“Do something. Some magic.”
I try to remember any healing spells I used to know. I was never very good with them. I put my hand on Traven’s chest and say the words. I don’t feel anything. There’s nothing left inside me. I’m too weak and too fucked up. My hoodoo won’t work.
Brigitte shoves Vidocq aside and leans over Traven, doing CPR. She counts in Czech each time she pumps the father’s chest. She pinches his nose and blows into his lungs, her mouth smearing with his blood. Traven doesn’t move. I can’t hear his heart or his breathing anymore. Sweat drips from Brigitte’s face onto Traven’s chest. No one moves. No one stops her. Let her do what she has to do even if there’s nothing left of Traven to bring back. Finally, she collapses on top of him, crying. Candy puts a hand on her shoulder and pulls her up. When Brigitte sees me, she slaps me as hard as she can across the face.
“Great magician. Why can’t you do anything when it matters?”
“I’m sorry. I . . . I’m sorry.”
Brigitte puts her hands on Traven’s bloody, red cheek and leans her forehead on his, whispering good-byes to his corpse.
I’m not even mad. I’m numb. Of course, they used the possession key on Traven. He’s hardly had a glimpse of this kind of apocalyptic insanity. He’s the closest thing to an innocent any of us knows. And I brought him into this shit asylum and got him tangled up in my old battles. I look at Medea’s dead body. She was powerful. It must have taken every ounce of strength, every sin Traven had ever swallowed, to bring her down. Which is the real joke in all this, because for any other sin eater, it would mean they were empty of sin and they’d get a first-class ticket to Heaven. But not Traven. He was already booked on a coal cart to Hell before any of this. Candy asked if either of us has souls. Right now I hope I don’t because I can’t imagine a bigger, more damning sin on my record than bringing a guy like Father Traven into Kill City.
The building rumbles from below. It builds until it feels and sounds like a freight train under our feet. The whole mall slides sickly to the left. The Christmas tree sways. The trunk cracks. I pull Brigitte from Traven’s body and everyone runs to the wall as the tree crashes to the floor. For a minute we’re blind from the dust and fungus spores. I can hear sections of the ceiling coming down around us. The floor stops shaking, but the rumble remains, a steady background hum.
The rumbling rises and Kill City starts shimmying again. The glass around the elevator shafts shatters to the ground. I see faint light across the lobby.
“Follow me. Keep your heads down.”
I grab Candy’s hand and feel the weight of her grabbing someone else’s. Crouching, running, feeling stitches popping in my belly wound, I head us down the stairs we just came up. Then down the dead escalator.
The windows over the Roman baths have collapsed into the main pool, flooding the whole floor in pale dawn light. I look around for a hole in the wall.
“This way. Through the chapel.”
The building shifts in one direction and then the other. It’s worse now. Before it felt like a solid movement from side to side. Now the motion feels soft and liquid, like we’re off the foundation and floating free.
Inside, there isn’t much left. A chasm has opened in the floor in front of the altar, swallowing the pews and part of the wall, destroying the regular chapel and revealing the secret Angra altar. Those fuckers are everywhere. Whatever the plan is to bring them back, it was set in motion a long time ago.
Something is crawling out of the wall. Not a crack in the wall. The wall itself, like the plaster and stone is trying to pull itself free. Its long beaklike mouth comes through first. That’s all I need to see. Concentric circles of cutting fangs and grinding molars. It’s a demon. An eater. We can’t make it to the hole that leads to the ocean before it gets loose in the room. I shout at Candy.
“Give me your knife.”
She tosses me her black blade and I rush the thing. Get a foot on some rubble and launch myself over the demon so I land right on its snout. It roars when it feels my weight and forces itself out of the wall faster. Its five spiderlike eyes emerge next and then the rest of its head. I bring the blade down as hard as I can at the base of its skull, where it meets the body, slicing through nerves connecting it to the head. The eater screams and bucks like a bronco, finally throwing me off. Halfway out of the wall, its buzz-saw mouth whirs and grinds at me, but its body won’t move. It’s stuck where it is. I toss Candy her knife and we head for the wall.
Vidocq and Candy jump into the water first. Brigitte comes to me slowly, looking back over her shoulder every few steps.
“What about Liam’s body?”
Before I can say anything, the building drops like it’s heading for the center of the earth. Back in the chapel something pushes the eater out of the wall and starts climbing out. What looks like a human hand clad in gold emerges. I grab Brigitte, toss her through the hole, and jump through after her.
The Pacific water is icy. The salt burns my gut and the burn Ferox left on my chest. The rumble grows. Around us, whole sections of the beach slip into the ocean, leaving a deep chasm below, like all of Santa Monica might be pulled down on top of us.
I don’t know how deep we are underwater. I kick toward the surface, trying to keep an eye on Brigitte. As Kill City sinks the suction pulls us down with it, like the damned place is magnetic. I look back and something swims up from the churning murk below. A woman, completely covered in gold. Patterns on her skin like snake scales and circuit boards. She wears an elaborate golden headdress with swept-back wings. Half of her face is missing. An empty eye socket above a nonexistent cheek and a raw, ragged jaw are all that’s left on her right side. She reaches for me. I kick harder but it doesn’t feel like I’m putting any distance between us. She gets hold of one of my boots, but seems to lose strength. Her body drifts down a few feet. She comes to for a minute, but it’s too late. The suction is too strong that far down and she’s sucked into the swirling wreckage below.
When Brigitte and I hit the surface, we swim away from shore, out into the deeper ocean, as Kill City comes around behind us. I don’t know how long we swim. Maybe minutes. Maybe just one. When the noise and rumbling stop, I grab Brigitte’s arm and turn her around. She looks at me wild-eyed. She doesn’t want to go back. She isn’t swimming away from the wreck but from Traven’s body. I point her back toward shore and give her a shove. Soon she starts swimming.
We walk out of the water and collapse, exhausted and hurting. Brigitte is crying. Then it hits me.
“The 8 Ball. Where’s the 8 Ball?”
“I dropped it during the quake,” says Candy.
She goes to Brigitte and puts her arms around her.
Vidocq, drenched and looking every one of his hundred and fifty years, comes down to the water’s edge and pulls me onto dry sand.
“All that for nothing.”
“Not quite,” he says. And pulls the wooden vessel Traven made for the 8 Ball from his coat pocket.
“I’m a thief, remember? Once a thing is stolen, it doesn’t get away from me unless I want it to.”
I’m so relieved I laugh. Then I hear Brigitte crying. A crowd of early-morning swimmers and surfers gathers behind us. The remains of Kill City slip into Santa Monica Bay, pulling a million tons of prime beachfront real estate with it. Sections of it continue to settle and collapse. Hattie’s rooftop kingdom comes crashing down. Walls crush inward, revealing the food court and the dead interior amusement park. I look for bodies to bob up in the waves. Where are the rest of the Shoggots and the other tribes we saw inside? Where are the Grays? They’re fighters. They’ll survive. Crawl out of the water and crouch among the pier pilings until the crowds go home. Then move into Santa Monica and find another abandoned space to take over and call their own.
People pull out phones and cameras and snap photos. That’s my cue to move. I look around and find a beautiful shadow by one of the broken boardwalk supports. I get everyone on their feet. While the crowd is busy watching Kill City breathe its last, I pull us through the Room and into the Chateau. I want to say it’s a relief being home, but it’s not.
Kasabian looks up from his work. I don’t know what we look like, but even he doesn’t have anything smart to say. I curl up on the floor, waiting for the salt ache to ease up on my wounds. The others fall onto couches and chairs. No one talks. Candy brings Brigitte some whiskey. Brigitte cries like she might never stop.
I FIND A bottle of Aqua Regia and drink enough that I’m more wasted than I’ve been in a long time. Maybe since Alice died. Drunk enough that for a while I blot out Traven, the Qomrama, the end of the world, and every other ugly thing boring into my brain.
Things swim in and out of my consciousness. Candy. Vidocq. Kasabian tries to talk to me and I push him away. It seems like maybe Allegra is there at some point, working on me. It doesn’t matter. This stupid dream is a joke. God is a joke. We’re a joke. Bugs on God’s windshield. If the Angra want to bite down on this shit sandwich, I say let them. What’s left to lose but a world that never made any sense in a universe that’s so out of control it takes a bastard like me to roust a little bit of God from his beach home and get him back in the game? Or at least to Hell, which is probably where he belonged in the first place.
I reach for the bottle but my eyes won’t focus, and anyway, it looks miles away. Maybe I’ll take a nap and try again later. Put on my walking shoes and make the long trek from this sofa to the coffee table.
How did any of us make it back in one piece? Mysteries within mysteries.
Man, I really wish I could reach that bottle.
SOMETIME BETWEEN KILL City and now, someone moved me onto the couch. Then someone set off Mount St. Helens in my head. Even my nose hairs ache. This isn’t a hangover. It’s cranial genocide. Candy is somewhere nearby. She hands me a glass full of something that smells like boiled crab ass.
“Drink it all,” she says. “Vidocq left it for you. He said it would clear your head. Personally, I’d like to see you suffer for diving into the bottle like that.”
“Sorry. I just.”
“You feel guilty. I know. We all do. Shut up and drink.”
She waves the glass in front of me. I sit up and immediately regret it. I hold my breath and swallow the potion as fast as I can. Halfway through, I hope the stuff kills me. That way I won’t have to finish it. When I’m done, Candy hands me a glass of water. I gulp it down, but I can still taste the crab muck in my mouth.
“Thanks.”
She takes the glass and says, “Brigitte’s asleep in the bedroom. I’m going to go and check on her.”
When she’s gone, Kasabian limps over on his twisted leg.
“So you lost the preacher.”
“You noticed.”
“Too bad. He seemed like an okay guy.”
“He was.”
“I saw them take him away.”
“Who?”
“The soul-sorting crew. I’ve been spending a lot of time looking around Downtown. You know, business research. Remember how I said souls go off the radar for a while when they’re being processed into Hell?”
“I remember.”
The ache behind my eyes feels less like monkeys trying to hammer their way out of my head and more like guppies with rubber mallets.
“Turns out it’s not the same for everyone. Murderers and rapists and your run-of-the-mill baby-eating dictators are white bread and mayo Downtown. They can take a while to get inside. But sinners against God? They’re filet mignon and get priority sorting.”
I rub the ache from my temples.
“Your boy Traven was in and out faster than a microwave burrito.”
“Where is he now?”
Kasabian leans back in his chair, giving me a funny look.
“You were Lucifer. Don’t you know?”
“I wasn’t very good at the job.”
“Color me surprised.”
“Do you have a name?”
“He’s in Helheim. A frozen patch of paradise way up north of Pandemonium. It’s where everyone who has a beef with God goes. It’s a lot like Antarctica, but instead of penguins they have armed guards.”
“Thanks,” I say, and try to stand. It almost works. I get up on the second try.
“Too bad you didn’t take me up on my business offer. You could find my hoarder and say hi to the father on the way back.”
“I’m going to do better than that.”
“FedEx him some mittens?”
“I’m going to get him out of there.”
Kasabian picks some fried shrimp off a plate someone abandoned on the coffee table. The sight of food almost makes me heave up my crab cocktail.
“I think certain people might be resistant to that idea,” he says.
“I’ll persuade them. Can you see Helheim? How many guards are there?”
“Not many,” he says through a full mouth. “Not many. Eight maybe? The prison is in the middle of nowhere. Not many places to escape to.”
I touch my stomach. Ferox’s incision is closed and almost healed. Allegra did some good work on me. I’ll have to thank her. And check on her ex-boyfriend she told me about. But after this. Everything can wait for this.
“What are you two talking about?”
It’s Candy. She took my advice and cleaned up from her tree climb. She’s beautiful. But I don’t want to have to say what I’m going to say.
“You’re going to love this,” says Kasabian.
She sits on the end of the sofa.
“I’m going to get Traven.”
