At night I pull out Curtis’ book, from underneath my shirt where I keep it safe and close, and read it by the light of a small lamp by my bedside. Even just looking around, I can see that Curtis has lived for thousands of years. His room looks more like a museum than a proper bedroom, only no museum would have such an odd mix of items from pre Christian times to the present. He’s got everything from sundials and stone tablets to lava lamps and a Segway (“I thought it would be so much cooler,” he told me when we first arrived, “but it just makes you look like a douche bag.”) The clutter of two thousand years is nothing to sneeze at.

Anyway, I like to look around at all his crap, and then turn off all the lights except that one little lamp and read before bed. At least, I like it this one time, so I’m pretty sure I’ll like it for future reference. So here we go:

‘Aren’t you glad now you decided to wait for another night? If you didn’t, feel free to laugh at me now, but you won’t be laughing when I get back.

‘So here I am, a little sixteen year old toddler, thrust into a whole new world with my dad that I don’t actually know that well. The first few years were rough, let me tell you. Rosalie didn’t really understand what had happened, and she often screamed for mom, but of course there was nothing we could do. Dad, wallowing in his own self pity, and unable to deal with Rosalie as well, retreated into his rooms. We hardly ever saw him.

‘For the next decade or so we raised ourselves, with a little help from the servants – a mad old cook and an aging butler. Dad was never big on servants.

‘Then one day a new woman appeared in the house, our new mother Helena. I don’t really know how dad even met Helena; let alone how she came to be a part of our family. He hadn’t left the house for years, so how could he find himself a woman you ask? I have no idea either. He never told me, and neither did Helena. It’s never really mattered anyway. Helena was a good mother. She couldn't replace our real mother of course, but she loved us well, and we didn’t have to take care of ourselves with her there to take care of us.

‘Rosalie loved Helena from the first moment she came into our house. I took a little while longer, having always been the cynical type, but I too warmed up to her. It was nice not to have to watch after Rosalie all the time.

‘I started school a few years later. Let me explain school here to you. The first decade is spent at a general school, where we learn everything we ‘need’ to know to get by in life (the same sort of useless things you learn in Earth schools). During this time we still live at home and commute to and from school. At the end of this decade we decide what career we want, and then we go to specialized schools where we learn what we need in order to get a job in our chosen career path.

‘As you can probably guess, I chose to go into the soul stealing occupation. It’s a very prestigious job in our world, and it requires a lot of school. Mostly just because we have to learn to work in human society without drawing attention to ourselves. I had to learn all about the human brain, and everything else that goes into a human, in order to better understand how to get a human to give up their soul. Imagine this; twenty years of learning human history, society, customs and anatomy. We had to learn not only western culture and religion, but every country’s traditions. It takes a long time to get through all that information, even back then, when there was two thousand years less of history to learn.

‘When you get into career school (let’s call it uni from now on, like proper English people) you go there to live for the rest of your school career. Like living in res. Except that here we’re not just thrown in a big building with hundreds of other kids to live with. At the beginning of our uni career, at least in the soul stealing business, we get paired up with a certain person, decided by the administrators to be the best fit, and we have to live and study with that person for our time at uni, and then we’re sent to Earth with them.

‘I bet you’ll never guess who I got stuck with. Go ahead, guess now and see if you can guess right.

‘I was paired up with Lucifer. Did you get it right? (Actually I did guess this right.)

‘Ah... Lucifer. I think you would be interested now, or at least you should know now, whether you’re interested or not, to know that Lucifer comes from a very strict, traditional family. They believe in human slavery, even to this day. They don’t believe that children should be raised by their human parents at all, that they should never even know the human who gave birth to them.

‘So, as I bet you can guess, Lucifer was a huge prick. We didn’t get along from the beginning. He knew that I had lived with my human mother for the first sixteen years of my life, and so he thought I was inferior. I just thought he was an asshole, and I was right.

‘We asked to be given different partners, but were refused. No one ever got to change partners. We were stuck together. For the next twenty years I had to live and learn with him, hating him every second. After a few years I guess we just settled into a comfortable rivalry, simply because it was too tiring to always actively hate the other person. It was enough work studying everything we had to learn; having to hate my roommate on top of that was just too exhausting.

‘I think this is a good place to stop this chapter. I won’t bore you with details of my school life. I didn’t have any great romances during school. Nothing exciting really happened. I went to school and I learned all I needed to. I did well in school, and if you don’t believe me, which I bet you don’t, just ask Rosalie. I’m really quite a smart guy you know.

‘Anyway, that’s the end of the chapter. Goodnight Josie.’

Goodnight.