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.”