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In some ways I’ll always be alone. But there are people who’ll miss me when I go. Maybe they’ll drag me onto a mountain and burn me so a crow can carry me back to—does it really even matter anymore? Heaven is open and Hell is obsolete. Except for the doom twins. While the other damned get to bum-rush the celestial stairs to the pearly gates, I’m keeping them in the House of Knives. It’ll be chaos Downtown for a while. No one will notice they’re missing.
Finally, I drop into a deep, dark sleep.
After all that’s happened, I’m afraid of nightmares, but if I dream at all, in the morning, I don’t remember a single one.
I wake up to a great smell. When I sit up I find
Samael sitting on the end of the bed sipping from a china cup.
He says, “Good morning, sunshine.”
“Is that coffee I smell?”
“Did you want a cup?”
“In fact, I do.”
“Sorry. This is the last of it.”
I throw the covers off me and try to get up but fall back over.
“Ow.”
“I take it you and Zadkiel had some fun last night.”
“She beat me like I stole her car.”
“Statistically, there’s a good chance you did at some point.”
“Please tell me that she wasn’t lying. The gates of Heaven are still open?”
He takes a sip of coffee and says, “They are indeed. Damned souls are flooding in while rebel angels are flooding out. It’s quite comical really. A sort of rerun of what I did with my pack of rebels all those years ago.”
“Bunch of copycats.”
“Unimaginative dross.”
I try sitting up and this time it works. Stumbling through the wreckage, I make it to the kitchen and open a cabinet. There’s a whole unopened pound of French roast on the shelf.
“You said there wasn’t any coffee.”
“You found some? Why don’t you make us a fresh pot?”
I find a filter, shove it into the blessedly intact coffeemaker, and pour in half the damn bag of French roast.
“I hope you like yours strong.”
“Like the Rock of Gibraltar,” Samael says. And looks around. “A bit of a step up for you.”
“Yeah. It’s not bad.”
“No. I meant the debris. You usually get beaten up in much worse places. You’re on your way to the big time, Jimmy.”
The coffeemaker burbles like it’s laughing at one of us, and I’m the only one covered in bruises.
I say, “Do you know how much blood I’ve lost over just the last few days? I could freeze it and carve you a new suit from it.”
Samael makes a face.
