Devil Said Bang (11 page)

I shove Brimborion over to the corner of the room.
He’s not going anywhere until I know if contestant number two is someone he
sent. If he’s looking for some payback because of his finger, he’s going to be
disappointed.

The bathroom door swings open slowly and a Hellion
walks out. You could mistake the guy for human if his arms and legs weren’t half
again as long as they should be. And if his skin wasn’t the color of a dead fish
on the ocean floor. He’s wet too. I hear running water. Sounds like he ripped
the sink out of the wall.

“Lahash?” says Brimborion. “What are you doing
here?”

Lahash takes a couple of uncertain steps out of the
bathroom. He looks up but barely registers us. I’m liking Lahash less and less.
The guy is on some major drugs or some heavy hoodoo. The bedroom is huge by
normal non–Lord of the Underworld standards, but if it was the size of a
zeppelin hangar, I still wouldn’t want to be in it with this guy.

“Lahash. I’m talking to you,” says Brimborion. “How
did you get in here?”

I shove Brimborion back against the wall.

“Shut up. There’s something wrong with him.”

Lahash stiffens. Turns his milky-white eyes in my
direction. He recognizes my voice. No point in playing church mouse now.

“Who sent you here, Lahash? Are you looking for me
or something in here?”

He swings his head to the other side of the room
like he’s trying to remember where he is. There’s a brain working somewhere in
his skull but it looks like the wiring is a little frayed.

Brimborion makes a break for the door. I sweep his
feet, cutting him down at the ankles so he falls on his face. Lahash shrieks
like a banshee in a blender and throws himself across the bed, crawling toward
us.

There’s a good twenty feet between Lahash and me. I
shove Brimborion back in the corner with one hand and pull the Glock’s trigger
with the other. The bullet hits Lahash above his left eye. He freezes, arms
stiff. Like I caught him in mid-push-up. A second later his eyes lock back on me
and he’s crawling again. Faster this time.

I put two more shots into his head. He doesn’t
slow. He stands on the bed, knees bent like he’s going to jump. I put five shots
into his chest dead center.

I should have stuck with head shots.

Lahash doesn’t fall. He falls apart. His bones seem
to crack and separate under his skin. Holes in his chest sag into slits and open
like a plastic sandwich bag, only it’s not egg salad on wheat inside. It’s bugs.
Lots and lots of bugs.

Behind me Brimborion alternates between
hyperventilating and doing a passable impression of Little Richard’s falsetto.
I’m kind of at a loss myself. I never tried to beat up bugs before. Do you work
the body or rope-a-dope them?

With nothing better to do, I fire off a few rounds
into the writhing pile. No reaction from the bugs, but I’m pretty sure I
murdered my bed.

The only thing that’s kept Brimborion and me alive
these few seconds is that when the bugs burst out of Lahash, they began eating
him. Now the first wave is getting bored with his dead ass and wants fresh
meat.

I throw some arena hoodoo at the swarm, a simple
slam-down move that feels like someone driving a knee into your solar plexus.
The middle of the swarm stops like it smacked into an invisible wall, but the
other billon little bastards flood around it.

I could do an airburst and explode all the oxygen
in the room. That would kill the bugs, but in an enclosed space like this, it
would blow out my lungs and turn my organs into cat food. Some kind of fire is
my best weapon but this is the wrong terrain. I go for the next best thing.

I crawl to the corner of the room with Brimborion.
Bite down as hard as I can on my right hand until I draw blood, and splatter it
on the floor between the bugs and me. The blood is like slop to pigs. They head
right for it, lapping it up. I keep flicking my hand, throwing out as much blood
as I can between the bugs and me. That sucks but it’s the next part that’s
really going to hurt.

Whispering some bad black Hellion hoodoo, I punch
through the wall above a wall socket. Feel for the wires with my bloody hand and
grab the bare copper leads where they touch the wires going to the plug.

The average human body doesn’t react well to having
120 volts blasted through it. In fact, it tries really hard to get away, so when
you force it to do something as stupid as grab live wires and not let go, you
get to experience the twin thrills of excruciating pain and a total revolt by
your skin and bones because your body doesn’t understand what your mind is
making it do. It’s pain on every level of your being. Nerves, muscles, and skin
all trying to crawl away from each other. But you hold on because it’s the only
thing keeping you alive and your body can goddamn well cowboy up and deal with
it.

The hoodoo kicks in just as I’m starting to black
out. Blood kick-starts dark magic like nothing else, and when the hoodoo hits,
my bedroom turns into the Fourth of goddamn July as the electricity flowing
through my bloody hand explodes from the splattered patches of blood on the
floor. Writhing drifts of bugs fry instantly. Thousands are blown into the air
by the force of the blast. The bugs spin like pinwheels, each trailing a tiny
lightning bolt from its head to the bloody floor. It’s all skyrockets and flare
guns in here. And when the bugs fall, they’re as crisp and dead as autumn
leaves.

I pull my hand out of the wall and fall flat on my
back. My knees are vibrating. My jaw aches from being clenched so hard. I look
down at my hand. Have you ever started cooking bacon, gotten a phone call, and
forgotten about it until you smelled charred pig? That’s me. I am bacon. Hear me
roar. On the upside, the bite is nicely cauterized.

Behind me, I hear Brimborion push back the table he
was hiding behind. He crawls over to me. There’s a neat, clean bandage wrapped
around one of his hands.

“You saved me,” he says.

I look up at him sitting above me.

“What?”

He sits back on his haunches. Rests his back
against the wall.

Brimborion says, “I don’t understand you. Yesterday
you cut off my finger and today you save my life. What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m just really tired.”

“You could have thrown me to those things and
gotten away.”

“I’ll have to remember it for next time.”

He leans over me and makes a face like he smells
spoiled milk.

“Your hand looks awful.”

“ ‘Awful’ is a kind of relative term. I mean, it
looks better than Lahash.”

Brimborion lifts his head to get a better look at
the smear of bone and gristle on the bed.

“You knew him. Who was he?”

“An herbalist,” Brimborion says. “He worked with
the palace thaumaturgists. I used to buy . . . things from him.”

“You mean he’s your dealer.”

“If you wish.”

“Did he have access to the good stuff?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like maybe hypnotics. Something that would loosen
him up enough for psychic control.”

“Do you think that’s what happened to him?”

“I don’t know. What kind of persuading would it
take for you to sit still while someone pumped you full of carnivorous
bugs?”

Brimborion crosses his arms. Uncrosses them. Leans
his head against the wall and looks at the ceiling.

I roll over onto my Kissi arm, the only part of me
that doesn’t hurt, and push myself into a sitting position. I try to move my
burned fingers. When they flex, flakes of black skin drop off, revealing
blistered red flesh underneath. At least there’s enough good skin left to
heal.

“Would you like me to get you something?”
Brimborion asks.

“What?” I say, my brain and body not quite on
speaking terms yet.

Brimborion points to my hand.

“Would you like me to get you something for that?
The palace witches make some powerful healing potions.”

“Yeah. Sure,” I say. “And some cigarettes. I really
need a cigarette.”

“I’ll be back.”

He pushes himself to his feet.

“Don’t tell anyone about this. Especially not
Vetis. I don’t want to be up to my eyeballs in security,” I say. “Act like
nothing happened. That should give whoever set this up something to think
about.”

“You don’t even want the room cleaned?”

“Leave it just like it is.”

“I understand.”

He starts to leave.

“What did you say when you first came in?”

He goes to the end of the bed, picks up an envelope
and a rectangular box from the floor, and brings them to me.

“I had your mail.”

“That all came today?”

“The box yesterday. The notes before. I don’t
remember when.”

“You wouldn’t have given me any of this if we
hadn’t had our little talk in the hall last night.”

“No.”

“Why these particular letters?”

He shakes his head.

“They weren’t the usual official correspondence.
Holding them back would make sure you stayed isolated.”

“People pay you off to hold back certain messages
and to give me others.”

Brimborion shrugs.

“Everyone in the palace has something on the side.
It’s the generals who get rich. Not civil servants.”

“Who paid you to hold on to these?”

He looks at the bed.

“Lahash.”

That’s a nice way of covering your trail. Don’t
just kill the guy who knows too much. Turn him into a suicide bug bomb.

“If someone wants to assassinate you, there must be
easier ways,” says Brimborion.

“They tried easier. Now they tried this. Watch your
ass. You work for me, so sooner or later you’re going to be on the bug list
too.”

He touches his hand to his chest, about where
Lahash burst open. He turns and goes out, pulling the doors closed behind
him.

I use my teeth to pull the glove off my Kissi hand.
I’ll be using it a lot the next few days.

I undo a couple of buttons on my shirt and slip my
burned hand inside like it’s a sling. The feeling is starting to come back,
meaning it already hurts like hell. I growl Hellion hoodoo and the blackened
skin on my hand lightens to its skin color. I’ve never been great at healing
magic but at least I can make the hand look normal while it heals. I just won’t
be penning Candy any sonnets over the next few days.

I pull the black blade from my waistband. It feels
weird doing it lefty. Prop the box between my knees and slice it open. It’s what
I thought. The bottle Bill sent me. I stick the point of the knife in the floor,
twist the cap off the bottle, and take a long drink. Bill was right. It’s not
half bad by Hell standards.

I toss the box over by the dead bugs and look at
the first envelope. Printed in a perfect, precise script on the first envelope
is the single word
Stark
. The envelope is made of
something almost transparent. Like rice paper, only tougher. Barely visible
angelic script is woven into the paper’s fibers. I hold it in my teeth and,
using the black blade like a letter opener, shake the envelope until the letter
falls out.

Dear James,

I know by now you must
hate me and you have every right to.

I only have to read a sentence to know who sent it.
Mr. Muninn.

I should have been
truthful with you from the moment you talked about returning to Hell. For
that I’m sorry. You have my best wishes, my prayers, and my full confidence
that you’ll make a safe return home. I wish I could say more but time is
short. By now I’m sure you know that my brother, Neshamah, is dead by
Aelita’s hand. She and my other brother, Ruach, the part of us that still
rules in Heaven, seem to have come to some sort of vicious understanding.
Aelita means to kill the rest of us and Ruach has agreed to let her, leaving
him alone to rule. I should leave Los Angeles, in fact this world, but I’ve
come to love it so. For now I’ll lose myself in the tunnels where the dead
once roamed under the city. I suppose it’s a pathetic fate for a deity but
one I probably deserve for deserting my brothers and not doing my part to
stop this madness long ago.

Take care of yourself, my
boy. I’m sure we’ll meet again.

Protect the
Singularity.

With warmest
regards,

Muninn

I guess it’s nice that one of us thinks I’m getting
out of this alive but it’s annoying how wrong Muninn is. I don’t hate him. I’m
pissed. I want to strangle him, but only until he turns some funny colors. Not
until he’s dead. The guy is scared to death and I understand that. Plus, he
apologized, which is more than I can say for Saint James.

There’s nothing written on the second envelope. I
turn it over. It’s closed with a red wax seal imprinted with twisted, angular
lines like a piece of rusty bailing wire in an old barn. Samael’s sigil is as
crooked as he is.

Dearest Jimmy. Or, if you
prefer, your Infernal Majesty,

I bet you’ve had a few
chuckles when you found out that all my plans and machinations designed to
return me to Heaven returned me to one ruled by a bastard and a fool. I’ve
laughed about it a few times myself, but only in private and very, very
quietly.

Have assassins given you
any interesting new scars? Murder is unsettling when you’re on the receiving
end, isn’t it, Sandman Slim? Worst of all, it destroys your ability to
trust, which is the point of this note. When you have no allies to go to for
help, there’s only one logical solution. Go to your enemies. When your back
is against the wall, ask yourself this question: which bastard has the most
to gain by helping me?

Here’s hoping this note
finds you as charming and unmurdered as ever.

Yours in
Christ,

Samael