slow down and feeling himself over to make sure nothing vital had broken in the fall. He could still wiggle all his fingers and toes. The road rash would heal. All in all, not the worst landing he’d experienced.
One pair of legs was clad in black denim and boots with flat, rounded toes, the kind specifically made for kicking seven kinds of shit out of a person. A second joined them, sporting a pair of alligator shoes and blue slacks that came to a stop above knobby ankles.
“Nice tuck and roll, brother,” said Alligator. “Didn’t need it, though. Just wanted to talk at you for a minute.”
“You always chase down blokes you want to speak with in a spook car?” Jack asked.
Shitkicker drew back his foot and drove it once into Jack’s abdomen. It was a strong, enthusiastic kick delivered by a man who enjoyed his work. Jack jerked, folding around the knot of bruise, and fought hard not to vomit. He had a feeling Alligator wouldn’t appreciate him redecorating his shoes.
“He said he talks, not you,” said Shitkicker, and drew back.
“Jesus, Parker,” said Alligator. “We need him not pissing his own blood, you stupid piece a’ shit. Slow your roll, all right?”
There was a click as Parker lit a cigarette, and Alligator leaned down into Jack’s vision. “Howdy,” he said. “Sorry about that.”
“Piss off.” Jack sat up. His guts rolled back and forth. The seasick throbbing in his skull would fade, eventually, but it wasn’t helping him any.
“’Fraid not, partner,” said Alligator. “We all need to have a chat.”
Jack tried sitting up, which wasn’t a day at the park, but he managed it. Standing was a little easier. “I don’t talk to flash gits who chase me down and knock me around,” he said. “Sorry to disappoint, but you’ll be deprived of my sparkling wit and charm.”
Parker, the big one, snorted. He blew smoke from his butt into Jack’s face and looked at Alligator. “We gotta listen to him yap?”
“We’re not kidnapping him, for fuck’s sake,” Alligator said. “He’s a guest.”
“A guest of what?” Jack calculated that there was no way he could break for the end of the alley, not unless he wanted the bulge under Parker’s leather jacket to materialize into a pistol. For now, he’d have to have Alligator’s little chat.
“Come on, now,” Alligator said. “Get in the car.”
“Sure,” Jack said. “Got nothing better to do than run off with strangers on mysterious errands.”
Jack had to admit he was curious—the person who’d bought the trance herbs from the dead girl in the bodega would be the one wanting to talk, he’d wager, and he wanted to see exactly what they were about. He wouldn’t put it past Belial to use competing mages to get his job done, not one bit. And if Jack failed, Belial would have an excuse to void his bargain with Pete, and keep his claws in her for who knew how long. These two didn’t seem to want to bash his skull in just yet, so he could play their game and see what they really had in store for him.
“You ain’t what I expected,” Alligator said, sliding into the back seat of the idling SUV after Jack and boxing him against the door. “Heard you was a USDA Grade-A choice badass, and look at you. You couldn’t hardly swat a fly.”
Parker gunned the engine into a U-turn and Jack watched the morning, tinted by the SUV’s black glass, roll past. “So now that I’ve disappointed you, where are we going?”
Alligator grinned, displaying one front tooth rimmed in gold, and the rest a startling shade of two-pack-a-day brown. “Now, Jackie. If I told you that, it wouldn’t be a surprise.”
PART TWO
JUDGMENT
CHAPTER 12
On the freeway, Alligator pulled out a black canvas sack. “You understand,” he said. “Our boss is pretty privacy conscious.”
“Fuck off,” Jack said. “He wants me so bad, he can bloody well take me without a sack on me head.”
Alligator sighed. “Figured you might say that.”
Jack felt a prick in the side of his neck, and whipped his head around to see Alligator holding a disposable syringe. “Nothin’ to worry about,” he told Jack. “Just a little shot of dream-time. You’ll be right as rain by the time we get where we’re goin’.”
Jack tried to reach for the man’s thick, sweaty neck, or even merely curse at him, but his mouth was stuffed with cotton wool and his brain was flying out the window, lifting up and then falling into crushing depths.
He tasted the hot wind and felt embers land on his exposed skin, face and chest and arms. Belial stood with him at the lip of a chasm, smooth sides made from riveted iron plunging into blackness his eyes couldn’t fathom. Far away, the fires of Hell burned, keeping the souls of the damned hot and aware of every second of their torture as they powered the great city that shredded the horizon like the claws of a beast in the tender pink flesh of the sky.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Belial told him, but Jack couldn’t step away, couldn’t stop staring at the blackness below.
“This is an old place,” Belial said. “A damned place. Nobody should be here. How did you slip away and find it?” His face in Hell was different, reptilian and slit-eyed, two sets of lids blinking against the hot wind. A forked tongue raked over his pointed teeth. He put his hand on Jack’s shoulder, black nails digging bloody half moons. “I’m not finished with you yet,” he said. “It’ll be a long time before I put you down there, Jack. You don’t need to start making friends just yet.”
The blackness rippled gently far below, the slightest echo across his sight. Just a match flare in the endless dark, and then it was gone. At the time, panic and fear had overridden his senses. He’d managed to slip from his cell, cross acres of bone and ash, turning to glassy sand and finally to foot-shredding rocks, before he’d fetched up here. Now Belial was leading him back toward the fires and the cities of Hell, to start his sentence all over again, and the next time escape wouldn’t be simply a matter of physical pain.
But now that he was remembering, he heard a whisper drift up from the ravine, from that ripple across his sight.
Jack came awake when the SUV guttered through a rut, and slit his eyes open to get his bearings before Alligator caught on. Another mansion, another gated drive—but this wasn’t the cookie-cutter glass-and-rock type that the Herreras had been murdered in. This was an actual mansion, a pile of rocks that looked like William Randolph Hearst could have put his feet up and felt at home.
“Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey,” said Alligator, jabbing Jack in the tender side of his ribs.
The drugs left him thickheaded and slow, but Jack shook off Alligator’s fat, gold-encrusted hand and walked under his own power. The mansion had double doors, banded in iron, a giant Mission-style statement that whoever lived there was better than you.
Iron bands could mean other things, too, and Jack looked up as Alligator and Parker skirted him through the door. A protection hex hung above. A magic user, then, and somebody who either knew what he was doing or knew somebody he could pay to do the job right. The hex was strong, and Jack felt it examine and discard him as he
