This time I am Alice's mother.

For centuries we had been reincarnated together, as mother and daughter, changing places from mother to daughter and back, again and again. Each life gets worse as the evil in Alice grows stronger. I am the force of good, but it does not seem to grow at the pace of her evil.

In the life before, Alice was the mother. Before I was born to her, she had spent her life getting in good with the Devil. She found people that were in dire straights and talked evil right into them. He rewarded her with money and power. She was gorgeous, we lived in Hollywood, she used drugs, sex and money to build a large congregation of evil there. She dropped me off at a brothel when I was eleven, my "goodness" annoyed her. More than one hundred years later, the Devil still has a strong grip on those Hollywood hills.

I was pure and good in that life, just as I have been in every life, I ran from the brothel found nuns, grew up, married a nice fellow, brought peace and joy to others and tried to balance out the evil she was spreading. But I never once felt like I had made much of a difference.

Lessons learned from the Hollywood life, this time I worked against the Devil, I had found a sincere preacher man and married him. We had a simple church filled life. I worried about her arrival, panicking sometimes, when I remembered the last time I was Alice's mother, she had burned me alive in our cabin when she was eight. Oh, how I didn't want to have Alice. Alice preferred being the mother, killing me when I was the mother got her to the next cycle.

He is not even her father, this solid preacher man that I had a good life with. I was raped on a high school campus he was preaching at, while our first small church was being built. He thought I was helping in the nursery, and I thought he would leave me if he knew the truth. It was the very first time I have lied in any of my lives. He believes he is her father but she knows he is not. I do not know how she figured it out, but she did. She was precocious as a child, mimicking his walk and talk, no one ever doubted she was anything but daddy's girl. I knew she did this to push my buttons, but I foolishly took her actions as a sign that she wanted to be good this go around. The downside of being good and pure, is expecting the best of others.

I should have been preparing for the worst. Alice always wanted more. Perhaps tennis lessons? She asked. That is how it started, simple enough, she planted the seeds of desire for more in her daddy. It happened so fast. Our church flourished, first a radio program, then television, it soon became one the largest churches in the country. We live in a mansion and Alice now has her own tennis courts.

Every Sunday, she scrubs her beautiful face and dresses conservatively, beaming at the cameras and the congregation. Not a person in that congregation, not even a cynical home viewer, suspects how evil she is, I know she is itching to bring them all to the dark side. Her evil is getting harder to hide.

Recently, Alice proclaimed she wanted to encourage teens to save themselves for marriage. Her daddy let her speak to the congregation and the cameras at the end of his one of his sermons. That led to setting up a meeting with a national jewelry store to sell promise rings. Before the ink was dry on the contract, Alice slept with the jewelry man. At fifteen years old the sinning begins, but the jewelry man is not enough. She tells me about it, she has no shame, she grins and says the Devil made her do it. I know it is true, in every life the Devil finds Alice.

Against my wishes, she has just signed a production deal to get her own television show. The producers have set her up with a book deal too. She is still a child, only fifteen, I tried to stop all of it. But she had her daddy under her power. He signed everything she needed to get the deals done; he even threatened to divorce me, if necessary. He is not the good preacher man I married, he seems possessed. I am more worried than ever.

She is pushing my buttons, talking about her plans, as we drive to her tennis lessons. We rarely talk about our past lives, most likely because she had dropped me off at a brothel and murdered me just before that. "This life," she brags to me, " is even better than the last, Mom, you provided me with a congregation, I just have to lead them to the man downstairs."

Alice doesn't see it coming, when I suddenly veer off the road and speed towards a tree. In all our lives together, I had never, ever, tried to kill her, I had not even considered an abortion, for I was so good and pure. But she was practically thanking me for helping her with her evil plans. It was too much, I pressed the pedal to the floor.

"Thank the Lord," she screams as we race to our deaths. "Killing me, brings you to the Devil, next life you are Alice and I am free!"