Not the most cheerful thought.
I stepped over the line in the sidewalk—and got smacked in the eye with a femur.
“Jesus,” I growled, slapping it away, spinning to look at what I’d walked into.
From this side, I could see that the entrance to Helltown was marked with an iron arch that had bones dangling down the middle, kind of like Isobel’s beaded curtains. I rubbed my face hard where the bone had touched it.
Lord, I hope the sun’s bleached all the bacteria off of that.
Then I turned around to get my first look of the morning at Helltown.
As soon as I had passed under that archway, the seemingly empty street had become populated. Demons and witches and idiot humans with death wishes bustled through the road, pushing along wheelbarrows and dragging sacks behind them. The road hadn’t been maintained since it vanished into Helltown in 1968, and the pavement was all but dust under my feet, making me stumble when I stepped off the sidewalk. My foot squished in something red-brown and rotting. Graceful, Cèsar, very graceful.
The yellowing lawns I’d seen from outside were nothing but dirt pits in here. The bars and glass were missing from most windows, letting me see to the seething darkness within the houses. All of the street signs had been torn down and replaced with sheets of engraved steel—all decorated with spikes, of course. Demons love putting spikes on everything.
It was a neighborhood out of a nightmare, twisted and perverse.
It was my only hope of finding a lead now.
“Welcome to Helltown,” I muttered under my breath.
I was talking to myself. Three days since going rogue and I was already going nuts.
Keeping my head down, I walked fast toward the intersection of Grim and Blacksburg. Demons and witches had self-segregated within Helltown, so there are neighborhoods within the neighborhood. All the higher demons, like incubi, live on the northern streets with the mortals that feed them; I was heading south, where the less powerful demons hid out.
I never went to the north side of Helltown. Never.
Moving quickly, I watched my feet instead of watching my surroundings, trying to look like I belonged. I didn’t want to see what I was passing anyway. The ramshackle buildings had human skulls over most doorways. Several of the houses had converted the yards to pens for exercising human servants. Vendors had carts set every few feet, selling crafts made of demon and human byproducts, selling kebabs of flesh, clothes woven from human hair. Those were the worst. Just the smell of them made me want to barf.
It wasn’t a nice place, Helltown. Kopides had been trying to shut it down ever since a coven of witches and duke from the City of Dis collaborated to make those streets disappear from Los Angeles. But you can fit a lot of evil in a couple square miles, and we couldn’t trust automatic weapons to operate around all that infernal power. It didn’t leave a lot of options for slaughtering the residents of Helltown.
For now, the OPA only jumps in when we need something. When Helltown is spilling outside its boundaries.
As long as Helltown stays self-contained, anything goes.
Down on the south side of Helltown, there are fewer shops and more apartments. The buildings were crammed all full of demons like carcasses being eaten by maggots from the inside out. But there’s one shop on the ground floor of a tenement that I’ve visited three or four times before. Aside from being a source of irritation for the OPA, the shopkeeper was a nosy pain-in-the-ass that always knows what’s going down in her town.
Monique was one of the more innocuous demons in Helltown—a glass blower. She mostly crafted supplies for witches—vials for potion making, bowls for mixing ingredients, enchanted flasks, that kind of thing—but she also made pipes for drug use. That was the thing that got her in the most trouble. It’s one thing to supply witches that live in Helltown, and another to supply potheads on the outside with pipes shaped like dicks.
Everything that demons craft gets demon energy crafted right into it. By smoking through a novelty pipe that Monique had made, druggies were opening themselves to demonic possession. It wasn’t a big deal for the occasional smokers. Now imagine April twentieth at UCLA with a hundred college students that suddenly need exorcism, and you’ll get why Monique is a problem.
We’d originally thought the dick-pipe affair was a witch thing, which was how it got assigned to me. Now Monique had the pleasure of being my one and only demon contact. She’d cut a deal to avoid incarceration, and she fed me information whenever I was brave enough to head into Helltown.
She still had a bunch of dick-pipes on the shelf by her front door at eye level. I had to give it to her. Monique was a real artist. Big dicks, little dicks, circumcised, uncut, all of them perfectly shaped for smoking weed.