Medea takes something from an inside pocket of her coat and tosses it into the car with me. Wolf teeth and crow feathers bound in linen with horsehair. An Inquisition death sign. She even went to the trouble to dribble a bloody X on top.
She says, “You’ve used up your nine lives. Go back to your room and be with that animal you rut with. Be happy and ruin yourself quietly the way you should have done years ago. If, however, you continue on the course you’re planning, the Inquisition will deal with you permanently. This is your last chance for redemption.”
I toss the death sign over my shoulder and take a puff of the Malediction.
“Redemption? I want redemption about as much as I want to be one of the blue-blood Ren Faire masters of the universe you report to. Lucifer chose me to deal with this. Not the Sub Rosa or you or the Golden Vigil or Mickey Mouse. Me. I’m the one who can stop Mason. You get in my way and he wins. That will be the end of everything and it’ll be your fault. So why don’t you go back to your gumdrop house in the forest and eat some lost children, witch?”
Medea walks to the curb and swings out her arm like a maître d’.
“I won’t stop you, but remember this. When your final judgment arrives, I won’t come for you. You’ll be the one who comes to me, and of your own free will.”
“So no hug good-bye?”
I pull the door closed and turn the ignition. The Geo coughs a few times, but the engine finally catches. Medea knocks on the passenger window and I push the button to lower it.
“We’ll see each other much sooner than you think,” she says.
“Super. You bring balloon animals and I’ll hire clowns. It’ll be a party.”
I steer the Geo around the wrecked van. The frat boy on the curb finally figured out someone to call. Blood runs down his forehead and drips onto his phone, but he looks relieved. There’s a siren in the distance.
I turn right at the corner and steer the Geo onto the freeway.
THINKING ABOUT DEATH makes a ride go by fast. Thinking about your own death—even if it’s supposed to be temporary—makes it fly by like a cheetah with a jet pack>
You’d think that with all my connections to the celestial sphere, I’d have a better handle on death. But I don’t know anything. I didn’t die in Hell and since then I’ve lived through every kind of attack, abuse, and humiliation Hellions, humans, and hell beasts could pile on. After you’ve been shot, stabbed, slashed, burned, and almost zombified and survived it all, death gets kind of abstract. It’s like valentines and diplomas. Something other people have to deal with. But now it’s my turn to ride the pale horse and I have serious reservations about it.
Every day I walk down Hollywood Boulevard and see civilians making themselves crazy worrying about the meetings they’re late for or did they put the rent check in the mail or is their ass starting to sag and I think, “I’ve seen the creaky clockwork that turns the stars and planets. I’ve gotten drunk with the devil and body-slammed angels. I’ve seen the Room of Thirteen Doors at the center of the universe. I know the taste of my own blood as well as you know your favorite wine. I’ve seen so much more than you’ll ever see. I know so much more than you’ll ever know.” And then it hits me like a runaway semi. I don’t know anything that matters. Here I am thinking how much better and smarter I am than all the stuffed-shirt meat puppets wandering L.A. and I remember that there’s a billion people who haven’t done a tenth of the things I’ve done but who know the big answer to the big question: What happens when you die? I’ve seen fragments of it. I stood in the desert of Purgatory with Kasabian after he died and before Lucifer brought him back. But that doesn’t count. That was someone else’s death and Purgatory was just a projection of the afterlife created by my spell. Not the real thing. I’ve seen death a thousand times, and almost snuffed it myself, but I’ve never made it through all the way, and that scares me.>“What’s this?”
“Alice said it was me in a former life.”
Candy smiles.
“I think we have a winner.”
“Eleusis,” says Traven.
I look at him.
“What’s Eleusis?”
He raises his eyebrows.
“I thought you’d be the one to know. It’s a region of Hell.”
“Never heard of it.”
He comes over and hands me the sheet of paper. It’s just chicken scratches and his calculations.
Traven says, “Dante wrote about Eleusis in the Inferno, though he didn’t call it by that name. Some translations described it as the woods given to the virtuous pagans. Dante described it as a green and pleasant place for pre-Christian men and women who weren’t sinners but couldn’t get into Heaven because they weren’t redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice.”
“Wait, Heaven is punishing those for being born too early?”
“It’s not punishment. It’s like Limbo. A work-around invented by the Church centuries ago. If humanity can only be redeemed by Christ’s death, what happens to the virtuous prophets of the Old Testament? Eleusis in Greece was the site of ancient mystery rites and therefore a vaguely mystical region as good as any to dispose of the pagans.”
I hand the paper back to him.
“Then Eleusis is where Mason has Alice.”