The Dirty Streets of Heaven bd-1

by Tad Williams

  “Grasswax had gambling debts with Prince Sitri? Are you certain? Who told you?”

  “Now it’s my turn to say none of your business.” I wasn’t going to give up my sources. Not that it would be so hard for her to find out-lots of folks knew about the pig man and his grudge against Hell. Still, it was a matter of principle. Yes, I do have a few. “What’s the big deal?”

  “Because, you pillock, I told you already that I gave the…thing to Grasswax. To hide. He owed me and I knew things about him, things he didn’t want known by the powers above him. But somehow I didn’t hear he was in debt to Prince Sitri. The slimy little bastard!”

  “Sitri or Grasswax?”

  “Grasswax! He must have been more afraid of Sitri than he was of me.” She got up and began to pace. “What’s Sitri’s interest in all this?”

  I would be lying if I didn’t say that part of me enjoyed watching her walk back and forth in front of me. She had kicked off the slippers she’d donned to pick me up, and watching her pale calves, ankles, and feet was mesmerizing. Distracting, too.

  “Hang on, I don’t get any of this.” I looked at something else for a moment to regather my thoughts. “You must have taken a big risk stealing something from Eligor. Why would you give it to a weasel like Grasswax?”

  “Because I was being followed, and I had to get rid of it! Because the…the thing…”

  “You can go ahead and call it ‘the feather’ now.”

  This last shot had been fired somewhat offhandedly, just to see the effect, which was pretty impressive: Her eyes widened in what I almost could have sworn was helpless fear. “How did you find out?”

  Since I didn’t want to get Edie Parmenter in trouble I only said, “A little bird told me-but that’s not the issue. I know all about it.” Which was one of the least truthful things I’d said all day. I still had no idea what a golden feather might be and why Eligor or anyone else should be so worked up about it, but just then I wanted her to think I knew more than I did. “I need to know everything else. Come on, Countess, help me fill in the details. You were being followed. You had this incredibly valuable thing-so you gave it to Grasswax? A lying, treacherous bastard who’s not only a demon from Hell to begin with but also a lawyer? Why would you do that?”

  “Why? Because I thought I had a hold over him. I promised that if he’d keep it safe, I’d destroy some evidence I had on him.”

  “Why did you have something on him? What was it?”

  She was clearly getting frustrated with me. “It doesn’t matter! Don’t you understand, you idiot? Where I come from, everybody has something on everybody. That’s how we survive. Everyone spies on everyone and cheats on everyone, and everyone makes deals. That’s how we climb up out of the mud and the shit and the molten lava and make a little freedom, create a little life for ourselves….”

  “Like here in San Judas,” I said. “Where you’ve created this pretty little pied-a-terre for yourself.”

  “This place?” She looked around with scorn on her face. “One of a dozen. I used to have houses all over the place. Not just in California, either.”

  “So what happened?”

  She looked at me like I was not just an idiot but the intentional kind, although there was also something strange beneath it, a simmering anger I hadn’t seen before. “You haven’t figured it out yet? Some gumshoe you are, Dollar.”

  “I’m not a gumshoe, I keep telling you that. That’s your fantasy. I’m just a guy trying to do his job and stay alive. Right now, staying alive is my job. Yeah, I think I know what happened. Because it isn’t just blackmail that can buy freedom is it? It’s also doing favors-all kinds of favors-for the right people. Important people, like Kenneth Vald, otherwise known as Grand Duke Eligor. Your sugar-daddy.”

  She tossed her head and her white-blonde hair fanned and then fell straight again. “You can put it that way if it makes you feel good. I’m sure you wouldn’t believe I actually fell for him.”

  “Yeah, you’re right-I wouldn’t. But I’m a big boy, so I understand. He’s powerful. He’s very powerful. Rich as Bill Gates but probably a lot more interesting, what with the eternal damnation and the sixty legions in Hell and all that. Yeah, I can definitely understand why a tough, smart little cookie like you set your sights on someone like that. What I don’t understand is why you decided to steal from him. That’s just asking for trouble. And why a golden feather?”

  She stopped pacing then and stared at me with such cold fury that I swear I could feel myself crystallizing from the cellular level out. “Stole from him. Oh, yeah, I decided that instead of staying the contented mistress of one of the most powerful creatures on this whole green earth, I’d just rip him off. That’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from a nasty little thing like me, isn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” I said. “But I do want answers.”

  She turned away from me then and walked to the antique desk, yanked out the drawer and began rummaging in it. “I should have known,” she said, but in a low voice that sounded strangled and odd. “I should have known. Should. Have. Known.”

  “Look, spare me the Snake Pit act, or Lady Macbeth, or whatever you’re doing here,” I said, walking up behind her. “I don’t care why any of it happened, and I’m certainly not judging you. If I’d been condemned to Hell I don’t think I’d be worrying a lot about what I did afterward either. But I still need to know what you did and why, since I seem to be on the hook for it with your boyfriend.” I put my hand on her shoulder, but even through the robe the chill of her skin was startling enough to make me pull back, and that was what saved me. She whirled. The huge, curved knife in her hand hissed past my jugular, nicking me despite my reflexive lunge backward. The weapon was one of those long Gurkha blades called a kukri, and little Casimira clearly knew how to use it.

  I reached up to my throat just in case I had underestimated the damage and was bleeding to death, but when I took my hand away there was only a thin smear of blood. “What the hell…?”

  “You bastard,” she said in the strained voice of someone talking to herself. “Not judging me, are you?” She took another backhand swipe, this time at my belly, and I jumped away just in time, but as soon as I landed she was on me again. I grabbed at her arm but she slipped under it. She actually got the point of her knife against my gut but a kukri is much better for slashing than stabbing and I managed to spin away to the side, suffering nothing worse than another shallow cut. Still, I was already in bad shape from my multiple run-ins with the ghallu, and I knew this was not just a squabble with an unhappy female-the Countess was as strong as I was, a lot angrier, and she was the one holding the sharp object.

  “Stop now,” I said. “I’m not kidding!” I was looking around for something to defend myself with, but in this Turkish boudoir of an apartment I couldn’t find anything more useful than a chair, so I promptly grabbed one and held it before me. It occurred to me that if I’d also had a whip I might have a chance of taming this tigress, but I didn’t feel I could do much with a heavy piece of furniture except what I was doing-clumsily trying to keep her at bay.

  She came after me again, low and with her hands wide, starting with a feint at my face. When I lifted the chair to block her she kicked out and got me in the shin hard enough to make me lose my balance and stumble sideways. She was right on top of me as I fought to regain my footing but I hammered her small pale foot with the leg of the chair, then as she hissed and took her weight off it, I managed to keep the chair from overbalancing me long enough to sweep her other leg out from under her. As she tumbled to the floor I very briefly considered hitting her with the heavy piece of furniture, but even though she’d just tried to slit my gorge, I sensed there was something strange going on: She fought like someone defending herself, even though she was the one who’d attacked me. Her eyes were distant, too, even desperate, full of what a more poetic angel might call resigned horror. Not the emotions you expect from a veteran hell-beast
doing her best to exsanguinate you.

  As the Countess hit the floor I leaped on top of her, paying close attention to the long-bladed kukri that for the moment was under her. As she rolled away and slashed at my face with it, catching my cheek and ear, I managed to grab hold of her knife-arm and carry it past me. I slammed it against the floor and promptly threw my body on top of it, pinning her wrist so that she couldn’t reach me to slash me-at least not with her knife. She managed to give me a good scratching with her other hand, then half an instant later, she somehow pulled her legs up and threw them around my neck. Despite the slenderness of those smooth white pins, within seconds she managed to cut off most of the blood trying to get to my brain. Things were going black, and everything that was Bobby Dollar began to disappear down a tunnel into roaring depths. I wasn’t entirely certain what was going on with the Countess and her crazy attack, but I had a strong feeling that if I passed out I might not wake up again, so I did the only thing left to me to do-I punched her in the head as hard as I could. It bounced her skull off the carpeted floor and for a moment shook loose the astonishing grip of her legs around my neck. I took advantage of the reprieve to gulp in as much air as I could, then grabbed her knife arm and started twisting until at last, as she snarled and spat and grimaced at me with what looked a great deal like insane hatred, I finally got her to open her fingers and drop the blade to the floor. I knocked the big knife as far away as I could, but that moment of changed balance gave her the chance to slide partway out from under me. Then all of a sudden she was somehow on my back instead, pulling my hair in the most painful way imaginable while she used her other hand to hit me over and over again on my already bloody right ear.

  I reached up with both hands and caught her behind the neck, then yanked her forward over my head and shoulders so that she cracked her forehead against the floor once more-which, even through the cushioning of the carpet, had to be getting uncomfortable for her. The she-demon didn’t hesitate, though, immediately snaking her legs around me once more, tightening them this time just under my floating ribs, which she then proceeded to do her best to break while I did what I could to get her off of me. Neither of us quite succeeded, but we were both inflicting a great deal of pain on each other. The fight had become something like a wrestling match between two crazy drunks, neither of us really sure who was winning, or why we were fighting, or even very concerned about such trivia-all we could do was keep trying to snap each other in half.

  I finally got her under me again, and although she had one leg over my shoulder, the knee of the other in my solar plexus, and was busily punching at my face with her hands, I managed to ignore the pain long enough to get the bar of my forearm down across her windpipe. I held it there, ignoring the hard blows she was giving me except to let my head roll with them, diffusing as much of the force as possible. After half a minute the fists became open hands, then the slaps became a strengthless grabbing and scratching. At last her arms went limp, and she sagged. I didn’t want to kill her-even if she was determined to do me in, she still had information I needed-but I stayed on top of her, and though I eased the pressure on her throat so she could breathe I didn’t remove my arm.

  For perhaps twenty seconds she lay beneath me, panting shallowly. Blood was dripping from my ear and face onto her cheek, where it mixed with her own, then ran down her jaw and soaked the carpet beneath her with a spreading red stain. Her eyes flickered open and for a moment she stared at me like an animal stares, without knowledge of anything beyond its own fighting instincts, but then that pale blue stare focused on me, and her mouth opened in a lazy grin. There was blood between her teeth and all over her lips. She pushed her belly up against me, and for a moment I thought she was trying to escape me again, but she stayed there, her pelvis pressing hard and insistent against me.

  “If you’re not going to kill me, angel,” she said, “then let’s think of something else to do while I’m still all worked up.”

  twenty-two

  cold hands

  I’ve never kissed a hellbeast before. I know that sounds like the beginning of an ex-wife joke, but it’s true. I’ve been with waitresses and biker chicks, middle-aged broads with a long tale to tell, and barely-legals just starting to discover their own story. I’ve also had more than a few flings with women of the angelic persuasion, not to mention those odd, sexless but intense, pre-teen-type relationships that you have in Heaven. Did I mention there’s no sex there? Yeah, put it into the “but that’s another story” category. I had even come close to something intimate a few times with members of the Opposition, but only because I didn’t know what they were; I’d always figured it out in time. But until now, I had never had cause to knowingly kiss a demon.

  Wow.

  I don’t mean to make it sound romantic, because it wasn’t-not really. Not at first. One moment I was lying on top of this crazy thing that was trying to murder me, the next moment we were rolling around on the floor again, but this time without the distraction of bladed weapons. Only as we bumped up against her writing desk did it occur to me I didn’t know where she’d put her gun when we first came in, or whether she had some even nastier weapon than her kukri stashed in that drawer-a tactical tomahawk or a Turkish yataghan or some other godawful exotic thing-but the Countess no longer seemed to be interested in killing me, at least not in any conventional way.

  I don’t want you to think I had completely forgotten an angelic lifetime of hatred and distrust. Alarms bells were going off in my head that would have deafened me if they’d been real, but at that moment I just didn’t care.

  Casimira’s robe was already half off, and we were both slippery with blood and sweat. Her mouth tasted hot as Tabasco but her skin was shockingly cold to the touch. We were pressed together so hard it seemed like we might simply pass through each other; I could feel her nipples against my chest, hard as silver bullets. My mouth was full of the salty tang of blood, but it tasted good. It tasted right. I didn’t know if it was infernal magic or plain old chemistry, but it was getting more and more difficult to think and more and more difficult to care about that fact.

  “Hold on,” I said, drawing back. We were lying side by side near the bed now, although “lying” is way too passive a word: She had one long, smooth leg wrapped around me, both arms around my neck, and her face so close to mine I couldn’t see much of anything except her blue eyes. At least I thought her eyes were still blue, but in the dim harem light they could have turned red again and I wouldn’t have known. In fact, we could have fallen through the floor and tumbled all the way into Tartarus during the last few minutes and I probably wouldn’t have noticed. “Wait a minute. Just…what are we doing here?”

  She leaned forward and licked a smear of blood off my chest, then smiled at me with it still glistening on her tongue. “They don’t teach you much in Heaven, do they?”

  “I mean what are we doing, you and me? We’re not…we’re supposed to be…”

  She pulled herself up until she could kiss my forehead-a surprisingly gentle kiss, almost ritualistic, lips as chilly as a marble statue’s-then slid back down until her pelvis was lodged against mine again, pressing, rubbing. “I don’t care!” She sounded almost drunk, halfway between tears and laughter. “I don’t care about any of that, Bobby. Not now. This is our time. Whatever happens later…” She didn’t finish, but lifted her face to be kissed-that beautiful, treacherous, untrustworthy face-and suddenly I no longer cared either. Not about my bleeding cuts and cracked ribs, not my friends or my angelic tribe, my place in the great conflict, anything. If the ghallu itself had kicked down the door, blazing and roaring, I would have done my best to ignore it. I lowered my face to hers and felt my last reservations melt.

  Although our mouths almost never left each other’s mouths and skin it didn’t take me long to ease her out of the torn nightgown, exposing her small white breasts and the delicate cathedral of her ribcage, to coax the filmy white strip of nothing off her hips and down her legs until she was
utterly naked, pale and splendid. She helped me remove my own clothes, pulling and dragging at things without patience until we both laughed at what a muddle we’d made, but even as we laughed we continued to press as much of our skin together as we could, feverish and hurried. We slithered against each other, kissing, licking, biting, tasting salty blood and sweat. Casimira was almost wordless, making little noises of surprise or mock-protest as something was pulled away from her tender attentions, then growling with pleasure as something else was given to her instead. We were both covered with small, stinging wounds, many of which we’d given to each other, but for that time, in that windowless room, even the pain of those injuries seemed only to broaden the range of our pleasure.

  Her skin was cold as the belly of a fish, smooth and dry in the few places my own sweaty skin hadn’t rubbed against her, and with just the faintest tang of blood and sea-musk curling through the sweetness of her scent like a snake in a garden. As I pressed my face against the skin of her stomach I had, for a moment-and only a moment-the sudden sensation that Casimira was some kind of animate corpse, that I had been tricked into loving a dead thing. I pulled back in shock, but one look at the frightened need on her face told me what was happening between us was far more complicated than any mere horror, any mere trick or stratagem of the long war. We were different creatures from different worlds, but at that moment we both wanted the same thing, even though we were neither of us certain exactly what that might mean.