It wasn’t always like this Downtown. I spent eleven years trapped down here, so I got to know the place pretty well. But a mortal named Mason Faim and Lucifer’s generals (Semyazah was the lone holdout) tried to start a war with Heaven. Bad idea. The city burned. The sky turned black. Earthquakes opened sinkholes that swallowed whole neighborhoods.

When I look at Hell, I see L.A. It’s a funny kind of magic. A Convergence. An image of each place dropped over the other. It’s weird but it makes it easier for me to get around. Hellions still see old Hell. They don’t need a Fatburger at 2 A.M. If they did maybe they wouldn’t be such 24/7 dicks.

I’m going slow putting the place back together, but I can’t stall forever. I want to keep these devils, plotters, and knife-in-the-back bastards busy. But sooner or later they’re going to finish rebuilding. Until then all I want is to not get assassinated and to figure a way back to the real L.A. and back to Candy, a girl I left behind.

There’s a bottleneck up ahead where two collapsed buildings cover most of the street, their roofs almost touching. There’s a slight incline between the buildings and smooth road beyond. If I hit it just right, I can get the bike airborne a few yards on the other side. I twist the throttle and I’m doing around fifty when I hit the incline.

They’re waiting for me at the top. Two of them.

The one on the right catches me across the chest with a piece of rebar, and instead of a nice smooth flight on the back of the bike, I’m airborne all by myself, doing a backflip onto the asphalt.

I slam down on my gut and look up just as the second attacker gets to work. He runs up a big pile of rubble and launches himself off at me, an armored gorilla in SWAT-team coveralls and hobnail boots. I roll onto my back and try to get up.

Too slow.

He lands feetfirst on me like he thinks if he stomps hard enough he’ll get wine. Hobnails isn’t finished yet. He kicks me in the side. Long, careful, well-aimed kicks. This guy’s had practice. A second later the guy with the rebar joins him in clog-dancing on my ribs. This isn’t the quiet ride home I’d hoped for.

If I was a normal mortal, I’d be dead by now or at least a four-way gimp after Hobnails landed on me and snapped my spine. But I’m not a normal mortal and this isn’t a normal situation. I’m hard to kill any day of the week and I’m even harder now that I have on Lucifer’s armor under my shirt.

One of the goons has gotten bored with kicking and is looking around for something to drop on me. These assholes are having more fun than if they were at Chuck E. Cheese.

I push myself up onto my knees. Going to throw some crazy monkey-style Bruce Lee moves on these guys. Any second now. Soon.

But I just kneel there, letting the two idiots kick me. My mind goes blank. I have the sick, dizzy feeling that I forgot something. There’s something I’m supposed to be doing or somewhere else I’m supposed to be. It feels like there’s something crawling around behind my eyes. Maybe I’m just supposed to wait until these guys kick the living shit out of me.

Then the feeling is gone. It must have lasted all of ten seconds, but it was long enough for Hobnail and his friend to knock me back on my face. I reach into my pocket, get a handful of the drytt crackers, and throw them. The kicking stops. I push myself back onto my knees.

You know how young vampires without any training can be so twitchy and compulsive they have to organize anything you throw in front of them? The same goes for brain-dead Hellions, and these two don’t look like they could run the fryer at McDonald’s. When I tossed the crackers, they went for them like zombies after a one-legged blind man.

After all the body shots, I have to crawl a few feet before I can get up. I take off my helmet and set it on the pavement, getting out the black bone blade I always keep hidden in the waistband of my pants.

The Glimmer Twins are crouched on the street, pushing the eggs into neat piles. I wrap my arm around Hobnail’s head, pull it back, and drag the blade across his throat. Black Hellion blood oozes down over my arm like leaking engine oil. His friend is concentrating so hard on stacking eggs that he doesn’t see the blade until the last minute. I swing and his head pops off and rolls away, coming to rest against my helmet.

I go over and look at it like maybe I’m going to have the head stuffed and mounted like a big-mouth bass. I’m waiting for a sound. And there it is. The tiniest tick as a boot comes down on a pebble behind me. I spin and toss the head like a scaly bowling ball. Hellion assassination teams usually work in threes. Seeing as how the first two had the combined IQ of waffle batter, whoever is left has to be the squad leader.

He’s taller than the other two, with the same not-bright lizard look you see in a lot of the legion’s grunts. His SWAT body armor is heavier than the others’, so the head just knocks him off balance for a second. He has a Glock strapped to his hip, but he’s making flashy fighting moves in the air with a couple of nasty-looking serrated long swords. He could go for the gun, but he wants to make himself a name by slicing up Lucifer old school. Fucking devils and their fucking rituals.

I take a step back like I’m dazzled by his video-game moves. I fought in the arena down here for years. Swords hurt, but after you get cut a few hundred times, they’re about as scary as road rash. Meaning they’re something to avoid if you can but they’re nothing to lose sleep over. Still, they hurt and I’m already hurt. And I lost my snack.

He takes the bait and charges. I step forward and catch his wrist with my forearm, deflecting the blade as it comes down on my head. Now that I’m in striking range, the textbook step two of an attack like this is simple: while your opponent is busy blocking your downward attack, you step in with a forward thrust of your second blade, skewering him like a cocktail wiener. The only problem with it is that every sentient being in the universe knows it and is ready for it. Instead of attacking, I let him plant a powerful shot in my solar plexus. His blade kicks sparks when it hits the armor and snaps in two. It startles him long enough for me to move a couple of steps and plant a foot behind my helmet on the ground.

When he comes back at me, I kick, sending the helmet into his face like a cannonball. I hear bones crunch and he spins around before landing on his face. I stand over him, kick the sword out of his hand, and shove his pistol in my pocket. I grab him by the lapels, spin and slam him headfirst into a pile of rubble. While he’s busy trying to breathe through a crushed face, I rifle his dead friends’ pockets. Empty. They don’t even have dog tags, so I can’t tell what part of the legion they’re from.

Their boots and body armor are the heavy kind issued to frontline infantry who are basically cannon fodder. But since the war with Heaven is over, clowns like this aren’t supposed to have time on their hands. Avoiding this kind of fucking mess is why I’m going slow with the rebuilding. Why aren’t these pricks with the rest of the grunts, clearing rubble or rebuilding roads? Did they think if they killed me, one of them would be the new Lucifer? Maybe they were going to share the title—Moe, Larry, and Curly, the Three Infernal Stooges. But not one of this bunch had the imagination or balls to try something like that on their own. Someone put them up to it. The one I clocked with the helmet is coming around, so I go back to him.

I pick up the unbroken long sword and press it against his throat.

“You awake, sunshine?”

He grunts. Shakes his head, trying to clear it.

“Who sent you?”

“No one. I don’t need permission to slaughter mortals.”

I lean forward, using my weight to press the tip of the sword into him until he bleeds.