He tucked his vampyre friend beneath his working arm once more, and began to sniff.
After nearly a quarter hour of searching, Alastor found the hob behind an alley of several glass storefronts. The boy’s weak eyes skimmed right over it, but there was no mistaking that sweet, sweet stench of rotten fruit.
Hobgoblins were prized servants Downstairs, a race trained to clean and care for their superiors. At the Black Palace, Alastor had his own army of them to tend to his clothing, carry his messages, and spy on his brothers.
Human shades were the true workers of the realm, cursed for all eternity to perform duties like scrubbing sewers, or picking fruit from the fields of razor-sharp ganglebushes. Hobs were cherished, trusted to perform their tasks without complaint. Hob families stayed with the families of fiends, including Alastor’s own, for centuries. His own nannyhob had been the daughter of his father’s nannyhob, who had been the daughter of his grandfather’s nannyhob.
Hobs stood about the height of a human infant, their skin a delightful shade of ash gray. Alastor was particularly fond of their bright yellow eyes, which bulged out from above a handsome nose as red and round as a radish. The true mark of a hob, however, was the snarfing, snorting, wheezing breaths they took as they tried to sniff out filth to clean.
And so Alastor was quite surprised to find this one wearing a half-rotten pumpkin dangling from his long, curved red horns. There were no gold hoops in his ears to mark his years of service. Instead of the pristine white spider silk the hobs Downstairs preferred, this one wore a dress of sorts made out of newspaper and something silver. It crinkled as the hob swung a twig at a hissing feral cat. The hob, it appeared, was guarding a tower of tidied rubbish—boxes, bright containers, and cartons stacked to look like a castle.
“BEGONE!” The boy’s voice squeaked, but it was enough to spook the kitten. It bolted farther into the alley and disappeared into the night.
Alastor stood, waiting to be formally addressed, but the hob only sighed and moved back toward his creation. With careful certainty, he placed his sword stick over the opening of a box that read HEINZ KETCHUP and crawled inside on bony hands and knees.
Surely this was all in jest….Alastor cleared his throat. When the hob still didn’t reappear, he coughed. Loudly.
Finally, just as he began to detect the faint wheezy snores of the blasted creature, he called out, “Servant, I require thy attention. Be present and willing, and, in exchange, I offer thee—erm.” Alastor paused, glancing around. Longsharp was beginning to feel heavy in his arm, so he set him down and picked up a sickly-looking apple. “I offer you this rare fruit.”
All he could see were the hob’s eyes, glowing in the darkness of his home.
“Do you accept these terms?”
It was a long while before the hob answered. “I do not. I do not serve humans. Blegh!”
“Come out into the night,” Alastor commanded. “For I am no human.”
“No.” The creature took a deep breath and, with a sound like a cannon explosion, plugged up one side of his nose and blew a wad of blue snot on the boy’s bare feet.
“Hob!” Alastor cried. “Zounds! Would a mere mortal be able to hear thee? Speak to thee?”
The hob seemed to consider this. “I think not.”
“Then it stands to reason I am no human, yes?” Alastor began to unwrap the bandages on the boy’s arm. The cut itself was still a furious red, blood oozing past black scabs. The air bloomed with the metallic smell of it. He could hear the hob take one rattling deep breath, then another.
“M-milord?” came the small voice from inside the box. “You are…”
Fiends could tell everything they needed to know about another fiend by their smell. Though his own scent was dampened by the boy’s disgustingly flowery one, it revealed Alastor for what he was: a malefactor, and a prince.
The hob shot out of its home and fell upon the boy’s feet, weeping. “Forgive me, milord! I am but a stupid creature, I have shamed myself—you must take a horn, please! You must!”
When a hob displeased his or her master, the most common punishment was to remove one of the curved horns. For the first time, Alastor noticed this hob was already missing one.
“It would not please me to punish thee now, servant. Thou may, however, clean me.”
The hob went to work immediately, licking his snot off the boy’s toes, licking away the dirt there, working his way straight up until he reached the knee. Alastor stood with his hands clasped behind his back, enjoying the warm slime of the fiend’s spit coating his skin. The smell of rot it left behind lifted his spirits somewhat.
“Now, pray tell, what is thy name?”
The hob kept his eyes on the ground. “It be Nightlock.”
“Nightlock,” Alastor repeated. “A fine name. Thou may refer to me as my lord and master, or My Eternal Prince of Nightmares that Lurk in Every Dark Sleep.”
“My—my lord and master, I do not mean to be—to be rude, and yet this hob wonders,” Nightlock began, his one ear twitching in fear, “how is it that you appear in the form of a human? Your magic is great, yes, but why, oh why, must you shame yourself this way?”
“I am in hiding,” Alastor said. “None of my kind may know I am here. That is your first command.”
He could see by the look in the fiend’s eyes that Nightlock was attempting to figure out who he was—which one of the six siblings Alastor would claim to be.
“Tell me,” he asked, “are there many of our kind left in this village?”
“Oh, milord!” the hob said, his eyes shining with dark blue tears. “A few, oh yes, a few, but this place is cursed. I and the others, we are hiding too.”
“What news from Downstairs?” Alastor asked. “How do our kind fare?”
A look of deep sadness passed over the hob’s face like a cloud over the moon. “I could not speak of it, even if I wished to. Not even under milord’s command.”
Alastor felt something icy pierce his chest. The boy’s chest, rather.
“They have locked the gates and allow no one to enter,” Nightlock explained. “And those who are cast out are banished, and shall never be allowed to return.”
“That is—” Alastor swallowed hard, fighting against the tension of the boy’s body. “That is preposterous. Who issued such a command? Who reigns on the black throne?”
The rotting pumpkin slid down over the hob’s face as he bowed his head in shame.
“One,” he said, “who has taken care to charm their name so that it may not be spoken in this world.”
Of all the fiends, only a malefactor could have the kind of power needed for such a curse.