Devil Said Bang (Sandman Slim 4)

“I’ll just say the order came from you.”

“You’re leaving out the best part but okay.”

“How did you . . . ?”

“Got to go.”

I hang up.

Samael knew I needed the armor to survive, so if I lived he knew I’d always have it with me. He was smart enough to hide the thunderbolt so that even if Mason won, he’d never have all of Samael’s power. Not telling me any of this stinks like more of his “figure it out for yourself” Socratic horseshit. Or did he tell me something more? I have a vague impression of talking to him about it and him telling me something else. What was it?

The more immediate question is this: where would I hide if I was a missing piece of armor?

Samael told me to read the Greeks, so that seems like a good place to start, which is exactly why I’m not going to do it. I’ve pawed through every Greek book on the shelves. I liked one book I found, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, but then I found out he was Roman and not Greek and that just pissed me off. For a while I thought that might mean something but probably someone just put it on the wrong shelf.

If the thunderbolt is anywhere, it will be anywhere but where Samael told me where to look. Aside from actuarial tables, Hellion tax law, and sports stats, what section would I be the least likely to look in? What other sections are there in libraries? I’m not exactly an expert on book jail, and when I walked around before, I didn’t pay much attention to what books were where or how they were arranged. Time to get rigorous and organized.

I hate this already.

You know how when you drive somewhere new it always seems longer the first time? That’s how it is the first time you walk through an entire library trying to figure out how it’s put together. I could have done this when I first got here but I didn’t give a fuck what was on the other shelves and mostly resented everything beyond my little pied-à-terre for not having more, meaning any, movies. If Samael really wanted me to pay attention, he’d have stuck Herodotus between piles of Howard Hawks and John Huston.

Twenty minutes of looking and my eyes are already glazing over. There are no section markers. No Dewey decimal system or card catalog. (Yes, I know about the Dewey decimal system. I didn’t spend a lot of time in libraries but I’m aware of their existence.) Just rows of books with titles in Hellion script. And I was just in a crash. My neck hurt before. Now it’s aching from holding it sideways to read the titles.

I should have brought a pencil and paper and been drawing a map as I go over the place. I find a general-history-of-the-universe section, including Heaven and Hell. There’s a section on science, which is broken down into categories I’ve never heard of. What the hell is Quantum Melancholia?

There’s politics, which is total bullshit. All Samael needs is one book with LIE AND CHEAT LIKE A SON  OF A BITCH in neon on the cover.

There’s also art. Instead of Sodom and Gomorrah clusterfucking and Giger monsters, it looks like Samael has a thing for Rembrandt and mortal portrait painters. Probably looking for the right dead soul to put his mug on a Hellion dollar bill.

Military theory. Ha. I bet he wishes he had these books back in Heaven.

Law and economics. Was he studying for his goddamn SATs? I guess the Devil needs to know things like mortal rules and money. But still. I’m learning Samael’s darkest secrets and they’re really boring.

Philosophy. Okay. He gets some slack for this one. His argument with God seems legit. Is it the sin of pride not wanting to be a slave?

I’m about to start making my own sections. Despair. Boredom. I Want a Nap. And Fuck This Shit Entirely. I’ll push them together in one big pile with a noose overhead.

This whole time I’ve been hoping to find a secret trove of romances or westerns but the long shelves of true-crime books are probably Samael’s pulp pop reading. He’s exactly the kind of guy who flips to the end of every crime book looking for his name in the index. I wonder if I’m in one of these things. Which reminds me. I need to check the Sandman Slim entry on Wikipedia. I’ve tried killing it a couple of times but it’s always back up the next day. If some psychic prick gets wind that I’m temping as Satan, I don’t want it online. Satanists make junior high Goths look like NASA.

There’s a reading area in the corner of the room. I drop down into the soft leather chair, mentally exhausted. There’s a small table with a lamp and an ashtray with a few old butts. I forgot to pick up a pack of Maledictions before coming in, so I poke around the ashtray like a wino looking for one that might still be smokable. None of them are. I’m on a real winning streak tonight.

This is getting me nowhere. There must be a million or more books in here. I could wander the aisles for years and not find anything. Maybe I’m wrong about the missing armor piece. Even if he left it for me, it might not be in here. That means more wasted years wandering the whole palace, searching it one room at a time.

No.

Samael is a dick but he isn’t that random or cruel, at least not to me. As much as he’s fucked with me over the years, there was always a point and he’s always given me something to work with. Saint James would have figured out this bullshit hours ago. It makes me want to hurt him even more.

First no cigarettes and now I realize I left my Aqua Regia back at home base. My neck hurts. My chest burns. My right hand aches from picking up books. I’m sore and sweating like a fat man chasing a taco wagon across the Mojave.

Sitting here and closing my eyes feels good.

Then it comes back to me.

“Right in front of you. Stop looking. Sit down and you’ll see.”

I open my eyes and see I’m sitting in the middle of a huge section on magic. Samael takes the subject more seriously than I ever did. Because I was born a nephilim, I never learned much real magic. Even as a kid I had enough power to improvise my own hoodoo. The first and only real magic I ever learned was down here killing in the arena and later as Sandman Slim. There’s probably a lot of useful information in these books. Too bad the whole reading thing is starting to give me hives.

A book lies facedown on the other side of a reading lamp. I didn’t notice it before. It’s a paperback with a bright yellow cover, the first paperback I’ve seen down here. I pick it up. The title is in big block letters.