I thought I'd already had a rough day. Mark, my overseer, had given me an earful about 'proper sigil formatting', my bus journey had been spent stood next to a man who had clearly never heard of deodorant, and I'd received yet another letter reminding me to pay my rune tax. So when I went to go crash on my bed and let the pillows swallow me whole, the last thing I needed was to be greeted with the bloody remains of some kind of black bird. Again.

"Azmodeus!" I cry out, "Where are you hiding?". This was the fourth time this week I'd found a dead animal tucked away in my room and frankly, I'd had enough. I checked all the usual spots - under the bed, in the wardrobe, on top of the ceiling fan - but the damned creature was nowhere to be found.

"Don't make me summon you!" I threaten whilst overturning the heap of clothing I'd been meaning to put away for weeks now. 'Take summoning class' I sneer in my best impression of my old classmate Ava, 'its so much more fun than divination'. Well if I'd taken divination I might have foreseen that a career in summoning wasn't all it cracked up to be. I mean who'd have thought I'd have to summon a demon and look after it for a month for some kind of Human-Hell bonding initiative.

Just as I was about to give up the search and pull out the rune chalk, I saw two beady yellow eyes peering from behind one of the many stacks of books that populated my room.

"Ha! Got ya", and with a flick of my wrist the books scattered, exposing the demon and the half-eaten book it was holding. Standing at 1ft tall, with red leathery skin, a small pair of wings and two black horns protruding from his skull, Azmodeus wasn't the most impressive of demons. Even in the month I've been doing my current internship at Portals'R'Us I'd already seen 8ft tall, axe-weilding Demon Knights, several charming, half-human half-snake Viperan, and even a six legged giant Scorpus. Yet as terrifying and awe-inspiring as they were, none of them held a candle to the sheer excruciation of trying to care for the small, red imp that believes dead birds are the key to untold cosmic power.

Just one more week, I remind myself. Then it can return back to whatever layer of Hell it came from and I can get the paycheck for surviving the ordeal. One more week.