This morning I walked in on Ella dressing herself up like someone who’s running for head girl. A twin set and pearls? I know I’m dead but I’m happy to say I still have my fashion sense. Ella is totally out of it, she can’t even see me anymore. She’s lost all of her powers and basically I’m REALLY dead to her. The other totally pathetic thing is that Malachi is ordering her around like she’s his servant girl, and even more sickening, she’s taking it! What the hell is going on?

Speaking of fashion sense, Maya and I visited the morgue to find her some new clothes. She has to dump the whole Goth thing, and who wants to wear the clothes they died in? That definitely needed fixing, but with my luck the clothing she liked best happened to be attached to a very cute dead girl. I don’t like the idea of her eyeing other hot dead girls, but I guess I have to stop being so jealous.

We have bigger issues to deal with now. I visited Ella in her dreams and she was dead. Everyone knows that you can’t die in your dreams, so that is definitely an issue. The only good thing is that Raphael has enlisted Leon to save the world from Malachi and his band of evil doers. Apparently the real Ella is still stuck in there somewhere, but she has to be released, and there’s only one way for that to happen. First Leon’s got to get Malachi to ingest enough St. John’s Wort to shut down all the powers of Hell, and then he’s got to bring out the sacred knife of Orakiah and end it once and for all. It’s a lot to saddle a mortal with; it isn’t as if Leon’s been preparing for this his entire life the way Ella has. But Raphael told him that his rewards will come in Heaven. Let’s hope that’s a long way off…

If Leon succeeds then everything goes back to normal, but that also means something else. When things are ‘normal’ that means that I go away. Just disappear into nothingness. It’s a scary thought, but the triumph of good over evil is more important than my ego. I guess. Of course I haven’t told Maya any of this, and she’s beginning to get suspicious. She thinks the reason that I’m far away in thought is that I have someone else, which of course isn’t true. If only it was that simple!

Before the deed was done, I went to say my goodbyes to Ella. I told her everything - about how I felt about our friendship, about how Leon might be the only truly honorable person I’ve known, and how much I wish I could be there when she was normal again, but then I broke down, and couldn’t go on. What was the point? She couldn’t hear me anyway.

So I went to be with Maya. Who knows, these might be the last few moments with her? She apologized for being a jealous nutcase, which made me feel really bad. I felt as if I were going to tell her what’s really going on, but then she told me she loved me and I just couldn’t bring myself to say it. She fell asleep in my lap and I just bawled my eyes out. Typical! I finally meet someone that makes me forget about Cassie, someone who for once in my life is actually into me… and now this. I couldn’t take it…so I did a horrible thing. I told Malachi that Leon planned to kill him. I know, I know. It’s a total betrayal and there’s really no excuse so I won’t even bother trying. I’m a total shit.

Afterwards, I was pacing in Ella’s room and Malachi’s mentor, Mephistopheles, came to me. He warned me that there was a Seraph after Leon. Do I have any idea why a force of evil intervened here…? He said he’d grown to have fond feelings for Leon. Who knows if that’s true? I guess the Fallen did used to be angels, so maybe he was telling the truth…

He told me to try harder to reach Ella through her dreams. He said that if in the dream I burned her with flaming branches I could bring her back to her old fighting self. He was right - when she woke up she could see me again, and I told her there was no time to explain but she had to hurry and save Leon. She arrived just in the nick of time. The Seraph had already sliced Leon with his claws, and he was bleeding, but he still had the knife of Orakiah strapped to his back that he intended to use on Malachi. He slid it to Ella who used it on the Seraph – with impressive results. That’s one evil being taken care of. But now what about Malachi?