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Florian and I looked at each other and somehow managed to exchange a fair bit of information in that brief glance. We both had an idea who left that note, and neither of us was particularly happy about it.
“The note, and the person who left it. Was it, I don’t know, a woman in a bikini?”
She raised an eyebrow and scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Fine. Then was it maybe a guy wearing a hoodie? Youngish, looks like a teenager. Sort of dresses like a skater.” I lifted my hand out. “About yay tall?”
Beatrice stopped mid-riffle, then looked me dead in the eye. “How did you know that?”
I grimaced. Of course. Belphegor.
8
Belphegor’s instructions were written in just the sort of lazy, half-hearted scrawl you’d expect from someone whose official designation was the Prince of Sloth. And not much about the instructions he left us had been appealing. We still ended up doing a fast food chicken dinner with Beatrice topside in Valero – where else but at a Happy Chicken, another one of Loki’s cholesterol-laden innovations.
Color me optimistic, but by then I thought it was safe to trust her with the note’s contents. Besides, knowing her, she probably snuck a peek at it before handing it over to us, anyway. It wasn’t like Belphegor bothered with an envelope or anything, just a scrap of paper that anyone could have torn out of a notebook.
It was a good thing we brought it up, too. Between bites of chicken and huge, heaping mouthfuls of mashed potato, Beatrice Rex offered what advice she could on meeting Belphegor’s bizarre standards for a communion. She did, after all, give us some help with tracking down Arachne and her domicile. Never mind that Beatrice happened to be in cahoots with Arachne back then. Different time, different place, water under the bridge and all that.
“I’ve got to admit, this is probably the weirdest communion I’ve ever heard about.” A chicken drumstick in her fingers, Beatrice licked her thumbs before continuing, as if the act of doing so was helping her to think. “The only thing I can really recommend is following the instructions precisely. It’s a good thing Belphegor isn’t asking for specific objects or artifacts to sacrifice, or this could get even more annoying. Or expensive, for that matter.”
A quickly cooling hunk of chicken breast waited to be eaten in my hand as I stared glumly down at Belphegor’s note, which I left facing upwards on our table. In the morning, I told myself. We’ll deal with this in the morning. Right in that moment, all I wanted was some crispy fried chicken skin, potatoes, and maybe one or two biscuits. I just wanted to have a good time while I could,
okay?
We finished off our dinner – Beatrice was very meticulous about eating her chicken down to the bone – and went our separate ways. Of course, for me and Florian, that meant heading back to Paradise together, but as we went off to our respective huts, there was still that cloying sense of unease hanging in the air between us.
See, Belphegor’s instructions specifically called for us to show up before nine in the morning, ostensibly because he expected us to put in a full day of work in his hellhole. Plus it didn’t help that the directions he specified for accessing his domicile were so off-putting.
Creepy, to say the least. The entities all had their idiosyncrasies, sure. Arachne liked fortune cookies from Chinese places. Artemis demanded a tithe of cheesy snacks whenever someone approached her for a favor, preferably a jumbo pack of Snacky Yum-Yums, her favorite brand.
Belphegor didn’t ask for anything especially difficult to find, but it discomfited me still. Every communion needed some blood as part of the offering, sure. Well and good. But the Prince of Sloth seemed to be asking for a little too much blood, if you asked me.
The destination? The Beauregard, an ancient hotel in one of Valero’s more, shall we say, weathered districts. Back in the eighties, it was supposed to be something big, the kind of place where you’d spot a movie star if you were lucky, a nice little retreat from Hollywood, not too near to the limelight, but never too far.
These days, as I saw when our rideshare pulled up, it was probably better off condemned. The building’s facade was peeling, paint jobs from maybe the late nineties at most already chipping away. Anything that hadn’t been eroded by time was weathered by, well, the weather, huge, gross streaks of greenish brown trailing from the mouths of concrete gargoyles that, even in the Beauregard’s heyday, couldn’t have possibly looked anything near classy.
“Imagine what this place looks like at night,” Florian said, shutting the door to our car and waving our driver off.
I looked up at the crappy exteriors, all two floors of bad maintenance and neglect, and shuddered to think. When night fell, the Beauregard probably looked like the perfect Halloween haunted house.
“They should rent this out in October. It’s just creepy enough to work.” I stuck my hands in my pockets, my fingers chilly despite the warmth of the day.
I let Florian take the lead as we approached the building. The both of us had packed to be prepared, based on experience from the last time we’d taken on contract work for an entity. Artemis was really chill about us improvising with tools, letting me use a battle-axe from the Vestments to chop wood when I admitted that I had no alternatives. Priscilla was even around to keep us fed and watered. But this was going to be a whole different kind of work environment.
We had no ideas at all about what to expect from Belphegor – whether the demon prince even cared about safety standards and shit – so you can be damn sure that Florian and I came prepared. We both wore jackets over tank tops, so we could shuck or add layers depending on what kind of climate we were going to be up against. We brought an ample supply of bottled water, too, just in case, tucked safely into Box, who was, in turn, tucked safely into my pocket.
Plus, there was that tiny matter of how we were even supposed to access Belphegor’s domicile in the first place. Getting indoors wasn’t going to be fun even the first time around, and I sure as hell didn’t want to think about what Florian and I would have to do if we went out on a lunch break and had to come back.
Our point person was already standing at the grimy double doors, her sallow face peering out of windows that hadn’t seen a good polishing in possibly decades. Despite how rundown the Beauregard was, though, I still fancied the idea of giving the place a facelift better than whatever Belphegor had in store for us.
Frankly speaking, though, the only good kind of renovation the Beauregard could have seen at that point would have involved a wrecking ball and a stick of dynamite.
“Get in here,” the woman said gruffly. She had the face and build of a bulldog, plus the temper to match, her lips clenched around what I had to assume was her fifth breakfast cigarette, considering the rasp of her voice.
The musty, ancient air of the Beauregard hit us like a cloud as we walked in, almost like a palpable wall of old, dead Hollywood history. Yellowing, peeling black and white portraits of fallen movie stars plastered the walls, tilted off-center and probably left that way after some earthquake.
What used to be a deep, rich red carpet was pulling up at the corners, and the brass knobs and railings of the hotel were specked with stains and verdigris, the patina of a once-glamorous place lost to time. Something like deep sadness permeated the building. This used to be a place of lush luxury, of excess, and I understood immediately why Belphegor kept a tether there.
