I ASK THE night manager what room Candy is in and head upstairs to the last one at the back. It has a nice view of a used-car lot.
I stop for a second before going in, feeling a little strange. Candy and I have been dancing around each other for months, but we've hardly ever been alone together. Maybe the one and only time was when she stabbed me in the heart to give me the zombie serum. Does that count as a first date? And if so, on what planet? I'm thirteen again, trying to figure out how to talk to a girl. This is ridiculous. We've killed and fought side by side and kept the gates of Hell from opening. I should be able to string enough words together not to drool on myself.
I open the door and Candy is waiting for me, standing naked in the middle of the bed. I barely get the door closed when she jumps all the way across the room and lands on my chest, pinning me against the wall. A pure predator ambush.
Candy's skin is as corpse cold as I remember from the first time she pecked me on the cheek outside Doc Kinski's clinic. But she warms up when we fall onto the bed and I'm on top of her and we're kissing like it's the cure for cancer.
She shreds my shirt with her nails and I barely get my pants off before she destroys those, too.
Candy wraps her legs around me. I slip inside her and the world goes black and hot. Her teeth wolf into my shoulder. I pull her hair as her nails dig into my back. I pull harder and bend her head back so I can see her face. I catch a glimpse of the Jade lurking just under the skin. Her nails extend into claws and our grinding bodies torpedo us from this soft and stupid human world to someplace where monsters can tear and bite. No one's afraid of it and all the groans and pain and craziness are beautiful.
The hotel bed makes a sound like a bullet and collapses beneath us. I pull her legs onto my shoulders and push deeper inside her. When she throws back her arms, her hands smash through the cheap wall paneling. She shifts her weight and rolls on top of me. My elbow comes down on the nightstand, cracking it and demolishing the phone.
We fall out of bed and onto the floor. Candy is on her hands and knees and I'm in her from behind. She doesn't hold the Jade inside anymore. Her body starts its transformation but she holds it halfway. Not quite girl and not quite beast. She moans and snarls as one clawed hand rips the stuffing and springs out of the sofa next to us.
The mirror on the dresser falls and shatters on the floor. I'm not really sure which one of us did that.
We crawl back onto the bed. Candy crawls back on top and thrusts down on me hard enough to crack the San Andreas Fault. I swear I hear plaster falling from the ceiling in the room below us. I don't care. All that matters is the girl and the monster thrusting down against me.
In the dim distant parts of our brains that can still form thoughts, I know we're both thinking the same thing.
This has been a long goddamn time coming.
LATER WE LIE in the ruins of the room. We push some debris out of the way and move the bed so it's at least flat on the floor. We lie down, wrapping ourselves in torn sheets and what's left of the bedspread.
"I like this hotel. The rooms are simple, but kind of pretty," says Candy.
"I think we broke this one."
"Want to do it again?"
"Sure."
Later, when Candy falls asleep, I put on my pants and boots and go back to the other room to get a new shirt. Kasabian hasn't moved from the computer. Beer cans are piled under his table.
"Your shoulder is bleeding," he says. "Let me guess. On the way over you ran into a midget with an armful of razor blades and barbed wire."
"I don't kiss and tell."
"You don't have to. I could hear you all the way over here. The whole hotel could hear you. Everyone was out of their rooms. They thought it was a gang fight. The hotel manager called 911."
I find a clean Max Overdrive T-shirt and put it on.
"Cops are coming?"
Kasabian shakes his head.
"Relax. I routed the call to a phone-company all-circuits-are-busy message."
"You know how to do that?"
"I'm on this computer all day. Making it do bad things is the only fun I have. Did you really think I spent all my time looking at video catalogs and porn?"
"Yeah. I sort of did."
His eyes narrow at me.
"See. That's exactly the kind of thing I expect from you. No respect whatsoever. After all the research and information I've found for you."
"That's not how I meant it. I just never pictured you as the high-tech type."
"I have to be. All my magic goes into keeping this goddamn skateboard upright. I don't have extra for anything else, so I have to use machines."
"That's actually a real smart way to deal with things. You're a credit to your race, Alfredo Garcia."
"Hey, don't call me that when you're off getting laid and I'm in here keeping LAPD off your back," he says, pissed and with a right to be.
"You're right, man. I owe you."
"You're goddamn right you do." He leans toward me and speaks in a whisper like maybe the CIA is listening. "Is she as cute naked as she is with clothes on?"
"Don't even start."
"Come on. I saved you both. And you just said you owe me. Get me a Polaroid."
I crack a smile at that.
"You know, she just might think that's funny enough to do. She's not shy."
"Seriously?"
"I'm not going to ask her for you. You want it so bad, you do your own begging. And I don't want to see you Photoshopping her head onto porn stars."
"What's her e-mail address?"
"I don't even know if she has one."
"You hick. I'll find it myself."
I take the Smith & Wesson out of my coat and reload it with special rounds I made with cut-down .410 shotgun shells. I might not need them, but fortune favors the prepared mind that thought to bring a really big gun.
I say, "Don't crash out on me. I'm looking for information right now and that'll probably lead to more questions. I might quiz you now, but I need to make a call."
"You know where to find me."
IF YOU'VE EVER wondered if your life has run off the rails, here's a handy quiz.
Is the only person left in the universe you can go to for help someone even God doesn't want to talk about?
Is the only alliance left to you with a gang that eats and shits chaos?
Are you about to drunk-dial the only guy in Creation who's probably more despised than you?
If you answered yes to any of these, then you should seek psychiatric help. If you answered yes to all of them, you're me.
I WALK OUT the front of the hotel and a block down Hollywood Boulevard.
On the way I get out my phone and thumb in a number I've had for a while but never dialed before. I let it ring once and hang up without waiting for an answer.
"It's about time we heard from you."
I spin around, toward a vinegar stink. When they aren't trying to pass as regular people, Kissi have a very particular smell.
"Goddamn you're fast."
He's blond, with the kind of sky-blue eyes that don't happen in nature. His cheekbones look like they were sculpted by a fascist Michelangelo. I don't know if he was grown in a petri dish or assembled from dead SS rent boys. I can't stand to look at him.
I say, "I told you I didn't want to see you wearing that Nazi face anymore."
"I don't remember my appearance being part of our bargain," says Josef.
"Wear your real face next time. It's easier looking at a burn-victim bug than Dr. Mengele."
You can't be subtle when you're dealing with a Kissi, even their leader. And he's the least psychotic one of the bunch.
The Kissi and I have one major thing in common. We shouldn't exist. We're both part of God's Misfits of Nature traveling show. When the Big Bopper created angels at the beginning of time, he fucked it all up. The blowback from conjuring all those angels created both angels and their opposite. The Kissi. They don't live in heaven with Daddy, but way out in the boiling chaos at the edge of the universe.
In their true form Kissi are fish-belly white and have a faint bottom-of-the-ocean-fish glow. They look like a cross between a regular angel and a six-foot-tall grasshopper dipped in wax and left in the sun to melt. If you've ever seen one, that's enough to last a lifetime, and I've seen a whole world of them. That was back when I destroyed their Honeycomb Hideout way out in the ass end of Chaosville. Yeah, it's hard to justify trying to kill off a whole species, but they were collaborating with Mason in his plan to take over Hell and then the rest of the universe. So basically, fuck 'em.
Most of them went spinning off into space and died when I wiped out their home world, but enough survived that Josef has assembled a small army of them. He did it because I asked him to. We made a deal with this particular devil a while back. I wasn't happy about it then and I'm not happy about it now, but when you're an Abomination, you can't trust Hell, and Heaven hates you, so you don't always get to choose who you dance with at the prom.
"Why are you wasting time chasing drug dealers over a dead boy? That's not what we agreed to."
"One, I don't think the kid is dead. And two, whatever is going on with the kid has to do with Mason and Aelita. You should thank me for finding out what it is."
When I first got back, the Golden Vigil's main obsession wasn't Lucifer, it was monitoring the Kissi. The Vigil saw Lucifer as a gelded pony. More of an annoyance than any kind of threat. The Kissi were the real danger in the universe. The only thing that could tilt all of existence toward total chaos. That's one more thing I have in common with the Kissi. They hate the Vigil almost as much as I do.
"You promised us a war. We're tired of waiting," Josef says.
"I know, but remember, you being impatient is why I beat you last time. When we made this deal, you agreed to wait for my signal before doing anything. My game. My rules. What we're planning is going to take some time to set up. If you don't want to play in my sandbox, then fuck off back to Limbo."
I'm tall, but Josef is taller. He straightens so he can look down his perfect nose at me.
"We'll wait, but not forever."
"Calm down. The big plan is still down the road, but I might have some fun for you in the meantime."
"What kind of fun?"
"Your favorite. Chaos and destruction. Loss of life and property. Burned toast and spoiled milk."
"I hope you're not lying to me."
"Is that a threat? That's big talk for a guy who ended up with his head and body in separate zip codes the last time we went at it."
Josef stares at me. Maybe the Nazi face is right for him after all. Like all good goose-steppers, Kissi think they're better than everybody else. In their minds they're high-rolling, comped-in-Vegas true angels. God, on the other hand, thinks of them as being like the black sludge that rolls into sewers. When he thinks of them at all.
"We're done for now. I'm going inside. Keep your phone on," I tell him, and start back to the hotel.
"The beast in your room is very pretty," says Josef. "Her true face is, at least. Much better than that human you wasted your time with before. You should thank Mason for getting rid of her for you."
I head back for him, trying to decide if I should rip out his tongue or stomp his ribs into marmalade. But he's gone before I even turn around. Like I said, Josef is fast.
I go to Candy's room, climb over the broken furniture as quietly as I can, and lie down next to her. I'm exhausted from getting up early, fighting the hangover, and torching my hand. A club like Dead Set won't open its doors until at least eleven and I'm betting Cale won't be there before one. There's time to get a few hours of sleep.
Candy stirs when she feels my body hit the mattress. Takes one of my arms and wraps it around her, pulling me onto my side until my front is pressed against her back. It feels strange to be in a bed with another person. Strange in an okay way. The kind of strange a person could get used to.
I don't even feel sleep coming on, but the room goes soft around me and I'm somewhere else.
I'm making coffee in the kitchen of the old apartment. Alice is on the sofa doing a crossword puzzle. Miyuki-chan in Wonderland, a weird fetish anime version of Alice in Wonderland is on TV with the sound off. X is playing "The World's a Mess It's in My Kiss" from a little boom box on the counter.
Alice says, "What's an eight-letter word for 'bountiful flora'?"
"I have no idea. You know I hate crosswords."
" 'Genocide,' " she says, and fills in the squares.
"What?"
She doesn't look up.
"How about a five-letter word for 'Pinocchio's kin'?"
"I don't know."
" 'Sheol.' "
I leave the coffee and walk over to the sofa.
"What kind of a crossword is that?"
" 'Saints' bones.' Seven letters. 'Armageddon.' "
I sit down next to her. On the TV, a dominatrix version of the Mad Hatter is coming on to cartoon Alice.
My Alice looks up, smiles, and kisses me lightly on the lips.
"Here's one that's two words for 'a makeshift mantra.' "
I look over her shoulder at the puzzle. It's completely normal except that she's filling in all the answers in strange runes or pictograms I've never seen before.
" 'Orphée.' "
"Is this a dream?" I ask her.
She shrugs.
"You tell me. This is in your head. Would you be more comfortable if I was a dancing midget?"
"In another dream, before the Drifters hit the city, you warned me about something that was going to happen to me. Is this one of those dreams?"
"What's a five-letter word for 'banker's holiday'?"
The X song starts up again. She must have it set on loop.
Go to hell see if you like it
Then come home with me
Tomorrow night may be too late
The world's a mess it's in my kiss
" 'HOLOCAUST,' " she says.
"I'm going to make this right, you know. I'm going to make Mason pay for what he did to you and me."
Alice finishes the puzzle and sets it on the coffee table. I can see it better now. Even though she was coming up with different answers, the puzzle is filled in with the same seven symbols, over and over again.
She leans over and puts her arms around me. Rests her head on my shoulder, watching the TV.
"That's one fucked-up movie," she says.
"I don't know why I picked it."
"Yeah, why would you possibly pick Alice in Wonderland?"
"Oh. Right."
She pulls me closer.
"You know I love you, right?"
"Yeah."
"Then you need to stop goddamn obsessing all the time. I'm dead. Boo-hoo. You're Sandman Slim. Boo-hoo. The universe is a lot bigger than us."
I shake my head. Reach for a cigarette. She lets go so I can lean forward and grab the lighter.
"I know all that. But a lot of little stuff still hurts like Hell."
"You're telling me? I'm the one who got a knife in the back."
She says it right after I light up. I try to move away, but she holds on to me.
"That's really what happened?"
"Yeah. You've got to give Mason credit for that. Sending Parker to do it fast. The guy knew how to do it. I hardly felt a thing."
"If you know that, then this isn't a dream."
"Maybe not a hundred percent. But it's still a dream."
"For a long time I was afraid of knowing what happened to you."
"Gee, I hadn't noticed. Now you do know. It's time to get your ass past it."
I take a drag off the cigarette. She takes it from my hand and puffs. Hands it back to me. Her fingertips are blue to the point of almost being black. They don't look like a living person's hands.
"I don't know what to do next."
Alice punches me on the arm.
"Were you even listening to the crossword, dumb-ass? It's all finally happening. What you knew was going to happen. You can either keep watching movies until the sun burns out or you can stop running from who you are. You're Sandman Slim, goddammit. You're that or you're nothing. Your choice."
"Isn't there a curtain number three? I don't mind a year's worth of Turtle Wax."
"Sorry. The money's all down. Betting is closed. Play or walk away."
I nod toward the crossword puzzle on the table.
"What's with the hen scratching? I can't read a damned word."
She glances at the crossword and shakes her head.
"It's a puzzle. You're supposed to figure it out. That's why they call it a puzzle."
"How?"
"Once again, it's called a puzzle for a reason."
"Okay."
Some kind of magic being, a stand-in for the caterpillar, I think, is hitting on Alice.
"You know I'm in bed with another woman, right?"
"It'd be pretty creepy if you were in bed with me, Ed Gein."
"It's okay with you?"
"I thought we went through this when you fucked Brigitte. Get on with your life."
"It's more like she fucked me. I was pretty much just an innocent bystander."
"Every guy tries that line at least once. It never works."
"Why did you pick that particular song?"
"Who says I picked it? Who says it's about me?"
Alice takes the cigarette from my hand, finishes it, and stubs it out on the sole of her shoe. She nods at the TV, where a barely dressed female Jabberwock is flying Alice across Wonderland.
"If you dream about me again, dream me like that Alice. She gets to fly around, have adventures, and isn't stuck in this fucking apartment forever."
"I'll work on it."
"Do that. You know I'd look good as an anime schoolgirl. I love you, but I'm over your moony guilt trip. Dream about that girl you're lying next to for a change."
She kisses me on the cheek, gets up, and walks away.
"See you around, Miyuki-chan."
"Later, alligator."
I wake up and take my arm from around Candy. I'm sweating. I go to the bathroom, run some water on my face, and wipe myself down on one of the hotel's rough white towels. I find my phone and check the time. Still early enough to get some sleep. I sit on the edge of the bed, letting my head clear. In a little while I lie down and put my arm back around Candy. She moves back against me.
Yeah, I could get used to this.
I WAKE UP around one and start putting my clothes on. Candy hears me and turns over.
"What's up?"
"I'm going to a zombie industrial club to track down a drug dealer. What are you doing?"
She throws off the covers and starts looking around for her clothes.
"No way I'm letting you tough-guy-solo it and hog all the fun."
"Then shake a leg, Modesty Blaise."
I KIND OF regret having ditched the Volvo in the afternoon. I have a bad feeling about where all this drugs-and-demon bullshit is heading, especially after talking to Alice. Or talking to myself. Or talking to some combination of Alice and my subconscious. I don't hate the dull anonymity of the car or, when I'm being honest with myself, the last month and a half of quiet. Things are changing and they're going to change faster. You'll be able to boogie-board on all the blood that's coming.
Tonight, though, the universe throws me a bone.
A BIKE RIDE is what I need to blow out the dust and clear my head, and what do you know? Someone's left a red Ducati Monster in the street just for me. Every day is Christmas if you know how to get around locks.
I look at Candy.
"You okay riding without a helmet?"
"What's a helmet?"
I take out the black bone knife, slice through the Cobra lock in one pass, and toss it away. I climb onto the bike. Candy gets on behind and puts her arms around me. I jam the knife into the ignition, turn, and gun the throttle. The Ducati purrs like a big mechanical cat. I kick up the stand, turn, and speed off to find Cale. At the corner I remember we're going across town and there might be cops. I grunt a little Hellion trickster hoodoo so civilians will see helmets on our heads. Sometimes magic is as dull as taking out the trash.
The wind feels good on my face and Candy is warm against me. Talking to Alice has taken a weight off my back, one I didn't even know I was carrying. I'm amazed I haven't been walking around like Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I know some of what I'm feeling comes from Alice's tough-love, leave-me-alone-and-find-a girl-that-breathes pep talk, but the more important part is finding out how she died. Not knowing was killing me and I never had a clue. I'm not saying that knowing feels good, but it feels more human. I've broken things and killed people for what happened to her and I don't regret any of it. But now it feels like the bottomless fury that both pushed me forward and held me back might have an end to it. Or at least it won't be cranked up to eleven all the time. I'll never let go of Alice entirely and I'll never forgive what happened to her, but I know I don't have to destroy myself to make things right. I just have to kill Mason.
Sometimes, when I'm out at night and things are quiet, I take pity on the angel in my head and let it take the lead.
The angel can see in the dark, but not like it's an owl or has night-vision goggles. The angel sees the world the way God must see it. Nothing is solid. Objects don't exist except as strings of vibrating pearls of light. Molecules are interlocked Tinkertoys of atoms hiding in smudged electron fogs, all wrapped in the twisted folds of superstring taffy. Swirling and flowing, the universe folds in on itself in a multidimensional Technicolor Busby Berkeley dance of the celestial spheres. And that's just in the city. I wonder what the ocean would look like with these eyes? Waves within waves within waves within waves, a fractal whirlpool dropping down forever, past Heaven and Hell and what? Could eyes like the angel's see the Big Bang? Could I pick out the atoms of Alice's ashes where I dumped them by Venice Beach? No. None of that tonight. I'm alive and I'm driving and there's a pretty girl at my back. I'm a goddamn Bruce Springsteen song.
When we get near the club, I leash the angel and stuff him back in his doghouse. I need to see with my eyes now.
I stop the bike in the driveway of a gated warehouse down the block from Dead Set. The scene is pretty much what Carolyn said it was. The Goth industrial crowd wrapped in latex and chrome. Girls and skinny boys wearing boots with heels high enough to tickle Gabriel's ball sac mill around outside, smoking.
Dead Set is in a converted furniture warehouse. There's a projector on the low brick building next door splashing Stacy, a Japanese-schoolgirl zombie flick, across three floors on the side of the Dead Set warehouse. A horde of barely legal shoujos in bloody school uniforms stumble toward soldiers firing automatic weapons. It goes the way these face-offs usually do. Schoolgirls one. Soldiers zero. I light up a couple of Maledictions, hand one to Candy, and we wait.
"Shouldn't we go inside?" she asks.
"Too crowded. If we get into a tussle, all those extra bodies are just going to get in the way. A club like this only has one entrance. Give it some time. Cale will come to us."
"I love it when you talk all Sam Spade."
A cop car cruises by every half hour or so to let the crowd know they're there. I smell some undercover bacon in the crowd, too. Their sweat is different. They're excited, but it's not by the drugs or possibility of sex. It's at the possibility they might get the chance to put a beat down on the young and beautiful. The cool kids who wouldn't let them sit at their table in the lunchroom. Fucking cops. They're making me side with these preening assholes.
I have to wait around an hour for Cale to come outside. Yes, it's boring. You can only make so many catty comments about the crowd when everyone looks pretty much the same. Candy and I burn through more Maledictions than we should. Fuck Lucifer, too. I saved his life. He could have at least sent me a crate of smokes before he fucked off back to Daddy's condo in heaven.
I get back on the bike and gun the ignition.
"Follow me over on foot," I tell Candy.
I hit the throttle and blast across the street like a twin-cylinder RPG. Cale and his crew have come outside. I screech-skid to a hard stop inches away from him. However high he is, his reflexes are good enough that he jumps back a few inches when he sees me closing in on him.
"Hey, Cale. Long time no see. How've you been doing?"
"Do I know you?"
"Sure. Carolyn McCoy introduced us."
"Sorry. You've got the wrong guy. I don't know you or any Carolyns or any McCoys."
I'm close enough to see that yes, he does have runes and sigils tattooed on the sides of his head. I want a closer look, but the lights are shit and he's too high to stand still.
He turns and tries to walk away.
"Sure you know Carolyn. You're her Akira connection." I say it loud enough so that everyone nearby can hear.
Cale turns and heads back, his long lanky body moving with a dancer's practiced grace but a boxer's strength. I'm pretty sure he's armed, but I'm not sure what with.
"What did you just say?"
There are five in his crew. Three girls and two other guys. They spread out behind him, blocking the street in case I try to rabbit away.
"Akira. The Akira that Carolyn sells to stupid college kids and, for all I know, underage go-go dancers. Damn, how many felonies is that?"
"That's what she says? And you believe everything every dumb junkie cunt tells you?"
"I believe her because you said you didn't know any Carolyns, but you know she's a dumb junkie cunt."
He does a little grunting laugh.
"All these small-time bitches have habits. If I ever did know a Carolyn, I don't know her anymore."
"Why would you? She dosed the kid for you and that makes her too dangerous to keep around. What I want to know is whether you dosed Hunter Sentenza on your own or did someone pay you to do it?"
He doesn't say anything, but he doesn't walk away either. He's trying to decide if he wants to talk some more or fight.
"I'm guessing the second," I say. "If you wanted Hunter dead, you'd have sent one of your monkey boys to do it. That means you did it for someone. I want to know who."
Cale subtly shifts his weight, dropping it onto his back foot. He's trying to be subtle, but I know a fighting stance when I see one. His crew is showing a lot of teeth. Candy is behind them in the street. She keeps an eye on them while they keep an eye on me.
Someone screams off to my right. Two drunk girls have fistfuls of each other's coiffed hair and are rocking back and forth trying to hit each other. Drunk catfighting for the crowd's amusement. Every town has its arena.
But I shouldn't have taken my eyes off Cale. By the time I refocus, he's throwing a hex at me. And it isn't in the textbooks in Sub Rosa school. He's been hanging out with a bad crowd. I bet he cheats on his spelling tests, too. But there's no time to think about that. A buckshot hurricane of wasps blasts from his hands right at my face.
The first wave hits me square in the chest and face before I can throw up a shield spell. The wasps are coming so fast that most of them don't have a chance to sting me. They splat and bounce off into the crowd. The young and the beautiful scream in pain and run. Fuck 'em if they're too dumb to get out of the way of a hoodoo street fight.
I get a shield up, covering my front from ground to head. The stream of wasps is coming at me so hard that I have to lean into them to keep from being blown onto my back. I expand the shield over and around Cale and his crew. Shouting in Hellion, I slam the shield shut, trapping them inside with Cale's ballistic bugs.
There's a couple of minutes of hilarious screaming and self-flagellation as Cale and his people crouch, crawl, and slap themselves silly trying to get the wasps off. Cale is barely in control of the hex, but finally turns off the bug spigot.
Cale is pissed. He shouts a string of hexes and chips away at the sides of my shield dome. I let him. I'll give the kid some credit. He's got some power and he's on his way to learning how to use it, but he isn't there yet. That's a dangerous place to be. It can make you do stupid things. Like now, for instance.
Finally, he blasts my shield dome into a million pieces of formless aether. A guy like this with lots of showy magic tends to forget the basics of fighting. The physical part. I rush him and get a hand around his throat before he can throw any more hexes.
Cale's boys just stand there like pricy mannequins. It's the girls who finally do something and make to throw some hoodoo my way. Candy is on them before either of them can get more than a syllable out. She puts the boot to them, but has enough control of herself not to go Jade on them.
I let go of Cale long enough for him to take a swing at me. Then I speak a single Hellion word.
He collapses. Not like he fell. More like a giant invisible foot from the sky is trying to squash him like a bug. He fights it, writhing and twisting. Almost pushing himself up on two arms and then collapsing again. His face is a few inches from the street when he starts vomiting blood. Some of it splashes onto his face and his bleached white hair. Cale's crew freezes. They don't run, but they don't try to help him either. Blood does that to people. I let him keep vomiting. In fact, I make him vomit more blood than any ten human bodies could possibly hold. Gallons and gallons of it. It spreads in a widening puddle in the street, covering him and threatening to touch his crew's expensive shoes. They want to stop the mayhem, but they're torn between their loyalty to their leader and their look.
One of the girls, Cale's squeeze I guess by her haughty high-toned look, rushes to his aid, but slips and ends up on her ass in the gooey red slip-and-slide pouring from her boyfriend's mouth.
I can hear the electronic beeps and boops of people dialing cell phones. Good citizens calling 911. I shout a bit of mind-control abracadabra. It's something you use on people and hell beasts, but it does weird things to electronics. I once blew out all the traffic lights on Hollywood Boulevard with it when I drove Allegra to Doc Kinski's clinic. This time it just fries some smartphones.
I let up on Cale. He can't breathe while puking and I don't want him to die of oxygen deprivation. The moment the blood stops, he sucks in big mouthfuls of air.
"Hurting your boss here is fun, but only one of you pricks is going home alive, and it's the one who names your Akira supplier. The one who makes it. Just shout out a name and address and you get to walk away."
One of the boys who's gone even paler than when he came out of the club waves a bony arm in the air like a drunk praying mantis.
"It's Hunahpu," he says. "He runs the cookers."
"Where can I find him?"
"Shut your fucking mouth, Jonas."
It's Cale, still on the ground, but still in command. His latex glistens with blood. He's gone from platinum blond to I Love Lucy red.
Candy moves behind him in case he freaks and takes a runner.
Jonas says, "I don't want to die here."
Cale shouts, "Say another word and I'll kill you myself!"
"Who do you think is in better shape to kill you, Jonas? Cale or me? Tell me where to find Hunahpu."
"I'll tell you if you don't kill anyone."
I nod.
"Good boy. That's reasonable. Tell me. I'll know if you're lying."
"Hunahpu works out of a lab in West Hollywood. Bio-Specialties Group."
"What kind of lab is it?"
"I don't know. There's test tubes and shit. It's a lab."
"Will he be there now?"
"How should I know?"
"You got a number for him?"
Jonas's hands are shaking so much he can hardly get the phone out of his pocket. The hoodoo I threw earlier should have just fried the part of the phone that makes calls. The address book and calendar still ought to work. Maybe.
Jonas nervously thumbs through a couple of screens. Cale's girl is up on her feet. She tries to grab the phone from Jonas's hands, but he shoves her back down in the blood. Candy kicks her hands out from under her when she tries to get up again.
"Jonas, you cocksucker, don't tell him anything," shouts Cale.
"I don't want anyone getting killed."
Jonas holds up the phone so I can read the number off the screen.
"Good boy. You are not a completely useless human being. Now get the fuck out of here."
"Cale? You okay? Cale?" calls his girl.
Jonas's chest explodes with wet red holes. The blood on his shirt is real and it's his. He collapses onto his knees and falls over onto his face.
I spin and see Cale pointing a .38 snub nose at me. Probably loaded with .357 rounds. He must have had it tucked in his boot. He has to use both hands to steady the gun enough to aim. The hammer is already halfway down. He gets off one shot. A body blurs by me. Candy has shoved one of the boys from Cale's crew in front of me. He catches the bullet just below his right ear and is dead before he hits the pavement.
Cale manages to get off one more shot. It goes through my right sleeve. I feel some heat and blood, but the bullet does more damage to the coat than to me. Cale doesn't know that, and too bad for him, neither does Candy.
She is on him and the blood isn't my hoodoo spell this time. She's gone full-on Jade and is tearing him apart.
"Candy, that's enough," I yell.
She turns to me. Her eyes are red slits in black ice. Her nails have grown out into curved claws and her mouth is full of sharp white shark teeth. Someone screams. Then a whole lot of people start screaming, which is the way it usually goes when people see a monster for the first time.
"Come on. He's not going to get any deader."
It takes her a minute to register my words. The beast is in control now and it takes a few seconds for the human part of her to get back online.
She walks over to me, her human face slowly replacing the Jade's. I put my arm around her, whisper, "Thanks for looking out for me," and kiss the top of her head.
Most of Cale's crew is long gone. Only his girl is still there. I walk over to his body and push his head to the side. He's a mess. When I wipe the blood away, I can make out the tattoos on his scalp and the rusty gears in my brain go click, click, click.
"What the hell is that doing there?" I ask Cale's girl.
The girl says, "That's the symbol for Sister Ludi. She's a protector spirit."
"I know what she is. What is she doing on Cale's scalp?"
"What do you mean?"
"Sister Ludi is fake. A gaff. She's something Sub Rosa touts made up to sell fake idols and potions to tourists. What's her symbol doing on the head of someone who had to know that?"
A better question is what does a demon have to do with a fake goddess? I recognize it now. Sister Ludi's sigil is the same symbol that was burned over the bed in Hunter's room.
"Oh, that. It's for Hunahpu. He's really into Sister Ludi. He thinks saying she's fake is some kind of Anglo conspiracy. Cale wore it to show respect and Hunahpu gave him a cut rate on product."
She keeps looking at Cale's body with no way to process what just happened. I feel a little sorry for her. But I feel sorrier for Hunter.
"Was it Hunahpu who gave you the special Akira for the Sentenza kid?"
"I don't know who it was for, but yeah, Cale said there was a special batch for someone."
"That's all I needed to know."
I take her by the arm and walk her to a cab that's been waiting outside the club. Like everyone else, the driver is standing and gawking at the mess. I put Cale's girl in the backseat and close the door.
"Listen to me," I say, leaning in the window. "It's hard and nasty what you saw tonight, but you're lucky it happened now. Cale was never going to last doing what he does. There are people out there ten times harder and a hundred times meaner than Cale was ever going to be. He was always going to end up on his back with holes in him. The difference is if you'd stuck around much longer, you'd be lying in blood next to him, another dumb dead girl in a place that spews out more dumb dead girls than smog. Go home. Be sad for a while. When you're over it, fall in love with someone who has better tattoos."
I go around, give the driver some money, and tell him to take her home. Before he can get in the cab, I take out the .460 and pop a few rounds over the crowd's head. The cut-down shotgun shells I'd loaded it with aren't filled with pellets, but with one of Vidocq's memory powders. It will scrub away the last hour from everyone's brain. I might have a bad temper and be dating someone who eats people, but I'm not stupid enough to leave witnesses.
Someone's dropped a coat on the ground. I pick it up, take Candy by the arm, and walk her around the corner. When we're out of sight of the club, I use the coat to wipe Cale's blood from her face and hands.
I say, "Thanks for saving me back there."
Her eyes are a little vacant.
"Wow. I haven't done that to a person for a long time."
"How are you feeling?"
"A little spacey, but okay. Are you okay? We should get you to see Allegra to get the bullet out."
"I'm fine. It barely grazed me and I've already stopped bleeding."
She leans against the wall, a little out of breath.
"He shot you. I wouldn't have done what I did if he hadn't shot you."
"I know."
She stares at me, her eyes still a little unfocused, but she's coming back to earth.
"Did I go too far?"
I shrug.
"Technically he did shoot me. And he did kill his friend, so we can assume he would have kept shooting until he killed me or I got him. So, yeah, you saved me, and from my point of view that's a good thing." I pause. "Next time, though, maybe you can just snack on the bad guys a little until we see just how much fight they have in them. We probably don't need to kill all of them."
"Don't kill everyone. Got it. You sure you're okay?"
"The arm's fine. The coat took most of the damage. It was brand-new. Now it's like all my damn clothes. Shot up and bled on."
She cups my face in her hands and kisses me hard. I kiss her back.
"What happens now?" Candy says.
"We go see Hunahpu. I know where the address is. We can leave the bike."
"How are we going to get there?"
I pull her away from the wall.
"Have you ever walked through a shadow?" I ask.
"Uh, no."
"Want to?"
"Sure."
"Don't let go of my hand."
I step into the ripe black darkness in the recess by a loading-bay door, pulling Candy with me into the Room of Thirteen Doors.
I take her out again near the address the kid gave me. It's on Fairfax a little north of Beverly Boulevard.
As we step from the shadow, Candy says, "Holy fucking goddamn fuck, that's cool. What was that room we went through?"
"It's called the Room of Thirteen Doors. I can go anywhere in the universe through those doors, even to Heaven and Hell."
"Why did we drive to the club? If I had something that cool, I'd be running in and out of it all day and night just to mess with people."
I believe her. I'm glad I have the key and she doesn't.
"It feels weird using it in the city when I'm going somewhere the first time. Like the club tonight. I didn't know where it was or what was going to be there when we arrived. I like to drive because I like to get a look at a place the first time I go there."
"Why don't you just get your own car?"
"Are you kidding? People steal them."
UP THE STREET is a white two-story office building plastered together to look vaguely colonial. It's as bland and forgetful as any real-estate office.
The first floor is dark, but there are lights behind the windows on the second. It's almost three and there's barely any traffic in either direction. Candy and I walk across the street to the glass-and-aluminum front doors. BIO-SPECIALTIES GROUP is painted on the door in a reassuringly scientific-looking serif font.
In theory, I could step into a shadow here and come out on the second floor near the lights, but I don't want to do that. Drug cookers tend to be on the jumpy side and I've already been shot at once tonight. I take Candy around the side of the building and we use a shadow to get into the lobby. No alarms go off, so they don't have motion detectors down here. So far so good.
There's a locked wooden door at the top of the stairs with the company's name on it. I stand there for a minute.
"What are we doing?" asks Candy.
"Shh."
Light leaks from beneath the door where it doesn't quite touch the floor. I watch for moving shadows to see if people are moving around and how many there might be. Nothing moves past the door. I let the angel's senses expand.
There are voices off to my right. Seven, maybe eight. The clinks and taps of metal and glass. The whir of machines and whisper of small gas flames. That will be the lab. Off to my left, closer to the street, I get nothing. Probably offices, unoccupied at this hour. Everyone seems to be bunched up in the lab.
I say, "Keep your head down when we get inside." Then I take her hand and we slip inside through a shadow on the wall.
Behind the door is a reception area with a desk, computer, and phone. Wrought-iron letters spell out BIO-SPECIALTIES GROUP on the wall above the receptionist's desk. Either the company deals with a lot of amnesiacs or they really, really like the sound of their own name.
The office at the front of the building overlooking the street isn't set up to impress, but at least it looks like the lab is a legit business. It must do everything by courier or pickup them. There's a plain wooden desk that you'd see in any high school principal's office, piled with receipts, schedules, and undelivered lab results. A business phone with about ninety buttons, most unlabeled. A combination fax and copy machine. In the corner is a plant with shiny green leaves. It looks like the only thing in the office the occupant cares about.
We go into the next office. Hallelujah. This one is decked out for a bank president. Dark green walls with light trim. Very Victorian. An oak desk with inlaid leather, big enough to land cargo planes. A plasma TV on one wall and a glass-fronted cabinet on the other filled with framed certificates and trophies. It's all very nice and respectable looking and copied straight out of an executive furniture catalog, I bet. The wall to the left of the desk is why the nice office is back here and not up front with a view. This one has a window looking right into the lab.
I was right. There are eight people on the night shift. A collection of clean-cut MIT types and scruffy old-school meth cookers who have enough brain cells left to move up the food chain to the exotica market.
What's really interesting isn't the people but their gear. It isn't ordinary college-surplus Bunsen burners and Dr. Frankenstein bubbling flasks. The place is decked out like a TV starship. Smooth, sexy, and at times translucent Golden Vigil gear, a collection of advanced human tech tweaked by angels recruited by Aelita, the Vigil's psycho angel queen. The last time I saw her, she was quitting the Vigil so she could return to Heaven and, no shit, kill God, the dead-eyed neglectful dad who she thought had outlived his usefulness. Aelita might be the most vicious and craziest thing with wings I've ever met, but you've got to give her credit for ambition.
The window looking into the lab must be one-way glass because no one in there has noticed us. Candy has probably seen drug cookers and I know she's never seen anything like Golden Vigil tech. She's got her nose pressed against the window like it's her first visit to the zoo.
I sit down at the desk and dial Hunahpu's number from his office phone. That ought to get his attention. I look through the lab window, hoping Hunahpu is inside with the techs. I hear the cell ring, but none of the techs pulls out a cell phone. After the few rings, Hunahpu's phone cuts off. No voice-mail message. Nothing. A minute later the desk phone rings. I wait. A few rings and a recorder built into the phone kicks in. An amplified voice comes through the unit's speaker.
"Stark. Pick up. I know you're there."
Damn.
I pick up the receiver.
"Who is this?"
"It's who you wanted to speak to. So speak."
"How did you know I'd be here?"
"I know you saw Carolyn. And I know you're the kind of persuasive person who would get her to talk about Cale. If you have my cell and are calling from my office, something tells me you found him, too. Is he dead?"
"Entirely. Have you ever been to Donut Universe? They're open twenty-four/seven. Why don't we meet for coffee?"
"Let's not and say we did."
"I'm looking at your lab."
"Of course."
"You're what's left of the Golden Vigil, aren't you? I mean, any idiot could have bought stolen lab gear from when the Vigil closed down, but how many people would know how to use it?"
"We're not all of the Vigil. There are other cells scattered here and there. But we all lost our dental plans and 401(k)s when the government shut us down. It was either find a way to earn a living or go on food stamps, and like you, we hate filling out paperwork. "
I'm trying to place his accent, but there's nothing to get hold of. It's like he learned to speak phonetically. The Vigil or Homeland Security sent him to speech classes to erase any regional traces.
"Do I know you?" I ask.
"I saw you at the Vigil offices, but we never had any heart-to-hearts."
The angel in my head talks to me. He's a little Sherlock Holmes, which, I guess makes me Dr. Watson. I'm not wild about that. Better that he's Starsky and I'm Hutch. At least I get a cool car that way.
"Why do I get the feeling that somehow Wells is involved in this? He's coming back to L.A. and he wants his own private army. Maybe he wants to start a panic with a drug associated with hoodoo and get them to send him back."
Hunahpu makes a sound. At first I think it's a sneeze, but realize it's a little laugh.
"Don't be stupid. Wells flunked out because he was and remains a Boy Scout. He can't see the big picture. He doesn't want to because it's so big there isn't even anyone to arrest."
"There's you and your people in the next room."
"If he was coming, we'd know it. If he grabs us, he won't keep us long."
It's not a boast. I can read it in his voice. This guy is connected to something or someone higher than the clouds and probably just as hidden.
"So you're off on your own, causing trouble after your boss takes a bullet. What does that make you? Do you think you're the forty-seven Ronin? Are you making a samurai movie in Grandma's backyard?"
"Fuck the feds. Sister Ludi set us up. We work for her now."
"You mean Aelita, don't you?"
I lean back in Hunahpu's chair. He hasn't said anything for a few seconds. I hit a nerve.
"Call her what you want, white boy. Sister Ludi came to me in a vision and I saw who she really was."
"You mean Aelita got inside your head and showed you what you wanted to see. She's good at that kind of thing. She's a fucking angel. And she's crazy. You know that, right?"
"She's doing the work that needs to be done, just like we are."
"Are you crazy, too, or just stupid?"
"You're hurting my feelings, Stark. If you really feel that way about Sister Ludi, I suppose you don't want what she left for you."
I sit up straight in the chair.
"I take it all back. Aelita is Florence Nightingale, Patti Smith, and Miss America all rolled into one. Now, what did she leave me?"
"A message. Listen. 'If you've made it this far, it's already too late.' "
I lean my elbows on the desk.
"What does that mean?"
"I assumed you'd know. It's pretty fucking funny that you don't, don't you think?"
"Why did you go after Hunter Sentenza?"
"She told us to."
I used to think Wells was a lapdog and a true believer, but this little shit's got a Ph.D. in celestial bootlicking.
"This is why the demon knows me, right? What demon is she using? At least tell me that."
"I'm a pharmacist. I don't know anything about demons."
Goddammit. He's telling the truth again.
"Aelita does. Do you think you're going to click your ruby slippers together and she's going to whisk you off to Heaven? She isn't going to kill God, and when she fails she'll drag you down the toilet with her, right down to the bottom of Hell."
"If the choice is you or her, I choose her."
"Answer one personal question. You're supposed to be a lab that analyzes things. DNA and AIDS tests, but you spend all your time cooking Akira and whatever else brings in money, right?"
"Close enough."
"Are you at least sending out the blood to a real lab so people know if they're sick or are you just letting them all die?"
"Of course we do," says Hunahpu. "We're not monsters. You're the monster, Stark. Or are you so comfortable with that now that you've forgotten?"
"I guarantee you I'm not going to forget your voice. We're going to run into each other down the road sometime, and when we do I'm going to pop you apart one rivet at a time."
"There's the monster. Hello, monster."
"I hope you have another lemonade stand stashed out back because this one is going out of business."
He sighs.
"With everything you know about the Vigil, you don't think we'd put our whole operation in one location, do you? Do your worst. We'll be up and running again by the end of the week."
"My worst is a lot worse than you remember. Be sure to check the papers tomorrow. It'll be on the front page."
"I wouldn't expect anything less from you, Abomination."
Candy is looking at me when I hang up.
"What was that all about?"
"This place isn't just a drug lab. It's God's little terrorist angel army on earth. That was one of them on the phone. You know how you said not everything is about me? Well, this is. Aelita sent a demon after Hunter because she knew I'd find out that he's TJ's little brother. I bet it's one of these pricks who sent me the text knowing it would piss me off and get me on the case."
She raises her eyebrows.
"They sound like they have their shit wired tight. How can you go after people like that?"
"I'm not. Come on. We're getting out of here."
I take Candy outside through a shadow by a bookcase.
When we're on the street, I dial a number on my cell. No one answers. I don't leave a message. A second later the phone rings. There's silence on the line.
"Do you know where I am?"
"Yes," says Josef.
"The building and everything inside is yours. Be sure to make a mess."
"We've been waiting so long for something to do, a mess is inevitable."
The line goes dead.
We walk to the other side of the street and into an alley hidden from view. Normally I'd cut and run from a scene like this, but Candy will want to see it.
"Who was that?"
"A guy who's head I once chopped off."
"What is it with you and cutting off heads?"
"It's an old habit. The crowd loved it in the arena. If you do it right, the body does a twitchy little dance before it falls over."
"It's pretty fucked up that you know that. I like it."
"I know. I've been saving that one up for you."
She kisses me on the cheek.
A warm wind swirls down from the sky, kicking up garbage and whirlpooling it away. There's a roar behind it. Like the wind, but lower in pitch. Like a billion hungry locusts. Or a jet flying low. Maybe both.
I say, "Among God's many fuckups at the beginning of time was this. When he created the angels he created something else, too. They're called the Kissi. Watch close because we're not staying long."
The Kissi come down on the building like a black boiling fog. At first they look like a solid mass. It isn't until they start tearing the building apart that you can see individual ones. I'm behind Candy with my arms wrapped around her, not because it's cold but to prevent her from doing exactly what she's doing now. Trying to leave the alley to get closer to the carnage. She only does it for a few seconds then settles down against my chest. I can hear her heart beating like a speed-metal-band encore. Something explodes and she jumps back against me. One of the Kissi must have hit a gas line. The building already looks like Pompeii. Broken walls. Cracked stones. And everything on fire. The horrible-beautiful faces of individual Kissi are visible in the flames. That's enough fun for one night. I pull Candy back farther into the dark.
We come out by the hotel. She's holding on to my hands, which are wrapped around her.
She looks up at me.
"I don't have the words," she says. "You've seen a lot of that kind of stuff, haven't you?"
"Way too much for my taste."
She steps out from my arms and takes my hand.
"Let's go upstairs and finish off the furniture."
"I can't right now. Every bit of information I get makes this whole thing more confusing. I know Aelita is doing this to fuck with me, but that can't be all there is to it. She thinks too big for that. And what does 'If you've made it this far, it's already too late' mean? I need to talk to Kasabian. Want to come with me?"
She shakes her head.
"He talked my ear off before. He doesn't get out much, does he? I think I need to take a break before I dive back in."
"Okay. I'll see you upstairs in a little while."
She heads for the room.
"Take as long as you want. I'm starting without you. You'll just have to catch up."
"I'll bring my Jet Ski."
INSIDE, KASABIAN IS drinking a beer and watching Las Montañas del Gehenna, an obscure seventies Mexican spaghetti western. Kind of a cross between Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Jodorowsky's God-is-a-Freudian-shootist epic, El Topo. After a long drought hits their village, the residents decide to sacrifice a young girl to the ancient Mayan rain god. The girl's father and lover shoot up the village and rescue her. Later, a priest visits them at their hideout in the desert. He tells them that they have to find the gods and make it up to them for stealing their sacrifice. Midway into the movie, the girl and the two men ride their horses up a mountain of bleached human and animal bones to a cave that's the entrance to the Mayan underworld. The gods' minions grab the girl and lay her out on a stone altar while a priest holds an obsidian knife over her, ready to cut out her heart. The girl's father and lover have to play the traditional to-the-death Mayan ball game to see if they're all going to be sacrificed or they get to return to earth. I was watching Las Montañas del Gehenna the night Mason sent me Downtown, so I never got to see if any of them survived.
"Is that blood on your jacket? You got shot again. Are you a bullet magnet or just have a fetish for never wearing the same clothes twice?"
I don't want to see how Las Montañas del Gehenna turns out. I decided a long time ago that the girl makes it home and I don't want to find out I'm wrong. I turn off the set.
"Hey! I'm watching that."
"You can finish it later. I just found out that Aelita is mixed up in this Hunter thing."
He nods.
"I'm not surprised. I think she's got something going with Mason, too. An angel's been sneaking in and out of Hell, coming in from way out in the badlands where even Hellions don't go. Who else is crazy enough to deal with Mason but her?"
"They're the ones that probably sent the Qlipots or whatever they're called. But why go after Hunter? And why get me involved? Maybe they're trying to railroad me into a trap."
"Were you just trying to say 'Qliphoth'? Look at you. You learned a big-boy word."
"Aelita can't have hit God already. That would shake the whole universe. They're not ready to invade Heaven, are they?"
"No way. Generals are still arguing over plans. Troops are still coming in from all over Hell. No way they're ready."
"Why would she be tiptoeing down to Hell?"
"Mason just got hold of something that's got him pretty excited. It's big, too. Like an oversized gold coffin carved with all kinds of binding runes and hexes. Aelita might have smuggled something out of Heaven. Maybe a weapon."
"Or something to help Mason make a new key to the Room of Thirteen Doors?"
"More likely something like the Druj Ammun. A passkey to a secret back door in Heaven. She's supposed to have allies upstairs, so it wouldn't surprise me."
"What if she didn't come straight from Heaven? If she sent that demon after Hunter, maybe she has more demons. Could she and Mason be raising a demon army?"
Kasabian smirks.
"Even Lucifer couldn't do that. Training demons is like herding cats on acid."
My gut is churning and I really want to hit something.
"This is all on me. I got too clever. I should have killed Mason when I had the chance. That proves my theory that thinking's overrated."
"Get a grip. We can rule out Mason having a key. He'd have used it by now. He'd have come back himself or sent a Hellion hit squad. No. This is something else."
"It's got to be the thing I'm too late to stop. I need to talk to the Sentenzas again. I freaked out and left last time when I realized that Hunter is TJ's kid brother."
"TJ? Our TJ? That's fucking insidious."
"I missed something with them. I'll go back in the morning. You keep watching Downtown. Consider it self-defense. If Mason gets back here, it isn't just me he's going to snuff."
"Now you've piqued my interest."
I think about things for a minute.
"You know, you could have told me some of this before. And saved me a lot of bullshit time."
"Right. I never know how you're going to react to information. I don't need you going batshit and throwing me out or pulling a gun."
It's true. I've thrown the little weasel out and I've taken a few potshots at him. It's not like I didn't have my reasons. He was spying on me for Lucifer, and then there was that time he tried to kill me. But that was a while ago, and since then the angel has been whispering sweet nothings in my ear about not killing people when they get annoying. And it was before I figured that I need all the friends I can get in this world. Not that Kasabian is exactly a friend, but he has good taste in movies and we both want Mason drawn and quartered.
He scuttles over to the set and turns it back on.
"If you're going to shoot me, I want to finish my movie."
On the monitor, the two vaqueros are playing the Mayan ball game. They're slow and clumsy, falling all over each other.
"All right, man. Sure. Mea culpa. On occasion I've been known to express myself in uncouth ways, but I'm on the wagon for pulling guns on people I know."
He turns his eyes from the monitor and looks at me for a minute.
"So that's my apology?"
"I guess so."
He turns off the movie, picks up his beer, and drinks. A trickle leaks out from the bottom of his neck and into his bucket.
"Ever since Lucifer left, the place has been falling apart, and I don't mean the trash isn't getting picked up. I mean Old Testament falling apart. Earthquakes. Wild fires. Hellion food riots. That's something you don't want to see. No one's in charge. Mason has the army and local Pinkertons tied up with his war plans. It's like he doesn't give a rat's ass how Hell is going to . . . you know. Hell."
"Who's working with him?"
"Most of Lucifer's generals have defected. Abaddon, Wormwood, Mammon. They're all in Pandemonium. General Semyazah is the only holdout. He doesn't like the idea of being pushed around by a mortal. And he commands a shitload of troops. I don't know if they can pull off the attack without him or his troops."
I get a Malediction from my coat and pour myself a drink from a bottle of Jack on the nightstand.
"You know what's weird? This whole thing between me and Mason---I can't even remember what started it."
"Aside from the fact that you're exactly alike?"
"Fuck you."
"The truth hurts doesn't it, Tinker Bell?"
I rub my arm where the bullet grazed me. At least it helps me forget about the burns on my arms.
"I don't get this Heaven and Hell thing of his at all," I say. "It's stupid enough wanting to grab Hell, but why would Mason want Heaven, too? The dry-cleaning bills on all those robes must be murder."
Kasabian swigs his beer. It sounds like distant rain as it drains from his neck into the bucket.
"I don't think Mason wants to be God. I think he just wants to be in control," says Kasabian. "Look, man, just because you don't want anything doesn't mean the rest of us feel that way. You always hid or fucked around with your power. Mason took his seriously because he had to. He was part of a heavyweight Sub Rosa clan and Daddy wouldn't have it any other way."
"Boo-hoo. The rich kid had it rough."
"He was raised to take magic as seriously as anyone alive. He had to. He went to Hell, too, when he was a kid. He used to joke about it."
I stare at him. Kasabian widens his eyes and nods, pleased he caught me off guard.
"What do you fucking mean, Mason was in Hell?"
Kasabian rolls his eyes.
"Not that Hell. Metaphorical Hell. Christ, how can you not know any of this? Mason was famous when he was a kid. His parents were even more famous."
"I met his mom once. A dumpy lady with the Bettie Page hair and trophy-wife jewelry. She's famous?"
"That was his aunt. His parents were dead and regular civilian court appointed an uncle and auntie dearest to take care of him. They were happy to move into the house in Beverly Hills and spend as much of Mason's inheritance as they could. Maybe that's why he burned the house when he disappeared. It covered up what he did to you and it sent the Beverly Hillbillies packing."
"Tell me about Mason's metaphorical Hell."
Mason grunts. He's calling me a hick without actually saying it out loud.
"It started with Mason's father, old Ammit Faim. Ammit killed and hexed his way into running a big chunk of the California drug biz, and I don't mean aspirin. Why would he cozy up to civilian dope peddlers? Because drugs are power and influence, and Ammit and Gabriella, Mason's mom, were the ambitious type."
He swigs from his beer.
"You know what assholes rich Sub Rosas are. Everything is about status and building a dynasty. None of the other clans were into the drug biz, so there wasn't any competition. He imported the stuff. Set up operations to manufacture the complicated stuff and then cut and distributed it himself. He had a handle on Sub Rosa recreational drugs and most of the pot, meth, and Ecstasy in the state, but he didn't control heroin and opium. So he decided to go to the source. Ammit and Gabriella packed up the kiddies, that's Mason and his little sister---bet you didn't even know he had a sister---and off the family went to Burma."
"The drug connection has to be why Mason and Aelita dosed Hunter. Another joke or clue for me to figure out."
"Shut up," Kasabian says. "Ammit had enough connections to get a meeting with an opium general up north. He was an army officer who'd defected and took a lot of his troops with him. Formed his own private army and marched into the Golden Triangle. They paid the local farmers to raise poppies for them. The farmers didn't care. Crops are crops and they made more money than growing rice.
"Ammit and the general cut a deal for his product and for a while everything was champagne and Hot Pockets. Mason's father had a good source of dope and Mom kept the books. The general had a real businessman selling his stuff and the money rolled in. The Faims' power grew and so did the family's status. Then it got ugly.
"The reason the general and his men had originally gone into the hills was to hunt down guerrilla armies in the mountains. The Faims were in the hills visiting their dope crop when the rebels attacked.
"The general and his men were pros, but a bunch of guerrilla groups got together and all attacked at the same time. There were so damn many of them, they wiped out the general's army.
"These rebels were some mean Khmer Rouge--type pricks. Once the fighting was over, one by one the guerrillas cut off the heads of all the general's men. Eventually someone found Mason and the kiddies. Normally Ammit could have magicked the family out of there, but the general had local witches lay down all kinds of antihoodoo spells around their camp.
"It must have been a pretty good shock for those Burmese grunts to find a whole Leave It to Beaver family up in the mountains. Normally in a situation like that, the local army will ransom off Americans for cash. But not the rebel general. He took one look at these wealthy white foreigners financing his enemy and he started to kill them on the spot. But an old shaman stopped him. The guerrillas might have been fighting about politics and money, but they brought their old tribal magic and religion with them. Supposedly the old man made a beeline for Mason and took him aside. He pawed at the scared kid, checking him out, and the shaman saw something special in Mason. After the shaman and the general talked, the old man took Mason while soldiers hacked his whole family to death with machetes.
"The Faims weren't slackers when it came to magic, but the witches' spells worked and they couldn't fight back.
"When the shaman was done blasting their asses around the camp, the soldiers had fun hacking them to pieces. They killed Mason's little sister last. The Burmese have these big dogs up in the mountains and the rebels use them as war dogs. Mason got to watch as the general let his dogs loose on the big pile of hamburger that used to be his family."
"I don't believe a word of this."
"You'll like this part. It gets weirder," says Kasabian. "People eventually found out about the dead white people in the hills, but not about the little boy. Mason is gone. Off the radar for two or three years. UN workers found him when a local militia shot up one of the rebel groups.
"Mason got passed down the food chain to the U.S. embassy. Imagine what that was like for a kid. In just a few days he goes from eating bugs and learning ancient fucked-up tribal magic all the way back to L.A.
"That's when the aunt and uncle show up. Ammit had put together a tidy little nest egg from his drug business, and with Mason only being around ten at the time, the court set him up with a brand-new family."
"Why didn't anyone tell me any of this?"
"Because you're an asshole and you never wanted to know. Listen. The best part is coming.
"Mason settles into the whole home-sweet-home thing. He goes to private Sub Rosa school. He has money. He has nice clothes. But no friends. Nothing. He didn't talk to anyone, especially his new family. At school, he gets the same kind of generic magic training we all got. Only Mason is like you. Kind of a freak. He showed them the shaman's stuff. Dark magic they'd never seen before. They graduated him early just to get him out of there.
"After graduation he disappears again. He was gone for three months, and when he came home he wouldn't tell anyone if he'd been kidnapped or ran away or anything. But no one cares because all of a sudden he's acting like a normal kid. They let him back into upper grade school. He made friends and generally acted the way any idiot schoolkid was supposed to act.
"A few months later stories started popping up on TV about arms smuggling along the Burmese border and how there must have been a bad accident. Like a big ammo dump or even a small tactical Chinese nuke had gone off. The land in one area was fried. And part of a mountain was gone, like it was scooped out with an ice-cream scoop. The funny thing was no one saw or heard any explosions. It all got hushed up pretty quick by the local government because whatever happened had wiped out an entire rebel army along with their village, their families, their crops, and their animals. There was nothing but ashes for miles."
Kasabian finishes the beer and tosses the empty into an overflowing trash can.
"Mason went to Hell all right, but he got his revenge. That's why I'm sure what Mason wants is to be in charge. This time around he's not going to be dragged into the jungle while his family is chopped into dog food. He's going to be the dragger, not the draggee."
What do you know? Mason isn't Dr. Doom after all. He's Bruce Wayne, pining away for his long-gone Partridge Family lifestyle. I have no way of knowing if everything in Kasabian's tall tale is true, but he got at least one thing right. From the moment we met, I don't think it ever occurred to Mason and me to do anything but go at each other. It's not that we hated each other. It's more like how some people can't help but bring out the not necessarily righteous parts of your personality. Like how you meet someone and instantly know they're a full-time professional victim, and no matter how hard you try, something takes over and you can't help needling them. From day one Mason and I were playing King of the Hill. It all makes a sad kind of sense now. Sending me Downtown wasn't just Mason's play for power. It was his way of finally winning the stupid game we'd been playing since we met. Kasabian nailed it. Mason and I aren't anything special. Just a couple of angry toddlers out to crack the world over a playground punch-out.
"You okay?"
I look around. Kasabian looks concerned. Somewhere along the way I'd gotten to my feet. I guess I've been standing here for a while.
"I'm fine. Thanks for laying it all out for me. At least now I know why Lucifer thought Mason was the only other candidate to take his place."
"Maybe you ought to sit down and finish your drink."
"Good idea."
I'm feeling a little dazed. A little high. Mason and I are connected at the hip and the brain stem. Isn't that goddamn hilarious?
"Just be cool. You wanted to hear the story. Don't go getting mad at me."
"Don't sweat it. I'm glad I know."
I pick up my coat. Finger the bullet hole. It's not bad enough to throw the coat away. Besides, I heard that blood is the new black.
My cigarette has gone out. I drop it in a half-finished drink by the bed and light another.
"I get it now. Why Mason wants Heaven and Hell."
"What do you mean?"
"He's going to do it again. He doesn't want to be God. He wants to burn us like he burned that mountain."
"Why would he do that?"
I look at Kasabian. He's as mad as any human or Hellion I've ever met. Why can't he see it? It's because he's a lousy magician. Third rate when he gets a good tailwind. He never learned to dream big.
"Because the universe abandoned him. Mason was scared. He'd seen his family butchered. He needed help. He begged and groveled and prayed, but nobody came. Not his parents. Not the Sub Rosa. Not the army. Not God or Lucifer or one lousy angel. The little boy got tossed out like the trash and now he's going to burn the universe because when he was lost and pathetic and needed help the universe turned its back and took a planet-size dump on his head."
"How do you know this sick shit?"
"Because it's exactly what I was going to do. When I got back from Hell, I traded Mr. Muninn for something I have hidden in the Room of Thirteen Doors. Something that can fry every atom in Creation. Turn this whole peep show to dust. I thought that killing the Circle and sending Mason to Hell was going to fix me and the world would be full of sunshine and pretty girls and bluebirds that shit cold beer. But it didn't. Alice was still dead. God and Lucifer still gave me the silent treatment. And Wells, Aelita, the Golden Vigil, and everyone who worked for them still walked the streets."
I open my left hand. It hurts from being balled tight into a fist.
"So what changed your mind?" Kasabian asks. "From where I sit, the world is exactly as shitty as it was when you left."
"It was that night I killed the Drifters. It would have been so easy to sit down and have a cigarette and let them eat the city. But when it came right down to it, I didn't want to. It's as simple as that. I wanted to live and I wanted Vidocq and Candy, Allegra, and Brigitte to live. And if I murdered the world, I'd be Mason and I didn't want to be him."
"You're quite the humanitarian. By the way, thanks a fuck of a lot for leaving me off your who-to-save list."
"You're on it, Alfredo Garcia. I just didn't want to say it out loud and have you call me Nancy or Tinker Bell."
"Yeah, I would have done that."
"Behave yourself, and when I'm Downtown maybe I can find some Hellion alchemists who can stitch you onto a new body. You can have Mason's after I kill him."
Kasabian snorts.
"Yeah. That's what I want. Every time I pee I can look down and see Mason's dick in my hand. That won't give me nightmares."
"But think how upset the dick's going to be when it looks up and sees you."
IN THE MORNING Candy, Vidocq, and I head back to Studio City in Allegra's car. Vidocq borrowed it. He's on a kick about not riding in stolen vehicles all the time. For a people who invented absinthe and blow jobs, sometimes the French can be a drag.
After hearing Kasabian's story last night, I was itchy to talk to the Sentenzas and didn't want to wait until the A.M., but they have a skull-fucked-by-evil kid wandering the streets and I didn't want to have to haul them to an emergency room with matching coronaries.
Candy is a lot more of a morning person than I am, which is easy since I refuse to believe in the existence of a 10 A.M. But she's insistent enough and strong enough to drag my ass out of bed and pour me into some clothes. She even found a coffeemaker in the kitchenette that wasn't broken. Coffee isn't the perfect morning drug, but it'll do until someone invents French Roast adrenochrome.
What's pissing me off is that I'm going to have to dance around a lot of what I've learned about Hunter and his pals. K.W. and Jen aren't going to want to hear how close Hunter was to some really nasty drug peddlers. And I'm sure as hell not going to tell them about Aelita. I still don't know why she'd go after TJ's brother. It's not like driving the kid crazy threatens anyone I care about. Me included. I could walk away from this anytime and it wouldn't change a damn thing in my life.
We get to the Sentenzas' place around eleven. Their car and truck are both in the driveway. Nothing surprising there. K.W. seems like a real worker bee, but a missing kid will dull your work ethic. The three of us go up the stone walkway and I ring the bell.
A minute or so later Jen opens the door. She's in a red silk robe. Her hair is a mess and her eyes are red. She's been crying and it looks like she just got up. She doesn't say anything. She just stands aside and lets us in.
"This isn't good news, is it?" she asks.
"Why do you say that?"
"Hunter isn't with you and you don't look much better than I feel."
K.W. comes down the stairs. He's in a blue tracksuit. It looks like he slept in it.
"Have you found him?"
"I'm afraid not," says Vidocq. Bad news sounds better with his accent. "But we know a lot more than we did when we left here yesterday."
I say, "What happened to Hunter wasn't his fault. It was done to him. That might sound bad, but it's actually good news. If he was set up for the possession, it means someone wanted to make a point, one that hasn't been made yet. That means whoever did it still needs him. Wherever Hunter is, I'm sure that he's still alive."
Their bodies change when they hear that. I can feel their nervous systems unknot. Their breathing and heart rates get somewhere in the neighborhood of normal. K.W. even manages a minuscule smile.
"That's great news. So, why are you here? Do you need something else from us?"
Jen breaks in.
"Who would do something like that to Hunter?"
No way I'm answering that.
"We're not sure," says Candy. "That's why we're here. We need to ask you a few more questions."
"I'll put on some coffee," says Jen, and heads for the kitchen. K.W. nods in her direction and we follow.
The kitchen is big and spacious. Spanish tile and copper pans. It's flooded with light from a row of French doors that open onto a huge backyard with neat trees and a pool. We sit on stools at a serving island in the middle of the room. I doubt I could even afford the coffee filters Jen is fitting into an expensive German contraption. It looks more like something that fell out of the space station than a coffeemaker.
"What do you need to know?" asks K.W.
I figured out one thing last night. If Mason and Aelita are mixed up in this thing, then not only do they want the kid found, but they want me to find him. That means there's information I don't have yet. Since I don't know where to look, there's nothing to do but go back to the beginning.
"Was Hunter in touch with any of TJ's friends who were into magic?"
Vidocq and Candy look at me.
Okay, I'm starting somewhere a little self-serving. I want to know if the Sentenzas know that TJ and I are connected. And it's a legit question. TJ might have known some Sub Rosas outside our Circle. I doubt it, but you never know. Like I said, I'm grasping at straws and crabgrass.
"Not that I know of," says K.W. "Jen, do you know anything?"
She stands where she is by the coffeemaker. She's a long way down the counter from us, like she's afraid of catching a flesh-eating virus.
Jen shakes her head.
"Not that I know of. If he knew any of them, he was keeping it a secret."
"Was it his habit to keep secrets?" asks Vidocq.
"No. That was more TJ. Hunter is a good kid," says K.W.
"He was on the debate team at school one semester," says Jen, like it's proof that Hunter is an angel and that none of this is happening. "But he had to quit to go out for track."
I ask, "Did he do all right in school? No changes in his grades?"
"He was a hard worker," says Jen.
K.W. smiles ruefully and nods.
"He did all his homework and his grades were decent, but there wasn't much danger of him becoming a Rhodes scholar."
While the coffee burbles away Jen starts getting cups down from the cupboard. She puts one down and stops. Her body has gone rigid again. Her heart rate is climbing fast. She's trying not to cry. Probably doesn't want to look weak in front of a bunch of strangers talking about her missing son like he's a stolen dirt bike. K.W. gets up and walks over to her, puts his hands on her shoulders.
"Why don't you go sit down? I'll get the coffee," he says.
She doesn't reply, but comes over and sits on the stool K.W. just vacated. Her arms are crossed and she's looking down at the counter.
Candy reaches out and touches Jen's hand lightly.
"We're very sorry to have to ask you all these questions."
Jen nods, still staring down.
This is bullshit. The kid was a jock with ambitious parents. They'd lost their smart son, TJ, and hoped that Hunter would take his place. But Hunter isn't TJ. If he joined the debate team, it was only to make his parents happy, and when he wanted off, he found a good enough reason that they couldn't get mad.
K.W. puts down cups for everyone. I sip mine.
"This coffee is good," I say to no one in particular.
K.W. nods.
"Yeah. It cost enough."
"You have a coffeemaker this good at work?"
"That's a funny question."
"It is, isn't it? But do you have a good coffeemaker at work?"
He shakes his head, still looking puzzled.
"Not this good, but the one in the office is okay. Most of the guys I work with wouldn't know good coffee from kerosene. They're the types who put on a pot on Monday and are still drinking it on Friday."
"What kind of guys are we talking about?"
"Construction mostly. I'm a property developer. Someone has a piece of land and wants something on it, they call me."
Makes sense. I remember seeing mud and cement around the wheel wells on the pickup in the drive.
"I have my own company. Some days I wear suits and some I'm out on the sites making sure the floor tiles are going in the right way up." He smiles like we're supposed to laugh. It's a joke he's used on a lot of clients. Now it's just a nervous tic.
"Depending on business, I'm either out in the field most of the time or back in the office having meetings."
"What kind of real estate do you develop?"
"Whatever a client asks for. Shopping malls. Business parks. Apartment buildings. Whatever a client wants."
"Is business good?" asks Vidocq.
K.W. shrugs.
"With development, it's always feast or famine. No one wants anything new. All they want is new electrics or pipes in old structures. Then someone wants a new hundred-apartment complex up in two weeks. And there are ten other companies behind that one who want the same thing."
"Was Hunter going to work for you when he finished school?"
"I don't know. We talked about it."
"Did he spend much time at the building sites?"
K.W. sips his coffee. Puts his hand on his wife's hand. Squeezes. She squeezes back.
"Not particularly. He liked the big construction machines when he was little."
Fucking fascinating. This family is in training for the Tedious Olympics.
"Are you developing anything new? Anything unusual?" asks Candy. Nice. She has good instincts for this Sherlock Holmes stuff. Me, I'm about ready to take her back to the hotel and break more furniture.
"What do you mean 'unusual'?"
"You're the builder," I say. "We don't know a dump truck from the Batmobile. You tell us."
K.W.'s eyes unfocus. Make microscopic movements back and forth in their sockets. It's an involuntary thing. The brain trying to access memories. If he was lying, his eyes would favor his left side, but they don't.
K.W. shrugs.
"Nothing out of the ordinary. We're finishing a housing development. Upgrading the fixtures in a strip mall. We're about to break ground on an office park near the 405."
"Okay, the jobs are boring. Are your clients? Any eccentrics? Odd requests? Anyone paying you in magic beans?"
He thinks again. His eyes stop and hold steady.
"There's only one thing I can think of and it's not really odd. It's just not something that happens every day."
"Tell us," says Vidocq.
"A client called for a fix-up on a business property. What was unusual was that I never met her or a rep in person. We did everything on the phone. It was like she was one person handling everything herself. That's unusual in this business."
"What was her name?" I ask.
He frowns.
"I can't remember. My secretary would know."
"What did she hire you to do?"
"She wanted us to renovate and restore an old commercial site in the Hollywood Hills. It was a big job, too. There was extensive fire damage, but she wanted us to fix it rather than tear it down. It was something historic. An old gentlemen's club. That I remember. It's not a phrase you hear too often these days."
I put down my coffee and Vidocq picks up his. Candy and I look at each other.
"Did she tell you the name of the club?"
"Maybe. I don't remember."
"Was it Avila?"
K.W. smiles.
"Yes, that's it. How did you know?"
The human brain is a very funny thing, and because of that, it can do very funny things to the human body. Take mine right now. My heartbeat just doubled. All my senses are cranked up to eleven. Even the angel in my head feels it. I hear Jen's breathing change. She knows my question and K.W.'s answer are important. I smell K.W. starting to sweat. He gets it that something he's said is connected to Hunter's disappearance. Vidocq and Candy are plain excited and trying not to show it. I'm as excited as any of them, but I feel cold, too. Like someone cracked open my chest and dumped a bucket of ice inside. But I don't show any of it. This is basic stuff. I could have had this information yesterday if I hadn't let the TJ thing get to me. But I guess getting to me has been the idea all along.
"How did you know the club's name?"
I sip my coffee. The room is practically vibrating from the tension. Candy is a furnace. She wants to run out and start gnawing on bad guys or the coyotes in the hills. Something.
"A lucky guess."
"I'll call the office and get you the woman's number."
I shake my head.
"Don't bother. It'll be turned off and she won't use it again."
Jen says, "You know who it is, don't you?"
"No," I say. It's the truth. I don't know. But yes, I know.
"I have an idea, but I don't want us to start getting ahead of ourselves."
The three of us get up and head for the door. The Sentenzas don't show us out this time. They stay in their bright and familiar kitchen, huddled there like the house is the Titanic and the serving island is the last lifeboat afloat.
Jen calls after us.
"What can we do?"
"Stay by the phone," I yell over my shoulder.
WHEN WE GET to Allegra's car, I say, "I'm driving," and Vidocq doesn't argue.
We get in and I tell the other two, "Get out your cells. You're going to make calls."
I start the car and back out of the driveway. I'm driving slow. Concentrating. I know what to do and I want to get to doing it, but I need to set it up right.
We head for the Golden State Freeway, but it's bumper-to-bumper, so I turn the car and we head to the city on surface streets.
I tell Candy, "Call Allegra. Tell her to clear out all the diaper-rash and splinter patients. We're bringing in a special case."
"You're that sure Hunter is at Avila?" she asks.
"I'd bet the pope's red shoes. Tell her to get out every piece of Kinski's hoodoo medical gear she has. The demon's been working over Hunter for days. He's going to be in bad shape."
I don't have to tell Vidocq what to do.
"I'll call Father Traven," he says.
I nod.
"Tell him to get his picnic basket together and be ready. I don't want to give whatever's in Avila the chance to know we're coming."
I get out my phone and dial the number Vidocq gave me for Julia. She answers on the second ring.
"Stark? How are things going?"
"I've got good news and bad news."
"What's the good news?"
"I know where Hunter is. We're on our way there right now."
"What's the bad?"
"Aelita is involved. It might be a trap and we all might die."
"Do I need to tell you to be careful?"
"It's always good to be reminded. I'll call you when it's over. If we're dead, I'll call collect."
I DON'T KNOW what to expect when we pick up Traven. How much bread do you need to bum-rush a demon out of Ferris Bueller? A baguette? A dump-truck-ful of biscuits?
Traven is waiting on the curb when we get to his place. He's all in black, with an old-fashioned high-collared coat that makes him look like Johnny Cash's stunt double. He's holding a battered canvas duffel bag. It's big, but he hefts it easily. I guess not that much bread after all.
I hit the brakes at the corner and say, "Let Traven sit up front. I want to talk to him."
Vidocq gets out of the car and takes Traven's duffel. He slides into the back with Candy. Traven gets in the front. I'm moving before he has the door closed.
"I understand you've found the boy. How's he holding up?"
I steer the car back toward the Hollywood Hills.
"We haven't seen him, but I know where he is. It was a place called Avila. In your line of work, you wouldn't have heard of it. They called it a gentlemen's club. Basically it was a casino and whorehouse for a very select group of über-rich assholes."
"Avila? After Saint Teresa of Avila?"
"Who's that?"
"Saint Teresa experienced an intense encounter with an angel. She describes it in sublimely intimate terms. The angel stabs her in the heart with a spear and the pain she describes is intense, but also beautiful and all-consuming."
"I didn't know saints went all the way on a first date."
He nods and purses his lips. He's heard it all before.
"A lot of people choose to interpret her description of religious ecstasy in simple sexual terms." He shakes his head. "Goddamn Freud."
"At least the name makes sense now. You see, Avila was a huge secret. A real Skull and Bones kind of operation. If you were one of the handful of people in the know, one of the politically anointed or rich enough to use the same accountant as Jehovah, you got access to the club inside the club. You go to see what the club was really built for."
"And what was that?"
"They didn't keep human hookers in the inner sanctum. For the right price and a few blood oaths, you could fuck an angel."
Traven turns and looks at me, his face a blank mask.
"I'm not joking," I say. "No one knows who started the place or what kind of hoodoo they used to capture and keep them. L.A.'s a major power spot, so for all anyone knows, it might have been here in some form forever."
"And you think that's where the boy is being held?"
I nod.
"I knew the last angel that got dragged up there. Her name is Aelita. She ran the Golden Vigil. God's Pinkertons on earth. Real turbocharged assholes."
"Yes. I know about the Golden Vigil. You think this Aelita was taken there to become another prostitute?"
"No, she and the other angels were going to be sacrificed to open the gates of Hell. You see an old buddy of mine, Mason, has ambition the size of King Kong's balls. He wants to knock off Lucifer and take over Hell. Then he wants to stick a fork in God and grab Heaven. He's hard-core enough that he might be able to pull it off. You still with me, Father?"
Out of the corner of my eye I see Traven squinting. He doesn't know what to believe. I guess it's a lot to absorb when you've spent your life in church libraries, reading the books, learning the stories, and then finding out you have no idea how the universe really works. All these years he's been thoroughly shielded from everything but writer's cramp. Now he finds out that a real-life low-down biblical horror show was going on across town from where he brushed his teeth in holy water every night before bed. I can't blame him if his mind is a little blown.
"You want a cigarette?"
"That's would be nice," he says.
I hand him Mason's lighter and the pack of Maledictions from my pocket. Listen to him rustle the pack and spark the lighter. He coughs at the first puff but keeps smoking. Maledictions are easier to take when you're doomed.
"You were talking about a man named Mason trying to open Hell. I gather you stopped him."
"Something like that."
"And we killed an ass load of devil minions and dark magicians along the way," says Candy.
Traven turns in his seat to look at her.
"You were there, too?"
She smiles.
"Stark invites me to all his massacres. Isn't that right?"
She kicks the back of my seat. I look at her in the rearview mirror.
"You're not helping."
She smiles and settles down in her seat.
Traven puffs quietly on the Malediction, staring out the window as I steer us into the hills.
"So, because you stopped the sacrifice, you think that Hunter is in Avila?"
"Yeah. Mason and Aelita are behind this whole thing. They set the Qlipuffs on Hunter."
"Qliphoth. Why not send the demon after you?"
"Because Mason has a truly fucked-up sense of humor. I knew Hunter's brother and Mason would bust a gut using the kid to get me back up here. Aelita is helping just because she generally hates my guts."
"I thought you said you saved her."
"Yeah, when she found out I'm not exactly human, she got testy. A real racist."
"You know, yesterday if someone told me I'd be driving to an exorcism with a nephilim I would have been surprised. Today, though . . ."
He trails off and smokes the Malediction.
I wish I could read minds like Lucifer. I can hear Traven's heart beating fast. He's feeling the mixture of cold and fear that's excitement. He half knows what's coming and he's not sure if he can handle it. That's me in the arena, waiting for the gates to open to see what I'm going up against in this episode of Kick Stark's Ass. After a while you learn to live with the fear and ignore it, but it's never a hundred percent gone. But some kinds of fear can make you more than you are. You face down something bigger than yourself and maybe come out of it with scars, but you're a little stronger for it. There are other fears that are like a hole in your center where pieces of your soul go down the drain. That kind of fear has nothing to do with the knock-down-drag-out in the arena. That's the horror of finally knowing how things really are. Who has the power and how they love tossing it around at everyone who doesn't have it.
Every one of us, human and monster alike, lives with an angelic boot on our throats. But we don't see it, so we forget about it and limp along doing the stupid little things that make up our stupid little lives. Then the boot comes down on your gut, squeezing the air out of your lungs and cracking your bones like old matchsticks. And you know the only reason it's happening is because you're not one of the celestials on high. You're suffering with the worst curse of all. You're alive. We're just bugs on God's windshield. That's all we are. Annoying. Disposable. A dime a dozen.
Traven says, "You toss it all off so easily. Men enslaving angels. Humans challenging both Lucifer and God. And you say you're a nephilim, something I don't even know if I believe in."
"Don't worry, Father. I believe in you."
He's talking about me, but it's not what he means. I can hear it in the almost inaudible tremors in his voice.
"Ask the question, Father."
"What do I have to look forward to in Hell? Do they have special amusements for ex-priests?"
I should have gone easier on him. The poor guy is ex-communicated. To him that means he already has one foot in the coal cart to the hot country.
"Don't sweat Hell, Father. There are Hellions down there and damned souls that owe me favors. I'll make sure you're taken care of."
The window is down a little on his side of the car. He pushes his hair back with a hand as lined and creased as his face. He does a little grunting laugh.
"I've read the most powerful and harrowing demonic texts you can imagine, and this conversation is still the strangest thing I've heard. You really think you can make deals with fallen angels?"
"There are Hellions down there with more honor than half the humans I meet."
"That's not terribly comforting, but I suppose it will have to do."
"That pretty much sums up Hell."
The road smooths out as we near the top. I can just see Avila's blackened roof through the trees.
I say, "Too bad guys like us can't apply for unemployment. You think they have special forms for being fired by a deity?"
"I heard you worked for Lucifer. Lucifer isn't God."
"You don't spend enough time in Hollywood."
Traven looks up through the trees. He's spotted Avila, too. Candy is kicking the back of my seat again, bored with the talk and the drive. She wants to get her teeth into a demon. My kind of girl.
Traven says, "You've told me some of what you know about the universe; now let me tell you something. If you want to know why the world and all of Creation is so broken and afflicted, look up the word 'demiurge.' "
Traven turns to look at Vidocq.
"If I'm killed today, I want you to take my library. I trust you to take care of my books."
"I would be honored," Vidocq says. "But there will be no dying today."
"Demiurge?" I say. "That sounds like it has something to do with God, and not in a good way. Hell, I've burned so many bridges with the celestial types, I'd probably be better off cozying up to your Angra Om Ya pals than to any of the local celestial types."
"Then I think all you'll have to do is wait."
"I was joking. The Angra Om Ya are dead."
"What does death mean to a god?"
"You think the old gods are coming back?"
"I don't think they ever left."
I SWING THE car into the big circular driveway out front and park. We get out and Traven takes the duffel bag from Vidocq.
Avila has seen better days. Most of the roof has fallen in, leaving charred wood overhead, a puzzle palace of broken beams. The place has been thoroughly looted, trashed, and tagged by waves of squatters and skate punks. Moldy leather armchairs and silk-covered love seats surround the remains of a fire pit someone has chopped out of the driveway with who knows what improvised tools. A broken roulette wheel is almost lost in the grass that grows wild on all sides of the building. The ground glitters like a disco ball from all the broken glass. Even the walls are ripped open and the copper pipes inside are long gone.
"So this is what the gates of hell looks like," says Father Traven.
"No," says Vidocq. "Le palais de merde."
Even with everything that's been thrown at it since New Year's, the front door is still standing, like Avila's last dying gesture was giving the finger to the world. Maybe when we're done, I'll let Josef and his bunch loose on the place.
I gesture for the others to stay back, and push open the door. I've never walked into Avila through the front before, only out, and that was just the one time. I mostly went into the place through shadows, and then only to kill people. The good old days when things were simpler.
I have the na'at and knife in my coat and the .460 cocked and locked up and ready to kill any spooky sounds or scary shadows.
Even though much of the roof is gone, it's dim inside, so I let my eyes adjust and then sweep the room. Nothing moves. Nothing makes a sound. It's as quiet as a pulled-pork-rib joint next to a synagogue.
I wave the others inside.
"It's safe to go in?" asks Traven.
"It's clear. I don't know about safe. I don't hear rats or even roaches in the walls. That's not a good sign."
"What does that mean?" asks Traven.
Vidocq says, "When even vermin abandon a building, it means that sensible people will stay out, too."
"Right now we're officially dumber than rats and roaches," says Candy.
"Welcome to our world, Father."
Traven starts to cross himself, catches himself halfway through, and drops his hand. Old habits die hard.
"Let's go. I'm pretty sure I know where the kid is, so I'm up front. Vidocq and the father in the middle. You okay watching our asses, Candy?"
"What do you think?"
"Here we go."
I lead them around the circular front room. We stay close to the walls. The place used to be full of antique furniture and Persian rugs. Now I can see down to the rock and grass of the hill where the floor has partially collapsed.
A couple of turns down a hall and the ceiling is intact. All of a sudden I'm missing the holes in the roof and their spooky shadows. With no lights back here, the place is pitch-black. As much as I hate it, I let the angel take the lead. Its vision is built for darkness.
The moment I ease back and let it run the show, Avila lights up like Vegas. I grab Vidocq's sleeve and tell Traven and Candy to hold on to each other. Then I walk them slowly around the circular corridors toward the sacrifice chamber.
It doesn't take long to find it. All roads lead here, the black nasty heart of the place. This is where I should have killed Mason. It's the room where I rescued Aelita. I don't think she's ever forgiven me for saving her. Maybe her thank-you note got lost in the mail.
The chamber's double doors are still open, still full of bullet holes and shotgun slugs from the New Year's Eve raid. Around here is where Candy and I had that first kiss on New Year's, shot up and covered in other people's blood. Good times.
A pale light comes from the room. I leave the others and step inside, sweeping the Smith & Wesson back and forth over debris from the partially collapsed roof. Going slow, I let my senses expand and fill the place, feeling for anything with lungs or a heartbeat. I feel something. I step lightly around bowling-ball-size chunks of marble that have fallen from the walls. A shaft of sunlight cuts down from a hole in the ceiling onto the stone sacrifice platform, and there's Hunter, stretched out like a boiled lobster, ready for the butter and claw crackers.
I wave Traven and the others in. They spread out around the platform. Traven goes right for the kid. We hang back, letting the father do his thing. Hunter is lying on his back. He's very still. His chest hardly moves. He looks like he's been beaten, left under a heat lamp, and dragged behind a truck. Patches of blackened skin are peeling away from his arms and face. The skin that isn't black or raw red is the greenish blue of tainted meat. Hunter's clothes would make any self-respecting wino jealous. Worn and splitting at the seams, they're covered in dried blood, shit, and vomit. He looks like he's been wearing the rags for weeks instead of a couple of days.
Traven leans in right over Hunter's mouth, listening for something. I'm waiting for the demon to take the bait and gnaw his ear off. But Hunter doesn't move.
Traven goes back to his duffel, unzips it, and lays out a bag of sea salt and bread on the floor next to him. Next he takes out a battered wooden box. Inside is a bottle of black sacred oil and a yellowed bone pen shaped kind of like a short, thick hockey stick. He dips the pen in the oil and scrawls symbols along all four sides of the sacrifice platform. He's creating a binding hex to keep the demon locked on the platform and away from us. I recognize most of the symbols. There's Hebrew and Greek. Some angelic script and even some Hellion cuneiform script. It's the last set of symbols that are the most interesting. Chicken scratches from some obscure heretical cookbook. I'll lay you odds they're from that Angra Om Ya book. Fine by me. Whatever hoodoo will keep Hunter and his demon on that side of the room and us over here in the cheap seats is fine by me. Now that I think about it, we should all be wearing body armor. Damn. Next exorcism for sure.
Traven's bread is a disappointment. It looks like an ordinary round loaf of French or sourdough. I was hoping for something belching fire and spinning like lowrider rims.
Traven rips the bread apart, setting a piece down every few inches from Hunter's throat to his crotch. He scoops up a handful of salt from the bag and drops a little mound of salt between each piece of bread. He sets the salt bag back in his duffel and moves it to the side of the room. He does it all in slow, practiced moves. A kind of moving meditation gearing up for the next step.
Traven points to Hunter's head, where he wants me to stand. He stations Candy by the feet. Vidocq is in the middle across from the father.
Traven says, "I understand that you carry potions with you."
Vidocq opens his coat like a flasher, showing Traven the dozens of pockets sewn into the lining.
Traven does his little smile.
"Do you have Spiritus Dei?"
"I didn't know the Church knew about or approved of such alchemical tricks."
Spiritus Dei is one of the best things in the universe. Like one of those all-in-one cleaners for your kitchen or hoodoo duct tape. It'll fix anything. It's a repellent for Hellions, demons, and pretty much any other nasty things with teeth. It'll Scotch Guard your panties from hexes and even cure some poisons. It's better than chicken-fried steak, but not by much.
"The church isn't here. I am. I'd like you to have some Spiritus Dei ready to throw if Hunter should get through the wards I've placed around the platform."
Vidocq nods.
"I'll be ready."
Traven looks at Candy and me.
"If he gets out, grab him and hold him, but try not to break him."
"I don't make rash promises. But he won't get away," I say.
Traven turns to the boy, holding his hands over him, palms down. His head is forward and eyes are closed. He's praying. To whom? I wonder.
Traven opens his eyes, raises his hands, and starts a chant. Another prayer, blessing the bread and salt. But I've never heard anything like what's coming out of his mouth, and I've heard drunk Hellions. Whatever language he's speaking is full of blurps, hisses, and deep Tibetan-monk throat drones and glottal stops. It sounds like a man drowning.
Hunter's eyes snap open. They're yellow and bloodshot, but alert. His heart is beating a million miles an hour, but his breathing is ragged. I don't know how both of those things can be going on inside him without him having a heart attack. His mouth slowly falls open. A vapor, as thin as fog but as bright as fire, drifts out. Guess Hunter's mother was telling the truth when she said he spit fire when he burned the symbol into the ceiling.
It doesn't surprise or impress Traven even a little. With one hand he pushes Hunter's head down. With the other hand, he picks up salt and throws it into Hunter's mouth. Then he shoves in a piece of bread to seal in whatever's trying to get out. Hunter goes completely batshit, thrashing and convulsing like he's being electrocuted. He flails his arms at his face, trying to knock out the bread, but Traven's magic has taken away a lot of his motor control. Traven keeps a hand over the kid's mouth, holding the bread in place. I grab Hunter's shoulders and Candy holds his feet to keep him from kicking.
Traven chants, and with one hand over Hunter's mouth he sprinkles salt over the lumps of bread and wolfs them down. Each time he downs bread and salt, Hunter goes wilder and wilder. I'm holding him tight. Candy is leaning over him, resting her whole weight on Hunter's legs.
All at once he stops moving. Goes completely limp. No one moves, in case he's playing possum. But Hunter doesn't twitch. Finally Traven nods to me and Candy and I let go. He takes some of the remaining salt and uses his finger to draw an elaborate sign on Hunter's forehead. He still isn't moving. I look at Candy and Vidocq and then back to the kid. I'm getting worried that the bread Traven shoved into Hunter's mouth has choked him. Traven takes the bread out of Hunter's mouth, cupping his hands around it. He holds it out with both hands.
Traven says, "The demon is in here. Use the Spiritus Dei."
Vidocq pops the top off the small vial with his thumb and upends the Spiritus on the bread. Traven squeezes the bread like a wet sponge so that some of the liquid dribbles into Hunter's mouth. Then Traven shoves the bread into his own mouth, chews, and swallows it quick. When it's down, he gets a funny look on his face.
I say, "What?"
"It doesn't taste right."
"What does that mean?"
"I should taste the remains of the demon. It's something, but it's not---" That's the last thing he gets out before Hunter's hand snaps up and grabs him by the throat.
The kid gets a good grip and lifts Traven from the floor. Traven flails at Hunter's arms, but he might as well be hitting tree trunks with a powder puff. I punch Hunter on the side of the head, digging a knuckle into his temple hard, but not hard enough to crack bone. He doesn't even react, just keeps squeezing Traven. Candy leaps from the end of the platform onto Hunter's chest. As she pushes him down, I give him one more shot in the head. I can't hit him any harder without scrambling his brains, so I aim low, hitting his floating ribs hard enough that I can feel a couple crack. That gets the message through. Hunter gasps and drops Traven, suddenly not able to breathe. Candy gives him a decent shot to the jaw before I pull her off. That knocks Hunter back onto his back. But not for long.
As we drag Traven away from the platform, Hunter starts up his Wild Man of Borneo routine. He tries to jump off the platform and follow us, but Traven's binding hex holds. Hunter punches, claws, and throws his whole body at the invisible barrier, but it knocks him back every time.
Vidocq rushes over, pulling another vial from under his coat. He pours the whole thing down Traven's throat. Traven coughs. His color goes from asphyxia blue to something human. He sits up and draws in a couple of wheezing breaths. He is alive, but he doesn't look all that happy about it.
"What's in there?" he says to no one in particular. "I've never seen a demon like this before. If the salt and bread didn't work, the Spiritus Dei should have paralyzed it."
Hunter is on his knees prowling back and forth along the platform like a pissed-off hyena waiting for its pack to arrive and kick our asses. The invisible barrier doesn't bother him anymore. He isn't even trying to get out. He's having fun. Licking it with his black tongue, spitting blood on it, and finger-painting with the clotted mess. At first it looks like he's just doodling, but a shape begins to emerge. In a minute he stops drawing, leans close to the bloody barrier, and opens his mouth. The fire fog that drifted from his mouth earlier flows out again. Flattening against the binding barrier, it spreads out like dozens of burning snakes. When it's done, he puffs out his chest and inhales the fire back down his throat. Then he collapses on the platform. This time I don't sense anything coming from him. I can usually feel life, a beating heart, even the shallowest breath, but this kid doesn't even feel dead. More like a black hole of life. Candy gets up and starts toward him, but I grab her arm. The hex barrier is still intact, but Hunter has burned a symbol into it. Sister Ludi's, the same symbol he burned over his bed.
And then I feel Hunter alive again. Still on his back, he turns his head and looks at me.
"Do you get it now? Please say yes. Don't make me embarrass you in front of your friends."
It takes me a minute to get past the face to the voice.
Hunter sits up. He stands, still a mess, but looking alert and calm.
"So, do you get it?"
I nod.
He's talking in Mason's voice.
"You're coming through loud and clear."
I reach into the barrier and run my hand through the burning symbol he drew until it drifts apart. Storm clouds and miniature fireworks.
"It's Sister Ludi's sigil. A fake goddess for a fake possession."
Hunter raises his hands and rolls his eyes heavenward in mock relief. He's a riot. Bob Hope with horns and a tail. But I deserve every bit of shit he serves up. Wells and Aelita foxed me like this once before, covering up a Drifter attack with a fake demon. Would I have fallen for the gag the first time if I was still on my game Downtown? No way. This stupid world is making me weak. Or maybe it's just reminding me of how weak I've always been. No more. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you're dead.
Hunter---Hunter's body at least---shakes his head.
"I thought I was going to have to put on that medicine show forever. I mean Julia talked this idiot into exorcising me and it didn't work. Now you drag him back and it goes tits up again. I thought that would have set off a few alarm bells."
"It might have if I'd had time to think, but I was kind of busy with not letting your meat puppet kill him."
Hunter smiles. Black gums and yellow teeth. I flash back on the Drifters and feel the urge to rip out his spine.
"What's one Holy Roller more or less?"
"I like this one. He unfriended God on Facebook."
Hunter looks skeptical.
"You sure it wasn't the other way around? We have a lot of that type down here and I'm betting he's on the party list. I'm getting a definite whiff of sulfur off him."
He looks at Traven.
"You know all those suicides your Church condemns to Hell? There's nothing they like better than having one of God's defrocked toadies to play with. I'll tell them to break out the party hats and get something special ready for you."
Traven is turning white. He's been through plenty of exorcisms, but having a rational, well-spoken demon threaten him personally is a whole new kind of fun for him.
"Don't listen to him, Father. That's no demon. It's the asshole I was telling you about in the car. My friend Mason, the one who thinks he's the new holy trinity---God, the devil, and GG Allin."
"That's the difference between us, Father. Ambition. He had none, so I had to have enough for both of us."
Traven is frozen on the floor. Candy's body vibrates, a low growl building in her throat. I put my hand on her back and shake my head. The last thing we need is for her to go full Jade.
"Don't be too impressed, Father. He's done this trick before. Talking through people on earth, but you don't have any real power here, do you, sunshine?"
Mason raises an eyebrow.
"What makes you think I can't pull this building down on you right now?"
"Because if you had any real power, you'd have made it through that binding hex by now."
Mason raps his knuckles on the invisible barrier.
"Good point," he says. "You've got me there. I suppose I'm helpless as a kitten."
He smooths down his filthy rags like he's getting ready for a date with Miss America.
"And here I thought you'd be occupied with your fantasy about attacking heaven. But you must have time on your hands to be pulling stupid tricks like this."
He shakes his head.
"I'm working twenty-four/seven on the big plan. Aelita, too. She came Downtown and brought some tchotchkes. She's a hell of a girl."
So it's true. That's not a combination I like thinking about. What do they have in common? One wants to kill God and one wants to be him, and I can't see Aelita approving of Mason taking the old man's place. Hell. Maybe they both want to be God and are going to do a set-up Pearly Gates time-share.
"You're bluffing," I say. "Aelita is a bitch on wings, but she's not stupid. She wouldn't have anything to do with a second-rate show pony like yours."
"Sure she would. We have the same hobbies."
"Like what?"
His face splits into a big grin. Those teeth again.
"Hating you."
"I'm flattered."
Traven grabs my arm and pulls me back a few feet.
"Stop talking to him. The demon is trying to confuse you."
"There is no demon. There's nothing in there but a little rich boy who wants to murder the world because some bad men took away his Etch A Sketch."
Mason clasps his hand over his heart like he's wounded. He spits some of Hunter's blood on the sacrifice platform and clears his throat.
"Answer me this, Jimbo. And I mean this sincerely. What you need to focus on right now is the key question of the night: Why is this happening?"
For all I'm bullshitting him, I know he's consumed with his plans to attack Heaven, so, yeah, I'm kind of wondering what's really going on.
"Because you're trapped," I say. "Because you got yourself in way over your head. Because you're not Lucifer and not really in charge down there. You bribed a few generals into coming to your place for catered lunches and cigars. Big deal. Without General Semyazah, you're never getting close to Heaven. And you haven't been able to build a key to escape from Hell. You can't admit you're stuck down there. That's why this is happening. Hiding in other people's skin is as close as you'll ever come to getting home."
He stares at me, leaning his forehead on the barrier like a bored kid.
"You're embarrassing yourself again by thinking small. What's happening here is a formal invitation, but not from me. Listen."
Hunter's body goes slack. Mason has released control. A second later Hunter snaps back up. His eyes brighten and he looks around, but is unsteady on his feet. His lips move as he looks for his voice.
"Jim?" says Hunter.
No. Not this.
"Are you there? What's happening? Where am I?"
I can't see anything for a minute. It's like someone flipped a switch and my vision has gone out. This is what happens to people in deep shock or sudden anger. "Blind rage," they call it. It's a real thing.
"Don't listen. It's the demon," says Traven.
"Shut up."
Alice's voice comes out of Hunter's mouth again.
"Jim? I don't know where I am. An angel took me away and locked me up here. She said it was your fault. That you made her do it. I don't believe her, but I'm scared."
Hunter's body twitches.
"That's all you get of Little Miss Falling-Down-the-Rabbit-Hole for now."
"How did you find her?"
"Don't worry, Jimbo. She hasn't been here all along. Except for getting mixed up with you, Alice was a good girl and all good girls go to Heaven. But God isn't what he used to be. You should know that. So while good girls might get to Heaven, they don't always get to stay."
"Alice is what Aelita brought you."
"She dropped poor Alice here like a basket of muffins from the neighborhood welcome wagon."
"Why?"
He doesn't say anything for a long minute.
"Why? Because you made me do it," he says. "You could have come down here and we could have settled this like men, but you stayed up there with your quilting bee, drinking beer and getting soft. Now you have to come down and face me. Or not. You can always leave poor Alice alone down here with me. I know Kasabian can see us through the Codex, so you can see what happens like watching the Super Bowl in that bar you like." He smiles and takes a breath. "You thought Downtown was crazy when you were here? You ain't seen nothing, pal."
I start for the platform. Candy puts her hand on my shoulder. I shrug her off. She thinks I'm going to charge Hunter. I'm not. I just want to get close to see who I'm talking to.
Mason understands and kneels down so that we're eye to eye.
He says, "Now you have it. Your invitation. You have exactly three days from when I leave this body to find Alice and take her . . . well, I really don't care what you do with her. In the meantime, don't worry. She's in the safest place in town. The penthouse suite of the big asylum. Most of the inmates escaped weeks ago. The dangerous ones. Of course, the place is home to them, so they tend to wander back."
I can see him looking back at me through Hunter's eyes. No demon. It really is Mason.
"What's it going to be? Are you going to play my game or are you going to stay safe in L.A. playing Gary Cooper and wasting your time saving people who don't deserve it from things they'll never understand?"
I lean in close to Hunter's ear. Mason leans in to listen. I say a word in Hellion and he flies back, bouncing off the shield on the far side of the platform like he was hit with a sledgehammer. Vidocq and Candy get me from behind, throwing their full weight into me. Pulling me down. I let them. I don't want to kill Hunter because of what's inside him.
Mason staggers to his feet.
"You got me good, Jimbo. But that's all right. I'll take that as a yes. It'll be good to see you again."
He twitches.
"Jim? Are you still there? What's happening? I . . ."
And Alice is gone. Hunter collapses onto the platform. It's over.
Traven rubs away some of the binding hex marks. He and Vidocq lift Hunter from the platform and lay him out on the floor.
I'm stuck where I am. I feel a sucking sensation in my chest and for a second I can't breathe. Gradually I feel Candy's arms around me. I squeeze her hand and she lets me up.
Hunter is breathing. His eyes flicker open and closed. He doesn't look like he's going to drop dead this minute, but he's still pretty Linda Blair. Traven isn't looking so good either. He's pale and his neck is dark with bruises and broken blood vessels where Hunter grabbed him.
I pick Hunter up and tell Candy and Vidocq to help Traven.
"We're going out the fast way."
They get their arms around Traven's shoulders and steady him. Vidocq is closest to me, so I grab his arm and walk the few steps to the wall. We disappear into a shadow.
Come out again in the minimall parking lot. Pedestrians pass us on the way to their cars with take-out pizza and new manicures. A few of them stare. They must have seen us. Fuck 'em. The way we look, no one is going to tell anyone about it without a doctor shoving Thorazine down their throat.
We head across the lot for Kinski's old hoodoo clinic. The place Allegra has taken over. A sign on the door reads EXISTENTIAL HEALING. Vidocq gets out his cell and dials Allegra. I don't wait. I start pounding on the door.
A few good raps later, someone opens the doors looking pissed. It's Allegra. She looks at Hunter and her eyes narrow. Then she sees Vidocq and Candy holding up Father Traven.
"Jesus, Stark. You're like the Antichrist Santa Claus. Bring in the presents."
We get Hunter inside and on the exam table. Allegra takes over, looking at Hunter's eyes, shining a light into his blackened mouth. She turns and takes things out of a drawer. She presses one of them to Hunter's forehead. A silver crucifix. Nothing happens. Then she touches iron. Gold. A mixture of garlic and holy water. Nothing happens with any of them.
"Good," she says.
She rubs a yellowish salve on the inside of a mortar and tosses in thistle leaves, white ash bark, and things I can't identify. She holds a match to the gloop and the whole thing goes up in a whoosh of fire, leaving only ash. She dumps it into her hands and rubs the ashes across Hunter's forehead and eyes.
"Get me the glass, will you, Candy?" she says.
Traven is standing on his own now, so she leaves him and lifts several bundles of purple silk from a cabinet. Allegra takes one as Candy sets the rest on the exam table.
Allegra unwraps the first one and sets it over Hunter's heart. It looks like a heavy white stone. She sets other pieces of glass on Hunter's hands and diaphragm.
The stones are really pieces of ancient glass vessels saturated in divine light. Shards of the first stars. Kinski once used six of them to save Allegra. Now Allegra is the doctor, using them to save a kid she's never seen before and has no reason to care about. But she does it like she'd die, too, if the kid doesn't make it. It's a funny world.
Hunter shudders and opens his mouth. Vapor drifts from his mouth again, but it's the same gray now as the ash. Allegra nods.
"Whatever was in him is gone."
"You sure?"
She looks at me.
"I know what possession looks like. This one took more stones than usual. What was in him?"
I don't want to tell her. I'm feeling stupid and the last thing I want to do is have to hang around and explain anything.
"Candy and Vidocq can tell you."
"Well, whatever it was, it's gone now."
"Good."
She nods at Traven.
"What happened to him?"
"That's Father Traven, the exorcist. No hoodoo injuries. The demon just grabbed his throat and squeezed like it was trying to make orange juice."
Allegra looks past me at the father.
"Set him down in the lobby and let me get my instruments. I don't want to move the boy for a while."
Traven makes it to the lobby under his own steam, though Candy and I walk behind to catch him if he falls. He drops onto one of the plastic chairs. He leans forward, resting his face in his hands.
"I think I left my bag at that place," he says.
"Don't worry, Father. We'll retrieve it for you," says Vidocq.
I hand him Allegra's car keys.
"Sorry. I'd like to go back and get it, but I have things I need to do."
"I understand," he says. He looks at me like I'm ice and someone is about to toss boiling water on me. Will I explode or just melt?
He says, "We all heard what the demon said back at Avila. Don't do anything insane based on the word of a creature like that, Jimmy. They are masters of lies."
I shake my head.
"That wasn't the demon talking. That really was Mason. And he has Alice. I'm not going to do anything crazy. I'm going to do what I should have done all along."
"What?" he says, but I ignore the question.
"Call Hunter's parents," I say. "Tell them he's all right and give them the address. I need to go."
I catch Candy's eye and she follows me out into the parking lot.
"Where are you going?" she asks. There's a little catch in her voice.
I get close and say, "I know this is the most fucked situation I could have dragged you into, but I need to talk to someone. Please trust me. I'll meet you back at the hotel as soon as I can."
She looks up at me.
"You're coming back, right?"
"Of course."
"Promise."
"I promise."
She kisses me. I kiss her back, though in the back of my mind I'm already going to do what I have to do.
She takes a step back.
"You're going back, aren't you? Back to Hell."
"I don't have any choice. They snatched Alice out of Heaven because of me. I can't leave her down there."
Candy nods.
"I know. You have to do the right thing. Ride into the sunset and do your Good, the Bad and the Ugly thing. I think that's why I like you. You do the most fucked-up things for the best reasons."
"I'll see you back at the hotel. Scout's honor."
"Where are you going?"
"I need to talk to Mustang Sally."
BY THE TIME I make the corner, my hands are shaking. Even the angel is pissed, and that's not easy to do. I want someone to try to pick my pocket or pull a knife. I want an excuse. All I need is an excuse.
No one comes near me. I'm somewhere south of sanity right now and people can tell. Fuck it. I let the angel's senses reach out and read the street until they zero in on exactly the right car. It's stopped at a red light in front of me. Second from the front. A couple of gangbangers inside. They're either on their way to a drive-by or coming back from one. They're too high for the angel to be sure. That's good enough for me. I step into the stopped traffic and go around to the gangbangers' car, a red midfifties Bonneville lowrider. I put the .460 to the side of the driver's temple.
"Do you want to keep the car or your head?"
There are two tough guys in the back. Real bruiser types. As big as linebackers. One of them wants to go for his gun. He stinks of coiled tension. I cock the .460 pressed against the driver's head and pull him out through the window. Toss him one-handed onto the hood of the car next to us. He leaves a nice dent as he hits and slides off. By the time I swing the gun back to the two toughs, they're scrambling out the passenger side. I get in and rev the engine.
I don't care that it's broad daylight, that a hundred people are watching, and that the traffic cams on the stoplights are recording everything. I want witnesses. I want them to see so that when I drag them from their cars, put a bullet in the gas tank, and let the explosion torch the street, they'll understand.
"This is the world. This is how it is," I'll tell them. "Jesus might have died for your sins, but a girl is burning for them. I'd trade every one of your fucking lives for one minute of hers. Don't you dare pray for her. Twiddle your rosaries and pray for yourselves, because if she goes down, I'm the Colonel, the fryer's hot, and you're my barnyard chickadees."
But I don't say it. I take the car and go. There's no way I could get the words out right now. I probably would have stood there hissing and twitching. Just another homeless schizo. Then I'd set the intersection on fire with some Hellion hoodoo and none of them would understand why.
The light turns green and I cut off the car next to me and pull a squealing and massively illegal left off Sunset, steering the Bonneville onto side streets and away from the cops.
The dinky little neighborhood streets with their speed bumps and stop signs are molasses-at-the-South-Pole slow, but eventually I get to Fairfax, where I stop for gas. When the tank is full I go inside the station to the little grocery. There's nowhere else you can get food like this. The donuts taste like diesel vapor and you have to smother the microwave hamburgers with mustard and onions to cover the taste of cancer. I spent a fair amount of time in places like this before I went Downtown. They're a solvent-stained oasis for people who drink till the bars close and are too brain-fried to find a Denny's for the grease injection they hope will soak up the poison they've been swallowing all evening. Here everything is poison and so full of preservatives that it will live forever. This is junk-food Valhalla. I grab a plastic basket and prowl the aisles, filling it with the right mix of the sweetest, greasiest, most guaranteed-heart-attack stuff I can find.
I should have dealt with this long ago. How to get back Downtown now that Mason has pretty much made it impossible for me to get in. I hadn't counted on the little prick making friends so quick. He fast-talked his Hellion guards, their bosses, and their bosses' bosses, clawing and hoodooing his way up the Infernal food chain until he got to some of Lucifer's generals. With that kind of pull, it was easy for him to set up traps and guards at all my favorite entrances and exits in and out of Hell. And it's not like I can just pick a new entrance at random. Hell is a complicated place. I might come out in a swamp or the House of Burning Ice. And it's not like you can trust most of the maps of Hell. Lucifer was paranoid enough to put in fake landmarks and move mountains and towns around, so it's damned close to impossible to navigate outside the cities unless you already know where you're going. Or you have a guide. But I'm a little too famous down there to hop on a Gray Line tour bus and hope no one recognizes me.
I know every crawl space and backstreet in Pandemonium, but if Mason has Alice locked up in another city, I'll need help getting there. Hellions can be very cooperative if you pull out enough of their teeth, so I know I can get a guide. What I really fucking need is a fucking way in. There's only one person in L.A. who might know and who I trust enough to ask.
I take my basket of donuts, candy, chips, refrigerated burgers, and barbecue sandwiches up to the clerk. He's red-eyed and bored, trying to hide the Hustler he's been thumbing through the whole time I've been in the store. I let him take the stuff from my basket. My hands could get diabetes and a stroke just from touching the wrappers.
I say, "Throw in a carton of Luckies."
The kid sighs. I've ruined his day by asking him to turn around and pick up something.
"We don't sell cartons. Just packs."
"Then sell me ten packs and leave them in the box."
He thinks this over for a minute. I can hear the gears turning. The factory that runs his brain is spewing copious amounts of ganja fumes. Finally, he thinks of something that won't make him sound too stupid.
"You have any ID?"
"Do you really think I'm underage?"
He shrugs.
"No ID, no smokes."
I take two twenties from my pocket and slide them across the counter to him.
"There's my ID."
He has to think again. The workers are fleeing the factory. The boiler might blow.
The kid holds up the bills to see if they're counterfeit.
"Yeah, okay. Don't tell anyone."
"Who am I going to tell?"
He considers this for a moment, like it's a trick question, but it soon fades from his resin-clogged brain along with the state capitals and how to do math. He drops a carton of Luckies onto the pile of death snacks and rings them up, setting the well-thumbed Hustler on the counter as he counts out my change. Then realizes what he's done. He freezes. It looks like he might stay like that for the rest of the day.
I pick up my bag and say, "Keep the change. I respect a man who reads."
I go back to the Bonneville and set the bag on the passenger seat. Time to talk to the one person who might be able to help me get Downtown. Mustang Sally, the freeway sylph.
EVERY CITY HAS a Mustang Sally. Every town and jungle village with a dirt path. She's a spirit of the road, an old and powerful one. If you add up all the freeways, the county and city roads, in and around L.A., it means Sally controls twenty thousand miles of intense territory. And that doesn't even count the ghost roads and ley lines.
I steer the Bonneville onto the shoulder of the 405, the freeway that runs along Sepulveda Boulevard, the longest street in L.A. I break open the carton of Luckies, take out a pack, and slice it open with the black blade. I slide across the front seat and get out on the passenger side. This would be a lousy time to die.
Traffic blasts past at sixty per hour and no one even glances in my direction as I walk behind the car and scratch Mustang Sally's sigil into the freeway concrete. When I'm done I stand in the center of the mark, take out a Lucky, and light up. Passing cars pull the smoke in their direction, like it wants to follow them down the road. I smoke and wait.
Mustang Sally has been cruising L.A.'s roads twenty-four/seven since they were nothing more than mud paths, horse tracks, and wagon ruts. As far as I know, she never sleeps and never stops except when someone leaves an offering. For the last hundred years she's been through every kind of car you can name. Of course, she never has to stop for gas. Sally eats, but only road food. Things you can find in gas-station markets and vending machines. She doesn't need to eat. She just likes it. It's like me and stealing cars. Sometimes you just want to feel ordinary. Like a person. She eats. I drive.
Twenty minutes later, a silver-and-black Shelby Cobra pulls onto the shoulder a few yards behind me. I stomp out of her emblem and hold the Lucky out to her.
Sally is taller than I remember. Taller than someone who spent all day and night comfortably in a compact sports car. Her hair is dark. Maybe jet black with blue highlights. She's dressed in a white evening gown and the highest spike heels this side of the Himalayas. I don't know how she drives in those things. She walks over to me slowly, sizing me up. She's running the show, and making me wait is part of it. She has on a pair of soft white calfskin driving gloves. From one hand dangles a small clasp purse rimmed in gold. She's every bit a goddess except for one thing. She's wearing what looks like a pair of round glasses with smoked lenses; the kind the blind wore a hundred years ago. They break up the goddess look. Like the Mona Lisa with a lip ring.
When we're just a couple of feet apart, she stops, peels off the driving gloves, and drops them into the clasp bag. She takes the cigarette from my hand and inhales deeply, letting the smoke drift slowly from her nostrils.
"Unfiltered. You sweet boy."
I wonder what's behind those dark glasses. I swear, even in daylight I can see a faint glow from underneath the lenses. She could be sporting twin suns or headlights back there. You would not want to aim your road rage at this woman.
Mustang Sally cocks her head and stares at me for a few seconds.
"I know you. The charming Frenchman introduced us."
She has a low, purring smoker's voice, the kind you can almost feel in your chest when she speaks.
"You've got a good memory. That was my friend Vidocq. He was looking for Mickey the Hammer's grave and figured that since you'd been everywhere and see everything, you might have noticed where he was buried."
"Yes. He's an alchemist and Mickey was . . . what? A tracker? He left me a few offerings, too."
"Mickey was a scoria hound. He could trace anyone or anything through its trail in the aether. I guess he found the wrong person because he ended up dead. People said he was buried with a scroll explaining how to do it. You told Vidocq where to find his grave."
"And did he find what he was looking for?"
"The body was where you said it would be, but someone got there before us and picked it clean. It cost Vidocq a lot of donuts to find that body."
She shrugs and gazes out at the traffic.
"That's the way of the road. It's gas, gab, or food. Nobody rides for free."
I go back to the bike and bring her the bag of snacks. Sally smiles when she sees it. I hold it out to her. She doesn't take it. Just pulls the edge of the bag with a fingernail and looks inside.
"My. You must be looking for a diamond as big as the Ritz." She smiles a tiger's smile. "Put it in the car and ask your question."
I go to where she's parked. The Cobra's seats are perfect. They look brand-new, but she must have logged thousands of miles in the thing. The only thing that gives away she lives and eats there is the trail of litter that stretches out behind the car for as long as I can see. Cookie boxes. Cellophane from around snack cakes. Crushed cigarette packs. Sally marks her territory and no one stops her. Not CHP. Not cops. No one.
I get back just as she grinds out the cigarette with the toe of one delicate shoe.
"I need a back door into Hell," I say. "A way in that no one will notice."
She curls her lips into a half smile.
"Sneaking into Hell. That's old magic. Beginning-of-the-world stuff. Back when the different planes of existence weren't so far apart that the residents of one don't even believe in the existence of the other."
"Is that a problem?"
"It depends on how you want to go in. There are places where this twelve-lane Möbius strip is the Hell parents tell kids they'll end up in if they don't behave. There are other places where this is Heaven."
She smiles.
"You don't want to go in that way. It's too unpredictable."
"Are there other ways in?"
"Don't be in such a rush. Give a lady a moment to think."
She takes another Lucky from the pack. I light it with Mason's lighter. As she breathes in the smoke, I swear the glow behind her sunglasses brightens.
"Nice car," I say.
"Thanks. It's pretty but it might be time to trade it in. It's getting too noticeable. These days, if you own something long enough, it becomes vintage and everybody wants one. In my day, when something was old, it was just old."
"I bet it handles these roads well."
She shrugs, unimpressed.
"Each road has its own way of going. You should have seen those few scratches in the dirt in the Fertile Crescent. The first roads that called me into being. Back then a decent pair of sandals was high tech."
She holds out the Luckies. I hesitate.
"It's all right," she says. "Half the job of being a spirit is knowing when to share."
I take the cigarette. She pulls a gold lighter from her bag and sparks the Lucky for me.
When she drops the lighter back in the bag, she says, "Do you know what it is you're asking? Do you have any concept of what Hell is?"
"I spent eleven years Downtown, so, yeah, I have a pretty good idea."
That gets her attention. She gives me a slow once-over with her eyes or whatever it is behind those glasses.
I say, "I was alive. The only living thing that's ever been down there and sure as Hell the only living thing that's ever crawled out."
"Oh. That's you. The monster who kills monsters."
Her body relaxes like we're chatting each other up in a bar.
"What a relief. For a minute there, I was afraid you were a ghost. I don't like doing business with the dead. They leave pitiful offerings."
"I guess being all disembodied would make you a little skittish."
"That's not the half of it. Ghosts are whiners. When they don't like the answer I give them, some even try haunting me. Me. Can you imagine how annoying it is to have a ghost moaning away in your car? I banish them to road structures. Overpasses or cloverleafs. Let them watch the living go by for a hundred years or so and see if that improves their manners."
"I wonder if the bums that live in underpasses know they're pissing on the dead?"
Mustang Sally looks at me hard.
"Why do you want to go back? Escaping once was quite a feat. Are you trying to become famous by doing it twice?"
"I'm going to find a friend who shouldn't be there. And then I'm going to kill someone. If I have time, maybe I'll stop a war or two."
That makes her laugh. A full-throated husky howl.
"You're not frivolous. But you might be crazy."
"My friends wouldn't argue that point, so I won't either."
"This friend you're going to rescue, is she your lover?"
"Yeah."
Sally looks out at the road. Heat reflects off it, making the cars in the distance soft and dreamlike.
"Do you know what most people ask me when I stop for them?"
She waits. I'm supposed to ask the question.
"What?"
"You'd think it would be about where to find the boy who got away or the girl they left behind. But no. They want to know where they should go to be happy. How can I possibly answer that? The road isn't here to make you happy. It's here so you can find your own way. Because they bring me cigarettes, they expect me to cure their misery."
"What do you say?"
"I tell them to go to a gas station and buy the biggest map they can find. It doesn't matter if it's the city, the state, or the world. I tell them to open it, close your eyes, and drop your finger somewhere on the map. That's where you'll find what you're looking for."
"Running off into the unknown can sure clear your head. It sounds like pretty good advice."
"Thank you."
I smoke the cigarette as a highway-patrol car slows down and gives us the once-over. Sally throws the driver a tiny backhanded wave. The patrol cop's eyes go blank. He turns his attention back to the road and drives on.
"Any thoughts on my problem?" I ask.
"Yes. What you want isn't all that hard to do, but it isn't easy if you get my meaning. What you need is a Black Dahlia."
"And that means what?"
"You're going to have to die. And not a going-gentle-into-that-good-night death. It's going to be messy."
Story of my life.
"I was hoping for something a little more in the hocus-pocus area. Getting Downtown dead and being stuck there kind of defeats the purpose of my coming to you."
She flicks the Lucky butt out onto the road. It flies in a perfect arc like a falling star. Marking her territory so more cops won't bother us.
"Silly boy. I said you had to die. I didn't say you'd be dead. Dying is just the offering you make to gain passage. Once you're on the other side, the debt is paid and you'll be you again."
"How violent are we talking about? I mean is the word 'entrails' involved?"
"Your death doesn't have to be quite as baroque as poor Elizabeth Short's Black Dahlia. A car accident should do it. At a crossroads, of course."
"Is there anything I need to do?"
"You'll need to carry an item worn by or touched by someone who suffered a violent death. Anything will do. A photo. A class ring. If the friend you want to find died violently, that's perfect. Get something of hers. Keep it close so it's touching your skin as you pass through. Love and death. There's no more powerful combination."
That's good news, but which of Alice's things should I bring with me? Maybe something she'd miss. Or is it too mean to remind her of her life here? On the other hand, it feels a little lame to bring the TV remote or her toothbrush.
"How do I find the right crossroads?"
"Elizabeth Short was murdered near Leimert Park. There was a nice crossroads there, but it's all suburbs now. Why don't you try the I-10 underpass at Crenshaw? That's a decent little crossroads. All you need to do is hit the accelerator and run the car into one of the concrete freeway supports. I'll be close by to give you a little push to the other side."
"Thanks. I appreciate it."
She nods and strolls to her car. I follow her over. She digs through the bag of snacks and comes up with a packet of jelly beans. She rips it open, offers me one, and when I shake my head, she spears one with a fingernail, takes it off with her teeth, and chews. She reaches into the packet, pushing the jelly beans around, looking for a specific one.
She says, "I'm only doing this because while you might be crazy, you're not stupid. You don't think you're Orpheus and can bring your friend back to the world of the living. That means you're willing to die and cross over to the worst place in Creation for someone you love but can never truly have. That's the kind of thing that can give even an old thing like me goose bumps."
"To tell you the truth, I'd rather be back running Max Overdrive."
"No, you wouldn't. You're like me. One of the night people. I'm the road. I give life and I take it. People like us don't get to close our eyes to the world and live cozy mortal lives."
Two men's faces slide into my memory. My real father, Kinski, a has-been archangel, and the father who raised me. One of the faces fades away. It's the other, not-quite-human one that stays.
"You make it sound so doomed and romantic. We should all be drinking absinthe as we die of consumption."
She shrugs her pretty shoulders.
"It's what you allow it to be. You can find beauty and joy in the dark places just as easily as civilians find comfort in the glow of their TVs. But you have to allow yourself to do it. Otherwise . . ."
"Otherwise what?"
"Otherwise, ten years from now, you'll be stopping me and asking a foolish question and I'll end up sending you to a gas station to buy a map."
"Ow. When you put it that way, Hell sounds just about right."
Sally touches my cheek. Her hand is warm, like the furnace burning behind her shades.
"Be a rock, James. Otherwise, you'll lose everything."
"How did you know my name was James?"
She swallows another jelly bean.
"It's just a trick I can do."
I shake my head.
"You sound like the Veritas sometimes."
"One of those little Hellion luck coins that insults you when you ask a question? I hope I'm not that mean."
"No. But what the hell does 'Be a rock' mean? It sounds like the kind of hoodoo warning that never actually means what it says."
Mustang Sally puts the jelly beans back in the bag.
"I always say what I mean."
She takes the white driving gloves out of her purse and puts them on. "Just like I always signal when I change lanes. I can't help if you don't see me coming and end up in a ditch."
Like a Howard Hawks freeway femme fatale, Mustang Sally slings the little purse over one shoulder and gets back in her car, revs the engine, and peels out. She blows me a kiss as she speeds by.