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“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. François-Eugène 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 Overdrive. 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 Eugène. 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 Overdrive, 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 Overdrive 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 & Beyond. I have a hard enough time keeping clothes for more than a week.