Wormwood was, not to put too fine a point on it, a demon. He hadn’t set out to be a demon. He’d just popped into existence as one, and therefore hadn’t been given a great deal of choice in the matter. He’d never been very good at being a demon. He was too nice for it, really. Sometimes folk just end up in the wrong job.³

A chorus of voices rang out around the kitchen table.

“Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday dear Woooorrrrrmmmmmwoooood, Happy Birthday to you! For he’s a jolly good, um, fellow . . .”

Wormwood smiled the biggest, broadest smile of his life. He looked round the table at those whom he now thought of as his friends. There was Samuel Johnson and his dachshund, Boswell. There were Samuel’s schoolmates Maria Mayer and Tom Hobbes. There was Mrs. Johnson, who had started to come to terms with having demons sitting at her kitchen table on a regular basis. There were Shan and Gath, two fellow demons who were employed at the local Spiggit’s Brewery as beer tasters and developers, and who were responsible for a 50 percent increase in the brewery’s profits, as well as a 100 percent increase in the number of explosions due to the instability of the still-experimental Spiggit’s Brew Number 666, also known as “The Tankbuster,” which was rumored to be under consideration by the military as a field weapon.

And then there was Nurd, formerly “Nurd, the Scourge of Five Deities” and now sometimes known as the Nurdster, the Nurdmeister, and the Nurdman, although only to Nurd himself. Nobody else ever called Nurd anything but Nurd. Nurd had once been banished to the remotest, dullest region of Hell for being annoying, and Wormwood, as his servant, had been banished with him. Now that they had found their way to Biddlecombe, Wormwood preferred to think of himself as Nurd’s trusty assistant rather than his servant. Occasionally, Nurd liked to hit Wormwood over the head with something hard and memorable, just to remind Wormwood that he could think of himself as anything he liked just as long as he didn’t say it aloud.

But in the end Nurd, too, was one of Wormwood’s friends. They had been through so much together, and now they worked alongside each other at the Biddlecombe Car Testing Institute, where Nurd tested the safety of new cars, aided by the fact that he was immortal and hence able to walk away from the worst crashes with only the occasional bruise for his trouble.

Wormwood had never had a birthday party before. He didn’t even know there was such a thing as a birthday until he arrived on Earth. It seemed like a very good idea to him. You got cake, and gifts, and your friends sat around and sang about what a jolly good fellow you were. It was all quite, quite splendid.

The singing ended, and everyone sat waiting expectantly.

“What do I do now?” asked Wormwood.