“There’s even a robot.”
“A masterpiece, then.”
Ipos says, “We should get to work.”
He sets his glass on the desk, holds it there, and pushes on it. The desk rocks a fraction of an inch up and down.
“I thought so. You wore down one of the legs dragging it over. I’ll fix that the next time we meet.”
“I can just stick a matchbook under it.”
He looks at me.
“No, you can’t. You might run the kingdom but I maintain the palace. This is my domain.”
“Whatever you say, Mr. Wizard.”
After they’re gone, I sit down at the desk and light a Malediction. Toss the Glock into the bottom drawer of the desk. I don’t like Glocks. They’re the gun equivalent of a middle-aged guy buying a Porsche.
From the top drawer I take out a shiny silver Veritas. The coin is a useful little pocket oracle. Another Veritas helped me survive my first few days when I first escaped back to L.A. The Veritas sees the present and the near future and never lies, though sometimes it’s a little shit about it.
I flip it and think, What now?
It comes down showing the image of a man pouring money into a woman’s hands. I’ve seen the symbol before. A hooker and her customer. Around the coin’s edge, in perfect Hellion script, it reads, Don’t make any long-term investments. Have a good time now. That’s what I mean. The little prick could have just said, You’re doomed, but it likes showing off.
I toss the Veritas back in the desk, pick up a book, and lie down on the sofa. I’m reading a chapter about a Greek philosopher named Epicurus. The guy was a kind of depressed swinger. Imagine the Playboy Mansion run by Mr. Rogers. Epicurus was all about pleasure but in a stingy eat-your-vegetables-or-you-won’t-get-any-dessert kind of way.
A lot of this philosophy stuff puts me right to sleep, but Epicurus must have been able to see into the future when people like me can’t read more than a paragraph without checking our e-mail because he spit out the important stuff short and sweet. It’s called the Tetrapharmakos and it’s a kind of a PowerPoint list to fix whatever ails you. It goes:
Don’t fear God
Don’t worry about death
What is good is easy to get and
What is terrible is easy to endure
He got it at least half right. That’s better than most people.
“Don’t fear God.” No problem. I met the guy. He had a nervous breakdown and is broken into more pieces than me.
“Don’t worry about death.” I died a couple of times already. It was boring.
“What is good is easy to get.” Here’s where Epicurus’s head starts disappearing up his own ass. This seems to be a common problem with philosophers.
“What is terrible is easy to endure.” Try being born half angel and half human, pal. A nephilim violates all the rules of the universe. I was born an Abomination, the only thing alive hated by Heaven, Hell, and Earth. Try that on for size and tell me how easy it is to endure, you grape-leaf-eating son of a bitch.
I drop the book on the floor. This is all Samael’s fault. I should have guessed that part of my torture in Hell would be having to read. L.A. was a lot more fun. Stealing cars, ripping out zombies’ spines, and getting shot at. Good times.
I get up and scrawl a note in big block letters and leave it on the desk in case Kasabian can see it.
CANDY. I MISS YOU. STARK.
Lucifer’s library has a pretty limited fiction section. I push around the pile of books by the sofa until I find The Trial by Franz Kafka. It’s about a guy on trial for something he doesn’t understand, accused by people he can’t find. It’s fucking hilarious. It might not be my first choice for how to spend an evening, but it’s better than going back to the Greeks. I don’t need another morality lecture from a dead guy. I’ve been getting those half my life.
My eyes snap open a few hours later. I sit up. I don’t even remember falling asleep. I get up and check the peepers.
After-hours flunkies sorting and filing endless piles of palace paperwork. Soldiers patrolling the grounds. Cleaners trying to get blood and gravel out of the lobby carpets. All expected. All boring. Good.