Authors: Richard Kadrey
“Don’t worry. The civilian media won’t see either of us. This is purely for the benefit of our sort of people.”
“The Sub Rosa.”
“Exactly.”
“Is that who owns the studio?”
“No. It’s a civilian gentleman, but most of his staff is Sub Rosa. The studio even has an outreach program, providing unskilled jobs to Lurkers that want to crawl out of the sewers and into the real world.”
“Sub Rosas get the corner office and Lurkers get to clean the toilets. Same as it ever was.”
“That sounds like class warfare, Jimmy. You’re not a socialist, are you?”
“Considering who and what I am …”
“An abomination?”
“Right. Considering that most Sub Rosa probably consider me a Lurker, do you really want me around so one of them can say something cute at a party and I have to pry his head off with a shrimp fork?”
Lucifer seems to think for a moment, sets down his drink, and leans forward in his seat. He speaks very quietly.
“Do you think for one second that I would allow any of the walking excrement that infests this world to insult me or anyone in my employ? You might be a natural-born killer, but I specialize in torment that lasts a million years. You think you’ve seen horrors because you were in the arena. Trust me, you have no idea what real horror looks like or the terrible things I’ve done to keep my throne. You’ll be by my side while I’m in Los Angeles because in this task and in all others, I’m as much your bodyguard as you are mine.”
It’s moments like this, when Lucifer gets rolling and the words and the intensity start flowing, that I understand how one lone angel convinced a third of Heaven’s worker bees to turn the dump over. And that was just the third with the cojones to follow him. I have a feeling that a lot of other angels listened, but were too scared to join the party. If I was some lower-class grease-monkey angel caught in the cross fire of an argument between Lucifer and Aelita—oh wait, I am—I’d probably think twice about giving God the finger and running off to never-never land with Satan and the Lost Boys. But I’d still go.
I want to ask what that part about us being each other’s bodyguard means, but when he gets like this, it’s scary to ask direct questions, so I go another way.
“What do I have to do as your bodyguard?”
He picks up his drink and relaxes like nothing ever happened.
“Not much. I don’t expect any trouble, but all the major celebrities travel with their own security these days. Who
better for me to have by my side than Sandman Slim? All you have to do is remember to wear pants and occasionally look menacing. Really, you’ll be less my bodyguard and more of a branding opportunity, like Ronald McDonald.”
“It sounds better and better all the time.”
“You’ve already taken a lot of my money and you’re not in a position to pay it back, so let’s not argue the point. You know you’re going to take the job. You knew it before you walked in here.”
“When do I start?”
“Tomorrow night. Mr. Ritchie, the head of the studio, is throwing me a little welcome party. We’ll make our debut then.”
“I have something I have to do later tonight.”
“I’m not going anywhere tonight, so feel free.”
“Does Kasabian know about all this?”
“Why would I tell him my business? His job is to send me information.”
“What’s he been telling you about me?”
“That you’re at loose ends. That you’re depressed. That you’re drunk much of the time. That ever since you locked up Mason, all you’ve done is kill things, smoke, and drink. You need to get out more, Jimmy. This will be the perfect job for you. You’ll meet lots of exciting new people to hate.”
“I hope you’re a better salesman when you’re buying suckers’ souls.”
He pours us both more Aqua Regia. When he holds out the pack of Maledictions, I take one and he lights it for me.
“I’m not a salesman. I don’t have to be. People offer me
their souls every second of every day. They bring them to my door ready to eat. It’s like having pizza delivered.”
“You’re making me hungry. There any food around here?”
“You want to eat with me? You don’t know much mythology, do you? Persephone’s story?”
“Who’s she?”
“She was abducted by Hades and taken to the Underworld, where she ate a single pomegranate seed. She was able to return home, but for the rest of her life she had to spend half of the year with her husband on earth and half of the year with Hades in the Underworld.”
“Was she hungry when she ate the seed?”
“I expect so.”
“Then what’s the problem? I once ate some greasy scrambled eggs at a truck stop near Fresno and puked and shit myself for two days. That was six months in Hell right there.”
Lucifer picks up a phone next to his chair.
“I’ll call room service.”
L
ATER, MY
P
HONE
goes off. It’s Wells texting me the address of where I’m supposed to meet him. I go out the
Alice in Wonderland
clock and down to the garage, where top-of-the-line cars are laid out like Christmas morning on repo-man island. There’s a white ’57 T-bird with a white top. I pop the knife into the ignition, fire it up, and head outside. On my way out of the lot, I nod to the valet I gave the Bugatti to. He raises one arm and gives me an unsure little half wave. He won’t be able to keep the Veyron, of course, the
cops and insurance company will make sure of that, but I hope he gets to have some fun before he has to ditch it.
I D
RIVE EAST
along Sunset. Cut south into what the chamber of commerce calls Central City East, but the rest of the universe calls skid row. The corner of Alameda and East Sixth is so boring and anonymous it’s amazing it’s allowed on maps. Warehouses, metal fences, dusty trucks, and a handful of beat-up trees that look like they’re on parole from tree jail. I turn right on Sixth and drive until I find a vacant lot. It’s not hard. A half dozen of the Vigil’s stealth supervans are parked by the curb, looking just a little out of place. Flying saucers at a rodeo.
The lot isn’t one hundred percent vacant. There’s a small house in the middle, an overgrown wood-frame shit box that’s so swallowed up by weeds, vines, and mold that I can’t even tell the original color. It’s not much more than a shack. A leftover from the days when L.A. was open enough to have orchards, oil wells, and sheep farms. Not that this place was ever any of those.
Rich Sub Rosas aren’t like rich civilians. Civilians wear their wealth on their sleeve. They get flash cars, like the Bugatti. Twenty-thousand-dollar watches that can tell you how long it takes an electron to fart. And big beautiful mansions in the hills, like Avila, far away from God’s abandoned children, the flatlanders.
Sub Rosa wealth works on sort of the opposite idea. How secret and invisible can you make yourself, your wealth, and your power? Big-time Sub Rosa families don’t live in Westwood, Benedict Canyon, or the hills. They prefer
abandoned housing projects and ugly anonymous commercial areas with strip malls or warehouses. If they’re lucky or been around long enough, they might have scored themselves an overgrown wood-frame shit box in a vacant lot on skid row. Chances are this house has looked exactly this feral and miserable for the last hundred years. Before that, it was probably a broken-down log cabin.
I park the T-bird across the street and jog over to the house. Just a few streetlights and warehouse security lights. There’s nothing else alive. Not a headlight in sight.
There’s a tarnished knocker on the door. I use it. A woman opens the door. Another marshal. She’s in the female equivalent of Wells’s men-in-black chic.
“Evening, ma’am, I’m collecting for UNICEF.”
“Stark, right? Get in here. Marshal Wells is waiting.”
“And you are?”
“No one you need to know.”
She lets me inside. The interior of the place is as rotten and decayed as the outside. She leads me into the kitchen.
“Nice. Defensiveness and moral superiority in two-point-four seconds. A new land speed record.”
“Marshal Wells said you liked to talk.”
“I’m a people person.”
“Is that before or after you cut people’s heads off?”
“I only cut off my enemies’ heads. I break my friends’ hearts.”
“So, that’s, what, zero hearts broken?”
“The night’s still young.”
She stops by the door. Where the back porch would be, if it hadn’t collapsed back when Columbus took his big cruise.
“Wells is in the study.”
“Thanks, Julie.”
“How did you know my name is Julie?”
Her heartbeat just spiked. I’m here in the middle of the night and being underpaid because of Wells. I don’t need to take it out on her. I smile, trying to look pleasant and reassuring.
“It’s nothing. Just a silly trick.”
“Don’t do it again.”
“It’d be a little stupid guessing someone’s name twice.”
Marshal Julie listens to something coming through her earpiece.
She says “Got it” into her cuff and looks at me.
“Is that your Thunderbird across the street?”
“No.”
“But you drove it here.”
“Yes.”
“You came here in a stolen vehicle?”
“Define ‘stolen.’ It’s not like I’m keeping it.”
“I don’t suppose you have the keys?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
She walks back to the front door, talking to whoever is in her earpiece.
“I need someone to evacuate a red and white Thunderbird coupe from the 6th Street inquiry.”
I head out back, pretty sure that Marshal Julie will not be my secret Santa at the Homeland Security Christmas party.
I’
VE ALREADY GONE
down one rabbit hole tonight at the Chateau, so it’s no surprise that the house beyond the porch
door has nothing to do with the wreck I entered. The house through the door is a sprawling old-fashioned California mansion. Very western. Almost cowboy. Lots of wood. Two-story-high ceilings. Leather and animal-print furniture right out of an old Rat Pack movie. Massive picture windows look out over the desert and San Gabriel Mountains.
This, the Sub Rosa house hidden inside the other, is crowded with Wells’s people. There are at least a dozen forensic agents in the living room alone. They’re using a lot of strange gear I’ve never seen before, more of the Vigil’s weird angelic technology. The room is full of agents lost behind flashing lights, on their knees shoving beeping probes under furniture or lost behind transparent floating screens showing weird images of supermagnified carpet fibers.
“Down here, dead man.”
It’s Wells, yelling to me from the far end of the house. He never gets tired of reminding me that I’m officially dead and off the radar of the cops and most of the government. But only as long as I make nice with the Vigil. It’s a good threat. Without them, my life would be a lot more complicated.
I pass another ten agents in the hall on the way to the study and six more in the study. Between agents chattering, vacuums sucking up evidence, and probes flying around checking for aether residue, I can hardly hear my own voice.
“Why the hell do you need so many people, Wells?”
The marshal doesn’t look at me. He’s staring off at something across the room.
“You do your job and let my people do theirs.”
What Wells is looking at is worthy of some top-drawer staring. There’s an altar and above it, a six-foot-tall statue
of Santa Muerte, a kind of grim reaper parody of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Despite her bony looks, she’s someone her believers pray to for protection. I guess whoever owned the statue wasn’t very good at it. It looks like half of his blood is sprayed across Saint Death, the altar, and the walls. The rest is in a nice congealed pool of rust-colored Jell-O around what’s left of his body. You can’t even call what’s on the floor a corpse. There isn’t enough of it. It looks like he tried to crawl into a jet engine, changed his mind, and tried to crawl out again.
I say, “I think he’s dead.”
Wells nods, still staring at the slaughter.
“I’ll be sure to write that down. Anything else?”
“This was no boating accident.”
Wells looks at me like he’s a trash compactor and I’m week-old bacon.
“Damn you, boy. A man is dead here and he was one of yours. Sub Rosa. And he died badly. Do you have anything to contribute to our finding out what the hell happened here?”
I want to get closer to the death scene and I have to walk around several agents to do it. Glad I’m not claustrophobic.
The body is lying in pieces scattered inside a strangely modified calling circle. The edges are sharp. It’s not a circle. It’s a hexagon, a shape only used in dark magic. It looks like at least part of the circle was painted with blood, though it’s hard to be sure with pieces of the guy laid out across the floor like a buffet. There are a lot of bones scattered around. Too many to all be his. He probably used them to reinforce the hexagon.
I have to walk all the way around the room to get back to Wells.
“He doesn’t stink. How long has he been lying there?”
“At least two days. There’s been very little tissue breakdown. No blowfly eggs. Not even rigor mortis in the one elbow joint we found.”
“Did you find anything in aether tracings?”
“There’s definitely dark magic residue. We’re not sure what kind yet.”
I go back to the body and stand as close as I can without touching it. Even without trying, I can feel something radiating off the mangled flesh and bones. But I can’t tell what. It’s ancient and cold. For a minute I wonder if the Kissi could have done it, but there’s no vinegar reek. If Wells’s crew would quiet down for a goddamn second, it probably wouldn’t be hard to figure out. Some of the angel devices are pumping out celestial energy fields, stinking up the aether.
“Can you get these people to quiet the hell down for a minute?”
“This is a priority job. It’s a big crew and everybody works. Do some magic, Sandman Slim. You’ve worked loud rooms before.”
I can’t get hold of whatever it is that’s coming off the body. I touch part of what I think is an arm with the toe of my boot. Turn it over. One of the forensic techs says something.