“Well, I’m still not sure I buy that argument, Samuel.” I sank into the fat leather chair behind my father’s desk.
Samuel sat across from me, clearly worried. “Perhaps I should not have left the Company.”
“But if you stayed I wouldn’t have a legal guardian. Well, I guess I would, but it might be Horace Tuttle, and I really don’t like Horace Tuttle.”
“I will do all within my power to guard you, Alfred.” Samuel got very serious, which was a lot more serious than most people get. “I will never abandon or betray you, though hell itself contend against me.”
“Don’t say that.” I laughed. “We’ve been down that road before.”
He nodded, and a dark look passed over his features.
My face grew hot. I shouldn’t have said that. It didn’t come out right and now it was too late to take it back.
“Anyway, I told you to forget about it,” I added quickly. “I know why you thought you couldn’t come with me to face Paimon. That wasn’t you at the Devil’s Door.”
/> “Oh, that is the terrible thing, Alfred, the thing I must live with until I live no more: it was me, and I have wasted many hours trying to convince myself otherwise. Too often we blame the temptation itself for our succumbing to it.”
I winced. “Please, don’t talk about temptation.”
I got up and went to the window, turning my back to him. I stared down at the street thirty-three stories below.
A delivery truck was parked in the loading zone in front of Samson Towers. A guy dressed in a brown uniform was unloading boxes from the back onto a dolly. The day was sunny but very cold, and the man’s breath exploded in curling white plumes over his head while he worked.
Nearly two months had passed since my final showdown with the demon king named Paimon, but the memory of what it offered me was still glittering and sharp.
A little house on a shady street. A kind older man and his pretty wife. And me. I went to school and hung with my friends. And that’s about all I did. No adventures. No saving the world from total annihilation. Just a normal life.
Nearly every morning since that day I woke with a little stab of regret for turning down the demon king’s offer.
A black SUV pulled up behind the delivery truck as the guy in the brown jacket and slacks wheeled the dolly toward the front doors, disappearing from view. A man in a dark suit emerged from the SUV, talking on a cell phone. One of the guards came out, pointed at the SUV and made a little waving motion with his hand, while the guy on the cell phone tried to juggle his phone conversation with the one happening with the guard.
Behind me, Samuel said, “Whatever the future holds, I will never forget this second chance you’ve given me, Alfred.”
Before I could say anything, a car sped around the corner, screeched onto Gay Street on two wheels, and then accelerated until it rammed into the rear of the SUV. The sound of the impact carried through the frigid air up to the penthouse. The man in the dark business suit fell forward, colliding with the guard as he stumbled backward.
Samuel’s faint reflection appeared behind me at the window. “What happened?” he asked.
The car’s hood had crumpled completely against the SUV’s bumper, shattering the windshield and deploying the air bag. I couldn’t see the driver.
“That guy just rammed into—”
A fireball leaped into the sky, and instinctively we jerked back from the window. The guy in the black suit and the guard faded out of sight toward the front of the building.
A second later they were back, joined by two other guards from the Towers and a few other people who tried to approach the burning car, but I didn’t think there was any way somebody could have survived that.
A voice spoke behind us. “Hey, what’s up?”
We both whirled around. Samuel reached inside his jacket for his gun.
It was the delivery man. He was holding a large tube wrapped in brown paper. It looked like the kind of packaging posters come in.
“I got a package for a mister”—the delivery guy consulted his clipboard—“Alfred Kropp.”
“I’ll take it,” Samuel said. He took a step toward the delivery man.
“All right,” the man said pleasantly. The package turned end over end as it fell to the floor, like it was falling in slow motion, the clipboard falling with it.
The man in brown was holding a sawed-off shotgun. He pointed it at Samuel’s chest and pulled the trigger.