“You’re not my master,” Billy says.
“I appreciate this attitude,” Lucifer says, after a beat. “It reminds me of myself at your age. Very well, then. You wish to make a deal? Let’s make a deal.”
And with those words it is like a circle is drawn around them, a circle that no one else in the room can enter.
“Let us discuss your book,” Lucifer says.
“No,” Billy says. “Screw the book. My book sucks and I don’t give a shit about it.” He exhales after he says that, like he’s letting go of a breath he’s held for years. Something that had been flailing in him, all that time, finally calms, and from that position of calm he is able to speak: “Here’s the deal: I give you the Neko and you leave me alone. You leave me alone and you leave my friends alone, forever. You release Jørgen and Elisa from their own oaths or obligations or whatever. You let us all go home and you don’t contact us again.”
“That’s really what you want,” Lucifer says.
“That’s what I want,” Billy says.
Lucifer watches him closely. “I went to some trouble to make the three of you, you know,” he says, with something bordering on affection in his voice. “To let all three of you go would represent the squandering of a great deal of effort.”
“You waited thirty years to track us down,” Billy says. “You can’t have needed us all that badly.”
“Thirty years,” Lucifer says. “That’s nothing to me.”
“Then start over,” Billy says. “Invest the time. Make another set like us. In the end you’d have exactly what you want now.” He feels bad, using someone not yet born in this way, an innocent person he’ll never know, but he has nothing else to bargain with.
Lucifer considers the idea impassively. It is like watching a computer chew up some enormous wad of data only without the benefit of a creeping bar to mark the progress of the process.
“This is the deal,” Billy says, quietly. “Take it or leave it.”
After a nearly interminable interval Lucifer breaks into a smile.
“No,” he says.
“No?” Billy exclaims.
“Don’t act so surprised, Billy Ridgeway; you’re not the only one who can say no when a proposal does not suit him.”
“Okay, fine,” Billy says, anger in his voice. “Make me a counteroffer, then.”
“I shall,” Lucifer says, his smile broadening. “And here it is. You give me the Neko. I send you and your friends home. I free Jørgen Storløkken and Elisa Mastic from their Oaths and I begin to work on building another retinue of hell-wolves. But that will take time. It will take years. What I want from you, then, is permission. I want permission to contact you again, should I require your services.”
“Am I obligated to say yes? When you pop up? Do I have to do what you say?”
“You do not. At that time, should it come, we will negotiate a new deal. I only ask for the right to approach you, and I ask that you consent to hear me out.”
“Will I have to watch a PowerPoint presentation?”
“Yes,” Lucifer says. “But any such presentation will be under forty-five minutes in duration.”
“Fifteen,” Billy says.
“Thirty,” Lucifer says.
“Agreed.”
“I have your consent?”
“You do.”
“Very well, then. Billy Ridgeway, I accept our deal.”
He extends his right hand, and Billy knows that the time has come: at long last, he has to shake hands with the Devil. And he does. Lucifer’s palm is cool and dry to the touch, and Billy feels a little self-conscious about his own, which is coated with a clammy sheen of panic sweat.
“The Neko, please,” Lucifer says, extending his left hand, without releasing Billy’s right hand from his grip. Billy passes the duffel bag containing the Neko and the cache of incriminating weapons.
“I shall honor our agreement,” Lucifer says, looking Billy straight in the eye. “And if you wish to go home, then home is where you shall go.”
“Yes, very good,” says Laurent, rising from his chair, “but, but, wait, wait just a second—”
But Lucifer does not wait a second. He releases the handshake and there is the flashbulb crackle. Everything goes white.
For a second Billy fears he’s been tricked, that he’s going back to Hell, on the grounds that Hell Is His True Home or some shit. Or even that he’s being flung back to Ohio, where he’ll have to deal with his dad. But no. When his vision clears he’s happy to see he’s back in his apartment, as he left it, only with one difference: Denver is next to him.