“Not even a little. See you around, Mr. Muninn.”
“It was nice meeting you,” says Candy.
“Good-bye, my dear. I hope we meet again.”
“Me too.”
I pull Candy through a shadow and a wave of nausea and we come out in the living room in the Chateau.
Kasabian looks up from his computer.
“Where have you two been? You smell like something a dead raccoon horked up.”
I look at Candy.
“Told you so.”
“WHO ARE YOU calling?” says Candy.
I’m dripping on the carpet and she’s still toweling off from the shower. I’m turned away dialing the phone so she doesn’t have to look at the new scar I picked up from Garrett’s lucky shot.
I say, “Manimal Mike. He might know who made the fake 8 Ball.”
She comes out of the bathroom, takes the phone from my hand, and tosses it on the bed.
“Stop it,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because you just got shot. Because you just got blown up and we just came back from Hell.”
“I had a donut this morning.”
“See? I didn’t know that.”
“You were sitting right there.”
“I wasn’t paying attention.”
I know what she’s getting at even if she doesn’t want to say it. Days like this I can maybe catch a bullet, she can maybe get her laptop murdered, and maybe we can go to Hell, but doing them all the same day isn’t exactly normal, even for someone as fierce as Candy.
I nod. Get a glove to put on over my Kissi hand.
“Okay, country mouse. I guess getting to Mike’s in the next ten minutes isn’t going to save the world. What did you have in mind? Shuffleboard or coupon clipping?”
She pushes me down so I’m sitting on the bed.
“How about sitting still for a whole sixty seconds. I think you have this illusion that you’re a shark. Like you think you’ll choke if you stopped moving all the time.”
“The bullet’s out. I’m all healed up inside.”
“I know that in my head, but it doesn’t feel that way yet. And I see you trying to hide the wound, so don’t bother. Can we please just be here for a minute together without weird weapons or old gods or monsters between us?”
“Come here,” I say, and pull her down on the bed. She curls around me with her leg over mine.
“I know I’m not always easy to be around,” I say.
“No. You’re fine. It’s just everything you do.”
“I should have listened to my high school guidance counselor and studied air-conditioning repair.”
“Then you’d have all those sexy jumpsuits I could wear around the place.”
“Jumpsuits aren’t sexy.”
“They are when you’re not wearing anything under them.”
She gets up and turns off the light, then comes back to bed. A few minutes later her breathing is shallow and regular. She’s asleep. I close my eyes and drift off. In my dream, I’m in the arena in Hell with the mad little ghost, Lamia. We circle each other, looking for an opening.
“Are you here to kill me?” says Lamia.
I tell her the truth.
“Only if I have to.”
Part of me feels like an idiot. Lamia looks like a little girl, nine or ten years old, wearing a blue party dress. She also has a knife as big her forearm. And the only thing keeping her from sticking me with it is that I have the 8 Ball. It’s the only thing that’s ever seemed to scare her.
But this isn’t right. This isn’t how I met Lamia. It wasn’t in the arena. It was in the Tenebrae, the limbo land of lost and desperate ghosts too afraid to move on to Heaven or Hell.
Lamia was there, radiating crazy like a Chernobyl straitjacket and stalking the place like a Sherman tank in kneesocks. She knifed ghosts in the Tenebrae and killed people back on earth, laughing the whole time.
When I asked who she was and what she wanted, all I got was schizobabble about the world before it was the world. Eventually she told me her name.
“I’m Lamia. I breathe death and spit vengeance.”
Try having a ten-year-old tell you that and knowing they mean it. It’s a Hallmark moment.
Father Traven is our resident mystical trivia expert. He used to translate books for the Church, but then he translated the wrong one. The Angra Om Ya’s bible. He got the boot for that. Excommunicated. A one-way ticket to Hell.
Father Traven thinks Lamia is a demon. A “Qliphoth,” he calls them. Not a little imp with a pitchfork and anger-management issues. A real demon is a broken thing. A mindless fragment of the old gods, the Angra Om Ya. But demons are basically morons, with about as much brainpower as an underachieving maggot. Some eat. Others dig. Others curse. But none of them choose it. It’s what they’re programmed for.
What makes Lamia special is that she’s relatively smart and chatty. You might think that’s a good thing, letting us get into a demon’s mind so we can see how the gears work and all that forensic horseshit. But it’s not good news at all.
You don’t want to get anywhere near a smart demon. A smart demon is a bigger, more powerful piece of the Angra. Lamia means that more of the old gods are leaking into our universe. How long until other smart demons break through? How long before a complete Angra?
And even though I know it’s wrong, Lamia and I are back in the arena, only she’s not slashing me. She’s slashing Candy. But I can’t protect her because even though I have the 8 Ball, I don’t know how it works. I’m helpless and useless.
I really want to ask Mr. Muninn about Lamia, but I haven’t figured out where to even start a question like that.
“Hey, Mr. Muninn, back when you were one big God, did you steal the universe from another race of older gods, lock them away somewhere, then pretend that you created everything and proceed to screw it all up for the next few billion years? Was that your plan? ’Cause if it was, mission fucking accomplished.”
CANDY IS STILL asleep when I wake up. I say her name and shake her, but she doesn’t budge. She gets like this sometimes. Some combination of being exhausted and her Jade metabolism. It’s more like she’s hibernating than sleeping. This can go on for hours. I’ll go out of my mind if I sit around that long.
I turn on the light and put on new leather pants and boots. No more button-down shirts for me. I don’t dress up for anyone. The only clean T-shirt I can find has a winking Japanese schoolgirl on the front over “I ♥ TENTACLES.” Guess who gave me that. I also grab my coat. It’s still too hot for it, but after the party at Garrett’s room I’m not going anywhere without my na’at and a gun.
Going to Manimal Mike’s place is a no-sweat trip I can do without anyone holding my hand. I leave Candy a note telling her where I am. She’ll be pissed if she wakes and finds me gone, but it’s better than lying around in the dark or watching Kasabian walk around on all fours like a Hellion windup toy.
I take the fake 8 Ball and go out through the grandfather clock. Take the elevator down to the lobby and wait for a second before going any farther.
The lobby feels all right. No hostile vibes aimed my way. The concierge nods in my direction. I nod back. Still, polite staff doesn’t mean I’m off the hook. They might be playing possum while calling security. There’s only one way to find out if the hotel still thinks that I’m Mr. Macheath, the Devil himself, and the rightful occupant of his gratis suite.
I pull out a Malediction and light it. In California, this is the equivalent of pissing into the pope’s minestrone. But aside from a few dirty looks and make-believe coughs from a family of red-faced tourists going up in the next elevator, nothing happens.
I’m safe. For another day. I’ll think I’ll order lobster and a T-bone tonight.
Time to press my luck one more time.
I go into the bar and tell them to give me a sealed bottle of Stoli. The bartender hands it over without blinking.
“Thanks. Put it on my tab.” Why not? Nothing actually ever gets charged to the Devil’s room.
When the Chateau throws us out one day, will they try to stick me with the charges for the suite and the miles of food and booze we’ve put away? Good thing I’m broke.
Even with a shower and clean clothes, I still feel a little rough around the edges. Candy was right about one thing. Sleep was a good idea even if it brought on fucked-up dreams. The blisters on my side are mostly healed, but the skin is still sensitive. It’s really putting me in the mood to punch something. Where’s a skinhead when you need one?
I go into the garage and spot a cherry-red ’68 Charger. Jam the black blade into the door and it pops opens. Jam it into the ignition and the car starts right up. I drive out into the early-evening L.A. sun, all thought of pain, the Angra, and eviction gone. Nothing improves my mood better than stealing a really nice car.
MANIMAL MIKE LIVES and works in a piece-of-shit garage in Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley. Mike does his Tick-Tock Man work in the back while his cousins, a couple of straight-off-the-boat Russian muscleheads, try to look like they know what they’re doing by pretending to fix the same cars that have been sitting in the garage for years. Mike’s cousins are vucaris. Russian beast men. Kind of like what civilians call “werewolves.” Like beast men, they’re not too bright, but with the right motivation they can be trained to fetch or just get out of the way.
Mike’s cousins wanted to gnaw my hide the first time I came here. Now I’m their best friend. I toss them the Stoli on my way in and get a couple of quick spasibas before they have the cap off and are arguing over who gets the first jolt. I leave them to work that out for themselves and head for Mike’s workshop in the back.
The first time I met Mike he was committing slow-motion suicide, getting blind drunk and playing a game called Billy Flinch. It’s basically playing William Tell only you’re trying to shoot a glass off your own head by ricocheting a bullet off the opposite wall. Good thing Mike was such a lousy shot.
Nowadays Mike’s office looks less like a grease monkey’s alcoholic crash pad and more like a professional workshop. I take a little credit for that. I think promising Mike his soul back gave him the kick in the ass he needed to pull himself out of the bottle and do real work. Now I just have to figure out how to wrangle his soul out of damnation so I can give it back to him.
“Hey, Mike. How’s tricks?”
Mike must have been lost in his work. He lurches up from his seat like he wants to jump out of his own skin and into whatever kind of animal he’s building. It looks like a Nerf ball with spikes. Mike has always been high-strung. It takes him a second to catch his breath.
“Shit. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
Then he remembers he’s talking to the guy he thinks is the Devil.
“Shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.”
I shake my head.
“No worries. It’s about the nicest thing anyone’s said to me today.”
Mike’s right hand is still sort of attached to the strange Nerf animal by spiderweb-thin filaments that run from a tiny clamp in his hand to the animal’s back. The animal is gently suspended in the air in a larger web strung up between two long, curved pipes bolted to each side of a metal table. The pipes look like they might have come off a car’s exhaust system. Mike’s terrifying tools are spread out on the table. They look like things Hellions would use to perform surgery on people they don’t like very much.
Once Mike has a second to process that this is an unscheduled visit, thankfully, a smaller wave of panic sets in.
“Oh God, don’t tell me. Something went wrong with Kasabian’s hands? His legs? I swear I’ll get whatever it is working again.”
“Attempt to be cool, Mike. Kasabian is fine. What’s the story with your spiny friend?”
“It’s a puffer fish. A fugu. Some famous Sub Rosa sushi chef is in town and one of the families wants to give him a present.”
“A fish. So, if the guy made barbecue, you’d be making him a mechanical brisket?”
“No, man. Fugu is special. Like an art form. It’s loaded with this stuff called tetrodotoxin. A badass neurotoxin. Cut the fish wrong and bam. Everyone’s dead. You need a license to make it and everything.”
I shrug.
“And people pay brisk money for this stuff?”
“ ‘Brisk’ ain’t the word. It’s more like make-you-weep money.”
“I didn’t realize that civilians were as stupid as Hellions when it comes to the shit they’ll stick in their mouths.”
“I wouldn’t know about that and hope I never do.”
Mike detaches the clamp from his little fish and wipes his hands on his dirty rag.
“The commission sounds like a good thing for you. You’re moving up in the Tick-Tock world.”
“Yeah. Things are going okay. You didn’t come by just to check up on me, did you?”
Up until now I’ve been holding the 8 Ball under my arm like a loaf of bread. I take it and hold it up so he can get a good look at it.
“Nothing like that. I was wondering if you’d look at something for me. It’s a fake mystical object I’m guessing someone paid a lot of money for. I was hoping you’d have some idea who made it.”
Mike takes it gently, like he’s handling a baby duck.
“I’ll have a look but I mostly know animals. Those charm- and talisman-making assholes won’t give us the time of day. They talk about Tick-Tock Men like all we make are big-ass Tamagotchis. But we’re artists, you know?”