I wonder if there’s a way to turn off the antihoodoo cloak around this place. I’m not too proud to crawl into a shadow and whimper in the Room for an eternity or two. Mason’s already putting up wanted posters. He knows I’m here. What do I care if one of his pet magicians detects me using the key? But I’m back in the holding area and the cloak is on, so I can’t throw any hoodoo. And there’s no way I’m fighting my way through all those guards with a wing clipped.
I need to stop for a minute and catch my breath. I don’t know how long Muninn’s egg is going to last. I need to keep moving while it does. I let the angel take over my senses. It can see right through the RV’s tin-can walls.
I expect to see Rommel and the Afrika Corps around the place, but there isn’t a Hellion within a hundred yards of me. I’m Chernobyl in a white-trash pied-à-terre. The angel does a three hundred-and-sixty-degree scan around the place. The few Hellions brave enough to be within eyesight are all on the arena side of the RV. Behind me is an empty field. But the RV is protected by the same Malebranche hex that zapped me good back in the flatbed. I cut a person-size hole in the wall and fall through. If I keep the RV between me and the posse, I just might be able to slink away into the dark with my tail tucked between my legs.
I guess this is Plan B.
JUST A FEW blocks away the streets are packed. I’m not sure where I am. I try to look nonchalant with my missing arm and the side of my coat soaked with dried blood and scorched by the Gladius. The crowd makes it easy to disappear. So does the fact that a lot of the losers lying in the street and begging around the food stalls don’t look much better than me.
I wonder if any of the big brains back at the stadium have figured out I’m not in the RV anymore. One of the brave ones is going to check out the arm I left behind, see that it’s human, and eventually figure out who it belongs to. My wanted posters are all over, so knowing the arm is mine doesn’t bother me, but I hate the idea that some Hellion cocksucker is going to stick it on his wall as a trophy.
This is the first crowded patch of land I’ve seen in Eleusis. Hard-core raider country. Instead of hitting the individual corner markets, the enterprising ones have cleared them out and set up their own stalls. It’s a county-fair midway, full of ugly Hellspawn and starving pagans desperate or brave or stupid enough to pick through the gutters and garbage for leftovers. Looking at what’s going on at the stadium and the ruthless bastards picking the city clean out here, I can’t see much difference between the raiders and the posse that followed Jack and me except who pays their salaries. It makes me wonder how many soldiers in Lucifer’s legions were true believers and how many were simple mercenaries. Another nice design job, God. You ate your roughage and shit out an angelic army that could be bought off with beer and Twinkies.
There are impressive cracks in the sides of some buildings. Like the houses, some are supported by power poles. Others by gas-station hydraulic lifts and broken-down backhoes. There are open cesspits on the side streets near piles of trash two stories high. That’s where most of the crazies and the pagans hang out, picking up and pocketing anything they can eat or trade. Cracks in the sidewalk ooze sewagey blood, but I don’t see any big sinkholes. That’s probably why everyone is bunched up in this part of town.
Being crippled like this isn’t going to make getting Alice out of the asylum any easier, but nowhere’s going to be safe when Mason starts his war. There’s no way around it. The trip is a package deal. I have to get Alice and I have to stop Mason. One doesn’t mean a goddamn thing without the other.
I keep touching my left side, looking for my missing arm, wondering if I made a mistake. Maybe I’m still lying on the street where the brick tagged me on the side of the head. Maybe Crab Man hit me with an illusion hex and my arm is still there. I swear I can feel my fingers move. But that’s just phantom limb syndrome. It’ll take a while for all the nerves that went to the arm to realize there’s nothing there and die. Maybe when I get home, Allegra can set me up with a big steel Iron Man mitt. That would scare the ugly off the baddest Lurkers. Sandman Slim, the cyborg nephilim.
The street is full of stalls, and raiders make the place almost look like regular Hell. But it’s not and I still don’t know where I am. It looks like Eleusis’s wall goes all the way around Griffith Park from the 101 on one side and the Golden State Freeway on the other. I can still see the Observatory asylum dead north. If someone around here had a cannon, they could shoot me straight up the hill and I’d be there. I need to find one of the tourist roads. If I tried climbing the damned hill through the trees, I’d still be going an hour after the universe ended. I need some elevation to get my bearings.
A few Kissi wander through the crowd. They trail raiders, making them jittery and paranoid and looking for a fight. They whisper to merchants who start screaming arguments with their customers. There’s one on a side street tossing lit matches into empty windows. Nothing’s caught yet, but give it time. I don’t dare try to scare them off. I don’t want to give myself away and I’m too weak to threaten them.
Right now the hard thing is keeping my head straight andv> straigh my thoughts focused. Muninn’s egg isn’t going to last forever. I can feel an edge of pain in my arm already. Maybe that’s normal and maybe it’s a sign the egg is wearing off. This is the first time I’ve been dismembered. I’m not an expert. I stumble against a table. Booze, cigarettes, and bottles of potions clatter against each other. A few fall. I bend down like I’m helping pick things up, but I’m really trying to pocket a pack of Maledictions. The owner comes around the stall and yells at me, punctuating his point by kicking me on the left side, where I can’t do anything about it.
I come to a large intersection. Eleusis isn’t burning, but L.A. glows like coal and spits fire into the sky. I duck into a four-story parking garage. The bottom floor is set up like a squatter camp. There are pagans and crazies from up the hill, cook fires and tents. The place stinks from bodies and waste. I go up the ramp to the second floor. There are fewer people and no one bothers me. I keep climbing.
The third floor is trashed, almost like a bomb went off. Every inch is blackened and scorched. It doesn’t look like a bomb. More like a fire, one big enough and hot enough so it didn’t leave anything but half-melted car frames. I’m exhausted after walking from the stadium. I find a spot in the dark back by the elevators and lie down. The cool concrete feels good against my head. I’m glad Alice isn’t here to see me like this. It might shake her confidence in my knight-in-shining armor act.
The air is relatively clean up here, but I still get whiffs of the body stink from down below. One smell doesn’t belong—the overwhelming vinegar reek. I tilt up my head and Josef is standing on the melted frame of a MINI Cooper.
“This isn’t exactly the progress I was hoping to find,” he says.
“Get out of here, man. Someone’s going to see you.”
“So? Do you think any of the mob out there would be willing or able to do anything about it?”
“My point is, I don’t want to find out. No loose ends. Remember?”
I sit up and lean my back against the wall. Josef looks at my empty sleeve and shakes his head.
“You’re ridiculous. Crippled. Locked up by idiots and robbed by a dead psychopath.” He kicks some loose rocks from near his feet and uncovers a pair of crushed reading glasses. “We’re tired of waiting. We’re coming in now.”
“Be my guest.”
He picks up the glasses and holds them over his eyes, squinting through the lenses. They must not be his prescription. He makes a face and tosses them out over the wall.
“Aren’t you going to try and talk me out of it?”
“No. Be my guest. Pandemonium is that way and ighhat wayso are about ninety percent of Hell’s legions. If you and your friends think you can take on a million or so Hellion soldiers all by yourselves, be my guest.”
He leans in close, bringing his stink with him.
“You don’t think we can handle these Hellion idiots?”
“Maybe when there weren’t enough in one place for a decent tailgate party, but these boys have just about put the original rebel angel legions back together.”
“So? They lost their war in Heaven and now even Lucifer is gone. They’re weak.”
“Yeah, but there’s the other thing.”
“What?”
“Do you have a cigarette?”
He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a pack of regular human cigarettes. Never count on a Kissi to give you what you really want. I light the cigarette with Mason’s lighter and pull the smoke deep into my lungs. It’s better than nothing and it helps cover up Josef’s smell.
“You said there was something else,” Josef says.
“Do you ever watch the Discovery Channel? They had a show on where a colony of little tiny red ants all got together and killed a full-grown wolf. See my point?”
“No.”
“Just because you’re the wolf at the top of the food chain doesn’t mean you’re bulletproof. You and your pals might be able to wipe out the Hellions, but they won’t go down easy, and by the time you’re done, you’re going to be blind and crippled. That doesn’t sound like the big win to me.”
Josef takes a deep breath and turns his head to the sounds from the street.
“How much longer are we supposed to wait?”
“Just a few more hours. I need to get up this hill and then get General Semyazah. He’s the one guy who can turn this whole thing around.”
“He’s in Tartarus.”
“I know.”
“You think you can help him? How?”
“I’ll tell them I’m the pizza delivery boy. They’ll never suspect a thing.”
“Don’t be cute. No one’s ever returned from Tartarus.”
“Maybe they were going the wrong way.”
His expression changes to genuine interest.
“You know a secret way out?”
I drag off the cigarette. After Maledictions, regular human cigarettes are like inhaling the steam off a cup of herbal tea.
“If you’re so concerned about winning this thing, why don’t you go and do your job and let me do mine? If I’m not back in Pandemonium in, say, twelve hours, you’ll know I’m stuck in Tartarus and I’m not coming back. After that, you can do what you want, but give me the time to do this the smart way.”
He gets closer, picks a bit of lint off my shoulder, and tosses it away.
“This is the last time. The tide is rising and you can’t hold back the sea. Besides, you’re not an easy man to trust.”
“Yeah, but nobody else wants to play our reindeer games, so we’re stuck with each other.”
Josef fingers my empty coat sleeve.
“How are you going to pull this off with only one arm?”
“I’ll manage.”
“Meaning you’re going to let your ego ruin everything.”
“It’s my plan. It’s mine to blow.”
“No, it’s not.”
It’s easy to forget that Kissi are a kind of angel. A factory-second, thrown-in-the-Dumpster-and-left-in-a-landfill angel, but still an awesomely powerful creature.
When Josef grabs me there isn’t a damned thing I can do to fight back. I’m one-handed, off balance, sick, and dizzy. He throws me onto my knees, pulls off my coat, and takes out the black blade. I try to back away, but he grabs my empty left sleeve and pulls me back like a fish on a reel. He slices through the cauterized stump of my arm, reopening the wound. My knees buckle. I hold on to him with my one good hand, trying to get my fingers around his throat or push him off. Something. Anything. He shrugs me off and pins me against the wall. With the black blade he cuts an X on the palm of my right hand and presses my bloody palm to the arm stump.
I’m sicker than ever. Not blacking-out sick or throwing-up sick, but lost in space. Like my body and brain have given up trying to register things like up and down or sane or insane. I keep waiting for the angel in my head to jump in and handle things, but he’s as floored as I am. The stump itches and the nerves that feel like they’re still connected to fingers feel even more li. Aeven moke that. I look to see what’s happening and find something white and pulsating hanging off my body like a giant maggot. Great. Now I’m going to have to change my online dating photo.
The maggot grows veins and arteries. Five twitching tentacle-things wiggle out the end. The maggot shrinks and turns almost black. The veins and arteries toughen until they’re cables within thick dark muscle. Shiny skin glides over and around the growing structures. It shines like metal or a scarab’s carapace. My fingers are delicate but strong, half organic insect and half machine. They flex when I tell them to. I touch each fingertip to thumb, counting one, two, three, four. They move easily. Josef is back by the MINI Cooper wiping my gore off his hands with a white handkerchief.
“That should give you a decent chance of not fucking things up entirely.”
He folds the handkerchief and puts it into a back pocket.
“I could lie and tell you that I can’t make the arm look any more human than that, but we both know I’d be lying. Wear that and don’t forget who your friends are.”
“You’re a Georgia peach.”
The pain and nausea are gone. I stand up. Josef comes over and helps me get my coat back on.
“Get used to your new arm quickly. You have twelve hours from now or we go without you.”
He walks down the ramp and disappears before he reaches the bottom.
