Undead and Unstable (24 page)

One of these days,
I seethed to myself,
one of these days I’d have so much power that cunning bitch will never be able to—

Whoa.

Okay, that was not the way to handle this. That was no way to think. Ever.

I yawned. “So you got my little sis to sit in for you, and you’re spending your first day off in a zillion—”

“Five billion.”

“—years telling me you got my sister to sit in? Really? That’s how you wanted to spend your day off? Pathetic, thy name is Lucifer.” I forced a chuckle and made myself stare into my laptop like I was still interested in my queen journaling.

“She’s got quite the aptitude for it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“In fact, she reminds me of you.”

“Mmmm. There’s just one
t
in
pathetic
, right?”

“The other you, I mean. The one who’s done something. The one worth talking to.”

“She said, talking to me, anyway. Go away, Lena Olin. Go take God out for a late Father’s Day brunch. There’s an Old Country Buffet around here somewhere.”

I could actually feel the room getting warmer around me as she struggled to hold her temper. It made the shock and fear I’d felt about hearing what Laura was doing almost not very bad news.

Because why
was
she hanging around? It was like she wanted something. Wanted something from me …
not
Laura. But what?

As bad: Ancient Me lurking in her own past. She wanted something, too, but she’d at least been a little more open. She was waiting for me to do something. Or waiting for me not to do something. Ah yes. So helpful.

It stank. There was no logical reason for them to be just … hovering in my life. So something big and bad was coming, was on the way, or worse … was here.

“You’re kind of a voyeur, aren’t you? You like watching us.”

“I’m a fan of man,” she said, swiping Al Pacino’s line from
The Devil’s Advocate.

“You really like to watch. Most of the time I see you, you’re not actually doing anything. You’re just hanging around until something happens. It’s kind of gross,” I told her in my most pleasant tone.

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand, idiot child.”

“And here with the superiority thing again. Yes, you’re so far ahead of us poor mortals we can never ever ever understand all your layers of awesomeness.” I laughed. “Wow, I could hardly get that out with a straight face.”

“I like you more when you don’t think so much.”

I’ll bet you do. Also, no one has ever told me that, ever.

“He thought too much, too, except at the end, when He simply refused to think for Himself.” Satan was staring over my shoulder, lost in thought. I’d seen her like this once or twice before, and it never failed to unsettle me, and make me feel a little sorry for her.

Which I
hated
.

“Are you aware you’re talking out loud?”

“Stupid boy, oh that stupid, stupid boy,” the devil muttered.

“Aww … not Jesus again.” You know how some people talk to themselves? She talked to Him. The kid she couldn’t save. The one thing the devil admitted regretting. Not the whole turning-against-God thing. Not getting half of heaven to turn on Him with her. Not talking all sorts of people through the ages into indulging their worst fears/lusts/rages/murders/hatreds. All that? Just a day at the office.

Him, though. The boy. She felt bad about Him.

I sighed and shifted in my chair so I could face her. “I can’t believe I’m saying this to you, but you should ease up on yourself. Free will, right? He had it, too. He knew what was coming. Knew since He was a kid, or at least, that’s the way I heard it. And you gave it the old college try, tempting Him…”

“
Warning
Him!”

“Okay, okay, don’t get your asbestos panties in a twist. You tried to warn or tempt or whatever, and you couldn’t, and they—”

“They killed Him. Like some half-dead alley cat … you see grimy little kids poking it and prodding it and after three days of that kind of handling the poor thing just gives up. That’s what He did for all you unworthy
idiots
. And His reward was … nothing.” She was actually giving off heat now. Being in the room with her was like standing in front of an oven full of roasting beef. I thought about all the old wood my house was made of and got, um, perturbed.

She was pacing now. The oven was pacing, and the heat waned and grew strong and waned, depending on where she was in the room. “You’re all still unworthy. Mankind isn’t even potty trained. A six-week-old puppy bitch knows not to shit where she eats. You guys can’t figure out what a
puppy
knows.”

I leaned back in my chair and looked at her. Either I was getting used to these confrontations, or my fear circuits were burning out. Cool as a cuke, that one, almost always. But I’d seen her angry before. I’d
made
her angry before. I’d even hurt her. But I was never sure if I was working my agenda, or hers.

See, one of the (many many many many) things I hate about the devil is how you can be booking along, minding your own business, thinking that everything you’re doing is part of your bigger plan, and you never find out until it’s leagues past too late that it was
her
plan you were following. Always hers, all along.

You were ready to pull the cart, but guess who’d been holding the reins the whole time? And never told you about the spurs ’til you felt them digging into your ribs?

“Are you channeling a cowboy or indulging a heretofore-unknown longing to be sidekick to the Lone Ranger?”

I blinked. I’d probably been staring at her with a blank look on my face for five minutes. “What, you read minds now?”

“More desires than minds, and yes. On occasion. It’s not much of a trick. As a species, you’re not especially complex.”

And here she was again. Just hanging around. Nothing was going on. Oh, except Ancient Me had hitched a ride from the future and was
also
hanging around.

Too bad I had no idea what to do about any of it. We were all in a holding pattern, and I couldn’t imagine what I could do to blast us out of the waiting game.

Nope. I wasn’t a secret genius, or a computer freak. I wasn’t a doctor or a cop or a farmer turned philanthropist. I wasn’t an old wise vampire and I wasn’t a pregnant millionaire. I wasn’t a Pack werewolf with all the power and backup that implied, and I wasn’t a formerly feral vampire who had survived decades of torture.

I wasn’t anything like that. I had been a slightly above average office employee before I died, and a considerably below average vampire queen after I died.

What I knew was barreling into situations with no prep and no help. What I knew was stomping right through a problem until I somehow stumbled over the—

You have to look to your strengths. You do have some, you know.

Oh.

Oh!

I clicked to save my queen journal, all two paragraphs of it so far. Slapped my laptop closed. Stood. Stretched. “Say, Lucy…”

“Do
not
call me that.” Her mouth was twisted in a sneer, but she was watching me carefully. Almost … nervously?

Satan is afraid of you. Don’t you find that at all interesting?

As a matter of fact, I did. Finally.

“Lucy, how about we cut the shit?”

The devil looked into my eyes … and she knew that I knew.

THIRTY-NINE

“Why? Why, Beetlejuice? That’s really all I want to know
before we do what you want us to do. Why?”

“Beelzeb—”

“Stop it. Why?”

She sniffed. “I can never make you understand.”

“
No kidding.
I’ve had a head full of how superior you are and how wormlike I am. Fine. But you gotta try, okay, O great and powerful asshat? Before you kill me and I die screaming—which I’ve been doing for the last six months, anyway—you gotta try. I can’t die not knowing. I won’t.”

She spread her hands, and in one of those weird why-am-I-thinking-this? moments, I saw again how beautiful her hands were. “What do you want to know? I’ll do what I can.”

“Fine. Thank you.” I took an unnecessary breath … funny how some habits were so hard to let go. That was probably a metaphor for something. “First there was nothing and then there was God and He made you guys and that’s all there was for a while, just Him and the angels, and then He made us.

“So you were never human and you’d never understand anything about our pathetic stupid lives, right? And even if you
were
ever human, you’ve been around for five billion years, so any perspective you ever could have had would have gone kaput ages ago, so you’d never understand anything about our pathetic stupid lives, anyway. It’s like you’re watching a bunch of grasshoppers and they’re so outside of your experience it’s not even worth trying to be their king, trying to even
explain
you’re their king; it’s just easier to do your own thing with them and never mind the fallout, right?”

Satan shrugged her elegant shoulders. “Right.”

“So why, why, why?” I cried. I realized I was almost crying, and hoped the devil wouldn’t notice. “Why even bother? Why the tricks, why the sneaking? Why are you still trying to get people to be their worst, do their worst, all the time? What do you get out of it? It can’t still be interesting. It can’t do much of anything for you after all this … you’ve seen every bad thing in the human condition. A million years ago you must have known there were never going to be any surprises. It’s gotta all be just so …
fucking
…
boring
. So what’s the
point
?”

“Well,” the devil began. Then she paused, thinking it over. Finally: “If there was one, I forgot all about it a long time ago.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No. It’s not that easy. You don’t get off that easy.” I was pretty sure I was gonna faint. Things were definitely getting swimmy around the edges. Yep. Wait—no. I’d held off rage-and-terror-induced unconsciousness for the nanosecond. “No.”

“Yes. That’s all. The reason is there is no reason. The reason is you don’t know and I don’t care. The reason is green. The reason is number twenty-seven. There was no point, is no point, won’t be one no matter how much you shrill and whine and bitch. So live with it, or die with it.”

Yes.

That was just right.

I took another unnecessary breath. “Laura’s watching the shop, huh?”

“Yesss…”

“So no one’s gonna notice if you go missing for a while, I bet.”

“What in the worlds are you—”

I launched myself at the devil.

FORTY

Here’s the thing about the devil: she’s really strong. She’s
really smart. She’s really fast.

And she’s really old.

And tired.

She was still giving off heat, but it didn’t hurt me. Either it wasn’t real heat—the stuff in my world that could burn things like mansions and fences and people—or I just didn’t give a shit. Or it was something else, something I knew nothing about. Yeah, it was probably the last thing.

We slammed back and forth like a couple of alley cats, spitting and snarling and clawing and punching and kicking. I could hear walls cracking, furniture breaking. A snap that was prob’ly a couple of my fingers. Maybe one of her ribs? Nope, one of mine.

“Good time to start praying,” she forced out through gritted teeth.

“Don’t need His help to kick your ass all over this mansion.”

She seemed to think that over, which was exactly what I hoped she’d do. The devil was a bitch, but she was a smart bitch.

Come on, Lena Olin, you jaded horrible thing, come on! You don’t want to do this here. You want to do it on your turf!

ELIZABETH!

Shit! Sinclair, knowing I was up a creek
sans
paddle and coming on the run. The gorgeous idiot could really screw this up for me. Us. Okay, me.

“If you won’t … pray … for you … will you pray … for me?”

“Never in life,” I gritted back. Also: WTF? Don’t tell me my nutball seat-of-my-ass hunch was actually
right
. I’d just wanted to do something. I didn’t expect to be right.