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Paul’s people—the grinning asshole who knew me and the two monsters who probably got their jobs by strangling inspirational cancer survivors—innocently turned. Forcing me to turn around, right into Dan’s face.

His grin got bigger. “Hey, Bob. It
is
you.”

I WANTED TO SWEAR OUT LOUD.
Dan looked about ready to say something else that might doom me with any number of killers who were within arm’s reach. I stuffed my hand into my pocket, pulling a stick of gum out of the pack and unwrapping it one-handed. I started walking back towards Dan, and when I had the gum unwrapped, I stooped and scraped the wrapper along the floor. “Sorry about that, sir,” I said, holding out the wrapper to him.

Getting closer, I growled, “Take the goddamn wrapper and you do not know me.” I smiled, handed him the wrapper, and headed back to Heather, who was watching me in confusion.

“What was that about?”

“He dropped his parking stub,” I said.

“But he said ‘Bob.’”

“Did he? Sounded like ‘stub’ to me.”

The tiniest crease formed between her eyes, which was probably the equivalent of a serious frown on anyone else.

“The midget is getting away,” I said.

“Mmm-hmm.”

 Paul’s people were halfway down the hall, so we both picked up the pace. We spotted him by the massive wall of his goons, the redheads fluttering and bobbing around the perimeter. Paul would be in the middle of them, looking as pleased with himself as it was possible to look. With her targets in sight, Heather slowed down a bit.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going?”

We both turned. The grinning asshole I’d delivered goat’s blood to was leaning against the wall next to the john, smirking like he’d just pulled off a coup. Paul’s majordomo, who thought that having the same shaved-head-and-goatee combination would lead to Satanic favor. Or possibly some kind of intergalactic royal title. He pushed off, ready to confront us while his boss got away.

Without hesitation, Heather shoved him through the bathroom door and followed him in. I didn’t hear anything for the approximately three seconds they were in there together. Then Heather emerged, fixing her hair and flashing her brilliant smile at me. “All right, let’s go.”

“Yes. Let’s.” I glanced back at the bathroom, wondering what the hell had just happened, and realized, more than anything, I did not want to know. My overactive imagination supplied a scene from an Alexandre Aja movie, which was a dick move by it.

We followed Paul’s group out onto the street where, naturally, the little bastard had a limo waiting. He took his sweet time loading the entourage, and I hoped it would be long enough.

We walked quickly to the corner and were reduced to sprinting up 1st Street. It wasn’t entirely vertical, but it sure felt like it. My legs and lungs were both burning and I kind of wanted to throw up at the top, but didn’t even have time for that. I jumped into the car, Heather following, and turned back down 1st and then onto Hill. I knew where Paul’s route would probably take him: the Hollywood Freeway, only a couple blocks from the courthouse. I gunned the engine, driving a little recklessly, knowing I had to put Paul’s brake lights in my sightline if I wanted to tail him.

I had an idea of where he was going, of course, but I couldn’t exactly reveal to the killer next to me that I knew where the Satanist temple was in Malibu. That would definitely provoke an awkward conversation.

On the stereo: “Kundalini Express” by Love and Rockets.

Come on. Do I really need to walk you through that one?

I trailed him to the Santa Monica Freeway and from there to PCH, where I had been that morning after walking out of the wilderness with Bigfoot. If I paid attention, I could have probably pinpointed the exact spot where I came out of the undergrowth to stumble along the gravelly shoulder. But I had more important things to worry about, like the carload of Satanists in front of me.

“You planning to tell me what we’re doing?” I asked her.

“I’m afraid you don’t have the eido—”

“Oh, cut the bullshit. You killed that guy back at the courthouse, and now we’re following the midget, and I want to know what’s going on.”

She stared out the windshield, not at Tallutto’s car, but right through it. Finally, she whispered something.

“What?” I asked.

“Primordial dwarf.”

“What?”

“He’s not a midget. He has Meier-Gorlin Syndrome... it’s a form of primordial dwarfism. It means, among other things, that he doesn’t have kneecaps.”

“How does he walk?”

“He has prosthetics.”

I let that sink in. “Okay, I knew that. Not the formal diagnosis, or the kneecap thing, obviously, but the point stands. Why are we following the world’s smallest galactic overlord?”

She finally turned to me, and her big brown eyes had gone all scrunched and parenthetical. She was about ready to have The Talk with me. I’d had The Talk, most recently with the woman I was presently trying to free from incarceration. See, in the Information Underground, your relative age is determined not in years, but in secrets. The more you know, the older you are, and by that kind of reckoning I am Gandalf. Problem is, they’re called secrets for a reason. No one really knows how much anyone else knows, and generally assumes that they know more than everyone else because this big movie called Life is their story. They’re the protagonist, so they’re older. And thus, everyone else is a thirteen-year-old who just learned that his wang gets hard when he watches Jennifer Connelly ride the mechanical horse in
Career Opportunities
. Life in the Information Underground is like being constantly surrounded by parental figures who want to explain your changing body in the most condescending way possible.

Heather Marie Tooms, star of the late, unlamented
Demon Eyez
, was about to have The Talk with me. She had her Sincere Face on, concern radiating from every pore, trying to make sure she didn’t shatter my fragile mind while I was winding along the highway.

“There are other groups out there, Jim.”

I had to play along, too. That’s the part that made me feel bad for both of us. “What? No!” God, I sounded like an asshole.

She nodded solemnly. “And none of them are as committed to raising the spiritual consciousness of all mankind as we are.”

You mean not all of them will do literally anything for a buck, officially making you less discriminating than every prostitute in Los Angeles.
I didn’t say that. “But why not?”

“They’re Misguided.” In Rosicrusophy, “Misguided” was capitalized at all times, mostly because it had more of a sinister connotation than in normal society. If you were truly Misguided, you had a subconscious desire, rooted in past-life evil, to keep doing bad things. It was also a convenient club to beat members with. Fail on a task? Must be Misguided! Don’t tithe properly? Misguided! Steal from the Temple? Misguided!

I mean, in their defense, I
was
Misguided. “Oh,” I said. “Who are they?”

“Many different ones. All kinds, many rooted in the kind of occult nonsense Dr. Wood tried so hard to eradicate from modern thought.” Sometimes their lack of self-awareness was a tad grating.

“No, I mean, who are
they
?” I pointed at the brake lights of the limo.

Heather took a deep breath. “They’re devil worshipers.”

I ignored that this was technically inaccurate and tried instead to think of what a normal—and I use the term loosely—Rosicrusophist would say when confronted with this new information. “That does sound Misguided.” Then, because I could not stop myself, “Why would they worship the devil? If there’s a devil, there’s a God, and they’re choosing to be condemned!”

I knew the answer—“they’re idiots” is the short version—but I had to know what Heather thought.

“It’s as I said. Their eidolons are stuck at a lower harmonic and can’t shed the trauma of the exobirth. This causes them to idealize the immoral.”

 That was Rosicrusophist for “they’re idiots.”

“So they’re Misguided. I’m thrilled that we’re doing good work here in trying to snap them out of their lower harmonic states. But what are we
actually
doing here? If this was a hit on the little guy, you would have waited outside the courthouse, probably on the roof of the LA Law Library right across the street. You would have had that Dragunov sniper rifle I got for you, and as soon as you saw his shiny little dome, you would have put a very large bullet through it. So I know for a fact we’re not trying to kill the leader of this group of very dangerous Misguided.”

 A silence filled the car that was so goddamn pregnant I could feel its twins kicking. Finally, Heather quietly said, “I never said he was the leader.”

I knew if I sputtered during my response, I was a dead man. “Give me a little credit. I
have
taken the course on Social Engineering in Negative Environments.”

She watched me while I watched the limo two cars up the road. The sun was setting over my left shoulder as we drove north. Probably took her some willpower to stare directly at me with the sun shining in her face, but if there was one thing Rosicrusophists were good at, it was staring. “How did you do?”

“I passed.”

“Good.” Her tone was noncommittal. “He is the leader of all the Satanists in the city.”

In point of fact, he’s the leader of one sect of Asmodeans, but now was not the time to be pedantic.

“What are we doing?” I repeated, this time harder.

“We’re looking for someone.”

“What, one of them?”

“A Satanist, yes. He murdered a security consultant, and now he’s being hidden away by his fellow travelers. We’re going to get him back.”

I started feeling sick to my stomach, but I had to know if my fears were about to be confirmed. “Does he have a name?”

Heather was silent, deciding whether or not to tell me. “Erick Levitt,” she said.

 Yep. Although there were a couple problems with her version. One, Shaw was not a security consultant. He was an old-school spook responsible for enough deaths to put him squarely in war criminal territory. Two, I didn’t even kill the guy; Mothman took care of that. I could see why everyone thought that, though. As a story, it tracked remarkably well. Pretty much confirmed whose picture was in the envelope.

I swallowed. “This Levitt is a Satanist?”

“Of course,” she said. “Why does that matter?”

“It doesn’t! Just curious. It’s a lot to process.” And incorrect. The First Reformed Church of the Antichrist, whose leadership I was tailing, knew me as Sam Smiley.

“This is precisely why I didn’t want to tell you. You have not climbed the ladder far enough to really understand the darker aspects of the world around us. You’re susceptible to insanity and even death right now.”

“I know! I’m so glad I have a certified technotist here or I’d be scared.”

I expected a little laugh, maybe a squeeze on my shoulder. What I got instead was silence I chose to interpret as stony. With the sunset and the traffic, I didn’t want to look over at her to see what was going to happen next. The mystery was solved when I started to hear sobs coming from her side of the car.

I glanced over; she was sitting ramrod straight as always, her face in locked in a grinning rictus. Tears poured from her eyes in rivers. The sobs were coming from the involuntary movements in her throat as she tried to swallow each one.

“Heather? Are you okay?”

“I’m just so happy!”

She didn’t look happy. She looked like Harley Quinn at the Joker’s funeral.

“Are you sure?”

“Sometimes I cry a little. It’s okay. Nothing to be worried about. It’s the technosis working, resolving the eidolons to my harmonic.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know that sensation of crushing sadness, where nothing matters and nothing makes sense, and you feel utterly insignificant and unloved?”

“No.”

“You will when you’re higher up the ladder.”

“Oh, good.”

“When you feel that way, you have to concentrate on your smile. That helps resolve it, tamping down those feelings in the negaverse where they belong and you can resume being perfectly happy and steadily going upward on your path.”

“I see.”

Heather continued sobbing and smiling and freaking me out. We passed the turnoff where the old Church of the Antichrist had been. I was glad I’d followed the limo instead of just driving there, another case of my knowledge being a year out of date.

Paul’s limo broke off to the right, winding up into the cliffs of Malibu. I wasn’t surprised: Satanists love beachfront property. It’s one of the odder facts I’ve found to be true during my time in my former life.

Traffic lightened up. I sagged off the tail a little, trusting my ability to find the limo even if we lost him for a turn or two. It wouldn’t do to get caught now. The sun was almost all the way gone, plunging us back into the LA night, which was never fully dark. A whole day without sleep. Fun. This really was just like the old days. Goddamn it, I was supposed to be retired.

The limo moved farther and farther into the cliffs, and now we were in the part of Malibu that was the exclusive purview of actors, athletes, corporate raiders, and the odd devil worshiper. Paul Tallutto was moving up in the world, it seemed. I guess when you find the Antichrist, that adds a little something to the faith.

Finally, the limo pulled off onto a street that led to a single property perched on the very edge of one of the cliffs. A self-consciously gothic building, the place practically screamed evil. If I went up and knocked, I’d be disappointed when Lurch didn’t answer. I parked on the closest street and turned off my car.

“What now?” I asked, not really wanting an answer.

“We’re going in. Erick Levitt is in there somewhere, and we’re bringing him out.”

Actually, Erick Levitt isn’t in there
yet
.