The car stops at the penthouse. I touch the brass plate again and step out onto the cool polished marble floor. The penthouse is a sight. Like Architectural Digest climbed to the top of the hotel roof and shit out a Hollywood movie mogul’s château. Windows everywhere. Expensive handmade furniture. Pricey art. And enough bedrooms and bathrooms for all the cowgirls in Montana to stop by for a pillow fight.
I kick off my boots by the elevator. Fuck the lobby carpet. Wash it. Burn it. I don’t care. But I don’t want blood all over my apartment.
My apartment.
It still feels funny to say, but I have to admit that after the three months the place is starting to feel like home. I used to run a video store in L.A. If I could move the inventory and a wall-size TV in here, I might go totally Howard Hughes and never leave. If I got Candy a day pass, I could definitely get used to the Hellion high life. Up here, surrounded by tinted glass and silk-covered furniture, I’m Sinatra with horns and Pandemonium is my boneyard Vegas.
I go to the bedroom and glance at the peepers I’ve scattered around the apartment. None are twitching and nothing looks out of place. I can relax. The truth is, I’m less worried about getting into another fight than I am about snoops. I need one place in Hell where I don’t have to look over my shoulder 24/7.
In the bedroom I strip off my clothes, dropping them in a heap at the foot of the bed. The ripped jacket I ball up and throw into the closet. I could get it fixed but I’m goddamn Lucifer. I’ll tell the tailors to run me off a new one.
I lock the bedroom door and run my hand over the top of the lintel. The protective runes I carved are still there. I get under a hot shower and stay there for a long time.
I might have gotten used to the apartment but I’ll never get used to showering in Lucifer’s armor. I never take the stuff off. The moment it’s gone, I’m vulnerable to any kind of attack. Knife, hoodoo, or a squirrel with a zip gun. I know I look schizo soaping down in this Versace tuna can but I don’t have to look at me.
When I’m done I pull on black suit pants, a silk T-shirt, and a hotel robe thick enough to stop bullets. The black blade goes in one pocket and Ukobach’s gun in the other. Then over to the dresser for a quick check of the bottom drawer. There’s the singularity, Mr. Muninn’s secret weapon to restart the universe if Mason or I broke it. There’s my na’at, my favorite weapon when I was fighting in the arena. And there’s the little snub-nose .38 I brought with me from L.A. One bullet is missing from the cylinder. The one I tricked Mason Faim into blowing through his head three months ago. That’s when Saint James, my angel half, took the key I need to leave Hell and left me stranded here. To tell the truth, I’m glad the goody-goody prick is out of my head. But I’d take him back in a second if it would get me the key.
The bedroom doors swing open and Brimborion walks in with a fistful of envelopes and messages. He’s something else I never wanted in my life. A personal assistant, which is to say a professional asshole who knows more about me than I do.
“What did I tell you about barging in here without knocking?”
“If I didn’t barge in, I’d never find you.”
“That’s the idea.”
Brimborion looks fairly human except he’s as skinny as a grasshopper, with limbs and fingers long enough to pluck a quarter from the bottom of a fifth of Jack. He dresses in dark high-collar suits like he fell out of a Dickens story right onto the stick up his ass. He also wears round wire-rim glasses. I think it’s those glasses that really make me hate him. What a weird choice for an affectation. I mean, whoever heard of a nearsighted angel?
I say, “How did you even get in here?”
He rolls his eyes heavenward.
“You mean those pretty doodads you scratched above the doors? I’m your personal assistant. I need to be able to follow you anywhere.”
He unbuttons his shirt and pulls out a heavy gold talisman hanging from a chain around his neck.
“I have a passkey. It opens any door in the palace no matter how many wards or enchantments are on it.”
“Nice. Where can I get one?”
“I’m afraid this is the only one.”
“Maybe I should take it.”
“Feel free, my lord,” he says. “And don’t worry. I’ll do my best to suppress the scandal.”
“What scandal?”
“The one about how the Lord of the Underworld, the Archfiend, the Great Beast is afraid of a glorified secretary. I hate to think what your enemies would make of that.”
I want to stack cinder blocks on this four-eyed fuckpop until he explodes. He opens his eyes a tiny bit wider behind the fake glass in his fake glasses and stares.
But the little prick has a point. Until I’m up to Samael’s full strength, I don’t want ambitious peasants storming the castle with pitchforks and torches.
I reach for the letters and messages, closing my hand around his. I squeeze. Not hard enough to break bone. Just enough to remind him I could if I wanted.
I let up and take my messages. He massages his fingers but doesn’t say anything.
“Learn to knock and we can go back to being BFFs. Got it?”
“Of course, my lord.”
He does a tiny bow and leaves.
I remember when I was out drinking with Vidocq in L.A. he introduced me to another old-time thief. He said the best way to deal with lock pickers is the simplest. You take all the furniture you can and stack it up so it’s perfectly balanced against the top of the door. Anyone who tries to get in will get a dresser or a rocking chair on their head. If you want to fancy things up, you can add a bucket of lye dissolved in water. The real trick is remembering to tell the maid before she comes in the next morning.
I take the na’at out of the dresser and put it under the pillows at the head of the bed. Stacking furniture sounds like too much work.
I toss the messages in the fireplace. Infernal bureaucrats can kiss my ass.
I head down to the library.
This is my Fort Knox, my office, and my panic room. I’ve laid the heaviest protective hoodoo I know around this place. Of all the hideouts I ever thought of running to when things got weird, a library was right behind a leper colony and a burning garbage truck. But here I am.
I haven’t paced the place off, but the library looks about a football field long, lined with two floors of books in hundred-foot stretches of ornate dark wood shelves. The ceiling is domed and painted with scenes illustrating the three tenets of the Hellion church. The Thought: God and Lucifer arguing that if humans have free will so should angels. The Act: the war. It’s pretty but stiff and trying too hard to look noble, like a Soviet propaganda poster. The New World: Lucifer and his defeated, punch-drunk Bowery boys in Hell. He looks like a tent revival preacher selling snake oil to rubes, but in his own fucked-up way, the slippery son of a bitch is trying to do right by his people.
I’ve made myself a comfortable squat over by a wall of the Greek wall, the stuff Samael told me to read. In a copy of a half-falling-apart Reader’s Digest–condensed large-print book on Greek history, I found his notes. (It’s embarrassing that he knows me well enough that he left the info in a book written for shut-ins and half-blind grandmas.) He included names of people I could think about for the Council. If they’re the Hellions I can trust, I’m not ready to meet the ones I can’t.
I dragged a plush red sofa trimmed in gold, a big partner’s desk, and a few chairs over to my squat. Sometimes I even let people in to use the chairs. Not many and not often, but anyone who comes in is on my turf. I know which carpets cover binding circles. I know which books are hollowed out and stuffed with knives and killing potions.