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“That’s you in about thirty seconds. Give me a name and a location.”
He stares down at the remains of his adorable red rat.
“Look at me. A name.”
“I can’t. No matter what you do to me, they’ll do worse.” I smash the hammer on the table.
“I’m so tired of hearing that from you faction people. Don’t tell me they’ll do worse because you don’t know what I’ll do unless I get a name quick.”
He looks at me.
“You are on a schedule, aren’t you? How interesting.”
I smash a raven and a rattlesnake.
He puts his hands on the table behind him and leans back.
“The answer is still no.”
Rose doesn’t just manufacture animals. The last time I ran into him, he’d even created a few pretend humans. They hurt people. They killed them. I don’t like him for it.
I bring the hammer down hard on his left hand.
He screams and cradles his crushed mitt to his chest.
“You bastard,” he says. “You fucking animal.”
I point to him with the hammer.
“That hand they can fix in the hospital. The next one I’ll smash with hoodoo and you’ll never use it again.”
He half-walks, half-stumbles down the rows of tables. I follow him, resting the hammer on my shoulder.
He stops at a table set off by itself against the far wall.
“Do any of these look familiar?” he sa
ys.
The creatures on this table aren’t like the others. None of them are from this world; they come from other dimensional planes of existence. Most I’ve only seen in drawings.
When he sees me staring, Rose says, “These are my most prized creations. Not even captains of industry or the governor could afford one. These go to heads of state.”
I tap the hammer in my hand.
“Or heads of Wormwood.”
“Exactly,” he says.
There’s a scaly, white boa constrictor with a face like a boiled baby’s. A beautiful bare-breasted sphinx. With her eyes closed, it looks like she’s asleep. At the far end of the table is a small manticore. You see them all over Hell, although they’re usually bigger. It has a craggy humanlike head, the body of a lion, and a thick scorpion tail.
I rest the hammer on the table near the sphinx.
“What if I smash every one of these? It won’t just be money you’re out, will it? Important people are waiting for these.”
“Very important,” he says. “Very dangerous.”
I hold the head of the hammer and use the wooden butt to push the sphinx slowly to the edge of the table.
