Richard Kadrey
Kill the dead

IMAGINE SHOVING A cattle prod up a rhino's ass, shouting "April fool!", and hoping the rhino thinks it's funny. That's about how much fun it is hunting a vampire.

Personally, I don't have anything against shroud eaters. They're just another kind of addict in a city of addicts. Since most of them started out as civilians, the percentage of decent vampires to complete bastards is about the same as regular people. Right now, though, I'm hunting one that's trying for a Nobel Prize in getting completely up my ass. It isn't fun work, but it pays the bills.

The vampire's name is Eleanor Vance. In the Xeroxed passport photo Marshal Wells gave me, she looks like she's about seventeen. Probably because she is. A pretty blond cheerleader type with big eyes and the kind of smile that got Troy burned to the ground. Bad news for me. Young vampires are all assholes. It's part of their job description.

I love older vampires. A hundred and fifty, two hundred years old, they're beautiful. The smart ones mostly stick to the El Hombre Invisible tricks that urban monsters have worked out over centuries. They only feed when they have to. When they're not hunting, they're boring, at least to outsiders. They come off like corporate middle management or the guy who runs the corner bodega. What I like best about old bloodsuckers is that when you've got one cornered and it knows it's coffin fodder, they're like noble cancer patients in TV movies. All they want is to die quietly and with a little dignity. Young vampires, not so much.

The young ones have all grown up watching Slayer videos, Scarface, Halloween, and about a million hours of Japanese anime. They all think they're Tony Montana with a lightsaber in one hand and a chain saw in the other. Eleanor, tonight's undead dream date, is a good example. She's got a homemade flamethrower. I know because when she blasted me back at the parking garage, she fried one of my eyebrows and the left sleeve of my new leather jacket. Ten to one she found the plans on the Web. Why can't vampires just download porn like normal jailbait?

It's Sunday, about a quarter to six in the evening. We're downtown. I follow her along South Hill Street toward Pershing Square. I'm about half a block behind her. Eleanor is wearing long sleeves and carrying an umbrella to keep the sun off. She strolls along happy, like she owns the air and everyone has to pay her royalties whenever they breathe. Only she's not really relaxed. I can't read a juicer's heartbeat or breathing changes because they don't have them. And she's too far away to see if her eyes are dilated, but she keeps moving her head. Microscopic twitches left and right. She's trying to look around without looking around. Hoping to catch my shadow or reflection. Eleanor knows she didn't kill me back at the garage. Eleanor's a smart girl. I hate smart dead girls.

At the corner of Third Street, Eleanor shoulder-butts an old lady and what's probably her grandkid into the street, in front of a flatbed truck carrying a backhoe. The driver slams on the brakes. The old lady is on the ground. Cue the screaming and squealing tires. Cue the sheep who stand around pointing and the Captain Americas who run to help. They pull the old lady and the kid back onto the sidewalk, which is great for them, but it doesn't do anything for me. Eleanor is gone.

But it's not hard to find her. Fifty people must have seen her pull the stunt and half of them point as she sprints down Third before cutting right onto Broadway. I take off after her. I'm fast, a hell of a lot faster than the flat-footed civilians trying to chase her down, but I'm not quite as fast as a vampire. Especially one who's lost her umbrella and wants to get out of the sun before she turns into chicken-fried steak.

She's gone when I hit Broadway. This part of town isn't that crowded on Sundays. I have a clear view in both directions. No perky blondes running down the street in flames. It's mostly stores and office buildings down here, but all the offices and most of the stores are closed. There are a few open doors in the small shops, but Eleanor is too smart to get cornered in one of those little cracker boxes. There's only one place a smart girl would go.

God said, "Let there be Light, and cheap take-out Chinese," and the Grand Central Market appeared. The place has been on South Broadway since before the continents divided. Some of the meat they use in the burritos and Szechuan beef is even older. I think I once saw Fred Flintstone's teeth marks on some barbecued ribs.

Inside, I'm facing down tacos and pizza. There's a liquor store to my left and ice cream against the far wall. Every spice known to man is mixed with the smell of sweat and cooking meat. Not too much of a crowd at this time of day. Some of the shops and kiosks are already counting up receipts. I don't see Eleanor down the central walkway or either of the side ones. I start down the middle of the place, cut to the right, and walk by a fish stand. I'm reaching out. Listening, smelling, feeling the movement of the air, trying to pick up any tiny vibrations in the aether. I'm getting better at this kind of hunting. Ambush predator stuff as opposed to my old Tyrannosaurus-with-a-hard-on moves that don't go down quite as well in the streets of L.A. as they did in the arena.

Subtle hunting, acting like a grown-up, I really miss Hell sometimes.

A tourist dad asks me how they can get back on the freeway to Hollywood from here. I ignore him and he mumbles something about his taxes and how come we don't have more cops to clear out these drug addicts.

Six months after the New Year's bash at Avila and I'm still not used to this place, these people. In a lot of ways civilians are worse than Hellions because at least Hellions know they're miserable sacks of slaughterhouse shit. More and more, I want one of these mortal types to have to face down a vampire, a Jade, or a bat-shit demon elemental. Not a ghost glimpse in the dark, but having to stare straight into a beast's red meat-grinder eyes hungry for the souls of the terminally clueless.

Be careful what you wish for.

A long orange jet of fire rains from overhead and there's Eleanor, standing on top of the glass-and-chrome cases at a spice kiosk. The business end of the flamethrower is a little thing, no bigger than a.45 semiauto. A tube runs from the pistol to an Astro Boy backpack, where the gas and propellant are stored.

Eleanor moves her arm in a wide arc, torching produce, signs, and the backs of a few slack-jawed market workers. She's smiling down at us. Annie Oakley and Charlie Manson's demon baby, jacked up on that sweet and special prekill adrenaline.

Then she's down and running with a small bubbling laugh like a naughty six-year-old. I take off after her, running deeper into the market. She's small and fast and a second later she cuts left, down the far aisle, and doubles back toward Broadway.

I can't catch her or cut her off, but there's an empty utility cart by a produce stand. I give it a kick and send it through the empty dining area. Tables and chairs go flying. The cart slams into her legs at the end of the aisle, knocking her through the counter of Grand Central Liquor. Suddenly it's raining glass and Patron Silver. Right on cue, people start screaming.

Eleanor is back on her feet a second before I can grab her. She's not smiling anymore. Her left arm is bent at a funny angle and a chunk of bone the size of a turkey drumstick is sticking out just below her elbow. She has the flamethrower up, but I'm moving flat out. No way I can stop. Instead, I go faster. She pulls the trigger and I'm drowning in fire.

I hit her a millisecond later. I can't see anything, but I know it's her because she's the only thing in the store light enough to fly like that. My vision clears, but even I don't want to see this. When she pulled the trigger to hose me down, all the liquor on her clothes and the floor went up. Eleanor is an epileptic shadow puppet pirouetting around in a lake of whiskey fire.

Vampires don't scream like regular humans. I don't know how they scream at all without lungs, but when they let loose, it's like a runaway train meets the screech of a million fighting cats. You feel it in your kidneys and bones. Tourists pee and puke at the sound. Fuck 'em. Eleanor still isn't going down. And the fire is starting to spread. Grease on the grills of nearby food stalls starts going up. A propane tank blows, setting off the sprinkler system. When I look back, Eleanor is sprinting out of the market back onto Broadway, still covered in flames.

Chasing a burning girl down a city street is a lot harder than it sounds. Civilians tend to stop and stare and this turns them into human bowling pins. Slow, whiny bowling pins. You'd think that on some basic animal level they'd want to get the hell out of the way of a burning schoolgirl screaming loud enough to crack store windows and the stupid son of a bitch chasing her. Not that I'm doing this for them. I'm doing it for the money, but they still stand to benefit from it.

When Eleanor runs across Fifth Street she isn't burning anymore. She's a black beef-jerky Barbie doll running on charred stick insect legs.

Up ahead, there's an abandoned wreck of a movie theater called the Roxie. The lobby and marquee areas have been converted into an open-air market. Eleanor blows past the racks of knockoff T-shirts and toxic rubber sandals. Slams straight through the inch-thick plywood screwed over the theater doors where the glass used to be. I follow her inside, but hang back by the smashed door, letting my eyes adjust to the dark.

The na'at would be a smart weapon in a place like this, but I feel like shooting something. Besides, Eleanor won't know what a na'at is, so it won't scare her the way I want. I retired Wild Bill's Navy Colt pistol a while back and replaced it with a Smith amp; Wesson.460 hunting pistol. The thing is so big and mean it doesn't even need bullets. I could beat Godzilla to death with it if I stood on a chair. The gun is loaded alternately with massive.460 rounds and shortened.410 shotgun shells, all coated in my special Spiritus Dei, silver, garlic, holy water, and red mercury dipping sauce. It only holds five shots, but it does its job well enough that I've never had to reload.

When you're going in someplace blind, don't know the layout or what's waiting inside, a place you know a Lurker likes to hang out, a smart guy will hang back, circle the perimeter, and look for traps and weak points. I'm hot, annoyed, and in a rush, so that's exactly what I don't do. Besides, I'm just chasing one dumb little Kentucky fried blonde. She can't be much trouble now that she's cornered. Yeah. That's probably what all those G-men said about Bonnie Parker before they saw the tommy gun.

Inside the theater, it's a sauna. Burst water pipes in a sealed-up building. I haven't moved and I'm sweating like a lawyer at the pearly gates. It smells like they invented mildew in here. How the hell did suburban Valley girl Eleanor end up day-squatting here? She didn't run into the theater by accident. She knew where she was going. By the sound of all the broken beer and wine bottles under my feet, so do a lot of other people. Make that "did," past tense. The winos are probably what attracted her to the place. Who doesn't love a free lunch? I have a feeling that there aren't too many random squatters in here anymore.

Turns out I'm half right.

The squatters aren't random. They're vampires. Friends of hers. A guy and a girl.

They jump from the balcony and the guy slams a piece of two-by-four between my shoulders. I go down on my knees in the crunchy glass, but I roll with the blow and come up with the.460 cocked. That's when Eleanor's other friends hit me. Two more guys from beneath the seats on either side of the aisle. I grab the smaller one by the throat and toss him into the second. The girl vampire pair hits me from behind and jams a broken bottle into my arm. I drop the gun and it's too dark to see where it went. I throw an elbow back and feel the side of the girl's skull crack. She jumps up like a gazelle and stumbles over two rows of seats, screaming. That gives me a second to sprint down the aisle toward the screen and put some distance between Eleanor's dead friends and me.

That's where Eleanor has been waiting. Not only is she smart, but she has titanium balls. Even when she was on fire and running through the boarded-up front doors, she never let go of the flamethrower. The other bloodsuckers fall back as she opens up.

The shot back at the market was her just introducing herself. This one is a "fuck you very much and good night" just for me. Eleanor pulls the trigger and doesn't let up until the gun is empty.

Stabbed and cold-cocked, I'm still not dumb enough to just stand there. I dive to the right, behind a row of seats. Fire wraps around them like it's reaching for me. I'm getting burned from above and below, steaming like a pork bun in my leather jacket. Even when the flamethrower is empty, the burning seats keep right on cooking me, and the two-by-four shot left me too dizzy to move very fast. I stagger over to the wall and try to run up the aisle, but I'm tripping on the garbage snowdrifts and land face-first in candy wrappers, needles, and malt liquor bottles.

I've turned into Buster Keaton and Eleanor and her friends are getting a real kick out of me gimping along on all fours. She's burned beyond any human recognition, but she's a juicer and they get over pain pretty quick. I do, too, but I'm not there yet. Not even in the same time zone. I give up and lie down on the sticky-sweet carpet to do what I should have done in the first place.

I press my right hand down into the broken glass and put my weight on it. The jagged bottle shards slice deep into my palm and I keep pushing until I feel glass hit bone. Most hexes don't need blood to work, but a little of the red stuff is like a nitrous afterburner when you want a hex to come on hard and fast.

Eleanor takes the two-by-four from the boy bloodsucker and thumps it on each seat as she strolls over to me.

"Hey, Speedy Gonzales. You like chasing things? Why don't I knock your head across the street and you can chase that?"

"Get him, Nellie. Look at that scarred piece of shit. He's too ugly to drink. Waste that faggot."

It's one of the boys talking. The one who got me with the chunk of wood. He has a southern accent. Somewhere deep, old, and hot. You can almost hear the kudzu wrapped around his words.

Eleanor says, "Shut up, Jed Clampett. Jethro is waiting for you to blow him in the parking lot."

Everyone laughs but Jed.

While Eleanor does an "Evening at the Improv" thing for her dead friends, I do a Hellion chant over and over, keeping my hand in the glass and letting the blood flow. For once, Hellion's guttural grunts work in my favor. The Lost Boys think I'm moaning.

"Why were you following me, asshole? Did Mutti send you? Mom, I mean? Does Daddy know? All she has to do is put on her knee pads and she can get him to do anything."

The wind starts as a breeze from the back of the theater, sweeping from the balcony and ripping down the rotten curtains that flank the dead movie screen. Eleanor drops the comedy act and the others go silent as the wind picks up force. Now they're the ones unsteady on their feet.

Even though I can't read the dead like the living, vampires still have minds and I feel around for Eleanor's. I can't tell you her lottery numbers or her kitten's name, but I can pick up images and impressions. She's gone from pissed to nervous and is steering into the skid, heading for scared. She hasn't been a Lurker long enough to run into anybody with real hoodoo power and she can't figure out what's happening.

Mommy is in her head, too, a black hole of anger and fear. Eleanor might even have gotten herself bit just to spite her. She has a secret, too. She thought it would save her in the end, but now she's having her doubts.

A gust blasts down the aisle like an invisible fist, knocking all five of them ass over horseshoes into the air. Eleanor loses the two-by-four and lands on top of me. I can smell the fear through her burned skin. The wind keeps going, moving up from Hurricane Katrina to space shuttle exhaust.

With all her strength, Eleanor pushes herself off of me.

"It's him! He's doing it!" she yells. "What do we do?"

Jed Clampett hauls his ass up off the floor and pulls himself to me using seat backs like crutches. I've changed the chant, but he hasn't noticed yet.

The wind shifts from a wind tunnel to a swirling twister. I haul myself to my knees and shrug off my leather jacket. The twister rips the carpet from the floor, throwing a junk-yardful of broken glass into the air. The shards circle us like a million glittering razor blades, which doesn't do much more than annoy Eleanor and her friends. They bat the glass away like flies. Each of their hundred cuts heals before the second hundred happen. But I'm getting cut, too. In a few seconds I'm the fountain in front of the Bellagio Hotel and all that broken glass is doing a water ballet in my blood.

The swirling air turns pink as I bleed out, which Jed and his girlfriend think is goddamn hysterical. They stick out their tongues and catch drops of my blood like kids catching snowflakes. About ten seconds later they're both screaming and tearing open their throats with their fingernails. Then the other three start to feel it. They try to run, but the wind and glass are everywhere. It's one big Veg-O-Matic in here, spraying my tainted blood down their throats and onto their million wounds.

Eleanor already looks like a Chicken McNugget, so it's hard to tell what's going on with her, but the others are starting to sizzle and glow from the inside like they swallowed road flares on a bet and lost. That's what happens to vampires dumb enough to drink angel blood.

It doesn't take long for them to go catatonic, then flare fast and hot. Human flash paper. They sizzle for a few seconds and cook down to a fine gray ash. I growl the end of the hex and the air grows still. The vampires are all dead, except for Eleanor. She hunkered down and held on to me during the twister. My body blocked enough of the wind for her to survive, but just barely. She moves her cracked lips like she's trying to talk. I lean my ear close to her.

"When you see Mutti, tell her I'm sorry. I only did what I did to scare her like she scares me and Daddy sometimes."

When you're hired to kill someone, the last thing you want is to have to give them absolution. You want them dead fast, not lying there asking you to be their therapist. Worse, you don't want to hear anything that might make you feel sorry for them. I don't want Eleanor's mommy trauma in my head. She's a monster just like me, but I want her to be a dead monster like her friends. She lets go of my leg and gives me a Say Good Night, Gracie sigh. A couple of minutes ago, I wanted to stick her on a spit and toast marsh-mallows on her while she burned. Now I cover her eyes with my hand and get out the black knife.

"Don't move."

I jam the blade between her ribs. One clean, surgical, pain-free thrust up into her heart. Eleanor stiffens, flares, and ashes out. The dead girl is finally dead.

I look around, making a quick mental map of the bodies and checking that we're still alone. I can hear voices outside. Now that the wind has died down, some curious civilian is going to stick a nose in here soon. I have to work fast.

Eleanor's clothes are pretty much gone, but I give her a quick pat-down. She's wearing a gold locket that's half-melted into her blackened chest. A couple of rhinestone rings have fallen off her fingers, so I grab those. No money in her pockets, but there's a flat metal thing, about the size of a rodeo belt buckle. One side is blank. There's a snarling demon encircled by a spooky monster alphabet on the other. Junk. Goth bling. That's the other problem with baby Lugosis. Eleanor's friends were brainless street kids and she wasn't a vampire long enough for any educated bloodsuckers to clue her in to what she really was. Death in go-go boots. A V-8 devil doll who could explode like a cruise missile and bite like an armor-piercing shark. Silly, stupid kid. Maybe if she hadn't pissed off whoever it was that got the Golden Vigil to call in the hit, she would have had enough time to figure that out.

Good night, Eleanor. I'm sure Mutti forgives you and maybe even misses you. As long as she never finds what you've been up to these last few weeks. She sure won't find it out from me.

I give the ghoul belt buckle one more look. It's heavy like metal, but the edges are chipped like an old china saucer. The dumbest fence in L.A. wouldn't give me a dime for it. I toss it into the dark with the other trash and get to work on Eleanor's friends, going through their pockets, bags, and backpacks. These aren't Beverly Hills Lurkers, just a bunch of downtown scroungers, so I'm not exactly coming up with the crown jewels. Still, it's tourist season, so there's about three hundred in cash that didn't burn up when they ashed out. Some joints, movie ticket stubs, car keys, condoms, and Eleanor's play jewels. I toss everything but the jewelry and the cash. Looting the dead might seem harsh, but they don't need the stuff anymore and the Vigil doesn't pay overtime. Besides, killing monsters is my day job. The way I look at it, me stealing from the dead is like regular people pocketing Post-its on their way out of the office.

I go out into the sun and take a breath to clear the greasy flesh smoke and ashed bodies out of my lungs. I sit on my haunches, head down, my back against the broken theater door, just breathing. My face and chest are covered in darkening bruises and enough blood that it looks like I've been sumo wrestling in a barbwire kimono. My burned arm, the one Eleanor got back at the garage, is starting to flake black skin. When I look up, a dozen faces are locked on me, mostly old Mexican women holding T-shirts and pink-and-orange flip-flops.

I stand and the women take a step back like maybe they're doing Swan Lake. There's a knockoff Evil Dead T-shirt on a hanger at the end of the nearest rack. I take it. The woman by the market cash register is holding an unopened bottle of water. I take that, too, and give her twenty dollars from the cash I took off the shroud eaters.

"Gracias," I say.

"De nada."

She nods at me nervously, a big "please get the hell out of here before my brain explodes" smile plastered on her face. I take off my bloody shirt, drop it into the trash can by her register, and slip on the new shirt. I kill the water in three big gulps before walking back into the theater.

In the dark, Mason's lighter sparks on the first try and I hear sirens just as the cigarette begins to glow.

The woman from behind the counter leans her head in the door.

"Hey, mister."

She points out at the street.

"Thanks. I heard."

She shoos me away with her hands.

"Just go. No trouble here."

"Plenty of trouble here," I tell her, pointing into the theater, where I left the bodies.

"Los vampiros? No trouble. Only bother turistas and pendejos."

So, they knew about the pod. L.A. is a get-along kind of town. The ladies work the day shift and los vampiros work the night. As long as they don't shoplift flip-flops, the undead are probably pretty decent neighbors. The muggers and dealers will learn to stay away. Hell, as long as you wear a muffler 24/7, this might be one of the safer streets in L.A.

The woman standing in the door turns to someone outside. I can hear them talking, but I don't really listen. The cop's voice is loud and clear and I know what he's asking. I take my phone out of my pocket, go to Eleanor's body, and snap a proof-of-death shot. When I get back to the lobby the cop is coming in, his hand on his Glock. He goes for it when he sees me. He's pretty smooth, but his body is all wrong for this game. He's been exercising for bulk at the gym, all showy slow twitch muscles, going for a Terminator look. He can probably throw a mean choke hold, but I bet even the old ladies outside could outdraw him. I flick my cigarette and it bounces off his chest before he has the gun belly-button-high.

He screams "Freeze!", but I'm already slipping into a shadow. GETTING IN TO see Wells is always a merry little dance. At the gate, the guys in suits go through an elaborate security and ID check. They scan my photo and fingerprints. Scrape cells off the back of my hand for quickie DNA profiling and species confirmation. Then they have to call inside for verification because maybe there's another guy who shows up at their gate from out of a shadow.

There are two agents on the gate today. One is the usual fresh-faced new guy that always pulls door duty and the other is a Shut Eye. A salaryman psychic. This one is young, almost as young as the guard. He's ambitious, too. I can feel him sizing me up. Most people don't like having their minds read. It doesn't bother me.

When I was a kid, I once took a sharp piece of wood from the backyard and smacked one of our neighbors' Dobermans with it. The dog chased me all the way to the end of the block, and when he was done, I had bruises and bloody teeth marks all down my left calf. My father was in the driveway, working on my mom's old Impala, and saw the whole thing. When I asked why he didn't stop the dog from biting me, he said, "'Cause you deserved it."

"What's that line from The Maltese Falcon?"

"Excuse me?" asks the guard. His name tag reads Huston.

"Bogart says it. 'The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.' You ever think about that when you're patting people down?"

"We're just doing our jobs, sir."

"Trust me, I know. I've been coming here about every week for six months. You're doing a really thorough job of looking at my fingerprints for the four-hundredth time and talking to the same guy inside you always talk to, the one who always gives you the same answer. I mean, I always get invited in, right?"

"We have to establish your identity, sir. It's procedure."

"You know who I am. Or do a lot people show up here covered in blood and goofer dust?"

That last bit sets off the Shut Eye. An unsubstantiated claim of identity. Catnip to psychic snoops. I can feel it when they're slipping their ghost fingers into my skull. It tickles behind my eyes.

There are two basic ways to deal with a peeper. You can back off and go blank. Name all the presidents or run through multiplication tables.

The other way to deal with psychics is to welcome them in. Throw open all the doors and windows and invite them deep inside your mind. Then grab them by the throat and drag them straight down to Hell. Well, that's what I do. It's not mandatory. The point is that once you've led them deep enough into your psyche, you're the one behind the wheel and they're strapped in the kiddy seat in back.

I give them the grand tour of Downtown, starting out with a quick jolt of the early days in Hell when it was all nausea and panic. Give them a quick taste of psychic rape. Experiments and Elephant Man exhibitions. Being the fox in a mounted hunt through forests of flayed, burning souls. Then some highlights from the arena. Killing, eleven years of killing. I let them see exactly what being Sandman Slim is all about. Most of them don't get that far.

This Shut Eye doesn't make it past my first week Downtown, when a drunk Hellion guard slit me open and tried to pull out my intestines because he'd heard that's where humans hid their souls. But I don't let the Shut Eye off that easy. I hold him inside long enough to feel me running away from the neighbor's dog and getting my leg chewed up.

When I let go, Criswell flies out of my head like a goose through a jet engine. He gasps and is on the verge of tears when the connection finally breaks.

Huston grabs him by the shoulder.

"Ray, you okay?" Ray doesn't hear him. He's looking at me.

"Why?" he asks.

"'Cause you deserved it."

Ray takes a key card from his jacket, waves it over a magnetic reader, and the gate swings open.

When I go through I turn back to them.

"I don't have to do this, you know. I could come out of a shadow on this side of the fence and not deal with you assholes. But I'm trying to fit in a little better around here, so I'm polite and I try to play by your rules. You might consider cutting me the tiniest piece of slack."

I head for the warehouse. Huston keeps asking Ray what happened and Ray keeps telling him to fuck off. I wonder if Ray is just a psychic reader or a projector, too, and what parts of the tour he'll show Huston to shut him up. WELLS YELLS AT me halfway across the warehouse floor so that everyone turns to see me looking like an executioner's practice dummy.

"Damn, son. Did you stop to gut a deer on the way over or did that little girl do all that?"

I hold up my burned jacket with my blackened arm.

"Your little girl did this. Her four friends did the rest."

"There's a pod?"

"Was. Five of them."

"That doesn't jibe with our intelligence."

I take four wallets from a jacket pocket and drop them on a table.

"Here's your goddamn intelligence."

Wells snaps, "Watch your language."

"I took those off Eleanor's pals. Their ash is still on them. Probably prints, too."

"What about Eleanor?"

I take my cell out of my back pocket, thumb on the photo album, and hold it up so Wells can see the screen.

He frowns.

"What did you do to her?"

"Silly girl had a flamethrower. She fucked-I mean, messed up and set herself on fire. Then she ran out into direct sunlight. I would have been happy to quietly take her heart, but she had to turn it into D-day."

"Are the remains still at the scene?"

"Yeah."

"We'll secure the site for now. Clean up isn't a priority if the pod has been cleared out."

"I didn't see anyone else there and they didn't seem to be looking, so that was probably all of them, but I can't be a hundred percent. Like I said, I went in thinking it was one girl."

"I'll need a copy of that photo. E-mail a copy to my account."

"Just did."

Wells isn't looking at me. He's put on Nitrile gloves and is examining the wallets.

He says, "They're empty."

"Are they?"

"Was there anything inside when you found them?"

"How do I know? I was killing vampires, not checking their IDs. I've seen plenty of Lurkers that don't use money. They steal what they want."

"Then why carry a wallet?"

Shit. Good point.

"Ask a shrink. I get paid to kill things."

"Right."

He turns to a female agent standing on his right.

"Bag these and take them downstairs for identification."

"Yes, sir."

Wells motions for me to follow him. We head out across the warehouse floor.

I kind of like the organized chaos of the Golden Vigil's headquarters. There's always something fun to scope out and think about stealing. A group of agents in Tyvek suits and respirators forklifting a massive stone idol onto the back of a flatbed truck. The idol is on its back, and from where I'm standing, it's all tentacles and breasts, but I swear some of the tentacles move a little as they tether the idol down. Across the floor, welders are modifying vehicles. Agents are examining new guns as they're uncrated. A guy as skinny, leathery, and looking as old as King Tut's mummy wanders the floor sprinkling holy water on everything.

"What kind of a bonus am I getting for taking out those four extra bloodsuckers?"

"From the look of those wallets, seems to me that you already got your bonus."

"Is that what it seems to you? If I happened to find anything at the crime scene, trust me, it's barely enough to cover the cost of a replacement jacket. Besides, with intelligence as bad as that, I deserve extra money just on principle."

"Do you?"

"Unless you knew what was inside that building."

Wells stops and looks at me.

"Come again?"

"Unless you knew there was a pod in there, but sent me in looking for one inexperienced girl. Isn't that exactly the kind of thing you'd tell someone if you were setting them up?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

"How's your lady friend downstairs?"

"Don't talk about her like that."

Wells gets a little defensive whenever I mention Aelita. He's got a thing for her but an angel is just a little out of his league.

"Okay. How is Miss Aelita? Healthy? Happy? I haven't seen her since right after Avila."

Aelita is a kind of drill sergeant angel. She runs the Golden Vigil, Heaven's Pinkertons. She knows I'm a nephilim and has a cute nickname for me: "The Abomination." I'm pretty sure she'd like to see me dead.

"Did you send candy and flowers on Valentine's Day, Wells? It's okay, you know. He was a saint."

His phone goes off. He walks away and speaks quietly into the receiver. I think an angel's ears are burning.

Wells nods and pockets the phone.

"You get a twenty percent bonus added on to your next check."

"Twenty percent? What am I, your waiter? I got you five vampires, not a BLT."

"Twenty percent is what I've been authorized. Take it or leave it."

"I'll take it."

He takes a white business envelope from his jacket and hands it to me. The check for my last Vigil hit. A bunch of suburban Druids in Pomona were trying to resurrect the In-vidia, a gaggle of transdimensional chaos deities. The Druids were hilarious. They looked like extras from The Andy Griffith Show trying to call up the devil in matching white housedresses. What's even funnier was that their plan almost worked. Their scrawny Barney Fife leader was one murdered infant away from annihilating Southern California.

I wonder if I'd just held back a little and Barney did get to unleash the Invidia, would we really be able to tell the difference?

I look at the check and then at Wells.

"Why do you always pull this shit?"

"Do what? Obey the law?"

"I'm a freelancer and you're deducting things like taxes and Social Security."

"You don't strike me as the type who files his taxes on time. I'm doing you a favor."

"I don't pay taxes because I don't exist. You think I'm going to apply for Social Security when I'm sixty-five?"

"You're going to want to wait until you're seventy. The extra benefits are worth it."

"I'm not waiting for anything. I'm legally dead. Why am I paying any of this bullshit?"

"I told you to watch your language."

"Fuck you, Miss Manners. You get me to kill for you and then you screw me out of my money."

"That money belongs to the government. It funds what we do here. You don't like it, run for office."

I don't want to run for anything. I want to shove this miserable cheap-ass check so far up Wells's ass he can read the routing number out the back of his eyes.

But Max Overload is just limping along these days and I don't want to have to find someplace else to live. Landlords in L.A. don't want you to have pets. What am I going to do with a chain-smoking severed head? Dignity is nice but it's money makes the lights and shower work.

I watch the welders working across the warehouse so I don't have to look at Wells while I fold the check and slip it into my pocket.

"At the end of time, when your side loses, I want you to remember this moment."

Wells narrows his eyes.

"Why?"

"'Cause Lucifer doesn't expect you to thank him when he fucks you over. That's why he's going to win."

Wells looks down at the floor for a minute. Puts his hands behind his back.

"You know, my mother watched a lot of Christian TV when I was growing up. Hellfire-and-brimstone hucksters telling Bible stories and yelling about damnation to get fools and old people to send them their welfare checks. I never paid much attention to 'em, but one day out of nowhere this one wrinkled old preacher starts telling what he says is a Persian parable. Now, that's weird for a Baptist Bible-thumper.

"You see, there was once a troubled man in a little village near Qom in ancient Persia."

"This is the story, right? 'Cause I don't want to hear about you and your dad going off-roading."

"Shut up. One day the troubled man got out of bed to work his fields and maybe he was killed or maybe he just kept walking, but he was never heard from again. The sun was shining through the door as the man left and threw his shadow on the wall by the hearth or whatever it is you call it over there. When the man's wife and children came home and found the house empty, the wife sees her husband's shadow and asks who he is. The shadow says, "The man is gone and become a shadow to this house. I am the shadow of the man who did not go, but will remain here." The shadow stayed and over time became a man and he and the woman and her children lived there happily together for many years."

Wells puts his hands together almost like he's praying. It creeps me out seeing this side of him.

"Later, when I heard that the Golden Vigil was founded in Persia, I knew it was God speaking to me through the TV that day. He was telling me that here is where I'm supposed to be."

"That story doesn't even make sense, and what exactly does it have to do with anything we're talking about?"

"It means we've done our job for more than a thousand years, so you can shove your disapproval."

"That sounds like the sin of pride, Marshal. Better run downstairs and let Miss December flog it out of you. Webcam it and charge by the minute. You won't ever have to take government money again."

Wells looks at me. His phone goes off. He ignores it.

I want to tell him to go fuck himself.

"You done whining? You ready to work? I have something else for you."

But I need this.

"What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to walk through a murder scene with me. The victim was Sub Rosa. No rough stuff. Just observation."

"You have forensics people. Why do you need me?"

"I don't want them getting too deep into this one yet. I want you."

"Why?"

"Because you've been to Hell."

"So?"

"I want you to take a look at a body and tell me what you think it means."

"Are you sure it's just one body and not five?"

"Funny."

"I want my full fee."

"Half. No one is asking you to kill anything."

"You're using up my valuable drinking and smoking time. I need compensation."

"As you just pointed out, we're government funded, which means that we work within a simple and predetermined pay structure. In other words, looking and pointing doesn't pay the same as hunting and killing."

"Tell you what, go down to Chinatown, find a club called the Owl's Shadow, and hire yourself a Deadhead. Those gloomy necromancers are a bunch of low-self-esteem Siouxsie and the Banshees bitches. They'll fall all over themselves to help a fed do a murder-scene magic show."

Wells takes the phone from his pocket, looks at the caller ID, and frowns.

"Look, you can sprinkle some pixie dust around while you're at the scene. Do some damn magic that won't break anything and I can get you two-thirds of your normal fee. But that's it."

"Done."

I put out my hand. He puts the phone to his ear so he doesn't have to shake on it.

"We'll meet at three A.M., when things are quiet and the bars are closed. I'll call you with the address."

"Nice doing business with you, Marshal. Give the missus my best."

"Get out." I DECIDE TO skip the Ray and Huston show on the way out, so I slip through a dark patch on a wall outside the warehouse. Come out in the alley across the street from the Bamboo House of Dolls.

What I thought was a one-night blowout right after I saved the world on New Year's has turned into a six-month running party. After I tossed Mason to the mob Downtown, it seemed like half the Sub Rosa in L.A. showed up at Bamboo House to kiss his ass good-bye. And they never left. Carlos is happy enough. Sub Rosa tip big at civilian places where they can hang out without ending up part of the floor show.

Most Sub Rosa, you'd never notice. They look boringly human, are human, and go out of their way to fit in with other humans, even if they sometimes dress like nineteenth-century dandies or Mayan priests. Others in the bar look like they stepped off a steam-powered zeppelin from Neptune. They're the Lurkers, and good, upstanding Sub Rosa don't like them soiling the furniture at their clubs so they come here. There are succubi and transgendered Lamia. Shaggy Nahual wolf and tiger beast men laughing like frat boys and stacking their beer cans in a pyramid until they knock it over. Again. A group of blue-skinned schoolgirls with pale blond hair and horns peeking out through their pigtails are playing some kind of betting game with ivory cups and scorpions.

Carlos is a big part of the reason Bamboo House of Dolls is still standing. He didn't even blink when the crusty half of L.A.'s magic underground dropped in to get shit-faced. If Jesus was a bartender, He would still only be half as cool as Carlos. With all his newfound lucre, all the man has done to the place is get some new bar stools, a better sound system, and cleaned up the bathrooms so they're a little less like a Calcutta bus station. It's good to have one thing that hasn't changed much. We need a few anchors in our lives to keep us from floating away into the void. Like Mr. Muninn said the one time he came in, "Quid salvum est si Roma perit?" What is safe if Rome perishes?

"Swamp Fire" by Martin Denny is playing on the jukebox. Carlos comes over with a cup of black coffee.

"You didn't have to get dressed up just for me," he says.

"Like the look? It's from the Calvin Klein Book of Revelations line."

"The crispy black arm is nice even if it is shedding dead skin all over my floor, but that burned-up jacket is un pedazo de basura."

"Time to let it go?"

"One of you needs to be buried and my Dumpster has a lovely lakeside view of the alley. Give it to me and I'll get rid of it."

I push the charred pile of leather across the bar.

"Do me a favor and pour some salt and bleach on it when you put it out."

"Is that a magic thing or a cop thing?"

"Both. Bleach for DNA. Salt for any leftover hoodoo someone can use in a hex."

He nods and puts the jacket under the bar.

"I'm guessing since you haven't even looked at that coffee that you want a drink."

"Some of the red stuff."

"You sure?"

"Does the pope live in a nice house?"

"At least have some food, too. I just pulled some pork tamales out of the steamer."

"Maybe that and some rice?"

"You got it."

"City of Veils" by Les Baxter comes on. Crazy trumpets and drums at the beginning, then it slides into old-fashioned strings and Hollywood exotica. I half expect to see Errol Flynn dressed like a pirate in a corner booth trying to get a hand job from Lana Turner. After some of the red stuff, maybe I will.

I haven't heard that Alice song again since the night it came blaring out of the jukebox, like nails being hammered into my ears. I had Carlos check and the song wasn't even on the machine. He had the company bring him a new box, just so I wouldn't sit at the bar getting twitchy, waiting for it to come up again.

Later I knew that the song had never been on the machine. It was one of Mason's hexes. He wanted to watch me go crazy. If he'd pumped me full of LSD and locked me in a spinning mirrored room full of rats, he couldn't have done any better.

That was six months ago. Half a year since I sent Mason to be poached in Hell and waved bye-bye to his Kissi pals as they burned up and blew away on the solar winds. A hundred and eighty days since I watched Alice's ashes drift away like fog into the Pacific. I'm doing fine, thanks. Maybe a little bruised around the edges, but I have all the medicine I need right here in this glass.

Carlos sets down the plate of tamales and pours a double shot of the red stuff into a heavy square tumbler, the way we used to drink it in Hell. Aqua Regia is so red it's almost black, like blood under moonlight. It goes down smooth, like gasoline and pepper spray. It probably saved my life Downtown. When I discovered I could swallow Aqua Regia and keep it down, Hellions starting looking at me differently. I think that's when one of them got the idea of putting me in the arena instead of killing me. Just when my novelty was wearing off, I was interesting again.

"I should have killed him when I had the chance."

Carlos shakes his head.

"You weren't strong enough to kill him."

"How would you know that?"

"Because you told me. We've had this conversation about fifty times before."

"Really?"

"Maybe you should stick with coffee or maybe a beer. You don't need the red stuff."

He reaches for my glass and I slide it away from him.

"Yeah, I really do."

"You couldn't have beaten him. He was too strong. You knew it, so you did what you could."

"Yeah, but sometimes it's not about winning and losing. It's about doing the right thing. I didn't do the right thing. I shouldn't have walked away. Lucifer was right. By leaving Mason in Hell I gave the prick exactly what he wanted."

"You're alive and you're walking around. Long as you can say that, doing the right thing remains an option. Just keep your head down until you figure out the right time and place."

"Thanks, Carlos. You're the best dad a boy could ask for. Will you adopt me?"

"I thought I already did."

Carlos looks past my shoulder and shakes his head. I don't have to look. I can feel them. Behind me are college girls with pens and paper. They want to stand too close and ask for my autograph in breathy voices. If I'm dumb enough to sign, as dumb as I used to be, I'll be able to buy my autograph off eBay in an hour. I sip my drink and dig into the tamales with my fork. Pretend I don't notice as Carlos waves them off.

The real problem with college girls is that they usually have college boys with them.

A second later someone is leaning on the bar to my right.

"You're the superhero who can do the portaling trick, aren't you? Let's see it."

He looks like Ziggy Stardust on a GQ cover. NASA engineers built his three-piece pinstripe suit. It's a work of art.

"Are you talking to me?"

"They say you can shadow-walk. I want to see."

He looks at me with a combination of arrogance and boredom. You never know what a guy like this is going to do. He has one hand in his pocket. What he's holding could be anything from a joint to a water pistol to a box cutter.

"Sorry. I don't speak French. Or is it Chinese? I can't understand a word you're saying."

"You think you're hot shit because you have a cartoon nickname and the Golden Vigil watching your back? Do you even know who I am? Do you know who my father is?"

"Maybe what you need is an asshole-to-English phrase book. I hear they have some fine bookstores in Kansas. You should start walking."

"My family owns this place. This city. L.A. to the Valley and out to the desert."

Carlos gives me a look and I give him one right back. He stays put, but starts cutting up limes so he has an excuse to hold a knife.

"People listen to me when I talk."

"I guess the rich really are different. Most of us come from monkeys, but you're giving off a whiff of rattlesnake."

Ziggy has a friend with him. Not quite as handsome. His suit isn't quite as nice. He's trying to maintain his cool in front of the girls, but he's about sixty seconds from running.

The friend says, "Please just do the trick, man, and we'll get out of your hair."

"I just killed five people. I'll show you that trick if you like."

I go back to my drink and the tamales. Ziggy is about to make another strafing run, not knowing that when he opens his mouth, I'm going to stick my fork into his eye and make him dance like a marionette. But the girls get on either side of him and pull him to the door.

As they go out, I hear one of the girls say, "Daddy would say that man looks like a sheep-killing dog."

When they're gone, Carlos curses quietly, so fast I can't tell if it's English, Spanish, or Urdu.

"I hate that shit."

He wipes off the spot where Ziggy was leaning.

"No, you don't. You encourage it. Look at you. You walk in here with that burned-up arm and dried blood all over a monster movie T-shirt and you don't want to be noticed? Normal people bet on football or collect stamps to pass the time. Your hobby is telling people to fuck off, but you can't do that unless they notice you in the first place."

"You understand how being a bartender works, right? I complain and you bring me drinks and sympathy. Don't start trying to get reasonable with me."

"You like these little fights because you don't have any real ones right now, is all I'm saying."

"I'll keep my fingers crossed for Armageddon."

"Don't sweat it. I think your star is beginning to fade. New people keep coming in, but a lot of old ones have disappeared."

"If I take up knitting, think the rest will go away?"

"Louie Toadvine is one of them, which is funny because I owe him money."

Carlos pours himself a glass of seltzer and drops in some of the lime wedges he was cutting.

"Your friend Candy was in here last night."

I dig into the tamales.

"Good for her."

I haven't seen or spoken to Candy more than three times since we saved a bunch of about-to-be-sacrificed angels on New Year's. We killed a lot of people that night, but none who didn't deserve it.

"She's a pretty girl."

"Is she? I don't entirely remember."

Since then I'd only seen her a couple of times with Vidocq and once when I got Doc Kinski to drain the venom from my arm after a Naga purse snatcher went king cobra on me. Kinski is the medical man for a lot of Sub Rosa and Lurkers. Most people think being a doctor is a big deal, but Kinski used to be an archangel, so for him, being a doctor is sort of like flipping burgers at McDonald's after you were president.

"Candy's nice. Asked about business. How is it dealing with the Sub Rosa? When am I ever going to get some new tunes on the jukebox?"

"What do I care about any of this?"

He shrugs.

"I thought you two were friends. More than friends maybe."

"Where'd you hear that?"

Carlos holds up his hands.

"Sorry, man. I didn't mean nothing. It's just something I heard. Anyway, she said she and Kinski had been moving around a lot. That's why she hasn't been around. She's heading back out to wherever he is."

"Did she mention where?"

"Nope."

"She was sick for a while after Avila. It isn't good for her to be around all that blood. It affects her funny."

Candy's a Jade, which is kind of like a vampire only worse. She's trying to lay off the people eating, but dragging her up to a massacre pushed her over the edge and she fell off the wagon for a while.

"I didn't get the feeling she was in here to talk to me. She asked when you usually came in. I had to tell her you come and go and don't keep regular hours."

Was Candy looking for me? It's funny she'd come to Bamboo House. I'd thought about waiting out in the strip mall by Kinski's clinic, but that felt more stalkerish than friendly.

"I'm glad she's feeling better."

"Is she why you're hitting the red stuff?"

"I'm drinking it because you have it. Do you know how rare Aqua Regia is? Rare isn't even the word. It doesn't exist anywhere outside of Hell. I'm going to have to thank Muninn the next time I see him."

"I don't know that it comes from Muninn."

"Who sends it?"

"I don't know. A bottle just shows up every now and then. First time I found one by the door, I tasted it. It's disgusting and you're one sick little pinche for drinking it. And you drink too much of it."

"Sometimes it's nice to know I'm not crazy. You know when you wake up and for a minute you don't know where you are and aren't sure if you're awake or still dreaming? This reminds me what's real. Who I am. Where I've been. How I got these scars. Living up here, sometimes I need that."

"It also gets you hammered fast."

"And it reminds me of… Never mind."

Carlos stabs a finger at me.

"Say it. I've been waiting to hear you say something like that. Go ahead. Say it out loud so everyone can hear you. This poison that comes from Hell reminds you of home. That's what was about to come out of your mouth, wasn't it? Think about that for a minute. How fucked up that is."

"Excuse me. I'm sorry to interrupt. One of those men over there said that you were the gentleman they call Sandman Slim."

Carlos doesn't miss a beat.

"Now, why would a nice lady like you be looking for a bad man like that?"

It's so obvious even Carlos, the most unmagic uber-civilian of all time, can see it. The woman isn't Sub Rosa. She's around fifty-five, but picked up a beauty allurement potion so she can tell people she's thirty. She dressed up to come here. She's wearing an expensive Hillary Clinton pantsuit, but it's a little off. The symmetry isn't quite right, but not in a way most civilians could see. It's probably from an outlet mall and it's brand-new.

"He's not Sandman Slim?"

"I didn't say that."

Carlos points to one of the bar stools. The woman sits.

"Would you like some coffee?"

She has dark, pretty gray eyes. Her pupils are pinpoints. This bar isn't where she wants to be.

I push the tamales and rice away. After Ziggy's anger, being jolted by her fear has ruined my appetite. I half turn and do a quick scan of the faces in the room. It's ninety-nine percent Sub Rosa, with a few civilian hangers-on and groupies. If she found me here, she must have asked questions in places she wouldn't normally go. And when she finally heard about Bamboo House of Dolls, people would have told her what happens to strangers who come here to bug me. But she did it anyway.

Good for her.

"Call me Stark. No one calls me that other name."

"I'm sorry. It's the only one I knew."

"No problem. Why are you looking for me?"

She takes a picture from her purse and sets it in front of me. It's a young man, about my age when I went Downtown. He's broad across the shoulders, like a football player. He has her eyes.

"This is my son. His name is Aki. It's Finnish, like his father."

"He's a nice-looking kid. But I don't know him, if that's why you're here."

"You don't know him, but he knows you. Your kind, I mean. He's Sub Rosa, just like my husband's family. Eighteen years ago we lived here, but we moved to my mother's property in Lawrence, Kansas, when Aki was born. We weren't sure we wanted him growing up here…"

She trails off and looks around the room. A bald man in a white silk suit takes what looks like a whiskey flask from his pocket and snaps it open. Inside is damp soil and pale, gray worms. He picks a worm up by its head and blows on it. The bug straightens, and when it's rigid, the man lights one end with a cigarette lighter and smokes it.

"Aki just had his eighteenth birthday and wanted to come back to where he was born. Alone, of course. A young man wants to feel independent. How could we say no?"

A corn-fed Kansas farm boy full of bumpkin magic loose in L.A., what could possibly go wrong with that?

"My husband still knows people, Sub Rosa, in the area. He asked them to keep an eye on Aki, but it's a big city. We haven't heard from him in weeks. I know he knew people out here. He was corresponding with a Sub Rosa girl. I forget her name."

"Do you have the letters with you?"

"No. They're gone. He must have taken them with him."

"Have you talked to your husband's friends?"

"None of them knows anything."

"Why are you coming to me about this?"

"I have a feeling something has happened to my son. I heard that you do things other people can't or don't want to do. There was a crime in the city earlier this year. I believe a cult was planning on sacrificing a group of kidnapped women. You stopped it."

Is that what the tabloids are saying happened now? It's annoyingly close to the truth. Couldn't they have worked in some ETs?

"Listen, Evelyn."

"How did you know my name was Evelyn?"

"Listen, Evelyn, I know you need help, but not from me. I'm not what you think I am."

"What are you?"

"I'm a monster."

I let that sink in for a second. She's a nice woman, but Ziggy really fouled my mood. I kill off the tumbler of Aqua Regia.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but if your husband really is Sub Rosa, why isn't he out here with you doing locator spells? Or echo tracing? Sloppy teenybopper magic usually leaves a fat shiny trail of residue all over the aether. Easy to follow."

"My husband is dead. It was very recent and sudden. That's why I was trying to get in touch with Aki. Now I might have lost both of them."

She looks down at the coffee cup. Her heart is slowing, but not because she's any more relaxed. My blackened arm is starting to heal. It burns and itches. I can't help this woman. I don't want to be here.

Carlos says, "I think you're getting a little ahead of yourself. Why don't you go to the cops or hire yourself a private investigator? You don't need magic for this kind of thing. And from what I've seen around here, magic doesn't really help anything. It just makes everything more confusing."

She puts her hand on my arm.

"You saved all those people. Why won't you help me?"

"Carlos is right. You need to go to the cops or hire yourself a detective. I'm not Sam Spade. That's not what I do."

"But you saved all those people."

"I didn't save anyone. I just killed the bastards who needed killing. Get it? I don't save good people. I murder bad ones." I wish I was saying this quietly and reasonably, but really, I'm way too loud.

Evelyn straightens and turns to ice. She puts her kid's photo back in her bag and gets up.

"I'm sorry to have taken up your valuable time."

"Wait a minute."

This time I grab her arm. I look around for someone who was here a minute ago.

"Titus. Come on over here."

A whippet-thin black guy in a purple velvet suit and glasses with round, yellow-tinted lenses walks cautiously to the bar. I hold a hand out at Evelyn.

"Titus, this is Evelyn. Evelyn, this is Titus Eshu. Titus is a Fiddler. Do you know what that is?"

"He reads objects by handling them."

"Right. He plays around with things, then tells you all about the owner. He can even use them like a divining rod. Do you have any of your son's things?"

"I have his high school class ring."

I look at Titus.

"That good enough?"

Titus nods.

"It's a good start," he says to Evelyn. To me he says, "And after I do this, you're going to owe me a favor, right?"

"Right."

He smiles, takes Evelyn by the elbow, and leads her to his table.

"This way, ma'am. Let's see if we can track down your wayward child."

Carlos says, "You were a real world-class prick there for a minute. Then you turned it around right at the last second and came out sort of looking like a person."

"I've gotta get out of here."

"I'm kidding, man. You did fine with the old lady."

"No, I didn't. This is my punishment for not killing Mason. I don't know what I'm doing anymore. There's no reason for me to exist. I kill things I don't care about for people I hate. I yell at old ladies. And now I'm going to owe goddamn Titus a favor."

"I'm going to wrap up this food so you can take it home with you."

I turn in my seat and look at Evelyn and Titus. He has Aki's ring in one hand and the photo in the other. His eyes are half closed and he's whispering an incantation. Evelyn hangs on his every word. She doesn't look happy, but maybe a little more hopeful.

I'm suddenly aware that while I'm watching Titus, pretty much everyone else in the bar is watching me. I'd like to think they're staring because of my white-hot animal magnetism, but I know I'm not Elvis. I'm Lobster Boy, hear me roar. Carlos gives me the tamales in a Styrofoam carrier. Thanks and good night. Be sure to tip your waitresses. I leave through a shadow near the fire exit in back. YOU KNOW HOW they put out oil well fires by setting off an explosion that's so big it snuffs out the first fireball with a bigger one? Sometimes the only way to get past something impassable is to smash it with itself. Like kills like. When you live with a dead man's head that won't shut up and smokes all your cigarettes, the only way to deal with the awfulness is to make it so unbelievably awful that it becomes kind of weirdly beautiful. Like an exploding giraffe full of fireworks. (Hellions really know how to throw a birthday party.)

Kasabian calls it his "pussy wagon," but I can't go there, so I call it the "magic carpet." Really it's a polished mahogany deck about the size of a dinner plate, supported by a dozen articulated brass legs. When I brought it home from Muninn's-partial payment for a quick smash-and-grab job-one end of the deck was loaded down with prisms, mirrors, and gears that must have meshed with another long-lost machine. The top is covered in what looked like teeth marks and stained with something black. I don't want to know what used to drive the thing or what happened to it.

After I unscrewed and sawed off all the extra hardware, I let Kasabian take it out for a test drive. What do you know? His low-rent, third-rate hoodoo was just powerful enough to keep the brass legs in sync, so he can move around on his own now. It's nice not to have to carry Kasabian everywhere anymore, but it means that every day I come home to a chain-smoking Victorian centipede.

He's standing on what used to be the video bootlegging table and using his brass legs to tap numbers into a PC. Ever since he got mobile, Kasabian has been doing Max Overload's books again. He and Allegra set up a little in-store wireless network so he can do the banking and buy new inventory online. Race with the Devil, a decent piece of mid-seventies trash with Warren Oates and Peter Fonda trying to outrun a bunch of rural devil worshippers, plays on a monitor next to the PC. Ever since his visit Downtown, Kasabian has been on a devil movie kick. He doesn't look up when he hears me come in.

"So, how did it go?" He turns and looks at me. "Oh, that bad."

"Just about that bad, Alfredo Garcia."

"I told you not to call me that."

"I had to go Wild Bunch in the theater. Left me in a Peck-inpah state of mind."

"Did you get paid, at least?"

"Yeah, here's the big money. Plus the usual deductions."

I drop the check next to the keyboard. Kasabian pinches the ends of the check between two of his brass legs and holds it up to read it.

"That prick. He just does this to humiliate you. It makes him feel better about not being able to do the stuff you can do and needing you for his dirty work. It's pure envy."

"Yeah, it's a glamorous life here in Graceland."

I pick up the bottle of Jack Daniel's from the bedside table and pour some into the same glass I've been using for three days.

"And he's trying to keep us on the hook by starving us. You know that, right? You ought to let me hex his ass."

I sip the Jack. It's good, but after the Aqua Regia, it's about as potent as cherry Kool-Aid.

"Save your hoodoo for real work. And, technically, he's only starving me. If he knew about you, he'd shit his heart out."

"Great, get him up here. I'll video it and put it up on YouTube."

"Aelita would be the fun one to get on tape. I'm an Abomination, but I don't even know if angels have a word for you."

"One does. 'Hey, shithead.'"

"Lucifer always had a way with words. He's just like Bob Dylan, but without all the annoying talent."

"That's hilarious. He loves it when you say stuff like that. Every time you do, he turns up the temperature Downtown ten degrees."

"Then he should be able to cook biscuits on his tits by now."

"I'll ask him for you."

"No, you won't. When you download your brain or play video highlights or whatever it is you do for the old man, you'll only show him what you want him to see. You hold back crumbs 'cause when you know something he doesn't it gives you power. Just like you hold back things from me. And I hold back things from you and he holds back things from both of us. We're a little clusterfuck of liars."

Kasabian nods to the Styrofoam container I set on the bed when I ditched my weapons.

"Do I smell tamales?"

"Yeah, you want them? I lost my appetite."

Kasabian kneels down on six of his legs and hangs over the edge of the table. He uses four of his free legs to open the door of the minifridge I installed and uses two more legs to grab a bottle of Corona. He pops the top off the beer while pulling himself back onto the table and waggles a bunch of his other legs at me like a horny lobster.

"Slip me some crimson, Jimson."

I hand him the container.

"Don't forget your bucket."

"Have I ever?"

"I just don't want a first time."

He doesn't answer. He's already diving into Carlos's spicy tamales, working a plastic fork with two of his front legs. After each bite of food, a glob that looks like white-orange putty oozes from the bottom of his neck, through the hole I drilled in the magic carpet and into a blue kid-size plastic beach bucket. There's a pop-top trash can at the end of that table. Kasabian is good about dumping his scat when he's done, but he's short, so he needs me to step on the pedal to open the top. It's nice to be needed.

I'm not in the mood for Cirque de Puke right now, so I find a pad and pencil and try to remember what Eleanor's monster belt buckle looked like. Alice was the artist in my family. Even my handwriting made my teachers weep. When I'm done, I have a sketch that's pretty good if I was a half-blind mental patient in the last stages of tertiary syphilis. I hold it up so Kasabian can see it.

"You recognize this?"

"I'm on my lunch hour, man."

"Just look at the goddamn paper."

He doesn't move his head from the food, just swivels his eyes and squints at the image.

"Nope. Never seen it before. What is it, some monster you're supposed to kill or have you started dating again?"

"It's something I saw today. Like a belt buckle or an icon or something. I didn't think much about it at the time, but it's been bugging me."

"I don't recognize it."

Plop goes the tamale putty.

"Can you check it out in the Codex?"

Now he turns to look at me. He hates it when I ask him to look things up. I'm not even supposed to know about the Daimonion Codex.

"I don't think so. Someone's using it. Occupado, you know?"

"Bullshit. I saw this kind of thing when I was Downtown. It might be a book, but you don't read it like one. It's conceptual, mental. Like a mystical database."

"If you know so much about it, why don't you look it up yourself?"

The Daimonion Codex is Lucifer's private notebook, reference book, strategy, spell and wisdom book, and anything-else-you-can-think-of book.

"The Codex is for official Hellion business and I only use it when the big man asks me because he's too busy to find something himself."

Satan's Big Little Book of Badass. A kind of Bizarro World Boy Scout manual. High-grade Gnostic porn. The Codex is the second most important document in the universe, right after the Scroll of Creation in you-know-who's personal library.

"Bullshit. Every time I leave the room, you're in there trying to find some angle that'll get your body back."

"No, I'm not."

"You always were a terrible liar, Kas. A career crook should be able to bull better than that."

"Leave me alone. When I get a spare minute, I'll look for your monster. Now let me eat these while they're warm."

I sit back on the bed and sip the glass of Jack. On the monitor, Peter Fonda is shooting at carloads of backwoods demon fanciers from the roof of a speeding camper.

"You been watching this all day?"

Kasabian talks between mouthfuls of food.

"No. Before that it was Shout at the Devil, only there wasn't any devil in it."

"No. That's a war movie."

"Why doesn't it say that on the box? 'Warning: Lee Marvin might look pissed off, but he's not the devil. There's not one fucking devil in this thing.'"

"Watch what you want, but promise me that I'm never going to ever come in here and find you spanking yourself to The Devil in Miss Jones."

"You're a scream, Milton Berle. Now I'm not going to tell you the good news."

"What good news?"

Kasabian takes a last bite of tamale and lets it fall into the bucket. Then he takes it and the Styrofoam container to the end of the table and waits. I haul my ass up off the bed and step on the trash-can pedal. When it opens, he tosses in the Styrofoam and upends the bucket into the can.

"What good news?"

Kasabian goes back to where he'd been working, leans over the table, and sets the bucket underneath, next to the minifridge. Then he finally looks at me.

"You have an actual job. Starting tonight. Something a lot better than stepping on bugs for the Wells."

"I've already got a job tonight. Straight consulting for the Vigil. No killing."

"When are you supposed to do it?"

"Around three? Why?"

"Good. You'll probably be done by then."

"Done doing what?"

He smiles at me exactly the way you don't want a dead man to smile at you.

"The big man is in town. He wants to see you tonight at the Chateau Marmont."

Damn. I finish my drink.

"What's Lucifer doing in L.A.?"

"What do I know? I'm just the answering machine."

"And snitch."

"That, too. He knows every time you jerk off. Unfortunately, so do I. You really need to get a girlfriend."

"What time am I supposed to be there?"

"Eleven. And be on time. He hates late. It's a real thing with him."

"Christ. I don't even have a jacket anymore. I need to get cleaned up."

"Don't freak out, man. You've got hours. This is a good thing. We need the money. Doing the deed for the Vigil tonight and picking up some new work from Mr. D might just let us keep the lights on for another month."

I go into the bathroom, close and lock the door. I've never been a shy boy until recently.

I peel the Evil Dead shirt off over my black shoulder. The pink flesh under the peeling black skin looks like the worst sunburn since Hiroshima. I kick off my boots and jeans, and check myself in the mirror.

A pretty sight, I am not. I turn the light on over the sink and lean close to the mirror, turn my head from side to side. The thousand tiny cuts from the flying glass at the theater are mostly gone. I tilt my head forward and back. Run my hands over my face and neck, looking at the shadows of the lines and creases from my neck to my forehead, feeling familiar contours.

Maybe not so familiar.

I felt the changes before, but over the last month they're undeniable.

I'm pretty sure my scars are healing.

The one thing I brought back from Hell that I wanted. The one thing I counted on. I spent eleven years and shed a thousand pounds of blood, flesh, and bone to grow my armor, and after six months of living in the light, I'm losing it.

I hate this place.

Hell is simple. There are no friends, just an ever-shifting series of allies and enemies. There's no pity, loyalty, or rest. Hell is twenty-four-hour party people, and the buddy you shared a foxhole with yesterday is a head on the end of a stick today, letting everyone in shouting distance know, "Abandon all hope ye who piss me off."

Back here in the world it's all soft, fish-belly white, "normal" people with jelly for backbones and not even the basic kill-or-be-killed honor of the arena. The L.A. sky doesn't turn brown because of smog. It's the metric tons of shit coming out of people's mouths every time they open them to talk. Know the old joke, "How do you know when a lawyer is lying?" "He's moving his lips." Up here, everyone is Perry Mason.

Little by little, I've been preparing for this moment, when I couldn't lie to myself anymore.

I upgraded my guns. Easy.

Before I got my ass kicked by malt-liquor-swilling teenyboppers this afternoon, my new working policy has been to duck when I see bullets, knives, and/or two-by-fours coming at me.

I've been shifting back more to hoodoo and hexes and relying less on muscle. It isn't as fun, but so far, the change has helped me keep my internal organs internal, where they fit better and don't attract flies.

A scalding shower helps to scrub off Eleanor and Ziggy Stardust. With an old hand towel, I scrape off as much of the burned skin as I can.

I even shave. It's a good, mindless activity and I'm sure the boss will appreciate me looking like I live indoors when I go to his hotel.

I wish I hadn't given Wells that body armor back after the shoot-out at Avila. The next time I'm at the Vigil's playhouse, I'm going to have to steal some.

Of course, to wear armor in the street, I'm going to need a new jacket. But not now. Not this second.

I go back into the bedroom with a towel around my waist, leaving my clothes on the bathroom floor. The dead girl's ash sifts onto the tiles. Except for the boots, I doubt that I'll ever wear those clothes again.

The bedroom reeks of cigarettes, whiskey, and tamales. I crack open a window.

Kasabian is back working at the computer.

"Careful, you're going to make L.A. smell funny."

Walking back to the bed I feel dizzy. All of a sudden I'm very tired. I shove the weapons to one side of the mattress, lie down, and pour a little bit of Jack.

"Do me a favor and watch that with headphones. I need to lie down for an hour."

"No problem."

Kasabian takes a set of earbuds, plugs them in, and the movie sound cuts out. He takes another beer from the minifridge and pops off the top.

"Before you zone out, have you heard anything about Mason?"

Ever since he became Lucifer's conduit to Hell, Kasabian has learned to overhear and "accidentally" stumble on a lot of information he's not supposed to have. He's Lucifer's personal ghost, so he doesn't really exist Downtown. Even Hellions can tell the truth when they think no one is listening.

He says, "Not much. He's in deep with some of the boss's old generals. Lucifer's original bunch. Abaddon. Baphomet. Mammon. They're trying to recruit the younger officers for a full-on revolution. But I haven't heard anything from Mason himself. He's pretty well insulated. He's the man with the plan, so they're keeping him out of harm's way."

"Is that the truth?"

Kasabian sets down his beer and looks at me.

"I wouldn't lie to you about Mason. I want him as dead as spats."

"Okay."

"Get some sleep. You want to look good for the cotillion."

"I'll save you a slow dance."

"Just keep your hands off my ass."

"What ass?" THERE'S THIS GUILTY dream I have. Been having it on and off for six months, since right after I dropped Alice's ashes in the ocean.

We're in the apartment smoking and talking. The Third Man is playing on TV, but the sound is off. A desperate Harry Lime runs through the sewers under Vienna. What I hate about the dream is that I can't tell if I'm remembering something that happened or inventing something. A confession or apology to the ghost that lives in my head.

"I blew up at a junkie on the street today. He just bumped into me. He smelled like piss and I wanted to strangle him and I almost did."

"Your father beat the shit out of you. Everyone who's been abused has those thoughts."

Alice is pretty forgiving when I get like this. She's a better human than me in almost every way possible. I don't know if I could be with someone whose main topics of conversations were movies and who I wanted to kill today.

"You need to get away from Mason and those others. They're no good for you," she says.

"You're right. But I've already blown off the Sub Rosa world. If I walk from the Circle, what am I? Should I pretend I don't have power? That was my whole childhood. Hiding so people wouldn't know I was what my granddad called an 'odd case.'"

"You're not an odd case."

"What am I?"

"You're my odd case."

"I'll tell you a secret. Mason's an odd case, too, but he doesn't care. I admire the hell out of him for that."

Alice rolls her eyes like she's a silent-movie star.

"Put a dress on, drama queen. Admiring anything about him is kind of fucked up."

"It's most definitely fucked up. But it's true. He's relentless. He's a force of nature. And he's always going to be just a little better than me. You should see the old books he's collected. Half of them are in Latin and Greek. He knows magic I've never even heard of."

"I thought you didn't need those things, all the books and objects he uses. You can pull magic out of the air."

"Maybe. Maybe that's not enough."

"From what I've seen and heard he's jealous of what you can do, which means you're doing fine."

"He says he can invoke an angel."

"Why would he want to do that?"

"To gain secret knowledge. Learn how the universe runs behind the scenes. And to prove he can. He says he's talked to demons, too."

"Now, that's just bullshit."

"Probably."

"Is that where all this is coming from? Demon and angel envy?"

"I can't help it. The sheer balls to say it is something. And if he can do it, I don't know. He'll be my hero and I'll have to put up a poster of him, like Bruce Lee over my bed back home."

"I hope you like this couch 'cause you're talking yourself into sleeping here tonight."

"Mason says he's making a deal with some kind of demons to get even more power."

"I don't believe in angels and devils."

"Why not?"

"I was raised Catholic."

She stubs out her cigarette and lights another. She was in a Robert Smith mood before I pissed her off, so she's smoking cloves. The apartment smells like a junior high girls' bathroom.

"He's Beverly Hills hoodoo. Going to be big in the Sub Rosa. He plans ahead. I skate by."

"So? If Mason's your big guy crush, be more like him and make some plans."

I smoke for a minute and watch Joseph Cotton following Harry Lime's girlfriend on the road from his grave.

"You're right. I can't just wing it for the rest of my life. Time to turn over a new leaf. I'll start planning ahead tomorrow. Or the day after."

"Or the day after that."

"Maybe next week."

"You're better than Mason and you can read people really well. If he starts waving his dick around and wants a Dodge City gris-gris shoot-out, you'll see it coming a mile away and kick his ass."

"Maybe I ought to get some of my own demons."

"Next week. Or the week after."

"Yeah. There's always time, right?" IT TOOK ME months to start thinking of the apartment as Vidocq's and not mine and Alice's. Francois-Eugene Vidocq is my oldest friend. He's two hundred years old and French, but don't hold that against him. I'm glad he took the place after Alice died. Six months in, the apartment is so transformed that I can't find a shred of my or Alice's life there. It was strange the first time I saw it that way. Allegra told me that in ancient Egypt, when the new pharaoh smashed the statues and hieroglyphs of the old one, it wasn't just good old-fashioned hooligan fun. The new pharaoh was trying to wipe the old one out of existence, erase him from the universe. To the Egyptians, no images meant no person. That's how it was when I first walked in. I felt erased. Now it's a relief not to be reminded of my old life every time I go over.

Vidocq, with Allegra's help, has turned the place into the Library of Alexandria, only French, with a schmear of L.A. art school punk. On a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf sits the foot-high three-thousand-year-old statue of Bast that Vidocq stole from an aristocratic bastard back in France. Next to Bast, Allegra has propped a pink Hello Kitty doll with tentacles. Hello Cthulhu.

The rest of the place is stacks of old manuscripts, crystals, weird scientific instruments, potions, herbs, and the gear to cut, cook, and mix them. Merlin's workshop with a big flat-screen TV and stacks of movies Allegra brings home from the Max Overload. There's porn stashed under the sofa, but they don't know I know about that. I think they watch it together.

"Where did Vidocq say he was going?"

"Out for mazarine ice."

"Sounds like wine cooler. What is it?"

"When he gets back, he can tell us both."

When I met Allegra her head was shaved smooth. Now she's letting it grow out short and shaggy. It suits her. It's pretty.

My shirt is off as she smears green jasmine-smelling paste on my burned shoulder with her hand. Somewhere in L.A. there's some poor guy who dreams about having a pretty girl rub paste on him, but none of the girls he knows will do it. Here I am taking his turn at bat and not even appreciating it.

"Does this hurt?"

"It's fine."

"That's not what I asked."

"Nurse, some psycho is making mud pies on my blisters with her hairy meat hooks and it hurts."

"That's more like it, baby boy. Knowing when I'm hurting you and not hurting is how I get better at this."

"You're doing fine. I'm a happy guinea pig."

Allegra sets down the jar and uses the lid to rub the excess paste from her hand.

"Why is it you come to me these days instead of Kinski? I'm not complaining. Patching you up is a great crash course in the whole healing thing."

"You're good at it, too. When people find out, you'll steal all of the doc's business."

She puts a couple of wide red leaves on top of the paste and wraps my arm in gauze, then uses white medical tape to hold the gauze in place.

I put my shirt back on. The arm still hurts, but it's definitely better.

"As for Kinski, I don't need any more neurotic angels in my life. Aelita wants to mount my head on a wall like a stuffed trout and Kinski is in his own remake of Earth Girls Are Easy."

"Avoiding Kinski doesn't have anything to do with Candy?"

"You're the second person who's asked me about her today."

"You should call her."

"Candy doesn't factor into anything. And I have called. She doesn't answer the phone anymore. It was only Kinski for a while. Now it's no one. I haven't talked to either of them in weeks."

"You only come over here anymore when you're bleeding. You don't talk to Eugene. Kinski is gone. You've been avoiding everyone who cares about you. All you do is lock yourself up with Kasabian, drink, and drive each other crazy. Speaking as your doctor, you've got serious issues. You're like those old guys you see at diners, staring at the same cup of coffee all afternoon, just sitting around waiting to die."

"Sitting around? Tell that to my burns."

"That's not what I mean. You came back to get the people who hurt you and Alice and you did it. Great. Now you need to find the next thing you're going to do with your life."

"Like learn the flute or maybe save the whales?"

"You should grow up, clean up, and treat yourself like a decent person."

"I'm pretty sure I'm not either of those things."

"Says who?"

"God. At least everyone who works for Him."

Allegra looks past me into space, thinking.

"If I gave you some Saint-John's-wort, would you take it? It might help your mood."

"Give it to Kasabian. He's the shut-in."

Allegra pulls me over to the window and examines me under the light.

"Do you think your face is getting worse?"

"Define 'worse.'"

"Are the changes becoming more noticeable?"

"I know what I think. Tell me what you think."

She nods.

"It's worse. Your old scars are healing and your new cuts aren't disappearing like they used to. You still heal fast, just not ridiculously fast."

"Can you stop it?"

"Leave it to you to ask for the opposite of everything I've been learning for the last six months."

"I need my scars. Come on, if you can fix something you should be able to break it, too, right?"

"I can beat the shit out of you with a claw hammer. That'd be easier than working up a scar potion."

"What about something that'll just stop the healing where it is?"

"I don't know about that."

The door opens as Allegra is talking.

"But I do," says Vidocq.

He comes in with a paper bag full of what looks like weeds, bugs, and most of the animal parts the dog food company rejected. He holds up a jar full of turquoise liquid.

"Blue amber."

He hands the jar to Allegra, who gets up and gives him a peck on the cheek.

"That's mazarine ice?"

"Oui. If you look in The Enochocian Treatise, the large gray book by the old alembic, you'll find notes on the Cupbearer's elixir. Take the amber and start gathering the other ingredients."

"That will bring my scars back?"

"No, but we might be able to halt the healing. The Cupbearer brewed and served the gods the elixir that gave them eternal life, keeping them as they were forever. Her elixir doesn't cure; it holds illness and infection in place. Teutonic knights brought it back from the Holy Lands during the Crusades for comrades who had contracted leprosy. I suspect that if it will stop the spread of a disease, I can make it hold your scars where they are."

"But you don't know."

"How could I? Only un homme fou asks for a way to stop healing."

"Fou me up, man. Give me skin like rhino hide. Make me look like the Elephant Man."

"It might take some time to get it right, but we'll see what we can do."

Vidocq and Allegra gather plants and potions, cutters and crushers, on the worktable. They don't have to talk much. Just whisper a word or two to let the other one know what they need. They're a nice team. Batman and Robin, but without the rough-trade undertones. For a second, I really hate their guts. I could have been like that with the right partner, but I'm stuck with the Beast That Wouldn't Shut Up. I wonder how smooth these two would be after a week of Kasabian screaming for porn and cigarettes. I should bring him over for a family dinner. Vidocq must have a ball gag around here somewhere.

Damn. What a childish little prick I am. There they are, working to save my ass, and all I can do is whine about poor, poor pitiful me. I need to go kill something real, not snuff dead cheerleaders, but something alive and nasty, something that deserves it.

"It's ironic, isn't it?"

I look up into Vidocq's eyes.

"You spent all those years in Hell fighting to stay alive, becoming injured and earning your scars. Then you come back home in hopes of destroying both your enemies and yourself, but instead you find yourself healing and becoming your old self again."

I get up and glance at my phone. There's still time to make a couple of stops before I have to be at the Chateau.

"Fuck my old self. My old self got his life stolen by morons and the person he cared about most killed. If I start turning into that asshole again, I'll peel these scars off myself and put a shotgun to my forehead."

"But how do you really feel?" asks Allegra.

"Thanks for fixing me up. I'll see you later."

"Where are you going?"

"I've got to buy a prom dress." I MAKE A quick stop at the Bamboo House of Dolls. You don't want to play into the "do me a favor, I'm a rock star" thing too often, but when you're being followed around because you're the celebrity killer of the month, why not use it occasionally, like when you need a human in the paranormal biz and you don't have time to screw around?

Mediums, exorcists, and sin eaters at Bamboo House aren't the big-money kind, so most of them have to do odd jobs to stay afloat. When you've been career-counseling ghosts all night, it's hard to answer phones or sling lattes for yuppies all day. Most human paranormals tend to dabble in things like gambling, sex work, and cream-puff crime. I only have to ask a couple of people to find a well-stocked thief. He sells me a new leather sport jacket and a rifle frock coat for a hundred, which even by booster standards is cheap. Of course, now he can tell his clients that he sells to Sandman Slim and jack up his prices. Let the circle of celebrity be unbroken. Amen.

There's still time to kill before I have to head over to Chateau Marmont and I'm restless. I haven't stolen a car in a month. All death and no play makes Stark a dull boy.

Hollywood Boulevard is long and the side streets aren't always well lit. You'd be surprised how cheap rich people can be when it comes to parking. They'd rather leave a half-million-dollar Lamborghini in a drugstore parking lot after hours than pay a valet fifteen bucks. Their car insurance payments are what most people put out for a mortgage, and they pay them for the privilege of being stupid, so they can leave their car on the street alone and unprotected, like a four-wheel Red Riding Hood waiting for a wolf like me. I'm doing people like that a favor when I take their cars. Every time stupid rich people get ripped off, it makes them feel better about hating poor people. All they did was leave the equivalent of a big pile of cash by a parking meter, and when they came back, they were horrified to find it was gone. Leaving their stuff out for people to steal proves to them that people want to steal their stuff. Fear is like curling up under a warm blanket for some people, especially the rich.

Something evil and full of testosterone must be smiling down on me tonight. About half a block from Sunset on Cahuenga Boulevard, parked right out in the street like Grandma's Camry, is a silver Bugatti Veyron 16.4. An easy two million dollars in precision engineering and eyeball kicks. If Hugh Hefner designed the Space Shuttle, it would look like the Veyron. Luke Skywalker would be conceived in the backseat of this car, if it had a backseat.

The Veyron is stuffed with more tech than a particle accelerator, so the black blade won't get me through the electronic lock without alerting every screaming bit of it. Fortunately, this isn't the first time the genius who owns the car has left it out in the open. A thin layer of dust covers the top. Just enough for me to draw in. I face west and move my finger slowly over the swept-back plastic roof, trying not to trip the alarm. I finish with a counterclockwise twist on Murmur's sigil. Murmur is a big-mouth Hellion prick with a voice like a 747 engine, but when you reverse his name, you can hear a pin drop from a mile away. When I'm done, I give the car a good shove. It rocks for a second, the lights flutter as the alarm tries to activate, but it gives up and dies. I slip inside through a shadow, jam the black blade into the ignition, and start it up. There's something very satisfying about stabbing two million dollars in the heart.

Murmur's silence fills the car inside and out. My brain starts to untangle after a long, weird day.

Which is good and bad. It leaves me asking the big question I need answered: Why is Lucifer in L.A.? There's nothing I've picked up from Kasabian that gives me a clue, and he can't lie as well as a five-year-old. Have I done anything to piss Lucifer off or make him especially happy lately? Not that I know of. I haven't done anything for him at all except take his cash. His retainer checks are a decent amount of money, and if I didn't piss it all away on the big black money pit that is Max Overload, I'd be doing all right. If I was a regular desk monkey with a regular apartment and a used Honda Civic, I'd be living pretty well. But I like my little tree fort. Any more room and I'd get lost. Vidocq would find me a week later, starving and hallucinating in the breakfast nook. Max Overload is all I need or want. There's a bed, a closet, a bathroom, and a million movies downstairs. I didn't crawl out of Hell to hit the pillow sales at Bed, Bath amp; Beyond. I have a hard enough time keeping clothes for more than a week.

So, what the hell does Lucifer want? I don't have my gun or the na'at with me, which is probably just as well. I have the black knife and the stone Lucifer gave me the last time we saw each other. I tested it. I've thrown every kind of magic I can think of at it and it seems to just be a rock. I don't know why I carry the damned thing around. Superstition, maybe. When the devil tells you you might need something someday, I figure it pays to listen. Between the rock, Azazel's knife, the na'at, Mason's lighter, and Kasabian's head, I'm starting to feel like a Gnostic junkyard.

As I cruise the streets, my mind wanders. Never a good idea. An image of Alice tries to form in my brain, but I concentrate on the lights, the billboards, and the other cars and it goes away. I spend a fair amount of time and energy not thinking about Alice these days. On the other hand, I think about Mason all the time. I know Kasabian knows more about Mason than he's telling me. I'd love to get some alone time with the Daimonion Codex, but I'm not willing to get my head cut off for the privilege. THE KISSI I don't think about much, but I dream about them. Their vinegar reek chokes me while their fingers dig around inside my chest like bony worms. I PUSH A recessed sci-fi button on the armrest and one of the Veyron's windows slides down silently, like a tinted ghost. I turn off Hollywood Boulevard onto Sunset, go about half a block, and flip a James Bond U-turn in the middle of the street. Kick the Veyron back into gear and burn rubber to the little strip mall where Doc Kinski's clinic is located. The Veyron bottoms out as I turn into the parking lot. A couple of local geniuses have broken into the doc's office and are carrying out armloads of junk. Nice timing. I'm just in the mood to hit someone.

I throw open the door and come around the car looking for which one to smack first and all the fun goes out of it. It isn't thieves after all. It's Kinski and Candy. They're loading boxes of scrolls and the doc's strange medicines and elixirs. They're as surprised to see me as I am seeing them. We all just stand there looking at each other for a minute like kids caught with their hands in the cookie jar. I threw a perfectly good cigarette out the window for this. The doc hands a box to Candy. She keeps loading while he comes over to talk to me.

"Nice to see you, doc. I don't suppose you got any of the like fifty messages I left you? With most people I'd stop calling, but I used to think we were friends. Then after a while I kept calling because I was plain pissed off and thought I'd spread the joy."

"Things have been a little crazy. Sorry. We're doing a lot of work away from the clinic."

"So I noticed."

Candy is carrying smaller and smaller boxes one at a time to the car so she doesn't have to come over. I give her a big talk-show smile.

"Hi. How are you?"

She stops loading for a second, but stays by the rear of the car.

"Okay. How have you been?"

"Getting my arm about burned off and the rest of me beat to shit by vampires. I was hoping maybe one of you would return my call and help me out with that since that's what I thought you did for a living. Don't worry, though. I got some Bactine."

"Problem solved, then," says Kinski.

"I hope you're doing some superfine doctoring wherever it is you've been going. You better have figured out how to cure cancer with ice cream or something 'cause your reputation is going to shit around here."

Kinski takes a step closer, speaking quietly.

"There's a lot going on in the world that doesn't have anything to do with you."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you're always going to get burned up. Or your ass kicked by vampires. Sinatra sings 'My Way' and you crack your ribs. You're a walking disaster area and I can't fix that for you."

"Thanks all to hell, doc. You're a real chip off the Hippocratic oath. I'd ask you for a referral to another doctor but L.A. is full of assholes, so it shouldn't be hard to find one."

"You want some advice? Start stealing ambulances instead of flashy cars. Allegra can take care of you until we get back. That's all I can do for you right now."

"Where is it you need to be so fast? Are you two okay?"

"Candy and I need to be elsewhere. We need to be there soon, and standing here talking to you isn't getting us any closer."

Kinski goes to his car and Candy gets inside. I walk around to the passenger side and look in the window at her. She looks at me, away, and then back. There's something in her eyes that I can't quite figure out. It's more than being uncomfortable about when we kissed at Avila, but I can't tell what. Did she fall off the wagon again and kill someone?

Kinski starts the car and guns the engine. He takes the brake off, and I step out of the way so he can line up the car for the street. I'm getting back in the Veyron when I hear a car door open and slam shut. A second later Candy is next to me. She grabs me around the neck.

"I miss you, but we have to go. Things will be okay soon. You'll see."

She pecks me on the lips, turns, and gets back in the car. The doc steers them out onto Sunset, where they disappear into traffic. THE CHATEAU MARMOT is a giant white castle on a green hill and it looms over Sunset like it fell out of a passing UFO. It fits in with the surrounding city with all the subtlety of a rat on a birthday cake. Make that a French rat. The place is a chateau, after all.

When the parking attendant sees the Bugatti, he mistakes me for someone he should care about and rushes over. His interest lasts for maybe a second, the exact amount of time it takes me to step out of the car. People have cash registers for eyes at places like this. By the time my feet are on the ground, he's totaled up exactly how much my clothes and haircut are worth and I've come up short. Still, I'm driving a two-million-dollar car, so I might be an eccentric foreign director who's just flown in for some meetings and sodomy, which means he can't quite work up the nerve to shoo me away like a stray dog that just crapped in the pope's big hat.

"Good evening, sir."

"What time do you have?"

He checks his watch.

"Ten to eleven."

"Thanks."

He tears a numbered parking tag in half, hands me half, and sets the other half on the Bugatti's dashboard.

"Are you staying at the hotel?"

"No. Meeting a friend."

"That will be twenty dollars, sir."

I tear up the parking tag and drop the pieces on the ground.

"I've got a better idea. Keep the car."

"Sir?"

He wants to come after me, but other cars are arriving, so he drives the Bugatti into the garage.

Inside, I go the front desk and it hits me that I don't have a room number or any idea who to ask for. Point for Kasabian.

"Good evening, sir. How can I help you?"

The desk clerk looks like Montgomery Clift and is better dressed than the president. He's smiling at me, but his pupils are dilating like he thinks I'm going to start stealing furniture from the lobby. I stashed the leather jacket in the Room of Thirteen Doors before coming over and am wearing the rifle coat. I thought it looked classier and more formal, but maybe I was wrong.

"A friend of mine is staying here, but I don't have his room number."

"Of course. What's your friend's name?"

"I don't know."

"Excuse me?"

"He's not going to give his real name and I don't know what name he's using. He has a lot of them."

The clerk raises his eyebrows a little. Now he has an excuse to release his inner snotty creep.

"Well, I'm not sure what I can do about that. You and your friend should probably have dealt with that in advance. Are you even sure he's here? We specialize in a fairly exclusive clientele."

"He'll be in your penthouse. The biggest one you have."

The clerk smiles like I'm a bug and he's deciding whether to step on me or hose me down with Raid.

"Unless your friend is a Saudi prince with an entourage of thirty-five, I'm afraid you're mistaken."

"Check your register again. I know he's here, Maybe the prince checked out."

"The prince's rooms are booked through the summer, so, no, there's no mistake."

I get out my phone and dial the direct line to my room above Max Overload. I know Kasabian is there, but he doesn't answer. He knows what time it is and he's probably dancing a centipede jig and laughing at me as the phone rings and rings. I put the phone back in my pocket. The clerk is looking at me. His expression hasn't changed. What I want to do is punch a hole in the front of the desk, reach through, grab his balls, and make him sing The Mickey Mouse Club song. But these days, I'm working on the theory that killing everyone I don't like might be counterproductive. I'm learning to use my indoor voice like a big boy, so I smile back at the clerk.

"Are you sure you don't have another penthouse lying around here somewhere? Some off-the-books place you keep for special guests?"

"No, I'm sure we don't have anything like that. And without a name or a room number, I need to ask you to leave the hotel."

"Is needing to ask me to leave the same as telling me to leave? That's a really confusing sentence."

"Please, sir. I don't want to have to call security."

No, you don't want to call them because then I'd have to make you into a sock puppet.

"Would you like me to tell your fortune?"

"Excuse me?"

I pick up a pen from the counter.

"Give me your hand a minute."

He tries to pull both of his hands away, but I'm faster by a mile and get a death grip on his right wrist. His heart is pumping as fast as the Bugatti's engine. He wants to yell for security, but he can't even open his mouth. I don't want the poor guy to stroke out, so I draw a single Hellion character on the palm of his hand, and then ball it closed. It's a mind trick I saw Azazel use a few times on his dumber enemies. It's like sticking the magic word in a golem's mouth. The clerk's eyes glaze over and he stares past me at nothing in particular.

"Can you hear me, hotshot?"

He smiles at me. It's nice this time. Like he's a human talking to another human.

"Yes, of course. How can I help you?"

"I need you to tell me the names of your extra-special guests. Not princes or movie stars. Your really special guests."

He looks away and taps something into the computer terminal behind the desk.

"We only have one guest who sounds like the kind of person you're looking for. A Mr. Macheath."

Another point for Kasabian. Alice loved The Threepenny Opera and I played the 1930s German version at the store a few times when I was extra drunk and maudlin. Kasabian must have told Lucifer. I wonder what else I let slip that he could pass on to his boss.

"Yeah, that'll be him. Where's his room?"

"That particular room isn't a where. It's a when."

"Say that again, but use smaller words."

The clerk laughs a little. I might have to leave him like this.

"You take the elevator to the top floor. On the east wall you'll see a very beautiful old grandfather clock. Open the cabinet where the pendulum swings and hold it to one side. Count to three and step into the cabinet."

"Inside the grandfather clock?"

"Of course, you're not actually stepping into the clock, but through it. A kind of time membrane that opens into the room. I don't know if the room is forward or backward in time, but I'm sure it's one of those."

"I'll try it. Thanks."

"Thank you. And Mr. Macheath."

"How are you feeling right now?"

"Wonderful, sir. Thank you for asking."

"Yeah, that's going to wear off in a while, so enjoy it while it lasts."

"Thank you. I will."

I go to the elevator and get out on the top floor. The grandfather clock is where he said it would be. I don't pick up any hoodoo from it, so I open the front and grab the pendulum.

One. Two. Three.

I push the pendulum to the side and step through.

And come out in a room so big, so stuffed with golden statues, marble, and antiques, that Caligula would think it's tacky.

"You're late."

Lucifer stands by a marble pillar as big around as a redwood. A tailor is marking his suit with chalk, doing a final fitting.

"I would have been here early if you and Kasabian weren't playing name games with me."

"You should have noticed that little detail before or factored in more time to work it out when you arrived."

"Kas said you hated it when people were late."

"I hate when people I pay aren't doing their best work. You're a smarter boy than you act, Jimmy. You need to start taking things more seriously."

"I'm taking this room seriously. This is what Liberace's nightmares must have looked like."

Lucifer turns around and looks at me. He's an angel, so I can't read him at all.

He tilts his head slightly and says, "Love the coat. Are you on your way to the O.K. Corral?"

I nod.

"Yeah, it's a little Doc Holliday, but it's called a rifle coat for a reason. I can hide a double-barreled shotgun under here. Or do you want me in slippers and a sweater vest, fighting off your enemies with a hot cocoa?"

"Not now, but when you come back down below, I hope you'll fight that way in the arena."

"Is that why you're here? To take me back?"

He frowns.

"No, no. That was just a terrible joke. Forgive me."

He turns to the tailor.

"We're done for tonight."

The tailor gives him a small bow and helps Lucifer take off the half-finished jacket and pants. Suddenly I'm alone in a room with the Prince of Darkness in his underwear. I wouldn't have pegged him for a boxers guy.

Actually, he's still wearing a silk maroon shirt and he slips on a pair of pressed black slacks folded over the back of a chair. I can't get into Lucifer's mood or mind the way I can with humans, but I can see him move. As he pulls on pants, he makes the tiniest imaginable move with his shoulders. He flinches, almost like he's in pain. I look over at a statue of a headless woman with wings before he turns around.

"Would you like a drink?"

I don't turn right away.

"That sounds great."

"I have some Aqua Regia, but I hear that's not such a rare thing for you these days."

"No. Are you the one sending it up?"

"Don't be stupid. I pay you enough to take care of your own vices. I'd like to know who is importing the stuff."

"You don't know?"

"I have a fairly full plate at the moment what with your friend Mason trying to turn my armies against me. Or hadn't you heard?"

"Tell the truth, the revolution was already going when he got there. He just jumped on the crazy train."

"And I have you to thank for that."

"I didn't plan it, if that's what you're thinking."

"I would never accuse you of planning things. Come over and sit down."

I follow him to an area where chairs and sofas are grouped together, facing one another. I sit on a leather easy chair. It's the most comfortable piece of furniture in the universe. My ass wants to divorce me and marry it.

"So, Jimmy, killed anyone interesting lately?"

"No. The ones I killed today were already dead and just needed reminding."

"I'm sure they appreciated that."

"No one complained."

"What flavor of undead were they?"

"Vampires."

"Young ones? God, I hate them."

Lucifer lights up a Malediction. I know he wants me to ask for one, so I don't.

"Why are you up here? Shouldn't you be Downtown spanking the guilty and slaughtering your generals? Or are you taking early retirement so you can spend more time with the grandkids?"

"Nothing so dramatic. I'm in town doing some consulting work."

"What kind?"

"Why does anyone come to L.A.?"

"To kill people."

"No, that's just you. Normal people come here to get into the movies."

"You're in a movie?"

"Of course not. I'm here as a technical adviser. A producer friend is in preproduction for a big-budget film of my life story."

"Please tell me you're bringing Ed Wood back from the dead to direct it."

"This is strictly an A-list project. I'm disappointed, Jimmy. I thought you'd be more excited. You love movies."

"Why do you need a biopic? About half the movies ever made are horror flicks and aren't all horror flicks really about you? So, you already have about ten thousand movies."

"But those are metaphorical. Even the ones where I'm depicted, it's never really me. This will be the real thing. The true story. My side of the story."

"Don't take this the wrong way, but who fucking cares? Are there really enough Satanists and girls in striped stockings to pay for a flick like that?"

"It's a prestige picture, Jimmy. Sometimes a studio makes a movie it knows won't show a near-term profit because they know that it's the right thing to do artistically."

"You own the head of the studio, don't you? Someone sold you their soul for fame and power and hot and cold running starlets and this is them paying you off."

"It's only a partial payoff. I still own the soul."

Lucifer goes to a desk and comes back with a framed piece of black velvet, like something a jeweler would have. It's covered with small shiny objects. A pocketknife. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses missing one lens. A pair of Shriner cuff links. A sleeping netsuke cat. He picks up a small gold necklace.

"I take something from everyone whose soul I hold. Not take. They choose what they want to give me. It's a symbolic act. A physical reminder of our deal. These are trinkets from Hollywood friends."

He holds the gold necklace higher so I can get a good look.

"This is Simon's. Simon Ritchie. The head of the studio. Simon imagines that he's very clever. Very ironic. The necklace belonged to his first wife. It was her First Communion gift. A rosary necklace with a pretty little cross. Of course, she was just a girl when she received it, so at some point she added a gold unicorn charm. A darling thing, though I'm not sure the Church would approve."

"What does he or she get for all this?"

"Simon? He gets a little more time."

Lucifer takes a long drag on the Malediction and puts the necklace back with the other soul souvenirs.

"That's all you people ever want. A little more time in a world that all of you, in your heart of hearts, secretly despise."

"I don't keep it a secret."

"And that's why I like you, Jimmy. We're alike in so many ways. Plus, you're so very good at making things dead. That's what you're going to do for me while I'm here. Not kill so much as prevent a killing, namely mine. You're going to be my bodyguard whenever I'm out in public."

"You're the devil. You gave God a rusty trombone and lived to talk about it. Why would you need a bodyguard?"

"Of course, no one can kill me permanently, but this physical body I inhabit on earth can be injured, even destroyed. Wouldn't it be embarrassing if it turned up riddled with bullets? We don't want that kind of negative buzz just as the production is getting off the ground."

"You need a new PR guy, not a bodyguard."

"All the most famous people travel with private security these days, don't they? You're mine. Sandman Slim by my side, ready to snap necks at a moment's notice. That will be quite a photo op. For both of us."

"That's exactly what I want. More people knowing who I am."

Lucifer laughs.

"Don't worry. The civilian media won't see either of us. This is purely for the benefit of our sort of people."

"The Sub Rosa."

"Exactly."

"Is that who owns the studio?"

"No. It's a civilian gentleman, but most of his staff is Sub Rosa. The studio even has an outreach program, providing unskilled jobs to Lurkers that want to crawl out of the sewers and into the real world."

"Sub Rosas get the corner office and Lurkers get to clean the toilets. Same as it ever was."

"That sounds like class warfare, Jimmy. You're not a socialist, are you?"

"Considering who and what I am…"

"An abomination?"

"Right. Considering that most Sub Rosa probably consider me a Lurker, do you really want me around so one of them can say something cute at a party and I have to pry his head off with a shrimp fork?"

Lucifer seems to think for a moment, sets down his drink, and leans forward in his seat. He speaks very quietly.

"Do you think for one second that I would allow any of the walking excrement that infests this world to insult me or anyone in my employ? You might be a natural-born killer, but I specialize in torment that lasts a million years. You think you've seen horrors because you were in the arena. Trust me, you have no idea what real horror looks like or the terrible things I've done to keep my throne. You'll be by my side while I'm in Los Angeles because in this task and in all others, I'm as much your bodyguard as you are mine."

It's moments like this, when Lucifer gets rolling and the words and the intensity start flowing, that I understand how one lone angel convinced a third of Heaven's worker bees to turn the dump over. And that was just the third with the cojones to follow him. I have a feeling that a lot of other angels listened, but were too scared to join the party. If I was some lower-class grease-monkey angel caught in the cross fire of an argument between Lucifer and Aelita-oh wait, I am-I'd probably think twice about giving God the finger and running off to never-never land with Satan and the Lost Boys. But I'd still go.

I want to ask what that part about us being each other's bodyguard means, but when he gets like this, it's scary to ask direct questions, so I go another way.

"What do I have to do as your bodyguard?"

He picks up his drink and relaxes like nothing ever happened.

"Not much. I don't expect any trouble, but all the major celebrities travel with their own security these days. Who better for me to have by my side than Sandman Slim? All you have to do is remember to wear pants and occasionally look menacing. Really, you'll be less my bodyguard and more of a branding opportunity, like Ronald McDonald."

"It sounds better and better all the time."

"You've already taken a lot of my money and you're not in a position to pay it back, so let's not argue the point. You know you're going to take the job. You knew it before you walked in here."

"When do I start?"

"Tomorrow night. Mr. Ritchie, the head of the studio, is throwing me a little welcome party. We'll make our debut then."

"I have something I have to do later tonight."

"I'm not going anywhere tonight, so feel free."

"Does Kasabian know about all this?"

"Why would I tell him my business? His job is to send me information."

"What's he been telling you about me?"

"That you're at loose ends. That you're depressed. That you're drunk much of the time. That ever since you locked up Mason, all you've done is kill things, smoke, and drink. You need to get out more, Jimmy. This will be the perfect job for you. You'll meet lots of exciting new people to hate."

"I hope you're a better salesman when you're buying suckers' souls."

He pours us both more Aqua Regia. When he holds out the pack of Maledictions, I take one and he lights it for me.

"I'm not a salesman. I don't have to be. People offer me their souls every second of every day. They bring them to my door ready to eat. It's like having pizza delivered."

"You're making me hungry. There any food around here?"

"You want to eat with me? You don't know much mythology, do you? Persephone's story?"

"Who's she?"

"She was abducted by Hades and taken to the Underworld, where she ate a single pomegranate seed. She was able to return home, but for the rest of her life she had to spend half of the year with her husband on earth and half of the year with Hades in the Underworld."

"Was she hungry when she ate the seed?"

"I expect so."

"Then what's the problem? I once ate some greasy scrambled eggs at a truck stop near Fresno and puked and shit myself for two days. That was six months in Hell right there."

Lucifer picks up a phone next to his chair.

"I'll call room service." LATER, MY PHONE goes off. It's Wells texting me the address of where I'm supposed to meet him. I go out the Alice in Wonderland clock and down to the garage, where top-of-the-line cars are laid out like Christmas morning on repo-man island. There's a white '57 T-bird with a white top. I pop the knife into the ignition, fire it up, and head outside. On my way out of the lot, I nod to the valet I gave the Bugatti to. He raises one arm and gives me an unsure little half wave. He won't be able to keep the Veyron, of course, the cops and insurance company will make sure of that, but I hope he gets to have some fun before he has to ditch it. I DRIVE EAST along Sunset. Cut south into what the chamber of commerce calls Central City East, but the rest of the universe calls skid row. The corner of Alameda and East Sixth is so boring and anonymous it's amazing it's allowed on maps. Warehouses, metal fences, dusty trucks, and a handful of beat-up trees that look like they're on parole from tree jail. I turn right on Sixth and drive until I find a vacant lot. It's not hard. A half dozen of the Vigil's stealth supervans are parked by the curb, looking just a little out of place. Flying saucers at a rodeo.

The lot isn't one hundred percent vacant. There's a small house in the middle, an overgrown wood-frame shit box that's so swallowed up by weeds, vines, and mold that I can't even tell the original color. It's not much more than a shack. A leftover from the days when L.A. was open enough to have orchards, oil wells, and sheep farms. Not that this place was ever any of those.

Rich Sub Rosas aren't like rich civilians. Civilians wear their wealth on their sleeve. They get flash cars, like the Bugatti. Twenty-thousand-dollar watches that can tell you how long it takes an electron to fart. And big beautiful mansions in the hills, like Avila, far away from God's abandoned children, the flatlanders.

Sub Rosa wealth works on sort of the opposite idea. How secret and invisible can you make yourself, your wealth, and your power? Big-time Sub Rosa families don't live in Westwood, Benedict Canyon, or the hills. They prefer abandoned housing projects and ugly anonymous commercial areas with strip malls or warehouses. If they're lucky or been around long enough, they might have scored themselves an overgrown wood-frame shit box in a vacant lot on skid row. Chances are this house has looked exactly this feral and miserable for the last hundred years. Before that, it was probably a broken-down log cabin.

I park the T-bird across the street and jog over to the house. Just a few streetlights and warehouse security lights. There's nothing else alive. Not a headlight in sight.

There's a tarnished knocker on the door. I use it. A woman opens the door. Another marshal. She's in the female equivalent of Wells's men-in-black chic.

"Evening, ma'am, I'm collecting for UNICEF."

"Stark, right? Get in here. Marshal Wells is waiting."

"And you are?"

"No one you need to know."

She lets me inside. The interior of the place is as rotten and decayed as the outside. She leads me into the kitchen.

"Nice. Defensiveness and moral superiority in two-point-four seconds. A new land speed record."

"Marshal Wells said you liked to talk."

"I'm a people person."

"Is that before or after you cut people's heads off?"

"I only cut off my enemies' heads. I break my friends' hearts."

"So, that's, what, zero hearts broken?"

"The night's still young."

She stops by the door. Where the back porch would be, if it hadn't collapsed back when Columbus took his big cruise.

"Wells is in the study."

"Thanks, Julie."

"How did you know my name is Julie?"

Her heartbeat just spiked. I'm here in the middle of the night and being underpaid because of Wells. I don't need to take it out on her. I smile, trying to look pleasant and reassuring.

"It's nothing. Just a silly trick."

"Don't do it again."

"It'd be a little stupid guessing someone's name twice."

Marshal Julie listens to something coming through her earpiece.

She says "Got it" into her cuff and looks at me.

"Is that your Thunderbird across the street?"

"No."

"But you drove it here."

"Yes."

"You came here in a stolen vehicle?"

"Define 'stolen.' It's not like I'm keeping it."

"I don't suppose you have the keys?"

"You're kidding, right?"

She walks back to the front door, talking to whoever is in her earpiece.

"I need someone to evacuate a red and white Thunderbird coupe from the 6th Street inquiry."

I head out back, pretty sure that Marshal Julie will not be my secret Santa at the Homeland Security Christmas party. I'VE ALREADY GONE down one rabbit hole tonight at the Chateau, so it's no surprise that the house beyond the porch door has nothing to do with the wreck I entered. The house through the door is a sprawling old-fashioned California mansion. Very western. Almost cowboy. Lots of wood. Two-story-high ceilings. Leather and animal-print furniture right out of an old Rat Pack movie. Massive picture windows look out over the desert and San Gabriel Mountains.

This, the Sub Rosa house hidden inside the other, is crowded with Wells's people. There are at least a dozen forensic agents in the living room alone. They're using a lot of strange gear I've never seen before, more of the Vigil's weird angelic technology. The room is full of agents lost behind flashing lights, on their knees shoving beeping probes under furniture or lost behind transparent floating screens showing weird images of supermagnified carpet fibers.

"Down here, dead man."

It's Wells, yelling to me from the far end of the house. He never gets tired of reminding me that I'm officially dead and off the radar of the cops and most of the government. But only as long as I make nice with the Vigil. It's a good threat. Without them, my life would be a lot more complicated.

I pass another ten agents in the hall on the way to the study and six more in the study. Between agents chattering, vacuums sucking up evidence, and probes flying around checking for aether residue, I can hardly hear my own voice.

"Why the hell do you need so many people, Wells?"

The marshal doesn't look at me. He's staring off at something across the room.

"You do your job and let my people do theirs."

What Wells is looking at is worthy of some top-drawer staring. There's an altar and above it, a six-foot-tall statue of Santa Muerte, a kind of grim reaper parody of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Despite her bony looks, she's someone her believers pray to for protection. I guess whoever owned the statue wasn't very good at it. It looks like half of his blood is sprayed across Saint Death, the altar, and the walls. The rest is in a nice congealed pool of rust-colored Jell-O around what's left of his body. You can't even call what's on the floor a corpse. There isn't enough of it. It looks like he tried to crawl into a jet engine, changed his mind, and tried to crawl out again.

I say, "I think he's dead."

Wells nods, still staring at the slaughter.

"I'll be sure to write that down. Anything else?"

"This was no boating accident."

Wells looks at me like he's a trash compactor and I'm week-old bacon.

"Damn you, boy. A man is dead here and he was one of yours. Sub Rosa. And he died badly. Do you have anything to contribute to our finding out what the hell happened here?"

I want to get closer to the death scene and I have to walk around several agents to do it. Glad I'm not claustrophobic.

The body is lying in pieces scattered inside a strangely modified calling circle. The edges are sharp. It's not a circle. It's a hexagon, a shape only used in dark magic. It looks like at least part of the circle was painted with blood, though it's hard to be sure with pieces of the guy laid out across the floor like a buffet. There are a lot of bones scattered around. Too many to all be his. He probably used them to reinforce the hexagon.

I have to walk all the way around the room to get back to Wells.

"He doesn't stink. How long has he been lying there?"

"At least two days. There's been very little tissue breakdown. No blowfly eggs. Not even rigor mortis in the one elbow joint we found."

"Did you find anything in aether tracings?"

"There's definitely dark magic residue. We're not sure what kind yet."

I go back to the body and stand as close as I can without touching it. Even without trying, I can feel something radiating off the mangled flesh and bones. But I can't tell what. It's ancient and cold. For a minute I wonder if the Kissi could have done it, but there's no vinegar reek. If Wells's crew would quiet down for a goddamn second, it probably wouldn't be hard to figure out. Some of the angel devices are pumping out celestial energy fields, stinking up the aether.

"Can you get these people to quiet the hell down for a minute?"

"This is a priority job. It's a big crew and everybody works. Do some magic, Sandman Slim. You've worked loud rooms before."

I can't get hold of whatever it is that's coming off the body. I touch part of what I think is an arm with the toe of my boot. Turn it over. One of the forensic techs says something.

"Get that machine out of my way so I can work," I say.

I'm not sure exactly how I sounded, but half of Wells's crew suddenly find other parts of the room to work.

Kneeling down, I take a close look at the not-rotting skin. There are funny marks there. Old ones. He'd tattooed over them, like he was trying to camouflage them. There are marks on the bones, too. New ones.

The altar is a jumble of magic objects. Saints and rosaries. A sephirot stitched together from separate pieces of parchment and linen. Pentagrams and swastikas drawn on Post-its. An old bottle of no-name whiskey. Animal bones. Bowls full of meth, joints, and poppers. Yojimbe bark. Gray's Anatomy. And a very nice selection of dildos, gags, butt plugs, nipple clamps, and antique handcuffs.

I drag a chair over to where Wells is standing. The forensic crew is falling in love with me.

"Who is this guy? Was this guy?" I ask.

"Enoch Springheel."

"Springheel, like the Springheels?"

"Yep. Supposedly, the first Sub Rosa family in L.A. I guess a couple of hundred years back, when this was mostly Indians and coyotes, they were the cock of the walk. But other families settled here and things sort of fell apart for the Springheels. Lost most of their land. Lost their status. Homeland Security doesn't know why. Neither does the Vigil. I was hoping maybe you knew something."

"When I was a kid, I spent most of my time trying to get away from the Sub Rosa. I know the names, but not much of the family histories."

"What a blessing it is to have you around."

While Wells complains I climb on the chair to get a better view of the room. Whenever I reach out with my mind, the combination of whatever is coming off the body and the Vigil's goddamn machines start making me dizzy. But from up on high something clicks in my brain and the scene falls together like a series of snapshots of things I've seen over the last eleven years.

Who needs nephilim superpowers when you've got the devil's slide projector in your head?

I go back to the body and cut some skin and bone with the black blade. Then I spit on the incisions. That gets their attention.

"Give me some salt."

One of the forensic drones pulls a vial from a potion case and tosses it to me. I sprinkle the salt over where I just spit. Nothing happens. Then there are bubbles. Steam. The saliva begins to boil.

"You know much about demons, Marshal Wells? What they are? How they work?"

"They're elementals. Not like you pixies or Lurkers. Demons are primitives. Like insects. They're pretty much programmed to do a single thing. Killing. Inciting lust. Planting lies."

"They're so dumb because they're fragments of the Angra Om Ya. The old gods. They're powerful but brain-dead crumbs of whatever god they fell from."

"That's blasphemy, boy. There were no gods before God."

"Okay, forget that. Did your team take a look at these marks on the skin? They're teeth marks. Senor Chew Toy could have healed himself, but he didn't. He liked the scars. He just covered them with tattoos to hide his dirty little secret from the other Sub Rosa."

"They're so dumb because they're fragments of the Angra Om Ya. The old gods. They're powerful but brain-dead crumbs of whatever god they fell from."

"That's blasphemy, boy. There were no gods before God."

"Okay, forget that. Did your team take a look at these marks on the skin? They're teeth marks. Senor Chew Toy could have healed himself, but he didn't. He liked the scars. He just covered them with tattoos to hide his dirty little secret from the other Sub Rosa."

Wells is looking at me now.

"Keep going."

"If you find Enoch Shitheel's head, check his teeth. I bet you'll find he gave himself some of those scars."

"Demon possession?"

"Think simpler. Ever heard of autophagia?"

"No."

"I bet you've never seen any Sub Rosa porn either. You're out of your depth, choirboy. In the books, autophagia is a mental disorder, but Springheel made it into a fetish. He got off on eating himself."

Wells is giving me his disapproving squint, but he's listening. His team edges in closer, not even pretending to work anymore.

"Santa Muerte is death and protection all rolled into one. A gangster Kali. She'd tighten Springheel's jeans."

"Watch your language."

"Fuck you. You brought me in. I'll do this my way."

Pause.

"Keep going."

"The altar is a dark-magic sex shop. All you need is Lucifer's cock ring to have the party of the century. I only mention that because that's what Springheel wanted to do. Party very hard."

I walk over and stand in the hexagon, trying to step around the sticky bits.

"The hexagon with blood and bone calls dark power. Yojimbe mixes in sexual energy, but that's not a big surprise considering all the speed and poppers on the altar. Well, maybe for you. Look at this one side of the hexagon. There's maybe a half-inch gap where the edges don't touch. If this is a protection configuration, it won't work. Whatever Enoch calls will be able to slip in through that hole. That's stupid and it's sloppy. Unless it's deliberate."

"What did Springheel invoke and why did he let it in?"

I step forward to the broken edge of the hexagon.

"He would have been here, near the opening. He's thrown yojimbe around. He's probably been snorting meth and doing his poppers. He starts his spell and he calls up a demon."

"What kind of demon?"

I hold up one of the still-smoking bones with my fingertips and point to the broken edge.

"An eater. Five hundred years ago, an eater was what you called when you wanted it to look like locusts chewed up on your neighbor's crops or wolves killed their cattle. Enoch wanted something more up close and personal. That's why there's a break in the hexagon. Springheel built himself a cosmic glory hole. He was a Bone Daddy."

Wells is frowning. He really wants me to shut up. I keep going.

"He's got a hard-on for demons. For eaters. Springheel wanted to stick as much of himself as he could get through that glory hole and get it nibbled on by a primordial retard with ten rows of shark teeth. Only something went wrong."

"What?"

"Damned if I know. Let your techs figure it out. Springheel called an eater because that's how he got off. But he fucked up. Broke the circle too wide or made some stupid stoner mistake to completely break the hexagon's protection and got himself eaten."

"You're sure about this sick shit?"

"Who else lived here?"

"No one. He was the last of the Springheels."

"All alone with no one to look over his shoulder. That's a nice setting to work out really elaborate fantasies. There's one other thing you probably ought to check out."

"What's that?"

"If end-of-the-line Enoch was the last member of a house that went from number one to less than zero, getting eaten might not have been a mistake. It could have been a nasty, lonely little suicide. A hard-core player partying one last time as he pisses off this mortal coil."

Wells turns and walks away.

"Enough. How do you live inside your head? I'm not saying you're wrong or that I disagree with your conclusions or that disgusting scenario that you obviously know a lot about. All I'm saying is stop. I don't want to hear any more. You've done your job. My team will finish up. Thank you for your valuable contribution to the investigation. Now please, get the hell out of here. I don't want to look at you for a while."

I've seen Wells screaming crazy, but I don't think I've ever seen him upset. I guess when you're in love with an angel, the idea of someone spending his alone time shoving his cock down demons' throats might be disturbing. Welcome to my world, G-man. I'll show you Hellion hobbies that make Enoch Springheel look like Jiminy Cricket.

I go back to the porch and into the kitchen. Marshal Julie is still alone up front.

When she sees me she asks, "Did you do your job?"

"I just got thrown out. That usually means I did."

"Good for you. I'm sure the marshal is grateful that you came through for him."

"Not really."

"Your car is gone."

"It wasn't my car."

"That's why it's gone. Do you need a ride?"

"Are you offering?"

She gets quiet for a minute. Stares past me over my shoulder.

"What's going on back there? I know it's a murder scene, but I'm supposed to stay up here and guard the doorknobs."

"You're the new kid, right? They give you the worst hours, shit duty, and they short-sheet your halo?"

She almost smiles.

"Something like that."

"Yeah, it's a murder scene. A rotten one, too. Dark magic gone bad. It even got your boss upset."

"Damn. I wish I could see that. You don't know how much I want to be back there."

"Cool your jets, Honey West. Don't be in such a rush to get what's back there stuck in your head. It doesn't come out again."

"I don't care. I need to know what's in rooms like that. I've prepared for it my whole life. Now I'm here, but I'm still missing out."

Scratch a cop, find a pervert.

"Don't worry," I tell her. "L.A.'s not going to run out of psychos anytime soon."

I go outside. The steps crack and crunch beneath my feet. Good special effects.

Marshal Julie says, "You never told me if you wanted a ride."

"Mind if I steal one of your vans?"

This time she does smile.

"Yeah. I kind of do."

"Then I think I'll walk awhile. I can use the air."

I get half a block down Sixth Street before I'm sure that someone is following me. Whoever it is isn't very good at it. The heavy footfalls say it's a he. And he's dragging one of his feet. He kicks and steps on things. For a second I wonder if it's Marshal Julie, but no one from the Vigil would be that amateur hour. I turn around twice, but the street is always empty.

At the corner of South Broadway, I look again. A man stands half lit under a streetlight. His posture is funny, like he needs a back brace but forgot his on the bus. He just stands there. When he tries to turn around, he stumbles on the foot he's been dragging. For a split second, his face is in the light. I swear it's Mason. His face is dead white and gaunt, the skin torn. But then it isn't him. It never was. I don't recognize him. By the time I run over to where the stranger is standing, he's moved back into the dark and disappeared.

Hissing sounds of car tires rolling by on Broadway. Gurgle of water from the sewer at my feet. There's nothing else. I'm the only thing alive on the street. Serves me right for turning down a ride home from a cannibal play party, even if it was with a cop.

I step through a shadow into the Room and stay there long enough to smoke a cigarette. I'm nowhere in here. I'm outside space and time. The universe crashes around me like cosmic bumper cars. Somewhere out there stars are being born while others flare out, frying planets and whole populations. A few billion here. A few billion there. Lucifer promises some pimply kid ten years at the top of the music charts for his soul. Of course, the kid is too dumb to specify which charts and is about to find himself with number one singles in Mongolia and Uzbekistan. God watches while a bus full of his worshippers spins out on a patch of black ice, flips, and catches fire, burning everyone inside alive.

The universe is a meat grinder and we're just pork in designer shoes, keeping busy so we can pretend we're not all headed for the sausage factory. Maybe I've been hallucinating this whole time and there is no Heaven and Hell. Instead of having to choose between God and the devil, maybe our only real choice comes down to link or patty?

When I got back to my room above Max Overload, I put Kasabian in the closet where I used to lock him up. I built him a bachelor pad in there. Padded the shelves with cabinets where he can keep beer and snacks, along with a bucket where he can slop the remains. There's a computer inside, so he can surf the Web and watch any movies he wants. It's soundproof so I can sleep and not hear if he's watching Behind the Green Door. I know I'm going to dream about Springheel's chewed-up carcass tonight and I don't need Kasabian and Marilyn Chambers joining the party. I DON'T WAKE up until almost two the next day. It took a fair amount of drinking to fall asleep last night. All the pillows are on the floor and the blankets are in a knot by my feet, so I know I dreamed, but I can't remember what about. Kasabian probably knows. He's back over on the table at the PC going through online video catalogs, pretending he doesn't know I'm awake. I think Lucifer gave him a touch of clairvoyance so he can get snapshots of my mind. That's okay. I've been playing a lot more with hexes lately so I don't always have to go for the knife or gun. I have some tricks I've worked up that he doesn't know about yet.

Losing the Bugatti has punched a car-size hole in my heart, so I steal a Corvette from in front of Donut Universe and drive to Vidocq's. Maybe I should start thinking of it as Vidocq and Allegra's. She's always there when I go. I don't think she goes back to her apartment to do anything but change clothes.

I hate Corvettes, so I leave it in front of the most obvious crack house in Vidocq's neighborhood and walk the last few blocks to his place.

Inside, I take the elevator to the third floor and head down the hallway. I can't find my cigarettes, so I stop in the hall to pat myself down. A gray-haired guy in a green windbreaker and worn chinos stops beside me.

"Didn't you used to live here?"

I nod, still patting myself down. If I left the cigarettes in the car, the crackheads have them by now, dammit.

"A long time ago."

"With a girl, right? Pretty. And she kept the place after you left."

Why do I do this to myself? This is what happens every time I try to be a person. I do something normal, like walk in the front door of a building, and the Neighborhood Watch is on me.

"Yeah, she was very pretty."

He gives me a just-between-us-guys half smile.

"What happened, man? She throw you out for doing her sister?"

Sometimes there's nothing worse than the truth. It can be harder and sharper and hurt more than a knife. The truth can clear a room faster than tear gas. The problem with telling the truth is that someone then has something on you that they can use against you. The good part is that you don't have to remember which lie you told who.

"I got dragged to Hell by demons from the dawn of time. While I was down there, I killed monsters and became a hit man for the devil's friends. How have you been?"

The guy's smile curdles. He takes a step back.

"Don't let me catch you hanging around the halls anymore, okay? I'll have to call the manager."

"No problem, Brenda. You have an extra cigarette?"

"My name's Phil."

"You have an extra cigarette, Chet?"

He walks away and gets a good twenty feet before he mumbles "Fuck you," sure I can't hear him.

I knock on Vidocq's door to let him know I'm there and go inside.

"Hi," says Allegra from behind the big cutting table where she and Vidocq prepare their potions. Vidocq is in the kitchen making coffee. He holds up the pot when he sees me.

"Good afternoon. You look like you're still asleep."

"I'm fine, just don't wake my brain. I think it's been drinking."

Allegra walks over with a shit-eating grin on her face.

"No thank you, little girl. I don't want to buy any of your cookies."

Her smile doesn't waver.

"Is it true? Is Lucifer really here in L.A.?"

I look at Vidocq.

"Word travels fast around these parts."

He shrugs.

"We have no secrets."

I turn back to Allegra.

"I spent the evening with a guy in a magic hotel room the size of Texas and decorated like the Vatican, if the Vatican was a whorehouse. I think there's a pretty good chance it was Lucifer."

"You knew him down in Hell, right? What's he like?"

Vidocq brings me a cup of black coffee, holds up his cup in a little toast.

"Girls are obsessed with bad boys, man. How can we compete with the Prince of Darkness?" I ask.

He sits on the worn sofa and shrugs.

"We've already lost the battle. We accept defeat and move along, sadder but wiser."

"Well?" says Allegra.

"What do I know that isn't in the Bible or Paradise Lost?"

"Are those right? Are they accurate?"

"Maybe. I don't know. I never read 'em, but they're popular."

She takes away my coffee cup and sets it on the table behind her.

"I want to hear it from you. Tell me what he's like."

"He's exactly what you think he is. He's good-looking, smart, and the scariest son of a bitch you can possibly imagine. He purrs like a cat one minute, and the next, he's Lex Luthor with a migraine. He's David Bowie, Charlie Manson, and Einstein all rolled into one."

"That sounds pretty hot."

"Of course he's hot. That's his job. He's the guy you meet at a party that you take home and fuck even though every sensible part of your brain is screaming at you not to."

"What's so scary about him?"

"He's the devil."

"I mean have you ever seen him do any devil stuff. Anything really evil?"

"I live with a dead man's talking head. I'd say that's pretty fucked up."

She hands me back my coffee, but is clearly not satisfied.

"That's not what I mean."

"I've never seen him turn a city into salt or make it rain blood. He doesn't do that kind of thing. Why should he? We do most of the shitty stuff in this world. He can just sit back and watch us like HBO."

I take a long swig of my coffee. It burns my tongue and throat all the way down. It feels good and tastes better. Allegra walks to the window and crooks her head at me.

"Come over here."

I set down the coffee and go to her.

She holds my face in her hands, moving my head back and forth, looking me over in the sunlight.

"Your cuts have all healed, which is pretty normal for you."

"Why's this happening to me?"

Vidocq says, "It could be a curse or some residual effect from being stabbed by Aelita's sword. I just don't know. I'm sorry. Your case is pretty unique. I'm still looking through my books."

"Your scars haven't changed much since the last time I checked," Allegra says. "Whatever's happening, I think it's happening at a steady rate and not getting any faster. Once we stop the healing where it is, we can figure out what to do next."

"How do we do that?"

"I'm making you a magic cocktail. It'll take just a few more minutes."

"And my scars will stay?"

"For now."

"What can I do to help?"

"Relax."

She pats me on the cheek, goes back to the worktable, and grinds up ingredients with a mortar and pestle. I stay by the window.

Vidocq says, "What does the Golden Vigil have to say about socializing with le diable?"

"Nothing. Why would they? I sure haven't told them anything about it."

"Do you really believe that Lucifer can come to Los Angeles and the Golden Vigil be utterly unaware of his arrival?"

"Who cares? I owe him. I'm supposed to go to a party with him so he can show off Sandman Slim."

"I'm sure Aelita will see it that way when you explain it so simply."

I turn to the old man. He looks more concerned than I've seen him since the day Aelita stabbed me with her flaming sword. The day he quit working for the Vigil.

"You think she knows? Wells told me about their magic radar. Supposed to track the Sub Rosa and any big hoodoo going on in town, but I've never seen a bunch with less of a clue."

"The Vigil's technology is, at best, inconsistent, but they have psychics and Lurkers who can smell and taste changes in the aether. I have to think that the arrival of an angel as powerful as Lucifer will cause quite a ripple."

"He's not here for anything they'd care about. He's here for his ego. He thinks he's Marlon Brando."

"Is that all?"

"And he wants out of Hell. Whatever fight's going on down there, I think he's losing. Maybe it's Mason or maybe it's just his time. I get the feeling he's looking for any excuse not to be home right now."

"Or he has another agenda altogether."

"What?"

Vidocq shakes his head, sets down his coffee.

"I have no idea, but this is Lucifer we're talking about. Next to God, the brightest light in the universe. He might not lie to you, but don't assume just because he tells you the truth you know what's going on."

"Don't start talking that way. My head already hurts."

Allegra is still grinding ingredients, concentrating. Ignoring us. It's nice to have a job and know exactly what you're doing, what's expected of you, and that you can do it all yourself.

"Sometimes I miss the arena. I miss being pointed at some monster and told, 'It's you or him, little drytt,' and just going for it. No decisions. No motives. No guessing games. Just blood and dust, and afterward, I have a gallon of Aqua Regia and go to sleep."

Allegra asks, "What's a 'little drytt'?"

I guess she is listening after all.

"A drytt is a bug that lives in the desert outside Pandemonium, Lucifer's capital. Drytts are like sand fleas. They're everywhere and get into everything. They live in the dirt and they eat and shit their body weight every day for two days. Then they die. They lay eggs in their shit and that's where their young are born."

"You miss being called a shit bug?"

"It's what they call all mortals," Vidocq says. "Angels, even fallen ones, are eternal. We, the story goes, are made from dust. We eat. We shit. We grow old and die. We are born in filth, decay, and return to filth. We're all little drytt to them."

Allegra shakes her head.

"I bet you were one morbid little kid, Stark. Your poor mother."

"You have no idea."

Vidocq asks, "How is the potion coming?"

"I have all the ingredients together. It just needs to be digested."

"Show him what you've learned."

Allegra turns and raises her eyebrows at me. I go to where she's working at the table.

"In alchemy, digesting something just means cooking it. You need the Friosan nostrum to stop your scars from healing, right? The storax, the liquid amber, is the base for the other ingredients. There's also white cedar, salamander bones, ground sea horse. All things that grow slowly."

"What's that other powder?"

She glances at Vidocq.

"I don't know. Mysterious things in old jars with Latin names. Eugene helped with that part."

"Good. I was worried about the Latin part."

Vidocq leans forward on the sofa.

"Don't be shy. Show him the rest."

Allegra dumps all the ingredients in a silver bowl and sets it on a tabletop brazier.

"Remember that fire trick you showed me?"

"The one you used on Parker? You saved my life, so, yeah, I remember."

Allegra smiles like a girl with a secret.

"Watch this."

She blows across her fingers the way I showed her back when she was just another civilian. Flames flicker to life on her fingertips, but she keeps blowing, moving her hand in a slow circle in front of her lips. In a few seconds, the flames have moved from the tips of her fingers to burn all the way down to her palm. She puts her hand under the silver bowl with the ingredients. As she blows, the flames rise and the storax begins to boil. Steam comes off the amber, filling the room with the smell of burned pine. The powder and other ingredients quickly dissolve. She holds her hand near her lips again, blows lightly, and the flames shrink and disappear.

"Damn. I showed you a party trick and you took it and turned pro. You're practically Evel Knievel."

"I'm McGyver, baby. Stick around. I'll make you a philosopher's stone from Barbie dolls and spark plugs."

Vidocq says, "She's a brilliant girl. She's learning much faster than I did."

"What do I do with the snake oil, doc?"

She pours the thick liquid from the silver bowl into a beer stein and hands it to me. The liquid has darkened from amber gold to something more like maple syrup.

"Slam it back. Every bit of it."

"You sure? I think I still see some of the salamander moving around in there."

"Drink."

It tastes every bit as good as you'd guess lizard and tree bark would. It's thick enough that I have to upend the glass to get the last dregs.

"Is that it? Am I cured?"

"Not even close. But it should keep you where you are for a while. Eugene and I'll keep looking for a long-term fix."

"Thanks. Both of you. I mean it."

"If you're really that pathetically grateful, take me as your date to the party tonight."

Vidocq is up getting more coffee.

"Did you put her up to this?"

He fills his glass and leans on the kitchen counter.

"Allegra is one of us now. She should see everything."

"I want to see everything," she says

"A while ago, Vidocq could have taken you to the soiree. You know why he won't now? 'Cause the Sub Rosa don't like me, but they don't like him even more."

She looks at him.

"Because you're not Sub Rosa?"

"Because I'm a thief."

"Because you steal their shit."

"Only because they want what each other has, but are afraid to do it themselves. They need me to take it and Muninn to sell it back to them because the wealthy and powerful have always preferred to pay their lessers to commit their crimes for them."

Allegra looks back at me.

"Take me with you tonight. I want to see the crazy people you two are always talking about. I'll brush my teeth and wear underwear and everything."

"Trust me, neither of those things are mandatory with this crowd. But you can't be my date. I'm Lucifer's date."

"Bull. He wants you there to intimidate people. I'll be Lucifer's date. You can loom behind us like a teddy bear with a Gatling gun."

"I'll introduce you to Lucifer when Hell freezes over and Jesus opens a sex shop on Melrose."

"Don't be such a grandma. Vidocq would introduce me if he could."

"No, he wouldn't."

"It does no good to hide the world from those determined to see it for themselves," Vidocq says.

"We're talking about Lucifer, not taking little Susie down to Planned Parenthood for birth control."

"When you introduce yourself to the devil willingly, you take away his power to surprise you."

"And an apple a day keeps the doctor away, except for all those people who got cancer."

Allegra yells, "This is what I'm talking about. You two are arguing like I'm not here about things I've never seen. I want to know about these secret people and places and I will, with or without your help."

"You're not coming with me tonight. Maybe I can get you into something else later. Lucifer is in town for this movie thing and those can drag on forever, so there'll be lots of other parties with plenty of magical douche bags for you to meet. But you're not coming tonight. And I'm not introducing you to Lucifer. Not now. Not ever. That's it. You want to do alchemy, you're in Vidocq's world, and you two can work that out however you want. You get near the Sub Rosa or anything to do with Hellions, you're in my world and I make the rules. Understand?"

Allegra turns away, nods.

"I understand. Okay."

I take my cup to Vidocq for some coffee to wash the taste of the nostrum out of my mouth.

Allegra says, "I'm sorry. I just don't want to be left out of the big things. I get frustrated because you and Eugene have done and seen so much. I don't think you want me to see anything. You want me to go back and be the cute little ignorant girl who runs the cash register at Max Overload."

"I wouldn't mind seeing you over there sometimes, but I don't want to nail your feet to the floor. Try to understand, if Vidocq or I seem like we don't want to show you something, maybe it's because we're not the best role models. We're basically a couple of huge fuckups who ought to be dead. Eugene screwed up his chemistry set so bad he made himself immortal by mistake. He could have ended up a worm or slime on a wall in a Paris sewer, but he got lucky. Me, I'm so good at what I do that I've spent more than a third of my life in Hell. Sometimes, if you ask a question and we don't jump in right away with the secrets of the universe, it's not because we think you can't handle it, but because we don't have all the answers either."

Allegra takes something out of her pocket and holds it behind her back.

"Put out your hand," she says.

I do it and she drops something heavy. It looks like a cigarette box, but it's dense enough to be full of buck shot.

"What is this?"

"It's an electronic cigarette. All the cool kids have 'em. They look just like normal cigarettes. You charge the cigarette part off the computer and there's a nicotine cartridge in the filter end. Basically, you're just sucking in nicotine and steam. It's just like smoking a real cigarette, but these won't kill you as quick."

"Doesn't that kind of defeat the point?"

She takes the pack from my hand and slips it into my jacket pocket.

"Sometimes being smart is more important than magic."

I say, "Thanks for looking out for me."

She smiles and shrugs.

"What choice do I have if I want to get into one of those parties?"

Vidocq gets up and puts his arm around Allegra's shoulders.

"I think the real reason he doesn't want to introduce you to Lucifer is that he's afraid you'll be running Hell within the week, which would make you his boss."

Allegra brightens at that, saying, "Make me a sandwich, beeyotch!"

I head for a nice shadow on the side of a bookcase.

"I'll call you tomorrow and let you know what the beautiful people are wearing this year. Thanks for the smokes." A COURIER DELIVERS a package from the Chateau Marmont. It's addressed to "Wild Bill Hickok," which is annoying, but better than if it was addressed to Sandman Slim.

Inside the box is a brand-new tuxedo, a white shirt, socks, and shoes. A small box covered in dark green snake-skin holds miniature silver Colt.45 cuff links. Throw in a hat and spurs and I could be one of Roy Rogers's pallbearers.

Kasabian says, "Someone wants you pretty tonight."

"Let's trade. You go to the party and I'll stay here and drink beer and watch The Wizard of Oz. We can both spend the night with witches and monkeys."

"I'll pass. But you have fun with the beautiful people. I bet they've missed you."

"Every bit as much as I missed them."

"Try not to do anything too stupid, okay? If you piss off Lucifer and get sent back to Hell, I'm going to be on a coal cart right behind you and I don't want to go back again for a good long time."

"The next time I go back to Hell it'll be because I mean to."

"Gee wow, that's a comfort."

I put on the butler suit and the new shoes. Everything is a perfect fit. Lucifer must have had his tailor run the thing off for me. He would have to do it after eyeballing me for just a couple of minutes. That's impressive, even for a Sub Rosa rag sewer, but then having the lord of the abyss looking over your shoulder is probably even more motivational than an employee-of-the-month fruit basket.

My only problem with the suit is that the jacket is too tight for me to wear a gun without looking like I have a conjoined twin. Allegra took me to a local fetish shop and I had them make me a kind of leather shoulder holster for the na'at. It fits under my left arm pretty well, and unless I get the urge to do jumping jacks at the party, it should stay hidden. If I was designing the suit myself, I would have run a twelve-inch Velcro strip from the pants cuff up the leg so I could strap the black knife under it. For now, I just slide it into my waistband behind my back. I check the bedside table for anything else I might want to take with me.

"What's that?" Kasabian asks.

"It's an electronic cigarette. Supposed to be better for you than regular ones. You want it?"

"I might not have balls anymore, but I still have a little pride, so no."

At ten, my phone rings. The limo's arrived to take me to pick up Lucifer. I go downstairs and out the back of the store, trying to get out without anyone seeing me. I know it's stupid to use the door when I can just as easily go out through a shadow, but I like using the door at Max Overload. I think I'm the only person I know who still has a normal door.

The limo is just like the kind you see in the movies. Long, shiny, and black. The driver opens the rear passenger door for me, and then gets back in the driver's seat. He doesn't say a word for the whole drive, probably because his throat has been cut from ear to ear and looks like it was sewn up by a blind man with bailing wire. This is going to be an interesting night.

When we're down the block from the hotel, I dial the number Lucifer gave me last night. Yeah, I have the devil on speed dial.

The phone rings once and a voice I don't recognize says, "He'll be right down. Wait for him in the lobby," then hangs up.

I tell the limo driver to wait in the parking lot outside the lobby. The staff seems to know that someone important is on his way down because none of them tell me to move the car. None of them even look at me. Does everyone at the hotel owe Lucifer a favor?

There are thirteen well-dressed people in the lobby when I go in. I'm pretty sure I know what this means. They confirm it a few seconds later when Lucifer steps out of the elevator and all thirteen jump up like kids on the last day of school. A woman in an expensive Jackie Kennedy black dress and pillbox hat leads the pack. Her face is young and her skin is perfect, but when she takes off a glove, her hands are like buzzard claws. Old as King Tut and dry as a Death Valley rattlesnake's eyeteeth.

"Master," she says, breathy and excited. The million-dollar coven behind her mumbles the word in stage whispers like stuttering ghosts.

"Amanda, lovely to see you," Lucifer says, all diabolical charm. "I have someplace to be, so I'm afraid I can't stay and chat."

The old woman with the Lolita face smiles like a maniac when he says her name.

"We don't want to keep you, Master. Will you be in L.A. long?"

"I'm not sure."

"We'd like to hold a special Mass for your arrival."

"No need. But thank you all the same."

Amanda is disappointed, but keeps smiling. Her heart is going like the drum solo in "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." Lucifer hasn't touched the woman's buzzard hand, and while he's probably technically smiling, you'd need a microscope to be sure. His contempt for these people is so obvious, it's even giving me the creeps. I don't know if I'm on bodyguard duty yet, so I stay put.

Amanda pulls back her hand and reaches into the huge damned purse that all old ladies seem to carry. I take a couple of steps toward her, just to make sure she's not taking anything too sharp or explosive out of her bag. Lucifer couldn't look more bored. She pulls out a carved whitish-yellow box and hands it to Lucifer. As he takes it he gives her a tiny nod. The Rosemary's Baby Mouseketeers behind her start mumbling "Master" again. Lucifer shifts his eyes toward me for a second. Now I'm on the clock.

I move in as Lucifer raises his left hand and touches the top of Amanda's head, like he's blessing her. She's thrilled and, to tell the truth, I like the move, too. A priest would have blessed her with his right hand, but Lucifer put his devil horns on and went lefty. If we had some pea soup we could do a scene from The Exorcist.

I put an arm up, and when Lucifer takes his hand off Amanda's head, I get between him and the crowd and stay there while I walk him to the front door. Amanda yells, "Praise thee, Master! Praise thee!" Lucifer ignores her. As he gets in the car, the limo driver opens and closes the passenger door behind him and gets in the front. Guess now that the big man is here, I don't rate door opening. A good thing to remember. I'm back with the ruling class, where everyone knows their place. Except for me, but I don't think Lucifer is going to be shy about telling me whose ass to kiss and whose to punch. I open my own door and slide in the back of the limo.

"You're like all the Beatles rolled into one. Getting you out of there is like them trying to get out of Shea Stadium after the concert in '65."

"I was there that night. The sound was terrible."

"You knew them? They didn't make a deal with you, did they?"

He gives me a look.

"Don't be ridiculous. Pete Best wanted to make a deal back in Hamburg, but he was already out of the band, so who cared?"

I nod at the box Amanda gave him. "What's the deal with the pyx?"

"You know what it is. I'm impressed."

"I'm trying to take the hoodoo thing more seriously. Been reading some of Vidocq's books and thinking about getting my magic, I don't know, more organized."

"Have you had any results yet?"

"Not much. But I've been thinking that killing everyone is maybe counterproductive. Been playing around with some stunning hexes. I wasn't big on stunning back in the arena, so it's all new to me."

"I'm impressed again. I know that thinking goes entirely against your ethos, so the fact you're considering a new approach to things is a good sign."

"A sign of what?"

"That you might actually live. That you'll become a new and improved monster. Not killing everyone means that if something happens there will be survivors to question."

"Of course, none of it means shit. Wells hires me to kill things and so do you. Thinking is like playing in a band when you're fifty. It only happens on weekends and holidays."

"Why don't we agree on a new policy starting tonight? I don't expect any problems, but if something does happen, try using magic instead of violence. I want to support the idea of a newer, better you."

"We're still talking about killing, right? Not potty training."

Lucifer turns the pyx over in his hands.

"Who was that bunch back at the hotel?"

"The most important human-only coven in the city. They had a lot of power back in the day, when Los Angeles was changing from orange groves into a city, but now they're mostly a nuisance."

"The Sub Rosa took over."

"The Sub Rosa have always been in charge here, but it helped to have civilians as go-betweens with politicians and business. These days everyone has moved beyond that kind of Checkpoint Charlie thinking. The Sub Rosa are powerful and there isn't a politician or businessman alive who doesn't like to rub shoulders with that."

"So, what's in the box?"

He hands me the pyx.

"Take it. Consider it your first bonus."

I wonder how much buzzard-claw Amanda liked being blown off back at the hotel? Is she the type to throw some disrespect back at Lucifer? Slip him some bad juju or an underwear bomb? I hold the pyx at arm's length and open the top. Nothing happens. I look inside.

"Are those fingernails?"

"Yes. A few toenails, too, probably. No, you don't want to know where they came from."

"I was just telling Kasabian I hoped I'd get to see a pile of ripped-out fingernails tonight. I guess dreams really do come true."

Lucifer lights a Malediction.

"The box is Grecian ivory and very old. Take it to a good auction house. You'll be able to open a dozen video stores."

"How much do you think I can get for the nails?" THE DRIVER TAKES US south on the Hollywood Freeway, gets off at Silver Lake, and steers us up the hills to the old reservoir. There's a concrete path all around and a steep descent down to the water. The driver stops on the street bordering the reservoir, gets out, and opens Lucifer's door. Neither of them says anything as the driver closes his door, gets back in the front, and drives away.

Lucifer says, "He'll be back when we need him," and leads us through a typical L.A. excuse for a park-parched grass and a line of half-dead trees-to a walkway sticking out over the water.

At the end of the walkway is a burned-out three-story concrete utility building. Technically, it's only two stories now. It looks like the top one collapsed and caved into the second during the fire. The city bolted wire shutters over all the ground-floor windows to keep kiddies from playing in the death trap. Naturally, most of them are torn down or bent back enough for someone skinny to squeeze inside. The double metal doors in front are shut with a padlock and chain heavy enough to hitch the Loch Ness monster to a parking meter.

Why am I not surprised when Lucifer pulls a key from his pocket, pops the lock, and throws open the doors? A blast of cold, wet air hits us from inside. The place smells like Neptune's outhouse. There's a set of stone steps inside, winding down to the waterline. A few high school kids are hunkered on the stairs below the first turn, drinking forties and passing around a joint. They lurch to their feet, a little shaky in that panicked stoner kind of way where cops and pigeons are equally terrifying. I guess they don't see a lot of tuxedos down here. Lucifer nods to them and one of the boys nods back.

"You cops?" he asks

As we pass the group, Lucifer turns to the boy.

"Sometimes. But not tonight."

I don't know if it's the dark, the narrows walls, or just being in a strange place for the first time, but the stairs seem to go down a long damn way. Feels like well below the waterline. When we hit the bottom, there's another door. Instead of rusted metal, this one is covered in red leather and has brass hinges. There's a doorman next to it in a gold silk coat and short breeches dripping with enough gold filigree to make Little Lord Fauntleroy look like he shops from the discount bin at Walmart. He opens the door when he hears us. I guess standing in the dark doesn't bother him. His eyes look black and blind and his lips are sewn shut.

I start to say something, but Lucifer cuts me off with a dismissive wave.

"Golem. Salvage from some Parisian potter's field. French revenants are all the rage among the Sub Rosa gentry this year. I wouldn't waste my money. Golems aren't much more than windup toys. You could train a dog to open that door and it could still fetch and bark on cue. This dead thing will open the door from now until doomsday, but that's all it'll ever do. Ridiculous."

"At least you don't have to tip him. Are they all sewn up like that?"

"Of course. Golems are lobotomized so they don't bite, but they're not so easy to recall if something goes wrong."

Past the door is another golem, this one with stapled lips, but that's not the hilarious part. There's a gondola floating in an underwater canal lit by phosphorescent globes hovering near the walls. The golem is dressed in a gondolier's striped shirt, black pants, and flat-brimmed hat like the ticket taker at a Disneyland ride, if the ride was hidden under an L.A. reservoir and full of animated corpses. It's a small dead world, after all.

Lucifer steps down into the gondola and I follow him. The golem poles us along the narrow canal until we hit a T-intersection where he steers us right into a wider channel.

"The limo driver, he was cut and stitched up, too. Is he a golem?"

"No, he's alive. He's just annoying."

"You cut his throat?"

"Of course not. When he apologized for what he did, he cut his own throat to prove his sincerity."

"I guess it's better than ending up in a box of fingernails."

"That's what I said."

"Where the hell are we? How far are we under the reservoir?"

"We're not under the reservoir anymore. Our brain-dead friend has taken us out into an old tributary of the L.A. River."

"Huh. It never crossed my mind that the L.A. River was ever anything more than scummy concrete runoff."

"Everyone here thinks that way. It's only the ones who remember when the river was wild who appreciate it."

"Muninn would remember."

"I'm sure he does. If I remember right, his cavern isn't far from another of the underground channels."

"Will he be here tonight?"

"I doubt it. He's worse than you when it comes to socializing with the Sub Rosa."

"Where are we going? Who's going to be there?"

"The party is being thrown by the head of the studio, Simon Ritchie. I think I mentioned that he's a civilian, so the party is being thrown in the home of one of the truly outstanding Sub Rosa families, Jan and Koralin Geistwald. Lovely people. They came here all the way from the northernmost part of Germany when this river roared along the surface."

"So, that makes them a couple of hundred years old?"

"I'm sure they're considerably older than that, but they came to America two-hundred-ish years ago."

"Why?"

"They were ambitious and they had the guts to do something about it. Europe was lousy with ancient Sub Rosa families who'd consolidated power centuries before. If you wanted to advance, the only way to do it was create your own dynasty and the only way to do that was to go very far away and start from nothing."

"Like the Springheels."

"Exactly. They were the first. They came a very long way and gave up virtually everything to get here."

"I guess we won't be seeing any of them tonight."

"Why not?"

"Damn. I know something you don't. Do I get a prize?"

"Be happy with your box."

"The reason why you won't see any Springheels is that the last of them, little Enoch, died a couple of days back."

"How?"

"There was a severe chewing accident. The guy was playing around with eaters."

Lucifer shakes his head and tosses his Malediction into the water.

"That family fell apart and just kept on falling. What a perfect way for the last of them to go."

"That's where I was going when I left you at the hotel. I met Wells at the Springheel place to help suss out what happened there."

"Do you do a lot of magical forensics for the Vigil? Or was it a Homeland Security matter?"

"I don't know if there's any difference to Wells. And it was the first time."

"And you're sure it was eaters?"

"All the signs were there."

"Good for you. Congratulations on your new job. I didn't know you were such an expert on demons."

"I'm not, but once I started looking, it seemed pretty obvious."

"Did Wells agree?"

"I think so. It's hard to tell with him. And his crew were everywhere. It was goddamn Woodstock at five hundred decibels in there. I could hardly think."

"Sounds like a hard way to work."

"It was a pain in the ass."

"Interesting that he'd call you in just to have you working in such terrible circumstances."

"That's Wells. It was probably a test. Like he was hazing me."

"Or distracting you."

"What?"

"It's what I'd do if I didn't want someone to find something. I'd call in someone new and then make it impossible for them to do their job. They'd be flattered I'd asked them and too embarrassed to say anything when they didn't perform well."

"Why would Wells do that?"

"I have no idea. I didn't say he did it. I said it's what I'd do."

"You have a lot more to cover up than Wells or the Vigil."

"Fair enough."

We come around a bend and up ahead the cavern place opens up into a huge marble room lit with hundreds of torches and candles. A dozen other canals cut through the place and there's a golem-powered gondola in each one, steering guests under arched stone bridges.

There are two Venices I know about and one of them is a hotel in Vegas. The other is an L.A. beach where pretty girls walk their dogs while wearing as little as possible and mutant slabs of tanned, posthuman beef sip iced steroid lattes and pump iron until their pecs are the size of Volkswagens. This Venice is pretty damned far from those. This is the old fairy-tale Venice with Casanova, plague, and Saint Mark's stolen bones, meaning it's a high-quality hoodoo copy. Hopefully without the plague. It's not as big as a real city and there's a vaulted roof over our heads, so we're probably still in part of the old L.A. River system.

Every few yards, there's a dock with a couple of steps leading up from the water. The golem stops at one and Lucifer and I get out. There must be a couple of hundred people down here. People and other things. Big-shot Lurkers and civilians laugh and chat with heavyweight Sub Rosas. They can talk shit about each other behind the others' backs, but when it comes right down to it, money is the one true race and everyone down here is the color of greenbacks and as tall as mountains.

Lucifer checks his tie and gives me a quick once-over like maybe I'd changed into clown shoes during the boat ride. He nods and says, "Let's get a drink."

I'm a little surprised that the total fucking ruler, grand vizier, and night manager of Hell can just walk into the place without us getting mobbed like he was back at the hotel. But of course, people like this don't do that kind of thing, do they? If Jesus, Jesse James, and a herd of pink robot unicorns strolled in walking on water, this bunch wouldn't even look up. I wonder if Lucifer had his tailor make my jacket too tight to wear a gun on purpose because I'm genuinely inspired to start shooting things just to see if anyone jumps.

A golem in a white waiter's jacket comes by with a tray of champagne. Lucifer takes one glass and hands me one.

"No guzzling tonight. You're on duty, so you get to sip politely."

"Don't worry. These golems all need a good moisturizer. I'm not drinking anything that might have dead-guy skin flakes in it."

"Don't worry. They're all certified as hypoallergenic."

"It's coming back to me why I fucking hate the fucking Sub Rosa."

When the costumed corpse that brought our drinks turns away, he bumps my shoulder, and his tray and the rest of the drinks crash to the ground. A few dozen heads turn in our direction. So, that's what it takes to get their attention. Wasted booze. A tall, heavyset guy pushes through the crowd. He's big, but not fat. Like maybe he was a cop or a boxer in some former life. He sticks out one hand to shake and the other goes to Lucifer's shoulder.

"Mr. Macheath, it's good to see you. Please forgive me for the mess. It's so hard to get really good subnaturals now that they're so popular."

Lucifer shakes the guy's hand warmly.

"It's no problem, Simon. You should see the kind of help I have to put up with at home."

The big man laughs. Not a big L.A. suck-up laugh, but a small relaxed one. His heartbeat isn't even going up that much. He's got some juice, being this relaxed around Lucifer.

"Simon, I'd like you to meet an associate of mine." Lucifer half turns to me while keeping an eye on Simple Simon. "This is James. You probably know him as-"

"Sandman Slim," says Simon. He puts out his hand to me. I shake it, but don't say anything. I'm not exactly sure what kind of performance Lucifer wants from me tonight, but I'm guessing it isn't bright and cheery.

Lucifer smiles.

"Be nice and say hello, James."

"Hello."

"I'm really happy you could make it tonight. I've heard so much about you, James. Or do you prefer Sandman Slim?"

"Stark. Just Stark."

Lucifer says, "James, this is Simon Ritchie, the head of the studio doing my little movie."

"Have you cast him yet?"

"Cast who?" asks Ritchie.

I nod at Lucifer.

"Him. Your star. Do you have a Lucifer yet?"

"Not yet. You can probably imagine he's a hard part to cast."

"No shit."

I look at Lucifer.

"You must have a lot of actors Downtown, Mr. Macheath. How about Fatty Arbuckle? Maybe you can put him on work release for a few weeks."

"What an interesting idea. I'm going to give it no thought whatsoever."

Ritchie laughs and shoots me a glance, measuring me up, probably wondering if I'm really the monster he's heard about. Ten to one he was LAPD before burrowing his way into the movie biz. He has those eyes that see everyone as guilty until proven otherwise. He wants to know if I'm for real or more Hollywood window dressing. Great. That ups the chances of something stupid happening while Lucifer is in town.

"Would you like something to eat? I can assure you that unlike the waiters, our chefs are very much alive and the best in town."

"We're fine, thanks," says Lucifer. "I think we're just going to stroll around and say hello to a few people. Care to join us?"

"I need to put out a small fire first. Our new imported starlet has gone rogue. You can't let Czechs wander around without a minder. They'll organize the workers and start a revolution."

"Do you know where Jan and Koralin are?"

"In the big ballroom straight through there," says Ritchie, pointing a couple of bridges away. "Why don't you go in and I'll catch up?"

"Excellent," says Lucifer. "We'll see you there."

Ritchie puts his hand out to me.

"Nice meeting you, too. I'd love to pick your brain sometime about your experiences in the underworld. There might be a story in it."

"Uh. Okay."

After he's gone I say, "If he calls, I don't really have to talk to him, do I?"

Lucifer shrugs and starts walking.

"You might as well. If you don't, someone else will and they'll get it all wrong. Trust me. I know about these things."

"Think they'd make me into a toy? I'd like to be a toy."

"Only if it talks a lot and doesn't have an off switch."

As we go over one of the stone bridges, I see something funny.

"Damn, I'd forgotten about that."

"What?"

"Elvis and Marilyn Monroe are talking to some drunk blonde over there. I hate that stuff."

"Don't be so judgmental just because it's not your kind of fun."

"People shouldn't rent ghosts for their parties. Ghosts shouldn't have better agents than live people."

"I never pegged you for a Puritan, Jimmy."

Errol Flynn is standing on the bridge railing, pissing into the canal. It's just ghost piss, so it doesn't make a sound, but he still gets a round of applause when he's done.

"Man, these rich assholes really love dead people."

"Do the math. Most celebrities are more valuable dead than they ever were when they were alive. Why shouldn't they get a cut? Almost everyone important has a wild-blue-yonder contract these days. They get to keep working and it puts off the damnation that most know is waiting for them."

I want a smoke, but I'm tired of bumming Maledictions off Lucifer. I check my pocket and find the electronic cigarette. I take a tentative puff. It isn't nearly as horrible as I thought it would be.

"That's the first time I ever heard you crack a joke about Hell."

"Hell is hilarious if you're the one in charge."

The ballroom is like Rat Pack Las Vegas in a Hellraiser theme park. The Sub Rosas, civilians, and Lurkers are all sporting tuxes and evening gowns, but even here there are a few holdouts. Cabal Ash looks like he slept under a leaking Dumpster and he smells worse. Being repulsive is an Ash family tradition. A sign of their big-league status. And they're not the worst clan. At least they wear clothes.

There's a band onstage, but no one's dancing. Dead people are okay, but I guess metal bands are too harsh for this crowd. It takes me a minute to recognize them over the noise.

"That's Skull Valley Sheep Kill."

Lucifer sets his empty glass on a wandering golem's tray.

"Is it?"

"Not the kind of band I'd expect at a party like this."

"That's because they were my daughter's favorite music, not mine."

It's a woman's voice, deep, melodious, and with an aristocratic German accent. Her skin is as white as a full moon and the irises of her eyes are gold.

Lucifer says, "Koralin, so lovely to see you."

He takes her hand and she kisses both of his cheeks.

"It's been too long, my dear," she says.

"You're one of the things that make coming to this silly world worthwhile."

She laughs and means it.

"How interesting that your daughter chose tonight's band. I think James here knew her."

"Is this true? You knew Eleanor?"

"I don't believe that she was using the family name at the time. What was she calling herself? Eleanor Vance?"

"Yes. It was some foolish thing from an old book."

She looks at me.

"Did you know Eleanor?"

"No, ma'am. Mr. Macheath made a mistake. I didn't."

It's true enough. I didn't know her at all. I just put her down. Sorry, Eleanor. I'm ignoring your last request. No way I'm telling your mommy you stole whatever it was 'cause you wanted to make her mad. Not this woman. Not here.

"Is Jan around?"

"He's helping Simon find his Prague whore."

"They make some awfully good ones," Lucifer says.

"Better than the French make their damned golems, I hope."

Koralin accepts the cigarette Lucifer hands her.

"You must be the little monster I've heard so much about. The one who tried to burn Beverly Hills to the ground."

"Just Rodeo Drive. And it wasn't my fault. The other guy shot first. Sorry if I messed up any of your friends' thousand-dollar jeans."

"Fuck those hausfraus and their witless rent boys. I'm sorry I missed the fun. The next time you're feeling genocidal, you must call me before acting on it."

"It's a date."

I look at her gold eyes, but I can't read them. Can't hear her heart or get a feel for her thoughts either. Some Sub Rosa keep a kind of antihoodoo cloak over their homes. It keeps hexes and general magic mishaps to a minimum. I bet the Geistwalds have it cranked to eleven tonight. The most excitement we can hope for is Cabal getting drunk enough to pick a fight with Bruce Lee's ghost.

"Here come the boys," says Koralin. "And they found the little slut. I wonder how many dicks she's sucked tonight?"

I look at Lucifer, but he's ignoring me and the remark.

Jan Geistwald is as dark as Koralin is light. He has a dark olive complexion and a deeply lined face like someone who's spent too much time in the desert squinting at the sun.

Ritchie has his arm around a woman's shoulder and he's smiling like he just won the lottery.

The woman is brunette and her dark pupils, within the bright whites of her eyes, look like bullet holes in the snow. She has the perfect bird-bone cheeks you see on French girls, but her non-plastic-surgery nose and full lips look more Italian or Greek.

Hollywood beauty can make your IQ drop, but there's that other kind that's like the end of the world. Armageddon gorgeosity. She walks in the room like the Angel of Death in a miniskirt and all you can think is, If I got shot in the head right now, I'd die smiling.

The brunette gives me a crooked smile. I was staring and she caught me. Outdrawn already.

"You found your way home," says Koralin.

"She gave us a good chase, but we tracked her down," says Jan. "Poor Simon was almost in tears."

"That was sweat, not tears. I usually make other people hunt-and-gather for me these days," says Simon.

The brunette holds out her hand to me.

"Hello. I'm Brigitte."

"Stark. Nice to meet you."

"And you."

Ritchie wakes up.

"Sorry, darling."

He takes her shoulders and points her at Lucifer like she's artillery.

"This is Brigitte Bardo. Brigitte, this is Mr. Macheath. Light Bringer, his film, is the one you're going to be in."

"Nice to meet you, Mack the Knife. Did you bring your dagger?"

Lucifer nods toward me.

"I brought him. He carries the knife."

"Only because I couldn't fit a gun under this damned jacket."

Brigitte and Koralin smile.

"I'm glad you're here taking care of our special guest," says Ritchie. He claps his arm around Lucifer's shoulders.

"Did you hear? Spencer Church is gone," says Jan.

"Missing?" asks Ritchie.

"No one knows."

"Spencer Church is a drug addict, a gambler, and a pusher," says Koralin. "He's either sleeping in a ditch or buried in the desert. But this isn't the time or place to be talking about these things. This is a party."

Jan says, "Why don't we make a circle around the room? I know there are a lot of people who'd like to pay their respects."

Lucifer nods.

"I always enjoy a little genuflecting. Shall we walk?"

Lucifer, Jan, Koralin, and Ritchie stroll on ahead looking impressive and important. Brigitte and I follow a few steps behind. Close enough to keep an eye on things, but far enough back that we look like a couple of sixteen-year-olds pretending we're not with our parents.

"So, you're the famous Sandman Slim. I supposed we both have to have funny names to do our jobs. Do you get that my name is a little joke?"

"You mean how there's Brigitte Bardot, a jet-propelled French succubus from the sixties? Got famous in And God Created Woman. Got respected in Contempt. Kind of a nut job, but she liked dogs. Then there's Bardo, like the Buddhist states of being. Life, death, enlightenment, and a side of fries. Yeah, I think I got it."

"Very nice. Most Americans don't understand."

"Don't be too impressed. Everyone in California is a Buddhist for fifteen minutes. Then they realize they're not allowed to eat chili dogs and enlightenment starts sounding like a real drag."

"You know, I thought you would be uglier."

"Huh. Thanks?"

"I heard that you were covered in scars. You don't look so bad, really."

"You sound disappointed."

"You were looking at me before. Have you seen my work?"

"Ritchie said you were an actress in France. You coming to work in Hollywood?"

"Simon is going to help me do different sorts of movies than what I was doing back home."

"Were you stuck in those rotten American action-movie rip-offs they do over there?"

"No, pornography. I'm very famous for it in Europe. In Japan, too."

Hey, at least she didn't tell me she's dead.

"I've met a couple of local porn girls in clubs over the years. I'm never sure what's worse for them-not recognizing them or recognizing them too quickly."

She smiles.

"It's fine either way. All that matters is that the person isn't too mean or too happy to meet you."

"Good way to put it. I've been trying to work through something like that myself."

"I know. You may not know me, but I recognized you and your funny nom de plume."

"Don't blame me. Hellions gave me that behind my back. I didn't even know about it until a cop told me."

"It's better than 'whore.' That's usually what's said behind my back."

"Most people are idiots. There's nothing worse than idiots who tell you their opinions."

I puff my fake cigarette. It really doesn't taste that bad, but the plastic texture is hard, like sucking nicotine through a spackle gun.

"So you're in Light Bringer. You an angel or what?"

"Don't be silly. I'm Eve, the destroyer of men and, so, the whole world."

"And here I am without a drink to toast you with."

"See? I'm much worse than you could ever be, Sandman Slim."

"People call you names behind your back, but trust me, they'd call me worse if they weren't afraid I'd skin them and wear them like oven mitts."

"Being friends with Lucifer must help."

"I'm not stupid enough to think we're friends, but we're not enemies. We have some common interests."

"Then you are what people say you are?"

"What's this week's theory?"

"That you're a bit of a vampire, but without the blood. You're strong like a vampire. You're fast. You heal and you can see inside people. Some believe that you were a vampire, but that Lucifer cured you and now you are his property."

Out of habit, I tap my finger on the cigarette to knock off the ashes. Moron. There's no ash on a piece of plastic.

"I'm no one's property. I get paid for my services," I say. "I also freelance for the Golden Vigil. They're not exactly on Mr. Macheath's side."

Up ahead, Lucifer is getting glad-handed by Cabal Ash. I think the guy took out his spinal fluid and replaced it with tequila. He's epically, gorgeously drunk. If his drunkenness had legs, it would be Alexander the Great and conquer the known world. Then it would puke for a week into a solid gold toilet it stole from Zeus's guest room.

Right now, Cabal is stinking up the party with the death grip he's got on Lucifer's hand. He's pumping it like he thinks he'll strike oil. A woman dressed in the same kind of dirty rags as Cabal is trying to coax him away with more booze. Maybe I'm supposed to step in and pull the guy off, but it's not my party and it's too damned fun standing right where I am.

Cabal's ragged lady friend finally gets his meat hooks off Lucifer and quickly steers the drunk into the crowd and out of sight.

"It's nice to hear that no one owns you. Men, especially Americans, have quite a desire to buy and sell each other. For me, they're attracted to me because I model and do sexy things in magazines and in movies, then when they have me-or think they have me-they want me to transform overnight into a mousy little housewife."

"I can see how what you do could intimidate a guy."

"But it doesn't feel as if you are judging."

"I'm pretty out of judgment for this lifetime."

"What is that you're smoking?"

"I'm not sure. I think it's low-tar crack for underage robots."

"May I try?"

She puffs away and gets a nice red glow going on the LED at what's supposed to be the lit end of the thing. Opens her mouth in an O and blows a series of perfect smoke rings. She gives the cigarette back to me, smiling.

"Is this what you smoke in Los Angeles these days? I'm not sure I approve. Vices shouldn't be safe. They're what remind us we're alive and mortal."

I toss the thing, sending it skipping across the floor into one of the canal tributaries that run along one wall.

"There. Thanks for saving me from a too-long life."

"So, you don't like to be called Sandman Slim. Your Wikipedia page says that sometimes you are called Wild Bill."

"I'm on goddamn Wikipedia?"

"It's a tiny entry full of notes saying that no one knows if any of what's there is real. It's very funny. You'd like it."

"Read it to me sometime. I have a feeling it'll sound better in Czech."

"But none of this answers my question. What should I call you?"

Up ahead, Lucifer turns away from his admirers with his phone to his ear. From the look on his face, someone is going to get a Cadillac-size pitchfork up the ass.

"Call me James. Not Jimmy or Jim. Just James. What do I call you?"

"Brigitte is fine."

"Ah. I thought we were confessing true names."

"No. I just asked what to call you."

Now that he's not getting the royal treatment for a couple of seconds, Ritchie's realized that Brigitte isn't next to him. He looks around like a Titanic survivor hunting for a life vest.

"I think you're about to be called back to the stage."

Brigitte gives a little sigh.

"You're lucky. Your patron doesn't spend all his waking hours worrying that you might fuck someone else."

"Not that he's mentioned."

She smiles and waves to get Ritchie's attention.

"I have to go. It's been lovely talking with you, Sandman. Pardon. James."

"You too, Ms. Bardo."

As she goes, she runs a finger lightly over the back of my hand.

I don't usually think of porn girls as actresses, but Brigitte might be an exception. When she goes to Ritchie, she gives him a Pretty Woman smile like she thinks he's the center of the world.

It looks like the center of Lucifer's world has gone sour. He crooks his finger at me and we start out of the ballroom. No good-byes. No handshakes. Nothing. It must be nice to just start walking and know that everybody else will follow. Which is exactly what happens. Jan, Koralin, and Ritchie practically sprint after him. Ritchie is pulling Brigitte like a puppy on a leash. She laughs as they go. I push through the crowd, cut around a hairy Nahual beast man and a couple of Jades eating raw meat off a golem's tray. Wolf Boy has hold of the golem's arm so it can't wander away.

I catch up with them just as everyone is saying good night. Lucifer shakes a last few hands, blows some air kisses, and we're moving again.

"What's going on?"

He looks at his phone one more time and stuffs it into his pocket.

"We're going back to the hotel. Apparently Amanda and her coven never left and they're not playing nice with the hotel staff who are too afraid to throw her out."

"Whose followers are dumber, yours or God's?"

"Mine are simpletons and his are self-righteous prigs. Take your pick."

"I should have known that little shit would be here."

Lucifer looks at me. I nod at a pretty young guy drinking and scowling at the edge of a group of other pretty young things. It's Ziggy Stardust, the bad-mannered kid from Bamboo House of Dolls who thought I was a dolphin who'd do a trick for a fish.

"That's Jan and Koralin's son. Rainier I think is his name. An angry little bore and a ne'er-do-well."

"Sounds like a typical Sub Rosa to me."

Lucifer heads for the first gondola he sees, cutting off an angry Sub Rosa woman who was stepping into it. She starts to say something, sees me, and shakes her head.

It's Medea Bava, head of the Sub Rosa Inquisition.

I step down into the boat and she says, "Judge a man by the company he keeps."

"Admit it. You live alone with thirty cats, all named Mr. Whiskers."

She stands there scowling at me as the golem gondolier poles us away.

"Friend of yours?" Lucifer asks.

"She either wants to burn me at the stake or shut off my cable. I forget which."

"Why don't you kill her?"

I look at him. I can't tell if he's serious or not.

"'Cause she hasn't done anything yet."

"Don't be an idiot. If you always wait for your enemies to move first, you'll be dead before breakfast."

"But it's your fans, not your enemies, that ruined your night. You just can't win."

"We might have put your no-killing policy on hold. Amanda and her people can be unruly, but they have to be dealt with one way or another."

"You want me to slaughter thirteen people in the hotel lobby?"

He shrugs.

"Do it in the parking lot if you're worried about the rugs."

"These aren't sulfur-sucking Hellions. I'm not promising to kill anyone."

He lights a cigarette and doesn't say anything. He doesn't offer me one this time.

"If you need to play at being the humanitarian, deal with Amanda first. Put her down and the others will most likely slink away home. I'll deal with them later."

"While we're dealing with annoying situations, fuck you very much for that Eleanor thing back there with the old lady."

"Don't be so serious. You hate the Sub Rosa because you don't know how to have fun with them."

"Light Bringer sounds fun. Great title, by the way. It makes you sound like Luke Skywalker's harelip cousin. Maybe they can get Ewoks to play the other fallen angels."

When the golem docks us by the reservoir stairs, Lucifer dials the chauffeur and tells him to wait back where he dropped us.

When we get back to the street, he isn't there. Does this moron want his throat slit all the way around back, too, so it matches the front?

I say, "Go back inside. I'll wait."

"Calm down. Here he is."

The limo pulls up to the curb and Lucifer heads straight for it. I grab his arm and hold him until the driver gets out. When he does, I do something I'm pretty sure no one but God has ever done before. I knock Lucifer down. The guy getting out of the limo doesn't have the heartbeat or the nervous breathing of someone who's just kept the lord of the flies waiting. He sounds more like me when I'm hunting.

Five more men follow him out of the car. They're dressed in black jumpsuits, boots, and balaclavas, typical tactical drag, but they don't have insignias on their suits. For all I know, they could be LAPD, Dr. No, or the SPCA.

Next time, no matter how tight the damn jacket is, I'm bringing a gun.

The six men split into two groups. The four with what look like nonlethals go for Lucifer. Two with guns come at me.

The taller one has an AA-12 auto shotgun. Looks like his pal has a G3 assault rifle. This is only interesting because it means that they work for people who can afford the best toys on the shelf, which means they're probably pros. Damn. I was hoping to buy them off with free movie rentals. Microwave popcorn included.

Shotgun Guy starts blasting the moment he hits the curb, pushing me back toward the reservoir, trying to cut me off so I can't help Lucifer. It's a good plan. I'm not running in front of the double-ought shot and I'm not charging him while he has that hand cannon. I do exactly what he wants me to do. I fall down.

In gunspeak, it's called a fall-away shot. You fall over backward while raising your gun and firing. If you're good at it, a fall-away is a great way to shoot at an armed assailant without getting shot. Unfortunately, I'm not great at it. Fortunately, hitting something in the dark with a na'at is a lot easier than with a bullet.

I snap the na'at up and out, tagging him on the side of the throat. Judging by the red fountain that erupts there, I must have nicked his carotid. Lucky shot. Double lucky because his buddy with the G3 turns to check him out and gets hit in the face with some of the blood spray. Blinded, he snaps up his rifle, but he's too afraid he'll hit Lucifer or one of his own men to shoot. He tries to wipe his eyes with his sleeve. It takes him all of about ten seconds to get one eye clear. Long enough for me to collapse the na'at's shaft and spin it like a whip so that it slams him in the center of his chest. His body armor stops the spear point from going all the way in, but the way he's gritting his teeth tells me I've made contact.

I sprint forward and pull my knife. Still half blind and hurt, he starts popping off panic shots. It's more dignified than just standing there. My jacket is open and the material snaps back when a couple of his shots get way too close to me. He finally clears both eyes, but I'm right on him, so it's not going to help. I drive my shoulder into his chest right where the na'at hit him and he thuds down onto his back. Before he can react or smack me with the gun butt, I drive the black blade straight down into his throat until I feel it snap through his spinal column.

I look over at Lucifer. The other four guys have him surrounded.

Two of the tactical team have Tasers as big as RPG launchers. The other two are carrying what look like industrial-strength tangle web guns. Those two are in a ready position waiting for the electric boys to drive Lucifer into their loving arms. That means they're standing there like a couple of macho ducks that got high and had targets tattooed on the sides of their heads right before hunting season. But I can't be sure their weapons don't have rifle fail-safes built in in case the nonlethals don't work.

I grab the G3 and put two rounds through the closest duck's head to see if anyone shoots back. Everyone looks at me, but no one fires. I give the second duck two in the chest and one in the head to make sure he stays down. The other two aren't so lucky.

There are lots of theories about fighting and warfare, from Sun Tzu's Art of War to Der Fuhrer's Total War to when you're a Jet you're a Jet all the way. The one thing all these theories have in common is this: Know your enemy. His tactics, strengths, and weaknesses. When you do, ninety-nine percent of the time you're going to make him squeak like a church mouse and run away like the Road Runner. Of course, if you get it wrong, you're going to be a ten-foot banana and the guy you're fighting will be King Kong with the munchies. That sort of describes the glimmer twins with the oversize Tasers.

Seeing the rest of their team dead, they do the only thing they can. They fire at Lucifer and keep pumping the juice into him, hoping to knock him down by themselves.

This whole time, all I've seen Lucifer do is watch what's happening like he's at the zoo and wondering what funny thing the monkeys are going to do next. When the Taser darts hit and the electricity starts to flow, though, he flinches. Then he stands stock-still and for a second I think that they're zapping him with so much current that his brain has short-circuited. A moment later he holds his arms out in a way that brings back bad memories. Bodyguard or not, I'm not getting anywhere near him.

Lucifer, once upon a time the greatest angel of them all, conjures up not one, but two flaming gladius swords. He sweeps them down in a smooth, simultaneous overhand attack that slices both Tasers in two. The swords are between the shooters and down low. He brings his arms up at an angle and hits the gunmen just above their waists, but he doesn't stop. He keeps going until he's drawn the swords all the way through them. Their bodies are nothing but towers of burned meat and they fly apart like suicide bombers at a backyard barbecue.

Lucifer stands with his head bowed, staring at the ground, studying the smoldering mess. I wonder how long it's been since he's used those swords. They probably bring back funny memories for him, too. Finally, he looks up and heads toward me.

On instinct, I snap the rifle up to my shoulder, sighting in on his left eye. He freezes. Looks at me hard, wondering what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. Finally, he lowers his arms and the swords flicker out. I drop the rifle to my side.

He comes over like he's going to say something, but two unmarked vans are roaring down the street toward us. Backup for the first team. I toss the empty rifle away and sprint to the limo, start it up, throw it in reverse, and floor it.

The vans are doing about forty and I'm doing the same when we hit. Van number one smashes through my back bumper and up onto the trunk. Then van number two crawls right up number one's ass, knocking it and the limo another ten feet down the road. Good thing I wasn't doing anything important with my vertebrae or my neck would probably hurt.

Both vans are smoking and silent, but the men inside won't be for long and I'm not waiting around for Lee Marvin and the Dirty Dozen to come out shooting.

Half a block from us, two limos are at the curb to take other guests home from the party. I gesture for Lucifer to head for the lead car and I take off after him.

I can feel it now. The heat in my muscles and bones whispering to me like an old forgotten friend. I'm not Lucifer's anymore. I'm not the Vigil's night janitor, sweeping up bloodsuckers and demon fuckers. I'm back in the arena where the air tastes like blood and dust. Something is screaming at my feet because I'm making it scream. Then I make it stop. I throw its head into the grandstands to remind the crowd what a real monster looks like and it's just like coming home.

I get to the limo first and put my fist through the driver's-side window to pull out the chauffeur. A jelly-bean-size chunk of my frontal lobe is firing just enough to remind me that the driver is probably just a terrified slob doing a shitty job. I pull him through the window and shove him hard enough that he lands on the opposite curb, out of harm's way. Lucifer is already in the limo when I slide behind the wheel. As we take off I can hear gunfire popping behind us. The crowd from the party is screaming and running back toward the water.

Overhead, there's the whup-whup of helicopter blades and a floodlight hits us from above. At the far end of the reservoir, two vans are parked side by side, blocking the road. I turn off the headlights and look at Lucifer.

"I hope that's not your favorite suit."

"Why?"

I floor it and crank the wheel right, fishtailing the limo up over the curb and across the grass. While we're still under the trees, I push open my door, grab Lucifer, and roll left. We hit the ground hard, but not as hard as the limo when it hits the water. The hood snaps back and smashes through the windshield. It only takes a few seconds for the car to disappear into an oily froth of bubbles. The helicopter hovers over the crash, its bright belly light turning the scene into a Vegas floor show.

By then, Lucifer and I are hunkered down behind the cars on the opposite side of the street. While the vans and chopper concentrate on the spot where the car went into the resevoir, we head down a side street into a residential area. I must have pulled a muscle or something when we rolled out of the car. My side is cramped and burning.

Down a block or so, I spot an old Jeep Wrangler in a weekend warrior's driveway. I get it open with the knife, but don't start the engine. Just pop it into neutral and Lucifer and I push it into the street. Then we hop in and coast. It's slow going with no engine and no headlights. I don't see any better in the dark than you do, and my Batman night-vision scope must have gotten lost in the mail, so we pretty much crawl down the hill.

When we hit Fountain, I start the engine and steer us onto Sunset Boulevard, where we're immediately lost in the city's bumper-to-bumper nightlife wonderland. I've never been so happy to get stuck in traffic among a million other assholes in my life. I glance at Lucifer to see how he's doing. He's frowning and fingering a spot on his jacket cuff where he lost a button. BACK TO THE Chateau it's no big surprise when we find that Amanda and her coven pals took off a few minutes after we left and there was never any trouble there.

We take the elevator up to Lucifer's floor, get out, and squeeze through the Alice in Wonderland clock. My neck and left side where I landed after jumping from the car is numb except for spasms of pins and needles. My right side is burning and leaking red all over my nice suit. I want a drink and a real cigarette.

I start to sit down and Lucifer says, "Don't get blood on my couch."

"It's not your couch."

I sit.

There's a black hotel phone on almost every flat surface in the room. Lucifer sits across from me and picks up the one on the coffee table between us.

"Desk? Would you ring Dr. Allwissend's room and tell him to come to my suite immediately? Thank you."

"If you're doing that for my benefit, don't bother. I've got my own doctor."

"Do you mean the little girl or the missing old man?"

"Sounds like Kasabian's been earning his keep."

"He told me about the girl. As for Kinski, it's part of my job description to keep track of all of Heaven's rejects. You never know when you might need an archangel."

"Maybe you can hire him for a party like those idiots tonight. He can turn your guests into pillars of salt."

Lucifer takes off his jacket and tosses it onto a chair. Gets a cut-crystal bottle from the end of the table, fills two glasses, and slides one in front of me. When I reach for it, I can feel the wet spreading from my stomach down to the tops of my legs.

"Does it hurt?"

"Is this Aqua Regia?"

"Yes."

"Then it won't hurt for long."

"Was it a bullet or the jump from the car that did that?"

"A lucky shot from the rifle, I think. I'd still be on my back if it was the shotgun. It's not too bad. He hit my side, so the shot went through and through. No bullets inside me this time. But I seem to be losing a lot of blood."

"The doctor will be here soon."

"I want to call Kinski."

"Be my guest."

Both of my hands are covered in blood. Not helpful when you're trying to dial the tiny keypad on a cell phone.

Surprise, surprise. I get Kinski's voice mail.

"Goddamn it, doc. Where are you? I'm bleeding to death and all I've got here is Lucifer, a stapler, and a couple of cocktail napkins. You said to get help from Allegra, but she doesn't know how to handle stuff like this. Please call me back."

I go back and drop down onto the couch.

"Did you have a nice chat?"

"Do you know where he is?"

"No."

"I don't believe you."

"I have a general idea, but he's a powerful fellow. Angels are very good at not being seen or heard when they don't want to be."

"Then what use are you?"

"None. We angels have outlived our time. We're superfluous. But I thought you already knew that."

"The pyx is gone. It's back in the limo. So much for my bonus."

I pick up my drink. Something reflects off the glass and for a second I see Alice's face. I turn quickly and the pain in my side is blinding. There's no one there.

Why can't I forget anything like regular people? Is it because I'm a nephilim that my brain hasn't dissolved by now? I've swallowed an ocean of the red stuff and Jack Daniel's, but I still remember everything. Every woman looks like Alice and every cigarette smells like my skin burning down below.

Memories are bullets. Some whiz by and only spook you. Others tear you open and leave you in pieces. Someday the right one will catch you in between the eyes and you'll never see it coming. There'll just be a flash of a face or a smell or her touch. Then bang, you're gone. The only rational thing to do is kill memory. Get it before it gets you. One more drink should do it. It hasn't worked before, but what the hell, maybe I'll get lucky this time. I finish the Aqua Regia.

"I don't want you to worry, James. I'm going to make sure you're taken care of. I know with the way your mind works, that must sound sinister, but you're just going to have to live with it."

"You're only worried 'cause I owe you money."

He ignores this and points to my stomach.

"You're still leaking. You need to keep pressure on the wound."

"I'm not made of rubber. I've got the front, but I can't reach the hole in back."

He gets up and comes around the table.

"Turn around so I can see your back."

I slide around and feel him press one of the throw pillows against the wound.

"I'm bloody and drunk and a strange man is holding a pillow over me. It's like summer camp all over again."

"You did a good job tonight. You saw the attack coming before I did. I hope you know how embarrassing that is for me."

"It'll be our little secret."

"A century ago, I wouldn't have missed it."

"A century ago, they'd have been coming by steamboat and horse-drawn buggies. Helen Keller wouldn't have missed it."

Someone steps through the clock with a leather satchel in his hand. It's an old man in a wrinkled shirt and a severe case of bed hair.

Lucifer barks at the old man.

"You took your time, you old fool."

"Ich schlief. Es tut mir leid, mein herr."

"Take care of his wounds."

The old man nods and sets his bag on the table as Lucifer goes back to his chair. I start to take off the jacket, but Dr. Allwissend waves at me to stop. He takes an oversize cutthroat razor from his bag and, with a couple of smooth Jack the Ripper slashes, cuts the jacket and shirt so he can lift them right off me. I wouldn't want to be dating this guy's daughter. He wipes the blood from my wounds and takes some bottles from his bag. He spreads them on the table and begins mixing a potion.

"So, which one of them did it?" I ask.

"Which one?"

I look over the doctor's shoulder so I can see him.

"Which one of everyone who hates your guts set you up? Mason? Aelita? Some civilian who doesn't want his soul on a hook in a Hellion butcher shop? Maybe Bruce Willis is scared your movie will be bigger than his?"

"You're hilarious. I have no idea."

"Guess."

"Not Mason. He wouldn't have done it like that. He would have gone for something more… baroque. Winged snakes. Fire from the sky."

"Yeah. Lizzie Borden with a death ray stuff."

"Exactly."

"At first I thought it was the Vigil, but-and don't get offended, I'm just the messenger-you're not on Aelita's radar. She thinks you're all buggy whips and syphilis. Quaint old antiques."

"Lucky me."

"That only leaves one candidate. Someone at the party. A Sub Rosa?"

"How's that?"

"Who else knew where you were going tonight?"

"Just you and Kasabian."

"Kasabian didn't know when you were leaving. If I was the one who arranged the hit, I could have just let those guys take you. That means either I arranged to get myself shot again or it was someone else."

"There were a lot of people at the party. Including civilians."

"Yeah, but how many of them have the contacts to arrange a hit like that? They came at you with nonlethals, so they wanted you alive. That means someone has the contacts to set up a snatch-and-grab that size and the balls to think that they can hold you. That doesn't sound like a civilian to me. At least not a civilian on his own."

"I don't imagine they wanted ransom. Whom would they ransom me to?"

"One of your generals? Mason? God?"

Lucifer laughs.

"If Father wanted me, he wouldn't send a SWAT team. A rain of toads or plague of locusts, maybe, but not children in ninja pajamas."

"What about a civilian who wants his or her soul back?"

"Hmm."

The doctor pours the potion he's put together into his hands and smears it on my wounds. It's thick and smells like diesel oil. From a battered wooden box he pulls a couple of fat, glistening beetles. Puts one on my stomach and the other on my back. They start eating the oil.

"Shit!"

I try to twist away, but the doctor grabs me.

"Nicht bewegen."

"He's telling you not to move," says Lucifer.

"Being shot is one thing. Bug food's another."

"Be quiet and take your medicine like a good boy."

As the beetles eat the oil, they nibble the dead skin around my wounds, leaving a filament behind. When they're done, both wounds are closed with a kind of thick spiderweb patch.

The doctor puts his beetles away and says something to Lucifer.

"He says that you've already stopped bleeding internally and that you won't even have scars. He says that all your scars, including the burn on your arm, are healing very nicely."

"Does he know any way to stop them?"

Lucifer says something to Allwissend. The doctor looks at me and laughs.

"I know. Only an idiot doesn't want to heal. Forget it," I say.

After the doctor puts away his tools, he and Lucifer talk for a couple of minutes. Allwissend looks at me and nods a good-bye.

Lucifer takes two Maledictions, lights both, and hands me one.

"To answer your question, I don't know which Sub Rosa or civilian would want to kidnap me. If they're working for one of my enemies, why not just kill me? I'd go straight back to Hell, to where whatever general hired them could pick me off."

"What about the missing guy, Spencer Church? Do you own his soul?"

"No, I'm not sure I even met the man."

"Seems like there's other people around town missing. It's practically all Lurkers at Bamboo House. Do you know anything about that?"

"No."

Now that my right side feels better, I can feel my neck and the pins and needles on my left side more.

"You need to be careful. And you need more help than just me. Who else do you have here?" I ask.

"I'll make some calls. But until this is resolved, I'll be doing most of my business from this suite."

"Good, 'cause I think I'm going to want tomorrow off."

"Of course. We can stay in touch by phone and through Kasabian. Let's talk and I'll let you know when I need you again."

I pick up the shirt the doctor sliced up.

"Can I borrow something to wear?"

Lucifer gets up and goes to the bedroom. It lets me get a good look at him and confirm what I thought I saw earlier.

He comes back and drops a pile of neatly folded silk dress shirts onto the table.

"Take whichever you like. Take a few extras, too."

I go through the pile shirt by shirt, dropping each one onto the table.

"You like these colors, don't you? Black, dark reds, and purples."

"Why do you ask?"

"They're good colors for hiding blood. You're bleeding, aren't you?"

He stares at me for a while. Long enough that I start to wonder if I've finally said the wrong thing and he's going to have to tip the maid extra to peel my skull off the ceiling. Eventually, he nods.

"Yes, I am."

"But you didn't get hurt tonight. You always wear these colors, so I'm thinking you've had the wound for a while."

He smiles.

"Keep going. You're impressing me."

"That's why you're here and not in Hell. You got hurt in a tussle with one of your generals who went bad on you, but you don't want anyone to know. It's better to come up here and play an egomaniac dick than it is to stay Downtown and hide all the blood."

He cocks his head and puffs his Malediction.

"Not bad. You're not entirely right, but you're closer than I thought you'd get."

"What did I get wrong?"

"No one in Hell did this to me. I received these wounds in Heaven."

Lucifer stands and opens his shirt. Most of his body, from his waist to his chest, is wrapped in linen bandages. Here and there, yellow lymph and blood have soaked through. There's a large bloody patch near his heart. That's the blood I noticed earlier.

"There are some things even an angel can't endure. A father's disapproval is one." He sits down and winces. "His thunderbolts are another."

He buttons his shirt.

"You think you were scarred in the arena? You should have seen my face before the surgeons had their way with me. Of course, in those days we had no medicines or medical instruments in Hell. My doctors attended to me with obsidian knives chipped from the walls and slivers of sword blades that had fallen from Heaven with us."

"You've always been like this. The whole time you've been in Hell?"

"Daddy showed me the door with a face full of fire."

"Do your generals know you're hurt?"

"They fought beside me. Of course they know."

"If they know, that means Mason knows."

"I suppose so."

"The wound is getting worse, isn't it? It's bleeding more than it used to and you had to leave to hide it. What happened? Did you get hexed?"

Lucifer gestures at the table.

"Pick a shirt and get dressed."

I take a red one so dark it's almost black. He stares at me as I put it on.

"The front desk will call you a cab."

He pulls a few hundreds from his pocket and hands them to me.

"This will get you home and buy you some drinks to stop the pain. We'll talk later."

I go to the clock and lean over to step through. I pause and look at him.

"You're the one who told me to get smarter about what I do, so don't get weird because I start asking questions."

I push open the door on the other side of the clock and am stepping through when he says, "I think I liked you better when you just killed things."

"So did I," I say, and pull the door shut. THIS IS SOMETHING I haven't felt for a while. This is pain. Real pain. Fire ants gnawing their way out of the stitches over my bullet wounds. Some use their pincers, but the twitchy speed freaks are going at it with chain saws and jackhammers. I remember this feeling from my early human-punching-bag days Downtown and later ones in the arena. I don't like remembering it and I sure as shit don't like feeling it. This is how regular people feel, not me. I'm home and my body is developing a mind of its own. It thinks it gets a vote in how things work around here. It wants my scars to heal and it's taking away my most basic weapon-my armor. My body is staging a revolution and it no longer recognizes me as its great and glorious dictator. Pain is how it's burning me in effigy.

It's not just the bullet wound, but also the road rash from bailing out of the limo. I didn't even notice it last night when I was busy leaking all over the stolen Jeep and hotel. My pants are shredded and Lucifer's shirt is stiff with dried blood. I may need to rethink my priorities. Maybe put off the not-killing-everyone thing while I work on shielding hexes. Getting hit without my armor just isn't fun anymore.

As sweet as it feels, I can't lie here forever curled up in a big ball of fuck-the-world.

If I was really smart, I'd go online, take an aptitude test, and change careers completely. Work around soft things and away from bullets. A marshmallow factory or a plush-toys sweatshop. Maybe dress like a clown and learn to make balloon animals for kids' parties. I know some beasts the kiddies have never dreamed of.

"You're awake," says Kasabian.

"If you say so, Alfredo Garcia."

"What happened to your pretty Sunday school clothes?"

"I jumped out of a car."

"Of course you did."

I get out of bed slowly, stagger into the bathroom to piss and brush my teeth. I wash my face in cold water, but it doesn't help. I'm as zombied out as last night's golems. I hope someone has the courtesy to burn my chewed-up headless corpse when I die. The thought of ending up a billionaire's Muppet makes me want to shoot every Sub Rosa I can find, starting in East L.A., heading west, and not stopping until I hit the ocean. I'd need a pickup truck to carry that many bullets. I wonder if Kasabian can drive shift?

Still on autopilot, I flop back down on the bed. It hurts, but I don't have to move again for a long time. Glad I told Lucifer I was taking the day off.

When I was a kid I plucked magic out of the air. Didn't even think about it. It was just there, like breathing. I was naked last night without my gun. I can't live without my weapons and I'll never give them up, but I can't rely on guns to get me out of every scrape. I need to make friends with my inner brat, get back to when magic was as easy as getting bit by the neighbor's dog. Ever since I got back, I've been in arena mode. I picked up the habit of weapons there and I have to get out of it here.

Time for a drink. Something to loosen up and let little Stark out of the basement, where he's been locked up playing five-card stud with Norman Bates's mom. She cheats, of course. The dead think they can get away with anything because you'll feel sorry for them. If you play cards with the dead, make sure you deal and don't let them buy you drinks. They'll slip you a formaldehyde roofie and pry the gold fillings out of your teeth.

I pour a tumbler of JD and take a long sip. Whiskey doesn't mix well with toothpaste, but I already filled the glass, and once whiskey's been let loose you have to deal with it, like love or a rabid dog.

There's a crumpled bag from Donut Universe on the floor. I drink and Kasabian likes glazed chocolate with sprinkles. We're the trailer trash that Dorothy never met in Oz.

I tear a square from the bag and fold it over and over again, trying to remember the pattern. When I'm done, I have a lopsided origami crane. I put it on the bedside table, tear another square, and start folding. It takes a couple tries, but I end up with a kind of thalidomide bunny. Now I'm on a roll and make a fish, a dog, and an elephant whose legs are too long. Like he escaped from a Dali painting.

I set up my inbred critters around the whiskey tumbler like carousel animals and whisper a few words to them, not in Hellion, but in quiet English, like I'm trying to coax a cat out from under the bed.

My mother once told me a story she said got left out of the Bible. It's when Jesus was a young boy. He snuck off from the fields where His family was working and Mary finds Him on a riverbank making birds out of mud. The little sculptures are lined up next to Him, drying in the sun. Mary yells at Him and tells Him to come back to work. Jesus gets up but before He goes He waves His hands over the mud birds and they come to life and fly away. A great way to let your folks know you're not going into the family business.

The origami animals start to move. The elephant takes a step. The crane tries its wings. I lean in close and blow on them. That does it. They march and flutter around the glass like a special-ed Disney cartoon. I pick them up, set them on the floor, and point at Kasabian. They start the long Noah's Ark march across the room.

I take another sip of my drink and see Lucifer's stone on the table next to the money he gave me last night. Is it a seeing stone? Chewing gum? Am I supposed to start carrying around a slingshot because he knows I'm going to run into a giant who never went to Sunday school and doesn't know how the story ends? I stare at it and the stone lifts from my hand and hovers about six inches over it. I tap it with a finger and start it spinning. Maybe Lucifer is supposed to take the stone back from me like David Carradine in Kung Fu. Or maybe he was fucking with me and it's just a stupid rock.

"Shit. What is this?" asks Kasabian.

The animals have made it across the floor, up the table legs, and are clambering onto Kasabian's skateboard.

"Get 'em off me!"

"Don't move, man."

I crook a finger and imagine a peashooter. When I flick the finger, the bunny flies off Kasabian's deck like it stepped on an origami land mine. The fish and the dog get the same kill shots. When I try to sniper the elephant, it seems to see it coming and the shot knocks Kasabian's beer over onto his keyboard. He kicks the bottle off the table as the elephant legs it for the window. The crane might be lumpy and not very aerodynamic, but it's no dummy. It flutters out the window after the elephant.

"What's wrong with you, goddamn it?" yells Kasabian.

Luckily, the beer bottle was mostly empty. I point to it.

"Come on, I'm open. Hit me!"

He doesn't need that much encouragement. Kasabian half turns and kicks the bottle at me with six of his legs. It goes somersaulting at my head.

When it's a foot away, I bark some Hellion and the bottle explodes into a million pieces. Okay, it wasn't exactly shield magic, but I didn't get hit.

"Don't even dream of asking me to clean that glass up."

"I'll get the maid to do it. Come on. Boot something else. I need to practice."

I don't have to tell him twice. He kicks an empty DVD case, a wire-mesh penholder, and a pile of printer cartridges at me.

This time I hold back and throw a big mental marshmal-low around me. The DVD case bounces and ricochets off the ceiling. The penholder bounces and flips into the bathroom. I block two of the printer cartridges.

"My wings are like a shield of steel!"

I'm so pleased with myself that I miss the third cartridge and it hits me over the eye.

"Touchdown!" yells Kasabian.

"Damn. That hurt."

I take another sip from my tumbler. The pains in my stomach and side aren't getting any better, but they're getting farther away. Like I'm looking down at them from the third floor. My cell phone rings. It rings again. Kasabian is back working on the computer. After the third ring, the phone stops. A second later, the phone at Kasabian's desk rings. He picks it up and gives me a look.

"Yeah, he's here. Sure it rang. He's just being a little bitch today."

I have a pretty good idea who's on the other end of the call. Kasabian mostly listens and grunts every now and then.

He has Black Sunday playing on the monitor with the sound down. Some very bad men are nailing a devilish witch mask to Barbara Steele's pretty face. I've seen that done for real. I'm glad this version is in black-and-white.

A couple of "okays" followed by a "yeah" and Kasabian hangs up.

"Guess who that was," he says.

"Unless it was about me winning the lottery, I don't care."

"Lucifer says for you to answer your damned phone."

"What did he want?"

"He doesn't need you today and maybe tomorrow, too. Ritchie and some bigwigs are coming to the Chateau for a meeting."

"Does he know them all? Does he trust them?"

"He said you'd ask that and says not to worry. He owns all their souls. They wouldn't dare cross him."

"Those are exactly the people who are going to cross him."

"He says he's got it under control."

"I hope he has fun and only agrees to tasteful nudity."

"You know, you've been drinking a lot lately, even by your standards."

"'There was moonshine, moonshine to quench the devil's thirst. The law they swore they'd get him, but the devil got him first.' Robert Mitchum wrote that for Thunder Road, the year of our Lord, 1958."

"You're not Robert Mitchum, this isn't Cape Fear, and the devil is pissed at you. You might think about spacing out the Jack with, I don't know, anything that's not Jack."

"You heard anything new about Mason?"

"Nope."

"Ever hear of a guy named Spencer Church?"

"Should I?"

"Probably not. He's a rich junkie who's turned up missing."

"There's a first."

"What about the Sub Rosa. The families. Are they in the Codex?"

"Everything is in the Codex."

"Except what I want."

"Try asking the right questions."

"It's my fault, then. You're not holding out on me."

Kasabian ignores me and watches his movie.

"What does it say about the families?"

"It's boring. It's mostly histories. Family trees. Who begat who. There's one fun fact to know and tell. Whenever a lot of families are in the same geographic area, each family specializes in a different kind of magic. It's like a franchise. Supposed to keep down the hillbilly feuds."

"The Springheels were blue bloods, so I suppose they'd have first dibs. What kind did they do?"

"Past-tense blue bloods. They didn't have much by the end. I don't know what magic they started out with, but even at the end they were pretty respected charm makers. Amulets. Talismans. Protective runes."

"What about the Geistwalds?"

"Scryers. Fortune-tellers. If you ask me, the whole so-called art is a joke. I've met maybe two or three scryers with enough nickels in their pockets to make a quarter. The others I'd second deal at poker and take all their money. They couldn't even see me cheating. What kind of seer is that? The whole so-called art is for rubes."

"The Geistwalds look like they're doing all right. Their house is about the size of the San Fernando Valley. Someone said they advise studios on what movies to make."

"Still sounds like a gaff."

"What does it say about the Ashes? Cabal and his sister."

"Another old family. They pulled something shady back in the old country, took off, and ended up here. No one's sure if Cosima, the chick, is Cabal's sister or his wife. Hell, they probably don't even remember anymore, which makes it even worse if you've ever seen them."

"I have."

"My condolences. The Ashes are into the Black Sun. Chaos magic. Technically, it's about controlling elementals to bring you luck and your enemies bad luck. It's power yoga for the ruling class. Tycoons and politicos love it. It's sketchy, but no one's getting attacked, so it's all legal. Everyone knows the Ashes keep the big-money stuff off the books. Revenge. Banishments. Maybe even vaporware."

"They're soul merchants?"

"Soul trading is bigger than hookers and drugs combined in L.A. So many people have lost theirs or the one they have is so rotten they need a transfusion."

"Think they'd murder someone for a particular soul?"

"There's stories."

"Working with elementals means they'd probably have hotshot demons on their Christmas-card list."

"Along with their T-shirt size and favorite Beatle."

"They ever been caught playing rough, demonwise?"

"The Inquisition has made some moves, but never found enough to do more than fine them. The Ashes are one of the oldest families in the world. They know how to cover their tracks."

"Unless they don't want to cover their tracks. Unless they want to make an example of someone."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing."

I mentally walk through the Springheel house, from where Marshal Julie was pulling doorman duty to Santa Muerte standing guard over bones and gristle, to the broken magic circle that was really a hexagon drawn to call dark forces. One dark force. The eater. Did Cabal and Cosima know that Enoch Springheel was a Bone Daddy and sent him something special delivery? But why bother? From what everyone is saying, the Springheels were about as low as you could get and still have indoor plumbing. If you wanted to off somebody to make a point, why not go for the Geistwalds? But the Ashes are too smart for that. And if they just wanted to have fun, they'd go for civilian rubes, not another Sub Rosa. Still, there is a dead guy and the demon that ate him.

I don't even know why I care. I didn't know the guy. I don't know any of these people. But I don't like being lied to, especially if being lied to gets me shot. Springheel gets eaten. Lucifer gets bushwhacked. Another Sub Rosa named Spencer Church is missing. Carlos lost his pal, Toadvine, and that woman at Bamboo House is missing a kid. Probably none of this has anything to do with me, but as long as Lucifer means to drag me along into the Sub Rosa's billion-dollar outhouse, I know there's a gun pointed at the back of my head.

"Give me the Walter Cronkite on Hell. What's the weather like down there?"

Kasabian turns from the movie and looks at me. He sighs.

"There's nothing to tell. It's the usual mess. Guys stabbing guys. Women stabbing guys who just stabbed guys. It's rerun season down there. Nothing new."

"The other night I was walking around East L.A. and for a second I thought I saw Mason."

"You didn't. That's impossible."

"Then he's down there. You've seen it."

"I don't have to see it. I know."

"From Lucifer?"

"I just know."

"That's not good enough. I need to know what's happening. Lucifer is here for a reason and it's not to make a damned movie."

"Can't help you. Speaking of movies, shut up. The two traveling doctors are about to open Barbara Steele's coffin and bring her back to life."

When you make a threat, make it big. When you make it big, make sure you're prepared to go all in if someone calls you on it.

I go to the table and hit the power switch on Kasabian's monitor.

"Hey, I'm watching that."

I grab Kasabian and his deck under one arm, pull open the door, and carry him downstairs.

He stage-whispers, "Put me down! Take me back!"

I carry Kasabian straight out the back door to the alley. If any customers caught a glimpse of a head on a deck, they would just think I was throwing away a mannequin or an old movie promotion.

Kasabian is pretty discreet considering his situation. He doesn't start screaming until I close the back door.

"What the fuck are you doing, man? Take me back inside."

"It's time for you to leave the nest, Tweety Bird. The world is your oyster. I saw a 'Help Wanted' sign at Donut Universe. With your managerial skills, you'll be running the place by the end of the week. Vaya con Dios, Alfredo Garcia."

"Are you out of your mind? What if someone sees us?"

"People will pay big bucks to see you. Maybe you should go to Griffith Park and sign up at the petting zoo. Hell, you'll be their star attraction."

"Is this about the money? I wasn't embezzling. I was investing it for us. The store is on its last legs, man. We're going to need a stake when it goes under."

"It's not the money or the attitude or you shitting beer out your neck hole. You've outgrown the place. You're a lone wolf, not a team player, and I don't want to hold you back."

I reach into my pocket, wad up one of Lucifer's hundreds, and toss it at him.

"Go buy yourself some platform shoes. Tall people always get the best job offers."

When I go back inside, he's still sitting there with his mouth open, the hundred lying at his metal feet.

I pull the door closed and wait. Right away I hear scratching, like a stray cat trying to get in after it got locked out of the house at night. Kasabian is cursing me through the door, but not loud enough for anyone else to hear. He doesn't want that. The kicking and cursing goes on for thirty or forty seconds, getting louder the whole time. Then it stops. I listen. Nothing.

Okay. That's something I didn't count on. That moneygrubbing jack-o'-lantern isn't crazy enough to go around to the front, is he?

I run up the stairs far enough that the customers can't see me, and step through a shadow into the alley.

At first, I don't see him. Then I hear a scrabbling from overhead. Fuck me. The little centipede is halfway up the wall, climbing for the bathroom window on his prehensile legs. He's slow, but he's moving steadily. I had no idea he could do that. Something else he's been hiding along with all the other information he's locked away?

I start to say something. When he looks down his eyes go wide. He screams and starts to fall. I throw up the shield I used earlier in the room. Kasabian is right over the Dumpster, so I vault the side and catch him when he bounces off the shield.

He yells, "Get out! Get out now!"

"Calm down. You've been in plenty of dirtier places than this."

"Look down, asshole."

I move Kasabian's deck to the side and look at my feet. At the bottom of the Dumpster, on a pile of JD bottles, boxes, and worn-out DVD cases is a man's hand. There's a few inches of bone sticking out past the torn and ragged wrist. It looks like rats have been having a Sunday buffet.

"Please take me back inside."

"What are you so upset about? It's not yours."

I get out of the Dumpster and set him on the ground.

"Sorry. I can't go carrying you through there naked again. You're wearing a disguise this time."

There's a Disney box lying on top of the Dumpster junk. I grab it, drop it on top of Kasabian, and carry him inside and up to the room. I punch the power on his monitor and set him down in front of it. Black Sunday is still playing. He stares at it for a moment like he's never seen a movie before, and then turns it off.

"Is there any beer left?" he asks.

"I think so."

I take one from the minifridge, pop the top, and slide his bucket under him. Kasabian is still staring at the blank monitor screen.

"Did you see that fucking thing?"

"It was pretty much on my foot."

"Where do you think it came from?"

"A guy's arm."

"I mean did you recognize it. Did it look familiar?"

"It looked like a hand. You want to be Sherlock Holmes? I'll drop you back down there and you can play patty-cake with it all day."

"Body parts lying around. That's a bad omen for me. I can't afford to lose anything else."

"That's right. The universe stopped by our trash to personally deliver you a message from the great beyond. Get a grip. Some wino probably died in the neighborhood and the dogs got at him. Or there's medical trash on the beach again and kids are leaving legs and eyeballs all over town."

"What a waste. A perfectly good hand like that."

"I'll look for the other one. You can wear 'em like angel wings."

"I'll never have one again. Lucifer'll never let that happen."

"You mean a body."

"It's humiliating, you know. This whole situation. I'm not even a dog. I'm half a dog. On top of that I got you and Lucifer surrounding me, gnawing my ass like it's filet mignon. You both want information and I know someday I'm going to tell one of you something you don't like and you're going to throw me into the wood chipper without a second thought."

"I can't help you get a body. The black blade is a mean Hellion hex machine. Whatever it cuts stays cut and all the king's horses and all the king's men can't, you know."

Kasabian picks up his beer and chugs the bottle. It drains out of his neck and into the bucket, sounding somewhere between a light summer rain and someone peeing in a Dixie cup.

"So, my options are: I can go back to Hell, be damned and tortured forever, but at least I'll have a body, or I can be Zardoz on a skateboard up here with you forever. You'd think this would be an easy choice, but it isn't."

"Does the Codex say anything about someone in your situation putting a body back together?"

"No, but I'll tell you one thing I've learned. Any spell cast can be broken. Any spell broken can be put back together."

"If you want I can have a word with the boss."

He shakes his head and drops the bottle into the recycling bin.

"Forget it. The last thing I need to get into is office politics."

"I can see how your situation sucks, but in case you haven't noticed, neither one of us is exactly free to go drink mai tais in Maui. Maybe if we don't shank each other in the shower, we can do something to improve that stupid situation. I don't know what exactly, but maybe something."

"You're going to improve things? I'm so fucking relieved. Just remember to tell Santa I'll need a stepladder when he brings me that pony next Christmas."

I get up and look for some clothes that don't have blood on them. When I'm pulling on my boots, Kasabian says, "Beelzebub is the only one of the big generals left who hasn't joined up with Mason's bunch. He has all the other generals, but Beelzebub's army is almost as big as all of theirs put together. But if he gets offed or switches sides, that's it. Mason wins."

"And Lucifer has nowhere to go."

"Allegra can teach him to run a cash register. He can be night manager and we'll be his bosses."

I check the drawers in the bedside table looking for something to smoke. I check my pockets for the electronic cigarette and then remember that I tossed it into a canal in the ballroom. Sometimes we do dumb things to amuse women.

"There's something else."

"Don't tell me. Mason has a herpes gun. Or a bomb that gives everyone a fat ass and they get depressed and sit around eating ice cream all day while he takes over."

"Mason is working on something all right. He's got his own Manhattan Project going with alchemists, sorcerers, witches-human and Hellion-all working together. One of Beelzebub's spies found out and passed the word along. From what I heard, right after that, he ended up in Tartarus."

"You can hear things when Lucifer talks with other Hellions?"

"Not always and not everything. But I heard enough of this."

I shrug and give up on finding smokes. That's okay. I need to get out of here and walk off some of the knots in my legs and side.

"This isn't news. Mason's always got two or three things going at the same time."

"Yeah, but nothing like this before."

"What is it?"

"He's trying to make a new key to the Room of Thirteen Doors."

I don't know what I was expecting to hear, but that wasn't it. But it makes sense. What's worse is that the prick is talented and relentless enough to actually do it.

"Is that what you didn't want to tell me?"

"You shot at me once. You threatened to drop me in the ocean and throw me to the coyotes, so I had some concerns you might overreact."

"You weren't holding back because you thought you could cut a deal with Mason?"

"Make a deal with the guy who blew me up and left me like this? He's right at the top of my people-to-trust list."

"Okay. Thanks for coming clean."

"You're taking it pretty well."

"No. I'm not."

I head for a shadow next to the closet door, stop, and turn back to Kasabian.

"No one's going to look out for us but us. We're just bugs on God's windshield. You need to get serious and work with me on this or we're both going to end up in Tartarus."

"What the Hell is in Tartarus? Even the Codex doesn't say."

"I don't know, but I figure anything that scares Hellions ought to scare me. We need to talk some more, but I need some alone time to clear my head."

"Me, too."

"By the way, what happened out back? I wouldn't have left you out there."

"Yeah, you would have."

"Only if I thought you were going to dick me around forever. Then yeah, but only then."

"Lucky me some schmuck lost a hand."

"You were wrong, see? Turns out it was a good omen."

Kasabian scuttles around and hits the eject button on the DVD player.

"You got enough devil movies for tonight?"

"Suddenly I'm out of the mood for those. Maybe I'll watch The Great Silence."

"Do one more devil movie. Bedazzled. The original. It makes facing down Lucifer easier if you picture him in a Brit burger joint in a silly cape."

"Maybe I'll do that."

"I'll be going by Bamboo House later. Want me to bring you back something?"

"A burrito. Carnitas. Hot. Not those old-lady ones you get. Lots of salsa and green peppers."

"Anything else, boss?"

"Thanks for not doing a slice-and-dice when I told you about Mason cooking up a new key."

"You've got good timing. I was going to try and not kill all those other people out in the world, but that's on hold since they're trying to kill me. That means you get to be my no-kill project."

"Lucky me."

"Lucky us. We might be doomed, but we're not in pieces in a Dumpster." I STEP OUT of a shadow into the hallway by Vidocq's apartment. Vidocq and Allegra's. I need to start thinking about it that way. I love the old man, but the thought of him rattling around in there alone used to bother me. Now that he's with Allegra, it's different. I don't know why. Yeah, I do. I don't want that place to be something else Mason has ruined.

I knock on the apartment door and Allegra answers. She looks at me.

"Since when do you knock?"

"Last time I was here, you said I only came over when I wanted a potion or needed to get sewn up, so I thought I'd come over and try to act like a person for a while."

She steps back and opens the door more.

"Come in."

Vidocq comes over, wiping his hands on a black rag that I'm guessing didn't start out that color. He grabs me in a bear hug.

"Good to see you, my boy. And look, no blood. We need some wine to celebrate."

"Thanks."

As he grabs a wine bottle and glasses off the counter, he says, "Allegra was going to call you. Tell him."

She smiles at me.

"The Cupbearer's elixir is ready. We finished it maybe an hour ago."

Vidocq comes back with the bottle, hands out glasses, and pours wine for everyone.

"Allegra figured it out. Often, when those old witches wrote their potions down, they would leave out a step or two to preserve their secrets. We worked all night, but the mixture wouldn't hold together. Then Allegra intuited a solution. You want to preserve your body, so that's what we gave it. I found one of your bloody shirts in the trash, cut a piece, and dropped it in. That's the trick. The elixir must be made for each individual. And this one is yours."

He hands me a small amber-colored antique apothecary bottle. Like something Mattie Earp would use to hide her laudanum from Wyatt.

"Thanks. I mean it."

Vidocq stands next to Allegra, puts his arm around her, and kisses her on the temple.

"She will replace us all soon. And you, you'll be back to yourself, as scarred and lined as Lucifer's scrotum."

What can you say to that? I hold up my glass.

"To the devil's balls."

Allegra and Vidocq hold up theirs.

He says, "Pour les bourses du diable."

Vidocq and I drain our glasses. Allegra sips hers politely.

She says, "Speaking of the devil, is it true you're working for him?"

I put my hand over the wound where the bullet went in.

"Looks that way. I saved the bastard's life last night."

Allegra is looking at me like a disapproving schoolmarm, but Vidocq leans in for a close look at the bullet hole.

"Saint Raphael's silk. Les petites araignees do beautiful work, don't they?"

"I wouldn't know. I had my eyes closed."

He laughs and pours us more wine.

"I don't blame you. They're ugly little buggers."

Allegra shakes her head when he offers her some.

"How can you work for him?"

"I work for him because he pays me, same as the Vigil."

"Taking his money doesn't bother you?"

"Does taking mine when you get paid? Some of your salary comes from what he gives me. A salary for a job you don't even do anymore."

"I'm no Bible-thumper, but I don't think it's right."

"A little while ago you were begging me to meet him. Now, all of a sudden, you're Cotton Mather. What is this?"

"Wanting to see him isn't the same as working nine-to-five for someone who's pure evil."

"He isn't the one who sent me to Hell. He isn't the one who wants to destroy the world and Heaven and everything in between. That's Mason. Lucifer has always played pretty straight with me. It's humans I worry about. Besides, he's had me on retainer pretty much since I got back, so I owe him."

"Do you really think he would worry about what he owed you? You think he wouldn't trick you so he could take your soul?"

"I don't care what he would do. I was raised to pay my debts. Besides, I'm Pinocchio, remember? Not exactly a real boy. No one knows if nephilim even have souls."

"That's right, stick up for the old man, daddy's boy."

"What does that mean?"

"You said Lucifer helped you when you were hunting Mason and the Circle. Up till now he's been paying you money for doing nothing but being a drunk. Now he's here with a job he could easily get other people to do, which means it's really an excuse for keeping you around."

"I pulled his ass out of the fire last night and I've got the holes in me to prove it."

"How many cops do you think Lucifer owns? How many politicians, soldiers, spies, and corporate billionaires just in California? And you're the only one who can protect him?"

"You think I can't?"

"Think about it. Your mother was a pretty, lonely woman and your father was an angel."

Vidocq sniffs the wine in his glass and shrugs.

"Surely the possibility that Lucifer is your father has crossed your mind before."

"A lot of things cross my mind, but I let go of the stupid ones."

Allegra gets closer and puts her hand on my arm. I know she's trying to be kind, but it feels like a cop about to snap on the cuffs.

"The more you're with him, the more he'll suck you down into his world so that you start really acting like his son, and when you do that you'll be like him and you won't be Stark anymore."

"For someone who says she's not a Bible-thumper, you've got a lot of opinions on the subject of the devil."

"I don't care about the devil. I care about you. He's going to manipulate you and trick you and make you into something you'll hate."

I move my arm away from her hand and pour myself more wine.

"You're just jealous 'cause everyone knows my daddy's name and no one's ever heard of yours."

"This isn't a joke."

"Everything is a joke if you come at it from the right angle and that's the angle I'm coming at this conversation."

I swallow the wine and set down the glass.

"I spent eleven years Downtown and you think Jake the Snake is going to twist me around in the few weeks it takes to make a movie? I don't care if he's my father. All that means is he fucked my mom. I grew up with another guy who fucked my mom and he wanted me dead every day of my life. Hell, in the world's greatest dad contest, Lucifer wins just for not wanting me laid out with pennies on my eyes. Like I said before, he isn't what keeps me up at night. It's humans I worry about."

Vidocq steps between us and puts a hand on both our shoulders.

"Why don't we all sit down, have some more wine, and forget this talk of devils and fathers. Neither of those subjects ever leads to anything pleasant."

I look at Allegra. Her heart is going like crazy and her pupils are dilated. Her breathing is steady, but she's having to work at it.

"Thanks. But I've got to be somewhere."

"Please don't go," she says.

She puts her hand on my arm again. I pull away and go to the door.

"Thanks again for the elixir. What do I do with it?"

"Just drink it," says Vidocq. "But mix it with something first. It tastes a bit like turpentine."

"I'll pick up some margarita mix and little umbrellas. Thanks."

"Come back soon, okay?" says Allegra.

I open the door and go out into the hall. I don't have anything to say to her, so I don't say anything.

Of course, it's occurred to me that Lucifer might be my father, but how do you even begin to wrap your mind around something like that? Is he the secret to my whole sorry life? Why I had so much power when I was a kid and why I never did a damn thing with it when I got older? Is it that simple? Maybe it's why it was so easy for Mason to send me to hell. And why I get everyone I care about killed or hurt on a regular basis. The worst thing is having to admit that maybe Aelita is right. Maybe I am an Abomination. Daddy's boy, just a chip off the old brimstone. TEN MINUTES LATER I'm talking to Carlos at Bamboo House of Dolls. Tak Shindo's "Bali Hai" is on the jukebox.

"On a scale of one to ten, how evil do I come off? Let's say one is Santa baking cookies for orphans and ten is Hitler eating babies with Freddy Krueger."

"You're sure not Santa. But I don't see you dipping babies in ranch dressing. To me how evil you are depends entirely on how much blood you track on my floors."

"You don't think I'm trying to trick you into becoming a serial killer or working for the IRS or something else horrible?"

"No. You just need to remember to wipe your feet sometime between when you kill things and when you come in here."

"That's good to hear. I trust you because you're a businessman and I know you wouldn't want Hannibal Lecter hanging around your bar."

"What do I care? 'Cause of the business you bring in, I'm going to be able to retire early. If you have to eat a few people to make that happen, I'll turn my back."

"You're a saint. You're Mother Teresa with a happy hour."

"I just call 'em like I see 'em. You might be crazy, but you're just not that evil, bro."

"Thanks. I just wanted a second opinion."

"Want something to eat?"

"Maybe just some black beans and rice. And I'm going to need a burrito to go. Spicy enough to melt an engine block. It's for a friend, not me, so I'll give you cash for that."

Carlos shakes his head.

"Don't be stupid. You want some of the red stuff?"

"A double. I'm drinking for two today. My scars and me."

Carlos brings the bottle and a glass and pours me two healthy shots. I take out the apothecary bottle and look through the amber glass.

"What's that stuff?"

"Medicine."

"You sick?"

"Not for long."

I upend the bottle and pour the whole thing into the Aqua Regia.

"L'Chaim," says Carlos.

"De nada."

I knock it back in one gulp. My mouth, throat, and stomach are very unhappy about that. I squeeze my lips together to make sure I keep it all down.

"That good?"

"Worse. It's like a dog with cancer ate a rat with leprosy and shit it down my throat."

"I had one of those in El Paso once. You're supposed to chase it with goat piss, but I'm fresh out."

"Next time."

"That old lady is back."

"Which old lady?"

"The one with the missing kid."

"Aki."

"Yeah, that's him. She's over with Titus. I hope he's not stealing all of that lady's money."

"He always leaves them enough to cover his drinks."

"Seriously, I don't like people messing with old ladies. Mi madre had cancer and gave all her Social Security money to a faith healer."

"What happened?"

"He gave her a homeopathic cure and she felt better. Of course, the homeopathic cure was just sweet wine with ginger and some low-grade morphine. When she ran out of money, the cure stopped coming. She went back to the regular doctor, but by then the cancer was everywhere. Let me tell you, having cancer sucks, but being broke and having cancer is the shittiest fate that can land on a human being."

"I'm sorry, man. You want me to go over and have a word with Titus?"

"Don't sweat it. I'm just talking out loud. I've got my eye on him."

"Titus might string things out a little, but he's good at what he does. If the ring is real and the kid's here, he'll find him."

"He better get his bloodhounds barking if he wants to keep drinking here."

Carlos goes off to serve other customers. I can see a few of them staring at me in the mirror behind the bar. It's a good crowd tonight. No one tries to talk to me.

I drain the dregs of the dog shit cocktail and set down the glass, feeling queasy. The things we do to stay ugly. I check my hands hoping that maybe I'll be able to see the scars grow back in front of my eyes like Lon Chaney Jr.'s hair in The Wolf Man. Nothing. I can't live without scars. I bet if I asked nicely, someone around here would tie me to their back bumper and drag me a few blocks. I'm like a marathoner coming off an injury. Only I need to get my wind back by peeling off a few layers of skin. Is that too much to ask? Where are Mason and Aelita when you need them? They'd drag me to Alamogordo and back.

Enemies kill you with a knife in the back. Friends kill you with kindness. Either way you're dead.

I didn't need to stomp out on Allegra like that, but I couldn't just stand there after she opened her mouth. There are things you think and things you say out loud and they're very different things. You'd think someone like her, six months into hoodoo lessons, would know that. You don't ever say "The devil is your daddy" out loud. It doesn't matter if you and everyone else in the room are thinking it. You don't say the words. Words are weapons. They blast big bloody holes in the world. And words are bricks. Say something out loud and it starts turning solid. Say it out loud enough and it becomes a wall you can't get through. The last thing I need is a big brick Lucifer in my way.

What kind of kid would want Lucifer for a father? He'd give you the shittiest Christmas presents ever. On the other hand, he'd throw great Halloween parties.

Carlos comes back with the bottle.

"You want another one to wash the taste out of your mouth?"

"Just a half. Thanks."

A woman says something to the guy on the stool next to mine.

"That pretty redhead in the Gucci blouse? She's been looking at you the whole time I've been here. Why don't you go and say hello?"

This guy looks around and gets up. The woman slides into his seat.

I know that accent. I turn and look at her.

"Brigitte?"

"I wanted to tell you that you're not an easy man to find. That I had to scour the back streets of Los Angeles to track you down. The truth is that you're ridiculously easy to find. All of Simon's friends know where you drink."

"But do they know where I get my donuts?"

"I'm not sure I know exactly what those are."

"Frosting and grease with a little cake in between. Sometimes chocolate on top. Sometimes they put in industrial waste that tastes like cherries or apples. They're like eating sugar land mines."

"Ah. You mean koblihy. Yes, I'm fond of them."

"No. What you ate back home probably resembled food. You're not in America until you've eaten an American donut."

"Then I'll have to try one. You'll take me?"

"If you promise not to tell Ritchie's friends. I don't mind if they know about Carlos's place. It's more money for him. But a man should be able to enjoy a fritter in peace."

"It will be our secret. Is that red wine? I'm famished. Do you mind?"

"It's not wine."

She sputters and spits it out. Curses in Czech.

"What awful thing is that?"

"Aqua Regia. It's an acquired taste."

Carlos appears with a glass of water.

"Drink this or you're not going to have any taste buds by morning."

"Brigitte, this is Carlos. Carlos, Brigitte."

"Nice to meet you, Brigitte. Have we met somewhere?"

"She's in the movies. Maybe you saw one of them. She goes by the name of Brigitte Bardo."

"Oh yeah."

He nods. Half smiles, apparently not sure what to do with his face.

"Sure. Okay."

Another customer flags him down for a drink.

"I think you made him blush," I say.

"That's sweet. I didn't think California people could blush."

"They're an endangered species. The government tags them like condors and pandas."

"You're not what I expected. You're a very silly man, James."

"I come from a long line of tall-tale talkers. Our family crest is bullets over crossed fingers and underneath it says, 'Bullshit Uber Alles.'"

She takes cigarettes from her purse, but Carlos stops her.

"Sorry. You can't in here."

"I'm in a bar full of vampires and witches, but what people are afraid of is my cigarette."

"Welcome to America, where everyone lives forever and everyone is beautiful if you have the money."

"Why do you drink that horrible drink?"

"It's a bad habit I picked up along the way."

"When you were gone?"

"Gone, yeah."

"And you still drink it? I'd think you'd want to forget about that place."

"No. I don't want to forget anything. Not one second of it."

"Why?"

"Because someone owes me for it. Every second I was there. Every beating. Every bad habit and every shitty dream. And for Alice."

"There you are. That's the man I was looking for. He was hiding in your eyes. A killer's eyes."

"What are you doing down here, Brigitte? Shouldn't Ritchie be buying you France or something?"

"Simon is with Mr. Macheath just now. I don't expect him back for some time. He says they're discussing the movie, but I think he's lying."

"He's trying to renegotiate his soul deal? I'd love to hear that conversation."

"Simon can be very persuasive."

"That I believe."

It bugs the hell out of me how beautiful she is. I've seen friends go through this. Falling for porn girls can be like mainlining Twinkies. It's usually more about addiction than nutrition. Both are sweet and oh so irresistible because they can't help it. Then you get jealous or she gets bored and the sugar rush ends. The crash hits and there you are, depressed, toothless, alone, and with crumbs in your sheets. I don't need to take Brigitte to Donut Universe. She is Donut Universe.

Or maybe I'm just full of shit, spooked by her ballistic beauty, and looking for an excuse to run away like a kid who's never figured out how to talk to girls.

"You still haven't told me why you came down."

"I wanted to see more of L.A. than the inside of a limousine. And our conversation was cut short at the party. I heard that I missed all the fun when you and Mr. Macheath left."

"Fun like a bullet hole in my side."

Her eyes widen.

"Really? Let me see."

Okay. Maybe I was too harsh. Maybe she's more than donuts after all.

I stand and pull up my shirt. She gets off the stool and squats on her haunches so she can get a better look at the damage. We're getting a lot of looks from around the bar and this time I can't blame them. This crowd probably thinks I get medical exams from porn stars every night. It's better than them knowing most of my social life is drinking and watching The Killers with a dead man's head.

"Do you always heal that quickly?"

"Not lately. But I'm hoping that's fixed."

"So do I."

"Do you know anything about the guy they were talking about at the party, Spencer Church?"

"Why do you want to know about him?"

I shrug.

"Because I've been drunk and out of touch for a long time and I've missed a couple of hundred things. A woman came in here asking me about her missing kid. Then I hear that other people are turning up missing. The truth is, I don't give a rat's ass about Spencer Church, but someone tried to make my boss disappear the other night and I got shot for it. If Church did disappear, I want to know who took him or if he did it on his own."

"I'm afraid I didn't know him well. I know that some of Simon's friends bought drugs from him."

"Did he burn any of them? Take their money and not deliver?"

"Not that I know of."

"I never heard of a Sub Rosa dope dealer before. I guess they had to be there, but I never thought about it till now."

Carlos sets down two glasses of brown beer nearby and comes over to us.

"Did I hear you talking about Spencer Church?"

"You know him?"

"Hell yes, I know that prick. He's an ice-cream man and a bad one. He used to sell his shitty product out of my bar, meaning when people came back to complain, I'm the one that had to hear about it, not him. He is totally, one hundred percent banned from any building I happen to be in."

"Good policy."

"Except that that ratfuck concha piece of shit just walked in."

"Spencer Church is here?"

"A couple of minutes ago. He's at the end of the bar. You can't miss him. Skinny blacked-eyed junkie that looks like a scarecrow with a migraine."

I look at Brigitte.

"I'm going to go talk to this guy."

"Do you think he will tell you anything?"

"Ritchie isn't the only one who can be persuasive."

I push through the crowd to the end of the bar. It's not hard to spot Church. He's taking up a lot of real estate. No one wants to get near him. Once upon a time his clothes were nicer than Cabal Ash's, but he smells worse and he looks like he's been sleeping under freeway overpasses for a week. Both of his hands are flat on the bar. His nails are long, dirty, and broken. He's got a thousand-yard stare aimed at the far wall. Between a hundred voices yammering and the jukebox, he doesn't hear me coming. I motion for Carlos to come get his attention.

I'm right behind Church when Carlos eyeballs him.

"What the hell are you doing here, man? I told you you weren't welcome here."

Church doesn't move. Doesn't blink. He just stares straight ahead. I nod to Carlos to try it again.

"Hey, asshole. You need to get out. Like now. Like five minutes ago. And don't come back."

This time Church seems to notice he's being yelled at. He slowly raises his head, like a Sphinx waking up after a thousand-year nap. He moves his lips and makes a small sound.

"What?" Carlos asks. He moves closer. "What?"

Church growls and half leaps across the bar, grabbing at Carlos with his filthy claws. His mouth is open and he's craning his neck like he wants to bite him. Carlos is yelling and bracing his arms against the bar. Church makes a gurgling growl. The floor clears as people try to get away from the chaos.

Church snaps black teeth at Carlos's face, missing it by an inch. I grab the back of Church's head and smash it down on the bar. I can feel his jaw crack, but it doesn't even slow him down. He turns and lunges at me. He's growling and biting the air, only his mouth isn't working too well anymore. His shattered lower jaw flaps around like a baggie full of oatmeal. His teeth and tongue are black as tar. Someone must have slipped something interesting into his syringe. But even meth won't rot your mouth that fast. What's he on?

Church grabs my arms and opens his black pit of a mouth. He's strong for a skinny guy. Must have pumped out a year's worth of adrenaline in the last thirty seconds.

Cue my own little panic attack. What if Church only seems strong because I've got a Samson hair thing going on and I'm getting weaker as my scars fade?

His teeth snap next to my ear.

One way to find out.

I grab Mr. Oatmeal Jaw's shoulder, spin, and toss him like a bag of trash. He flies the full length of the bar and smashes into the back wall, leaving an extremely satisfying dent in the plaster. While I'm admiring my work, feeling a warm, giddy sense of relief that I can still do unreasonable amounts of damage to my fellow man, Church rolls onto his side and stands up. He's holding his body at a funny angle. It looks like his back cracked when he hit the wall. His left arm is badly dislocated. It hangs by his side, as limp as his jaw. If he's in pain, he doesn't show it. He teeters, gets his balance, and rushes me.

His head jerks back and then explodes. Not all of it. Just the back. An exit wound.

I spin around to see who fired and there's Brigitte, up on the bar, kneeling and holding a weird little pistol in a double-hand cop grip. A white wisp of CO2 curls out of the gun barrel.

I'm thinking When the hell did you turn into Emma Peel? but before I can say it, two more hungry-black-mouth scarecrows come stumbling in. Brigitte turns and blasts one before he gets more than three steps inside. The other one lunges for a woman by the jukebox. A blond civilian wearing her girlfriend's oversize leather jacket. Lucky for her that her girl rides. Scarecrow Guy latches onto her shoulder, but can't bite through the thick leather. The blonde's girlfriend pulls her one way while I get an arm around the guy's throat and pull him the other. It doesn't help. He's not choking and he won't let go of the jacket.

"Break his neck!"

It's Brigitte.

"Don't let him scratch her! Snap his neck!"

I slip my arm from around his throat, grab his jaw and the back of his head, and twist sharply. You can hear the crack of vertebrae and his spinal cord snapping over the music. I know this because everyone in the bar groans at exactly the same time. He drops to the ground near the scarecrow Brigitte shot. The crying blonde falls back on her girlfriend, who pulls her away. They bump into a table and a bottle smashes on the floor. The sound is like a starter's pistol going off. Everyone in the bar decides to go batshit simultaneously and stampede over each other trying to get outside. In less than a minute it's just Brigitte, Carlos, the corpses, and me. Except for a couple of drunk Deadheads slumped at a corner table in their purple necromancer robes.

The less drunk one shakes his head at us.

"Big deal. The soccer games at necromancer school were rougher than that."

"We're closed," says Carlos.

The Deadheads stagger out while Brigitte and I drag the corpses into the back. Carlos goes to the doors and locks them.

"Can one of you tell me what the goddamn hell just happened?" I ask.

I look at Brigitte.

She says, "Don't worry. Whatever you think you saw, no one died here tonight."

"You're saying Church and the others were already dead?" asks Carlos.

Brigitte nods.

"You're saying they were a bunch of High Plains Drifters?" I ask.

"High Plains?"

"Zombies."

"Yes."

"How did you know Church and his friends were going to be here?"

"I didn't. I came here looking for you."

"You go everywhere with that gun?"

"Of course."

"Why?"

"It's part of why I came to Los Angeles. My real work. I kill the dead."

Carlos is leaning over Church's body.

"Your friends are starting to leak on my floor. Should I be worried?"

"Is the back door unlocked?"

Carlos nods.

I grab Church and one of the other Drifters by the ankles while Brigitte grabs the third. We drag them into the alley behind the bar. The Dumpster is about half full, but I can make them fit if I push hard enough.

"Don't bother," says Brigitte.

"Why?"

Brigitte walks to the next building. Water is leaking from an outdoor spigot. She turns it on harder and washes her hands. I follow her over and put my hands in when she's done, letting the frigid flow rinse black gunk from my palms. When we're done, I wipe my hands on my jeans. Brigitte is wearing a red T-shirt with the name of a Czech band, a black miniskirt, and boots.

She gives me a questioning look.

"Go ahead," I tell her.

She's not shy. She happily wipes her hands all over my jeans and even kneels down so she can use my cuffs to clean between her fingers. Wish I'd thought of that.

"I take it that you don't know a lot about revenants?" she asks.

"I've never even seen one until last night."

"Do you know how to kill one?"

"I thought I just did."

She shakes her head.

"We haven't killed any of them. Just their brains. The rest of them is still alive and will awaken soon. That's why it's pointless to put them in the trash. They will just crawl out. A revenant without a brain can still hold you while others attack and kill. Or bite or scratch you, passing on their disease."

"Okay. How do you kill it?"

"The nerves are the key. You must completely destroy its nervous system by ripping out its spine."

I should have stayed home and watched Bedazzled with Kasabian.

"I did that to a Hellion once. It peeled all the skin off my fingers and knuckles, and really hurt."

Brigitte makes a "why bother teaching a retard to juggle?" face.

"Don't be stupid. There are tools for it. I don't have mine with me, but look here."

She takes a broken slat from an orange crate and draws something on the ground. It's like a spear, but with a kind of claw and long backward-facing barbs on one end, like a hand with the fingers pointing the wrong way.

"The Hellion weapon you use. A na'at? Can you shape it into something like that?"

"I've never tried, but probably. Give me a couple of minutes."

"Don't take long. Depending on their injuries, revenants will revive in five to ten minutes."

She paces back and forth while I rework the na'at. The clicking of her boots echoes down the alley. She isn't like the woman I was talking to in the bar. More like a tiger waiting to eat an antelope it took down.

"What kind of gun was that?" I ask.

"Compressed CO2, like at an amusement park. Mine is more powerful and fires sharpened silver-coated stainless-steel bolts."

"Why silver?"

"It's not necessary for revenants, but the silver allows you to also use them against verdilacs, beast men, and other undesirables."

"You'll have to let me try it sometime."

"After you take me to your donut shop."

"Are you really here to get into the movies?"

"Of course. I've wanted to come to Hollywood for a long time, but I was needed at home. My erotic career was going well. I made money and had ample time to do my family's real work. Now, though, I'm needed here. It wasn't hard to get Simon to invite me. I'm going to be in a big-budget Hollywood movie and still have time to do my other work. This is what you call a win-win, yes?"

"You think there's more Drifters out there?"

"If there are three here, there are many more. How many is the question. We believe the numbers must be dealt with now before things become intolerable."

"How do you know about all this?"

"My family has done this work for centuries. In the old world and the new. I'm Roma."

"Gypsies."

"My grandfather would shoot you for using that word."

"I've been shot for less."

"So I've heard."

"Let me make sure I have this straight. The cavalry just now rode into town and it's a Czech Gypsy porn-star zombie killer. Have I got that right?"

She crosses her arms and looks at me like if we weren't on a timetable she'd kick my ass.

"Forgive me. I didn't think my life would seem so strange to Lucifer's alcoholic cowboy assassin."

"I wasn't criticizing. I'm just trying to get everyone's resume straight. Last night you were a pretty girl at a party and tonight you're Catwoman."

She shrugs.

"Secrets quickly revealed often seem more profound than they really are."

"Everything's profound when there's guns and zombies."

She taps her wrist.

"Ticktock, Wild Bill."

"Done. How does that look?"

I hold out the na'at to her. She takes it and spins it easily, making thrusts, jabbing the air. She drops into a strong forward stance, mimes pushing it through a body and yanking it back out. Whatever else she is, she's comfortable with weapons.

"Church will revive first. Bring him to me and I'll show you how it's done."

I kick the other two aside and pick up Church. He's already starting to twitch.

"Lean him against the wall, facing away from us."

I do it and get behind her.

"Your weapon isn't perfectly designed yet, but you'll fix it when I show you a real one. It's best to go in through the back so you aren't forced to rip out the rib cage and organs. Thrust the weapon at heart height through the back with an upward motion so you slide between the ribs. Try not to pop it out the front of the body. The blades will expand inside the body and grip the spinal column. Spin the blades to cut away connective tissue and pull sharply using your body weight. Only when the spine is out is the revenant dead."

Church groans. His body straightens as much as it can, but stays facing the wall. Without its brain it doesn't occur to it to turn around.

"You can do the next one," she says.

Brigitte collapses the na'at as small as it will go. Stands at a forty-five-degree angle to Church's body, resting most of her weight on her back leg, and then swings the na'at over her head. On the third rotation, she snaps the na'at out like she's throwing a blade. The weapon extends in a second, spearing Church in the back. That wakes him up. He groans and wiggles around like a fish on a line, reaching back with his one good arm to grab at the na'at. Brigitte gives the na'at a sharp snap to the right. Church stiffens. The blades are a Veg-O-Matic in his dead guts. Brigitte crouches and jumps, not an easy thing in her boots. When she comes down she shouts something in Czech and drops her weight back. Church's back splits open and his spinal column pops out like the handle on a one-armed bandit. This time he goes down and stays down.

"Now you."

Brigitte retracts the na'at and hands it to me.

The second Drifter is dressed in brown shorts and shirt. Some kind of delivery guy. He's pulling himself to his feet hand over hand, using the Dumpster like a ladder. His back is to me. When he's upright, I spin the na'at and toss it.

It goes all the way out his front and one of the barbs hooks on the edge of the Dumpster.

When I pull the na'at, the Dumpster moves, too, and the Drifter has to do a little soft shoe to stay upright.

Brigitte sighs and walks to the Dumpster. The Drifter lunges for her and she calmly spins and catches him with a roundhouse kick to the head. While it's dazed, she climbs onto the Dumpster's lid and kicks the na'at free.

"Thanks."

"Don't talk. Kill it."

That might be the sweetest thing a woman's ever said to me on a first date.

I snap my wrist the way she did, but the barbs are still out the front of the guy's body. The spinning helps dig through his chest, but I get stuck on his rib cage. I'm pushing and pulling the guy all over the alley, like I'm the worst puppeteer in the universe.

"You've shit it all up. There's no finesse here. Use your strength. Just rip it out."

I take half a step forward and then snap back, using all my body weight to pull. The Drifter's back explodes as its rib cage, lungs, heart, and spine spill out onto the alley floor. The stink is worse than a Hellion outhouse.

"Now you know why we try not to do that," Brigitte says.

"Thanks, Nurse Ratched. Haul up the other one. I'm getting a feel for this."

Brigitte sets the third one upright. It takes one drunken step toward her. As she steps back, her left boot heel comes down on a chunk of the delivery guy's liver. Brigitte wobbles for just a second, but it's just long enough for the Drifter to lunge forward and grab her wrist.

She lays into the guy hard with fists, knees, and elbows, hammering him and twisting her arm to break his grip. A living guy would have let go just from the pain. The problem is that Drifters don't feel pain and none of her shots are quite hard enough to lay him out because she's still ice-skating on the guts of the other Drifter.

I swing the na'at and throw. It hits the Drifter square in the back and this time it stays inside. Wrist snap and pull. His spine pops out of his back like a bony jack-in-the-box.

I run over to where Brigitte is leaning on the Dumpster, scraping pieces of lungs, muscle, and who knows what else off her boots.

"I'm really sorry about that."

"Do you know what these boots cost? Of course you don't because if you did you'd be shitting yourself."

"Sorry. I don't have money, but I can walk into any store in the world and steal you another pair."

"I'm not worried about the boots. Simon will buy me all the fucking boots I want. I'm worried about what I'll tell him happened to them."

"He doesn't know about your hobby?"

"Simon can be a sweet man, but ninety-nine percent of his IQ is in his cock. I'm his trophy fuck and he can't conceive of me as anything else."

"Too bad. He's missing out."

Brigitte looks around at the gore-filled alley.

"I've seen neater kills, but I've also seen worse."

"I need to call someone about this. I can't leave a bunch of corpses lying around Carlos's back door. I know some people, the Golden Vigil. They have all kinds of resources. They can handle this kind of thing."

"I have people, too. They know how to dispose of revenants. Besides, I don't much like your Vigil."

"What do you have against them?"

"They're the government. They're police. That's enough."

Can't argue with that. I let her call her people.

I go back into the bar. Carlos is closing up, putting glasses in the washer, dumping ice in the sink, and wiping down the bar top.

"Brigitte is finishing up out back. The bodies will be gone soon."

"I never thought I'd see anything in here scarier than those skinheads that used to come in, but you always manage to surprise me."

"Don't worry. We're going to check this out and make sure it doesn't happen again."

"Esta chido. I'd appreciate that."

"This is probably a bad time to ask, but can I still get a burrito to go?"

Carlos looks at me for a second.

"I'll see what I can do."

I go into the men's room and check myself in the mirror. I don't look too bad, but there's more blood spatter than I'd hoped. I slip off my shirt and hang it on a hook on the back of one of the toilet stall doors. I turn on the spigot in one of the sinks and wait for hot water.

A minute later, Brigitte comes in, slapping her cell phone closed.

"My people are on their way."

"Who are your people?"

"Friends."

"Roma?"

"Some."

She goes through the same routine I just did. Looks in the mirror. Doesn't like what she sees and turns on the water in the other sink.

"Where did you hang your shirt?"

"There's hooks on the toilet doors."

She takes off her blouse and comes back to the sink in just her bra and skirt.

I keep my eyes to myself, scrubbing the last drops of dead guy off my arms and face. I should probably do something about my boots, too, but I'd feel kind of stupid shining my shoes next to a half-naked woman. I can wait until I get home.

Brigitte dries her face with a paper towel.

"How do I look?"

"Like thrill-kill Mona Lisa."

"No, you fool. Look close. Is there any blood? On my neck? My arms? Check my back."

"You're fine."

"Good," she says, and pushes her hair back with her wet hands.

"Now I'll do you."

She turns me into the light and inspects my face.

"You missed a spot."

"Where?"

"Lean down."

She uses her thumb to rub something off my cheek. Then my forehead. Her fingers move around and hold the back of my head. Her arms ripple where the muscles work underneath her skin. So different from the pretty girl at the Geistwalds' party. And the rancid meat we just left in the alley. Her heartbeat and breathing are up. She runs her other hand over my chest.

"I like your scars."

And just like that, we're kissing.

My hands move down her back and up her sides. I can barely remember what it's like to be this close to another body without trying to punch or stab it. Brigitte's skin is smooth in a way that feels brand-new. Is all skin like this? Have I really forgotten everything about bodies that isn't about killing them?

I run my hands up Brigitte's belly to cup her breasts. She reaches back to undo her bra and tosses it on the sink. We catch ourselves in the mirror and how ridiculous we look. Making out in a bathroom. Tracking gore on the floor. Brigitte smiles up at me and pushes me back with surprising strength into the stall where I hung up my shirt.

I sit down on the toilet and she follows me in, closing and locking the door behind her. She drops down onto my lap, straddling me, and we're kissing again. Her skirt is pushed up and she's moving her hips up and down over the hard-on that's been tucked away in my pants for eleven years.

Maybe she's part mind reader because she reaches down, unzips me, and lets my cock flip back against my belly. She reaches down and wraps her hand around it.

"What about your pal Ritchie?"

"You talk too much."

She lets go of my cock and stands up, reaches under her skirt and slips her panties off, balancing on one leg at a time with the sure and practiced motion of a sniper taking aim.

"You should know I haven't done this in a long time."

"Shut up."

She lowers her hips, grabs my cock, and slides me into her. The feeling is both familiar and strange, in the same way that everything happening is both familiar and strange. The good news is that bodies are bodies, and even if your brain is on overload, sense memory takes over when you feel her body start to move. After a couple of fumbling tries, we fall into a gliding rhythm and our bodies seem to sync up, Brigitte coming down deeper and deeper as I move up into her.

My hands move back up her body, cup her breasts, and pinch her nipples. She leans back, pressing her hands and arms against the stall walls while thrusting down hard with her hips. Every few strokes, I put my hands on her waist and hold her there, deep inside her, then let her go and we fall back to our rhythm.

We're both panting and covered in sweat. Gutting Drifters was a walk on the beach. This might kill us.

Something blares from across the room, bouncing off the tile walls. It's a short loop of Johnny Cash singing "Ring of Fire."

Brigitte slumps for a second.

"Shit."

She grabs my hair as her hip thrusts come harder and faster. She moans, wraps her hands around my neck, and kisses me hard. Her breathing gets ragged. Her nails dig into my shoulders. Just as Johnny reminds us one last time that it burns, burns, burns in the ring of fire, Brigitte presses down hard onto me and stays there. Her hands shake on my shoulders and she's about to draw blood. Then she slowly relaxes, letting out a long, breathy "oh," and starts breathing normally again. We stay that way for a while, her forehead resting against mine. It's sweet at first. We're both panting, but sweat keeps running into our eyes and burning. She laughs, brushes my cheek with her palm, and stands, reaching between her legs to slide me out of her.

Brigitte unlocks the stall and goes straight for her phone. I don't have to ask who has a "Ring of Fire" ringtone. I tuck my softening cock back inside my pants and go to the sink to wash up again.

Brigitte is staring at her phone, reading a text.

"The call wasn't important, but the text is my people saying that the truck is nearby. We should be somewhere else before they begin their work."

"Fine by me."

Brigitte comes to the sink to wash next to me. She bumps her shoulders into mine. I bump back. It's a very strange sensation, not having seen a naked woman in all these years and now being next to one whose profession is being naked, so she's completely relaxed and in no rush to put her clothes back on. But she does. Still relaxed. Still content. And I know that half of her fun is knowing she has done and is doing serious damage to my brain.

"Do you always finish off zombie hunts by seducing a virgin?"

She smiles at me in the mirror.

"How long has it been since you've done that?"

"Eleven years."

"My God. Now you can tell your friends at school that you've seen a real live naked girl."

"I don't talk to most of the people I know. The rest either aren't human or they're dead."

"You can tell Carlos."

"I kind of think he knows."

"You didn't come back there, did you?"

"No."

She smiles.

"We'll have to do something about that next time."

We go into the bar. The chairs are up and the lights are off. The front door is open. Carlos is out front smoking.

I say, "I thought you gave those up."

"I started again. Tonight. I knew this thing, riding your coattails and making money off you, was too good to be true. I just didn't think it would end with me almost getting eaten in my own bar."

Brigitte goes over and puts her arm around Carlos's shoulders.

"The secret world behind the world is always strange at first, but seeing James's friends must have been strange, too, yes?"

"That's true."

"Don't be afraid for your business. Customers will be back. By the weekend, you'll be making more money than ever. People love the exotic, but they love danger even more. And danger they escape is the best of all."

"You think so?"

"I've seen it with my own eyes. You'll have a line outside. You'll need a doorman and pretty girl waitresses."

He looks back at me over his shoulder.

"I never liked the velvet rope thing, but I guess there's worse fates."

"Definitely."

Like ending up in a Dumpster. Seen that twice today. None of the sushi out back is missing any limbs, so someone else lost a hand near Max Overload in the last couple of days. Wonder if it belonged to the eater or the eatee?

"I have to go. Simon is waiting for me." She turns to me. "I'll call you. We have a lot to talk about."

She pecks Carlos and me on the cheek and gets into a cab waiting at a stoplight at the corner.

"Interesting night," says Carlos.

"That's one word for it."

"Don't forget your burrito."

He hands me a brown paper bag.

"Thanks. See you tomorrow."

"Don't get eaten on the way home."

"That's my mission statement."

By the time I make the corner, my adrenaline is dropping and all the pain I felt when I woke up is coming back hard. The bullet wound throbs and I slip into an alcove half doubled up. Even with the pain, I'm thinking straighter than before. I lean against the wall and chant some healing hoodoo. Nothing too heavy. I just want to turn the pain down a few decibels, but not erase it. I don't want to forget I'm hurt, but I don't want to be stumbling around like a cripple. It's stupid I didn't think to use the spell when I woke up. What is it about me that it takes a massacre to clear my head?

I stop by Donut Universe on the way home and get coffee and a bag of glazed old-fashioneds. Waiting for my change, I remember New Year's Eve and kissing Candy in the middle of the bodies, blood, and the smell of cordite the night we took down Avila and wonder why I seem attracted only to women who enjoy carnage. I'M SITTING IN bed with Alice. She's smoking and flipping through a magazine.

"Something happened last night. There was this woman I met."

"I know. I'm dead. I'm not blind, dear."

"That's the thing. You're dead, but I still feel guilty. Like I was cheating on you."

"You're such an idiot. That's why I love you. It's been eleven years since we last touched each other and I didn't exactly die a virgin queen. I mean, I waited for you and hoped, but after a while it got clear that you weren't coming back. A girl can't rely on her Hitachi Magic Wand forever."

"You always cheated on me with technology."

"Technology is more reliable than boys or girls."

"You're okay with what happened?"

"You're alive and I'm dead. Of course I'm okay."

"Thanks. It feels like I'm coming off a six-month bender. Things aren't straight in my head yet."

"You are coming off a bender. Want me to tell you the secret of life?" she asks.

"Please, no."

"Everyone in the world is a Charlie. The trick is to figure out which Charlie you're going to be. Charlie Manson. Charlie Starkweather. Or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

"Charlie Chaplin."

"Charlie Parker."

"Charly."

"Who's that?" she asks.

"The retard from Flowers for Algernon."

"'Retard' is not a nice word."

"How would you know, retard?"

"Whatever you say, Charlie Brown."

"I am not Charlie Brown."

"Denial isn't just a river in Egypt, Chuck."

"Did I ever tell you I thought I saw an angel when I was a kid?"

"What happened?"

"I'd left my bike on the lawn again and the old man yelled at me to move it. I went outside and there was a woman staring at me from across the street. Really intensely. She had dark skin and bright green eyes. For a second I thought that I'd died in my sleep and she was there to take me to Heaven, but she just shook her head, turned, and walked away."

"Why did she do that?"

"I think she knew what I was and was there to tell me that no matter what I do, Heaven isn't interested."

Alice shakes her head.

"What a morbid little bastard. Your poor mother."

"Mom was worse than me. She saw angels everywhere. She looked for them like other women in the neighborhood looked for two-for-one sales at the booze warehouse by the freeway."

"Charlie's Angels."

"Forget it. Charlie's Angels is three people and none of them are Charlie."

"I was going to say your girlfriend Mason is Charlie Manson, but that's too good for him. He's Charlie Douche-bag."

"That's exactly who he is."

She kisses me. I can taste the cigarette and her lips and tongue.

"When you thought you saw Mason the other night, it wasn't him. But he's still looking for you. You should find him first."

"Am I really talking to you?"

"I doubt it. Not with the whole being-dead thing and all."

"Yeah."

"But that doesn't mean I can't tell you real things."

"Like what?"

"That something bad is coming."

"What do you mean?"

"Something really bad."

"She's right."

Brigitte is sitting in the doorway of the bedroom on one of Carlos's bar stools and cleaning her gun with one of my old T-shirts.

"Something bad is coming," she says.

"What do you mean?"

Alice says, "Just remember who you are."

"What the fuck are you two talking about? Why are all dreams and prophecies so goddamn obscure?"

"Because, dumb-ass, if any one of them flat-out told you what was coming, you'd try to stop it or change it. Some things you can't stop. You just have to go through them. At least with a clue, you'll be able to recognize it when it gets there."

"If a bus hits me I'm pretty sure I'll notice. But it would be more help if you told me when to get out of the way."

"You ask a lot, James," says Brigitte.

"Sometimes you need to get run down," says Alice. "It could keep something worse from happening."

"Now you're both trying to piss me off, but that's okay because I feel a lot less guilty than when this dream started. Thanks for that."

"See you around, Charlie."

"Dobrou noc, Sandman." I KICK THE sheet down by my feet and roll out of bed the moment I wake up. I'm still naked from the long shower I took last night. Kasabian stares at me from the desk, his little legs poised over the keyboard.

"Morning, sunshine."

"Do you smell anything funny?"

"No. What's wrong with you?"

I know it's in my head, but I swear I can still smell Drifter gunk all over me.

"Nothing. Just a funny dream."

"Good for you. Get dressed. I don't need your junk staring at me while I'm trying to work."

Last night's clothes are getting burned as soon as I get some lighter fluid. I find a pair of jeans tossed over the back of a chair and one clean and folded T-shirt in the drawer. Thank the gods of laundry for wash-and-fold places.

"You've got some donuts left over from the last night, but the coffee is cold."

The crumpled donut bag is on the floor near the head of the bed. I open it, take out one of the old-fashioneds and take a bite. I can't taste it. I'm afraid to breathe because I might get a whiff of Drifter. I go in the bathroom, gargle, and wash my face in cold water.

"You didn't talk much when you got back last night. You're no fun when you go to bed sober."

The bullet wound in my side still looks pretty raw. It doesn't hurt, but it should have faded to just another scar by now. I'll have to ask Allegra about that. If she's talking to me.

I sit on the bed and eat the rest of the donut. I can sort of taste it now.

"What happened last night? All you did was grunt when you got back and then you were running a marathon all night in your sleep. Chasing bunnies again, Lassie?"

"There anything in the Codex about Drifters?"

"Lots. Why?"

"I think I killed some with a friend last night."

"Is that what they're doing in Hollywood instead of aerobics? Who did you hunt coffin jockeys with?"

"I just met her. Name is Brigitte Bardo. She's supposed to be kind of an actress in Europe."

Kasabian looks at me for a minute.

"Are you shitting me? The star of Cosmonauts of Sodom Brigitte Bardo?"

"I have no idea."

"You'd know her. She has a tattoo of an angel that starts on her stomach and the wings wrap around her and up her back."

"I wasn't looking at her stomach."

"Oh man. She does this scene with these two other chicks."

"I don't need to hear about this from you."

"No, listen. All the chick cosmonauts quit the space program and joined a traveling circus. They're all dressed like clowns, only their noses are dildos-"

"Stop right there and tell me about Drifters."

He stares at me. If he had regular hands, he'd give me the finger.

"At least get me her autograph."

"If you promise not to talk about clown fucking, I'll get her to Xerox her ass for you."

"Think I could meet her?"

"Are you crazy? She kills Drifters. What's she going to make of you?"

"I'm not a zombie."

"You're undead. She'll think you're a new model Lucifer just invented."

"Do you know anything about zombies at all?"

"Yeah. They smell like an abandoned slaughterhouse when you pull their spines out."

"You know about spines. That's a start. What else do you want to know?"

"Everything. But I don't need a Ph.D. Just give me the Trivial Pursuit version."

"Okay."

He looks at me.

"You're really going to get me her autograph?"

"Christ."

"Forget it. Tell me about the zombies last night."

"They stank. They were stupid. They drooled and grunted and tried to bite us."

He nods.

"Zeds and zots."

"What?"

"Zombie shoptalk. They're zeros. Dumbest of the dumb. Nothing more than a mouth with legs. What most people call golems."

"It sounds like there's something besides golems."

"See? Who says you have a learning disability?"

"Yeah, who says that?"

"There's another kind of zombie. Lacunas. You don't want to meet them."

"What's the difference?"

"Lacunas have some brain function left. They can talk, walk, and dress themselves. You might not even notice one in a crowd. But don't get close enough to smell their breath. They can't really think for themselves, but they can take orders. The other thing is they're mean. Old-timers called them St. George's Pet, like all that's working upstairs is their speech centers and their lizard brains. Because they're such little shits, they mostly get used for muscle work."

"Like Mason with Parker."

"Exactly. You don't usually see them unless there's Deadheads having a turf war, but sometimes they make money renting them out or selling them to street gangs. Lacunas are pretty much the perfect thug."

"How do you kill them?"

"Like the others. The spine."

"That's it? Nothing else?"

"Whatever fucks up the nervous system. Run them through a wood chipper. Nuke them. Chase them down the street like an angry mob in Frankenstein and burn them."

"I wonder if I could mount a wood chipper on the front of a Bugatti?"

"What happened with you and Ms. Bardo last night?"

"You're talking your way out of an autograph fast."

"Asshole."

I offer Kasabian the last donut, but he shakes his head. There's a half-smoked cigarette butt in the ashtray and I light it up. That he wants, of course. I let him have a couple of puffs and then kill it off.

"Does the Codex say where zombies came from?"

He shakes his head.

"Not really. Hellions have plenty of blind spots and their own tall tales to fill in the missing pieces. Most Hellions say that Cain was Patient Zero. After he killed Abel, God sent him out to wander the earth forever and put a mark on him so no one would stop his wandering and torment. The Hellion smart set think zombieism was the mark. When Cain got into beefs with pushy civilians, he'd just bite them. They became the first golems and Lacunas."

"The ones who don't think it was Cain, what do they say?"

"This is bullshit, man. There's facts and there's fairy tales. None of this is going to help you kill them any better."

"Who says I'm going to kill them? I killed those ones last night because they attacked us. I don't have anything against going on a Drifter safari, but I want to get paid for it."

"Goddamn it, you don't get to be a brat when it comes to zombies. They're like jackrabbits. They make new zombies, eat everything in sight, and then migrate down the road and do it again."

"What do you care, Alfredo Garcia? You don't owe this world anything either."

"No, but I happen to live here and I like beer and burritos and cigarettes. Last time I checked, zombies don't deliver."

Alice and Brigitte's voices come back to me. They're telling me that something bad is coming. Is this it? I hope not. That would be about the lamest prophecy in history. I don't exactly need a vision to explain how everyone getting eaten, including me, would be a downer. No, it can't be this and that's bad news. It means there's something even worse coming.

"What's the other Drifter story?"

"You're like a dog with a bone. Let it go. Go chase a ball. Hump a stranger's leg."

"Tell me the story and I will."

"The story? You're the story. You and your kind. You fucked-up angels. The Codex says that when Lucifer's army was cast out of Heaven, one of the fallen didn't make it all the way to Hell and landed in a valley on earth instead. It was burned and broken, but humans still recognized it as an angel. The local blue bloods sent their doctors to help it, but the angel was sick and bloated like a tick by then. It attacked anyone who came near it. All of those people ended up turning into zeds. Those zeds attacked their families and friends. The ones they didn't eat became zeds and attacked other people. The people who lived in the hills saw that things were getting out of control, so they started fires and burned the whole valley. They thought they'd gotten everything, but some of the zeds supposedly escaped into caves. Mostly they stay underground, but every now and then one wanders out or gets summoned by a necromancer. That's it. They all lived happily ever fucking after. The end."

I wave him off.

"You were right. This isn't any help. Might as well say Muppets did it."

"You asked and I answered. You still owe me an autograph."

"You'll get your scrawl. I wonder who'll pay me more to hunt zeds and zots? Lucifer or the Vigil?"

"You don't actually have to say 'zeds and zots' all the time. You can say one or the other."

"I'll stick with Drifters. Those other names make them sound like candy."

"Lucifer and the Vigil both have a stake in keeping humans in general and L.A. in particular alive. Get them both to pay."

"That's what I was thinking. But there's one thing bugging me."

"What?"

"When those Drifters came in, I knew one of them. I mean I knew who he was. A guy named Spencer Church. I only heard of this guy the day before when someone said he was missing. I asked a couple of people about him. Then, out of nowhere, the guy shows up at Bamboo House like the place is a zombie salad bar."

"That's a hell of a coincidence."

"Isn't it? And if golems can't think…"

"It means someone sent him there. Probably walked him right up to the door and pushed him in."

"Somebody who knew where I was and happened to have a few spare Drifters lying around."

"You know the most interesting people."

"Guess I do have a vested interest in this after all. But I still want to get paid."

"Hell yeah."

"I need to set up meetings with the Vigil and Lucifer."

My phone buzzes on the nightstand. I pick it up and listen. It's a short call.

"Cool. See you there."

"Who was that?"

"Speak of the devil. He's out at the studio. Wants me to swing by and squint menacingly at the help."

"Next he'll have you doing his taxes."

"I've never been to a movie studio. How many guns do you think they'll let me take inside?"

"You? All you want."

The.460 pistol is too big to carry in my waistband, so I wear it on my hip in a tool belt I colored black with a Sharpie and modified into a speed rig. I can have it out and cocked before an angel can say "amen."

The knife and na'at hang snug inside the coat lining.

"Does the Codex say anything about Lucifer having a family?"

Kasabian gives me a curious little smile.

"Like is there a Mrs. Lucifer?"

"Yeah. Or kids."

"Not that I've ever seen, but the Codex isn't exactly easy to use. It's all stories and allusions, not a PowerPoint presentation. But I can look if you want. Of course, Lucifer has been fucking around on earth since the Fall, so he probably has a load of sprogs earning their keep as warlords and priests. You looking for a cage match with the Antichrist?"

I shake my head and go into the bathroom. I check myself in the mirror to make sure I look presentable and that the weapons don't show.

"No. It's just more trivia. I'm going to go and find a ride."

I'm closing the door when Kasabian says, "Can you imagine him for a father?"

"Uh. No."

"He's such a jerk, it would be torture ninety-nine percent of the time, but, come on, parent-teacher night would be fun. 'Little Bobby took half the class's lunch money.' 'Only half?'"

I nod at him.

"I'll pick up some cigarettes while I'm out." THERE'S A VINTAGE car lot on North La Brea. Big glass showroom up front. A lot full of classics and a service bay right around the corner. Cars come out of the lot, make a quick right, and are double-parked by the garage until another car pulls out. A situation like this is all about shopping and timing. I don't love T-birds or Corvettes. However, when a mechanic double-parks a red '67 GTO, I start across the street.

I mumble a little Hellion spell. There are boxes stacked around the side of the garage waiting for garbage pickup. The oil- and gas-stained cardboard goes up fast. It takes about thirty seconds for the crew to clear the garage, some to gawk and others to hit the flames with fire extinguishers.

The moment they're out, I'm behind the GTO's wheel, knife jammed in the ignition and the V-8 engine growling like a Tyrannosaurus rex. I aim the beast out into traffic and take the corner as white smoke from the dying fire drifts into the street.

I pull onto the Hollywood Freeway, heading north toward Burbank. The time on my phone is 3 P.M. Should I give Brigitte a call? There's a better-than-even chance that she'll be at the studio with Ritchie, so I wait.

It's not a long drive. I'm kind of sorry when I see the exit for the studio. For a second I think about not turning. Just hitting on the accelerator and heading north until there's nowhere left to go. What would stop me first, a moose, an oil pipeline, or a glacier? I'd sit on the shore of the Arctic Ocean and let the snow pile up around me in my GTO igloo. Curl up in the backseat with a radio, turn on a news station, and listen to the world ending.

There's a guard station at the studio gate. A tired-looking guy in a blue rent-a-cop uniform leans out of the guardhouse as I drive up.

"Sweet ride. We don't get many V-8s on the lot anymore. It's all rice-rocket hybrids."

"L.A. is going to be under water in twenty years. As an American, I figure I should do my bit to help out."

He eyes me before deciding I'm joking. He takes a clipboard from the wall inside his hut.

"Name?"

I have no idea what name Ritchie or Lucifer gave the guy.

"Stark."

The guard scans the list and nods. He hands me a plastic parking permit about the size of a hardback book.

"Keep that on your dashboard in plain view."

He pulls a white paper map of the lot from the back of the clipboard and hands it to me, pointing to landmarks with his pen.

"Follow the outside road around the edge of the lot. The soundstage you want is all the way on the far side. There are some producers' bungalows nearby. That's where you can park."

"Thanks."

"Looks like there's a hell of a production going on out there."

"That's the idea."

I follow the road around the outside of the lot. On my left is the freeway. On the studio side, there are forklifts and sweaty guys putting up scaffolding outside soundstages. Men and women in khakis and button-down shirts cruise by them on golf carts. The stages look like blimp hangars, giant humpback Quonset huts with huge posters of the studio's new releases. The place is about as glamorous as dental surgery.

I park the car outside the bungalows, take the knife from the ignition, and slip it back inside my coat.

There's a soundstage across the road. Outside, a hundred people are unloading trucks, telling other people how to unload trucks, or sitting in trucks waiting to be unloaded. Ritchie and Lucifer are at the edge of the chaos, with Ritchie pointing at some papers and then at the stage, where they're building something huge. Old women in elaborately decorated robes carry incense among the workers. Others walk around the perimeter with bottles in each hand. From one they sprinkle sacred oil on the ground. From the other they sprinkle what smells like animal blood.

Ritchie waves me over. He nods at the car when I get close.

"She's a beauty. How long have you had her?"

"A half hour, give or take."

"You know, if you leave the windows down like that, the sun is going to bleach the upholstery."

"That's okay. I only drive cars once."

Ritchie looks from me to the car and back. It takes him a minute, but he finally gets it.

"I see."

"Keep it, if you want. It drives like a dream. There aren't any keys, but I'm sure someone around here can change the VIN and slap in a new ignition."

Lucifer watches the old women make their rounds. Ritchie's eyes flick down to my waist. He's spotted the gun and smiles.

"Have you ever been on a movie lot before?"

"Can't say that I have."

"Then this ought to be pretty interesting for you."

"Okay."

"Let me give you a tour. We're shooting all the Heaven sequences first, so that's what's being built right now. I guess you'll have to take my word for that since you're better acquainted with the other place."

"Heaven for the weather and Hell for the company."

"Who said that?"

"Mark Twain. Or Jim Morrison. Or Stalin. One of them."

Lucifer turns to me.

"When did you start quoting Twain?"

"It was in a fortune cookie. I've been saving it up."

Lucifer stops and looks at Ritchie.

"Simon, why don't you let me show James around. We need to discuss some work details."

"Yeah, we do."

"Sure. Good seeing you. Stop by and say good-bye before you take off. I still want to pick your brain about life down in the hot country."

"Before you go, let me ask both of you something. What exactly is my job right now? Am I here all day every day you're shooting? How is this going to work?"

Ritchie shakes his head.

"We won't need you all the time. Mr. Macheath won't be on set every day. Unless he wants you, you don't need to be here the whole time. I'm sure you noticed that we've brought in a planeload of Chinese nyu wu witches to work special security. Mean old bitches, but they know tricks and charms older than dirt. Stuff most of the local talent has never even heard of."

"I'm well protected here," says Lucifer. "Mostly, I want you anytime I'm in public and not at the hotel or the lot."

"Maybe when you're not here, you should stay at the hotel. I mean you're pretty much royalty. People can come to you."

"Considering the drama after the party, I have to show my face around. I don't want people thinking I'm Howard Hughes."

"Okay. Just be smart about when and where."

Ritchie checks his watch and looks around with a sour expression.

"You two have fun. I need to find someone and see if these goddamn union guys can possibly unload my fucking trucks any slower."

Lucifer heads for the soundstage and I follow him inside. The Heaven set is pretty skeletal, but it's still impressive. The floor is fake marble inlaid with complex star patterns. There's a gold vaulted ceiling encrusted with jewels and subtly shifting lights. In the middle of the fake room is a throne decorated with intricate celestial, animal, and plant shapes.

I ask, "So, is this what it looks like?"

"Not in the slightest. But for the purposes of the movie, it's uncannily accurate."

"You trust Ritchie and his imported Golden Girls with security?"

"Simon knows what he's doing. He's been protecting himself and his stars for a long time. And he knows that his soul is at stake."

I follow him as we circle the interior of the stage.

"Did he ever have to protect anyone from Drifters?"

Lucifer raises his eyebrows.

"Zombies here?"

"Last night. Three of them came into the Bamboo House of Dolls. What's worse is that one of them was Spencer Church, a guy I heard about at your party and had been asking about since. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that wasn't a coincidence. That means that not only do we have Drifters, but someone is running them."

"A situation like that right now could be very bad publicity. With something that extraordinary happening while I'm in town, I'll end up being blamed for it."

"Then hire me to go after them. Take what you've paid me so far, tack on a bonus, and I'll find them and get rid of them for you."

"You killed three of them?"

"Actually, I only took out one. A friend killed the other two."

"Maybe I should hire your friend."

"Ritchie wouldn't like that."

"Why?"

"It was Brigitte. Turns out the aspiring actress and porn things are her playing Clark Kent. The rest of the time, she's a trained Drifter killer."

Lucifer nods.

"I noticed that you two were getting along well at the party. When you're not killing zombies together, you aren't doing something reckless and stupid, are you?"

"When have I ever done that?"

"You don't want Simon for an enemy. He has a lot of resources at his disposal and a bad temper. There are bodies buried all over this lot and he's responsible for more than a few of them."

"Don't worry. No one is running to Vegas for an Elvis wedding."

"Be smart for once. Remember, you're still under contract to me."

"About that. What's really going on? Why did you hire me for the job? Is there something I should know? Or am I still your science project, like Jesus in the desert?"

"Temptations are a bore. I only played that game with the kid and a few of the more annoying saints. Read the Book of Job. One of my jobs was to test self-righteous mortals for Father, but everyone has conveniently forgotten that."

"That's what the movie is going to fix."

"Among other things. I learned early on that tempting you people was unnecessary. How does the song go? 'I'm waiting for my man, twenty-six dollars in my hand…' What I have is better than crack, heroin, money, or love. I don't have to sell it. People come to me to buy."

"What exactly is it you sell?"

"Same as Father. Hope. For a better life. A brighter future."

"Only the back ends of your deals are pretty harsh."

"I can make your dreams come true here and now or you can hold your breath, click your heels three times, and hope that it's all cruise ships and finger sandwiches when you die. It's one hundred percent your choice."

"What about the world? What about wars and famines and AIDS? Watching a million people die is probably a Marx Brothers double feature for you."

"'I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things.' That's Father talking about Himself, not me. And I never started a war except the one I lost with him."

"That's pretty hard to believe."

"I'm not saying I'm an innocent, but on earth I've never directly instigated or fired a shot in anger."

"So, it's just us, then."

As we walk down a short staircase to a lower level of the set, Lucifer bumps me with his shoulder. I miss a step and almost fall.

"What the fuck was that?"

"That's what I do. I nudge. That's the extent of my vast power in the affairs of mankind. I nudge. I jostle. I whisper."

"Your nudges have a little more juice behind them than when civilians do it."

"True. But as I said, it's always your choice. That's one rule I've never broken. In your old stories, I'm always tricking or cheating you people, but that's something I refuse to do. Cheating you would be an admission of weakness. I would never give Father the satisfaction."

There's a short silence.

Lucifer asks, "When did you decide to become the loyal opposition? Conventional morality isn't your strong suit."

"Nothing. It's just something someone said."

"Let me guess. 'Why are you working for Old Scratch?'"

"Something like that."

"What did you say?"

"That I owe you money."

"That's what I've been talking about. You made a free choice to take a deal with me. But unlike some people, you've chosen to honor your debt. Did it occur to you that accepting responsibility for your actions is in itself a moral act? It certainly makes you a better man than fools like Ritchie who think they can deal and scheme their way out of anything."

"About how many human women do you think you've fucked over the years?"

"That sounds like the old you. Subtle as always."

Shit. I didn't mean to blurt that out.

"Forget it. So, how about giving me the Drifter gig? Between Brigitte and me, we can clean up your zed and zot problem fast."

"You shouldn't see Brigitte again, even for work."

"I know, but I'm going to. Give us something to pass the time. Maybe it'll keep us from doing something reckless and stupid."

"I'll think about it."

An alarm goes off outside. Not an alarm. It's like fifty sets of truck brakes screaming as they all lock up at once. It takes me a few seconds to figure out that it's human voices colliding in a terrifying animal wail. The old Chinese witches are screaming and running, converging at one point of the stage perimeter where they'd splashed oil and blood. The sun glares off raised knives and white banners scrawled with ancient spells.

Ritchie sprints onto the stage and right at us. A big man, he looks more like an ex-cop than ever. Without a word, he loops one arm around Lucifer's shoulders and half drags, half pushes Lucifer to the back of the stage. I get on the other side and push them into a small office in back. Ritchie kicks over an armchair leaning against the far wall revealing a barely visible crease running up the seam between two sheets of paneling. He slams the heel of his hand on a point halfway up the wall and it pops open. Ritchie pulls Lucifer inside. I follow them and Ritchie slams the door closed.

Ritchie huffs his words, winded and bent over.

"You'll be safe here."

Lucifer turns in a slow circle. There are comfortable chairs. A stack of five-gallon water jugs. Packets of dried food. Two queen-size inflatable beds. A cabinet against the far wall is marked MEDICAL. I open it. The cabinet is divided into two tall vertical compartments. The left side is stocked with enough drugs and medical junk to open your own hospital. The right side is all guns. Mostly flashy action-movie hardware. HKs, Berettas, and Desert Eagle automatics. There's a foot-high stack of ammo at the bottom of the cabinet.

I say, "Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff," but no one gets it.

Lucifer nods. Ritchie drops down into an office chair in front of a bank of video monitors.

"I never took you for the panic-room type, Simon."

"You weren't here for the riots in '92. Hollywood looked like Dresden after the bombs. We kept waiting for the mob to get this far north, but they never made it. Lucky for us. Back then our security was a gate, a few off-duty cops, and a new sprinkler system. All we were safe from was shoplifters and people smoking in the bathroom. I swore that would never happen again."

"Good for you," says Lucifer. "I love a take-charge coward."

Ritchie flips a switch on the console and all the video screens come on, giving a 360-degree view outside and inside the soundstage. The witches are on the center screen. They're manhandling someone who looks almost human, but not quite. His arms and legs are too long. His skull is too flat. Uniformed security people push through the mob, cuff the Lurker, and perp-walk him away. The old women still yell and slap his shoulders as he goes by.

A couple of minutes later, a phone on the console chirps. Ritchie picks it up.

"Yeah? You're sure? Take him to one of the special cells downstairs. No one gets in or out until I get there."

He swings around in the chair and smiles at us.

"Looks like a false alarm. A Lurker maintenance worker, one of the water nixies we keep around to clean the pipes, decided he wanted a closer look at the set and crossed the old ladies' protection circle. We'll question him and probably let him go with a warning."

"At least you know you're getting your money's worth out of the old dears," says Lucifer.

I ask, "What's to keep a magician or a few of your witches from marching up to the door and lobbing hexes in here?"

Ritchie shakes his head.

"The room is shielded from outside spells. We're like a roach motel. Magic goes out, but it doesn't come in."

"That makes us the roaches," says Lucifer.

"I guess so," says Ritchie.

"At least they're survivors."

"Are we done in here or do we need to show a permission slip to the teacher?" I ask.

Ritchie nods to the gun on my hip.

"Slow down. Not all of us are packing as much heat as you."

"That's why I have it. So I don't have to drag our boss into Fort Knox every time a pixie farts."

"Holster your dicks, boys," says Lucifer. "Everything went smoothly. Everyone did their jobs, and no one had to get shot. Unless you need to wing someone to feel useful."

He looks at me. I look at Ritchie.

"I wonder how your room would hold up if a few Drifters came knocking. Is it soundproof?"

Ritchie's eyes widen.

"Zombies? Not the ones at the party. You've seen zombies in the streets?"

"Less than a block off Hollywood Boulevard. It was just some shamblers, so don't pop a cork. Mr. Macheath is hiring me to do a search-and-destroy on the whole glee club, right?"

"We'll see."

Ritchie is staring at the monitors. Things are pretty much back to normal outside. The old ladies are laying down a new layer of oil and animal punch where the Lurker smudged their circle. The sweaty guys are back unloading the trucks and the office types who were standing around before snap right back to standing around. Ritchie shakes his head. I didn't think the news would hit him so hard, but he's not like my friends and used to this kind of shit.

"We haven't had any walking dead since I was a kid. Not wandering the streets. It only lasted a few days. They were supposed to have crawled out of an old Pasadena gold mine after a quake."

"What does 'not wandering the streets' mean?"

He shrugs.

"They pop up every now and then, like any dark magic. But they're always contained, not strolling to Whisky A Go-Go."

"When was the last time someone used Drifters to settle an argument?"

"The last I heard about was when Regina Maab and Cabal Ash were going at each other. I don't know about what. It sounded like it was old-world stuff. That's maybe why it escalated so far. You know how those Europeans get. Some Cossacks stole Grandma's beets five hundred years ago and they're still bitching about it."

"Where's Regina Maab now?"

Ritchie shrugs.

"Gone. No one's seen her in years. Whatever the argument was about, I think Cabal won."

"Ash is into Black Sun hoodoo. You think he's hooked up with Drifters?"

"Not directly, but chaos magic attracts a lot of freaks. He wouldn't be above hiring an alcoholic Deadhead who can't pay his rent. God knows there are enough of them around."

Lucifer is examining the drugs in Ritchie's cabinet, pretending he's not listening to us.

"You ready to hire me to get on this?"

He doesn't say anything for a minute.

"I'm more interested in who shot at us when we were leaving the Geistwalds' party. Find me something on that."

"You're the ones with cop connections. They do hit men. I do monsters."

"Who says they're not connected?"

"Hire me and we'll find out."

He slips a bottle of pills into his pocket and puts the rest back.

"Go talk to Cabal and then call me. I'll decide then."

"Fine. You want to hang here or do you want me to ride back to the hotel with you?"

"I'll stay here for a while. You'll find the Ash clan in the Linda Vista Hospital. You'll love it. It's been closed for years, but they still shoot movies and television there. You get into Cabal's place through the big freezer in the morgue."

"I'll come by the hotel after I talk to him."

"Call first. And take a shower and change your clothes before you come over. Smelling Cabal every decade or so is quite enough. And one more thing."

"Yeah."

"Take your new partner with you. Cabal can be difficult, but he's an important man. Maybe your friend can keep you from shooting his place up."

"She carries a gun, too, so I wouldn't count on it." Now I'M ON two missions. Three if you break them down the long way: