worried that Satan had never properly mourned his Fall from Heaven. Satan seemed stuck at the second stage of grief: anger. But now he seemed to have moved on to stage four: depression. That was only natural. However, Nero was concerned that Satan had skipped stage three: bargaining. But after depression came stage five: acceptance. And for Nero, that was the best stage of all. He just had to stick by Satan until he made the transition from stage four to five and it would all be okay.
Nero was a great believer in self-improvement. After all, a few hundred years of torture had changed him for the better so he didn’t see why it wouldn’t work for everyone else. He came to visit Satan ready to listen, to offer advice, to recite a few choice quotes he’d copied from Tuesdays with Morrie. He was prepared for emotions. Instead, it was an anticlimax. Satan just sat there. Sister Mary’s corpse just moldered. No one asked Nero to share his own experiences with grief. Nero tried to start the conversation a few times but he felt awkward talking to himself and his words trailed off into silence. There was no indication that Satan even heard him. After a while, Nero felt silly for trying and he stopped talking. Satan didn’t even notice when he left.
A swarm of black flies hovered over Sister Mary’s body, just out of Satan’s reach. Eventually, it began to rain warm blood.
All was quiet on the Seventh Circle of Hell.
It was snowing in the event room. Michael had been walking for eons, and at some point it had started snowing. Cold wind stabbed his face like knives, frozen blades slashed his chest and stomach, his wings were encrusted with ice. Freezing water ran down his back. He plodded on.
One did not make the decision to enter the Empyrean lightly. It had been hundreds of thousands of years since anyone except Michael and Phanuel had even tried. Before the Creation, the angels had all dwelt in the timeless, formless, perfect Empyrean, but after God made the Heavens and the Earth he moved his Host to Heaven and he had remained in the Empyrean alone.
What The Creator was doing in there was anyone’s guess. Phanuel seemed to know, but no one ever quite understood exactly what he was talking about. Metatron had come up with the theory that there were other Creations, each with its own Heaven and Hell and the Empyrean was where they all overlapped and the place from which God watched over them all. Michael thought this sounded vaguely blasphemous, but Metatron often talked like an idiot. Whatever God was up to in the Empyrean, he clearly did not want to be disturbed, and so he had made The Room.
The Room looked as neutral and bland as every other room in Heaven, but it was crammed with folded time. Just as the human intestines were really thirty feet long but folded into a space only two feet long, the path through The Room was much longer than it appeared. Hundreds of years had been folded and pushed into this event room that looked like it could seat maybe two hundred people for dinner. It would take Michael centuries of subjective time to cross it, and yet when he reached the other side he would have just spent a few days of objective time. He had done it before and it had harrowed him, but crossing The Room was essential to his plans.
He put one foot in front of the other. He kept walking. He had been doing this for what felt like years. He was three feet closer to the exit sign. He was making good progress.
“What I want to know – what America wants to know – is when will we get our day in court?” Nancy Grace said. “With me now, a woman who fights for all of us. Frita Babbit. Victim. Survivor. Fighter. Plaintiff. Thank you for being with us, honey.”
In the postage-stamp-sized video insert was not Frita Babbit, but Ted Hunter.
“Hello, Nancy,” he said.
“For our viewers,” Nancy Grace said, “The horrible, disgusting things that Satan did to Frita Babbit have left her too emotionally traumatized to speak in public. Ted Hunter has been authorized to speak on her behalf.”
“Nancy, I want your viewers to know that when I speak, it is actually a brave young woman speaking,” Ted Hunter said.