The shape stopped speaking. For a long moment, nothing moved in the yellow light except a few strands tugged by some impossible current. Then the figure shifted again, suddenly and violently, stretching into a shape that seemed too long, too many-jointed and angular to fit into the slender column. It might have been a man made of broomsticks; it might have been a scarecrow built of long, thin bones.
“What is that?” it asked, and the harsh voice took on a colder, even more threatening sound. “What does that creature do?”
Von Reinmann looked over in the direction of the camera. “He . . . records this historic meeting, great Prince Sitri! For the glory of the Black Sun!”
“No.” A moment later a great blackness leaped out of the light, straight toward the camera. Every single one of us flinched. Halyna, who had been leaning on my shoulder, damn near got knocked on her ass. The monitor went black. The video was over.
For a long moment we all stared from the blank screen to each other. Then Clarence said, “I think I might have to be sick,” and staggered off toward the bathroom.
“And this is who you’re up against?” Wendell had lost much of his healthy color. He looked like I felt.
“Every fucking day. But not just him.” I turned to check on Halyna, but she and Oxana had retreated to the couch across the room and were whispering anxiously. “In fact, to be completely aboveboard, I don’t think Prince Sitri gives a damn about me at all. It’s Grand Duke Eligor he wants to damage. They hate each other. If that horn goes public, Eligor is in serious trouble with the rest of the nobles of Hell, so Sitri wants to find it.”
“But why?” Wendell closed the black video window. “What’s the struggle over the horn all about? Why is it even in circulation?”
“You’d better get yourself some coffee,” I said. “Even Harrison doesn’t know all of this. And when you know the whole truth, you may want to re-think getting involved. Like I said, these are some serious bad folks.”
“I don’t care if it’s the Adversary himself,” Wendell said. “They have to be stopped.”
“The Black Sun? Yeah, I’d be happy to take them out if the chance arises. But they’re not what matters here.”
Because though I could never make anyone else understand it, the only thing that truly mattered was getting Caz back. Demonic rivalries, Nazi child-murderers, angelic vendettas, none of it meant anything if I couldn’t save her.
“I feel it too,” she’d admitted to me. “I have since the first.” That was what mattered.
• • •
Once I’d laid it all out for them, Wendell and Clarence seemed so overwhelmed that I sent them home, sending two of the new untraceable phones with them. They looked like they’d been in a firefight, which wasn’t that surprising. I mean, it’s one thing to find out that things are different behind the scenes than you thought they were, another to find out that not only are things different, but that the truth is batshit crazy. We all, angels included, spend most of our time acting like reality is pretty safe, that the world is more or less familiar, and most difficulties can be dealt with simply by determination, hard work, and (if we’re sentimentalists) good intentions. But it just isn’t so, and sometimes it’s painful to be reminded.
The Amazons retreated to the bedroom after the angels left. When I heard the noises begin I thought they were taking comfort in each other’s bodies, but after a little while I realized that, while that was true, it wasn’t in the way I thought: They were sparring. At some point they must have changed to bladed weapons, because the tank, tank, tank noise of steel on steel filled the apartment. Our neighbors had no idea how lucky they were that Caz had insisted on thick concrete walls.
It was nearing midnight, and I was exhausted after one of the longest days I’d ever had outside of Hell, but I still had a few things to do. I didn’t want to wait for Fatback to be human-brained, but I did want to get him going on some of the new information I wanted, now that I’d confirmed that Donya Sepanta was Anaita. I especially wanted to know more about bugbears, or at least more about how to kill them. Also, I now had the ominous words of Prince Sitri to consider. “I will give you three servants,” he’d told the Black Sun crew. I already knew the Nightmare Children better than I’d like, but the bugbears, or as he’d called them, the Boneless Ones, were a lot more powerful than the swastikids. I didn’t even want to guess at what the third servant might be, but it was likely to be another escalation and I wanted to be prepared.
To my pleasant surprise, old Javier answered the phone at Fatback’s house. George was back in town, he told me, and was feeling much better for his stay in the valley. Yes, he’d let me ring through to voicemail, although if I just called back in half an hour, he said, I could talk to the boss in person.
I was simply too tired. I left a message for George, then, on an impulse, called Gustibus. One of the Russian nuns picked up the phone and informed me Gustibus had retired, which I hoped meant only that he’d gone to bed for the night. I asked her to have him contact me and gave her the number off one of the new phones.
I could scarcely keep my eyes open at this point, but I also felt a kind of jerky, wired restlessness that made me want to drink. That’s one of the things about booze that keeps bringing me back, like a man who can’t give up a woman who keeps breaking his heart: It shut my brain up sometimes when nothing else would. It sucked the jangle out of my nerves enough to let me sleep on some bad nights when sleep was the only thing that might help me.
That’s not an excuse, or rather it is an excuse. Yes, I drink more than I should, and if I didn’t have a very fit angel’s body which could heal a deep wound in twenty-four hours or less, I’m sure my liver would be in a jar somewhere in a medical museum, next to Rasputin’s famous kielbasa and Einstein’s deli-sliced brain.
• • •
I had just stretched out on the couch, hoping to watch some sports news or something that would shut off the parts of my brain the vodka hadn’t reached. Halyna came padding out of the bedroom in her socks, pulled on a hoodie, and went outside to smoke a cigarette. I had just decided that college football must be the second most over-discussed sport in the world—after golf, of course, which has no serious competitors—when Halyna came back through the door with a very weird look on her face.
“Do you know bats?” she asked.
It took me a moment to shift gears, but the baseball season was long over. “Bats? Like flying rodents?”
“Yes. Bats. Do you know them?”
“I know a little bit about them. Why? Did you see one outside?” I thought maybe she’d found an injured or sick one and was about to warn her about rabies, but the expression on her face was weirder than that. “What’s going on?”
“There is . . . bat on the fence. I think. And it is talking.”
For a full two seconds I literally couldn’t figure out what she was saying, what bizarre wrong-turn in her mental Ukrainian-English dictionary had taken her so far down the road to impossibility—then I suddenly realized what was going on. I leaped up and rushed to the door, pushing past her in my hurry. She followed me out into the apartment courtyard.
“There,” she said, nervously quiet. “On fence.”
Something was indeed hanging on the fence, and it did look quite a bit like a bat, except that one wing was much larger than the other, and the body itself looked more like some kind of slug, except with a lot of furry legs. As I approached, the little beast turned its head all the way around on its shoulders, so that it faced me even with its back toward me. It looked a bit like one of those tree-climbing, branch-tapping critters, a potto or a loris or something, if pottos and lorises were made of mucus and had one really large eye in the middle of their faces.