“Bobby, no! That’s just crazy!”
I heard her but I kept going.
“Bobby! You can’t go down that way! Take the tram!”
But I was too angry. If I didn’t burn off some of the rage coursing like napalm through my veins, I was going to strangle something. Not that random strangling was such a no-no in Hell, but it might attract more attention than I wanted. Still ignoring Caz’s calls, I reached the nearest end of the lake and headed off the path, down the slope through the black trees. My brain felt like a wasp’s nest that someone had kicked.
I had made it perhaps a mile downhill, dusty gray dirt filling my lungs with grit, thorny branches scratching my exposed skin, when the worst of my anger began to wear off. In fact, I was just beginning to wonder if I had been a little hasty (or, God forbid, overly dramatic) when I stumbled out into a clearing and realized I was face-to-face with Caz’s two bodyguards, still waiting by the parked Hell limo. They stared at me for a second, not so much recognizing me as recognizing that I probably didn’t belong there. I had just realized the same thing when one of the two ugly bastards shouted, “Oy! You!” I turned and ran back into the trees, cursing myself for the self-absorbed idiot that everyone always says I am. Everyone is right, of course, but shut up.
Now it was a race. They weren’t coming after me as hard as they would have if they had recognized me, but names aside, Candy and Cinnamon were strictly the snips and snails and severed puppy-dog tails sort of guys—military-grade weapons in hypermuscled, vaguely human forms. They didn’t have to go around trees the way I did, just through them. The sound of shattering trunks and exploding branches followed me down the hillside like artillery fire.
Judging by the noises, I seemed to have pulled ahead of at least one of them, but his ugly brother was right behind me. I followed the tramway cables as best I could, half the time sliding down the slope on my ass because the loose black soil was treacherous under my feet. The much heavier Sweetness Twins didn’t seem to have the same problem: When I looked back, the nearest of the two was only about ten yards behind me. He was holding something in his hand that looked like a short whip made of loops of glowing barbed wire, and I decided that I really, really didn’t want to find out what that would feel like. Sadly, it didn’t look like I was going to have much choice. A couple of dozen yards in front of me the slope fell away sharply, the tram cables swaying in midair above a drop of at least a few hundred feet. I had to slow to a stop.
I was pretty sure the one thundering down behind me was Cinnamon, although there wasn’t a huge amount of difference between the kinds of ugly the two of them wore, but even in demonic form Caz’s driver retained a sort of mustached look, a greater thickness to his leathery upper lip. I was tempted to remind him of my many humorous comments about his porn career in the hopes of making him angry and reckless, but I figured since we were both wearing different bodies and he hadn’t recognized my new one, that would definitely count as asking for trouble. Instead I took a few steps back up the slope toward him and lowered myself into a kind of wrestler’s crouch, my arms spread wide.
“Hold up, you,” he growled at me, slowing down a little as he saw me ready to fight back. He lifted the glowing, rattling wire whip. “Tell me what you were doing . . .”
If I was any normal idiot he would have caught me off-guard, because halfway through that sentence he suddenly swung his flail, with every clear intention of swiping my head right off my neck. Luckily for me, I already knew that neither of us meant the other well. I ducked the weapon and then scooped a handful of black dust from the slope into his eyes.
He screamed in fury, but he wasn’t anywhere near as angry as I wanted him to be, because instead of charging down the slope in an insane rage, he groped toward me with small steps, sweeping with the glowing flail, angling himself so that I would find it hard to get back up the slope past him while he was momentarily blinded. I’ve faced off against more good fighters over the years than I ever wanted to, and Cinnamon was definitely one of them.
However, he was a fighter, and I wasn’t, which was my only advantage. I’m just a survivor. I kept throwing things at him, making enough fuss and ruckus to keep him staggering downhill toward me, wiping at his streaming eyes while also trying to keep me in front of him. Another few steps and I stumbled and fell back, ending up in a crouch. I tried to look exhausted, which wasn’t hard since I was. Cinnamon could see just enough of me to know that he had me, so he hurried to reach me before I could get up again. And that was the mistake I’d been hoping for.
Just before he got to me, I jumped as high as I could. The Highest was with me, or at least not actively trying to kill me at the moment, and the tips of my fingers just curled over the tramway cable. I pulled my legs up as Cinnamon lunged at the place where I’d just been, then as soon as he had tottered past I twisted around and shoved him in the back of the shoulders as hard as I could with both feet, sending him stumbling down slope. I wasn’t strong enough to hurt him much, and he would have recovered his balance within a few more steps—he was massive, at least twice my size—but he didn’t have a few more steps. I had lured him far enough back that we were at the edge of the drop-off, a near-vertical, and by the time he tried to put his second foot down there was nothing beneath him. Even in Hell they don’t tread water in midair like they do in the cartoons. He dropped out of sight like a big bag of rocks. Unluckily for me, when he threw his hands up in astonishment at the complete lack of anything solid beneath his feet, the wire flail brushed me before it disappeared with Cinnamon into the emptiness below.
It wasn’t like electricity, and it wasn’t like fire, but whatever was in that flail combined many of the least pleasant parts of both. I don’t even remember letting go of the tram cable, and if I’d been a little closer to the edge I would have gone over right behind the big gray guy, but I dropped to the ground so limply that instead of rolling I lay at the edge of the hill like a half-filled sandbag.
I was wondering idly how I kept winding up in situations like this when the streaky reddish light of Hell’s late afternoon was blocked by another large, dark silhouette.
“You little smear of shit,” said Cinnamon’s buddy, Candy. He leaned forward, and I felt his knee come down on my chest like someone had parked a truck on me. He shoved something like an oversized flintlock pistol at my face, a huge thing of cast-iron, brass, and wood. I had no idea what level of pit technology it represented, but I was pretty certain it would blow my head off. Candy’s finger was so huge I was astonished he hadn’t already pulled the trigger by accident. He was breathing hard, and what little I could see of his big, ugly face looked pretty unhappy. “You messed up my partner,” he growled. I could swear his knee was touching the ground, even through my chest. “Oh, yeah. You’re going to be screaming for years.”
thirty-two:
lifted
IN MORE normal circumstances I might have tried to talk my way out of it, not that Candy was going to let me walk away, of course. It was far too late for that. But I would have tried to bullshit him long enough to get some distance between us, then done my best to outrun him. For some reason, though, I had been getting angrier and angrier for most of the last hour. Perhaps getting dumped had something to do with it. Also, I’d just kicked Candy’s partner over a cliff, which meant he probably wasn’t going to listen to me very carefully. So instead of trying to find a less violent way to deal with an elephantine knee in my chest and a gun in my face, I ducked under the gun barrel and yanked the long, curved knife I’d bought at the Night Market out of my boot. I did my best to hamstring him as I pulled it forward, but didn’t spend too long worrying about whether I’d succeeded or not, because the main thing I wanted to do was drive it into his groin, which I did about a quarter second later. Candy screamed and fell across me, fountaining blood, but I was already rolling; I managed to kick my way out from under him, but not before getting covered in sticky red stuff. If he’d sunk his thick fingers into me with his weight on top of me, I’d still be there.