“Vera. Vera, talk to me.” It was hard to speak in a normal voice after the pain I’d just suffered, but I was fighting for my life. “Why does it have to be this way? Because I looked at a woman at the opera? I thought I knew her, that’s all. It was nothing to do with you.”

“Nothing to do with me.” Her voice was heavy, the words bleak. She was always like this after her attacks on me. “That is just the problem. I wanted you only to care about me. I wanted you only to see me.”

I tried to get her to talk, to explain, anything that would keep the lines of communication open. Already she was losing interest in me, I could tell. The worst of her anger, her almost operatic feeling of betrayal, was beginning to cool, but I didn’t fool myself that when she was done with me she’d just let me go.

“Listen, we could try again!”

She didn’t even bother to reply, just shook her head and slid off the bed, then walked out of the room, bare feet whispering on the stone floor. Belle, who always stood guard now during Vera’s frenzies, gave me a look of contempt.

“She’ll be done with you soon. Maybe she’ll give you to me. I’ll break your neck like a chicken’s and then you’ll be no trouble to anyone.”

I didn’t say anything, but I wondered what this breaking of my neck would mean in a place like this. It probably wouldn’t kill me, since as far as I knew you couldn’t die in Hell, but it would make things pretty unpleasant, especially if it was combined with being thrown on a garbage heap somewhere or burned, as the two women had both threatened to do. Not to mention when my soul arrived at the depot for re-bodying, and Hell’s authorities realized it was the kind that usually sported a halo. Lameh’s implanted briefing made it clear that mere destruction of my demon body would not free me from these horrors. Unless I left Hell under my own power, by the route Temuel and the guardian angel had given me, I was going to stay there forever.