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Eric braced himself as the summoning resolved and spat one of him out into the summoning circle. Putting on his most ferocious look and voice, he demanded, "Who dares summon the Legion of Hell!"
A sharp bark was his only answer. He looked down to see a dog with glowing red eyes, staring back at him from outside the circle.
No, not a dog, Eric realised. A hellhound, though he had never seen one look like that before. Pretty much everyone with a hellhound wanted them either big and vicious, or bigger and more vicious. Small and harmless-looking was not usually on the cards.
All the easier to infiltrate places, he supposed. Although there was one...
The hellhound barked again, as it followed the train of his thoughts, and recognised its unclaimed self.
Eric suppressed the memory of being thrown into its room to test its destructiveness - all things considered, that was one of the better ways to be discorporated, slower certainly, but vastly more preferable to when an irritated Duke wanted to hurt someone - and hunkered down to the hellhound's level. "What do you want?" he asked, and opened this part of his mind to receive images back.
A red rubber ball that bounced when it was thrown. Sticks to be chased and caught and broken instead of erics. A sense of wonder and uncertainty and hope from an animal that was still working out how to 'play' and was now bored all day.
"And where's your master? Why isn't he doing this with you?"
This time, the image was of a big grey building*, full of desks, and people writing on piles of paper. Eric grimaced. It looked something like a cleaner version of Dagon's office, or the Reincorporation Room where you filled out the endless paperwork for whatever you had done (or in his case, usually, had had done to him) or for replacement corporations you needed. Hellhounds were no longer allowed there, not since someone (everyone suspected Crowley, no-one could prove it) had released a pack of hellpups in there and the young hounds had turned it into their bathroom and then shredded everything. It was probably the same up here.
So, Eric thought, piecing things together, the Antichrist was stuck doing whatever paperwork young antichrists were required to do up here, and his hellhound was bored and wanted company to try out new, less destructive things. Well, there were far worse things he could be required to (indeed, there were far worse things that some of him were doing right now) and he could probably spin the sumoning to sound properly demonic if he thought about it.
They made a verbal agreement, since nothing else was binding between Hell's lesser creatures, and then Dog scuffed a paw through the lines of the circle.
Eric picked up the ball and threw it carefully, watching it bounce off ground and dead leaves and bare trees as the hellhound chased after it. This, he thought, could be fun!