Undead and Unforgiven(29)
“Your analogies are starting to suck less,” she said grudgingly.
“Thank you!” Ugh, I was always so pleased when she complimented me. It was the dark side of being Miss Congeniality, the thing they don’t tell you at the pageant rehearsals. “Listen, Hell and the devil being real doesn’t disprove Allah and Buddha and, uh, Mohammed and Zeus and, uh—” Why hadn’t I taken a single religious studies course before I flunked out of the U of M?
She shrugged off Buddha and Mohammed and Zeus. “They can’t prove their religious icons are real. That’s the difference.”
“But what’s the point of— Oh.” I saw it. Finally. “Aw, jeez. This is about you bringing gobs of unfaithful into the flock. So if you get to Heaven—”
“When.”
Oh, Christ. “Fine, when you get there, you can tell your pal Jesus that you heroically avoided running Hell—through lies and trickery, but who cares about the details, right?—and that you disapproved of your sinful vampire sister but managed to recruit her into helping you bring millions into the fold so where’s your Christian Gold Star already.”
Her pretty mouth (how does she not have chapped lips in a Minnesota winter?) went thin. “It’s a far better use of your time than lolling around your mansion slurping smoothies and accepting blood orange offerings.”
“First off, I don’t loll.” I was pretty sure. That meant lying around, right? Lolling around? I rubbed my temples. Don’t beat the Antichrist to death with a hymnal. That would be deeply uncool. “Second, if vampires want to stop by and bring me fruit and promise not to be assholes, what’s the problem? It’s a lot more than the previous vampire monarch did. His big contribution was starving newborn vamps until they went insane and making older vamps do all his murder-ey dirty work.” Ugh, I hadn’t thought of Nostril, or Noseo,8 in years. Nobody talked about the undead-and-now-dead-forever wretch; he wasn’t missed by anyone. New as we were to the monarch thing, Sinclair and I were still loads better at it on our worst day than Nostril was on his best. Was it weird when vampires showed up at the mansion to hand me a bag of citrus and pledge eternal bloodsucking devotion and seemed relieved when all I made them do was promise not to be asshats? Yes. Was it a bad thing? Hell no! (Or just no.)
I scooted back a bit on the pew, away from her, and I wasn’t aware I was doing it until I noticed I’d put another foot between us. “Y’know the difference between you and me, Laura? Other than the fact that you’ve never had a pimple? I never sat in judgment on you. You and our father like to bitch about the embarrassment of having a vampire in the family; how d’you think I felt when I found out my long-lost sister wasn’t just prettier and smarter than me, but was the Antichrist? And what did I do? Huh? Whine? Yes. Feel incredibly insecure? Of course. Show you the door? No. Tell you that you were bound to turn evil because that’s what happens in every single book or movie about the Antichrist? No.”
“That’s not—”
“Now let’s talk about what I did do. Did I welcome you into my home? Yes. After you tried to kill me? Yes! You tried to commit fratricide, and I could have killed you for it but didn’t, but I’m the Hell-bound bitch?”
“Sororicide. Fratricide is killing your brother. And we’re not discussing your nature,” she added, but she had the grace to look uncomfortable. “This is about the great thing we can do together.”
“Ohhh.” I saw it then. Her actual plan, and the plan beneath, the thing driving her to recruit zillions for the Lord’s force, the thing she might not be consciously aware of. “So your life’s purpose wasn’t to take over for Satan. And me giving you the boot from Hell—and by extension taking away all your supernatural abilities—that’s all fine because really your purpose was always to bring peace on earth goodwill toward men by proving the existence of God. It’s not you flailing around for something meaningful to do because you didn’t think past getting out of your birthright.”
“I hated my powers,” she said to the pew in front of us. “They were proof of my sin, my dark nature. But . . . I liked them, too. And now I miss them.”
“Tough shit.” I couldn’t muster even a shred of sympathy. She’d been able to teleport to and from Hell, and she could focus her will, which was considerable, to make weapons of hellfire—swords and knives and, on one memorable occasion, arrows—that had no effect on “normal” people but were devastating to the supernatural. They made her remarkably skilled at killing vampires. “Like a hot knife through butter” didn’t begin to cover it. “If you’re waiting for me to go all ‘there, there’ for you, I hope you packed a lunch, because we’ll be here for a while.”