Read Page 17

"Well, last word, singular." There was a long pause while I observed Laura wasn't a) leaving, b) shrieking at me to shut up already, or c) killing me. "'Finally.' That's what she said when she knew her plan to make me have a plan was going to work."

"You can't tell me the Lord of Lies actually wanted-"Advertisement

"I don't know what she actually wanted. I barely know what I want half the time. I just know she wasn't sorry to die. I think..." It took a couple of seconds before I could articulate what I knew was true. "I think she was very tired. And tired of being tired." Awesome cover by Jane's Addiction aside (much better than Jagger's take), I really did have sympathy for the devil. Not a lot. But yeah, some. Even when I was afraid she was killing me, some. "I think she knew there wasn't anything she hadn't seen a million billion times. I think when life can't offer up any surprises, ever again, what's the point in staying around?"

"That doesn't make anything right."

"No."

"Not any of it." Laura had shoved her hands in her pockets and turned her back to me. "Not one thing."

"I know." I swallowed a smile at the Antichrist's double take when she spun back around to face me. "No, really, I know. It was a crap thing to do to you. I knew you'd be the one stuck with the bag." I shrugged. "I knew and I did it anyway. Plus, I half-assed it and it shouldn't have worked at all. I'm the one who should be dead."

Silence. Hey, she didn't rush to agree! That was something. The balloon bouquets had definitely softened her up. Thanks again, 1-800-FLOWERS. Is there any squabble you can't heal?

"And since I'm coughing up all kinds of details where I come off like a sock-clad sociopath, I'll tell you I wasn't smart enough to think of anything else. And she was tired. That's why Satan is dead." Oh, and because I had a choice: Laura's future or Sinclair's. And I chose Sinclair's. But there was a limit to the amount of truth I thought she could handle.

No. That was a lie. There was a limit to the amount of truth I was willing to share with a volatile Antichrist with the powers of a god in Hell.

Laura sighed. "You can't get out of this by playing the genius ditz card."

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Okay, time and place, time and place, but I couldn't help being absurdly flattered. Genius ditz! That was me all over, except she was only half right.

"I'm not trying to get out of anything. I'm telling you straight out, it was a shitty thing to do." I spread my hands. "I'm owning it, okay? I still suck at it, but I'm getting better. You should have seen me when I was twenty."

Which I didn't say lightly, because Laura could see me when I was twenty. Not only could she use Hell to travel through space, she could also travel through time. At first, she could only do that with "strong physical contact," the devil's euphemism for "smacking the shit out of the vampire queen." But in almost no time, in a scary amount of no time, Laura had gone from zero knowledge and control to pretty decent knowledge and better control. In this case, no time meant less than a year. And she didn't have to touch me to do it. I was starting to wonder if Satan had pulled that whole "contact with one of your blood" thing out of her ass.

"It's nice you're telling me this," Laura was saying, so I pasted on my politely attentive expression. The eyebrows were crucial for that: raised slightly. Too far and you looked like a bad improv actor; too little and you looked like you didn't give a tin shit. Like so many things in life, a fake "I'm listening" look was all about the middle ground. "But words don't change anything. 'Sorry' doesn't fix anything."

"No," I agreed, "but not saying it is kind of a douche-bag move."

She almost smiled. "I'm still stuck with"-she gestured to the nothing again-"this. I still have no idea what to do and I'm stuck with it. How can I turn my back on this? But how can I take it on?"

"Sorry." I hated to even think it, but the girl who'd informed me she was a grown-up was going round and round a lot with the "it's not fair!" bleating. A) She was right, and b) it didn't matter. Sure, it wasn't fair and, sure, I'd wronged her. And anytime you drop by a playground, you'll hear a lot of the "it's not fair" battle cry, because things started being not fair pretty much the day you're born. Kids had to cry about it; grown-ups had to deal.

It was probably too soon to point this out.

"Sorry," I said again. "I don't know how to fix this. And I'm pretty sure I'd be out of my league to even try."

"Yeah," Laura said sadly. "Me, too. So: see how it feels."

And like that, the gray fog swallowed her and I heard the muffled pop of air rushing into the space she and her boo-hoo 'tude had just occupied.

The Antichrist had dragged me to Hell, heard my apology, and then coldly left me there.

It was just me. Me and the fog and Tina's fuzzy purple socks.

"Yeah?" I cried, shaking a fist at... uh, nothing. "Well, I take it all back, how about that? Your mom was horrible and I'm glad she's in pieces, how about that? You can leave me here to rot and she'll still be dead! How about that? And you sound like a fucking baby with all the 'it's not fair,' how about that?"

Then I remembered the nature of the fog. That there were a billion souls out there somewhere, and any one of them could be hearing this.

I shut the hell up. pqdm.com