“You never said we couldn’t fuck on top of the money,” Nadine shouted over the sound of gunfire, over the sound of her own heart racing as she ran.
“That was implied by the fact that this is a robbery!” Jeff shouted back, walking backward, shooting down the imps that were descending upon them. The car hadn’t arrived yet, the boys presumably preoccupied with their own imp problem outside, and so Billy leapt behind an upturned table and Nadine followed. An imp appeared out a hole in the floor that smelled of sulfur, and Nadine shot him in the face with her supersoaker.
It had been decided early on that there was no point giving Nadine a gun: her aim was awful even with her glasses, and really, it just seemed a terrible plan overall. No point giving her a melee weapon, either: too small and too scrawny for that. So she got a supersoaker full of holy water, and it served her just fine as the imp’s face smoked and he screeched and clawed at his own flesh. Billy took advantage of the situation to punch the little fucker, brass knuckles made of iron, and he flew an impressive distance before disappearing in a puff of smoke. The little bastards were never decent enough to leave a corpse. Or die properly. If they were alive.
“Did you at least get any of the goddamn money?” Jeff asked as he reloaded, and to answer both girls held a bag aloft so that he could see – not counting the ones they’d tossed out the windows to the boys, of course. Jeff did not have the decency to be pleased. “Billy Dean, I swear to God if that is what I think it is-”
“A fuckton of loot?” Billy asked, as she kissed her wife behind the table.
“Did you put my goddamn money in bags with dollar signs on them?”
“Well obviously,” Nadine began with a roll of her eyes.
“We have some pride in our work,” Billy continued.
“What would even be the point-”
“- of robbing a Scrooge McDuck vault-”
“- if we didn’t put the money in goddamn dollar sign bags?”
Billy stood to bend over the table and shout more effectively at Jeff. “It’s called professionalism, thankyouverymuch.”
“Professionalism is not fucking on top of the goddamn money.” Jeff was reloading, and the front door to the anachronistic castle burst open with a bang, sunlight streaming in around the figure now in the doorway.
“Fucking on top of the money? Why didn’t I think of that?” Maria stood aside to let the girls pass, and they fled with grateful grins. Whatever banter occurred between Jeff and Maria was lost to them as they hopped in the back of a pickup truck already loaded up with what appeared to be cartoon money.
“I thought of a name for what we just did,” Nadine informed her wife as the truck peeled out, Kim behind the wheel and Tommy very literally riding shotgun. Billy grinned back, and she knew that her wife had thought of the same thing the moment she’d mentioned it.
There was the hiss of a walkie talkie amidst the bags, and Nadine dug it out with a sigh. “What was that, Jeff? I missed it.”
“I said, how the fuck are we supposed to kill this many goddamn demons?”
Nadine made an incredulous face at the walkie talkie, rolled her eyes. “Dude, those are imps. There’s no point tryin’ to kill all them. Just get the fuck out before the actual demon shows up.”
“How the fuck – what do you mean, actual demon?”
“Motherfucker’s got a castle, that means it’s one of those suave ones that wears a suit. Those guys are trouble, man, you don’t want to stick around for that.”
There was swearing on the other end of the line, and Nadine wished they weren’t busy driving down what was essentially a cliff face, wished she could see the castle and what Jeff and Maria were doing. She hoped they were getting the fuck out of there. Armed robbery was really only fun when you pretended that everyone around you knew what they were doing.
“You wanna tell me how you know that?” Jeff asked finally, barely audible over the sound of motorcycles.
“I fucked a half-demon once. Bars are lousy with ’em.”
Nadine kissed Billy to tamp down her nerves, to distract herself from the thought of demons and devils and hellfire. And then the truck came screeching to a halt, and the girls nearly fell over the edge of a cliff face. They giggled in unison, as if almost dying was hilarious instead of terrifying – and maybe it was. They heard a pop, saw smoke drift away in front of the truck, reappear behind it as Jeff and Maria caught up on their bikes.
“Told you it’d be a dude in a suit,” Nadine whispered to her wife – and there he was, tall and well-dressed with horns and a tail, back to the girls. Jeff and Maria hoisted their guns, and, in the way of devils, the man whose money they’d just stolen began to grow. It was their favorite trick, it seemed, going from one stereotype to another. “Hey,” Nadine called impulsively, hands cupped around her mouth – because it wasn’t as if she could make the situation worse. “Do you know a dude named Isaac?”
Jeff was giving her A Look, but that was less important than the fact that the recently-robbed demon turned his head to her, a snarling maw with too many teeth and with eyes like a void full of fire. It was as utterly horrifying as it was intended to be, but Nadine just grinned wide and squeezed her wife’s hand.
After a moment’s consideration, he was a man again, slick black hair with two white spots by his ears. “You know Isaac?” he asked, gaze steely. “Is that how you knew to come here?”
“What? Naw, we knew to come here because it was a bigass castle on a mountain, it ain’t hidden. I met Isaac at a party, he seemed cool. I mean, kinda whiny, but cool.”
“My son is not whiny.”
“Aw, shit, was he your son? I can see it now, the resemblance. Around the horns.” She gestured vaguely to the devil’s face, and Billy giggled beside her.
The devil squinted at her, looked her over as if examining the contents of her soul. Fortunately, Nadine was quite certain that she didn’t have one. “Nadine Pascal-Said,” he said finally, “yes, I remember you.”
“Your name’s Nadine?” her wife asked, still giggling, and Nadine shoved her shoulder playfully.
“Shaddup, Wilhemina,” she shot back, before turning her attention back to the man who could easily kill them. “You keep track of all your son’s playdates? Because that seems kinda creepy.”
“Did you put my treasures into bags with dollar signs on them?” Behind the demon’s back, Jeff mouthed the word professionalism.
“Hell yeah we did. Want one?” Nadine offered him a bag of his own stolen goods with no acknowledgement of the absurdity inherent in the situation, which she found often went a long way in terms of disarming it. The demon opened the bag suspiciously, ran his fingers through the coins and jewelry and gemstones.
“This money has been tainted,” he said suddenly, dropping it to the ground as if it had contained a dead cat. “It has the taint of Lilut.”
“Yeah, we kinda Scrooge McFucked on your stuff,” Billy confirmed, the way you might admit to drinking the last of someone’s beer. Nadine was glad that they both agreed on the appropriate verbage.
“I mean, let’s be fair – some of that shit is, like, doubloons. You clearly weren’t using it. And now it’s tainted. At this point, why not just let us keep it?” Behind the demon’s back, Jeff’s face was buried in his hands.
“You killed many of my imps.”
“Yeah, but those guys were assholes.” Nadine considered this stance to be perfectly reasonable.
“I think I heard one of them say he never really liked you. Like, those were his dying words. So you didn’t want him around, anyway.” Billy considered this story to also be perfectly reasonable.
“I ought to kill you all,” the demon declared, pinching the bridge of his nose, and Maria hoisted her gun again. “But – Isaac liked you well enough. And this is… I don’t even know where to begin, with this. I certainly don’t want that taint in my house. And I do have to admire combining greed and lust into a singular, heinous act.” He turned then to Jeff, who was also pinching the bridge of his nose. “If you ever bring those girls back here,” he declared finally, “I will eat your heart.”
And then he vanished in a puff of black smoke, leaving behind nothing but the reek of sulfur and the money they’d stolen.
“I swear to God,” Jeff began, “if you two start doing the goddamn dance-”
Before he had even finished, both girls had begun waving their arms in the air, doing their best to dance while sitting in the back of a pickup truck filled with bags of money.
“Don’t fuck on top of the money, he said!” Billy sang.
“Don’t fuck weirdos in bars, he said!” Nadine crowed.
“Don’t join a cult, he said!”
“Don’t put the money in cartoon moneybags, he said!”
“You know what time it is, Dean?”
“I think it’s what now time, Billy!”
By the time both girls had begun to sing ‘our stupid bullshit saved the day’ in unison, Kim had enough sense to begin driving, and Jeff had enough sense to lag behind so he couldn’t hear.
Nadine Pascal-Said 