Philosophy. Okay. He gets some slack for this one. His argument with God seems legit. Is it the sin of pride not wanting to be a slave?
I’m about to start making my own sections.
This whole time I’ve been hoping to find a secret trove of romances or westerns but the long shelves of true-crime books are probably Samael’s pulp pop reading. He’s exactly the kind of guy who flips to the end of every crime book looking for his name in the index. I wonder if I’m in one of these things. Which reminds me. I need to check the Sandman Slim entry on Wikipedia. I’ve tried killing it a couple of times but it’s always back up the next day. If some psychic prick gets wind that I’m temping as Satan, I don’t want it online. Satanists make junior high Goths look like NASA.
There’s a reading area in the corner of the room. I drop down into the soft leather chair, mentally exhausted. There’s a small table with a lamp and an ashtray with a few old butts. I forgot to pick up a pack of Maledictions before coming in, so I poke around the ashtray like a wino looking for one that might still be smokable. None of them are. I’m on a real winning streak tonight.
This is getting me nowhere. There must be a million or more books in here. I could wander the aisles for years and not find anything. Maybe I’m wrong about the missing armor piece. Even if he left it for me, it might not be in here. That means more wasted years wandering the whole palace, searching it one room at a time.
No.
Samael is a dick but he isn’t that random or cruel, at least not to me. As much as he’s fucked with me over the years, there was always a point and he’s always given me something to work with. Saint James would have figured out this bullshit hours ago. It makes me want to hurt him even more.
First no cigarettes and now I realize I left my Aqua Regia back at home base. My neck hurts. My chest burns. My right hand aches from picking up books. I’m sore and sweating like a fat man chasing a taco wagon across the Mojave.
Sitting here and closing my eyes feels good.
Then it comes back to me.
“Right in front of you. Stop looking. Sit down and you’ll see.”
I open my eyes and see I’m sitting in the middle of a huge section on magic. Samael takes the subject more seriously than I ever did. Because I was born a nephilim, I never learned much real magic. Even as a kid I had enough power to improvise my own hoodoo. The first and only real magic I ever learned was down here killing in the arena and later as Sandman Slim. There’s probably a lot of useful information in these books. Too bad the whole reading thing is starting to give me hives.
A book lies facedown on the other side of a reading lamp. I didn’t notice it before. It’s a paperback with a bright yellow cover, the first paperback I’ve seen down here. I pick it up. The title is in big block letters.
ANGER MANAGEMENT FOR DUMMIES
Like I said, Samael always leaves me something to work with and a cheap joke is better than no clue at all.
I flip through the book looking for highlighted passages or dog-eared pages. I even read most of a chapter. It’s all the usual
