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The Ant and Laura had succeeded in pulling me off. This helped mostly because I stopped resisting them. They yanked back so hard I ended up sitting on the floor. Garrett still hadn't moved. When I glanced at him, wondering if I'd hear dismay or anger or fear or something, he said, "We're going to go get Antonia now, right? Betsy? Right?"

"Jeez, you've got a one-track mind." I wasn't as annoyed as I sounded. For one thing, I was still high from throttling the Lady of Lies. For another, if I were in his place I'd have the same focus. Well. That wasn't true; I could never, ever have that kind of focus. But I'd be anxious about Sinclair.Advertisement

Sinclair! Thank you, thank you, thank you, God, thank you he wasn't here. Thank you he wouldn't be here when Satan came to.

Because I wasn't kidding myself. There was no way someone who was once in the Miss Burnsville Pageant could have killed the devil.

I hope I startled the shit out of her, though. I hope the next time she thought about fucking with me, her neck throbbed like a rotten tooth.

"Look what you did!" The Ant was staring at the crumpled form of her boss, tossed in the corner like a new toy six months after Christmas. "You-I can't believe what you did!" The Ant looked scared and exhilarated. But mostly scared. She'd always had an easy face to read, and I could see her wondering about which way to jump.

The devil was the big boss in town; it was safe to align with her. But her bitchy entitled stepdaughter had just kicked Satan's ass all over Satan's waiting room. So maybe the balance of power wasn't as stable as she imagined. "What-what are you going to do next?"

"What, like I know?" Actually, I did know. I walked up to the (temporarily) prone body, bent, and slipped off first one shoe, then the other. I held them with the two fingers on my left hand. I could have put them on, but that would have meant abandoning my loafers (Ella Signature, Coach, black). With luck I wouldn't have to choose between them.

With luck. I could have rolled my eyes at myself. I just bitch-slapped the devil on her home ground and I was worrying I'd have to leave a pair of shoes behind? If I was lucky.

Well, I wasn't going to bitch (much). I wasn't going to whine and blame Satan and snivel to myself that life just wasn't fair for poor old me, boo-hoo, how come my life is so weird and dangerous and full of felony assault?

I wasn't going to indulge because a) I wasn't sorry, and b) I'd do it over again, which I guess is the definition of not sorry, and c) I was okay, probably, with sucking up the consequences of those acts.

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"Oh. Oh, oh, oh. Betsy, what did you do?" Laura sounded shocked and scared. At least she wasn't avenging her mom by getting strangle-y all over my ass. And her wings had popped.

Okay, that probably sounded odd. Let me back up. Laura was the daughter of an angel. See, the devil's lineage didn't change when she moved to hell. (That was her story. Got kicked out and had to go to hell, that was my story.)

Anyway, Laura had inherited her wings. I didn't know if all those old painters were right (that angels were fair and gorgeous with snowy white wings and halos and long flowing robes), but this part was right. Angels had wings, half-angels had wings, Laura had wings.

They were lush and brown, like a sparrow getting ready for winter. And it was obvious Laura hadn't noticed they were out. So I wasn't gonna tell her.

"What are we going to do?" Funny . . . Laura had asked the question, but she and her biological mother had identical expressions of dismay on their faces. Looking at Laura was like looking at the Ant and seeing what she'd looked like when she was young. The way she used hair dye and loud clothes and vivid makeup to look like when she was young. "Should we call for help?"

"Who would we call?" the Ant pointed out. Good questions. Glad it wasn't my problem.

What I thought was really interesting was that either the Ant saw Laura's wings and decided not to comment, or she hadn't noticed they were out.

Okay, I'd better explain out. The way I understood things, Laura always had wings . . . in hell, in the past, in the present, in the future. The way I always had my appendix. But people in an ordinary shithole realm like earth couldn't see them.

Hell wasn't necessarily a hot place beneath the earth's crust (though it was nice and toasty warm here in the waiting room). It was another dimension, with different rules and different people and different customs and different physics. As in, "Ye canna change the laws of physics, mohn!" Except since this wasn't earth, anything was possible.

Laura had been staring at me this entire time, and I could tell she was torn. Yell at me? Help her mom? Yell while helping? Kick me in the shins? Flap and fly away? Call hell's version of 911? What?

None of us knew what to do, and that was a plain fact. Of the three of us, though, I was definitely in the best mood. I even hummed a little, waiting for them to decide what they were going to do.

"You . . . perfidious . . . violent . . . crude . . . hideous . . . wretched . . . bitch." pqdm.com