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“Here’s the deal. You can walk away but you have to do something for me. What do you think? You ready to come on down off your high-and-mighty for a second and make a deal?”
“I don’t seem to have a choice.”
“Sure you do. But one of them isn’t pretty.”
The angel nods.
“All right.”
I let my Gladius go out. The angel tries to stand, but he’s favoring the side where I slashed him. I take his other arm and help him up.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” he says. “The nephilim. The monster who kills monsters.”
“I’ll give you an autograph, but if it shows up on eBay, I’m going to be mad.”
“You are an Abomination and will not pass through these holy gates.”
I should have seen that coming. Never trust an angel.
We both fire up our Gladiuses and go at each other. Even hurt, the angel is inhumanly fast and strong, but so am I. He’s not going to fall for the same trick twice, so I stay in close to him. He can’t get a good swing at me, and with his injured arm he can’t push me back enough to put me in dissecting range. But he figures out what I’m doing and kicks my leg. When I stumble he gets an overhead shot at my back. I see it coming and turn my shoulders so he only gets a piece of me. Still, the blow burns like nothing I’ve ever felt before. It feels a lot like a magic flaming sword.
I snap my head up under his chin and knock him back. I swing at his shoulder, but the prick has been playing possum. He grabs my throat with what I thought was his injured arm, raises his sword with the other, and brings it down at my head. I kick out my feet and fall backward, pulling him down with me. As we fall I swing my sword up between us. The angel lands on top of me and my Gladius goes out.ar isn’t a car anymore. It’s a big metal cigarette butt a giant stubbed out in a six-lane concrete ashtray. I pull my leg off the bumper and let it drop to the ground. I was expecting a lot of blood, but there isn’t any. I check my arms. No bones sticking out. I feel for the knee I left behind in the car. It’s on my leg right where it should be. My clothes aren’t even ripped. The plastic rabbit is laying in the grit by my head. I pick it up and wobble to my feet. Mustang Sally was right. I went through the Dahlia and came out me again. But where am I?
I’m still at the crossroads. Sort of. This isn’t the underpass from last night. This one is an underpass and nothing else. There isn’t any freeway on either side of it, just cracked hardpan in both directions. The concrete support and the car are half buried in sand, like they’ve been there a hundred years. The sun is so bright out in the open that I can’t see anything. The only thing I’m sure of is that this isn’t L.A. and it sure as hell isn’t Hell.
I go out the far side of the underpass into the light. I have to close my eyes until my eyes adjust to the glare. When I can see, there’s nothing to see, just sand and more sand. Big rippling dunes curving down to little dunes. They go on forever. There’s a miserable path of compacted dirt leading between the sand hills. A few parched and poisonous-looking weeds stick up along the sides of the path. I go back through the underpass and check the other side. It’s the same. I’m in the middle of a goddamn desert. And this side doesn’t even have a little path, so I head back out the other.
When I’m out I grab hold of the rusted guardrail and pull myself onto the Twilight Zone slice of freeway. A road sign is suspended across all eight lanes. One of the support legs has fallen, but it’s still readable. Big white letters studded with reflectors on a green background. Typical California freeway stuff. The sign reads:
WELCOME TO NOD
POPULATION 0
A second smaller sign points to where an exit might have been a million years ago. It reads:
EDEN 10 MILES WEST
The arrow at the bottom points in the same direction as the dirt path. I climb down and start walking.
IT’S AS HOT as a dragon’s balls. I have my coat off and thrown over my shoulder before I’ve gone fifty yards. I don’t do outdoors. I’ll take the arena any day over this Miami damnation tanning contest.
Bava showing up and sticking her bony fingers in my skull really threw me at the end. If something has gone wrong and I’m stuck in an afterlife cow town somewhere between Nowhere and Fuck All it could be my fault.
Alice was a mole feeding the Sub Rosa intel about my life and me? I don’t buy it. That’s exactly the kind of psyops party trick Mason would come up with. Then he’d get Aelita to tell Bava because she’s security and security believes anything a superior or a halo tells them.
I don’t believe it, but the angel won’t shut up about it. I think the Black Dahlia might have shaken something loose in its head. I’m the unreasonable one in this Laurel and Hardy act, but it’s jabbering away in a frantic stream of What if? Could it be? And that explains everything.
Maybe the angel can’t deal with being on this side of death or whatever this is. Have I blown its tiny feathered brain? This treasure hunt was going to be hard enough with Little Mary Sunshine whispering to me, but it’s going to be a whole lot worse if I end up with a crazy person trying to claw his way out of my skull.
The simple truth of it is that Alice couldn’t be a mole. I would have felt it if she was Sub Rosa. Alice is the only person I never bullshitted or lied to. She’s the only person I ever really trusted. That means if she was what Bava says and I missed it, everything I’ve ever believed about my life or myself is wrong.
My human father, the one stuck with the lousy job of raising me after a certain angel called Kinski knocked up my mom, hated me. He even took a shot at me once when we were deer hunting. So much for the father-son three-leg race at the church picnic.
My mother loved me, but was lost at sea most of the time when I was growing up. The drinking and pills didn’t help. I don’t remember a single moment when she didn’t seem lonely. She jumped at every sound in the yard or at the door like she was expecting someone who was never there.
There’s Vidocq, who’s been more of a fatherend of a f to me than my civilian father or Kinski. He’s the only other person I trust as much as Alice. Trusted.
I don’t see how Bava’s bullshit could be true, but Alice did hold out on me at least once. One night she told me that she was rich and that she came from heavy money. She never said much else about her family, but I always took that to mean she was as far from hers as I was from mine. Was she about to confess that all that filthy lucre came from Daddy’s late-night infomercial magic-wand business or youth potions from Elizabeth Báthory’s blood?
