Epilogue
l had just finished checking on my new “ink” and
deciding who would rest in peace, and who would be my new gopher,
when a familiar doorway made of Hellfire began cutting its way into
my office.
I leaned back, opened
the top drawer, extracted the pen I’d had made just for this, then
smiled as the devil dropped through the door in the ceiling onto my
carpet.
“That’s dramatic,” I
commented, “even for you.”
Laura Morningstar
grinned. “What can I say, big sister? I’m in a flamboyant
mood.”
“Another of your
would-be heirs made it through adolescence?” I asked idly. “Or
another dupe allowed himself to be seduced? Or did you think up
something even more wonderfully awful to do to our
father?”
“All three!” my
sister answered, hugging herself with glee. She was, as I was,
still a beautiful woman. In fact, at only a thousand-some years
old, she was years away from her prime.
Which was fine with
me. I didn’t need her in her prime, but she needed me in
mine.
“I’m glad to see
you,” I said, and it was nothing but the truth.
“I’m sure.” She
plopped into the chair opposite my desk. “Relieved they’re
gone?”
“There are no words,”
I fervently replied. “What a distasteful business.”
“You just don’t like
remembering how you used to be.”
Among other things, yes. But never mind, little sister.
Never mind.
“And speaking of the
bad old days, I’m finished with your husband.”
“Excellent. Because
I’m ready to take him back.”
“Oooh, sounds kinky.
Can I watch?”
“It doesn’t, and no,
you cannot.”
Laura held out her
hands. A small circle of Hellfire—even after all these centuries, I
still couldn’t look at it directly—opened about two feet above her,
and an enormous book landed in her hands with a distinctive
whump!
“Behold, the king of the vampires,” Laura dropped the book
on my desk. “It took longer than I anticipated to quiet him, skin
him, and bind him, I won’t lie: I was impressed. He never
made a sound. Not once in seventy-five years.”
I sighed . . . an
unnecessary breath, but old habits were the hardest to break. Case
in point: my husband.
I had disliked him at
first. Then had become infatuated. Then devoted. And then
disappointed. Finally: disenchanted.
He never would have
helped me keep things the way they were, the way I knew, from my
travels with the devil, they had to be.
Really, there was
only one way he could help me now.
“It’ll take a while
to get it all down exactly right. There’s quite a bit to
remember.”
Laura yawned. She’d
never been one for details.
“But once it’s
finished, you’ll be able to bring it back? It’s a trip of more than
a thousand years, you’ll recall.”
“If I recall, why
d’you remind me? And a thousand years might as well be six months,
after all this time. Or did you forget about practice making
perfect?” She smiled. “I got my start schlepping you around Salem,
remember?”
“Vividly.”
I picked up my pen,
flipped open the cover of the blank book, dipped the tip of the pen
in blood, and began to write on my husband.
Chapter one, page
one.
The Book of the
Dead.