Sympathy for the devil Read online

  "I'll drop that charge, then," Lucifer shouted. "I have enough others that I can sentence him to the deepest of misery for the rest of eternity."

  God said, "Not so. There is no place in Hell for love. Anyone who loves truly will never be yours, Lucifer—and Agonostis loves truly."

  "He doesn't love you." Agonostis could hear the sneer in the Archfiend's voice.

  "No. He doesn't. But love is an emotion of hope and faith. If he does not love me now, that is of no matter. His soul is changed for the better, and may change further with time. He may come back to me someday. In the meantime, he is no longer yours."

  An explosion of white light blinded Agonostis. The pain stopped, the screaming stopped, and he discovered that he could breathe again, and move his arms and legs. His knees buckled and he sobbed and fell to the ground—to a giving, spongy ground that felt like nothing he had ever touched before. His vision cleared. He was on a gray plain that was almost entirely featureless, though speckled in a few places with things of great beauty; Agonostis saw the steep banks of a rushing stream over to his right, and just a section of clear white water that rushed over huge, slick, moss-covered boulders with a delightful thunder. The stream began and ended in the nothingness of the gray plain, but the tiny section of it that existed was as lovely as anything the fallen angel had ever seen.

  "This is Purgatory," God said. Agonostis looked around, but could not see God; his voice, though, was clearly audible. "Many souls find it a valuable place to work through the problems they could not deal with in life. The only things here are those things the soul creates for itself; things that have some deep significance. The creations fade after the soul has made its choice between Heaven and Hell, or has decided on one of the other options. I added Purgatory after you . . . left. You won't have seen what it can do, but its stillness and silence have been beneficial to many of my children."

  Agonostis stood. He felt the peace of the place soak into him, but he did not desire such monklike peace. "Why have you brought me here, God?" he asked.

  "What I told Lucifer was true. There is no place in Hell for love. But I didn't say the rest—it concerned none but the two of us. If Hell cannot hold you, Heaven cannot claim you either. There is no place in Heaven for the anger you still bear, Agonostis."

  Agonostis looked around, then hung his head. "This second chance . . ." He sighed. "I don't want to appear ungrateful. I thank you with all my heart for pulling me from Lucifer's clutches."

  God chuckled. "But . . . ?"

  "You mentioned other options."

  "There are always other options, Agonostis. They involve sacrifice, and they involve determination and courage, but there are always other options."

  Agonostis swallowed, and took a deep breath. "Yes. Could I ask for one of these options? Could I return to earth?"

  "To earth? I don't see how. You are neither Lucifer's angel nor mine. On earth, the powers of Hell now walk the streets in broad daylight; the powers of Heaven work, as they always have, in stillness and in subtlety. But you . . . with the forces of eternity to draw on, what power would you represent?"

  "I would give up the powers of eternity."

  Agonostis listened with heart tearing against his chest, while the Almighty pondered in silence.

  "Would you?" God asked at last. "You don't know what it is to be human, Agonostis. You put on human flesh when you walked the earth, but the immortal you was still inside that flesh. You tasted both the love and the pain of human existence, but you did not taste the certain knowledge of death that drives my human children. Death is a goad, my son, the likes of which you have never known. It is the wellspring of human hope and fear, and of human creativity; all art and all science are the attempts of the human spirit to conquer it. You are a creature of eternal summer, Agonostis, and death is winter without the spring that follows. You have known many things, but you have never known grief—and if you are human, grief will shock you with its suddenness, and weigh you down with the burden of its company. It is because they can love and laugh and create beauty in the face of annihilation, knowing always that they must die, but never knowing when, that I place my human children above all the hosts of Heaven. Their courage is unlike anything you have ever experienced."

  Agonostis squared his shoulders and said, "If I can be with Dayne, Almighty, I will willingly face death."

  "You can take nothing with you, Agonostis, but your memories. Further, you will have a fleshly body, weak and mortal. You will have neither the powers of Hell nor the powers of Heaven—only those things that you can earn by the sweat of your brow will be yours. But you will have a human soul—and if, when you die, you are judged one of mine, you will be greater than you have ever been."

  Agonostis nodded. "I understand."

  God said gently, "Then go—and go with my blessing."

  The gray, featureless silence of Purgatory swirled up around Agonostis, and filled his eyes and his ears and his mouth. He was filled by its emptiness, and felt himself changing, falling, growing weaker and more fragile, prey to pain and illness and huge, enveloping fear. Conversely, he felt excitement building within himself; the thrill of unimaginable adventure on the brink of happening, the wonder of a future of infinite possibility.

  So this is what it is to be human, he thought.

  Chapter 46

  Agonostis' infernally clever plan couldn't die just because Hell had lost Agonostis, Lucifer thought. The Devil's Point theme park stood to drag in souls faster than any gimmick Hell had ever tried, but the whole concept needed to be under tough management—it needed to be in the hands of someone who was as close to irredeemable as any Hellish soul could be.

  Lucifer had a few openings Earthside. Souls he had considered unsalvageable were drifting Heavenward at an alarming rate; while Hell would not be depopulated of its billions any time soon, Lucifer resented the loss of even one soul to the opposition. He needed to make sure the souls who went up to earth wouldn't keep on rising. He needed the truly hideous, the incorrigibly vile, the bitter, the viperous, the deadly—

  And the worst of the lot he needed to promote Earthside as manager and place in charge of building Devil's Point.

  He closed his eyes and thought, then pulled up the personnel records in Quick'N'Dead. He looked for war criminals, mass murderers, poisoners; he came up with a few possible subjects. Adolf Hitler, transmuted into his executive secretary Pitchblende, might have held some possibilities, but Lucifer considered him too tender. Pol Pot, the Cambodian nightmare, had just arrived, and would still have all the deliciously rough edges of his humanity about him, but he'd not shown any real skill at budgeting, and Lucifer wanted an operation that brought in both souls and money. Besides, he'd lacked subtlety. Genghis Khan lacked administrative skills, and was as crude as Pol Pot had been. Lucretia Borgia might have done, but she didn't work well with others. Lucifer had the same reservations about his list of serial killers. And while a few of the late American presidents had shown themselves to be both smooth liars and fine manipulators, able to work well with large numbers of people, none of the Democrats knew a damned thing about economics, and the Republicans couldn't have made a theme park fun if they'd had Walt Disney as their chief advisor—and Disney was working for the other side.

  So I need to think lower profile, he thought. Someone who was a clever slime—good with money, evil as Hell itself, someone who had done horrible things and who hadn't gotten caught. He punched in the characteristics he was looking for, and waited interminably for Hell's computer system to run through its list of evildoers.

  Lucifer read the printout that started churning out of the printer with some frustration. The Evilness index, which could run from a low of two hundred (high enough to get damned) to a high of one thousand, for most individuals ran in the three-fifties and four hundreds; pretty damned unimpressive. A few souls topped five hundred, but that wasn't high enough.

  Just to check the numbers, Lucifer brought up Pol Pot's record. He scored in the
high eight hundreds—that was very good. It was a shame he hadn't bothered to get an MBA.

  But then an actual MBA popped out with a score of nine-sixty. Lucifer whistled and double-checked the records. Nine-sixty, and steady as a rock. The man's record, on the surface, was hardly a picture of evil. He'd been a small-town businessman, widowed with three kids, two boys and a girl. He'd run a tight ship business-wise, and while he was hardly well-liked in the town where he'd lived, he had managed to spend his whole life there without ever raising the suspicions of even his closest neighbors.

  He'd killed his wife to get rid of her after she'd had their last child—killed her because the doctor had informed him that she wouldn't be able to have any more children. Then he'd systematically abused and molested all three of his own children. One had died in an "accident" engineered by his father when the man had suspected he was going to tell; the other two had learned their lessons and kept quiet. And when they grew up and fled, the man had started preying on children in his own neighborhood, and picking up strays. He'd gotten sicker and more deadly, until his backyard was a veritable graveyard, full of the children he'd destroyed.

  No one had ever known—or if they had, they'd been too terrified to tell.

  Lucifer smiled slowly and leaned back, studying the name on the paper. Nothing was lower than a child molester, a pederast, an abuser of the innocent and helpless. Not even God had much hope of seeing one of those monsters repent.

  "Pitchblende!" he shouted. "Get in here! I have a job for you."

  Chapter 47

  Dayne, curled up on the couch, cradled the cordless phone against her shoulder and sniffled. "I don't want to be comforted, Paige. I just want to stay at home for a few days and be alone." She pulled the afghan up under her chin and said, "I'm sure. I really don't want company."

  She switched off the phone and dropped it to the floor, then rolled over and shoved her face into the nubby cushions of the back of the couch. She was a lot more depressed than she'd let on to Paige—she didn't care if she never got up again. Her life felt hollow; emptier than when Torry had died, worse than when she'd lost the baby. Adam had been her hope of happiness; he'd been all her dreams rolled up into one wonderful package. He'd been her chance to get it right this time—her chance to find out if love was everything the songs and the novels said it could be.

  And now, for all she knew, both of the men she'd cared for in her life were in Hell.

  She wondered if she'd ever sleep again.

  She clutched a throw pillow to her chest and sobbed.

  "Please don't cry," a soft voice whispered in her ear. Warm lips kissed the back of her neck.

  She screamed and rolled over, bringing her knees up, ready to attack whatever stranger had broken into her house—but her scream died off into silence, and her legs dropped weakly to the couch, and she gasped.

  "Adam! How . . . ?" She stared at him. His face was unchanged, his body was just as she'd seen it before—except with navel this time. He knelt by the couch wearing nothing but the worried expression on his face, and he was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. Yet something about him was different. The aura of otherworldliness, the compelling air of nearly magical bad-boy sexuality—that was gone.

  She was surprised to find she was glad to see it go. He seemed both more touchable and more real to her than he ever had.

  She finished her question. "How are you here?"

  "I made a deal with God."

  "But Lucifer dragged you back to Hell."

  "And God pulled me out. I loved you—and there is no love in Hell. That is, in fact, the defining characteristic of Hell."

  Dayne nodded. That made sense to her. "But how did you get back here?"

  "I asked God to make me human, to let me be with you."

  Dayne frowned. "You were immortal."

  "Now I'm something more." He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. "I'm human. And I love you. And if you'll let me, I'll love you for the rest of my life."

  "And beyond," Dayne whispered, kissing him back. "If love is the defining characteristic of Heaven, there will be a place for our love there. And I could ask for nothing more than to love you forever."

  Chapter 48

  God, once again in his Christian form, smiled at the scene on the monitor.

  "You must be delighted to have been proven so right. This business of Hell on Earth isn't at all what I'd expected—and to have gotten another chance to redeem none less than Hell's second-in-command . . ." The recording angel leaned back from his keyboard and looked up at the Almighty.

  "I'm happy for Agonostis and for Dayne. I always rejoice when my children find love, and when they triumph."

  The angel chuckled. "I must say I was glad to see Jezerael get what she had coming." He looked up at God, expecting a smile, or some form of agreement. Instead, he was startled to see a tear roll down God's cheek and disappear into the luxuriant white beard. "You weren't amused?"

  "No. I always hope, you see. . . . She did something good. I thought for a moment that the results of her actions might reach her—that she might feel once again the joy that comes from kindness. I always hope." The Almighty wiped at the tear, and the one that followed it. "Heaven is for you," God said gently, "and for them," as he pointed to the Earth spinning lazily below. "For me, there can be no Heaven until the last of my children is safely home."