Chapters (60)
- DAW Books Presents
- HAPPY HOURINHELL
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Dedication
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- prologue
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- interlude
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- interlude
- thirteen
- fourteen
- interlude
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- interlude
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- forty-one
- forty-two
- forty-three
- forty-four
- forty-five
- forty-six
- forty-seven
- forty-eight
- epilogue
We’d both seen a lot of ugly stuff, but Smyler was worse than anything, somehow. He—it—whatever, his skin was gray and pulled tight over his bones like a shriveled corpse, mottled with dark purple-blue patches too regular to be bruises. His jaw stuck out like a piranha’s, so that even with his mouth closed you could see his bottom teeth, deformed little things like seed pearls, a perfectly straight line of them. But his eyes were the worst. His eyes were all black, except for a little sliver of bloodshot white at the edges when he looked around, like he was doing now. The rest of the Harps, the ones that weren’t tending Reb and Zone, gathered around, and as he looked at us, he opened his mouth and started giggling again. The inside of his mouth . . . well, it looked rotten. That’s all I can tell you. Black and gray and oozing and rotten, except for little bright spots of blood.
“Angels,” he said in his scratchy voice. “It love you! All for you! All for you!”
Sam was ready to shoot him in the head that second, wipe that horror away in a storm of bullets, but Leo yelled, “No! Stand down, soldier!” Leo waved his phone—they were bigger in those days. “I’ve called the bagmen.”
I’d never heard the expression, and at first I thought he meant the medics. He’d called them too, to treat our wounded, but they weren’t the people he was talking about.
“Just keep him here,” Leo said. “But don’t touch him. We’re not sending him back.”
“But Leo,” Sam said quietly, “the Convention—!”
“I don’t give a fuck about the Convention.”
And I suddenly understood, or at least some of it. See, the Tartarean Convention says that in conflicts on Earth we can do anything to the demons’ physical bodies, just like they can to ours, but when their—or our—bodies die, all bets are off, and everything returns to status quo ante. Which means that the souls go back to their respective abodes, Hell or Heaven, and whatever happens next is up to the authorities of those places. Which means you can kill a demon’s body and send its soul back to Hell, but you can’t do anything to prevent its masters from popping it right back into a new demon body. And as far as I knew then, that wasn’t just the Convention’s rules, that was the reality—we couldn’t do anything to a demon’s actual soul any more than they could do anything to ours.
I was about to learn differently.