“It was pretty much on my foot.”
“Where do you think it came from?”
“A guy’s arm.”
“I mean did you recognize it. Did it look familiar?”
“It looked like a hand. You want to be Sherlock Holmes? I’ll drop you back down there and you can play patty-cake with it all day.”
“Body parts lying around. That’s a bad omen for me. I can’t afford to lose anything else.”
“That’s right. The universe stopped by our trash to personally deliver you a message from the great beyond. Get a grip. Some wino probably died in the neighborhood and the dogs got at him. Or there’s medical trash on the beach again and kids are leaving legs and eyeballs all over town.”
“What a waste. A perfectly good hand like that.”
“I’ll look for the other one. You can wear ’em like angel wings.”
“I’ll never have one again. Lucifer’ll never let that happen.”
“You mean a body.”
“It’s humiliating, you know. This whole situation. I’m not even a dog. I’m half a dog. On top of that I got you and Lucifer surrounding me, gnawing my ass like it’s filet mignon. You both want information and I know someday I’m going to tell one of you something you don’t like and you’re going to throw me into the wood chipper without a second thought.”
“I can’t help you get a body. The black blade is a mean Hellion hex machine. Whatever it cuts stays cut and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t, you know.”
Kasabian picks up his beer and chugs the bottle. It drains out of his neck and into the bucket, sounding somewhere between a light summer rain and someone peeing in a Dixie cup.
“So, my options are: I can go back to Hell, be damned and tortured forever, but at least I’ll have a body, or I can be Zardoz on a skateboard up here with you forever. You’d think this would be an easy choice, but it isn’t.”
“Does the Codex say anything about someone in your situation putting a body back together?”
“No, but I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned. Any spell cast can be broken. Any spell broken can be put back together.”
“If you want I can have a word with the boss.”
He shakes his head and drops the bottle into the recycling bin.
“Forget it. The last thing I need to get into is office politics.”
“I can see how your situation sucks, but in case you haven’t noticed, neither one of us is exactly free to go drink mai tais in Maui. Maybe if we don’t shank each other in the shower, we can do something to improve that stupid situation. I don’t know what exactly, but maybe something.”
“You’re going to improve things? I’m so fucking relieved. Just remember to tell Santa I’ll need a stepladder when he brings me that pony next Christmas.”
I get up and look for some clothes that don’t have blood on them. When I’m pulling on my boots, Kasabian says, “Beelzebub is the only one of the big generals left who hasn’t joined up with Mason’s bunch. He has all the other generals, but Beelzebub’s army is almost as big as all of theirs put together. But if he gets offed or switches sides, that’s it. Mason wins.”
“And Lucifer has nowhere to go.”
“Allegra can teach him to run a cash register. He can be night manager and we’ll be his bosses.”
I check the drawers in the bedside table looking for something to smoke. I check my pockets for the electronic cigarette and then remember that I tossed it into a canal in the ballroom. Sometimes we do dumb things to amuse women.
“There’s something else.”
“Don’t tell me. Mason has a herpes gun. Or a bomb that gives everyone a fat ass and they get depressed and sit around eating ice cream all day while he takes over.”
“Mason is working on something all right. He’s got his own Manhattan Project going with alchemists, sorcerers, witches—human and Hellion—all working together. One of Beelzebub’s spies found out and passed the word along. From what I heard, right after that, he ended up in Tartarus.”
“You can hear things when Lucifer talks with other Hellions?”