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He grins and licks his lips, showing off a jumble of craggy gray teeth, like someone hammered broken cement into his gums. Maybe that’s how God keeps Heaven’s other angels in line. A better dental plan.
“Got a smoke?” he asks.
Something squirms under his grimy face. It looks like my glamour isn’t the problem. It’s his. Too bad I’m so slow on the uptake. By the time I recognize what he is, he has something very pointy and very sharp against my throat. It’s double-pronged. Probably what on earth they’d call a Heretic’s Fork. This fucker isn’t a regular Hellion. He’s a Malebranche, one of thirteen horned bastards that Lucifer kept as his private gestapo and interrogation squad. Even other Hellions hate the Malebranche. My back still hurts from Rizoel’s sword. The last thing I want is to go one-on-one with a professional flesh ripper.
I say, “Looks like you’ve hit hard times.”
“You’ve hit worse unless you have something I want.”
The riot seethes along in its merry way behind us, but the Malebranche and me are in our own cozy little world in the alcove. A bottle breaks above us and we both reflexively turn our heads to avoid the flying glass, but it was random. Even though no one is paying any attention to us, I keep getting hit from behind, which pushes my throat down onto the fork. I hope not enough to break the skin. Human blood would be a dead giveaway.
I look at the Malebranche’s dirty face. His skin is bright red under the grime.
“Which one are you? Rubicante?”
His laugh is high and a little frantic.
“Oh my. Am I still that famous?”
“It’s your pretty face,” I say. “Maybe I have something for you after all.”
I reach into my pocket, feeling Rubicante push the sharp prongs harder against my neck.
“Easy, friend. I wouldn’t want to slip.”
He gives a quick flick of his head at my hand.
“Bring that hand out slowly and bring out something tasty with it or I’ll have to pop outcole to po one of your eyes for a snack.”
The alcove is a dim place and the riot is reflected clearly in the glass behind Rubicante’s head. I feel around in my pocket for a minute, trying to buy some time.
“Any day now, friend,” he says.
I have to do this just right. Or completely wrong. That sometimes works.
I come out with the half pack of Maledictions and Rubicante’s eyes go wide. I hold them out and he takes his eyes off me. I drop the pack and he watches it fall all the way to the ground. I glance at the reflection in the glass door and throw myself out of the way.
A riot cop tossed from the crowd smashes into the Malebranche and they go flying through the shop’s glass door.
I leave Rubicante and the cop playing Twister in the sex shop, grab the Maledictions, and run for Sunset.
It feels like the fall reopened the wound on my back. I don’t want to smell even vaguely alive, so I whisper a little hoodoo and crank up the fumes from my corpse hoodie until I stink like the Dumpster behind a used-ass store. This is going to be a pleasant way to travel.
I’m going to have a hell of a time finding Eleusis if the whole place is as twisted as it was back then. Not that that matters if I’ve been napping for twenty years, Mason has already won, and this really is L.A.
Sunset is as scorched and sterile as a nuke test site. Some of the burning palm fronds fall and others float over the buildings, carried away by weird convection currents.
I stand on the corner and let the angel out of the attic long enough to expand my senses and do a kind of quick minesweep to see if there’s anything alive or lurking in the burned-out buildings. Sunset is dazzling through the angel’s eyes. The smoldering street with its torched trees is like a line of suns down a glory road of trembling atoms and subatomic particles.
The first time I saw Hell, it was a very different story. I was dragged down through Mason’s floor and landed in a naked heap on a main street in Pandemonium. I must have been out cold for a while, and when I came to, the first thing that hit me was the stink. Nothing human smelled like that. It wasn’t just waste. It was filth that had been packed, compressed, and locked away for a million years. Hell is the bottom of the universe and Heaven isn’t going to let Lucifer pollute the rest of existence with Hellion shit and candy wrappers. So they still bury it in the deep, deeper, deepest caverns in their craptacular kingdom, where it sits, cooks, and festers in its own juices until the end of time.
The angel gives the all clear. I shove it out of the way, but I don’t lock it up. Unfortunately, I’m going to need all of me to get through this, and that includes my divine squatter.
I head west down Sunset so I can cut up Las Palmas to Max Overdrive. The strrdrive.angel better be right that it’s clear down here. I’m not above self-trepanation.
I can still see the Hollywood Boulevard riot when I cross Vine Street. And Cahuenga.
Getting down Sunset is harder than the road by the cemetery. The fault lines are wider and the broken pavement is pushed up higher and at steeper angles. Sinkholes have opened around whole blocks, forming skyscraper islands with sewage moats. Maybe that’s why everything feels so wrong. I’ve only gone a couple of blocks but I swear it feels like I’ve been walking for-fucking-ever. Who or whatever built this L.A. got the proportions all wrong. The buildings are right, but some of them are in the wrong place. The Cinerama Dome still looks like a giant golf ball dropped to the earth by aliens, but it’s on the wrong side of the street. Some of the side streets that used to cut across Sunset have twisted around like asphalt taffy and now run parallel.
