"Creatures of the Underworld …"

"Yup. That's me."

"… on Earth and below …"

"Gotcha."

"… I summon thee!"

Crowley throws up his hands in frustration. Ten more minutes of this, and he's going to start pulling his hair out.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm summoned! I'm summoned! Let's get a move on, will ya? I'm late for a date!"

"Demons of vengeance! Hear my plea! Do my bidding!"

"Let's have at it then, girlie!"

"Lords of the Dark!"

"Oh, bollocks! Here we go again!"

"I, Samantha Westin of West Berkshire, call you to my aid!"

"Ugh!"

Crowley, hidden between a dresser and a closet, in a shadow created by several taper candles throwing light, slides down the bedroom wall and sits. He'd been summoned here, but not really. Only very specific spells can truly summon him. It's not a simple matter of yelling out, "Oi! Demon! Get your bum over here! I need you to do something for me!"

If that were the case, he'd never get a moment's peace.

But this was different – an amateur incantation but on a day of the year when demons get the greatest (and easiest) opportunity to make mischief – and Crowley appreciates easy; when people from all walks of life will call for a demon like they're ordering take away and invite them into their homes with little to no thought of the consequences.

St. Valentine's Day.

Crowley doesn't do much in the way of official assignments for the big bosses anymore, but old habits die hard, and this one's too tempting to resist. He's running late for dinner with his angel, but this was going to be fun. He could risk being a few minutes late.

That's what he'd originally thought.

He's closing in on over half-an-hour.

Samantha leans over a book on the floor in front of her. She reads a bit, then jumps nervously. She grabs a container of salt by her knee and spills it out in a circle around her.

A protective ring –a boundary between her and any potential evil.

"Aw!" Crowley coos sarcastically to himself. "She fancies herself a white witch! How adorable!"

He has to give her some credit. Whatever book she bought, it's from someone who knows an inkling of their stuff. Salt is effective against evil creatures, but only minor ones, like the insects of the demon world. Still, considering no one would want their house invaded by a horde of demonic termites or zombie ants, it's nothing to sneeze at.

"Find a photograph of the offending and fix your eyes upon it."

"Okay, okay." Crowley sits up, wondering if he should miracle himself up a bag of crisps. "Finally! Things are gettin' good."

"Tear up the photograph," she reads, "and proclaim his sins into the dark." She takes a deep breath, then lets it out. "Okay. Here goes."

She begins to tear the picture in half, then fourths, and Crowley rubs his hands excitedly together.

"So let's see. What did this crank handle do, huh, Sammy? Stepped out with another bird, I'll wager."

Samantha carefully places the torn pieces of the photograph into a small wooden bowl, part of her arsenal of witchcraft paraphernalia, and sighs. "He left me for my twin sister."

"Ding, ding, ding! Winner, winner, chicken dinner!" Crowley licks his finger and marks a single, sparking tally into the air. "Well, you should take that as a compliment, love, really. He left for someone who looks exactly like you."

"He stole my car …"

"Oh, we're not done."

"… broke into my house …" She takes a long breath, shuddered by the onset of tears. "He killed my dog …"

The grin that had been spreading on Crowley's face falls into an immediate frown. "For Satan's sake! This prick should be working for us."

The woman stops, bites her lower lip as the tears gathering around her heart begin to fall.

"He hit me. Not just once. Not just twice. And he … he …" Her voice fails her, but she mouths the words, and Crowley rises to his knees, subconsciously gearing up for a fight. This is a new instinct for him, being protective of anyone, specially a mortal. He's known right and wrong from day one. He's felt anger over the injustices he's witnessed, even remorse over the ones he's helped cause. But, for the most part, he's been fine sitting on the sidelines, inconveniencing people when he could for the greater good.

It's a grey area – thwarting a crime. In the end, someone gets hurt or killed. When you're in the business of harvesting souls, the who doesn't necessarily matter.

Crowley simply finds a way to harvest a bit more selectively than other demons.

"Holy fuck!" he groans, tossing his head back and staring up at the ceiling. "Why? Why me? This was supposed to be a simple little fun hex-and-go. What am I supposed to do now?"

The real question, he discovers with very little wracking of his brain, is what would Aziraphale do?

"Sprinkle rose water on the pieces of the photograph and set them on fire."

A conflicted Crowley watches the young lady search for her flask of rose water. He'd seen it beside her a moment ago – a simple vessel of water with roses floating in it that she probably prepared herself. She suddenly seems to remember where she put it because she spins around quickly with an anxious look on her face, mumbling, "No, no, no! Crap!" before she finds it tipped over onto its side. "Dammit!" She examines the empty flask, wet rose petals plastered to the sides, the water that had been inside soaking into her rug. She shakes her head and sets the flask down. "Of course! Of course! Just my luck! Now what am I going to do?" She gets on her hands and knees and goes searching for something to replace the water with. She finds another bottle within reach of her salt circle and grabs it. She reads the label, then gives it a sniff. She consults her book, and shrugs.

"Smells like roses. This should do."

Crowley squints from the darkness to catch a glimpse of the label. This bottle isn't rose water. It's perfume. Not expensive perfume. The kind one buys at a corner market along with their milk and eggs on the way home. Perfume of that caliber is usually teeming with alcohol.

Flammable alcohol.

He watches as she gives the bowl a few spritzes, a subtle floral aroma filling the air. Then she goes for broke, untwists the top, and empties the contents into the bowl. The scent of roses smacks him in the face like a freight train along with an undercurrent of sharp and chemical. She grabs a book of matches, tearing four from the inseam, and strikes them.

"Jesus Christmas! She's going to light herself on fire!" Flashbacks fill his brain of a heat seared inside his memory like a wound that refuses, even with time and treatment, to heal. Crowley leaps to his feet and materializes from the shadows, rushing at her, waving his hands to get her attention. "Stop! Stop! For Satan's sake, stop!"

Samantha's head snaps up. She drops her matchbook and scuttles backward, stopping when her hands hit the salt. With a snap of his fingers, Crowley extinguishes the flame before it has a chance to ignite the bowl.

"What the -? What the fuck?" Samantha screams. "Who the fuck are you?"

"I'm a demon!" Crowley pats his chest dramatically as if she might mistake something else for the demon and him for a coat rack. "You know, the one you've been summoning?"

"I-I don't believe in demons!" she yells and for a moment, all of Crowley's worries about this woman setting herself, her house, and her neighbors ablaze dies with the absurdity of that remark.

"I … huh … what!? If you don't believe in demons, why the bloody heck are you trying to summon one then? That's literally the stupidest … you don't dabble in magicks, young lady! That's even worse than knowing what you're doing!"

"It -it wasn't supposed to be serious! It was a coping mechanism!"

"Don't talk to me about coping mechanisms! My entire existence is about coping mechanisms! Don't do that!" Crowley snaps, catching her with his magic before she can jump to her feet and dive onto her bed for her cell phone. The bed is halfway across the room. Making a break for it would have taken her out of her circle. "Don't break the ring of salt! Even terrible spells need to be ended correctly!"

"What happens if they aren't?" she asks, relaxing when he releases his hold over her.

"Trust me, you don't want to know."

"Yes, I want to know! I wouldn't have asked if I didn't want to know!"

"Cheeky little …" he mutters, fishing his phone out of his pocket, realizing how much this young lady and his angel would get along. "Let's just say if you don't want to know what it feels like to have your brains liquefied inside your skull and then drunk by demon maggots, you'll end this spell. Meanwhile, I'm gonna call in some reinforcements."

"Reinforcements?" Samantha swallows hard. "L-like … more demons?"

"Luckily for you, no. I run with a different crowd."

"How do I end the spell?"

"Jump to the bottom of the page," he says, phone to his ear. "It'll tell you-Aziraphale?"

This isn't the way Crowley saw this going. Back in the old days, he'd hex the guy and be done with it – make him go bald with his head hair growing out his nose, give him a festering boil on his face that would never heal, make him severely and flatulently allergic to his favorite foods. Only thing was, unbeknownst to the young lady who summoned him, she would be damned, too. That wasn't even a demonic rule. That one came from the good book itself. It was the kind of two-for-one demons delighted in.

One that came with a divine loophole.

But not anymore.

For some bizarre reason, he's taking this personally.

"Crowley?" Aziraphale's voice barks over the line. "What the heaven has happened to you? You're nearly an hour late!"

"I know, angel, I know. I got caught up with work."

"You're working? Tonight!?"

"I'm sorry. I'll explain when I get there." Crowley glances down at Samantha, reading through the spell, sniffling as the words take her back to why she was doing what she was doing a moment before. "I'll be bringing work home with me. I need a little help."

"There, there, dear," Aziraphale says, handing Samantha a cup of tea. "Let's talk this out, hmm? Tell us everything, and then we can come up with a solution."

It took Aziraphale close to an hour over the phone to convince Samantha to get into Crowley's Bentley and accompany him to his bookshop. When he did, he made Crowley swear he'd obey the posted speed limits.

When they arrived in under fifteen minutes, Aziraphale knew he hadn't.

Remarkable seeing as they stopped along the way to pick up a friend.

"The solution is we should call the police!" Anathema says, bringing over a plate of cookies.

"I … I tried." Samantha takes the plate with a small but grateful smile. "Everything he's done, even with the evidence I have against him, and it's still a his word against mine sort of situation. It's almost like the police don't want to listen. Like they think it's not worth their time."

"Sounds about right," Anathema reluctantly admits, dropping onto a nearby sofa and accepting a glass of whiskey from an angrily hissing Crowley as he paces the floor.

Aziraphale watches on with sympathetic eyes. He'd asked Crowley in private why? Why did this mean so much to him? With everything he'd done in the past, why did this one woman's plight trigger such a strong response? Crowley had confessed that he didn't know, but mumbled something about those abusing the vulnerable beginning to get under his skin.

"So, what do you suggest, angel?" Crowley asks, peeking up when he feels his husband's eyes on him. "What does it say in the rule book about dealing with a situation like this when the supposed good guys sit around with their thumbs up their arses?"

"Normally, I would recommend gentle persuasion, and if that doesn't work, then a little forceful persuasion," Aziraphale says. "But as I don't feel the man in question would be receptive to that, and the authorities aren't in the mood to help, maybe we should skip the usual steps and jump to the end."

"And what's the end?" Samantha looks nervously from Aziraphale to Anathema, then to Crowley staring at the man in white with a disbelief that erases the color from his face. All three have gone quiet, but they've seem to come to the same conclusion, and it stuns at least two of them.

Samantha is obviously missing something big.

"Well, you did summon a demon, my dear," Aziraphale says kindly, but with a grave nod to his husband. "I'd say it's about time that demon got to work."

"Are you serious?" Anathema yelps, but not in a way that indicates she disagrees. In fact, she looks fully on board with this plan – whatever it is.

"What about the whole damnation clause thing?" Crowley asks in a lower than low whisper.

"Find a loophole, my dear. That's what you do."

Crowley grins, impressed at the ability of his innocent Aziraphale to straddle the grey line as well as he. During a discussion about guns, his angel had once said that they lend weight to a moral argument when wielded by the right people. He wonders if this falls under the same category. "Right. And what about dinner?"

Aziraphale escorts his demon to the door, kissing him softly on the lips before showing him out. "It'll keep."