me-in-the-eye. “I didn’t count on—I hadn’t expected my birth mother . . . to be helpful to you. She would have known the truth. I couldn’t just lie about it; it had to be a real thing.”
“You did lie about it.”
I got another shrug for my trouble and had to shake my head at the whole fucking mess. “And isn’t that the goddamned irony of the century. My age-old nemesis, she of the pineapple hair, being helpful while you were doing everything you could to fuck me over.” I’d chosen my words deliberately, hoping she’d get angry, raise her voice, something besides the detached nastiness. In vain, sorry to say. Now that she knew she was getting what she thought she wanted, she just wanted the convo to be over so I would leave.
I had to shake my head. “Letting them out. Great. As long as you didn’t do anything that’s totally going to bite me in the ass later.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“Random souls wandering the earth? Good guys, bad guys, just set loose? Did you even keep count? Did you bother to get names? Or did you just tag and release?”
“It’ll be fine,” she said again, and for the first time I was afraid I would kill her. She was the Antichrist, but she was mortal. I could toss a Pontiac into a brick wall if I wanted; it’d be less than a second’s work to snap her neck.
No. No. No. You’re the big sis, even if only until you walk out her door forever. Set an example. Besides, it’s like Dad . . . let her live with her guilt. It should be nothing to you.
No idea if that was good advice or bad, but I was going with it. I calmed down enough to reply almost calmly. “You’re sure it’ll be fine, huh? Why is that? Because you’ve never read a book or seen a television show or a movie? Because this shit always, always comes back. It always bites whomever in the ass.”
“Maybe. Either way.” A chilly smile. “It’s now officially filed under Not My Problem. Your terms, remember?”
“It was three minutes ago, of course I remember.”
“Impressive,” she mocked.
“Wow, you’re a bitch.” I shook my head again. At least I wasn’t shaking a finger at her in scolding-elderly-aunt mode. “How have I not noticed this?”
“Exactly,” the Antichrist said.
“What, this is my punishment for not paying attention?”
“Exactly.”
Enough of this shit.
I studied her while getting ready to leave. She was so lovely, and so young. And I had hopes that her close-minded religious beliefs would loosen with maturity. Because if not, the world could be in a whole lot of trouble. I didn’t think this was the end of anything between us. The lengths she’d gone to in order to get out of her birthright showed me that. At best, she and I were on a time-out that could last years, decades.
And that could be bad, because while this confrontation might be done, and while we both assumed we were out of each other’s lives for good, I wasn’t sure it would be so easy or so complete. I had the feeling Laura wouldn’t just eventually become a villain. She’d be the worst kind of villain, the bad guy who thinks they’re a good guy, who is rock-solid certain they’re in the right, and thus can justify every awful thing they do by telling themselves it’s all for the greater good. Laura was almost as good as I was at justification. And, of course: Antichrist. She’d bear watching for that, if nothing else.
But I was confident. Or at least, not as horrified and despairing at our fate as I might have been. I wasn’t alone; I had a mansion full of people who loved me and would help me with pretty much anything I needed. Laura didn’t have that, and she scorned my resources. Her choice, of course. Just as it had been her choice every step down the line. She hadn’t considered that, but I had.
“I’ll send a plant,” I said and turned to leave. She didn’t walk me out, which was just as well. I was sad and angry, but maybe a tiny bit smug, too, and it wouldn’t do to have her pick up on it. Because it wasn’t all bad. Maybe, in time, it wouldn’t seem bad at all.
I hadn’t fed in days and felt fine. Teleporting was getting easier (though my accuracy still sucked). I’d commanded my father out of my life, as well as my sister, and agreed to take over Hell.
Hell was making me stronger. I bet Laura hadn’t considered that, either.
It made me wonder if the devil had.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
“Wow. Look what the dog barfed up.”
“I’m in charge now,” I told Cathie, who was in the Hell Mall’s Payless store, trying on sandal after sandal that didn’t fit. (Hint: none of them would fit.) “You can’t talk to me like that.”
“I’m absolutely going to talk to you like that all the time,” my “friend” replied. She was wearing khaki shorts that displayed knees that looked like scowling trolls, white anklets (why? why try on sandals with socks? even in Hell?), and a red sweatshirt with “I’d tell you to go to Hell, but I don’t want to see you every day” in an oddly cheerful white font. “So you should resign yourself to that right now.”
“How long was I gone?”
A shrug. “There aren’t any clocks in Hell. It’s like Las Vegas.”
“Or my house.” I pointed at my well-shod tootsies. “Luckily my magic shoes helped me get back.”
Cathie stared at Dorothy’s silver slippers, then looked back up at me. “You do know they aren’t magic, right? And that they aren’t even shoes? They’re a physical manifestation—”
“—of my ability to travel between dimensions, something tangible to help me focus on decidedly intangible dimensional abilities, yeah, yeah. Now I need to think up magic shoes that help me teleport without getting the toolshed involved.”
“Wow, do I not want a single one of your problems.” She pulled a shoe box out from the middle of a stack as high as the deep end of a pool. The stack swayed like a rickety bridge in a hurricane, but miraculously didn’t topple and bury poor Cathie under a pile of pleather flats. “Why am I even doing this?”
“Dunno.”
She opened the box and scowled at its contents: flattering, comfortable sandals in just the right color. One was a size five, the other size ten. “You’re back in a short time, probably, and you’ve got a ‘well, time to roll up my sleeves’ expression, which, by the way, you can’t pull off. So your sister finally told you what’s what, huh?”
“No.”
“Oh.” Cathie’s expression was placid, and then her eyebrows arched in surprise. “Oh. Had it out, huh? Is she going to show up dead? Here? Ugh.” She glanced down at her sweatshirt. “I really don’t want to see her every day. My ironic sweatshirt has become an oracle, which is not normally what I look for in a long-sleeved garment.”
I laughed. “I didn’t kill her. But I forbade her to use her Antichrist superpowers.”
“And she’s going along with that?” I could tell Cathie was thinking about the serial killer Laura had dispatched with ruthless, capable efficiency in that poor woman’s basement. And Cathie didn’t know the half of it, or how many Laura had killed just in the short time I’d known her.
My sister could take all sorts of lives, supernatural and human, and in the past she hadn’t considered killing vampires to be murder. But killing the killer, however richly deserved, was. And she hadn’t hesitated.
“She’s going along with that.” For now. A problem for another day. Another decade. Or never, please God. She can stay on her side of the playground, I’ll stay on mine. Except hers was now mine. “She got what she wanted.”
“Yeah, well. You know what they say about that.”
“Oh God,” I groaned. “Don’t tell me. I think that’s the lesson of the week.” Dad, Laura, even Satan. They’d all gotten what they thought they wanted, poor bastards. “When did my life turn into an R-rated After School Special?”
“The minute you were too dim to stay dead,” was Cathie’s smiling reply. Sh
e booted the last box of sandals away and stood, slipping on her loafers and following me past stack after stack of sandals that were all wrong. “I don’t even know why I bothered.”
“Again: I don’t, either.”
“Okay, I do. I was curious. Hell’s been a void for a while and I was curious. At least it was something to do.” We fell into step as we left the store and merged with the souls wandering around, shopping, running, being tortured, or all of the above. It would have been more upsetting (it was definitely off-putting), except plenty of them looked interested or intrigued and clearly weren’t being tortured or punished. Exchange students? Tourists? A couple of them were wearing fanny packs. So much I didn’t know. So much I’d better learn, and quick.
“Oh. Welcome back.”
“The mother of the Beast,” Cathie said without turning around as my stepmother came up behind us. “Don’t fret, Toni. Betsy didn’t hurt your horrible kid.”
Toni? “What, you’re buds now?”
“Uh, no.”
“No! We just have things in common. We know some of the same people.”
Cathie let out an inelegant snort. (Redundant?) “She means we both want to help you, because you’re bound to fuck up and will need support before, during, and after the inevitable fuckups.”
This was how rotten my week had been: I interpreted that bitchy speech as stuffed with care and concern. My eyes welled, for God’s sake! Or they would have, if I were still alive.
“Thanks,” I replied, managing to keep it short and clipped. No one here but us ruthless rulers of Hell. “Um, Antonia?” My voice almost caught. I was so used to referring to her as the Ant that I had to think about what I was doing for a second or two. “I ran into your husband earlier.”
The Ant busied herself with her clipboard. The three of us were now walking abreast past the theater, which was playing (with constant interruptions, as the film needed to be spliced again and again) Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Caligula, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, The Astronaut’s Wife, From Justin to Kelly, Cutthroat Island, and Sahara. Which was just staggering. Movies so bad, they couldn’t even be hate-watched? Diabolical.
“I said I ran into your husband earlier.”
“Dead,” Cathie muttered under her breath, “not deaf.”
“I’m sure you did,” the Ant replied, not looking up from the clipboard. “I didn’t think you’d leave it alone.”
Awkward silence. I gave Cathie the side-eye, and she gave me the “what? I just work here” look in return. God help me on the inevitable day when I have to give her the “get the hell out of here and, yeah, I hear the pun” look.
“So anyway, Dad’s dead to me now. And, um, so’s your daughter.” It occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one having a shit week. At least I was an active participant in all the awful. The Ant had to hear about it secondhand. “But they’re both okay. I mean, I didn’t hurt them.”
“No, of course not.” She looked surprised, like she’d assumed all along I wouldn’t hurt them. Which was really, really nice. “You gave them what they wanted. That’s much worse.”
Oh. Less nice.
“Did you want to know—”
A noise that might have been a snort, or a bitten-off sob. Please not the latter. Feeling sorry for the Ant flew in the face of everything I believed. “I don’t, actually. Let me guess: he faked his death because one of his kids was a vampire, another was the Antichrist, another was going to turn into God-knows-what, he’d found out his mistress made a shitty second wife, and he wanted his old, simpler life back and knew he couldn’t ever have that again. Right?”
“Pretty much.” Yes, that was a succinct and devastating sum-up. What she didn’t say was that she’d known he was alive, and why he was alive, and found it humiliating. And just like that, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore and, better, didn’t need to talk about it anymore.
“So what’s next?” I asked, shuddering as we passed a gelato store where the only flavors in stock were rum raisin, black licorice, and bacon. Bacon! They took two of the most wonderful things in the history of terrific things to eat, bacon and ice cream, and merged them into one horrible entity. Maybe I was too soft for this job, because I instantly wanted to stock vanilla at least. Or at least pistachio.
“We were hoping you’d tell us.”
“Oh.” Oh. “Great!” Fuck. “Well. Let’s round up Father Markus, and anybody you two think could help, and let’s talk about what happens next. Letting Laura off the genetic hook and deciding to run Hell by myself has taught me that I can’t run Hell by myself. I don’t think anyone can.” Well. Satan had, but I was pretty sure that was why she’d been such a huge, historical bitch.
“All right,” the Ant said. “I’ll get started. Father Markus. Hmm.” And she clicked off, efficiency in a bad dye job and worse heels.
“What was that supposed to mean?” I asked, the opposite of surprised when the Ant didn’t turn and answer.
“Oh, nothing.” Yeah, not buying it. Cathie’s tone was way too innocent. “Certainly not that you switched out one father for another, and kinda one sister for another. Not that you ever thought of me as a sister, but Jessica’s alive. She can’t help you with this. Uh, she is alive, right?”
“And kicking,” I agreed, thinking of Mowerzilla and swallowing a chortle.
“Right. You can’t have her here, but you can have me—someone who gets you more than the Antijerk ever did.”
“Wow,” I said, my tone pure admiration. Antijerk! How had I never thought of that? “You never did like her, did you?”
“I never did like her. Which was fine; I was never one of those women who has to be pals with everyone. You, though . . .”
“Recovering Miss Congeniality.”
“Oh my God. Just when I thought I didn’t have anything new to mock you with. Thank you. Thank you.” She shook herself out of her euphoric haze and continued, neatly avoiding three men in business suits all having loud conversations on their cell phones, sharing TMI tidbits like, “But you said the rash would clear up by now!” and, “I said embezzle, not decapitate,” while dodging other Mall-goers. Were they the ones being punished? Or was it the people who couldn’t help overhearing? So much to know! “Laura maybe never loved you—and I’m sorry, she’s an idiot. But you couldn’t ever get close to her, either. For all kinds of reasons, and maybe none of them are important now. You couldn’t warm up to each other, but you and I get along. I’ve—I’ve always really liked you. I’m glad now for the chance to help you, after everything you did for me.”
“Mushy,” I said, delighted. I was usually the one getting mocked for that.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“If you cry,” I teased, “then I’m going to cry. Then all of Hell will cry. It’ll be sobfest of the damned.”
“That’s it. Offer retracted. You can wander off and die now. Or something.”
“How’d you guess Laura meant to stick me with the job?” I’d accepted that the people around me had picked up on this faster than I, because I’d always known the people around me were smarter. But I wanted specifics. “I get now that you knew.” I remembered how she’d been so dismissive of Laura from the start. How she’d been so quick to ride my ass for not understanding more about my supernatural abilities than the last time we’d spoken, years earlier.
Cathie laughed, but the sound didn’t have much humor in it.
“Yeah, you got me. I’ll admit it, I couldn’t get over that you hadn’t made much progress. In the time I saw the world twice over, you’d gone from reluctant vampire queen to . . . reluctant vampire queen. I remembered wondering just what the hell you’d been doing with yourself. Clinging to the decayed remnants of a normal life?”
Yep, she got me. “Pretty much.”
“I figured you needed all the help you could get and I wanted to be there for it.”
“Yes, but why?”
That brought her up short; she stopped so suddenly the mom behind her ran into her heels with her empty (?) stroller. “Watch it!” the mom (?) snapped, wrenching the stroller around us and rushing off. Cathie barely took notice.
“Why? You kidding?”
“I helped you, but it wasn’t a trade. You didn’t have to help me back. You sure didn’t have to wait in the wings to help me with what you know will be a sucky, likely eternal, job.”
Cathie shook off her shock and grinned at me. “You’re kidding. You really don’t know? Why am I surprised you don’t know?”
“I haven’t a clue. I know it wasn’t just because after you were murdered, I was the only one who could see you and talk to you.” Plenty of other ghosts had haunted me, and every one of them hadn’t lingered once I’d solved their problem. “But I don’t know what it is.”
“Uh-huh. Well, it’s like this. You didn’t just offer to find the guy who strangled me with his belt until I shit myself,” she explained in that odd, cheery tone most people used to describe why they thought baby bunnies were cute, “who then stripped me and made fun of my tits and dumped my naked body in a Walmart parking lot. He did those things to me because he was afraid of me, even though we’d never met, and you heard me—though your listening skills were, and still are, for shit. I was alone but you heard me and offered to find him.”
I opened my mouth, but Cathie shook her head. “Shut up now,” she said kindly, and I did. “But you didn’t stick to that. And when you reminded me you had no lawful authority, that the most you could do was stall my killer until the cops showed, you demonstrated your resolve by preparing to let him stab you multiple times. You knew he couldn’t kill you but you also knew it would hurt like a bitch because, hello, stabbing. And you didn’t care. You wanted to stop him. You put your body between a killer and someone you didn’t know, and that’s such an integral part of your personality that you don’t even remember making the offer, and you didn’t expect anything from me in return. That’s why. Oh my God,” she added, horrified, “are you—you’re not going to cry, are you?”
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