CHAPTER

FIVE

“Okay . . . that’s not . . . completely terrible.” Whoa. From the Ant, that was high praise. “Except for the shoe addendum. That’s just stupid.”

“It is not! Okay, it’s a little dumb. But give me a break, it took me hours to come up with all that.” Well. An hour. Except it was more like thirty minutes. I had time to kill while waiting for Sinclair to get ready to go another round. For a dead guy, his refractory period was pretty impressive. But not, y’know, instant. Besides, he was getting steadily more sulky about being left at the mansion every time I went to Hell. But that was an argument for another day. Another year, hopefully. “But it’s like Father Markus said: the basics are pretty much always the same. Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t be a dick. The big diff is, it’s not a hard-and-fast set of rules for Christians. Don’t kill and don’t steal apply across religions, or lack of religion.”

“I can’t decide if that’s brilliant or deepest blasphemy. I’ll pray on it and get back to you.” He would, too. He was always tracking me down to let me know he’d prayed on something, and how the power of prayer revealed to him my general incompetence. Blech. “It’s true, you’ve covered the basics,” Markus admitted. “Though I’m not one hundred percent behind the ‘murder is okay in wartime’ clause.”

“When else would murder be okay?”

“Meet the new boss,” Tina murmured, “same as the old boss.” At the stares, she replied, “Why are you looking at me like that? I enjoy the Who as much as the next woman.”

“Except that’d be me,” Cathie pointed out, “and I hate that shit. The Simpsons described the sixties perfectly: ‘What a shrill, pointless decade.’ In fact, as more and more boomers end up in Hell, I’d like to move we forbid all bands who were in the top one hundred between 1960 and 1979. For their own safety.”

“I’m not the same as the old boss,” I said, stung. “I’m giving Hell a much-needed and long-overdue makeover, for free, I might add, which is something the old boss either never thought of or never cared about.”

“I’ll guess it’s the latter,” Markus replied. “So then. How to get this information to the masses?”

“I dunno. Put up flyers?”

“Isn’t that a little late, though?” Marc asked. He was definitely more engaged in the meeting, which was really, really, really, really good. You know that whole “zombies need braaaaains” thing? It was true. But the movies got it wrong: zombies needed stimulation, not Dr. Hannibal frying up brains in butter. Marc needed to keep busy, to keep learning, to stay focused, to be alive. He was a zombie, but one who had been dead maybe a minute. Still (mostly) warm, still (for most intents and purposes) alive. He doesn’t need to eat or drink; he’ll enjoy his Caesar haircut forever; he’ll never have to worry about cancer or Alzheimer’s or arthritis. But if he went too long without stimulation and got bored, or was away from me for too long, he’d start to rot.

Nobody wanted him to rot. Especially after all he’d done for us from the moment I talked him out of jumping from the rooftop, BBC Sherlock–style: embracing our vampire natures, backing us up regardless of the Big Bad du jour, risking his life, being turned into a vampire in the future and a zombie in the present . . . endless. Endless sacrifices.

So we put up with him dissecting mice on our kitchen counters and reading and writing at all hours of the night and doing Sudoku (when will that puzzle trend die?), cleaning out the attic by dumping all the old stuff into the basement, then reversing the process to clean the basement, and roaming the mansion at all hours, always looking for something to keep himself occupied. Not that I had anything against roaming; Sinclair, Tina, and I did it all the time. (We’ve tried to keep the lurking to a minimum.) But it was less creepy when vampires did it, which makes no sense but is true regardless.

“Right? Betsy?” I blinked and realized Marc had been waiting for an answer.

“Okay, I see what you mean. If we put up flyers—”

“We’re not putting up flyers, for crying out loud,” Cathie muttered, staring down at the minutes. “What year do you think it is? Why not just round up all the town criers, have them disseminate the info?”

“—what good does it do? The people who ‘earned’ Hell, for lack of a better word”—There were kids down here, for God’s sake. No kid on the planet fucking deserved an eternity in a lake of fire and that was the fucking end of it. Although if a kid spent a century in a lake of fire, were they a kid still?—“they’re stuck here now. Knowing the rules won’t help them avoid Hell. It’s too late. Isn’t it?”

“It’s still a starting point. As I said, most of them know what they did to deserve eternal damnation.” Father Markus looked around the table at all of us. “But if I understand Betsy’s plan correctly, they can learn what to do to earn their—I don’t know how you’d say it—heavenly parole?”

“I can’t decide if they go to Heaven,” I said, shocked. “It’s absurd enough that I’ve got any say at all in what goes on in Hell! That’s . . . you know.” I pointed at the Lego ceiling. “Up to the big guy. So to speak. Once they’re paroled, they can leave here and go wherever.” Which reminded me: we needed some parole officers of the damned. I might not be as hard-core as the devil was, but I’m not about to release random spirits back into the wild without a way to keep an eye on them for a while. “Tina, while I’m thinking of it, could you make a note for us to talk to some actual parole officers, pick their brains?”

“Of course.” She tap-tap-tapped on her phone, which would have been impressive except I knew how much time she spent playing Cupcake Crash on the thing.

No one else had said anything, so I added, “Even if we could get the word to the living: ‘Hey, here are the new and improved Ten Commandments, even though that’s not for me to say—oh, who am I? Just a vampire who runs Hell on the side—anyway, I’ve got no authority on earth over regular people and God is probably generally disgusted with me, but just abide by the new (except not really) commandments as best you can and maybe you won’t end up with an eternal season pass to the Mall of America of the damned.’”

“That . . . probably won’t work,” Tina said, ever the tactician. (That’s what you call someone who’s super tactful, right?)

“Betsy has a point about not choosing who goes to Hell,” Markus said. “That’s completely out of her—your—purview.” He shifted his full attention to me. “All you can do is decide what to do with the souls who show up in your territory.”

I shivered. My territory used to be designer shoe stores and Orange Julius drive-thrus. Then it was the whole of the vampire nation. Now it was the endless dimension that was Hell, with all its billions of inhabitants. If I kept getting these unasked-for promotions, I’d end up running the universe if I wasn’t careful. And who needed that headache? I now perfectly understand why God created the universe and then basically went on vacation. I could almost picture the mind-set: “Here it is, you’ve got free will. Enjoy and good luck.” God: the first slack-ass.

“I guess it’s God’s purview,” I said at last. “And He’s welcome to it! My end’s hard enough. I wonder—d’you think He knows? About Satan being dead and me being undead but nominally in charge? Of course He does,” I answered myself. “He’s omnipotent. Or Satan went up there to tattle on me.”

“Doubtful,” the Ant said. “She wouldn’t set foot in Heaven for anything. They haven’t spoken since the Fall.”

“A long time to sulk,” Cathie commented, and that made Father Markus bristle.

“It’s a bit more complicated than a father-son spat over who put the ding in the bumper,” he said. “Lucifer upended the world order. Even if there could be forgiveness for such an act—and of course our Father can forgive all who genuinely repent—who’s to say the Morningstar would want it?”

“Clearly she didn’t want it,” Cathie replied. “Or at least, not in all the time she was running the show down here.”

(Clarification: Lucifer, also known as Satan 1.0, was a fallen angel and thus, apparently, genderless. But she’d always appeared to us in the guise of Lena Olin in terrific designer suits and killer footgear, so most of us were in the habit of referring to the devil as “she.” “It” was probably correct, but it sounded weird and mean. Though why I worried about sounding mean to the devil, of all creatures, was a mystery. You can take the Miss Congeniality out of the Miss Burnsville pageant, but you can’t take the Miss Burnsville pageant out of the Miss Congeniality. Or something.)

And all of this raised the question: where did the devil go when you killed her? Not Hell. Not Heaven. Where? Walmart? Where?

I shook my head. “I can’t worry about that now. Too much other stuff on my plate.”

“Majesty, if we cannot stay focused, bringing change will be that much more difficult.” Tina always managed to say “focus, idiot!” without actually saying it, which I appreciated.

“Yes, focus, idiot,” Cathie said. I mentioned I appreciated Tina’s tact, right? Tina’s lips went thin and she opened her mouth, so I jumped in. (Figuratively. Not literally.)

“I am, but there’s so much stuff to worry about! For one thing, I’m still figuring out how my kind-of onomatopoeia works.”

“Omniscience,” Tina corrected gently. “Onomatopoeia is when the name of a sound is its sound, my queen.”

“You lost me,” Marc said, and thank goodness, because I was trying to limit my stupid questions to under a dozen an hour. So far, no good.

“Like honk or quack or sizzle,” she explained, and you’d think that would have helped, but nope. “Quack really does sound like a duck’s quack. Splash really does sound like a splash. Like that.”

“Whatever. So my problem is figuring out the other thing you said. Omniscience. I’m stronger here than I ever have been, which, for a vampire queen, is pretty great.” Queenhood, much as I liked to bitch about it, had its perks. Unlike other vampires, I could bear sunlight, could blaspheme from dawn ’til dusk, could gargle with holy water with no ill effects (except wondering how many people had had their hands in the holy water I just glugged, and then feeling ill). I could accessorize with crosses like a mideighties Madonna and the only thing that would hurt would be knowing how tacky and mideighties Madonna it was.

In Hell, however, I was even more powerful. Which was cool, but terrible. Because . . .

“The power—Satan’s abilities? Are they an executive perk, like a company car? I can use them because she isn’t? They come with the job, like health bennies?”

“I think that’s exactly it,” the Ant said. “You can’t do such things up in your precious mansion, right?” Ooh, she couldn’t resist getting in a zinger. The Ant deeply coveted my Summit Avenue mansion, but was usually better at hiding it.

I took her breaking of the Tenth Commandment (People: I just gave you a list of things not to do!) at face value. “Right. In the ‘real world,’ for lack of a less lame phrase, I can only do vampire queen stuff. Down here I can do a lot more. But it’s all over the place, and totally unreliable. Sometimes I can make things happen . . .” I waved my clipboard, which in addition to holding all the stats on the new arrivals also smelled like blueberries. I had made yesterday’s clipboard smell like strawberries and planned to run the gamut of fruit scents before the month was out. It was important to have goals. “And sometimes not. Watch this. Rain. I want it to rain in here really hard.”

Cathie and Marc let out unanimous yelps of alarm, but even as they scrambled to take shelter beneath the Lego table, nothing happened.

“Oh, God, what does it rain in Hell?” Marc shrieked from the floor. “Acid? Blood? Clumps of pubic hair?”

“Right now it’s not raining anything, even though I ordered it to rain in here. My point! Why do some commands work and some don’t? Oh, come out from under there,” I added impatiently.

Only Father Markus had kept his shit together and remained seated. “Frustrating,” was his only comment, and was that a smile?

“Ya think? Quit grinning at me, you’re awful.” He shrugged it off, which was fine because I hadn’t meant it.

“Since it didn’t rain pubic hair,” Marc said, climbing out from under the table and collapsing back into his chair, “I think it’s as good a time to adjourn as any.”

Not much had been accomplished, but Father Markus seconded it almost before Marc had finished the sentence and, like that, I was paroled from another meeting. Yippee! I was like a kid let out of school! Except I was a kid (one of the youngest in the room, never mind the whole of Hell) let out of the bureaucracy of Hell, which was even better.

“Same time tomorrow?”

Oh, blech.