“Fuck Medea. She’s not a voice anyone needs in their head, especially you. She’s as crazy as Aelita. Deumos is the only one of the bunch who’s sane, and she’s completely deluded. And Merihim is just a power-hungry prick. He’s long overdue for a hard fall down a long flight of stairs, if you get my drift.”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“I don’t know how he did it, but Merihim used to crank-call me in L.A. after I left here.”
“He was upset with how you left things.”
“Cry me a river, pal,” I say. “Isn’t there something you can do to get Merihim and the church under control and off Deumos’s back?”
“That would be taking sides.”
“Fine. Then stop them both and make them play nice.”
He looks around, uncomfortable. Slams his fist down on the arm of the chair.
“It’s not that simple,” Muninn shouts.
It’s the first time I’ve heard him raise his voice about anything.
“You never understood how being a ruler works, James. And you have no idea what a deity is. You want me to make myself known and manifest to humankind. Do you really think that would solve anything? Or would it make things worse? You, like Samael, want total free will for the angels.”
Muninn sweeps his arms out to the broken landscape of Hell.
“Behold. That is what angelic free will looks like.”
“That’s not fair. You took the worst of the worst, the losers and the rat-fuck crazies, and locked them at the shit-pit bottom of the universe. There was no way they were ever going to build anything but this.”
“That’s also Samael’s argument. You two are so much alike.”
“I’m not anything like Samael.”
Muninn leans forward in his chair.
“Really? Does that wound in your side hurt?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Of course it is.”
He looks at Candy.
“Samael walked around for millennia bleeding from a wound I gave him during the first Heavenly war. All he ever had to do was ask and I would have healed him.”
Candy gives me a look.
“That does sound familiar.”
“Samael and I aren’t anything alike.”
Muninn looks at Candy.
“He’ll bleed with that bullet in him until the end of time before he’ll ask for help.”
“What if I ask?” Candy says.
Muninn raises his eyebrows.
“Ah. Here’s someone unburdened by the sin of pride.”