Devil Said Bang (4 page)

When I’m done I pull on black suit pants, a silk
T-shirt, and a hotel robe thick enough to stop bullets. The black blade goes in
one pocket and Ukobach’s gun in the other. Then over to the dresser for a quick
check of the bottom drawer. There’s the singularity, Mr. Muninn’s secret weapon
to restart the universe if Mason or I broke it. There’s my na’at, my favorite
weapon when I was fighting in the arena. And there’s the little snub-nose .38 I
brought with me from L.A. One bullet is missing from the cylinder. The one I
tricked Mason Faim into blowing through his head three months ago. That’s when
Saint James, my angel half, took the key I need to leave Hell and left me
stranded here. To tell the truth, I’m glad the goody-goody prick is out of my
head. But I’d take him back in a second if it would get me the key.

The bedroom doors swing open and Brimborion walks
in with a fistful of envelopes and messages. He’s something else I never wanted
in my life. A personal assistant, which is to say a professional asshole who
knows more about me than I do.

“What did I tell you about barging in here without
knocking?”

“If I didn’t barge in, I’d never find you.”

“That’s the idea.”

Brimborion looks fairly human except he’s as skinny
as a grasshopper, with limbs and fingers long enough to pluck a quarter from the
bottom of a fifth of Jack. He dresses in dark high-collar suits like he fell out
of a Dickens story right onto the stick up his ass. He also wears round wire-rim
glasses. I think it’s those glasses that really make me hate him. What a weird
choice for an affectation. I mean, whoever heard of a nearsighted angel?

I say, “How did you even get in here?”

He rolls his eyes heavenward.

“You mean those pretty doodads you scratched above
the doors? I’m your personal assistant. I need to be able to follow you
anywhere.”

He unbuttons his shirt and pulls out a heavy gold
talisman hanging from a chain around his neck.

“I have a passkey. It opens any door in the palace
no matter how many wards or enchantments are on it.”

“Nice. Where can I get one?”

“I’m afraid this is the only one.”

“Maybe I should take it.”

“Feel free, my lord,” he says. “And don’t worry.
I’ll do my best to suppress the scandal.”

“What scandal?”

“The one about how the Lord of the Underworld, the
Archfiend, the Great Beast is afraid of a glorified secretary. I hate to think
what your enemies would make of that.”

I want to stack cinder blocks on this four-eyed
fuckpop until he explodes. He opens his eyes a tiny bit wider behind the fake
glass in his fake glasses and stares.

But the little prick has a point. Until I’m up to
Samael’s full strength, I don’t want ambitious peasants storming the castle with
pitchforks and torches.

I reach for the letters and messages, closing my
hand around his. I squeeze. Not hard enough to break bone. Just enough to remind
him I could if I wanted.

I let up and take my messages. He massages his
fingers but doesn’t say anything.

“Learn to knock and we can go back to being BFFs.
Got it?”

“Of course, my lord.”

He does a tiny bow and leaves.

I remember when I was out drinking with Vidocq in
L.A. he introduced me to another old-time thief. He said the best way to deal
with lock pickers is the simplest. You take all the furniture you can and stack
it up so it’s perfectly balanced against the top of the door. Anyone who tries
to get in will get a dresser or a rocking chair on their head. If you want to
fancy things up, you can add a bucket of lye dissolved in water. The real trick
is remembering to tell the maid before she comes in the next morning.

I take the na’at out of the dresser and put it
under the pillows at the head of the bed. Stacking furniture sounds like too
much work.

I toss the messages in the fireplace. Infernal
bureaucrats can kiss my ass.

I head down to the library.

T
his
is my Fort Knox, my office, and my panic room. I’ve laid the heaviest protective
hoodoo I know around this place. Of all the hideouts I ever thought of running
to when things got weird, a library was right behind a leper colony and a
burning garbage truck. But here I am.

I haven’t paced the place off, but the library
looks about a football field long, lined with two floors of books in
hundred-foot stretches of ornate dark wood shelves. The ceiling is domed and
painted with scenes illustrating the three tenets of the Hellion church. The
Thought: God and Lucifer arguing that if humans have free will so should angels.
The Act: the war. It’s pretty but stiff and trying too hard to look noble, like
a Soviet propaganda poster. The New World: Lucifer and his defeated, punch-drunk
Bowery boys in Hell. He looks like a tent revival preacher selling snake oil to
rubes, but in his own fucked-up way, the slippery son of a bitch is trying to do
right by his people.

I’ve made myself a comfortable squat over by a wall
of the Greek wall, the stuff Samael told me to read. In a copy of a
half-falling-apart
Reader’s Digest
–condensed
large-print book on Greek history, I found his notes. (It’s embarrassing that he
knows me well enough that he left the info in a book written for shut-ins and
half-blind grandmas.) He included names of people I could think about for the
Council. If
they’re
the Hellions I can trust, I’m
not ready to meet the ones I can’t.

I dragged a plush red sofa trimmed in gold, a big
partner’s desk, and a few chairs over to my squat. Sometimes I even let people
in to use the chairs. Not many and not often, but anyone who comes in is on my
turf. I know which carpets cover binding circles. I know which books are
hollowed out and stuffed with knives and killing potions.

The desk and nearby shelves are covered with books,
paper, pens, and weird little machines. Stuff you can only find at an Office
Depot doubling as a night school for amateur torturers. There’s a spongy red
clamshell that growls when you squeeze it and spits out what I think pass for
Hellion staples. They’re sharp and thick, like they’re designed to punish the
paper and not just hold it together. There’s something that looks like a set of
brass teeth. The teeth chatter sometimes. Sometimes they don’t do anything for
days. There’s a gyroscope that when you spin it talks in a deep monster-movie
voice in a language I’ve never heard before. On one of the bookshelves is a gold
armillary sphere. When I touch any of the golden rings, I feel like I’ve fallen
out of myself. Like I’m nowhere and being pushed through empty space by a
freezing hurricane. There are stars far away and beyond them a mass of pale
boiling vapor streaked with lighting. I think it’s the chaos at the edge of the
universe and that this is the deep void that separates Hell and Heaven. Wherever
and whatever it is, it’s a lonely and desolate place.

In L.A., I lived with a dead man named Kasabian who
worked for Lucifer and could see into parts of Hell. I don’t know if he can see
me here, but sometimes I scrawl notes and leave them on the desk for days. Some
are to friends. Most are to Candy. We’re a lot alike. Neither of us is quite
human. And we’re both killers. We try to forget about the first as much as
possible and try to avoid the second as much as we can, which, the way things
are, usually isn’t long.

There’s a click behind me. I put my hand on my
knife and turn.

Two Hellions come in through a false section of
bookcase that slides away like Japanese paper doors.

Merihim, the priest, bows. He’s in sleeveless black
robes. Every inch of his pale face and arms is tattooed with sacred Hellion
script. Spells, prayers, and, for all I know, a recipe for chicken vindaloo.

The guy with him, Ipos, is big and blunt. Like a
walking fire hydrant in gray rubber overalls. The heavy leather belt around his
waist holds tools that range from barbarian crushers to delicate
surgical-quality instruments. From a distance you can’t tell if he’s the
palace’s maintenance chief or head torturer. His job in the palace makes him a
useful agent. No one pays attention to the janitor.

“Did we interrupt playtime with your toys, my
lord?” asks Merihim.

“Go harass an altar boy, preacher. I’m
working.”

On a table near the sofa there’s a line of peepers
projecting images from around the palace onto an old-fashioned home movie screen
I found in a storeroom. I pop out my right eye, drop it into a glass of water,
and stick a peeper in the empty socket, rolling back the images the eye picked
up like a video rewinding. Like I said, I have a few of Lucifer’s powers but
mostly Vegas magic-act stuff.

“What are you looking for?” asks Ipos. His voice is
a low rumble, like an idling sixteen-wheeler.

“The front of the palace where I dumped the bodies
of three bushwhacking assholes. I want to see what happened after I came
inside.”

Merihim and Ipos are the only two Hellions who can
walk in here on their own. They were Samael’s confidants and spies and I
inherited them with the gig. I don’t think Samael would have lasted as long as
he did without them. I know I wouldn’t still be here.

I roll back to where I came inside and let the
peeper play. The officer I talked to barks orders at the troops who are about
thirty seconds from a soccer riot trying to get a look at Ukobach and his dead
friends. The officer orders most back to their duties and others to take the
three bodies to the gibbets. A young officer comes over. They walk along the
gory trail where I dragged in the bodies. I try to read their lips but they’re
too damned far away.

“I see by your hands you were hurt in the attack,”
says Merihim. “I’ll send for a healer from the tabernacle. I daresay they’re
more discreet than the palace medical staff.”

“I’m fine. All the bastards did was murder my
jacket. It was a nice one too.”

I switch my eyes back, pour myself a shot of Aqua
Regia, and hold out the bottle. Merihim shakes his head and walks away. He does
that. Prowls the room when we meet. I’ve never seen the guy sit down. Ipos nods
for a drink and picks up a glass with his big bratwurst fingers. When I start to
pour, he flinches.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and nods in my direction.

“The arm, my lord. Would you mind? It’s
. . . distracting.”

I flex my prosthetic Kissi hand. The Kissi were a
race of deformed, half-finished angels that lived in the chaos on the edge of
Creation. One of God’s first great fuckups while creating the universe. Kissis
give Hellions the shakes. I think they see themselves in those other failed
angels. It reminds them that even in Hell you can always fall lower.

I dig around in the desk and find a glove. This
time he takes a drink. He carries it to the sofa and sits down. I sit on the
desk. Merihim prowls.

“Thank you, my lord,” says Ipos.

“Stop with the ‘my lord’ stuff. It bugs me.”

“Sorry.”

Merihim smiles, leaning over the peepers. Projected
images from around the palace flicker on the screen like a silent movie.

“What’s up with you?” I ask.

“Nothing. It’s always amusing watching you pretend
you’re not who you really are.”

“I’m only interning in Hell for college credit.
When I find the right replacement, I’m gone, Daddy, gone.”

“Of course you are. Why would you want any
influence over the creation of a new Hell? Or care about the welfare of the
millions of mortal souls you’ll be leaving behind? I wonder if Mr. Hickok will
be allowed to keep his tavern or will he be thrown back into Butcher Valley? But
what do you care? ‘All are equal in the grave.’ Isn’t that what you living
mortals say?”

“Keep talking, smart guy. I’ll fake a heart attack
and make you Lucifer. Let’s see how you like whitewashing this outhouse with a
target painted on the back of your bald head.”

Ipos glances at the priest.

“It would probably look better than all the
scribbling.”

Merihim gives him a sharp look, flips through the
pages of an ancient Hellion medical book, and sets it down.

“Someone has found out about your habit of riding
alone and what routes you take. You can’t ever ride like that again.”

“I know. There’s something else.”

I take out the Glock and set it on the desk.

“Where did these pricks get guns? Only officers get
to carry weapons these days.”

Merihim frowns and crosses his arms.

“We need to find out—very discreetly—if there are
any officers who can’t account for their weapons.”

“There are merchants who sell stolen weapons in the
street markets. I can get people on the road repair crews. They might see or
hear something,” Ipos says.

Merihim nods.

“Good.”

“Wait. It gets even better. I checked the attacker
who lived. He’d been hexed. He might not have even known what he was doing.”

“An enthrallment?” says Merihim. That gets his
attention. He comes back to the desk. “That’s not a power many in Pandemonium
would possess. I doubt that any of the officers could do it.”

“Maybe the bastard bribed one of the palace
witches,” says Ipos.

“I think whoever set up the attack tried to hex me
too. After I dumped the bike, I couldn’t think or fight or defend myself. I’ve
been in plenty of wrecks and it didn’t feel like a concussion. It felt like
someone was trying to get inside my head.”

Merihim starts wandering again.

“It makes sense. One, Mason Faim created a key that
allows him to possess bodies. Two, the key is missing. Three, according to you,
it works on mortals. Four, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t work on
Hellions too. That means whoever arranged your attack either has the key or is
in league with whoever does.”

Ipos says, “I suppose if any of us would be hard to
possess, it would be Lucifer. They probably won’t try it on you again.”