Richard Kadrey - Kill City Blues

“You never understood how being a ruler works, James. And you have no idea what a deity is. You want me to make myself known and manifest to humankind. Do you really think that would solve anything? Or would it make things worse? You, like Samael, want total free will for the angels.”

Muninn sweeps his arms out to the broken landscape of Hell.

“Behold. That is what angelic free will looks like.”

“That’s not fair. You took the worst of the worst, the losers and the rat-fuck crazies, and locked them at the shit-pit bottom of the universe. There was no way they were ever going to build anything but this.”

“That’s also Samael’s argument. You two are so much alike.”

“I’m not anything like Samael.”

Muninn leans forward in his chair.

“Really? Does that wound in your side hurt?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Of course it is.”

He looks at Candy.

“Samael walked around for millennia bleeding from a wound I gave him during the first Heavenly war. All he ever had to do was ask and I would have healed him.”

Candy gives me a look.

“That does sound familiar.”

“Samael and I aren’t anything alike.”

Muninn looks at Candy.

“He’ll bleed with that bullet in him until the end of time before he’ll ask for help.”

“What if I ask?” Candy says.

Muninn raises his eyebrows.

“Ah. Here’s someone unburdened by the sin of pride.”

“Don’t you dare,” I say to Candy.

“Too late,” says Muninn. “Here.”

He puts something in my hand. The bullet.

Candy leans over to look at it.

“And what do we say when someone magically heals us?”

“I didn’t ask him to.”

She smiles at Muninn.

“He says, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Muninn.’”

“I hope you’ll forgive me for snatching away your martyrdom, James,” Muninn says.

“That’s okay. You I can forgive but the idiot who put it in there and whoever he works for I don’t. Or his bastard brother.”

“Will you be seeing Wild Bill while you’re here?”

“Next visit. When I’m not on the clock.”

Candy holds out her hand.

“Can I have the bullet?”

“What, are you a crow all of a sudden? You want all the shiny things.”

“I wanted the money clip because it was pretty. I want the bullet because you’re going to conveniently lose it somewhere and I want to keep it.”

“What for?”

“Who knows? Maybe when you get shot again I’ll make you cuff links.”

“For all the times I wear dress shirts.”

Dress shirts. Clothes. The bullet in my gut. I almost forgot the whole reason I came down here in the first place.

“Mr. Muninn, I’m looking for a new damned soul. His name is Trevor Moseley. Is there any way I can find him?”

“You say he’s new down here?”

Muninn shakes his head.

“I’m afraid our intake procedures aren’t what they should be. Why do you want to speak to him?”

“I want to know why he was so happy to walk in front of a bus.”

“That is unusual. I can put out a notice for him and let you know when he pops up on my radar.”

“Thanks. I’d appreciate it. We should go. We’ve taken up enough of your time.”

Muninn gets up.

“I’m sorry I raised my voice.”

“Don’t apologize. I probably deserved it.”

“You did,” says Candy.

“Feel free to come or go through any of the shadows in here,” says Muninn. “I don’t think you’ll be wanting to take the long way next time.”

“Not even a little. See you around, Mr. Muninn.”

“It was nice meeting you,” says Candy.

“Good-bye, my dear. I hope we meet again.”

“Me too.”

I pull Candy through a shadow and a wave of nausea and we come out in the living room in the Chateau.

Kasabian looks up from his computer.

“Where have you two been? You smell like something a dead raccoon horked up.”

I look at Candy.

“Told you so.”

“WHO ARE YOU calling?” says Candy.

I’m dripping on the carpet and she’s still toweling off from the shower. I’m turned away dialing the phone so she doesn’t have to look at the new scar I picked up from Garrett’s lucky shot.

I say, “Manimal Mike. He might know who made the fake 8 Ball.”

She comes out of the bathroom, takes the phone from my hand, and tosses it on the bed.

“Stop it,” she says.

“Why?”

“Because you just got shot. Because you just got blown up and we just came back from Hell.”

“I had a donut this morning.”

“See? I didn’t know that.”

“You were sitting right there.”

“I wasn’t paying attention.”

I know what she’s getting at even if she doesn’t want to say it. Days like this I can maybe catch a bullet, she can maybe get her laptop murdered, and maybe we can go to Hell, but doing them all the same day isn’t exactly normal, even for someone as fierce as Candy.

I nod. Get a glove to put on over my Kissi hand.

“Okay, country mouse. I guess getting to Mike’s in the next ten minutes isn’t going to save the world. What did you have in mind? Shuffleboard or coupon clipping?”

She pushes me down so I’m sitting on the bed.

“How about sitting still for a whole sixty seconds. I think you have this illusion that you’re a shark. Like you think you’ll choke if you stopped moving all the time.”

“The bullet’s out. I’m all healed up inside.”

“I know that in my head, but it doesn’t feel that way yet. And I see you trying to hide the wound, so don’t bother. Can we please just be here for a minute together without weird weapons or old gods or monsters between us?”

“Come here,” I say, and pull her down on the bed. She curls around me with her leg over mine.

“I know I’m not always easy to be around,” I say.

“No. You’re fine. It’s just everything you do.”

“I should have listened to my high school guidance counselor and studied air-conditioning repair.”

“Then you’d have all those sexy jumpsuits I could wear around the place.”

“Jumpsuits aren’t sexy.”

“They are when you’re not wearing anything under them.”

She gets up and turns off the light, then comes back to bed. A few minutes later her breathing is shallow and regular. She’s asleep. I close my eyes and drift off. In my dream, I’m in the arena in Hell with the mad little ghost, Lamia. We circle each other, looking for an opening.

“Are you here to kill me?” says Lamia.

I tell her the truth.

“Only if I have to.”

Part of me feels like an idiot. Lamia looks like a little girl, nine or ten years old, wearing a blue party dress. She also has a knife as big her forearm. And the only thing keeping her from sticking me with it is that I have the 8 Ball. It’s the only thing that’s ever seemed to scare her.

But this isn’t right. This isn’t how I met Lamia. It wasn’t in the arena. It was in the Tenebrae, the limbo land of lost and desperate ghosts too afraid to move on to Heaven or Hell.

Lamia was there, radiating crazy like a Chernobyl straitjacket and stalking the place like a Sherman tank in kneesocks. She knifed ghosts in the Tenebrae and killed people back on earth, laughing the whole time.

When I asked who she was and what she wanted, all I got was schizobabble about the world before it was the world. Eventually she told me her name.

“I’m Lamia. I breathe death and spit vengeance.”

Try having a ten-year-old tell you that and knowing they mean it. It’s a Hallmark moment.

Father Traven is our resident mystical trivia expert. He used to translate books for the Church, but then he translated the wrong one. The Angra Om Ya’s bible. He got the boot for that. Excommunicated. A one-way ticket to Hell.