Big fat punch in the nad on that.
As a tide of exasperation crested, V shitkickered into the one place he really didn’t want to go—which, considering there was an open-late Hobby Lobby eight point four miles away from his precise location, was really saying something.
Pausing just inside the wood-paneled room, he forefingered his back pocket, took out a hand-rolled, and lit up. It was on the exhale, as he started by his preferred pool table, that he noticed the TV was off.
Had there been a fuse blown? Was the cable/Internet out?
And… wait, what? Why was the couch empty, nobody with ass-less chaps long-legging it in front of a Golden Girls marathon over there.
Just to be sure he wasn’t missing anything, V went around to close-inspect the sofa. There was no depression on the cushions and the throw pillows were plumped and arranged nicely in the corners created by the arms. So nope, even if the angel had gone invisi to avoid interacting, and was somehow able to tolerate his own company without benefit of the distraction of Netflix or Hulu or the Cartoon Network, his weight would have registered.
Plus come on, there was no way the screen would be dark. Lassiter ran on two sources of energy: Sunlight and anything with Bea Arthur in it.
“Where are you, angel,” V muttered.
As he tried to remember the when/where of seeing the guy last… it was more like, where had the disco ball been? V hadn’t been viscerally irritated for… well, shit, the respite had been at least a long weekend’s worth of time.
And to think he hadn’t recognized the non-noyance for the staycation that it was. Pity.
“Sire? May I help you?”
V glanced away from the unused remote. Fritz, butler extraordinaire, had materialized in the billiards room archway, sure as if the ancient doggen had an antenna out for anybody in the mansion who had even a passing need he could assist. In his penguin suit, and with that old, wrinkly face, the head of household staff was a fixture that, if V had been the sentimental type—which he was not—he might well have felt a little apple pie warmth in his chest for.
Okay, fine. Maybe he had some affection for the old guy. But like any sociopath wouldn’t catch a case of the fuzzies when faced with all that earnest?
Not that V was a sociopath. Not really, at any rate.
Fine, he was mostly not sociopathic. Especially when he wasn’t around fallen angels—
“Sire?”
“Hey, my man.” V cleared his throat and focused. “Have you seen Lassiter anywhere around?”
“No, Sire.” The doggen bowed low. “Neither inside nor on the grounds. May I summon him for you?”
By like, what, hanging that remote off the second story balcony and humming a few bars of “Thank You for Being a Friend”？
“Nah, I’ll find him. Thanks.”
“May I get you anything?”
Talk about your loaded questions. “I’m good. I appreciate it, though.”
The butler bowed again, so deeply, his jowls nearly Swiffer’d the floor. “Please let me know if there is aught I may do for you, Sire.”
After the doggen left, V considered whether to make himself a Goose, but he passed on that idea. He was off rotation, but you never knew, and the night was young in a way that inevitably would mean good news was not coming. So instead of sucking back some liquid sanity, he smoked the hand-rolled down. Then he flicked the stub into the cold fireplace, closed his eyes, cursed three times…
And just like Dorothy with her ruby fucking shoes, he was up, up, and away, traveling in a scatter of molecules to the Other Side, to the Scribe Virgin’s Sanctuary, to the place from which his mahmen had run her little cult of personality for eons.
As he re-formed up on the perpetually green lawn, he wanted to avoid thoughts of the one who had given birth to him, so he got his walk on and tried to view all the white marble, Greco-Roman architecture as a disinterested third party might: From the bathing temple to the treasury to the library, the last time there had been so many columns in one place had been Seti I’s hypostyle hall at Karnak.
Yes, it was true, he’d been watching ancient Egyptian documentaries lately.
Anyway, all the buildings he passed by were empty, and it was with no small amount of satisfaction that he took note of the persistent vacancy. Ever since Phury had become the Primale and freed the Chosen from their servitude, the Sanctuary had been a ghost town—and good for those females. They were out living now, not tied to the black robes of his mahmen.
They had left even before the Scribe Virgin had. So maybe this ghost town thing was part of the reason she had quit her job and given the reins of the race’s existential shit over to the David Lee Roth of fallen angels.