Devil Said Bang (5 page)

“This might not be an assassination attempt at
all,” says Merihim. “An isolated ambush would be a good way to cover up a
psychic experiment. If your attackers killed you, all the better. If you killed
your attackers, the only evidence would be the corpses of a few rogue
soldiers.”

“That makes sense. It’s one thing to kill Lucifer
but another to spellbind him,” says Ipos. “You could make him do anything.
Something unforgivable.”

“Which means I get to live this little drama all
over again.”

Ipos nods. Merihim picks up the gyroscope from the
desk and spins it the wrong way. The ominous voice comes out high and weird. A
demonic Alvin and the Chipmunks.

“Definitely,” says Ipos.

“And it will be both subtler and more serious. We
have access to potion makings in the tabernacle. I’ll personally prepare some
draughts to protect you from psychic attack.”

“What I want to know is why now?” say Ipos. “After
all this time, why would someone attack you?”

I shrug.

“Maybe someone caught me counting cards.”

Merihim says, “Something has changed. They’ve
discovered something or they’re afraid you will, and they need to kill you
before you discover it too.”

I say, “It’s the possession key. Mason wasn’t
exactly generous with information. He created the key and wouldn’t want anyone
else using it, so it’s not like there’s going to be a user manual lying around.
Maybe it’s taken this long for whoever has it to figure out how it works.”

Merihim waves off the comment.

“Perhaps. Speculation is pointless. We need to
contact our operatives among the legions and the palace thaumaturgy staff to see
what they can find.”

“Did anything interesting happen at the Council
meeting?” says Ipos.

“Not really. Marchosias wanted to fuck me in her
limo to annoy the others. I called Buer a Nazi and sent them all home to watch a
silent movie about good architecture and a mad scientist.”

“It sounds charming,” says Merihim.

“There’s even a robot.”

“A masterpiece, then.”

Ipos says, “We should get to work.”

He sets his glass on the desk, holds it there, and
pushes on it. The desk rocks a fraction of an inch up and down.

“I thought so. You wore down one of the legs
dragging it over. I’ll fix that the next time we meet.”

“I can just stick a matchbook under it.”

He looks at me.

“No, you can’t. You might run the kingdom but I
maintain the palace. This is my domain.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Wizard.”

After they’re gone, I sit down at the desk and
light a Malediction. Toss the Glock into the bottom drawer of the desk. I don’t
like Glocks. They’re the gun equivalent of a middle-aged guy buying a
Porsche.

From the top drawer I take out a shiny silver
Veritas. The coin is a useful little pocket oracle. Another Veritas helped me
survive my first few days when I first escaped back to L.A. The Veritas sees the
present and the near future and never lies, though sometimes it’s a little shit
about it.

I flip it and think, What now?

It comes down showing the image of a man pouring
money into a woman’s hands. I’ve seen the symbol before. A hooker and her
customer. Around the coin’s edge, in perfect Hellion script, it reads,
Don’t make any long-term investments. Have a good time
now.
That’s what I mean. The little prick could have just said,
You’re doomed,
but it likes showing off.

I toss the Veritas back in the desk, pick up a
book, and lie down on the sofa. I’m reading a chapter about a Greek philosopher
named Epicurus. The guy was a kind of depressed swinger. Imagine the Playboy
Mansion run by Mr. Rogers. Epicurus was all about pleasure but in a stingy
eat-your-vegetables-or-you-won’t-get-any-dessert kind of way.

A lot of this philosophy stuff puts me right to
sleep, but Epicurus must have been able to see into the future when people like
me can’t read more than a paragraph without checking our e-mail because he spit
out the important stuff short and sweet. It’s called the Tetrapharmakos and it’s
a kind of a PowerPoint list to fix whatever ails you. It goes:

Don’t fear
God

Don’t worry about
death

What is good is easy to
get and

What is terrible is easy
to endure

He got it at least half right. That’s better than
most people.

“Don’t fear God.” No problem. I met the guy. He had
a nervous breakdown and is broken into more pieces than me.

“Don’t worry about death.” I died a couple of times
already. It was boring.

“What is good is easy to get.” Here’s where
Epicurus’s head starts disappearing up his own ass. This seems to be a common
problem with philosophers.

“What is terrible is easy to endure.” Try being
born half angel and half human, pal. A nephilim violates all the rules of the
universe. I was born an Abomination, the only thing alive hated by Heaven, Hell,
and Earth. Try that on for size and tell me how easy it is to endure, you
grape-leaf-eating son of a bitch.

I drop the book on the floor. This is all Samael’s
fault. I should have guessed that part of my torture in Hell would be having to
read. L.A. was a lot more fun. Stealing cars, ripping out zombies’ spines, and
getting shot at. Good times.

I get up and scrawl a note in big block letters and
leave it on the desk in case Kasabian can see it.

CANDY. I MISS YOU.
STARK.

Lucifer’s library has a pretty limited fiction
section. I push around the pile of books by the sofa until I find
The Trial
by Franz Kafka. It’s about a guy on trial
for something he doesn’t understand, accused by people he can’t find. It’s
fucking hilarious. It might not be my first choice for how to spend an evening,
but it’s better than going back to the Greeks. I don’t need another morality
lecture from a dead guy. I’ve been getting those half my life.

M
y
eyes snap open a few hours later. I sit up. I don’t even remember falling
asleep. I get up and check the peepers.

After-hours flunkies sorting and filing endless
piles of palace paperwork. Soldiers patrolling the grounds. Cleaners trying to
get blood and gravel out of the lobby carpets. All expected. All boring.
Good.

In L.A., I used to dream about Hell. In Hell, I
dream about L.A., but it doesn’t make me any less homesick. Home in my dreams
isn’t home. I see the city turning soft and sinking into the desert. Whole
neighborhoods are swallowed or just wink out of existence. The sky is black and
bruised like Hell’s, and then turns normal again. Sometimes instead of fighting
in the arena, my arena dreams turn into a floodlit Hollywood and Vine.

This time I’m circling a Hellion roughly the size
and shape of a locomotive. I have to fight with a rusty junkyard na’at while
Casey Jones has a shield and a Vernalis, a kind of steel crab claw the size of
your average go-go dancer. A bunch of red leggers, freelance raiders and
looters, hoot and cheer for blood.

We drive each other back and forth across the
killing floor. I slip one of his attacks and get in close. Just as I’m about to
open him up like a can of pork and beans, my na’at jams. It was rigged and the
Hellion knew it. The next thing I know, I’m on my knees screaming. There’s a wet
sound as the Vernalis slices through meat and crunches through bone. When I look
down, my left arm is lying in the intersection next to a three-month-old
People
magazine.

And that’s not even the worst dream. The worst are
when I wake up sweating from nightmares about city-planning meetings. Swear to
God. I dream about signing papers. I dream about progress reports on freeway
repairs. About digging through mile-high piles of office supplies for Post-its
and paper clips. I’m a magician, an ex-gladiator, a killer, and now the Devil
himself and my greatest night terrors revolve around lost memos and trying to
remember the Hellion word for “incentivize.”

Some nights I swear I’m tempted to sneak back to
the arena and step in for a couple of fights, like a junkie looking for one more
fix. It’s sick, I know. Yeah, it’s misery, but it’s a familiar kind and
sometimes that’s as close to happy as I’ll get down here.

No wonder Samael took a powder. For all his talk
about going home to make up with the old man, he was really running away from
eternal damnation as a salaryman. I didn’t figure out until I was doing it that
this is Lucifer’s damnation. The Light Bringer reduced to riding herd on bank
clerks. It was worse than any torture.

I get up and pour myself a drink. Throw the robe
over the back of a chair and slip the black blade behind my back. I leave
through the fake bookshelves and head downstairs to the kennels.

I
t’s
afternoon and the senior planning staff is waiting in the palace meeting room.
The place looks like Bring Your Clown to Work Day at a Masonic lodge. The slick
suits and Hellion power dresses aren’t the problem. It’s everything else they’re
wearing. Ceremonial aprons covered with old runes. A morbid rainbow of colored
scarves and gloves showing everyone’s place in the food chain. Blinders.
Gaggers. Masks.

They’re all giving me the pig eye as I roll in. I
take my time getting to the head of the table. The dirty looks aren’t just
because I’m late. I’ll always be that sheep-killing dog Sandman Slim to most of
them, and now, just to rub their ugly noses in it, I’m their boss. At least the
armor is doing its job. No matter how much they hate me, they keep their hex
holes shut with my devil armor shining like the mirrored belly of a chrome
wasp.

There are twelve on the planning committee. With me
there’s thirteen. A cozy little coven. Buer is there. So are Marchosias and
Obyzuth. Semyazah would be here but none of the generals will put up with this
shit.

Technically I’m supposed to be in ritual drag too
but I have a hard time picturing Samael dressed up like a Brooks Brothers Pied
Piper, so I follow his example and skip the wardrobe call.

There’s a silver circle in the center of the table.
Lines radiate out to the edges, cutting the table into twelve sections. Each
trick-or-treater steps up and sets down a different ceremonial object. The junk
looks like leftovers from a Goth-club garage sale.

Obyzuth sets down a green rock, like a Templar
meditation stone. The Hellion next to her sets down an athame knife that cuts
through ignorance or butters magic toast or something. Buer drops a snake carved
from the leg bone of a fallen Hellion warrior. It goes on and on like that. I’m
supposed to light a red candle at the end of the ritual but things are going too
slow. I fire it up now and light a Malediction off it.

“Don’t take it personally, but if I have to sit
through one more of these meetings, I’m going to gut every one of you like
catfish, shit in your skulls, and mail them to your families. This isn’t Hell.
It’s a PTA meeting. Maybe all we need to save Hell is a bake sale.”

I flick my ashes over the candle.

“Here’s how it is from now on. Do your projects any
way you want. Fuck the budgets. Fuck the schedules. When it’s done, you get one
minute to tell me about it.”

The room is silent. It’s not like regular silence.
More like the kind you get with a concussion.

“In case anyone thinks letting you off the leash is
a license to steal or stab me in the back, let me introduce the newest member of
our team.”

I go to the doors and open them. A hellhound clanks
in on its big metal claws and looks over the room. The hound is bigger than a
dire wolf, a clockwork killing machine run by a Hellion brain suspended in a
glass globe where its head should be. They’re terrifying on a battlefield but in
an enclosed space like this, the whirs and clicks of its mechanics, its razor
teeth and pink, exposed brain, are enough to give a tyrannosaurus a heart
attack.

The hound follows me around the table, folds up its
legs, and settles down on the floor next to me. A dutiful guard dog.

“This is Ms. 45. The new head of HR. Any of you
upstanding citizens that do less than your best work, conspire against me, or
sell supplies to the black market can explain it to her. She works nights,
weekends, and holidays, and if she’s indisposed, Ms. 45 has a few hundred
colleagues downstairs. In fact, the hounds now have the run of the palace, so
watch your step. I hear stainless-steel turds stain bad.”

No one says anything. Besides the hellhound, the
only sound is people restlessly moving their feet.

“Now get to work and leave me the fuck alone.”

All twelve of them file out, right into the other
two hounds I stationed outside. It would have been a hoot programming them to
eat each Council member as they left. A little counterproductive, though. I need
them to do the work I’m sure not going to do. But if I can’t have a little fun
being the Devil, why bother?

Now I can get back to figuring out the rest of
Lucifer’s power so I can get the hell out of here.

I
’ve
made circuit after circuit of the empty parts of the hotel. I know Lucifer won’t
leave me hanging on half power forever. He likes games. I know there are clues
for me around somewhere. But I don’t know all the rules of the game, so I might
be looking right at one without knowing it.

When he left he said he’d come back if I ever
really needed him. I haven’t heard a goddamn word since. I’ve tried to get a
message through to Mr. Muninn. He’s the one guy on Earth I
know
could come down here if he wanted. I guess he doesn’t. I know
why and we’re going to have to have a long talk about it when I get home.

Saint James would have a plan but I’m just prowling
relentless, hypnotic halls, floor by floor looking for clues. The windowless
corridors could be anywhere. In space on a rocket circling the edge of the
universe. Or Donald Trump’s diamond-encrusted submarine at the bottom of the
Marianas Trench.