When I start walking, the wall of Kissi bodies parts like the Red Sea, then closes in behind me.
I'm moving just to move. Standing still feels like asking for trouble. But every direction looks exactly the same to me. I can't tell if I'm walking on something solid or just the idea of something. One minute, it feels like I'm on hard-packed dirt, then the next, I'm sinking into sponge cake. I don't stop or slow down. I keep walking, like I know exactly where I'm going.
A Kissi puts its glowing hand on my arm. I look at it like I talk to zombie angels every day. Its face is half-baked dough. I can't quite bring it into focus.
"I told you we'd meet again."
The Kissi's face rearranges itself for a second. Turns into Josef's Aryan poster-boy mug. "He's waiting for you. Straight ahead. We've all been so looking forward to this."
"Hang around, ugly. When I'm done with Mason, the two of us can get some dim sum before I kill you again."
Josef laughs, turns his sluglike head, and dissolves into the writhing mass of Kissi bodies. They pick up his laugh and it spreads out across the colony, so that in just a few seconds the sound surrounds me. Thunders down on me from a billion throats like a storm. It rattles every molecule in my body. I'm being mugged with sound. I turn and shove the lighter straight into the heart of the closest group of Kissi. They shriek and scatter. Shove the lighter in another group. And another. They still surround me, but they're not laughing anymore. And they keep their distance.
Straight ahead is the Faim family's Beverly Hills mansion, a Tudor playhouse standing in a universe of nothing. I don't bother knocking.
Head straight downstairs to the basement. Mason's magic room. The room where he sent me to Hell and where I found the lighter.
I open the door at the bottom of the stairs and, like that, it's eleven years ago.
The room is exactly the way I remember it. Even the circle drawn on the floor in lead is the same. I never figured Mason for the nostalgic type.
"I know you're not going to believe me, but it's really good to see you, Jimmy."
Mason sounds exactly the same. He looks the same, too. I can't tell if he's keeping himself young with magic or if time works differently here.
"When you've spent as many years as I have with no one to talk to but Parker or the Kissi, it's a real thrill to run into someone with some brains. Who isn't here to kiss my ass or be my Renfield."
"That's funny. I always thought you and Parker were best buds. Not Vlad and Renfield."
"You used to call him my attack dog. Maybe that's a better way of putting it. A dog is man's best friend, but it doesn't mean you're going to talk to it about anything important. You pet a dog. You feed a dog. You put it out back to guard the henhouse. Reward it when it's been good. Punish it when it's been bad. That's pretty much it."
"Your plan is working out great, if your plan was to sit out here in an empty house in the middle of fuck-all, surrounded by talking army ants. Wow. You really are a genius. I never saw that one coming."
"You see? Anyone else, I'd want to strangle by now. But noise like that. Criticism. It's all right coming from you. Because I respect you. You really are the only other Sub Rosa I thought had any real talent and style."
"That's why you had to kill me."
"I didn't kill you, did I? I could have and you wouldn't have seen it coming any more than the other thing."
"You can't even say it? You sent me to Hell. Say it."
"I don't want to reopen old wounds. That's not why I brought you here. And before you tell me that you found me on your own, we both know that I made sure that Kasabian knew just enough about where we were to help you finally figure it out."
"If you wanted me here so bad, why didn't you just send up a flare or have one of your Kissi forward me a Google map link?"
"Because I had to know that you could do it. I haven't seen you in eleven years. Maybe the air in Hell or all those knocks on the head in the arena turned your brains to butterscotch pudding. I had to see you work it out and here you are. And since you got rid of Parker, I have a staff opening right now. A nice midlevel executive job. Good hours. Terrific benefits. Possible deification. Interested?"
"Keep talking. The more you yammer, the more I want to kill you. That's the only reason I'm here, in case you forgot about what you did to me and Alice."
"Alice was Parker's thing. I just wanted to make sure she wasn't going to make too much of a fuss after you were gone. He took it too far."
"He was your dog. You sent him out to hunt. Your responsibility."
"What if I told you that you could get her back? Exactly as she was. And the two of you could live together forever. What would you say?"
I'm not at all surprised by his arrogance and bullshit. What's so strange about Mason is how young he seems. Like he's exactly the same little show-off he was all those years ago. Has he really been sitting here alone for eleven years? That's worse than what happened to me. I'm the old man now, but I saw and did a few things. I didn't just crawl up my own teenybopper ass for a decade. Imagine eleven years, sitting in a dollhouse version of your childhood home, reading magic books and not talking to anyone but your pet thug and talking roaches. If Mason wasn't crazy before, he's definitely joined the banana army now.
"What are you talking about? How could I get back Alice?"
"That's why I had to make you solve a puzzle to get here. I had to know if you could keep up once the project got rolling. Stage one is why I formed an alliance with the Kissi. To take control of the world."
He smiles at me like he just got all A's on his report card.
"Why would anyone want to run the world?" I ask. "It sounds like a huge pain in the ass."
"That's just stage one. If all I wanted was to take over the world, believe me, the Kissi and I could have done it already."
"What do you want the world for?""In any military campaign, you need a few basic things. Troops. Equipment. Support staff. Supply lines, that kind of thing. Earth is the perfect staging area for that."
"When I knew you, all you wanted was to prove that you were the best little magician in Candyland. Now you want to be Patton, too? What is wrong with you?"
He goes to a large ebony desk, piled high with books, writing paper, and maps of the universe like Aelita had, from Heaven looking down and from Hell looking up. Mason grabs an old book about the size and weight of a bag of cement and shows me the pages he's been studying. A single word crosses the two pages of the spread: L'Infernus. Below that is a detailed map of Hell's topography.
"We're invading Hell. I have the troops and the plan. You know Hell's strengths and weaknesses. You've already softened the place up for invasion. How many of Lucifer's generals have you killed? A dozen? Two? More?"
"You want to rule this world, a not particularly great place, so you can take over an even worse place? Is that basically it? That's why you ruined me, killed Alice, and fucked over everyone who ever trusted you?"
"Firstly, fuck all those people who trusted me. Except for Parker, every one of them was greedy and then turned jellyfish the moment you stuck your nose out of the grave. I gave all of them their heart's desire and they folded the moment things got a little weird."
"You didn't exactly give Kasabian his heart's desire."
"Yeah, I did sort of screw him, didn't I? But admit it. There's the opposite of love at first sight. There are people walking the earth that the moment you meet them, you want to punch them and keep punching them."
"I can't argue with you about Kas, but what do you want with Hell? It's already on the verge of a civil war. You want to walk into the middle of warring Hellions?"
"With the Kissi and you to back me up, yes. I really do. Because with our combined strength and your contacts with Lucifer's generals, we could find which to kill and which will make good allies. Then march in and take Hell, just the way we took Earth. Once we've secured the place, we'll combine the armies from Earth and Hell with the Kissi. Then go to stage three."
"You want to invade Heaven."
"I want to storm Heaven. I want to rip open the Pearly Gates and throw them from the firmament. I want to see all nine ranks of angels on their knees bowing down to the humans that conquered them. And I want to throw out that senile old fart that runs the place. Ship Him off to a retirement home for old deities. He can get a duplex with Zeus or Odin. He ruined the universe at the beginning of time and He's been ruining it ever since. He needs to be off playing golf in Boca and power walking at the mall, not running the fundamental laws of time and space. One day, He's going to forget where he put the remote, get all distracted, and forget about gravity. Then where will we be? I know you know I'm right. I know how you think."
I look at him. I don't know what else to do. He's right, of course. I agree with pretty much everything he said about Heaven and Hell. I wouldn't mind seeing God and Lucifer stuck on a cruise ship-shuffleboard, all-day buffets, a decent band in the bar, and a passable magic act in the lounge for all eternity. But the idea of replacing the current fuckups with Mason? That part doesn't scan and he knows I'd never go for it.
"So, I help you become the new Yahweh, and what do I get out of it?"
"The world. It's yours. And Alice. You and she can live forever. If you want her to. Once we're in charge, we'll control that kind of thing."
"Who gets Hell? The Kissi?"
"Who better to run the place of torments than a race of natural-born torturers and killers?"
This isn't what I was expecting. I don't know what I thought would be waiting for me here in Never Never Land, but it wasn't this. I came ready to fight Genghis Khan and I walk in on a shut-in playing the biggest Dungeons and Dragons game in history.
"You're right. I can't think of anyone better suited to run Hell than the Kissi."
I walk around the room, admiring how detailed his memory must be to have built this place. I stop at a bin full of maps that runs from the floor to the ceiling. City maps. World maps. Maps of time and celestial mechanics. Maps of the edges of the universe. I'm still holding Mason's lighter. I flick it and hold it to one of the maps.
"What are you doing over there?"
Old maps are printed on good, heavy paper stock. They burn well. Old ones are dry enough to burn fast. When Mason runs to the maps, I use the lighter to fire up the books and papers on his desk.
"Stop it!" he yells.
I hold the lighter to a book on his lectern. The book is written in Aramaic. It looks very rare and expensive.
"Stop it!"
That's the one I'd been waiting for. He's losing his shit. Getting sloppy with his power. The demonic boom of his voice knocks the house off its foundation and cracks the walls. Books, globes, and old specimen jars fly off the shelves. I lose my balance and knock over a spiderlike Kissi skeleton.
"The problem, Mason, is you only know me from the old days when breaking things was more fun. Your plan is so completely brain damaged that I might have gone for it back then. But all that matters now is one thing. You killed Alice and I'm going to kill you."
I set fire to anatomy charts and diagrams of mystical automata.
He uses a throw rug to smother the fire on the lectern.
"When I'm sitting on my golden throne in the sky, I'm going to make you and your bitch my special project."
Mason blurs across the room at me, faster than I could ever move. He knocks me out of the way so that he can rescue the papers I've set on fire. He's working really well for a few seconds, but then the black knife that I stuck in his side when he cuffed me away really starts to hurt. He reaches around to take the knife out. But I'm pretty fast, too. I leap and roll, jam my boot heel into the knife hilt, plunging it another six inches into his side. Mason groans and falls on his face.
I climb on top of him and rip the knife out with my left hand. Get my right arm around his throat and stab up, slipping the blade between his ribs and into his heart. Mason shudders and so does the house. The walls and ceiling crack. Bricks, lath, and plaster rain down on us. I push the knife in farther and hear the upstairs collapse.
A bookcase comes loose from the wall and crashes down on me. Mason throws an elbow and knocks me onto my back. Then he's on top of me. I get the knife up in time and jam it right back between his ribs. But Mason does a trick I didn't know he could do.
He's been doing more with the Kissi than exchanging sea stories and brownie recipes. He slips his hand through my body and right into my chest. Instantly I'm cold and nauseous, remembering what it was like in Josef's office. With every wave of pain and sickness, I twist the knife deeper into him.
The mansion walls are dust and the floor is sagging under our weight. A great, black dome of nothingness hangs over our heads. Then even the floor is gone and we're in the dark, surrounded by the chittering, scuttling noises of the Kissi, the only reminder that we haven't fallen out of the universe completely.
I shout Hellion control curses and poison hexes into Mason's ear. He digs his hand into my chest and gets his fingers around the key. The whole universe shifts, like a car sliding on black ice. I drag the black blade between Mason's ribs. Throw attack spells. Mason chatters in Kissi, trying to fill my head with dread and confusion. Luckily, I'm already confused and full of dread, so the spell is kind of redundant.
The darkness shreds around us. Streaks of something leak through the opaque wall of nothing. A billion Kissi scream as light burns into their hiding place.