Yes, there had been times when it had pulsed a little brighter. When she was submitting assessments to Professor Proctor, for example. Or, this last week, it had thrummed warmer than usual on occasion—her nerves about the impending Ferretcon and her application for postgraduate study getting to her.

It helped me to know when I wasn’t able to be there with her, that she might need a little zap to her phone to remind her how brave, and clever, and prepared she was for everything she was doing.

I wanted so badly to hold onto this little piece of her … to just keep that insight into her feelings, that connection to her, when I was away on work business.

And more, now that I’d … tinkered with the relic somewhat … and there was something else we could do with that little sliver of her soul …

While she thought I’d spent the entirety of the last two weeks managing the review of the many suspicious souls that had made their way to Heaven under my mother’s watch—and I had spent an inordinate amount of time doing that—what downtime I did have I’d spent sneaking back into Hell. I’d holed up in my old rooms to utilise the Hellfire there … and also to rummage frantically through some of my textbooks on the properties and uses of incomplete souls …

After many theories made and discarded, and several trial runs and adjustments, I was sure that I’d done it. I’d reversed the Token’s hold on her soul. I’d reforged it into something new. Something that presented her—presented us both—with a choice.

But I really had to give her the option of having a full and complete soul once more before I explained the other thing we could do with it. I couldn’t possibly sway her decision with that particular temptation … could I?

No. Don’t be so selfish, SJ!

I scrubbed my sweaty palms more vigorously against my breeches. Why the Home did they have to be made from the least absorbent fabric?

Devils don’t get nervous. They don’t.

Except when they’re about to do something potentially life-changing.

The line shuffled ever forwards. Ever closer to her, and I was funnelled along with it.

“Holy Hell!”

Her voice rang through the burble of too many human voices, and I scanned over the heads of the crowd. There she was. Standing higher than all the others, waving frantically, her eyes practically popping from her head. Her delicious body squeezed into an even more delicious corset than the one she’d been wearing that night in Hell … the night that had changed everything.

“I think she likes your ‘costume’, Boss,” Beezle commented, his little ferret voice smarmy. I ignored him, weaving my way through the cosplaying humans, my heart beating a frantic tattoo inside my ribs.