The Afterlife of the Party, page 1
To everyone who saw something of themselves in Malachi’s story. I’m glad you’re here.
Dear Divine Being of Creation,
You are cordially invited to the gala of the millennia!
In order to foster goodwill and create friendships that will last our nearly eternal lives, we, the celestials of the paradise otherwise known as Heaven, invite you and your families to a mixer to be held in the hallowed halls of our beloved great hereafter.
Our golden gates will open for the first time in eons to welcome you, the denizens of the infernal realm, into our home, where we may live, laugh, and love in mutual respect.
Please join us for food, fun, and dancing at a date and time to be agreed upon shortly.
~C
ONE
From the outside, the shop looked perfectly normal for something that had just appeared one day on a crowded street with no empty lots. It settled at the end of a row of my favorite stores, somehow lining up perfectly with the street like it belonged there, even though it shouldn’t have even fit.
Glamourie had stood empty for weeks. Only a small gap between the blue velvet curtains allowed any snooping of the vacant interior, while the sign above had displayed the name of the shop in swooping silver glittery letters… and nothing else.
The endless rumors of Hell’s new resident from Faerie had kicked up immediately.
Interdimensional travel was heavily regulated, as I now knew firsthand, but interdimensional residency was an entirely different thing altogether. When Morgan arrived from Faerie, it constituted BIG NEWS.
Speculation was everywhere. Why was one of the fae coming to live here? What was the shop going to be? Was it the start of a secret invasion? Who knew!
Morgan was seen around town in a sequence of brief sightings, but they hadn’t said a word to anyone. One day they posted a countdown on the door of the shop. Day by day the pages fell to the ground, each bringing us closer to what everyone assumed would be the grand opening and finally the answer to so many questions.
As the days ticked down, there was just one problem: I was STILL grounded.
After our unplanned visit to Salem, my squad and I had been in as much trouble as you’d expect from us sneaking off to another dimension and almost causing the apocalypse. Which is to say, a lot.
We had been questioned again and again—Aleister included, though he thought it was pretty unfair to have to deal with the consequences when he hadn’t even gotten to enjoy the mayhem in the first place—by increasingly higher-level people, until eventually we’d been brought as a group to face the Powers That Be.
The group of intimidating elites had sat at a table, as we’d all taken chairs at one of our own. Their table had been polished black wood with elaborately carved legs, framed by dramatic flame sconces. Ours had been a folding table that had looked like it got brought out for bake sales, with folding chairs just slightly too short.
We had exchanged panicked looks at the PTB’s stern shadowed expressions, certain that we were heading to a very eternal grounding. But after yet another recitation of the facts, at least the version my squad and I had all agreed to tell, a man came in pushing a cart of snacks.
“Excellent,” said the man at the far left, clapping his hands. “I missed lunch.”
And with that the entire vibe changed. True, I vaguely wondered if taking the cupcake was a trap, but when nothing happened, I let the worries about eternal punishment fade away and sat a little more slumped in my seat.
The Powers That Be reassured us, between sips of cider and bites of snacks, that they figured it had all been an accident on our parts rather than any malicious intent, and that this interrogation was all about following the proper procedure. Unfortunately, exchanging victorious grins with my squad was one of the last good times we’d have for a while.
We were happily received by our parents when we left the room, with enormous, relieved hugs, but once they realized we weren’t actually being sent to the Cage, they decided that if the PTB weren’t going to punish us, it was their job to do it.
I ended up with Methuselah as a babysitter for literally every time my parents were not home, which should have been punishment enough. But oh no, it didn’t stop there. It was school and home only. No Faust’s. No Choirs of Hell. No Frozen Over. Not even Burn This Book, even though I told my parents that reading was fundamental and people who didn’t read were highly suspect. They didn’t completely block us from seeing each other, but we weren’t allowed to hang out without supervision.
Like we were littles.
Seriously. It was awful.
And I suspected it wasn’t so great for the parents either, a fact we may have exploited just a teensy, tiny bit.
As our supervised antics ramped up, there were more than a few rubbed foreheads and grumbles, rolled eyes and exasperated sighs from whoever was stuck in charge of us for the moment. By the time we were all pleading to be let off this punishment from—well, you know where—our parents were ready to surrender.
It only took a bit more nudging, a few well-placed phrases of apology, and our constant begging to attend the grand opening of the mysterious Glamourie with everyone else, and our grounding came to an end, not with a bang but with a parental whimper.
Yeah, we were pretty good.
That first breath outside on our way to the grand opening was just as good as the one I had taken when I had walked through the forest with my friends that Samhain night. Ahh, freedom.
The celebration at Glamourie featured massive amounts of food, live music, and incredible displays of magic. After the over-the-top party, the revelation that the shop was a salon was a bit of a letdown. Well, at least until Morgan’s work started appearing around town.
Now Glamourie was hopping, and I had a standing weekly appointment. How, you may ask, was I able to do this on my woefully meager allowance? Luckily for me, Morgan apparently wasn’t in it for the money. At my first appointment Morgan declared me “fun,” and that was that. They announced they’d get their infernal denarius from boring people and stretch their creative muscles on me.
Flamelight flickered across the glass front as I stood on the sidewalk outside, and as I always did, I tried to find the seam where Glamourie’s brick walls met Choirs of Hell’s—the music store next to it, and formerly the last shop on this street. But as always, the fit was perfect.
I had a theory that the shop was actually a pocket dimension that Morgan conjured with faerie magic, but I still wasn’t sure how that worked. I just knew that pocket dimensions were small bits of extra space, not existing in this dimension but not big enough to be their own.
The bell chimed with a sound unlike any other shop bell I had heard, sophisticated and pure, as I pushed open the wreath-decorated door and entered the best and brightest salon in all of Hell.
“Ah, there’s my favorite customer!” called Morgan over their shoulder. “Have a seat. I’ll be done in a sec.”
I waved and threw myself into an open chair, sending it spinning. Ever since our grounding had ended, I had become obsessed with the new salon. It was a welcome distraction from the endless parental lectures on my “recklessness,” and how I could have been stranded in the mortal coil or snatched off to Heaven forever, and I was never, ever, ever supposed to go through a gate, authorized or otherwise, from now until the end of time… or something.
The lectures had been occasionally interspersed with grudging pride in how my squad had managed to recapture an escaped soul without a morningstar, something fully trained powers couldn’t even do. Powers were what our class of angels were called, and the only ones living in Hell. Mom seemed more concerned about the possibility of me being lost forever, which was nice, but Dad seemed pleased that under pressure I had done what I was supposed to do.
Dad and I had always butted heads about destiny, and after witnessing my epic speech to the forces of Heaven, he had seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. Not that he approved of everything I did, but he wasn’t as uptight, now that he believed I was falling into line.
I scowled at the thought and sent the chair spinning again, watching colors streak by and letting myself be surrounded by the heady scent of Morgan’s magic, or possibly whatever incense they had burning.
When the spinning began to slow, I put my foot out to stop the chair and studied myself in the elaborate mirror while I waited for Morgan to finish up with their client. The purple tint to my hair was pretty much gone, and the cat’s-eye slit to my pupils hadn’t really held up at all. The first time I got angry, the resulting flames in my eyes wiped the glamour clear. I smiled as I thought about how Morgan’s magic had looked before it had worn off. It had only been an illusion, but it had been an illusion that had made sure I didn’t blend into the background.
This was especially important because the return from Salem had led me straight into the start of a new school year. The new school year. I may have had no choice in accepting my fated track at school and being separated from my squad mates, but that didn’t mean I had to be like everyone else.
There was probably something deeply psychological to be revealed there, but whatever. My trip to the mortal realm may have made me face some things I didn’t want to face, but I was still very much me, and I had done enough personal reflection over the last forty-two days, thank you very much.
Morgan whipped the sparkling cape off their current client with a flourish, and the movement caught my eye, bringing me back to the present.
“Voilà, m
“Perfect!” the faun said, examining his rhinestone-covered horns in the mirror.
The faun was dressed in the latest fashions, with piercings up and down his ears, and was exactly the type of trendy I wanted to be. If my parents and teachers thought I was going to live in a field uniform when I was an adult, they were crazy.
“Lovely,” Morgan said, standing back to admire their work. Today Morgan had tan skin and gold eyes, with hair the color of flames running down their back in elaborate braids. “Now, come back whenever the stones fall loose or lose their shine, and we’ll dazzle them up, and of course if you change your mind about the hooves…”
“I just might do that,” said the faun. He touched his horns once more before smiling in wonder. Morgan had that effect.
Before Morgan had arrived, I’d been only vaguely aware of Faerie as a dimension of wild creatures and mysterious beings. I had learned a lot since then from incessantly picking Morgan’s brain, and reading everything I could find, though I still considered “wild” and “mysterious” to be pretty accurate.
The fae came in all shapes and sizes, some of which, like the brownie we had seen in Salem, were more animalistic, while others were people just like us. Faerie was broadly separated into two courts, the Seelie and the Unseelie, sometimes called the Summer and Winter Courts. After meeting my heavenly counterparts, I had a new appreciation for the divide.
Morgan had been in the inner circle of the Unseelie Court, but after eons they had decided they’d had enough of political intrigue and needed a change. With no interest in the boring mortal realm where their talents would be stifled—their words, not mine—Morgan had toured the dimensions available to them and decided that my great hereafter was their kind of people. They settled in Hades, opened a shop, and changed the local fashion for the better.
That high court impressiveness was still there, though, and Mom said it was like having an archangel cut your hair, except the way she said it was like it was a colossal waste of time and not something amazingly cool. Morgan was doing what they loved, something I could appreciate.
“What’s it going to be today, Malachi?” Morgan smiled as they turned their attention to me.
Morgan changed their appearance even more than I did—so who was just having a teenage rebellion, DAD?—and they had taken to dressing in red and green as Yule approached. I didn’t know if their clothes were glamour or something they’d brought from Faerie, but the fabrics were like nothing I had seen here. I couldn’t help smiling in return.
“I’m thinking… blue flames.” I felt a tiny rush of freedom, just saying the words.
“I like your style.”
TWO
The bells over the door of Frozen Over were tinkly and vaguely childish and didn’t sound anything like Glamourie’s. But that sound meant you were getting ice cream, and it was hard to be in a bad mood when you knew you were getting ice cream. The chime turned my friends’ heads, and it was a bonus that my appointments with Morgan always had me running a little late. All the better to make a dramatic entrance.
“What did you do this time?” Crowley said, throwing his hands up in exasperation.
“Awesome!” yelled Aleister. “You do you, dude!”
“Your dad’s going to kill you,” Lilith said, but she didn’t look overly worried. She turned her attention back to the sundae in her hand, clearly looking for an angle of attack that wouldn’t send the whipped cream spilling over the edge.
I did a little turn, showing off my latest look, grinned, and took my spot in line with an extra bounce in my step. I looked over the array of options in the case, scanned the entire menu, debated the benefits of fruit verses spice, and then ordered the same thing I always ordered.
“Two scoops chili cinnamon chocolate, extra whipped cream, please,” I said to the yeti at the counter, whose blue skin was visible through spiky white hair that remained completely motionless no matter how quickly he moved.
I got a few looks from the people nearby as I waited, and my wings puffed in pride before I could control them. I didn’t stress about it, though; the movement made the blue flames skirting the feathers’ edges look that much more dramatic. I ran my fingers through my hair, knowing the flames there would flare too.
“Thanks!” I said, grabbing my frozen goodness from the new kid at the counter, who was immediately sent to scoop something else. I skirted around the tables to my friends and watched gleefully as a few people moved aside in clear terror of my flaming wings.
Lilith gingerly reached her hand just above the flames, and I held very still. My stomach tingled like it usually did when Lilith was close, but then she realized the flames gave off no heat and ruffled my hair.
“Hey!” I grumbled. “Leave it.”
“Maybe I should go to Glamourie,” Lilith said.
“Your mom would love that,” Crowley scoffed. “Besides, I think Mal’s just showing how much he wishes he were me.”
Crowley activated his magic and let the red swirl of power run up and down his arms in a mimicry of the blue flames Morgan had glamoured onto my wings and hair.
“You wish,” I said, shoving a spoon full of whipped cream into my mouth. “Whad I mid?”
“Well, we were talking about your atrocious manners,” Crowley said, letting his magic fade away. “But I suppose we’ll have to talk about something else now.”
“We were just comparing notes on our school days,” Lilith said, kicking Crowley gently. “I may not make it out of this year without spending time in the Pit.”
“Dina?” I asked, swallowing the ice cream in my mouth way too fast, and sending a jagged arrow of pain to just behind my eye. “Ow.”
“Yes!” Lilith exclaimed. “If I have to hear her know-it-all voice one more time… UGH!”
We were all still adjusting to our new school situation, which had us separated into our “appropriate” tracks. For me, that meant a Command track filled with people who wouldn’t know fun if it bit them in the butt. Crowley was spending all his time studying the arcane, and boiling frogs or whatever magicians did. Aleister seemed to spend all his time working out, and for Lilith? Her track meant more time stuck with her nemesis.
“She can’t be in all of your classes,” Aleister said. “Can’t you just ignore her?”
“Yes,” Lilith said, slamming her empty ice cream cup down on the table. “I could do that! If I wasn’t assigned a partner project with her!”
“Ooohh.”
“Ouch.”
“That’s…”
“Yeah! Exactly!” Lilith said, throwing her arms up into the air. “I’m heading to the Pit for sure.”
“Or,” I said. “And hear me out. Have you thought of not killing her?”
Lilith struck a pensive pose. “I’ve thought about it. I don’t think I have the self-control.”
Which, of course, was a complete lie.
“What about you guys?” Lilith asked. “Distract me, please. I have to meet with her tomorrow, and I just can’t.”
“I love my classes,” Aleister said, as cheerful as ever. He passed his nearly empty cup under the table.
I leaned back to glance under the blue table and was met with glowing red eyes, accompanied by a happy drooling grin. I hadn’t realized Damien was here, but I wasn’t surprised that Aleister had brought his dog. Frozen Over was pet friendly, and Damien wasn’t even the only pet there.
A cat with shiny eyes and a scaled tail was perched on their owner’s shoulder, sending a forked tongue into a cup the woman held up. And a fluffy black something or other with bat wings was darting in and out of an imp’s long trench coat.
“We’ve been sparring all week,” Aleister said. “It’s awesome. I haven’t opened a book since the school year started. I wish I could have done this ages ago.”
“Sounds awful,” Crowley said. “We’ve been doing nothing but books, and my Enochian is spot-on.”
“Nice!” Lilith said, and they high-fived over the table.
I still wasn’t used to us having to catch each other up. It was so weird to think about us living completely different lives all day.
“Well, I survived yet another day of bossy camp,” I said. “But the important question is, Are we all going to the concert tomorrow at Choirs of Hell?”
