Deaths Excellent Vacation

because I have a score to settle with a conniving apprentice Guardian, but I can’t, so I won’t.”
    “Yes, you can. You’re a creature of Abaddon. You can’t be dictated to by the Court. That means you can get out.”
    “The Court doesn’t have any say over me, but I’ve been sent here, in a roundabout way, by my demon lord. I can only get out if she summons me, and she’s not going to know what that witch Butterfat did until she gets back and finds out I’m not with Amelie or Anastasia.”
    “There has to be another way!”
    “Well, yeah, the Hashmallim guarding the door could let me out, but that’s never happened, so it’s not worth thinking about.”
    “Oh!” she said, stamping her foot and pointing to a spot in the distance. “Don’t you dare cross me, demon! I will make your life a living hell if you don’t get me out of here!”
    “Look, sister, I just said—”
    “Do it!” she bellowed.
    Thirty hours later I gave in to her gigantic ongoing hissy fit and headed over to the circle of Akasha, the center of the whole place, where three Hashmallim stood guard over the entrance. It was an ugly spot, like the rest of the Akasha, nothing but sharp jagged rocks with dead-looking scrubby plants that were the same shade of sepia as the dirt.
    “Hi, guys,” I said as I got up to the nearest Hashmallim. If you’ve never seen one of these guys, they’re Freak City with a capital Freak. They look like something that Jim Henson would have dreamed up after a night of hitting the opium pipe: tall and gaunt figures draped in black, but not really black, some sort of living black that moved and shifted, and oh yeah—they had no faces. Seriously freaky. “How they hangin’? Er . . . that’s assuming you have any to hang. So, this nymph named Titania and I were wondering if we could get out of Dodge. She’s got some vengeance thing, and I want to give a trainee Guardian what for.”
    The Hashmallim didn’t say anything. He just stood there and stared at me. Kind of. If he’d had eyes, he would have been staring me down. Then again, maybe he was looking at my package. “Now, I know you guys have rules and everything, so Titty and I—”
    “Don’t call me Titty!” came the echo of a roar that rolled down from a nearby rocky hilltop.
    “We are happy to make it worth your while, if you know what I mean,” I said, dropping my voice so the other Hashmallim couldn’t hear. “I’ve got a credit card. Well, OK, it’s actually Aisling’s that she lets me use on TV shopping channels, but still, I know her PIN—I can pull out a wad of cash big enough to choke a behemoth. So whatcha say? Shall we talk turkey?”
    The Hashmallim stood there and said nothing. The bastard.
    By the time I ran through everything that Titania and I could think of to offer as a bribe—up to and including her sexual favors, and a sweater woven from hair brushed from my gorgeous coat—two hours had passed, and we were still no closer to getting out.
    “Look, I don’t want to get tough with you. I will if I have to, but you can trust me on this, it won’t be pretty.”
    The Hashmallim remained silent, but it was a mocking kind of silence, the kind that just dared me to try him.
    So I did.
    It took three days, but eventually, the Hashmallim cried mercy, and opened a rend in the fabric of time and space, shoving Titania and me through it.
    “Do not return,” it said in its creepy, wheezy voice, then slammed shut the rend. “And do not ever sing that song again!”
    “That was brilliant,” Titania said, her eyes giving me a long, considering look. “I would have never thought that singing the same song for seventy hours straight would be enough to break a Hashmallim, but you did it. What exactly was that song?”
    “ ‘My Humps.’ Effective, huh?”
    “Extremely so. I thought the last time when you wiggled your butt on the Hashmallim and asked him what he was going to do with his junk that he was going to scream. Well done, demon. Very well done.” She rubbed her hands and looked around the busy city street we had been dumped out on. It was Helsinki (per Titania’s request), and although it was close to midnight, there were a surprising number of people wandering around. Several of them gave me an odd look.
    “What’s wrong, you never seen a naked demon?” I asked a woman who stopped and stared.
    She looked startled and hurried off.
    “OK, I fulfilled my part of our bargain—now it’s your turn. You