Free The Weirdness by Jeremy P. Bushnell Page A

to steal some dealie from out of Hell and do the thrice-ward thing you were talking about? If he can fuck with
you
then what’s going to stop him from hitting me with a lightning bolt or—you know,” he churns the air with his hands, “killing me in some other wizardly way?”
    “Well, he’s not a wizard,” Lucifer says. “He’s a warlock.”
    “Yeah,” Billy says, “but the important part is the Me Getting Killed part.”
    “He won’t kill you. Ollard has warding powers, but I have ones of my own. I can ward you against him.”
    “That would work?”
    “It will work,” Lucifer says.
    This is crazy
, Billy thinks. He does not think about what it would be like to get his book published. He does not think about reconciling with Denver. He thinks
This is a good way to die
.
    “Billy,” Lucifer says. “I care about this world. I do not wish to see it come to harm. I need your help.”
    “Man,” Billy says. “Aren’t you supposed to be
evil
? Why aren’t you asking me to do some evil shit that I could say no to? Why do you care about the world anyway?”
    Lucifer looks at Billy for a long second.
    “You know what I do?” he says, finally. “I
tempt
people. I’ve done it for a long time. I
like
it. I’m
good
at it. And if the world goes away there will be no people left to tempt. There will be cindersand there will be ash. And looking at cinders and ash for the rest of eternity strikes me, frankly, as no fun at all.”
    “I have to think about it,” Billy says.
    Lucifer looks at his watch. “How long do you think you’ll need?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know. How long do we have?”
    “Maybe a week,” Lucifer says, after taking a moment to pause for some kind of calculation.
    “Okay, then,” Billy says. “I had a long day. I’m tired and I’m high and even if I
weren’t
it’d
still
be a good idea to sleep on it.”
    Lucifer watches Billy’s face, reading something in it, then says, “As you wish.”
    “Let me do the reading, get that over with, and then
after
the reading I’ll have a decision for you.”
    “After the reading,” Lucifer says.
    “Yeah,” Billy says. “But I don’t necessarily mean the
second I step down off the stage
. I mean, like, a
while
after.”
    “I am reasonable,” says Lucifer. “I agree to these terms.” He closes the laptop and stuffs it back in his messenger bag, swaps it for a manila folder. “I’ll leave you with these for your review.”
    Billy takes the folder. Inside is a printout of all the PowerPoint slides. “Uh, thanks,” says Billy.
    “Until after the reading,” Lucifer says. As he turns to go, something nags at Billy, some question that Anil raised.
    “Hey, wait a second,” Billy says, remembering.
    Lucifer, half out the door, pauses.
    “What about God?” Billy says.
    Lucifer frowns.
    “I mean, if I believe in you—the Devil—then it reasonably follows that I should believe in God. But I don’t know if I believein God, not really. So—I don’t know—I just thought I’d ask you, like,
is there a God?
”
    Lucifer looks at Billy.
    “Don’t talk to me about God,” he says, and then he’s gone.
    Billy stands there, at the doorway, for a long time. He latches the chain. He tries to get back to having the feeling he had this morning, the victorious feeling he had at having turned the Devil away the first time. But it’s not working. He no longer feels like turning the Devil down is proof that he’s not a fuck-up. This time, with the fate of the goddamn world hanging in the balance, he only feels like a coward.
    Why me?
he wonders.
Why put this on me? There are people out there who infiltrate places for a fucking living. Navy SEALs. CIA spooks. Fuck, send a UPS guy; he could at least get Ollard to open the door
.
    It’s because you’re desperate
, he thinks.
The only person desperate enough to say yes
.
    But that can’t be it. There are plenty of desperate people. He lives in New York; he sees buttloads of human