4—Five Feet And A Hammer

 

 

LYN WONDERED how old she was.

She knew most people assumed, when they knew she was a harpy, that she was being coy about her age, like supposedly all women were. But the real reason was far more embarrassing—she had forgotten.

Apparently a brain could only retain so many bits of information before losing some others. Maybe The Simpsons was right, and learning something new inevitably pushed out another thing, because that had been Lyn’s experience.

It wasn’t a total blank. Every now and then, a fragment surfaced, but nothing that helped give her any context. She was alive in the nineteen hundreds, clearly. Harpies could live to a thousand, because, as Logan had once described her, they were tanks. Hard to hurt, harder to kill, with a natural immunity to most human diseases. Because, despite their ability to look like any human woman, they were not human. They weren’t birds either, despite their natural winged state.

It was hard to say what they were. Her mother honestly believed that whole thing about them being blessed—or cursed, depending on the interpretation—by the gods to wreak vengeance for all wronged women, but Lyn always had a hard time believing in gods. Never mind that she was a gender-based shape-shifter living in an isolated part of the Italian Alps with other gender-based shape-shifters. Gods still seemed like a tough thing to swallow.

Her mother was named Lucia—she knew that—and she had very vague memories that the springs and summers in the mountains were beautiful and the winters were fucking brutal. But much of her childhood was gone. It was a blur of training and an occasionally weird solstice festival, which she quickly learned was not a thing in the wider world.

She also wasn’t sure why the harpies were hiding their true nature, although years in the human world had taught her the why of that, in that women were generally ignored and hardly considered human. After all, males seemed to be determining what history was, making a harpy a term for a shrill woman, not a fierce warrior for justice; mythical instead of real; birds with tits instead of the shape-shifters they were. Human male history was decidedly wrong and pretty much went out of its way to exclude women, as if they were props and not people. Lyn could still remember wondering how humanity continued, since men were so disdainful of women as a group. Why would any woman agree to breed with them? That was before she learned that human women couldn’t control their pregnancies like harpies. They only became pregnant when they wanted to. Human women got the shit end of the deal all the way around. Also, harpy procreation was purely parthenogenesis, which meant they were all basically genetic clones of the original harpy, but because they could change appearance at will, no one looked the same, so you really couldn’t tell. Human reproduction was just fucking bizarre.

But her age. She couldn’t remember her exact birthday because the harpies had a different calendar than much of the western world, and the months didn’t exactly match. She had decided, at some point, on August fifth, but she couldn’t remember why now. It felt close enough, maybe? Or maybe there was some other reason, now lost to her retrograde memory. Not that it mattered exactly, but it seemed like a petty thing to lie about. Except she’d done it so long, it wasn’t a lie anymore. It had taken on a sheen of truth, thanks to repetition.

She remembered having to train herself to ignore the constant sexism, because there was a shit-ton of it everywhere. It got better slowly, but men seemed to be constantly under the impression that things were fine for ladies. Occasionally some women would think that too. Human society as a whole was fucking weird.

It wasn’t the first time she’d found herself wondering why she was trying to fend off the apocalypse. Humanity was kind of done here and could do nothing but take the Earth down with them. But her girlfriend was human, and she liked her. Also, harpies did live on Earth, even if most people didn’t know they existed. Lyn had to be in this fight, no matter how hopeless it was. And also, angels and demons were dickbags. No offense to Ceri, who was the best half-demon she’d ever met. Usually they were up their own asses and convinced of how good or evil they were. Better than everyone else. Although those were arbitrary markers on which to stake your ego, but okay. Some people thought having a big car was important too. People’s priorities were way out of wack.

Lyn sat on the couch with her second cup of coffee, hoping the caffeine would finally kick in, as she watched Esme setting up more wards and protection spells on the house.

Of course, it was protected against everything up to sea beast invasion, but psychic attacks were another thing entirely. Were harpies immune to those? She assumed, but only because harpies were immune to so much. Maybe not that, though.

The problem was everyone was vulnerable to something, and sometimes you didn’t know what that was until you were up to your waist in it. And an invisible attack—which was essentially what a psychic attack was—was easily the scariest of the bunch.

“Anything I can do to help?” Lyn asked.

Esme shook her head as she drew a protective sigil on the wall in lamb’s blood. One thing you learned early dating a witch was the most powerful spells had blood in them. Sometimes a metric ton of blood. That was barely hyperbole. “Nope. Just tedious spellwork.”

“Have you done a lot of psychic fighting in your life?”

“Sadly, no. Few people have that power, and those who do are probably insane. Or supervillains. I mean, if you could wander through people’s minds, you’d want to wipe out the human race right quick. Not that I’m projecting.”

“Oh, of course not.” Honestly, not wanting to kill the entire human race was a constant battle for the nonhumans. Humanity had no idea.

Esme paused and made the vague pointing hand gesture she always made when something occurred to her. “Hey, yeah—astral projection.”

“What about it?”

“I know how to do that.”

“Does that help in a psychic fight?”

“It could. The problem is, I’d need a target.”

Lyn sat forward, cradling the warm mug in her hands. “So there’s no improvising?”

She grimaced. She looked cute when she did that, but when Lyn said it, Esme never believed her. “Not really. And I’m not sure I could do it on an angel at all. I mean, what are their brains like? Are they at all compatible with ours?”

“Well, Logan has said his sister’s walked into his dreams, so I’m thinking they must be.”

Esme put the finishing touch on the latest sigil, and then wiped the blood off on a tea towel that would most likely be thrown away. There was no getting blood out of most of them, unless Esme felt like casting a spell on them. “I’m still a little nervous about trying to cast into an angel’s head. Even if I could, what could I do in there? There’s no reason to believe that I could do anything if I even got in there.”

“Come on, you’re the most kickass witch alive. You’d think of something.”

“Yeah, but angels are energy beings of incredible power, no matter how ineffective they’ve been to date. The moment they get their shit figured out, we’re doomed.”

“We could be lucky and they’ll never get it together. Besides, we have Cthulhu on our side now. That has to mean something.”

“You mean besides ‘we’ve gotten into bed with some scaryass people’?” Esme came over and collapsed on the sofa beside her.

Lyn put her mug down and put her arm around Esme’s shoulders, leaning into her. She always smelled good. Esme claimed it wasn’t a spell she’d cast on herself, but Lyn was willing to bet it was. Everybody smelled terrible at some time under some circumstance. “Yeah, besides that. I think we’re in the beggars-can’t-be-choosers position.”

“It does make me wonder what’s in it for them. Sure, their own apocalypse, but I can’t believe that’s enough to get an elder god mixed up in this bitch.”

Lyn nodded. “I’ve been wondering the same thing. There must be an angle we’re not seeing here.”

Esme sighed heavily. “I know. I wish all the info on the elder gods wasn’t fictional.” She leaned her head against Lyn’s.

Lyn was lucky to have such a sexy, beautiful, smart girlfriend. Esme might even have a solution to her memory issues, although Lyn had never asked, because she wasn’t sure it wasn’t simply a natural harpy thing. Well, she might have forgotten exactly how old she was, but Lyn hadn’t completely lost her head. “What about the library? Would they have anything in there about elder gods?”

Esme had a secret basement—because what house with a witch didn’t have a secret basement—that held her library of witchcraft tomes and other assorted sundry occult books. When Esme first told Lyn she had a library, Lyn thought she was exaggerating for effect. It turned out she wasn’t.

Her library held about twenty towering bookcases worth of books, many handed down through her family, as Esme was from a long family line of witches. Also, one of her grandmothers was apparently a collector of occult books and might have once run a semi-illicit underground sales ring for said books, but that was a long story. Anyhow, they had a secret basement with a fuckton of old and potentially deadly books. Esme said she had at least glanced at most, but Lyn figured that was hyperbole, because there was no way she could have had that much time on earth, not at her age.

Esme considered it, tilting her head and putting a casual hand on Lyn’s leg. “I don’t recall any mention of elder gods… but then again, I never looked either.”

“I can’t believe I’m the one saying this, but… should we look?” Lyn preferred punching things in the head rather than doing research, because she was good at punching things. But as much as she hated to admit it, sometimes fighting wasn’t the answer.

“Maybe we should. It’s either that or I have to go out and get more lamb’s blood.”

“I’m still surprised you can’t conjure that.”

“I’ve tried. Conjured blood doesn’t have the same effect as the real thing.” Esme leaned over and gave her a quick but meaningful kiss.

“What was that for?”

“For being the best girlfriend in the world and doing tedious shit with me, when I know you’d rather be fighting.”

Lyn grinned at her. She was the one with the best girlfriend, simply because she knew that about Lyn. “Yeah, but come on. Let’s go find something we can kick Cthulhu’s ass with.”

If they did this tedious bit well enough, she’d get to fight later. If she hadn’t learned to be a little patient after all this time, there would be no hope for her at all.

 

 

CERI WONDERED why he bothered.

The instant the dream started and he found himself sitting on a park bench, looking at the asphalt slab of a tiny basketball court under the raging afternoon sun, he knew it was all a lie. “Why are you doing this? This isn’t going to end any better for you.”

A basketball seemed to dribble on its own before being tossed into the air. It hit the backboard and slipped through the hoop, and suddenly a man appeared at center court. “I try to be nice to you, and all I get is static,” Satan complained.

His father, Lucifer, could change appearance at will, but still, like most shape-shifters, he had a favorite form. His favorite form was a blond-haired, blue-eyed, blandly handsome man who could have been a teen idol in the late ’50s/early ’60s with an unlikely name, like Trey or Cam.

What Ceri hadn’t told Logan was that the one demon that could walk into your dreams without a previous foot in the door was Lucifer, but only if you were related to him in some fashion. Lucifer had contacted him this way before. The last time, Ceri had forcibly thrown him out. Yes, he could get in at any time, but Ceri could also slam the door on him. If his head got caught in the door, it was extra fun for him. “Go fuck yourself,” Ceri said.

Lucifer put on his sad face, barely smothering the smirk, as he grasped his chest like Ceri’s words physically hurt him. “I do and do for you, kid, and this is the thanks I get.”

“Do you really want me to dismember you this time? Because you know I will.”

He smiled, flashing perfect blindingly white teeth. The one thing that always gave Satan away, and something that apparently no one else knew, was perfection. Satan was always perfect. He didn’t have a blemish or a scar or a single hair ever out of place. He was factory faultless, and that gave him such a creepy vibe. Ceri had learned from Logan that imperfections were not only kind of wonderful, but ideal. Look at Logan—it was agreed, pretty much across the board, that he was a beautiful man. And yet he had an acne scar on his face, broken blood vessels beneath his eyes from all the punches he’d suffered over the years, and a ghostly pale scar on his lower lip, also from all those beatings. These “flaws” didn’t make him ugly; on the contrary, they seemed, incongruously, to make him more beautiful. And Logan had complained about his soft stomach, not having six-pack abs, but that was crazy. Ceri loved his soft stomach, and honestly, it wasn’t all that soft. Kissing it, he could feel the firm muscles underneath. It was these little flaws that made Logan so lovely and convinced Ceri maybe he didn’t have to be so concerned about his own bifurcated looks. The universe didn’t bend toward perfection. It couldn’t. Entropy was a driving force of the universe, and entropy was nothing but a fancy word for chaos. Lucifer was perfect because he was everything wrong with the universe. It made a perverse sort of sense.

“I’d expect nothing less from my boy.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Lucifer was now dribbling the basketball and grinning at him in that unsettling way. “But you are my boy, and nothing is ever going to change that.”

“Dismemberment it is,” Ceri said, standing up.

“Cthulhu? Really?” Lucifer asked, making a frowny face at him. “You’re throwing in with that squiddy motherfucker? And you think I’m bad?”

Ceri sighed. He didn’t want to talk anything over with his fucking piece-of-shit dad, and that went double for talking about Cthulhu. “If you want to get technical, it’s his daughter, Cthylor.”

Lucifer bugged his eyes out in comical shock. “Who the fuck could breed with Cthulhu? A whale? Does he even have a dick? Is he even a he in the first place?”

“Do you really want to go down this gender road, Dad? Or are you Mom?”

“I’m Dad, smartass, because you didn’t erupt from me. The fact that you came out of a human male doesn’t change that.”

Of all the things Lucifer had given him, the knowledge that he was implanted in a man’s body and exploded out of him like a chest-burster, killing a man who never had any idea Satan had planted an embryo in him, was among the fucking worst. Maybe the guy was a black magician, and maybe he deserved worse, but that still didn’t make Ceri feel any better. “Well, if you can figure out a way to breed, so could Cthulhu, huh?”

“But he’s so… ugly.”

“And how would you know? Looking at him is lethal, isn’t it?”

“Not for me. I mean, maybe it’d make me crazy, but with a god, can you even tell the difference?”

Ceri wasn’t ever going to admit Lucifer had a point, but he did, damn him. “Do you think if I promise Cthylor rule over Hell, she’ll kill you?”

Lucifer’s smirk finally fell away, and he stared at Ceri stonily, his blue eyes briefly tinting red. “Don’t even joke, boy.”

“It’s not a joke. I’m genuinely curious. You think she’d even be interested in ruling it?”

“You don’t fuck with the Old Ones, you idiot child,” he snapped. “You can’t win with them. They take what they want.”

“Unlike you, huh?”

“Don’t sass me, boy.”

That made Ceri genuinely chuckle. “Or what? If you could actually kick my ass, you would have by now. I’m stronger than you.”

“But I’m the more experienced fighter. So I think we’re even. Speaking of which, I heard you activated the Scourge? Well done. It eats angels like candy.”

“It also eats demons like candy.”

Lucifer scowled at him. If he had horns and a tail, maybe he’d look more menacing, but as it stood now, he seemed barely dyspeptic. “Turning against your own kind is a cowardly move, Cerberus.”

“But they’re not my kind, are they? Someone once told me I was a breed apart.”

Lucifer smirked at hearing his own words parroted back at him. “You are of two worlds. But that means you have a foot in each. You’re still demon.”

“And still human. So who wins?”

“Well, demon, obviously. Humans are as fragile as eggshells. You’re not.”

“And I’m not wiping out a species I’m a part of.”

Lucifer cocked his head to the side and tossed away the basketball, which disappeared into the nothing it had come from. “But if you work with Cthulhu, that’s what you’re doing. You’re basically siding with a being that will destroy both species you’re a part of. He guzzles misery like your boyfriend gulps shots on two-for-one Fridays. I mean, sure, the apocalypse is gonna make Earth a little vacant, but you can keep your human toy if he really means that much to you. Hell, keep a couple. See if we care.”

Ceri clenched his fists so hard his own fingernails dug into his palms. Well technically, one hand, since one was human, with fingernails, and the other was demon, with leathery flesh and nails that were honestly claws. They were retractable, like a cat’s.

“Logan is not my toy or my pet. And you are only interested in saving your miserable hide, because you’re afraid of Cthulhu.”

Ceri knew that would get to him, and it did. His father’s massive ego would tolerate no hits. His eyes flared red. “I am not afraid of that overgrown squid.”

“Then why not kill him? Or banish him from the Earth? Are you saying you’re not strong enough?”

“No one gives a fuck about Cthulhu!” he roared. “He is a nothing! He’s a primordial discharge that doesn’t belong in this universe, but the other Old Ones didn’t want him! As long as he stayed at the bottom of his aquarium, sleeping like a good bottom-feeder, we all forgot about him. Which is as it should be. He’s a relic.”

“If he’s such a relic, why are you trying to talk me out of working with him?”

Lucifer made a noise of frustration and threw his hands up as if appealing for help from the universe. The basketball court had now transformed into an arena, with a full crowd holding signs like Lucifer #1! and Satan/Trump 2020. “Because that old fucker will screw you. No one gets anything out of a relationship with Cthulhu except bad news and probably a killer case of fish herpes. I’m trying to save you from yourself, because while you’re being an unbelievable snot-nosed brat right now, I still don’t want you to get your dumb ass killed. Do you know how humiliating that would be for me?”

At least that was true. If Lucifer didn’t kill him himself, he would consider it an embarrassment. “You know you can’t lie to me, don’t you? You’re humiliating yourself. If you don’t want me working with Cthulhu, call off this fucking apocalypse.”

Ceri hadn’t even finished his sentence before Lucifer was shaking his head and grimacing in a way that suggested his lunch wasn’t sitting well. What, had the baby been past its freshness date? “Everything has an end, sunshine. The sun, your boy toy, and humanity. The fact that they haven’t nuked themselves into oblivion already is a mild shock. I lost a thousand bucks on that one. But they’ve got to go. You realize they’re killing the planet, yeah?”

“You don’t give a fuck about the planet.”

“True, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are.”

Ceri had nothing to say to that, because he was right. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed cheerleaders coming out onto the floor. They were dressed in either one-piece or two-piece red foil devil costumes that consisted of briefs, bras, a tail, and some horns. The pom-poms were made of either silver Mylar or tiny rubber dildos. It was an equal split between pretty women and handsome men.

“This isn’t even about humanity,” Ceri pointed out. “This is about your stupid war with Heaven. You want to prove to them, once and for all, that you’re superior, and they want to put you down like a rabid dog. Humans are only getting it in the neck because you picked Earth for your battlefield.”

“They brought it on themselves. Some of these fuckers actually think we’re letting them into Heaven or Hell after they die. How stupid is that?”

“So you’re punishing them for lies you push? Seems like you’re setting them up to fail.”

Lucifer got a look in his eye that Ceri reflexively didn’t like. It was sort of like a twinkle, but a malevolent one, very excited to cut you open and gut you like a fish. “If you’re so crazy about humans, why wear your glamour? Why not let them see the real you? How do you think they’d react?”

“Like demons, who didn’t like it either.” Ceri almost said that Logan loved him like that and didn’t care, but that might be giving his father ammunition to use against him, so he didn’t.

At least he was able to confirm what he’d expected—Hell was terrified of Cthulhu. But what were they going to do about it? Could they do anything?

It was a shame he couldn’t ask. But at least Ceri could feel smug in the knowledge that his father had given away far more than he intended.

 

 

ALEX DIDN’T know how normal people lived in this society.

Normal was so reductive and subjective, though, wasn’t it? Accepted norms, perhaps. Either way, it seemed perfectly impossible.

If Alex was quote, unquote normal, they’d be dead. That wasn’t hyperbole. After all, Cthylor saved them from being sacrificed.

The trajectory of that was so strange. Alex was abandoned as a baby and eventually came to be adopted by an ultra-religious couple called, ironically, the Wrights. They felt they were doing their civic duty by adopting a disabled baby of dubious provenance, as their deafness had already been confirmed. They were sure to let everyone, including Alex, know how saintly they were for doing this. They started as hard-core evangelical born-agains, believing in a fiery Old Testament style God who would punish them for thinking about nudity. Somehow, this eventually morphed into following a preacher named Reverend Green, who slowly but surely turned them on to worshipping darker, crueler gods. It wasn’t an overnight change, but relatively dramatic all the same. Somehow, born-again led to survivalist nutjobs who wanted to overthrow the godless government, which led to worshipping a consumptive deity that demanded blood and rewarded followers with all their darkest desires. Or so they hoped. Alex was six at the time and didn’t comprehend what was going on. Even as they were chained down to the rusty altar—which was not rusty but bloody, although that they only realized in hindsight—they didn’t understand. It was alarming, but Alex didn’t understand their life was in danger.

Until they heard the first voice they had ever heard.

They heard it in their head, and it was very startling. It was a smooth but alien sort of voice, without any gender the inexperienced Alex could discern. “Do you want to die?” it said.

What a scary question. Still, they knew the answer. “No.”

“You are not here of your own free will?”

That was also a nebulous concept to Alex, as free will was not something the Wrights wanted their child to have. “No,” Alex thought in reply.

There was a sound behind the voice. It took years for Alex to figure out it was the wind, or some approximation of the wind. A voice out of space or, more correctly, out of a pocket dimension. “Do you understand they want to kill you?”

This was news to Alex. Looking around at the dark room ringed with lit candles and the dark figures of the worshippers, what seemed like some silly adult thing crystallized into a perfect tableau for death. Reverend Green even had a weird-looking knife that, once again in retrospect, was probably a ceremonial dagger. They had already been chilled, as the chains were cold, but now they started shaking. Alex had never been that scared, and they had been scared a lot.

“No. Why do they want to kill me?”

“They think it will please a god they meant to contact, but they screwed up and contacted me instead. Shall I kill them?”

Alex squirmed against the chains, but they weren’t going anywhere. They were crying, and the reverend was coming toward them with the knife. “Yes,” Alex thought. “Yes, yes, yes.”

And it was over in a blink.

That was not an exaggeration. Alex wasn’t sure what had happened, but the darkness flickering around the margins of the candle flames seemed to come to squirming, writhing life, like the shadows had become angry anacondas, lashing out at anything warm. They didn’t see what had happened to Green, except his knife fell to the floor and he was simply gone.

The chain broke, and suddenly they could move again. Alex was still frightened, sure that some adult would rear out of the dark, but the voice was in their head again.

“No one can harm you as long as I am with you. Would you like to be a speaker for me, little one?”

“I don’t know if I speak well. I’m deaf.”

“That doesn’t matter. You’re my eyes in the world. You relay messages from me whenever necessary and I will protect you for as long as you live.”

Alex was six. Their parents had tried to kill them and were probably gone now. Did they have a choice? “Okay.”

“You are free to go. The way is clear.”

“What if more adults come…?”

“There are no living adults in the vicinity. I guarantee there will not be for as long as you are here.”

Alex was still cautious, stepping carefully out onto the cold, dark floor. But Cthylor was as good as her word. Alex briefly stepped in something wet and warm but couldn’t see what it was. They couldn’t see anything in the shadows either, which were quiet now, peaceful. Lumpy but unmoving. There was a bad smell in the air, like metal and shit.

Of course, Alex had walked through a massacre. Again, they realized that in retrospect. Cthylor had killed everyone in the room, as if they were made of fragile eggshells. One tap and they were gone. But that was Cthylor’s power. Too overwhelming for this world. She needed a messenger, because to completely appear even in shadow form would wipe out a city, a state, possibly an entire continent, without intention.

In the end, Cthylor wasn’t sure what god Green had been attempting to contact; best guess was Dagon or Ba’al. But he opened a far deadlier channel and was probably so stupid he didn’t realize it even as she killed him.

Cthylor did take care of Alex. Alex didn’t know what to do, but Cthylor instructed them, and Alex followed. Cthylor led Alex to a house in California where they met an older woman named Miri Rayasi. Cthylor didn’t go into detail; she simply said Miri’s family had known of her and her father—Alex didn’t know that was Cthulhu until they were a bit older—for some time. Miri pretended to be Alex’s great-aunt, and she lived in a big old house. She didn’t know sign language, so she wrote Alex notes. Miri took to constantly carrying a notebook with her, and Alex usually had notes spilling out of their pockets.

They were never super close, but that was okay. Miri performed the role of adult parenting figure more than adequately and only expected the basics from Alex: keep their room moderately clean, do basically okay in school, avoid getting in trouble. That was it. Their relationship was friendly enough but not warm, and that should have bothered Alex, but it never did. Maybe because Cthylor was really their parent.

There was no special school for deaf children near them, and Miri balked at putting them in a “special needs” class, so Alex went with the “normal” students. Even Alex was initially nervous, assuming they’d be bully bait. But that was where Alex first learned about the strength of Cthylor’s word.

The first day, Alex was approached and taunted by a group of boys, led by the chief bully boy himself, Tyler Ambrose. Of course being deaf, Alex couldn’t hear what they were saying, but judging from the hyena-looking laughter of his friends, it wasn’t great.

But Cthylor had vowed to protect Alex. Apparently, it encompassed even this.

Following a blink of darkness, a shadow appeared between locker bays, and it looked to Alex like a nearly translucent shadow tentacle slapped right through Tyler’s chest. He froze like a deer in headlights and dropped to his knees, shuddering so violently his mouth opened and closed like a suffocating fish. When the smell hit them, Alex realized Tyler had pissed himself, and since there was nothing funnier to boys than that, his group started laughing hysterically at him.

Tyler recovered physically, but his reputation was destroyed. As for Alex’s, theirs grew quickly. Anyone trying to bully them ended up like Tyler or worse. They’d be struck dumb or come down with full-body shivers that were occasionally mistaken for seizures. They were basically ostracized as the “spooky deaf kid,” but that didn’t bother Alex at all, as long as they were left alone. Rumors circulated that Alex was a witch or something and cursed people, which Alex found hilarious.

Not having to be afraid of anyone or anything was a source of great freedom. Alex could walk alone at night, secure in the knowledge that Cthylor would incapacitate or kill anyone who tried to harm them. People did try, and they never lasted long at all. It wasn’t that Alex liked to see people suffer, but the people who intended to hurt others…? Oh yeah, fuck them. Cthylor was the instant karma they deserved.

No one ever seemed to notice the shift of shadows or the nearly translucent, smokelike tentacles. Cthylor said it was simply that people didn’t want to see it, and it had always been the greatest boon to all extranormal creatures. Humans didn’t generally accept things that didn’t fit into their narrow worldviews, therefore making everything infinitely easier for creatures on the margins. Human denial had been, and always would be, a benefit for all the monsters, human or otherwise.

And yes, a world of other things existed. Cthylor reassured Alex that they’d never have to worry about any of them, but Alex already knew that. Most people believed in either a wrathful god or a peaceful one, a being they never saw or communicated with in any meaningful way, but Alex knew they had a god in their corner.

The thing was, Alex never saw Cthylor as evil. Cthulhu? From the sound of it, he was. But not her. She had been a genuinely caring parent, and those she hurt deserved it. You couldn’t call the best parent you ever had evil.

This complete freedom from fear allowed Alex to come out quite early with regard to gender expression, and once again, those who mocked quickly wished they had never opened their mouths. Also, because Cthylor had a tendency to show up whenever Alex was annoyed, they had to work out a system where Alex would request Cthylor’s help in certain circumstances. In physical attacks, there would be no requesting—Cthylor showed up. Alex was fine with that.

Cthylor’s appearance did affect people beyond the initial hit. Alex discovered that in high school when Tyler Ambrose decided to come to school with a gun.

Alex didn’t hear the shots—of course—but they were in the bathroom and witnessed the other kids there freaking out. Most of them hid in the stalls. Alex decided to see what was going on and asked Cthylor to guide them. Cthylor did, and that’s when Alex found Tyler in the hallway leading to the lunchroom, holding an automatic weapon. Upon seeing Alex, Tyler screamed and aimed the weapon at them, then froze as still as a statue. Alex asked Cthylor to hold him but not move in for the kill—not yet. They saw the fear in his eyes as he kept attempting to pull the trigger, veins standing out as he struggled in vain against an invisible opponent, one he could never beat. Cthylor was the size of the moon, of the ocean, of the dark space between the stars. Her shadow was vast, and all that shadow brought was death. This little boy, armed with the American god—also known as a gun—was less than an insect. More like a protozoa or krill, something too small for Cthylor to see. A million of them in one place would still not register with her.

“I’m not a witch,” Alex told him. “And I am not responsible for what happened to you. You decided to pick on a deaf kid to make you feel like a big man. You’re a piece of shit, Tyler, and you will be remembered, very briefly, as another piece of white-trash crap in a vast tapestry of them.” Alex couldn’t help but smile as Tyler started panicking, as the hand holding his weapon began moving of its own accord. Alex could see the dark tentacles controlling his arm, the wreath of shadows around him, but Tyler seemed completely unaware of it. His gun turned to face him; Tyler now had a beautiful look down the barrel of his weapon as it aimed at his own eye.

“My god ate your god,” Alex said.

Tyler screamed before he pulled the trigger, and the top half of his head was simply erased in a cloud of blood and pulverized bone that splattered down the mouth of the hall.

In all, Tyler had killed two students, including his ex-girlfriend, and one teacher, and injured seven others. It was assumed he killed himself before police could get him, even though police were five minutes away from arriving when Cthylor killed him. Some students in the science room reported they thought he was talking to someone and screamed before he shot himself, briefly making people think he had a helper. But that was never proved, and it was determined he was a small asshole of a boy, a broken bully who could never feel big enough to suit his ego. Cthylor didn’t do that to him; she just made him see it.

Cancer eventually killed Miri, but by that time, Alex was nineteen and able to live on their own. They got the creepy old Rayasi house, which, for all its creepiness, was big and well situated. Cthylor learned of the looming apocalypse and clued in Alex as to what they could do about it. She taught them the secret language of the Old Ones, the language that would not only allow Cthylor’s shadow self to peek in, but a portion of her to reach into the world. That spell took down all the demons and angels in the building where the others found the Scourge.

Alex couldn’t remember when they had figured out that Cthylor was their true parent. But Cthylor had always been there for them, always took care of them, and wiped out any obstacle that might harm them. Alex couldn’t have asked for a better parent.

In fact, looking back on it now, Alex’s adoptive parents attempting to murder them was the best thing that had ever happened to them. Without crazy Reverend Green, his rusty knife, and his poor summoning abilities, Alex never would have met Cthylor.

Cthylor admitted love was a foreign concept to the Old Ones, who didn’t love or hate or anything. They consumed, they burned, they destroyed. They were entropy incarnate, chaos given form. But Alex believed Cthylor did have something approaching fondness for them, or at least something similar. She couldn’t have taken such good care of them if she hadn’t.

They didn’t kid themselves. Surely they were an oddity to Cthylor, a weird little pet she impulsively decided to feel sorry for. To assume more would have been way above their station. But Alex didn’t mind that. Cthylor didn’t pity them. Cthylor had made them strong and fearless and capable of taking on the entire world and winning that fight. If their life had followed the trajectory of its beginning, they’d probably be a miserable foster kid, looked upon as an annoyance by all the so-called normals. They would be just another sad statistic in a world full of them. No human could possibly do for them what Cthylor had. Not even close.

They didn’t even want for money. Once, when Miri was having a hard time paying the bills, Alex did their best to explain money to Cthylor, as it was a human thing that no Old One was familiar with. After attempting to understand it, Cthylor dumped a few hundred pounds worth of gold, silver, and gemstones in the living room and asked if that was what was meant. In the end, they cleared a little over a million dollars. Cthylor had access to everything—under the ground, beneath the waves, out in the stars. Alex could ask for it, and Cthylor would give it to them, because material things meant nothing to her. They were simply fuel, things to be consumed or destroyed, now or later. And when Earth boiled and burned, she would get all those goods back anyway. Cthylor saw it as a temporary reshuffling of items. In the long run, it didn’t matter where they were. They were always and forever hers.

As was Alex, even though a human lifespan wasn’t even a full blink to the Old Ones. It was a nanosliver of a nanosecond. They existed before time and would be present at its death. Alex was a little sad they wouldn’t be there too, but honestly? Immortality didn’t sound that great. According to Cthylor, much of it was extremely boring.

Alex was aware these people—Team Apocalypse was what they had mentally dubbed them—weren’t very comfortable with them. It was probably a lot to take in. Sure, they were aware of the angel and demon bullshit, but the Old Ones? They’d hid their existence well. Most people, if they knew of them at all, assumed them to be the fictional ramblings of a troubled racist horror writer. How could they possibly be real? But of course, that was how the Old Ones wanted it. If they wanted to be known, they would be. But most predators were better hunters when their prey had no idea they were there.

Team Apocalypse was a curious bunch. Alex had never met a harpy before, or a witch who bled so much power. And then there was the Destroyer, who was in a class all his own as a hybrid human-demon amalgam, blessed with both Satan’s power and some magics, which must have come from the human side. But the human was weird—why was a human involved? They were cannon fodder and could bring nothing to the fight, although now that the Scourge was twinned to him, he had something to offer beyond a pretty face. But the most curious of them all was the mummy, Ahmed.

He didn’t instantly read as a life-form to Alex. Being the messenger of Cthylor allowed them to see energy that other people could not, and living things usually had a background pulse of light to them. Ahmed was flat, with a curious glow that sometimes occurred with seriously cursed objects. He wouldn’t register on their radar as a living thing.

But he was, in a sense. He was an undead being, but unlike vampires, who pulsed with the lifeblood they stole, he was a stillness. Cthylor knew little of mummies, except they were only immortal in the sense that their state of living death made them almost impossible to permanently kill. Where a vampire’s undead state still gave them appetite, and therefore a very obvious and lethal weakness—a mummy was simply a person cursed to never be human and never be dead… again. Cthylor admitted it was a sort of parsing of the terms of being undead and curse work, and it was arcane enough to bore her. In one sense, Ahmed was a perfectly useless member of team apocalypse. Yes, he wouldn’t die, but his use as a fighter was iffy. He was only a physical being when he had the intent to be physical, and while he could be stronger than a human his size, not much stronger. But he was also an asset, because, yes, he wasn’t a living being. He couldn’t be cursed again, as the curse he bore was overwhelming in size and scope. It would be like trying to relight coals that had already fallen to ash. There was no fuel there, nothing to consume. Magic would be mostly useless for the very same reason. How could you affect a thing that was barely a thing at all?

 

 

THANKS TO Cthylor, Alex was taken back to the witch’s house as soon as they were summoned.

Cthylor opened a small dimensional rift that Alex could step into. Cthylor would then move Alex wherever they wanted to go. They didn’t know how Cthylor did it exactly, but much like the shadow manipulation, Alex didn’t care how it worked, as long as it did. And Cthylor remained the perfect parent who never let them down. How many humans could say that about their parents? Alex knew they were very lucky.

The witch’s house was very nice, well appointed, and rife with spellwork. Some witches were very careful about spells and how they used them because magic had a cost. Magic used energy, and that energy came straight from the caster. Cast too much, cast poorly, and you could drain your life force to nothing. But Esme was different in many respects, and thanks to a combination of genetics—she was clearly from a long line of magic users—and natural talent, she probably couldn’t kill herself in such a manner. Her evil eye alone generated so much energy, it would power a city if you could harness it properly. Not that Alex would ever try. Even Cthylor thought her power was impressive for a human, and that was really saying something.

Although it didn’t compare to the radiant nuclear furnace that was the Destroyer. He was somehow a walking neutron star, so full of energy it was amazing anyone could be near him without being burned to a crisp. Thanks to Cthylor, Alex could see through the otherwise powerful glamour to his true hybrid self, and it was a little startling at first. Alex had never seen anyone who was essentially the halves of two different beings smushed together, but there he was, a thing that shouldn’t be but was, thanks to powerful demonic forces and a little bit of dark magical energy. The sword he carried too, Godslayer, had a dark current of energy all its own, like a black hole in weapon form. It wouldn’t hurt Cthylor, but even she was slightly unnerved by it. An inanimate object shouldn’t have that energy signature. But everything about Lucifer and Hell and Heaven was deeply confusing, and Cthylor referred to them all as “fleas,” so that’s how much Alex thought about any of them.

The harpy had a sharp green energy signature that suggested power and vitality uncommon to average beings. That apparently came from the long-ago goddess who created them. Cthylor seemed to think they were decent soldiers, which was high praise from her.

The human was just a human, with the standard energy field, although there was an oddity to it when you looked at it from the corner of your eye, like a stray glint that Alex assumed was proof of angel blood in the lineage, although it was dormant. Now he also had a spot, which was the Scourge locked to him. Cthylor really liked the Scourge—a magnificent beast, supposedly, and according to her, the only thing Hell ever did that was worth a damn.

They were gathered around Esme’s slate table, and Ceri quickly caught Alex up with his deft signing. He was quite good at it, remarkably fluid, but according to Cthylor, that was to be expected from the offspring of the devil. Satan spoke every language because how could you recruit to your side with a language barrier? Made sense. And what Satan had, Ceri had.

They were expecting a call from Bucket, the lone demon survivor of the battle of Seattle, where Cthylor had officially introduced herself to Heaven and Hell. It was easy to imagine neither was pleased by this development.

The demon called, and Ceri put the phone on speaker and placed it in the center of the table, signing the conversation for Alex’s benefit.

“Okay, so, I can’t talk long,” Bucket said. “And I haven’t gotten a coup started yet. But a lot of guys are really unnerved by Cthulhu picking a side here. They know there’s no way that’s good for us. Or anybody really. What you need to know is we’re going after the cursed artifact supposedly buried in Aokigahara. It’s a trap.”

Logan snorted. “Of course it is.”

“How exactly do they expect to take Cthylor out of the bargain?” Ceri asked.

“I dunno,” Bucket responded. “I asked, but I was told it was above my pay grade. They seem to think they can neutralize Cthylor. Gotta go. Remember our deal.”

“You don’t try to kill us, we won’t try to kill you,” Ceri said, before ending the call.

Everyone was now looking at Alex. “What can neutralize Cthylor?” Ceri asked.

“Nothing,” Alex replied.

“Hell seems to think they have something.”

“They’re full of shit.”

“What’s in Aokigahara?” Logan wondered.

Ahmed waved a hand dismissively. Today he had modified himself so it looked like he was wearing a red-and-black plaid suit with a black vest and a gold watch chain dangling from a pocket. Alex had to imagine his outrageous fashion choices were a way of making his interminable life less boring for himself. “Rumor has it a black-magic artifact of great power is buried there, hence its ‘suicide forest’ reputation. But it’s horseshit. There’s nothing there. It’s an attempt to explain why so many people go there to die.”

“They’re unhappy isn’t reason enough?” Logan asked.

Ahmed shrugged. “People like simple explanations for complicated things.”

Beyond being a true oddity, Ahmed had his likable characteristics. Alex was aware the others probably found him depressing, but he had true insight into human nature. It wasn’t his fault that most of those insights were incredible downers.

Logan looked around the table. “So we walk into this trap and see what they’ve got?”

“It’s risky as hell,” Ceri admitted. “No pun intended.”

“But that’s the only move we have,” Lyn pointed out. “We need to find out if they do have anything to neutralize Cthylor. ’Cause if they do, that changes everything.”

“I can tell you now they don’t,” Alex said. “It’s probably part of the trap. They know we’ll come because of that.”

“Maybe so, but I vote we check it out,” Ceri said.

Lyn nodded. “We gotta see. And hey, best case scenario, we get to kick their asses again.”

Alex had to admit that was fun. Showing up and kicking ass was the best thing they did.

No one actually voted for not going, even Ahmed, who seemed indifferent to it all. Esme and Ceri discussed who was going to bring everyone else there, while Alex stepped out into a pocket Cthylor opened for them and was instantly moved to Aokigahara. Cthylor took them closest to wherever she picked up demon signatures.

Alex had stepped one foot on the soft dirt when the ground lit up in bright blue-white patterns that looked like some obscure language. Which was exactly what it was.

It was Enochian, the language of angels, which looked like a combination between chicken scratch and Norse runes. The words were written in circles, and while Alex couldn’t read what they said, it was easy to assume it had something to do with freezing, because Alex found themselves unable to move. They couldn’t even put their other foot down. They were frozen in place.

The others showed up and faced a similar fate as the whole forest floor lit up in blue-white graffiti. The forest here was thick, with tall, dark trees, the branches above so tightly interlaced that the daylight above was barely visible, and the glare from the spell was almost blinding. It did allow them to briefly see the demons in the trees. Hell was working with Heaven now? Well, it was only a matter of time until that happened. They both wanted the end to come sooner rather than later.

“You motherfuckers,” Ceri said. He was probably the only one who could talk, as the runes beneath him were still bright and looked like they were straining to hold him, which made sense. He was the strongest among them, so he’d take the most resources to hold still.

An angel walked out of the trees. He looked like all the angels so far, which meant dressed like a hippie-dippy and pretty pale. Alex had spotted nonwhite angels, but angels generally took the white-bread approach, as it generally suited their wardrobes better.

“Did you really think we were going to allow this nonsense to continue?” the angel said. “I will admit, pulling in Cthulhu was a worrisome touch, but this apocalypse is happening. We’ve tried to get you to see reason—”

What’s wrong? Cthylor’s voice asked in Alex’s head. Again, there was a sound behind the words—a slight echo and a noise like wind or water.

The angels have frozen me in place, Alex responded. It was ridiculous. They would have laughed if they could have. The angel was still debating Ceri, but Alex had looked away and completely lost the thread. Lipreading, however easy, was a bunch of horseshit. With some kind of spell drawn on the ground.

They’ve done what? From what Alex had discerned, Cthylor was not an emotional creature. There wasn’t much inflection in the “voice,” and it was clear that emotions as humans knew them were foreign to her species. And why not? They were gods. It was probably beneath them.

But Alex heard a tinge of something like anger in Cthylor’s voice, something hard enough to make them shudder. Oh, the angels had fucked up. They’d fucked up big-time.

The first obvious sign of it was the light went out. It wasn’t a fading. It was a dramatic stop, like someone had put out the sun. The angel looked up, brow furrowed in consternation. Alex thought he said the word “eclipse,” which was probably what was happening. Never mind that one wasn’t supposed to happen today.

Ceri had figured it out. “You stupid bastards,” he snapped. “To quote a wise man, ‘You come for the king, you best not miss.’”

Wasn’t that from the TV show The Wire? Oh, funny. Who would have guessed Satan’s son would have a sense of humor?

The angel was looking at Alex, eyes narrowed in scrutiny. “You can’t do this,” he said. “Cthulhu isn’t psychic. How are you doing this?”

A vibration began deep underground, a tiny tremor that took on the aspect of a tsunami in milliseconds. The demons had already started running, and the handful of angels around seemed genuinely alarmed. But showing how unaccustomed they were to having their lives threatened, they stood around, strengthening the holding spell as the towering trees began swaying back and forth in an ungodly rhythm.

The ground split, fissures growing like cracks in ice, and the pressure of the freezing spell disappeared as the ground revolted, breaking the circles of symbols. Vines whipped from the chasms and wrapped around the angels’ necks, thorns digging in, until their heads popped off like special effects. Now Alex could laugh and did. They also signed a quick “Fuck you” at the space where the angels had been a moment before.

The lead angel now seemed to understand what his mistake was, and he shouted something before he winked out of existence. Now another vibration made itself known, but it was different from Cthylor breaking the ground. As the eclipse ceased and the light returned, a wall of water came for them, shoving down the trees in its path.

The water was maybe two rows of trees away when it froze, as if it had hit some invisible wall. “Nice spell,” Lyn said.

Esme shook her head, hands still raised to cast. “I haven’t thrown one yet.”

They glanced among themselves before they all turned their gazes on Alex.

“Cthulhu sleeps at the bottom of the ocean,” Alex said. “He wouldn’t sleep in an element he couldn’t control.”

As they spoke, another crack opened in the ground and the wall of water began to disappear inside it. It didn’t make sense, as it seemed like some of it would have splashed over the top, but even physics couldn’t resist the call of Cthulhu or Cthylor.

“Well,” Logan said. “I think I’m about to piss myself in terror. She can cause a fucking eclipse and stop a tsunami?”

“I told you, the protogods are ludicrously over-powered,” Ceri said. “If Cthulhu wanted to crash the moon into Australia, he could. If he wanted to make Canada an island, he could do that too. The fact that the angels thought they could do a work-around was sheer hubris on their part. Did they really think freezing the messenger was a solution? They’re desperate. And that whole trying to drown us at the end? What the hell was that?”

“We need to go after them,” Alex said.

They all stared at Alex with expressions ranging from disbelief to shock to Lyn’s reaction, which was to burst into laughter.

“Are you crazy?” Esme asked. “You can’t really be advocating we storm Heaven. Even if we can find a way there, we’ll be slaughtered.”

“We have Cthylor with us,” Alex pointed out. “We won’t.”

“Actually…,” Ceri began.

Logan’s head snapped around so fast, it looked like he nearly gave himself whiplash. “What? Fuck no. You can’t be seriously considering this.”

“It’s not a completely horrible idea,” Ceri told him. “The angels won’t see it coming, and if the angels were Hell’s last resort—which I bet they were—this will really throw them into panic mode. We can force their hand and make them give up this whole ridiculous end-times shit.”

“We don’t know that will work,” Logan argued. “Nothing we’ve done has made them give up. And hey, I didn’t think Heaven was that accessible to humans.”

Yes—the greatest joke to emerge from all of this, although there were several, was that humans didn’t go to Heaven when they died, or Hell. Those were other-dimensional places, and not usually accessible to humans in any respect. As it was, it was easier for humans to access Hell, because Hell wasn’t one to pass up a free meal. But angels were snooty motherfuckers, and usually the only way for humans to get into Heaven was to have angel blood in the family and agree to become an angel before they died. Then they were reborn as angels, which was a whole bunch of complicated bullshit that neither Cthylor nor Alex had any time for. Honestly, the only thing angels were good for was to be an annoyance.

“I know a way in,” Ceri said.

Logan widened his eyes in surprise. “You do? How?”

“Lucifer was an angel, eons ago. He’s always known a way in, but he’s never cared to go back. According to him, Heaven is super boring.”

That made sense. As beings, angels were relatively boring. You’d think they wouldn’t be, but nope. They never did anything fun with their powers.

“I thought no living human could go into Heaven anyway,” Ahmed said. “Not that that applies to me. I’m neither alive nor human.”

Lyn held up a finger. “Not human either.”

“Does having angel blood get me in?” Logan wondered.

“I can probably cook up a spell that gets us in the door,” Esme said to him, shrugging.

“Satan’s son,” Ceri said. “I’m probably grandfathered in.”

When they looked at Alex, they repeated what Cthylor had said. “No doors are closed to us. For long.”

Logan shook his head. “Nice and creepy.”

“Maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves here,” Lyn said. “I for one want to go and kick some feathered asses. But we have to be smart about this. Fighting them on our turf is one thing. Fighting on theirs? That’s a whole lot of guesswork. Before we run and gun for them, we have to identify main weaknesses and make a plan. Because I have a feeling getting in will be the easy part. Getting out will be the hardest.”

Alex smiled faintly and wondered what it was like to worry about your mortality. Or anything. Alex didn’t think twice about that. Why should they? They were the child of Cthylor in just about every way but physical. And no other love could compare to that.

 

 

GILL BARELY remembered dying anymore.

It was more an impression than an actual memory. A feeling of heat, a flash of light, and then… emptiness, until the light returned, full and blinding and magnetic. They warned her being reborn would mean she’d forget her time as a human “more or less,” which was close to a lie. It was guaranteed, which the angels hadn’t mentioned when she was a mere human. But still, she held on to fragments. It helped that as soon as she was reborn and realized how fragile her remaining human memories were, she started writing them down.

Some of it was simply data. Her mother had been named Amanda; she had an older brother named Logan. Mom was mentally ill and an alcoholic, and she was afraid her brother had been going down the same addict path, mainly from the pressure of growing up taking care of her and their mother both. Logan’s birthday was February sixth; hers had been October twenty-seventh; their mother’s had been December sixteenth. Gill’s favorite class in school had been drama, and she’d written down she’d been sort of a theater kid, but she no longer knew exactly what that meant and had decided not to ask Logan about it. She’d written at the top of most of the pages, Don’t hurt Logan!

Emotions were abstract for her now. She knew she used to have them, but she no longer did, or at least she was pretty sure she didn’t. But that phrase kept rattling around her head, and she knew it still meant something to her. They used to be siblings, and she wanted no harm to come to him. She wasn’t sure Logan felt the same way, judging how their usual meet-ups in the dream plane went, but Gill had figured out that maybe those acts of violence were due to the fact that Logan felt betrayed somehow by Gill’s decision to become an angel. Why he felt that way was a bit of a poser, since it was essentially their destiny. But Logan had been especially resistant to it.

And he was involved with Ceri, which struck her initially as odd, and then it struck her as perfect. Among the notes she’d written was the fact that her brother used charisma like a weapon, and when they were growing up, often charmed people into helping them in some fashion. She’d also written that Logan always said he got items via shoplifting and money from pickpocketing, but there were times she wondered if he got money in other ways, such as prostituting himself. Logan denied it, but she wasn’t sure she believed him. Not that it mattered anymore.

Angels were energy beings that didn’t need to be physical ones unless they chose to be, and yet, they did have a physical space. They existed in a pocket dimension that abutted Earth’s dimension and would probably be called Heaven by humans. Certainly the angels had adopted the nomenclature. But it would meet no one’s idea of Heaven.

It was all white and silver, and when Gill first saw it, the word that popped into her mind was Ikea, which turned out to be some store on Earth. Why she thought that, she still didn’t know—it looked nothing like a store. It was sterile, and there was little in the way of anything. Just snowy white and pale blue light and silver accents. There were walls, and you could have your own dwelling if you wished, but these seemed like concessions to the empty echoes of their once-human existence. From what she’d written in her notebooks, Gill was glad she’d lost a lot of these memories. Such as the night when her mother tried to commit suicide and she wrote about seeing blood and glass everywhere as Logan tried to keep her alive until the ambulance came. She wrote she’d never seen so much blood until that night, and Gill wondered why she wrote it down, since it sounded horrific. There were notes that Logan had been calm and collected, even with his face and his shirt marred by their mother’s blood, and Gill had worried about him. Until she heard him later in a hospital bathroom, crying. Logan always tried to hold it together for Gill. Was that why she recounted the incident? To remind herself that her brother was worth saving?

There were other things she’d written down that she couldn’t figure out. They’d lived in a car for a bit, squatted in an empty house. She was sure Mom was spending her rare sober/sane moments trying to turn Logan into some kind of martial arts/self-defense robot, a hellish fate she resisted as much as she could, although in the end, Mom was right. Why did Gill write those down? Those seemed like things worthy of forgetting. But that thing with Logan explained why he got a reputation as the only human able to go toe-to-toe with various demons and beat them. It was what he was trained to do.

Angels were big on rules and regulations, which didn’t seem surprising. And there were rules about when “new” angels could travel to the Earth dimension. They wanted you to be able to control your powers and yourself, because an angel without control was a dangerous thing indeed. But since they were energy beings, they didn’t have to talk. They were all connected, in a weird sort of way. You could protect your thoughts if you wanted, but it was hard, and few did. Which was how Gill learned, despite being left out of the mission to Earth, exactly what Raphael had done.

Raphael had his own place in Heaven. He referred to it as his “office,” but it was more like an atrium. It was a large white space with well-tended plants along the sides in huge containers, and in the center, a bigger-than-life-sized carved marble statue of some muscular young man with a sword held aloft, nude save for a drape of cloth that covered his groin and about half of his butt. Gill recognized it as in the style of Michelangelo without quite knowing who that was anymore.

“I thought we had a deal,” Gill said, walking down the rows of greenery, looking up at the statue. She couldn’t currently see Raphael, but she felt his presence.

“Why are you saying that in the past tense?” Raphael replied. Gill found him on the far end of the atrium, making flowers open and close with errant finger gestures. Gill had never been sure if these plants were real or simply manifestations, and this didn’t clear up matters. She looked at the purple-and-orange blossoms that opened at Raphael’s will, and wondered if she ever knew their names.

“You tried to kill Logan.”

Raphael scoffed. He was still focused on the flowers and hadn’t looked at her once. “Hardly. We tried to contain the threat of Cthulhu. It didn’t work. I still don’t understand how it failed, unless Cthylor has some unknown ability, or maybe the messenger does. It’s unclear.”

“You tried to drown him. Him and all his friends. What the hell was that?”

“An attempt to wash away evidence. It didn’t work either.”

A human emotion genuinely came back to Gill. It was anger. “You could have killed him.”

Finally Raphael deigned to look at her. “No. He’s the Destroyer’s pet. He would have protected him.”

“He’s not his pet, and you didn’t know that would happen.”

Most angels copied a look. Maybe it was how they were as a human, or maybe it was simply someone they saw. Trying to figure out a rhyme or reason for it was a form of madness. Gill had no idea who Raphael was copying, if he was indeed copying anyone. He had a narrow, morose face and long brown hair he kept on the top of his head in what she knew Logan called a “man bun.” She’d also heard him refer to Raphael as “that hippie-looking motherfucker,” but she had no idea where to start with any of that. Gill didn’t know if it was true on Earth, but here in Heaven, Raphael’s eyes were crystal. Not totally clear, although they mostly were—there was a hint of blue visible at some angles. But his eyes were like geodes, rocks with crystals inside. Why he made that choice was unclear. It was true that angels didn’t need eyes any more than they needed bodies, but somehow this was a telling detail. How, Gill wasn’t sure. That was part of the problem with your memories draining and becoming something else. It left you feeling caught between worlds most of the time.

“Yes, I did,” Raphael said. “It’s easy to extrapolate what will occur from past actions. The Destroyer is very protective of his pet. It’s almost as if he has feelings for the thing, beyond the merely carnal.”

Was Raphael constantly referring to Logan as a pet to annoy her? It seemed that way. But why? What was the point of that? “I thought you wanted him to fulfill his destiny and become an angel.”

Raphael had looked away again, at his flowers. She still wasn’t sure if she knew what any of these were, if any of them were actual flowers. “It’s preferable, but not necessary. It was why we made two of you. In case one died young or was simply too stupid to see their purpose.”

Gill still had enough humanity in her to feel that burgeoning rage surge. “What? What the fuck did you just say?”

He glanced back at her, possibly surprised by the last bits of emotion in her. “You’re one of us now. Surely you see the wisdom in this.”

“In what? The whole apocalypse doesn’t make sense. Why would we want to fight demons until one side is conquered and destroy Earth in the process? How does any of that make sense?”

Raphael feigned a sigh and looked at her with what could be best described as pity, or a close approximation thereof. “If you wish to ignore prophecy, fine. I know that, even while you were a human, you thought most of humanity was terrible. It’s time for a do-over.”

Gill had hoped being stunned went away with most of the other emotions. Apparently not. “What?”

“You know your former species is destroying the planet, yes? You’d think that would spur humanity into a new renaissance, but no. They keep doing the same shit, as if their home isn’t dying under their feet. This experiment is over. Time for something new.”

“What?” Gill wished she could ask something else. But her mind was reeling.

“Again, you know this. You felt much the same way as a human. You recognized that killing the thing you’re living on is a recipe for disaster. Once humanity evolved, we hoped they’d get better, but it seems they get worse all the time. It’s time to scotch the whole experiment before we lose the planet for good. Maybe the next species will be smarter.”

Gill didn’t know if her new angel guise was responsible for this, but did it sound all that bad? It sounded reasonable. Except, of course, for one sticking point. “But I can’t let Logan die. You agreed—”

“I agreed to not kill him if I had a choice. There’s no choice to be made here except his own, and he has made it very clear that he doesn’t want to be reborn an angel. I’m sorry, Gillian, but the choice was his to make. Have you been able to convince him?”

“Not yet.”

“You’ve just about run out of time. If he doesn’t want to be saved, we can’t force the issue.”

This felt like a betrayal. He was being logical, of course, but it still stung. “What about Cthulhu?”

Raphael shrugged, deadheading his flowers, which was weird. There hadn’t been dead flowers before, had there? “He’s nothing but an appetite. Chaos in a physical form. As long as he can destroy something, he’ll be happy. We’ll tell him he can wipe out the new race, the one that comes after humans, and that should make him happy. As long as he gets to wipe out something, he’ll be good.”

Now that truly baffled her. Because while new angels were generally kept out of things, Gill was aware of the shock wave through Heaven at the announcement that Cthulhu was joining the battle on the side of the misfits. (Which was one of the unofficial names of Logan’s team in Heaven. The other was losers.) “You think that Cthulhu will listen to you? Wasn’t everyone terrified of him? And hey, didn’t his daughter—the one that Heaven knew nothing about—cause a spontaneous eclipse? That’s cosmic.”

Raphael kept fussing with his flowers, and another brief surge of anger led Gill to imagine burning his garden down. “Of course it’s cosmic. It is the personification—beastification?—of entropy. It is a basic force of the universe. It was at the beginning and will be at the end.”

Either she was missing something and she was the stupidest angel around, or this didn’t make sense. “Wait. Why is everyone so freaked out by Cthulhu and his daughter if they’re so easily handled?”

“Because the lesser angels don’t know how to handle him.”

“And you do?”

Now Raphael deigned to look at her again, and his gaze was withering. “I just said I did.”

“Did you ever before? Can anyone even talk to him?”

His eyes narrowed. “Are you questioning my authority, Gillian?”

Was she supposed to be intimidated? Gill honestly wasn’t sure. “I’m questioning your reasoning. Even if—big if—Cthulhu was okay with wiping out the next higher mammalian race—or whatever—what makes you think Cthylor will go along with that? Clearly the link between Cthylor and the messenger was stronger than you thought. You can’t assume that Cthylor will act as Cthulhu would.”

“If I were you, I’d concentrate on trying to get your tragic brother to embrace his destiny before time runs out. It won’t be long now.”

Gill hadn’t wanted Logan to be right. It wasn’t the first time she’d had that feeling in her life. And it ran about fifty-fifty. But he was right about the angels, wasn’t he? Because either Raphael was leaving out something huge, or he was a delusional asshole who thought his sheer righteousness alone would beat Cthulhu.

Holy shit. What did she do now?

 

 

THE THOUGHT of storming Heaven and basically burning it down was thrilling and yet so insane Esme wanted to scream and shake everybody for even thinking about it. What a way to die that would be.

Again, being this torn was awesome. She should be used to it, though. Born from a long line of brujas, going way, way back, her mother was the inheritor of a legacy stretching to Aztec times, if you could believe her abuela. (Which… maybe fifty-fifty. She did love her hyperbole.) Her father was a Scottish warlock whom she barely knew, as he was successfully assassinated when she was three. Warlocks and witches always had enemies, and they were usually fellow witches or warlocks. There were spells that allowed you to absorb someone else’s magical abilities, but it usually took decades off your lifespan. Still, people did it, hoping they could circumvent death if necessary. The odds weren’t in their favor.

It was exceedingly rare for a witch or a warlock to be born with a “gift”—it had to be someone from a very powerful line, and it couldn’t be predicted or engineered. It simply had to occur on its own, which was knowledge gained the hard way by the entire witch world. Esme was born with a birthmark that said she would evolve a power—the mark was a loose raven-shaped wine stain on her right shoulder, the size of a quarter. When she hit thirteen, her power manifested, and she ended up with one of the most powerful to ever exist: the evil eye.

Although giving someone the “evil eye” was a euphemistic expression, and in some cases a genuine superstition, the actual evil eye was super rare. She was technically a balance of white magic and black magic, but the eye purely channeled dark magic. And, because it was a natural function of her body, her use of dark magic never cost her, which wasn’t typical at all. Casting a curse never drained her. She could theoretically do it morning to night, every day of the year, and never run out of energy. It made her the most powerful witch in the world and possibly to ever exist. Which meant she had a target on her back from puberty on.

Not many had challenged her. That mostly happened when she was younger and less experienced and older witches and wizards thought she would be the most vulnerable. They were wrong. In fact, she was probably much more vicious with her curses when she was younger and more scared. She had to get older and more experienced before she learned how to use her power more subtly and, in many ways, much more cruelly. With youth came savagery; with maturity came creativity.

Her mother and extended family tried to protect her as well, but considering how powerful she was, she was expected to do most of the heavy lifting. And although she did have a grandpa for a while, the truth was most of her living family was female, and for a very good reason.

While she enjoyed the Harry Potter books as a kid, they were extra unrealistic to her because she knew the secret of magic. The secret was there were limitations based on gender. As her mother once described it, men could venture into the territory, but they could only go so far. Women owned all of the land. The most powerful wizard was still subordinate to a middling witch. There was a reason normals were afraid of witches but not wizards—wizards could only do so much. A witch could destroy you.

Also, there was the fact that men in general were terrified of women, but that was a separate thing entirely. The important thing was Hermione should have destroyed Voldemort by book three. But that was neither here nor there.

Esme was frustrated by the lack of choice—she was going to have to be a witch whether she wanted to or not, and her power level meant she would essentially be the “sheriff” of the supernatural world—but she understood it. She was the mystical equivalent of a nuclear weapon. Even if she wanted to shirk her duties, her power set wouldn’t allow her to do so. But nothing had prepared her for the reality of being one of two mystical world-destroying weapons and the other one being male.

But to be fair, Ceri wasn’t simply a male. He was also half-demon, and not just any demon, but Satan himself. That’s why he was called the Destroyer, after all—he was the end of all things. But so was she. Could there be two ends? And now they were two ends working together to avert it. With two tactical nukes in play, it would seem that everyone would back down and stop fighting them, but that was underestimating what buttheads angels and demons could be. Demons could be expected to be assholes, but angels? Who knew they were so wedded to vague prophecies? Every being was a victim of habit, not only people.

But after watching Ceri absorb Astaroth’s energy, she wondered if she—or anyone—could honestly take him on. She probably could, but she imagined it would end up what the military folks like to call mutually assured destruction. If she went all out, maybe she could beat him, but she wouldn’t be walking away from it.

And the supernatural sheriff? When she first heard about it, she thought it was a joke. But it wasn’t. When witches or wizards or demons or vampires got out of line, few were able to handle them and rein them in. Except her. She absolutely could. She was also expected to. Much like her evil eye, she was born with a gift, and she was expected to use it wisely. “Not going to do it” was not an answer.

Again, she was getting away from the point. Storming Heaven. Sounded like suicide, and probably was. Well, it was until they got Cthylor on their side. Now it felt like it would be a massacre on par with a horror movie, and while there was some question whether they’d live through it, Heaven would certainly get the worst of it. You’d think they’d have some defenses, but if Ceri was right about the protogods—and he hadn’t been wrong yet—they might not be enough.

Because they were in Japan and hungry, they decided to go to a noodle shop in Tokyo that Lyn knew about and said was good. Considering how packed it was, word had gotten around. But Ceri used his sway to not only get them a table, but a private one in the back, used for VIPs who didn’t want to mingle with the regular folk. That wasn’t why they were using it, though—they had shit to discuss nobody needed to overhear.

Ahmed, who was never hungry, simply sat at the table. The rest waited until they had some really delicious noodles and green tea in their stomachs, along with some sake (because, come on, they were in Japan), before they got to the meat of it. Logan, who seemed to inhale most of his food, was the first to clean a space in front of his part of the table. “We need to know the general layout of Heaven, if you’ve got it. We need to know where they could be coming from, home field advantages, everything.”

Ceri looked like he didn’t know how to answer, but Alex barreled ahead. “You’re thinking like a human,” they said.

Logan scowled. “I am a human.”

Esme sat forward and decided to be diplomatic. Technically, Logan was the only human among them. Oh sure, she was human too, in a way, but anyone infused with as much magic as she was probably ceased being anything close to human by the time puberty rolled around and she got her powers. “What they mean is you’re thinking like we have to do this like a regular attack. We don’t. Hell, we can send Alex in alone to do it. You up for that?”

Alex smiled, like they were a person without a care in the world. Which is exactly what they were. Who had worries when they had the powers of Cthulhu in their pocket? “Of course. Cthylor would never let any harm befall me.”

Absolutely no one doubted that anymore. Esme was mildly curious how cable news was explaining a spontaneous eclipse but couldn’t be bothered to find out.

Logan frowned. “I know Alex probably could do it on their own, but shouldn’t we follow, if only to bat cleanup?”

Ceri coughed, covering his mouth. And while his mouth was still covered so Alex couldn’t read his lips, he said, “And confirm what Cthylor might be up to in Heaven.”

A great point. While Alex did seem to be a team player, it was only because they were working toward a similar goal. They’d be idiots to assume that if something changed slightly, Alex and Cthylor would remain fighting on their side. Dealing with Cthulhu was worth more than a deal with the devil because you had a chance to beat the devil. Cthulhu? Not so much.

“Do we have a plan,” Logan asked, “or are we going in just to fuck shit up?”

“Isn’t fucking shit up a plan?” Alex countered.

Logan shrugged, a tacit admission that it was. Not a very detailed plan, admittedly, but it functioned the same. Logan glanced around the table as he asked, “Are there downsides to wrecking the shit out of Heaven?”

Now that was a poser. Esme had no idea, but then again, if anyone asked her what Heaven did, exactly, all she could do was shrug. Did it do anything besides make asshole angels?

Ceri, who probably had a better chance of knowing than the rest of them, poked his chopsticks into his rice. Lyn and Ceri were using chopsticks; the rest of them were using forks and spoons like uncoordinated, uncouth Westerners. Ceri also spoke flawless Japanese, but of course he would. “It’s possible we could force angels to stay on Earth for a time. The same is true if we do a flip side and fuck up Hell—we’d send demons to Earth.”

“You mean more demons,” Logan said. Ceri nodded.

It was certainly not great as far as demons were concerned, but was that true of angels? What kind of mischief would they get up to on Earth? Hard to say. Angels came to Earth, sure, but they generally didn’t stick around. Why would they? They felt they were beyond humans. Human society offered nothing for them. At least demons got enjoyment from being asshats. Angels didn’t seem to enjoy anything. They were the universal harsh critic—but with less charm.

“I don’t know what angels would do,” Ceri admitted. “They are a gray area.”

“What territorial advantage will they have?” Logan asked. He was still thinking like a human, but he seemed to be trying to adjust a little, which was something. Esme couldn’t imagine what it was like to be powerless in a group like this. He must feel like Arthur from The Tick, except Logan didn’t even have a flying suit. On the plus side, he did have a helldragon now.

“Well, Heaven’s adaptive to its residents,” Ceri said.

Logan stared at him. “Which means what, exactly?”

“They can change their surroundings on a whim. I assume they’ll use it in an attempt to disorient any trespassers,” Ceri said.

“It won’t save them,” Alex said, cheerful as ever.

Logan overused the word creepy when talking about Alex and Cthylor, but Esme was totally beginning to get it. Maybe because Alex was so young and bright-eyed, it was easy to ascribe sunny optimism to them, but to then combine that with a bloodthirsty chthonic god made the effect jarring. It seemed like nothing could give Alex pleasure besides wiping out a ton of beings.

“No, but it’s good to know,” Ceri replied.

“I gotta admit, this sounds completely fucking mental,” Lyn said. “And I want you to know I am here for it. I mean, we gotta do it if only for the story, yeah?”

Esme sighed and patted Lyn on her very muscular arm. “Half of your most distressing stories start that way.”

Lyn smiled at her. It lit up her hazel eyes and reminded Esme that her girlfriend, while also being a badass harpy, was a thrill seeker. Little could hurt her permanently or kill her, so she was always out there doing crazy shit. Storming Heaven certainly qualified in that department. “Yeah, but they’re great stories.”

“I don’t like going into a fight without a plan,” Logan said. Which was a fair point. Yes, it was human thinking, but he was traditionally the weakest of their group, accomplished demon fighter or not. He had to think in terms of strategy, to maximize the odds he’d live through the encounter. He must have forgotten he really didn’t need to anymore. Helldragon.

Ceri reached over and rubbed Logan’s upper arm. Yep, you could tell who the couples were at the table. “We have a plan—it’s just very loose. Besides, you really shouldn’t worry that much. You have the Scourge now, remember?”

Logan looked at the tattoo on his arm like he’d forgotten it. “Oh yeah. It kills angels too, right?”

“It’s not called the Scourge for its sparkling personality,” Ceri replied, giving him a smile so he didn’t take it the wrong way.

“Am I sitting this one out?” Ahmed asked. “I can only harm someone with a physical body. They’re energy beings solely in Heaven, correct?”

Ceri grimaced. “Well, if I understand it properly, it’s kind of optional.”

Ahmed raised an eyebrow at that. “What is optional?”

“Whether to retain physicality or not,” Ceri said. He’d managed to snag a small chunk of tofu in his chopsticks, which impressed the hell out of Esme. “So you could hurt some of them, assuming they kept a form.”

“Hmm.” Ahmed almost looked pleased, but with him it was hard to say. He wasn’t very emotionally expressive, or his sand physiology didn’t allow him to be. “Well, I’ve never seen Heaven, and this is probably my only chance to do so, so why not?”

“We need to do this as soon as possible,” Alex said. “We can’t give them a chance to anticipate or regroup. We have to strike now.”

“Why? There’s nothing they could do to stop Cthylor, is there?” Esme asked. Why was Alex so invested in doing this now?

“Of course not, but you never give an opponent a break in a fight. You go for the throat, or why are you even fighting in the first place?”

Lyn nodded, agreeing with the point, but Esme hadn’t expected such a sentiment from the wee gender-fluid person sitting at the opposite end of the table. Being the messenger of an eldritch god seemed so at odds with the outer package. But that was the point, wasn’t it? Cthylor wouldn’t choose a goth or an incel creep; they’d go with the most harmless person they could find. The eldritch gods seemed to be real fans of irony. Sure, they were going to burn the world to cinders, but no one said they couldn’t have fun doing it.

“Well, creepy,” Logan said, putting down his now-empty cup of tea. She was surprised he wasn’t hitting the sake harder, but it was an acquired taste. Also the grizzled, slightly paranoid borderline alcoholic she’d met months ago had slowly been transforming. His relationship with Ceri had done him a fuckton of good, although she was hesitant to say that, because he was one of Lyn’s exes, and while she wasn’t threatened by him, she really didn’t want to like him. But Logan was a tragedy writ large, a human who could barely function in the human world anymore because his entire life had been all about fighting demons and angels. He didn’t know how to exist outside the monster world; he was, in many ways, a freak without a country, belonging neither to humans or monsters. Except now he did; he was one of the many freaks who made up their over-powered and yet somehow still-doomed troupe. Ceri had opened Logan up in many ways. He seemed more relaxed now, more focused, and less haunted by the demons of a really fucked-up childhood. In fact, everyone here had a fucked-up childhood, didn’t they? Except Lyn. Even growing up in an all-female “rookery” of harpies, she had nothing but happy childhood memories. Of learning to fly over cliffs overlooking the Adriatic and learning to fight in many games and tournaments. It seemed like living with the harpies was an ideal most people should shoot for. Too bad outsiders were generally killed. “But correct,” Logan finished his comment. “If we’re not all about this fight, we shouldn’t be in it.”

They all turned to Ceri, who sighed and looked into his teacup as he considered. No one ever named him leader of the group, but by virtue of being Satan’s son, he was. Esme almost resented that at times, mainly because they were both god destroyers, but she got past it. Besides, Alex was now lucky world destroyer number three. Who knew there were so many mystical tactical nukes in the world? “As long as everyone’s in agreement, we can go. But we do need to establish some ground rules before we go in.”

“Such as…?” Lyn wondered.

“We stay together. I think the angels will assume getting us separated is the best way to defeat us, so we should stick together. If we get separated, we have to rejoin one another as soon as possible. We’re great, but they can overwhelm us with numbers.”

“Not for long they can’t,” Alex said, as always, smiling. Esme wished she could be that anxiety-free—and she was an all-powerful witch! Some people had all the luck.

Logan sighed, sagging back in his chair. “Can you cause a natural disaster in Heaven?”

Alex’s smile seemed to grow even wider, which was surely a violation of physics. “More like an unnatural disaster. But yes.”

Esme expected Logan to make another comment, but he decided to refrain for once, although he looked puzzled. She understood that. What was an unnatural disaster exactly?

Logan suddenly sat forward, shoulders tense with anxiety. “Look, I know this is a lot to ask, but if you encounter my sister, can you leave her for me? I mean, I get if she attacks you, you gotta defend yourself. But in all other cases?”

“We make no promises about angels,” Alex said. The sudden use of the collective “we” was a little disturbing.

“Hon…,” Ceri said in a way that suggested there was some history about Logan’s sister. Hard to imagine there wasn’t.

“I know becoming an angel wipes out the human, but there’s still a bit of her in there, and I think I can reach it. At least give me a chance.”

Esme felt bad for him, even though he really needed to let go of the fantasy that his sister could be saved. Angels were insidious, and there was no way to undo becoming one. “What does she look like?” she asked.

Logan dug out his wallet and quickly searched it before pulling out a small photo. Esme had no idea anyone had physical photos anymore, and the fact that he carried a picture of his dead sister with him was super sad.

Gill and Logan did not look alike but were both extremely attractive—was that the angel blood?—in completely different ways. While Logan was honestly so handsome she could see why some people liked men, Gill’s beauty was of a more subtle variety, more of an innocent, girl-next-door vibe. Logan reeked of danger and sex; Gill looked like safety and cuddles. Gill’s hair was light brown and naturally wavy, where Logan’s hair was straight and dark brown, shading to black. Gill had a friendlier, more open face, whereas Logan’s was chiseled marble, handsome and cold. Gill’s eyes were baby blue, whereas Logan’s were deep green. They appeared to be mirror reflections of each other, with Logan representing physical, dark earth and Gill representing ethereal, weightless air. Which made it extra funny—or terrible?—that Gill was the angel and Logan was the one left behind.

“This is her when she was a human,” Logan said. “I’m gonna assume she’s kept the same look.”

Lyn, the only one at the table who had met Gill while she was human, glanced at it and shook her head. “I should have known on sight you two had angel blood. The both of you are ridiculously good-looking.”

Logan shrugged as he put the photo back in his wallet. “Our mother was pretty, if that means anything.”

“I’d think the angel blood would be so diluted in the line that the mother’s genes would have more influence on them than anything else,” Ahmed said.

Esme noticed that Ceri and Logan shared a quick, knowing glance before Logan looked away and shrugged. “Guess so.” What had that been about?

“If anyone needs any protective amulets or charms, we have some that might work for a bit against angels,” Ceri said.

“I can cast a spell on us that will give temporary protection,” Esme offered. “But it will be temporary. Celestial energy cuts through most things.”

“I won’t need any,” Alex said. Yes, they all knew that. Why else had Esme said “most”? Until Cthylor came along, angels had been at the top of the power food chain.

Holy shit—angels had been replaced as top of the food chain. Once they figured this out, it would be full-on panic time. She better get some combat spells ready beforehand, because something told Esme the angels weren’t going to take this lying down.

But throwing a huge fit was about all they could do. They couldn’t win the fight, but they were going to make it as unpleasant as possible.

Too bad. She might have felt an ounce of pity for them if they all weren’t such horrible assholes.

 

 

LOGAN COULDN’T help it—he was so nervous it was like his whole body was vibrating to the pounding of his heart. Could he kill Gill if he had to?

During dreamscapes was different. He could go full chainsaw massacre on her and not feel bad because he knew he wasn’t actually hurting her. This wasn’t the same. He’d be in Heaven, and if Gill had a physical form, he could make her bleed. The Scourge could kill her regardless of form. Logan liked to think he was angry enough at his sister—former sister—that he could kill her. But in all honesty… he’d basically raised the fucker, tried to spare her the worst of their mother’s screwed-up behavior. There were times he’d wanted to kill her, and yet he hadn’t really wanted to, as tempting as it was. They’d been through so much together. Was this really the end of it?

He and Ceri sat in their quiet bedroom, enjoying the relative silence, and Logan couldn’t help but wonder if it would be the last. No, he couldn’t think like that. You had to believe you were going to win or you’d beat yourself before you started. Despite the fact that he never really experienced things like jet lag when Ceri teleported them places, he felt a bit off since they returned from Tokyo. No, it wasn’t the sake, but it probably hadn’t helped.

Ceri touched the back of his neck, his fingers delicately massaging his nape. Logan closed his eyes, enjoying the sensation. “If you want to sit this one out—”

“You know I can’t.”

“I know. But Gill made her choice, as you have made yours. Respect it, even if you hate it.”

Logan looked up at him. He hadn’t activated his glamour, so he had his bifurcated face on. It should have been startling, but it never was. This seemed like the most pure expression of him. “Is this your way of saying I may have to kill her, so suck it up?”

“No, this is my way of saying that whatever happens, guilt doesn’t fall on you.”

Logan was touched, although he didn’t completely agree. The fact that Gill chose the angels made him feel like he had failed her in some fundamental way, and the facts in the case didn’t matter. He had left Gill alone to battle the demons and angels, and that was all on him. Well, partially on him and partially on Lucifer, the bastard who kidnapped him.

Ceri kissed his forehead. “You’re not listening to me at all, are you?”

“I am, it’s just… I think I’m gonna need a few years before the guilt fades.”

Ceri shook his head and gave his neck a last caress before stepping back. “How about I give you Godslayer?”

Logan sighed as he sat forward, trying to steel himself. He should come to terms with the fact that he was never going to be ready to face Gill, but he couldn’t. Was he in denial about his denial? It was almost comical. Sad but really funny too, in a pathetic sort of way. “Absolutely not. I have the Scourge. Everybody has to have at least one weapon, and that’s yours.”

He rose to his feet, feeling his age a bit, and found Ceri smiling at him. “You’re just taking one weapon? Since when?”

“Since my others won’t work on angels.”

Ceri went to the footlocker at the end of their bed and popped it open. He hadn’t even looked for a full minute before he pulled out a weapon sheathed in a black leather harness. It had warding symbols written on it to block anyone who was trying to search for it through mystical or equivalent means. Despite that, outside of the warded trunk, it seemed to have a strangely heavy energy to it, and gave you a taste in your mouth like rust. “Then take the blade of Alastor.”

Logan stared at him, not so much in disbelief but surprise. “I thought we were saving that for a last resort.”

“Unless we can convince Alex—and beyond them, Cthylor—that moderation is warranted, we may be taking part in the final fall of Heaven. If we can’t use it now, when?”

He had a point. Still, Logan reached for it with great reluctance. This was another Hell-forged blade. Not as powerful or as instantly lethal as Godslayer but perhaps worse in its own way, especially for angels. The blade was cursed. Anyone stabbed with it took a one-way rocket ride to Hell. According to Ceri, angels weren’t immune to it. If he wanted to send an angel unprepared into the arms of their greatest enemies, this was exactly how to do it. It wouldn’t kill them… right away. But it was probably worse than death.

As soon as Logan touched the sigil-embellished leather sheath, he could feel the supernatural heaviness of it. It had a gravitas that was unnatural. It wasn’t like Godslayer, but it was definitely within the same family. “Now I feel over-powered.”

Ceri smiled faintly at his weak joke. “Stick close to me, okay? The angels will know how I feel about you. They may single you out.”

That and they had Gill. They could still use her against him whenever they wanted, and undoubtedly they would. Just like Alastor’s blade—if not now, when? Logan simply nodded.

Logan tied the knife sheath to his right upper thigh, and he would swear it was giving off a very low-level warmth, like a smoldering coal. Not painful but noticeable. After, he and Ceri shared a kiss, and a long moment where they simply rested their foreheads together and embraced like they were about to jump off a cliff in tandem, which they kind of were. Declaring a war on Heaven and taking it right to their doorstep wasn’t something someone who wanted to live forever—or even for the next ten minutes—did. They were fucking insane. But hey, at least they weren’t alone.

And of course, they had a secret weapon that wasn’t so secret. They came out of the bedroom and into their living room, where the rest of their misfit team waited. Ahmed stood stock-still, dressed in a blue-and-gray plaid suit that seemed almost understated for him, while Esme and Lyn sat together on the couch, holding hands like they were preparing for the same cliff dive. Alex was sitting on the other end of the couch, posture perfect, hands on knees, smiling at nothing and still wearing those awesome yellow boots. The most adorable weapon of mass destruction ever.

Esme stood up with a sigh, finally letting go of Lyn’s hand. “Okay. So, I’m gonna hit us with the biggest protection spell I have, but keep in mind, it’ll be lucky to last a minute. So empty the clip once you’re through the door. If ever there’s an actual time for stupid sports clichés, go big or go home applies here. Although really, it’s more go big or get dead. And I have these cursed charms that should reunite us should we get separated.”

She started tossing them to people, save for Lyn, who was already wearing hers. The one Logan caught looked like a tiny starburst, something you might find hanging off a charm bracelet. He slipped it into his pocket.

The charm Esme tossed at Alex landed in their lap, and they looked at it a moment before putting it on the coffee table. “Thanks, but I don’t need this.”

“Yeah, well, it’s the thought that counts,” she said with a small sigh.

Logan watched Ahmed put his charm in a pocket that suddenly formed on the front of his vest and then sealed up and disappeared again. Logan thought that was actually pretty handy. He would like the ability to randomly create and dismiss pockets. That hardly qualified as a superpower, but it would be useful.

“You’re going to need an anchor,” Ceri said, addressing the room. “Something that will help keep you tied to your reality while the world around you is going crazy. Most humans find pain an adequate anchor, but if you’d like something a little less traumatic, a resonant memory or a song can work as well. Just remember, your eyes and ears will deceive you. Neither Heaven nor Hell can be completely trusted.”

“No one can be trusted,” Ahmed said. “All you can trust in is physics, and even that may abandon you from time to time.”

“Thanks, Mr. Sunshine,” Esme said, rolling her eyes at Ahmed’s unabashed cynicism.

“Cthylor can help you if you need help,” Alex chimed in. “No angel tricks will work on her.”

“And she’d help us?” Lyn asked. Her voice was frosty with skepticism.

“If I ask her to.”

That wasn’t hard to believe, but it wasn’t comforting at all. In fact, Logan recalled feeling Cthylor’s approach and shuddered. “Isn’t that a way of imposing fear? Even her shadow is ridiculously terrifying.”

Alex shrugged. “Not to me.”

“Okay, let’s consider that a last resort,” Ceri said. “If you’re really in the weeds, call out to Cthylor. But know what you’re in for.”

“Almost paralyzing fear,” Logan said. “It feels like swallowing half your body weight in liquid nitrogen.”

“Again, last resort,” Ceri reiterated.

“Just say fhtagn,” Alex continued.

Everyone, save for Alex, shared glances that ranged from mild alarm to general consternation. “Was that a word?” Logan asked.

“It was,” Ahmed—of all beings—said. “It’s Cthulhu language. They all sound like they’re coughing up hairballs.”

“It’s an approximation of the noises people make upon seeing them,” Alex said. “Before they die. Or while dying. I’m not really sure which.”

“Are you saying they have an entire language built around sarcastic heckling?” Esme asked, appearing caught somewhere between being appalled and being in awe of the concept.

Alex shrugged, while Ahmed nodded. “Seems on-brand for them,” he admitted.

Well, sure. They did seem to be wide-awake nightmares. Why wouldn’t they make their language the death rattles of their prey?

Alex looked around the room before their restless eyes settled on Ceri. “Are we ready to go?”

Ceri glanced around, and Logan just shrugged. It was now or never, he supposed. Damn, this still seemed really stupid. But hey—wasn’t fighting the apocalypse stupid? Not a single bit of this was smart. It was too late to start getting a brain now. “As ready as we’ll ever be, I guess.”

Alex stood and faced Ceri. “If you told us where the back door is, we could meet you there.”

Ceri shook his head. “It’s too hard to explain. I’m going to have to take you there with everyone else.”

Alex frowned, and the change of facial expressions was startling. Logan had been beginning to think they’d smiled so hard their face froze that way. “Must you?”

“Yes. Come on, people, trust circle,” Ceri said, and Logan took his hand before Esme took Logan’s. And so it went, all of them joining hands in a circle and feeling a tad ridiculous, which got worse when Ceri said, “Okay, we need to crouch.”

“Beg pardon?” Lyn asked.

“It’s a rather cramped area.”

Esme sighed. “Please tell me you’re not teleporting us inside a coffin.”

Ceri clicked his tongue and rolled his eyes. “No, of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. If the back door to Heaven was easy to access, it wouldn’t be a secret.”

There was no arguing with that logic, or anything else. Although they were likely all feeling some shade of embarrassment about it, they all crouched, save for Ahmed, who shifted his sand around until he was much shorter. Only then did Ceri teleport them out.

Right away, it was clear they were in a strange place. It was very dark and humid, and there was both the sound and smell of water. It took a moment for Logan’s eyes to adjust, but he still wasn’t sure where they were. He reached up over his head, feeling something close, and ran his hand over stone.

“Okay, Ceri, what the fuck…?” Esme asked, and her voice echoed in a curious way.

“We’re in a hidden underground cave in Thailand,” Ceri said. “We’re on a tiny rocky outcropping above a small lake that forms after the rainy season. In the dry season, it’s just a sinkhole.”

“Charming,” Ahmed said. “And this is Heaven’s back door? Which, by the way, still sounds irredeemably filthy.”

“I wish. But no, there’s a dimensional rip, which probably none of you can see, that’s basically halfway between us and the water. That’s Heaven’s back door,” Ceri said, gesturing vaguely below them. Logan did his best to try to find it, but it was too dark to see much of anything. Even the water was a very vague shape, with only the sound letting you know you weren’t looking at more rock.

“I can see it,” Alex reported. Of course they could.

“So how exactly do we enter it if it’s halfway between the water and here?” Ahmed asked. “And don’t say what I think you’re going to say.”

“We dive in,” Ceri said.

Ahmed sighed. “I told you not to say that.”

“Dive into a hole we can’t see?” Esme asked. “You know that’s bananas, don’t you?”

“You actually don’t have to worry about that,” Lyn said. “I’ll fly you in.”

“Does that go for the rest of us?” Ahmed asked.

Alex crawled forward to the edge of the thin rock shelf and said, “Follow me.” Without so much as a glance back, they dived off toward the water but disappeared into thin air, with the slightest blink of light.

Logan would have admired the guts of that if Alex didn’t have an elder god guardian angel. It was hard to say where exactly they had dived, so Logan asked Ceri, “Can you point out the exact location?”

He did. “It’s right below us.”

Logan nodded, taking a deep breath. He trusted Ceri, and if worse came to worst, he’d just be in for a cold, unexpected swim. He braced himself as best he could and threw himself forward, ready to tuck and roll as soon as something solid came into view.

To say it was weird was an understatement so massive, words actually failed him. If asked to describe it, Logan imagined he’d be reduced to hand gestures and grunts. He was swallowed by darkness, and reality twisted and twisted him with it. It was like falling down and up simultaneously, and both his stomach and his brain threatened to revolt, but neither seemed to know how to do that under the circumstances, so it remained threats only. It took one second and an eternity. He was moving forward and backward, up and down, sideways and diagonally. He was everything and nothing—a small, compressed atom and a planet that dwarfed the sun. Logan was relatively sure his mind was going to snap like an overstretched rubber band when suddenly he landed on his feet in an empty room of luminous white. It was the negative of space: something vast, eternal, empty, and rather than dark nothing, it was light nothing. And yet it couldn’t have truly been nothing, because he landed on something.

Alex was several feet ahead of him, walking into the nothing. They turned back, and for the first time, Logan saw they were covered in shadow.

The shadow was far larger than Alex—in fact, he was sure he was seeing only a tiny portion of it. There was no head and no feet. It was a bulky shadow that became thick tentacles that gradually tapered to whip-thin ends that also disappeared through the walls(?), dotted with what could have been thorns or claws? Were they fangs? They moved independently of Alex, who was either unaware of them or so accustomed to them they didn’t notice them anymore. The shadow continued through a theoretical floor and a theoretical ceiling, but who knew what this place was. Logan could now see the shadow cast by Cthylor on Alex, and it was so terrifying he wasn’t even capable of running away screaming. He was frozen in place, a mouse hoping the hawk overhead hadn’t spotted him. He had no ability to fight back; his only hope was to be ignored.

Alex looked around, not at all bothered by the larger-than-life thing surrounding them. “You might want to wait a minute or two before following me in. Things are gonna get messy.”

Oh, he bet. He didn’t have a chance to respond in any way before the ground jolted like there was an earthquake. But didn’t you need earth for a quake? “What was that?” Logan asked warily.

“An unnatural disaster,” Alex said. Was that a joke? “They’re getting attacked from all sides now. I’d almost feel sorry for them if they weren’t all judgmental pieces of shit.” With that, Alex turned around and walked straight forward, the shadow tentacles seemingly ripping open a space in the white that Alex disappeared through.

Holy fucking shit, what was that? He was still wondering if Heaven was letting him see what Ceri probably saw when Lyn flew in with Esme on her back, hands around her neck and legs around her waist. As Lyn landed, Esme climbed off. “This is Heaven?” Esme said, looking around. “This is disappointing.”

“It’s not Heaven precisely,” Ceri said, dropping in. He opened his hands, and sand spilled from them. Ahmed re-formed into a more human shape. “It’s a dimensional pocket right next to Heaven. That’s how come Heaven’s never found it. It’s its own separate bubble sitting right on top of them.”

“Am I feeling something shaking?” Ahmed asked.

“Alex said they caused an unnatural disaster but didn’t say what that meant,” Logan said.

Ceri crouched down and put a hand on the floor as he closed his eyes and concentrated. He had been doing this for barely two seconds before he gasped and his eyes flew open. “Holy fucking shit. Cthylor’s opened a singularity.”

“A singularity?” Esme repeated. “As in a black hole?”

“Yes.” Ceri straightened, biting his lower lip nervously. Logan suddenly realized he could see Ceri’s demon half beneath the ghost of his glamour. No one else was reacting, so maybe he was the only one seeing things that way? Why? “That’s… wow. I’m going to assume that speeds up our timetable.”

“Can Heaven be affected by a black hole?” Esme asked. “I mean, saying it aloud, it seems fucking ridiculous.”

“Yes, it can,” Ceri replied. “Black holes are multidimensional sinkholes. You’d think they’d be unable to affect something mystical, but you’d be wrong. Reality breaks down around a black hole. That includes all realities. If the angels can’t figure out a way to stop it or shut it down, all of Heaven will be shredded like Trump’s tax returns.”

“Which begs the question, can they shut it down?” Ahmed wondered.

Ceri both shook his head and shrugged, which wasn’t super helpful. “I don’t really know. Archangels are extremely powerful—look at Lucifer—but black holes feel more like a protogod thing.”

“At least we know that Cthylor won’t let Heaven be completely destroyed while Alex is here,” Lyn said.

“Yeah, but Cthylor could remove them at any time,” Ceri pointed out. “Hence the moving up of the timetable.”

Esme sighed. “They never needed a back door into Heaven, did they?” It was then Logan noticed he could see her tattoos glowing. Most of them were covered by her Bikini Kill T-shirt, but a few tendrils of one protective sigil were visible on her left arm, and they were glowing green. Some of the symbols glowed bright enough to be seen beneath her clothes. That made him look down at himself, at his own arms, and yes, his were glowing too. The mark of the Scourge on his wrist was a deeper black than black—it was like neon black, if that color existed, which it didn’t.

Again, no one else was reacting to this. Did this mean they saw this all the time and he didn’t? Or they simply weren’t seeing it at all? Logan considered this, and the answer suddenly hit him like a two-by-four—he was supposedly a full-on Nephilim, right? What if proximity to Heaven was activating his latent angel powers? Was that even possible? Or was he just going crazy? It would be a hell of a time and place to finally lose his marbles. No pun intended.

Ceri looked at him curiously, coming close. “Is something wrong?”

“Is it possible that proximity to Heaven is activating my latent angelness?”

Ceri frowned, eyes scouring him for clues to what was going on with him. “I don’t know. A living human has never been in Heaven before. Or dead ones, for that matter. Why, what’s going on?”

“I saw the shadow of Cthylor around Alex, and I can see my and Esme’s sigils glowing. Also, I can see through your glamour. Can anyone else see these things?”

Lyn and Ahmed shook their heads, while Esme shrugged. “I could if I used my curse eye,” she said. “But I see no reason to use it that way right now.”

“So maybe proximity is making them unlock,” Ceri said. ”Be careful, okay? We don’t know what the other fallout will be.”

Logan nodded, as that was true, but also? He felt amazing. It was like the Scourge and the blade of Alastor were not the only things he was bringing to the party now.

Ceri looked at them all and said, “Don’t forget the anchor, all right? Trust yourselves.”

They nodded, and Esme’s curse eye started glowing as she also called up a spell that made a ball of green energy glow in her hand. Lyn had not put away her wings, and her hands were now talons, with claws so thick as to be absurd. The angels who were keeping physical forms were going to be very sorry about that decision.

Ceri pulled Godslayer from its sheath and used it to stab into the white, which seemed like an impossible thing, and yet Logan could see him splitting the seams of reality somehow. He couldn’t see what was beyond the cut, simply more white energy, as bright as a flare.

But somehow he could hear something. It was like…. It was hard to explain. It was like a combination of a hum and whispering voices, speaking a language he didn’t understand. Was that angel language? He’d heard it once, and it was like painful radio static. It didn’t make sense as a language at all; it was noise. Except… now he could make out words. They were still nonsense to him, but he could see how it was an actual language. God, this was strange. But that wasn’t the biggest problem.

The biggest problem was the fact that he could feel the power in his body now. Like he was filled with molten light and could punch through the walls of the world. Did angels feel like that? If so, no wonder they were such arrogant bastards.

Having split open the dimensional pocket, Ceri stepped into Heaven, sword held high. Logan followed, aware Esme and Lyn were right on his tail.

And he knew he was in Heaven the moment he heard the screaming.

It was a combination of the singularity ripping at the heavenly firmament and Cthylor tearing away everything else. The ground(?) was shaking more here, but it was deep, almost more like a sound than a sensation. Strange.

Not quite as weird, however, as seeing the landscape shift like someone had hit the slide-show setting on a laptop. The white was replaced by a black void, like space, with the distant glow of a faint yellow star. Swinging closer was a chunk of rock, maybe the size of a limo, coming straight for him in a lazy arc. Logan actually felt cold, like he was in space, and he unconsciously held his breath as if lack of oxygen would be a problem. But that was ridiculous. It was all a lie.

He’d been hoping his angel awakening would mean this wouldn’t affect him, but clearly not. Logan closed his eyes and tried to anchor, but he honestly wasn’t quite sure what Ceri had meant by that. So he did what he always did when he felt like his consciousness was about to get away from him—he bit the inside of his cheek.

It hurt, and that was the point. What he had learned over the years of fighting demons was that sometimes you needed a little pain to keep you from giving in. Pain was terrible, but there were moments when it could be very focusing. He also stamped on the ground to remind himself there was one. No matter what his traitorous brain was insisting, he was not in space.

When he opened his eyes, it looked like he was back on Earth. On a beach, to be more specific. He didn’t recognize it, but why would he? He’d never been to a lot of beaches—he wasn’t that kind of guy. He didn’t know why exactly, except his life hadn’t been full of vacations. Or family outings that somehow didn’t involve the police, mental health professionals, or both. But it was nice, as these things went. Although it must have been low tide, as there was a lot of sand and the water seemed very far away. He also saw some sea life scrambling as if caught off guard, fish flopping for air.

Come to think of it, hadn’t he seen a picture like this before? It took him a moment, even as the blue water started to swell and seemingly rise up, but Logan finally recalled it. It was before a natural disaster. A tsunami.

Oh, fantastic. The angels were trying to reenact what they’d fucked up on Earth. Great.

He could hear it now, the roar of water as it started coming back with the force and speed of a bullet train. Although his fear spiked, he closed his eyes and chomped on the inside of his cheek, drawing blood. He hated the sour taste of his own blood in his mouth, but it was a necessary evil, no matter how many bad memories it brought up. He could still feel the throaty roar of salty air coming for him like a runaway semi, and he shouted, “Ceri!”

Suddenly he felt a warm hand on his arm, and he opened his eyes to find Ceri looking at him with concern. “Everything okay?” he asked.

They seemed to be standing side by side, as they had been before the landscape started changing. They also seemed to be in a white corridor of nothing, and Logan could hear the screaming again, although it had a strange finish to it, like the distant chime of a bell. “I didn’t go anywhere, did I?”

“No. As I said, they enjoy mind-fucking people. And with Cthylor attacking, it might be the only weapon they have left.”

Logan could feel something like a shiver, something manifesting physically, but it was a sound. Was it because his angel powers were activating now? Seemed like it. The shiver was a call to arms. It wanted to pull him somewhere deeper into this bland white space. He was about to tell Ceri this, but something else caught his attention, something like an oncoming tide. “He’s coming,” Logan said, not completely sure who he was.

But wasn’t it obvious? A disruption in the air announced Raphael, who suddenly appeared in front of them, wielding his flaming sword. Luckily, Ceri had positioned Godslayer so if Raphael wanted to bring his sword down, he’d have nowhere to go.

Here in Heaven, he looked different. Raphael wore silver metal armor—a breastplate, some silver panels that ran down the arms and legs, and slightly thicker metal panels that made up a sort of a skirt—that looked like it was filigreed, so finely made it could have been woven. His hair was a long fall of white over his shoulders. Not old white, but ghost white, like snow, like marble. His eyes were irises and whites only, and those irises were a molten gold. Besides the sword, he had no other clothes or adornments. He looked ageless and ethereal, and a hell of a lot more ripped and intimidating than he did on Earth.

“Abomination, is it not enough that you mock the natural laws?” Raphael boomed. He really did boom. The ground shook with the bass in his voice, and Logan imagined that if his angel powers weren’t activating, his eardrums would have burst. It was painful enough as it was. “Now you bring these filthy creatures into our world!”

“Who was the stupid asshole who thought he could attack the messenger of Cthulhu and not pay for that in blood? You brought this on yourself, Raphael,” Ceri snapped.

Raphael didn’t appear to like that remark. Hard to blame him. “Leave it to you to find the only being more depraved than Lucifer.”

“Go say that to Cthulhu’s face. It’ll be a hilarious way to die.”

Goddamn. When divine beings trash-talked, they didn’t pull any punches, did they?

Several things happened at once, and only in retrospect could Logan put them in any order. Esme threw a spell, which Raphael deflected simply by holding out a hand and shouting something. But that alteration of his attention was enough for Ceri to swing Godslayer around, trying to dislodge Raphael’s flaming sword from his hand, slicing a thin line across his silver breastplate. Lyn soared into the fray then, flying overhead and ensnaring Raphael in her talons, and Raphael squirmed while shouting something that made the floor open up beneath Logan, and before he got the barest glimpse of Ceri’s eyes widening in horror, Logan was plunging into darkness.

Was this happening? Or was this another angel mind fuck? Logan closed his eyes and bit the inside of his cheek again, causing a shock of pain as well as a fresh spurt of blood in his mouth. But Logan opened his eyes to find himself still falling into darkness. What did he use as an anchor now?

He recalled what Ceri had said and realized Ceri might be his anchor. He thought back on his first meeting with him, which was in that hotel room in Tacoma. Logan was aware they’d had a couple of talks in Hell, but he couldn’t recall them, which Ceri said was fairly normal. People usually didn’t visit Hell, and if they did, they never left, so those who did and somehow managed the impossible often found their memories of it faded fast, to the point where they had completely forgotten about it within days—sans some external reminder, such as the son of Lucifer. It was an odd built-in Hell fail-safe, to keep anyone from trying to return. That led Logan to ask him why Lucifer thought anyone would willingly return, and Ceri sighed. “My dad is a greedy bastard. There are rooms in Hell that are made of nothing but treasure. Open the door, and a sea of jewels pours out on you. It’s extra crazy since Lucifer has no need of money. He’s never used it. He knows it means a lot to others, so he hordes it for the sole purpose of rubbing it in other people’s faces.” Which sounded like a pure dickhead move—meaning, of course, that he was indeed Satan. He probably invented the concept of income inequality.

When did Logan first realize he was attracted to Ceri? It was close to right away, after things settled and Logan was reasonably certain Ceri wasn’t going to kill him. Yet. It opened many uncomfortable doors for him. Why did he find a guy attractive? He went back into his memories and made some uncomfortable realizations.

For instance, Ceri wasn’t the first man Logan had been attracted to. He used to have this thing for an actor when he was a teenager. Everybody said the guy was really handsome, but Logan claimed not to notice that. Even though he watched every movie the man was in—though they were terrible—and stayed up late to watch him on talk shows. But it wasn’t a crush! No sir, he was as straight as they come. He just… really liked him. And when you were a teenage boy, absolutely anything could get you hard or give you a wet dream, so that didn’t mean anything either. No, sir. Everything else in his life was abnormal—his crazy mother, his precocious sister, and him trying to hold everything together and keep everybody fed and warm while also learning all the martial arts bullshit his mother insisted on, trying to keep her happy. He didn’t have time for anything else. At least in that one meager sense, he could be normal.

The most disappointing thing to Logan was he had basically enforced heterosexuality on himself. Not because his parents would disapprove, or his religion—what religion?—but because he felt he was dealing with enough things. Somehow he put himself and his own needs and desires in the back seat. And why? Wasn’t he miserable enough without doing that to himself? But that was his default, wasn’t it? He took care of others first and worried about himself later. But later never came.

Until Ceri, of course. Or perhaps more correctly, until he hit fucking bottom. Kidnapped by Hell only to return and find his sister had joined the angels, leaving him with no one anymore save for the son of Satan, who might be using him. Fuck it! World was ending. Might as well admit to himself he wasn’t only attracted to women.

So Ceri saved him, in more ways than the obvious one. Ceri helped him understand what his desires were, what he wanted, and what he deserved. That shouldn’t have been a big deal, but somehow it was. Because Logan was a mess of a human being, and he might not even be a human being anymore.

Which reminded him.

He imagined wings unfurling behind him, and by Cthulhu, he was slowing down. What the fuck…? How did that work?

Abruptly his feet touched down on something solid, and he opened his eyes and looked over his shoulder. Yes, he had wings. They were lightly sketched out in blue energy, like slender veins connecting him to his new appendages. Oh, that was fucking weird. Dope as hell, but still goddamn weird.

That weirdness intensified as he looked around and saw he was somehow in the backyard of that home he and his family briefly had in rural Washington. It was essentially a mobile home, but it was on a parcel of property next to the woods, a lot that had wholly gone to seed. The “backyard” blended seamlessly with the scrubby woods, and a huge tangle of blackberry vines, big as a car and twice as deep, took up the space where a shed used to be. If you dug around in the vines, you could still see slats of rotted wood.

“Believe it or not, this was my favorite place,” Gill said.

Logan turned and saw her—adult her, not the ten-year-old girl she would have been in this memory—standing next to the rickety back stairs. He wasn’t that surprised. He should be angry that the angels were finally using Gill against him, but he wasn’t. There was an inevitability to this that seemed hard to fight. “Even though we had no privacy, heat, or dignity to speak of?”

Gill shrugged. “Dignity’s overrated, especially when you’re ten. Mostly I loved the woods and all the berries.”

“Oh man, I think we both made ourselves sick eating so many blackberries.”

“Yeah, but they tasted great, didn’t they? But that bush… goddamn, that was a monster.” Gill rubbed her arm as if remembering how the thorns would hook on to you. Blackberry and raspberry bushes had the worst motherfucking thorns. They never looked big, but once they had you, they never wanted to let go.

This run-down trailer was one of their few forays into rural poverty, as they mostly stuck to urban poverty. He remembered being amazed at how flimsy the place was. Mom said they only had to stay a month, and they ended up staying eight. They weathered a brutal winter, in which Logan was fairly certain he’d never get warm again. He remembered milk freezing inside a cereal bowl. It was an added drawback to the problems they already had. In fact, that’s what poverty was—one difficulty breeding another until there was no room to move due to all the unsolved problems.

“Almost killed us.” That was an uncomfortable reminder that Gill was actually dead. Logan sighed. “So are we fighting, or what?”

Gill shook her head. “I’m sure that’s what they want, but I don’t want to fight. In fact, I don’t want to help them at all.”

“You saw the light?”

She scowled at him. Logan thought he could see her wings as wispy white fog behind her. Or were those nearly translucent feathers? Hard to say. “Don’t be holier than thou, okay? Don’t rub it in. I did this because I thought it was the only way to rescue you from Hell. I knew there would be strings attached, but I didn’t expect them to just give up.”

Logan raised his hands briefly in surrender. “Okay, I didn’t say anything.” He paused briefly. “I take it they’ve decided I’m not to become one of the angels, huh?”

Gill eyed him warily. “You guessed that?”

“I figured once they got the better Fox, they’d cut bait on me.”

“Who says I’m the better one?”

“Me. I’m the self-defense robot who only found happiness with the son of Satan. I was a fucked-up deal from the jump. You had potential.”

Gill’s scowl remained, but he saw something like pity in her eyes. “Jesus, Lo, why do you always do that?”

“Do what?”

“Put yourself down. You were all that stood between me and child protective services—and Mom and the mental institution—for years. Mom would have died long before she did, and who the fuck knows what would have happened to me in the foster system. And all of that isn’t even taking into account when the demons finally found us. You’re badass, man. Always have been.”

“It might have been better for us if we did go into county custody. For Mom too. Maybe she’d still be alive.” Those were the kind of questions that tormented him at night. Did he make the right decision? Was keeping them together at all worth it? He wanted to be angry at Mom, but first he couldn’t blame her for her mental illness, then he couldn’t blame her because society thought she was crazy, even though angels and demons were things that actually existed and were in fact after her and her kids. It was all so fucked-up.

Gill shook her head. “You can’t think like that. You did the best you could with the information you had.”

That still felt like a cop-out. But it did remind him of a question he always wondered about. “Where were the angels when the demons finally tracked us down?”

Gill rolled her eyes, looking exactly like she had as a teenager. “Believe me, I asked. According to Raphael, they didn’t want to ‘show their hand.’”

“So we could have died and they’d have moved on to Plan B?”

“Pretty much.”

“Motherfuckers.” He’d barely spat out the curse before what felt like a deep, unsettling roil moved through Heaven with the distant roar of a typhoon in its wake.

“Okay, so you know Cthylor’s gonna tear Heaven to pieces, right? If there are any decent angels, I say you grab ’em and head for Earth. It’s eviction day.”

Gill sat down on the rickety steps with an exasperated sigh. “Why? I understand Cthulhu is an irrational, destructive force, but why have such a hissy fit?”

“Because pissing off a protogod isn’t wise? And also, Cthylor really cares for Alex. I didn’t actually understand that myself until I saw the shadow of Cthylor, or whatever that was. Psychic field?”

Gill shook her head again. “Protogods don’t have feelings, or at least not as we understand them. It would be like a person caring for an ant.”

“But that’s it. People do. There are entomologists and weirdass guys who have favorite beetles and shit. Cthylor may have started looking after Alex as a lark, but along the way I think they made a genuine connection. And Raphael just tried to kill Cthylor’s pet slash step-child. How would you react?”

“I wouldn’t burn down their entire fucking house!”

Logan actually had some doubts about that, but it didn’t matter. “You’re not a protogod, are you? Raphael really stepped in it this time. Leave now, while you can.”

“I have a better idea. Help me stop it.”

Logan scoffed. “Dude, you can’t tell Cthulhu—and by extension, Cthylor—anything. You’re either on their side or you’re simply another corpse. There isn’t a middle ground.”

“So why team up with such monsters?”

“You’re acting like we had a choice. You don’t say no to Cthulhu either. Would Raphael have if he’d popped up on your doorstep?”

She opened her mouth, probably to protest, but then remained silent while she thought about it, a dozen emotions playing across her face. Finally she said, “No, I guess not.”

“So back to square one. Fucking run while you have the chance.” He hated to think this was the last gasp of Gill as he knew her. Eventually the angel took over, and all human memories—and human everything—disappeared. Gill was lucky she had lasted as long as she had. It hurt his heart a little to think he’d lost his sister for good, but of course he had. Right now, Gill was a shadow. Soon enough, she wouldn’t exist anymore. He’d failed her twice.

“Are you ever gonna tell me why you’re giving off a weird energy signature?” Gill asked.

That puzzled Logan for a moment until he remembered the new glowing dark thing on his arm. “Oh. Ceri slaved the Scourge to me so I’d always have a weapon for fighting the big boys.”

Gill’s eyes nearly bulged out in alarm. “The Scourge? You control the Scourge?”

“Yep.”

“Holy fuck. You realize what that is, right?”

“Mother of all hellbeasts? Big dragon-y dude? Yep. I saw it when it was freed from its… crystal thing. It wasn’t at all what I expected. It’s sort of more existentially terrifying than anything else. Although, yeah, you’d never mix it up with a terrestrial monster.”

Logan didn’t understand why Gill looked so surprised, until she said, “Morningstar really does care about you, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah, he does.” If Ceri had both the Scourge and Godslayer, he’d be close to unbeatable, even by his dad. But why was Gill surprised? It made him wonder what the angels were telling her. “What, do your holy friends think he’s using me or something?”

“That was the implication, yeah.”

Implication? Ooh, were they saying Logan was Ceri’s fuck toy? You know, he might be into that. But that wasn’t the case. “Did you really think I’d be that easy to manipulate?”

Gill grimaced and turned her gaze on the blackberry bush behind Logan. “He is the son of Satan. He has sway.”

“Which he has never used on me and never would.”

“You can’t know that for sure.”

“Yes, I can. I trust him as much as I trusted you.”

Gill grimaced in what resembled equal parts guilt and pain. It was funny how family ties could still bind and gag, even after death. “He makes you happy, huh?”

Logan nodded. “He does. I love him, and he loves me.”

“I’m glad. You deserve to be happy.”

“So do you.”

She scoffed but with little humor. “Too late. Angels don’t have emotions.”

“Bullshit. That’s what they want you to think. Have you seen how Raphael’s getting his panties in a bunch? That’s emotion.”

Gill’s expression faltered, and what may have briefly been amusement ended up looking like she’d realized she’d had a bad chili dog. “The next time I see you, I probably won’t recognize you.”

“I know, kiddo. I wish I could help you.” He was intensely sad for his sister, who had deserved so much better than this. Despite what the angels claimed, becoming one of them wasn’t a reward—it was a punishment.

For a very long moment, they shared the silence of their childhood memory and pretended the world wasn’t burning down around them.

 

 

TRUTH BE told, there was no way one of Esme’s spells, or even Lyn’s physical attacks, would genuinely hurt Raphael. He was an archangel and pretty close to indestructible. But they would be a distraction, and that was the whole point.

Of course, Ceri had to focus and not get distracted himself. Logan falling away was designed to do just that. He reminded himself that Logan was more than capable of handling himself, especially with his angel powers manifesting in Heaven, and with the Scourge and the blade of Alastor with him wherever he went. The angels didn’t know about that bit, but they soon would, and boy, would they fucking regret trying to separate Logan from the herd. He didn’t know if the Scourge would manifest differently in Heaven, but he had a feeling it would. Much like Godslayer, it consumed the life energy of its prey, and angel power was probably a delicacy to it, like caviar or those really fancy handmade chocolates. They might have to physically rip the Scourge away from it, like trying to wrestle a bear away from an all-you-can-eat buffet.

But that was another one of those problems for later. Right now, Esme was throwing spells like glowing balls of energy, anime style, and Lyn dove at Raphael like a falcon on the hunt as Ceri tried to slice his way into the angel’s midsection. Somehow Raphael was meeting his charges, but that would soon change. He was looking frazzled as hell. Finally he lifted a hand and blasted white angel energy out of his palm and Lyn managed to dive down and take the brunt of it, although it sent her crashing into Esme and they both hit the floor. Such an energy blast would have put a major hurt on anyone else, but harpies were clearly the inspiration for the Hulk. You could hurt her, eventually, but it would be a long and hard thing to do. Harpies were well equipped to fight anything the universe could throw at them.

“I’m going to enjoy skinning you all alive,” Raphael said, parrying Ceri’s thrust.

Ceri lunged with Godslayer again, and this time Raphael took a step back, proving he was on the losing side. Rather than forcing an attack, he was simply reacting. He wasn’t accustomed to being on the defensive. Their swords clanged, metal on metal, with another, more unusual, sound beneath. It was the deep, unsettling hunger of Godslayer clashing with the primal angel energy infusing Raphael’s sword. Both powers consumed, although in completely different ways.

“You’re really confident for a being about to be destroyed,” Ceri noted.

A gloating smile appeared on Raphael’s face, and Ceri really wanted to rip it off. “Am I really?” Raphael sneered. The white walls of Heaven seemed to expand, and suddenly the hallway behind him was filled with angels wielding their own flaming swords. They wore armor too, but none quite as ornate or fabulous as Raphael’s. They stood shoulder to shoulder, five in a line, and a quick count totaled maybe fifty angels. “Did you think Heaven would have no defenses?”

Ceri nodded. Made sense. Too bad it wouldn’t help them one bit. He met Raphael’s eyes and simply said, “Fhtagn.”

For a couple seconds, Raphael seemed confused. Maybe he spoke Old One and knew what the word meant, so its use here puzzled him. But then he realized it wasn’t the content of what Ceri said, but its origin. His eyes widened. Ceri looked over Raphael’s shoulder at the phalanx of attack angels and said, “Run if you want to live.”

But it was probably too late. An odd chill, like there was a crack in a window, except there were no windows, put the creeping shudders up his spine. Then the walls erupted with black tentacles made of smoke and shadows and baring bright, white, sharp fangs. They slammed into angels and twined around them. Neither having a physical body nor presenting as energy helped or hindered the tentacles. The angels tried to slash them with their swords, but the blades went straight through them with no damage done while the angels burst into miniature explosions of bright white light that was quickly absorbed by the tentacles, which got bigger with every angel ingested.

It was a chaotic scene, and while it didn’t last long, time kind of stood still as the angels disappeared one by one, subsumed by tentacles that seemed to get larger by the second, until the magically expanding white hallway was a black mass of writhing, toothed tentacles. It was like watching some helpless marine life get tangled in weirdly multiplying seaweed, until only the binding weed was left. Even though it kept them from having to deal with a bunch of avenging angels, the rapidity of the slaughter was horrifying. Ceri briefly wondered what would happen if he started up with that whole Cthulhu chant, which he did know some of simply because idle curiosity about his new battle partners made him look up some lore on them. The fact that it was all considered fictional muddied the waters a bit, but no more than the Bible, which most people assumed to be true when it was anything but.

Raphael was trying to keep an eye on them, and on his army behind him, which was super difficult. But clearly he was managing, as he did something Ceri had never seen an angel do—he visibly paled. “Did you forget that Cthulhu can be in two places at once? If he can transubstantiate, so can Cthylor. Nothing could breed with Cthulhu—she must be an asexually spawned clone. As for the gender swap, Cthulhu technically doesn’t have a gender as we recognize it. I doubt Cthylor does either.”

Raphael’s eyebrows furrowed, and his glare was overflowing with contempt. “So you know the nature of the monsters you’re working with, and you work with them anyway?”

“Considering you’re working with Hell, I could ask you the same thing, couldn’t I?”

Raphael didn’t have a comeback for that one. Instead, he lashed out with his sword, the flames flaring, in a move so telegraphed Ceri hardly needed to adjust his stance for it. In an extremely muted way, he felt bad for Raphael. For almost an eon, he’d been the unquestionable power around these parts, and now not only was he being supplanted, but his entire house was burning down. On the other hand, he was an arrogant bastard who wanted to murder his boyfriend, so fuck him.

The hallway faded out of existence, taking its ton of writhing tentacles with it, as their swords continued to clash, metal on metal and power on power. As Raphael’s sword sliced the air near him, Ceri felt the sizzle and hiss of the angel energy, while Godslayer’s hunger seemed to thunder in his ears. It wanted the angel.

But it was a stalemate. Raphael was a good swordsman, and while Cthylor eating his backup must have shaken him, it didn’t really show. They were both sweating and breathing hard, because fuck if sword fighting didn’t take a lot out of you. And they were supernatural beings. How humans did it he would never understand.

The slight but constant rumbling beneath their feet had turned up a pitch in both sound and intensity, and Ceri wondered how many minutes Heaven had left.

It was then that the ceiling disappeared, and a horde of armor-clad angels dropped in from above.

Lyn launched herself at them and cut through them like a bowling ball in midair, sending a few angels into suicide spirals into the remaining walls and floors while she grabbed two and took them with her. Her talons nipped the arms off the few unlucky enough to decide to have a physical presence today, splattering blood on all the white. Esme threw a couple of spells in energy-ball form that hit their mark and sent the survivors falling like they were bugs hit with insecticide.

Still, there seemed to be a whole lot of them falling from the theoretical ceiling. Lyn continued flying through them, slashing at will, causing limbs to fall like especially grisly hail, but not all the angels were physical or affected by that. Several of the energy-form-only angels had dropped down to what passed for the floor and started approaching, flaming swords raised, ready to back up Raphael in the fight.

A slight tremor in the floor, different from the constant hum of the singularity tearing Heaven into pieces, caught Ceri’s attention, and before he could look around to see what was happening, an odd noise sounded. It was like the roar of a lion crossed with a deep, angry hiss, and Ceri realized he knew that sound, even if he couldn’t immediately place what it was.

Fear blossomed on the faces of all the angels a millisecond before the dark smoke figure of the Scourge came charging in, scooping up some angels in its gaping jaw and trampling others as it ran through the fray. Since it too was an energy creature, tearing angels into constituent parts was no problem.

“Sorry I’m late,” Logan said. “Got a little sidetracked.”

“You okay?” Ceri asked. He was too busy trading thrusts and parries with Raphael to look back for a visual confirmation.

“Fine. Now let’s clear these bastards out and head home.” The Scourge continued farther down the corridor, making more hiss/roar noises, and now the angels were fleeing. Yep. Like that bear at the all-you-can eat buffet. It was tossing angels left and right, sometimes shaking them in its maw before spitting them out and going for a new toy, like a big dog. A dog that looked like a dragon and was made of smoke. You know, those kinds of dogs.

While doing his best to focus, Ceri found all this distracting, and while he managed to dodge one swipe, Raphael’s sword sliced his arm on the second pass.

It wasn’t deep or much more than a surface wound, but the angel energy hit him like a lightning bolt. It seemed to reverberate through his system, traveling down his nerves, briefly whiting out his vision and leaving the taste of metal in his mouth as his teeth vibrated. Ceri had dropped to one knee without realizing it, but he knew it when his vision faded back in again and Raphael was standing over him, his sword raised high above his head.

Before Ceri had a chance to react, a cloud of dust obscured Raphael’s visage.

He coughed and sputtered, waving his hand in front of his face, but it did no good. He basically had a dust devil concentrated around his head. He stumbled back, but it followed him tenaciously, and nothing Raphael did helped.

His hand lit up with white light, but how could anyone blast sand? Raphael must have realized he’d only blast himself, and the light died without use. Ceri raised his sword as he jumped to his feet, lunged at the preoccupied Raphael, and drove Godslayer straight through the center of his torso.

The swirling sand re-formed into a much bigger pile that became Ahmed in his haute couture. He eyed Raphael, who was staring in shock at the sword in his chest. “When you meet your god, tell him Ahmed says go fuck yourself.”

Ceri wondered what that was about, but he was now a little diverted by the power funneling through Godslayer and into him. It was a brilliant white, tasted like ice and fire, and made him feel like his blood was becoming effervescent, filling his head with helium. He was becoming giddy with power.

Raphael sank to his knees and grabbed the blade of the sword with both hands, but it wasn’t only Ceri’s grip that kept him from pulling it out—Godslayer was fighting him too. It liked feasting on angel energy. Honestly, Ceri couldn’t blame it. It was a hell of a rush. If it were a drug, Ceri would have happily mainlined it.

Raphael poured on the strength as he attempted to pull out the sword, but the more energy he used, the more the sword drank, and the more power flowed through Ceri.

“Abomination, you will live up to the prophecy,” Raphael said. His skin was becoming waxy and gray. “You cannot fight destiny.”

“Watch me,” Ceri said and pulled the sword upward. With all the new energy infusing him, it was nothing for him to force Godslayer through superhumanly strong muscle and bone and slice Raphael perfectly in half, bisecting his skull last.

Ceri expected the usual, meaning blood and guts, but that’s not what happened. Raphael exploded into a blinding burst of white light that sent Ceri flying backward. He collided with someone, but he didn’t know if it was Esme or Logan. Maybe both.

It took a moment for the light to fade, but as it did, the trembling beneath them seemed to be getting worse. Heaven was falling, and they probably didn’t have much time.

Logan grabbed his arm, and while it was comforting, it was also a bit of a shock, as Ceri still had angel energy coursing through him, and there was more of the stuff in Logan’s veins. Ceri felt a tremendous urge to spill it, drink it, but he managed to fight it off. “Are you okay?” Ceri asked.

“Always, but I think we gotta go now.”

“Yeah, it feels like the roof’s about to cave in,” Lyn said from close by. “Well, metaphorically, at any rate.”

Ceri’s vision recovered enough that he was able to see everyone was there—well, save for Alex, who would be fine since Cthylor was with them—including Ahmed, who was building back to human shape since the angel blast had reduced him to sand again. They joined hands, and Ceri warped them out of there.

They ended up in the living room of the house he shared with Logan. Seeing this, Esme sighed. “Oh, thank Hecate. I thought you were gonna put us back in that cave.”

Ceri almost replied that so did he but managed to stifle it at the last second. Why had he brought them here?

Oh, right. He’d just absorbed the life force of an archangel. It was the same reason he was jittery and wired. He was probably lucky he hadn’t exploded. He could feel all that energy was still boiling within him, and he realized something kind of distressing—his dark side, his demonic side, was flaring up. It was feeding on all the energy, and it seemed to be getting fat with nourishment. That wasn’t good.

Ahmed dusted off his sleeves, like he even had real sleeves or a need to do that, and said to Logan, “Where the hell did you get off to? You certainly took your time coming back.”

Logan frowned at him. It was his special Ahmed frown, for when Ahmed vaguely or directly insulted him. It happened enough that he had a special facial expression for him. “Hey, I was thrown into an abyss. I probably ended up in Heaven’s basement.”

Lyn scratched her head. She was mostly back to human form, save for a few stray feathers. She had blood on her clothes, but none of it was hers. “How do you know it was a basement? Was there a water heater?”

He grimaced at her terrible joke. “I got there as soon as I could, okay? Just in time.”

“It was Gill, wasn’t it?” Ceri guessed. Not a hard guess.

Logan nodded. “But she didn’t want to fight. Raphael totally disillusioned her. I told her to grab any good angels, if she knew some, and go.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Lyn snapped. “I’m sorry, Logan, but she’s gonna forget you, and when she does, she’ll be part of the angel horde gunning for us.”

“And when that happens, I’ll deal with it. But I wasn’t going to try and kill my own sister. Not while she’s still my sister.”

Ahmed rolled his eyes. “You kicked the can down the road. Do you actually think it’s going to be easier when she can’t remember you? You’ll always remember her.”

From the way Logan’s shoulders stiffened, Ceri knew he was about to lose his temper. Gill was a sore spot and would always be so. It wasn’t that Ahmed wasn’t right, because he was, but he didn’t need to be a dick about it. Of course he’d argue it was his personality, but now was not the time for any of it. Ceri put a hand on Logan’s arm and stepped between them. “Hey, we have bigger issues to deal with right now.”

“We do?” Ahmed replied. “What?”

Ceri was on the verge of telling him to stuff it when suddenly something wrenched deep inside of him. It was like a bolt of lightning had hit him at the base of his soul, and he hadn’t realized he’d dropped to his knees until Logan’s arm went around him and he heard him saying, “Ceri? What’s wrong? Did Raphael hurt you?”

He shook his head, trying to banish the fog that seemed to have settled in his brain, as if a part of himself had been amputated. That wasn’t true, though. He was just full of Raphael’s energy. “Heaven’s gone. I felt it fall.”

As if on cue, Alex appeared in a dark corner of the living room. “So that’s done,” they said.

“So Hell’s next?” Lyn asked.

Alex smiled. “Sounds good to me.”

“Wait a sec,” Esme said. “We have homeless angels walking the Earth now. Do we really want homeless demons joining them?”

Lyn, who seemed ready to get into a new fight, appeared deflated by that. “Oh shit, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“If we kill them all, we don’t have to worry about strays,” Alex said cheerfully.

Logan stared at them like they’d shoved a red-hot poker up his ass. “Look, we all hate demons, but you can’t be advocating genocide.”

“Of course not. There are always many on Earth. There will be some left.”

Logan gave Alex a glance that suggested he found that less than comforting. But Cthulhu wasn’t known for restraint or logic.

“I’m going to need a break, okay?” Ceri replied. “Besides, if I know my dad and his endless capacity for self-preservation, he’s going to hear about Heaven’s fall and want to negotiate a better end for himself. We may not have to destroy it.”

“Have to doesn’t really come into it,” Alex said. “It’s more like want to.”

“Still, my dad is going to make a move. He’s not stupid, and with Heaven gone, he has to know the prophecy can’t come true, not as it’s sketched out.”

There were nods all around, save for Ahmed, who looked dyspeptic. “He’s your father and you still don’t understand his main power? It isn’t getting people to do things they wouldn’t do. It’s getting people to destroy themselves willingly, even happily. He could still use that against us.”

“How?” Lyn asked.

“Wrong species asking. It’s humans with the infinite capacity for self-immolation. You harpies have more dignity than that.”

Logan sighed. “Look, Ahmed, I know you have a low opinion of humans, but why do you have to be such a downer when we got a win?”

“I’m not being a downer. I’m warning you. Now isn’t the time for complacency.”

Esme groaned. “Dude. Give us all a minute to have a drink and contemplate the fact that we just destroyed Heaven. I don’t even think we knew that was an option.”

Ahmed grimaced and quickly glanced around the room. No surprise to Ceri, the only person who looked happy was Alex, who always looked happy. “Look, I know I don’t know the devil as well as some of you, but I do know strategy,” Ahmed said. “Satan will probably pretend to be shaken, and as soon as our guard is down, come in with knives. This battle isn’t won. It’s barely begun. And the prophecy isn’t completely off the table.”

“Fine, Captain Downer,” Logan snapped. “We got it. Paranoia glasses on. Can you cut us a break now?”

Ahmed scanned the room once more and then generated a dark blue scarf, which he threw dramatically around his neck. The gesture lost some of its impact since everyone in the room knew it was made of sand, like his neck. There was a sandman joke in there somewhere, Ceri thought, but he could never quite find it.

“Just be ready,” Ahmed cautioned. “This is about the time when everything falls to shit.” And with that, he formed into a human-sized dust devil and blew away beneath the front door. Somehow, he never left a grain of sand behind.

“Well, what are we gonna do now that the life of the party is gone?” Lyn said.

“He knows he’s unliving proof that immortality itself is a curse,” Alex said. “His hell can never end.”

Well, that was a cheery thought. Correct, but still.

Maybe that’s why this victory, such as it was, felt so hollow.