The thing was, although it had almost taken over my life in the last year, I had no idea what Kainos was for, why it even existed. The official version handed out by Kephas/Anaita had been that it was an alternative to the present either/or of Heaven and Hell, which could be true for all I knew. But why would the Angel of Moisture want to create such a thing, and why would Eligor help her? It was hard to imagine either one of them getting misty-eyed over the rights of souls, and from everything Sam had said, an incredible amount of work had gone into making the Third Way real. Could I square the idea of Anaita as a sincere reformer with the creature who had now tried several times over to destroy me and the people I cared about?
Actually, I thought it was entirely possible. Maybe she really did think of herself as a do-gooder. Nearly every revolution, even the necessary ones, spawns a great deal of pointless bloodshed, revenge killings, and show trials of the insufficiently committed. Most of what Anaita had done to me had been in order to cover her own tracks, so I could accept, at least for now, the possibility that she’d set out to do exactly what was claimed, then panicked when the feather went missing—the feather that proved her guilt in conspiring against Heaven’s order.
But Eligor was another story, of course. Whatever Anaita’s motives might have been at the beginning, I found it impossible to believe that the Horseman had any interest in reforming the system or changing anything that didn’t benefit him personally. So why would he play along, and even take a huge risk, by giving his horn—which wasn’t really a horn, but a token of his essence—to Anaita to keep as potential blackmail fodder?
Trying to figure out the motivations of Hellfolk was like going down Alice’s rabbit-hole. I put it aside to concentrate on things that I had a better chance of answering.
Don’t worry about anything else, I told myself. Follow the power. I couldn’t yet answer the questions about who benefited and why, but there were still plenty of other things to consider. I’d been fairly sure that the horn was hidden at the museum because Anaita had gone to a lot of trouble to conceal something there. If it hadn’t been the horn, if it was only the entrance to Kainos, why? Why hadn’t she just built the doorway into one of the many rooms in her giant, fuck-off mansion?
Because she needed to hide it, had to be the answer. Anaita wanted ready access to it, but not in a place obviously associated with her. Heaven didn’t like the Third Way. Not at all. And it probably took a great deal of power to get there and back, or at least enough to be noticed by Heaven’s higher-ups. That might be why the doorway to Kainos was hidden far from Anaita’s own house. Perhaps that was also why she hadn’t followed Sam and I through it when we got away from her—she’d expended as much angelic might as she could manage to disguise.
If so, then the only real weapon I had against her was her fear of discovery. But that still didn’t tell me where Eligor’s horn was, and without that, everything else was pretty academic, because eventually Anaita was going to catch me and blot me out like an unwanted spill on the kitchen counter. She had more resources than I did—a lot more. “Oops! I seemed to have crushed a Doloriel,” she’d say, and everyone would say, “Tsk, tsk, too bad!” Then they’d go on as though it had never happened.
My new cell phone rang, startling the bejabbers out of me. The ringtone was some horrible European disco crap, and I throttled it into silence as quickly as I could.
“What?” I said into the phone, a little sharply. I assumed it was Clarence.
It wasn’t. “Bobby,” a male voice said. “I need to speak to you. In person.”
My heart got a little jumpy. Nobody had one of these phones except Clarence, Wendell, Oxana, and Halyna, and Halyna was dead. “Who is this?”
“The person who took you for a nice drive in the Baylands. Remember?”
Temuel. But since he hadn’t used his name, I wasn’t going to, either. “Yeah, I remember. In person where?”
“How about the place we met before you went on your sabbatical? Do you remember that?”
By “sabbatical” I guessed he meant “trip to Hell,” so he was talking about the Museum of Industry up in the Belmont district. I was a bit tired of museums, as you might imagine, but I also knew that the Mule wouldn’t have called me unless it was important. “Same spot? Give me half an hour.”
“Take the Camino Real. Traffic isn’t too bad today.”
I suppressed a smile. Some angels can’t stop angel-ing. It’s like an addiction. Or a reflex. “I’ll be there.”
I retrieved the nizzic from the pantry, listened to the message from Caz one more time, then burned some white camphor in a spoon and blew the smoke at the little monstrosity. The nizzic slumped a bit, and its head wagged slowly from side to side, like a cruise ship passenger who’d had one mai tai too many.
“Pay attention,” I told it. “Otherwise it’ll be silver salts instead of camphor, and you won’t like that.”
• • •
“I can’t just be funny and sweet, my beautiful Caz, even to make you happy. You told me once you didn’t do tender very well. I don’t do friendly chitchat very well, because I usually only use it on people who worry me or bore me. Right away I get out the sharp stuff and start looking for a weakness.
“The fact that it’s my own weaknesses I usually find is beside the point.
“So I can’t do that shallow stuff with you, not after where we’ve been and what we’ve done. I want you so badly, Caz. I dream of you. I replay our one night together over and over in my head like I was some sad little film fan watching Casablanca for the tenth time, hoping against sanity that this time Rick actually gets on the plane with Ilsa. I can still taste the salt of you, the sweat, the tang of your juices. I can still hear the sounds we made together like they were happening in the next room. You want to fuck me? I want to fuck you so much that if someone opened a door to Hell right now, I’d walk right in and start the whole thing over again, just for the chance to get near you.
“I’m never giving up. I’m never giving up. Have you got that straight yet?
“Never. Giving. Up.”
• • •
I put the re-messaged nizzic outside under a bush to wait for dark, then I gave Oxana some money in case she needed to go out and get anything. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t. She’d found a bottle of wine and was systematically polishing it off while she watched people argue on TV about paternity tests and other unimportant things. Just as I was leaving she called me back, then raised her eyes from the screen long enough to kiss me carefully on the cheek, like I was Dad and she was my college-age daughter home for the holidays or something. It was weird but not entirely bad.
I took Temuel up on his suggestion and went by the Camino Real instead of surface streets. I had to change lanes frequently to keep moving, but otherwise the traffic wasn’t too bad. The cab handled like a speedboat in tapioca even at the best of times, but I didn’t mind. I was in no hurry. Even with all the stuff thrashing around in my brain just now, and a strong urge to look closely at every driver I could see in case they were planning to kill me on Anaita’s behalf, something else had begun to bother me, though it took me most of the drive to put a finger on the problem.
My boss Temuel had called me on my Serbo-Croat Spinksphone. But Temuel wasn’t supposed to know about the Spinksphones. That’s why I’d bought them from Cubby Spinks before the museum break-in, so that the Amazons, Clarence, and I would have a private method of contact that neither Heaven nor Hell knew about. This was the second time Temuel had done something like this to me lately, and neither made sense. He’d known when I called out for a cab, too—the very cab I was now driving. He hadn’t told me how he’d done that trick, and now he’d pulled another one. He really was keeping tabs on me, probably tapping these new phones too. But why? Was he really so concerned for my health? Or was it just his own ass he was covering? That made more sense, but it meant that things would change very quickly if our interests ceased to coincide.