Read Online Happy Hour In Hell: Volume Two of Bobby Dollar by Tad Williams - Free Book Online Page A

movement made the blade glint with reflected streetlight, its point only a thin width of skin from my eye and the brain behind it. The door closed again, and the street was silent. I cursed myself for having parked in a residential neighborhood instead of the busier street in front of my building, but I’d thought I was being careful. How had the little bastard spotted me in an unfamiliar car?
    “Feather. Tell it.”
    “What feather?”
    The tip of the knife, or whatever it was, pushed down until I felt it pierce the first layer of flesh. I sucked in a breath. “
It
say question.
You
say answer.”
    “I don’t have it with me.” Which was mostly a lie—I wouldn’t leave a crucial object like that sitting around unprotected—but not completely. The feather was in my jacket pocket, as it always was, but since my buddy Sam had used special angelic powers to hide it there, even I couldn’t reach it. See, it wasn’t just in the pocket, it was in a version of the pocket that had existed several weeks earlier. Yeah, it’s weird, but all you need to remember is: Feather in jacket pocket but not within reach by any normal methods. “The feather’s hidden far away,” I told the withered horror-monkey on my chest. “I have to get it.”
    Smyler giggled. It was all I could do not to throw up. Knowing something that should have been dead was perched on top of me was one thing; hearing that papery chuckle again was another altogether. God in His Heaven, I’d seen this thing burn!
    “Go? You not go. You tell. Then it find.”
    It
. Smyler called himself “it.”
    “Why would I tell you the truth? You’ll just kill me anyway.”
    Again the whispery laugh. “Because it see your friends. It see who you like. It very smart.”
    I wanted to believe that he meant he would just do plain old physical harm to Monica and Clarence and the rest, as he’d done to Walter Sanders. Then again, Walter still hadn’t come back. This thing on top of me apparently couldn’t be killed—was it possible he also knew how to prevent the rest of us from coming back to life? Not to mention that if he was looking for the feather, he must be working for Eligor, and only the Highest and his closest servants could say what a Duke of Hell might be able to accomplish. I couldn’t take that risk.
    “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell if you promise not to hurt anyone else . . .” And as I said it I lifted my left hand in surrender—or at least I wanted it to look that way, because I had a lead cosh zipped into the other sleeve of my jacket. There was no way I would have time to get it out, but during the instant his hidden eyes turned toward my left hand, I swung my other arm up as hard as I could and clubbed Smyler on the side of the skull with the hidden piece of metal.
    I’d hoped to smash his head in, or at least knock him cold, but I wasn’t that lucky. What I did manage was to snap his head sideways and give myself a moment to kick my way free. Then he was back on me, and we were rolling on the ground. The nasty little fucker still had that long blade, which he was doing his best to stick between my ribs. I managed to get my right arm up and took part of the blow on the hidden cosh, but it was a stab, not a slice, so it bounced off the metal and went all the way through the sleeve of my jacket and raked my belly. It burned like someone had tried to tattoo me with a soldering gun; it was all I could do to roll away and dig in my pocket before the thing came after me again. I couldn’t get my gun out in time, so I shot through the pocket, three slugs right into Smyler’s middle as he lunged at me,
bang-bang-bang.
If I hadn’t been paying more attention to my new ride than my own safety, those slugs would have been silver, but Orban’s new rounds were still sitting in my glove compartment, and I was still pushing plain old copper-jacketed hollow-points. Still, Smyler had a physical body, so I knew they would at least knock him down if