Kasabian shooting pool is as graceful as a lobster playing soccer. He scuttles around the green felt tabletop, lines up his shot, and kicks the cue ball with his stubby metal legs. I’m not sure if him playing like that is fair, but y">
“What’s that smell?” he asks.
“Me. I got parboiled by a demon when I was out with Vidocq.”
I shrug off the rifle frock coat Muninn gave me and show him the burns on my arms. I’m doing my best to ignore the pain, but I’m going to need a drink soon. Getting tossed in a meat grinder every now and then is part of what I do. I came back to earth to kill things, so I have to expect things to fight back occasionally.
“Nice. New scars to add to your collection. You collect getting fucked up the way old ladies collect state spoons.”
Kasabian takes a shot and sinks the nine, eleven, and four. Two stripes and a solid.
He says, “I’ll play stripes. Thirteen in the corner,” as he lines up the shot. He sinks it.
I puff on the smoke. I get the feeling he’s not going to leave me much else to do.
“So what kind of a demon was it?”
I shake my head.
“Damned if I know. I’d never seen one like it before.”
He creeps around the table, not looking up.
“What did it look like?”
“Not much. I mean, from a distance it looked like a guy in a cheap suit. But when it got closer, it was all Jell-O and acid. When it grabbed me, bang, I was burning.”
He takes one of the blue chalk cubes from the side of the table and uses it on his stubby legs.
“Sounds like a Gluttire.”
“A what?”
“Gluttire. A glutton. He wasn’t burning you. He was trying to dissolve you. Gluttons are pretty rare and mostly eat other demons. You been around any recently?”
“Yeah. The guy whose house we hit had a digger in the wall safe.”
“There you go,” he says, and sinks the fourteen. “He smelled the digger.”
“I need to start bringing cologne on robberies.”
“There’s a ton about demons in the Codex. There’s a lot more kinds of them thalis of than you think, but Gluttires are the rarest. Most people never get to see one.”
“Lucky me.”
Things get quiet for a minute. He knows what I’m going to ask.
“Talk to me about Downtown. Got any gossip? Marilyn Monroe dating the Antichrist? Is Lovecraft being tortured by sexy octopuses?”
“What makes you think Monroe’s Downtown?”
“Wishful thinking.”
Kasabian lines up another shot and sinks it. I’m not even paying attention to which balls anymore.
I say, “So?”
Kasabian doesn’t look up when he answers, keeping his eyes down on the table.
“The weather’s hot with a chance of chain saws and bullshit blowing up from the south.”
I walk over and put my hand over the cue ball. Kasabian looks up at me, not at all happy.
I’m bugging him about the one thing he controls. His one little domain. The Daimonion Codex. It’s Lucifer’s Boy Scout manual, Google search engine, and secret angelic ballbuster cookbook all in one. The most valuable thing in Hell besides the horned one himself. It contains every bit of dark, esoteric-stuff-you-don’t-want-to-know-about-if-you-ever-want-to-sleep-again knowledge in the universe. As far as I know, Kasabian is the only one on earth who can read it.
He glances down at my hand and I take it off the cue. He sinks another ball. The little prick has been practicing when I’m not around.
Kasabian used to look things up in the Codex for Lucifer when he was too busy, which was 90 percent of the time. Of course, nothing in Hell works the way it’s supposed to. That’s why they call it Hell. The magic gear down there is like buying Russian souvenirs. The samovars are pretty, but you know they’re going to leak all over your mom’s chintz tablecloth.
What that means is that Hell’s half-assed gear hacks pretty easy. Take the Codex. Kasabian’s supposed to get a peek Downtown just wide enough to read the book. But it doesn’t work right. He’s like one of those traffic surveillance cams that catch you running red lights. If he squints just right, he can see a lot more than the book. He’s like a whole series of traffic cams wired together and he can spyglass all over Hell. Not all of it, but a lot. It’s the one thing he has over me and he never lets me forget it.
He says, “The usual Chuck E. Cheese ball pit-party games. Since Lucifer pissed off back to heaven, Mason’s completely taken over. Lucifer’s generals are having slap fights over battle plans. MammoKasplans. n and Baphomet have been sabotaging each others’ troops. Poisoning their food and shit like that. All so they can suck up to Mason. Semyazah is the only general who refused to kiss Mason’s ass, so he’s had to blow town.”
“Smart move.”
“Mason’s getting ready for something. He’s pulling troops in from everywhere, but they’re scattered all over Hell, so it’ll take a while. In the meantime he’s got some other game going, but I haven’t figured out what it is.”
I can walk through shadows and come out almost anywhere I want, passing through the Room of Thirteen Doors, the still-central point of time and space. I can get into the Room because years ago one of Lucifer’s generals, the one who wanted me as his personal assassin, stuck a key in my chest. I’m the only one in the universe who can get into the room because I have the only key. But while the Drifters were tearing through town like graveyard locusts I found out that Mason was trying to make his own key.
“Is it the Room of Thirteen Doors? Has he found a way to get in?”
“I don’t think so. If he did, he’d be up here already gnawing on your skull.”
Kasabian is right. Mason isn’t shy or subtle. If he could escape from Downtown, even if it was just for a minute, he’d do it and try to kill me.
“So, what’s he up to?”
“You tell me. You talk to the guy every night. It used to be Alice, which was creepy enough, but now it’s Dr. Doom.”
He shoots at the twelve. It bounces off the cushions and doesn’t drop. My shot.
I set down the cigarette, lay the cue down on my thumb and index finger, and line up a shot.
“What does that mean?”
“Back at Max Overdrive you used to talk to Alice in your sleep. Since we got here, though, whenever you’re asleep you start spinning like a rotisserie chicken and talking to Mason.”
“What do I say?”
I bank the one off the rail and sink it in a corner pocket.
“Aside from ‘Fuck you’ and ‘I’ll kill you,’ you mumble a lot in Hellion, so it’s hard to tell.”
“Buy a dictionary.”
He walks around the edge of the table, a fleshy spider circling a fly.
“There’s something else. It doesn upse. It ’t really change anything, but you might want to know.”
“What?”
“No one’s all that scared of you Downtown anymore. You used to be the bogeyman who kept them up at night. Now they talk about you like you were the high school bully.”
“So they’ve forgotten about me.”
“I didn’t say that. What I mean is, Mason is the new scary human in town, and you’ve been gone so long, he wins badass title by default.”
I take a shot at the three, but hit it too hard and it rolls back into the center of the table.
I pick up my cigarette and Kasabian crawls back onto the table.
“First he sends me to Hell and then he won’t even let me keep my rep. The little prick wants everything.”
Kasabian lines up a shot.
“So go down there and kill something. Slit some generals’ throats. You’re the monster who kills monsters. Be creative.”
I shake my head.
“Everyone knows my face, and Mason’s put wards on all the entrances I use to get into Hell. He’d know the moment I stuck my big toe down there.”