I took a drink from a servant. It wasn’t all that much better than Riprash’s demon rum, but the glass was clean, and I could feel my demon body repairing the damage to my throat and stomach after each sip. The guests talked about many things, and as I moved restlessly from room to room I listened in on dozens of conversations, but I didn’t hear a single one mention anything about the past or their lives on Earth. Instead the talk was the sort of things rich people chatted about everywhere—the problem of finding good servants, gossip about their social set, and discussions of the best places to go on holiday. It was like hanging around with a bunch of rich fascists; after a while, I just stopped listening to the cruelty underneath the words and let it all wash over me. I did begin to feel a bit better about my chances of passing undetected, since they seemed like a pretty incurious lot. Nobody asked me a single question about my background or seemed to need any more information than that I was “Vera’s guest.” I was one of the crowd now, it seemed. The in crowd.

I found Vera and Elizabeth again in the main parlor, a candlelit room whose high ceilings were decorated with golden cobwebs. As we chatted, a young man who had been introduced to me earlier as “Fritz,” a handsome fellow in a military uniform, hurried up to us. Other than a ridiculously puffed-up chest under his military tunic, he was perhaps the most ordinary looking person in the room, at least by earthly standards, but there were a surprising number of demons there who looked nearly as human.

“Elizabeth!” he squealed to our hostess, “you’ll never guess who’s arrived!”

“Fritzi, my chicken, do you have to be so common?” Vera asked. “We’re gossiping.”

“Then I have something you’ll really like to gossip about,” he said, grinning. “The president himself is here.”

I turned, half-expecting to see Richard Nixon with a party box of wine coolers or something, but the figure coming through the door with a small entourage of lesser demons was unfamiliar to me, or so I thought, a tall, spare figure in a black tailcoat whose elongated face and sharp, curved nose made him look like a humanoid crow. Then I realized who he was. Even worse, he had actually met me in my Bobby Dollar body and might recognize me.

“Caym, the Grand President of the Council of Hell,” a servant announced loudly. This was the bastard who had run interference for Eligor at the big Heaven/Hell conference in San Jude, just before the grand duke tried to roast me like a marshmallow.

I couldn’t do anything but watch as that infernal raven, black eyes bright as blobs of oil, came toward us. Worst of all, he was looking right at me and beginning to smile.