"Holly Lisle - Sympathy for the Devil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

what will surely be perceived as a broad stroke. So just hang onto
it. I’ll be back to you when I’ve had a chance to work out the
details.”
The angel watched the Creator stalk away, head lowered in
thought. Then he turned his attention back to the computer and
deleted the “Pending” notice. He typed in the words,
“Granted—implementation in progress.”
Then he nibbled thoughtfully on his lower lip and stared off into the
glorious infinity of heaven. He had a few dear friends who’d gotten
involved on the wrong side of that first political
disagreement—friends he hadn’t seen in eons. With paroles on the
way, he wondered if there might be some hope of getting back in
touch.




Chapter 7
Friday night at nineteen hundred and thirty hours EDT on Hell’s
big clock, the imp on the soul radar yelped like an air raid siren and
began bouncing around its station. It grabbed the mike and howled,
“Holy Tarheels, Your Bat-Winged Arch-Fiendishness! Bogie on the
big board! Bogie on the big board! And it’s a whopper!”
Lucifer rose slowly from his work and stalked through the lined
rows of desks, glowering, scattering secretaries with every step.
When he walked, the rest of Hell went face down and shivered until
the ground beneath it ceased to tremble with the passing of its lord.
Flames curled up where Lucifer had stepped, and the stench of
brimstone hung in his wake.
He reached the imp, and from his great and terrifying height, he
looked down. Into the vast silence in the office, silence that came
not of deference, but of dry-mouthed, unthinking fear, the Lord of
Darkness growled, “What do you mean, doomed imp?”
The imp pointed to a swirling dot of white spinning against the
deep red background of the soul-board. “Right there, O Foul
Putrescence.” The imp switched from doing Robin the Boy Wonder
to doing Chuck Yeager. “Right smack in the heart of Charlotte,
North Carolina—we got us a four-point-seven-nine plus-soul
crosscurrent intersecting on the material plane with a triple-A
hardcase bearing zero-zero-ninety and carrying an unidentified
soul-cargo anomaly aimed straight at us, Roger Wilco, over and
out.”
“Little imp,” Lucifer snarled, picking the imp up by the scruff of the
neck, “tell me what you are called, that I may remember to curse
you more fully after I have ground your very soulstuff into paste,
ingested it, and shat it into the Bottomless Pit.”
The imp squirmed and shook. “Er . . . Earwax, Your Hellishness.”
“Earwax. You have only the time between one heartbeat and the
next to tell me, Earwax, what exactly it was that you just said, or I
will see that you spend an eon simply finding all your scattered