“Fuck.”
“I agree completely.”
Alice grabs me.
“Help me up. If I’m going to die, I won’t do it on my back.”
I pull her to her feet. She does her best to stand straight up, but she can’t quite do it.
Michael heads for us.
“If it isn’t Sandman Slim, the monster who kills monsters. Isn’t that what they call you?”
“I prefer Abomination. It fits better on a T-shirt. I’d comp you one, but we don’t have any big enough for your ego.”
“Why would you say that? You don’t know anything about me.”
“You’re an archangel who hates his dad, has a neurotic thirst for power, and when the war is all over, you have a plan to set yourself up as a tinhorn messiah with those goons up there as your brownshirts. Am I in the ballpark with all that? I think I am.”
“You have a big mouth and make a lot of assumptions about your betters.”
“I just helped kill an archangel exactly like you Downtown, so I’m acquainted with your type.”
He thinks about that for a minute.
“Who did you kill?”
“Raziel.”
He laughs and so does his peanut gallery.
“That imbecile? He couldn’t even pick a side, so he ran off to the hinterlands with his tail between his legs.”
“He had nice things to say about you, too.”
“Did he? What did he say?”
“That you’re a coward, and even though you might not have liked him, you were always jealous of Samael because he’s smarter than you and has bigger balls.”
“Feel free to leave me out of this conversation,” Samael says.
Michael rubs the back of his neck.
“You’re aware that I’m an angel, correct? I can tell when mortals are lying. And you’re lying.”
“But I’m not a hundred percent mortal. Can you be a hundred percent sure when it comes to anything about me?”
That stops him for a minute. He turns to Samael.
“What’s that you’re holding? You’re friends with this thing. Are you doing his laundry now, too?”
“If only it were clean laundry,” Samael says. “Care for a sniff?”
Michael looks from Samael to me to Alice.
“You don’t look too well, my dear,” he says.
“Attack me and see how bright my Gladius is.”