第10章 The Demand

David drafted the formal demand letter to the Celestial Court the way he would draft a letter to the IRS, with the same care and the same quiet threat underneath the politeness, the threat being that he knew what the numbers showed and he was not afraid to show them. It was the most careful document he had ever written. Every clause cited precedent, the celestial codes he had spent a week learning from Marla's source, the ones the angel's contract referenced in the margins. Every argument was supported by cross-referenced supernatural law, the kind that bound even the Courts when they chose to obey it. The demand was precise and unemotional, the prose of a man who had learned that feeling has no place in a balance sheet. He wrote it, rewrote it, and rewrote it again, until the sentences were clean enough to survive any reading. He sent it through the channel the angel provided, a folded sheet of light delivered by a courier with too many eyes, who took it without a word and vanished into a corner of the office that was not there when David looked back. The Court responded in three days. Their answer was a single sentence, delivered the same way, on a sheet of light that did not so much arrive as simply appear on his desk one morning when he came in from the laundromat's rumble next door. The management fee is standard practice. David read it. He read it again. He set it down and made tea, and he read it a third time, and the tea went cold while he did, because a single sentence was sometimes all an audit needed to become a war, and he had to decide whether to fight. He responded with a fourteen-page rebuttal. He cited the angel's original contract, the clause that fixed her severance as a lump sum with no conditions. He cited the Court's own operating procedures, the ones Marla's source had dug up, which forbade fees not disclosed at signing. He cited the Committee of Accounts' regulations on fee disclosure, the ones he now operated under, which required every charge to be named in the document that authorized it. The management fee was named nowhere. It was a ghost in the ledger, a subtraction with no line item, and David wrote fourteen pages proving it. The Court responded again, three days later, in the same way, on the same light. We will review the matter. David read it. He read the weight in the words, the way a man reads the difference between a refusal and a retreat. The Court had not said no. It had said it would review, which in the language of the powerful meant that he had made them uncomfortable enough to pretend to consider. He waited. He had learned, in the months since the demon, that waiting was half the work of an audit. The numbers did not change while you waited, but the people who had hidden them sometimes did, and a person who has been shown their own error will often, in the quiet, choose to fix it rather than be fixed. He kept the rebuttal in his folder, the fourteen pages, and he went back to his other clients, and he let the Celestial Court read and reread a letter written by a human accountant who had decided that even the highest Court was still, at the bottom, a keeper of books. And books, David Lin had learned, could always be audited. He kept the rebuttal in his folder, the fourteen pages, and he went back to his other clients, the ghoul and the banshee and the ghost, the small cheats that kept his hands in the work and reminded him why the large ones mattered. He did not let himself check the celestial banking app, the way a man does not check a wound he knows is healing, because patience, he had learned, was half the work of an audit. A week passed. The laundromat rumbled. The pawn shop bell rang. The angel came once, said nothing, and left a small light on his desk that did not dim, a thanks he had not asked for and would not refuse. David wrote two more pages to the rebuttal, tightening the citation of the Committee's own fee-disclosure rule, because a human auditor licensed by the Committee had standing the Court could not easily dismiss. He imagined the judges of the Court reading his fourteen pages by the light of their own grace, and finding, in the plain citation of their own procedure, the fee they could not defend. It would not be a victory of power. It would be a victory of the column, the number set where it belonged, the stolen thirty-seven percent returning to its owner. David had won smaller audits with less, and lost none he should have won, and he trusted the math the way he trusted the floor under his feet. He closed the folder. He made tea. And he let the Celestial Court read and reread a letter written by a human accountant who had decided that even the highest Court was still, at the bottom, a keeper of books. The waiting was its own kind of audit, David decided, the discipline of a man who had learned that the books correct themselves in their own time once the error is shown. He thought of the angel, who had waited two centuries for the payments to fall, and who was now waiting for the adjustment, and he understood that patience was the one virtue the old powers had never learned, because they had forever and he had an hour, and the hour, oddly, was the stronger hand. He returned to the ghoul and the banshee and the ghost, the small cheats that kept his reading sharp, and he found in each the same pattern he had found in the Court, a fee or a claim that no one had agreed to, hidden where no one but an auditor would look. The fourteen pages waited in his folder, a letter that would, he was certain, make the Celestial Court pay, not because he was clever but because their own procedure condemned the fee, and a power that breaks its own rule to cheat a fallen angel is a power that cannot survive being shown the break. He made tea and let the letter do its quiet work, the way a seed does, underground, before the plant appears.