Sympathy for the devil

by Holly Lisle

  Then she saw it—she saw the catch. She closed her eyes, and took one deep, steadying breath.

  "Prove to me that this is something that can actually be done."

  "Healing? Of course it can be done." Mhya Jezick looked annoyed. "The Bible is full of healing."

  "Not by Hell's creatures." Dayne crossed her arms and looked coldly up at the fallen angel. "Prove it to me. I'm not signing away my soul for something you can't deliver."

  "It's in the contract. . . ."

  "And Hell is full of liars. Prove it to me. Heal him." Dayne pointed at Tad.

  "Me? That isn't my line of work."

  "I don't care. If you want my soul, you'll prove to me that this isn't something that could only be done two thousand years ago."

  Mhya looked positively nonplussed. "Sign the contract and then you heal him if you want to."

  "It was a fraud, then," Dayne said, and held the contract up so that she could rip it in two.

  "No!" Mhya yelped. "It isn't a fraud. I just don't want to—" She studied Dayne, her head cocked slightly to one side, her eyes squinted. "You aren't going to sign until I do this, are you?"

  "Not a chance."

  "Oh, Hell. This is going to be a nightmare to explain to the Boss," she muttered, and reached out her hand, and touched the child's face. He began to glow—a warm, rosy pink glow. The glow ran from Dr. Jezick's fingertips and covered the child's body like an aura. His face smoothed over, the gutted socket where his eye had been plumped out, the gouged flesh filled in. Scars erased themselves, slack muscles grew tight. . . .

  And suddenly Tad thrashed in the bed. His eyes flew open, his hands wrapped around the endotracheal tube that ran from the ventilator into his mouth, and with a solid yank, he pulled it free—and began screaming at the top of his lungs, a high-pitched, childish shriek that Dayne only made out as "Moooommmmmmmmmyyyyyy!" after the third repetition. He started to rip out his IVs and Dayne managed to grab his hands and remove the needles before he could do it. She felt sure her eardrums were going to explode—her head was right next to his mouth as she worked the IV cannulas out of his skin, and that mouth never shut up.

  People came running—first the other nurses, then Tad's doctor, and then Tad's parents.

  There was more screaming—a lot of it. Tad ripped the bandages off his head and kicked Dayne, trying to get away; meanwhile his mother and father hugged each other and shouted incoherently at the tops of their lungs. Tad's doctor was babbling, Dayne's colleagues were shouting questions, the other alert patients on the floor began to ring their bells, demanding that someone come in and tell them what was going on—the room became a tiny point of total pandemonium.

  Dayne slipped out, and Dr. Jezick followed her.

  "It works," the fallen angel said.

  "I see that." Dayne nodded and walked around the nurses' station; she settled into her seat and found Tad's chart. She wasn't sure how she was going to document the miraculous healing, but she thought her notes would give JCAH something to ponder when they came through, auditing charts.

  "Well . . . here's the contract." Jezick pushed it towards her.

  Dayne looked over at the flawless creature and shook her head. "I'm not going to sign."

  Mhya Jezick paled. "What? You have to sign. We agreed."

  "We didn't agree to anything. I said if you wanted my soul, you would prove to me that this wasn't something that only happened two thousand years ago. I never said I intended to give you my soul."

  "You—"

  "Healing seems like such a benevolent thing," Dayne interrupted. "So kind. I could make everyone better, rid the world of ills, put an end to disease." She sighed. "Except I couldn't. If I did nothing else with my every waking hour, I could heal only a few people. Who would I choose? How could I decide which people deserved to live, and which would have to die? I am only one human being. I can't make those decisions—they aren't mine to make. I do what I can to hold back death, but the right to decide between life and death belongs to God—and only God."

  "Then watch that child die, and know that you could have prevented it," Jezick snarled, and pointed at the little boy on the other side of the glass wall.

  Dayne shouted, "No," and reached for Jezick . . .

  But nothing happened to the boy. He still clung to his mother, his arms wrapped around her neck, while she rocked him from side to side and cried into the scruffy little tufts that were left of his hair.

  "Die!" Jezick pointed both hands at the child and narrowed her eyes in concentration. Again, nothing happened.

  "You can't do any harm, remember?" Dayne smiled at "Doctor" Jezick, and the fallen angel turned on her and came at her.

  Adam appeared out of nothingness, right behind a bright blue monster of extraordinary ugliness who pointed at Dr. Jezick and shrieked, "There she is!"

  Adam lunged at the statuesque fallen angel and tackled her. With Jezick pinned beneath him, he looked up at Dayne and yelled, "Don't sign anything! It's a trick!" Then he glared down at the ersatz doctor and growled, "I'll destroy you if you've done anything to her, Jezerael."

  Dayne stood up so quickly her chair shot out behind her and slammed into the wall, then rolled into the middle of the nursing station floor again. The little blue monster jumped into it and rolled it along the floor while spinning in circles.

  Dayne didn't have time to chase after the imp. Jezick/Jezerael had shifted into the true form of a fallen angel—she was easily fifteen feet tall and beautiful in the same way Dayne imagined vampires might be beautiful: seductive but deadly. She was trying to rip Adam's throat out with her teeth, all the while clawing at his face with needle-sharp talons as long as Dayne's fingers.

  Adam was fighting back—but he was half the size of his opponent and lacked her dagger teeth and deadly claws.

  "She can't hurt me," Dayne told herself, and jumped into the fight. She gouged at Jezerael's eyes with her thumbs, and when the enormous fallen angel let go of Adam and tried to escape, shoved a knee into her throat and braced it there.

  But once she had Jezerael pinned, Dayne stopped. She hadn't been able to afford the body of a two-inch-tall dead gremlin—she hated to think how much she'd have to pay for killing off an enormous angel. Adam was safely out of Jezerael's reach, and Jezerael wasn't able to so much as touch Dayne; when she tried, her hands slid past her without making contact. It was an eerie thing to watch, but reassuring, too.

  She glanced over her shoulder at Adam. "You okay?"

  Adam's pale face bore the most worried expression she'd ever seen. "I'm fine. Earwax came and got me as fast as he could, but I was afraid I wouldn't get here in time. You didn't sign anything, did you?"

  Earwax? Earwax got him? She decided she didn't really want to know. "I didn't sign anything, Adam."

  He knelt on the blue industrial carpet, near her but not so near that Jezerael could reach him. "I'm not what you think I am."

  "You're exactly what I thought you were."

  "I called security," Mary Deiner yelled. "They're on their way."

  Dayne couldn't imagine what Mary thought security was going to do.

  Adam shook his head vehemently. "I'm not what you thought, though, Dayne. I'm . . . I'm what she is." He nodded at Jezerael. "I'm one of Hell's angels—just like her. Maybe even worse. After all, I've been second-in-command of Hell for eons. But I didn't want you to see me that way. And I didn't want you to go to Hell. You . . . wouldn't be happy there. And I want you to be happy."

  "I'm happy with you. I knew you came from Hell, honestly I did. Well . . . not at first, but I figured it out. I love you, Adam—and it doesn't matter to me what you are. When you talked me out of joining Satco, I knew you weren't trying to damn me anymore. So it will work out for us—and as long as I can have you, I'll be happy."

  He hung his head. His shoulders sagged. "You can't have me."

  Dayne almost lost her grip on Jezerael. "What do you mean I can't have you? Why can't I?"

  "I . . . I have to go
back to Hell. I didn't do what I was supposed to do while I was here—at least not all of it. So Lucifer is going to punish me."

  "He can't take you back," Dayne whispered. "I love you."

  "And I love you. I'm afraid Lucifer doesn't care about such things, though. He can take me back—I knew yesterday that this was my last day. I just wanted to spend some of it with you. At least I got to see you again."

  "He'll have to go through me to get you."

  "I'm afraid not. And when he does get me, he will consider my love for you just another reason to punish me." Tears slid down Adam's cheeks. Dayne felt a lump forming in her throat. "Besides . . . it couldn't work for us—not for any length of time. You're one of God's children, while I am a pariah in His sight. We have no future. We cannot have a future."

  "Tell God you're sorry," Dayne urged. "Don't leave me."

  "I was wrong to support Lucifer—but I cannot repent; my time in Hell has made me too bitter and angry. Deep in my heart, I still blame God for the pain I have suffered." He stared at his feet. "Dayne, even if I could repent, it wouldn't matter. If I went to Heaven, I would still not be with you. You would be here, I would be there. And when you reached Heaven I would be as far below you as you will be below God. We are not equals, you and I. I'm an angel—a lesser creature. I've never faced the trials of being human."

  Dayne whispered, "But I love you."

  Adam smiled at her, a trembling smile that broke her heart. "Thank you. Thank you for loving me." Then he stiffened, and his gazed focused on something Dayne couldn't see.

  A voice as cold and hollow as death whispered in the air, "Agonostis . . . Jezerael—both of you have failed me. Both of you have betrayed me. Now feel my wrath."

  Dayne jumped to her feet and ran to Adam, screaming, "No! Satan, you can't take him. Adam—fight him!"

  She couldn't reach Adam in time; she grasped at him, but he was already shimmering, already dissolving, falling away from her into a direction and a dimension she couldn't describe, melting into the air like ice under the North Carolina sun.

  "Remember me," she heard him call—his voice disembodied, its echoing hollowness a sad and empty thing.

  Then he was gone.

  The hospital's single day-shift security guard ran in. "Where's the emergency?"

  Dayne stood in the middle of the floor, crying. Mary, hugging her and patting her on the back, told him, "You missed it, pal. We could have used some help two minutes ago."

  At that moment, the little blue monster who had been sitting silently atop the nurses' station watching, decided the security guard was what it had been waiting for. It jumped at the guard, wrapped its arms around his neck, and planted a wet, slurping kiss squarely on his lips. "Hi, beautiful!" it said in a shockingly deep, radio-announcer voice, "What say you and me go someplace quiet and get to know each other re-e-e-eal good."

  The man yelled and shoved the thing away from him so hard it flew into one of the glass walls facing into a patient room. The imp bounced to the floor and said, "Oh, baby, that's the way I like it." Then it ran.

  The guard took off after it, billy club swinging. The ICU doors hissed shut behind the two of them, and the unit fell back into the hissing, chugging, beeping white noise that felt like silence.

  Tad walked out of his room, holding hands with both of his parents. The doctor came out behind them, his face bewildered. "We're discharging Tad," he told Dayne. "I have absolutely no idea how to document a miracle . . . but I'm glad to have the opportunity to find out." He smiled ruefully.

  Dayne nodded and wiped her eyes. "His chart is on the desk next to the monitors. I haven't finished my notes yet, but I'll get to them after you're done."

  While he was dictating the chart, she phoned the nursing supervisor and said that she was going to be out sick for the next two days. The supervisor evidently caught some of the anguish in Dayne's voice; for the first time in Dayne's memory, she didn't try to wheedle Dayne into working the next day and "going home if you just can't manage."

  Wynne Connelly, the administrator, dropped into the unit around one, a puzzled expression on his face. "Dr. Jezick had an appointment with me this afternoon," he told Dayne, trying hard to look like a man whose mind was on business. "Do you have any idea where she is?"

  Dayne nodded. "She went home. I don't think there's any chance that she'll be back." Dayne nibbled the skin on the inside of her lower lip and sighed. "No chance at all, I guess."

  Chapter 45

  They knelt at the rim of the Pit, with the stench of sulfur and rotting flesh, and the sounds of the screams of the damned-and-undying, thick and clinging as tar around them. Agonostis, still in human form, with his human flesh blistering and blackening in the heat, crouched next to Jezerael, whose angelic flesh tolerated the Hell-furnace, even if she was not immune to the pain.

  Lucifer glowered over them, slashing at them with whips, screaming incoherent threats—howling.

  Agonostis could not even breathe to scream. His lungs burned and shriveled in the heat, his arms and legs pulled in to his chest as his flesh tightened and baked. He still had the power within him to change into his other, ancient form—and he knew that the pain in that form would have been less. Still horrible, still mind-breaking sooner or later—but less. But he was not the creature he had once been, and he would not don again the body of the hated thing that had once been himself. Lucifer would change him and break him. Agonostis knew that. The Archfiend would alter his body into something unspeakable, would leave him groveling and pleading for some smallest sign of mercy, and would laugh when he broke. But Agonostis held onto the thin shreds of his hard-won near-humanity; what he was suffering, Dayne would have suffered, had he tempted her into damnation. If he could never be near her again, he could find some comfort in knowing what she would have felt, and in knowing that she was safe from Lucifer's vile touch.

  Lucifer caught his breath, and crouched on hands and knees in front of them, so that he could look them both in the eye. "You insufferable fuck-ups," he said in a calmer, more rational voice, "you brainless, backstabbing, incompetent Pit-meat—I'm going to hold your trials and your sentencing here, right by the side of the Pit, so that you can hear the screams of the doubly damned and think on the consequences of your betrayal while you are tried. Pitchblende!" he shrieked. "Bring me the charges."

  Agonostis' vision blurred—his eyes were dry and blistering. He couldn't blink, so that he saw a steady stream of images, but the images bore little relation to what he knew was actually there. Where there had been one towering form before him, though, now he made out two.

  Beside him, Jezerael screamed monotonously, already sounding very much like the Pit-buried damnedsouls she would soon join. Over her screams, Pitchblende read out the charges.

  "Jezerael, once Fallen from Heaven, once mighty in our sight . . ."

  Lucifer had decided to try Jezerael first; Agonostis, familiar with his procedures, knew that this meant Jezerael's charges were lesser, and that Agonostis could therefore expect his torture, when it came, to be greater.

  Pitchblende read on, through Jezerael's rank and title, and droned through the charges.

  "That you did willfully do good, healing to full health a child, without gaining for Hell any compensation greater than the value of said child, and that you did neglectfully fail to include such internal failsafes in the healing as would cause the child to waste away and die, in spite of external appearances of health, and that you did fail to acquire the soul of Dayne Kuttner, for which sole purpose you had been placed on Earth. How then do you plead?"

  Jezerael screamed on.

  "She pleads guilty, Master of Iniquity, Lord of Hatred and Pain."

  "So I hear." Lucifer's voice became oily—smug and self-satisfied. "I do not tolerate incompetence or betrayal—you have been an obstacle to my will through both. This is your sentence, then. The very molecules of your body will not tolerate the presence of each other. You who have been among the highest ranked of the cre
atures of Hell will now be less than the lowest. You will spend a million years in the Pit as constantly burning gas, a self-aware cloud every molecule of which will feel and recognize pain. You will remember all that you have been, and all that you could have been, and you will know that you will never be such as you are again. You will have no recourse in madness, nor hiding place in loss of self. And at the end of your first punishment, you will rebuild yourself as you can, one molecule at a time, into whatever oozing, stinking form you can manage, and so you will spend the rest of eternity."

  Agonostis could see the motion of Lucifer's arm—he both heard and felt the explosion beside him as the Lord of Hell vaporized Jezerael. Her screaming, horribly, didn't stop. It hung in the air, ghostly and ululating.

  Lucifer chuckled; if Agonostis had had any skin left to speak of, it would have crawled.

  "The charges against you are worse," he said. "The punishment will be, too."

  Agonostis could hear Dayne's voice in his head, whispering Repent! Repent!

  He would have if he could have, but one could not reach Heaven out of fear of Hell, and while the terror of what was about to become of him devoured him, he could still not abase himself before God and beg forgiveness. He could admit he was wrong—but he could not forgive God for all the things that had happened to him because he had been wrong.

  Pitchblende read the charges, but Agonostis didn't listen. He heard only the sounds of the screams—only the anguish of the damnedsouls. He knew only that he would join them. So he didn't realize for an instant that Pitchblende had stopped reading, or that a third voice had intruded.

  "So you charge him with loving a human, do you?" Agonostis recognized that voice. It had been more than millennia since he'd heard it—but the voice of God was not a voice any soul could ever forget.

  Lucifer snarled, "My charges in my domain are my business. You have no place here."

  "My place is where I choose to be, Lucifer—it has ever been thus. My business is what I say it is. And if you charge Agonostis with love of one of my children, I say my business is here."