I want to run for the door, get Downtown as soon as possible, and spend as much time as I can there, but my legs won’t cooperate. I feel like I’m drunk, and that didn’t happen last time. It might be the effect of coming through here with no one waiting on the other side. Whatever it is, I’m not feeling springtime fresh by the time I step through the door. I throw on another glamour as soon as I get inside. The last thing I want is for anyone to recognize Sandman Slim when he can barely stand and definitely can’t defend himself.
For this disguise, I choose a Hellion face. Some Hellions look pretty much human while others look like they just won an ugly-farm-animal contest. Some are more like human-size bugs—even other Hellions don’t like them. I go for middle ground and put on a bland, empty-eyed boar’s face, complete with cracked yellow tusks. It’s the little details that make the disguise. I don’t want to look like I got my mask from the bargain bin at Walmart.
It’s a shock being back Downtown. I haven’t been here in months and for the first few minutes the smell and sound of the place are hard to deal with. It’s all familiar, but drunk like I am, it’s hard to ease comfortably back into damnation.
When doomed souls walk through the front door into Hell, they’re funneled like cattle into veal pens, where they wait to be sorted. Who gets a holiday in lava? Who goes to the Butcher Valley or the Room of Knives. Me? I’m just another idiot Hellion out for a stroll, so I don’t expect any trouble getting past the guards. Turns out it’s no trouble at all.
And it’s not because I’m dressed like a local.
The new souls aren’t being led to the holding pens because they aren’t there anymore. Where there were cages is a collection of twisted metal bars and the crushed remains of cages in a shit-reeking mud swamp. I want to get a closer look, but I’m so light-headed I have a feeling that I’d end up flat on my face in the muck. Damned souls mill around the pens not sure what to do or where to go. There aren’t any Hellions left guarding them, much less telling them where to go. A few notice me and head in my direction, but I wave them off and head into the Hell’s capital, Pandemonium.
I don’t make it. I have to duck inside one of the abandoned guardhouses on the outskirts of the city, where I collapse on the floor. I’m drunk and the peepers are kicking in full force now. I can see everywhere, all of Hell at once, and it’s making me throw up in my skull.
You know how flies have those funny compound eyes that divide images into hundreds of little pieces? Now imagine one of those compound eyes where each of those hundreds of lenses sees something different. This is beyond information overload. It’s a flat-out Hellion acid trip.
I’m back at Lucifer’s palace in Downtown’s demonic Beverly Hills. I have a watery image of the palace lobby. The grounds outside. The kennels where the hellhounds are supposed to be. Even Lucifer’s endless library upstairs.
Ruins everywhere.
Everything trashed. The palace looks deserted. Out front, hundreds of Hellion legionnaires are camped in tents and in the backs of broken-down trucks. There are fires everywhere, fueled with Lucifer’s furniture and his books. Damned souls wander the streets—the ones that haven’t gone native and joined the roving legionnaire gangs raiding the last of the stores for food, Maledictions, ammo, and booze, that is. There are gang fights, executions, riots, and burning buildings all across the city. And I’m seeing this all at once, through one big sulfurous, spinning kaleidoscope.
I’m cold. I’m sweating. I can’t feel my legs. Then my legs come back and I can’t feel my arms. My heart bangs around my chest like my ribs are a mosh pit. I’m too dizzy to even get up and head back to the Tenebrae door. All I can do is lie here as drytts—Hellion sand fleas—trampoline over my face and hands.
I see south of the city, all the way to the golden walls around the fortress that opens into Heaven. Millions of Hellions and damned souls surround it. I expect rioting and fights here too, but it’s different. The crowd is barely moving at all. It’s just miles of hopeless, catatonic bodies, human and otherwise, in every direction. Months ago, God—Mr. Muninn—put out the word that Heaven was now open to everyone, human souls and fallen angels alike. Only the gates never opened. Over the walls of the fortress, I can see flashes of the angel war that’s raging to decide who gets into Heaven and who doesn’t.
It’s too much. I feel like someone parked an earthmover on my head. I can’t get enough stinking air breathing through my nose, but if I open my mouth, the sand fleas get inside. Even though I know I’m not bodily back in Hell, that I’m only here as a projection of my soul, everything hurts and everything is horrible and I roll over and throw up as the visions continue.
There are waves of Heavenly angels in the streets of Pandemonium. They’re carrying bottles in wooden crates like we use to haul wine bottles. The angels’ bottles are dark and whatever is in them swirls with a deeper darkness. I don’t need anyone to tell me that this is black milk because around the ones humping the bottles other angels are on guard, their Gladiuses out and ready to murder anything that gets in their way.
Somewhere in Downtown’s Hollywood, the leader of this angelic horde is talking to an old human soul, one I only met a couple of times, but one I’ll never forget. It’s Norris Quay. He’s laughing it up like him and the angel are all old Skull and Bones club buddies.
I don’t care about any of it anymore. I just want it to stop. For these bugs to get off me and the pounding in my head to stop.
But another vision comes swimming up through the rest. It’s Samael with some Hellion generals in the burning ruins of the old street market. They’re arguing. The generals close in on him. Fire up their Gladiuses. Samael doesn’t flinch. He fires up his twin swords and waits for them, a Zen warrior in a sea of monsters. I want to help him. I try to get up. Instead, I fall on my face back into the sensation of warm Jell-O that brought me here.
“FUCK!”
I open my eyes. I’m back in Max Overdrive, curled up in a fetal position on the kitchen floor. My arm is wet where I’ve drooled all over it. I wipe my mouth. Kasabian is on the couch with the dirty bucket by his foot and a beer on his knee.
He takes a sip of the beer.
“I take it it worked?” he says.
I roll onto my back.
“You could say that. It was all jumbled together, but I saw plenty. As much as I needed to.”
“So, you’re okay.”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” Kasabian says.
He walks over and dumps the bucket of water on my head.
I sit up sputtering and coughing.
“That’s for calling me Tin Man in front of Brigitte and Marilyne. Now give me my eye back.”
I pop it out and hand it to him. He pops it back into the socket, blinking to get it into place.
I sit up, drenched and cold.
“Would you hand me the glass?”
He gives me the glass with my eye floating on top. I pop it back in and gulp down the water.
Kasabian takes the bucket and goes back downstairs. I stagger to my feet and get some towels from the bathroom. While I wipe up the water I yell at Kasabian.
“I’m trying to save everybody’s soul, you know.”
“And we appreciate it,” he yells back. “But you’re still a dick.”
Honestly, I can’t argue with that.
ABBOT GIVES ME Geoff Burgess’s address in Beverly Hills and I drive the Hellion hog over as soon as it gets dark.
The place is a gated Tudor behemoth. Something an exiled dictator or a silent-movie star would have. I park down the street between a Land Rover and an Escalade. They’re big enough to hide me, but close enough that I can keep an eye on the place.
Around nine, the gate opens and a Bentley Mulsanne pulls out. It’s a gorgeous machine and I have to talk myself down from ramming it to avenge my Catalina. But I stay put until it passes. Pull out and get on its tail, keeping my light off until we’re out of Beverly Hills and back into normal traffic where Burges
s won’t notice me.
He heads across town, then north up into the hills. I keep a respectable distance. The streets up here wind around each other and branch off in all directions, like veins and arteries. It would be easy to get lost and starve to death by a millionaire’s billion-dollar digs. The coyotes will drag you down into a ravine and the only thing they’ll find of you will be your bones. They’ll identify you by your dental work and joke about you around the morgue, calling you Coyote Bob or Susie Dog Food. If no one claims your carcass, you’ll be burned, and your dust and bone fragments will be buried in the L.A. County Crematorium Cemetery, a place that’s prettier than the Mojave Desert, but no less lonely.
The Bentley slows at a curve and pulls up to a gate where a uniformed flunky or maybe low-key security guard speaks to Burgess through the driver’s-side window. After a few seconds, the flunky punches a button on one of the brick gate supports and they swing open. The Bentley continues up the circular driveway and I pull a U-turn and park down the hill. Even if I pass by casually, whoever is on gate duty is sure to notice an oversize rat bike prowling somewhere it isn’t supposed to be. A Maserati goes through the gate next, then a Hennessey Venom. L.A. is a town that judges you by your car and the crowd tonight is pulling out all the stops. The only thing that’s going to top these last few heaps is a solid-gold submarine.
From where I am, all I can see is a twenty-foot wall around the mansion grounds. Maybe I could climb a tree, only what am I going to find up there but bats and squirrels with a taste for Dumpster caviar? I’m way too far away from the mansion to see inside. I should have brought binoculars, but unless they’re doing a human sacrifice on the lawn, I still don’t know that I’d be able to see anything. It’s probably just another cocktails-and-cheese mixer like I sat through on Abbot’s boat. I don’t need to waste one more evening on one of those. Besides, it’s Burgess I’m after and Burgess is behind the locked gates of Fort Sugar Daddy. Which means he’s not home and that’s good news for me.
I gun the bike and head down the hill, back to Beverly Hills.
Headlights in my eyes all the way, and while they don’t bring on a Trotsky headache, my head starts hurting after a while. I should have asked Allegra about the migraines. Bullets and knives I can handle, but these damned headaches are my Kryptonite. Like the one I had when I was Downtown this morning. That laid me out but good. I run through the images again as I drive, each time stopping at the same one: Samael facing off against six or eight Hellion generals. I’ve seen him fight with a Gladius, but not against a group like that. It feels stupid to hope that he’s not hurt. I just hope he’s not dead and vanished, one more victim in a cosmic brawl made worse by whatever Wormwood is up to.
In Beverly Hills, I roll the bike back between the Rover and the Escalade. Burgess’s place looks empty and quiet. I wonder if he’s the kind of guy to have a staff that spends the night? I get the feeling not. During the day, I can image the place being a busy little beehive. But at night, with what he’s into, I think he’d want some privacy. I watch the windows for a while. The lights don’t change and no shadows pass by.
It’s a thin reason to break into the place, but I’ll take it.
There’s a wall around Burgess’s palace, but it’s lower than the one back up on Mount Olympus. There’s a row of topiary bushes by the near side of the wall. They give me a nice pool of shadow, so I can climb over without being too obvious. When I land I do another glamour. This time I put on Burgess’s face. That should confuse any video cameras he has on the grounds.
My skin prickles from all the protective wards he has installed around the grounds. They make my heart race and my throat tighten. I whisper some Hellion hoodoo and my chest and throat loosen up as the wards lose their effectiveness. I’ve broken into a lot of houses here and Downtown, and the owners almost always go for the same lame protections. Once you figure out the pattern, you can find a way to work around them. The problem is that I can’t turn off the wards indefinitely. They’re going to start working again soon, so I have to do whatever I’m going to do fast.
That leaves me with one big question: Do I kick the front door in or maybe toss a potted plant through a window and poke around Burgess’s linen drawers? I decide against both. They’ll give away too much too soon. I want to be able to keep tailing him or come back here again, so I don’t want him getting paranoid, maybe doubling his wards and hiring armed guards to prowl the place at night. That means it’s just a recon mission. Prowl the grounds and see what I can see. Come back later and rip into the interesting stuff after coordinating with Abbot and whatever he’s up to.
There isn’t going to be anything interesting at the front of the house, so I head around the side.
Nothing but bushes over there. I can make out the frame of a gazebo at the rear of the place, so I head that way.
It’s awfully exciting around back—meaning it’s the same giant heated pool, lounge chairs, and tables you’ll find in every backyard in the goddamn neighborhood. If Burgess has any secrets stashed around here, they’re inside the house, exactly where I can’t go yet.
I’m looking over the house’s rear windows when my throat starts getting itchy. Maybe I should take off and come back another night when I’ve had a chance to prepare some better protection for myself. But as I’m moving back to the front of the house, something moves upstairs. In the far right window, the curtains part and a small face looks down at me.
It’s Nick, the kid Abbot is looking for.
I start for the rear door when my lungs decide to stop working. My throat tightens and my heart kicks into overdrive. I’m almost to the door, but I’m moving too slow.
Lights come on all over the mansion grounds. I’m pinned under floodlights beaming down from every direction. If the lights are on, it means someone else has been alerted. The cops or local private muscle. There’s no way I can break in, get Nick, and get out again. The kid waves at me. I wave back. Then head for the wall I climbed over to get in.
The moment I’m on the other side, my lungs open up and my heart slows down. I feel like shit and know a drink would help, but this isn’t the right time or place to administer medication. I run back to the hog as lights come on in other houses. Kicking the bike into gear, I haul ass out of blue-blood country, still wearing Burgess’s face. I don’t change back until I’m in Hollywood.
Across from the Whisky a Go Go, I pull the bike over and get out my phone. I dial Abbot’s number. He takes his sweet time answering.
“Stark? What’s going on? I’m in a meeting.”
“Fuck your meeting. I found your kid.”
“Nick?”
“No. The ghost of Jackie Coogan. Who do you think I mean?”
“All right. Calm down. Where did you find him? Are you with him now?”
“Burgess has him. Geoff goddamn Burgess. I saw him there not ten minutes ago, but I couldn’t get to him. Now the place is going to be crawling with cops.”
I can hear Abbot breathing at the other end of the line.
“All right, listen to me. Do nothing. Do you hear me? Nothing. Let me handle this.”
A cop car cruises slowly down Sunset Boulevard. I keep the phone up, blocking my face as it goes by.
“Stark, did you hear me?” says Abbot. “If you do something stupid, it could put Nick in jeopardy. Do you hear me?”
“Yes. I hear you. You know everything I just told you is worthless now, right? By the time you can do anything, they’ll have moved the kid.”
“Let me worry about that. You did a good job tonight. Let’s keep it that way. Go home. I’ll call you when I learn anything new.”
“You told me Nick was with his father in Long Beach. What the hell is going on here?”
“I don’t know. Sit tight and let me handle this.”
“Sure. You do that.”
I hang up and dial Julie.
“Stark. What time is it?” she says with a voice thick and slow. “I must have fallen asleep.”
r /> “Well, wake up. That kid you’re looking for for Abbot? I found him. He’s in Beverly Hills, at the home of Geoffrey Burgess.”
“Burgess? Where do I know that name from?”
“He’s a heavyweight at a talent agency called Evermore Creatives Group. But trust me, he’s into worse stuff than boy bands.”
“Right. You went after them before I fired you. Why are you bothering Burgess now?”
“I told you. I found the kid there.”
“You were looking for the kid? Dammit, Stark. That’s not your case.”
“I wasn’t looking for anyone. I just found him, which means I solved your case, so do something about it. Burgess is into some weird shit and that kid shouldn’t be around it.”
“Listen. You stay out of this. After the stunt on Hollywood Boulevard the other night, no one wants to hear from you. I’ll call some contacts in LAPD and get them to look into it.”
“Look into it. Well, I feel better. I’m sure the kid’s parents will be thrilled to know you’re looking into it.”
“Calm down and go home right now. I’m sorry if I don’t sound eternally grateful, but you have a way of making any crisis worse.”
“Burgess is in bed with some pretty bad people. They probably have contacts in the police force.”
“So do I. Go home. I’ll have Chihiro call you later with any updates.”
The line goes dead.
I spend all of six seconds wondering if I should go home. Then I kick the bike on and head back to Beverly Hills.
Which is pointless. I can’t get within a block of Burgess’s house. LAPD and rent-a-cops are all over the neighborhood. It looks like D-Day with palm trees. For a minute, I consider throwing some hoodoo at one of the cars. Maybe set it on fire. But I can’t take those kinds of chances with a kid around. I can burn something later if Abbot or Julie’s cops don’t come through.