Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar (28 page)

We fell to the carpeted floor, scattering clothing, half-dressed as we wrestled, our only goal to obliterate ourselves in each other. For that moment, everything I’d been through, everything that still stood before me—treachery, torment, death—they all fell away. I didn’t even stop to consider that making love in one of Hell’s most famous boutiques wasn’t exactly discreet, because at that moment nothing existed but the two of us, separated for so long but never truly apart, still burning for each other. It doesn’t make sense in Hell or on Earth, but if you’ve been there, you know. We were making a cathedral of sweat and skin and stifled cries in the worst place that ever was, and nobody was in it but us.

We gave up on the clothes at some point, having removed enough of them that I could climb on top of her and sink myself to the root. My demon body, I was discovering, reacted pretty much like my earthly one. I guess the scientists are right: most of sex is in the mind.

Caz gasped and stiffened, her nails driving into my thickened hide like the tips of knives, ten stabs at once, but it only made me crazier, more animal. I rubbed my face against hers, taking in her smells in insane gulps even as she wrapped her thighs around me, urging me past the chilly bite of her petals to her deep inner heat. She groaned. So did I. We were pushing against each other so violently, striving for some impossible completeness of connection, that we kept bumping into things on the floor, legs of tables, dressmaker’s dummies, knocking things over until we must have looked a lot like those two damned souls in the Lykaion race, trying to destroy each other in the bloody sand of the Circus Commodus.

At last I paused, panting, dripping sweat and blood, still too exalted and too stupefied to come. Caz pushed me onto my back and then slid her body over me, pushing her pussy in my face as she licked me and smacked at me with her clawed fingers, then she climbed back onto my cock to ride me as though I were a dying horse, pulling everything out of me she could. When my orgasm finally burst out of me it felt like a heart attack. I shouted and pulled her against me as tightly as I could, and this seemed to squeeze her into climax as well. She clenched my ribs between her knees and rode harder and harder until her ragged breathing rose to a sustained growl of desperate and only coincidentally pleasurable release, then she rolled off me and lay like a dead thing. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I could barely breathe, but what air I could draw in smelled like Caz. She might be a woman who had been damned since before Columbus sailed, but she was the woman I had crossed Hell to find: to me, it was the true breath of Heaven.

At last her own panting slowed, calmed. She reached out a hand, nudged my arm with it. For a moment I didn’t know what to do, then I realized she wanted me to hold it.

We lay there, both of us still breathing very hard, hand in hand in a pile of Hell’s finest couture.

“Well,” she said at last. “We’re
really
fucked this time, Dollar. I hope you’re happy.”

“Strangely, yes,” I said. Of course we would both suffer terribly when we were caught. Dying would be the luckiest possible outcome, but neither of us were that lucky. “Yes, I am.”

a different universe

S
HE GOT
up. I hated that. I hated anything that wasn’t the two of us lying close and connected, preferably forever.

“Don’t.” I reached out a hand, barely touched the back of her cold thigh as she moved past me. “Stay with me.”

“I need to get out to some of the stores and look like I’m spending money, since I’m supposed to be shopping today, and I’m due back soon. And I need to let Poitou have his shop back. He only let me borrow it as a favor.” She smiled, but it wasn’t a nice one. “He thinks he’s doing it for Eligor, of course.”

The grand duke’s name was like a bucket full of cold water. I sat up. “Don’t. Don’t go back. That’s why I’m here, to take you away.”

“Let go of me, Bobby. This was already an incredibly stupid thing for me to do. You’ll just make things worse.”

“Worse? How could they be
worse
Caz? We’re in
Hell!
You live here, and I’ve spent better times in DMV offices—not counting what just happened, of course.”

She shook her head and kept gathering up her clothes. “Enough. My keepers are going to be after me any moment.”

“Keepers? You mean your former bodyguards, Crunchy and Yum-yum? I can take them. I can take them both.”

“Candy and Cinnamon. No, you can’t. Not here. Not in that body.” She was moving faster now, spinning out of my orbit, probably forever. “They’d tear your arms off like pulling the wings off a fly.” She nodded toward my partially regenerated hand. “Looks like you’re already having a hard time hanging onto body parts.”

I stood up. “Don’t, Caz. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been telling me, ‘No, no, no! Don’t do it! Leave me alone! I don’t love you!’ But I’m not buying it. You just put yourself in terrible danger for me. You said it yourself, your big gray guidance counselors might come bashing through the door any second . . .”

“Not in here. They don’t know about this place. I’ve borrowed it before.”

“It doesn’t matter!” But a steam-jet of jealousy turned my insides scalding hot. Who had she brought here? I suppose I should have applauded her cuckolding Eligor any way and any time possible, but my feelings were a bit more complicated than that. “Just listen to me. I came here for you, and I’m not leaving without you.”

She was trying to ignore me but not doing a very good job. I wasn’t going to make it easier for her, so I got up and followed. When she sat down to pull on her shoes, I crouched beside her.

“I’m not going away, Caz. I’ve been missing you so badly for weeks—months! Can’t sleep, can’t do anything but think about you. I’m not leaving without you.”

“Months?” Her laugh was harsh, startled. “Do you know how long it’s been down here? More like years. Don’t tell me about missing someone. I was an idiot to let myself care. And now I’m paying for it. Just go away, Bobby. Let me heal.”

Years? Had it really been so long for her? “I can’t, Caz. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let myself care, either—but I did. And now I can’t stop.”

She stared at me for a long, quiet moment, eyes narrowed so that her irises were only blood-red stripes. “You’re a fool.
I’m
a fool! It’s going to end badly,” she said at last.

“What doesn’t?”

Tears suddenly welled in her eyes and spilled over. They slowed as they ran down, freezing on her cold cheek. I reached out and touched one, watched it flutter to the floor, a lost snowflake in Hell.

“Where?”

“Where what?” But she wasn’t pulling away now. She held her bag and her wrap in front of her chest, as if they were all she had left to protect herself.

“Where do I see you again? When?” The sight of the pale, vulnerable skin on her neck made me so hot for her that I began to drag my own clothes back on in self-defense. I didn’t want to get her caught, no matter how powerful my need for her. I also wasn’t ready to take her away yet. I still had a few things to prepare, and I hadn’t expected to find her so quickly.

She was so beautiful I kept getting distracted from my clothes. I crawled toward her and ran my hands up the insides of her legs, lifting her skirt as I went, rolling it back until it lay in an untidy pile across her belly. I bit her gently on the flesh of her thigh, just above the femoral artery. She was cold and hot, both at the same time. She pushed my head in irritation as if I were an overly familiar dog, but she didn’t push very hard. I nibbled further up her leg until I could barely hear her because her thighs were pressing against my ears.

“Stop it! You’re like a teenage boy.” She made a little moaning noise of indecision, then finally shoved me away me more firmly. When she could manage it, she stood and shook down her skirt. “Tonight, at last lantern. Dis Pater Square, in front of the old temple. I’ll send someone for you.”

“Temple?”

“Just look. You’ll know when you see it.” She let me kiss her, sinking right into me for a moment, so that I almost thought she’d fainted. I think it was the first time I’d felt her without any of her armor, although it didn’t last long. I could sense her toughening up again in my arms. “I have to go,” she said, pulling away.

“You love me, don’t you?”

“I . . . care about you. I don’t love anything.” She shook her head. “That’s not my word.”

“It’s mine. It’s the same thing.”

“It’s an entirely different
universe
, Bobby,” she said. “Lock the door when you go.” Then she hurried out.

It took everything I had not to follow. Instead, I waited a decent length of time, tidied things up a little, then made my way out of Chateau Machecoul to the crowded streets. They looked different now, but it was hard to put my finger on why. More familiar, perhaps. The Halloween parade of hideous shapes and faces was never quite as bad in the expensive parts of the Red City, anyway, but it was still horrifying. If you dropped an ordinary human being into the midst of what I was seeing, they would have made a pants-wetting conversion on the spot to the most puritanical religious sect they could find. But to me, still floating on the high of having been with Caz, it looked endurable. It looked . . . ordinary. I really was beginning to get used to the place.

It was worse than when I quit smoking. Just knowing I was going to see Caz again in a short time made waiting for that time to pass the most painful, frustrating thing imaginable. It wasn’t just that I was going to see her and be with her, it also meant I could finally take her away. But it had to happen soon. After all, I had other problems besides Caz. I didn’t have any idea how long I had been in Hell by Earth reckoning, and there hadn’t been much I could do about it anyway, but if I was away too long I was going to have serious trouble with my job. But I was almost done. Now that I’d found her, all I had to do was steal her from one of the biggest, meanest bastards in the universe and then sneak her out of Hell. It was impossible, I knew, but just being near her again had reminded me that I really had no choice.

According to Lameh’s implanted memories, to escape I would have to get us both back to the place I’d come in—the Neronian Bridge, many levels below Pandaemonium, on the outskirts of one of the deep Abaddon layers. But whether it was entirely rational or not, I no longer wanted to go anywhere near the lifters. It wasn’t just that my experiences had been so horrible, although that was very much in the picture, but because they were so easy to police, with only one outlet at each level. I was pretty sure it was no accident that Hell had been set up like some kind of ideal fascist state.

But if I didn’t use the lifters, I needed to make some other arrangements, and that’s why I headed to the shipyards down by the Stygian docks.

Some of the biggest ships had smokestacks, and some of the most modern looking, most expensive vessels looked like they might have even more sophisticated forms of locomotion hidden beneath their dark-gleaming decks. But even here in the great harbor of the Red City, most ships had masts, and it looked like an endless thicket of black trees, the swells swaying the trunks of these tree-ships like a strong breeze.

The noise of the place grew louder as I made my way to the docks, until I could scarcely hear myself think above the pounding of mallets and the groaning of saws, not to mention the usual whip cracks and screams. Demons and damned in harness swarmed the hulls of the sailing ships or scuttled like crabs over the rough metal of the armored steamers, scraping away the worst of Hell’s noxious marine life from the previous voyage, blood-red barnacles as big as traffic cones and disk-shaped creatures that humped away from the sailors who were trying to catch them like manta rays skimming the bottom of a muddy river.

As I stood wondering how to find a ship that could carry me to the lower levels, I realized someone was watching me. I didn’t even see who it was at first—it was just a troubling sensation that made my neck tingle. But then I turned and saw a weird little fellow staring right at me from a dozen yards away, across the busy wharf. A somehow familiar little fellow like a pudgy, upright cat, with buggy eyes and a too-human face.

I thought he might run when I took a step toward him, but instead he only stood, goggling at me like someone who didn’t even realize he was staring. By the time I’d reached him, I’d remembered.

“I kn-kn-know you,” the little creature said.

“The slave market. You work with Riprash.”

“Y-Yes,” he piped, “I d-do. But there’s something . . .” He scowled, his little face wrinkling like a dried apple doll. “I know
y-y-you . . .”

“Shut up. Is Riprash
here
? In Pandaemonium?”

“Of c-course.” Krazy Kat was still staring. It was beginning to bug me. “K-Kraken Dock.”

I was stunned. Good luck, for once? “Can you lead me to him?”

He shook his head, the faraway look replaced by a sudden fear. “Can’t. Already late. He wants his supper fetched.” He backed away from me, then turned and tottered off at speed, like a raccoon forced to run on its hind legs. “Kraken Dock!” he called back over his shoulder.

Kraken Dock was one of the farthest down the main pier. I hurried past all manner of disturbing cargoes being unloaded from an equally strange assortment of ships, from great, flat-drafted swamp wanderers to deep-hulled slavers. I saw more than a few slender trading sloops from the distant lower levels, too, but most of the craft had the look of Chinese junks, built more for reliability than for speed. When I remembered some of the hideous things I had seen coiling in the depths of Cocytus during my journey with Riprash, I completely sympathized.

The Nagging Bitch
lay at anchor, her hull shiny with black pitch, her sails furled but ready. Grim as she was, I was so thrilled to see her again that I almost ran up the gangplank, but I had been in Hell long enough to know better. I couldn’t even guess what eyes might be on me in Hell’s greatest harbor, so I took my time, mounting to the deck with the weary slouch of someone with nothing to look forward to but more slavery. I was challenged by some of the sailors hauling supplies on board, but before I had any serious problems with them Riprash appeared at the top of the aft stairs, the huge wound in his skull glinting in the lantern light.

“Snakestaff!” he rumbled.

I held my finger to my lips. “Pseudolus.”

For a moment he just stared, but then he nodded. “Soo-doh-luss.” I suppose you don’t survive on the rivers of Hell for as many centuries as Riprash without being fairly swift on the uptake. He beckoned me toward his cabin. It still smelled like a giant sweat sock, but felt pleasant and familiar compared to most of the places I’d been.

Gob was crouching on the floor. He looked up when I came in with the same expression you see on dogs who get kicked more often than not. If I’d expected him to run and hug me, or even just to grunt, I would have been disappointed, though I could tell he recognized me. Folks just don’t hug in Hell, unless they’re rich and pretending they’re actually people. Still, I was definitely glad to see him. He looked a little fatter and healthier, I thought.

“I owe you something,” I said to the boy and crouched beside him. I took his hand and put two iron spits into his palm. “That’s what I owe you.” Then I shook out another handful and a half’s worth of iron. “And that’s because you spent so much time helping me.”

Gob looked at the money, his apelike little face deadly serious.

Riprash laughed. “He’s trying to think where he’ll hide it from me.”

I frowned at the ogre. “You steal his money?”

Riprash laughed even harder. “You’re joking! I wouldn’t take a quarter-spit off the little hairwad. But he doesn’t trust me. Likely he doesn’t trust you, neither.”

I remembered how long it had taken before the boy would let himself sleep while I was awake. “It’s likely you’re right.”

To my relief, Riprash said he was heading out the next night and would be happy to take me, which meant that if I could somehow convince Caz to come with me, I wouldn’t have to keep her hidden from Eligor very long. The grand duke was a rich, powerful figure, and I felt pretty sure he’d send everything at his disposal after us.

Riprash seemed pleased by the prospect of my company on his voyage back to the slave market at Cocytus Landing, but just to help him keep his priorities straight I gave him a copper-handful coin, worth six spit, and told him I’d give him two more like it once we’d lifted anchor.