Текст книги "Aloha from Hell"

Автор книги: Richard Kadrey

Соавторы: Richard Kadrey,Richard Kadrey,Richard Kadrey
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ALOHA FROM HELL

A SANDMAN SLIM NOVEL

RICHARD KADREY

Dedication

To Suzanne S, always inspiring

Epigraph

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

—T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land

Life is a bucket of shit with a

barbed wire handle.

—JIM THOMPSON

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Aloha from Hell

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Richard Kadrey

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Aloha from Hell

“TELL ME,” SAYS the Frenchman. “How long has it been since you last killed anything?”

He’s fucking with me. He knows the answer, but he wants to make me say it. Father Vidocq taking confession.

“I don’t know. What time is it?”

“That long, then?”

I shrug.

Vidocq and I are in a very dark room in a very large house full of very fashionable furniture and we’re stealing something very valuable. I have no idea what and pretty much don’t care. It’s just nice to be hanging out and doing some crimes with the old man. Crimes where no one ends up zombie meat, shot, or annoyingly decapitated.

“It’s been a while,” I say. “Six. Eight weeks. Somewhere around there.”

I slipped us into the house through a shadow. Vidocq is working on the wall safe. He’s good with safes. He’s had over a hundred years of practice.

“So, no crusades? No great wrongs that need to be righted?”

I reach into my pocket for a cigarette, then remember there might be smoke alarms.

“Nothing worth killing for. I’m no cop. The Sub Rosa has their own Mod Squad to deal with the small stuff.”

I like watching Vidocq work over a safe. He has hands like a surgeon. Nimble. Precise. He could thread a needle while being shot out of a cannon.

“Incroyable. Perhaps you’re reaching something of a rapprochement with your angelic half and it’s having a moderating effect on your disposition.”

Right. I’m part angel. Half, if you want to get picky about it. It’s great. A halo and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee in L.A.

“Maybe. The angel screams at me sometimes, mostly at night when I’m tired and he can ambush me with one of his Give-Peace-a-Chance, no-smoking, veggie-bacon sermons. But he isn’t trying to run the show single-handed anymore. We reached a kind of MAD pact the other day.”

Vidocq looks at me.

“MAD?”

“Mutually Assured Destruction. I told him that if he ever tried to push me out of my brain and turn me into a clean-living choirboy again, I’d have to do something, you know, unreasonable.”

“Such as?”

“I told him I’d get hammered and go through the Room of Thirteen Doors to the Pearly Gates. Then I’d find the Archangel Gabriel and thunderbolt-kick him in the cojones in front of all the other angels.”

“Whereupon the other angels would draw their swords and kill you.”

“Exactly. Mutually Assured Destruction.”

“That sounds much more like the old you.”

“Thanks.”

Technically, I’m what you call a “nephilim.” Half human, half angel. And I’m the only one. The others are all dead. Suicides mostly. Some people call my type freaks. If you’re one of heaven’s lapdogs, you’ll probably call me “Abomination.” I say, call me either of those things to my face and you’ll get to see what your lungs look like as throw pillows.

The angel half of me got shaken loose a while back when a High Plains Drifter—that’s “zombie” to you—bit a chunk out of my hand. The human half of me almost died and the angel half thought that was its chance to take over. It was for a while, but then I got my strength back and I locked the angel upstairs in the attic like Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? It still bangs on the door and shouts, but I’ve learned to ignore it most of the time. Some of the time. It depends on the day.

Vidocq goes back to work on the safe. Over his clothes, he’s wearing a tailored gray gabardine greatcoat. Looks like/fo. Looks his girlfriend Allegra’s been dressing him again. He looks like the doorman at a speakeasy in the Kremlin. The greatcoat tinkles gently when he moves, like he’s smuggling wind chimes. The sound of the hundred or so little potion bottles he has sewn into the coat’s lining. I have my guns, my knife, and na’at. Vidocq has his potions.

“What exactly are we stealing?” I ask.

“A golden brooch or device in the shape of a scarab. It’s quite ancient. There is a clockwork mechanism inside. Perhaps it’s God’s pocket watch.”

“He doesn’t need a watch. He needs a compass so he can find his own ass.”

There’s a click and the front of the safe swings open.

Vidocq moves his hands in a graceful TV-spokesmodel arc in front of the safe.

“Et voilà.”

“You are the man, Van Damme.”

He squints at me.

“Jean-Claude Van Damme is Belgian, not French.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Fuck you.”

I like how Vidocq pronounces “fuck”: “fock.”

He whispers, “C’est quoi, ça?”

“Anything wrong?”

“No. It’s very interesting. The owner of this safe is a very paranoid man. The inside is etched with spells and runes.”

“Can you still get the swag?”

He flashes a small LED light around the inside of the safe.

“I don’t see anything in here that should stop us. They mostly seem to be containment spells. He must have been afraid of this shiny scarab walking away.”

He reaches into the safe and pulls out a polished ebony box the size of a cigar box and pushes up the lid. A beautiful gold scarab lies on bloodred silk. He hands me the box and begins packing his tools. I slip it into my coat pocket.

I say, “I have to admit, it doesn’t feel bad, but it feels a little weird not raising a hand in anger this long. I can pretty much just talk humans and Lurkers out of doing stupid shit to each other these days.”

“See?” he says from the floor. “By embracing your angelic half, the mere force of your personality is enough to keep the peace.”

“I think killing all zombies in the world in one night helps.”

“Yes, that could be a factor.”

“And Lucifer and the Vigil aren’t around paying me to be a hit man rent-boy bitch.”

Vidocq scrolls his gear into a leather tool roll and stands up.

I ask him, “Are we cool?”

He smiles and says, “As the North Star on Christmas Eve. But we aren’t quite done.”

He takes two potion bottles from inside his coat and pours their contents onto the floor where we were standing and on the safe door, trying to shampoo away any magic or forensic dandruff that might lead back to us. When he tosses the contents of a third bottle into the safe, I hear the scratching.

“You heard?” he asks.

“Get out of the way, Eugène.”

He doesn’t. Vidocq has a scientific mind. Instead of getting out of the way, he looks inside the safe.

It wouldn’t be my fault if the back of his stupid French skull blew out like a five-dollar retread, but I pull Vidocq out of the way just before the demon cannonballs out of the safe and hits the far wall.

The demon’s carapace gleams like blue-black gun steel. The big bug doesn’t have eyes, just two sets of jaws at an angle to each other and two huge hooked front claws. The moment it hits the wall, it starts tunneling through it. That’s what this particular type of demon does. It’s a digger. A greed demon. It’ll protect anything it thinks it owns. Like the contents of a safe. It’s why the safe had containment spells on the interior. To keep the demon inside. Smart. Your basic bad guys—us, for instance—will maybe test for eaters, but who’s going to worry about a brainless digger until it’s excavating the Panama Canal through your intestines?

Vidocq bumps against the desk when I pull him to his feet. The digger freezes and turns. It’s blind but it has great hearing. I can slow my heart and breathing, but in a few seconds the demon’s going to zero in on Vidocq. I step back from him, leaving him exposed to the digger. He turns and looks at me with wide horrified eyes.

Sorry, man. This is how it has to be.

The digger turns. It has Vidocq’s heartbeat. It hooks its two huge digging claws into the wall and uses them to slingshot forward. A metallic blur, four glittering jaws, and arm-size hooks going right for the old man’s chest. He doesn’t look at it. ty look a He never takes his eyes off me.

As the digger’s body blurs across the desk, I whip the na’at out. Twist the grip out from the body into a hair-thin serrated whipsaw.

The digger hits the na’at like a meteor with teeth. I twist the na’at’s cutting edge into its body and the bug splits in two lengthwise. The halves come apart and smash into the wall on either side of Vidocq, embedding themselves deep into the wood and plaster.

Vidocq swivels his head, checking out the giant insect shanks that flank him.

I say, “What do you know? I do remember how to kill things. Good news for our side.”

“Fuck you, boy.”

An alarm goes off when a naked fat man kicks open the office door. I’m going to roll the dice and guess he’s the home owner. He points an exquisitely made-over and -under shotgun at us. It might even be a Tullio Fabbri. A hundred and seventy-five grand worth of etched steel with a carved walnut stock and accurate as a cruise missile. I’m almost tempted to ask him, but his pupils are dilated and I smell the excitement in his sweat because he thinks he’s finally going to get to use that Fort Knox popgun on actual human beings.

Through the angel’s senses I hear the infinitesimal scrape of metal over lubricated metal as the fat man applies pressure to the shotgun’s trigger. I grab Vidocq in a bear hug and jump through the window just as the gun goes off.

Davy Crockett here isn’t Sub Rosa, but he must know some because he has an antimagic cloak over his house and the grounds outside. What that means is no one’s supposed to be able to throw any hoodoo or hexes around here. Whoever built the cloak probably pegged him for a mark right off. I figure they got him to pay a bonus to build it big enough to cover the whole estate, the perfect way to turn a cloak into something as reliable as a marshmallow condom. Antimagic shields are powerful things when you do them right, and part of that’s knowing they can only be so big. Blow them up too much and the skin stretches thin. Keep blowing and they can pop right out of existence. That’s what Davy the Rube paid for: a one-hundred-thousand-dollar soap bubble.

The cloak is stretched so thin I can throw all kinds of hoodoo in here. Like when we climbed the fence onto the grounds, I could take us into the house through the Room of Thirteen Doors. But I can’t get us off the grounds that way. Of course, I could have used some hoodoo to wrap Davy Crockett’s shotgun around his neck like a mink stole and swung him around like a carousel pony while I shot the shit out of his office, but I didn’t do any of that. Someone else might think that would earn them karma points down the line, but I know better. Karma is just loaded dice on a crooked table. Celestial pricks with wings and halos make the rules and the house always wins. Always.

SO VIDOCQ AND I are falling. Tinkling glass falls with us like razor-blade snowflakes.

When you’re jumping two floors with a civilian whose broken bones won’t heal overnight like your own, you need to remember a couple of things. One, cushion the fall as much as you can, and two, be prepared to use your body as an air bag. That means controlling the fall enough so the other, usually extremely startled, person lands on top of you. Does it hurt? Go outside, get a friend to drop a garbage-can-ful of bacon fat on your chest, and see.

Trying to control a fall is no tea party when you’re holding on to someone who’s thrashing around like a Tasered octopus. But it’s not impossible. The trick is to grab them just under the ribs and squeeze so they can’t breathe. Then you let go just as you hit the ground so they breathe out hard when they hit. It helps absorb the shock, though it still hurts. Especially if you’re the one on the bottom.

There’s a tree below Davy’s window. I aim for it, rolling us into the branches, hoping it’ll slow our fall a little. It does. Coming down into the hedges helps, too. We still have some momentum to burn off, so I keep rolling and we end up on the lawn that Davy was kind enough to lay out with fresh soft sod in the last few days. Thanks, man. I’ll send you a honey-baked ham for Christmas.

I pull Vidocq to his feet and we run for the wall like a couple of spooked raccoons. I look back over my shoulder and Davy is standing in the broken window with the shotgun at his shoulder. Wishful thinking. We’re too far away for him to hit anything but the air.

Don’t sweat it, Davy. Vidocq and I aren’t going to touch your safe or wreck your office again. But I might have to come back some night for that Tullio Fabbri and you can try to shoot me with something else. I am in severe need of something like that. It’s so quiet and peaceful out here I’m getting bored with breathing. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the world will go to Hell again. Fingers crossed.

I PARKED THE stolen Lexus half a block away. Vidocq is limping. He stops and opens his coat like a flasher. There are dozens of pockets sewn into the lining. Each holds a different potion. Batman has his utility belt. Vidocq has his coat. I have guns and a knife. None of us will be on the cover of GQ.

Satisfied that Vidocq’s little glass vials aren’t broken and leaking about a hundred hexes into his underwear, we head for the car. The old man is limping, but when I put a hand on his arm to help him, he shrugs it off. Another grateful customer. I have a knack for pissing people off, especially my friends.

He still won’t talk to me, but at least when we get to the Lexus he lets me help him into the car. I start to close the door, but he blocks it with his hand.

“Who is that?” he asks.

I turn and see a man a few yards away. He’s standing in the shadow of a big shade tree on someone’s lawn. He doesn’t move when I look at him. I reach behind my back and pull a Smith & Wesson .460, making sure he sees it. He doesn’t flinch. I put the gun back and stackeback anrt toward him. Now he moves. He comes right at me.

“Is this Disneyland?” I say. “Are you Mickey Mouse? I always wanted to shake hands with giant vermin.”

Not a peep. Maybe he’s a Daffy Duck fan.

There’s something wrong with his face. I can’t make out any ears and there’s a deep slit where his nose should be, like he’s healed up from third-degree burns. Must be a tough bastard to go through that and still walk.

We both stop about six feet apart, having a Sergio Leone stare-down.

“I don’t know if you’re looking for directions or a date, but we’re fresh out of both. Take a walk and stare at someone else.”

He’s fast for a guy who looks like he just escaped from a deep-fat fryer. He lunges and grabs my arms over the biceps. He’s strong for a cripple, but nothing I can’t handle.

Then my arms are burning. Literally. My coat sleeves smoke and burst into flames where he’s holding me. I have heavy Kevlar inserts in the sleeves, but in just a couple of seconds the heat is almost through and down to my skin.

I step back and bring up my forearms in an outward circle from underneath and hit his arms hard. Standard self-defense stuff every high school kid knows. It doesn’t work. It’s like hitting Jell-O. And now my forearms are burning. Wrestling this guy is like waltzing with lava. I try to form hoodoo in my mind to knock Smokey the Asshole across the street or at least make him let go, but the pain makes it hard to think straight.

I bark some Hellion I learned back when I was fighting in the arena. If you do the hex right, it’s like a garbage-can-size gut punch that hits in a blaze of purple light and bores like an oil-rig drill through just about anyone or anything. I get it just right. The purple explosion, the whirlpool of power. Smokey’s midsection collapses in on itself. And goes through and out his back, dragging a long strip of lava flesh with it like burning taffy. The prick doesn’t even seem to notice.

The guy isn’t a burn victim. His face churns like thick liquid as we wrestle. Stupid. I should have known this asshole wasn’t human.

The heat is down to my skin, cooking my arms. Being hard to kill means a lot of things. I have a high pain threshold, but it’s not infinite. Not when something a volcano shit out is trying to give you an Indian burn. Being hard to kill also means that you don’t go down fast, so whatever’s cutting you, shooting you, or burning you alive is something you get to experience for a good long time.

Being hard to kill isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you, but it sure as shit isn’t the best, and right now it isn’t even fun.

Something clear and hard spins past my shoulder and hits Smokey in the face.ionin the He jerks his head away like I have bad breath. But he doesn’t let go. Another vial flies past. And another. Smokey lets go this time. Vidocq is behind me, limping over and tossing potions like a pitching machine.

Smokey backs away, his arms pulled in close to his body. Something’s hurt him. Good. He starts to shake like someone stuck a vibrator in a bowl of cherry Jell-O. I step back and grab my gun, but before I can use it, Smokey melts like the Wicked Witch of the West, leaving a circle of scorched black earth on the green lawn.

Vidocq grabs my shoulder and pulls me back to the car. He bunny-hops on his good leg into the passenger side and I slide into the driver’s seat, jam the black blade I carried back from Hell into the ignition, and we peel out.

“What the hell kind of burglar alarm was that? Why can’t rich people have rottweilers like everyone else?”

“I don’t think that was an alarm. That was a demon.”

I glance at him. My arms are throbbing now, and between each throb they still feel like they’re burning. I smell something, but I don’t know if it’s the coat or me.

“I’ve never seen a demon like that before.”

“Neither have I, but the potion that hurt the creature was a rare type of poison. A toxin formulated to affect only demons.”

I drive at a moderate speed. I pause at stop signs and obey every light.

“Think it was after us?”

Vidocq shrugs.

“Possibly. But who knew we’d be here tonight? And why would someone attack you now? You’ve been a good boy for weeks.”

I roll down the windows to let out the smell. I’m stinking up the Lexus, but who cares? I hate these luxury golf carts. Gaudy status symbols with as much personality as an Elmer’s-Glue-on-white-bread sandwich.

I say, “Maybe someone was settling an old score. Hell, maybe it was after you.”

Vidocq laughs. “Who would send a demon for me?”

“I don’t know. The few thousand people you’ve robbed over the last two hundred years?”

“It’s more like a hundred and fifty. Don’t try to make me sound old.”

“ ’Course, sending a demon for something like that sounds like overkill. Especially something rare enough that neither of us recognizes it.”

“I’>

“Whiner. Your girlfriend is the best hoodoo doctor in town. She’ll give you an ice pack and conjure you some kangaroo legs. Then you can do your own second-story work.”

Vidocq pats me on the shoulder.

“There, there . . .” like he’s patting a five-year-old with a skinned knee. “I would have thought you’d be happy. You got to have a fight. Draw a little blood. Isn’t that what you’ve been wanting?”

I think it over.

“I suppose. And you killed it, not me, so my not-slaughtering-things record is still intact.”

“Unlike your arms.”

“A little Bactine and they’ll be fine by the morning.”

“Judging by the look of them, they’ll hurt in the meantime. Take this. It will help you sleep.”

He reaches into his coat and hands me a potion.

“No thanks. Dr. Jack Daniel’s is coming by tonight. He’s got all the medicine I need.”

He slips the vial into my pocket.

“Take it anyway. He might be late.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“And don’t forget to brush your teeth and say your prayers.”

“Fuck you, Mom.”

WE DRIVE ACROSS town, near what the city fathers call the Historic District, an ironically named area in a city that has no history but has seen more shit go down than a lot of countries. It’s all right to forget all the Mansons, the celebrity ODs, the brain-boost religions, the UFO religions, the tinhorn Satanists, the rock-and-roll suicides, the landgrabs, the serial killers, the ruthless gangs and even more ruthless cops, the survivalists with cases of ammo, cigarettes, and freeze-dried beans in their desert compounds, as long as we remember to bring the family downtown to grab a latte and admire the knockoff Mickey Mouse T-shirts.

We ditch the car in the Biltmore Hotel parking lot and start the four-block walk to the Bradbury Building. This is flat-out stupid, but Vidocq insisted that he could walk off whatever happened to his leg in the fall. I’ve seen plenty of injuries. I know he can’t, but I let him hobble until he grabs my arm, huffing and puffing before falling against a newspaper box full of local porn papers. I didn’t know those things were still around.

“Want to take the shortcut?” I ask.

“Please,” he says.

I put one of his arms around my shoulder and lift him off the box. We limp to the corner and around the side of a Japanese restaurant. I pull him into a shadow by the delivery entrance. We go into the Room of Thirteen Doors and I pretty much carry him out the Door of Memory and into Mr. Muninn’s place.

Every good thief needs a fence and Mr. Muninn is Vidocq’s. Muninn’s regular shop, the one he keeps for his vaguely normal clients, is in the old sci-fi–meets–art-deco Bradbury Building on a floor that doesn’t exist. He serves a pretty select clientele—mostly Sub Rosa and über-wealthy L.A. elites. But if you ever stumbled into his store and could afford a Fury in a crystal cage, the seeds from Eve’s apple, or Napoleon’s whalebone cock ring, he’d let you in. Mr. Muninn’s a businessman.

The really interesting stuff he keeps in a deep cavern beneath the Bradbury Building. His secret boutique for only the oddest and choicest items in the world. That’s where we come out.

When he sees us Muninn holds his arms out wide like he’s giving a benediction.

“Welcome, boys. What a pleasure to see you two working together again.”

Vidocq says, “Just like the good old days. I’m limping and he was just on fire.”

Vidocq drops into a gilt armchair that probably belonged to King Tut.

I stamp my foot on the stone floor a few times, shaking loose shotgun pellets that have embedded themselves in the soles of my boot.

“On fire is my best look. Ask anyone.”

Muninn shifts his eyes to Vidocq and then back at me.

“How may I ask did a simple robbery turn into a Greek drama? And were there any witnesses who might make things complicated later?”

I say, “The drama started and ended with demons. One in the house and one in the street.”

“The only witness is the man who owned the scroll you wanted,” says Vidocq. “His residence was badly cloaked and there was a guardian demon in the safe. He’ll be too embarrassed that he paid for a worthless shield to tell anyone. No doubt he knows that leaving a demon mantrap where an innocent party might stumble on it is a serious violation of Sub Rosa precepts. No, I believe he’ll lick his wounds and not tell a soul about tonight.”

Muninn smiles and does his benediction thing again.

“And there we are. An adv he are. Aenture complete with just a few scars to make the memories all the more vivid. And then there’s your reward. Not a bad night’s work, I’d say.”

I take the box out of my pocket, then peel off the charred remains of my coat and drop it on the stone floor. If it was anyone else, I’d stomp him for his attitude, but Muninn doesn’t think like regular people. I don’t know if he’s the oldest man in the world, but I’ll bet there isn’t anyone else within midget-tossing distance who’s seen multiple ice ages freeze and thaw the world. He’s a nice guy for someone who thinks like a Martian. And he’s always fair when it comes to business. If you ask me, we could use a few more like him. You never know what’s going to come out of his mouth and he always pays on time.

He rummages around his endless maze of shelves crammed with books, bones, strange weapons, the crown jewels of kingdoms no one’s ever heard of, and ancient scientific devices. Does even he know what they do? They could be Krishna’s gumball machine for all I know.

He comes back with a handblown green glass bottle and three small silver cups, takes them to his worktable desk, and pours drinks. He hands us each a glass and raises his own.

“To God above and the devil below.”

Vidocq says something pithy back in French.

Great. Now it’s my turn to sound smart. The angel in my head chimes in with something, but I shove Beaver Cleaver back into the dark.

“You owe me a coat,” is all I can think of.

He smiles and nods, pouring more drinks.

“A man of many thoughts but few words. Lucky for us all that it’s not the other way around.”

Vidocq laughs and turns away, pretending he’s looking at the shelves so I won’t see him.

Muninn says, “I hear that when you’re not playing le voleur with Eugène, you’re rebuilding your movie house.”

“Rental place. We don’t show them. We just pimp them. And yeah, Kasabian and I are rebuilding and expanding Max Overdrive with all the Ben Franklins that vampire bunch, the Dark Eternal, gave me.”

Muninn looks down, contemplating his glass.

“I expect they would be grateful for you clearing out the revenants. Zombies can’t have much nutritional value for vampires.”

“According to the news, it never happened. It was mass hysteria. Drugs in the water or weaponized LSD. Between tourists, traffic cams, and private security, there’s a million video cams in L.A., but there’s not one good minute of zed footage andzed fooanywhere, just blurry cell-phone shit. We might as well say we were attacked by Bigfoot.”

It stinks of the feds like ripe roadkill. Like Marshal Wells.

Until I snuffed the zeds, Homeland Security had heavy muscle in L.A. I mean, they had a goddamn angel on staff. Aelita. The meanest celestial rattlesnake I ever met and I’ve partied with Lucifer. Aelita is Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, but not as good-natured. She was the organ grinder and Marshal Wells was the monkey. They’re exactly the kind of bastards with connections to levels of occult and law enforcement power who could make thousands of hours of video disappear overnight.

Washington spanked Wells hard after the zeds got out of control. Aelita strolled away, so he got to be the fall guy. DHS closed him down out here. Who knows, if he plays nice and eats his vegetables, maybe the Men in Black will send him back. They might even let him resurrect the Golden Vigil, his and Aelita’s private jackboot army. Heaven’s Pinkertons on earth.

Muninn waves his hand.

“It was bound to happen. Most ordinary people’s desire to forget what they can’t comprehend is virtually infinite. It’s more comforting to disbelieve their own eyes than accept the possibility that the dead can walk the streets. I can’t say I blame them.”

I raise my glass.

“To reality. The most overrated and underpaid game in town.”

We all drink.

“So, what will you do until your movie palace is complete?” asks Muninn. “Are you considering carrying on as an investigator? You seem to have a flair for it. No one else figured out the nasty little secret behind the revenants.”

“That was a onetime thing. And I got lucky. If Brigitte and I hadn’t been bitten, I wouldn’t have done any of it. I would have taken her and blown out of town.”

Brigitte is a friend from Prague. A trained High Plains Drifter—that is, a zombie—hunter. I might have fallen for her if we’d met at a different time, under different circumstances, and on another planet. I screwed up and let Brigitte get bitten by a Drifter. She almost turned. If it hadn’t been for Vidocq and his alchemy hoodoo, she would have.

“That’s not true and you know it,” says Vidocq. “Perhaps you’ll turn your attention back to Mason? If I remember correctly, finding him was the main reason you returned from Hell. I understand, of course, your getting distracted, what with saving the world and all.”

“I did find Mason. And I locked him up good and tight Downtown.”

“Which is what he wanted all along,” says Vidocq. “I’m not sure you can call that punishment.&igipunishm#x201D;

I give the old man a look. I don’t like having my own stupid confessions thrown back at me. Of course he’s right. Mason wanted to go to Hell and he wanted to go there alive, just like I did. And I walked up to him like a backwoods rube with a corncob pipe and put him there. Not many people know about that. I couldn’t walk the streets if they did. I couldn’t look people in the eye if they knew I’d sent the most dangerous man in the world to the worst place in the universe so he could raise an army to kill them all. People get murdered for mistakes like that. Sometimes they don’t wait for someone else to do it. If someone else tries it, they might get it wrong and leave you in a coma, only half dead. That would be even worse. Someone might feel sorry for you and that’s something I couldn’t take.

“Kasabian still has access to Lucifer’s book, The Daimonion Codex. He keeps an eye on Downtown twenty-four/seven. If Mason makes a move, I’ll know about it.”

“Why not simply go yourself?”

“I’ve tried a few times. Even changing my face with a glamour, there’s always some Hellion or other who spots me and I have to de-ass the place fast. There’s got to be another way to get to him, but I haven’t figured it out yet.”

I’m lying. I’ve tried it a couple of times and I was so nervous that the glamour wasn’t even half-baked. I thought I could walk back Downtown like Patton riding a tank. But I can’t. The smell and the heat hit me and I’m back on the arena floor, ripped open and bleeding, hoping my guts don’t slip out into the dirt. Or I’m covered in thick Hellion blood, playing hit man for another Hellion while he tells me Alice will be safe as long as I keep killing for him. And then she’s dead and all I am is a murderer. So I close the door to Hell and I slink back home, sitting at my favorite bar long enough that the smell fades and Kasabian won’t know what a coward I’ve become.

What’s more useless than a weak-kneed killer?

“You’ll find a way in,” says Vidocq.

I nod and finish my drink, putting on my serious, thoughtful face.