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.
I really was planning on coming back when I found some hoodoo that would let me stay in real L.A. while saving Hell from burning. Now I know I can’t ever come back. If I do, I’ll never leave. I won’t grow horns or hooves, but if I come back, I’ll never stop being Lucifer and it will prove what I’ve always secretly suspected. Hell didn’t make me a monster. It just confirmed all my worst fears about myself.
I rev the bike, pop the clutch, and burn rubber down the driveway, past the gates, and onto the street. The hellhound pack sprints behind. After a couple of blocks, they catch up and fan out around me. We blitzkrieg traffic off the roads and pedestrians off the streets. We tear up the asphalt, burst store windows, and rip the bumpers from idling trucks. Unlike the troops at the palace, these haven’t figured out I’m deserting their sorry asses. They scream and fire their weapons into the air like it’s New Year’s as we blow by.
I head to the 405 entrance at Wilshire. There’s less than a mile of freeway left but that’s plenty. I crank the throttle until the bike’s engine glows cherry red. The hellhounds can’t keep up. They begin to fall back. I hear them howling and baying above the noise of the engine. They’ll be okay. They have the run of the palace now, and if no one feeds them, well, they’ll just have to dine on whatever meat they can find.
This is it. The end of the road. A hundred yards ahead, the city spreads out below the thicket of jagged rebar that marks where the freeway has collapsed. I get low in the saddle. Every time we hit a pothole, Lucifer’s armor collides with the gas tank and kicks sparks into my eyes. I’m blasting down a broken road toward the heart of a half-dead city with fireworks burning my face. Whatever happens next, it’s a hell of a trip.
Jetting off the end of the freeway, the universe goes quiet and a ghost melody fills my head. “The Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish” by Martin Denny. Carlos’s favorite song on the jukebox at the real Bamboo House of Dolls. I picture home but I’m still in Hell. What am I doing wrong?
The front of the bike noses down toward the rubble.
Did I use up all the armor’s power on Brimborion?
Wouldn’t that be a hilarious goddamn end to everything?
The ground comes up fast. “The Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish” mixes with the rising sound of the engine. What did I expect? Fucking up is my true home and I’m heading there fast.
I wish I had a cigarette.
Then there’s nothing at all.
Then there’s something.
The front wheel hits pavement. A rush of vertigo. Lights. Smeared and jittering. The nothing parts like heavy curtains. Or a trapdoor.
The rear wheel drops. The impact is like being rear-ended by a battleship. I can’t hold the bike. So I lean it to the side. Lay it down and let it slide. Ten or twenty yards. The asphalt grinds against my legs but the leathers hold. I’m not so sure about the coat. Have I mentioned I’m hard on clothes?
When the bike finally stops, it’s sliced a deep groove in the roadbed. I grab the handlebars, get my weight low, and tilt the bike upright. It’s not even scratched.
Welcome home.
It feels good to say it and mean it. How do I know? The place doesn’t smell like bad meat and misery. The sky is clear and full of stars. Clue number three: the bike’s stopped right in front of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Tombstones never looked so good.
A big screen is set up by the columbarium. People sit and sprawl on blankets among the dead. Movie night at the cemetery. It’s not as weird as it might sound. On Día de los Muertos, families offer food and eat meals with their dead. In Hollywood, we show up with offerings of cowboys and show tunes.
Tonight we’re entertaining our favorite stiffs with a pristine print of The Bad Seed. Pigtailed moppet Patty McCormack just set Leroy the janitor on fire and her mother and best friend watch him burn from an upstairs window. How are you enjoying the movie so far, dead people? We could have shown The Sound of Music but we thought we’d scare the last few scraps of coffin jerky off your bones.
I’m back on the bike when I notice a kid by the cemetery gates. A girl in a frilly blue party dress. Maybe nine or ten years old and she’s all alone. Who brings their kid to a murder movie in a graveyard drive-in and lets her run off alone? Hell, who brings their kid to one of these things at all? The place is half stoners and speed-freak hipsters. The moment the show is over the whole block will turn into one big bumper-car ride.
The kid doesn’t move. Just stares at me until she realizes I’m staring back. Then she turns and runs through the cemetery gates. I can hear her laughing all the way across the street. With an attitude like that, she’s going to grow up and start a mind-blowing band or become a serial killer. I flash on Candy: that could have been her years ago bouncing into Hollywood Forever, a tombstone Disneyland for kids too carnivorous for teacup rides and cotton candy.
I step on the kick-starter and the bike fires up on the first try.
First question. Where’s Candy? No way she’s at the Beat Hotel anymore. What’s the second choice? L.A. is a lot to take in when it’s not on fire. I can’t get used to seeing the sky. I need to get my bearings and screw my head on straight.
I’m starting to feel just a little conspicuous on this Hellion hog, with a headlight that could blind the space shuttle, no driver’s license, license plate, title, or insurance. Not that I ever had any of those things. But now I don’t have them and I’m on an illegally imported foreign motorcycle. Back on Earth thirty seconds and I’m already a felon. Welcome home, shithead. I’ll stick to the side streets for now.
I cross Hollywood Boulevard and pull the bike into the alley next to Maximum Overdrive video, the store where I lived with Kasabian. Kasabian used to be dead. I know because I cut off his head. It’s where I’ve been staying since I got back from Hell the first time, which makes it the closest thing I’ve had to a home in eleven years.
A man and a woman walk by holding hands as I turn into the alley. It looks like they’ve been picnicking by a coal-mine fire. Their hands and faces—every exposed patch of skin—is smeared with gritty dirt, but their clothes are clean and pressed. I’ve never see two dirtier clean people in my life. They catch me looking at them and cross to the other side of the street.
The alley by Max Overdrive is a snowdrift of junk. The Dumpster overflows with plastic trash bags and food cartons. There are enough broken bottles that the alley looks like a salt plain. I don’t think the garbage has been picked up in weeks. I steer the bike and park in the Dumpster’s shadow.
In the old days I’d use the Key to the Room of Thirteen Doors to walk into the store through a shadow but Saint James has that. I take the duffel off the bike, get out the black blade, and slip the tip into the door lock. One turn and it clicks open.
Inside, the place stinks of paint. The floors and display stands are covered with plastic drop cloths, but there’s a fine layer of dust on them. No one’s done any work in a long time.