Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar by Tad Williams Page A

wounds.
    “You’re shitting me.” His ginger ale arrived and Sam drank half of it at a swallow, as if the long trip from Third Wayville had made him thirsty. “Leo bagged and burned that little creep.”
    It was strange how easily it all came back together, as if Sam and I hadn’t been through all that craziness, as if he had never lied to me. There was, however, a little hollow place deep inside me, even if I was ignoring it. “Tell me about it. But it was Smyler. It
is
Smyler, and he’s still out to get me. I think Eligor put him on me.”
    Sam raised an eyebrow, the closest he’ll let his good-old-boy persona come to showing actual surprise. “Eligor? Why would he do that? You’ve still got the magic golden feather, don’t you?”
    My old chum was the one who had hidden it on me in the first place, trying to protect me from an infernal double-cross. With one thing and another, though, he hadn’t bothered to tell me about it until much later, which was one major reason I had almost died about eleventy-thousand times in the previous weeks, in many, many interesting ways.
    “Yes, I’ve got it,” I said, “or at least I assume I do, since I can’t actually touch it myself. And if Eligor was smart he’d just leave me alone. But I think the whole thing goes a bit deeper than common sense.” I took a breath. “I have to tell you something.”
    And I did. I told him the whole thing about me and the Countess of Cold Hands, the whole bizarre, tabloid-headlines story:
Angel Loves Demon,
or
I Sold Out Heaven for a Roll in Hell’s Hay
. Although, the only people actually disadvantaged in any way by our relationship were Caz and myself. Oh, and Eligor, of course. The grand duke definitely counted himself as an injured party.
    Sam didn’t say anything for a long time after I finished. He signaled for another ginger ale, and the proprietress brought it over with the good grace of a camel trudging through a sandstorm. He took his time pouring and then rolled it around in his mouth like a wine critic about to hold forth on this year’s Beaujolais nouveau.
    “Well, B,” he said. “I have to admit, you have lifted fucked-up to an entirely new level.”
    I laughed in spite of everything. “I have, haven’t I?”
    “I’ve got no problem with you
shtupping
a
dybbuk
, particularly.” Sam liked to use Yiddish sometimes. Maybe he thought it made him sound intellectual, maybe he just knew it was funny when an angel who looked so Boston Irish started dropping Brooklyn Jewish. “But you definitely could have picked one who would have been less trouble than Eligor’s main squeeze. So what are you going to do?”
    And that was the problem: I didn’t know. As far as I could tell, Grand Duke Eligor had just decided he didn’t want to wait until I made it to Hell the usual way—he was sending me an express invitation. “It’s got to be Eligor trying to get me, right? You and I saw the bagmen take Smyler. Leo burned him! How else could he be after me now?”
    “Yeah, somebody powerful does seem to have it in for you. What happened to Walter Sanders, by the way?”
    “He’s still not back yet. No news. Which now that you mention it is pretty strange.”
    Sam had a last
paratha
, ladling up the curry sauce like a canal dredger, then polished off his ginger ale. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
    We walked to Peers Park, then settled on a bench. The lights were on and the park was full of parents and kids enjoying the spring evening, which made me feel slightly less vulnerable to being attacked by a twice-dead guy with a bayonet, but Sam himself was on Heaven’s Most Wanted List, so I wasn’t exactly relaxed.
    “Okay, first off,” Sam said as we watched a guy trying to get his obviously brain-damaged dog to fetch a tennis ball, “only a butt-hat says, ‘my enemies are trying to kill me, so I’d better make it easier for them by going over to their place.’ Trying to sneak into Hell is the dumbest thing