The Weirdness(70)

“Already on it,” says the other commando, Jean, who has slung his weapon over his shoulder and is poking at some kind of gadget that looks a little like a plastic model of a thighbone. Like Billy’s dad, this guy is all done up in paramilitary gear, and he looks like a soldier, his face grease-smeared and sooty, but Billy can’t help but wonder whether he has a double identity as a high school principal or a pastry chef or something normal.

The gadget in Jean’s hand is flashing red.

“They’ve been changed,” Jean says. “It’s hard to tell how recently. We’re glitching hard here—this tech was not really cleared for cross-planar function—”

“Are you talking about the wolf thing?” Billy says. “ ’Cause you could just, you know, ask us.”

At the word wolf, a look of deep remorse settles into Keith’s face. “I’m sorry, son,” he says. “This is not the way that I’d hoped you’d learn about your unfortunate circumstance—”

“My unfortunate circumstance?” Billy shouts, finally having had enough. “Missing your bus is an unfortunate circumstance. Throwing up in a cab is an unfortunate circumstance. Being a goddamn sex-demon wolf thing whose whole life is a lie is a fucking existential nightmare.”

“You know, Billy,” Keith snaps, his voice suddenly flinty with annoyance, “maybe you’d have a little bit more information about this situation if you’d just picked up your phone sometime in the last month.”

“If I’d picked up my—You’re really going to put this on me? You knew about all this wolf shit for thirty years and you never told me; I go a couple of weeks without calling you back and it’s my fault that everything goes to Hell?”

Elisa jumps in. “Listen,” she says. “You two. Watching you bicker is very illuminating—every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, as we know?—but I could have sworn that somebody mentioned something about getting out of here, and it seems to me that if we can do that—? Then maybe we should do that.” She taps a finger on the doorframe once, firmly.

Jean looks at Billy. “She’s right,” he says. “Get your clothes on. Your dad will explain everything when we’re all back safe.”

Billy, kind of past caring who sees his ass, drops the sheet, kicks off his shoes, and grudgingly works his legs into the orange jumpsuit. “Safe,” he says, as he struggles with the zipper. “Can we really even be safe? We’re talking about going on the run from the Devil. I kinda doubt that bullets kill him. He’s going to come back, and he’s going to be pissed. Where can we run?”

“We’re going to go to the Manhattan headquarters of a group that can help us,” Keith says. “They call themselves the Right-Hand Path.”

“No way,” Billy says, shaking his head in vigorous denial. “Not those guys.”

“Not those guys?”

“Yeah,” Billy says. “I met them, they’re assholes.” He feels a cold wave of dread swell in his gut. “Oh my God, are you one of them?”

“Not formally, no,” Keith says. “But they’re—allies. They have the resources that we’ll need, and they’re open to our using them. From their HQ we should be able to hide you from Lucifer, and once he’s lost your trail I’ll take you all with me back to Ohio; I can reestablish your wards there. That should effectively mean the end of your collective wolf problem. So. Come on.”

Billy looks at the ring of faces. Maybe they’re right. Maybe he should just go. Maybe he just got off on the wrong foot with the Right-Hand Path; maybe they really are decent guys. He thinks for a moment about how it would feel to have his life back, to be safely removed from the grand design of Lucifer’s plan, the full extent of which he still may not know. It sounds good, and yet he balks. He wonders, though, how much of his resistance is just willful perversity. He doesn’t want to do what his dad is telling him to do: But how much of that is just because he’s being told to do it by his dad? Has he just straight-up backslid to being a sulky adolescent?

He looks down at the bloody ruin of Lucifer’s most recent manifestation, just a foot from his bare feet, leaking ichor. And he thinks, for just a second, about Lucifer’s promise to him. The promise of a book. And he thinks about his mission, and the Neko in the tower, and the world, and the threat that the world would burn. And some impulse in him stirs.

“I hate to be the guy who’s going to say this,” he says. “But—what about Ollard? I mean, do you think Lucifer could have been right? Maybe Timothy Ollard is a dude we should be worrying about. You know he’s gotten past five seals of six, right?”