Chapter 28
Retire where?” I asked, because I couldn’t help
picturing the devil buying a condo in Boca Raton. She could then go
from angel to fallen angel to mistress of hell to retiree to
snowbird to, inevitably, crazed nursing home resident.
“I don’t know. But
that’s the beauty of retirement.” Satan actually looked wistful.
“Choices. You have choices.”
“Mother, I had no
idea.” Laura was looking at the devil with sympathy writ large all
over her pimple-free, wrinkle-free complexion. “You must be ... I
didn’t know.”
“You’re not gonna be
one of those stage mothers, are you? You know—they didn’t win Miss
Teeny Miss Whatever, so they raise their daughter to be Miss
Teeny—”
“I wouldn’t force
Laura,” Satan interrupted. “But I would ask. A mother can
ask.”
Now Laura’s big
enormous anime eyes were filling with tears. “You poor thing!” she
cried. “You poor, poor—”
I interrupted again.
Laura feeling sorry for Satan was not the plan. Laura taking over
hell was soooo not the plan. I didn’t know what the plan was, but I
was sure it wasn’t either of those. “But if you’ve been doing this
for tens of thousands of years, how can—oh.”
“What?” Laura
asked.
“That odd look on her
face?” Satan asked. “She isn’t constipated. She’s realizing
something for the first time.”
“Shows what you know.
I haven’t taken a dump since I died, so by definition I’m
constipated all the time.”
Laura frowned. “Uh,
I’m not sure—”
“How long do you
expect Laura to live?” I asked, working to keep my voice level and
nonshrieky. Because none of this had occurred to me before. “Will
she be like you? Are you immortal?”
“By my father,
no.” Satan actually shivered. The
thought of what could give the Lady of Lies the shakes was giving
me the shakes. “Just long-lived, like
all my race.”
“Angels?” Laura
asked.
“Yes, for lack of a
better word. We can be killed, certainly. But we never get sick and
we age slowly.”
“I’ll say. You don’t
look a century over eight thousand.” Of course, her stolen shoes helped keep her looking young, the
hateful ...
“When Father created
us, he knew he would need helpers who had long life spans. A child
can grow up in a decade and be dead not even ten decades after
that” Satan snapped her fingers. “Like that! Poof. The light goes out.”
“Yeah, the fruit
flies of humanity,” I said. “That’s us. But why do you need to live
long in the first place? Especially when the average life span
these days is—uh—” Seventy-five? That sounded low. Ninety? Too
high. Where was Marc when I needed him?
“Seventy-five for
men,” the devil supplied. “Eighty for women. Quite an improvement
over, say, the Neolithic era, which was twenty. Can you imagine
being considered a doddering elder before you could legally
drink?”
“Stop
it!”
Satan blinked.
“Pardon?”
“Stop being so
helpful. It’s freaking me out.” A thought struck me, and for a
moment I thought I was going to fall down. “Retire—so Laura—how
...” I tried again. “How long do you expect Laura to live? You
yourself, you’ve lived for—”
Laura seemed to pale
before my eyes. “M-mother? Will I—will I be as long-lived as
you?”
Now, some people
might be psyched to find out they could live for thousands of
years. But Laura, who was occasionally a complete mystery to me,
looked horrified. I could almost feel her counting up all the loved
ones dying of old age, her parents, her friends, her future husband
and children, and their children, and theirs, while she went on ...
and on ... and on ...
“I don’t know,” Satan
replied, no screwing around, no smirky, mean grin. “I don’t know
how long you’ll live, Laura. Nobody knows that, except maybe our
father.” A ghost of a smile. “And he’s quite famous for hiding his
cards.”
Things were starting
to make sense, but instead of liking it, I was becoming more
uneasy. The devil might have a perfectly legitimate gripe and
reason for getting me to bring Laura to hell.
And she might
not.
Or it might be both.
Either way, we were probably in huge trouble. If this was some
big-budget movie, I, the intrepid heroine, would do something
fabulous and heroic. But it wasn’t a movie and I wasn’t an intrepid
heroine. I didn’t even know what intrepid meant.
I turned to Laura.
“Okay, so, we’ve had the tour and the devil wants to retire and
it’s possible you’ve got the life span of Japan, the U.S., and
France combined. Let’s retire back to earth and ponder. For
years.”
“Ah.” Satan cocked
her head. “One moment, please, ladies.” Then she blinked
out.
“Great,” I fumed.
“Stranded in hell. Too bad I didn’t see this coming. Oh, wait, I
did.”
“She wouldn’t strand
us here,” Laura said, sounding pretty reasonable for a half-angel
psycho with a murderous temper and a loathing for lemon bars. “If
nothing else, she needs me, right? She wants me to take over. Is it
true?”
“Which
part?”
“Will I live for a
long time? Tens of thousands of years?”
“I don’t know. But
I’m thinking about the Book of the Dead.”
“Which predicts
you’ll rule for five thousand years.”
“That’s the
one.”
We stared at each
other, surrounded by the damned, sisters who had no control over
events or even, sometimes, themselves.
“She needs me,” Laura
ventured after a long moment. “So she has to be nice. To both of
us.”
“That’s true,” I
conceded. And it was probably why the Lady of Lies was being just
sooo helpful today. “An awful lot has happened in a very short
time.”
“Par for the course,
right?” Laura had a peculiar expression on her face ... she was
trying to eavesdrop into the hell cells without the people in the
cells knowing what she was up to. “I can’t thank you enough for
agreeing to come.”
“Chalk it up to brain
damage. Ongoing brain damage, because I think I’m definitely in
shock.”
“Do you need to lie
down? I guess I could ask one of the damned for a cot. Or maybe a
quilt? Um, excuse me? Excuse me—sir? No, not you, sir, the one in
the cell next to you having what looks like involuntary dental
surgery ...”
“Something’s fucked
up severe,” I announced.
Laura came close to
me, her hands fluttering ineffectually. “Do you feel
faint?”
“Yep. Definitely in
shock. Because I’m having trouble taking all of this
in.”
“It’s okay, Betsy.”
The Antichrist patted my forearm. “It’s hard for both of us, I
think.”
“For example, Laura,
you have sprouted enormous wings. I think I probably should have
picked up on that earlier. Yep, definitely.”
“What?”
“Yeah. I’m pretty
sure I should have. Weird. This is a very weird day.”