Don’t worry about death
What is good is easy to get and
What is terrible is easy to endure
He got it at least half right. That’s better than most people.
“Don’t fear God.” No problem. I met the guy. He had a nervous breakdown and is broken into more pieces than me.
“Don’t worry about death.” I died a couple of times already. It was boring.
“What is good is easy to get.” Here’s where Epicurus’s head starts disappearing up his own ass. This seems to be a common problem with philosophers.
“What is terrible is easy to endure.” Try being born half angel and half human, pal. A nephilim violates all the rules of the universe. I was born an Abomination, the only thing alive hated by Heaven, Hell, and Earth. Try that on for size and tell me how easy it is to endure, you grape-leaf-eating son of a bitch.
I drop the book on the floor. This is all Samael’s fault. I should have guessed that part of my torture in Hell would be having to read. L.A. was a lot more fun. Stealing cars, ripping out zombies’ spines, and getting shot at. Good times.
I get up and scrawl a note in big block letters and leave it on the desk in case Kasabian can see it.
CANDY. I MISS YOU. STARK.
Lucifer’s library has a pretty limited fiction section. I push around the pile of books by the sofa until I find The Trial by Franz Kafka. It’s about a guy on trial for something he doesn’t understand, accused by people he can’t find. It’s fucking hilarious. It might not be my first choice for how to spend an evening, but it’s better than going back to the Greeks. I don’t need another morality lecture from a dead guy. I’ve been getting those half my life.
My eyes snap open a few hours later. I sit up. I don’t even remember falling asleep. I get up and check the peepers.
After-hours flunkies sorting and filing endless piles of palace paperwork. Soldiers patrolling the grounds. Cleaners trying to get blood and gravel out of the lobby carpets. All expected. All boring. Good.
In L.A., I used to dream about Hell. In Hell, I dream about L.A., but it doesn’t make me any less homesick. Home in my dreams isn’t home. I see the city turning soft and sinking into the desert. Whole neighborhoods are swallowed or just wink out of existence. The sky is black and bruised like Hell’s, and then turns normal again. Sometimes instead of fighting in the arena, my arena dreams turn into a floodlit Hollywood and Vine.
This time I’m circling a Hellion roughly the size and shape of a locomotive. I have to fight with a rusty junkyard na’at while Casey Jones has a shield and a Vernalis, a kind of steel crab claw the size of your average go-go dancer. A bunch of red leggers, freelance raiders and looters, hoot and cheer for blood.
We drive each other back and forth across the killing floor. I slip one of his attacks and get in close. Just as I’m about to open him up like a can of pork and beans, my na’at jams. It was rigged and the Hellion knew it. The next thing I know, I’m on my knees screaming. There’s a wet sound as the Vernalis slices through meat and crunches through bone. When I look down, my left arm is lying in the intersection next to a three-month-old People magazine.
And that’s not even the worst dream. The worst are when I wake up sweating from nightmares about city-planning meetings. Swear to God. I dream about signing papers. I dream about progress reports on freeway repairs. About digging through mile-high piles of office supplies for Post-its and paper clips. I’m a magician, an ex-gladiator, a killer, and now the Devil himself and my greatest night terrors revolve around lost memos and trying to remember the Hellion word for “incentivize.”
Some nights I swear I’m tempted to sneak back to the arena and step in for a couple of fights, like a junkie looking for one more fix. It’s sick, I know. Yeah, it’s misery, but it’s a familiar kind and sometimes that’s as close to happy as I’ll get down here.
No wonder Samael took a powder. For all his talk about going home to make up with the old man, he was really running away from eternal damnation as a salaryman. I didn’t figure out until I was doing it that this is Lucifer’s damnation. The Light Bringer reduced to riding herd on bank clerks. It was worse than any torture.
I get up and pour myself a drink. Throw the robe over the back of a chair and slip the black blade behind my back. I leave through the fake bookshelves and head downstairs to the kennels.
It’s afternoon and the senior planning staff is waiting in the palace meeting room. The place looks like Bring Your Clown to Work Day at a Masonic lodge. The slick suits and Hellion power dresses aren’t the problem. It’s everything else they’re wearing. Ceremonial aprons covered with old runes. A morbid rainbow of colored scarves and gloves showing everyone’s place in the food chain. Blinders. Gaggers. Masks.
They’re all giving me the pig eye as I roll in. I take my time getting to the head of the table. The dirty looks aren’t just because I’m late. I’ll always be that sheep-killing dog Sandman Slim to most of them, and now, just to rub their ugly noses in it, I’m their boss. At least the armor is doing its job. No matter how much they hate me, they keep their hex holes shut with my devil armor shining like the mirrored belly of a chrome wasp.
There are twelve on the planning committee. With me there’s thirteen. A cozy little coven. Buer is there. So are Marchosias and Obyzuth. Semyazah would be here but none of the generals will put up with this shit.
Technically I’m supposed to be in ritual drag too but I have a hard time picturing Samael dressed up like a Brooks Brothers Pied Piper, so I follow his example and skip the wardrobe call.
There’s a silver circle in the center of the table. Lines radiate out to the edges, cutting the table into twelve sections. Each trick-or-treater steps up and sets down a different ceremonial object. The junk looks like leftovers from a Goth-club garage sale.
Obyzuth sets down a green rock, like a Templar meditation stone. The Hellion next to her sets down an athame knife that cuts through ignorance or butters magic toast or something. Buer drops a snake carved from the leg bone of a fallen Hellion warrior. It goes on and on like that. I’m supposed to light a red candle at the end of the ritual but things are going too slow. I fire it up now and light a Malediction off it.
“Don’t take it personally, but if I have to sit through one more of these meetings, I’m going to gut every one of you like catfish, shit in your skulls, and mail them to your families. This isn’t Hell. It’s a PTA meeting. Maybe all we need to save Hell is a bake sale.”
I flick my ashes over the candle.
“Here’s how it is from now on. Do your projects any way you want. Fuck the budgets. Fuck the schedules. When it’s done, you get one minute to tell me about it.”