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Back Happy Hour In Hell
Chapters (60)
  1. DAW Books Presents
  2. HAPPY HOURINHELL
  3. Copyright page
  4. Contents
  5. Dedication
  6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  7. prologue
  8. one
  9. two
  10. three
  11. four
  12. five
  13. six
  14. interlude
  15. seven
  16. eight
  17. nine
  18. ten
  19. eleven
  20. twelve
  21. interlude
  22. thirteen
  23. fourteen
  24. interlude
  25. fifteen
  26. sixteen
  27. seventeen
  28. eighteen
  29. nineteen
  30. twenty
  31. twenty-one
  32. interlude
  33. twenty-two
  34. twenty-three
  35. twenty-four
  36. twenty-five
  37. twenty-six
  38. twenty-seven
  39. twenty-eight
  40. twenty-nine
  41. thirty
  42. thirty-one
  43. thirty-two
  44. thirty-three
  45. thirty-four
  46. thirty-five
  47. thirty-six
  48. thirty-seven
  49. thirty-eight
  50. thirty-nine
  51. forty
  52. forty-one
  53. forty-two
  54. forty-three
  55. forty-four
  56. forty-five
  57. forty-six
  58. forty-seven
  59. forty-eight
  60. epilogue

I was completely soaked in blood. I did my best to clean the knife, then slipped it back into my boot. I knew that Candy and Cinnamon’s car had been just a few hundred feet above me, but I didn’t want to risk going back to steal it, which would force Caz to walk all the way back to Flesh Horse by herself through some of the worst parts of the Red City. I didn’t want to put her in that kind of danger. This led to another Bobby Dollar Special Moment: I was actually leaving her the car so she could get home faster and report the disappearance of her bodyguards sooner. And she’d have to, of course. You didn’t just go out for the afternoon, misplace about a half ton’s worth of demon-gorillas, and then not mention it to their employer.

I probably should have tried to find Caz then and take her with me, but I didn’t know how long I could hide her from an angry grand duke and his soldiers. Riprash wasn’t leaving until the next day, and the last thing I wanted was to have them start checking the ports. If she went home now, Eligor would be alerted to what happened to her bodyguards, but I hoped Caz herself wouldn’t be suspected of anything. Of course, it was going to be more difficult now for her to get out to meet me at the temple. (And yes, I know she’d never even hinted she would, but I needed to believe it just to keep myself going.) I had my own bad decisions to blame for that.

My personal situation was a bit more difficult. Even if I could wash off everything that had leaked, dribbled, and spurted out of the beheaded bodyguard, I was sure I was covered with bleeding wounds of my own. I really didn’t want to go back to the Ostrich looking like that and hope nobody noticed. Hellfolk might not care much about stuff like that as a general rule, but they’d sell you out in a hot second if there was a chance of profit.

I was lucky that I hadn’t left anything I really needed there, because the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to go near the place. I was exhausted, shaking, and looked like I’d fought a cage match with a pride of lions. I needed to go somewhere safe, if only to rest. That really only left me one option.

Before I reached Riprash’s ship, I took a few moments to slip into the oily black shallows of the Styx and wash off as much of Candy’s blood as I could, then I climbed quickly back onto the dock just ahead of a flotilla of large, corpse-white eels who had come wriggling toward the smell of diced bodyguard.