“You’re going away with him, huh?” I was beginning to wonder how much of her visit had been her idea, and how much might have been Eligor setting her on me just to soften me up for the killing blow. At the moment, though, I didn’t care if he shot me through the heart. Wouldn’t have been the first time. Wouldn’t even have been the first time tonight. It never even occurred to me that I was carrying a gun too.
“Yes, of course I’m going away with him. Don’t you understand? I don’t have any other choice.”
“Does he have the feather?”
She shook her head, but she still had me pinned back against the concrete wall. “Wake up, Bobby! This isn’t a detective novel. No, he doesn’t have it. I don’t have it either, and I don’t know where it is. I told you what happened.”
“Then why did he take you back?”
She stepped back again so that half of her was bathed in the light from the hotel’s grand front entrance. Behind her I saw Eligor lean forward a little as if he was watching. For just a moment his eyes gleamed red in the darkness of the front seat, as if he was his own anti-theft system.
Fucking show-off, I thought.
“He let me come back…because he wanted to know about you. All about you. And I told him everything. There? Are you happy? I sold you out, Bobby, just like any good demon. Just like you should have expected.”
“But everything else-”
“Everything else was a lie!” She lowered her head for a moment. When she lifted it she wore an expression of rage and misery like I’d never seen. “I thought we might have something, sure. I like students. I told you that. I thought we might study things together. I thought we might even learn from each other. But I was wrong. You’ve been wearing a body too long, Dollar. You’re just like any other angel or demon who’s gone native. You’re letting your human disguise convince you of things that aren’t so-that can’t be so.” She stepped all the way out into the light. “Goodbye, Bobby.”
She turned toward the long, black car.
“But damn it, I love you,” I said, loud enough that even the monster waiting for her behind his tinted windows must have heard. “I don’t care about Heaven or Hell, Caz. I just want you.”
She hesitated for such a long moment I thought time itself might have ground to a halt. Then she came back toward me and grabbed my lapels as if she wanted to shake me the way I’d wanted to shake her since she first walked into my room. She pulled at my coat so hard I thought she’d rip it, then stood on tiptoes and put her face close to mine so I could feel the chill of her skin, the heat of her breath. She stared at me. I could not have told you for all the glory of Heaven what she was thinking.
“I love you,” I said again.
She turned away, empty, hopeless. “Then you’re a fool.”
She let me go and walked toward the car. The door opened as if by magic and she slid inside, then the black sedan pulled away from the sidewalk and slipped off into the night.
I must have stood there for several minutes watching the taillights dwindle and then disappear in the fog off the bay, wondering why they spent all that money on an expensive replica lighthouse if they weren’t going to turn on the goddamn light, before I realized that something felt funny on the front of my jacket. Only half paying attention I rubbed my chest, looking for wounds Caz’s fingernails might have left, thinking at least I would have a few days before those last traces were gone, too, but something hard and heavy was making a lump in my kerchief pocket. I took it out and let it slink into my palm, then took a few steps out into the light so I could see what I had.
It was a heavy, shiny little oval sitting on a snaky pile of chain like the last little serpent’s egg in the nest waiting to hatch. As I turned it back and forth I finally realized through my haze of blasted thoughts what I was looking at: the locket Caz wore around her neck, the gift her husband the Polish count had given her (if any of her story was true) on the night she’d killed him.
What did it mean? An apology? A curse? Maybe even-and for a moment I almost let my useless human heart get the better of my sense-a promise of sorts? Or was she just telling me that she was done with all obligations, obligations to the dead and to the living as well?
I flicked it open. Inside two curls of hair lay twisted together like the DNA of some unknown species, one brown, which must have come from her little maid, the other a gold so pale it almost looked like platinum, which could only have come from the Countess of Cold Hands. I closed it and walked back to the hotel entrance.
I was standing in the elevator watching the lights flick slowly upward toward my floor, feeling empty and cold as an abandoned house, when the bomb went off in the ballroom downstairs.
thirty-five
There’s an evil old song by Little Walter called, “Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights,” and that’s pretty much how it happened. The explosion down in the Grand Ballroom rocked the entire building, most definitely including the elevator shaft. The car lurched up and down and even a little bit sideways, knocking me around like a pinball, and then suddenly everything went dark.
How do I know the explosion was down in the ballroom? Because if you were going to make sure the summit conference didn’t continue, where else would you put a bomb except in the room where it was happening, the only room big enough in the hotel? Eligor’s own hotel.
He blew up his own fucking hotel! I remember thinking as I stood very still, trying to figure out if there was structural damage to the elevator and shaft or if it had only stopped because the power went out. But I came as close to admiring a murderous bastard of a demon-lord as I can get. Eligor the Horseman had cojones, I had to give him that. There was a lesson in this for me, too; I’d been trying to imagine how he’d get it done and hadn’t even considered that he might just blow the shit out of his own joint and kill a few dozen people at the very least, not to mention seriously inconveniencing hundreds of his closest allies. I’d seen how crowded that lobby was and couldn’t even imagine the scene now. I would never underestimate him again.
Eventually, I pushed up the emergency hatch on the top of the elevator and climbed out, then reached up in the dark. I seemed to be only a short distance under the next floor, so I braced myself against the walls of the shaft and worked my way upward until I could perch close enough to the door to work on it. It was hard to find leverage, but at last I got my fingers into the crevice and pulled it far enough apart to risk scrambling over and out. The escape was a lot hairier than I would have liked-it was pitch black, and even though the elevator was blocking the shaft, that was only in the spot just beneath me. If I didn’t manage to stay on top of my particular elevator I could have a straight drop to the basement. Anyway, I managed at last to clamber out onto the floor, covered with greasy carbon stains, the muzzle of my gun causing a permanent groin bruise through the inside of the pocket.
Some emergency lights came on now, casting a dull red-dare I say hellish? — glow over everything, so that even with my better-than-average sight I had to get real close before I could be certain I was on the third floor. Sam’s room was on the next floor up so I headed for the stairs. The stairwell was crowded with overstimulated people, most of them hurrying down toward the lobby before the hotel fell over or something, others in just as much of a hurry to get away from the lower floors where the explosion had happened. I smelled smoke but hadn’t yet seen any sign of fire, though the other guests looked and acted like terrified animals. There’s nothing like sudden disaster to deliver humans back to their original state of being, and even if you’re a demon or an angel vacationing in a human body, it works pretty much the same way.