I shook my head. “So, are we talking about the five-alarm fire at the railyard that wiped out at least twenty warehouses as well as destroyed two cargo trains and caused a handful of deaths?”

She shrugged. “What was I supposed to do? Let them deliver the guns so Baalth’s men can use them to kill innocent people?”

“I didn’t say all that.” Subtlety was a foreign concept to Scarlett. “I just don’t think it makes a lot of sense for you to go burning down the city. You’re drawing attention to yourself and that’s not good.”

“Why not?” She puffed her ample chest out.

“The humans need to know.”

I tore my eyes from her cleavage and gathered my thoughts, yanking them from out of the gutter. Puppies and kittens, puppies and kittens. “What do they need to know? That God and the Devil have gone on permanent vacation? That they’ve left humanity to the mercy of a bunch of crazed angels and bloodthirsty Page 9 demons who want nothing more than to bring about Armageddon?”

“Yes, exactly.”

I rubbed my temples. “We’ve been over this a thousand times, Scarlett. If the humans knew what was really going on there’d be wholesale panic, chaos. They’d start killing each other in the streets, destroying everything they could get their hands on. You’d be helping the pro-Armageddon forces bring about the end. Is that what you really want?”

“Would it be so bad?” I could see the weariness, the loneliness wearing on her, the emptiness welling up to moisten her eyes.

“You’re starting to sound like Gabriel.”

She wrinkled her nose at me. “I’m not suggesting we help bring it about like he wants, but maybe oblivion isn’t such a bad alternative.”

“How can nothingness be cruel?” I quoted the immortal words of Bayou poet, Dax Riggs. She gave me a gentle smile. It made my crotch tingle.

“The truth is I’m not ready to not exist yet.” I didn’t think she was either. “Besides, it’s not our place to make these kinds of decisions. It’s way above my pay grade, for sure. God should be the one to say whether or not to pull the plug on existence. He willed this mess into existence so it’s His job to clean it up.”