Aloha from Hell. Richard Kadrey

you’re fast.”

      He’s blond, with the kind of sky-blue eyes that don’t happen in nature. His cheekbones look like they were sculpted by a fascist Michelangelo. I don’t know if he was grown in a petri dish or assembled from dead SS rent boys. I can’t stand to look at him.

      I say, “I told you I didn’t want to see you wearing that Nazi face anymore.”

      “I don’t remember my appearance being part of our bargain,” says Josef.

      “Wear your real face next time. It’s easier looking at a burn-victim bug than Dr. Mengele.”

      You can’t be subtle when you’re dealing with a Kissi, even their leader. And he’s the least psychotic one of the bunch.

      The Kissi and I have one major thing in common. We shouldn’t exist. We’re both part of God’s Misfits of Nature traveling show. When the Big Bopper created angels at the beginning of time, he fucked it all up. The blowback from conjuring all those angels created both angels and their opposite. The Kissi. They don’t live in heaven with Daddy, but way out in the boiling chaos at the edge of the universe.

      In their true form Kissi are fish-belly white and have a faint bottom-of-the-ocean-fish glow. They look like a cross between a regular angel and a six-foot-tall grasshopper dipped in wax and left in the sun to melt. If you’ve ever seen one, that’s enough to last a lifetime, and I’ve seen a whole world of them. That was back when I destroyed their Honeycomb Hideout way out in the ass end of Chaosville. Yeah, it’s hard to justify trying to kill off a whole species, but they were collaborating with Mason in his plan to take over Hell and then the rest of the universe. So basically, fuck ’em.

      Most of them went spinning off into space and died when I wiped out their home world, but enough survived that Josef has assembled a small army of them. He did it because I asked him to. We made a deal with this particular devil a while back. I wasn’t happy about it then and I’m not happy about it now, but when you’re an Abomination, you can’t trust Hell, and Heaven hates you, so you don’t always get to choose who you dance with at the prom.

      “Why are you wasting time chasing drug dealers over a dead boy? That’s not what we agreed to.”

      “One, I don’t think the kid is dead. And two, whatever is going on with the kid has to do with Mason and Aelita. You should thank me for finding out what it is.”

      When I first got back, the Golden Vigil’s main obsession wasn’t Lucifer, it was monitoring the Kissi. The Vigil saw Lucifer as a gelded pony. More of an annoyance than any kind of threat. The Kissi were the real danger in the universe. The only thing that could tilt all of existence toward total chaos. That’s one more thing I have in common with the Kissi. They hate the Vigil almost as much as I do.