Giving Him Hell: A Saturn's Daughter Novel (Saturn's Daughters Book 3) (11 page)

“Exorcists ought to do it,” Andre agreed, obviously appeasing me. “A few voodoo priestesses while we’re at it.”

I wasn’t that drunk. “Not to exorcise the Zone, dumquat.” I thought about that. “Okay, maybe for the Zone, too. But for Hell’s Mansion. Know any priests?”

“Hell’s Mansion?” Schwartz had obviously come along to protect my virtue from Andre’s marauding hands. He didn’t know how to follow my drunken rambling.

Andre did. “Dane has demons?” he asked in amusement. “I’d pay to watch that.”

“I’ll tell him you’ll pay the cover charge for the priests,” I said. Max would probably kill me for mentioning any of this to Andre, but now that it looked like Max and I would never get it on again, I was still worried about my ex. “I’m thinking Benedictine nuns. No sane devil could hang around when they sing like heaven’s angels.”

“We could hold the meeting about Acme and eminent domain at Dane’s place,” Andre suggested, possibly with tongue in cheek. “The Zone’s newly self-appointed representative used to love visiting the mansion. With priests and nuns around, no one might get killed.”

His mother wanted to be the town rep, I remembered hazily. I could hope that Katerina might be more stable than Andre. “If Gloria doesn’t burn the house down around us,” I agreed, revealing what shouldn’t be revealed.

“Gloria?” Schwartz asked in puzzlement.

“Clancy’s drunk, Schwartz. She has nightmares. You gonna take her upstairs or shall I?” Covering for my lapse, Andre propped me up on the bottom step of my boarding house.

“Taking myself up. Tell Katerina if she knows priests, we’ll exorcize the mansion. We’ll make Max . . .” Even I wasn’t that drunk. I corrected myself. “We’ll make
Dane
see what we’re up against.”

If Andre narrowed his eyes suspiciously, I didn’t notice. I just stumbled to the door, let Schwartz open it, and proudly hauled my own carcass upstairs.

Since he lived in the apartment across from me, Schwartz followed to keep me from toppling backward.

Pinned to my door was a pink ribbon and a pencil message in a familiar scrawl:

Hell has many dimensions,
aziz.
So does time. Don’t risk them.

Themis, my mysterious Iranian grandmother—whom I’ve never met. She’s the only one who speaks Persian to me. I unpinned the ribbon and message and crushed them against my chest. My birthday present.

Hell exists and my grandmother is reading my blog messages to Fat Chick. Swell.

Schwartz was studying me with bewilderment, as well he might. In theory, no one can enter the boarding house without a key and our landlady can’t climb the stairs. Messages appearing from nowhere are a trifle unsettling, as I should know.

I unlocked my locks, then stood on my toes and kissed the good lieutenant’s rough cheek. He smelled of beer and Old Spice. I hiccupped and kissed him again. “Night, Schwartz.” I hastily opened my door and shut it between us.

With any luck, the kiss ought to distract him from weird messages. I was in no shape to explain invisible grandmothers who spoke foreign languages. I’d looked it up.
Aziz
is Persian for
dear
. My very own Mesopotamian grandmamma—except she used the English alphabet.

Twelve

By the next day, the police had taken down the crime scene tape, and Ned’s clean-up crew had scrubbed my office lobby to a pristine brilliance it hadn’t seen in fifty years.

Nursing a dull headache, I began shoving the boxes of gnomes inside, mostly using my feet instead of my injured arm. It was Saturday. I didn’t have office hours on weekends. Even the Do-Gooders had taken the day off.

Unless I learned otherwise, I might have an entire lonely year of celibacy ahead. I could fill my working hours fighting eminent domain. But for relaxation, I’d better find a hobby—one safer than ticking off thugs and exploring under the Zone. I wasn’t sure exorcising Gloria was healthier, but she and Dane were the only demons I knew who might set wreaths on fire and blow up gas lines.

I’d rather tackle Gloria than go wandering under the Zone again. For all I knew, the utility workers had gone bonkers from walking through the Zone’s underground pollution.

I just didn’t know how to hunt a dead person in the hellish dimensions that my granny said I shouldn’t risk.

I shoved a box of gnomes to an empty office and studied the situation. I wasn’t accustomed to idleness. I needed activity before I went looking for trouble.

Andre had a huge building here. The wiring was ancient and wouldn’t support modern electronic offices. He’d had cable run in from a safe neighborhood behind us for my computer. So far, the Zone hadn’t grown tentacles this far up the hill.

That didn’t mean the building was secure or comfortable. But it was empty, had four walls, and a roof. It had possibilities—if one ignored bats, stenches, and mysterious wails in the cellar. I’d lived with partying college students, screaming sirens, and rodents and been homeless the better part of my life. Now that I had a place of my own, I couldn’t let the Zone’s idiosyncrasies scare me. Sarah and corpses had put me off yesterday, but I needed to do something about sealing up the cellar.

I carted a few boxes of gnomes to the cellar door to block it—until my arm ached worse than my head. I kicked a few more over to reinforce the barricade. The Force could wail all it liked, but it would have a lot of concrete to deal with if it tried to get out.

I had an insane dream of a little community of enterprises in this big empty space. I liked having people around me. I needed the human interaction to get outside the weirdnesses in my head.

So when Sarah showed up later and asked if she could rent a room, I didn’t automatically yell
hell
no.

Logically, I knew I should. No kitchen, right? Limited toilets. And she
had
eventually
turned into a chimp.

But she’d been severely provoked, so maybe that didn’t count as much. The fact remained that Sarah thought she was steadier up here.

Justice was a bitch to deal with.

“Just a room for sleeping in?” I asked warily, leading her around the maze of hallways. “It’s probably not good to have cosmetics stacked up in the bathroom of a professional office.”

“You don’t use the upstairs,” she pointed out, taking the stairs in question to the second floor. “I could put in an air mattress in the office next to the restroom up here. I eat at Chesty’s anyway. I don’t need much.”

That was pretty sad, but really, not my problem. “You were nearly mugged by an intruder the one night you slept here. Why would you want to live here?”

“But I
killed
him,” she said with relish. “And I got great hair. The way you attract trouble, you’ll probably have more intruders. I can kill them, too. I’ll be your guard dog.”

Ah, now I got it. Silly me. Sociopath at work. But instead of hiring the fictional Dexter, I would be renting space to a black widow spider. Swell.

I thought of the stoned Nazis in the office downstairs. What if they started coming back to life as the frogs had? Sarah would call them intruders and kill them.

Really, I think too much. “I can’t have the police out here all the time,” I said sternly. “If that’s your only reason for renting, then forget it. No more violence.”

“Okay, okay.” She gestured dismissively and studied an office suite that overlooked my apartment and Andre’s. “I just want to get over this chimp stuff and change my life around like you have. Living outside the Zone could be my chance.”

When she put it that way . . . I still didn’t believe it. But I’d laid out my rules, and I couldn’t argue if she wanted to stalk Andre. “I’m thinking the Zone makes us better if we
behave
better, if we
try
to fit in,” I warned. “If you want to try, have at it. There’s a back exit you can use so you don’t disturb my office. I’ll get a key made.”

That’s how Sarah and I ended up spending the weekend painting my office slate blue and her room a pale pink. I hate pink, but that was her choice. She’d probably install a cute white princess bed next.

Milo prowled the halls, occasionally bringing me gifts of mice. As long as they weren’t bats, I was okay with that. I decided a smaller coffeepot was more practical than an urn and installed a two-buck Goodwill one in my private office off the lobby. I admired the blue walls and white trim and added a navy blue and maroon silk sash above the window for color. I bought—paid full price, mind you—a shade to fit the window so I could work when it was dark without the world seeing me.

I found a fireproof safe on Craigslist and sent a friend with a truck over to get it. If Sarah was living in my office, I needed a place to lock up sensitive records.

Deciding that if Sarah could live with the Force in the cellar without a qualm, that I could, too, I unpacked a few of the gnome boxes still sitting by the front door. The statues were easier to lift one at a time. I distributed them around the building in dark corners. I patted them on their gnarly heads and called them my guardian angels and prayed like crazy they’d wake up and run away and never return.

The Graham Young gnome I put on the building’s flat roof and hoped he’d fall over the edge if he woke up. He needed to know what it was like to live with the elements, like the vagrants he’d tried to toss into the cold.

Sunday evening, Andre arrived with a Christmas tree.

“The mayor is throwing this out,” he announced, apparently promoting his mother to a higher rank than neighborhood representative. He looked almost defensive when I stared in amazement at the seven-foot fake monstrosity. “Julius and I have been using it, but she wants a real one.”

“That makes sense,” I agreed, studying plastic branches with built-in lights. I was pretty sure the lights were pink and purple. “Thank you, I think. The place could use a little holiday décor.”

“We’ve called a meeting at the mansion for nine tomorrow.” He dropped the heavy tree in a corner near the front lobby window, then looked for a place to plug it in. “Paddy and MacNeill will be there representing Acme, plus Dane and the doctor behind MSI.” He shot me an evil glare. “For some odd reason, they can’t find MSI’s chief executive.”

Because he was languishing on my roof. I shrugged, not even bothering to play innocent. “And someone from the EPA, I hope?”

Andre scowled. “Your boyfriend pulled the strings, so yeah, the feds will be there. You’re invited, of course, along with our new Zone representative.”

“The senator is not my boyfriend,” I said reflexively. “You probably know Dane better than I do.” Of course, I knew Max better than Andre did, but the mix that was the senator was a puzzlement I couldn’t intelligently discuss. “I don’t want to be there, but given Hell’s Mansion, I probably ought to be.”

“Right. They may need a few more garden gnomes,” he said with his usual sarcasm. Then he plugged in the Christmas lights and glared at me. “I don’t want Katerina involved. She just doesn’t realize what’s happened to the Zone since she went comatose.”

“I can’t make your mother stay home, Andre. She has to make a new life for herself. And she isn’t dumb. She’s spent some time in a different dimension and has to know the world is more than what we see in front of us. You just have to decide at what point you’re going to tell her that the Zone is cracked, and she’s defending monsters.”

He ran his hand through his glossy black hair and glared at the blinking pink and purple tree lights. “Maybe the EPA is right. Maybe they should raze the place and dig out the dirt.”

“What color are the manholes tonight?” I asked cynically. “You want to send innocent workers down those hellholes? You want construction people crushed by angry Dumpsters or suffer heart attacks when the statues throw darts? What if displaced gargoyles move uptown? And then you want some smug fascist to build a medical clinic on that ground to experiment with the dangerous chemicals that
started
all this?”

“Thanks for making it clear, Clancy,” he snarled, advancing on me. “You do have a way with words.”

I wanted him to hold me too badly. I put up a hand to stop him. “Maybe Papa Saturn will give us a solution for Christmas. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

He studied me for a minute, letting the tension smolder. He knew I wouldn’t protest too hard if he applied his moves on me. But he probably remembered Friday night’s discussion better than I did. “Merry Christmas, Clancy.” He strode out.

I needed to turn
myself
into stone.

***

Monday morning, I rode the Harley out to Ruxton. Yeah, I know it’s unprofessional to arrive wearing leather pants, knee-high boots, and Max’s biker jacket—since mine was being mended. So, sue me. Nothing good had ever come of a visit to the Mansion. This time, I came prepared.

Besides, I needed an edge to deal with silver foxes in suits. They needed to know I wasn’t one of them, even if I am a full-fledged, card-carrying lawyer. And Max’s soul needed to see the rebel Justine, not the white-collar female in his Senator Dane fantasy.

It was kind of cool boldly roaring up to that guard booth where my swarthy self hadn’t been welcome when Gloria was alive. The guy at the gate simply waved me through.

The circular drive was lined with limos and expensive sedans. Heaven forbid that they share a car.

If I was polite, I’d have to find an empty place in the north outer forty and freeze my tush off walking up the drive. Instead, I parked the bike near the pretentious portico, among the azaleas.

Pulling off my helmet and letting my shampoo-model hair swing free, I held up my ID to the guard at the door. He looked disapproving, but in my experience, that’s the normal face of authority. He ushered me in.

I followed the sound of voices and the trail of armed security guards across the three-story atrium where Gloria had so ignominiously popped her head like a pumpkin. I avoided looking at the marble tile where she’d briefly turned into a demon before she gave up her rotten soul. The memory was seared firmly in my neurons without any reminder, thank you very much.

I entered the ginormous dining hall on the right side of atrium.