Hell's fallen angel woke weeping.
Agonostis felt the hot tears rolling down his cheeks, and jerked upright in the bed, gasping—for a moment he thought he was drowning. He wiped his eyes and caught his breath. Crying? He hadn't cried since . . .
He couldn't remember if he had ever cried, but he didn't think he had. He hadn't ever slept before, either. Neither the angels of Heaven, nor of Hell, had any need of sleep—and yet he had been as soundly asleep as any human. What did it mean?
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stared at his reflection in Dayne's closet doors.
It means, you damned idiot, that you could have held her all night and watched her sleep, and instead you missed it. And today, everything comes to an end.
Dayne was gone—he'd known that even before he rolled over to look for her; the emptiness of the apartment around him ached like an old wound. The only sound in the place was his own breathing. The cats sat, noiseless, glaring at him from atop Dayne's dresser—cats loathed the Hellraised. He stared at them, then turned away. Everything loathed the Hellraised. Dayne would look at him the same way her cats did, if she knew what he was.
Agonostis hugged Dayne's pillow to his chest and pressed his face into the flannel pillow case. The pillow was rich with the scent of her—hay and sunlight and some earthy shampoo. There were no such scents in Hell—he drank that one in, knowing he was losing it as surely as he would lose her. He wondered if he would even hold her again, or bury his face in her hair, or taste her lips against his, before Lucifer dragged him back into Hell. Surely the Lord of the Damned would discover Agonostis' deception before he had that chance. The Father of Lies intended to drag his one-time second-in-command back to Hell to turn him into an imp of the smallest and tastiest sort, and wasn't likely to wait until the stroke of midnight—not when he had the opportunity to change the rules yet again.
A piece of paper lay on the bed, where the pillow had been. It was a note from Dayne to him.
"Adam—I had to get to work, but you were sleeping so soundly, I hated to wake you. I'll see you this evening if you can get free from work. Love, Dayne."
She rarely got away from her job before seven P.M. He was likely to be gone before she got home—no, he was likely to be ground into component atoms and strewn about the Pit before she got home—and she would never even know what happened to him.
He could leave her a note. Something that explained his sudden, unwilling disappearance. She kept pens on her bedside table. He found one, turned her note over, and on the back started to print a quick explanation.
"Dayne—I was recalled to . . ."
He paused. Did he really want her to know what he had been? Did he really want her to hate his memory? He didn't—but suddenly he didn't want to lie to her, either.
". . . Hell. If you can, please think of me with kindness when you think of me. I'm sorry that I tried to tempt you, but pleased that you didn't fall. I will always love you. Adam D'Agonostis."
He sighed and stared at the wretch in the mirror, and wondered if she would miss him. He hoped so.
None of this had worked out the way he'd expected. He'd forgotten so much in all those millennia in Hell. He'd forgotten beauty, and the joy of silence, and the pleasure of being alone without being lonely. He'd forgotten the feel of being loved. Moreover, for the first time, he had discovered the thrill of a challenge, of being set to a nearly impossible task, with only his wits between himself and disaster. This thrill was something humans lived with daily—the opportunity to succeed or fail by their own effort. He'd tasted that opportunity in the task Lucifer had set for him, and had seen the same pleasure in Dayne's eyes when she talked about the challenges of her work—the importance of being right the first time, of thinking fast, of doing something that mattered.
She played for life, against Death—and in the brief time Agonostis had known her, he'd seen the zest she displayed for every aspect of living, because she knew from experience how thin the line was drawn between living and dying.
"God was right," Agonostis whispered. He couldn't repent—not after what God had put him through. But he could see that he'd made a mistake in supporting Lucifer's stance.
At the time, the situation had seemed so clear cut. Lucifer petitioned God for the right to give humans the knowledge they lacked. God turned down the petition, stating that humans would respect the things they earned more than the things they were given. Lucifer, incensed, played Prometheus—and in fact, most human religions still remembered his role, though imperfectly. He gave humanity the secrets of fire, and simple technology, and simple writing—and as God predicted, humanity, with no respect for its windfall, had subverted those gifts into the tools of deceit, greed, and war.
Pity he hadn't come by his wisdom millennia ago, when it could have done him some good. Now nothing but the agony of Hell's fiery Pit awaited him.
"Might as well go in to the office," he muttered to his reflection. He could completely screw up his records in just a few minutes—might as well make life miserable for Jezerael. He stood, and so did his mirror image. He cocked his head and stared at himself. He didn't look right—he'd missed something subtle.
He frowned and walked closer to the mirror, trying to figure out what was out of place. He'd gotten the look pretty close to the first incarnation of his Adam persona, but he'd made some sort of mistake in reforming himself into human shape.
"Oh, my God," he whispered. He stared at his midsection—nicely muscled, lightly furred with curling black hair that narrowed to a thin line down his lower abdomen. A thin line, unbroken by a belly button, or anything that might be mistaken for one.
"Not even a mole or a freckle there," he muttered, running his fingers across his inhumanly smooth stomach. He took a deep breath. "The bedroom was dark . . . most of the time. She couldn't have noticed."
It didn't matter. He'd lost, and he was going to end up serving Jezerael, and the fact that he'd forgotten to give himself a navel in his haste to get to Dayne would not cause so much as a blip in the currents of eternity.
He pulled on his clothes, and trudged wearily out of the apartment, carefully locking the door behind him as he left.