“Oh, yeah, the girls in the hospital kept saying it! Pretty sure it means delusional. They said that Jemma was ‘delulu’ for not spilling all the tea about her snack of a boyfriend earlier!”

“Snack?” I was completely discombobulated by this conversation.

“I think it means you’re good enough to eat,” Beezle remarked.

“Bad grief,” I muttered under my breath, trying very hard not to think about Jemma Bliss wanting to eat me. It was bad enough that I still heard her snarky little voice discussing the mounting of my horns on a regular basis.

“What else can you tell me about him? Anything that I can use when I … once we’re in front of him?”

The Hounds looked at each other in the way they had that always made me feel incredibly paranoid.

“Well, his female was all, ‘Oh, babe, I’m sorry you missed out because of that big mean man’,” Bub yipped in a very believable impersonation of the female in question. “And then he smirked and said that it was only a matter of time before someone with good taste would waltz in, fall in love with his talent, and purchase the lot, and suddenly everyone would be clamouring for a Chad Dunston original, and he’d be famous.”

“Delulu,” Beezle panted.

Yes, the ‘delulu’ was indeed rampant with Ratty-Man. But delusion was very easy to manipulate.

“Well, that gives me a good idea,” I murmured, flipping the Soul Token between my fingers. “I’m not sure this will be all that difficult.”

“Daddy’s gonna be so proud of you, Junior!” Beezle nuzzled his head against my thigh, interrupting my reverie.

Bub barked out a chuckle. “Our little boy is becoming a man!”

“I wonder if the Pit Demons know that King Satan hasn’t been up to Earth in decades …” Beezle wondered.

“I mean, they are pretty dense,” Bub added. “But even they would see that souls are just not descending the way they used to …”

“No wonder they’re constantly on the edge of rioting!”

“Lucky Boss is taking matters into his own hands, just in time, too!”

I cleared my throat. “None of this is helpful right now.” The last thing I needed was to be thinking about how my father used to do this regularly; come up to the Human Realm, find someone in a vulnerable state, and convince them he had just the solution for their problem … as long as they were prepared to do a ‘little favour’ for him in return.

None of them knew when they struck the bargain with him that the ‘little favour’ was that their soul belonged to Hell. When they died, they got the nastiest surprise of their afterlife.

I’d been training to do this for years but had never actually done it. Instead, I’d developed the Soul Token, believing I had a solution that could help the kingdom both immediately and long term.