I shrug.

“Maybe someone caught me counting cards.”

Merihim says, “Something has changed. They’ve discovered something or they’re afraid you will, and they need to kill you before you discover it too.”

I say, “It’s the possession key. Mason wasn’t exactly generous with information. He created the key and wouldn’t want anyone else using it, so it’s not like there’s going to be a user manual lying around. Maybe it’s taken this long for whoever has it to figure out how it works.”

Merihim waves off the comment.

“Perhaps. Speculation is pointless. We need to contact our operatives among the legions and the palace thaumaturgy staff to see what they can find.”

“Did anything interesting happen at the Council meeting?” says Ipos.

“Not really. Marchosias wanted to fuck me in her limo to annoy the others. I called Buer a Nazi and sent them all home to watch a silent movie about good architecture and a mad scientist.”

“It sounds charming,” says Merihim.

“There’s even a robot.”

“A masterpiece, then.”

Ipos says, “We should get to work.”

He sets his glass on the desk, holds it there, and pushes on it. The desk rocks a fraction of an inch up and down.

“I thought so. You wore down one of the legs dragging it over. I’ll fix that the next time we meet.”

“I can just stick a matchbook under it.”

He looks at me.

“No, you can’t. You might run the kingdom but I maintain the palace. This is my domain.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Wizard.”

After they’re gone, I sit down at the desk and light a Malediction. Toss the Glock into the bottom drawer of the desk. I don’t like Glocks. They’re the gun equivalent of a middle-aged guy buying a Porsche.

From the top drawer I take out a shiny silver Veritas. The coin is a useful little pocket oracle. Another Veritas helped me survive my first few days when I first escaped back to L.A. The Veritas sees the present and the near future and never lies, though sometimes it’s a little shit about it.

I flip it and think, What now?

It comes down showing the image of a man pouring money into a woman’s hands. I’ve seen the symbol before. A hooker and her customer. Around the coin’s edge, in perfect Hellion script, it reads, Don’t make any long-term investments. Have a good time now. That’s what I mean. The little prick could have just said, You’re doomed, but it likes showing off.

I toss the Veritas back in the desk, pick up a book, and lie down on the sofa. I’m reading a chapter about a Greek philosopher named Epicurus. The guy was a kind of depressed swinger. Imagine the Playboy Mansion run by Mr. Rogers. Epicurus was all about pleasure but in a stingy eat-your-vegetables-or-you-won’t-get-any-dessert kind of way.

A lot of this philosophy stuff puts me right to sleep, but Epicurus must have been able to see into the future when people like me can’t read more than a paragraph without checking our e-mail because he spit out the important stuff short and sweet. It’s called the Tetrapharmakos and it’s a kind of a PowerPoint list to fix whatever ails you. It goes:

Don’t fear God

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.