Chapters (60)
- DAW Books Presents
- HAPPY HOURINHELL
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Dedication
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- prologue
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- interlude
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- interlude
- thirteen
- fourteen
- interlude
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- interlude
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- forty-one
- forty-two
- forty-three
- forty-four
- forty-five
- forty-six
- forty-seven
- forty-eight
- epilogue
Of course the news sucked: the forest looked like it went on forever, in all directions. I couldn’t see anything except foggy treetops and the occasional lump of stone sticking up like an ancient skull eroding from the ground. For a brief moment I considered just waiting on top of the rock until the hounds and soldiers arrived, so I could at least take a few of them with me, but then I thought of Caz, of her face as she sat in that horrible, shrieking theater beside Eligor, and knew I couldn’t condemn her to be that monster’s prisoner forever.
I climbed down and stumbled on in the direction I had been going.
I hadn’t seen any bodies for quite a while, until I stumbled over a girl in the stream, facedown in a very shallow pond that had gone largely red. I stopped, still a prisoner of my treacherous angel reflexes. She looked young when I turned her over, scarcely past puberty, her face white as the most determined goth made up for her Facebook profile. Both wrists were cut so deep I could see the tendons, because the blood had mostly run out. She moaned at my touch and shivered. I fought the urge to lift her up, to bandage her and try to heal her. I shouldn’t have touched her at all, because I really didn’t need any more harpies, but for some reason I couldn’t just ignore this one as I had so many others. I didn’t recognize her, of course, but she looked like the kind of person I might actually know—some poor soul condemned by God’s justice to commit suicide over and over until all the stars burned out. I couldn’t remember anymore what it was like when things made sense.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
Her eyes opened but didn’t really focus on my face. I think I must have been something like a dream to her. “Because I could think of nothing else. Because I even dreamed about it. Because I wanted peace.”
“But you didn’t get it.”
She closed her eyes and moaned again, a sound far too deep and dejected for such a slip of a girl. In the real world she would have weighed no more than eighty or ninety pounds, if that. She should have been playing tetherball or studying fractions for a math test. “God hates my sin.”
“I can’t believe that.” And I couldn’t. I had never lost a client just for suicide; I think the prosecutors have to prove serious selfishness to get a suicide condemned these days. I asked again. “Why did you do it?”
“Everywhere I went, they stared at me.” She shook her head and tried to crawl back toward the crimson water. “No. Don’t make me talk. You’ll bring the harpies. When it stops hurting so much, they come.”