I had a horrible headache when I returned to my body, and was now almost positive that I had a concussion. If Bedlam had been around, I would have had him wake me up during the night to make sure my pupils weren’t dilated, but in his absence, I decided to chance an uninterrupted night’s rest. One advantage to being immortal was that you could be pretty sure you wouldn’t die in your sleep.
I awoke and opened the diner on time the next morning. Madame Zarita was back in her booth, and I had a customer, a boy with hair of a particularly unpleasant shade of yellow who ordered a rare steak with tomato juice. I was standing behind the counter waiting for him to finish when Sebastian walked in.
“Hi, Carrie.” He glanced at the jukebox, which, after seventy-two hours straight of playing different break-up songs, was starting to grow desperate. Currently, it was playing the scene from La Bohème wherein Colline sings farewell to his coat. “It plays opera?”
I pulled a mug out from under the counter, assuming that he would want some coffee. “It plays whatever Bedlam wants it to. One week it played nothing but Indian mourning music, over and over. Be grateful for the opera.”
“So, Bedlam.” He looked at the stool upon which he had last seen my friend sit. “Is he really…?”
I poured a cup of coffee and slid it over to him. “A demon? Yes, but he’s not so bad. I mean, technically, yes, he is a fallen angel, but he does his best to be good. Most of the time.”
“Wow.” He sat on one of the schools and took a sip of the coffee. “I mean, I guess I knew before. I sold my soul to one and everything, but I guess it’s hard to fathom demons walking around the earth.”
I shrugged. “There are angels too, if it makes you feel any better.”
“Really?” It did seem to cheer him some. “What are angels like?”
“Honestly? Mostly self-righteous and irritating.”
He smiled, then took another few sips of coffee. “So you’re probably wondering what I’m doing here.” I nodded at him. “Well, it’s Tuesday now, and my contract is coming due on Saturday, which means I have fewer than five days left to spend on Earth. I’ve been trying to spend as much time with my family as possible, and I plan to spend the rest of the week with them. But the thing is, I need a break. It’s so hard to pretend to be cheerful and normal around them when I know I’m going to be gone soon. Felicity knows, but she’s angry at me about it, so that’s not much of a comfort. I want to spend a day with someone who knew what I was going through and wouldn’t judge me. And the only person I could think of like that was you. So I was wondering if you wanted to hang out with me today.”
I opened my mouth to answer, but he continued before I could say anything. “I totally understand if you don’t want to. I mean, you don’t know me or anything, and I guess you have your diner to run. Plus, I was going to do some things I like to do in the city—you know, for the last time—and I would understand if you thought that was boring. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask.”
His request surprised me. It had been a long time since someone human had wanted to spend time with me for the pleasure of my company and not the insights I provided.
“Well, I need to wait until my customer goes,” I said, nodding at the yellow-haired boy, who was still working his way through the steak. “But I don’t have that many customers, so I can close for the day without a problem. Dwayne will probably be overjoyed to get the day off, as long as I still pay him.” I smiled at Sebastian, and much of his nervousness abated. “I could use a day off. I don’t remember the last time I had one. Do you want something to eat while you are waiting?”
“Actually, I would love some bacon and scrambled eggs. If you don’t mind.” I sent his order back to Dwayne and poured him an orange juice.
Sebastian sat on a stool. “So of all the things you could be doing, why run a diner?”
I shrugged and slid his juice over to him. “I don’t know where I had the idea. In the past, I’ve always worked for other people, but one day I just decided I wanted my own place. And a diner seemed so wonderfully normal. I love being able to spend time in my own space, where no one can kick Bedlam out if he stays too long.”
“I can see that.” Sebastian’s food came out soon thereafter, and by the time he was done eating and I had washed his dishes, the diner was empty again, except for Madame Zarita, and she seemed pleased to be able to spend the day with her grandchildren. I switched the sign to “Closed” and ventured outside.
Feeling the breeze that hit me, I realized that it had been several weeks since I left the diner—for somewhere other than Hell, at least. I used to go out all the time, but I had recently been in a slump. There wasn’t much to see on my block of brick-faced houses and businesses. The one-way street was lined on both sides with parked cars, and the unpleasant smell of exhaust fumes wafted through the air. We passed a few other pedestrians on the street, and Sebastian led me to where he had found a spot to park.
“So what are we doing today?” I climbed into his black sedan. I didn’t have a car and had never learned to drive one. When I needed to go somewhere public transportation couldn’t access, Bedlam provided the car.
Sebastian grinned at me. “It’s a surprise.”
I didn’t see what good it did him to surprise me on his special day, but I decided to go along with it. “Do I get a hint?”
He thought for a moment. “How do you feel about hearts?”
“Um… fine for Valentine’s, but I’m not going to wear little ones all over my clothes.”
He laughed. “No, I meant the organ, the thing that beats in your chest.”
“Oh.” I considered his question. “I never really thought about it. For most of my life, the heart was considered to have the functionality of the brain. This concept of the heart as a blood-pumping muscle is rather unromantic, in comparison.”
He glanced at me in astonishment, and I suspected he would have stared if he hadn’t had to keep his eyes on the road. “How old are you, anyway? I mean… you just…”
I laughed at him. “It’s okay. I gave up being sensitive about my age a long time ago. I stopped aging when I was about sixteen, I think. We didn’t keep track of dates then like we do now. I guess I look older than that, since sixteen was a lot older back then. I was old enough to be married and have a child. As for when I was born, I’m not entirely sure. Most of the historical markers that you would know were identified in retrospect, and I wasn’t near them at the time. But I believe it was somewhere in ancient Mesopotamia.”
“That… is a very long time ago.”
“It is.” I glanced over at him; he was hiding it well, but the conversation was making him uncomfortable. “I’m creeping you out, aren’t I?”
“It’s not that. I just can’t even imagine living that long. I mean, cognitively, yes, I can know that you’ve been alive for thousands of years, but I can’t really imagine what it must be like.”
“I understand.” I turned my head to look out the window at the cars lining the side of the street. “Sometimes I look ahead, at all the time I’m going to have left, and realize that it’s infinitely longer than what I’ve already lived, and it terrifies me. But I think I’ve been alive for so long that the idea of not having that—the idea of actually dying—terrifies me even more.” We were silent for a few minutes. “So tell me about yourself and your life.”
He shrugged as he turned the car left, onto another narrow one-way street. “Not too much to tell. I was born and raised in Philadelphia by a good Catholic family, with my younger brother and sister. I went to college at Villanova, where I majored in Sociology and Spanish. I was going to try to go on to law school; I wanted to be a public defender or work for Legal Aid. But then Felicity got sick, so there wasn’t money for it. I figured I wouldn’t be around to finish, anyway.”
Sebastian drove us to a location on the Franklin Parkway. The signs said we were at the Franklin Institute. I had heard of it, I thought. It was some kind of science museum.
I felt an unexpected thrill to be going somewhere new. I must have been more bored with the diner than I realized.
“Come on!” Sebastian grabbed my hand and dragged me further into the museum. We came to a stop in front of something that looked like an enormous red plastic human heart, with a line of people coming out of a large purple blood vessel.
“Wow, that… is a giant heart,” I said.
Still holding my hand, Sebastian pulled me to the end of the line. “I know it’s lame, but we used to come here all the time when I was a kid. It’s a learning tool. You move through the heart and lungs the way a blood cell would, and it tells you where you are, each step of the way.”
As we moved further up the line, I heard the amplified sound of a heartbeat coming from the opening in front of us. “Okay.”
Sebastian squeezed my hand and grinned at me. “You have to get into it! You can be a red blood cell, because you work at a diner and provide people with food, like the red blood cells carry oxygen to feed the body. I’m going to be a white blood cell and fight off infection!”
I agreed, and he pulled me through the line of people entering the opening in the side of the giant model heart. Sebastian’s excitement was infectious, and I found myself laughing along as he described to me which part of the heart I was in and when I was supposed to pretend that I was obtaining oxygen from the lungs. “Again!” he cried when we emerged, and we got back in line to once again pretend we were blood cells being pumped through the body. After we went through about five times, some of the people were gaping at us, at the laughing couple who seemed a little old to be enjoying the heart quite that much.
I leaned over to catch my breath. “Where to next?”
When Sebastian didn’t answer, I looked up at him. His gaze followed a young couple with two children, standing near the entrance to the heart. The little girl seemed afraid to go in, and her father picked her up and reassured her in a soothing voice.
That was supposed to be me, thought Sebastian. I was going to bring my kids here.
I rubbed his shoulder, but I didn’t know what to say.
Next, we drove to the Wissahickon Valley Park. “We’re going to walk along the Forbidden Drive, by the creek,” Sebastian said as we got out of the car.
“Oh.” I looked down at my kitten-heeled sandals with some concern. “I don’t think I have the right kind of shoes for that, and my feet are sore from some walking I was doing the other day.”
He looked stricken. “I hadn’t even noticed. It didn’t occur to me that today might have a dress code.”
He was reconsidering the trip, and I hated to spoil his day like that. “I think I’ll be all right. If we don’t go too fast, my feet should be fine.”
He let out a sigh of relief. “Okay. But let me know if your feet hurt too badly, and we’ll stop or turn back.”
“Your family came here a lot?” I asked as we started down the trail.
He shook his head. “Mostly my friends. I had a girlfriend in high school, Nicole, who loved to go walking or hiking anywhere, and she would drag all of us along…”
His words sounded happy, and looking at his face, I would have thought that he was enjoying these memories. But underneath there was a layer of sadness, as if he were aware that every step he took brought him one little bit closer to the end of everything. This is the last time I will take this walk, he thought. And I won’t see Nicole this year when she comes home for Christmas.
What if I can’t save him? I thought. What if he ends up like every other soul in that Abyss, screaming out for reprieve, when there is none to be found? I didn’t want to believe it, but as I listened to the train of his thoughts, I couldn’t help but think his damnation was inevitable.
“Carrie, are you all right?” Sebastian stopped walking and grabbed my arm to stop me, too. “You’re crying.”
I lifted my hand to my face and realized that was true.
“You told me you would tell me if your feet hurt too badly! Come on. Let’s sit down.”
It seemed easier to let him guide me to sit by the creek than to explain that my tears had nothing to do with any physical pain. “Thank you. I’ll be all right in a minute.”
He stared into the water. “This is where it happened, you know. I mean not this exact spot, but here in the park. I was walking along here, thinking about Felicity, and I wanted to save her more than anything. I was so angry with God right then, for taking her away, and I guess that anger left a gap for a demon to sneak in.”
“You think there was something about you that brought her here.” I could feel the emotions hovering under the surface of his mind. “You think you must have somehow been damned already if it meant a demon could reach you. It’s not true; that’s not how it works. The archdemons prefer to gather good souls when they can, especially Azrael. She chooses people who will do anything for someone they love; she hates God so much for casting her out that she uses His greatest gift as a weapon to hurt him. It wasn’t your anger that called Azrael to you; it was your love.”
He gave me a small smile. “Somehow, that doesn’t make me feel that much better. Maybe Felicity is right; maybe I should have trusted that God knew what He was doing in taking her away and not interfered. She says it was my pride talking, thinking that I could somehow improve upon God’s plan. I don’t think that was it, though. I didn’t want to have to live in a world where that plan involved my sister’s death.”
“It wasn’t pride. If it had been pride, Lucifer would have come for you, himself.” Though I suspected that Lucifer was sorry that he missed out on collecting Sebastian’s soul. He always liked to be directly involved in the major contracts, and the damnation of a righteous soul was surely unique enough for his tastes.
He looked back out at the water. “I wish there were another way. I mean, I’m not sorry I did it, really. I know that Felicity is going to do great things with her life, greater than I would have done. And I believe that one day, there will be a final reckoning between God and Satan that will free all the souls in Hell, so it’s not like I will be there forever. But I still wish there could have been another way to save her.”
I wanted to tell him that he was right, but after spending four nights listening to the souls in Hell, I doubted that Sebastian would maintain his sanity long enough to appreciate freedom. If God ever bothered to grant it, and I was far from certain that would ever happen.
We sat in silence for a few minutes, both of our thoughts spiraling further downward, but soon he forced a smile onto his face. “We should get going. Still things to do!”
“Where to next?” I asked as we walked along Chestnut Street. Other people seemed to have the same idea that we had and were out enjoying the June evening.
“I have reservations at Morimoto,” Sebastian said.
I slowed as we passed the Philadelphia History Museum, glancing at their list of exhibits. “I’ve wanted to eat there, but Bedlam never likes to eat anywhere you need reservations more than a few days in advance.”
Sebastian had gotten ahead of me, so I hurried to catch up.
“Is he, like, your boyfriend or something?” he asked.
“Or something.” I never liked trying to explain Bedlam’s and my relationship to anyone. How did you tell a mortal what it was like to have only one friend for three thousand years? “Anyway, you must have made these reservations months ago.”
We passed by a small Indian restaurant, and the scent of spicy curry filled the air. “Well, I’ve known for a while when the end was coming. I planned to drag Felicity with me, but she hates Asian food.”
I glanced sideways at him. “Somehow, I think she’d make an exception.”
He stopped suddenly to avoid a woman stepping out of a nail salon. “Probably, but it’s more fun to go with someone who actually enjoys it.”
I guess. “If she hates Asian food, she must have had a hard time in Japan these past few months, then.”
Sebastian laughed. “That she did.” He turned to look at me. “Wait. How did you know about that?”
“She met my friend Gabriel there. He’s the one who told her where to find me.” I considered how to best describe Gabriel to Sebastian. “He’s the only angel I’ve ever met who would actually get his hands dirty cleaning up after a storm.”
“Well, it’s nice there’s one out there, I guess.” We reached Morimoto, and he pulled the door open, gesturing that I should go inside.
We ordered the omakase, and Sebastian insisted on paying. I’m not exactly sure what the first course was, and the miso soup tasted a little bland, but that was followed by some outstanding fish from the raw bar. We cleansed our palettes with some Asian fusion sorbet made of some fruit that I had never heard of and then moved on to the heart of the meal. We tried a delicious snapper served in some citrus sauce, followed by crispy duck and a selection of assorted sushi. By dessert, we were both full, but we managed to make room for the chocolate cake and hazelnut mousse.
Our next stop was an ordinary bar, crowded, most of the tables full of people huddled over small pieces of paper. A man wearing the bar’s T-shirt stood at the front of the room, adjusting a microphone. “It’s quizzo night,” Sebastian said. “Bar trivia.”
I must have looked puzzled.
“They ask questions, and the team that gets the most right wins a free tab for the night. I used to play all the time in college.”
I looked around the room. The teams seemed to be made up of four or five people. “Are you sure we can do it on our own?”
Sebastian frowned. “Well, usually I have a bigger team, but it doesn’t matter if we win.”
“I suppose.”
As I moved toward one of the few free tables in the bar, I picked up a random thought: Damn it, Stephanie and Greg aren’t coming. Now we’re down two more players. I turned to see who thought that, and I found two college-aged girls, a blond and a brunette, sitting at a half-empty table. I pointed them out to Sebastian and moved in that direction.
“Hi, I’m Carrie, and this is Sebastian. We’re in desperate need of a team, and we were wondering if you needed some more people.”
“Definitely.” The blond moved her purse off the chair to her right so that I could sit next to her. “We’re lucky you came along. I’m Greta.”
“I’m Marilyn.” The other girl reached out to shake our hands. “I hope one of you knows something about history, because we hate losing.”
We made a pretty good team, we discovered as the night went on. Marilyn had four brothers and consequently knew a great deal about sports, which was useful because I never would have remembered that Jacques Anquetil won the Tour de France four years in a row in the 1960s. Greta was a biology major who could answer things entirely beyond my knowledge, like what HNO3 was and where the superior vena cava was located, though I suppose I should have learned that on my many trips through the heart that morning. Sebastian had spent a summer volunteering in Nigeria, so he knew that it had the largest population in Africa. And as for me, I can only say that a lot of the questions seemed less obscure when you had actually lived through the events.
At the end of the night, we were tied with one of the other teams. I had drunk some sake back at the restaurant and was on my third beer at the bar, which was more alcohol than I was accustomed to consuming, so I actually laughed aloud when the tiebreaker question was “What was the name of the river in the Ancient Greek Underworld that allowed its drinker to forget?”
“I don’t know, but I think she threw me across the room last night.” Bedlam would have laughed, but my audience had no idea what I was talking about. They were grateful, though, that my personal knowledge of the demon of mercy won us a free bar tab for the night.
We finished our drinks and chatted with Greta and Marilyn for a little bit, but Sebastian’s heart wasn’t in it. This is it, he thought. No more quizzo. No more last day. No more anything. At the earliest polite break in conversation, I asked Sebastian, who had stuck to drinking soda, to drive me back to the diner.
“Thanks for inviting me out today. I had a lot of fun. I had kind of forgotten what it was like to be out with people.” I pulled on the door handle and let myself out.
He forced a smile. “I had a good time, too. I’d invite you out again, but my schedule is pretty packed for the foreseeable future.”
I tried to force a smile to match his, but I found I couldn’t quite manage it. “I’m sorry.” I planned to do what I could to save him, but in case I failed, I wanted him to know how I felt about it. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more to help you.”
He leaned over and kissed my cheek. “You did help, Carrie. You made it so I didn’t have to go through this alone, and that means everything to me.” Should I ask her? No, it would be too much.
“What is it?”
He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Can’t keep anything from you, can I? I just wanted to ask… Would you be there? You know, when she comes for me, could you be there with me?”
“Of course.” If I failed to save him, I at least owed him not having to face his death alone. “Let me know when and where.”
He wrote down an address and told me to be there before eight p.m. on Saturday. I promised him that I would.