Kristine Grayson
The computer spit out the information, then locked as a single piece of paper printed to the left of Grint. He closed his eyes, resisting the urge to bang his head against the screen.
Could anything else go wrong today?
He stood on his chair and peered over the fabric walls of his cubicle. As far as he could see, other minions were working their computers, taking notes, making life and death decisions, finishing their daily quotas.
He wasn’t even halfway there, and it was already two-thirty in the afternoon.
His boss, a stunning, six-foot tall woman who wore her red hair up (adding at least six inches to her height), emerged from her office. She started into the maze of cubicles, walking with purpose.
Grint ducked back inside his. He had no idea what his boss would do if she caught him staring at the other minions. She could do anything. Rumor had it that she was the one who had convinced Mata Hari to be a double agent.
Of course, other rumors stated that she had been Mata Hari in her previous life. Who knew? All he could be sure of was that she was tough, she was mean, and she believed that minions should stay on the job until each day’s work was done.
He sighed and sank into his chair. The desk still smelled of the coffee he’d spilled that morning, and the garbage can still carried the faint odor of the burrito he’d tried to eat last week when he decided to have lunch in and get work done. Of course, he had to get a burrito that had been improperly cooked, and he’d missed two days of work, and returned to find that no one had emptied his garbage can, which really was the worst of it. The fact that no one had picked up his assignments was irritating, but survivable.
Until now. He crossed his legs and grabbed the paper from the printer. The letters were faint. He was running out of toner on top of everything else. He had to squint to see the information — and when he finished reading, he wished he hadn’t squinted at all.
What he had thought was that this one lost soul was, in fact, one lucky soul. The bastard — and the man had truly been a bastard in both senses of the word — had received a blessing just before he died, and somehow, it had negated all the times he’d been cursed.
At the moment, the lucky soul was standing outside the Pearly Gates in a line that extended halfway around the cloud. Grint had the rest of the day to make sure the lucky soul was truly supposed to pass through those gates. If Grint missed, he’d be fired.
He’d seen it before. Stazy, who’d had the cubicle next to him, had let a saintly woman who’d been cursed just as she stepped in front of a bus, slide into the fires of Hell. It had taken two days, fifteen instant replays, and one innocent bystander interview to determine that what the automated Cosmic Balance Acceptance System had thought was a curse had really been a startled response.
In that instance, God damn you! accompanied by a shaking fist had meant get out of the way instead of go to Hell, you awful person.
Accidents like that — not the bus part, but the misinterpretation of exclamations made in the heat of the moment part — happened all the time. It was up to the Cosmic Balance Examiner to resolve surprise issues in a timely manner, so that saintly women who’d unfortunately died under the wheels of a bus did not end up burning for eternity when they were supposed to sit in the coolness of the clouds.
The fact that the saintly woman had gone to Hell for two days was a firing offense.
The fact that Grint’s man was still in line gave him time to clear up the mess.
Grint ran a hand through his short-cropped black hair. Before he started on the case, he punched the speed dial on his phone, then put the receiver to his ear. He prayed for his answering machine, and, for once, his prayers were answered.
“Babe,” he said after the beep. “Gotta work late. Might be on a few out-of-the-office reviews. I’m really behind from that burrito thing. I’ll make it up to you this weekend. Promise.”
Then, as he hung up, he realized he probably shouldn’t have promised anything. If something went wrong, he might have to work the weekend. Then Sherry’d be really pissed.
She was already beginning to believe he had some action on the side.
He wished he had some action on the side. Then he wouldn’t have to review other people’s lives all the time. Then he could stress about deceiving his wife while spending time with his girlfriend or vice versa.
But he wasn’t handsome enough or nice enough or interesting enough to have action on the side. Hell, he wasn’t handsome enough or nice enough or interesting enough to have a wife. He’d lucked into Sherry because she was desperate to marry before the ole biological clock ticked down and he didn’t have the heart to explain to her that he couldn’t father children.
He hadn’t even told her he was no longer human. He was just a minion, trying to make certain the cosmic balance worked in each individual life.
He’d opted for minion status, way back when. Back when his own life had very little balance — cosmic or otherwise. He’d died without a requisite number of blessings or curses. He could have been reincarnated, trying again to live a life that someone noticed. Or he could stay in Purgatory until a slot opened up. But he wasn’t guaranteed a spot in Heaven or in Hell. He had to take what became available.
Or he could become a minion and, with diligent work and a standard annual review, he could earn his way to the Pearly Gates. Of course, if he got fired like Stazy, he’d have a one-way ticket to Hell.
What the Cosmic Balance minion who’d informed him of these choices had failed to mention was that Grint would have something resembling a life outside his work. People — real, living, breathing people — could actually see him and interact with him, and cling to him desperately when they felt they needed a man (and any man would do).
He’d let Sherry believe that he could live a normal life with her, and that was probably bad, but she’d let him believe she was in love with him, and he hadn’t found out otherwise until a month or two ago when she was talking to her mother about getting a loan for some kind of fertility treatments.
I thought we’d have a baby by now, Sherry’d said over coffee in their too-small dining room. Her mother had been clutching a cup and staring at the cheap pictures on the wall. If I’d known that it would take us this long, I’d’ve married Larry instead.
Larry. Grint had met Larry, and Larry was no prize. In fact, being placed in the same category as Larry was somehow offensive, even though Larry was the same kind of nebbish that Grint had been in his actual life.
Grint suspected he was even more of a nebbish now. At least he hadn’t screwed up at his real life job. In those days, he’d been a night janitor for an office building. He’d taken a lot of pride in the way he kept each office—hell, each cubicle—so clean that it shined.
No such janitor here, not at night and certainly not in the day. If Grint had that job, he knew he’d have a stellar review at the end of each quarter.
But paperwork and computers and information tracking — he’d been lousy at that kind of thing when he’d been in school. And if he’d known he was signing on for that kind of work, he might actually have chosen Purgatory, and taken his chances with the whole stupid lottery system.
Instead, he was stuck here, with this little piece of paper and someone else’s confusing life. That someone else was named, unfortunately, Binky Innis, born out of wedlock, father unknown. His mother, Rosemary Innis, cursed the day Binky was born on the day Binky was born, and that brought officials from CBI into that squalid hospital room, just to make sure there was no misunderstanding. These were higher-level minions, the kind who could actually turn themselves invisible and be present at the moment of a cursing (or a blessing), unlike Grint who’d never been officially invisible in his life.
Birth day curses (and birth day blessings) were powerful and rare, which was why they required a CBI minion to witness the event (of course, the minion had to know it was coming — and Grint had been present at dozens of lunch room discussions about the ethics of allowing a birth day curse to even happen, given the negative impact it had on a young, fragile and innocent life. CBI’s mandate, of course, was non-involvement, but still, lots of minions [many of whom were minions because of similar bad fortune that they’d tried to overcome] believed that every little soul needed a bit of TLC in the beginning, and the fact that so many of them got none made for a terrible playing field.
(Once Grint had pointed out that the playing field might be terrible, but it was at least level [statistics showed that about .01 percent of all babies born received a birth day curse and about .01 percent of all babies born received a bona fide birth day blessing, maintaining the ever-precious cosmic balance] and for that bit of wisdom, he was ostracized for more than a week. He only got allowed back into the fold when he brought dark chocolate from home [and that had been an accident too, since he’d been planning to give it to Sherry after a particularly devastating fight, and he didn’t want to keep it in the hot car in the hot parking lot for an entire afternoon]. He got on everyone’s good side, which meant that they promptly forgot him, and went back to their everyday business. Such was his life. Or his non-life, as the case might be.)
So poor Binky Innis was the recipient of a birth day curse, and things didn’t go much better from then on. Rosemary abandoned him when he turned two and his grandmother got him, thinking he would be the cute lovable child she never had, and she soon realized she still didn’t have a cute lovable child. She didn’t curse him — she was too nice a woman for that — but she bit her tongue so much trying to prevent herself from doing so that she had permanent teeth-marks in its tip.
Teachers disliked him, but none of them cursed him. Other boys hated him, but none of them cursed him either. They just beat him up. So he beat up any smaller kid he could find. And the smaller kids, mostly little girls (years younger than he was) started the second wave of curses.
The third wave came when Binky (who now called himself Bruiser, thinking the name had power [when it sounded, to Grint anyway, like a name someone would give his dog. Come to think of it, so did Binky. No wonder the guy ended up so messed up]) started hanging out in bars. Since he received his full height at 14, and since he lived in a community that cared more for bar revenue than the legalities of drinking ages, his barroom days began in his fifteenth year and continued until a few moments before he died.
In Grint’s review of the file, he could find no blessing at all. None, not a one, and no reason why dear old Binky/Bruiser found himself outside the Pearly Gates where, the big screen at the end of the cubicle row showed, he was currently badmouthing the Boy Scout (a real Boy Scout, who’d died trying to get some kind of merit badge) in line ahead of him. Apparently, Binky/Bruiser had a sense that he needed to cut the line and get inside those gates fast, where no one could touch him — at least for a few days while this all got straightened out.
That whole idea scared the crap out of Grint. A little old lady mistakenly burning in the fires of Hell simply suffered. A mean-spirited curse-hound like Binky/Bruiser could do a lot of damage behind the Pearly Gates. In other words, if B/B got inside Heaven, everyone else would suffer.
Including Grint.
So he had to discover what caused the snafu.
And at the moment, he didn’t have a clue.
***
The lunchroom was closed by the time he finally took a break for dinner. He wasn’t the only one standing outside the cafeteria looking just a little lost. At least half a dozen other minions had gathered there as well, all of them working late on difficult cases, all of them terrified for their own futures.
Except for some woman misnamed Charity. It soon became clear that she was the night shift supervisor, there to guarantee that none of the minions banded together or changed assignments. It was her job, Grint eventually realized, to make certain the minions couldn’t do things the easy way.
She wouldn’t even allow them to share a pizza. She made them order individual pizzas, and then she made them wait near the front for the poor pizza delivery guy to show up.
Grint took his pepperoni and cheese back to the cubicle, even though the smell of rotted burrito and stale coffee made him queasy. He tucked one napkin under his chin, another in the middle button of his cheap white shirt, and a third in the NASCAR belt buckle that Sherry had given him, even though he’d never watched a day of NASCAR in his non-life (or in his real life for that matter).
He ate and studied and couldn’t find a single blessing anyone had bestowed on B/B, not even an accidental blessing that missed its intended target and landed on B/B instead.
Grint was about to call in Charity to see if these were the kind of circumstances that warranted help, when he saw the toast.
He’d been rerunning the last few moments of B/B’s life, watching them on a small screen next to his computer. He’d looked at these last few moments half a dozen times already, always concentrating on B/B, who was hunched over the bar, drinking some green beer, and looking green himself. B/B was feeling the nausea that, in some men, came just before a heart attack.
Grint already knew the sequence of events: B/B would suck on that beer, ask for another, reach into the jar of pickled eggs, pull one out, and fall over backward, sending the egg flying over his head and into the face of a nearby patron who, predictably, cursed. That curse might’ve been an epithet, but it might’ve been heartfelt too.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to get B/B away from those Pearly Gates. Grint had already checked. A mild goddammit to hell might’ve been referring to the egg, might’ve been referring to B/B, or might’ve simply been the patron’s standard exclamation when something surprising happened.
Grint didn’t have to do the bystander interview because rerunning the scene (and querying the higher ups at CBI) did not result in B/B being sent into the fires. So, something else had happened.
Something big.
Something powerful.
Something that guaranteed B/B a place in that line, a place so firm that his new harassment of the Red Cross Aid Worker two people ahead of the Boy Scout didn’t automatically send him to Purgatory.
In frustration, Grint tossed a pizza crust at the rerun screen, and it had hit the zoom-out function. And that’s when he saw a little woman, no bigger than Grint himself, climb on top of the bar, a mug of beer in hand.
She was dressed all in green — kelly green, which looked good on her. Even the jaunty Robin-Hoodish cap looked good — or it would have if she hadn’t had a matching green feather, a feather that drooped behind her skull and looked vaguely like a question-mark that had fallen against the side of her head. Her eyes were as green as her clothes, and her hair, underneath that strange cap, was a startling black given how very pale her skin was.
She held up a mug of green beer and tapped a green fingernail on it for quiet.
Grint turned up the sound. He didn’t like how this was going.
She actually got the bar to quiet down. Not a soul spoke. They all looked up at her, and her green-tights-encased legs.
“In my country,” she said with a real Irish brogue, “we give blessings on saint’s days. Let me give you one and please, to accept it, take a sip of your beer when I’m through.”
Grint groaned. The people around the bar held up their mugs in anticipation.
The little woman extended her mug, and said in a loud voice, “Blessed be everyone in this room. And may you be in Heaven a half an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead!”
“Hear, hear!” someone shouted, and then everyone in the bar drank in unison.
Grint zoomed in and reran the event. Sure enough, it had been B/B who had shouted “hear, hear” and then he’d taken a drink. That last fateful drink. Only a few seconds later had he taken the pickled egg, then fallen over with a heart attack.
Only a few seconds later.
Grint felt as green as B/B’s beer. The pizza threatened to come back up. He grabbed the sheet of paper with all of B/B’s statistics and there it was, so plain he shouldn’t’ve missed it the first time around:
Binky Innis aka Bruiser aka that Mean SOB had died in the last few hours of March 17.
St. Patrick’s Day.
Grint’s hands were shaking. He took the image of the woman, froze the frame and printed the image. Then he put the image in his scanner (for reasons he didn’t understand, his re-run imager and his computer were not networked), and scanned it into his computer.
Then he ran the face recognition software, asking for a special concentration on leprechauns.
She showed up after only fifteen seconds — a full facial shot without the hat. Her name was Erinna Gobra. Her eyes were that green and amazingly large, even in the DMV photo (although Grint wasn’t sure why a leprechaun needed a driver’s license). Her hair really was that black, and her skin that pale. She had thick red lips and a hint of mischief around the eyes.
Triple threat: A real blessing, accepted, on a saint’s day, from someone who spoke for the saint. On St. Patrick’s Day, a leprechaun’s curse damned, and a leprechaun’s blessing blessed fivefold.
But, according to the computer calculations, a fivefold blessing still shouldn’t have negated all those curses that B/B had received (and deserved!) throughout his weasly little life.
Grint’s hands were shaking. He got up and went to the Pearly Gate’s streaming video that fed into the wallscreen near the door, and looked once again for B/B. There he was, pulling on the pigtail of a little girl who’d leapt in front of a truck to save an old man she didn’t know. The little girl was sobbing — not because she was dead, but because B/B was tormenting her.
The line had gotten very short. Grint’s time was almost up.
And he still didn’t know what to do. B/B shouldn’t be in that line, and yet there he was, shouting obscenities at the Mother Teresa clone a few yards behind him.
Grint stomped back to his own desk. He studied the leprechaun’s photo, then asked the system for more information on her.
She was a known troublemaker, out to break the CBI system. The CBI system was a sign of corporate greed, she’d said on more than one occasion, reducing the human equation to a series of numbers that had little meaning when someone found himself face to face with his destiny.
She had given that blessing deliberately to a room full of drunks, because she knew someone had probably (sincerely) cursed them recently. She was trying to negate previous curses, and she went from place to place doing so — in and out of prisons, touching the heads of serial killers and child molesters, blessing them as if they had souls; going to hospitals and cursing newborns, just to throw the system out of whack (most of those birth day curses had been caught and negated, thank heavens); and doing crowd-pleasing blessings on important holidays, like Christmas, Yom Kippur, Ramadan, and of course, her personal favorite, St. Patrick’s Day.
She’d been flagged, though. If Grint had had more time, he would have found her and been able to negate the blessing or at least reduce its power.
But even with the flagging, he’d missed her, and he shouldn’t have.
The computer had frozen at the moment of B/B’s death, right?
Right?
Grint grabbed his paper, and looked at it again. Then scratched his head and frowned.
He was bad at dates. He’d always been bad at dates and times. He’d even been bad at them when he was (theoretically) alive. He didn’t celebrate many holidays, and even if he had celebrated a few, Sherry wouldn’t have let him go out last night because it was a drinker’s holiday.
Last night.
St. Patrick’s Day.
First of all, this should’ve been someone else’s case. And secondly, this was March 18th. The day after. Hell, he’d gotten the download the afternoon after.
And that was wrong.
He was about to run through the file again when a chill ran through him.
That brogue echoed in his imagination: May you be in Heaven a half an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead.
B/B hadn’t gotten to Heaven yet. He was just in line. The Devil wouldn’t be involved until later in the day — and Grint didn’t want to see that temper tantrum.
He’d seen St. Peter get mad at Stazy for the elderly lady thing. That was bad enough. But the Devil was known for his temper. St. Peter was known for being … well … temperate.
Grint’s stomach rolled. He was about to punch the button for his supervisor when a puff of green smoke appeared in the remaining pieces of pizza. Erinna Gobra, the leprechaun, stood on top of a piece of pepperoni. She raised her arms and the piece of pepperoni flew toward Grint as if it were a magic carpet.
The pepperoni landed on his shoulder, staining his white shirt with tomato sauce.
“Oh, crap,” he said, and flicked her off. He’d worked all evening to prevent a stain, and there she was, the unwanted leprechaun, ruining everything from his day to his clothing.
Erinna tumbled backwards and landed in the cheese. She got up, dusted herself off, and grinned. But the grin had a malevolent edge.
“I don’t think we’re starting off on the right foot,” she said in that brogue. Only it sounded fake since she was so small and her voice so tiny.
“I’ll say.” Grint had dipped one of the napkins in water, and was dabbing at the tomato-y spot on his shoulder.
“You could’ve killed me,” Erinna said.
“And then where would you’ve ended up, hmmm?” he asked. “Someone at CBI would be balancing your blessings and curses, and if you keep pushing me, I’m going to curse you with all my middle-management anger and power.”
“Oooooo,” she said, stepping out of the cheese onto the pizza box. “Such threats.”
“Or I’ll just squash you.” He picked up the nearest keyboard and raised it.
She snapped her fingers and grew to cat-size, sitting on the edge of his desk. Her legs looked fine even at one-tenth power.
“You wouldn’t want to do that,” she said with that malevolent smile.
“What do you have against us, anyway?” he asked.
“You?” she said. “I have nothing against you. I don’t like CBI.”
Neither did he, but he couldn’t say that. He had a hunch he was on review at this job already.
“CBI and its ilk are so impersonal,” she said. “In my day, blessings and curses were the province of magical beings.”
“They still are,” he said.
“The magical beings who were in charge of their own patch of woods. Or bit of river, or whatever plot of land they’d been assigned.”
He was making the stain worse, so he quit dabbing at it. “That was a long time ago.”
“Not that long,” she said. “And it was a better system.”
He shrugged. “I can’t do anything about it.”
“I know.” She wrapped her hands around her knee. “All you can do is write me up. And I’ll keep messing up your systems, until—”
Systems! She was talking to him so that the clock would tick down, and B/B would be in Heaven, and that half hour was critical. If B/B was in Heaven for a half-hour, he was more-or-less grandfathered in, and it would take an act of the Demon/Angel Board to toss him out.
“Excuse me,” Grint said, and sprinted away from his cubicle. He was running for the night supervisor. As he hurried, he realized that a pizza box was coming at him at full clip. Erinna was riding it, just like she had that piece of pepperoni.
He waited until she was close, and then he knocked her out of the air.
Then he dove into the supervisor’s office, slammed the door closed, and stood there, plucking nervously at the napkin still tucked into his NASCAR belt, while he explained the twisted circumstances that had gotten a nasty piece of work like Binky Innis that close to the Pearly Gates.
“Good work, Mr. Grint,” Charity said when he finished explaining. She pressed a few buttons on her system. Behind her, a screen lit up and, as he watched, the line near the Gates appeared. B/B was only three people from St. Peter when a hole in the cloud appeared, and B/B fell back to Earth.
“Isn’t he going to Hell?” Grint asked.
“We have to reset a few systems,” Charity said. “That’s one powerful blessing your friend created.”
“She’s not my friend,” Grint said.
“Then why is she sitting on your shoulder?”
He looked. She was sitting in the tomato stain. He resisted the urge to flick her off.
“Get down!” he snapped.
Erinna grinned at him. Those green eyes twinkled in a way that made him nervous. Sherry could probably sense the flirtation from miles away.
“We’ve been looking for you, Ms. Gobra,” Charity said. “You realize that you’ll have to serve fifteen years in CBI’s review wing just to make up for this one offense.”
“You wouldn’t,” Erinna said.
“We have to. You know the rules.”
“I hate the rules,” she said. Then she raised her hand and disappeared in a puff of green smoke.
The smoke smelled faintly of mint. Grint coughed, and waved it away. “I could’ve caught her,” he said.
“I know,” Charity said.
“Why didn’t you let me?”
She grinned. “Do you realize how automated this system would be without people like her? “
“You mean you let her mess up as a check on the system?” Grint felt anger build. He’d wasted an entire afternoon and one favorite shirt because of this woman.
“Her and some of her little friends,” Charity said. “Be grateful, Mr. Grint. Without people like her, you wouldn’t have a job at all.”
He almost said he didn’t want the stupid job. Almost. And then he remembered his other choices.
Besides, someone had just noticed him. A leprechaun had spilled tomato sauce on him and used him in her nefarious plan. Nothing that exciting had ever happened to him before.
He cleared his throat, and resisted the urge to wipe at the stain again. “You’re going to take care of B/B?”
“I will,” Charity said. “And congratulations.”
“Huh?” Grint said.
“You’ve been promoted.” She didn’t sound particularly pleased about it. “You’ve been reassigned to the Little People Division. Leprechauns, nymphs, nyads, brownies, and anything else that’s tiny and angry at their loss of personal power now falls under your purview.”
“But I don’t know anything about these creatures,” he said. “I was surprised to learn that demons existed.”
Not to mention minions and angels and God Himself. But Grint knew better than to say that. He’d said it once, and nearly got bounced to Hell just for having the temerity to say what was on his mind.
“And look how well you’ve coped,” Charity said. “Now that you’ve discovered how wonderful and manipulative the little beasts are, you can start working on stopping them. Unless you like all that computer work…?”
She said that last as if she knew he hated it. Could she read his thoughts?
He shook that idea out of his mind. There would be nothing worse than a night supervisor who knew what all her little minions were thinking.
“I’ll take it,” he said, wondering how working in an area he’d never heard of with creatures he hadn’t believed in was in any real way a promotion. “You know, though, I’d be willing to settle for just cleaning the offices.”
Charity crossed her arms. “Settle. Settle’s a word we don’t like around here, Mr. Grint.”
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant,” she said. “And let me remind you that this is a corporation. We follow the Peter Principle here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, stumbling out of the office. He was tired and he wanted to go home and he wasn’t sure how he’d make it through the promotion. Did he have to finish the work from his previous job? He was too scared to ask.
He made it all the way back to his messy desk when he realized that she hadn’t said St. Peter’s Principle. He actually had to tap into the Internet for it. The Peter Principle: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” Well, he was already at his own level of incompetence. He supposed he had just moved into a whole new realm.
He’d finally gotten his wish. He’d been noticed.
And he wondered if that meant someone had cursed him. Hadn’t Sherry said to him just the other day, Be careful what you wish for?
Hadn’t she?
Or had he said it to her?
He supposed he could look it up on his rerun screen. But he didn’t.
Instead he started in on the files that had built up while he’d been saving Heaven from Binky Innis.
Grint wouldn’t be coming home tonight either. He supposed that would be the last straw for Sherry. And that clinched it. Someone had cursed him…
…and he was getting everything he wished for, and finding, just like the old saying said, that none of it was what he really wanted.