“I know.”
Candy comes up and puts her arm around my Kissi arm, politely avoiding my raw meat one, but nothing is very comforting right now.
“I’m working for the augur. I was trying to be—”
“A whipped dog,” Kasabian says. “Oh, and smart move coming out here with that burned chicken wing out for all the world to see.”
“Maybe he’s right about the arm,” says Candy. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”
We go into Max Overdrive and Kasabian locks the door.
“This is what trying to be Joe Citizen gets you,” he says. “More scars and a shitmobile you can’t drive to Fatburger without attracting a SWAT team.”
I drop down on the stairs and Candy sits next to me.
I look at her.
“What would you do?”
She rests her arms on her knees and laces her fingers together.
“Well, you can’t drive it like that. Maybe you can do like me when I go to work. Take taxis.”
“Sandman Slim saving the world from the back of a yellow cab. That’s beautiful,” says Kasabian. He goes to the till and tosses a twenty at me. “Here. Buy a fucking bus pass.”
Candy scowls at him.
I lean back, resting my elbows on the stairs, but my burned arm feels like someone stuck it with a boning knife. I sit back up.
“I’ll use the bike.”
“Really?” says Candy.
“That’s stupid,” says Kasabian. “I mean, it shows you’ve got some balls left, but it’s stupid.”
I shrug and turn to her.
“What choice do I have? Kasabian’s right. I can’t take cabs everywhere and I can’t just run out and buy another car. They cost actual money.”
“But the Hellion hog,” she says. “It will stand out worse than the car.”
“Not if I do some modifications.”
“What kind of modifications?”
The Hellion hog is a one-off. A custom monster bike built by Hell’s finest mechanics back when I was Lucifer. The wide handlebars taper to sharp points like something you’d normally find on a longhorn’s thick skull. It doesn’t run out of gas because it runs on pure Hellion hoodoo. The pipes are like something you’d find at a power plant. They’ll turn cherry red when I open up the accelerator. I don’t know how fast it will go. They don’t have speedometers in Hell.
“If I replace the light on the front with a regular one, change out the handlebars, and only ride it at night, I think I can get away with it.”
“What about a license plate?” says Candy.
“I’ll steal a plate.”
Kasabian holds up his metal hands like a preacher looking to Heaven.
“My God. He’s back from the dead.”
“That’s one vote in favor of the hog.”
I look back at Candy.
“What do you think?”
She purses her lips, thinking.
“On the one hand, it’s really irresponsible and dangerous for you to be running around on something built by lunatics for a lunatic,” she says. “On the other hand, you’re pretty hot on the bike, and being more like your old self, maybe you’ll be a little less depressed all the time.”
“I’m not depressed. Maybe a little off . . .”
Kasabian picks up the twenty and puts it back in the till.
“Are you kidding? You look like a kid who nobody showed up at his birthday party.”
“He’s right,” says Candy.
“Then that’s it. I’ll get some tools, hit a bike shop, and I’ll fix it up tonight.”
Kasabian says, “And when you move the bike from around the side of the store, drive that four-wheel piece of shit back there and cover it with a tarp.”
“That’s a good idea,” says Candy. “At least until we can figure out what to do with it.”
“And take the plates off too,” says Kasabian. “If the cops find it, don’t make their job too easy for them.”
I get up.
“Okay. It’s a plan.”
“Great. I’ve got to get to work now,” says Candy, and starts upstairs.
I follow her up.
“I’ll go with you. I wanted to check in with Vidocq and he said he’d be at the clinic today.”
“So, you are going to take a cab?” Kasabian calls up the stairs. “The monster who kills monsters does not take cabs. No good can come from this.”
I close the door and Candy and I get dressed for the normal world.
Or as normal as ours ever gets.
ALLEGRA’S CLINIC IS in the same building as Julie’s detective agency. Julie upstairs and Allegra downstairs. Allegra worked at Max Overdrive when I first got there. Then she discovered she had a talent for healing and took over the clinic after Doc Kinski was killed. Allegra has patched me together after fights more times than I can count. Perhaps more important than that, though, she and Vidocq are an item and I think introducing them is one of the best things I’ve done since crawling out of Hell.
While Candy heads upstairs I go into the clinic. Fairuza is in the waiting room doing paperwork for a couple of Lurkers. Fairuza is a Lurker herself, a Ludere. Blue skin and horns, and always in a schoolgirl uniform. She also plays drums in Candy’s band. When she sees me, she straightens.
“Hey, Stark. Go right in. You’ve got the two of them all aflutter about whatever it is you gave them.”
“Thanks. Kasabian says hi.”
“Hmm,” she says, and looks at her papers. She and Kasabian have had an on-again, off-again thing. I guess it’s off again.
I go through the waiting area into the exam room.
Vidocq and Allegra are inside talking quietly. Her hair is close-cropped and shaved on the sides. She recently got a tattoo on her right forearm—two snake skeletons wound around each other in the shape of a Caduceus—and the ink looks good on her café au lait skin. She and Vidocq are huddled over an odd device with a lot of stacked lenses, a bit of Kinski’s old hoodoo medical gear. Engrossed in what they’re doing, neither she or Vidocq looks up when I come in. Allegra just motions me over when she hears me close the door.
“Stark, get over here and look at this.”
They get out of the way and I walk over. The device looks like an upside-down spider with brass legs holding the lenses that swing in and out of the way. I have to move the top one around to get a sharp view.
It’s no surprise that I’m staring down into a dark blob of black milk. The smell of the stuff fills the room. What’s weird is that there’s something twitching and moving through the muck like a hairy electric eel. Tiny blue sparks glow along its edges.
I nod.
“Very pretty. Was the wiggler in there already or is it a new pet?”
“We added it just before you came in,” says Vidocq.
Allegra stands close to me so she can look through the lenses too.
“This isn’t an ordinary microscope,” she says.
“No shit.”
“It doesn’t just see the form of an object, but other characteristics, like its life force. That’s what the blue glow along the sample is. It indicates that it’s alive.”
“But what is it?”
“The leg of a dead roach we found outside,” she says. “We put it in a tiny amount of black milk and it sort of woke up. If you look closer, you can even see that where we cut the leg off has healed itself.”
I stand up and look at them both.
“You’re telling me that angels are using this stuff to reanimate bugs?”
“No,” says Vidocq. “Look again.”
I watch the roach leg happily swimming through the stinking milk, kicking up sparks. Allegra gets an eyedropper and adds a tiny speck more milk to the mess.
The leg begins to spasm like it’s having a seizure. It goes on like that for a few seconds more before it stops moving and the sparks along its edges disappear.
“You murdered it, you fiends.”
“Yes, we did,” says Vidocq.
“Eugène showed me the bacon you reanimated,” says Allegra. “We’ve been testing different things in the milk all night.”
She points at the device.
“Look at the leg now.”
I look through the lens. The leg isn’t there.
“Where did it go?”
Allegra says, “It dissolved. That’s the strange thing about this stuff. In tiny amounts it has restorative powers.”
“But if you add just a touch too much, it destroys the tissue. Any kind,” says Vidocq.
“It happened with the bacon too. It was still wiggling around when I got home. Then we added a little more milk, and the strips dissolved into a black sludge like the roach leg.”
I glance back at the stuff in the device.
“That’s all swell, but what is it?”
“We don’t know.”
“But we have some ideas,” says Vidocq. “While Allegra studied the milk itself, I spent the night with my books and papers. I found references to something like it in a twelfth-century treatise on rare hermetic poisons. The document had been suppressed because it references various heretical biblical gospels. It definitely identifies the substance as angelic in origin and said that it’s been seen on Earth before. Athanasius Reuchlin, a German mystic, was said to have been given a small amount by a divine spirit and told to guard it. That’s not so different from what happened to you, is it?”
“So, what happened to it? And what happened to him?”
“He found results similar to ours,” says Allegra. “Microscopic amounts of the milk heal, while larger amounts are toxic.”
I look at one of them, then the other.
“Yeah, but what’s it for?”
Vidocq says, “Reuchlin believed it was used by warrior angels in battle.”
“You mean they went around melting other angels?”
“Here is where it’s frustrating. The treatise is incomplete. However, Reuchlin believed that while the base materials of the black milk were of angelic origin, it was refined here on Earth.”
This is when I want to be back home drinking.
“How? By who?”
Vidocq shrugs.
“I’m afraid the answer to that is among the missing sections.”
“Can you at least say if this stuff is medicine or poison?”
“Both maybe,” says Allegra. “Without knowing how the angels used it, we might never know.”
She gets all starry-eyed at me.
“Can you get more?”
“Hey, I almost died for this bottle. I don’t want any more.”
“All you all right? What happened?” she says.
“You two haven’t watched the news today, have you?”
“No. We’ve been working since last night,” says Vidocq.
“The short version is, an angel came to see me last night and words were exchanged. She did this to me.”
I take off my coat and show them my fried arm.
“Dammit,” says Allegra. “Why didn’t you tell me? Let me get you something for that.”
“Thanks.”
While she hunts around for some hoodoo Bactine, Vidocq looks concerned.
“I’m sorry about your injury, but how is it that your angel would be on the news?”
“The spat was kind of public. We broke part of Hollywood Boulevard.”
“You fought an angel in public?”
“She started it. That armored asshole about murdered my car.”
“Merde,” says Vidocq. “James, you are a reckless soul.”
“Hey, I’m the victim here.”
Allegra comes back with a salve that smells like cinnamon and roses.
“Leave him alone, Eugène,” she says, smearing the stuff on my arm. “I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”
“Yeah, Eugène. Can’t you see I’m hurt?”
Whatever supernatural goo Allegra puts on my arm, it cools my skin and cuts the pain immediately.
“That feels great.”
“I found it in one of Doc Kinski’s books. It smells nice too, doesn’t it?”
“Very nice. Something I could give Grandma for Christmas.”
I look over at Vidocq and he’s frowning.
“Say whatever you’re going to say,” I tell him.
“If you say that fight was unavoidable, I believe you. But what is your employer going to say?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to see him right after this.”
“Did the police see you?” says Allegra.
“No, but there were a million witnesses and I’m sure a gruesome amount of video.”
“This isn’t good,” says Vidocq.
“She was out of her mind. If I didn’t fight back she would have killed me and everyone on the boulevard. This isn’t my fault.”
“I didn’t mean that. What I meant is that if angels are free to battle in the streets, Heaven must be in extreme disarray.”
“That’s the impression I got.”
“Have you heard from your friend Samael? Or Mr. Muninn?”
“Not a word. I get the feeling they’re pretty busy. And it’s not like I can go and see them anymore.”
“You must watch yourself,” Vidocq says. “You’re in danger from Earth and the celestial realms.”
Allegra finishes with the salve and wraps my arm in gauze. She smiles.
“Maybe we should have tried some of the black milk on your arm. I bet it would have fixed you right up.”
I get up as soon as Allegra finishes wrapping me. She helps me put my coat on. I go to the counter and put the milk vial back in its box and put the box in my pocket.
“No one is trying black milk on anything anymore.”
Allegra makes a face.
“Can’t you leave us just a little? A few drops.”
“I’m not having some liquored-up angel come after you. This stuff stays with me until I know exactly what’s going on.”
Vidocq nods at Allegra.
“It’s probably for the best. Things regarding the milk seem to have moved from our world into James’s.”
“It looks that way,” she says. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Hide it,” I say. “I don’t know where. The augur is smart. Maybe he’ll have an idea.”
“You can’t go to him in broad daylight. You could be recognized,” says Vidocq.
“Way ahead of you.”
I improvise a quick glamour spell and change from my face to Charlie Anpu’s.
“How do I look?”
“Distressing,” says Vidocq.
Allegra wipes her hands on a towel.
“Don’t let Chihiro see you like that. You’re entirely unfuckable right now.”
I check myself in a mirror over the sink.
“Perfect, then. Thanks for the help.”
I give Allegra a hug and she squirms away.
“Ew. Take that face and go do whatever it is you have to do to fix things.”
I head for the door.
“Maybe I’ll see you two at Bamboo House later?”
“Not if you’re going to look like that,” Allegra says.
“Bamboo House is safe. I’ll be me by the time you get there.”
“Please do,” says Vidocq. “And be careful.”
I open the door.
“I’m always careful. I’m just not lucky.”
I head out. Fairuza lets out a little scream when she sees me. Now I just hope I don’t spook all the cabbies. It’s a long walk to Marina del Rey.
IT TAKES A while, but I finally get a ride. The fare all the way out to Abbot’s place is soul-sucking, but I pay the cabbie off with a wad of the cash I get paid for being on the council.
So, this is how regular people live. They get paid to do a job, then have to spend the money on clothes they don’t want to wear somewhere they don’t like, then spend even more money commuting. And that doesn’t count the years of their lives spent going from home to a desk and back again. Fuck that. At least
in the arena in Hell they didn’t charge us for our weapons. And we got to steal better ones from who or whatever we killed that day. Sure, we didn’t have 401(k)s, but if there was a boss who wouldn’t get off your back, we didn’t have to go to HR about it. We just cut the fucker’s throat. That’s job satisfaction.
I go through the locked gate and down the pier to Abbot’s boat. There are a couple of security guys on break, just smoking and shooting the shit. They straighten up when they see me. Toss their cigarettes in the water and stand up straight like maybe the Queen of England is behind me. Only it’s just me and I’m getting nervous and wondering if I’m going to have to hurt someone when one of them starts talking.
“Mr. Anpu?” he says.
He looks me up and down.
“We didn’t know you were coming.”
I’d forgotten on the ride over that I’m wearing someone else’s face. Seeing Charlie’s mug in my boots and ex-con clothes must be frying some circuits in these boys’ heads. I can’t let a moment like this pass.
“Since when do I have to clear my social calendar with the employees?”
I let that float in the air for a minute.
“Sorry, sir. Of course. The augur is inside. If you’ll come this way, we’ll see if he’s free.”
“He better be. I’ve come a long way to get turned away like a beggar at the door.”
I follow them onto the boat.
The truth is, I don’t know if this is how Anpu talks and I sure as hell don’t know his voice. It just goes to show you that people will believe anything, let you in anywhere, if you show up with a clipboard or an attitude.
They show me into the living room and I make myself comfortable on Abbot’s million-dollar couch. One of the security guys goes off to find Abbot while the other stays with me. I don’t think he’s here because I might steal the silver. Let’s see if I can figure out why.
“I’d like a drink. Gentleman Jack. Neat, if you have it.”
For a few seconds he looks puzzled. I guess he’s not my waiter after all. How am I supposed to know how these things work? No one gave me instructions when I got the job. Or did they? Maybe it’s in the envelope with my insurance papers. I need to check that sometime.
“Oh,” he says. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to . . .”