Attack of the Cupids by John Dickinson Read Free Book Online

Erry. They din’t seem ter like it much.’
    â€˜Fug, my darling Fug,’ sighed the Voice. ‘How many times? We are
Love
. We are patient, we are kind. We are not easily angered. We keep no record of wrongs. Tell me – don’t you like the nice job I gave you? Truthfully now?’
    Angels are angels, even when they are cupids. They have great respect for the truth. Fug told it.
    â€˜Hate the b♥ggers,’ he said.
    â€˜Then – would you like me to give you another one?’ said the angel gently.
    â€˜Yeah?’ Fug was wary. He would have been very happy to be taken off the Appeals Board. But experience made him cautious. There were some jobs around the Angel of Love he
really
didn’t want.
    Anything but her secretary, he thought. If it’s anything but her secretary, I’ll do it. If she wants me to take over as secretary, I defect.
    â€˜No need to be shy, Fuggie darling. It’s nothing you haven’t done before. There’s a little job I need doneon Earth.’ Golden fingers plucked a card from thin air and spun it across the chamber. ‘Her.’
    The cupid caught it and looked at it coolly, like a pro hit man being handed the details of his next victim.
    His coolness warmed up very quickly. ‘What’s the . . .? This is a schoolgirl!’
    â€˜I believe she is.’
    â€˜So what’m I s’posed to do with her?’ said Fug sourly. ‘Hand her a crush on her Maths teacher?’
    Fug was tough and cunning. He had been doing a cupid’s work for a long time, down among all those humans with their warm blood and hormones and their great, beating hearts that were about as easy to miss as a barn door. What he liked best were the hard targets – the people who thought they had seen everything, who had little hearts and locked souls and who never believed they could fall in love again. And when he
did
get them, there were consequences that went far beyond the victims themselves. That was what the Department needed him for. In the slang of hit men everywhere, he did the special deliveries.
    Early-teen crushes weren’t his thing. They were more of a mass-mailing job.
    â€˜My dear, sweet Fug,’ said The Voice, unrolling the ‘r’ on ‘dear’ as if it were a rich carpet. ‘
Why
do you think I picked you? She’s to get “the works”, as you like to say. The “full kazooie”. Yes?’
    That ‘Yes’ lingered in the air like the dying note of a bell. Fug raised an eyebrow.
    â€˜Erry?’
    â€˜Don’t call me that.’
    â€˜Yeah, but what’s the deal?’
    The Light pulsed slightly, as if to warn the little cupid that he had come very close to using that word ‘Why?’
    â€˜I have my reasons.’
    (OK, thought Fug. So someone had upset the boss. Or done something to get her interested, which came to the same thing only usually a bit worse. Last time he had done a “full kazooie”, an empire had fallen and three hundred aunts had been thrown into a snake pit.)
    The name on the card said
Sally Jones
.
    â€˜I want you to
do
her for me, Fug,’ said the angel with a slow, sweet smile. ‘Do her properly. Make her an offer she can’t refuse.’

In the mind of Sally Jones walked Muddlespot, Messenger of Hell.
    He was not a happy little Muddlespot.
    He had said he was going to lie down. But he couldn’t lie down. He was all jangly. He was depressed.
    He knew he should never tire. He should never give up. He should keep coming back, disguised as this, veiled as that, suggesting, whispering, steering, ready for those moments when Sally was weak and using every one.
    It was just that she never was.
    The pathways of her thoughts spread in all directions. They ran under high, arched ceilings, up flights of broad steps and through many-sided chambers that opened onto more corridors downwhich the perspectives dwindled towards