Faith of the Divine Inferno by Leslie Thompson (e textbook reader txt) 📕

However, in a place as closely crowded as the Cellar was tonight, I stood a very good chance of getting stabbed in a place that mortals didn’t survive. That could put me in a position where correct assumptions would be made about what I am, and that would be bad. I had to hurry and get what I came for then get the hell out before the shit hit the fan.
“Rebecca!” Harry Cervantes greeted me with a broad smile and open arms. Harry is an interesting man. In the legitimate world, he is a successful antiques dealer with an auction house that made him a fortune. He was well known in all the best social circles and he gave thousands in charities. But he found that world small and boring, so he had turned to dabbling in crime, buying and selling small arms and stolen art and artifacts. I don’t know what he does with the money he makes from his secret career, but I suspect that he gives it to the causes he seems to love so much.
“Hello Harry. You called and said my order came in.” In my first few centuries, I had a tendency to dispose of my things whenever I changed lives. It wasn’t until I reached my thousandth year that I began to regret the habit when I recalled some object that held sentimental value. Since then, I have been looking for those things that had been precious to me. I quickly learned that most of what I had lost had been destroyed by time, and so I am forced to settle for things that were as close to the items I had as possible. The item I had ordered from Harry was illegally obtained and that’s why he had called me to the Cellar instead of meeting me in his office.
He snapped his fingers and his bodyguard picked up an item from the table behind him and handed it to Harry. Harry held out a beautiful box, lacquered in black with a green and white jade inlaid on the top. Forgetting about the strange tension in the air, I took the box from Harry and opened it. Inside was exactly what I was looking for. It was a bronze blade gone green with age, and the soft metal had been corroded by time. The Chinese sword smith had forged the blade and handle from one piece and attached a large ring at the end. Some eighteen hundred years ago, when the blade was new, the grip had been wrapped with sharkskin that had long since rotted away.
“I would have cleaned it up for you, but the pieces are so delicate now that I don’t dare do touch it very much to it,” Harry explained, swelling with pride. I wondered what he had done to recover the dagger to get that kind of emotion from him. I didn’t ask though. The Chinese were going to be pissed when they figured out that one of their artifacts had left their country. If they traced it to me, which is unlikely but not impossible, I didn’t want to be able to tell them how Harry had pulled it off.
“That’s fine. If I wanted a perfect blade, I would have bought a reproduction.” Carefully taking the brittle metal in my fingertips, I lifted the dagger from the velvet cradling it. Despite its delicacy, it was wonderfully preserved and I saw the four straight lines etching the bronze at the point where the long blade met the handle. Breathless, I stared at these little engravings and searched for the hooks that I thought might be there. I nearly squealed with delight when I found them.
Unable to believe my eyes, I laughed out loud and all but wept in joy. This blade had been truly mine once. I had carried it during the Han Dynasty when the Chinese countryside had been ravaged by wars between the Emperor Wu and the Xiongnu. In those years I had made some very dear friends who had been slaughtered by bandits who had defected from both armies. It was with this very blade that I had extracted my vengeance, drawing the lines in the handle as I tortured and killed the men responsible for my murdered my friends.
“You did perfectly. It is more than I could hope for,” I told Harry with a joyful grin. Harry didn’t understand the why my reaction was better than what he had expected for a job well done, but he accepted it with grace. And he jacked up the price of the item by fifty percent. I was so happy by the trick of fate that had returned my property to me that I paid the outrageous sum in cash without question.
While I had been marveling at my good luck, the air of the Cellar had turned. A fight had begun in the small arena set against the Western Wall where two large men were facing each other with their ham-sized fists raised and their broken lips curled into vicious snarls. Both men dripped blood down their faces and their features were obscured by dark bruises and swollen flesh. All around them people were screaming and goading them on, waving their fists and shoving violently at each other in their fervor. There was the stink of raw meat and feces, as if someone nearby had died violently and no one had bothered to clear the corpse away.
I turned to warn Harry of the danger when a white pamphlet with black writing was thrust under my nose. Frowning, I followed the hand and arm holding it to the round, smiling face beaming into mine. The man’s skin was waxy and coated in a greasy sweat that dripped from the end of his bulbous nose and bulging jowls.
“Have you found Jesus?” he asked.

Chapter 2

“Why? Did you lose him again?” I asked, giving the religious nut my standard response to this dumb assed question. If I had followers like Jesus does, I’d hide too. The man’s smile was frozen to his face. He was shocked and irritated, which was bad because I meant to piss him off so that he would leave me alone.
“I would like to invite you to hear the word of our lord, Jesus Christ,” the man persisted through clenched teeth.
“I’ve already heard it,” I replied. And I have too. I listened to Jesus as he spoke of his Heavenly Father on a street corner in Jerusalem as I slowly walked by. The Christian Messiah had been a nice man who had tended the sick and catered to the poor like a proactive hippie without any of the marijuana. It was a shame what the Romans had done to the guy. Of all the spiritual gurus I’ve encountered over the centuries, (and I have met many) he was one of the very few who felt truly sincere. I often wonder what the world would have been like if he had been allowed to live another thirty years.
“Then you know the importance of worship,” the man continued as if I wasn’t frowning at him or that he was surrounded by a hundred people who would beat him to death for saying ‘church’ to their faces. “Our faith is unique among other Christian religions. We do not discriminate, we honor our congregations, and we don’t judge.”
I nearly laughed in his face. Everyone discriminates and judges. It’s part of what makes us human, and what keeps us alive as a species. The habit allows us to determine right from wrong, choose the types of people we want to spend time with, and it keeps criminals in jail and the good people in the suburbs. Obviously it isn’t a perfect mechanism, anyone who follows politics can tell you that, but it is a necessary function. But I wasn’t going to argue the point with the nitwit. I have better things to do than talk sense into the senseless. “Go away little man.”
The Happy Christian shook the pamphlet so fiercely that I thought he was having an epileptic fit. He was still smiling, though his lips were pressed into a broad, manic line. Worried that he was going to get violent, I pulled a baton from my belt and stepped back. I bumped into a man standing behind me and made him spill his beer down the front of his shirt. I paid no attention to the man at my back. He wasn’t the most immediate threat. Instead, the spastic Happy Christian was quickly becoming the most dangerous person in the Cellar.
He threw the pamphlets violently to the floor then barked and snarled wildly. All around us, people turned to see what the ruckus was about and then shrank away in alarm. No matter how big and bad a criminal might be he will avoid contact with a crazy person. Such people care little for their own safety while they try to tear you to pieces and are convinced that killing you is entirely justified. Those kinds of people are notoriously difficult to reason with.
Happy Christian foamed at the mouth as he bled from his eyeballs. I wondered what filthy disease he was dying of as he flopped on the floor like fried convict. Then he burst into dazzling orange flames that shifted to blue and green, and then a flaring, hot white. The fires whipped upwards like a living thing, dancing and twisting wildly. The Happy Christian screamed in agony that faded away deliberately and excruciatingly into a dwindling gurgle.
The fierce heat drove the crowd further back, and the witnesses decided now was a good time to leave. They stampeded toward the door, shoving and trampling each other in their attempt to get away. Within seconds, the Cellar was vacant save for a few curious souls who wanted to see what would happen next. Nothing clears a room like an inferno.
One of the big bonuses of immortality is that I won’t burn to death. I can roast as easily as the next person, but the toxic fumes and scorching heat have no effect on my status of life. It hurts like hell, and I bear a few ugly scars earned during the Spanish Inquisition, but other than that, it’s not a threat. I sat back on my heels and watched his death throes while everyone around me flinched in horror.
As the fire slowly dwindled I realized that I wasn’t alone. The man I had bumped into was still standing behind me holding a folded handkerchief to his nose and mouth. Harry had come around his table and was watching the scene from a safe distance, while Baja and Kootch were muscling their way through the dregs of the fleeing crowd to investigate the abrupt evacuation.
Happy Christian let out a last gurgling sigh and became Dead Christian. The fire danced a while longer until all that was left was a charred pile of black ash with a pair of chubby calves and feet jutting from the bottom. The men around me let out cries of disgust and dismay and turned away from the horrendous sight and the smell of burnt pork.
“What the hell happened?” Baja demanded from a safe distance.
“I think it was spontaneous combustion.” I hadn’t smelled any chemicals on his skin and he had gone up so hot and fast that there was no other explanation. I have seen a couple of people go this way before, and it always puzzled me. One minute the people were fine, and