“May He learn well how the rest of us feel.”
“I need to go out and grab a smoke.”
Candy is talking to Brigitte and Traven. I kiss her as I go by and head out the door.
The street is crowded with civilians and Lurkers. I go around the side of the building far enough that there’s no streetlight and fire up a Malediction. I feel a little earthquake under my feet. A hole opens in the concrete a few feet away.
“Hi, Cherry,” I say. “Thanks for helping out with Teddy.”
I go to the edge of the hole and look down. Cherry is a mess. She’s lost an arm and a lot of teeth. There are a couple of bullet holes in her skull.
“Thanks for whatever you did to the Imp. She’s gone.”
“I didn’t do anything to her. I set her free and let her make her own choice. My guess is she went home.”
“As long as she’s gone.”
“Agreed.”
“Are you fishing for compliments?”
“No. Just thinking about things. Back in Hell, Great-Great-Great-Granddad told me to pick and choose my fights. I agree with him but sometimes it’s hard to pick which fights because you don’t know what they are until you start. I thought I was Elvis on Ice when I stopped Mason’s war with Heaven. But I left all those Hellions worse off because they thought they were going to get free from Hell. Then I come back to L.A. to find Candy off with someone else, Aelita is back, there’s a murdering ghost on the loose, and a scar-faced skinhead’s looking to kill me all because I cut off a Kissi’s head a year ago. He deserved it but that doesn’t matter in the big picture. What matters is everything down the line that killing him triggered. But how do you know what bad juju you’re shaking loose before you start shaking things up?”
Cherry turns her hollow eye sockets up at me.
“And the point of your eloquent speech?”
“I don’t exactly know. Maybe we need to be more careful about the messes we leave behind. Try to tidy things up a bit when the bullets stop flying.”
“Maybe you could cut off fewer heads.”
“That too. Muninn told me to forgive part of myself, and as much as I hate that healing-your-inner-child yammer, I’m trying. You need to let go and move on. Look at you. You were a sad sight when you were in one piece. Now you’re not even a skeleton. Just a sack of random bones. Come out of there. Even if you don’t want to pass on entirely, have a little dignity. Be a ghost and not a burrowing bug.”
“I am a ghost.”
“I mean a real ghost. Ditch the skeleton and do a regular haunting. How about the Lollipop Dolls store? Think of it. A high-end J-pop place with its own ghost. It’ll be like
She’s quiet for a minute. If she had a face, she’d look lost in thought.
“I couldn’t just move in. I’d have to ask the girls.”
“I hardly know anything about that anime stuff but Candy has a Ph.D. I bet she’d talk to them for you.”
“Why are you going out of your way to help me?”
“Because you and me have a past too. You thought I
