do I believe in the rules? Also no.”

“Benevolent anarchy,” Cthulhu remarked, peering down at me. “It doesn’t exactly have a good track record.”

“Well, not under these conditions.”

“You do realise the military is all about following orders without question,” she said with a wry smile.

I sat back up. “And yet your application showed a flagrant disregard for convention and common sense. If you’d prefer to be put in a box, be sure to let me know.”

“Maybe I don’t want to.”

“I see you’re getting it. As for benefits, there’s no pay and Greed is already taken. But you get immortality and magic, and those are better.”

“Huh,” said Cthulhu, battling for volume against the distinctive whistle of a kettle making its way up the stairs. “What’s the catch?”

“You do the job.”

“So much for anarchy. What is it?”

“Relaying messages, mostly. Easy stuff. The rest is undecided.”

“And the extra arms?”

“Unlikely.”

She gave me a long look, then chuckled and shrugged. “I’ll take the risk. I’m between jobs, and it’s better than the pension.”

“Also not mutually-exclusive. It’s not like you’ll be registering ‘demon lord’ as your occupation for tax purposes.” I extended my hand to seal the deal.

Only for nothing to happen.

Right – I needed to recognise the candidate’s affinity to one of the key attributes. Not Wrath; if anything, Cthulhu’s reaction was remarkably measured. Not Sloth, either. If she’d possessed those sorts of inclinations, the punishing regimes military services tended to enforce would have bullied them out. Which left Envy and Gluttony.

“What did you answer on the sin question?” I asked, not letting go of her hand.

“Sloth, obviously. What else could it be for an ancient abomination slumbering for aeons beneath the uncharted deep?”

“Yes, yes, very clever and all that,” I brushed forward, still shaking the hand. “But what would it be for real? Do you have weight loss issues? You’re getting on a bit. Must be sneaking up on you.”

“First of all, that’s an unhelpful generalisation. And no, not really. Some people just have broader builds. My doctor says I’m quite healthy.”

“Work with me, here,” I said impatiently. “It must be tiresome jumping between all those jobs all the time. All that uncertainty can’t be good for a person. Wouldn’t it have been so much easier if you could just have the things that land in other people’s laps?”

Cthulhu’s lips quirked. “So that’s how it works, is it? I’m not flawed enough? I guess I’ll take it as a compliment.”

“They’re very narrow categories,” I sulked in response, dropping the hand. “Not how I would have done it.”

There was bound to be a way around it somehow. Holding up a finger, I directed Cthulhu to sit on the bed while I paced around the room warp juggling Vince’s candles and having Tru establish a complaints channel to Lucy.

He says those are the rules, came the reply. And that you should just induct Vince. It’ll make his day.

More likely the ecstasy will induce a premature heart attack, I grumbled uncharitably, and severed the connection. “Ugh,” I said aloud. “Well, I got your hopes up for nothing.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Cthulhu. She stood up off the bed. “I can take it or leave it, really. Besides, I should retreat before my son tries to spark a state-wide manhunt. And at least the other guy will be happy.”

Somehow I had a strong hunch it would take with Vince, more was the pity. “Tch. I can give you a consolation prize, by which I mean bribe. This was all a dream, etcetera, etcetera.” Not that I expected people imagining demons in their rooftops would be quite as uncommon as it had been before the events of the past two days, but it paid to provide incentives. “Any preferences?”

“Hmm. College funds?”

“Done.” I waggled my fingers until she held out her arm and scratched a fehu rune into it, much like I’d done to Passport. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

“Likewise. Give my congratulations to the other candidate.”

I sent her back home and turned to face the last remaining candidate by process of elimination, who had been vibrating from the shadows in the hallway for some time holding a steaming mug of hot chocolate. Two white marshmallows bobbed in its suction as the liquid slowly stripped them of their structural independence. “Did you get any of that?”

Vince beamed at me. “Not a word. But if you’ll excuse my audacity, your nefariousness,” he added, passing me the vessel, “I don’t need to be a linguist to know this is the most marvellous day of my life.”