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Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by Voyager US 2009
Copyright © Richard Kadrey 2009
“Alice,” written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Copyright © 2002
By Jalma Music (ASCAP). Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Richard Kadrey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007460977
Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007445998
Version: 2017-10-18
For Nicola
Just judge of vengeance,
grant the gift of forgiveness,
before the day of reckoning.
– DIES IRAE, REQUIEM MASS
The dumber people think you are, the more
surprised they’re going to be when you kill them.
– WILLIAM CLAYTON
Table of Contents
One
I WAKE UP on a pile of smoldering garbage and leaves in the old Hollywood Forever cemetery behind the Paramount Studio lot on Melrose, though these last details don’t come to me until later. Right now all I know is that I’m back in the world and I’m on fire. My mind hasn’t quite kicked in yet, but my body knows enough to roll off the burning trash and to keep rolling until I can’t feel the heat anymore.
When I’m sure I’m out, I struggle to my feet and shrug off my leather jacket. I run my hands over my lower back and legs. There’s no real pain and all I feel are a couple of blisters behind my right knee and calf. My jeans are a little crispy, but the heavy leather of my jacket protected my back. I’m not really burned, just singed and in shock. I probably hadn’t been on the fire too long. But I’m lucky that way. Always have been. Otherwise, I might have crawled back into this world and ended up a charcoal briquette in my first five minutes home. And wouldn’t those black-hearted bastards down under have laughed when I ended up right back in Hell after slipping so sweetly out the back door? Fuck ’em for now. I’m home and I’m alive, if a little torn up by the trip. No one said birth was easy, and rebirth would have to be twice as hard as that first journey into the light.
The light.
My body isn’t burning anymore, but my eyes are cooking in their sockets. How long has it been since I’ve seen sunlight? Down in the asshole of creation, it was a dim, perpetual crimson-and-magenta twilight. I can’t even tell you the colors of the cemetery where I’m standing because my vision goes into an agonizing whiteout every time I open my eyes.
Squinting like a mole, I run to the shade of a columbarium and crouch there with my forehead on the cool marble walls and my hands over my face. I give it a good five or ten minutes then lower my hands to let my eyes get used to the bloody-red light that seeps through my lids. Little by little, over the next twenty or so minutes, I open my eyes, letting in minute amounts of glaring L.A. sun. I mentally cross my fingers and hope that no one sees me hunkered down against the wall. They’d probably think I was crazy and call a cop, and there wouldn’t be a damned thing I could do about it.
The
