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Chapters (60)
  1. DAW Books Presents
  2. HAPPY HOURINHELL
  3. Copyright page
  4. Contents
  5. Dedication
  6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  7. prologue
  8. one
  9. two
  10. three
  11. four
  12. five
  13. six
  14. interlude
  15. seven
  16. eight
  17. nine
  18. ten
  19. eleven
  20. twelve
  21. interlude
  22. thirteen
  23. fourteen
  24. interlude
  25. fifteen
  26. sixteen
  27. seventeen
  28. eighteen
  29. nineteen
  30. twenty
  31. twenty-one
  32. interlude
  33. twenty-two
  34. twenty-three
  35. twenty-four
  36. twenty-five
  37. twenty-six
  38. twenty-seven
  39. twenty-eight
  40. twenty-nine
  41. thirty
  42. thirty-one
  43. thirty-two
  44. thirty-three
  45. thirty-four
  46. thirty-five
  47. thirty-six
  48. thirty-seven
  49. thirty-eight
  50. thirty-nine
  51. forty
  52. forty-one
  53. forty-two
  54. forty-three
  55. forty-four
  56. forty-five
  57. forty-six
  58. forty-seven
  59. forty-eight
  60. epilogue

Lameh was in my head, just where Temuel had put her, murmuring words I could barely understand, things that sounded more like incantations than useful facts, and which entered me not like knowledge but like a chemical transfer. I did my best to relax and just let it trickle through me. It wasn’t like I could actually understand her anyway. She wasn’t telling me the names of things or the chief annual exports of various regions of the underworld. Everything she said was just a feeling I had, as though some benign but strange little animal had made a home deep in my skull and was going about its strange animal business there. But every now and then I could perceive things that hadn’t been there before, as if I had fallen asleep in a misty rain and now was feeling the water beginning to pool and run down my skin. I did my best to get comfortable.

At last I slipped into drowsy darkness, and for a little while that hard-to-hear voice accompanied me as I settled down, down. For a time I dreamed I was standing outside a door, knowing that the saddest thing in the world was on one side of it, but I didn’t know for certain which side the sadness was on, my side or the one I couldn’t see.

At last even the dream was gone, and I was alone with the near-silent whisper, sinking slowly into oblivion.

On my way.

On my way down.

All the way down.

interlude

I WAS ADMIRING a mole on her back, a smooth brown dot just below her shoulder blade, like a fairy-mound in a snow-covered field.

“So how did Hell know to put that perfect mole right there on your perfect back to make me fall in love with you?”

She snorted. “Right. Like Hell bothered to plan for you, Dollar. That happens to be my own original mole, direct from the Fifteenth Century.”

I bent and bestowed a kiss on the icy skin, then moved up to where the first pale wisps of hair grew on her nape. I spent a little while kissing her neck and ears and savoring the smell of her. I’ll never be able to describe it, not in its complex entirety, but I will never forget it even if I somehow beat the odds and survive to become a very, very old angel. Which would be a very long time.