(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
"I know," said the patient.
And there it sat, like a boulder blocking the only way up a mountain.
Daniel hadn't been the only soul to feel guilty without knowing what he felt guilty about, and Lee hadn't been the only soul who could look right into his own fatal failure and deny it was there. The human mind had more twists and turns than the canyons outside. One person might think they'd been damned for driving drunk on a rainy night only to find, after Lucifer had spent a century waist-deep in their memories, that it was really failure to support a sick friend or even an actual, not-metaphorical act of violence that they'd convinced themselves didn't count.
Eric had lived, died, gone over, gone under, gone through all his sins. He'd owned his role in getting his then-classmate Greg drunk the night before the organic chemistry final so that he'd oversleep and miss the test, leaving Eric to set the curve instead. His guilt over the one instance when his academic advisor had actually detected any plagiarism had come more from getting caught than from the cheating, but, with careful guidance, Lucifer had coaxed him into taking responsibility. He'd backstabbed colleagues from undergrad through post-doc, sabotaging samples, peeling stamps off funding applications so they missed their deadlines. It had gotten him all the way to his own laboratory, where he perennially took advantage of his grad students. Not sexually—that hadn't been his proclivity—but he'd taken all the credit and reaped all the professional glory not only for projects he'd shepherded through the experimental process but anything he could get away with, even on one occasion when he literally had not known the young doctoral candidate's name. He'd threatened to fail the young man, badmouth him at his next hearing, get appointed to his dissertation review and make sure his career came to nothing if he didn't put up, shut up, give up the byline on three years of work.
Getting Eric to own that one had been hard. It was always difficult to get humans to admit they were wrong for doing something that they thought everyone was doing. Professors taking credit for subordinates' scientific discoveries had been all but standard practice in the first half of the twentieth century, and Eric had paid his dues on the receiving end. But with time, with effort, with some of his less incompetent demons, Lucifer had found the tiny, fluttering scrap of guilt, followed it like a moth through the forest of Eric's mind, and finally brought it to land in its owner's cupped hands. Eric accepted that he'd done wrong.
Eric hadn't been the worst of humanity. Not a single murder, rape, or grand theft sheepfold. He'd been hardworking and sometimes kind. He'd taken his God-given intelligence and cultivated it for the betterment of science, even if he'd worshipped the graven idol of his own ego before all. He was practically a textbook case of a human who should punish himself for his sins and then move on.
But there was no door, no gate, no hanging tent flap. Eric, Dr. Masterson to his students, was reliving the exchange with the younger scientist, but instead of repeating his mistakes, he was offering to collaborate with him on a new experiment that would follow up on his existing work. It was his third go-round. When other souls reached this point, it was all beams of light and an express trip straight to fly fishing with your long-lost son under the boughs of color-coded judgy topiary.
"What do we try next?" whispered Crevos. He held up a Bunsen burner, "Should I brown him with this cooker?"
Lucifer blinked. "What in the name of Coco Chanel's perennially pitchforked buttocks is on your head?" he demanded.
Crevos' three eyes pointed up. In some flight of ridiculous fancy, he'd crafted himself a pair—a treble—of lab goggles that had a third cup and lens off to the side for his red-only eye. The scalded wrist of his third arm slipped through the gap in the buttons of his lab coat and gestured apologetically. "I thought they were nice!"
Lucifer fought the urge to slap them off the demon's semi-exposed skull, but he didn't want to touch whatever had given him that rash. He also didn't want to admit that he was out of ideas.
Again.
Lucifer remembered Masako blowing him a kiss on that long-ago visit to the Silver City. Eric and this graduate student (the demon Easus in a human suit) reminded him of that day. There was something here. He just couldn't see it.
Hardly unusual, he told himself. Frustration was Hell's stock in trade, even for its warden. Healer. Whatever he was.
There was the squeak and faint suction as the metal door to the lab slunk open. A thin, chalk-limbed figure slunk into the room, ducking his beech-pale head to avoid bumping the fluorescent lights. Smooth eye sockets that held nothing but shadows passed left and right as he took in the loop. His legs moved with the pneumatic hesitancy of a walking stick bug, though his unpigmented skin offered no camouflage in the faux fluorescent lighting. Slowly, two mantis-clawed arms rose up in greeting.
"I see you're here early, Hovee. You know the rules. Can't have you dressed for the Black Forest."
Lucifer waved a hand and a lab coat, size XXS-tall draped itself over the demon's exoskeleton. With a funneling of fluid pressure, the demon pointed its head down to look at the "666" logo over the breast pocket.
A hollow, sibilant moan came from the dark opening in the demon's jawless mouth. Lucifer blinked.
Crevos looked from Hovee to Lucifer and back. "I'm sorry, my Lord, I never learned how to understand this kind of—"
Lucifer held up a hand. "Sorry, everyone, it seems I have to cut out early. Privilege of being the boss, I suppose." Eric looked up, blinking, as all the imitation humans in his loop froze. "Don't worry, Eric," he said, as he had to remind himself that instructions could never be a lie. "We'll come back to you later."
He looked at Hovee, who moaned again.
"I have a family obligation."
Crevos scrambled after him as he headed for the door.
"Get Shirime?" asked Crevos.
"Get Shirime," said Lucifer.
.
.
Lucifer managed to keep his face stern, but his stomach was fluttering as if it contained more butterflies than Emma Lopez' entire wardrobe. He shouldn't look forward to this, he knew he shouldn't look forward to this, but he was practically snapping his fingers for Crevos to stretch Shirime's eye across the boulder. He stepped forward intently, touching the membranes as the image came into focus.
Every second Rory spent in Hell put her in danger, body and soul. He had a thousand reasons not to want her here, not the least of which was that he had to fight the urge to speak to her or at least come near enough to finally see this part-Chloe being without fifteen tons of ash in the way. It was like bending your own hand all the way back past ninety degrees. You'd wonder if it would peel off. But this was the only part of her childhood he got, and he wasn't going to miss a second of it.
Most of Rory's visits lasted minutes. Lucifer received a report and nothing else.
Once, she'd come through the gates and stopped immediately, blinking down at the field of low, oily green plants that hadn't been there when she'd shown up with binoculars, a backpack, no map and a rescue plan. Lucifer knew from his own examination of the underworld's new understory that their leaves were sharper than holly, their blooms more stinging than nettles, definitely Hell's own interpretation of flora. But the fact that it was the first and only living thing to grow in this ashen, sunless place... Lucifer had caught Kpfrit wearing some in the buttonhole of her human suit before banning the demons from touching it.
The next time, Rory had picked a direction and flown. Behe said she'd stopped at the edge of a volcanic crater and shouted something. He'd claimed he hadn't understood the words over the wind, but he'd been lying. From the gleam in his eye, it was something he thought he could use. Behe had been resentful ever since Lucifer had taken him off his favorite, violent tenancies and forced him to partner with Cedon. Never mind that they'd never found Cedon after his one and only stint guarding Michael.
Last time, she'd crouched down in the not-earth near the gates with a trowel and tiny pot, dug around the thorny roots and carried the little living thing away with her. Lucifer had no idea whether it had withered or flourished, but Gabby hadn't flown down complaining about black-and-purple razor shrubbery that smelled like Rory's love choking L.A. like kudzu, so he imagined nothing too terrible had happened.
Lucifer had drawn himself a line, scratched it out, redrawn it on his own heart. When would he interfere? How deep into Hell was too deep? How close to Michael was too close? There was a point at which keeping Rory alive was worth breaking his promise, worth risking a time collapse.
"It looks different this time," Crevos whispered as Lucifer watched the gates through Shirime's distended eye. "She's taller."
"Forget taller," muttered Shirime. "It looks mad."
"Quiet," said Lucifer.
Rory did look mad. She was standing by the gates, yelling something into the air. Lucifer wondered if she knew he was here, and not an inmate, and aware of her presence. Any one of his careless siblings could have spilled the beans. Probably Jophiel.
"You're getting better at this," murmured Crevos. Hovee gave a low moan of agreement.
"Thanks," answered Shirime. "It still itches terribly, though. Like when you pluck the spines off a spongy catterworm and put them up your—"
"I said be quiet."
Lucifer watched Rory's face. There were pale lines in the ash on her cheeks. Tears. His eyes shifted to her mouth, trying to pick out words as she practically snarled. "Mom" was in there and "you," but he could only guess the rest.
"This is different," he murmured to himself. "Something's wrong."
Rory was taller, clearly older. Almost a teenager. Maybe actually a teenager. The hair across one temple had been buzzed and the rest of it was bright blue. Lucifer couldn't imagine how she'd gotten that look past her mother. It made her face seem even redder.
A swirl of gray wings and Charlie, definitely a teenager, appeared behind her. Lucifer watched him shake his head as Rory asked a question. "No." But no to what?
Rory's posture contracted, her face hidden against the boy's thin chest as her shoulders shook. A fist struck Charlie's shoulder.
A surge of air and weight threw Lucifer off-balance, and he realized his wings had come free without his conscious command. He heard Crevos swear and scrabble for his footing. Lucifer breathed in and tried to slow his heartbeat. No he would not take flight to the gates, find out what had put his daughter in pain. His wings twitched. No he would not.
Charlie held Rory at arm's length as she smeared at her face with the knuckles of one hand. He gestured back in the direction of the gate.
"Are they leaving?" asked Shirime. "I can't see."
"Yes. Shut up!" whispered Crevos.
Rory gave the hellscape one last glare and kicked a rock into the field of plants. She turned on her heel and headed back to the gates. Charlie heaved a huge breath and followed.
Oh, he could kick around until Amenadiel showed up to run interference, but since when did the serpent of Eden ever wait when there was knowledge to be had?
Chloe couldn't be dead, not this early. But there had been other hardships, other things that had drawn her rage, which, Lucifer now realized, Rory had been maddeningly vague about. Injuries, financial disasters, or—Lucifer had spent the past eighty thousand years up to his elbows in human sin, and his imagination flared in flesh tones. Someone could have done something to make Rory mad enough to show up in person and call down the Devil. And not all car accidents were Uriel-spawned. What if Chloe were being pieced back together in some cut-rate hospital? He felt a pang. The woman who'd literally run down Dr. Carlisle, needles and all, would loathe being confined to a wheelchair. The only thing he knew was that she wasn't dead.
He stopped.
Chloe wasn't dead.
"Hovee," he said, "do you have the list of new arrivals?"
Rory had grown up surrounded by the wisest and most powerful women in creation, Linda not the least among them, but they were mortal. Eve hadn't stopped being human when she'd stepped back into her bones, and there was no predicting what price Mazikeen's new soul would demand of her body. It was early for any of them to have died of old age, but Earth had its perils.
Hovee's right claw emerged from the wide pocket of his Hell-issue labcoat. He began to read out the last entry in his own tongueless lowing, but Lucifer snatched it out of his grip, narrowing his eyes against Behe's handwriting.
His eyes stopped.
His heart stopped.
.
.
Lucifer spread his wings and leapt into the acidic air, feeling sweat break out between his shoulder blades. The list was wrong. He'd have to dig up enough old habits to create a suitable punishment for Behe and his sloppiness.
He landed on a ledge halfway up the side of a canyon, his blood souring as he imagined the tenant climbing this place. The door had a huge wheel like something out of a submarine, except this one had a fingerprint panel and a set of buttons for entering an access code. Hell demanded that the damned acknowledge their tenancy.
He lay one palm against the imitation metal and the portal gaped wide without so much as a spin. It gave off a convincing sealant sound as it closed behind him, like a valve inside some giant vein.
The space inside was narrow, lit by LEDs and tubes full of some glowing substance that seemed vaguely bioluminescent. What wasn't white paneling fixed with black studs resembled nothing so much as a padded room, coarse white cloth covering the walls with strategically placed handles and strips of Velcro.
A figure lay near the center of the room, bright red against the white.
The tenant gasped and sat halfway up onto her elbows on the unmarked floor, mouth gaping in an empty "Oh!" at the object sticking halfway out of her sternum. She lifted her right hand, gasping as she made contact with the handle. A low scream filled the small chamber as she pulled it free. Red surged up through her fingers, hotter and more vivid than life, meant to terrify.
Metal thudded on the floor as the woman fell back, pressing both hands hard against what she probably still thought of as her living blood. After a full minute, she rolled onto her side, inching toward the wall. One fist pounded against the base. "Simmons!" she called. "Doctor Corning!" She pressed her palm against the warm metal, twisting until she was sitting up on both knees. "Somebody help me! I'm locked in."
"You're not," Lucifer said, barely above a whisper.
Then tenant's head turned, and then there was a sound. It started like an intake of breath and then rose to the roar of a jet engine, an underground river through a cavern scoured through the loop like a storm. She put her hands over her ears, then dropped, then fell, all hips and elbows against the flow. Lucifer couldn't help looking up, down, in every direction, as if anything in this illusory world could confirm what he was hearing.
"What is that noise?" she shouted.
"Your heartbeat," he answered.
The tenant turned, one spiral of curly hair sticking to her sweaty neck as she took Lucifer in from his loafers to the comb marks in his hair. She crab-walked backwards to the nearest wall and pushed herself to her feet, still staring, one hand cupped over the wound on her chest.
"Technically," Lucifer said, stepping toward her, "you're only mostly dead." He sighed. "Billy Crystal ruined that line for me forever. Anyway, time flows differently here, and I'm afraid it's not unusual for a newly deceased spirit to jump the gun before their body's gone completely—"
She became one motion, sweeping the knife up off the floor and lunging toward him exactly like someone who'd studied under a demon since girlhood.
Lucifer ducked to the side on reflex, eyes following the blade, which suddenly looked just like the one he kept in the pocket of his suit jacket. "That can't actually hurt me, but honestly!"
"I know!" she practically snarled, and he could hear Maze in it. One of her hair ties had broken, and the bun came loose. She glared up at him through dark curls. "Do you have any idea what you did to my mom?"
"Yes," he said. "But I can't help that now, Urchin."
She slumped against the wall, hand going back to the stab wound. "Don't call me that," she said. "Things took some really weird turns after you dumped her."
"After I—" he said. "Oh dear," he said, looking around. Loops took their shape from the tenant's memory and imagination. Enclosed space, narrow walls... He looked at Trixie. Tasteless, unflattering gray jumpsuit...
Lucifer could hardly believe it. When he and Chloe had made their pact, he'd only been thinking of Aurora's future. He should have known, he chided himself. He'd been an even bigger part of Trixie's life than he'd realized, and his departure must have been like a flash flood knocking a support beam out from under a bridge. She wouldn't have been the first bright, motivated tween to be defeated by tragedy.
Lucifer steadied himself. If he could spend all his not-days getting humans to acknowledge their carelessness, then so he could be devil enough to admit his own. "I'm terribly sorry, Urchin, for ruining your life," he said.
She turned toward him slowly, one eyebrow creeping halfway to her braids. "You did not ruin my life."
"That's a good sign," he said, putting one hand on her shoulder. She glared at his fingers. "The tenants who take responsibility are usually the ones who make it out of here. Now can you tell me how you ended up in prison?"
"Prison?" she asked.
"Yes, you're in—do they still call it 'the hole'?"
"This isn't a cell, you idiot," said Trixie. "It's a simulator." She twisted until he could see the insignia on her sleeve. "I work for NASA."
.
.
Trixie picked at the red-and-white patch that read "NASTY."
"Infernal autocorrect," commented Lucifer. "Can't say I'm surprised to hear that billionaire douchebags didn't make it past low Earth orbit. Elon never struck me as having much staying power." And he was an absolute weenie about facing his sins, but she didn't need to know that just yet.
Trixie raised an eyebrow and took a breath, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the mockup of a vehicle she said was called U.S.S. Perseverance, though Hell had creatively slashed Perdition on any visible logos.
Trixie held up one finger. "So, on the off chance that this isn't a hallucination cooked up by my neurons as they wave goodbye from oxygen deprivation..."
Lucifer gave her a moment.
"This is my own personal corner of Hell, which I'm in because I feel guilty about something—"
"Not necessarily something you're consciously aware of," Lucifer chipped in.
"—the girl I met at Maze's wedding was Rory from the future, and you skipped out on her whole life because she told you to?"
"There's also a slight possibility that the universe would break apart if we created any kind of paradox that would stop Rory from coming back in the first place," he added. "But not even Albeit Almighty Amenadiel can give me a clear answer on that one."
"That's not as bad a reason as I'd been imagining," Trixie thought out loud. "Mom said something about you being needed elsewhere but I figured that was like when you tell a kid their dog went to live on a farm."
"For Here's sake, Urchin, why would I leave the love of my life to raise our daughter alone?"
Trixie eyeballed him like Daniel right after he figured out who'd eaten the pudding cups.
"All right—" he began.
"You didn't exactly keep it a secret that you hate kids—"
"—silly question—"
"Your pre-Rory lifestyle was nonstop hookers and blow—"
"—most of them weren't hookers—"
"—and you're a self-centered narcissist who expected a standing ovation every time you even kind of remembered that other people have needs. It doesn't scream diapers and PTA meetings."
Lucifer rubbed one hand over his eyes. "I know I probably wouldn't have been the best father in history..."
Trixie raised an eyebrow.
"Fine," he swept a hand sideways. "Not even top ten. Let's talk about you."
Trixie blinked hard as the scene around them changed.
"Is this Mom's old precinct?" she asked, standing up. She looked down at her chest and plucked her shirt. "Okay, not cool. What happened to my flight suit? And a maroon blazer? What is this, 2025?"
"That polyester rag is hardly proper attire for solving a murder," Lucifer said primly. He wheeled one of the whiteboards a little closer and scrawled "SUSPECTS" top and center in big letters. "So long as you're here, we might as well work out who tried to perforate your sternum." He turned around, exhaling with relish. "I haven't solved a murder since—"
"I saw who stabbed me, Lucifer."
"You..." His arms fell to his sides. "You did?"
She nodded. "Came at me from the front. Whoooooole face," she said, making the wavy-wavy gesture. "Maris Lockwood," she said. "Person who'd get my place on Perseverance if I get knocked out of the running, like an interplanetary understudy." She shrugged. "She's already scheduled to go up two missions from now. In my opinion it's better if she waits until her—never mind."
The cap fell off Lucifer's marker and rolled across the floor.
"There's no mystery here," she said. "If I make it back to my body, I just have to tell the police who to arrest, not to mention that there might be video. Nasty trial, which I do not intend to be on-planet for. The end."
"But you don't know what she stabbed you with," Lucifer said, nodding at the object in Trixie's hand, which currently looked like an LA-County-issue nightstick.
"Is that important?" Trixie asked. "Getting murdered can be a little distracting. So!" Trixie said, ducking around a conference room chair. As she passed, it warped and twisted into an instrument panel as the loop resumed the appearance of the Perseverance. "Do I just wait around for the EMTs to show up with the defibrillator or..."
"No, ah..." Lucifer recovered. "I mean yes, if your body recovers, your soul will be pulled back into it," he said. " I—any angel, really—could also take you back to Earth and try to drop back into your bones, at which point, the power of your spirit returning might even heal some of your injuries." He tilted his head in a wince. "As I know from the exactly one time that I'm sure it happened."
"You said 'try,'" said Trixie. "I'm not loving 'try.'"
Lucifer tipped his head to the side. "If your body is ...beyond functioning, then you'd be trapped there, invisible to other humans, with no way to talk with or affect the world around you."
Something in Trixie's face went thoughtful. "Total isolation..."
Lucifer watched her think. It was uncanny how she reminded him of Daniel, even without the reek of cheap body spray.
"The only soul who ever experienced that isolation," Lucifer began, "asked me to bring him back to Hell." He exhaled. "But the sooner the better. The mortal coil awaits. Shall we be off?"
Trixie moved her eyes without lifting her chin from her hand.
"You didn't reach out," she said.
"What?"
"When someone says something like that, they usually make a gesture, stand up, step toward an exit, shift their weight." She picked herself partway up and stretched out a hand as if for Lucifer to take it. "But no," Trixie said shrewdly. She looked him up and down. "You're still mimicking my posture. Your body language is focused on communication, not action." She raised her chin. "That's not my only way out of here, is it?"
Lucifer's fingers froze on his cufflinks. When had she gotten smarter?
"You have some choice when it comes to destination," he said. "I can take you back to your mother on Earth or to your father in Heaven." At her wide eyes, he corrected. "Daniel. He's in the Silver City. You work through your guilt, a door opens, and up you pop."
"I could go see my dad?" she asked, voice rasping.
There was a strange hotness in his chest. "Yes," he said, a little too quickly, "but you'll spend most of your existence in the Silver City anyway. Life on Earth is essentially only a blip in your eternal existence, so you may as well—"
"What the—?" Trixie snapped. "You're not the only angel I've ever talked to, and from what I hear, the living world is where all the action is. We learn, we build things without superpowers or supernatural bullshit. It's where the stuff that matters gets done. I'm prepping a team to go to another planet."
"No, that—" he stopped. "You're only saying that because you haven't seen the rest of the universe."
"I'm working on that!" she said, pointing to her NASA insignia. She folded her arms. "Fine. So why don't you want me to do it?"
"Urchin, I have no problem with you blasting yourself off to Mars if that's what you desire."
"No, I mean how come you—"
There was a hollow thudding sound of a fist on metal. "Lord Morningstar?" came a voice from outside the door.
"Who's that?" Trixie asked.
Lucifer exhaled, rubbing one hand over his eyes. "One of my demons." He sighed. "Look, they can actually be quite helpful to the process."
"'The process'?"
"Essential, if I'm being honest. They take on the appearance of people you knew—they embody your memories."
"Like Gestalt therapy? That's been obsolete since the 2030s."
"Down here it's cutting edge." He sighed. "Given that it feels like I just got them off the other kind of cutting edge..."
Trixie got quiet. "So," she started, "if I go to the..."
"Silver City," supplied Lucifer.
"Silver City," Trixie finished, "and my body heals after I get there?" She drummed her fingers on the edge of the seal between the floor panels. "Do I still get pulled back to Earth?"
"I don't know," he answered. "If the Silver City is your true home, you might not be able to—"
"Anders Brody!" she shouted.
"Anders... I'm sorry, is he a friend of yours?"
"No, yours!" she said, scrambling to her feet. "Billionaire douchebag? He had a near-death experience in his cut-rate vanity space project. One night he got drunk and posted on Wobble about how he'd been to Hell and the Devil helped him 'find forgiveness,'" she air-quoted. "A year later, he doubled wages for all his employees and started a climate change think tank."
"Anders..." Lucifer trailed off. "Short fellow? Faux-bougie beard? Deathly afraid of heights and for some reason red squirrels?"
Trixie shrugged.
"When I found his loop empty, I thought he'd gone to the Silver City."
"He did! He was yammering on about a bright light and someone giving him a boring speech about how this wasn't the universe with centaurs in it."
"That was Gabby!" he said. "And you're telling me Brody ended up back on Earth after that?"
"Still alive, as far as I know," she said. She nodded to herself, "So you help me through my guilt—"
"Ah," Lucifer held up one finger. He could see her thought process like the twisted roots of a willow through the pipes.
"Then I head up to heaven and I get to see my dad," her face flashed white with a smile as she caught her breath. "And I still get to go back?" she asked.
"If your body heals," he said.
"Which it will or it won't," said Trixie.
"Did you miss the part about how your soul reinfusing your nervous system might stop your brain cells from waving a permanent goodbye?" He gestured to the simulator. "Just guessing but I think you might need your brain to go to Mars."
"Didn't miss a thing," she said. "But I need to see him. There are things I need to say to him."
He watched her carefully. "You're going to risk not going back to Earth, back to your mother and sister, and I presume some overmuscled Buzz Aldrin wannabe—"
"Leon and I are just friends but yes," said Trixie.
"If that is your desire," he said, but he didn't smile. "Hell wasn't built for insight, not originally," he warned her. "And the renovations are taking longer than I expected."
.
.
Lucifer put one hand on the door to her loop and held up the other. "You must remember something. Although these demons still think of me as their king, that doesn't mean I can order them to do whatever I want. Many are plotting against me even now. You must do nothing to undermine my authority."
She raised an eyebrow. "So no, say, calling you a narcissistic idiot?"
"That's exactly the kind of thing I—"
"Or ...'deadbeat devil-dad'?"
Lucifer narrowed his eyes.
"Or 'bite your own dick, you self-centered disappointment factory'?"
"Urchin," he said, "I apologize for ruining your life."
"You didn't ruin my life," she clipped. "Let's do this thing."
Lucifer spun the wheel and the door slid open. Three arms, two wiry and one translucent, grasped the rim and an angular shadow slunk inside. Three tongues flicked the air. The figure took a step toward Trixie, rising and warping with a hiss of flesh and fabric.
"Oh hey, one of these again!" Crevos plucked at his labcoat with two stubby fingers and patted the sides of his shiny, half-bald head. His eye that could only see the color red looked left and right and then closed to a slit until it seemed like no more than a ruddy mole. Crevos dipped into his pocket protector and pulled out a hunk of gray plastic. He pointed it at Trixie and pushed the largest button. She raised her eyebrows. Crevos held the graphing calculator up to his good eye and shook it like an Etch-a-Sketch. He tapped at the buttons again. "Which one of these squirts out acid, Lord Morningstar? Or does this one do electricity?"
"I take it he only looks like Dr. Collins," said Trixie.
"This is one of my demons," said Lucifer.
"Hi! My name is Crevos and I'll be torturing you today."
Lucifer whapped him up the back of the head.
"I mean helping you process your guilt today."
"Better," said Lucifer.
"Can Hovee come in too? I think he's bored."
"Fine."
Bored and curious as to why the boss was taking so much interest in a new arrival, Lucifer concluded. This time, Lucifer exerted his will, and Hovee kept his own shape as he ducked his head to enter Trixie's loop. If the sight of a creature from Jake and Willie Grimm's deepest nightmares couldn't convince her the situation was serious, nothing would.
Her eyes went wide.
"Holy crap. Are you Slenderman?"
Hovee's voice went up in pitch as he drew one skeleton-twig hand and looked down at his waist. He looked at Crevos.
"I think it was a video game," said Crevos. "Sorry, there was this one tenant who played it a lot."
"Oh Aymee!" remembered Lucifer. "Not down here for the video games, by the way. I believe she pulled off an armed robbery."
"And put tire marks on a cat," said Crevos, "but I don't know how she cooked it afterwards. It looked like a good fat one."
Lucifer rubbed his eyes. Absent his attention, Hovee's sticklike body swelled until it was merely skeletal, an underfed intern with the hollow eyes of those who substituted caffeine for vitamins. He walked jointlessly up to Crevos and pointed at the back of his graphing calculator with an indicative moan.
"Oh batteries. I guess it does electricity. Thanks!" Crevos brandished the machine at Trixie again. "Huh," he said, popping open the back. He pulled out a chunk of metal marked 666-V and sniffed it.
The demonic idiocy finally hit a blip on Lucifer's infernal radar. "Crevos, that isn't a—"
Crevos opened his jaw to its full width—nearly half his head—and bit down hard with his first two rows of teeth.
Hovee's moan turned to a squeak as Crevos convulsed in pain.
Trixie looked from Crevos to Lucifer and back. "I thought you said they could help."
.
.
"Why is the simulator's first aid kit full of bees?!" demanded Trixie, patting Crevos' face with the ripped sleeve of her flight suit.
"I'm fairly sure I told you you're in Hell, Urchin," Lucifer said wearily.
"Electricity and acid," Crevos gasped at the graphing calculator. "Genius."
"Focus on deepest parts of your heart," Lucifer coached. "Some souls say it feels like an anchor or a set of diving weights."
Trixie's eyeroll could have won a bowling tournament. "Okay," she allowed, handing Crevos the rag as she took a yoga-deep breath.
"We had one guy say it felt like a hunk of cheese he ate the night before."
"You have only one mouth Crevos. Close it," said Lucifer.
"Yes, sir."
The scene shifted to fluorescent lights and linoleum floors. Chairs with metal legs scraped hellishly on Lucifer's ears.
"School days?"
Trixie opened her eyes and looked down at the cheap pantsuit and then at the sheaf of notes in her hand. "Grad school days. I'm defending my second doctoral dissertation."
"Second?"
"I have two PhDs. Only one of them is in engineering," she said. She looked at him. "It's part of the appeal. For NASA. Why send up two hundred and forty pounds of expertise if you can send up one-twenty?"
Lucifer put a hand to his chin.
"Fine, one-thirty-five, but a lot of it's muscle!"
"Okay," Crevos said from the review panel, now wearing a halfhearted dye job, power blazer, and gloppy pink lipstick behind wire-thin glasses. "So just reenact what happened, but this time, try to do it right."
Trixie looked awkwardly at Lucifer.
"This moment is one of your regrets, Urchin. This time, act as you think you ought to have acted. The demons won't make it easy on you, but that's all part of the process."
"Professors," Trixie swallowed, "I would like to make an amendment to my paper."
Crevos, Zzpfrit, and the other infernal academics sent up bureaucratic chorus of "Most irregular!" and indignant "At this juncture?!" with a fair number of comments about Trixie's planning skills, presumed sexual habits and poor hygiene. Hovee managed a convincingly mind-racking echo of the broken air conditioner.
"I neglected to credit Dr. Linda Martin for the passage on narcissistic personality types," she said. "She and I discussed one of her patients informally on many occasions, though she never violated confidentiality," she added quickly.
"Dr. Linda?" asked Lucifer. "Wait, are you a therapist?"
"Psych officer," said Trixie. "We're going to be crammed together in a tin can for two and a half years. Someone has to manage the group dynamic so we don't—"
"Stab one another?" Lucifer asked.
Trixie narrowed her eyes. "Shut up."
Lucifer exhaled. It made so much sense. Trixie had spent day after day in the presence of a magnetic and multitalented man who nonetheless had room to benefit from therapy, so she'd realized that even astronauts could do with a headshrinking or two. But her memories of Linda were inextricably tied with her memories of himself, which meant they were so painful that she'd somehow inadvertently plagiarized— He opened his mouth to speak.
"You did not ruin my life," Trixie snapped.
.
.
Trixie, now twenty-two and sporting chunky braids, re-dumped her MIT boyfriend of three years. Lucifer nodded slowly.
"It appears that, when I returned to Hell, you subconsciously absorbed the idea that men always leave, and after that, you could never trust—"
"No!" said Trixie.
The demon Belios sat up on the bed. "I thought she was dumping me because she figured out I'm a childish bonehead who can't handle that she's getting the internship I wanted." He turned to Trixie. "Not at all like your dad. He kept telling me between tennis games that your mom's close rate and Charlotte Richards' law degrees were, 'kinda hot.'"
"You did not ruin my life," Trixie added.
.
.
"Lord Morningstar?" Crevos asked as Trixie stood in a cramped kitchen, carefully rehearsing a kinder, gentler way to tell her ex-roommate that she could start paying her share of the electric bill and give her mangy street cat a flea dip or move out, sans taking all her stuff to the pawn shop while she was out getting doughnuts.
"Yes?" Lucifer said dully.
"You know how most tenants feel guilty about... the people they spawned or the ones who spawned them? Like Marcellus."
Lucifer frowned. "I'm surprised you remember."
Crevos reached up with one hind leg and scratched hard at the fur behind his eye. "I remember that Marcellus moved to Chic-ago when his mother was turning flaky in the bones, and we haven't done any loops with this tenant's parents, so—"
"That's nothing," Lucifer said quickly. "I'm sure her mother and sister have nothing to do with why she's here."
"Really, Lord Morningstar? How can you tell?" Crevos give his scarred head a fur-flapping shake, as if there were parasites in both ear canals. Lucifer stepped back. "I mean, you keep saying that when the tenant says 'it can't be that,' it means it is that, but it's not the tenant saying that, it's you saying that, so—"
"Since when do you remember anything I say?"
"AND HERE'S YOUR PEANUT BUTTER!" shrieked Zzzpfrit as she threw the jar at Trixie's head. Trixie, in the body she'd had at twenty-six, dove nimbly to the side. Crevos, not used to life on all fours, did not. He hit the far wall with a feline yowl.
.
.
"So when I taught you that the way to handle bullies was to intimidate them—"
"You did not ruin my life," said Trixie, as she handed an ice pack to an eighth-grade boy moaning over his kicked crotch.
.
.
"When I was never able to keep my promise to let you drive the roadster..."
"You did not ruin my life," said Trixie, teenaged with bright red highlights, as she stood over the ex-frame of Maze's ex-car.
.
.
"You did not ruin my life!" Trixie snipped as she picked a piece of butter-side-down toast off Eve's best clubbing dress.
"As guilts go..." Crevos mumbled, touching the fingers of his first and third arms together, "this seems pretty bland, Lord Morningstar." Hovee gave a short moan of agreement. Belios, still decked out as Eve in a bathrobe and matching towel tied over his head, turned to hear what Lucifer would say.
"They're right. This doesn't make sense," said Trixie. "I can't see this as the guilt keeping me out of heaven." Trixie exhaled, hands clasped over her head as she stared at the ceiling. "We're not getting anywhere."
The room shook as another cardiac crescendo built and died away.
"We don't know how many more of those you have left, Urchin," Lucifer said carefully. "Perhaps we should abandon this path. Let me take you back to Earth before your body becomes any weaker." She watched him cautiously, face creased between the brows. "Work through your guilt up there. You'll see your father again eventually."
He stepped closer, taking her wrists in his hands. "What would Daniel think if you got yourself perma-dead or trapped down here—" He felt a strange feeling flare through his heart. "—just because you couldn't wait a few years to, I don't know, give him his Father's Day card?"
Trixie pushed his hands away. "That's not why I need to see him," she said. She exhaled hard. "How can my guilt be something I don't even know about?" She looked up. "Hang on a sec. If someone does something bad, but they don't feel guilty about it—"
Lucifer held up a hand. "I know where this is going, Urchin." Should he tell her that he'd had this conversation with Daniel, twelve times, in between the years of willing participation in the corrupt bits of a corrupt institution and active deception of his then-spouse? Not to mention the completely irrational idea that he'd somehow failed Charlotte. "In theory, if someone is truly devoid of morality, then I suppose they'd board the upbound train, but I can't say it's ever happened." A flare of a memory, the flash of fear in Cain's eyes as he left the mortal coil. "As far as I've seen, all humanity's worst hits number among your neighbors. Hitler, Atilla, Dahmer, Manson—"
"The guy who killed Dad?"
On reflex, Lucifer's head turned in the direction of the pit. Michael seemed to be drifting quietly. If Lucifer's sense of Hell could be trusted. The damned place could have a mind of its own at times. "He came here." More like picked up by the still-bleeding scruff and chucked downward. Jophiel and Temeluch had been angrier about Remi than they'd let on.
"Did you help him get out of here?" she asked.
"I don't think he—" Lucifer stopped. Belios was already changing shape to match the new Trixie-fixation. A short human with gray in his beard and nothing at all behind his eyes. "No," he answered.
"Will you?"
From the corner of his eye, Lucifer saw Crevos touch Hovee on the arm, as if telling him to listen.
No lying. Ever.
"That's the plan, yes," he said. Trixie's fingers twisted around the object in her hand, suddenly a plastic fork. Lucifer stepped forward as if he had to catch something she'd dropped. "When I was in the running to replace my father as God, I asked myself if I could be the protector of all humans, even the ones who'd hurt my friends." But he'd had Chloe by his side then, and that had been—
"I didn't mean that in the abstract, Lucifer," said Trixie. "I mean now."
Notes: So I had the general idea for this chapter around the time I decided to go past a one-shot, but the specifics took on a life of their own.