Chapter 9 The Client

His first licensed client was a fallen angel, and she arrived on a Tuesday, which David had by now decided was the day the strange things chose to find him. She was tall, gaunt in the way of someone who had once been more and was now less, with wings that she kept folded under a long coat the color of a winter sky. The coat was too large for her, or she was too small for it, and she wore it the way a person wears a shield. Her ledger was written on light, pages of condensed luminescence that hurt David's eyes to read, the figures burning soft and white against the dark of his office, so that he had to look at them through his reading glasses and squint, the way you squint at snow. "I need you to audit my severance package," she said. "Your what?" "When I fell, the Celestial Court issued me a severance. A lump sum of Grace, paid over my lifetime. I've been receiving payments for two hundred years. But recently, the payments have been decreasing." David set down his pen. A severance package from the Celestial Court was not the kind of thing he had imagined auditing when he opened the strip-mall office, but the principle was the same as any other package, and he had audited stranger things in the three months since the demon. He took the ledger of light and laid it on his desk, where it glowed against the wood, and he began to read. The contract was a document of extraordinary complexity, layers of celestial law wrapped in infernal exceptions, binding across multiple dimensions the way a treaty binds across multiple nations. The syntax shifted as he read, the way the demon's runes had shifted, so that he could only hold one clause in his mind at a time and had to write each one down before it slipped away. He filled three pages of his legal pad before he understood the shape of it. But underneath the complexity, he found a pattern, the way he always did. A pattern of subtraction where there should have been addition. "The Court has been deducting a management fee," he said, and the angel went very still. "It's not in the original terms. The severance was a lump sum, paid over your lifetime, no conditions on delivery. The fee is an addition. An unauthorized one." "They're charging me for the privilege of receiving my own severance?" "Yes. And the fee has been increasing. They've been applying an inflation adjustment to the fee, but not to the base payment. So the fee grows while the payment stays fixed. Over time, the fee eats the payment. That's why your deposits have been decreasing. You're being charged more and more to receive less and less." The angel's expression darkened, the way the sky darkens before a storm that has been building for centuries. "How much have they taken?" David calculated. He ran the numbers the way he ran any client's numbers, careful with the dates, careful with the rates, and when he finished he wrote the total at the bottom of the page and turned it toward her. "Over two hundred years, approximately thirty-seven percent of your total severance." The angel was silent for a long moment. The light of her ledger pulsed once, dim, as if the news had reached the place inside her where the Grace lived. "Can you recover it?" "I can try. But this is the Celestial Court. They don't respond well to demands. They answer to no committee, no tribunal, no earthly license. They wrote the rules everyone else follows." "I know. But they sent you a license. That means they recognize your authority, or at least the authority of the Committee that licensed you. You have standing they can't easily dismiss." David looked at his license, the card in his wallet, the seal of the supernatural financial world pressed into it. He looked at the signature of the Committee, seven marks he could not read, and he thought about the woman and the Collector, the fae and the Winter lord, the demon and the loan shark, all the small cheats he had corrected because the numbers did not lie. The Celestial Court was larger. It was not, he decided, larger than the truth. "Yes," he said. "I suppose they do." He looked at his license, the card in his wallet, the seal of the supernatural financial world pressed into it, and he thought about what it meant that the highest Court in the supernatural order had answered to a letter from a human accountant. It meant the rules bound even the rule-makers, when someone was willing to read them aloud. It meant the angel, who had fallen and been forgotten by the powers she served, had an advocate in the mortal world, a man with a pen and a principle. He thought of the woman and the Collector, the fae and the Winter lord, the long line of the cheated who had found him in the strip mall, and he understood that the angel was simply the largest of them, a being with a severance instead of a soul fragment, a Court instead of a Collector, but the same fundamental error, a fee charged that was never agreed. David Lin audited powers the way he audited people, because a power, in the end, was just a very large account, and an account, in the end, was just a list of numbers that had to add up. The angel watched him think, and she did not press him, the way the old powers had learned, through him, not to press, because an audit takes the time the audit takes. So she waited, and David thought, and the office hummed with the laundromat's rumble and the pawn shop's bell, the ordinary sounds of the place where the extraordinary was balanced, and when he looked up at last, she saw in his face the particular steadiness of a man who had found the number he needed, and she permitted herself, for the first time in two centuries, to hope.