Aloha from Hell


I RUN AT a steady pace, but I don't sprint. The street is straight, but there's plenty that can come at me from side streets and the scorched foliage around the old buildings. I let the angel out a little to expand my senses and look for trouble. Even this far off the suicide road, the land under the buildings isn't stable. Walls sag on old apartment houses and wooden Victorians have their walls held up with tree trunks and wooden power poles cut to length.

The palms that line both sides of the road burn like the ones on Sunset, turning the dark street orange and brighter than streetlights would.

There are more pagan souls on the street as I go deeper into Eleusis, away from the wall and the suicide road. They duck under cars and cower in burned-out buildings when they see me coming and I remember that I'm wearing a Hellion face. Thanks for reminding me. It still burns a little and it's starting to itch as it heals. One more level of bullshit to deal with, but at least it's clearing the streets.

A block ahead, one of the big apartment buildings has collapsed across the road. I slow down as I get closer. Plenty of places to hide in all that rubble. A Hellion dressed in army-issue pants and a red leather jacket sprints around the corner, sees me, and hauls ass my way. I grab the na'at from my coat. Alice is right up the hill and I'm not stopping now for anyone. I twist my wrist so the blade pops out at the na'at's tip. The Hellion is female, soon to be a dead female. As she gets closer she barks at me in frantic Hellion. She's out of breath and her voice is rough. It takes me a minute to figure out what she's saying and then I get it.

"Run, asshole!"

A second later more of them come tearing ass into the street. Maybe twenty of them. Like the woman in half a uniform, they're deserters, though they don't look like they have enough gear or sense to be raiders. Just a bunch of noncoms who'd rather live on what they can steal from empty homes and liquor stores than get stomped by God's golden hordes. I can sympathize. They're running straight at me, but from the looks on their faces, they're not stopping anytime soon.

I sprint toward them, the na'at up and out. I'm not letting a few purse snatchers and shoplifters get in my way. They part like the Red Sea when they see me coming. I pick up speed. If there are more raiders on the other side, they won't be expecting me. I can see Griffith Observatory from here, so I'm not heading down any streets so God can get his rocks off by dumping me in Malibu or Disneyland.

A metallic roar fills the air and echoes off the buildings. Telltale mechanical clicking after that, like a thousand clocks ticking out of time. A few last deserters make it around the collapsed house just long enough to see freedom before being snatched back by steel claws like a fistful of butcher knives.

They're bunched together when they make it around the building. All the light shows is a mass of gracefully moving shoulders and flexible backs so they look like a clockwork flood. A Hellion dressed in priest's robes gives up and stops running. The hellhounds don't even slow down. The Hellion disappears into a wet spray of bones and thick, clear blood.

Like on a synchronized mechanical cue, half the hellhound pack rears up and attacks the raiders from the back. Ambush predators. They get their steel teeth into the prey's throat and choke them or drive them headfirst into the ground and snap their necks. Hellhounds are strange and beautiful things. Candy would dig them. I'd love them more if I were seeing them from a little farther away. Like, say, France. The part of the pack not having thieves for lunch breaks from the larger pack and heads down my way. I look like a Hellion. To their bottled peanut brains I'm part of the gang they're turning to chum. The strategy in this situation is simple. Run the other way.

I keep the na'at open. Waving it at these clockwork poodles would be like trying to scare King Kong with a lit cigarette, but it'll clear the street of slow Hellions if they get in my way.

Jack's been following me after all. He's in the middle of the street a block down. I think he's hypnotized by the hounds. He's probably never seen them at work before. When he sees me coming, it snaps him out of it and he starts running. He's not fast enough. I pass him easily, thinking of the old joke. When you're running from a bear, you don't have to be the fastest runner. You just have to be faster than the guy behind you.

I hear Jack behind me whining and shouting something. I don't look back. I can hear the hounds' clockwork legs and jaws closing in. They're too fast. I'm not going to make it.

I cut from the street and onto the sidewalk. We're not back to the suicide road, but maybe we can make our own killer road right here.

I slow down just a hair. Let the hounds get a bead on me and close in. I hold out the na'at. If I'm wrong, this is going to be a messy way to go, but it's better than old age or being poisoned by bad clams.

We're near a block of half-collapsed houses. As the hounds close in, I hold out the na'at and let it rip through the support poles holding the walls up. At first nothing happens, but then there's a crash behind me, followed by another and another. It sounds like the whole block is coming down, but I'm not slowing down to look.

I hear a hound right behind me. It's scraping and clattering like it's taken heavy damage, but it's gaining on me. I cut to the side, hoping the huge thing's momentum will carry it past. It does and it runs right into a support post on the side of a house. I see it just before it happens and cut back into the street so I don't get crushed. I outrun the wall. Too bad I can't outrun the falling debris. Something clips me right above my left ear and that's all she wrote. Hello pavement. I love you, pavement. I think I'll stay here a while.

WHEN I OPEN my eyes a billowing black snake is crawling over me. Its belly is a furnace and its body is the whole sky and it will take the rest of eternity to pass. I can wait. If this universe burns, I have the other one that Muninn gave me in my pocket. Let the show roll on.

I WAKE UP flat on my back and moving. I'm on a flatbed with heavy wire mesh over the top. It's being towed by a Unimog. Someone shifts and grinds the truck's gears. There are maybe eighteen Hellions back here with me. Some sitting up. Some on their backs. Others are leaking clear blood where they were ripped open by big hellhound jaws. I recognize some of them. They're the Hellions that were running from the hounds.

The Unimog hits a bump and one of the leaking Hellions blips out of existence.

Someone says, "That was a good trick back there with your na'at."

I turn my head so I'm looking up. There's a smiling Hellion looking down at me.

"So good I coldcocked myself with a brick," I say.

Like a lot of Hellions, he looks like a spiky horned toad after some Hollywood plastic surgery. Slim down the cheeks and neck. A chin implant that gives him a long horse face. He's bruised and battered. It looks like the beat-down took his stubby horns, too. But his big white canines are still there. Those really hurt when they dig into you. Trying to get a Hellion off when he's got a good hold of you with his choppers is like trying to coax a moray eel into a round of minigolf with knock-knock jokes.

I rub the side of my head. There's sticky blood in my hair. I pull the hood back up, covering up the blood. I touch my face. Good. Mammon's skin is still there.

I lean on my elbows and look up front. The flame job and animal skulls wired to the front of the truck look familiar. This is the same damned posse that's been chasing Jack and me since Pandemonium. The saps caught me and they don't even know it. If I wasn't flat on my back being hauled around suicide roads in a wire-mesh chicken coop to who the fuck knows where, I'd feel like a real winner right now.

"Where's the guy I was with? A damned soul."

"Oh, him," the Hellion snickers. "He seemed like a nice guy. When you were out cold, he stole your bag and ran off."

I feel around for the leather satchel with my face in it. It's gone.

"A real nice guy," snickers the Hellion.

I reach into my coat for Mammon's flask of Aqua Regia, but it's not there. The little prick even stole my booze. Now he really has to die.

I should have cut Jack loose the moment we saw Eleusis. I should have let the sinkhole take him. The goddamn angel in my head softens me up at those moments. Every time I think we've found a balance point, it shifts its weight one sneaky gram at a time until it's standing straight and I'm flailing around like a blind man on black ice. I will not let God's little bootlicker win. I'm a nephilim, you haloed fuck. You're part of me and you better learn to take the bad, me, with the good, you, or I swear I'll put a double barrel to my head and do a Hemingway. Then we'll see which one of us is left to Mr. Clean the wall.

"I'm Berith," says the Hellion. "Who are you?"

Shit. For fifty points, name a Hellion I haven't killed.

"Ruax," I say. I wait to hear "Ruax is dead" or "He's my brother-in-law," but Berith just nods.

I sit up and lean against the wire-mesh enclosure.

"Where are we headed?"

"No idea. Jail I suppose."

A Hellion with a mangled arm pipes up.

"Then back to Pandemonium. We're so fucked."

Berith looks out at the road.

"I don't want to think about that."

The truck rolls steadily, but it's not in a rush to get anywhere. The posse up front is passing bottles around. I don't suppose they'd be too keen on sharing with us prisoners. Maybe I can put my fist through the mesh and ask one nicely with my boot on his throat.

I get up and grab hold of a section of the fence. And promptly land on my back, feeling like someone just handed me a glass of whiskey with a thousand-volt chaser.

Berith laughs.

"Neat trick, eh? One of the Malebranche's hexes. You can touch the walls of your cell all you want, but the moment you come at it with attitude, well, you see what happens."

"Thanks for the warning."

"We're all going to be dead soon. We need to have a few laughs along the way."

I put my hand on the fence. Nothing happens. Holding on to it, I pull myself to my feet. We're past all the houses and apartments and into a wider main street. Somewhere around Western maybe. Lots of burned-out buildings, but with a little something extra. My face.

Wanted posters offering a hefty reward cover every building, signpost, and bus kiosk still standing.

I guess someone figured out that Mammon and his staff are missing. Mason will know who did it, but that's still goddamn fast to get posters plastered all over the place. Even with all the map games this place has been playing on me, the angel, who's better at these things than I am, is sure we haven't been here more than a day. And how does Mason even know I'm heading for Eleusis and not wandering the streets of Pandemonium like the Flying Dutchman? Jack couldn't have made it back yet and ratted me out. With my face in a bag he can claim he killed me and get the reward. The bastard will be drinking mai tais and eating prime rib before I get near the asylum.

I hear cheering voices. There must be a lot of them if they're loud enough to hear over the Unimog's rumble and grinding gears. A couple of more blocks down, there's a stadium. It's not as big as the L.A. Coliseum. It's more like the place well-off parents pay for so their sprogs can play soccer on a regulation field that's not full of beer cans and gopher holes. From the tone of the crowd, they're not playing in there.

We turn off the main road and onto a two-lane driveway behind the stadium and roll alongside what looks like a holding area for the posse's prisoners. Big wire-mesh pens and RVs with blacked-out windows hold dozens of dirty, frightened Hellions. The fact that they're being held in a stadium tells me that the posse isn't above having a little fun with their prisoners before they're shipped back to Pandemonium.

The truck stops. Six Hellions in SWAT body armor, carrying shotguns and homemade morning stars, hustle us off the flatbed and into the pens, where we have a clear view of the playing field.

Some people have dreams where they show up for final exams in their underwear or for a course they didn't know they were taking. Other people wake up in the middle of the ocean. There's land in the distance, but no matter how hard they swim, they never get any closer. Me, I dream about the arena. Shrinks call these "anxiety dreams." I call them road maps. They show you where you've been and where you're headed. A dream about being lost at sea doesn't mean you're going to end up as an extra on Gilligan's Island, but it probably means you've gone off track somewhere. For me it's even simpler. I don't dream in metaphors. When I dream about the arena, I'm really dreaming a dream about the arena.

In my heart of hearts I've always known I wasn't finished with the place. It's like a drunk who goes on the wagon but decides to pitch his tent in the Jack Daniel's parking lot. Yeah, he cleaned up, but he didn't run very far from what made him a lush in the first place.

Once I'd killed the other members of my old magic Circle and sent Mason Downtown, I should have walked away from the whole hoodoo world and become just another brain-dead civilian. Take a mail-order course in taxidermy or sell maps of the stars' homes to tourists. Instead I hung around with Lurkers, renegade angels, and Jades. I'm surprised it's taken me this long to get back here. If the Bamboo House of Dolls didn't have such a high-quality jukebox and Carlos didn't make such good tamales, I would have been back here months ago and this would all be over with.

All those dreams about tests and being lost and being back in the blood and the dust are just lines on a map. The elevation marks reveal that no matter how low you get, there's always somewhere lower to fall.

Some of the Hellions from the flatbed go right up to the fence to get a good look at the current fight, trying to convince themselves they're not seeing what they're seeing. Others, the ones with a firmer grip on reality, are at the far end of the pen puking and shitting themselves. They're not in denial about what's coming.

The arena isn't much to see. Just a flat soccer field with semis parked a hundred feet apart to mark the boundaries of the killing floor. Hellions and even a few pagan collaborators fill the stands between the trucks, drinking, cheering, and throwing bottles and rocks at the Hellion prisoners forced to fight each other. I shake my head. Lucifer wouldn't have put up with the peanut gallery getting his arena floor messy. These small-time bullies have no class.

I look around the stadium, not really paying attention to the current fight. There's the unmistakable sound of metal smashing into meat and bone. The crowd cheers. The bone crunch comes again. A cheer. Then a bigger cheer. I go to the fence and look through. It looks like the Hellion who was to be chopped into McNuggets got the other fighter in the throat with a knife when he got too close. They both fall over and disappear. Cue the crowd. People drink and pay off wagers. It's a party and they take their time about it.

A few minutes later armored guards grab more prisoners from the pen. Berith is with them. He looks at me like he thinks I'm going to do something about it. All I do is stay by the fence to watch. The guards walk the group out to the middle of the killing floor and hand them weapons. Every Hellion was a soldier once. They were all part of the rebel legions in Heaven, but that was a long time ago. In the arena the prisoners look at the rusty swords and shields in their hands like they've never seen anything like them before. That's the lousy thing about shock. It makes you look stupid.

I remember my first time in the arena. It wasn't like this bumpkin retrofit. The arena in Pandemonium was built for blood sports and nothing else. It was like the Roman Colosseum, but clad in plates of bronze and ivory and hung with sculpted bone chandeliers over each entrance. It was full of false walls that could be moved to change the fighting floor. There were trapdoors and chutes where beasts and fighters could be lifted or shot into the arena in a few seconds. The crowds were connoisseurs of pain.

My first fight was against a human soul. The arena bookers thought it would be a hoot to put the one living guy in Hell up against one of his dead brethren. The thing is, the guy I was up against was from one of the lowest regions, one reserved for child killers, so I didn't exactly think of him as one of my brethren.

I'd been in Hell long enough to have built up a thick skin of fury. I was still a circus attraction back then. The living freak to be passed around and used and gawked at like a pickled punk. And I was sure as shit a long way from being Sandman Slim.

I went into the fight all teeth and claws and righteous idiot fury. It was the first time I used a na'at and I had no idea what to do with it. I can't say I was scared going up against a real killer. I was too crazy for that, and when I did think about it, more than anything I was amazed at where my life had taken me. The unreality of Hell became even more unreal. That's probably what saved me.

The Kid Killer knew how to use blades and I didn't. He gave me my first scars. Later they changed me, made me stronger, and I became a kind of living body armor. But that night in the arena, the slashes just hurt.

I tried using the na'at the way I'd seen Hellions use it, but I mostly bounced it off the ground and hit myself in the face when it sprang open into different configurations. That routine went for big laughs.

I wish I could say I finished the Kid Killer with a flashy na'at move, but the blood and pain nudged me from crazy into Norman Bates territory. And the crazier I got, the more the crowd cheered. When I managed to knock the Kid Killer down, I climbed on top of him, pinned his arms, and choked the fucker until his eyes bulged out like twin eight balls. You haven't seen surprised until you've seen a dead man realize he's about to die again. Later, one of my guards explained to me about Tartarus and the double dead.

I'd never killed anyone before and knew I was supposed to feel bad about it, but I didn't. I felt just the opposite. These geniuses were training me to kill, building up my strength and turning me into the monster I was always meant to be. Later, when Azazel made me his assassin, I thanked every Hellion I killed for their contribution to my schooling. The looks on their faces when I cut their throats never got old.

I'm glad Alice never saw me in the arena. I hope Kasabian has the brains not to show Candy.

What none of the Hellions except maybe Lucifer understood was that when I stepped onto the killing floor, I wasn't fighting an opponent. I was fighting all of Hell. When I killed a beast or a soul, I was killing every leering, putrid Hellion in existence. The nouveaux riches in the stands came for a fight. I was there for extermination, and every time I murdered them, it felt like Christmas morning. That's what I don't want Candy to see. Back in L.A. we talk about being monsters together, but it's not the same thing. I don't have any problems with my L.A. monster side, but I don't want her to see the kind of monster that comes out when I'm the real Sandman Slim.

I don't want to watch Berith and the other lead-footed fighters. I know how this is going to go. I don't want to see it again. The angel wants me to shout some strategy or encouragement to Berith. But it's already too late for him. He's down in the dust and disappears less than a minute later. The crowd cheers the winners, but cheers even harder when the guards knife each of them in the back. Hellion humor isn't what you'd call sophisticated.

I want out of here, but I don't want to get stomped by a hundred armed Hellions. I look around for a good shadow. There's one on the ground at the far end of the pen. I walk over, trying to look like I'm going over to puke. When I stick my foot into the dark, the ground is solid. The posse has thrown up an antihoodoo cloak around the place. I can't use any decent magic in here. What's Plan B? Hiding is my favorite choice, but everyone in the holding cell is trying to hide behind everyone else. It's like the saddest square dance you ever saw in here.

I still have on my coat and hoodie, so my human arms are covered up. I feel inside the coat. The na'at is still there. So's the knife, Lucifer's stone, the plastic rabbit, and Muninn's crystal. I check my leg. The pistol is still taped to my ankle. The posse must have just tossed me into the flatbed. Good. That means they're drunk or just plain stupid. I like stupid. There are lots of possibilities in stupid.

Instead of hiding in the back, when the guards come back looking for someone else to toss to the wolves, I move up by the gates. The two closest guards look me over and whisper to each other. The talker motions me to come closer so I'm right against the gate.

The talker walks over to me. He has a sickly green complexion and a smashed cheekbone. In one hand he's holding a long truncheon. A piece of flexible metal covered in leather. When we're close together he reaches between the gates and pops me in the face with the truncheon's butt. The guards just about bust a gut at me holding my bruised nose. He takes a step forward, presses his face into the space between the gates, and spits at me. I pivot and swing, catching him under the chin with my fist. His body goes limp. I reach between the gates, get a hand behind his head and the other around his throat, and pull. The gates bow in and he starts slipping through. The other guards pounce on him, pulling him out. The gates bulge in as I get his head and the tops of his shoulders through, like he's being born out of twisted wire and steel. It's a fun tug-o'-war we've got going. I wonder if this is how giraffes were invented.

The guards get together and do a nicely coordinated group pull. I've got my death grip and dig in my heels, but they're dragging both of us toward the gate. I can't hold the guard, but I don't want to let him go. When I'm sure they're going to get him away from me, I lean down, get a good grip with my teeth, and let go. The guard shoots out of the gates like they're a solid metal slingshot and lands with his hands over his face, screaming and coughing up blood. I wait for the rest of the guards to look at me before I spit his nose on the ground in front of them. I expect them to rush me, but they go into a huddle. Their buddy is on the ground screaming, but they've already forgotten about him.

The huddle doesn't last long. One of the guards takes charge and beckons over a couple of other guards to take away the idiot who lost his nose. The head guard comes close to the gate, but out of biting range. He's wearing a faux military/law enforcement uniform, the kind you see bounty hunters wear. It gives them an air of authority, but isn't close enough to any specific uniform to get them busted for impersonating an officer. It's sad the assholes they'll sell uniforms to these days.

"Come here," he says.

I stand pat.

"Come here."

"I can't hear you clear over here, Audie Murphy. Get a little closer."

He signals to the other guards. They pull their pistols and shotguns and point them at me.

"I'm going to open the gate and you're going to come with me."

"What if you forget to say 'Simon says' and I don't?"

"My men will shoot everyone else in the pen."

So much for honor among thieves. I try to look like it's a hard choice, but all I want is out and I'm not sticking my neck out for any more psycho killers today thanks. It's all I can do not to jump into his arms and say, "Home, Jeeves." Finally I nod.

"Yeah. Okay. I'll come."

Audie gestures a couple of other guards over to open the gates. Everyone keeps their guns on me as we walk past the pens and RVs to the killing floor.

The place reeks of dust, sweat, and blood. When I step onto the floor, the crowd shrieks like banshees at spring break. The scene is twisted and familiar and, in a terrible way, comforting.

The guards lay out weapons on the ground. I start to reach for the na'at in my coat, but decide that no one around here needs to know anything about me other than that I don't like getting spit on.

The gear on the ground looks like it was pulled out of a garbage dump. Rusting swords and battle-axes. Spears with broken shafts repaired with duct tape. I stroll around the weapons like a window shopper at Christmas, taking my time. I find a battered old na'at and pick it up. It's stiff, and the first time I try to open it, it jams. I get down on one knee and whack it against the steel toes on one of my boots. It springs out to full length and holds. I notice guards haven't hauled out any other prisoners for me to fight. That means they're going to throw guards at me to fight. I wonder how many.

Turns out it's just one.

When my opponent comes out, I'm not sure if it's a Hellion or someone is backing a moving van into the arena. The guy is big the way a sonic boom is loud. Just a big knot of muscles with a head on top, like a cherry balanced on a fist. He's holding a shield the size of a car hood in one hand and has a Vernalis over his other. A Vernalis is like a metal crab claw that extends up to the fighter's elbow and is as long as an average person is tall. When it snaps shut, it can cut a tree in half. Maybe I should have stayed in the back of the pen with the other scaredy-cats. I'm giving serious consideration to cutting and running, but the guards are still holding guns on me. And I can't do any hoodoo here, can't even click my heels three times and say there's no place like home.

No one gives a signal, blows a whistle, or drops a hanky. Crab Man just howls and charges me. I get out of his way, but not too far or too fast. I stay put and try to look confused long enough to spring the na'at's blade and slice the Crab Man's Vernalis arm. I leave a nice gash but don't do any real damage.

He howls, some in pain and some because he didn't get to draw first blood. He swings the Vernalis at me like a club, but it's a feint. When I move in to stick him, he brings the shield around like a battering ram. I throw myself on the ground just before the shield splatters me like a dump truck. I roll to my feet and Crab Man and I circle each other. I try to extend the na'at again, but the mechanism jams when it's just halfway out.

I can't fight him like this. The Vernalis gives him too much reach. I need to get in close.

I attack this time, feinting left and right. Getting the shield and claw swinging at me just a little too late. I duck forward, closing the distance between us. Crab Man is used to fighters not wanting to get near him, so he doesn't have a lot of inside defense. I spear him in the side, but he's fast for a guy his size. He catches me in the back with a big elbow and I fall against him. He snaps his knee up hard enough to toss me on my back ten feet away. The Vernalis crashes into the ground near my head. I roll out of the way just as Crab Man spits a ball of fire at me. I reflexively block it with a kind of shield hex that bounces the attack back at the opponent. Goddamn. They left a hole in the cloak for the fighters. We can throw hoodoo out here. If the Andes Mountains weren't trying to beat me to death, I could probably get right out of here.

I throw a blinding hex at Crab Man's eyes. Part of it hits his arm, so I only get one eye. He howls like I pissed on his Batman #1 and a bolt of lightning hits the ground a few feet behind me. He has some big bad hoodoo under that claw, but I have an angel in my head and it can see the flash of power when he throws the big stuff.

I move around him, trying to stay on his blind side and draw him in closer. The magic he tosses at me is like the rest of him. Big and powerful, but not all that fast or creative. Being in the arena with him is like playing tennis in a meteor shower, but one where I can see the meteors a second before they hit. I keep tossing sharp little barbs of hoodoo at him. Waves of white-hot razors at his legs. Blasts of arctic cold at his eyes and balls. Muscle disruptors that have him shaking and spasming like an epileptic. But I can't pull out the big stuff. I could air-burst this place and turn the air into a blowtorch, but Crab Man is too close and the arena's too small and burning myself up with him isn't part of what little strategy I have.

Crab Man keeps on with the blockbuster spells, raining fire and brimstone. If he keeps on tossing the big stuff this fast, all I have to do is keep out of his way and he'll wear himself out.

I toss a starburst into his face. It starts as a fist-size ball of plasma that explodes into a thousand burning pieces of shrapnel. Crab Man raises his shield to block the hex and I slide in underneath, thrusting the na'at at his gut, going for a kill shot.

The fireballs chew up his face, but he protects his one working eye and brings his shield down at me like a guillotine. I get the na'at into his gut a few inches, but not far enough to finish him. He swings the shield at my head, but I duck it. He raises it high and brings it straight down on the na'at, snapping it in half. That's not supposed to happen. When a na'at is hit like that, it goes limp and bends in the middle like rubber. Mine shatters like glass. The break is clean and bright like someone's taken a hacksaw to the thing and cut partway through it. I look at Crab Man. The na'at was rigged and he knew it. In the second it takes me to understand that, he gets my left arm in the Vernalis and closes the pincers. There's a single white convulsion of pain as he crushes my arm and snaps it off a few inches below my shoulder. It's a race between the arm and me to see who can hit the ground first. I win.

The crowd is going completely apeshit. For a second, the mad screaming and stomping sounds like I'm back in the real arena. I relax. I don't want to croak in a backwater Hooverville soccer-mom park, but being back in the real arena, I can die happy.

Crab Man is bowing all the way around the stadium. Me, I just lie there and bleed. I'm done and he knows it. I want to go to sleep and stay that way. The angel in my head starts shouting. He reminds me that if I go out, I'll die and so will Alice.

I let my mind float away and the pain takes me over completely. The agony of crushed muscles and bones revs my engines nicely. I bark a Hellion combat spell to slow the bleeding and another to suck the blood into the dirt so no one will notice it's human.

Crab Man is soaking up the love. A few more bows and he'll come back and finish me.

John Wayne wouldn't shoot a man in the back, but that's my favorite target.

I manifest the Gladius and drag myself up. I'm not what you'd call steady on my feet, but I'm close enough that I don't have to be. I raise the Gladius as high as I can and slice off Crab Man's Vernalis arm. The crowd goes silent. Crab Man stares at his stump. I take off one of his legs next. He falls on his face, balancing on one arm and one leg. He's trying to move around to face me so he can attack. He swings his shield blindly, hoping I get too close and he can crush me. I let him close the distance before taking that arm, too. I keep waiting for the armed guards to open up with the shotguns, but they're watching, as stunned as the drunks in the stands. I stagger around in front of Crab Man. I want him to see this.

He's got one leg left and I slice that off at the knee. I want him to look in my eyes. I want the crowd to soak up every minute of this. I'm killing all of them. Every portion of pain I bring on Crab Man I'm bringing down on them. Genocide is evil and evil tastes good right now.

I slash Crab Man from right to left, through his chest. Before he comes apart, I swing the Gladius up and over, slicing him neatly from skull to ass. He falls apart in four big cauterized chunks of honey-baked ham.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call showmanship, with love from Sandman Slim.

The stadium is still quiet, like all the air has been sucked out of the place. But all it takes is for someone to drop a bottle and the sound sets everyone off at once. You didn't see that coming, did you? Some ugly half-dead Hellion foot soldier that could pull out a Gladius. Sleep tight wondering what other secret things us infantry grunts can do.

My left arm has stopped bleeding, but it's still a big open wound. I bark a pain spell, hold the Gladius to my arm, and burn the wound closed. Then I fall over and drift into a comforting blackness.

I feel a couple of guards drag me back to the holding pens. I don't go back into the pen with the other prisoners. They toss me into one of the blacked-out RVs alone. Even through the half-dead haze I can see they're scared shitless. Maybe I'm a spy or an officer from Pandemonium come to check up on them and they just tossed me into a death pit with a roid-rage moron. The smell of my burned skin is making me nauseous. Damn I could go for a cigarette right now.

I feel around for the Maledictions. This really is Hell. One cigarette left and it was crushed beyond all recognition in the fight. I toss the pack into the dark. The angel is trying to remind me of something. I reach back into the pocket and find Muninn's hoodoo healing egg. I bite into it and something soothing and sweet flows down my throat. In a few seconds my head is clear. I'm still weak, but the pain is gone and the world feels firm under my ass.

I let the angel loose. I need to think through this, because unless my new stump has a 007 plan to get us out of here, I'm going to have to call leaving my arm back in the arena a major setback.

I wonder if there's a way to turn off the antihoodoo cloak around this place. I'm not too proud to crawl into a shadow and whimper in the Room for an eternity or two. Mason's already putting up wanted posters. He knows I'm here. What do I care if one of his pet magicians detects me using the key? But I'm back in the holding area and the cloak is on, so I can't throw any hoodoo. And there's no way I'm fighting my way through all those guards with a wing clipped.

I need to stop for a minute and catch my breath. I don't know how long Muninn's egg is going to last. I need to keep moving while it does. I let the angel take over my senses. It can see right through the RV's tin-can walls.

I expect to see Rommel and the Afrika Corps around the place, but there isn't a Hellion within a hundred yards of me. I'm Chernobyl in a white-trash pied-à-terre. The angel does a three hundred-and-sixty-degree scan around the place. The few Hellions brave enough to be within eyesight are all on the arena side of the RV. Behind me is an empty field. But the RV is protected by the same Malebranche hex that zapped me good back in the flatbed. I cut a person-size hole in the wall and fall through. If I keep the RV between me and the posse, I just might be able to slink away into the dark with my tail tucked between my legs.

I guess this is Plan B.

JUST A FEW blocks away the streets are packed. I'm not sure where I am. I try to look nonchalant with my missing arm and the side of my coat soaked with dried blood and scorched by the Gladius. The crowd makes it easy to disappear. So does the fact that a lot of the losers lying in the street and begging around the food stalls don't look much better than me.

I wonder if any of the big brains back at the stadium have figured out I'm not in the RV anymore. One of the brave ones is going to check out the arm I left behind, see that it's human, and eventually figure out who it belongs to. My wanted posters are all over, so knowing the arm is mine doesn't bother me, but I hate the idea that some Hellion cocksucker is going to stick it on his wall as a trophy.

This is the first crowded patch of land I've seen in Eleusis. Hard-core raider country. Instead of hitting the individual corner markets, the enterprising ones have cleared them out and set up their own stalls. It's a county-fair midway, full of ugly Hellspawn and starving pagans desperate or brave or stupid enough to pick through the gutters and garbage for leftovers. Looking at what's going on at the stadium and the ruthless bastards picking the city clean out here, I can't see much difference between the raiders and the posse that followed Jack and me except who pays their salaries. It makes me wonder how many soldiers in Lucifer's legions were true believers and how many were simple mercenaries. Another nice design job, God. You ate your roughage and shit out an angelic army that could be bought off with beer and Twinkies.

There are impressive cracks in the sides of some buildings. Like the houses, some are supported by power poles. Others by gas-station hydraulic lifts and broken-down backhoes. There are open cesspits on the side streets near piles of trash two stories high. That's where most of the crazies and the pagans hang out, picking up and pocketing anything they can eat or trade. Cracks in the sidewalk ooze sewagey blood, but I don't see any big sinkholes. That's probably why everyone is bunched up in this part of town.

Being crippled like this isn't going to make getting Alice out of the asylum any easier, but nowhere's going to be safe when Mason starts his war. There's no way around it. The trip is a package deal. I have to get Alice and I have to stop Mason. One doesn't mean a goddamn thing without the other.

I keep touching my left side, looking for my missing arm, wondering if I made a mistake. Maybe I'm still lying on the street where the brick tagged me on the side of the head. Maybe Crab Man hit me with an illusion hex and my arm is still there. I swear I can feel my fingers move. But that's just phantom limb syndrome. It'll take a while for all the nerves that went to the arm to realize there's nothing there and die. Maybe when I get home, Allegra can set me up with a big steel Iron Man mitt. That would scare the ugly off the baddest Lurkers. Sandman Slim, the cyborg nephilim.

The street is full of stalls, and raiders make the place almost look like regular Hell. But it's not and I still don't know where I am. It looks like Eleusis's wall goes all the way around Griffith Park from the 101 on one side and the Golden State Freeway on the other. I can still see the Observatory asylum dead north. If someone around here had a cannon, they could shoot me straight up the hill and I'd be there. I need to find one of the tourist roads. If I tried climbing the damned hill through the trees, I'd still be going an hour after the universe ended. I need some elevation to get my bearings.

A few Kissi wander through the crowd. They trail raiders, making them jittery and paranoid and looking for a fight. They whisper to merchants who start screaming arguments with their customers. There's one on a side street tossing lit matches into empty windows. Nothing's caught yet, but give it time. I don't dare try to scare them off. I don't want to give myself away and I'm too weak to threaten them.

Right now the hard thing is keeping my head straight and my thoughts focused. Muninn's egg isn't going to last forever. I can feel an edge of pain in my arm already. Maybe that's normal and maybe it's a sign the egg is wearing off. This is the first time I've been dismembered. I'm not an expert. I stumble against a table. Booze, cigarettes, and bottles of potions clatter against each other. A few fall. I bend down like I'm helping pick things up, but I'm really trying to pocket a pack of Maledictions. The owner comes around the stall and yells at me, punctuating his point by kicking me on the left side, where I can't do anything about it.

I come to a large intersection. Eleusis isn't burning, but L.A. glows like coal and spits fire into the sky. I duck into a four-story parking garage. The bottom floor is set up like a squatter camp. There are pagans and crazies from up the hill, cook fires and tents. The place stinks from bodies and waste. I go up the ramp to the second floor. There are fewer people and no one bothers me. I keep climbing.

The third floor is trashed, almost like a bomb went off. Every inch is blackened and scorched. It doesn't look like a bomb. More like a fire, one big enough and hot enough so it didn't leave anything but half-melted car frames. I'm exhausted after walking from the stadium. I find a spot in the dark back by the elevators and lie down. The cool concrete feels good against my head. I'm glad Alice isn't here to see me like this. It might shake her confidence in my knight-in-shining armor act.

The air is relatively clean up here, but I still get whiffs of the body stink from down below. One smell doesn't belong---the overwhelming vinegar reek. I tilt up my head and Josef is standing on the melted frame of a MINI Cooper.

"This isn't exactly the progress I was hoping to find," he says.

"Get out of here, man. Someone's going to see you."

"So? Do you think any of the mob out there would be willing or able to do anything about it?"

"My point is, I don't want to find out. No loose ends. Remember?"

I sit up and lean my back against the wall. Josef looks at my empty sleeve and shakes his head.

"You're ridiculous. Crippled. Locked up by idiots and robbed by a dead psychopath." He kicks some loose rocks from near his feet and uncovers a pair of crushed reading glasses. "We're tired of waiting. We're coming in now."

"Be my guest."

He picks up the glasses and holds them over his eyes, squinting through the lenses. They must not be his prescription. He makes a face and tosses them out over the wall.

"Aren't you going to try and talk me out of it?"

"No. Be my guest. Pandemonium is that way and so are about ninety percent of Hell's legions. If you and your friends think you can take on a million or so Hellion soldiers all by yourselves, be my guest."

He leans in close, bringing his stink with him.

"You don't think we can handle these Hellion idiots?"

"Maybe when there weren't enough in one place for a decent tailgate party, but these boys have just about put the original rebel angel legions back together."

"So? They lost their war in Heaven and now even Lucifer is gone. They're weak."

"Yeah, but there's the other thing."

"What?"

"Do you have a cigarette?"

He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a pack of regular human cigarettes. Never count on a Kissi to give you what you really want. I light the cigarette with Mason's lighter and pull the smoke deep into my lungs. It's better than nothing and it helps cover up Josef's smell.

"You said there was something else," Josef says.

"Do you ever watch the Discovery Channel? They had a show on where a colony of little tiny red ants all got together and killed a full-grown wolf. See my point?"

"No."

"Just because you're the wolf at the top of the food chain doesn't mean you're bulletproof. You and your pals might be able to wipe out the Hellions, but they won't go down easy, and by the time you're done, you're going to be blind and crippled. That doesn't sound like the big win to me."

Josef takes a deep breath and turns his head to the sounds from the street.

"How much longer are we supposed to wait?"

"Just a few more hours. I need to get up this hill and then get General Semyazah. He's the one guy who can turn this whole thing around."

"He's in Tartarus."

"I know."

"You think you can help him? How?"

"I'll tell them I'm the pizza delivery boy. They'll never suspect a thing."

"Don't be cute. No one's ever returned from Tartarus."

"Maybe they were going the wrong way."

His expression changes to genuine interest.

"You know a secret way out?"

I drag off the cigarette. After Maledictions, regular human cigarettes are like inhaling the steam off a cup of herbal tea.

"If you're so concerned about winning this thing, why don't you go and do your job and let me do mine? If I'm not back in Pandemonium in, say, twelve hours, you'll know I'm stuck in Tartarus and I'm not coming back. After that, you can do what you want, but give me the time to do this the smart way."

He gets closer, picks a bit of lint off my shoulder, and tosses it away.

"This is the last time. The tide is rising and you can't hold back the sea. Besides, you're not an easy man to trust."

"Yeah, but nobody else wants to play our reindeer games, so we're stuck with each other."

Josef fingers my empty coat sleeve.

"How are you going to pull this off with only one arm?"

"I'll manage."

"Meaning you're going to let your ego ruin everything."

"It's my plan. It's mine to blow."

"No, it's not."

It's easy to forget that Kissi are a kind of angel. A factory-second, thrown-in-the-Dumpster-and-left-in-a-landfill angel, but still an awesomely powerful creature.

When Josef grabs me there isn't a damned thing I can do to fight back. I'm one-handed, off balance, sick, and dizzy. He throws me onto my knees, pulls off my coat, and takes out the black blade. I try to back away, but he grabs my empty left sleeve and pulls me back like a fish on a reel. He slices through the cauterized stump of my arm, reopening the wound. My knees buckle. I hold on to him with my one good hand, trying to get my fingers around his throat or push him off. Something. Anything. He shrugs me off and pins me against the wall. With the black blade he cuts an X on the palm of my right hand and presses my bloody palm to the arm stump.

I'm sicker than ever. Not blacking-out sick or throwing-up sick, but lost in space. Like my body and brain have given up trying to register things like up and down or sane or insane. I keep waiting for the angel in my head to jump in and handle things, but he's as floored as I am. The stump itches and the nerves that feel like they're still connected to fingers feel even more like that. I look to see what's happening and find something white and pulsating hanging off my body like a giant maggot. Great. Now I'm going to have to change my online dating photo.

The maggot grows veins and arteries. Five twitching tentacle-things wiggle out the end. The maggot shrinks and turns almost black. The veins and arteries toughen until they're cables within thick dark muscle. Shiny skin glides over and around the growing structures. It shines like metal or a scarab's carapace. My fingers are delicate but strong, half organic insect and half machine. They flex when I tell them to. I touch each fingertip to thumb, counting one, two, three, four. They move easily. Josef is back by the MINI Cooper wiping my gore off his hands with a white handkerchief.

"That should give you a decent chance of not fucking things up entirely."

He folds the handkerchief and puts it into a back pocket.

"I could lie and tell you that I can't make the arm look any more human than that, but we both know I'd be lying. Wear that and don't forget who your friends are."

"You're a Georgia peach."

The pain and nausea are gone. I stand up. Josef comes over and helps me get my coat back on.

"Get used to your new arm quickly. You have twelve hours from now or we go without you."

He walks down the ramp and disappears before he reaches the bottom.

I flex and move the arm. Pick up a piece of concrete. Toss it from my good hand to my new one and back again. The biomechanical hand feels pressure, heat, and sharpness, but not like my regular one. It'll take some getting used to, but it's better than a burned stump.

The arm isn't the only thing I have to work out. I don't know a secret way out of Tartarus. I don't even know the way in. But I'll find it, and if hoodoo and bullshit won't get me out, I'll hold my breath until I turn blue. That always worked on Mom.

I walk up to an open level at the top of the garage and look out over the city. On top of a hill less than a mile away is the asylum. If Eleusis is as weirdly laid out and fucked up as the rest of this L.A., Alice might as well be on the moon. I don't know if I can even get to her in twelve hours, much less get her and Semyazah. I should have asked Josef for a jet pack instead of an arm.

Escaped lunatics are warming themselves around a fire of old furniture and my wanted posters.

Maybe I should steal a car and take my chances on finding a road to the Observatory somewhere.

"Still trying to get up that hill, eh?"

I look over my left shoulder and then my right. There's a small round man in a red tailored suit sitting on the edge of the wall with his feet dangling over the edge. I look at him and he glances at me.

"Is he gone?"

"Who?"

"Your pal Josef. Is he gone?"

"He's not my pal and yes, he's gone. Who are you?"

"I've had my eye out for you and then I see him fitting you out with a bug claw. I just naturally assumed that you two were buddies."

I circle around behind him, trying to get a better look.

"Who are you?"

He shrugs.

"Who is any of us really?"

"Don't get cute."

"I was born cute. You're the monster."

I get out the na'at and hold it where he can't see and walk over until I'm close enough to get a good look.

It's Mr. Muninn. Only not. It's one of his brothers. They're not just twins, they're the same in every detail including the clothes, except that where Muninn is all black, this one is all red. The angel in my head makes a sound I've never heard it make before. I put the na'at back in my coat.

"What's your name?"

The round man bounces his heels off the side of the building.

"Kid, you couldn't pronounce my name with three tongues and a million years to practice."

"Muninn told me his."

"Did he?"

"Didn't he?"

The red man holds up his hands, the fingers spread wide.

"Five brothers. Each of our names and consciousness corresponds to a color. Yellow. Blue. Green. I'm red, as you might have noticed. Muninn is black, the sum of us all." He ticks off each color with a finger. "Now, if you were the literary type or had ever read a book in your life, you might know that the mythical Nordic deity Odin traveled with two black ravens. One was called Huginn. Guess what the other was called?"

"Muninn named himself after a bird?"

"It's his idea of a joke. Don't hate him. He's the youngest."

The angel in my head stops making the funny noise and finally gets out a single word: Elohim.

The red man is looking at me. I get the feeling he can read me a lot better than I can read him because I can't read him at all.

"Are you . . . ?"

"Yep."

"All five of you are?"

"Yep."

"Mr. Muninn, too?"

"I think we established that when we established that he's one of us five brothers."

My head is going funny again. My stomach twists. I'm swamped by a fascination and anger that I've been carrying around a lot longer than the eleven years I spent Downtown.

"Muninn lied to me. I thought he was one of the few people I could trust."

"Calm down. He didn't lie to you. He just didn't come up and say, 'Hi, kid. I'm God. How's tricks?' Would you have believed him? I wouldn't, and I'd know he was telling the truth."

"At least I can call him Muninn. What am I supposed to call you? Santa Elvis?"

"How about Neshamah? That's one I think you can pronounce without breaking your jaw.

"What are you doing down here?"

He holds out his hands.

"Surveying my handiwork."

I lean on the wall with him and look out over the city. Something explodes a few blocks north. A fire starts in a building down the block. I guess the Kissi with the matches got his wish.

"If this was my Erector Set, I'd return it and get my money back," I say.

Neshamah shakes his head and shrugs.

"It wasn't supposed to be like this, you know. Eleusis was a beautiful place once. The whole universe was. We . . . well, it was still I back then . . . were building perfection, but it went wrong."

"Did you invent understatement back then or did you come up with it later?"

"At least we, I, dreamed big. What do you dream about?"

"You know exactly what I dream about. It's why I'm here."

"A dunce on a white horse tilting at windmills. Very original. You know what my brothers and I did? We invented light. And atoms. And air."

"If you get the credit for light, you deserve the credit for skin cancer, too, so another bang-up job on that one."

He puts his head in his hands in an exaggerated gesture.

"Cancer. Damn, you people are a mess."

"You made us, so what does that make you?"

He watches smoke rising from the nearby fire as it drifts up to meet the burning cloud of the sky.

"We were so sure we got you right the first time. Then there was the whole Eden debacle and it was all downhill from there. But don't worry, the new ones are a lot better."

"You're done with us and on to Humanity 2.0?"

"Oh, we're way beyond 2.0. The new ones are nearly perfect. Nearly angels. You'd hate them."

"Fingers crossed I never have to meet one."

He leans over to me and speaks in a fake conspiratorial whisper.

"You won't. I put them far, far away from you people. Why do you think space is so big?"

He sits up and laughs, pleased with his vaudeville act. I always wondered if I'd run into him sometime. I'm not sure what I was expecting. A muscle-bound Old Testament Conan Yahweh. Maybe a pothead New Testament love guru. Something. But not Muninn. And especially not a bad Xerox asshole version of Muninn.

"Why did you leave me down here all those years?"

"You mean why do I allow human suffering?"

"No. What I mean is why did you leave me down here?"

"You don't belong anywhere, so what difference does it make where you are?"

"You really hate me, don't you? I'm every fucking mistake you ever made all rolled into one."

"That's about the size of it."

"Aelita murdered Uriel, my father."

"Yes."

"Did you tell her to?"

"Aelita and I aren't really on what you'd call speaking terms these days."

"Is my father stuck in Tartarus?"

"No."

"Where is he?"

"He's gone."

"Where?"

"He's just gone."

"The other dead nephilim, are they gone, too?"

He raises one hand and drops it back in his lap.

I ask, "What's in Tartarus?"

He doesn't say anything for a while.

"I'd appreciate it if you'd put that cigarette out. It bothers my allergies."

"You have allergies?"

"Only down here."

I flick the cigarette over the side into the crazies' bonfire below.

"What I don't get is the disappearing act. You hate me. That's a given. But if you were done with all us mortal slobs and moving on to 2.0, why didn't you just kill us? Or didn't you care enough to put us out of our misery? Is that who you are? One of those people who forgets their kid in the car on a hot day until it has a stroke?"

He doesn't move or speak for a while. He just looks down into the street. A couple of raiders walk by, passing a bottle back and forth. Neshamah leans over the edge and spits, hitting one of the raiders on top of his head. He laughs.

"You broke my heart. Not you in particular. All humanity. And then there was the incident in Heaven with Lucifer and his juvenile delinquent friends. I had to throw a third of my children into the void. I think the ones that stayed, the quote 'loyal ones,' were just as bad if not worse. So puffed with their importance and self-righteousness. The funny thing is, I never really believed that Lucifer wanted my throne, but I think a few of the angels who stayed did. They saw my failure and felt entitled to it after they fought and won."

He shakes his head. Looks down while he bounces his heels off the building.

"Like any decent God, I willed myself into being. I created time, space, and matter and set out to construct a universe. When I was finished, nothing quite worked the way I wanted. The angels rebelled. The Kissi wreaked havoc. And all of you on earth, well, you were just you. Then one day I realized I wasn't me anymore. I'd gone from one big me to five smaller ones. I never bothered trying to put myself back together. What was the point? Some of me wouldn't want to do it and I didn't want to fight with myself."

"You know, I'm sure if you asked nicely, they could find a bed for you at the pretty hospital on the hill."

"Watch your tone. I could turn the rest of you into an insect to match that arm."

Just what I need. For this whole thing to turn even more Kafkaesque.

Adjust course.

"I've been wondering, who would build an asylum in Hell and who'd it be for?"

"Ah, that's the first interesting thing you've asked," says Neshamah. "Originally it was for the Fallen. Some of them went mad when they realized what they'd done and gave up. Occasionally damned human souls develop a similar condition, so when I took back this portion of Hell to create Eleusis for the heathens, I left the asylum intact. It's pointless to punish the insane---they don't understand what's happening or why. Treatment helped them come back to themselves so they could properly resume their suffering."

I rub my new arm where it meets my shoulder. The contrast between soft flesh and hard chitin is startling.

"You are one cold fucker," I say.

"Coming from someone who blissfully hacked another sentient creature to death not an hour ago, that's quite something."

"Father Traven said something interesting about you. He used a word I'd never heard before, so I looked it up online. There was this Greek bunch called the Gnostics . . ."

He rolls his eyes.

"Not the fucking Gnostics, please."

"They didn't call you God. They called you the demiurge. They didn't believe you're an omnipotent übermensch. You're more like one of those dads who tries to build a barbecue in the backyard only you can't follow the instructions, so you lay out the bricks wrong and the cement dries too fast and the thing comes out as crooked as poker in Juarez. Then, around sunset, you announce it's finished even though it looks like a brick cold sore. You throw some T-bones in the fire and pretend it's what you were going for all along. That's what you did to the universe."

He swings his legs back over the wall and hops down onto the garage roof. He smiles at me.

"You actually read something? There's evidence of a true miracle, right up there with the loaves and fishes."

"Why are you such an asshole when Muninn is such a good guy?"

He throws up his hands in disgust.

"Everyone is so in love with poor sweet Muninn. It's why he's always gotten his way. He hides down there in his cave collecting toys, holding on to the past because he doesn't want to have to deal with any of this." Neshamah gestures to the burning city. "But he's part of our collective being, and as responsible for this disaster as any of the rest of us."

"At least he's not a whiner."

"Take away his toys and see how long that lasts. Why do you think he's hiding? He never learned to share."

Neshamah takes a flask from an inside pocket. He unscrews the top and takes a long drink.

"Do you think I could have a hit off that? It's been a long weird day."

He shakes his head.

"You wouldn't like it."

"I drink Aqua Regia; how bad can this be?"

He shrugs and hands me the flask. I upend it and spit out everything that touches my tongue. Neshamah takes the flask away and bursts into belly laughs.

"What is that shit?"

"Ambrosia," he says. "Food of the gods."

He takes another sip and puts the flask back in his coat.

"So, if you're down here and Muninn is on earth, where are the others?"

"Around. We travel a lot."

"Are any of you in Heaven?"

"Always. At least one of us."

"Lucifer knows you're broken, doesn't he?"

He nods.

"Lucifer was always the smart one. That's why he and the kid never got along. One's all heart and one's all head."

"This all happened after Lucifer left. Why don't you send him down here to fix it?"

"It wouldn't help. You're right about one thing. I didn't build everything as well as I might have. This was going to happen sooner or later."

"Do the five of you know what the others hear and see?"

"Not everything. We like some privacy, too. Otherwise we'd all still be together."

"Do they know about us talking right now?"

"They can hear every word."

"Then you got the message I sent back with the angel from Eden?"

"We got it. You didn't have to cut him up like that." He nods at my new metal bug arm. "But I guess you're even."

I look away. The building the Kissi torched is really roaring. I can feel the heat all the way over here. I wonder if we should move, but Neshamah doesn't seem worried, so I decide not to be.

"Maybe I was a little harsh. I'd just gotten over being dead. And he threw the first punch."

"I guess that makes it all right, then."

Neshamah walks across the parking lot and looks out over another part of Hell. The view isn't any better from over here. I don't say it because I can see it on his face.

He says, "He's not Lucifer anymore, by the way. He's Samael."

"So I heard. Speaking of your kids, what's the story with Aelita? She makes Lilith look like Mother Teresa. Didn't she get enough face time with Daddy?"

"You're not a parent. Don't tell me how to raise my family."

"I don't know if she has Electra complex or Oedipus complex or diaper rash, but she really wants you dead. You need to get her some Prozac."

We walk all the way around the roof. The sky remains a solid mass of smoke. Earthquakes rumble on the horizon.

"I knew that Lucifer was a troublemaker, but I also knew he'd grown out of it. But I never saw this coming with Aelita. I've tried talking to her, but she might be a lost cause."

"You could always kill me. That's what she really wants."

"Don't think I haven't considered it. And that's not what she wants. You're just a symptom of what she sees as a larger condition."

"Sounds like she's gone Gnostic on you and thinks Daddy's the demiurge, too."

He turns and looks me in the eye.

"Who the hell are you to talk about misbehaving kids? Your whole life has been about breaking things. You're not a dumb kid. Why do you go looking for trouble?"

" 'Cause one of your angels ruined my mother and father's lives and made me an Abomination. When I finally found my real father, he told me that all I was and ever will be is a killer. Not exactly Leave It to Beaver, is it?"

"We've all got our troubles. Look at this mess."

Neshamah leans his elbows on the low wall. I do the same.

"Some of those old Greeks thought that the world couldn't be such a cruel mess without it being on purpose. They said that who or whatever made it deep down inside had to be evil."

"What do you think?" he asks.

I feel in my pocket for a cigarette my brain knows isn't there, but my body has to check for it anyway. I flex my new hand and run it over the concrete, feeling the rough surface.

I say, "I'm not a hundred percent either way. But off the top of my head, I don't really think you're evil. Just out of your depth. Or like a kid who gets a note on his report card. 'If Chet applied himself, I'm sure he could do better in class.' "

"Funny, that's how we feel about you."

"I'm a nephilim and a killer. Do you think I'm evil?"

"I'm not a hundred percent either way. Besides, there are worse things to be than a killer."

"What about 'Thou shall not kill'?"

"What about the Egyptian army Moses drowned when he closed the Red Sea on them? Do you think he could have turned them around with a few kind words? Do you think I could do that here?" He points to the city below. "Do you want to know the difference between a killer and a murderer?"

"Sure."

"It's where you aim the gun."

That sounds more like the Old Testament guy I was looking for.

"Well, chatting has been a little slice of heaven," I say, "but I have to figure out how to get up that hill so I can do a couple of miracles and save the universe. You wouldn't be in the mood to help or anything?"

He looks into the distance and smiles.

"I think you have it in hand."

"Was that a fucking joke?"

"Sorry. I couldn't resist."

I take a couple of steps to go when I hear him clear his throat.

"I think you have something of mine."

"Oh, right."

I walk over and give him the crystal.

"Muninn says that's your insurance policy. If everything ends, you can start over again."

"Is that what he told you? The truth is no one knows what it will be, but something is better than nothing."

"You and Muninn, it's like Jesus and Lucifer, isn't it? One's all heart and one's all head."

He puts the crystal in a pocket of his red waistcoat. It's a tight fit.

"He's the youngest. I'm the oldest. You do the math."

"What happens if Aelita kills one of you?"

He leans over the wall and looks down at the street.

"See that manhole down there? I have a feeling if you went down inside and walked exactly three hundred and thirty-three paces west, you'll find where you want to go."

"Seriously? Why that number?"

"Because that's how many it is. Not three hundred and thirty-two or three hundred and thirty-four. Count off three hundred and thirty-three and look around. You'll be there."

"Seriously? Thanks, man. And after all the things I've said about you over the years."

"Don't worry. I've said the same about you."

"Will you be here when I'm done up the hill?"

He shrugs.

"Hard to say. I work in mysterious ways."

I start for the ramp wondering if I'll need something to pry up the manhole cover.

"Nice meeting you, Spider-Man!"

I look back. Neshamah is waving, a shit-eating grin plastered on his face. I have no choice. I start an old tune my mother used to belt out when she had just the right number of martinis.

At the Devil's ball
In the Devil's hall
I saw the funniest devil that I ever saw
Dancing with the Devil
Oh, you little devil
Dancing at the Devil's ball

He turns back to the city.

"Yeah, fuck you, too, kid."

THERE'S A KID'S game that goes something like this: "Don't think of a white bear for half an hour and you win a dollar." No one ever wins because the moment anyone says "white bear," that's all you can think about. Being told your life depends on walking exactly 333 steps is a lot like that. You count on your fingers, but what if you get distracted and drop a number? What if you repeat one? How do you know each step you're taking is the same distance as all the others? I should have a calculator, a tape measure, and Rain Man as a guide. If I count wrong and don't find a way out, maybe I should keep on walking. No. I could end up in here forever, and if it's only one Apocalypse per customer I don't want to miss it.

330. 331. 332. 333.

I stop and look around. Light comes through a crack in the wall to my left. I dig a finger into the crack. It feels like a service door that's been welded shut but it was a sloppy job and the dampness in the tunnels has been working on the joins ever since. I push my new hand into the crack, gouging out layers of corroded iron and faded paint. The new hand works pretty well. It feels the shape and roughness of the metal, but it doesn't bleed or register pain. I might just have to keep it.

When there's a clean clear crack an inch wide in the door, I brace my feet and put my shoulder and body into it. The metal slides away, scattering sewer fungus and oak-leaf-size sheets of rust.

Ragged lunatics are asleep on the floor and dirty mattresses dragged down from the wards upstairs. They don't look so different from the ones I saw on the street. Maybe these are a little farther down the road to Candy Land. The others managed to run away, but these bedlam sheep never left the pasture. They drool and stare at me as I step through the old service door.

I'm in the lobby of what back home is the Griffith Park Observatory. This version doesn't look like Galileo would stop by for a piss. The floors and walls are bare cement. A large open ward and single cells in a circle are around the bottom floor. All the cell doors are unlocked or have been smashed open.

The loons over here watch a couple of old souls, maybe witches, spin a dust of tiny emerald pyramids into orbit around crystal glass cubes like imaginary constellations.

The second floor is for more impressive head cases. Jack said there were Hellions in the asylum and for once he wasn't lying. There are several, mixed in with the human souls. They're playing games that only they can possibly understand, tossing potion bottles and human or animal bones, then drawing symbols on the floor in blood and shit. When the drawing is done everyone takes a step and contorts into a strange new position. Dungeons & Dragons for actual monsters in an actual dungeon.

The third floor is the old-fashioned black-and-white Boris Karloff Bedlam I've been looking for. Dim, wet, and stinking. This is where they keep the one-percenters. All the cells on the lower two floors are open, but these have double-thick bars surrounded by bonding hexes. And they're working because most of the cells are still occupied.

The good news is that the few third-floor patients who've escaped their cells look more dangerous to themselves than to me. Two grimy Hellions roll around on the floor, each gnawing on the other's straitjacket. I can't tell if they're trying to help or eat each other. Going by the holes in the material and their broken teeth, it looks like they've been going at it for quite a while without getting anywhere. Still, you have to give them points for hanging in there.

A Hellion as big as Crab Man emerges suddenly from the dark and lumbers past without looking in my direction. He must have been shackled to the wall of his cell. He has metal cuffs and chains attached to his wrists and is hauling two huge carved stones behind him. Going by the deep scratches on the floor, it looks like all he's done since getting out is drag his heavy chains and rocks around and around the third floor. As he passes each locked cell, damned souls and Hellions pound the doors and howl at him.

There's a short hall off the main corridor. The worst of the worst will be down there. I go through the hall quietly and peer around the corner. Just two guards at the end. That's where Alice will be. My breath catches in my throat. This is the closest I've been to her in over eleven years and there's only a couple of bored doormen in the way.

For the first time I've been down here, I'm scared. Normally I'd get out the na'at and go completely brontosaurus on two lousy guards. But if I do anything spectacularly stupid, there might be another guard in the cell who could kill Alice. The angel reminds me that I'm also wearing a brand-new arm that I've never used in a fight. For once I need to think this through.

A couple of minutes later the rock-dragging Hellion makes the turn to this end of the corridor. The guards by Alice's cell don't even look up. They've heard him walk by a hundred times. The guards couldn't look more bored.

I flatten myself against the wall. As the backwater Sisyphus passes, I get out the black blade and slice through his heavy chains while giving him a little kick in the ass. Not enough to hurt him. Just enough to push him into the side hall so that the guards will be the first thing he sees when he realizes he's free.

At first he stands there, probably feeling off balance with the big load off his back. Then he looks at his empty hands. Sees the dark and gangrenous flesh around the shackles where they've been biting into his wrists for who knows how long. The guards aren't pleased. They want him to keep dragging the stone exactly the way he always has. They don't want him to improve himself. The boy with the wrist shackles must be picking up on the guards' negative waves because he heads right at them for a heart-to-heart. I can't be sure exactly what they're saying, but I hear a lot of "ows" and "don'ts" along with the kind of crunching I've come to associate with smashed bones. The angel reminds me to be patient and wait for the conversation to die down by itself.

In a couple of minutes a still-disoriented giant wanders out of the side hall. He's covered in blood and other colorful fluids that I don't want to think about. He stares at his stones, lost and desperate without them. I go over and pick up the end of one of the chains. He looks up when he hears the links rattle against each other. I hold the chain out to him. He eyes me for a full minute. I'm not sure what he sees. I wonder if the insane can see through glamours? I still have Hellion skin plastered on my face, so I'd be pretty confusing to look at if he can see my living body.

Slowly, he puts out a hand. I wrap the chain around his palms and close his fingers over the metal. He leans forward. The weight is different, but familiar enough that he knows what to do. The moment he puts his head down, he forgets about me. He leans into the weight and pulls. The stones scrape reassuringly along the floor behind him.

I go down the side hall, stepping over pieces of the guards, until I come to the door in the back. It's locked and the sliding viewing panel is welded shut. I can't be a hundred percent sure what's on the other side. I slash open the iron padlock with the blade. Before the lock hits the floor, I kick the door open as hard as I can. It swings back and one of the hinges pops as the door swings open and hits the wall.

As I step inside I hear a stifled scream from the farthest, darkest corner of the cell. It sounds awfully human.

"Alice?"

Nothing.

"Alice?"

And a second later there she is. Eleven years I've been waiting for this. I've lost track of how many beings I've killed, and destroyed everything in my way. I've been beaten, stabbed, burned, and maimed across two planes of existence to get to this moment. And here I am and here she is and we're together in the same room maybe a few hours before the end of everything. I want to grab her and kiss her, but I don't think the feeling is mutual.

She has her back to the far wall and her teeth are bared. She's holding a wooden stake. It looks like she broke the leg off a chair and sharpened it on the floor. That's my girl.

"Alice . . ."

"Keep away from me!" she screams, and kicks a metal dish covered with foul-smelling slop at me. Have these pinheads been trying to feed her Hellion food? Even I wouldn't eat most of that stuff and I didn't come here on a direct flight from Heaven.

"It's okay," I tell her. "It's me. I've come to take you out of here."

She holds the stake higher.

"I'm not going anywhere with you, asshole! Leave me alone!"

There's only one small oil lamp in the cell. All she can see is my shadowed profile from the light in the hall. I get closer so I'm not a ghost anymore.

"Alice. I've come to save you."

She lunges and jams the stake deep in my chest. I fall back against the wall. A couple of months ago Candy gave me the zombie-bite antidote on the point of a knife and now this. Why do all the women I like end up stabbing me?

In this case the answer is obvious. I got so excited at the idea of finally seeing her that I forgot I'm sporting a robo-bug arm and a Hellion's face.

I pull the wood out of my chest and toss it into the hall. Even unarmed, Alice looks like she's ready to go Frazier and Ali with me. She's always been like that. She was never big on backing down from anything.

Are you really going to sacrifice yourself to save your great betrayer?

Shut up, Medea. We're having a moment. And I know you were lying now, so can it.

Getting staked isn't going to kill me, but it hurts like a rhino giving you a flu shot with its horn. I sit down on a wooden chair Alice didn't break and push the hoodie back from my head with my new bug arm. My boots are slick with the dead guards' innards. My coat is covered in blood and smells like the sewer. And then there's my face. For those few seconds when I first saw her, it felt like I wasn't Sandman Slim anymore. I was plain old boring James Stark. With the pain the truth comes back. I'm in a Hellion asylum, rank, mangled, and horrible. I'm finally the monster I always said I was.

I have to laugh. There isn't much else left to do. Go down into the deepest darkest parts of Hell, and you'll see what I mean. They laugh all the time down there.

I reach into my coat pocket and feel around. For a second I don't even know what it is I'm looking for. I pull out what Mustang Sally told me to bring through the Black Dahlia. My hands are bloody from my chest wound and I've left sticky red fingerprints all over the small plastic rabbit. I wipe it on my coat, but that just smears the blood. Fuck it.

I toss the rabbit over to where Alice is hiding in the corner.

"I was going to bring you a turkey dinner since we missed Christmas, but it wouldn't fit in my coat, so you'll have to settle for that."

I see a hand dart from the blackness and disappear back inside. My chest burns, but the wound is already closing up. My legs are cramping. I want to stand, but I don't want to spook her. I wish God hadn't made me put out my cigarette.

Soon I hear, "Jim?"

I can't see her, but the angel in my head can. He shows her to me outlined in the deep dark. The atoms that hold her together are the same as the air around her, her clothes, the walls and floor. And me. There's no difference.

"Jim?"

"Hi, Lucy. I'm home."

She comes over to me slowly, still afraid it's a trick. I know the feeling.

"Jim. Are you . . . ?"

"I'm not dead and I'm not a Hellion. I just needed to borrow a face to get here. Trust me. This isn't the weirdest thing I've done since we last saw each other."

She kneels down and looks into my eyes but keeps some distance between us.

Alice was always the smart one. She read books and thought about what she was going to say before she said it. Sometimes she said the most important things without talking. It was all little physical reactions.

She shakes her head a tiny bit, an almost subliminal movement.

"Is that really you in there?"

"You tell me."

She looks down at my human hand. I turn it over so she can see the back. It's like she's trying to read a secret in the lines. But the hand is so scarred I doubt she'll find anything familiar about it.

"Whoever you are, you really need to do something about those cuticles," she says.

"All the beauty parlors down here are closed or on fire."

She gets up and looks down at me.

"Say something only Jim would say."

"Oh shit."

"Nice start. Keep going."

I try to think, but my brain is freezer-burned.

"Vidocq has our old apartment. He uses a potion that makes it invisible and makes everyone else forget it's there so he doesn't have to pay rent. He lives there with a nice girl who's a hoodoo doctor but originally worked in my video store. Oh yeah. I own a video store. Remember Kasabian? The store used to belong to him, but I cut off his head, so now the store's mine. Kasabian's head is my roommate. He steals my cigarettes and drinks my beer. We usually live over the store, but it's being fixed up, so now we're in a hotel. I finally met my real father. He was an archangel, but now he's dead. I really missed you."

She crosses her arms. Nods at me.

"What happened to your face?"

"I had to get rid of it to get here and this one was available."

"Put it back on. I want to see the real you."

I look at the floor, smiling.

"Of course you do. But it's not here."

"Where is it?"

"Jack the Ripper stole it."

She takes a deep breath and lets it out. I'm never going to get used to seeing the dead breathe. Or mimic the memory of breathing. I don't know which it is.

"I almost believe you. Say something else."

"For almost a year I've had the strangest dreams about you. I know some were just plain old dreams, but others were different. It's like you were really talking to me."

She grunts faintly.

"I had dreams about you, too. Some were like you said. Just dreams. But I think a few were something more. Like we were talking to each other. I saw another girl in one of them. She had an accent."

"That's Brigitte. She's Czech. And a zombie hunter. You'd like her."

"Sounds fun. Is she your girlfriend?"

I shake my head.

"I almost got her turned into the undead, so it didn't really work out. But I started seeing someone recently. You'd like her, too. She's a Lurker, and when she gets mad she eats people."

Alice gives a little laugh.

"They make me sound so boring."

"That's the last thing you were."

She sits on the table and leans in close, like a scientist examining a new kind of bug.

"We need to find your real face because, seriously, human or not, no girl is going to stick her tongue in that thing." She sits up. "And for the record, I missed you, too."

She reaches out to touch my Hellion cheek but her hand goes right through me.

"Damn I was afraid of that," she says.

"What the fuck just happened?"

She stares at her hand.

"It happens with everything down here. I guess since I was in Heaven, Hell things can't touch me."

"How did you get dragged down into this cell?"

"It was that crazy angel, Aelita. She had some interesting things to say about you. She said you aren't human."

And Medea Bava said some things about you.

"I'm humanish. I'll tell you about it later."

"What happened to you all those years ago? Where were you? I know it had something to do with Mason. He's been behind every lousy thing that's happened to us."

"Like Parker." Mason's Sub Rosa attack dog who murdered her.

"Parker." She nods. "Whatever happened to him?"

"I killed him."

Alice looks at me and turns away. She's not sure if I'm kidding or not. I want to ask how Parker did it, but I can't.

I say, "I know that Mason's running what's going on down here. And to answer your question, I spent eleven years right here in Hell."

She turns halfway back.

"You seem a lot saner than I would be. I've only been here a couple of days and I'm starting to lose my mind."

"You want to know something really funny? I'm the one who sent Mason to Hell in the first place."

She shakes her head.

"This is officially the worst three-way ever." She finally looks at me again. "I'm sorry I stabbed you."

"That's okay. The nonhuman thing helps me heal fast. Also, I can park in handicapped spaces."

"So, are you going to rescue me or what? Aelita is going to drag me off to Mason soon."

"That doesn't make sense. Our deal was I had three days. And Mason is still waiting for soldiers and arguing strategy."

"Whatever he's doing, Aelita made it sound like I'm part of it, so I'd really like to not be here." Her eyes narrow and she looks out the cell door. "How did you get by all the guards?"

"There were only two."

Her eyebrows go up a fraction of an inch.

"There are a hell of a lot more than two."

Shit.

I let the angel loose and my senses expand across the floor. The entire ward beyond the hall is filled with Hellion guards. The fuckers were hiding in the locked cells.

"Why don't they attack?"

"They're probably waiting for Aelita. She seems to be the one in charge around here."

There's no way I can get us past all the guards outside. But we're only on the third floor.

"Step back. This is going to look strange, but don't ask any questions. Just jump when I tell you."

Alice goes back to the wall. I manifest the Gladius and smash it into the floor. It cuts through the stones like a blowtorch through a marshmallow. It doesn't even make much noise. Just a low sizzle. Three hits and a section of the floor gives way.

"Jump," I say.

I don't have to say it twice. She hops into the hole and I follow her. The second-floor crazies are still playing their game. A couple glance at us when we hit the floor, but we're not nearly as interesting as the game, so they turn away. I hack another hole in the floor and we drop through to the first floor.

There are a few Hellion guards stationed downstairs, but only a couple by the stairs. They're surprised when Alice and I come falling out of the ceiling, but shocked when they see the Gladius. One of the guards tries to shout, but I take his head off before he can make a sound. Unfortunately, the second guard shouts a Hellion alarm command. I stab him in the heart and he disappears. I try to push Alice into the tunnel, but my hand goes right through her. She's staring at me. She's never seen me kill anything before.

"Go," I shout, and she snaps out of it and jumps into the tunnel. When I get out I pull the door back into place and slash at the tunnel ceiling and walls, knocking down as much debris in front of the door as I can.

I let the Gladius go out and we head back to the manhole. She stops and looks at me a little like she did when I first walked into her cell.

She says, "What the hell was that in your hand?"

"It's called a Gladius. It's just something I found I can do." There's no goddamn way I'm explaining to her how only angels have them.

"You killed those guys and didn't even flinch," she says.

"First off, they weren't guys, and second, I've killed a hell of a lot more than them. How do you think I got here? Do you think I got these scars on the debate team? Killing is what I do down here. And it's what I still do."

"But only bad things, right?"

"We're in Hell. I don't think Mother Teresa or Johnny Cash are in much danger."

She has to think about it for a minute. It'll take her a lot longer than that to make sense of the last few minutes and we don't have time.

"We need to keep moving."

"Okay."

As we go, she tries to take my hand. It goes right through me.

"Shit," she says.

I lead her back to the manhole and we climb the ladder out.

I WALK ALICE up the garage ramp, skirting the crazies and the squatters. She can't take her eyes off them. I get the feeling Aelita dropped her straight into the cell, so she hasn't seen much of Hell. Lucky girl.

Neshamah is on the roof looking through Muninn's crystal like a jeweler checking a diamond for flaws. He shoves it back in his waistcoat when he sees us.

"The prodigal son returns. I wasn't sure you had enough fingers and toes to count to three hundred. I see you've brought back a friend and that you have a hole in your chest. Just another day at the office," says Neshamah. He turns to Alice. "Was he this clumsy on earth or is all this blood a Sandman Slim thing?"

"A who?"

"Alice, this is Neshamah. Neshamah, this is Alice. Neshamah is the one who told me how to get into the asylum."

"Thanks for helping Jim get me out of that place. I would have gone crazy if I'd been in there much longer."

Neshamah holds out his hand to Alice. She looks at it like he's holding out a dead squid. But out of a kind of doomed sense of politeness, she puts her hand out, too. She looks at their hands and then at him when they touch. She starts to say something, but Neshamah cuts her off.

"If it's any comfort, you wouldn't have been in there much longer. Probably just a few hours. A day at the most. Wouldn't you say?"

He looks at me.

"If I don't get to Pandemonium in about seven hours, the Kissi are going to come down hard on the place. The way Josef is acting I don't know if they're going to start a war down here or join up with Mason's boys and make a play for Heaven."

He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. The angel in my head squirms like something is trying to get inside. I think he's losing.

"I noticed Kissi lurking about. What exactly are they getting out of all this?" Neshamah asks.

"They'll get what I give them. Nothing more and nothing less."

His eyes narrow.

"Do you think it was a good idea to ally yourself with such, let's say, touchy creatures?"

"I knew I was going to need help to stop Mason and I never got anything but the silent treatment from your bunch, so who was I supposed to go to? Besides, Aelita wants you out of the way, and for all I knew, she was the new CEO of Heaven Inc."

"Boys? I'm new here," says Alice. "What are Kissi? Why did Mason bring me here?"

I say, "Kissi are like angels, only worse. I'm not sure why you're here now. I thought it was just to get rid of me, but with what Aelita said to you, there might be something more." I look at Neshamah. "You want to jump in here with any insights?"

He shrugs.

"Mason wants to get into Heaven. She's from Heaven. Maybe he thinks she hid a key under a flowerpot."

"I don't even know how I got here," Alice says. She notices the sky behind Neshamah's head and it must have just registered that the darkness isn't night, but a coffin lid of smoke blotting out the sky.

Alice looks at me.

"Did you just say you're friends with Lucifer?"

"Not friends really. We're more like professional assholes who play golf occasionally and get drunk at the clubhouse before talking business."

Neshamah smiles and addresses Alice.

"Actually, there is no Lucifer at the moment. The old one is retired. Your friend James here is up to replace him. As is Mason."

Alice gives me that I-don't-know-who-you-are look again. Wraps her arms around herself.

"Is that really why you're back? You're finally going to whip them out and see whose is bigger?"

I look at Neshamah.

"The Gnostics were right about you after all, you evil motherfucker."

I turn to Alice.

"I came back here because I love you. But I'm also here to kill Mason because he needs killing. He's not going to be Lucifer or this sack of shit," I say, nodding at Neshamah.

"What does that mean?"

"I have to go. Let Rain Man here explain it to you."

Alice stares at Neshamah.

"Do I know you from somewhere?"

"You might have run into one of my brothers."

"Do you think you could possibly not be a prick long enough for me to go and finish this?" I ask.

"Are you running off to Pandemonium alone? That's magnificently stupid."

"I'm going to Houdini someone out of Tartarus, but I don't even know where it is. Do you have a map of the stars' homes or something I could borrow?"

Neshamah scratches his chin.

"I have to hand it to you, kid. You're a pain in my ass but you're not boring. Tartarus is in the Badlands."

Alice reaches for my arm but her hand goes through me.

"Wait. We finally see each other again and you're dumping me here with a stranger?"

"I know this stinks. But trust me, getting you out of the asylum wasn't rescuing you. What I'm about to do is."

She turns to Neshamah.

"Who are you? You're part of this, aren't you?"

"He can explain it to you after I go."

Neshamah pats Alice's shoulder.

"And indeed I will."

"So how do I get to the Badlands?"

"Are you sure you want to do this? Once you're in Tartarus, there's nothing I can do for you. It's not my domain. It belongs to my brother Ruach. And if you think I'm a bastard, you should meet him sometime."

"If he's around, I'll give him a peck on the cheek for you. How do I get there?"

"The same way you got to the asylum. Three hundred and thirty-three paces, but in the opposite direction."

"You really like that number."

He nods.

"Actually I like nines. Sacred numbers. You've got to love them. If you people were better at math, you'd be as smart as me."

I nod in Alice's direction.

"You can take care of her while I'm gone, right?"

"She was taken from her place in Heaven, so unlike some people, she's one of mine. No one will hurt her."

I start down the ramp. Alice follows me a few paces. I stop.

"Can you for sure stop Mason?"

"I don't know."

"Then promise me this. If you can't win and everything is going to fall apart, you come back here so we can ride it out together."

"I promise."

"Okay, then," she says.

I half turn away then pivot back.

"Did you spy on me for the Sub Rosa?" The question just charged out on its own. I can almost feel the angel trying to reach into my mouth and snatch the words back.

Alice stands still. I can read faces pretty well. If she had a heartbeat, it would be spiking right now. That's all I need to know.

There's a crack like a cannon going off as the building the Kissi set on fire collapses. I wave to her once and go.

I COME UP in the Badlands, though I don't see how this parcel of the L.A. shit-scape is supposed to be worse than any of the others I've seen. In fact, I'd find the area downright restful if it wasn't for all the blood.

I'm in a deserted industrial area surrounded by collapsed warehouses and bent and twisted railroad tracks following the L.A. River. The river's concrete banks are stained the color of old bricks from a rushing river of blood, a tributary of the Styx. I guess this is the source of the blood bubbling up out of the sinkholes.

There's nothing here that points to Tartarus. No signs, burning bushes, or sphinxes playing Jeopardy! for clues. The one time a sphinx tried that with me, I held it down and shaved it until it looked like one of those hairless cats you see in Beverly Hills pet stores.

I'm not far from a burned-out, crumbling version of the old Fourth Street Bridge. It's all big Roman arches with a few out-of-place Victorian streetlamps to class up the thing because you don't want your industrial wastelands to look tacky.

There's something strange under the bridge. A bright patch of green. There are palm trees on either side and they're not on fire. The green looks like fresh, healthy grass. In the middle of the little oasis is a white stucco forties bungalow. It has red slate shingles and it's styled with the vaguely hacienda look you see on the older places. I go up the pristine walkway out front and knock on the door. It opens and the woman inside smiles at me. Her face shifts and re-forms, showing the phases of the moon.

"I told you that in the end you'd come to me," says Medea Bava.

"So this is your dirty little secret. Tartarus is the Inquisition."

"No. I'm the Inquisition. Tartarus is your fate. The Dies Irae," she says, and recites, " 'Just judge of vengeance, grant me the gift of forgiveness before the Day of Judgment.' "

"I like the sound of that forgiveness part."

"And some receive it, but I'm afraid you're a bit too late for that."

I step out of Bava's way, tromping on her perfect lawn with my bloody-sewage-waste boots.

"Then why don't you scoot us on over to the Club Double Dead and let me in?"

She comes out, locking the door behind her.

"Seriously? You think someone's going to steal your stamp collection all the way out here?"

"You're not the only one in Hell with a chip on his shoulder. I don't believe in taking foolish chances."

"That sounds boring."

She leads me to a rickety-looking metal staircase leading up to the bridge through a hole chiseled in the roadbed. Medea gestures for me to go first. I take hold of the railing and shake it. The stairs wobble a little, but it looks like they'll hold. I start climbing.

"You know, I've been waiting here for you your whole life."

"I hope you've got cable, or you've missed a lot of good TV."

When we reach the top, she heads for the far side of the bridge and I follow. She stops abruptly halfway across and looks at me.

"You know that once you get inside, you can never leave."

"That's what Angie Summers said in the back of her daddy's Cadillac on prom night. If I can get away from her, I can get away from you."

"It's refreshing to meet a man so anxious to embrace annihilation."

"Okay. You've had your supervillain moment, now can you show me to the front door?"

Medea steps back a few paces and holds out her arms.

"We're here. Behold Tartarus."

I turn around, looking for something.

"We're nowhere. Behold fuck-all."

"Look down," she says. "Then jump."

I look over the edge. We're right over the Styx.

"In your dreams, Vampirella."

"Is Sandman Slim afraid of a little blood?"

"He's afraid of how deep that is. You want me to jump and crack my head on the bottom."

She shakes her head. Shadows make her shifting features even more disturbing.

"This is the way in. You can keep a little dignity and jump, or I can push you."

"Try it."

I start for her and suddenly I'm airborne. When I land I slide about twenty feet. Medea just smacked me with a hex that felt like a tornado giving birth to a hurricane. I climb to my feet and brush the dust off my coat.

"If you put it that way, maybe I'll just go ahead and jump."

"That's the first sensible thing you've said since you've been here."

I climb onto the wide concrete railing and tightrope-walk down to where Medea is waiting.

"You've got the home-field advantage here, but I bet you can't throw hoodoo like that back on earth."

"We're not on earth, and whatever power you have in this place, I will always have more. Now jump."

"I'm going to look you up when I get back to L.A."

"You're not the first person to say something like that."

"Yeah, but I'm the first one who means it."

She gestures impatiently toward the river.

"Go."

I glance down at the bloody waves and turn back to her.

"I don't have time for one last smoke, do I?"

"Jump or I'll throw you."

I put my arms out and take a breath.

"As a great man once said, 'I should never have switched from scotch to martinis.' "

I lean back and let myself go over the edge, tumbling through the air and slamming into the red river.

I hit flat on my back. It feels just as good as falling fifty feet into blood sounds. I hold my breath and try not to breathe in anything.

I sink and keep sinking, like the gravity in the river isn't the same as the gravity outside. I'm pulled down into soft mud at the bottom. At least I hope it's mud. Another gladiator once swore to me that he'd sailed to Pandemonium on a river of shit. I hope there wasn't any backwash down here.

I'm instantly engulfed in the muck. My lungs want to crawl up my throat and hitch a ride back to Hollywood. The angel in my head chants a serenity prayer. If I could punch my own brain, I would. The angel stops long enough to remind me that everything has a bottom, even Hell.

I'm being squeezed down through sediment that gets harder every inch I go. The sucking soon turns into pushing, like a hydraulic press is pounding me down into the riverbed. This must be what pasta feels like coming out of a spaghetti extruder.

Then I'm fucking falling again. But only a few feet this time. I slide through a tight fleshy opening in the roof and down a steep incline, like a garbage chute. Nice touch.

I slip down another level and slam into the ground. At least I'm not moving anymore. I lie on the floor and breathe. My heart is pounding. I know I'm surrounded by souls, but they're not paying any attention to me. They're used to hard-luck cases sliding down the poop shoot.

The angel is awestruck by where we are and pissed about being stuck inside me. It never really believed I'd take us this far. The absolute end of the line.

Welcome to Tartarus.

I FELL THROUGH what felt like a mile of blood, but when I get to my feet, there isn't a drop on me and my clothes are dry.

It's cold here and dim, like light that can't decide what it wants to be. Dark. Light. Or some strange wavelength that's simultaneously the opposite of each.

The walls and floors are dull gray metal. There are gleaming conveyor chains overhead. Souls hang from hooks by their ankles. They're being taken away, but I can't see where from here. If we were on earth, I'd swear that I'm in a busy industrial meat locker.

The place is packed shoulder to shoulder with double-dead Hellions, human souls, and Lurker spirits. I can even see Kissi scattered around in the mob. It's like a strange exodus, frozen just before it got started.

Aside from the overhead conveyor and the distant hiss and bang of machines, the place is almost silent, like the tens of thousands of dead around me and the thousands in the adjoining lockers have sunk so low in their misery that they can't even acknowledge each other.

I didn't think seeing Tartarus would get under my skin the way it is. I always imagined it would be Hell cranked up to eleven. Torture, chaos, and cruelty on a planetary scale. Mountains of flensed flesh. Mad bone seas. But this is worse. Tartarus is a dim, crushing despair. Heaven might not have been where you were headed, but now even Hell is a long-gone distant memory. Dante got it wrong when he put the "Abandon All Hope" sign at the entrance to Hell. This is where all hope dies, even for monsters.

I've only been here for a few minutes and the place is starting to bring me down like the permanent residents. I think about Candy, but it's already hard to remember her face. I can make out the ghost of her body, but not her voice or how she felt. When I try to remember our room at the hotel, it feels as dismal and dead as this place. What am I doing getting close to her? Even assuming I get out of here, do I want to drag her into this life? Look what happened to Alice. Look where I am now. I've been here ten minutes and I already miss Hell.

Candy is a big girl and can make her own choices, but what if she chooses wrong? Will I be doing this again in a year when someone murders her and steals her soul?

The angel in my head isn't handling any of this well. Tough shit. I didn't exactly enjoy the ride when it took over while I was sick with zombie hoodoo. I suffered through its choirboy routine so now it can limp along while I figure a way out of here.

What looks like mist in the distance shifts and parts. It's steam coming off an enormous old-fashioned open-face furnace beneath a gigantic boiler with transit pipes on top. Like a scene out of Metropolis, blank-faced but efficient workers take souls off the conveyor chains and toss them into the fire. The ones who aren't frying the double dead are adjusting iron valves and enormous levers. They inspect gauges and bleed off hurricanes of steam to keep the pressure steady.

I push my way through the mob. It's like walking through a wheat field. They're so insubstantial that I can barely feel the spirits around me. The meat locker goes on for miles in every direction. I could wander down here for years without ever seeing a familiar face.

I yell, "General Semyazah!"

Heads slowly turn in my direction. The motion ripples out in small waves, like I dropped a rock into a pond of the dead. No one here has paid attention to anything in a long time.