The last thing I heard, as though spoken into a tin can down the longest, shakiest string any child had ever strung from a tree house, was a surprisingly sweet, feminine voice exclaim, “Oh! The poor, pretty creature!”
Then it all went away.
interlude
CAZ WAS asleep. I was lying beside her, too buzzed to do anything except think, think, think. God knows, I should have been sleeping too, after the day I’d just had—ambushed while trying to auction off something I didn’t actually have, shot at, chased by an ancient supernatural monster, several minutes under extremely cold water breathing through a tube, then a couple of hours of vigorous sex with a she-demon. I should have slept for a hundred years like Sleeping Beauty. Instead, Not-Sleeping Bobby lay in Caz’s curtained bed with his hands laced behind his head, watching the translucent fabric sway gently in the air-conditioning. The curtains were red, bright yellow, and several shades of earth tones. It seemed odd to me that she would choose such flamelike colors, but the entire apartment was like that, a cross between a grand opera about the Middle East and a Dutch prostitute’s red-light flat.
I was thinking, but not about anything important. I couldn’t afford to think about anything important, because at that moment I couldn’t do anything about anything. I could have closed my eyes and tried to force myself to sleep, but that never works with me. So instead I just lay there, listening to Caz’s quiet breathing and fantasizing about an impossible day when we could be together like this without threatening the entire balance of Creation. But any attempt to imagine a future for us quickly fell apart. Even assuming we weren’t vaporized for our crimes by her bosses or mine, where would we live? What would we do?
Before that night, I would have immediately recognized the stupidity of even thinking about an angel like me living a normal, human life. I would have shaken my head, laughed ruefully, then gone out with Sam for a couple of drinks to soak the ashes of the extinguished dream and render it harmless forever. But I wasn’t sure that was going to work this time. I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to work.
But what was my alternative? This one night, as Caz kept saying, and then nothing? Only memories? I’d been born into my angelic existence without any real memories at all, so I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have memories that were better than the rest of your life could ever be. How could someone live like that? How could someone keep any kind of faith that the universe made sense?
Then again, whatever made me think the universe should make sense? I worked for God Almighty Himself, the Highest, and I was just as confused as every other thinking creature.
Was this really the end? Would I never see this beautiful woman, demon, whatever she was, after tonight? Or, even worse, would I see her again but be unable to do anything except watch her walk past, she condemned to her business, me to mine?
I felt so cold at that sudden vision, so empty, that for a moment I thought my soul might actually be dying.
As though she sensed it, Caz opened her eyes and looked at me. She didn’t say anything, just spread her arms as if welcoming me back from a long, hazardous trip. I moved in close until I felt the cool length of her against me from chest to shins, the chill pressure of her cold little feet and her cold little breasts.
We held each other in silence, because there really wasn’t anything left to say.
twenty-two
sweet lady zinc
“YOU DEAR man,” she said. “You must tell me who did this to you. There was blood everywhere!”
My eyes, which had been sending me nothing useful for some time, just a vague sensation of light and shadow, the kind of thing even a snail can accomplish, finally began to focus on the moving shape. Considering all I had seen and been through, the object slowly coming into view was strangely human. And not just human but quite lovely—a woman in the glowing prime of adult life, with dark, curly hair that turned into a spreading cloud down her shoulders where it had worked loose from her hairpins. Her face was heart-shaped, her cheeks plump and pretty, and even in my pathetic state I couldn’t help but notice that she had some serious décolletage (an old-time word for cleavage) going on. Her bright eyes took in my own wandering gaze, and she colored a little with a flush that not only touched her pale cheeks but her breastbone as well, like a dusting of rouge from an invisible brush.
“Who?” I said, then, “What . . . ?” My brain was, I swear to you, prickling like a limb that had fallen asleep. I figured it could be my thinking tissues regenerating after all that oxygen starvation, but it was also possible I’d been so damaged that I was going to be permanently fucked in the head.
“You are safe. I am Lady Zinc, but you may call me Vera.”
I suddenly remembered why I had been losing consciousness before I was struck and darted a look at my injured right arm. The hand was still missing, of course, but it had been carefully bandaged, and the blood had been scrubbed away. What was weird, though, is that I could feel my hand at the end of my arm as though it were still there; I chalked it up to “phantom limb” or whatever they call that syndrome. I was even dressed in clean clothes, some kind of old-fashioned nightshirt of flimsy material, the kind of thing the Sheriff of Nottingham might have worn to a slumber party.
“How did I get here?” I managed all five words without coughing, but it felt as though I hadn’t spoken for years. My head was a little better, though. Either I was learning to ignore the prickling in my brain, or it was going away.
“You ran into the street in front of my car, dear man. I thought I’d ruined you, but you’ve cleaned up very nicely.” The dark-haired woman smiled. This couldn’t be happening, I thought. Not in Hell. Nobody did anything for free in Hell. Still, I was definitely one of those beggars who couldn’t afford to be choosers, so I did my best to smile back and look properly grateful.
“Thank you, Lady Zinc.”
“Oh, Vera, please. After all, you’re a guest now!” She laughed and stood up. “Which means I really should know your name. Do you mind telling me?”
For just about a half second I couldn’t remember—not my Hell-name, not my real name, as though I had just dropped out of the sky into this crazy dream without bothering to bring along any baggage. How much blood had I lost? How close had I been? Then both of the names came to me. I gave her the right one. “Snakestaff of the Liars Sect, my lady. And I’m in your debt.”
She laughed again with what sounded like genuine pleasure. “No, no, I am in yours. It was a filthy morning, and it’s been a miserable, pointless week. You have cheered me up hugely.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone in Hell use a term like “week,” and I wondered if that was just Vera’s way or something peculiar to Pandaemonium. “Where am I?”
“My house in the Trembling Heights. Now rest. We will have plenty of time to talk as you recuperate. If you need anything, ring the bell for Belle.”
It took me a moment to realize the second bell was a name. I was distracted, because Vera had been sitting at the foot of my bed but now stood, and I could see her whole. There was a lot to see. She was curvy but slender-waisted, with a graceful neck, and although she wore a long dress that covered her legs I suspected they were nice, too. Yes, even nearly dead guys notice things like that, even when they’re angels in demonic bodies. It had nothing to do with Caz, and it didn’t really have anything to do with sex, since I felt so weak I couldn’t have put up a convincing tussle with a ball of yarn. That’s just the way the male eyes and brain are hooked up. Go sue the Highest if you don’t like it.
Lady Zinc went out. I spent a moment surveying the room, which looked like Old Hollywood’s idea of the Middle Ages, including stone walls and a high window with no curtains, but I was too exhausted by the short conversation to even think about getting up and finding out whether the door was locked from the outside—whether I was a prisoner—because at that moment, I couldn’t have cared less. Some of the higher demons liked to play-act, I knew. Maybe this was all some elab
orate game. It couldn’t be real, could it? I couldn’t actually be safe, at least for a while? Could I?
Safe or not, I was still exhausted by what I’d just been through. I sank back into the richness of a bed and the fuzziness of my wits and let sleep take me.
I woke up to find a very different woman in the room, this one tall and heavyset. I groggily remembered that dark-haired Vera had mentioned someone named Belle, and this woman did seem to be dressed in the plain style of a servant. Unlike her mistress, though, Belle was visibly demonic, with rough gray skin and spurs of horn or bone jutting through the hide at her shoulders, elbows, and other visible joints. I’d seen lots worse. I rasped out a request for water and she brought me a cup; when I had finished, she refilled it for me and set it on the stand beside the bed. She looked stronger than me, especially the weakened version of me lying in the bed, but she seemed kind enough, showing me a sort of smile and squeezing my hand when I handed the cup back to her.
“Don’t worry, sir. You will be well soon,” she assured me as she went out.
The prickling was definitely almost gone. I felt less dizzy than before, as though I had slept for some time. I wondered how long I’d been out. I literally had no idea if I had been in Lady Zinc’s house for hours or days, and I couldn’t see a clock. You’d think, considering how much of a curse of modern civilization clocks are, that Hell would be full of them, but no. In fact, they don’t have calendars either, although they kept dates and even seasons of a sort. I guess when you’ve been condemned to infinite punishment you don’t want to dwell on how slowly time is passing. Not to mention that if it was anything like Heaven, time didn’t pass, at least not in any normal way.
As my wits came back, I also realized that I couldn’t trust any of this apparent kindness. Even if it wasn’t some trick, even if Vera herself was the Riprash of her upper-class demon set, that didn’t mean everybody she knew wouldn’t happily eat me or turn me in. I had to be careful.
I staggered toward the window, which to my happiness didn’t look barred or defended in any unusual way, as if I truly was a houseguest. I was hoping a view of the outside might give me an idea of what time of the infernal day it was, which would be a start at orienting myself. It seemed to me that I had been in Hell for months, and although I didn’t have a formal deadline on leaving again, I knew if I didn’t find the Countess of Cold Hands and get out soon I’d never get out at all. The crushing weight of the place, the sheer, dull horror of it was wearing me away. Only the memory of Caz was keeping me moving, the knowledge that if I didn’t do anything, her lot was going to be the same as all these others: eternal misery. In fact, I had probably made it worse for her, and not just by exposing her to my sparkling, charming self. I doubted Eligor was going to let her get back to the real world ever again, so even that small solace was denied her.
No, I couldn’t worry about that now, I told myself: it was too far away, too unlikely. One thing at a time.
I reached the window by standing on a heavy chair made of some kind of animal bones. But even when I got to the windowsill I still couldn’t tell anything about the time. We seemed to be at the bottom of one of the soaring towers, a few hundred feet beneath the tangled forest of spires and connecting bridges I’d seen when I came out of the Terminus. One of the city’s massive black walls loomed nearby, effectively cutting off my view of anything but the giant stones themselves, as though a starless night had been tipped on its side and shoved up next to the window. The light that painted the courtyard in red could have been anything, a day beacon, a dangerous fire nearby, or even just the glow of one of the open lava pits that pocked Pandaemonium like titanic gopher holes.
As I shakily climbed down from the window, awkward with only one hand and my whole right arm still throbbing with pain, I noticed something lying on top of a broad chest at the foot of the bed. Facedown in the middle of a gentleman’s grooming assortment, tweezers and brushes and such, lay a heavy hand mirror. I hadn’t seen my own face since I’d been in Hell. I’d grown quite familiar with my gray-and-black skin, patterned like some creature of the African Veldt, even fond of it (because it was tough as buffalo hide) but my features were still a mystery to me, except that they felt human to the touch. Hell was very short of reflecting surfaces; almost no clear standing water, of course, and most metal too defaced by rust and corrosion to show a reflection. I lifted the mirror with a mixture of unease and curiosity.
I got a shock, too, I can tell you.
It wasn’t that the face didn’t match the skin, because it did. The dark gray and light gray had the same streaky pattern, and black stripes rose from my jaw on either side of my mouth, over my eyes, and up into curls that looked a little like Maori tattoos across my forehead. The mouth was fanged, but I knew that already, and even the eyes were pretty much par for the course: a pale, goatish orange with vertical slits like a cat’s. But the astonishing part was that it was my face under it all; Bobby Dollar, immediately recognizable, like a hastily painted stolen car. No shit. The demon-body amounted to no more than camouflage, and I had real doubts that it would fool anyone who had met up with my earthly self—a group that included Grand Duke Eligor, the monster I was planning to rob.
Panic swept over me. I had been walking around in more or less my own face the whole time I’d been here. How could that be? Had Lameh failed me? Or had Temuel betrayed me somehow? But why would he go to such elaborate lengths when all he needed to do was report me as AWOL and let his superiors do the rest? The Ephorate investigating my buddy Sam’s Third Way movement had seemed to be only a moment’s irritation away from condemning me anyway.
I’d been walking around Hell wearing a huge “KILL ME” sign for weeks without knowing it.
I tried to calm myself. Perhaps it wasn’t anything to do with Temuel betraying me, but some effect of the body transfer. After all, I’d never heard of any angel using a demon body before. Back on Earth, my bodies always looked kind of similar. Maybe this was the same process at work. But did that mean that our souls had built-in facial features? That seemed crazy to me.
The door opened, startling me so that I dropped the heavy mirror. I tried to grab at it with the hand I no longer had, but only kept it from breaking by flinging out my (bare) foot and letting the mirror fall on that instead.
“What are you doing, my lord?” said Belle. “You will hurt yourself!” The servant hurried to me, picking up the mirror as though it were light as a playing card, then used her other strong hand to guide me back toward the bed. “Too soon! Too soon to be getting up!” She shook her head like a mother gorilla with a wayward youngster and gave me a gentle push that almost flung me across the mattress and off the other side. “Back you go. My lady will be angry with me if you harm yourself. Do you want me to lose my position?”
I assured her that I didn’t, and in truth it was rather nice to settle back into the sheets, but I still couldn’t figure out what was happening. Why was Lady Zinc treating me so kindly? I was at best a very minor member of the demonic nobility. My hostess, by comparison, clearly had an awfully nice thing going here. Did she want something from me?
And now I had to worry about my treacherous face, too. Worrying is hard work, though, and my body was still very weak. Sleep soon chased my thoughts away.
I woke to find Vera and her servant tenderly changing my bandages. The wrist had almost completely healed, the ragged marks of Block’s teeth now covered with new, pink skin, but what was astonishing was that my wrist seemed to be growing new bone already. I don’t know what they put in these Hell-bodies but they heal faster than the ones Heaven provides, and at that moment I wasn’t complaining. The worst of the pain was gone, nothing left but a mild throb, and although my brain still prickled when I first woke up, I had a sense of physical well-being I hadn’t felt since beginning my infernal adventure.
“You are doing so well!” Vera said when she saw I was watching. She got up quickly, as though sitting on the bed of a man awake was different than sit
ting on the bed of a slumbering invalid. “I think you are ready to go outside. Would you like that?”
No shit. I was feeling surprisingly well, and although the timer in the back of my thoughts was still ticking, I nodded. A chance to reconnoiter could only do me good.
“Wonderful,” she said, and the look of pleasure on her pretty face was girlish. Why was this woman in Hell? Did I even want to know? “Then we shall go out tonight. Francis and Elizabeth are having a party, two of my very closest friends, and you shall be my escort, handsome Snakestaff.”
I suffered getting dolled-up by the two women with as much good grace as I could muster, since no matter what secret worries I might have, Vera had done me nothing but good so far. Eventually they rigged me up in what they thought of as suitable clothes, including a tie and what seemed a distinctly Victorian-looking long coat. A pretty damn fancy outfit. Once I was dressed and seated, Vera herself very tenderly tied the tie, a narrow affair more like a ribbon than anything I was used to. I thought it made me look a bit like a posh Old West gunfighter (with a skin condition and yellow eyes). “It’s the climate, of course,” she told me, breathing on my ear. “Too hot for an ordinary tie.”
“Do I have to wear one?” I’ve never liked the things.
Vera gave me a look of undisguised horror. “Do you think I could take you to meet my dearest friends without you being properly dressed?”
While I waited for her to finish her own preparations, I sat stiffly in a chair and watched brawny Belle tidy my room. “She likes you,” the big woman said with a distinct twinkle in her eye. She pushed heavy furniture around as if the pieces were made of balsa, then swept beneath them. “She thinks you’re handsome.”