Muninn doesn’t look surprised to see me.
“Would you like a drink, son?”
“Sure. Am I dead?”
He just smiles and wags a finger at me.
I look at Samael.
“No wonder you never went up against Aelita. You can’t even work tweezers.”
He nods and sips from a crystal champagne glass.
“Lovely to see you too, Jimmy. How’s tricks?”
“Is this real? Am I here? Are you there?”
“Real is a relative thing for people like us. What’s real? What’s here? What’s there? Things are as real and as where as you want them to be.”
“I’m not like you or Muninn. My celestial half is gone. I’m just another human asshole.”
Over my shoulder I hear Muninn laugh.
Samael sets down his glass and tries for the funny bone again. He misses.
“You’re not a regular human any more than we are.”
I look around the cavern piled high with junk from every earthly civilization that ever was. Everything from cave paintings to a Higgs boson trapped in a magnetic bottle.
I turn to Samael. He raises an eyebrow.
“I went to my enemies.”
“And how did that work out?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s the downside of working with enemies. You seldom do.”
Mr. Muninn brings me a glass of Jack Daniel’s. He has to put it in my hand. I can’t move it.
“Cheers,” he says, and clinks his glass against mine.
“I think I’m just dreaming and all this is me talking to myself. Except it’s a little like a phone call I got. It didn’t make too much sense either.”
Muninn shakes his head.
“I’m afraid we can’t help you with those,” he says.
“Let me at least ask Samael a question.”
“Of course.”
“All I’ve done down here is shuffle papers, try not to get killed, and now I’ve completely fucked myself up. When do I get to do the Devil stuff?”
He leans back in his chair.
“This is the Devil stuff.”
“I was afraid of that. I need the rest of your power. Where is it?”
“Exactly where it should be.”
“Don’t riddle me, you bastard. Tell me where it is.”
“East of the sun. West of the moon. Right in front of you. Stop looking. Sit down and you’ll see.”
“I can’t stop. I have to get out of here.”
“Then that’s where it will be,” says Muninn.
“Fuck you. Fuck you both.”
I open my eyes. Standing over me is a girl with too much skin. It’s in piles around her neck and hangs like dirty laundry from her arms. Her eyes are thin slits under a curtain of flesh.
She’s dressed in a lizard-green Hellion EMT uniform. She adjusts an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth. I’m breathing, so I must be alive. Or this is another dream. But if it’s a dream, why does it feel like Mike Tyson has been pounding on my chest with a bulldozer?
The EMT moves quickly. Her expression and gestures alternately resemble a cool medical professional and a nervous babysitter who just caught the cat’s tail in the refrigerator door. Maybe she has a hot date waiting back in Pandemonium. Or she’s never worked on the Lord of the Underworld before.
There are other people standing around. Some of them look worried. Others puzzled. A couple more EMTs. Some soldiers. From the guard station probably. Filthy Hellions in clothes like grimy rags. Some of the ones who lit out for the hinterlands. A few others I recognize from Deumos’s procession through the marketplace.
It takes me another minute for my sluggish brain to put it all together. Someone besides my assassins saw me go down. None of them would imagine Lucifer would hurt himself. To them I’m the victim of an unsuccessful attack. Perfect. Word will get out that I’m vulnerable. If my killers are ever going to move, it’s now.
The EMTs lift the gurney I’m on high enough to slide me into the back of an ambulance. I’d feel a lot better if it was a troop truck or Unimog. Hellion ambulances look a lot like garbage trucks. Not a comforting look.
I’m strapped to the gurney with heavy nylon across my waist and legs. My burned chest is covered with a heavy gauze dressing stained bloody orange with Betadine. There’s a cool salve on my neck where the Gladius struck above the armor.
When the gurney is locked down, the EMT with the sagging shar-pei skin goes up front and starts the ambulance’s engine. As we start to move, the other EMT, a big son of a bitch with crustacean eyestalks sticking out over a bushy Grizzly Adams beard, checks my pulse.
“Does this bus stop at the Sands?” I say. “I hear the Rat Pack is even funnier now that they’re all in Hell.”
Grizzly Lobster jumps a little. Guess I’m not supposed to be awake yet. But seriously, I’m Satan, asshole. Time is money. The Devil doesn’t nap.
I push myself halfway up on my elbows. Grizzly shakes his head and puts his hands on my shoulders to hold me down. Message received. I relax and lie back down and wonder if he has a mouth under the beard.
The driver is running us through the hills at a nice clip. I crane my neck enough to see the glow of a GPS on the dashboard. Ipos told me they have them programmed with all the safe routes through the L.A. badlands. What he didn’t say is how GPS works down here. Unless Hellions have their own satellites. That would mean they have their own space program and can I get a ride out of here on a sulfur-powered Saturn V? Do Hellion tots grow up and want to be demon cosmonauts? The old Greeks believed the stars and planets carouseled around the sky in celestial spheres. Megasize glass globes made of a mysterious something called Quintessence. It would be fun to go target shooting with Wild Bill and blow them to crystal kitty litter.
Plato and his pals are as full of shit as everyone else who ever thought they had it all figured out. Deumos especially. The universe doesn’t revolve around Earth. No goddess is going to come along with milk and cookies for Hell’s lost lambs. We’re so fucked.
The ambulance crunches and jerks hard to the right like we hit something. The rear end fishtails. Feels like it’s skidding along the soft edges of the road. Then it catches again and we straighten out. I hear the engine rev as the driver punches the accelerator. But ambulances are built for stability. Not speed. A second later we’re bouncing to the right again. This time we didn’t hit anything. Something hit us.
Grizzly Lobster is on his feet, pressing his big hands against the ceiling to hold himself steady, and leans down to look out the rear window. There’s a pop and Grizzly’s head explodes. One eyestalk hits the wall and ricochets hard enough to knock bags of saline and bandages off the storage shelves. I unbuckle the gurney straps and haul myself to my feet, still wobbly and a little seasick.
Something hits us again and this time the driver can’t hold it. She curses in a grunting Low Hellion growl while jerking the wheel one way as the wheels slide the other. We’re tossed around like socks in a malfunctioning dryer. When we stop, the floor is the ceiling and the ceiling is the floor. We’re upside down a few feet from a sheer drop off the road.
The engine sputters out and things go very quiet. The driver has fallen over onto the passenger side but her legs are moving. She’s alive but pretty out of it. Voices come through the wall. Four? No. Three. A by-the-book Hellion hit team, just like back when Ukobach and his friends pile-drived me.
Grizzly Lobster’s blood is everywhere. I slip on it and fall back, banging my head hard on the wall. The outside voices stop. A shot comes through the wall. More follow. I throw myself down on the ceiling, about knocking my teeth out on a light fixture.
The rear doors creak open, metal grating against metal. One falls onto the ground. Someone locks the other in place so it won’t fall closed. All I can see are silhouettes framed in headlights. Two are way back from the ambulance. Lookouts. One hovers by the entrance for a minute then comes inside. He kicks Grizzly Lobster a couple of times, and when he’s satisfied the big man is dead, he looks up front where the driver is starting to thrash around. He yells back to the two covering him.
“One of you get up front and pull her out. Keep her quiet. This is a private audience.”
He turns back to me. Makes a big show of pulling a curved skinning knife from a sheath on his hip and waits for one of the grunts to get to work.
There’s a lot of cursing and heavy breathing. The sound of feet slipping and someone being pulled to her feet against her will. The assassin in the ambulance pushes the driver to the assassin on top of the ambulance, who hauls her out the window.
The one running the show hasn’t moved the whole time. He’s the strong, silent type with his knife. I can see he’s wearing standard-issue legion boots and pants. The pants are camo-colored, so he’s not a red legger.
From outside someone yells, “All clear.”
He kicks Grizzly’s body out of the way and kneels with the knife right over my face. Light coming through the door outlines one side of his face.
“Do you know who I am? It’s important that you know who I am. I know you’re hurt. I can wait a minute while you work it out. We’ve got all night.”
I can almost place the face but it’s the voice that gives him away.
“Vetis. Look at you all grown up and slick as pig shit. You’re finally doing your own dirty work. Of course you waited until I was in an ambulance. Am I supposed to be impressed?”
“Brave talk for a man covered in blood.”
“The blood belongs to the dead ambulance guy. You can’t get anything right, can you? You blew it bad with bug boy. And that phone call? What was that, you fuckwit Ghostface wannabe?”
He stares at me.
“So what’s this all about? You and your crew want a raise? How about two weeks’ vacation while I pull out your intestines with an oyster fork?”
He lowers the knife close to my eye and wiggles it around. The shiny blade glints in the headlights. It looks brand-new. I’m flattered.
“You mortals love to hear yourself talk, don’t you?”
It’s hard to shrug gracefully flat on my back.
“In Hell, I’m usually the most interesting person in the room, so it’s kind of inevitable.”
He glances away for a second like he’s thinking and then jams the knife deep into my cheek, twisting the blade before pulling it out.
“Was that interesting enough for you?”
“Would it help if I said yes?”
He takes a breath and his mood changes. Tense lines of anger soften to something else. Not sadness. More like bone-deep exhaustion.
He says, “Why did you come back?”
“I ask myself that every day.”
He pokes my cheek with the knife again.
“I came here to kill Mason Faim, you ungrateful motherfucker. I saved your ass.”
He lets his head sag for a second. Uses his sleeve to wipe my blood off the knife.
“That’s the problem,” he says. “If you’d just stayed away, we’d be gone.”
I try to sit up. Vetis puts his forearm on my scorched armor and pushes me down. He doesn’t have to push hard.
“Jesus fucking Christ. Are you stupid? Do you really think the legions could have taken on Heaven’s armies and won?”
He looks out the back of the ambulance and then back at me.
“Of course not. They would have slaughtered us. And all of this”—he stretches out his arms to take in all of Hell—“would be over.”
I’m so dumb sometimes I’m surprised I’ve never used dynamite for a toothbrush.
Now I know how Mason got so much of Hell and got so many generals and their troops working with him so fast. The war with Heaven wasn’t a war. It was a suicide pact. Death by cop. Provoke the guy with the gun so he’ll shoot. Storm the gates of Heaven until the golden army burns you in a rain of holy fire. Bye bye Hell. And they wouldn’t have to worry about being sent to Tartarus because I destroyed that. A perfect setup for the biggest suicide cult of all time.
Semyazah was the only holdout. One of the few Hellions left that still believed in Lucifer’s argument with Heaven. Semyazah isn’t stupid. Of course he doesn’t want to be Lucifer. How do you lead an entire civilization of wrist cutters?
No wonder Deumos and her shiny happy church popped up. She’s the only one offering an alternative to dog-paddling around God’s toilet forever. Even if it’s New Age bullshit wrapped up in a Hellion wet dream.
Is this why God broke into a million little pieces? Before Aelita murdered him, Neshamah said Hell was never supposed to be like this. I thought he meant the fires and sinkholes and earthquakes. Now I know what he meant. He put the rebel angels in an eternal time-out and never came back. The Lord’s just and wise punishment inspired millions of his children to mass suicide. No wonder the old man had a nervous breakdown.
“What happens now? You going to slit my throat? With no Lucifer, this place is going to get real interesting real fast. Maybe the whole thing will collapse into one big sinkhole. Won’t that be fun, wading knee-deep in blood and shit for a trillion years, waiting for the universe to end?”
He taps the knife against my Kissi arm like he’s trying to tell if a melon is ripe. He moves the blade to the gauze on my chest, trying to work the tip of the blade underneath so he can lift it and take a look.
“Don’t worry about us. You need to be worried about yourself right now.”
“Why? You’re going to kill me and I’m too hurt to fight back. I’d only worry if I thought there was something I could do and maybe I’d fuck it up.”