Tru wasn’t where I’d left him, but the obvious trail of footprints he’d left behind made catching up short work. I found him shivering along en route to a slight rise on the horizon, which I figured he’d estimated would either provide him with a better view, slightly improved shelter from the wind, or both.

“Bad practice, walking off on your own in the desert,” I told him. “I told you to stay put. What if I hadn’t been able to find you?”

To his credit, he didn’t show any fear. Only sullenness, and there was plenty of that. “That was the idea,” he said. “Take me back home. Now.”

“I don’t want to see you, but please take me home? That’s one mother of a mixed message. But there’s a bigger problem with your proposal. Namely that, as of now, it isn’t your home anymore. I’m requisitioning it."

He gaped at me. "Who the fuck do you think you are?"

"What you should be worrying about is who everyone else thinks I am," I threw back. "I think we both know the answer to that one. I look like you and sound like you, and that's really all I need. Now, we can do this one of two ways. You hand over the keys to your penthouse and bank accounts and peacefully give up your official identity, and I'll drop you off anywhere you like for a fresh start. I don't really care what you do from there. Or, we can -"

I broke off at this point because there was a fist coming towards my face. Out of practice as I was, I didn’t manage to dodge completely, and it clipped me hard on the ear. Pain bloomed and died in instants, as I fixed the wound as rapidly as it appeared.

A second blow struck my gut and took the wind out of me for a second. I warped back a couple of metres, making sure he saw it for what it was, and held up my hands. “You don’t want to fight me,” I warned him. “Very bad idea.”

Aware the towel across my waist had come loose, as had the dressing gown, I shifted into a more suitable outfit for trekking in the wilderness and changed back to bedraggled rock star, flexing my fingers on reflex as the new joints and muscles took hold.

“What are you?” he growled, wisely keeping his distance. “A demon? Here to punish me for thoughts I had as a teenager?”

“God no,” I said. “They’re all as thick as two short planks. All they have going for them is ugliness and intimidation. Besides, they mostly got wiped out with the afterlives.” I’d let him mull over that one on his own time. “I told you, I’m one of the poor sods God outsources this stuff to.”

“You’re doing a really shit job of it,” he declared.

“Spot on,” I concurred, snapping my fingers. “I think you and God might actually get on. But instead you’ve got me. Funny how that works out.”

“Then I want to make a complaint.”

I snorted. “You can try. Let me know how that works out for you.” I gestured around us at the desert landscape in its thin dusting of snow. “And it doesn’t solve your immediate problem. I can just leave you here and take what I want. So are you going to cooperate? It would save me a lot of time if you simply gave me your passwords and bank details.”

“Liar. You are a demon,” he proclaimed. “You think I don’t know how this works? If I cooperate with you, you’ll get your hands on my immortal soul. Not going to happen.”

That didn’t make logical sense even if you believed the stereotypes. “Then it looks like we’re at an impasse," I said. "Which is my way of saying ‘I’ve got a series of very dull bank meetings ahead of me and you’re going to get to test out your survival skills.’ I guess we’re done.”

I gave it a couple of seconds.

“Wait,” he said.

“I’m listening.”

“Is there something else I can give you?”

“Maybe.” I shrugged. “If it’s equal in value to your house and savings. Which your immortal soul isn’t, by the way. Free piece of advice. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or hasn’t studied basic economics.”

“What if I promised you…” He looked around for desperate inspiration, and seemed to find it somewhere between the cacti and tumbleweeds. “…my future inheritance,” he finished.

And we were back here again. “So,” I said, lackadaisically waving my hand from side to side, “after all that gaff about not really wanting your old folks dead. Not really true. You’re still considering it, at the very least.”

“I would never –“

“You would,” I interrupted, tossing him the phone. “See for yourself. Ever wondered what kind of dirt God digs up on people? Now’s your chance to find out.”

He caught the device on reflex, and held it for a while in both hands without looking down, trying to keep me within line of sight. But eventually curiosity won out.

“This is all just gibberish.”

“Give it a minute.”

But I could see he was already starting to see through the text into the underlying substance. The tyrant’s fabled omniscience, only ever just a well-marketed scam, nevertheless had a small grain of truth behind it. A grain that had been digitised, automated and mass-produced to feed an entire multinational company to act on what one man could not.

It wasn’t all of a person. Not even much of one. Just enough of a slice of a person to provide enough information to get the job done. The task I’d given Tru to read was his own, so there was no risk of permanent damage from it, but it was still a lot to take in. When he looked up from the screen, his eyes were wet.

“And you know all this about me,” he said, as the wind picked up.

“Don’t start feeling special. It’s my job.” I beckoned at him to return the phone, and dropped it back into a pocket when he did.

He slumped to the ground, narrowly avoiding a cactus, and drew the dressing gown close around his body. “So that’s what God thinks of me. I’m doomed.”

“If it’s any consolation, I very much doubt he thinks about you at all,” I disclosed. “But yes, you're doomed. You and everyone else. Nothing you do will change that. You can sit here and sulk about it, or you could use your newfound knowledge to do something meaningful. Ideally something that doesn’t involve your house and bank account.”

He drove a fist into the dirt hard enough to take a few layers of skin off the knuckles. “You asshole! You have this kind of power, and you use it to steal from people?”

“Coming from someone who is willing to murder the family who raised them for money, that seems a little hypocritical,” I told him. “I’ve done a few things, but even I stop short of that.”

“You seemed more than happy to do it for me a few minutes ago.”

“I’m not responsible for what you believed,” I said.

The glower he directed my way could have melted stone. “I’m not giving up my house or my assets. Fuck you.”

“And the inheritance?”

“Fuck. You,” he said again, and shivered.

I made a dramatic sigh and rolled my shoulders. “Enjoy your desert experience, then.”

“There’s a third option,” he blurted out, before I could leave.

“Is it ‘fuck you?’” I asked. “Because I've heard that one before.”

The pause was telling. I had to try hard not to smile despite myself. But he managed to push past the temptation. “We can both get what we want with a compromise,” he proposed, in a strained tone. “Move in with me.”

It was the last line I would have expected to follow up that emphatic string of ‘fuck yous’, and as such, I had to let it sink in for a second or two. Huh.

“As my housemate, you’d have uninterrupted access to the property.” He shook his head with a pained expression, as if unable to stomach the words coming out of his mouth. “I can pay you a stipend. Or something.”

“Full access to your main account,” I jumped in. It wasn’t what I’d been planning, but on the face of it he was right. It did offer me what I wanted and I was by no means married to the notion of living alone. Not a bad idea at all. Rap Boy did have the ability to surprise, after all.

“Empty it and I’ll make your life hell.”

“And what about use of your identity?” I asked, getting into the swing of the negotiation.

“You can borrow it when you need it,” he relented. “Borrow being the key word. You can’t steal it. You just get a copy.”

“Doubling up? That could cause problems.”

“No it won’t,” he said. “You don’t want my life, you want my money. Let me handle my obligations and you can… do whatever it is demons do.”

I found myself smiling for real. This could be entertaining, and it was hard to argue with that. Despite the rocky start, I could see myself getting to like Tru. And of course, there was nothing to stop me breaking the arrangement at any time.

“Deal,” I said, nodding.

“Just to be clear,” he said, rising to his feet, “there’s going to be no selling my soul, murder, or underhanded tricks?”

“I swear it on the most sacred dark altars of Mephistopheles,” I stated, watching his eyes widen like an anti-vaxxer discovering solid evidence of vaccines causing everything from dementia to smallpox.

“Fine. Deal.” Holding his robe in place with one arm, he extended the other towards me. I’d seen happier-looking people in literal torture chambers.

“Cheer up,” I said encouragingly. “We’re going to be housemates! It’ll be fun.” I clasped his hand in both my own, at which point something went horribly wrong.

The moment our palms touched, several things happened. A thunderous crack split the air accompanied by the sound of a hundred tortured voices wailing, and bright light tinged with purple radiated out from the space between our hands. I tried to pull mine away and found I couldn’t, not even by making the hand disappear. All the hair on my body stood on end.

Some gigantic force I hadn’t been aware of until this very moment awakened within me, only to be forcibly ripped out using my arm as the channel. It wasn’t my powers, or anything I recognised as belonging to me. I didn’t know what it was, only that it was alien and large and that the process of having it removed was extremely painful, like someone had gotten into my body with a pair of tweezers and was ripping out the individual nerves one by one.

In a state approaching shock I somehow found the presence of mind to numb the physical pain, sending my sense of touch into total shutdown, but the agony continued all the way down beyond the physical into my soul itself, and there was nothing I could do to prevent that.

It was over in a matter of seconds; the light dying, voices fading, and pain diminishing into nothingness. I found I was holding onto Tru’s limp body by the hand, knees buckled, his head and torso dangling backwards, my grip apparently the only thing that had saved him from blacking out headfirst into a cactus.

Restoring my sense of touch and calming the out of control adrenaline coursing through my veins, I lowered him down onto a less spiky patch and turned his hand over for examination. In the centre of his palm rested a symbol etched in raised scar tissue: a vertical line met by two diagonal ones reaching off to the right like branches of a tree. It glowed with a faint remnant of the violet light that had shone so brightly a moment ago, sinuous flickers under the skin.

I knew this symbol, and I knew what it meant. Fehu, one of the Old Norse runes. Wealth.

Runic magic wasn’t really my thing. I could do it at a stretch – when I had access to my powers, anyway – but I wasn’t very good at it and it was a struggle to remember how the individual pieces were meant to fit together. What I was certain of was that it didn’t just come out of someone by accident. Or hurt. Or create dramatic fireworks displays. Putting those details aside, the standard use for runes was to apply them to something to attract or amplify a particular characteristic, and Rap Boy was already filthy rich. Marking him with fehu was, if nothing else, a waste.

By contrast, my own hand remained smooth and unblemished. I shook my head, mystified.

Movement in my peripheral vision alerted me to the fact we were no longer alone. Considering we were in the middle of nowhere, that probably wasn't a good thing. “Who’s there?”

Footfalls crunched to my right, and I turned to see a man in business casual walking towards us. Slender, breathtakingly good-looking, and one of the few people in the world who could say he’d deliberately kept the pope waiting. Because it was Lucifer.