I hang up and listen at the door to make sure there’s no one outside. When I’m sure, I go upstairs quietly.
There are six armed guards in the mansion foyer. I go through a shadow and come out by the kitchen. Four more guards in there. That means there are going to be guards scattered all over the mansion. The grounds too, probably. I mumble some Hellion hoodoo. The guards in the kitchen and foyer drop to the floor and start babbling like babies. The sounds of falling bodies come from upstairs too. It wasn’t my best hoodoo or the strongest. It’s a confusion curse that won’t last long, but I’m hoping it’ll hold just long enough for me to get my work done.
BECAUSE SHE HATES it, I shadow-walk into Eva’s office. She and Barron are having a nightcap and watching the news on her million-inch TV. On the screen is a helicopter shot of vans and cop cars around a warehouse in East L.A. The news is reporting it as a raid on a terrorist compound. That’s a smart way for Abbot to have played it. There are enough Sub Rosa in the police department and local FBI office that he could call in some favors and make it look like the Golden Vigil takedown was good, clean law enforcement. Your tax dollars at work. Let Marshal Wells count rosaries, meditate, chant, or whatever the Vigil does in jail for a couple of days. Then, if Abbot can play it right, the badass part of the Sub Rosa—the part no one likes to talk about—will swoop in and haul the Vigil’s true believers off to a hoodoo black site. I have no idea what happens then and I’m not asking. Life is too short. Way too short for some of us.
I say, “You two must be breathing easier, huh?”
Barron chokes on the pill he was trying to swallow. I walk over and slap him on the back a couple of times. He drains a glass of water and just sits there, too exhausted by the choking fit to care that I’m close enough to snap his neck.
Sandoval, on the other hand, cares a lot. She’s on her feet, clutching the TV remote like it’s a gun.
I put my hands up.
“Don’t shoot. Think of the children.”
She turns off the TV and tosses the remote on her desk.
>
“I was praying you’d be dead by now.”
“I couldn’t leave without one last good-bye.”
She stands there coolly, like she’s staring down a poodle that just shit on her chinchilla long johns.
“Have you killed Howard yet or just tortured him, hoping he’ll save your precious life?”
“How do you know he hasn’t already told me how to fix my complexion problem?”
“You wouldn’t be here if he had. From the looks of you you don’t have much time left. You’d be spending it doing the ritual.”
I walk slowly around the room. Sandoval stands her ground but doesn’t want me behind her, so she has to follow me, turning around in place. We’re like an ugly little carousel covered in bones and bad meat instead of bouncing horses. Barron sits in his easy chair gobbling pills like they’re sweet potato fries and he hasn’t eaten in a year.
“What if I told you that I don’t care about the ritual anymore? That I’m not afraid of Hell, I’m not going to get fixed in time, and I want to have one last little blowout before I go?”
Sandoval looks at me.
“If you were a normal person I’d say you were lying, but it being you, I don’t know. I can’t imagine the life you came back to is what you’d hoped for. Your lover in the arms of someone smarter and much less ugly than you. Your business thriving without you. Finding that many of your friends are doing better without you and that the ones who aren’t are still happy that the chaos you drag with you like Jacob Marley’s chains is no longer infecting their lives. Now that I think about it, even someone as crude and dull witted as you must find it almost unbearable.”
I say, “You left out the part where I haven’t had a proper drink or smoke since I got back. You think I want to live without Aqua Regia and Maledictions forever? I’ll have all I want in Hell. And I won’t share any of it with you.”
“This is where we’re supposed to cower in fear, isn’t it? The threat of eternal damnation hanging over our sinful heads. I’m positively quivering. Are you quivering, Barron?”
With drugs in his belly, he’s looking a lot better now.
“Like a violin string, Eva,” he says. “I don’t know when I’ve been more terrified.”
They both laugh.
I wave a finger at them.
“I know the punch line here. You have a secret. You’re immortal. While everybody else slinks around the Hellion shit pits, you’ll live forever on caviar and ambrosia.”
“Something like that,” says Sandoval. “In fact, exactly like that.”
“How are you feeling over there, Barron? Are you looking forward to eternity choking down those horse pills?”
“Not at all,” he says. “I’m getting a little better every day. Even if it takes a year or ten years to get back to normal, what do I care? What’s a decade when placed against eternity?”