They were ignoring me completely.
It was kind of glorious. And then they were hugging, and that was kind of glorious, too.
“Can you please,” Cathie asked sweetly, “get us the fuck out of here?”
“It’s always so nice to see you,” I said, smirking, and her wish was my command.
CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE
“Please don’t construe this as criticism,” the vampire king said critically, “but it’s so odd that Hell looks exactly like the Mall of America.”
“Hey, the system works.” “The system” meaning Hell looked like whatever the person in charge wanted it to look like. When Lucifer was in charge, Hell was a waiting room leading to any one of a million billion doors with something awful behind each one. Dead kittens. IRS auditors. Severed heads. The Payless ShoeSource website. “And really? You’re here five minutes and you’re giving me crap?”
“Mostly to conceal my terror and admiration,” he admitted. He glanced at me and smiled. Thank you for allowing my return.
Okay, so our link works in Hell if you’re here, but not when you’re in the real world. Interesting . . .
I don’t know that the mansion is the real world anymore. Surely after all you’ve seen, it cannot be so.
It is to me, Sinclair.
Fair enough, beloved. For me, the real world is wherever you are.
Awwww.
“Quit it,” Marc said, waving at us like we were flies. Flies with a telepathic link. “Bad enough when you gaze at each other without talking for an hour back home. I won’t put up with something that annoying in Hell.” When I laughed at him, he grinned. “I’d better rephrase.”
“You’d rather be canoodling with Will Mason,” Tina teased. She and Marc were holding hands. Not like that, of course. Sometimes I think she saw Marc as an overgrown kid and herself as his protector/honorary aunt, because often when she grabbed his hand it was to lead him toward or away from something. (“Be careful, Marc, the fire is hot and will burn you.” “Tina, please stop hiding the paper clips. I promise I won’t put one in my mouth and choke.”) He tolerated it, because he adored her. “A shame you couldn’t call on him before we left.”
“Okay, first, never say ‘canoodling’ again. Second, we’re going out tomorrow and I happen to be scared shitless. My first date since I died. My first date altogether in three years. My first—”
“It will be fine,” she assured him, patting his hand. “He seems like a sweet boy.”
A useful boy as well, my husband thought, and I grinned.
My thought, too. I never go looking for ghosts—the few who find me never leave me alone until I do whatever chore they left behind when they died. But it’d be pretty handy to have someone around who could see and hear them. Think of all the good gossip he could tell us!
Intelligence, my darling.
Dress it up how you like, pal, it’s still gossip. It’s talking about people behind their backs about things they don’t want you talking about.
. . .
Ha. Got him.
We were entering the food court, which was teeming with the damned. Funny how people often stuck to a schedule—it was 12:32 p.m. HST (Hellish standard time), so that meant it was time to hang in the food court and stand in line, choke down something you were allergic to, be offered drinks you couldn’t stand, or get stuck talking to people you cordially loathed.
Speaking of cordial loathing, the Ant was at one of the larger tables with Cathie and Father Markus. She saw us and kept talking. Cathie turned, spotted us, rolled her eyes, and jerked her head in a “come on over” gesture. The Ant’s surliness made Cathie seem like Miss Congeniality (and I should know).20
A path magically cleared for us and we started toward them. I could see Cindy and Lawrence sharing a table and talking, Cindy with her hands while she gabbled at him, Lawrence leaning forward and listening intently, smiling every once in a while. Good; that was settled, then. One less thing to worry about.
I could sense Sinclair’s surprise and pleasure at the deference, and . . . yep, there it was. Pride, too, that I could command that kind of respect. He knew they had no idea who he was, knew they weren’t parting like the Red Sea for him or Marc or Tina. Seeing so clearly into his emotional state made me ashamed it had taken me so long to let him come back to Hell. Our link working here was no excuse; the link worked fine in the real world, too. I could have seen his pride in me if I’d bothered to look. Instead, the only things I looked for were reasons to exclude him.
The Ant’s eyebrows were arching, but not quite high enough to disappear beneath her hard shiny bangs. “Hello again, Betsy’s husband.” She wasn’t kidding. She’d never bothered to learn his name. “Hi, Marc!” Whoa. Actual warmth.
“You know you missed me,” Marc replied, smiling. She giggled
(!!!!!!!!!!!!)
I know! My thought exactly: !!!!!!!!!!!!
and ducked her head.
“Father Markus was just explaining why the buddy system should be dismantled.”
“I didn’t use the term ‘dismantled,’” he said mildly. He turned to me. “I understand you’re trying to lighten your own workload by getting the souls here to take on some of the burden. But you’re laboring under the same misunderstanding you always have: it’s not your job to make things easier for them.”
“Actually, I’ll be the one who decides what my job is.” I kept my tone mild, too. “We’ve had this discussion already. The buddy system stays. The new and improved Ten Commandments stay. Which reminds me, it’s time for me to work on the new and improved Seven Deadly Sins. Being jealous because your neighbor got backstage passes to Jim Gaffigan is no reason to be damned for eternity.”
“That is enough.” Father Markus was on his feet, face flushed. “With all respect, Betsy, that’s idiotic.”
Don’t, I thought as Sinclair’s fist clenched. Seriously: you keep the fuck out of this. I mean it.
As you will.
Thank you.
If he touches you, I may have to disobey. Punish me as you will. His thought was serious and unwavering, like a five-hundred-watt flashlight in a dark basement: this is what will happen, I’m sorry to disobey, I will accept the consequences. There were some things a chivalrous man in his nineties couldn’t tolerate, I guess.
It didn’t matter, it wasn’t going to come to that. But I made a mental note to give the old duffer a serious scolding when we were back at the mansion. After I’d fucked him.
“You know, Markus, I’ve about had it with your attitude. For a guy who’s never been out of Minnesota, you’re pretty surly.”
“Minnesota Nice is a lie,” he replied, so I punched him.
Ohhh, did I punch him. My hand snapped into a fist and I belted him in the face as hard as I could. That punch, which had been trying to escape for at least a week, came up from my heels and knocked him twenty feet through the air until his momentum was stopped by a helpful cement pillar.
Total, complete silence—no one gasped, no one stirred, it was just a sea of open mouths and eyes everywhere—broken by Markus groaning and trying to sit up. Once he sat up he tried to stand. Took a few tries, and I was bitchy enough to take pride in that.
I actually heard the click as he pushed his dislocated jaw back into place and Marc hissed in sympathy behind me. “That usually requires big-time anesthesia,” he muttered to Tina, who murmured agreement. They were still holding hands, looking less like an elderly auntie watching out for her boy, and more like Hansel and Gretel wondering when the witch was going to make her move.
????????
Wait.
Excellent punch, beloved. Anything that flies that far and fast usually has wings.
Shut up. I’m working.
“Nnn fffrrr,” Markus said, limping toward me. He’d broken an ankle or a leg when he hit the p
illar, too.
“You should put some ice on that,” I suggested, smiling. “Or a cast.”
He shook his head again, spraying blood in fat drops. He opened his mouth but this time I cut him off.
“Who are you?”
He just looked at me.
“There’s this nifty thing called the Directory of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis,” I told him. “It’s online, and free. It lists all the priests and their backgrounds. Father Markus was born in Connecticut and ordained in Boston. He only got to Minnesota a decade ago.” I reached out, seized him by his fake collar, and hauled him toward me until we were nose to nose. “Who are you?”
Those bright brown eyes, which I’d often thought were sparkling with compassion and humor, were gleaming with what I now knew was scorn. “You know,” he whispered, kissing-close. “Don’t you?”
I dropped him and he fell to his knees, scrambled back, and then made the painful climb to his feet again. Except he was moving quicker, easier. The blood was drying, disappearing. The broken bones were reknitting. The black suit and collar were fading. He was shrinking into something else. No. Someone else.
I turned to my family, who’d been watching in stunned and fascinated silence. “You guys remember Lucifer, right?”
And there she was, looking as Satan always had to me: like Lena Olin in a wonderful black suit, sheer black stockings, and black Christian Louboutin Pagalle pumps.
One eyelid dropped in a small wink. “Miss me, sweetie?”
CHAPTER
FORTY-TWO
“Oh my God,” Marc managed. He looked around. “I might need to sit down. Possibly forever. You killed her!” He said that to me like I’d fallen down on the job, or lied. “It’s the whole reason you’re stuck running Hell! It’s the only reason we’re in Hell with you!”
“Well, there’s killed,” the devil replied, still absurdly cheerful, “and then there’s killed.”
“I always maintained she let me win,” I replied, because it was true. The devil and I had fought to the death, and we’d gone at it hard, but somewhere in there I’d gotten the sense that she wanted out, wanted to be gone, wanted away. Why else do me a favor as she was leaving? Why else grant me a wish, and let Sinclair bear the light of God’s love again?
“How’d you know?” Satan seemed honestly curious. “Checking the directory was a neat trick, but how’d you even get suspicious enough to do that?”
Sinclair’s thoughts were so stunned, they seemed to come from far away. She was a fool to underestimate you.
Yeah, maybe. But I’m not going to make the same mistake. She’s the Lady of Lies, you know.
The Ant coughed into her fist. “I’d like to know that, too. Because I—” She left it unspoken, but I knew her. She meant: I knew Satan better than any of you—we were friends, kind of—and if I didn’t suspect; how the bleeding hell did you?
“There were lots of hints,” I said.
“Oh?” Satan smirked, because she was a bitch. “Enlighten me.”
“When you said that thing, ‘Behold, evil’s coming forth’ or whatever . . .”
“‘Behold, evil is going forth from nation to nation,’ that tipped you off?”
“I looked it up when I got home. It’s from the Old Testament. Catholics in general and priests in particular tend to stick with the New Testament. And you knew who that Civil War guy was—David? Davis? Not Jefferson Davis—most Americans have heard of him. You knew about the other Davis, the one who murdered his CO and never went to trial, the Davis almost no one has heard of. I remember being surprised you were a Civil War buff when it had never come up before. When you’d never asked Tina about anything Civil War related, though you knew she lived through it. That seemed out of character. My mom’s doctorate is all about the Civil War and she practically stalks Tina. Why didn’t you?”
“Perhaps because I could speak with any number of people who lived through it here?” she suggested.
“That’s another thing. You knew so many backstories of the damned, but you were never seen interviewing anyone. You just knew what they’d done in life to deserve their punishment in death. I put it down to efficiency, but after a while I realized nobody was that efficient. You knew their stories because you know everyone here. Because you’re you. And even in disguise, you’re so fucking vain you couldn’t resist sticking up for yourself.”
She’d been listening to me with what looked like fond attention, head tipped to one side as she smiled. The smile dropped off at that. “Explain yourself.”
“Don’t you remember? We were in one of our meetings—one of the many meetings you scheduled—and got to wondering where you—Satan you, not Father Markus you—had gone to. Someone suggested Heaven, and you were pretty quick to point out that the devil wouldn’t set foot in Heaven for anything. And not because the devil was sulking—except you were, Satan, just admit it already: you’ve been in a billion-year sulk, a sulk for the ages.
“You said it was more complicated than that—except it wasn’t. You said even if God could forgive, ‘who’s to say the Morningstar would want forgiveness’? You were supposed to be a kindly priest, but couldn’t resist defending your childish bullshit. It’s hilarious when you think about it.”
Any pretense of being interested in how she’d given herself away, how this was just too cute and my goodness wasn’t Betsy adorable, dropped away. Satan was scowling, and I’d like to say it wasn’t a pretty sight, except she looked like Lena Olin, so it was.
She gestured to the masses of souls behind her. “No need to do this in front of everyone.”
“Oh, sure, now you need privacy.”
She gritted her teeth. “All of you: disperse.”
NOBODY FUCKING MOVE.
I hadn’t said it. I’d thought it the way I did with Sinclair. And I fired that thought like a bullet into every soul in Hell.
Nobody moved.
“Where’s the real Father Markus?”
“How should I know?” she cried, recovering quickly. Had to give it to her, Satan was like those stand-alone punching bags with sand in their base. You could punch them, but they bopped right back up. “Not here, that’s for sure! He’s in Heaven with my Father, I suppose, or haunting a rectory somewhere. I needed to be someone you’d trust, so he was it.”
Well. I guess it was good that the real Father Markus wasn’t condemned to Hell. Still, it made me sad for some reason, because I should have been happy for him. But now wasn’t the time.
“You’re here, you’re ‘alive,’ whatever that means anymore. But you’re not as strong as you were, because Hell is mine now. They”—nodding to the souls who hadn’t budged—“listen to me now. So tell me: why couldn’t I make it rain in the conference room? Why do some things here bend to my will, and some don’t?”
“Because you didn’t really want it to rain, you were clutching at a straw. When you really needed a watch, Hell provided. When you’re just bitching, Hell’s got nothing to fix on.”
“That sounds completely made up.”
She shrugged. “Mouthing words with nothing behind them isn’t bending Hell to your will. It’s just babbling, for which I assume you could take the gold.”
I smirked. “Yes, I babbled and I’m so stupid and, by the way, I saw through you in less than a week. So how about you choke on that for a while, you hateful tricky twat?”
Ever wonder what Satan would look like if she tried to swallow her own face? I don’t, because I know. It’s pretty funny. And like all mistresses of deflection, she didn’t directly respond. She just turned to the Ant (who was wearing a distinct “ulp!” expression) and said, “I expected better of you, Antonia.”
“Me?” she gasped. “Why, what was I supposed to do?”
“Prevent some of her sillier changes from going through! Rewriting the Ten? Buddies? And now she’s rewrit
ing the Seven? What shit!”
“Well, I expected better of you,” the Ant replied, drawing herself up, her big, shellacked hair making her seem taller than she was. “You let her kill you, for what? So you could sneak back in and try to slow down any changes to your precious regime? That’s not worthy of you, Lucifer. Stay or go, but don’t do this cowardly in-between nonsense.”
“I know nobody says this anymore,” Marc murmured to Tina, “but oh, snap!”
“Shut up!” Satan snapped.
Marc gulped. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, you’re disappointed in me?” the devil taunted. “You think I should have confided in you? Did you think we were friends?”
“No.” That was it, just “no.” My stepmother stood on her dignity, which I would have thought was impossible.
“Good. We were never friends.” She ignored the Ant’s flinch and continued. “I allowed you to be the Vessel for the Antichrist, and when you left your tiresome dull life by way of your tiresome dull death, I put you to work so you’d feel wanted. That’s all you were to me: a worker bee. And I would have thought that you’d know a real leader from the false moron who’s been pretending to be in charge.”
“She might be a moron, but she’s doing a pretty good job so far. And as she pointed out, she figured you out pretty quick.”
“A fluke from a flake.”
“Ladies.” I cleared my throat. “I’m right here. Well within earshot.” Also, this was further proof (like I needed it) that this was all happening in Hell: the Ant was sticking up for me. And appeared to be sincere! Soon: the three horses of the Apocalypse. Wait. Four horses. Right? Red, white, black, and pink. No. Pale. Right? Argh.
I shook off thoughts of pink horses. “But why?” I asked. “Why do any of it? Why let me kill you and then sneak back and try to help, kind of, when not trying to undermine me? Because you were helpful, some of the time. But how come?”
“I wanted to see how you’d do at the helm. I couldn’t give you on-the-job training unless I came back disguised like someone you’d trust. If you sucked at this too much,” Satan said with aggravating cheer—I’d never known anyone to get so mad and then recover so quickly—“you’d have been replaced. My daughter might have been stuck with it. I went to too much trouble to prevent that, so I wasn’t going to just stay gone and risk that my sacrifice was for nothing.”