Luckily, it rained sometime before I woke up, and the heat of the season was quelled and dampened by the time I went outside to garden.

Ms. Robles came out with me, pointed out a few species of weeds, and hobbled back inside. I was really starting to get curious about her age- everything about her screamed frail and elderly, but she couldn't have been older than forty. Her hair was greying, her movements pained, but she couldn't have been that old.

I had come to work for her when she had sent me a letter back in college, explaining that she was an old friend of my mother's, and that her health was worsening. When I met her then, her memory was gone and her hands were shaking. This was seventeen years earlier. She was stronger, but didn't seem younger.

I tended the garden, something that seemed without time. It was a task, and I set about to completing it. There was nothing fantastical to it, nothing extraordinary. It was uprooting plants, occasionally stopping to throw the current pile in the compost.

Somewhere below me, there was a bottled city and a coming war.

Though I did stop a few hours in, I had not come close to finishing my work. I had instead been interrupted by footsteps, boots scraping through the dust of the driveway and kicking at the rocks.

I heard the footsteps stop, and after about five minutes, realized they had never continued onwards. I looked up.

Mannie was watching me. Wearing the same clothes as always, a wrinkled white button down paired with dress slacks, though now she was sporting a pair of bulky boots. Like an office temp only slightly prepared for a camping trip.

"You're doing my job." She said.

"Gardening?"

"Yeah." She gestured with her head to the orphanage. "This is my house. Anyway, grab your things. We're heading to Hell."

"I'm trying to avoid Hell right now, sorry."

"Let me rephrase that: I'm taking you to Hell."

"Isn't the big thing you're sore about when it comes to me that you mistreated me in my past life? Ignoring my wishes now doesn't do much to rectify you." I said. "Also, excuse me, this is your house? What does that mean?"

"Being an asshole towards you seems to be an integral part of my personality. I'll gripe about it later, I'm sure. Right now I need to get away from this house."

"I don't want to leave. My sister's here."

"Alexandria will be fine." Mannie stared at the house, unmoving. "We both belong to Hell."

"I was only there for two months."

"Once you enter Hell, you can only be freed of it with death. The cycle, reality's way of trying to fix an erroneous mishap, grazes by any object that has spent a second in Hell. To live there is to be stained by it. To witness the cycle change is to have left your mark in the eternal reoccurrence." Mannie looked at me briefly. "Or some shit like that. I don't know."

"But demons aren't really demons though, right? This isn't really Hell. We're just... odd things with horns in a weird city. There's nothing biblical about it."

"Yeah. It's an old lab under a war bunker. Hell's a fuckup. That's why we belong there."

I didn't need much persuasion to do anything. For a moment, I was caught up wondering how best to seem slow with my decision, how to make it seem like I gave anything any thought.

Then I gave up on that. "I'll go."

"Nice." She said in reply, after a short pause. "I don't have much possession wise, but go ahead and grab your things."

"I'll go, but can you promise me something?"

"Like a conditional? You'll have to say what it is first. I'm not an idiot."

"Can you tell me exactly who you are?"

To my surprise, Mannie briefly smirked. "Yeah. Sure. On the elevator down."

I went inside. Mannie was right, I didn't have many possessions I needed to grab. A couple clothes and my phone.

I hate goodbyes, enough that I probably wouldn't regret leaving without one. But I wasn't exactly leaving forever- I would come back for Ria some day eventually.

Ms. Robles sat in her place by the window, watching the garden. "Who is that girl?" She asked, as I stood next to her.

"A friend. I'm going to live with her for few months."

"Is she your girlfriend?"

"A friend."

"Hm."

From where I was standing, I had the distinct feeling Mannie was watching me. She had a narrow face well suited for leering, and piercing dark eyes.

She was definitely staring.

Ria was in the kitchen, preparing a peanut butter sandwich. She glanced at me. "What's wrong?"

"I need to talk with you."

"Yeah?"

"Outside."

She led the way, quickly eating her meal. "This is something about Hell."

"How'd you guess?"

"I'm not an idiot."

"I'm returning. People keep asking me to come back, and I guess I have some sort of... unfinished business to attend to."

"Just yesterday you-" She didn't bother to say what both of us could remember.

I gripped the strap of my overnight bag. "So that's all. I'll be back soon."

"Oh, no. Nope!" Ria ran up beside me, though I was only a few steps down the driveway. "I'm going with you. I'm the one who was whining about going back."

"The city isn't safe. The insurgents of the under city are... still a thing that is happening."

"I don't have to trample around squashing freedom of thought or whatever it is you need to do. Just leave me to chill in the safe zone."

"That's essentially what you do here."

"Yeah, but in Hell. I'm sure I'll find something to do."

A smile crept onto my face, a sure sign that Ria had won this round. "Go get your stuff. Tell Ms. Robles that-"

"Does it really matter?"

"Come seventeen years, it won't. But death isn't a reason for anything. I told her I'm staying with a friend. Tell her you are too."

After what felt like ten minutes, Ria returned from the house. The entire time she was gone I was debating whether or not to walk down the driveway and meet with Mannie. She was still staring at the house, not moving in the slightest.

Only as Ria and I made our way over towards her did she turn her head. And then, much to my confusion, she seemed to flinch, nearly jumping in the air like she'd had a bug crawling on her.

She regained her composure instantly. "Alexandria? Why are you joining us?"

"Huh?"

"She needs somewhere to go. Doesn't fit in on Earth since the change." I explained. "How do you know her?"

Mannie started walking, waiting a minute and not looking back before talking. "I was prepared to make myself look bad when I explained my history to you." She said. "And now another unexpected piece has come back to make me look worse."

"You're a demon, right?" Ria said. "I'm going to make an educated guess here: you must be my mother."

"No." Mannie said, but she had a certain falter in her tone. "I was there though, yeah. Maybe I did some raising."

"You looked familiar." Ria said calmly. She seemed to have learned quickly to just roll with whatever shit Hell brought into her life. "And you did a lot of raising."

"I mean, maybe." Mannie said weakly. She sounded uncommitted to the idea. "Your parents abandoned you. I was just the gardener. But I don't age. I had to leave before you got to an age where that'd be obvious, where you might start asking questions. You never called me mother."

"I always just assumed." Ria said. "What about the man, then? Who was he?"

"An idiot. Let's leave it at that."

"Let's not." I said. "You raised Ria and Adeline? Excuse me? What the hell?"

"I didn't really want to!" Mannie exclaimed, sounding more surprised than defensive. "They were left at my house. I had been living there since the last cycle change, and then this idiot- different idiot- shows up and hands me some infants. The hell was I supposed to do?"

"Call the police?"

"No, the guy who gave me the kids was a fallen angel. I still don't know where he got them, mind you, but it wasn't something I could call the authorities on."

This was the first thing Mannie said that surprised Ria. She was staring at her feet, probably slightly too self conscious to just stare at her hands and debate her origin.

"Am I human?" She asked.

"I don't know. Don't think so though."

"Oh. Yeah. I guess there isn't much of a way to tell."

"Please Mannie." I said. "Continue the story."

"Yeah. So I had these two terrible named kids for a year, and then a friend moved in with me and we looked after them for a few years. My mother did most of the work, really. Child rearing isn't my thing."

"Who was the friend?" I asked.

"Alexander Scott."

"He's a friend of yours?"

"As previously stated, yes. We go way back. Think two hundred years."

"Which is your age." Ria said plainly.

"Yep."

"I'd really like the full story." I said.

"It gets a little long when you've been alive as long as I have."

"Yeah." I told her. "You know what I mean."

"Right. The short of it is that... the world sucks and never half-ass your wishes. When I was a kid, Hell existed without Heaven, and Alexander grew a bit too curious about it. We found an abandoned lab and pretty sadistically tested a serum on a mutual friend of ours, Michael, of archangel fame. We made the angels- things with wings and the ability to weaponize their life force. We got old. Alexander started regretting things, made a bad wish, and... now the world cycles and nothing changes."

"I'd like you to elaborate, but I'm not sure on what. Everything?" I said.

"That's most of it. Though. I want you to stop me every time I say something creepy. Just flare your hands up and say 'Mannie, you need to stop. You are the worst and the creepiest.'"

"I don't think you're the worst." I said. For the first time since we had set out towards the Hellmouth, Mannie turned around a looked at me for a few seconds.

"Next there was a lot of loitering about Hell, and then I met you." Mannie said. "The first Blake. Or the ninth, really, cycles being what they are. I liked you a lot. You don't remember it, thank god, since I really fucked things up- but I really really liked you. I should have just shoved you down the Hellmouth the second I saw you that night. Instead we sat there like idiots. And then I was alone."

"You don't have to be so hung up about this."

"I want to be. I don't want to forget you- because I would. On Earth, people forget me. In Hell, I forget them. Two hundred years is a long, long time."

Some things are too fantastical to formulate a response to. I was quiet for a few seconds.

"Anyway." She continued. "Then it was the next time around, and I just wanted to check up on you- just wanted to, you know, see you were fine."

"Back when I was a kid?" I said, the memory of seeing her still lodged in my mind like still photographs. A sighting of my ghost had charged any day up into significance.

"Before it too. You were two after the change. I was there. I watched you play. I watched your mother. I was there for her death too, you know."

"You're being creepy."

"Oh, you fucking think? I'm the fucking... worst. God, I'm the worst. But I was just trying to... God... I'll just- Shut my fucking mouth, sorry."

"Then I won't hear what I need to hear."

"Right. Uh. Yes. So. I received Adeline and Alexandria fourteen years ago, and not long after Alexander faked his death and started living with me. Every so often I'd get on a plane and find time to watch you. I had the money- my mom, despite the terrible house, is pretty rich. So I did that for six years, until you were fourteen. Me and Alexander left the kids, but I kept watching you. I was the one who took you away from college-"

"That was the best year of my life." I interrupted.

"I know." Mannie said with a startling amount of pain. "It was shitty, so fucking shitty of me to do, but-" She paused. I couldn't tell if she was trying to withhold tears or not. Her voice was weak enough, but all I had to tell was the back of her head. "I couldn't sit through my mother's death again. I can barely stand her now. I know her so well, and to her, I'm just half a hazy thought, a child born four years earlier. Out of mind and buried by cycles."

My moral instincts nearly forced me to apologize and offer condolences. It took willpower, real thought and effort, to keep silent. Be polite to sociopaths, but not kind. "I miss college." I told her.

"I know. You were nineteen the first time I knew you."

We walked on.