It didn't mean I couldn't feel some kind of empathy for what had to be a horribly lonely way to exist.
Life's easier when you can write off others as monsters, as demons, as horrible threats that must be hated and feared. The thing is, you can't do that without becoming them, just a little. Sure, Lasciel's shadow might be determined to drag my immortal soul down to Perdition, but there was no point in hating her for it. It wouldn't do anything but stain me that much darker.
I'm human, and I'm going to stay that way.
So I felt a little bit bad for the creature whose purpose in the universe was to tempt me into darkness. Hell, once I'd thought about it, it was just about the only job I'd heard of that had to be even more isolated and frustrating than mine.
"How many shadows like you have ever stayed in a host like me for longer than a few weeks, huh? Longer than three years?"
"Never," Lasciel's shadow replied in a near-whisper. "Granted, you are unusually stiff-necked, for a mortal. Suicidally so, in fact."
"So?" I said. "I've held out this long. Suppose I do it the whole way? Suppose I never pick up the coin. Shadow-you never goes back to real-you. Who's to say that shadow-you can't find some kind of life for herself?"
Hellfire eyes narrowed at me, but she did not reply.
"Lash," I said quietly, and relaxed my will, releasing my hold on her. "Just because you start out as one thing, it doesn't mean you can't grow into something else."
Silence.
Then her voice came out, a bare whisper. "Your plan has too many variables and will likely result in our destruction. Should you wish my assistance in your madness, my host, you have only to call."
Then the form was gone, and Lasciel was absent from my apartment.
Technically, she had never been there at all. She was all in my head. And, technically, she wasn't gone. She was just off somewhere where I couldn't perceive her; and I knew on a gut level—or maybe my darker self was telling me—that she'd heard me. I was onto something. I was sure of that.
Either I'm one hell of a persuasive guy or I'm a freaking sucker.
"Get your head in the game, Harry," I told myself. "Defeat the whole damn White Court now. Worry about taking on Hell later."
I got back to work. The clock ticked down steadily, and there was nothing I could do but get ready and kill time, waiting for nightfall and the fight that would follow.
* * *
CHAPTER
Thirty-Four
I let Mister back in after his morning ramble, which happened to fall between three and four P.M. that day—Mister has a complicated ramble schedule that changes on a basis so mystifying that I have never been able to predict it—and took Mouse out for a stroll to the area of the boardinghouse's little backyard set aside for him.
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
I took a bit of sandpaper to my staff and cleaned off some gunk on the bottom and some soot along the haft. I put on all my silver battle rings and took them to the heavy bag I'd hung in the corner. Half an hour's worth of pounding on the bag wouldn't bring them all up to charge, but something was better than nothing.
Tick, tock.
I showered after my workout. I cleaned my gun and loaded it. I pushed aside my coffee table and couch to lay out my coat on the floor and took the leather cleaner to it, being careful not to disrupt the protective spells I'd scored in the hide with tattoo needles and black ink.
In short, I did everything I could to avoid thinking about Anna Ash's corpse in that cheap, clean little hotel room shower while the time crawled by.
Tick, tock.
At a quarter to six, there was a rapping sound outside my door. I checked out the peephole. Ramirez stood outside, dressed in a big red basketball-type tank top, black shorts, and flip-flops. He had a big gym bag over one shoulder and carried his staff, nearly as battle-scarred as mine, despite the difference in our ages, in his right hand. He rapped the end of the staff down on the concrete outside again, instead of touching my door.
I took down the wards and opened the steel security door. It didn't take me more than five or six hard pulls to get it to swing all the way open.
"I thought you were going to get that