Devil Said Bang

Like the first time I was here, it’s mausoleum dark inside. We leave the door open for a little light but there’s not much to see besides the spindly foyer tables and Teddy’s bone sculptures. I take out the .45 and head into one of the side rooms to look for Teddy.

I left the towels in the car. It’s hard intimidating people with fluffy white towel corners sticking out from under your shirt. I feel a little liquid in my chest when I take deep breaths. Maybe a bullet sliced into my lung. The armor is holding me together, but whenever I cough there’s blood in it. Besides Teddy, my biggest worry is not letting Candy see it. I wish I had some Aqua Regia. That stuff is better than a swimming pool full of penicillin.

Something small shoots past my ear. A hand grabs my shoulder and slides down my back. When I turn, Candy is lying on the polished marble floor.

“Wow. She really is a Jade. I wasn’t sure.”

I kneel by Candy. Hold my fingers to her throat. She’s still breathing and her heart is beating.

I look around for the voice.

“This stuff doesn’t do anything to regular people but it’s like curare to Jades. Completely paralyzing. Amazing stuff.”

I turn slowly while Teddy talks, listening for where he might be. I hear him reloading the tranq gun but the foyer echoes, making him hard to pinpoint.

“Are you going to play with your gun all day or do something?”

“Come for me,” he says.

Traven leans down beside me and says, “There.”

In the dark, I can make out someone at the foot of the sweeping staircase with his hands up like a bank robber surrendering in a movie.

I charge him. Fish and rocks smash and splat outside and in my head I see Teddy hitting the ground and splitting open with them. Maybe I’ll toss him off the roof.

I fall. But it’s not really a fall. More like I’m a piece of iron sucked down by a magnet the size of Arizona. I land on my injured side on a big square of canvas, coughing up an impressive fountain of blood. Something is holding me to the floor like two-ton shackles. Lying here isn’t so bad. It’s hard to catch my breath, so I doubt I could stand right now anyway.

Traven moves from Candy to kneel beside me. He tries pulling me up but I don’t budge.

Teddy flicks a switch and a crystal chandelier lights up the foyer. There’s someone with him. She’s on the stairs above him, so even though she’s smaller, she towers over him. She has a pistol in her hand.

“You. Priest. Get away from them. Over by the wall.”

She moves the barrel of the gun to indicate where she wants Traven to stand.

Teddy opens his hands wide.

“Two-for-two. I’ve never been so lucky. You’re a gem. Do you know that? Poison for the Jade and a binding circle to trap the Devil.”

He looks at Traven and frowns.

“We didn’t expect a civilian. All there is for you is the gun. How boring.”

I can move just enough to crane my head around and see the woman. I’m low and from this angle can only see her upside down but I know those scars. It’s Lula Hawks.

Teddy comes over from the stairs. I haven’t seen him like this before. Happy and animated. The crazy fuck is practically skipping like a little kid to dinner. He walks right past me to Candy. I try to turn my head but I’m stuck.

“I’m keeping this one alive,” he says. “She’ll go into one of the Gnostic graves until she’s ripe. I won’t eat her all at once. How often does one get to eat a Jade? I have to make her last.”

All I can see are his calfskin loafers as he circles in front of me. He bends at the waist and looks down so we’re eye to eye.

“Cat got your tongue?” he says.

He looks at Lula and brightens.

“Can I have his tongue? You can have the rest. I just want one little taste.”

“No,” she says. “The deal was you get the girl and I get the monster.”

She comes around next to Teddy, one hand on Traven’s arm and the other holding the gun.

“You know me now but do you remember me from before King’s place? Before Blackburn’s? Before I got these scars?”

“Didn’t I scrape you off my boots at a Fresno dairy farm?”

Teddy laughs. All worked up like this, he sounds creepily like the little girl.

“You killed Josef right in front of me. I loved him and you cut off his head and handed it to me like it was a big joke.”

All the birds do come home to roost. Cherry was right. The past catches up with us in Hell and in L.A.

I remember a girl. It was right before New Year’s at a skinhead clubhouse where Josef the Kissi had set up shop. His pretty-boy Aryan face and dominant personality made him a perfect White Power leader. He used the skinheads for muscle and cover. Lula was there but I didn’t know her name back then. She was just a pretty tattooed girl with a shaved head. It was right after I escaped from Hell the first time. I hadn’t been back on Earth very long and was still getting used to mortal women. I fell in love with her for the ten seconds I saw her in her white wife beater. A day or two later I burned the skinhead clubhouse to the ground. Probably killed a lot of them. Burned the hell out of others. I cut off Josef’s head that night. Of course, all I did was kill Josef’s human body. The Kissi part of him was fine but Eva Braun here never got the joke because she never copped to the fact that Josef wasn’t human. I’m going to die because a dumb little Nazi bitch had a crush on another monster. Maybe God has a sense of humor after all.

“Why?” I say. It’s all I can get out.

“Why didn’t I kill you when I met you at Blackburn’s? Why didn’t I feed you to King or send you straight to Teddy to die? Because I knew all I had to do was give you a little push and you’d find your way up the hill on your own. And it would hurt a lot more along the way. I hope it did. But not as much as what’s going to happen.”

“Mr. Osterberg,” says Traven. “When God threw Satan out of Eden, he said, ‘Thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field. Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.’ Do you know how much lower than that you are?”

Good for you, Father.

Teddy raises his eyebrows in mock innocence.

“None of this is my fault. I was just hungry and King Cairo told Lula here my secret. All the men in my family have the hunger. If you want to blame someone, blame Great-Grandfather. He made a deal with . . .” Teddy leans down into my face and yells, “The Devil. Yes, Great-Grandfather made a deal for wealth and power and volunteered to become something abominable—an eater of the dead—to prove his loyalty to Satan.”

Samael must have laughed his ass off at that. He would have been happy with the idiot’s soul, but when the nitwit offered to eat corpses for the next fifty years, how could he say no to that? Some people are too stupid to even damn themselves properly.

“None of you will be as tasty as the kids but I’m forced to go on a child-free diet for a while. The Imp hasn’t killed all the parents of the ones I’ve already taken and until then I’m forced to subsist on dreary adults.”

I was right. He used the girl to kill for Aelita, then for himself when Aelita didn’t need her. A sweet deal for a guy like Teddy. I wonder if he used her to kill new food for his pantry? How could he resist? I think I finally know what Aelita wanted out of all this. Not that it matters down here on the floor.

I take a deep breath and cough up blood on Teddy’s shoes.

His face turns red and he kicks me in the teeth. Lula slaps him hard enough to leave a mark.

“You don’t touch this one.”

Traven says, “How do you control something as powerful as the girl? You barely seem to be able to control yourself.”

Lula hits him in the back of the neck with the gun butt.

Teddy goes to a table where a child’s skull sits under a bell jar.

“Isn’t she beautiful? The angel bought me the Imp’s cemetery for safekeeping. As payment, she gave me the skull. There was hardly any flesh left on her and it was as dry as paper. I soaked it in toddler fat and fried it brown and crispy. The Imp was exquisite. And after I said the words the angel gave me, her ghost was mine to command.”

“That’s it,” says Lula. “They’ve heard enough to know they’ve been fucked all along. Especially this one.”

She kicks me in my injured side. Teddy laughs.

“He pulled a gun on me, you know.”

Lula rolls her eyes.

“Yes, I know. You’ve told me at least twenty times.”

“I was being polite and he pulled a gun.”

She nods.

“Go play with yours and leave mine alone.”

“I want to watch,” he says.

“Then get out of my way.”

Lula disappears and comes back with a big jerry can. I can smell the gasoline from here. She kicks Traven.

“Turn him over on his back and drag him outside on the canvas. We don’t want to break the circle. I want plenty of room to see him squirm while he burns.”

Teddy smiles down at me.

“Burn yours if you want. I’m eating mine raw.”

Fish and stones fall outside. Traven looks scared. He doesn’t want to help Lula kill me or go out into the supernatural rain. I know the look on his face. He’s vapor-locked. His brain can’t process the choices. He’s a good man and good men shouldn’t be in places like this having to do these things.

I feel a tiny earthquake. Teddy screams and drops the Imp’s skull. Tries to turn and falls backward into a hole.

All I can see is the top of the hole. Teddy’s hands scrabble around the edges trying to pull himself out while Cherry’s bony arms pull him back down. Lula points the gun at Traven and sidles up to the hole.

“What the fuck?”

She’s disgusted. The dead are misbehaving. You have no idea, lady.

Lula points the pistol into the hole and fires shot after shot. She doesn’t see Traven. He picks up the Imp’s skull and hits Lula from behind. She drops the pistol into the hole and falls to her knees. Traven hits her again and knocks her against the wall. He pushes Lula upright and pins her arms.

“Do you want to go to Hell, young lady?”

“Fuck you.”

She spits at him. Traven leans in like he’s going to kiss her. Black vapor and dust stream from his mouth into hers. I watch with Lucifer’s eyes, as her skin, already stained black with sin signs, turns wet and sloppy like she’s been dipped in hot tar. Her body sags. Traven has to hold her up to continue the Dolorosa.

“Enough” is all I can get out. Traven stops. I’ve never seen that look of fury on his face before. It’s happened. He wanted to do more and he walked into the belly of the beast. Ghouls. Jabbers. Murderers and hit men. All in a day. The good man that came in the house is gone. The man I’m looking at is still good but in an angry, wounded way that matches Traven’s lined soldier’s face.

Traven looks to where Lula slid down the wall into a sitting position. She’s unconscious and twitching. Eyes rolled back and breathing hoarse as her body tries to absorb the Dolorosa poison.

I whisper, “Help me.”

That wakes Traven up. He looks at me in a dazed way. Recognizes what’s happened and flips through all the books in his head. He takes the knife from inside my coat and slits the canvas, ripping out a piece to break the circle. Suddenly I can take a decent breath. I can even stand. Slowly. I spit blood and go to where Traven is bent over Candy.

I collapse onto my knees next to her body.

“She’s alive,” Traven says. “But the other woman. I think I might have killed her.”

“Who cares? Dead now or dead later. Either way she’s hellbound.”

He looks at me with a mixture of sorrow and shame. The preacher inside is still hanging on by his fingernails. Traven understands damning someone but not being an executioner. Maybe later I’ll tell him that the first one is always the hardest. Maybe not.

“Do you know how to do mouth-to-mouth?”

“Yes,” he says. “The Red Cross came to the seminary.”

“Get her to the car and do what you can. She’s just paralyzed now but we don’t want any brain damage, do we?”

“No.”

“Get her out of here.”

Traven nods. Picks Candy up in his arms and runs with her through the cursed rain.

I go to the hole and look inside. Lula plugged Teddy five or six times. There are lots of bone fragments in the dirt. She hit Cherry too.

I shouldn’t do what I’m doing but I’m still doing it. I pick up the Imp’s skull and throw it on the floor as hard as I can. The marble cracks and the skull explodes into a thousand pieces, destroying Lamia’s connection to this world. I don’t have to kill her. She was never really responsible for what she did. She was a slave killing for a sick bastard. I did plenty of that in Hell. With any luck, she’ll be just another ghost in the Tenebrae now. Maybe she’ll be strong enough to squeeze out whatever hole she came through and go home to the Angra. Who knows, maybe freeing her will buy humanity some brownie points when the Angra come back to eat our lunch. They can keep us around like sea monkeys and teach us tricks. Why not? One God fucked with us at the beginning of time. What’s one more?

I pick up the jerry can and spread gasoline all over the floor. Before I light it, I find the kitchen and rip all the gas hoses out of the walls. I go outside and light a Malediction, letting the house fill with fumes. When I’m halfway through the smoke, I open the front door and toss it inside. The house catches. Windows blow out, sending burning debris onto the perfect lawn. Traven starts the car. The flames light our way down the long hill.