Straight to Heaven (20 page)

I landed on my stomach with an
oomph
, and lay on the ground, panting. My demon screeched in horror, demanding that I leave, but I ignored her.

It didn’t take long for me to draw a crowd of angels. I heard one say, “She’s back
again
!”

I raised my head. “Only because you all are trying to kill me.”

The one with the ponytail and John Lennon-style glasses helped me to my feet. “No, we may intimidate, but we don’t kill.”

“Where’s Harmony?” I asked, glaring.

“At this moment, she’s protecting Craig Fuller from William Benedict.” He brushed off several dead leaves that were sticking to my arms.

I frowned. “So who was that pair just shooting at me?”

“Not us,” he said. There were murmurs of agreement from the other angels.

“Then who?” I peered through Heaven’s doorway and looked around the parking lot. My attackers were nowhere in sight.

“Probably demons,” the angel said. “Demons dressed in white.”

Then I caught sight of one of the wanted posters that were hanging on the trees of Heaven’s pathways. There they were, the two demons in the trench coats and fedoras. The very same ones I’d seen the night before shooting pool in the bar.

With William.

When I was sure that the coast was clear, I left Heaven, went back to Earth, and entered Hell’s realm.

Mr. Clerk, looking puzzled, still stood at the entrance to the doorway. “Where did you go? All of a sudden, you disappeared.”

“I went to Heaven.”

He twisted his lips into a moue of distaste. “That’s not funny.”

“I’m not kidding,” I said. “It was the only safe place I could go. Those things were trying to kill me.” My left shin itched painfully. Looking down, I saw that the fabric of my jeans was scorched. “I got hit!” The wound was slight, but it outraged me. “This is William’s fault! I could have died!”

Mr. Clerk looked at the tear in my pants. “Those demons were only sending you a message. If they’d wanted to kill you, they would have. Creatures like that don’t miss.”

“I had no idea that William would play so rough.”

Mr. Clerk looked grim. “Neither did I, but if it’s any consolation, William failed today’s assignment as well.”

That was good news, but it didn’t quell my temper. I was so furious that I wondered if there was any way for
me
to hire assassins to go after
William
.

Then I had another thought. Now that I knew how serious William was about winning, I worried how far he would take it. Would he go after me again? Would he go after
Grace
?

I had to talk to Miss Spry. The competition was getting out of hand, and the insanity had to end.

“So William hired a pair of demons to stop you today,” Miss Spry said. She glanced at the burned cloth below my knee. “Clever boy.” She smiled.

I was outraged. “Clever?! He nearly got me killed!”

“I tried to explain to her that those kinds of demons never miss unless they intend to,” Mr. Clerk said. “William wanted to scare you, not kill you.”

“Well,
I
didn’t know that.” I sat on the couch and carefully pulled the cloth away from my injury. The skin underneath the tear had turned an angry red and was beginning to blister. Mr. Clerk brought me some ice wrapped in a tea towel. “I don’t think it’s fair that William got outside help,” I complained.

“Fair?” Miss Spry sounded surprised. “What made you think anything in Hell is fair?”

Good point. I put the ice on my wound, sucking in my breath at the pain. “I still think that if I hadn’t gone into Heaven, I would have wound up dead.”

“Heaven?” Miss Spry was at my side in an instant. “What’s this about going into Heaven?”

“Nothing.” Mr. Clerk gave me a warning look. Taking his clue, I shrugged.

Miss Spry was not about to be put off, however. “Tell me, Lilith.” Her eyes began to glow.

“I went to Heaven to avoid those assassins,” I admitted. “It was a matter of self-preservation. That’s it; I swear. And the other time was only because of my niece.” I lifted the tea towel for another look at my burn. “You would have been proud of me, though. I roughed up an angel when I was there.”

When no one said anything, I glanced up. Miss Spry stared at me, and Mr. Clerk appeared horrorstruck. I’d already broken so many rules in my contract that I hadn’t thought it was possible to break more, but from the looks on their faces, I realized that I must have done something awful.

“You went to Heaven,” Miss Spry finally said. I nodded. “Twice?”

“Three times,” I admitted.

Miss Spry tugged on her pearls so hard that I was certain the strands would break. “Patrick, you told me that when Lilith met with
Him
, she did it on neutral ground.”

“She did! I know for a fact she did.” Mr. Clerk looked in danger of swooning. “I think Lilith is mistaken about these visits. She probably
thought
she was going to Heaven, when really she was back on neutral ground.”

“It was Heaven,” I said firmly. “There were these pathways in the woods, and it was really quiet and gloomy there.” I searched my memory. “And posters! All kinds of wanted posters were stapled to the trees.”

Mr. Clerk paled, and Miss Spry’s face was full of an emotion I’d never seen on it before: fear.

“It’s not possible,” Miss Spry whispered. “No demon can enter Heaven and then leave again!”

I’d been called a liar once already that day; I wasn’t about to let it happen twice. “I can prove it,” I said, remembering my last visit. “Hold on.” I left the office and found the door leading to my own kitchen. Because there were only two of us living in the house now, I hadn’t needed to take out the trash for a while. Digging underneath a still-damp coffee filter full of used grounds, I found the wadded up poster I’d stolen from Heaven.

When I returned to the office, Miss Spry and Mr. Clerk were conferring in quiet voices. At the sight of me, they instantly shut up. I un-crumpled the poster and tried to smooth it on Miss Spry’s desk. “See? It’s a poster from Heaven.”

To my surprise, it wasn’t a wanted poster. It was a missing poster. Right in the center was a picture of someone very familiar: Mr. Clerk.

Beneath his bewildered-looking face was the message: ‘Missing: Our beloved Patrick Clerk. Last seen in the company of the incubus, William Benedict. Reward.’

Miss Spry grabbed the poster from my hands. “Well isn’t that sweet? They miss you, Patrick.” She glared daggers at Mr. Clerk. “They want you back.”

“But I don’t want to go.” He helplessly wrung his hands. “I keep telling you that.”

She shoved the poster at him. “Lilith, I don’t know how you’ve managed it, but you are
not
to go into Heaven again. Do you understand?”

“Perfectly,” I said.

Miss Spry tapped her finger thoughtfully against her lower lip. “Lilith’s mother wasn’t able to enter Heaven like that, was she?” She arched an eyebrow at Mr. Clerk who shook his head.

“What about other women from Sarah Goodswain’s line?”

Again, Mr. Clerk shook his head. “The ability must come from Lilith’s father,” he said.

Miss Spry nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. Lilith, who is your father?”

I dreaded the question because I couldn’t answer it. Simon Yoshida had raised me, but my mother had never told me who my sperm donor was. And if it was true, that my unnatural ability to enter Heaven came from him, I didn’t even
want
to know who he was. “I have no idea.”

Miss Spry looked at Mr. Clerk. “Well?”

“How would
I
know,” he asked, looking offended. “You ordered Carrie to get pregnant, and she did. She wasn’t obligated to tell you who did the honors.”

I was shocked. “You
ordered
my mother to get pregnant? With me?”

Miss Spry’s eyes narrowed. “Your mother was being difficult. She knew that one generation must follow the next, but she refused to get pregnant. So I gave her an order. Either she bear a daughter, or…”

I was about to ask ‘or what’, but from the corner of my eye, I could see Mr. Clerk frantically shaking his head. He was right. I didn’t want to hear the answer. Miss Spry probably had all kinds of nasty ways to ensure my mother would get pregnant. So I swallowed my question like a good, little, submissive demon and went back to attending my burn.

“No more visits to Heaven,” Miss Spry repeated sternly.

I nodded. “I swear it.” Now, if only I could get Heaven to stop visiting me, everything would be grand.

Chapter Fourteen

After leaving Miss Spry’s office, I headed towards the doorway that led to the Everston Recreation Area so that I could get my car, but halfway there, I hesitated. There had to be a way for me to reach Craig. There
had
to!

Mr. Clerk had insisted that I wait for instructions, but so far, his careful plans hadn’t amounted to anything. I was tired to death of his fussy attention to detail, and his insistence that I follow his recommendations. I had a feeling that if I was ever going to tempt Craig, I needed to think outside the boxes printed on those charts and diagrams. I needed to dig deeper. One quick look around Craig’s house. That’s all I wanted.

I found an otherworld passage that led into Craig’s kitchen. My succubus scented the air like a dog and then told me the coast was clear. Searching the house revealed nothing other than that Craig was a neat freak. The most interesting discovery was a well-organized DVD library that featured every war movie known to Hollywood. Ignoring the pain in my leg, I carefully made my way downstairs.

Craig had what is known as a Michigan basement. A polite term which means, ‘dank hole in the ground that is good for nothing but a fallout shelter.’ It was here, under the dim light of the two hanging bulbs, that I finally found the real Craig.

There were several cabinets full of rifles and handguns. An enormous closet under the stairs stored canned goods, hundreds of bottles of water, canisters of propane, bars of soap, rolls of toilet paper, and Ziploc bags of hard candy. In another room, this one probably a coal cellar at one time, stood a cot with linens neatly folded at the end, a battered easy chair, and a small bookshelf full of books that included the Bible, old copies of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine, several dog-eared westerns, and
The Anarchist’s Cookbook
. Light reading for those days when the fallout was too dense to go outside.

Beyond yet another shelving unit of canned goods and bottled water was a small room with walls covered in what looked like Styrofoam. In the corner stood a video camera on a tripod. High-intensity lights were mounted near the ceiling. This must have been where J.T. and Craig made their training videos. It was an interesting setup, but not unusual. If you considered making Surviving Armageddon for Idiots videos usual, that was.

Across from the camera was a battered metal desk. The same one I’d seen in a few of the YouTube videos. I sat behind it and looked through the drawers. It was there that I finally found something interesting.

It was the package that Craig had been thinking about mailing on the first day I’d met him at the post office. It was still wrapped in brown paper. For the first time, I read what was written on the front. It was addressed to the
Detroit Free Press
.

I slid a nail under the tape and opened the package. Inside was a stack of neatly-printed papers. I scanned the first one, and halfway through realized that I was reading a manifesto. One that demanded that the government come clean about its secret experiments, cover-ups, and domestic terrorist activities. It accused public schools of turning the children of ‘honest, law-abiding citizens’ into Buddhists and radical vegans. It said the President of the United States was a clone of a space alien who had landed in Roswell, New Mexico.

It was horrible, yet fascinating, reading. The kind of thing you think is a joke until you find a copy of it in someone’s house. Even touching it made me feel dirty.

My demon alerted me to the sound of footsteps from upstairs. I froze, terrified that Craig had returned. There were no otherworld doorways down in the basement, and if he found me in his house, not even my succubus’s charms could help me talk my way out.

I felt a burst of otherworld shine. Having Mr. Clerk find me down there would be nearly as bad as running into Craig. He’d be furious with me for interfering.

“Lilith?”

It wasn’t Mr. Clerk after all. It was William. Furious, I went upstairs to face him.

His eyes went straight to my injured leg. He paled. “Lil, are you okay? Patrick told me you’d gotten hurt.”

“Isn’t that why you sent those demons after me?”

“No! I swear that I’d never harm you! I only wanted a diversion to keep you occupied for a few minutes.” He couldn’t take his eyes from the gash in my leg. “They promised me that they would be very careful, but I should have known better than to trust a pair of demons.”

“You wanted to keep me occupied by having demons
shoot
at me?!”

His eyes filled with pain. If I hadn’t been so enraged, I might have believed that his emotion was genuine. “I let the competition get the better of me,” he said. “I never intended to hurt you.”

I glared at him. “No wonder Miss Spry thinks so much of you. You’re just like her. You’ll use anyone to get what you want.”

“No,” he protested.

I raised my eyebrows. “What about Mr. Clerk?”

He dropped his head. His shoulders sagged. “You’re right. I used Patrick because I needed his help to win. But I’d never use you, Lilith. You’re very special to me. More than you realize.”

There was a gasp.

Mr. Clerk stood on Hell’s side of the otherworld. From his stricken expression, I knew he’d heard everything.

I hurried from Craig’s kitchen and into Hell’s hallway with William on my heels. He started to speak, but Mr. Clerk held up his hand, cutting him off. As heartbroken as he was, he managed to keep a little dignity. Ignoring William completely, he said, “Lilith, I came to tell you that your meddling is completely unacceptable.” His voice trembled. “Visiting Craig like this could shift the entire equation, and then my work would be ruined!” Then he gave me a freezing stare and stalked off.