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He shakes his head.

“The affairs of angels don’t interest me.”

Then he looks at me.

“You’re still human too. You don’t have to listen to your father.”

“Yeah, but he was right. Killing and hoodoo are the only things I’ve ever been good at. They’re sure the only things that have ever helped anyone else. Why should I quit? Shouldn’t I just get better at it?”

“That’s not for me to say. But I do appreciate the steady stream of work you’ve sent me over the years. I like keeping busy.”

“Glad to oblige.”

I take out a Malediction, light it. I’m downwind, so the breeze blows the smoke away from Vincent. If he’s annoyed he doesn’t say it.

He says, “When I was younger, there was a time when I didn’t want to be Death. I wanted to be one of the guardian angels, protecting life, not taking it. For a while I pretended to be one.”

“Wait. This isn’t the first time ­people stopped dying?”

­“People? No? There weren’t any ­people back then. Most of the life in the universe was teeming swarms of microscopic organisms. I liked them. I didn’t want to see them go.”

“Why did you change your mind?”

“Life stagnated. Things were born, but nothing ever changed. After evolving from almost nothing, the universe filled with copies of copies of copies of the same organisms for millennia. It felt wrong. So, I went back to work.”

“And along came us.”

“Eventually.”

“Well, thanks for that. Understand, that’s my answer today. If you’d told me that story last Christmas, I might have punched you for letting humans, gods, and angels live at all.”

“It will all be over soon enough.”

I look at him.

“That’s by immortal standards, right?”

Vincent nods.

“Don’t worry. I’m talking about billions of years from now.”

“Good, because I haven’t even seen that Sergio Leone The Godfather we got.”

“It must be nice to have things to look forward to.”

“I hadn’t thought of that before. I guess your job is kind of production-­line work. The same thing over and over.”

He looks up, tracking a seagull as it flies over us.

“When I took Henry Ford’s soul, he made some suggestions about how I could operate more efficiently.”

“Did you take any?”

“No. I have few enough surprises that turning death into a true assembly line would make existence unbearable. I might have to end things early.”

“Then by all means, be as inefficient as you can.”

I smoke and Vincent looks down at his hands.