I cut from the street and onto the sidewalk. We’re not back to the suicide road, but maybe we can make our own killer road right here.

I slow down just a hair. Let the hounds get a bead on me and close in. I hold out the na’at. If I’m wrong, this is going to be a messy way to go, but it’s better than old age or being poisoned by bad clams.

We’re near a block of half-collapsed houses. As the hounds close in, I hold out the na’at and let it rip through the support poles holding the walls up. At first nothing happens, but then there’s a crash behind me, followed by another and another. It sounds like the whole block is coming down, but I’m not slowing down to look.

I hear a hound right behind me. It’s scraping and clattering like it’s taken heavy damage, but it’s gaining on me. I cut to the side, hoping the huge thing’s momentum will carry it past. It does and it runs right into a support post on the side of a house. I see it just before it happens and cut back into the street so I don’t get crushed. I outrun the wall. Too bad I can’t outrun the falling debris. Something clips me right above my left ear and that’s all she wrote. Hello pavement. I love you, pavement. I think I’ll stay here a while.

WHEN I OPEN my eyes a billowing black snake is crawling over me. Its belly is a furnace and its body is the whole sky and it will take the rest of eternity to pass. I can wait. If this universe burns, I have the other one that Muninn gave me in my pocket. Let the show roll on.

I WAKE UP flat on my back and moving. I’m on a flatbed with heavy wire mesh over the top. It’s being towed by a Unimog. Someone shifts and grinds the truck’s gears. There are maybe eighteen Hellions back here with me. Some sitting up. Some on their backs. Others are leaking clear blood where they were ripped open by big hellhound jaws. I recognize some of them. They’re the Hellions that were running from the hounds.

The Unimog hits a bump and one of the leaking Hellions blips out of existence.

Someone says, “That was a good trick back there with your na’at.”

I turn my head so I’m looking up. There’s a smiling Hellion looking down at me.

“So good I coldcocked myself with a brick,” I say.

Like a lot of Hellions, he looks like a spiky horned toad after some Hollywood plastic surgery. Slim down the cheeks and neck. A chin implant that gives him a long horse face. He’s bruised and battered. It looks like the beat-down took his stubby horns, too. But his big white canines are still there. Those really hurt when they dig into you. Trying to get a Hellion off when he’s got a good hold of you with his choppers is like trying to coax a moray eel into a round of minigolf with knock-knock jokes.

I rub the side of my head. There’s sticky blood in my hair. I pull the hood back up, covering up the blood. I touch my face. Good. Mammon’s skin is still there.

I lean on my elbows and look up front. The flame job and animal skulls wired to the front of the truck look familiar. This is the same damned posse that’s been chasing Jack and me since Pandemonium. The saps caught me and they don’t even know it. If I wasn’t flat on my back being hauled around suicide roads in a wire-mesh chicken coop to who the fuck knows where, I’d feel like a real winner right now.

“Where’s the guy I was with? A damned soul.”

“Oh, him,” the Hellion snickers. “He seemed like a nice guy. When you were out cold, he stole your bag and ran off.”

I feel around for the leather satchel with my face in it. It’s gone.

“A real nice guy,” snickers the Hellion.

I reach into my coat for Mammon’s flask of Aqua Regia, but it’s not there. The little prick even stole my booze. Now he really has to die.

I should have cut Jack loose the moment we saw Eleusis. I should have let the sinkhole take him. The goddamn angel in my head softens me up at those moments. Every time I think we’ve found a balance point, it shifts its weight one sneaky gram at a time until it’s standing straight and I’m flailing around like a blind man on black ice. I will not let God’s little bootlicker win. I’m a nephilim, you haloed fuck. You’re part of me and you better learn to take the bad, me, with the good, you, or I swear I’ll put a double barrel to my head and do a Hemingway. Then we’ll see which one of us is left to Mr. Clean the wall.

“I’m Berith,” says the Hellion. “Who are you?”

Shit. For fifty points, name a Hellion I haven’t killed.

“Ruax,” I say. I wait to hear “Ruax is dead” or “He’s my brother-in-law,” but Berith just nods.

I sit up and lean against the wire-mesh enclosure.

“Where are we headed?”

“No idea. Jail I suppose.”

A Hellion with a mangled arm pipes up.

“Then back to Pandemonium. We’re so fucked.”

Berith looks out at the road.

“I don’t want to think about that.”

The truck rolls steadily, but it’s not in a rush to get anywhere. The posse up front is passing bottles around. I don’t suppose they’d be too keen on sharing with us prisoners. Maybe I can put my fist through the mesh and ask one nicely with my boot on his throat.

I get up and grab hold of a section of the fence. And promptly land on my back, feeling like someone just handed me a glass of whiskey with a thousand-volt chaser.

Berith laughs.

“Neat trick, eh? One of the Malebranche’s hexes. You can touch the walls of your cell all you want, but the moment you come at it with attitude, well, you see what happens.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“We’re all going to be dead soon. We need to have a few laughs along the way.”

I put my hand on the fence. Nothing happens. Holding on to it, I pull myself to my feet. We’re past all the houses and apartments and into a wider main street. Somewhere around Western maybe. Lots of burned-out buildings, but with a little something extra. My face.

Wanted posters offering a hefty reward cover every building, signpost, and bus kiosk still standing.

I guess someone figured out that Mammon and his staff are missing. Mason will know who did it, but that’s still goddamn fast to get posters plastered all over the place. Even with all the map games this place has been playing on me, the angel, who’s better at these things than I am, is sure we haven’t been here more than a day. And how does Mason even know I’m heading for Eleusis and not wandering the streets of Pandemonium like the Flying Dutchman? Jack couldn’t have made it back yet and ratted me out. With my face in a bag he can claim he killed me and get the reward. The bastard will be drinking mai tais and eating prime rib before I get near the asylum.

I hear cheering voices. There must be a lot of them if they’re loud enough to hear over the Unimog’s rumble and grinding gears. A couple of more blocks down, there’s a stadium. It’s not as big as the L.A. Coliseum. It’s more like the place well-off parents pay for so their sprogs can play soccer on a regulation field that’s not full of beer cans and gopher holes. Frposer holeom the tone of the crowd, they’re not playing in there.

We turn off the main road and onto a two-lane driveway behind the stadium and roll alongside what looks like a holding area for the posse’s prisoners. Big wire-mesh pens and RVs with blacked-out windows hold dozens of dirty, frightened Hellions. The fact that they’re being held in a stadium tells me that the posse isn’t above having a little fun with their prisoners before they’re shipped back to Pandemonium.

The truck stops. Six Hellions in SWAT body armor, carrying shotguns and homemade morning stars, hustle us off the flatbed and into the pens, where we have a clear view of the playing field.

Some people have dreams where they show up for final exams in their underwear or for a course they didn’t know they were taking. Other people wake up in the middle of the ocean. There’s land in the distance, but no matter how hard they swim, they never get any closer. Me, I dream about the arena. Shrinks call these “anxiety dreams.” I call them road maps. They show you where you’ve been and where you’re headed. A dream about being lost at sea doesn’t mean you’re going to end up as an extra on Gilligan’s Island, but it probably means you’ve gone off track somewhere. For me it’s even simpler. I don’t dream in metaphors. When I dream about the arena, I’m really dreaming a dream about the arena.