“We’re in Hell. I don’t think Mother Teresa or Johnny Cash are in much danger.”
She has to think about it for a minute. It’ll take her a lot longer than that to make sense of the last few minutes and we don’t have time.
“We need to keep moving.”
“Okay.”
As we go, she tries to take my hand.01Cake my It goes right through me.
“Shit,” she says.
I lead her back to the manhole and we climb the ladder out.
I WALK ALICE up the garage ramp, skirting the crazies and the squatters. She can’t take her eyes off them. I get the feeling Aelita dropped her straight into the cell, so she hasn’t seen much of Hell. Lucky girl.
Neshamah is on the roof looking through Muninn’s crystal like a jeweler checking a diamond for flaws. He shoves it back in his waistcoat when he sees us.
“The prodigal son returns. I wasn’t sure you had enough fingers and toes to count to three hundred. I see you’ve brought back a friend and that you have a hole in your chest. Just another day at the office,” says Neshamah. He turns to Alice. “Was he this clumsy on earth or is all this blood a Sandman Slim thing?”
“A who?”
“Alice, this is Neshamah. Neshamah, this is Alice. Neshamah is the one who told me how to get into the asylum.”
“Thanks for helping Jim get me out of that place. I would have gone crazy if I’d been in there much longer.”
Neshamah holds out his hand to Alice. She looks at it like he’s holding out a dead squid. But out of a kind of doomed sense of politeness, she puts her hand out, too. She looks at their hands and then at him when they touch. She starts to say something, but Neshamah cuts her off.
“If it’s any comfort, you wouldn’t have been in there much longer. Probably just a few hours. A day at the most. Wouldn’t you say?”
He looks at me.
“If I don’t get to Pandemonium in about seven hours, the Kissi are going to come down hard on the place. The way Josef is acting I don’t know if they’re going to start a war down here or join up with Mason’s boys and make a play for Heaven.”
He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. The angel in my head squirms like something is trying to get inside. I think he’s losing.
“I noticed Kissi lurking about. What exactly are they getting out of all this?” Neshamah asks.
“They’ll get what I give them. Nothing more and nothing less.”
His eyes narrow.
“Do you think it was a good idea to ally yourself with such, let’s say, touchy creatures?”
“I knew I was going to need help to stop Mason and I never got anything but the silent treatment from your bunch, so who was I supposed to go to? Besides, Aelita wants you out of the way, and for all I knew, she was the new CEO of Heaven Inc.”
“Boys? I’m new here,” says Alice. “What are Kissi? Why did Mason bring me here?”
I say, “Kissi are like angels, only worse. I’m not sure why you’re here now. I thought it was just to get rid of me, but with what Aelita said to you, there might be something more.” I look at Neshamah. “You want to jump in here with any insights?”
He shrugs.
“Mason wants to get into Heaven. She’s from Heaven. Maybe he thinks she hid a key under a flowerpot.”
“I don’t even know how I got here,” Alice says. She notices the sky behind Neshamah’s head and it must have just registered that the darkness isn’t night, but a coffin lid of smoke blotting out the sky.
Alice looks at me.
“Did you just say you’re friends with Lucifer?”