“Are you certain this is your mother?” he asked.
Oh, right, how could I have forgotten already? Nothing is as it seems.
But it looked an awful lot like her. Same curly, honey-blond hair. Same distant blue eyes. And surely I couldn’t mistake all those smoker’s lines around her lips? “How else would she recognize me?” I reasoned. “You said nobody could see us here because we weren’t of the place. But
she
can, so it must be because she’s my mom.”
We were distracted by the arrival of a couple of demons, who had apparently decided to take a stroll before they followed their brethren out of the pit. They were deep in conversation, one with his horned head bent almost double over the other’s green, slimy one. Though Raoul didn’t bother to translate, I still got the visuals.
A big, fancy office with a desk you could sail on and enough chairs in which to seat a jury. Samos and the Magistrate standing on either side of the desk as Samos’s dapper male secretary laid two copies of a contract between them. Samos pointing to a particular section, shaking his head, an incredulous look on his face. The Magistrate, smiling like a saint, uncoiling his whip and flicking it against the shoulder of Samos’s secretary, ripping his white shirt, his skin, leaving a bloody trail both men found uberfascinating. Samos, licking his lips hungrily as the secretary’s face transformed into Uldin Beit’s and then back again.
The Magistrate pushed the contract toward him. Samos pointed toward the same spot, mouthed the word “sacrifice,” and shook his head. When he said “sacrifice” I began to get another image. Something started to emerge from the shadows behind his open door. All I could see were the eyes. Glowing like embers in the darkness. They winked out when the largest of the conversing demons glanced up.
“Look!” he cried. “The Lucille is in our midst!”
Raoul snapped, “Is he your mother too? Or is it that everyone can see you because there’s a Demon Mark on your forehead!” I had time to think,
Oh, so that’s what Mom was trying to rub off!
before he grabbed my hand and yelled, “Come on!”
I still had my mother’s wrist, so I shouted the same to her and we ran like mountain goats, leaping over rocks and dodging malicious plants as the demons raced after us.
“What have you done?” screamed my mom.
“I killed a reaver!” I yelled back. “But only because he ripped a woman’s heart out and stole her soul!”
“But why did they call you ‘the Lucille?’ ”
“It’s my alias. I’m an assassin for the CIA.” Wait, could I tell her this now that she was dead? And in hell? Holy crap did I ever need a Zima!
“How far?” I asked Raoul as we muscled our way through crowds of shocked self-mutilators, all of whom could see us now. He looked over his shoulder at the pursuing demons.
“They’ll be on us before we get there. We’ll have to fight.”
“I’m armed,” I said helpfully.
“Your weapons won’t work here.”
And neither,
said his eyes,
will your hand-to-hand. At least not well enough to save you. Not on their turf. We’re doomed.
Suddenly Mom ripped her arm out of my grasp. “Run, Jazzy,” she cried as she leaped back at the demons. “Get free!” With a frenzied sort of charisma I’d only ever seen in my father, she mustered a unit of maybe twenty psychos who thought battling demons would be a great way to commit hari-kari, and together they attacked our pursuers tooth and nail.
I tried to go after her, but Raoul wrapped his arm around my waist and, lifting me bodily, rushed back to our original boulder. Somebody hit me on the back of the head. Though I blamed it on my Spirit Guide, he later told me it was simply the jolt of transition that had sent me, once again, into the Land of Blackout.
Dave considered me for a while, then turned his eyes to the reaver corpse. “It wasn’t Mom.”
“No?’
“Couldn’t have been.”
“Why not?”
He turned on me so sharply I almost cringed. “Our mother is not in hell!”
“Why!” I demanded. “Because you don’t want her to be? Let’s sit here and list all her redeeming qualities, David, starting with the fact that she only beat our butts on a
semi
regular basis!”
“So she was harsh. That shouldn’t make her demon fodder.”
Actually, I agreed. But that’s because I was just as twisted as him, thanks, in large part, to our dear, departed mother. I suddenly realized I’d spent a lot of my life hating the people I loved. I wondered if that could become habit forming.
“Fine, so maybe it wasn’t her,” I said. “And even if it was, it’s not like we could do anything about it anyway. Right?”
