He stares at me.
“So what’s this all about? You and your crew want a raise? How about two weeks’ vacation while I pull out your intestines with an oyster fork?”
He lowers the knife close to my eye and wiggles it around. The shiny blade glints in the headlights. It looks brand-new. I’m flattered.
“You mortals love to hear yourself talk, don’t you?”
It’s hard to shrug gracefully flat on my back.
“In Hell, I’m usually the most interesting person in the room, so it’s kind of inevitable.”
He glances away for a second like he’s thinking and then jams the knife deep into my cheek, twisting the blade before pulling it out.
“Was that interesting enough for you?”
“Would it help if I said yes?”
He takes a breath and his mood changes. Tense lines of anger soften to something else. Not sadness. More like bone-deep exhaustion.
He says, “Why did you come back?”
“I ask myself that every day.”
He pokes my cheek with the knife again.
“I came here to kill Mason Faim, you ungrateful motherfucker. I saved your ass.”
He lets his head sag for a second. Uses his sleeve to wipe my blood off the knife.
“That’s the problem,” he says. “If you’d just stayed away, we’d be gone.”
I try to sit up. Vetis puts his forearm on my scorched armor and pushes me down. He doesn’t have to push hard.
“Jesus fucking Christ. Are you stupid? Do you really think the legions could have taken on Heaven’s armies and won?”
He looks out the back of the ambulance and then back at me.
“Of course not. They would have slaughtered us. And all of this”—he stretches out his arms to take in all of Hell—“would be over.”
I’m so dumb sometimes I’m surprised I’ve never used dynamite for a toothbrush.
Now I know how Mason got so much of Hell and got so many generals and their troops working with him so fast. The war with Heaven wasn’t a war. It was a suicide pact. Death by cop. Provoke the guy with the gun so he’ll shoot. Storm the gates of Heaven until the golden army burns you in a rain of holy fire. Bye bye Hell. And they wouldn’t have to worry about being sent to Tartarus because I destroyed that. A perfect setup for the biggest suicide cult of all time.
Semyazah was the only holdout. One of the few Hellions left that still believed in Lucifer’s argument with Heaven. Semyazah isn’t stupid. Of course he doesn’t want to be Lucifer. How do you lead an entire civilization of wrist cutters?
No wonder Deumos and her shiny happy church popped up. She’s the only one offering an alternative to dog-paddling around God’s toilet forever. Even if it’s New Age bullshit wrapped up in a Hellion wet dream.
Is this why God broke into a million little pieces? Before Aelita murdered him, Neshamah said Hell was never supposed to be like this. I thought he meant the fires and sinkholes and earthquakes. Now I know what he meant. He put the rebel angels in an eternal time-out and never came back. The Lord’s just and wise punishment inspired millions of his children to mass suicide. No wonder the old man had a nervous breakdown.
“What happens now? You going to slit my throat? With no Lucifer, this place is going to get real interesting real fast. Maybe the whole thing will collapse into one big sinkhole. Won’t that be fun, wading knee-deep in blood and shit for a trillion years, waiting for the universe to end?”
He taps the knife against my Kissi arm like he’s trying to tell if a melon is ripe. He moves the blade to the gauze on my chest, trying to work the tip of the blade underneath so he can lift it and take a look.
“Don’t worry about us. You need to be worried about yourself right now.”
“Why? You’re going to kill me and I’m too hurt to fight back. I’d only worry if I thought there was something I could do and maybe I’d fuck it up.”
“See? Talk. Talk. Talk. That’s all you humans do.”