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“Don’t sweat Hell, Father. There are Hellions down there and damned souls that owe me favors. I’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”
The window is down a little on his side of the car. He pushes his hair back with a hand as lined and creased as his face. He does a little grunting laugh.
“I’ve read the most powerful and harrowing demonic texts you can imagine, and this conversation is still the strangest thing I’ve heard. You really think you can make deals with fallen angels?”
“There are Hellions down there with more honor than half the humans I meet.”
“That’s not terribly comforting, but I suppose it will have to do.”
“That pretty much sums up Hell.”
The road smooths out as we near the top. I can just see Avila’s blackened roof through the trees.
I say, “Too bad guys like us can’t apply for unemployment. You think they have special forms for being fired by a deity?”
“I heard you worked for Lucifer. Lucifer isn’t God.”
“You don’t spend enough time in Hollyginime in wood.”
Traven looks up through the trees. He’s spotted Avila, too. Candy is kicking the back of my seat again, bored with the talk and the drive. She wants to get her teeth into a demon. My kind of girl.
Traven says, “You’ve told me some of what you know about the universe; now let me tell you something. If you want to know why the world and all of Creation is so broken and afflicted, look up the word ‘demiurge.’ ”
Traven turns to look at Vidocq.
“If I’m killed today, I want you to take my library. I trust you to take care of my books.”
“I would be honored,” Vidocq says. “But there will be no dying today.”
“Demiurge?” I say. “That sounds like it has something to do with God, and not in a good way. Hell, I’ve burned so many bridges with the celestial types, I’d probably be better off cozying up to your Angra Om Ya pals than to any of the local celestial types.”
“Then I think all you’ll have to do is wait.”
“I was joking. The Angra Om Ya are dead.”
“What does death mean to a god?”
“You think the old gods are coming back?”
“I don’t think they ever left.”
I SWING THE car into the big circular driveway out front and park. We get out and Traven takes the duffel bag from Vidocq.
Avila has seen better days. Most of the roof has fallen in, leaving charred wood overhead, a puzzle palace of broken beams. The place has been thoroughly looted, trashed, and tagged by waves of squatters and skate punks. Moldy leather armchairs and silk-covered love seats surround the remains of a fire pit someone has chopped out of the driveway with who knows what improvised tools. A broken roulette wheel is almost lost in the grass that grows wild on all sides of the building. The ground glitters like a disco ball from all the broken glass. Even the walls are ripped open and the copper pipes inside are long gone.
“So this is what the gates of hell looks like,” says Father Traven.
“No,” says Vidocq. “Le palais de merde.”
Even with everything that’s been thrown at it since New Year’s, the front door is still standing, like Avila’s last dying gesture was giving the finger to the world. Maybe when we’re done, I’ll let Josef and his bunch loose on the place.
I gesture for the others to stay back, and push open the door. I’ve never walked into Avila through the front before, only out, and that was just the one time. I mostly went into the place through shadows, and then only to kill people. The good old days when things were simpler.
I have the na’at and knife in my coat and the .460 cocked and locked up and ready to kill any spooky sounds or scary shadows.
Even though much of the roof is gone, it’s dim inside, so I let my eyes adjust and then sweep the room. Nothing moves. Nothing makes a sound. It’s as quiet as a pulled-pork-rib joint next to a synagogue.
I wave the others inside.
