Of course, sheer reflex already had me planning how to bring him down—a kick in the knee, hard as I could, to be followed by crumpling his cantaloupe-sized head with the chair I’d knocked over on my way down—but I reminded myself I wasn’t going to let things get out of hand the way I had last time.
I did my best to fill my lungs. I wasn’t ready to get up yet. “Hello, Fiddlesticks. Nice to see you again. How are the wife and kids?”
He just stared at me.
“What’s with the sour expression? Seems to me if I hadn’t got Howlingfell killed, you wouldn’t have this nice white-collar job. Is it really worse than being back in Hell hacking pieces of petrified shit into smaller pieces, or whatever you used to do?”
“Why are you here?”
“Duh. To see your boss, as I already explained at the front desk. Of my own free will. No socking people in the breadbasket required.”
His head was certainly strange, almost normal in profile, but too narrow across the front, and about eighty percent of the proper size, although with the right haircut and clothing he could just pass for a normal human. He didn’t really have the right haircut, though. The small span of his face and the slightly outturned eyes made him look more like a horse or a fish than a person. Still, he at least knew how to tie a double Windsor knot. That’s kind of a dying art.
“Why shouldn’t I just beat you to a bloody, dead mess right here?” he asked.
“First, because it wouldn’t be as easy as you think it would. Second, because I’m an angel, so I wouldn’t be dead anyway, just waiting briefly for a new body so I could come back and gut you like a largemouth bass.” I should have stopped there. “Oh, sorry. Smallmouth bass, in your case.” I was lucky that he didn’t seem that sensitive about his appearance, but I’d almost sent the whole thing off the rails. “And third,” I said quickly, in case he just hadn’t figured it out yet, “because I have an offer for your boss that I know he’ll want to hear.”
He looked angry and bewildered—not a good combination on anyone, much worse on him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“It’s not hard, Fiddle-me-this. I want to offer the Grand Duke something. He’ll want to know about it. So if you and I get to ripping pieces off each other, and he never finds out what it was until it’s too late . . . well, he’ll probably send you to Doctor Teddy.”
This hit home. Doctor Teddy was a hideous little thing that worked for Eligor in his house in Hell, inflicting inventive kinds of pain on the grand duke’s enemies. Fiddlescrape gave me a worried look and stood there for a moment, rubbing his huge hands together. I took the opportunity to lift myself slowly from the floor until I was standing. Whatever else happened, he wasn’t getting another free shot at me like the first one.
He growled at me to stay put, then stepped out of the room again. I heard the door lock with a very definitive click, then heard his steps moving away at the same time as I heard him speak to someone, presumably on a phone. I righted the chair I’d knocked over, sat in it, and calmed my breathing, trying to slow my heart. I can’t tell you how badly I’d wanted to put my foot up Fiddlescrape’s too-tall ass. It’s a lot harder being smart than it is being stupid.
A minute or two later he came back. He beckoned and led me out into the hall, then nudged me along it, past another half-dozen unmarked doors and into what looked like a freight elevator at the end of the corridor. We went up. The stories ticked over until we’d reached the forty-fourth, then the door opened.
“Office is at the end,” said Fiddlescrape.
“You’re not coming with me? What if I start to litter or unreel the fire hose or something?”
“Office is at the end,” he said, louder this time.
“Well, it’s been fun,” I said as I stepped out. I’d been in this corridor before, knew the dark green carpets and expensive wainscoting. The entrance to Vald’s office was at the far end. The door of the elevator hissed shut behind me. Then the lights went out.
But I hadn’t been hit this time, or if I had, I hadn’t noticed it. I was still standing, though, could still feel my body, could still hear the elevator murmuring down toward the lower stories, but I couldn’t see a damn thing. Until the fire came. Whoosh! Flames all around me, blossoming from the walls, ceiling and floor like huge wavering flowers. It had to be gas jets—that was all I could figure, but I could already feel the fire licking at my clothes, shriveling my lashes and eyebrows to ash, so I jumped forward into the dark space before me.
Whoosh! More flames. What had at first seemed like a built-in crematory just outside the elevator on the executive floor expanded into a cascade of flames that stretched away in front of me, as if the oven had just become a long fiery tunnel. I couldn’t find the elevator now, let alone get back into it, and the skin on my hands and face was beginning to burn. Eligor, I had just enough time to think, you are such a shit.
Then I began to run, telling myself that it couldn’t last any longer than the twenty yards or so down the hall to Eligor’s office door. I could barely see the narrowing of the flames ahead of me, but I put my head down and did my best not to bump into any walls, or—God forbid—to fall down, because then I’d be roasted like a chicken dinner. The pain had already gone past the point I can describe. Fire had engulfed my clothes and was burning the skin right off my body. The only thing that had kept me alive this long was the fact that my body was from the heavenly warehouses. I could feel my eyes glazing, cracking, my lungs smoking as they shriveled into chipotle peppers. Every nerve in my body was giving its death cry, a shrill, continuous screech of pain that felt like it would kill me long before the actual damage did.
I ran for what must have been a hundred yards without finding anything but more fire. The burning corridor went on and on forever. Which meant I wasn’t in Five Page Mill anymore, or even in San Judas. Which meant I was in . . . no, not Hell. Not that fast. If Eligor could have managed it so quickly and easily the first time, I never would have survived to be here now. I wasn’t in Hell, I was stuck in my own mind.
Not that it did me any good to know that. It took everything I had to ease my crazy, dying sprint, because every second that passed meant I could feel the skin and muscles blackening right on my bones. But running wasn’t going to do it—I had to find my way out. Physically, I felt pretty sure I was still in the corridor on the forty-fourth floor.
I slowed to a walk. It really was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do—it went against the desperate, dying alarms of every nerve ending I had, against pain like nothing you could understand unless you’ve been through it. But I had to do it that way. I reached out my hands, putting them right into the jets of flame as I groped along. I was feeling actual walls beneath my touch while simultaneously feeling the bones of my fingers char and turn into ash and flake away. I don’t know why I wasn’t screaming like a madman. Maybe I was.
At last I felt a bump as I trailed my fingers over a doorframe—fingers that my howling senses told me had already been burned away. It felt like my actual brain was exposed in a scorched skull, and that everything they always said about no nerves in the brain was a horrible fucking lie. I found the doorknob then and turned it before I had time to think about what I was going to do if it wouldn’t open.
It opened. Into nothing. Then I was falling through blackness—tumbling, waving my arms and kicking my legs as I plummeted down into depths I couldn’t see, couldn’t even imagine. For half a second the air sawing across my exposed bones and meat actually felt like a cooling relief, but then it began to feel like all that raw Bobby-area was being sandblasted. This wasn’t lost-in-emptiness blackness, this wasn’t floating-in-nothing blackness, this was a hole that went down so far that I was plummeting like a meteor out of space. I’d plunge forever, burn up, or hit the bottom and burst into a million pieces.