In L.A., I used to dream about Hell. In Hell, I dream about L.A., but it doesn’t make me any less homesick. Home in my dreams isn’t home. I see the city turning soft and sinking into the desert. Whole neighborhoods are swallowed or just wink out of existence. The sky is black and bruised like Hell’s, and then turns normal again. Sometimes instead of fighting in the arena, my arena dreams turn into a floodlit Hollywood and Vine.
This time I’m circling a Hellion roughly the size and shape of a locomotive. I have to fight with a rusty junkyard na’at while Casey Jones has a shield and a Vernalis, a kind of steel crab claw the size of your average go-go dancer. A bunch of red leggers, freelance raiders and looters, hoot and cheer for blood.
We drive each other back and forth across the killing floor. I slip one of his attacks and get in close. Just as I’m about to open him up like a can of pork and beans, my na’at jams. It was rigged and the Hellion knew it. The next thing I know, I’m on my knees screaming. There’s a wet sound as the Vernalis slices through meat and crunches through bone. When I look down, my left arm is lying in the intersection next to a three-month-old People magazine.
And that’s not even the worst dream. The worst are when I wake up sweating from nightmares about city-planning meetings. Swear to God. I dream about signing papers. I dream about progress reports on freeway repairs. About digging through mile-high piles of office supplies for Post-its and paper clips. I’m a magician, an ex-gladiator, a killer, and now the Devil himself and my greatest night terrors revolve around lost memos and trying to remember the Hellion word for “incentivize.”
Some nights I swear I’m tempted to sneak back to the arena and step in for a couple of fights, like a junkie looking for one more fix. It’s sick, I know. Yeah, it’s misery, but it’s a familiar kind and sometimes that’s as close to happy as I’ll get down here.
No wonder Samael took a powder. For all his talk about going home to make up with the old man, he was really running away from eternal damnation as a salaryman. I didn’t figure out until I was doing it that this is Lucifer’s damnation. The Light Bringer reduced to riding herd on bank clerks. It was worse than any torture.
I get up and pour myself a drink. Throw the robe over the back of a chair and slip the black blade behind my back. I leave through the fake bookshelves and head downstairs to the kennels.
It’s afternoon and the senior planning staff is waiting in the palace meeting room. The place looks like Bring Your Clown to Work Day at a Masonic lodge. The slick suits and Hellion power dresses aren’t the problem. It’s everything else they’re wearing. Ceremonial aprons covered with old runes. A morbid rainbow of colored scarves and gloves showing everyone’s place in the food chain. Blinders. Gaggers. Masks.
They’re all giving me the pig eye as I roll in. I take my time getting to the head of the table. The dirty looks aren’t just because I’m late. I’ll always be that sheep-killing dog Sandman Slim to most of them, and now, just to rub their ugly noses in it, I’m their boss. At least the armor is doing its job. No matter how much they hate me, they keep their hex holes shut with my devil armor shining like the mirrored belly of a chrome wasp.
There are twelve on the planning committee. With me there’s thirteen. A cozy little coven. Buer is there. So are Marchosias and Obyzuth. Semyazah would be here but none of the generals will put up with this shit.
Technically I’m supposed to be in ritual drag too but I have a hard time picturing Samael dressed up like a Brooks Brothers Pied Piper, so I follow his example and skip the wardrobe call.
There’s a silver circle in the center of the table. Lines radiate out to the edges, cutting the table into twelve sections. Each trick-or-treater steps up and sets down a different ceremonial object. The junk looks like leftovers from a Goth-club garage sale.
Obyzuth sets down a green rock, like a Templar meditation stone. The Hellion next to her sets down an athame knife that cuts through ignorance or butters magic toast or something. Buer drops a snake carved from the leg bone of a fallen Hellion warrior. It goes on and on like that. I’m supposed to light a red candle at the end of the ritual but things are going too slow. I fire it up now and light a Malediction off it.
“Don’t take it personally, but if I have to sit through one more of these meetings, I’m going to gut every one of you like catfish, shit in your skulls, and mail them to your families. This isn’t Hell. It’s a PTA meeting. Maybe all we need to save Hell is a bake sale.”
I flick my ashes over the candle.
“Here’s how it is from now on. Do your projects any way you want. Fuck the budgets. Fuck the schedules. When it’s done, you get one minute to tell me about it.”
The room is silent. It’s not like regular silence. More like the kind you get with a concussion.
“In case anyone thinks letting you off the leash is a license to steal or stab me in the back, let me introduce the newest member of our team.”
I go to the doors and open them. A hellhound clanks in on its big metal claws and looks over the room. The hound is bigger than a dire wolf, a clockwork killing machine run by a Hellion brain suspended in a glass globe where its head should be. They’re terrifying on a battlefield but in an enclosed space like this, the whirs and clicks of its mechanics, its razor teeth and pink, exposed brain, are enough to give a tyrannosaurus a heart attack.
The hound follows me around the table, folds up its legs, and settles down on the floor next to me. A dutiful guard dog.
“This is Ms. 45. The new head of HR. Any of you upstanding citizens that do less than your best work, conspire against me, or sell supplies to the black market can explain it to her. She works nights, weekends, and holidays, and if she’s indisposed, Ms. 45 has a few hundred colleagues downstairs. In fact, the hounds now have the run of the palace, so watch your step. I hear stainless-steel turds stain bad.”
No one says anything. Besides the hellhound, the only sound is people restlessly moving their feet.
“Now get to work and leave me the fuck alone.”
All twelve of them file out, right into the other two hounds I stationed outside. It would have been a hoot programming them to eat each Council member as they left. A little counterproductive, though. I need them to do the work I’m sure not going to do. But if I can’t have a little fun being the Devil, why bother?
Now I can get back to figuring out the rest of Lucifer’s power so I can get the hell out of here.
I’ve made circuit after circuit of the empty parts of the hotel. I know Lucifer won’t leave me hanging on half power forever. He likes games. I know there are clues for me around somewhere. But I don’t know all the rules of the game, so I might be looking right at one without knowing it.
When he left he said he’d come back if I ever really needed him. I haven’t heard a goddamn word since. I’ve tried to get a message through to Mr. Muninn. He’s the one guy on Earth I know could come down here if he wanted. I guess he doesn’t. I know why and we’re going to have to have a long talk about it when I get home.
Saint James would have a plan but I’m just prowling relentless, hypnotic halls, floor by floor looking for clues. The windowless corridors could be anywhere. In space on a rocket circling the edge of the universe. Or Donald Trump’s diamond-encrusted submarine at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
Hellhounds glance up when they see me. I scratch the underside of their glassed-in brains and they growl contentedly. They’re like temple dogs guarding a royal tomb, only here the altars are unused Jacuzzis and Hellion minibars. I don’t even want to think about what’s in those.>“This might not be an assassination attempt at all,” says Merihim. “An isolated ambush would be a good way to cover up a psychic experiment. If your attackers killed you, all the better. If you killed your attackers, the only evidence would be the corpses of a few rogue soldiers.”
“That makes sense. It’s one thing to kill Lucifer but another to spellbind him,” says Ipos. “You could make him do anything. Something unforgivable.”