“Then I shall forgive you, my dear, if you’re kind enough to forgive me.”
They were ignoring me completely.
It was kind of glorious. And then they were hugging, and that was kind of glorious, too.
“Can you please,” Cathie asked sweetly, “get us the fuck out of here?”
“It’s always so nice to see you,” I said, smirking, and her wish was my command.
CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE
“Please don’t construe this as criticism,” the vampire king said critically, “but it’s so odd that Hell looks exactly like the Mall of America.”
“Hey, the system works.” “The system” meaning Hell looked like whatever the person in charge wanted it to look like. When Lucifer was in charge, Hell was a waiting room leading to any one of a million billion doors with something awful behind each one. Dead kittens. IRS auditors. Severed heads. The Payless ShoeSource website. “And really? You’re here five minutes and you’re giving me crap?”
“Mostly to conceal my terror and admiration,” he admitted. He glanced at me and smiled. Thank you for allowing my return.
Okay, so our link works in Hell if you’re here, but not when you’re in the real world. Interesting . . .
I don’t know that the mansion is the real world anymore. Surely after all you’ve seen, it cannot be so.
It is to me, Sinclair.
Fair enough, beloved. For me, the real world is wherever you are.
Awwww.
“Quit it,” Marc said, waving at us like we were flies. Flies with a telepathic link. “Bad enough when you gaze at each other without talking for an hour back home. I won’t put up with something that annoying in Hell.” When I laughed at him, he grinned. “I’d better rephrase.”
“You’d rather be canoodling with Will Mason,” Tina teased. She and Marc were holding hands. Not like that, of course. Sometimes I think she saw Marc as an overgrown kid and herself as his protector/honorary aunt, because often when she grabbed his hand it was to lead him toward or away from something. (“Be careful, Marc, the fire is hot and will burn you.” “Tina, please stop hiding the paper clips. I promise I won’t put one in my mouth and choke.”) He tolerated it, because he adored her. “A shame you couldn’t call on him before we left.”
“Okay, first, never say ‘canoodling’ again. Second, we’re going out tomorrow and I happen to be scared shitless. My first date since I died. My first date altogether in three years. My first—”
“It will be fine,” she assured him, patting his hand. “He seems like a sweet boy.”
A useful boy as well, my husband thought, and I grinned.
My thought, too. I never go looking for ghosts—the few who find me never leave me alone until I do whatever chore they left behind when they died. But it’d be pretty handy to have someone around who could see and hear them. Think of all the good gossip he could tell us!
Intelligence, my darling.
Dress it up how you like, pal, it’s still gossip. It’s talking about people behind their backs about things they don’t want you talking about.
. . .
Ha. Got him.
We were entering the food court, which was teeming with the damned. Funny how people often stuck to a schedule—it was 12:32 p.m. HST (Hellish standard time), so that meant it was time to hang in the food court and stand in line, choke down something you were allergic to, be offered drinks you couldn’t stand, or get stuck talking to people you cordially loathed.
Speaking of cordial loathing, the Ant was at one of the larger tables with Cathie and Father Markus. She saw us and kept talking. Cathie turned, spotted us, rolled her eyes, and jerked her head in a “come on over” gesture. The Ant’s surliness made Cathie seem like Miss Congeniality (and I should know).20
A path magically cleared for us and we started toward them. I could see Cindy and Lawrence sharing a table and talking, Cindy with her hands while she gabbled at him, Lawrence leaning forward and listening intently, smiling every once in a while. Good; that was settled, then. One less thing to worry about.
I could sense Sinclair’s surprise and pleasure at the deference, and . . . yep, there it was. Pride, too, that I could command that kind of respect. He knew they had no idea who he was, knew they weren’t parting like the Red Sea for him or Marc or Tina. Seeing so clearly into his emotional state made me ashamed it had taken me so long to let him come back to Hell. Our link working here was no excuse; the link worked fine in the real world, too. I could have seen his pride in me if I’d bothered to look. Instead, the only things I looked for were reasons to exclude him.