Undead and Unwary (34 page)

“Right,” she replied firmly, which was the funniest thing to happen all day.

I had known. I just had no interest in facing it. Or, the truth: no courage to face it. Because in retrospect it was so obvious. Everyone around me had been dropping hints.

Father Markus:
I’ll help
you.

Cathie:
It’s the murderous temper coupled with magic and no-actual-checks-on-power thing. I don’t trust her. You shouldn’t, either.

Sinclair:
You know I stand ready to assist you in this, as in all things.

Hell, even Jessica’s teenagers.
She’s got stuff. It’s not easy running Hell.
“She,” not “we.” Everyone knew I was kidding myself about being co-anything with the Antichrist. Everyone knew I was in it alone. They were just too tactful or kind or scared to explain it to me. And that was on me as well. I had to be approachable, and I had to keep an open mind. “Easier said than done” had never been more accurate, or annoying.

“I’m not here to fight,” I told her, and that was true. Good thing, too. I was exhausted as it was. “Just to tell you that I’ll do it. I’ll take over your job, your destiny, the one you tricked me and lied to me to get out of. But . . .” I snickered, and finished: “But
you
do more good in one week than I have in my whole life. Right?”

And all at once, the Antichrist had trouble meeting my eyes. I was almost sympathetic, because in that moment, for the first and last time, I saw our father in her. She was getting what she thought she wanted, and one day that would bite her in her perfect ass.

“But there are strings, Laura. You don’t get to dump this on me and walk away without
major
strings. I’m giving you the same deal I gave our dad: we’re family or we’re not. This isn’t something you can change your mind about later. And you can’t half-and-half it, either. No flitting down to Hell to check on me or catch up on family gossip.” Laura managed a sour smile at that one, and I smirked back. “Yeah, I know, not likely, right? But even if you were the type, that would all stop now. If you’re giving up your birthright and dumping your responsibility on me, then
do it
, and do it all the way.

“You’re done; you’re out. Hell’s not your inheritance anymore; it’s not yours in any way anymore. You don’t get to jettison the responsibility but keep the perks. No using Hell as a way station to teleport from point A to point B. Hell’s mine now, which means you stay away. You want to pop over to Paris for a week in the spring, you fly Air France like everybody else. If I see you in Hell, I’m going to assume you’re dead.”

If I saw her in Hell, she might be dead anyway.

“I would never end up there,” she said in such a low gasp it was more like a hiss.

“Then it shouldn’t be a problem. Right?”

She nodded, surprised, and I could tell she was thinking hard. I was guessing she thought I’d put up more of a fight. She had no idea that after the showdown with Dad, this one was almost easy. Almost.

“Right,” she said at last. “Agreed.” She made an aborted movement with her arms and I realized she’d been about to hug me, then stopped herself. Of course. You didn’t trick your sister into the worst job in the history of jobs, agree to denounce your demonic supernatural abilities while condemning her for stepping up, and then hug her. Just wasn’t done.

“Anything else? Now’s the time, little sister. I don’t think we’ll be seeing each other for a while.”

“No.” I barely caught it; she coughed and raised her voice. “No. There’s nothing else.”

“Yeah. You’re right about that, at least.” Then I slapped my forehead, because there
was
something else, something we’d both forgotten. Or I had forgotten, and she’d never cared about. “What about the ones who escaped?”

“No one escaped.”

Yep. It was as bad as I’d feared. I knew she’d been desperate to get me to Hell, but I hadn’t guessed how deep that went. “So you lied when you said souls were escaping Hell. That’s what Father Markus—”

“Who?”

“Never mind. He tried to tell me that no one had escaped, that some souls had left by choice. Because you, what, left the gate unlocked? You just let them leave?”

Shrug.

“You didn’t even have to, you stunning shithead! What, like I was taking attendance? You could have just
said
they were escaping; it’s not like I would have known the difference.”

“You wouldn’t have, no.” Again with the not-looking-
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. She 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.”