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  “The Grand Duke is just fine,” Isobel replied, though this response didn’t quite equate to the truth. Being a concubine for a member of the Unsacred College of Cardinals brought lofty social status for someone such as Isobel, but the status only lasted as long as the fascination. Isobel feared that Grand Duke Pilate was growing bored with her body of late; hence, she felt compelled to do something about the matter quickly, a few nips and tucks, a few maintenance spells, etc. Most of the other concubines in the Duke’s harem were human—he had a thing for them—so Isobel thought it only logical to try and follow their example, starting with Hell’s equivalent of a breast implant. Without the Grand Duke, where would she be? Gotta keep my man happy, she resolved. “Yes, yes, he’s just fine,” she went on. “But a little enhancement couldn’t hurt, now could it?”

  “Then you’ll simply love our latest models. I can’t wait for you to see them!” The Troll spoke with great enthusiasm because Isobel, as a Hierarchal, was always regarded as a priority patron. The Troll passed Isobel a flute of blackish wine made from the finest aged Brooden blood. “One’s a bona fide succubus from the Lilith Subcarnation Institute. And the others are brand-new acquisitions from the Ramirez Agency—”

  “I’m looking for something human,” Isobel interrupted.

  “It’s all the rage these days!” the manager exclaimed, bat-ting crystal-red eyes the size of billiard balls. She leaned over to whisper, even though no other customers occupied the salon. “It just so happens that yesterday we signed on two absolutely stunning human women, whom we’ve reserved especially for our favorite buyers such as yourself.”

  “Show them,” Isobel said, sipping her wine. “Just the humans. I’ll pass on the succubus and half-breeds.”

  “Of course!”

  The manager snapped her fingers and an instant later, two reasonably well-fed human females traipsed out onto the runway. Both were nude and well-curved, one a strawberry blonde, the other a brunette with the most stunning sea-green eyes.

  “Marvelous,” Isobel whispered to herself. A nine-foot-tall Golem made of polluted riverbed clay had brought the pair of models out. It stood behind them dead-faced, arms crossed. The Duke would love those! Isobel thought in glee. This glee, of course, she couldn’t express vocally because that would’ve been unrefined. In truth, Isobel was desperate to keep her man’s eyes off of the other concubines. If he gets sick of me, it’s the end of the line. The Grand Duke had no ex-concubines; when he tired of one, he had his chef prepare her as marinated satay to be served at the next orgy.

  “Yes, marvelous,” Isobel repeated.

  “The blonde?” asked the proprietor.

  “No, no. The brunette.”

  “Very good!” Next the Troll gave a single nod to the Golem, and the Golem nodded likewise. One arm shot around the brunette’s neck in a split-second, lifting her kicking and screaming off the runway floor. With the long curved knife in its free hand, it neatly sliced off both of the woman’s breasts. Her screams sounded more akin to some kind of high-rpm machine with bad bearings.

  I’ll look ravishing with her breasts! Isobel thought. “Oh, and the irises, too,” she hastened. “I simply adore those sea-green eyes.”

  The manager nodded again, and next the Golem was expertly removing the brunette’s eyeballs from their sockets with a specially made ocular retractor. The eyeballs and severed breasts were then passed to a waiting surgeon dressed in a black mantle and hood.

  “And don’t worry,” the giddy Troll prattled on, “our transfigurists are all licensed. They’re the best in the district.” She put her dainty, clawed hand at the small of Isobel’s back and gently urged her toward the surgery suites in back. “The procedure’s completely painless. You’ll be out of here in a jiffy! With brand-new human breasts and irises!”

  “I really can’t thank you enough,” Isobel replied. “And I’ll be sure to tell all my friends about your fabulous salon.”

  Isobel was led into the back, where the transfiguration would take place. Eventually, the Troll-woman returned to the showing room. Eyeless, breastless, and now too deep in shock to scream, the brunette shuddered on the runway.

  The Troll sternly instructed the Golem: “Now cut this bitch’s guts out and call the diviners. Then sell what’s left to the pulping station down the street.” She clapped her hands sharply twice. “And be quick about it!”

  The Golem nodded.

  Hell is a city.

  It stretches, literally, without end—a labyrinth of smoke and waking nightmare. Just as endlessly, sewer grates belch flame from the sulphur fires that have raged beneath the streets for millennia. Clock towers spire in every district, by public law, but their faces have no hands; time is not measured here in seconds or hours but in atrocity and despair. In the center of this morass of stone and smoke and butchery and horror stands the 666-floor Mephisto Building, where Gargoyles prowl the wind-blown ledges and from whose highest garrets the innocent are hung from gibbets and left to rot for cons. The lone occupant of the very top floor looks down upon his dominion and smiles a smile that is brighter than a thousand suns. Here, yes, everyone is dead yet everyone lives forever.

  Welcome to the Mephistopolis.

  Welcome to the city of Hell.

  Welcome.

  Part I

  Etherean

  Chapter One

  (I)

  “You would do that? For me?”

  The voice which had spoken the words was incalculable. Words like light, a vocal utterance like a caress.

  The response to these words was nearly as luminous. A simple, resolute “Yes.”

  In a sense they were merely two men in a room.

  “Verity and reckoning,” the first man said. His face could not be viewed. Could it have been that he was too beautiful to be perceived? “Is this all that we are? Two men in a room?”

  “Much more than mere men,” the second man said. “I will prove that to you.”

  “You’ll die, my friend.”

  “I’ll die gladly, for your glory.”

  The first man opened a door studded with jasper stones, revealing the parlor of atrocity within. “She reminds me of Mary,” he whispered.

  The second man looked in, where a lovely Demoness wheezed, locks of long hair dripping wet and hanging over her face. Hands corded behind her back, she gagged on her knees, before a tub of water. A cloaked Warlock knelt right behind her and suddenly thrust her head into the tub, held her down. She convulsed. Bubbles of air exploded in the water, and still the Warlock kept holding her down. Eventually she went limp and died.

  “Watch,” the first man said.

  The Warlock pulled her out and let her collapse to the scarlet-carpeted floor. Dark words flowed from his lips, an incantation in the most secret of vocabularies. Shards of dark light seemed to flit about like butterflies, and then all at once the Demoness heaved, expelling blasts of water from her lips, and her heart which had stopped only moments ago began to beat again.

  “It’s a Resuscitation Spell,” the first man said rather proudly. “The idea titillates me. They kill her, then bring her back to life, kill her, then back to life, over and over. I can’t resist the symbol of that. It’s so ... rapturous.”

  The second man watched the striking demon-woman fully regain consciousness. She briefly screamed, and her head was plunged back into the water.

  “Kill her, then back to life, kill her, then back to life.” “And, yes, she does,” the second man remarked. “She looks just like Mary.”

  They walked back into the main hall, their footsteps silent as death on tiles of amethyst and agate. The first man went and opened a hinged, iron-framed window of stained glass. The mosaic depicted an orgy of monsters at the summit of Calvary, while three victims of crucifixion helplessly looked on. His eyes drank in the wondrous red night outside, watched a Griffin sail by, reveled at the endless vista of buildings and smoke. “All that out there, and just us up here,” he whispered.

  “All that
out there is yours. And so am I,” the second man said.

  “Yes. You are my most blessed.”

  An acolyte in white robes entered, bearing a large wicker basket. The basket was set down, then the acolyte bowed and left, his face sewn with pearls and diamonds. The first man approached the basket and withdrew from it a newborn Imp. Its huge eyes looked back at the man in total love.

  “So beautiful, so innocent...”

  “Not much innocent is ever born here,” the second man said.

  “Oh, but you’re wrong. Everything is innocent at first. Even you and I. Even God was innocent once, wasn’t He?”

  “I ... don’t remember.”

  The first man held the infant creature closer, looking at it as a father would. “Like this, this joyous creation here in my hands. The longer it lives, the more of its innocence it loses. It becomes corrupt. But now, right now, this instant.” The luminous voice fluttered. “It’s perfect undefected pure clean innocence.” He smiled at the second man, passed the infant to him. “What’s wrong with me, my friend? I don’t have the heart anymore.”

  “I’ll be your heart,” the second man affirmed. With no hesitation, he threw the infant out the window, knowing it would likely be devoured by Griffins long before it hit the pavement 666 stories below. “I will be your heart, and I will be your mind, and I will be your might—in the Living World. I promise.”

  The first man maintained his smile, a tear in his gemlike eye. “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’ll lose everything.”

  “And you will gain everything, as you should. Let me be just a drop of the ink that you use to rewrite all of human history.”

  “And for all of this that you will do for me, you ask nothing in return.”

  The second man bowed as if ashamed. “I ask only ... that you remember me.”

  From the open window, the most distant howls could be heard; it sounded sweet, serene. Clouds a sickly green parted, to reveal the coal-black moon.

  “Go now. And I witt—I will remember you forever.” The second man left the room. He was a Fallen Angel from the House of Seraph, and his name was Zcihl. The other one’s name was Lucifer.

  Chapter Two

  (I)

  Two cops, on routine patrol. Well, not actually routine, not tonight—or at least not by any standard that would be called typical of modern law enforcement. Ryan and Cooper were partners, the quiet town of Dannelleton’s only two midnight-to-eight cops, routed through the dispatcher of the county sheriff’s department. Cooper keyed the mike, standing just outside their patrol car’s open window. “County dispatch, this is Unit 208, we’re 10-6 at the 600 block of 76th Avenue on a TCD violation.”

  “Roger, 208. You want us to run a make on the vehicle?”

  “No, don’t bother,” Cooper replied. “He’s a local. We got it covered. We’ll call back when we’re 10-8.”

  “Roger, 208. Out.”

  TCD stood for traffic control device, and what Officer Cooper had just related to the dispatcher was a complete lie. No one had run a red light, and they weren’t really at the 600 block of 76th Ave. They were pulled over on a long dark back road just out of town. “Hurry it up, will ya, man?” Cooper complained to his fastidious partner. “Somebody’s gonna see us out here.”

  Ryan was just as lean, mean-eyed, and cocky as Cooper ... but a little more whacked in the head. “Out here in the boondocks? Relax.” Then he looked down at the driver of the mint ’68 Camaro that they’d supposedly “pulled over” for ignoring a “traffic control device.” “What do you think, Dutch? My partner’s over there dumping in his pants. You think anyone’s gonna see us out here on this shit-hole road in the middle of the night?”

  “You better hope not,” Dutch said back, his arm crooked out the window. In his other hand he hefted the sizeable bag of crack cocaine that Ryan had just given him. It had taken Ryan and Cooper all night to shake down all those dealers for the stuff. “What’ll happen to me if I get pulled over by real cops?”

  Ryan shrugged. “You’ll go to prison for ten years, and that’d make me very disappointed.”

  “I didn’t know you cared.”

  “I don’t. I just don’t want to have to go to the trouble of finding a new bag man to buy all this crack we rip off of clockers and whores.” Ryan ripped out a loud belly-laugh.

  “Would you guys quit yacking? Jesus Christ! We have to get out of here!” This latest complaint hadn’t come from Cooper, it came from Dutch’s passenger, a brown-around-the-edges beach tramp by the name of Arianna. She was Dutch’s squeeze, very attractive in her own way, yet a spoiled blond pain in the ass just the same. “Dutch, give the guy his money so we can get out of here.”

  “I’ll second that motion,” Cooper remarked from the cruiser. “Suppose a county sheriff or a state cop drives by? We get caught out here, our fuckin’ asses are fuckin’ fucked.”

  Dutch grinned. He had a gold front tooth, which he thought of as stylish for a mid-level crack mover. Crack was hard to get down here; everything was pharmaceuticals and crystal meth, due to the virtual multitude of rednecks. In the crackburgs, Dutch was The Man. “Here ya go, Deputy Dawg. Call me on my cell when you got more for me.”

  He passed Ryan a band of fifties. Ryan’s thumb flitted over the band’s edge like a deck of playing cards. “Thanks, amigo, but I’m thinking that maybe this isn’t quite enough.”

  Dutch’s golden smile disappeared. “Yo, yo, that’s not cool. Three grand’s what we agreed to. Don’t be pulling any Dirty Harry on me.”

  “No, I mean I’m just thinking that maybe we could go for a little benny on the side. You know. A little something to jazz up another lonely night for a couple of hard-working officers of the law.”

  Dutch smirked and opened the bag. “You want a couple rocks, you should’ve said so.” He proffered two wax-pale nuggets of the drug. “Put this in your pipe and smoke it. It’ll definitely jazz up your lonely night.”

  “We’re fuckin’ cops, you moron,” Ryan reminded him. “We don’t smoke that shit. I’m thinking that maybe we could go for a little of that.”

  Ryan’s eyes shot past Dutch, to Arianna, who was doing her lipstick in the mirror behind the sun visor. The following silence seemed to give her a nudge, then she glared at Ryan and then at Dutch.

  “No way, Dutch!” she complained. “I’m sick of spreading my legs for every chump you buy product from.”

  “That’s Officer Chump to you, little miss,” Ryan said.

  “Come on, honey,” Dutch passed it off. “You used to do it all the time. It’s good business, it’s how things are done.”

  This response was clearly not what Arianna wanted to hear. Her tone of voice turned into a bray: “Goddamn it, Dutch. The old days are over! You promised I wouldn’t have to do shit like that anymore.” But even Arianna, way way deep down, realized that her objection was a bit unreasonable. When you were a drug-dealer’s girlfriend, part of your function existed as a deal-sealer. It was part of the turf and she knew it.

  And she’d sealed many, many deals for him and others in the past.

  “Sweetheart, how about a little slack?” Dutch asked next. “It’s not that big a deal, is it? Ryan and Cooper are prime business, and it’s only fair we keep ’em happy.”

  “Fine!” Arianna spat, ludicrously crossing her arms to cover her $2500 implanted bosom. “You fuck them!”

  Ryan leaned over and looked at her. “Hey, Arianna, I’ve been meaning to ask you. You still have that outstanding warrant going on in Hillsborough County? What was the name you used there? Francine Rauder? Aiding and abetting the transport of controlled substances, harboring a known felon? That’s a five-year hitch, baby. It would really suck if Hillsborough ever found out what your real name is.”

  “Shit on a stick,” Arianna conceded. She climbed into the Camaro’s cramped back seat, peeled off her top and peeled off her hot pants. “Come on,” she griped to Ryan. “I ain’t got all night, and I hope
you’ve got rubbers.”

  Ryan grinned. On the job? He always had rubbers.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Cooper nearly wailed. “Ryan, what in the name of fuck are you doing?”

  “I just got us some ring-a-ding, partner. Hope you don’t mind sloppy seconds.”

  “What part of WE HAVE TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE don’t you understand? You want to boff the tramp, do it off-shift.”

  “Hey, did he call me a tramp?” Arianna took exception, nude and spread-legged in the back seat.

  Cooper’s rant went on, “Jesus Christ, the dispatcher thinks we’re in town right now. What if we get a call?”

  Ryan opened the door, was about to get into the back of the Camaro. “Cooper, you’re being paranoid. At this hour we’re not gonna get a call—”

  “Unit 208, this is dispatch,” the radio suddenly crackled. “I have a priority call. Proceed immediately to west end. Investigate multiple civilian complaints of fires and screaming. Code Two.”

  Ryan never had a chance to get into the back. “What did they say? Fires and—”

  Cooper was close to flaking out; he grabbed the mike. “This is 208, I.D. 8. Please repeat.”

  “Investigate multiple civilian complaints of fires and screaming. Code Two. Abandon your current 10-6.”

  “Did you get a 20 from the call?” “The computer went out when the calls came in. You’re at 76th Avenue, right?”

  Cooper stalled. No, actually we’re not at 76th Avenue, he thought. We’re out in the sticks selling crack to a dealer. “Uh, roger, dispatch. We, uh, don’t see any fires or hear any screaming, but we’ll check it out. What’d the fire station say?”

  “We couldn’t raise them. The entire phone net seems to have failed all through Dannelleton.”

  “Did you call them on the radio?”