We sat there, and I knew that despite his words, we were all indeed panicking. My stomach was rolling, but this time, it wasn’t a reaction to the severing of my bond with Hell. This was born of pure terror. When things were bad in my life—particularly after Seth and I had broken up—there had been times when I’d hated immortality. Death had sounded appealing. I honestly hadn’t been able to fathom how I could endure the centuries to come and had envied the finite life spans of humans. But now? Faced with the idea that I could actually die? Suddenly, desperately, I wanted to cling to my immortality with every scrap of my strength. Death was bleak, dark, and frightening. All the world’s dangers descended on me at once, all the things I’d hiterto been able to ignore. Car accidents. Electrocution. Bird flu. The world was no longer safe.

If the vampires felt any such fears, they apparently decided it wasn’t going to get in the way of their last few days as free men. They rose as one and made motions to leave.

“Well, if Jerome’s going to get replaced with or without us, then there’s no point sitting and moping,” said Peter.

“We got cut off without warning,” I told him. “We could get reconnected to Hell’s circuit board just as suddenly, you know. Aren’t you a little nervous about getting caught out in the sun?”

“They’re not going to make any decisions in the next five hours,” said Peter brashly—too brashly, I thought.

He paused a moment, his gaze drifting to my window and the blue sky beyond it. There, in his dark eyes, I saw the tiniest, tiniest bit of longing. It occurred to me then just how much he must have missed the sun these last thousand years or so. Like the rest of us, he’d willingly sold his soul for immortality. Along with that, he’d gotten superhuman strength and speed in exchange for a dependency on blood, a denial of sunlight, and a job as a dispenser of fear and nightmares. I certainly had regrets about my hellish deal some days; no doubt he did too. And maybe, despite his lax, overconfident attitude about the sun, he truly was aware of the risk of getting fried—and thought it was worth it after all this time.

He and Cody left, leaving me and a still bleak-looking Hugh. I gently touched the imp’s shoulder. “I’m sure this’ll work out.”

He cut me a wry look. “Really?”

I laughed softly. “No, not really. I’m just trying to make you feel better. I never realized before how much you liked your . . . what would you call it? Imp vision?”

This finally got him to smile. “You always thought of me as a paper pusher?”

“Nah, no one uses paper anymore. It’s all electronic.”