From that hot mess, I’d taught myself the Words, their grammar, how chunks of a spell could be spliced together to do something more powerful.
THE DEMON WANTED a spell. I was in agony. Something was taking hold of my essential being like an old blanket and twisting and tugging it, trying to squeeze some damp out of it. I stiffened, my hands going clawlike on the bar, my head snapping back, a low growl bubbling down in my chest. I shook for a few moments, grimacing, sweat popping out all over my body, sizzling on my skin like blood.
The Bleeders were lined up to my left; I could see them in the tarnished mirror, the saddest group of assholes ever. They scratched at themselves, shuffled their feet, and licked their lips nervously, all of them concerned with one thing: when they were getting their money. I didn’t know what the going rate for a part-time bottom-feeding Bleeder was, but I knew it couldn’t possibly be enough. Nothing would be enough.
I tried to hide from Lugal, to throw up confusion and uncertainty. I tossed everything I had at it, my memories, scraps of spells, doggerel, and bullshit. It clawed through and I could feel it splitting me open, destroying me to get what it wanted: a spell that would cause chaos and bloodshed, a spell that would add to the destruction its Master wanted.
The demon wanted a spell. As the pressure mounted inside my existence, agonizingly bursting me at the seams, I started making one up.
8.
HIRAM DIDN’T ANSWER HIS door; the old Fabricator, Fallon, did. The old man’s deeply lined face was impassive and lit by the flames and cherry tops as he studied me for a second, then lashed out an arm and pulled me in.
“Quickly,” he said.
Across the street, three buildings were burning, and a lone cop, his car at an odd angle in the middle of the street with all four doors open, was standing there watching it with a dumb look on his face.
“All,” I said, my voice thick and rough. “All.”
Fallon spun me into Hiram’s hallway and slammed the door behind him. “Bosch!” he shouted, taking me by the arm and walking me rapidly toward the bathroom. “Bosch!”
I was barely moving my legs; the old man was a lot stronger than he looked, and I was being half carried. Hiram emerged from his bedroom with a sleep mask perched on top of his head, looking rough and ragged.
“What—”
“Come!” Fallon snapped. I’d never seen anyone treat Hiram like this; my memories of the man were mainly of him yelling at me. Here, though, he blinked in surprise and followed the old man readily enough, and soon we were all crowded into the bathroom with Mags mooning in the doorway.
“Lem!” he cried, trying to shoulder his way into the tiny space despite the fact that the laws of physics deemed that impossible. But Fallon turned and put one hand on Mags’s chest, and the giant stopped cold.
“Mr. Mageshkumar,” Fallon said gently. “Please, wait in the hall.”
Mags hesitated, trying to see around Fallon and Hiram, then took a step back, deflating like a schoolboy who’d been told there would be no ice cream now or ever. Fallon nodded crisply and shut the door.
“Now,” he said, turning. “Mr. Vonnegan, are you able to speak?”
“What’s going on?” Hiram asked, sounding annoyed.
“Can you not sense it?” Fallon asked, his leathery hands aiming my face up at his as his eyes studied me. “We have a Stringer. He has a presence in him. An intelligence. He appears to have partially neutralized it, but the trick will not hold. Mr. Vonnegan? Can you speak?”
I nodded. “All,” I said. “All all all.”
THERE WAS A room in the back of the bar that had been renovated into a large shower in black tile. They marched all twenty-five Bleeders into it, Lugal communicating its desires with grunts and a small number of words.
“Bleedin’ ’em here costs extra,” Housedress said, making a mark in her notebook.
I existed in a tiny corner of my own mind, a darkened space where I was only dimly aware of what my senses were perceiving, everything secondhand and filtered through Lugal’s distinctly alien sensibilities while the demon worked my limbs and my voice and my face.