I’d never killed anyone before and knew I was supposed to feel bad about it, but I didn’t. I felt just the opposite. These geniuses were training me to kill, building up my strength and turning me into the monster I was always meant to be. Later, when Azazel made me his assassin, I thanked every Hellion I killed for their contribution to my schooling. The looks on their faces when I cut their throats never got old.
I’m glad Alice never saw me in the arena. I hope Kasabian has the brains not to show Candy.
What none of the Hellions except maybe Lucifer understood was that when I stepped onto the killing floor, I wasn’t fighting an opponent. I was fighting all of Hell. When I killed a beast or a soul, I was killing every leering, putrid Hellion in existence. The nouveaux riches in the stands came for a fight. I was there for extermination, and every time I murdered them, it felt like Christmas morning. That’s what I don’t want Candy to see. Back in L.A. we talk about being monsters together, but it’s not the same thing. I don’t have any problems with my L.A. monster side, but I don’t want her to see the kind of monster that comes out when I’m the real Sandman Slim.>I hear a hound right behind me. It’s scraping and clattering like it’s taken heavy damage, but it’s gaining on me. I cut to the side, hoping the huge thing’s momentum will carry it past. It does and it runs right into a support post on the side of a house. I see it just before it happens and cut back into the street so I don’t get crushed. I outrun the wall. Too bad I can’t outrun the falling debris. Something clips me right above my left ear and that’s all she wrote. Hello pavement. I love you, pavement. I think I’ll stay here a while.
WHEN I OPEN my eyes a billowing black snake is crawling over me. Its belly is a furnace and its body is the whole sky and it will take the rest of eternity to pass. I can wait. If this universe burns, I have the other one that Muninn gave me in my pocket. Let the show roll on.
I WAKE UP flat on my back and moving. I’m on a flatbed with heavy wire mesh over the top. It’s being towed by a Unimog. Someone shifts and grinds the truck’s gears. There are maybe eighteen Hellions back here with me. Some sitting up. Some on their backs. Others are leaking clear blood where they were ripped open by big hellhound jaws. I recognize some of them. They’re the Hellions that were running from the hounds.
The Unimog hits a bump and one of the leaking Hellions blips out of existence.
Someone says, “That was a good trick back there with your na’at.”
I turn my head so I’m looking up. There’s a smiling Hellion looking down at me.
“So good I coldcocked myself with a brick,” I say.
Like a lot of Hellions, he looks like a spiky horned toad after some Hollywood plastic surgery. Slim down the cheeks and neck. A chin implant that gives him a long horse face. He’s bruised and battered. It looks like the beat-down took his stubby horns, too. But his big white canines are still there. Those really hurt when they dig into you. Trying to get a Hellion off when he’s got a good hold of you with his choppers is like trying to coax a moray eel into a round of minigolf with knock-knock jokes.
I rub the side of my head. There’s sticky blood in my hair. I pull the hood back up, covering up the blood. I touch my face. Good. Mammon’s skin is still there.
I lean on my elbows and look up front. The flame job and animal skulls wired to the front of the truck look familiar. This is the same damned posse that’s been chasing Jack and me since Pandemonium. The saps caught me and they don’t even know it. If I wasn’t flat on my back being hauled around suicide roads in a wire-mesh chicken coop to who the fuck knows where, I’d feel like a real winner right now.
“Where’s the guy I was with? A damned soul.”
“Oh, him,” the Hellion snickers. “He seemed like a nice guy. When you were out cold, he stole your bag and ran off.”
I feel around for the leather satchel with my face in it. It’s gone.
“A real nice guy,” snickers the Hellion.
I reach into my coat for Mammon’s flask of Aqua Regia, but it’s not there. The little prick even stole my booze. Now he really has to die.
I should have cut Jack loose the moment we saw Eleusis. I should have let the sinkhole take him. The goddamn angel in my head softens me up at those moments. Every time I think we’ve found a balance point, it shifts its weight one sneaky gram at a time until it’s standing straight and I’m flailing around like a blind man on black ice. I will not let God’s little bootlicker win. I’m a nephilim, you haloed fuck. You’re part of me and you better learn to take the bad, me, with the good, you, or I swear I’ll put a double barrel to my head and do a Hemingway. Then we’ll see which one of us is left to Mr. Clean the wall.
“I’m Berith,” says the Hellion. “Who are you?”
Shit. For fifty points, name a Hellion I haven’t killed.
“Ruax,” I say. I wait to hear “Ruax is dead” or “He’s my brother-in-law,” but Berith just nods.
I sit up and lean against the wire-mesh enclosure.
“Where are we headed?”
“No idea. Jail I suppose.”
A Hellion with a mangled arm pipes up.
“Then back to Pandemonium. We’re so fucked.”
Berith looks out at the road.
“I don’t want to think about that.”
The truck rolls steadily, but it’s not in a rush to get anywhere. The posse up front is passing bottles around. I don’t suppose they’d be too keen on sharing with us prisoners. Maybe I can put my fist through the mesh and ask one nicely with my boot on his throat.
I get up and grab hold of a section of the fence. And promptly land on my back, feeling like someone just handed me a glass of whiskey with a thousand-volt chaser.