Cecilia and Denise pronounced me free of curses and said all the worst damage had already been healed. Cecilia gave me some ointments and stuff and encouraged me to see a real doctor as soon as I was able.

I wasn’t technically enrolled in school, and I didn’t have any kind of insurance, so I decided magical healing would have to be good enough, until I got a job.

I had a few months of money left but winning my soul back from demons had not been cheap. Hundreds of dollars in translation and research fees, with thousands of dollars spent on training equipment, including one homicidal sparring robot that had never quite made it to the dump.

I still owed Veazey a new truck, but that would have to wait, until I could win the lottery or sign my soul away to some corporation willing to take a chance on a freelance wizard who had just dropped out of school.

My mentor, Evan Coleridge, could probably hook me up with a job, but he had already done so much for me, it felt wrong to lean on him again so soon.

Part of me still had dreams of being a superhero, but that’s not the kind of job you can just fill out an application for.

* * *

I came home and found Lydia staring at her heart. She’d brought it back from Hell in a black wooden box, lined with red velvet. I came home and found her sitting at my little table with the box open, staring at it like it might stop beating if she turned away.

She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were moist, and she didn’t even turn to look as I walked through the door.

Lydia’s heart was a tiny black thing, like a human heart cut free of veins and arteries. The bottom three quarters of it were jet black, fading to gray and white at the top, with little lines of pure white creeping down, like the white parts were slowly putting down roots to crowd out the black.

“Lydia, are you okay?”

Lydia whispered to me without moving her head. “Last time I saw it, it was all black.”

I looked back and forth between her and the heart. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know!” Lydia snapped, suddenly angry. “I don’t know what it means!”

“When’s the last time you saw it?”

“Nineteen forty-three. I got clipped by an artillery shell and got swept right off the deck. My Master let me watch while they grew my new body.”

“So, this heart can grow you a new body, as long as it remains in Hell?”

Lydia said, “Yes.”

“And now that you’ve brought it to Earth?”

“Now I can die.”

“Yeah, welcome to the club.” I didn’t mean that to be as callous as it sounded, as the words slipped out of my mouth.

Lydia turned to scowl at me, and I said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just saying, the rest of us don’t get to reboot when we get our bodies destroyed. Most people can’t even cheat with healing magic. Human beings, we get hurt, we stay hurt, until our bodies can recover the long way. And when we’re dead, we’re just dead, until a demon or an angel shows up to drag us away.

“You’ve lived for centuries without having to worry about death. You’re not broken now, you’re just mortal. So, congratulations, you’ve just been given one mortal life. You’ve got one life to live and even if you don’t age, nobody can say how long you have, so you have to make the most of it, just like anybody else.”

“You could take it from me,” Lydia said, gripping the box. “I couldn’t stop you, if you wanted it.”

“Nope,” I said, way too casual for the matter at hand. “I told you; I am not a goddamn slave owner. And besides, you don’t need a new Master, you just need a safe place to put your heart. Maybe you could get a safe deposit box?”

Lydia was clearly offended. “You want me to put my heart in a bank?”

“Sure,” I said. “I just beat a demon prince yesterday, but even I couldn’t crack a modern bank. You can’t even imagine the protective shit they’ve got on banks now. Would all your powers still work, if you stored your heart somewhere on Earth?”

“I don’t know,” Lydia said. “My body needs a constant flow of magic, provided by this heart, and I’ve never seen a demon heart run on Earth magic before. Even just fifty years ago, there wouldn’t have been enough background magic on Earth to maintain my form. But now? Now that you’ve got enough magic in the air to give people innate abilities? I feel fine here in Boston, but if I walk into a dead magic zone, I may only have minutes to get out.”

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“But you really do feel okay?”

“I feel fine.”

“Does it feel different? To be running on Earth magic? I only got a little taste of infernal magic down in Hell, but it made the violent spells really easy, and healing would have been impossible, if there hadn’t been an open portal to Earth.”

“It feels… peaceful, I suppose. I thought the Earth might be hostile to me, but I don’t feel like this magic is hurting me or pushing me away. If anything, it feels more natural than running on infernal magic, but that makes no sense at all. Demons are created in Hell, created to draw power from Hell. I didn’t even realize a demon could draw magic from the Earth, until I started doing it myself.”

“You want me to try and hex the box for you?”

“No,” Lydia said. “There’s only one safe place to put this.”

Lydia unbuttoned her blouse, exposing her breast. But before I could enjoy the view, she popped one of her claws out and slit her own chest open, holding the hole open with one hand. She picked up her heart with the other hand and just kind of… popped it in.

The golden clay of her insides grew into simulations of veins and arteries, as it started pumping… something, through her whole body. The golden goop in her chest lit up when she put the heart in, like she had just popped a battery into a flashlight. Then she pushed the flaps of skin back together and counted to ten. In a few more seconds, her skin was completely smooth.

“Jesus, Lydia! Warn me before you do shit like that! Do you feel okay?”

“I feel fine. I feel… whole.”

* * *

My touching reunion with Veazey was basically two minutes of me saying thank you while he pounded me on the back and called me dipshit.

Then we went out to Crazy Henry’s shooting range and I answered questions about the fight while he drank beer.

He asked me so many questions, I finally just shared my POV. My optics had captured most of the fight on Earth, from my humiliating retreat from the tower to my street fight with Baalphezar, to my failed attempt to absorb the Wampanoag Rift, fading to black for a moment as I fell on my face.

“You almost had him,” Veazey said. “Before you broke off to save me, you had him on his knees.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You could have killed him. You could have won the whole thing right there, if you had just let me…”

“Don’t blame yourself,” I said. “There were demons all over the Zone, and no guarantee I could have killed him, even if I had gotten that blast off.”

But Veazey was on his feet, pacing angrily back and forth in front of the abandoned concrete shelter that served as my training room.

“Son of a bitch. Why didn’t the bullets work?”

“The bullets worked fine. Two big dents in his head, and none of that damage healed. He had to use illusions once I got to Hell, just to hide how much we hurt him.”

“I could have killed a fucking bear with those shots, but they didn’t even…”

“Demons aren’t completely here in the real world, man. The old ones can keep parts of their bodies phased out. Lydia’s so good at it, she may be faster than a bullet. You obviously tagged him with your first two shots, but I have no idea what demon skulls are made of. I had trouble cutting his ribs with a faerie blade, so I can only imagine how thick that skull was.”

“I should have started shooting the minute he came through that portal,” Veazey said.

“And I should have let you. I guess I will next time.”

“Next time? Are you goin’ full superhero on me?”

“No. But when I left Hell I… stole something that they might want back.”

“Oh no,” Veazey said, already guessing. “You didn’t?”

“I did. I brought Lydia back with me.”

Veazey put his head in his hands, and I rushed to explain myself before he could start in on me, giving him a shorter version of the same explanation I gave Denise.

“She earned it, okay? She risked her life for me, there at the end. If I had lost, she would have been dead. Not just demon dead, but real dead, the kind they don’t come back from.”

“Tim, when you brought her back, are you sure this was your idea? Does she have hooks in you?”

“No. She’s not using magic on me, and I haven’t lost my mind. I’m not… enthralled, okay? She took care of me, so I’m taking care of her. That’s all this is.”

“Uh huh,” Veazey said, clearly not convinced. “Tim, it’s just us here. I’m not gonna judge you. Be honest with me. Which part of your body made this decision?”

“It’s not a sex thing,” I said, desperate to convince both of us. “I mean, the sex is good, but it’s not eighteen-years-old lose your mind good. She did the best she could to protect my family, and now… Now I’m responsible for her.”

“So, you’re doing what you always do,” Veazey said. “Sacrificing yourself here and now to make dead people happy.”

“I guess. But she really did help me through a lot of shit, and taking care of demons, it’s kind of a wizard thing.”

Veazey shook his head. “You don’t even hear yourself anymore, do you? What are you gonna do when the cops find her? You gonna try and explain ‘wizard things’ to a jury? She’s gonna turn you into a supervillain just to keep a roof over her head.”

* * *

Veazey was smirking at me, getting ready to say something everybody else in my life had been thinking, but was too polite to say. “So, you’re shacking up with the same demon who lived with your grandpa?”

“Yup.”

“Isn’t that a little…?”

“Yup.”

“So, did that ever stop you from…”

“Nope.”

* * *

Veazey was headed to Colorado, to help retrieve my buddies from Innovex, who I had sent to holy ground for their own protection, as soon as Lydia’s Master started threatening my friends.

Their camp site wasn’t surrounded by demons anymore, but Veazey didn’t want them trying to leave without an armed escort. We had flying cars for evac now, but demons can fly, too.

I assured him I would be fine, and we recorded a message for the guys, thanking them for their help and proving we were both alive and well.

It felt like I had sent them there a year ago, but it had only been a few weeks. Most of them still had vacation.

Everybody who knew about my powers was begging me to take it slow and keep a low profile. It was perfectly reasonable advice, but when I saw a chance to save someone with my powers, I didn’t last a week.