I don’t come straight out into Mr. Muninn’s cavern. I lean against the wall in the Room of Thirteen Doors. This is the still, quiet center of the universe. Even God can’t text me here. In here I’m alone and bulletproof.
I’ve had one ace up my sleeve since this whole circus with Mason, Aelita, and Marshal Wells began. The kill switch. The Mithras. The first fire in the universe and the last. The flame that will burn this universe down to make way for the next. I told Aelita about it but she never believed me. She couldn’t. I’m an Abomination and I could never get anything over on a pure-blood angel like her. So what good does that make the Mithras? A threat only works if people believe in it, which leaves me alone in this eternal echo chamber, not sure what to do. I can get behind Mustang Sally’s beauty-in-darkness idea. That’s half the reason Candy and I have been circling each other all these months. We’re each other’s chance to find some black peace in the deep dark.
Burning the universe was a lot more fun to think about when Alice was somewhere safe. Some puny hopeful part of me imagined that Heaven would still stand even if the rest of the universe turned to ash. But Alice is Downtown now and I know she was right and I have to let go of her, but I can’t let her die down in Mason’s crazy-house hellhole, and that’s what will happen if I throw the kill switch.
I grab a heavy glass decanter from the floor and step out into Muninn’s underground storeroom.
I yell, “Mr. Muninn. It’s Stark.”
He sticks his head out from around a row of shelves overflowing with Tibetan skull bowls and ritual trumpets made of human femurs decorated with silver. He wipes his brow on a black silk handkerchief as he walks over.
“Just doing a bit of inventory. Sometimes I think I should hire a boy like you to put this all on a computer, but then I think that by the time he’s finished, computers will be obsolete and we’ll have to do it all over again with brains in jars or genius goldfish or whatever other wonders scientists come up with next.”
He sighs.
“I suppose in a place like this, the old ways work best. Besides, I know that while it looks like a jumble to other people, I know where each and every item is. I only do inventory as an excuse to revisit doodads and baubles I haven’t handled in a century or two.”
He sees the glass container in my hand.
“Oh my. You’ve brought it back. Let’s sit down and have a drink.”
Muninn’s desk is a worktable covered in the kind of junk that would give the staff at the Smithsonian nuclear hard-ons. An early draft of the Magna Carta that included the emancipation of ghosts. Little floating and whizzing matchbox-size gewgaws from Roswell. Cleopatra’s lucky panties. For all I know, he has Adam and Eve’s fig leaves pressed in their high school ag high s yearbook.
I set the decanter on the table between us. If you look hard enough into the glass, you can see a flickering match head of fire. It doesn’t look like much, but neither do the few micrograms of plutonium it takes to kill you as dead as eight-track tapes and with a lot more open sores.
“You’ve changed your mind, have you? You’re not going to set us all ablaze like the Roman candles on the Fourth of July?”
“When you put it like that, it sounds fun. Giving this back might be a mistake, but I don’t think it’s mine anymore.”
I pick it up and look inside. I’ve had the Mithras all this time, but I’ve hardly ever looked at it. It’s beautiful.
“I don’t want this sitting in the Room in case Mason manages to make a key and can get in there.”
“No. If there was anyone even more unsuitable than you to hold the Mithras, it would be him. No offense, of course. I would never have traded it to you if I thought that you were capable of using it.”
“But I am. I was. I almost pulled that plug a hundred times.”
“But you didn’t. And that’s why I let you have it.”
I push the Mithras across the table in his direction. Muninn picks it up carefully, like a preacher who just found a Gutenberg Bible at a garage sale, and puts it on a nearby shelf where he can keep an eye on it.
He says, “If you see any of my brothers when you get to Hell, please give them my regards.”
“Your brothers are in Hell?”
“One or two, I expect. I’m the only sedentary one. The others are restless sorts. They’re bound to pop up anywhere. Some of them pass through Hell on occasion and send me trinkets for my collection.”
He points to a shelf with Hellion weapons, a cup I recognize from Azazel’s palace, and a chunk of the same kind of black bone that my knife was carved from.
“How will I know if I meet one of your brothers?”
He laughs.
“You’ll know. We’re twins except that there are five of us, so I suppose we’re two and a half twins.”
“I’m going to be moving pretty fast, so hello is about all I’ll have time to say.”
“You won’t even have to say that if you’re busy. Here,” Muninn says.