“She’ll have a good life here,” I said quietly. “People who care about her. Who love kids.”
“Yes,” Uriel said.
Mouse’s tail thumped several more times.
“Yeah, buddy. And she’ll have you.” I glanced up at Uriel. “For how long? I mean, most dogs . . .”
“Temple dogs have been known to live for centuries,” he replied. “Your friend is more than capable of protecting her for a lifetime—even a wizard’s lifetime, if need be.”
That made me feel a little better. I knew what it was like to grow up without my birth parents around, and what a terrible loss it was not to have that sense of secure continuation most of the other kids around me had. Maggie had lost her foster parents, and then her birth mother, and then her biological father. She had another foster home now—but she would always have Mouse.
“Hell,” I said to Mouse, “for all I know, you’ll be smarter than I would have been about dealing with her, anyway.”
Mouse snorted, grinning a doggy grin. He couldn’t speak, but I could effortlessly imagine his response—of course he’d be smarter than I was. That particular bar hadn’t been set very high.
“Take care of her, buddy,” I said to Mouse, and gave his shoulders a couple of firm pats with my fists. “I know you’ll take good care of her.”
Mouse sat up away from me, his expression attentive and serious, and then, very deliberately, offered me his paw.
I shook hands with him gravely, and then rose to face the archangel.
“All right,” I said quietly. “I’m ready.”
Chapter Fifty-one
Uriel extended his hand again, and I took it.
The Carpenters’ house faded from around us and we reappeared in the world of empty white light. There was one difference this time. Two glass doors stood in front of us. One of them led to an office building—in fact, I recognized it as the interior of Captain Jack’s department in Chicago Between. I saw Carmichael go by the door, consulting a notepad and fishing in his pocket for his car keys.
The other door led only to darkness. That was the uncertain future. It was What Came Next.
“I can hardly remember the last time I spent this much time with one particular mortal,” Uriel said thoughtfully. “I wish I had time to do it more often.”
I looked at him for a long moment and said, “I don’t understand.”
He laughed. It was a sound that seethed with warmth and life.
I found myself smiling and joined him. “I don’t understand what your game is in all of this.”
“Game?”
I shrugged. “Your people conned me into taking a pretty horrible risk with my soul. I guess. If that’s what you call this.” I waved a hand. “And you’ve got plausible deniability—I know, I know—or maybe you really are sincere and Captain Murphy threw a curveball past all of us. Either way . . . it doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?” Uriel asked.
“Because it doesn’t have anything to do with balancing the scales of one of the Fallen lying to me,” I said. “You haven’t done any fortunecookie whispers into my head, have you?”
“No,” he said. “Not yet.”
“Well, that’s what I mean,” I said. “The scale still isn’t balanced. And I don’t think you send people back just for kicks.”
Uriel regarded me pleasantly. He said nothing.
“So you did it for a reason. Something you couldn’t have gotten with your seven whispered words.”
“Perhaps it was to balance the situation with Molly,” he said.
I snorted. “Yeah. I bet all the time you go around solving your problems one by one, in neat little rows. I bet you never, ever try to hit two birds with one stone.”
Uriel regarded me pleasantly. He said nothing.
“I’m headed for the great beyond, and you still won’t give me a straight answer?” I demanded, smiling.
Uriel regarded me pleasantly. He said nothing. A lot.
I laughed again. “Tell you what, big guy. Just tell me something. Something useful. I’ll be happy with whatever I get.”
He pursed his lips and thought about it for a moment. Then he said, “No matter where you go, there you are.”
I blinked. “Goodness,” I said. “Buckaroo Banzai?”
“Confucius,” he said.
“Wow. How very fortune cookie of you.” I gave him a half smile and offered him my hand. “But despite your cryptic ways, I’m sure of one thing now that I wasn’t before.”
“Oh?”
“Souls,” I said. “I mean, you always wonder if they’re real. Even if you believe in them, you still have to wonder: Is my existence just this body? Is there really something more? Do I really have a soul?”
Uriel’s smile blossomed again. “You’ve got it backward, Harry,” he said. “You are a soul. You have a body.”
I blinked at that. It was something to think about. “Mr. Sunshine, it has been a dubious and confusing pleasure.”
“Harry,” he said, shaking my hand. “I feel the same way.”
I released his hand, nodded, and squared my shoulders.
Then, moving briskly, lest my resolve waver, I opened the black door and stepped through.
Given the way my life has typically progressed, I probably should have guessed that What Came Next was pain.
A whole lot of pain.
I tried to take a breath, and a searing burst of agony radiated out from my chest. I held off on the next breath for as long as I could, but eventually I couldn’t put it off anymore, and again fire spread across my chest.
I repeated that cycle for several moments, my entire reality consumed by the simple struggle to breathe and to avoid the pain. I was on the losing side of things, and if the pain didn’t exactly lessen, it did, eventually, become more bearable.
“Good,” whispered a dry, rasping voice. “Very good.”
I felt the rest of my body next. I was lying on something cool and contoured. It wasn’t precisely comfortable, but it wasn’t a torment, either. I clenched my fingers, but something was wrong with them. They barely moved. It was as though someone had replaced my bones and flesh with lead weights, heavy and inert, and my tendons and muscles were too weak to break the inertia. But I felt cool, damp earth crumbling beneath my fingertips.
“Doesn’t seem to bode well,” I mumbled. My tongue didn’t work right. My lips didn’t, either. The words came out a slushy mumble.
“Excellent,” rasped the voice. “I told you he had strength enough.”
My thoughts resonated abruptly with another voice, one that had no point of contact with my ears: WE WILL SEE.
What had my godmother said at my grave? That it was all about respect and . . .
. . . and proxies.
“The eyes,” rasped the voice. “Open your eyes, mortal.”
My eyelids were in the same condition as everything else. They didn’t want to move. But I made them. I realized that they felt cooler than the rest of my skin, as if someone had recently wiped them with a damp washcloth.
I opened them and cried out weakly at the intensity of the light.
I waited for a moment, then tried again. Then again. On the four or five hundredth try, I was finally able to see.
I was in a cave, lit by wan, onion-colored light. I could see a roof of rock and earth, with roots of trees as thick as my waist trailing through here and there. Water dripped down from overhead, all around me. I could hear it. Some dropped onto my lips, and I licked at it. It tasted sweet, sweeter than double-thick cherry syrup, and I shivered in pleasure this time.
I was starving.
I looked around me slowly. It made my head feel like it was about to fly apart every time I twitched it, but I persevered. I was, so far as I could tell, naked. I was lying on fine, soft earth that had somehow been contoured to the shape of my body. There were pine needles—soft ones—spread about beneath me in lieu of a blanket, their scent sharp and fresh.
There was a dull throb coming from my arms, and I looked down to see . . .