Devil Said Bang (Sandman Slim 4)

“You got it on the first try. Congratulations. You just got Brimborion’s job. Let Semyazah know. Also, send a cleanup crew to my room. There’s a couple of bodies. They can’t miss them. But don’t call them until after you clear out the garage.”

“Yes, Lucifer.”

I go to the closet and get out my bloody leather bike pants and hoodie. I found it in a cemetery when I first got back from Hell. Yeah, that’s kind of disgusting but I’m the only one who knows where it came from and it doesn’t smell any worse than anything else down here. After surviving the market, the Magic 8 Ball, being burned in effigy, and getting my arm cut off, it feels kind of like a good-luck charm.

I take a quick look around at the room. Nothing I need or want. I pick up the duffel, step over Brimborion’s body, and head back to the library.

I step around the hexes in the floor. I should have told Semyazah about them but he’s a smart guy. He’ll send in another smart guy to check the place out first. With any luck, he’ll be smart enough to look before he leaps. If not, it will be just one more Hellion watercooler story. Did you hear the one about Phil’s head exploding in the library?

I open the false bookshelves, lock them from the inside, and go down the stairs.

The garage is empty. The sound of my boots echoes down to deep, deep sublevels. A B-movie Halloween spook show. I could make a fortune selling weekend Hell junkets to the movie biz. Nonmortal ones, of course. Vampire sound techs. Nahual film editors. Jade cinematographers. Give them the full tour. Where I first landed down here. The arena. The palace where I murdered my first Hellion. The field where the red legger cut off my arm. I wonder where it is now? I should check eBay.

I go to the bike, secure the duffel on the back, and do a quick walk around checking for oil leaks, a flat tire, or a broken chain. It looks fine. I swing my leg over the bike and kick it to life. It sounds good. Like it could crack the foundations of the palace.

I get a glove out of my coat pocket and put it on my Kissi hand. Better get used to it. I’ll be hiding it a lot more soon. I hope.

Time to let go of a lot that happened over the last hundred days. I got ruthless and I got lucky. On the upside, I stayed alive this whole time. I found the 8 Ball. I even figured out Marchosias’s game. On the downside, Samael tricked me into cleaning up his mess again. Creating the Council so I could put the right people in the right places and take the heat for everything that went wrong. Kick Buer’s ass into building a City Hall that doesn’t look like skinhead porn. Get Semyazah on board with keeping Lucifer, any Lucifer, alive at all costs. Draw Marchosias out and almost take the bullet that sooner or later would have been aimed at Samael’s head. Obyzuth was the real ringer, though. She led me to Deumos and something that will change Hell forever. Whether or not that’s a good thing we’ll find out when the place becomes something new or blows itself apart. Samael handed me a leaf blower and left me to clear off the driveway, and for what? So he could stay in Heaven? Or is he going to blow back into town looking like Steve McQueen driving the Batmobile? If he does, I’ll shake his hand and thank him. Take the place back over. Pretend you fixed it all yourself and suck up the applause. Just let me go home and stay there.

I heel up the kickstand and wait, feeling the weight of the Hellion hog against my body. Letting it rattle my bones.

Don’t fear God

Don’t worry about  death

What is good is easy to  get, and

What is terrible is easy  to endure

The only thing I’m sicker of than philosophy is philosophers. I bet Epicurus is living free and easy in Eleusis, the province of Hell reserved for righteous pagans. Next time I’ll trade places with him and sip wine with the vestal virgins while Epicurus runs Bedlam’s outhouse for a while. Then you tell me how easy it is to roll with the terrible, you goat-cheese-salad asshole.

I put the bike in gear and roll by the kennels before heading for the garage gate.

I’m leaving by the front door this time. No sneaking out the back. There’s no reason to be subtle. In a palace, rumors are like flying monkeys. Annoying as vegan desserts and hard to stop once they’re airborne. Besides Bill and Semyazah, no one is supposed to know when and where I’m leaving. But of course people do. Everyone in the fucking palace.

Troops from ten Hellion legions are spread out across the lawn when I roll up to street level. They’re dead silent. Dead still. They’re not blocking Lucifer’s way, but they’re not happy to see me rolling out on my own. Someone is going to twitch first. It might as well be me.

I whistle. There’s a low roar and the sound of razored steel on concrete. Shadows lumber up the driveway walls. When the hellhounds reach the surface, they spread out around me, pawing the ground impatiently. They scan the troops, pink brains sloshing in the bell jars where their heads should be. They settle around me in a protective semicircle.

The potion the palace witches whipped up for me we used to call a Sheol Sucker Punch. Technically, it’s a kind of poison, but a very selective one.

When most people see hellhounds, all they see is the machine part. They forget about the brain, usually because when they’re that close, it means a hound is gnawing off their leg. I don’t know where hellhound brains come from, but I know that brains are brains and they need food to work. And any brain that needs food is a brain you can dose. A Sheol Sucker Punch burns out the parts of the brain that control memory but skates around smarts and motor functions. Mostly it resets a brain’s emotional clock back to when it was a newborn. And like every good duckling, the newborns wake up looking for something to imprint on. I made sure it was me. I’m Mom now and the hounds, their gears whirring and pistons pounding, are a loyal pack.

The legions back off but stand their ground. They know not to run. Running makes you prey and no one wants to be prey to a hundred metal hounds.

Some of the troops want to cut my throat. Others stare at me like wounded children. Neither are good looks for crazed killers. I should probably say something, but what am I going to say? “Sometimes the Devil needs a little me time”?

The best I can come up with to say is, “Hell needs a Lucifer and Hell will always have one. Just not tonight.”

The wind changes and brings new smells with it.

The gibbet holding Ukobach holds a bloated corpse. By the street, scalps and fresh skins are tied to the ornamental fence, flapping and drying in the breeze. Guess I know what happened to Vetis’s men. I wonder if Vetis’s hide is up there with them?

As the smell of rotting Hellion meat drifts across the lawn, whatever little guilt I’ve been nursing for running out on these poor slobs evaporates. Why did I ever think mass suicide for these murderous hellspawn hyenas was a bad idea? Let them all burn.

The lousy thing is maybe I deserve a seat in the frying pan right next to them. I dragged Ukobach behind my bike when I could have just snapped his neck. But Lucifer needs to put on a show and I never get tired of killing Hellions. Maybe I should send the hounds back to the kennels, go to my rooms, and die down here with these assholes. Maybe that’s the real reason why Samael marooned me here. His way of teaching me one last lesson. The one he wouldn’t tell me because I had to figure it out for myself. That I don’t deserve to go home.

I thought I could skate and cheat and finesse my way around the worst parts of playing Lucifer but I was fooling myself. You can’t play the Devil without becoming the Devil. That’s why Saint James abandoned me. He knew what was coming and he didn’t want to see it happen. He also didn’t stick around to help me through it, so a few of those scalps belong to him.