I knew from where I spoke. My TSD got P’d when I was tortured by a monster named Earl. While attempting to execute my rescue, Swopes was shot and died as a result. The doctors were able to resuscitate him, but he’d recently told me that while in the jaws of death, he went to hell. That worried me. What worried me even more was the fact that, while in the fiery pit of eternal damnation, he had a heart to heart with Reyes’s dad, an experience that had to be traumatic on all kinds of levels.

“I’m fine,” he said, as he had the last seventeen times I’d asked. “I’m just working on something.”

I scanned the area. “I can see that. Anything you want to share?”

“No.”

He’d said it with such determination, no way was I going to argue. “Roger that,” I said instead. Wait. Who was I kidding? “But you know you can tell me anything, right?”

He eased his head back, closed his eyes, and stretched out his legs in front of him, his foot sending a stack of notes sprawling across the floor. He didn’t care. “Stop fishing, Charles. It’s not going to happen.”

“Roger that.” I took a sip of beer, then added, “But this stuff looks really interesting. I could help with the research.”

“I’m good,” he said, his voice edged with a hard warning.

“Roger that.” I picked up a page of scribbled notes and tried to decipher his handwriting. “Who is Dr. A. von Holstein? And is he related, by chance, to a race of cows?”

He bolted upright and snatched the page out of my hand. Oh, yeah, that wouldn’t stimulate my curiosity. “I said no, Charles, and I meant it.”

I sat back. “Geez, roger that.”

After placing the paper back in the exact same spot from which I’d freed it, he leveled an exasperated stare on me. “Why do you keep saying ‘roger that’? You don’t get to say ‘roger that’ unless you’ve been in the military.”

I regarded my beer, pausing a long moment for dramatic effect, then said in a quiet voice, “Roger that.”

The sigh of annoyance he released was long and meaningful. I won. My journey to the dark side really was complete. And I owed it all to my bestie Darth. Where would I be without him? Without our friendship? I shuddered to think.

He polished off his beer, leaned forward to steal mine, then sat back to nurse it at a slower pace. “Who sent me there?” he asked, his voice suddenly distant, and I knew exactly what he meant. Who sent him to hell? “Why did I go?”

I folded my legs until they resembled a pretzel and settled back against the sofa cushions. “You saw me right after you died, right?”

He nodded, eyes closed, beer perched on a thigh while he rubbed the bottle absentmindedly with long fingers.

“And then your dad met you on your way to heaven to tell you that you had been brought back to life. That you had to go back.”

His fingers stopped but he didn’t answer.

“But before you went back into your body, you went to hell?”

That was pretty much all I knew about Garrett’s vacay down under. He’d refused to go into detail when he told me and had shut me out every time I’d tried to talk about it since. While I was hungry to know every minute detail of what transpired, he was determined to let me starve.

“You said you were sent for a reason,” I continued. “To understand. To learn more about Reyes. How he was raised. What he had done.”

Without opening his eyes, he said, “And you only made excuses for him.”

He was angry with me, but I’d surprised him at the time by knowing before he told me that Reyes was the son of Satan. By being okay with it, in his eyes.

“Like I said, he wasn’t raised in the most nurturing environment.”

“So you insist. And you take up for him every chance you get. A general from hell. A skilled assassin who rose through the ranks of a demon army, who lived for the taste of his kills, who became the most feared creation in their history.” Then he did open his eyes and pinned me with a lethal stare. “An abomination who was sent to this plane for one reason and one reason only. You.”

This would get us nowhere. I unfolded my legs and instead folded my arms across my chest in a defensive maneuver. “I told you, he was sent for a portal. Any portal. Not me specifically.”

The way I understood it, Satan had sent Reyes to this plane to nab a grim reaper. Reyes was Satan’s way out of hell and he supposedly wanted a way into heaven. With the two of us, he would have a direct door into the very realm he’d been kicked out of. But Garrett was dead set on the idea that Reyes had been sent for me specifically, which was ludicrous. There was no way for Satan to know that out of all the beings like me in the universe, I would be chosen to serve on this plane as the portal. I would be sent here. From what Reyes told me, there was an entire race of us, a fact I had yet to verify or explore. But he said I had a celestial family out there. I found the concept both intriguing and comforting.

“And I told you you’re wrong,” he said.

I would never win this. “Fine. So you sat around a fiery pit and swapped war stories with Reyes’s dad.” I picked lint off my shirt and asked, “What did he tell you?”

“It’s not important.”

I gaped at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No, I’m not. What’s important is why I was sent there. I mean, who sent me? Who has that kind of power?”