Sympathy for the devil Page 16
"Toejam told me you did all the circuitry checks and passed this piece of trash." Lucifer glared at the little box and punched in Jezerael's code.
Immediately, Jezerael's thoughts poured out.
". . . and give the little bastard a bath in a few minutes, and when she does, I'll have her alone. Then I'll tell her she was screwed by one of Hell's angels, and that he was using her to win points with Lucifer, and that because of him, she's bound for Hell . . .
Lucifer smiled. At least Jezerael's thoughtbug was still functioning. He punched in Agonostis' number again, and again he got dead air—the ominous silence of something gone very, very wrong. Even when Agonostis had been blocking his thoughts, the effort it took had emitted a noisy interference that Lucifer had been able to work through with the descrambler. It was only because of the descrambler that Lucifer knew Agonostis was skimming fifteen percent of the daily take off the top of the leccubi earnings, or that he had already set up a Swiss bank account for himself.
"What time did you lose him?"
"He sort of . . . faded out at around oh-seven-hundred."
Lucifer glanced up at Hell's big clock, which showed thirteen hundred twenty-four, Hell Standard Time. "That was a very long time ago," he said in a voice grown cold and quiet. "Why didn't you call me when he began to fade?"
"I didn't think you would want to be bothered—I remembered what happened to Bootlicker. And I thought it was something that could be fixed."
Lucifer vaguely recalled Bootlicker, consigned to a thousand years as the soul in one of Hell's shovels for disturbing him at an inconvenient hour over a major matter. Lucifer loved destroying people who were actually doing their jobs when they crossed him; it kept everyone else on edge.
And here was Bilgemire, afraid to find himself sharing his doomed colleague's fate, failing to notify Lucifer of important information. The Lord of Hell smiled and leaned against his desk, looking down at the demon.
"I might as well be trying to read the thoughts of the Kuttner bitch for all this is doing," he said in conversational tones. "You've failed me, Bilgemire."
Bilgemire's warty olive green skin flushed black, and he backed up a step. He cringed and whispered, "Per-per-perhaps it isn't the technology, your Awfulness. Perhaps you've—er, we've, ah, lost him to the other side."
"And you didn't call me for hours after my second-in-command deserted?" Lucifer shook his head slowly, and let his smile grow bigger. "Oh, dear. What dereliction of duty that is. I'm afraid I'm going to have to demote you. One thousand years as . . . oh, what would be appropriate?" The Master of Evil rubbed his chin with an index finger and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. "As the fuel that heats the lower reaches." Lucifer nodded. "Yes. Fully aware, constantly burning, constantly reforming. And when you've served your time, perhaps I'll permit you to work your way up to demon again . . . though I think your promotions will be slow in coming. A few millennia as an imp ought to teach you something."
The demon knelt. "Please, oh . . . please mighty Master . . . I throw myself on your mercy—"
"You missed." Lucifer flicked a finger at Bilgemire and the demon vanished with a scream.
The problem of Agonostis remained, of course. Lucifer conjured up a long-distance spiriscope and searched through the cosmic ether for his second-in-command's soul. Agonostis had always been easy to locate before—the components of his soul were scarred and twisted with rage and anger and hatred, jealousy and greed, ambition and duplicity. That raw red seething energy should have drawn the viewfinder of the spiriscope like a beacon in darkness—but Lucifer, while he found many exemplary fallen souls in the cross hairs of his lens, found none that were his missing lieutenant.
Agonostis wasn't redeemed. Lucifer would have had a message on the Hellex from God, bragging about his latest acquisition. God always sent Lucifer messages when one of the Fallen slipped out of Hell's clutches.
Lucifer frowned. Perhaps Agonostis had simply discovered the mechanism of the soul-scanner and found some ingenious method to block it. If that were the case, Lucifer wasn't going to be able to give Agonostis to Jezerael. He'd have to throw him into Research and Development instead. Set him to the task of mass-producing his invention. With several billion stealth-souls, Lucifer could stage his long-dreamed-of assault on Heaven, and God wouldn't even know Hell's army was coming until it had already overrun the place.
Lucifer nodded. That was the most likely explanation. He paged Pitchblende, and when his executive secretary arrived, told him, "I'm going to need several new demons to run the soul-scanner. I misplaced the last ones. And locate Agonostis for me. I want to know where he is and what he's doing."
Pitchblende nodded and backed out of the office. Lucifer settled into his chair and rested his hooves on his desk. He imagined the stealth-soul device, and amused himself by thinking of the fun he would have with it when it was in his possession.
Chapter 42
Dayne finished unwrapping the bandages from her seven-year-old patient's face. She was supposed to apply a new coat of Silvadene, then rewrap the head. Most of the boy's skull had been shaved before surgery, and blood had matted, black and ugly, in the remaining strands of hair.
While she did the dressing and began his bath, Dayne sang songs her mother had sung to her when she was a child.
"If you go down to the woods tonight,
You'd better go in disguise.
If you go down to the woods tonight,
You're in for a big surprise.
'Cause all the bears that ever were there,
Are gonna be there again today . . .
'Cause today's the day the
Teddy bears have their picnic."
She rolled him gently and applied antibiotic ointment to the abrasions on his body. He was so small, and so horribly quiet.
"Down in the valley, the valley so low,
Hang your head over, hear the wind blow,
Hear the wind blow, love
Hear the wind blow,
Down in the valley . . ."
She started to cry. She was angry with herself—she usually managed to stay bright and cheerful and professional when she was around her patients, but her patients weren't usually seven years old. She knew the little boy's doctor was out talking with his parents right then, telling them that the life support that was keeping air in his lungs was never going to make him better, and that they ought to prepare themselves for the worst.
"It isn't fair," she whispered. She sniffled and wiped her tears from her cheeks with the sleeve of her scrub jacket.
"So few things are."
Dayne stiffened. Dr. Mhya Jezick had come in while she was singing, and had managed to do it so quietly that Dayne hadn't even suspected someone else was in the room.
"Leave, please," she told the doctor. "There is nothing here you need to see."
"No. There isn't. I've seen this sort of thing forever, it seems. It is never any more fair or right than this." The doctor smiled at Dayne, a sly smile that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. "I didn't come in here to watch you work, however. I came in here to talk to you about something very important."
Dayne went back to giving her patient a bath. "This isn't a good time. I prefer to spend my time with my patients actually paying attention to them."
"He can't hear you sing. You might as well talk to me."
"I don't know that he can't hear me. I prefer to keep in mind the possibility that he can."
"Trust me. There's nothing left of him but the body—and not an awful lot of that." Jezick didn't leave. Instead she settled into the recliner that sat next to the window, leaned back and crossed her legs. "A group of interested persons has been watching your boyfriend."
"Adam?"
"Is that what he's calling himself? Very amusing."
"I'm not interested in hearing you bad-mouth Adam."
"You
will be. Don't you think it at all strange that he appeared on the day of the Unchaining? Haven't you thought it strange that he was so charismatic, so attractive? Doesn't it seem strange to you that he managed to lure you into bed in mere days, when Dr. Prestwick tried to bed you for months and still hasn't succeeded?" She smiled. "Or that prim Dr. Weist."
Dayne put down her washcloth and dried Tad off, and put the pediatric gown on him. "I don't think Adam is any more unlikely than you."
Dr. Jezick chuckled. "Clever girl." Her smile grew broader. "Agonostis, who has apparently been calling himself Adam when he's with you, is the number one man at Satco, Lucifer's North Carolina division. He's a fallen angel—not a human, not something that ever has been human. It was his job to lead you into Hell, and he won. He betrayed you."
Dayne sighed. "And you're telling me this because you want to help me, right?"
Dr. Jezick frowned. Dayne decided her response hadn't been the one Jezick had expected.
"I assume you'll want to get even—after all, you certainly weren't one of the damned before this."
Dayne repositioned Tad, rolling him to one side and placing pillows under his upper arm and upper leg to hold him in place and keep the pressure off of his limbs. "I knew Adam was one of the Hellraised," she told Dr. Jezick. "Just as I suspected you were. I was pretty sure about Adam before I went to bed with him; I didn't have any doubt at all after." She smiled, remembering Adam's little anatomical omission—an omission that would have been just right had he been the original Adam, too.
Dr. Jezick blanched. "You . . . knew?"
"I knew. I love him, and he loves me, so I didn't feel—and still don't, for that matter—that God would hold our lovemaking against us. Not in any real, significant way. I knew Adam was trying to tempt me, too; I figured that out after the fiasco with the contract." She pulled the sheet up over Tad, and stood there resting her hand on the little boy's arm. "Adam refused to offer me the contract a second time, and told me that I wouldn't like working for Satco; when he did that, I knew he cared about me."
"He . . . did . . . what?" Dr. Jezick stood. "He threw the contest?"
"Apparently. You haven't though, have you? You're here to tempt me, too."
Mhya Jezick got out of the chair and walked to Dayne's side. She towered over Dayne, exuding the same aura of compelling sexuality and inhuman beauty that marked Adam. "Since you know why I'm here, we might as well not play games. I can give you whatever you want. You want to be rich—I can make you richer than nations. You want to be beautiful—I can make you the most stunning woman since Helen of Troy . . . who also ended up working for us, for that matter. You want power—I can make you the President of the United States, if you want the job . . . or the power behind the President, if you prefer that."
"I don't want anything."
"Of course you do. What about Agon—Adam? You want him, don't you? I can give him to you."
"He isn't yours to give." Dayne pulled a roll of tape out of her pocket and began tearing it into short, narrow strips—she needed to redress both IVs.
"He will be after today."
"No. I won't deal with you for Adam. That is in God's hands."
Mhya Jezick glared at Dayne with eyes that glowed red and evil. Then the red glow guttered out, and the fallen angel smiled. "There is something you want, after all, and if you sign my contract, consigning your soul to Hell at the end of your life, I'll give it to you."
Dayne laughed. "You're persistent, but I'm not kidding. There is nothing you can offer me that I'd even consider."
"How about the power to heal your patients?"
Dayne froze. The roll of tape dropped to the bed. Involuntarily, she glanced down at Tad—lifeless Tad, who deserved a whole life ahead of him. What if she could speak a single word and make him better? What if she could bring back his missing eye, restore his damaged face, return his wandering spirit to his body—what if she could, in an instant, give him back the life that stupidity and carelessness had stolen from him?
The ghosts of the patients she'd lost during her career paraded before her—mothers and fathers and grandparents, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters; all of them important to someone . . . all of them important to her. In the next twenty or thirty years, how many more would there be? How many more people beyond hope or help would come through those doors, begging her to do something. How many more of their families would look at her, their eyes filled with a frightening desperation, and ask, "Do you think he'll get better?"
How long would she be able to face them, if she knew that she'd had the chance to make the difference, but that she had chosen to turn it down?
Her soul, or all those lives?
She bit her lip and looked down at Tad, then up at Dr. Jezick. She was beyond words.
Dr. Jezick wasn't. She said, "I have a pen and a contract right here."
Dayne whispered, "Let me read the contract." Out of the corner of one eye, she saw a flash of blue.
Chapter 43
"I'm sorry, your Omnipotence, but I was desperate! Look!"
God, now a tall, beautiful black woman with her hair braided in cornrows, crossed her arms beneath her impressive bosom and said, "I was in the middle of blessing the crops in a drought-stricken village in Africa. I would have liked to finish."
"But she's thinking about signing!"
God gave the angel a blank stare. "Who?"
"Dayne Kuttner!"
God stopped looking put out; her mouth dropped open and she whispered, "Signing? A contract with Hell? That can't be!"
"Jezerael offered her the power to heal."
God hit a few keys on the keyboard and the scene on the monitor rewound, then ran forward. The angel once again saw Jezerael tempting Dayne, and once again heard Dayne say, "Let me read the contract."
God put the monitor on pause. "Don't watch," she said.
"What? What do you mean, don't watch."
"Even I'm tempted to interfere in this—but if we stopped her from making a decision she wished to make, we would be making a mockery of the free choice I promised humankind. So just don't watch. Then if she signs, we won't know until we check the register."
"But Dayne Kuttner is special. She's the one who called on you to . . ."
"They're all special," God said softly, tugging on one bead-tipped braid. "I regret the mistakes each of them makes, and I hope each of them will live well. I hope Dayne will make the right choice . . . but I won't make her. She had faith in me; now I must have faith in her."
"I don't want to turn the monitor off."
God shrugged. "Then watch . . . and I'll watch with you. Remember, though, that only through the exercise of her free will can her soul grow; only through courage in the face of temptation and pain can her spirit soar."
Chapter 44
Dayne put the contract down on the bedside table. Unlike the contract that Adam had brought over, this one was short and to the point. The main clause, written in large print and plain English, specified that she would be able to do miraculous healing for her entire life—that she would be able to make the blind see, the deaf hear, the mute talk, and the lame walk. She would be able to reverse the effects of cancer, of AIDS, of madness, of massive trauma, and of the excesses of lives saturated with high-fat foods and television watching.
The second clause was very clear, too. On her death, her soul would go straight to Hell. "Do not pass GO, do not collect two hundred dollars," she muttered. The remark wasn't funny under the circumstances, but it was the first thing that came to her mind.
In the meantime, she would be able to cure anyone. She would be able to cure everyone, of everything.
Maybe.
She looked up at the fallen angel who was waiting for her signature with obvious eagerness. Dayne, however, was not eager to sign. It wasn't just the going to Hell, though the thought of that terrified her. She also faced the long history of stories that indicated that contracts with Hell always contained appalling loopholes geared t
owards making the human's sacrifice of his soul an empty one. This contract seemed too straightforward. One page. Two clauses.
The loopholes must be in the omissions.
She considered those for a moment. The first, obvious omission was how much time she would be given to work these miracles. She might drop dead immediately after signing, she realized—and then she would have sold her soul to the Devil for nothing. The more she considered that, the more likely it seemed.
"How long do I have?"
"To sign?"
"No—to live."
Jezerael frowned. "I have no way of knowing that. None of us does. Only God can foresee the future—he was very tight with that ability."
"But if I sign, you could make me drop dead immediately afterward, couldn't you? Then I wouldn't be able to heal anyone. My life wouldn't make any difference at all."
Mhya Jezick sighed. "I swear. We have an agreement with What's-His-Name that we can't hurt any of you people. Physically, anyway. So we can't make you drop dead, much as we might sometimes like to. You want I should stick in your contract a clause stating that you will live out your full lifespan?"
Dayne nodded. "Yes. Add that."
"Not very trusting of you." Jezick smiled again—that evil, self-satisfied smile of hers. "Lack of trust is such a good sign." The fallen angel took the contract in her hand, held it and stared at it. After a moment, she handed it back. "This is perfectly straightforward, Dayne. The contract will deliver exactly what it promises. You will be able to heal the masses. We will own your soul."
Dayne's insides twisted. If she could heal her patients, she could do so much good. How could Hell twist that into something evil?
She played out the future in her mind, imagining spending her days in doing good. She recalled the yellow stick-up notes that had covered her locker her first day back to work after the Unchaining—most of those notes had been requests for her to pray for one ailing beloved person or another. If she could not just pray for them, but actually heal them—where could the evil come from that?