“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’hol didnt 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.&000ple I k#x201D;
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.
“As w0">mmit 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 busiounis drugness, 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.