Devil Said Bang (16 page)

I start the bike and head out, keeping the speed
subsonic. Between the Gladius and the ambulance crash, I’m feeling a little
rough. Deumos and her people are just about to leave when I catch up. When I
slow the bike, I can feel tension ripple through the air. People holding guns
thumb off the safeties. Ones without guns get theirs out. I wait, gunning the
throttle and waiting for something to happen. Deumos comes over slowly. Stands
an arm’s length away, straight and defiant. I take the flask from my pocket and
hand it to her.

“Tell the owner thanks.”

She takes the flask and I pop the clutch, burning
rubber out of there.

I
take
the secret stairs up from the garage straight into the library, careful to step
around the hexes in the floor. I pick up the phone and hit
PISSANTS
. Brimborion picks up.

“It’s me.”

“You’re alive.”

“Surprise. Release Deumos’s crew.”

“Security isn’t through questioning them.”

“You mean torture? They’re done. If any of them
have a problem, tell them Lucifer said to put it in writing and shove it up
their ass.”

“I’ll just say the order came from you.”

“You’re leaving out the best part but okay.”

“How did you . . . ?”

“Got to go.”

I hang up.

Samael knew I needed the armor to survive, so if I
lived he knew I’d always have it with me. He was smart enough to hide the
thunderbolt so that even if Mason won, he’d never have all of Samael’s power.
Not telling me any of this stinks like more of his “figure it out for yourself”
Socratic horseshit. Or did he tell me something more? I have a vague impression
of talking to him about it and him telling me something else. What was it?

The more immediate question is this: where would I
hide if I was a missing piece of armor?

Samael told me to read the Greeks, so that seems
like a good place to start, which is exactly why I’m not going to do it. I’ve
pawed through every Greek book on the shelves. I liked one book I found,
Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius, but then I found out
he was Roman and not Greek and that just pissed me off. For a while I thought
that might mean something but probably someone just put it on the wrong
shelf.

If the thunderbolt is anywhere, it will be anywhere
but where Samael told me where to look. Aside from actuarial tables, Hellion tax
law, and sports stats, what section would I be the least likely to look in? What
other sections are there in libraries? I’m not exactly an expert on book jail,
and when I walked around before, I didn’t pay much attention to what books were
where or how they were arranged. Time to get rigorous and organized.

I hate this already.

You know how when you drive somewhere new it always
seems longer the first time? That’s how it is the first time you walk through an
entire library trying to figure out how it’s put together. I could have done
this when I first got here but I didn’t give a fuck what was on the other
shelves and mostly resented everything beyond my little pied-à-terre for not
having more, meaning
any,
movies. If Samael really
wanted me to pay attention, he’d have stuck Herodotus between piles of Howard
Hawks and John Huston.

Twenty minutes of looking and my eyes are already
glazing over. There are no section markers. No Dewey decimal system or card
catalog. (Yes, I know about the Dewey decimal system. I didn’t spend a lot of
time in libraries but I’m aware of their existence.) Just rows of books with
titles in Hellion script. And I was just in a crash. My neck hurt before. Now
it’s aching from holding it sideways to read the titles.

I should have brought a pencil and paper and been
drawing a map as I go over the place. I find a general-history-of-the-universe
section, including Heaven and Hell. There’s a section on science, which is
broken down into categories I’ve never heard of. What the hell is Quantum
Melancholia?

There’s politics, which is total bullshit. All
Samael needs is one book with
LIE AND CHEAT LIKE A SON
OF A BITCH
in neon on the cover.

There’s also art. Instead of Sodom and Gomorrah
clusterfucking and Giger monsters, it looks like Samael has a thing for
Rembrandt and mortal portrait painters. Probably looking for the right dead soul
to put his mug on a Hellion dollar bill.

Military theory. Ha. I bet he wishes he had these
books back in Heaven.

Law and economics. Was he studying for his goddamn
SATs? I guess the Devil needs to know things like mortal rules and money. But
still. I’m learning Samael’s darkest secrets and they’re really boring.

Philosophy. Okay. He gets some slack for this one.
His argument with God seems legit. Is it the sin of pride not wanting to be a
slave?

I’m about to start making my own sections.
Despair. Boredom. I Want a Nap.
And
Fuck This Shit Entirely.
I’ll push them together in
one big pile with a noose overhead.

This whole time I’ve been hoping to find a secret
trove of romances or westerns but the long shelves of true-crime books are
probably Samael’s pulp pop reading. He’s exactly the kind of guy who flips to
the end of every crime book looking for his name in the index. I wonder if I’m
in one of these things. Which reminds me. I need to check the Sandman Slim entry
on Wikipedia. I’ve tried killing it a couple of times but it’s always back up
the next day. If some psychic prick gets wind that I’m temping as Satan, I don’t
want it online. Satanists make junior high Goths look like NASA.

There’s a reading area in the corner of the room. I
drop down into the soft leather chair, mentally exhausted. There’s a small table
with a lamp and an ashtray with a few old butts. I forgot to pick up a pack of
Maledictions before coming in, so I poke around the ashtray like a wino looking
for one that might still be smokable. None of them are. I’m on a real winning
streak tonight.

This is getting me nowhere. There must be a million
or more books in here. I could wander the aisles for years and not find
anything. Maybe I’m wrong about the missing armor piece. Even if he left it for
me, it might not be in here. That means more wasted years wandering the whole
palace, searching it one room at a time.

No.

Samael is a dick but he isn’t that random or cruel,
at least not to me. As much as he’s fucked with me over the years, there was
always a point and he’s always given me something to work with. Saint James
would have figured out this bullshit hours ago. It makes me want to hurt him
even more.

First no cigarettes and now I realize I left my
Aqua Regia back at home base. My neck hurts. My chest burns. My right hand aches
from picking up books. I’m sore and sweating like a fat man chasing a taco wagon
across the Mojave.

Sitting here and closing my eyes feels good.

Then it comes back to me.

“Right in front of you. Stop looking. Sit down and
you’ll see.”

I open my eyes and see I’m sitting in the middle of
a huge section on magic. Samael takes the subject more seriously than I ever
did. Because I was born a nephilim, I never learned much real magic. Even as a
kid I had enough power to improvise my own hoodoo. The first and only real magic
I ever learned was down here killing in the arena and later as Sandman Slim.
There’s probably a lot of useful information in these books. Too bad the whole
reading thing is starting to give me hives.

A book lies facedown on the other side of a reading
lamp. I didn’t notice it before. It’s a paperback with a bright yellow cover,
the first paperback I’ve seen down here. I pick it up. The title is in big block
letters.

ANGER MANAGEMENT FOR
DUMMIES

Like I said, Samael always leaves me something to
work with and a cheap joke is better than no clue at all.

I flip through the book looking for highlighted
passages or dog-eared pages. I even read most of a chapter. It’s all the usual
straight-arrow self-help babble. No clues. No codes. Just sensible advice for
sensible people, which leaves me out in the cold. I throw the book across the
room. For all I know, Aelita brought it down so Mason could use it to mess with
my brain.

I need a drink. Many drinks. And I need them
now.

I kick over the chair as I get up, knocking over
the table and sending the lamp flying.

There’s something on a shelf that had been hidden
behind the table. On a bottom shelf all the way at the back of the magic section
is an old book whose cover is the same shade of yellow as
Anger Management for Dummies
. I kneel and pull it out.

It’s musty and a little mildewed and the leather
binding cracks when I touch it. The lettering and illustration of a kid on the
front looks Victorian. Gold lettering reads
A Magic Primer
for Little Gentlemen. Magnificent Feats and Rousing Conundrums for Boys of
All Ages
. I open it. Inside, the pages have been hollowed out. Lying
at the bottom of the empty book is something wrapped in purple linen. I unroll
it. And find a golden thunderbolt. Bingo.

I stand up and clip it into place.

Nothing happens. Zero. Zip. Nada. I didn’t think I
was going to roll around the floor growling like Lyle Talbot sprouting Wolf Man
whiskers but I was hoping for something. I’m so jacked up on
adrenaline that all traces of exhaustion are gone, but that’s still a letdown
when you expect to feel like the second most powerful being in the universe.

Then something hits me like a baseball bat to the
kidneys. My guts knot up and my body temperature shoots up a hundred degrees.
Darkness spills out of me, rolling onto the floor and spreading like black
Hellion blood. I’m spewing darkness from every pore of my body. The darkness
isn’t solid. It’s a cold dead void like a drop into a bottomless pit. Things
curl up from the nothingness, icy and sharp, like freezing rattlesnakes.
Suddenly I’m a supercharged nitro-burning Hell beast with teeth the size of the
Rockies and hands the size of Texas. If I bend down, I can lift all of Creation
onto my back.

And then, like a supersonic orgasm, the feeling is
gone. There’s nothing left and I’m back on the floor gasping for air.

What the hell just happened? Does this mean I had
Lucifer’s power for a second but my human body couldn’t contain it? Or did it
just feel like it passed into me?

There are voices. They don’t come through clearly.
Whispers of Hellions all around me in the palace. Even though I can’t hear
individual words, the meaning still filters through. Most words are nothing.
Empty compliments or straight-up information. Other things hang in the air.
Faint wisps of vapor like steam coming off hot coffee. They’re veiled threats
and lies. The half-truths, evasions, and bullshit that’s the blood in the
arteries of this place. They float in through the walls like a ghost mist.

Okay. Right. This is new. It’s not much more than a
trick from one of those shitty amaze-your-friends-and-half-wit-relatives magic
kits you buy off late-night TV but it’s something. Maybe the superhero stuff
will kick back in later. I like the darkness thing that just happened. I hope I
didn’t blow all my power in one big death-dive money shot. Maybe being Lucifer
isn’t about power but just being more aware of your Luciferness. That would be a
hell of a letdown. I swear on every pointy little Hellion head if I start to
grow bat wings and a tail, I’m going to cut them off and feed them to Samael
through the wrong hole.

There’s one supertrick I want more than anything,
and even if I still have the power, I don’t know how to get at it. How did
Samael leave Hell? I never got a chance to ask. Maybe a hoodoo chant? Something
you do in a Magic Circle? Walking through a waning arch? Maybe he just had a
pair of ruby slippers like Dorothy.

I can’t stand this. Get me out of here. Take me
home.

The roar and the wind hit like a hurricane. Things
shoot past me, shrieking like tracer rounds. All metal and leaving trails of
lights. A blue-brown twilight sky hovers above gray clouds. I smell diesel fumes
and scorched engine oil. A green sign trimmed in white catches my eye. It reads
CRENSHAW BOULEVARD EXIT.

I recognize this. I’m on the I-10 freeway above
where I did the Black Dahlia and splattered my brains and bones on a freeway
support. I can’t help it. I laugh and laugh like a lunatic way off his meds.

This is L.A. I’m
home.

Mustang Sally, the beautiful sylph and goddess of
the roads, is perched on the hood of a silver Mercedes 550 convertible in the
breakdown lane, smoking like she’s been waiting for me the whole time I’ve been
gone. She smiles and crooks a finger to my right. I turn.

A sixteen-wheeler is bearing down on me going
seventy. The driver is laying on the air horn as cars flash by all around me.
Right. Cars. Fuck. Standing on freeways is bad even if you’re magic.

There’s nowhere to run. I close my eyes and try to
come up with some clever hoodoo but all that’s in my head is Oh shit. Oh shit.
Oh shit.

Suddenly the roar is gone and the smells with it
and the sudden gusts of wind as things whiz by. When I open my eyes, all that’s
left of L.A. is a faint afterimage of Mustang Sally’s Cheshire-cat smile. I’m
back in the library.

My brain is whirling like it’s going to splatter
itself all over the inside of my skull like carnival spin art. I was home and it
wasn’t any harder than walking from one room to another. Only I think I need to
maybe get more specific about what room.

My legs are shaking too much to walk. I sit
crossed-legged on the cool marble floor. Stare at it, making sure it’s real.

My burned hand throbs and my chest itches and I
couldn’t give less of a goddamn. Suddenly every shitty, painful moment of the
last three months has been worth it. I was home and I can do it again.

Every part of me wants to go back to L.A. right now
and stay there and pretend none of this ever happened. But I know if I run off,
there are things that will bite large chunks out of my ass later. Take care of
business and get out clean. I’m halfway home. More than halfway. Getting away
clean means making nice with people I never want to lay eyes on again. I’ve got
to get Brimborion in gear and start making calls.

But that can wait a minute. Until I get off the
floor, which will be any minute now. After my legs stop shaking and I catch my
breath. Until then I’m just going to sit here in the cool quiet with my magic
yellow book and think of how many ways this freak factory can kiss my ass on its
way out the door.