I grab Mammon by the collar and toss him across the room onto his desk.
He waits until I’m close before he attacks.
I’m walking around the desk when he moves his arm in a very particular way. He’s angel-fast, but I recognize what he’s doing because these days I can do it, too.
Mammon swings his Gladius back over his head, trying to slice me in half as I come around the desk. I dodge it just in time. Feel it burn through my coat sleeve.
He swings again but I’ve already manifested my own Gladius. I block the strike. Mammon is flat on his back, not a prime defensive position. When I block his next shot, I slip my Gladius under his, shift my weight, and flip his sword over and down onto his chest. He screams and I stab my sword into his fighting arm as far as it will go. I hold it there until his arm blackens and his Gladius goes out. Hellions smell bad at the best of times. Burning Hellions are like a bonfire in a garbage dump.
He lies on the desk blinking at the ceiling.
“You still with us, General?”
He doesn’t say anything. He just holds his burned arm with his good one. I don’t have time for him to lie around and go into shock. I open the bottle of wine, lift him up, and hand him the bottle. He takes it in his good hand and drains half the bottle. I pick him up off the desk and sit him in his leather executive chair.
He’s looking at me, but his eyes have the vacant stare of someone on a bad acid trip.
“What doesn’t Lucifer know about?”
It takes him a few seconds to focus on me.
“The key. The key Mason was building to get into the Room of Thirteen Doors. It will never open the Room, but it will do something else. It will open Heaven to us.”
“Maybe you„igbe you&9;ve made a passkey, but how can you break through all of Heaven’s defenses and get close enough to use it?”
“There’s a weak spot. One of the protective seals is missing.”
“You mean the Druj Ammun?”
His eyes go wide.
“How do you know about that?”
This time I laugh at him.
“Because I had it. Back in L.A.”
He grabs my coat sleeve with his good hand.
“Where is it? Name any price.”
“Too late. I traded it for some magic beans.”
He drinks more wine.
“This isn’t anything to joke about.”
“I took the Druj Ammun off a dead vampire. A young girl. The only one of her kind I ever felt bad about killing. When I found out one of the Druj’s powers was to mind-control Hellions, the plan was to come down and get you assholes to rip Mason to pieces for me.”
“Where is it now?”
“I also found out that it controlled zombies, and as it happened, we had a substantial zombie surplus in L.A. right then. Instead of letting everyone get eaten, I destroyed the Druj. That killed every single zombie in the world in one night. By now your secret weapon is in a million little pieces clogging up the L.A. sewer system.”
Mammon stares at the floor. I can’t tell if he’s listening or getting drunk. He lifts his head.
“It would have been good to have. We could have built a great weapon from it. Made it control the other angels,” he says, and looks up at me. “Baphomet said if anyone was going to ruin this for us, it would be you. But you’d been gone so long many of us thought that you wanted to forget all about this place and wouldn’t get involved. We should have erred on the side of caution.”
“If it’s any comfort, L.A. is completely zombie-free these days, so you can bring the wife and kids to Disneyland.”