“I was there.”

She clasps her hands in front of her.

“You shouldn’t have been so shy. We would have welcomed you into the circle.”

“Thanks, but I’m allergic to seeing myself executed.”

She makes a tsk sound with her teeth.

“A symbolic burning is just that for us. Symbolic. We meant and we mean you no physical harm. Burning the symbol of authority is a signal that we must overturn completely the current order of Hell.”

“Now you sound like a politician.”

She shakes her head.

“I mean spiritual order. Though I suppose to Lucifer there’s no difference between the two.”

“You didn’t have anything to do with the attacks on me, did you?”

“Don’t be absurd. Assassination is the last thing we want. Hell has seen enough upheaval to last us a thousand years.”

“But if someone else put a bullet in my head, you’d be happy to send flowers to my funeral.”

“Asphodels and moon wort in a lovely arrangement.”

“See? No one else admits they want me dead. That’s why I don’t trust them. You want a drink?”

I head down to the couch. Deumos follows, pausing to examine the broken bookcase and splinters from where I tossed the desk.

“What do you have?” she asks.

“Aqua Regia.”

She makes a face.

“No thank you.”

I find the bottle Wild Bill sent.

“This too. I’ve never heard of it before.”

She looks the bottle over and nods.

“This I’ll try.”

I find a fairly clean glass behind the sofa and pour her a drink. I fill mine with Aqua Regia and raise it to her. She raises hers to me and takes a sip.

“You knew my church and I had nothing to do with the attacks on you and you arrested us anyway. Why?”

“You tell me.”

She stares at her drink and doesn’t say anything for a minute.

“To make a public spectacle. To make us look like more than we are and yourself less.”

I hold up my glass like I’m toasting her.

“Give the people what they want. The ones who are after me. They want me weak and twitchy. I send a SWAT team to take out a storefront preacher and it comes off like a huge overreaction.”

“You get your shadow play and we get to sit in prison. Forgive me if I don’t applaud your cleverness.”

“If I thought you’d applaud me, you’d still be locked up.”

She sits on the sofa, relaxed but alert.

“Here we are. Two civilized beings having a drink. Tell me why you called me up here.”

“You know why. To make a deal. A deal where you get released with a pardon and something else.”

“What?”

“What do you want?”

“You know what we want. The old order controls the government and the brothers control the church. They treat us like drytts and chambermaids. We want the Tabernacle.”

I shake my head and sit down on the other end of the sofa.

“I can’t give you that. But I can give you your own church. We’re rebuilding Pandemonium from the ground up. You can have a tabernacle as big and oppressive as Merihim and his boys’.”

She sets her glass on the floor. Picks an invisible piece of lint from her robe.

“And what do I have to do for this indulgence?”

“You can get word out to your people from jail?”

“Of course.”

“I’m going to need a few. Especially cops or soldiers. Anyone who won’t get rattled when things get noisy. And a doctor or a nurse.”

“What will you be needing them for?”

“They’re going to help me get murdered.”

I take her over to the peepers and show her the one on the far end. A deep bowl in the desert floor glowing red from exposed lava pits.

“That’s where it’s going to happen.”

“What a fitting place for your demise.”

“I thought you’d like it. And don’t get too excited. I’m not aiming for supersized dead. More like a kid’s-meal-with-an-action-figure dead. That’s where you come in.”

“Tell me.”

“Let me pour you another drink.”

And I do.

Fifteen minutes later we have a deal.

Deumos is a preacher, so she has her own damned ritual to perform. She holds up a mirror so both of our faces are framed in the glass.

She says, “As we’re bound in the mirror, we’re bound in the compact we make here tonight. If either breaks the pledge, may she or he shatter like the faces captured here.”

Deumos lets go of the mirror and it falls, shattering into a million little pieces.

“Looks like we’re married. Mazel tov,” I say.

She squints and walks away from me.

“Don’t even joke about that.”

“Can you get your people together by tonight? I want to get this thing rolling.”

“I’ll need to start right away.”

“Brimborion will get you whatever you need.”

She looks at me when we get to the library doors.

“You agreed to the compact but don’t believe in oaths, do you?”

“No. People do what they’re going to do.”

“Yet you’re trusting me with your life.”

“Believe me, if there was any other way to do it, I would. But you’re smart enough to see an opportunity when it takes a dump on your lawn.”

“For a chance to have our own tabernacle I’d make a deal with the Devil himself.”

“You’re a regular Phyllis goddamn Diller.”

She doesn’t look at me but I can tell she’s pleased with herself.

Brimborion knocks a minute later.

I yell, “Hold on a minute,” and look at Deumos.

“You’re wrong. You know that? I don’t think you mean to sell snake oil but your church is a New Age wet dream. There’s no Hellion fairy godmother who’s going to overthrow big bad Daddy and fix this mess.”

When she smiles it’s like she feels sorry for me.

“How is it you’re so sure? Because you’re the great and powerful Lucifer?”

“Because I’ve had drinks with God. The real one. He’s broken into so many pieces He couldn’t lead a high school field trip. And trust me, lady, He doesn’t have a backup plan. We’re on our own.”

She pats me on the arm and angles around to get to the door.

“You let me worry about Hellion souls and you worry about your impending death. I have one more stipulation, by the way.”

“What?”

“I want to be there tonight. I can supply you with fighters and medical help but I want to be there so that whatever happens there are no misunderstandings between the two of us.”

“You got it.”

I open the door and she steps out into the hall.

“Is there anything else?” Brimborion asks.

“Take her back downstairs and get her anything she wants. And keep a low profile yourself. Things are going to get weird in a little while.”

“How weird?”

“Duck-and-cover weird. Take the lady downstairs. She can fill you in.”

Brimborion wants to ask more questions. Deumos takes his arm and leads him away.

The Hellion hog rumbles to life. I slip out the back of the hotel and head north on Rodeo Drive. There’s always a pang of nostalgia here. Once upon a time I got into a kaiju smackdown with Mason’s attack dog, Parker, and almost burned the street to the ground. But that was almost a year ago and I’ve forgiven it for being so crowded with rich assholes. And for being so flammable.

I blow up Sunset heading north. My burned hand aches from working the throttle but that’s just how it is.

Off the Boulevard, the road is a mess. Earthquakes tore up the asphalt. Fires melted what was left, and when it cooled it was like a lava bed, full of frozen waves and sudden dips. There aren’t a lot of repairs going on up here. No percentage. There’s nothing but scorpions and lost Tartarus ghosts out this way.

People don’t go where I’m going for fun. It’s not smart to take the direct route, so I turn off the main street onto winding two-lane roads that circle scorched hills and abandoned movie-mogul estates before dropping off into hidden canyons. It’s midnight in a coal-mine dark out here except for the bike’s headlight. I open up the throttle and the roadbed shakes and cracks under my wheels. Lines spread around me like thin bolts of black lightning. The edges of the road sag. Chunks break off and fall into the dark. Most roads north of Hollywood are suicide roads, streets so fucked up by underground blood tides and quakes that they could collapse into sinkholes at any minute. This is my way of keeping things interesting for whoever is following me.

I’m working from the idea that coming out to no-man’s-land will encourage my assassin to make his or her move. And being in the boonies will give me a better chance of running the hell away without any freelance shooters or red leggers in town taking potshots at me when I go down. I might have spooked my assassins by not lying down and dying. If I give them a head start on the deed, let them get to me half dead, maybe it will encourage them to come out in the open to finish the job.

That’s the idea. Truth is, I’m not even a hundred percent sure that I’m being followed. I hope I am. I better be. I don’t want to have to do any of this again. I’ll know soon enough.

There are lights ahead. I kill the bike’s headlight and ease off the throttle.

Back home, Coldwater Canyon is a pretty green slice of Heaven where nice parents take their happy kids for weekend hikes to expose them to the joys of nature, rabid coyotes, and Lyme disease. In Hell, the canyon walls are hundreds of feet high and impossible to climb. Twisted spires of wind-smoothed granite are the only things that break up the bare landscape. Millions of shadows swarm across the valley and up the sides of the spires and walls. They beat, slash, shoot, and boil each other in open lava pools again and again and they’ll do it until the end of time. Butcher Valley. This is where I found Wild Bill.

A couple of hundred yards around the valley is a guard station. We have these all over Hell. I have no idea why. No one has ever done a dine-and-dash out of any of Hell’s punishment territories. My theory is that the stations are for the guards. You have to be a real fuckup to get dumped out here. The legions don’t have brigs or courts-martial. They have babysitting dead assholes for ten thousand years with no days off. Worse, every year in Hell is a leap year.

Considering tonight’s itinerary, I didn’t bother putting on a shirt. Why throw good clothes after bad? I heel down the kickstand and cut the bike’s engine before the lowlifes at the guard station notice me.

I’m wearing the leather jacket that prick Ukobach ruined with his sword. It seemed appropriate. I unzip it and toss it on the ground by the bike. All the way up the canyon I’ve been debating whether or not I should take off Lucifer’s armor. It would make what happens next more dramatic. On the other hand, without my angel half, Hell’s fetid air is like Kryptonite to my lungs and the armor is the only thing that lets me breathe. Without it I’ll probably choke to death before anyone finds me. Which brings me to the other point I’m going over. In a life full of dumb stunts, am I hitting a new level of idiot behavior? I’m alone and trusting my life to people who had me in a barbecue pit a couple of days ago.

The burns on my right hand are just about healed but I’ve never tried invoking a Gladius with an injured hand. I take a half-empty bottle of Aqua Regia from one of the bike’s saddlebags, have a long drink, and decide to keep my armor on. There’s going to be drama galore even if I’m in my Tin Man zoot suit.

I could use just a little help  right now, Saint James. I swear to God if I live through this, we’re going  to have a frank and honest talk about our feelings while I cut the Key to  the Room of Thirteen Doors out of your chest with a chop saw.

I’m feeling light-headed. Fear will do that. I got it sometimes in the arena when I knew they were going to throw something special at me but I didn’t know what. I pick up my leather jacket and bite down hard on the sleeve. It would be a shame to live through this having bitten off my tongue.

I don’t know what to say, Candy. We only had a couple of days together but they were a hell of a couple of days. Sorry for letting myself get stuck here. Talk about a long-distance relationship. If I live through this, I’ll tell you all about the new big stupid thing I did. If I die, just add it to the long list of bullshit you don’t need to hear.

I always wondered what Lucifer felt when God hit him with the final thunderbolt. The one that scorched and dented his theoretically invulnerable angelic armor.

This should be interesting.

I manifest the Gladius. It burns my injured hand but not enough to stop. I hold it out and count to three. Then swing it.

Whatever it is I feel when the Gladius hits my chest, it’s not pain. It’s something so far beyond pain that my human brain can’t register it. The only way I know I’ve made contact is that I’m knocked flat on my back with a heady bouquet of burning skin and seared metal in my nose. I don’t think the Middle Way smells like this. Missed it again, Bill.

I’m done fighting and looking for answers. I got mine.

What did that last thunderbolt feel like?

Nothing at all.

Good night, moon.

I drift for a million years. I’m in Mr. Muninn’s cavern. Samael is with him. They’re playing Operation. The buzzer goes off when Samael tries to take out the funny bone.