YOU’D THINK after having to call up so much energy to use on spells, Esme would be tired. But she was the opposite. A spell-slinging fight always left her feeling jazzed.
Much like Ceri after he absorbed the life force of a bunch of demons, which was unsettling to think about. Wasn’t that sort of evil? Although Ceri was such an adorable puppy, it was hard to say that and mean it. At least he only absorbed energy from the bad guys. That they knew of.
Okay, yeah, Esme really hadn’t been on board with this shit at first. How could anyone trust the son of Satan when he said he didn’t want the apocalypse? But the thing was, Ceri was so fucking sweet. He was polite and thoughtful, and it was clear he’d blow up the universe if someone hurt anyone he cared about. And he was also clearly head over heels in love with Logan. Which was another weird thing, since Logan was King Machismo, and yet Ceri seemed to bring out his marshmallow core.
She knew Lyn and Logan used to be a thing, and that disturbed her a little, but that’s what she got for being with a bi girl. Lyn used to sleep with a man, Mr. Macho Pretty Boy himself. It gave her the shudders if she thought about it too long. But while he was still a cocky little shit, Logan had grown on her. Even though he was a human, he was the amazing fighter his reputation claimed, gifted with technique if not exactly strength, and she knew he’d go balls to the wall for his cause. Even when he was clearly outmatched, he didn’t quit. Why else was he leading this charge to circumvent the apocalypse? It was foolish. How could they possibly stop this fucking thing? But they had to try.
They had several items, including the codex, that might help them avert it, but Esme had this sinking sensation that it wouldn’t—and couldn’t—be enough. When Heaven and Hell wanted it done, who were they to stop them? Yes, she was the world’s most powerful witch, with an evil eye to boot, and while Logan didn’t bring a whole lot to the table, Lyn made up for him, being an incredibly hard-to-kill harpy. Then there was eternal Ahmed, although he was fighting out of fear of loneliness at being left behind on a dead world, nothing else. His enthusiasm was lacking. But Ceri did tilt things in their favor, being Lucifer’s son and the fabled “Destroyer of Earth.” Esme tried to look on the bright side, but… it wasn’t enough, was it? She feared it wasn’t and couldn’t be. Technically, she and Ceri were the heaviest hitters on their team, and while she had little doubt that Ceri could take on Heaven and Hell, she didn’t think the rest of them would survive it. They needed more power on their side to make this even remotely doable.
She and Lyn went home and had dinner, along with a decent bottle of frou-frou ale. Unlike Esme, Lyn was usually tired after the big fights and went to bed, while Esme remained up and busted out her Tarot cards.
Yes, they were hokey, and hardly more than playing cards. But this was a special deck. They looked like your standard Rider-Waite Tarot cards, except these were haunted. Well, sort of. Technically she’d cursed the cards because her evil eye gave her the ability to curse anything. She’d made them a bridge between this world and the veil, the place that stood between life and death. These could tell her the immediate future or the consequences of certain actions. She had stopped asking whether or not they’d be successful in halting the end of the world, because every time she did she ended up with the Tower, a card that meant the end of the fucking world.
With the TV tuned to overseas rugby—New Zealand, maybe? She didn’t have the sound up enough to tell—Esme sat on the couch, shuffled her cursed cards, and asked, “What’s the result of what we’ve done so far?” Kind of vague, but it was best to leave some room when asking the cards for answers.
She laid out three cards on the coffee table. Immediately, she knew they were weird.
She got the Page of Wands, the Magician, and the High Priestess. Pages, if not referring to a specific person, were often messengers or envoys, especially in the case of Wands. The Magician could be referring to an actual magic wielder, although the High Priestess threw that in doubt. A mystical being? Something not human? But where did the messenger come into this? “Okay, what the hell does this mean?” she asked, shuffling the remaining cards. “Is this good or bad?”
She laid two cards over the three. They were the Seven of Wands and the Two of Swords. The Seven of Wands was basically saying this thing, whatever it was, gave them an advantage; the Two of Swords was the card of stalemate.
“What the fuck…?” Esme said out loud. If she was reading this right, they were about to be joined in battle by someone—possibly a her, if you could assign gender to it—of immense power. A power so great it pushed them from a losing side into a force to be reckoned with, something Heaven and Hell couldn’t simply crush and sweep aside. The appearance of the sword card here—although one of the better sword cards, since all swords pretty much meant violence of one kind or another, and it was usually best to avoid them in a reading if at all possible—indicated this being could be extremely dangerous, even if it was on their side. What the fuck did that mean? Did Heaven or Hell have a major player who’d decided they weren’t down with the end of the world after all?
She shuffled the cards and asked, “Heaven or Hell?” This time she laid down a single card. The Moon.
“Fuck you,” she snapped. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
There were obvious Heaven and Hell cards in the deck. Judgment, with its giant angel astride the world, was Heaven. The Devil was Hell. The Moon was… what the fuck was the Moon? Aliens? Why the fuck not at this rate? It was bad enough living in a world with actual gods and monsters. Maybe aliens would make for a nice change.
She tried a second shuffle and draw, just to make sure, and all the same cards came up. She figured that would happen but had to check. Afterward, Esme put the cards aside and watched the game halfheartedly, drinking a second beer. She found rugby kind of fascinating for unclear reasons, although she did like it when scrums looked like humongous human spiders, moving with shambling force across the field until they all fell apart.
At some point, she dozed off, and a knock on the door woke Esme with a jolt. It took her a moment to realize it because she was distracted by a terrible need to pee. But the person knocked again, and she heard it very clearly.
She got up and whispered a few words of enchantment under her breath as she approached the door. She had a temporary paralysis spell ready to throw in case this person was some sort of bad guy. It could be Logan or Ahmed, but that was unlikely, as Logan usually knocked on the door like he was punching it, and Ahmed rang the doorbell. She hadn’t ordered a pizza and completely forgotten about it, had she? That had actually happened once, but she’d had a lot more than two beers.
Esme cast a small reveal spell that made the door translucent to her alone and saw a young woman(?) or man standing on the doorstep. They didn’t look familiar at all. They were dark-skinned and striking, maybe twenty-three or so, with a silver septum ring. Their dark, red-streaked hair was done up in dreadlocks tied behind their head like a ponytail made of tentacles. Their clothes were aggressively gender-neutral—loose jeans, oversized promotional T-shirt for Evil Dead 2, a nongendered Army surplus jacket in olive drab, also too big—and made Esme wonder if they had a gender at all. Maybe not. She/he/they had awesome bright yellow boots, though.
Esme opened the door, holding her right hand behind it, ready to cast the spell if necessary. “Yes?”
The person smiled. “Hello. You’re Esme Navarro?” They said this, but also signed, their hands moving with great speed and fluidity. They were apparently deaf or hard of hearing as well.
She nodded. “I am.” Esme wished she knew sign language, but she didn’t. Seemed like a grave oversight on her part.
“Great. I’m Alex Rayasi, and I’m the spokesperson for Cthylor.” Alex kept smiling, like that meant something to her.
Esme shook her head. “I don’t know who that is. What are your pronouns, by the way?”
“Oh! Thank you for asking. I am they/them. And Cthylor is the daughter of Cthulhu.”
Esme stared at them a moment, wondering if she’d misheard. Their speaking voice was very clear, so she didn’t think so. “Um… Cthulhu has a daughter?”
“Yes, and she is quite distressed about the upcoming apocalypse. She’d rather it didn’t happen, and word was the world’s most powerful witch was opposing it. Cthylor would like to help you.”
Okay, Alex was a crazy person. Or at least Esme entertained that idea for several seconds until she remembered the Tarot cards. Powerful female, not human, tips the scale into stalemate territory. Oh. Oh shit.
Esme was still processing this when Alex reached a hand in their pocket and pulled something out. “She knew you might have a hard time believing this, so she gave me this to give to you as proof.”
Esme looked at it warily. It looked like a small dark stone with some kind of shell impression imprinted in it. How did this prove anything? Esme picked it up—
—and suddenly she was in a room full of stars. No, not a room—space. She was in boundless space, surrounded by stars and nothingness. Her mind reeled, and her body started to panic about lack of gravity and air when suddenly she was plunged into the water, into a vast and ceaseless ocean, bizarrely empty of everything. Except when the bottom finally came into view, a large rock that seemed to take up a good bit of the sea floor stood there. Except… no, not a rock.
It was a leathery, tentacled thing as big as a skyscraper on its side. There were knots of muscles, or maybe undeveloped eyes or tentacles, all over the thing. The more she looked at it, the more it seemed to be escaping her scrutiny in a way she couldn’t understand. It was like the water was filling up with something that made it gauzy and caused her eyes to glide over the thing on their way to something else. It was almost a force, trying to push her gaze away. As if her mind refused to allow her to see the whole thing in front of her.
Finally Esme came to stand on the silty bottom of this fathomless ocean, in front of this vast and ungodly thing. It was giving her a headache trying to look at it. And the moment she decided this was probably its face, a handful of eyes opened, shedding golden light that flared as bright as a supernova—
—and she gasped, dropping the stone as she reeled backward, somehow still in her house. Esme inhaled and exhaled deeply several times, unsure if she’d been holding her breath or it just felt that way. “What the fuck was that?” she finally gasped.
“Sorry,” Alex said, still outside. They hadn’t assumed Esme’s retreat as an invitation to come in. “I know the visions can be overwhelming. But Cthylor means you no harm. If she did, you’d be dead already.” They said this with an innocent smile that almost made it creepier.
“Was that… thing Cthylor?”
“It’s possible. She can appear as many things, as she has her father’s powers. Which is also why you probably couldn’t see her clearly.”
“I couldn’t.”
Alex nodded. “That’s because seeing her or hearing her in full automatically renders you insane.”
Esme nodded. “Okay. Good to know.” That probably explained why she needed a messenger (Page of Wands). “But you’re telling me all the Cthulhu mythos gods are real?”
“Pretty much, yes. Most exist on another plane of reality. Save for Cthulhu, who sleeps, and his daughter, who is here watching.”
That sounded as ominous as fuck. “Watching for what?”
Alex shrugged. “She’s never said.”
Esme almost asked where Cthulhu was sleeping, exactly, since you’d think he’d have been discovered by a submarine or something by now. But maybe not. Contrary to what most people thought, not all oceans had been thoroughly explored. Many of the deepest depths were far too dangerous to venture into, and even where it was possible, it was dark and crushing and not something anything could handle for long periods, even cameras. To this day people were still discovering sea creatures that hadn’t been seen before. If Cthulhu was asleep at the bottom of the Marianas Trench or something, there was a good chance no one knew, even if he couldn’t disguise himself in some way. “But wait—how is that even possible? I mean, how in the hell does Cthulhu have a daughter? And oh yeah, wasn’t H.P. Lovecraft just a horrible old racist?”
“Well, daughter is not exactly correct. Please understand that the Old Ones don’t have specific genders like we do, and the word is used as an approximation. As for Lovecraft, I’m with you. He was a horrible old racist. But from what I’ve been able to gather, he had probably gotten hold of a real memory stone.”
“Memory stone?” Esme looked down at that strange dark rock on her floor. Was that what it was? It was deeply unpleasant. It also made her wonder what happened to the person(?) who created that stone. She had a feeling, if it was an actual person, no way in hell could they have survived Cthylor opening her eyes.
“Why do I get the feeling this isn’t a total surprise to you?” Alex asked, cocking their head to the side.
Esme wondered how they’d figured that out. She was completely flabbergasted by all of this, and only her insistent bladder was telling her she was awake and not dreaming. “I did a Tarot reading that was really confusing… except, it kind of jibes with everything going on here. Is Cthylor as powerful as Cthulhu?”
“In what way?”
How did Cthulhu operate? What did he do? She could barely recall the fiction, which she stopped reading because Lovecraft was a horrible racist who also wrote very purple prose. It had to be your thing, and it wasn’t hers. “If she rose, or whatever, could she end the world simply by showing up?”
“Oh, I see. If she wanted the world to die, it would. She wouldn’t actually need to rise for that.”
Esme had a sudden flash of a comedian on some show or other doing a bit about how his mother would say, “Don’t make me get out of this chair,” when she was really mad. That was Cthylor, wasn’t it? If she had to show up, someone had hosed something up so massively, it was hardly worth the telling. She didn’t need to get out of her chair to kill them. She’d only get out of her chair to massively fuck them up first. “Could Heaven or Hell stop her? Or them?”
Alex scoffed. “Oh no. The Old Ones are protogods, gods that existed before the gods. They are tied to the universe… well, this universe. There’s a multiverse, actually, but that’s neither here nor there. They will die when this universe dies. But not before.”
Holy motherfucking shit. Did that mean if Heaven and Hell teamed up in their masses to take on Cthulhu and Cthylor, they would lose? Esme envisioned the picture of the Two of Swords, with the blindfolded woman holding two perfectly balanced blades. Stalemate as a figure. “Shit. Come in, please.”
“Thank you.” Alex did and closed the door behind them. They seemed chipper and spritely, which seemed a bit odd for the messenger of an eldritch death god, but hey, sometimes you had to make your own fun.
“Are you a witch, by chance?” Esme wondered. The Magician could have been a reference to Cthylor, who obviously had mystical powers, but it could have referred to Alex as well.
Alex shook their head. “No.”
“So how did you end up as Cthylor’s messenger on Earth?”
“I was taken as a child to be sacrificed in the name of a dark god by a cult that thought it could get some favor from him,” they said, chipperness still in place. “Cthylor took pity on me and decided to make me her messenger.”
“What happened to the cult?”
“She killed them all.” Now Alex’s smile took on a dangerous edge. “Cthulhu finds worship beneath him and would never grant any favor to a human. Except in this case, Cthylor would rather the world didn’t end before her father wakes up.”
“He’s not waking up anytime soon, is he?”
Alex shook their head. “He will wake before the death of the universe. I think that’s a few billion years off.”
That was a relief. So, not their problem. They didn’t have to fight Heaven and Hell and then Cthulhu. She honestly wasn’t sure how they’d survive the first two; the third sounded impossible.
“Okay, so, I hafta go pee before I bust. Why don’t you sit down, make yourself at home, and I’ll also go wake up my girlfriend and we can talk strategy, okay?”
Alex gave her that bright grin again. “Okay.” They sat on the couch, hands on their knees, and continued smiling at nothing.
Yes, they were a bit creepy, but that wasn’t their fault. Alex didn’t ask to be the messenger of an insanely over-powered protogod any more than they’d asked to be sacrificed to one in the first place.
Now they had an ally that might make a difference in the coming apocalypse. Esme could only hope they could trust them.
LOGAN ASSUMED he was in for a sex dream when he found himself in a subway car. But things immediately took a turn for the shitty.
He wasn’t alone in the car, and not in the fun way either. He knew exactly who was in this car without having to see her. “Gill,” he said, not turning around. “I told you not to visit my dreams again.”
“We need to talk, Logan. I can’t have you constantly hanging up on me.”
Logan tried to do as he did last time, imagining a chainsaw in his hands, but this time nothing appeared. He tried to imagine something simpler, an axe, but it still didn’t appear. “What the hell, dude? Are you doing this?”
“Your juvenile reenactment of a horror movie is over. Again, we need to talk, without your usual jackassery.”
Logan turned and scowled. “You used to find me funny.”
Growing up, Logan always heard he looked more like his mom, while Gill looked more like their dad. Gill had a more slender build, a sharp jawline, light brown hair, and pale blue eyes. Gill was often called attractive, whereas Logan was called pretty, a semantic difference that still seemed to mean something to people.
Angel Gill looked the same as human Gill except her hair was neater. She also dressed better, although in this dreamscape, she was dressed as the human Gill—more casual, in jeans and hiking boots and a Pink Floyd T-shirt that Logan was pretty sure was the last outfit he saw her in as a human being. She probably thought this familiarity was a kindness, something to put him at ease, but it made Logan instantly furious.
Gill picked up on it, because she said, “I’m not going to fight you. In a dream, it’s a pointless waste of time and energy.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass, you—” Logan began, stomping toward her. But he stopped the instant he slammed into an invisible wall. “Oh, what the fuck? Really? You put me behind a fucking sneeze guard?”
“Yes, until you calm down.”
“Calm down? Fuck you, drama queen. I’m not the one who ran off and cut a deal with the angels while I was stuck in Hell.”
“Becoming an angel was the only way I could get you out.”
“But you didn’t get me out, did you?”
Gill frowned. She was standing with her hand on a suspiciously clean and sparkling pole, the kind that told you whoever was conjuring up this scenario wasn’t going for authenticity. “I was too late. The Destroyer made his escape first.”
“Don’t call him that. That’s not his name.”
She met his gaze with one of her own, and for the first time since Gill had switched sides, he saw a bit of the old Gill in there, self-righteous and snappish. “His name isn’t Ceri either. It’s Cerberus, the fucking three-headed dog of Hell.”
“Yeah, we’ve been through this.” Logan retreated to one of the empty subway seats and sat. If he couldn’t do anything here, there was no point in standing up.
“Only because you’re not listening. Do you really think this ends well in any context, Logan? Come on, you’re smarter than that.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Oh please, don’t trot out this bullshit again. Hell won’t let their Destroyer be happy, because if he’s happy, he can’t play his role. Hell will destroy you, and Cerberus will be unable to stop it.”
Logan shook his head, concentrating on the ground. Very slowly, fuzzy green carpet started spreading over the floor. So he did have some control in this dreamscape; it was simply limited. Good to know. “He killed Astaroth today, you know.”
It was the silence that made Logan look back at his now-angelic sister. She looked genuinely taken aback. “Astaroth? Really?”
“He came for the codex. He left a pile of ashes.”
“I didn’t realize he was that powerful. But surely you know it’s not going to be enough. The amulet, the codex, whatever other artifact you’re after. You can’t even slow this process down.”
Logan wondered if he should tell her he’d figured that out already but couldn’t just roll over and let the end happen. But that might make her happy, so he decided not to. “Then why did the angels want it? If it doesn’t matter, they shouldn’t care if we have it or not.”
Gill rolled her eyes, like she always had. “Except it’s extremely dangerous. That book is evil, and you know it.”
“And that doesn’t matter if the world is dead within a week anyway, does it? Be honest with me, Gill—what is the fucking point of any of this? Why are angels so hot for destroying the world?”
Gill continued frowning at him. Logan wanted to tell her if she kept doing that, her face would get stuck. “We’re not… it is the way it is, Logan. Everything has a beginning and an end. This is the end. You can fight it all you want, but you won’t stop it.”
“If that’s true, why this showing up and telling me I need to quit? I think we’ve got you scared.”
“Oh please. I’m trying to save you. You’re still my brother.”
“Save the world, not me. Weren’t you always the one telling me that most people were good and decent?”
Gill threw up her hands, like Logan was being deliberately obtuse, but Logan felt he had her. “They are, but prolonging their survival past the end point is cruel.”
“And why would I want to survive past the end point if no one else can? Seems kind of… privileged, doesn’t it?”
Now Gill gave him her pissy look, the one she’d perfected when they were teenagers and everything Logan did seemed to mortify her. “You have to understand, this was fated. We—”
“Oh, don’t give me that fated bullshit. All I’m fated to do is break my foot off in your ass.”
“Don’t be crude. This is your destiny, Logan. You can’t run from it.”
“Fuck you, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
Finally, that spurred her into showing some rage, proving she wasn’t a complete Stepford bot. Mostly, but not all. “You know what? I’m going to tell you. I figured it’d crush you, but fuck it. If you’re gonna insist on being an asshole, so be it.”
“Does this mean you’re going to leave me alone now?”
“It means we have no choice, Logan. We don’t have angel blood in our family line. Only we have angel blood.”
Logan made a point of mentally dissecting that sentence, but nope, it made no sense. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying our father was an angel.”
Now Logan laughed, shaking his head. “Oh wow, you’ve full-on chugged the Kool-Aid, haven’t you?”
“I’m serious, Logan.”
“Our dad was a deadbeat who fucked off shortly after you were born. He was as far from a goddamn angel as you can get.”
Gill shook her head and gave him an infuriating look of pity. “Investigate him. His cover is very flimsy and falls apart easily. Augustin Gabriel Fox never existed. Our birth signaled the beginning of the end, just as Cerberus’s birth did. Equal and opposite reactions.”
Logan had this sudden and terrible feeling in his gut, one that made his blood turn to ice. “You’re fucking joking. We’re not half-angel.”
“I didn’t want to believe it either, which is why, when they told me, I investigated him. I wondered why I never had. And it’s so terrible. The angels knew nothing about forging documents. There has never been a Saint George’s Hospital in Greenford, Maine. Also, there’s no such town as Greenford in Maine.”
Logan was vaguely aware that that was where their dad was born and raised. But… no. How could that be true? He remembered their father; he was—wait, did he?
“You don’t remember him, do you?”
“Of course I do. He….” Logan struggled to recall him. A lot of his childhood was a blank now, with a couple of traumatic instances highlighted, but all he could remember of his dad was a vague image of him. He couldn’t remember doing anything with him, or even talking with him, which was crazy. He’d pissed off not long after Gill was born, leaving them all high and dry and sending their mother into her first alcoholic tailspin, from which she never recovered. But he was there for the first few years of Logan’s life, he… why couldn’t he remember him? “This is a trick,” he snapped. “You’re fucking with my mind.”
Gill held up her hands as if in surrender. “I wouldn’t do that even if I could, Logan. With Cerberus existing, we had to exist too. We were born to fight the son of Satan on the final battlefield. You know, your boyfriend.”
Logan stood, hands balling into fists at his side. He so wished he could punch her. “That’s a motherfucking lie.”
“I wish it was. How do you think I felt when I realized the angels were telling the truth? We were doomed from the start.”
Logan shook his head. He didn’t believe this fate bullshit, because no one had to do anything. Entropy ruled the universe—all was chaos. The fact that Heaven and Hell actually existed seemed to support this theory more, because what random bullshit. One of the first tattoos he got was the No Gods, No Masters one tattooed in lovely script encircling his left bicep. Ceri got a matching one in honor of him, only on his right bicep. They were a matching pair of fucked-up losers. “The angels are liars. They are more than capable of ret-conning our dad, from our memories, from fucking existence. They hoodwinked you.”
She was shaking her head, looking sad. “I wish that was true. But think about it, Lo. Mom started going off the deep end after Dad left, right? That’s when all this demon nonsense started? Because Dad must have told her what he was and what we were. She knew demons would hunt us.”
“Listen to yourself! We can’t be half-angel! We have no powers! We’re only fucking humans. Well, I am.”
“Our powers are latent until we die and are born again as angels. But that might be why you’ve managed to best demons in a fight.”
“No, the reason I can do that is because Mom spent a fuckload on getting me trained, and I always go for the weak points first. There’s nothing paranormal about it.” Right? That certainly felt true. He was the powerless, mediocre man in the group. Nothing had happened to change that.
Gill was looking at him with pity, which infuriated him. “I think there is. It makes sense.”
“None of this is sense. This is bullshit. The angels are manipulating you.”
“For what reason? Listen to yourself. They already have me. There’s no point to lying to me now.”
“Yes, there is. They want me too, for some fucking reason.”
“Because you’re half-angel. Because you’re destined to be here.”
“Do you really wanna end the world, Gill?” he snapped, leveling a glare at his supposed sister. “You were the one who told me that people weren’t all bad, that there was a reason to save people. Now you can’t wait to kill them all.”
She sighed, shoulders sagging. “You know that’s not true.”
“No, I don’t.”
“The apocalypse can’t be stopped. But we have to win it. Otherwise Hell wins. And you don’t want to see what happens to the Earth in that case.”
“It’s all death. Whether Heaven or Hell tends the ashes is semantical, and no one will be alive to care. Except maybe Ahmed.”
“Is he the mummy…?” Logan nodded. “Okay, yeah, the angels aren’t sure about those. You find the weirdest people to fraternize with.”
Logan glared at her. “Oh yeah, my friends, who are the only people brave enough to defy you clowns.”
Her pissy look came back. At least there was enough of her left that she could do that. But the look quickly faded and fell away. “Maybe you count them as your friends, but we’re family. I don’t want you to die for nothing, Lo.”
“Trying to save the world isn’t nothing.”
“You won’t get the chance. Hell won’t let you. They’re going to want to see Cerberus take on his role as the Destroyer, and as long as you’re alive, he can’t. Join us before it’s too late.”
“Do you have any lines that don’t sound like a canned villain speech?”
Gill’s frown deepened. “You’re not stupid, Lo. Think about it. You know where I am if you want to talk.”
Logan woke up and found himself staring at the darkened ceiling for a moment—actually several long moments, as he had to reacclimate to being awake—and considering what Gill had said.
Angels were liars. So were people and demons. Lying apparently was the glue that held the universe together. That made sense.
He sat up and realized Ceri wasn’t in bed. Logan got up, went to use the bathroom, and wandered out into the living room. Ceri was sitting near the window, looking out at the dark. “Is something wrong?” Logan asked.
Ceri shook his head and gazed back at him. “No. I just had a hard time sleeping. I’m literally full of energy. Absorbing Astaroth really hit my system like a twelve-ton burrito.”
“Hopefully not that bad.”
Ceri considered that, probably remembering how things affected a human digestive system. “Okay, not quite that bad. But you know what I mean.”
“I think so.” Logan sat down beside him and glanced out the window, in case Ceri was actually looking at something. Didn’t seem like it.
Ceri put his arm around his shoulders and leaned into him. “So why are you up?”
“Oh, Gill decided to invade my dreams again.”
“Did you resume your horror movie scenario?”
“No. This time she took control of it somehow, kept me from doing it.” First time Gill decided to talk to him through his dreams, Logan thought he’d teach her a lesson by going all Evil Dead on her—dismembering her with a chainsaw, whole nine yards. But Gill had refused to play along and mostly made it a bummer. Much like this time, but worse.
“Was it the same old shit?”
“Pretty much. Except… hey, if I was half-angel, wouldn’t you know?”
Ceri studied him with a raised eyebrow. Since his glamour was off and he looked like his usual bisected self, it seemed like only his human side was interested in the conversation. “I’d think so. Why, did she say that?”
“Yeah. She said our dad wasn’t human but an angel, and we basically came along as an answer to you.”
“Huh. But if that were true, wouldn’t you be manifesting angel powers?”
“That’s what I thought. But she said it was latent until we came back as angels.”
“Oh.” Ceri leaned his head against him as he thought about it, and Logan liked the comfort of it. To think, a little over a year ago, they didn’t know each other at all except as rumors. Now they were staring down the end of the world together. Life was fucking strange. “Well, if that’s true, then I suppose it’s possible you’re a Nephilim and I wouldn’t know it.”
“Nephilim. That’s the actual term, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Sounds kidney related.”
“I don’t think it is.”
Logan started biting his cuticle, caught himself, and stopped. He hadn’t done that for years. But with the end of the world looming, it seemed like all his nervous tics were coming back. “Probably not. It can’t be true, though, can it? I mean, the angels wouldn’t plant an angel pretending to be a person on Earth, simply for the purpose of popping out a couple of kids, would they?”
He saw the way Ceri grimaced, and Logan’s heart skipped. Oh no. “Yes, they might. I remember my father talking about hunting down an angel hiding on Earth. I wonder if that’s related.”
Logan pondered whether that meant Satan had killed their dad. Well, it would make sense. And wasn’t that technically rape? Him pretending to be human, getting a woman to fall in love with him, all so she’d have a couple of kids? Sure seemed a little rape-y, and he didn’t like it at all. “Did they find the angel?”
“Oh yeah. Dad was bragging about killing it for years.”
Logan wondered if he should be relieved or sorry. He was kind of relieved, to be honest. It might not have been their dad—he had no reason to think that the angels were telling the truth—but he still felt better about it.
There was an odd noise, and Logan looked around for the menace before realizing it was the sound of the phone in its charger, vibrating across the table. Boy, they made weird sounds on glass. He picked it up, and as soon as he saw who was calling, he was slightly alarmed. “Esme? Everything okay?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess. Um, you guys aren’t sleeping now, are you?”
“No. Too charged from the day. Why?”
“Uh, well, there’s been a pretty dramatic development here. I think we may actually have a way to win this thing.”
Logan immediately felt a thousand times better. “Did you find a spell in the codex?”
“No, Ahmed hasn’t given that up yet. This is… someone wants to join us in our fight. Someone incredibly powerful.”
“Who?” He was slightly unnerved by this.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. You guys should come over. It’ll be easier.”
“Okay. We’ll be right there.”
“What’s going on?” Ceri asked as soon as he hung up.
He repeated what little Esme had given him and asked, “Do you think a major player in Heaven or Hell has switched sides?”
“Besides Lucifer or God, I don’t know if there’s anyone strong enough to make that much of a difference.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.” But who did that leave, then? And why couldn’t Esme simply tell him over the phone?
Logan returned to their bedroom to get dressed. He’d slept in boxer shorts, because he never knew when he’d have to get up and fight, and fighting naked left some obvious weak spots on display. He dressed casually in jeans, a T-shirt, and steel-toed boots in case fighting broke out. For that reason, he also slipped on his leather jacket, which was already loaded with weapons. Possibly not ones he needed, but even inappropriate ones were better than none.
Ceri was already dressed, since he never got to sleep, but he reinstated his glamour so he was back to fully human-looking sexpot again. Sometimes it staggered Logan, realizing how intimate it was that Ceri showed him, and only him, his true self. And of course the trust in it as well. If he didn’t stop thinking about it, he was going to get choked up.
Logan called Ahmed, hoping he’d have his phone with him this time—Logan had asked him to do so before he disappeared with the codex—and it went straight to voicemail, which was typical. He told Ahmed they might actually have a win, and he needed to show up at Esme’s ASAP. Logan also told him to bring the codex, although he had no idea if he would or wouldn’t.
As soon as he put the phone away, Ceri gave him an intense look, a tacit “You ready?” Logan nodded, and Ceri grabbed his arm and folded space.
For Logan, it was simply a blink. He was in his living room, and then, blink, he was in Esme and Lyn’s living room.
Their house was something else. Where Esme didn’t have Ceri’s innate ability to compel people, she could do it with a spell, although she only did it to assholes. Which is how she got this lovely waterfront home—a multimillion-dollar one previously owned by a misogynistic senator Esme compelled to sell the home to her for a fragment of its actual worth. And then she cursed him to never have an erection again, not even with the help of drugs. Permanent limp dick seemed excessively mean until you read up on the guy, and then, frankly, she should have ripped it off of him. He was a real garbage person.
But whereas Esme compelled the sale as a punishment, Lyn actually bought the property because Lyn was as rich as hell. Being alive longer than anyone else—save for Ahmed—and basically working as a mercenary for many years had led to her having a good bit of scratch. Much like her age, she was reluctant to talk about it.
But the look the house generally went for was, according to Esme, goth fortune-teller’s place, and that was basically achieved. They had couches and chairs in dark blue velvet, a lavender carpet, and pale yellow walls that looked gilded in certain lights. There were a couple of paintings on the wall: a framed abstract of slashes of color that Lyn claimed was from a reasonably famous artist—although Logan couldn’t remember who it was, and didn’t care to ask again—and a large rendering of the Tarot card Strength, which had a woman opening a lion’s jaws. Or maybe holding its jaws. It really wasn’t clear.
The thing was, Esme could change anything in the room whenever she wanted. Much like she did when she changed the sigiled wooden stairs to plastic, she could transmogrify anything in the room when she felt like it. Undoubtedly that saved on both furniture costs and moving stress.
Esme was standing in the archway between the living room and the kitchen, and just beyond her, Logan could see a sleepy Lyn with her head over a mug of coffee.
There was a stranger sitting on their blue velvet sofa, though. It was either a slightly effeminate man or a slightly butch woman, attractive either way, in spite of the nose ring. They had dreadlocks held back in what looked like a ponytail and awesome yellow boots. The person looked at them with a sunny, guileless smile, and Logan wasn’t sure if they were in their late teens or early twenties.
Logan had opened his mouth to say something when Ceri jerked his head back as if someone had taken a swing at him and gawked at the person on the couch. “You’re giving off chthonic energy. How…?”
The person looked at Ceri, still smiling. “You’re the Destroyer, yes? Nice to meet you.”
“Chthonic?” Logan asked. He felt like he should know the word, but he didn’t.
“Underworld. Specifically underworld deities.”
“Like Satan?”
“No,” Esme said, entering the living room. “Logan Fox, Cerberus Morningstar, meet Alex Rayasi, the spokesperson for Cthylor.”
“Hi,” Alex said, making an odd hand gesture. Wait, was that sign language?
“Who’s Cthylor?” Ceri asked, signing his words as well.
Logan looked at him, surprised. “You know sign language?”
Ceri shrugged. “Satan knows every language, and apparently so do I.”
“Really?” That was a weird detail. Still, why not? If you were a god, it probably behooved you to speak everything imaginable.
“Daughter of Cthulhu,” Alex replied, also signing.
“Wait, what?” Logan asked, looking to Esme for confirmation.
She shrugged. “See, I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Cthulhu is a real thing? I thought that was made up.”
“The mythos is realish,” Ceri told him. “But most of them exist on another plane of reality. Save for Cthulhu, who sleeps at the bottom of the sea.”
“And his daughter, who watches,” Alex both said and signed. “She’s become aware of the impending apocalypse and would like to stop it, since the apocalypse is her father’s to bring, not Heaven’s or Hell’s.”
Was that supposed to be comforting? Esme said, “Supposedly that’s a few billion years off.”
“Oh. In that case, who gives a fuck?” Logan asked.
“Would you like a memory stone?” Alex asked.
“Say no,” Esme said.
“I know you’re telling the truth,” Ceri said and signed. “Just like you know I’m Lucifer’s son. I can see your energy.”
“And I see yours,” Alex said. “So I guess we’re even.”
“Wait. Cthylor levels the playing field? Cthylor is strong enough to face off with Heaven and Hell?” Logan wondered.
Ceri scoffed. “Yes. Technically, both Cthylor and Cthulhu are immortal. They’re tied into the universe at such a fundamental level that to kill them would destroy the universe as a whole.”
“How is that different from the apocalypse?” Logan asked.
“Scale, dummy,” Lyn snapped from the kitchen. “The apocalypse wipes out the human population on Earth. Destruction of the universe takes out Heaven and Hell too.”
“Holy shit.” That was incredible. Something that could take out Heaven and Hell both? “How have we not instantly won this fight? If we can take them with us, what is there to discuss?”
Esme gestured to the kitchen and said, “Can I have a word with you in private, Sherlock?”
First dummy, now Sherlock. He gave her an evil scowl for the insults but went into the kitchen, Ceri following. Alex remained smiling on the couch.
They gathered around the large piece of slate that made up their kitchen table. Logan would have sworn last time he saw it, it was wood, but all that meant was Esme had done some minor redecorating. Lyn had her eyes closed, head still bent over her cup of coffee, but she was definitely listening.
“Look, I’m not denying this is great news,” Esme said. “Whether the spells and amulet pay off, we know we have something that works against both sides. But it could work against us too.”
Before Logan could ask, Ceri nodded. “It’s another variation of a deal with the devil. Clearly Cthylor is working out of self-interest here, but how do we know they won’t extract a price for that?”
“Admittedly it’s fiction, but I’ve never read anything that said entering a pact with Cthulhu was a good thing,” Lyn said, eyes still closed.
“Do we have a choice?” Logan said. “I mean, can we even say no to this? If Cthylor is as powerful as you say, can’t she just swing her big dick around?”
“I think you’re mixing your metaphors, champ, but I get what you’re saying,” Esme said, rubbing her eyes. “And you’re probably right. You can’t exactly say no to Cthulhu—or his daughter—when he approaches you in the spirit of cooperation. ’Cause I got a feeling Deathless God of Insanity doesn’t take rejection well.”
“No god takes rejection well,” Ceri said, with the kind of gravitas that felt like experience. “In fact, they rarely if ever give you that chance.”
A small dust devil blew across the marble floor and re-formed into Ahmed, wearing a dark blue faux sharkskin suit with a faux snakeskin patterned shirt, a leather messenger bag slung over his shoulder. “Are you aware there’s an emissary of a dark lord in your living room?” he asked.
“Yes,” Lyn answered, finally opening her eyes to give him an evil look. “That’s Alex, nonbinary representative of Cthylor, daughter of Cthulhu, and they want to stop the apocalypse now, so Daddy dearest can do it later.”
“Ah. So do we need this anymore?” Ahmed responded, lifting the flap of the bag. Inside was the dark leathery cover of the codex.
“Depends,” Esme replied. “Find anything good in it?”
He raised a neatly arched eyebrow. Despite technically being a pile of sand, everything about him was always so neat, Logan felt like a slobbering wreck by comparison. He probably was. “Depends on your definition of good.”
“Something we can use to fight angels and demons, smartass,” Esme replied.
“In that case, maybe. I know you’re a strong enough witch to pull them off, but the prices on these might be too steep to pay.”
“I can look at them.”
Ahmed took the book out of the bag and put it on the table. Everyone stared at it like it was a grenade with its pin pulled.
“Is there a warding spell on it?” Esme asked.
Ahmed nodded. “Minor insanity spell. You can probably get rid of it with a simple cleansing or purity spell.”
“Okay, nobody touch it before I cast at it,” Esme said. Unnecessarily, really. No one was in a hurry to get near it.
“So what’s our move here?” Logan asked.
Lyn sat back in her chair with a heavy sigh. “We don’t really have a choice. We have to let Alex and Cthylor into our little kamikaze clubhouse.”
“Hurting Cthulhu is next to impossible, and that probably goes for Cthylor as well, but we can look at possible containment,” Ceri said. “I know Hell has a lot of contingency plans for containing gods if they have to. Cthulhu was never one of them, but if we put our heads together, we might think of something.”
There was an idea. Esme nodded, but Ahmed frowned like he thought the idea alone was ridiculous, and maybe it was. But sometimes when you were at the bottom, you had to grasp whatever straws of hope you could.
They went back to the living room, sleepy Lyn joining them this time, and found Alex where they last left them, sitting on the couch and staring at the wall rather than the muted sports channel coming from the television. Yeah, that was creepy.
“Mind translating for me?” Esme asked Ceri. “I’m still not sure if they’re deaf or simply hard of hearing, and I don’t want to be a complete asshole.” Ceri shook his head and came to stand right beside her. “Okay, we’re in,” Esme said. Ceri dutifully signed the words. “But we can’t have some damn double cross, okay? If we work with you, everything has to be aboveboard.”
Alex looked at her, still grinning. “Is that your variation of don’t start none, won’t be none?”
“Basically,” Esme agreed.
Alex stood up, and their smile never broke. Right now, it was taking on an eerie quality, like they knew something no one else did. And that could very well be the case. Logan had no idea how tied to Cthylor Alex was, but if Ceri could see it, it must be substantial. “Agreed. So what’s our next move?”
They exchanged searching glances before Esme admitted, “We’re not sure yet.”
Alex cocked their head, looking at them curiously. “Do you not know that Hell has a plan to attack the Wantanabe building in downtown Seattle?”
They were all surprised by this. “Why?” Ceri asked.
“Because some unwitting bastard bought what they thought was a harmless decoration from an antique store, unaware it was actually the Scourge encased in amethyst.”
Ceri gasped. “The Scourge? How was that not contained?”
“What’s the Scourge?” Logan asked.
“The mother of all hellbeasts,” Ceri said. “It was captured by witches when it first came to Earth, and then it was lost, deliberately. No one but witches or someone with Hell magic could free the Scourge, but they clearly have the ability to do it.”
“So we retrieve the Scourge first and use it ourselves,” Alex said. Still smiling, always smiling. It now seemed less friendly than ever, like a polite way of baring your teeth. Which is what it was, basically.
“Uh, what?” Lyn asked.
“I can command the Scourge like I commanded the hellhound today,” Ceri admitted.
“But isn’t that just a variation on hellhound?” Logan asked.
Alex’s smile somehow got wider, and Ceri scratched his cheek nervously before admitting, “No, not at all. The Scourge is… basically a dragon.”
Logan stared at Ceri and assumed everyone else was doing the same. “There’s a helldragon? How big is this fucking piece of amethyst?”
“It’s not large,” Ceri explained. “It’s probably about paperweight size. The Scourge is only physically manifest when it wants or needs to be, much like a hellhound. It’s more energy and intent than anything else.”
“Okay, for one, freaky,” Logan said. “For two, how much damage can it do? Can it hurt an angel or a high-level demon?”
Ceri considered that a moment before answering, “Within limits, yes.”
“Okay, so that’s another piece in our ‘make Heaven and Hell cry’ puzzle,” Lyn said, running a hand through her hair. Whenever she was newly awake, she didn’t get bedhead more than she got ruffled birdhead, but Logan never told her that because he didn’t really have a death wish. Well, most of the time. “When is this attack happening?”
Ceri translated, and Alex said, “About now, I suspect.”
“Now?” Esme demanded. “You couldn’t lead with that?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Goddamn it. Give me a second to get dressed,” Lyn said, leaving the room.
Esme looked to Ceri. “Can you get us all there?”
Ceri nodded. “I should be able to.”
“I can meet you there,” Alex said, standing up. “Cthylor takes me wherever I need to be.”
“Okay,” Ceri said and signed, and Alex winked out of existence. Logan thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye.
He turned, searching the living room for it, and Esme asked, “What?”
“Did anyone else see that?”
“See what?” Esme replied.
“A tentacle. I swear I saw a tentacle.”
“You probably did,” Ceri said, giving him a pat on the back. “With the protogods, it’s always tentacles.”
Esme had retrieved her own leather jacket, which was a pearlescent pink with a few too many zippers and honestly was really awesome. “So they really are a thing. I thought this might be a con job.”
“They’re not, but it would be nice if they were. They are stygian and unreasonably powerful life-forms. Which is how most of them ended up banished to another reality,” Ceri said.
Esme raised her eyebrows at that, running a hand through her asymmetrical bangs. “Is banishing Cthylor a possibility?”
Ceri sighed. “Oh, I wish. But Cthulhu banished the others because he wanted to sleep and didn’t want those assholes cramping his style.”
“These dark gods are nothing but bad news,” Ahmed said. His messenger bag was gone, but he’d probably reabsorbed it since it was made of sand. Technically he was never wearing clothes; he was simply replicating them. When he was still, he had a tendency to disappear. Or Logan continually forgot he was in the room. It was simply that no normal living being could approach the level of total stillness that Ahmed naturally achieved. Being made of sand made him as frozen as a statue if he didn’t move. “If we get into bed with them, it’s just as bad as sharing the covers with the devil or God. No offense.”
Ceri shrugged. “None taken. And you’re right, but what choice do we have?”
“Oh, I never said we could refuse the shit sandwich,” Ahmed said. “I’m merely pointing it out.”
Yep, that was classic Ahmed. He’d single-handedly convinced Logan that being immortal must suck donkey balls.
Lyn came back dressed in stretchy yoga pants and a loose, sleeveless orange hoodie, and she was barefoot. It was an outfit made to stay on during transition to full harpy. She had quite a few of them. “Okay, time for the trust circle.”
Which meant they all held hands, Ceri taking one of Logan’s hands and closing the circle by gripping Lyn’s hand on the right. Holding Ahmed’s hand was always weird. Logan was afraid of clasping it too hard and making it crumble into sand, but according to Ahmed that couldn’t happen. Logan was still worried, though. And Ahmed’s hand was always dry—as you might expect—and absolutely temperature-free. It was like an inanimate object attached to a living being. Ahmed took Esme’s hand on his other side, and Esme grasped Lyn’s hand, completing the circle. It never failed to be a little strange.
But Ceri did the thing again. One blink and they were out of Esme and Lyn’s decorous living room and in the baking-hot parking lot of some building. It wasn’t a skyscraper by any means, but it was tall enough to look exhausting.
There were a lot of cars in the parking lot but no people, so that was a bit of a break. “Damn, the pavement is really hot,” Lyn commented.
“Should have worn shoes,” Ahmed said unhelpfully.
Lyn glared at him. “Next time I’ll wear Crocs.”
“Don’t you fucking dare,” Ahmed snapped. He hated Crocs and flip-flops with an equal passion. Mainly because they were so damn ugly. Logan agreed with him, but honestly, he didn’t care either way. Not true for Ahmed, who seemed to take every fashion faux pas personally. Except he’d given up complaining about Logan’s wardrobe, having already declared him a hopeless case, and once, very meanly, accusing him of having straight-man taste. Which seemed out of line.
They crossed from the parking lot to the sidewalk, talking about how they could get people to evacuate the building, when a man walking down the sidewalk made obnoxious kissy noises and leered at Esme. “Hey, mamacita, give us a smile.”
Esme glared at him, and Logan saw, out of the corner of her eye, a golden glow, suggesting she’d just activated her evil eye. “That burrito you had for lunch isn’t sitting very well, is it?”
The man looked briefly confused, then grabbed his stomach and looked mortified. “Holy shit,” he muttered, duck walking away at a good clip. Logan noticed the back of his jeans was wet.
“Did you make him shit himself?” Logan asked. As punishments went, that was ingenious—and well deserved.
“Yeah. And I cursed him with hellacious irritable bowel syndrome that will only flare up when he’s a fucking asshole.”
Lyn chuckled, and Logan shook his head.
“He’s spending the rest of his life in the toilet,” Ahmed noted.
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” Ceri said.
“Rest of his life?” Lyn replied. “I’m willing to bet he shits himself to death this weekend.”
Oh sure, there were worse people in the world, but no one needed to go out of their way to be obnoxious. That was a low-level, but extremely pervasive, evil in society that was better off gone.
The group decided Esme would cast two spells. The first made them invisible to everyone. The second was for once they were inside the building.
The Wantanabe building was air-conditioned to within an inch of its life, and people were in the lobby, which was what they were afraid of. Demons didn’t give a shit about collateral damage.
Despite the floor-directory sign on the wall and people behind the front desk, Logan couldn’t have told you what the Wantanabe building did if his life depended on it. It was super unclear, and the sterile white-and-blue lobby gave no hints. They could sell edible pianos or custom beards for the balding hipster, for all he knew.
Esme cast the second spell, which set off all the fire alarms in the building. They watched the people behind the counter jolt at the noise, and then it was their turn to almost jump out of their skin. “I could have done that,” Alex said.
After they all settled, Lyn hissed, “Of all groups of people you could sneak up on, we’re the most lethal.” Ceri quickly translated it into sign language.
Alex kept smiling at them. Since no one filtering out of the lobby paid them any mind, presumably they were all unseen, Alex included. “I fear nothing,” they said.
No one had anything to say to that. Good for them? But who would be scared if they had an omnipotent, immortal protogod on their side? Nothing in the universe could touch them without paying dearly for it.
“So how do we find this thing?” Esme asked. “Should I throw a locator spell?”
“No need,” Ceri told her. He then closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath. Logan knew he was probably “feeling” for it. Demons had more senses than humans did. Ceri had tried to explain it once, but it was really confusing, and Logan told him he was fine living with the mystery. Expecting a being with five senses to understand ten others was a big ask.
After a moment, Ceri exhaled and opened his eyes. “Fifth floor.”
“Great,” Lyn said. Her arms were now feathered, and her fingers had become thick, razor-sharp claws that could cut through metal. So now wouldn’t be an optimum time to hand her something fragile.
“Any way to tell how many demons we’re facing?” Esme asked.
Ceri both shook his head and shrugged, a twofer of pointless gestures. “A lot is all I can say.”
“Good,” Alex said. “Cthylor is hungry.”
Alex waded through the crowd heading out of the building and walked into the stairwell, avoiding the man currently holding open the door, who didn’t see them or any of the others.
“Well, that wasn’t creepy at all,” Lyn said.
“We might want to hang back and let them take the lead,” Ceri said.
Logan frowned. Ceri was usually eager to go in first because he could kill most demons as easily as look at them. “Why?”
“Because… well, you’ll see. And you should know what the power of the protogods really is.”
“Dare I ask, why do we need to know?” Esme wondered.
Ceri gave them all a look that was almost pitying. “In case we ever have to go against them.”
Yeah, that was not ominous at all. They all shared a what-the-shit look as they followed Ceri up the fire stairs. Logan pulled out his minimachete, although between Ceri, Esme, and Lyn, he usually did nothing but bat cleanup. He was actually good with this. It was nice not to be in constant peril, although he had to admit, he did miss it from time to time. You did get kind of addicted to the adrenaline rush of not dying.
Alex decided to start on the second floor, which was odd, because why not start at the fifth, where the item was? But once Esme cast the spell that removed the glamours from the demons in the hallway, Logan realized they had to start here.
There were ten, and now that they knew they’d been rumbled, they pulled out guns and knives. Most of them were leering in their direction but largely ignoring Alex, who was ten feet ahead of them.
“If it isn’t Lucifer’s wayward son,” a green demon with a cheek piercing snarled, “and his pack of fellow mongrels. You think we didn’t know you might show up?”
“Okay, I know the witch and the birdwoman and the pretty boy,” a reddish demon said. “But who’s dreadlocks in the front, there?”
Alex said something in reply. But Logan thought he’d misheard them at first, until they repeated it. They said something in a language he’d never heard, with syllables he was sure couldn’t exist. It not only sounded wrong to his ears but started to make them hurt. All he could make out of it was something that sounded like “cffthyt rig nfary.” Was it Welsh? Alex was repeating it, and it got no clearer.
The demons looked among themselves, obviously confused, but they also winced and raised their weapons. “What the fuck language is that?” the green one asked, holding a hand to one of his ears.
Then the lights in the hall dimmed, which was odd because the light was all coming from the windows. It was like a sudden eclipse had occurred, occluding the sun. They all looked, and that was how Logan saw what was happening to the walls.
They were ordinary white walls, nothing special, except now Logan could see veins in them, full of poisonous black blood. They seemed to throb, push to the surface, crack the paint. The engorged black veins were coming out, three dimensional and pulsing with grisly life, like the building was a living thing they were hiding in.
“What the motherfucking shit…?” the green demon exclaimed, a second before one of those veins burst from the wall, wrapped itself around his thick, nearly unseen neck, and popped his head off like a bottle cap.
The other demons didn’t have time to react, as the same thing was happening to all of them almost simultaneously. What Logan took for veins were in fact tentacles, as thick and as long as giant anacondas, with white claws where suction cups would be.
“Oh my fucking God,” Lyn exclaimed. “What the fuck is going on?”
Logan was too stunned to say anything. This couldn’t be real. It had a disorienting dreamlike quality to it that convinced him maybe this was a nightmare or a defensive sigil gone horribly wrong. Something, a deep hum or a pulse almost beyond hearing, vibrated along his spine and produced an electric buzz in his head. It was like they were suddenly inside the aorta of a giant.
And then it was over.
Alex stopped speaking those painful nonsense syllables, and the tentacles and the darkness seemed to vanish at the same time, along with that electrical hum, which released them like it had been holding them immobile. Logan wavered on his feet, almost collapsing into Esme. Looking around, he expected to see holes in the wall from where all those tentacles punched through, but the walls were completely intact. The paint wasn’t even flaked. It could have been nothing but a hallucination.
But the demons were all on the floor, dead, in pools of black blood. And there wasn’t a single head anywhere. Much like the tentacles, they were simply gone.
Esme took a breath so deep it was the opposite of a gasp, and she pressed a hand to the center of her chest. “That was a reality warp,” she said, sounding panicked. “How… the power necessary to….”
“Which is why I thought you should see it,” Ceri said. He sounded low-key and grim.
Alex looked back at them, still smiling. “Cthylor is the best god.” They then went on walking, deftly avoiding the headless bodies and pools of blood.
“What were they saying?” Logan asked, since Ceri spoke all known languages. “And what language was that?”
“Unknown to Earth,” Ceri replied. “It’s the old tongue, a language specific to the protogods. They were doing a summoning invocation. ‘Cthylor break their bones, Cthylor swallow their souls, Cthylor destroy your enemies.’”
“Oh, we are fucked,” Esme said. “I mean, fuuucked. We can’t fight that kind of power.”
“Well, right now we don’t have to,” Ceri said. “And now this is Heaven and Hell’s problem. We just have to hope it remains that way.”
“What if it doesn’t?” Logan asked.
“Then we’re fucked,” Esme repeated.
Okay. As long as they were all on the same page.
Logan put away his machete, because after that display of power, it was clear that Alex and Cthylor were wiping out every single demon on each floor. How did you escape a god who could twist reality? The answer was you didn’t, if all the headless demons they kept finding were any indication. Cthylor could come out of the walls, the ceiling, the floor—anywhere. Logan imagined they could be in a solid steel bunker one mile underground and they still wouldn’t be safe. If Cthylor wanted in, she was coming in, and there was fuck all they could do about it.
But while this was as chilling as fuck—and under any other circumstance, Logan would probably be shitting his pants over it—he actually felt relatively good. Until he saw Cthylor work, he hadn’t believed Alex pushed them into a stalemate with Heaven and Hell. But now he believed it. Heaven and Hell both had enormous weapons at their disposal, but something about Cthylor was inevitable. Like the tides. Like death. Nor could he forget that weird background hum and the feeling they had been inside a humongous organism, cells in a body that honestly didn’t care if they lived or died and wouldn’t notice either way. Was that what ants felt like, whenever they found themselves among people? Afterthoughts in a world not made for them?
Finally they reached the fifth floor and more headless demon corpses. Alex stood in the center of the hall, waiting for them. “There’s still one alive, hiding. I thought you might have wanted it.”
No, that wasn’t creepy either.
No one asked where it was; they simply followed Ceri as he walked into one of the side offices. It was an office like any other, with a standard desk-and-chair setup and a tinted window looking out on the bleak downtown Seattle landscape. Ceri headed for a small room off the office and opened it to reveal a tiny private bathroom with a red demon sitting on the floor.
“Here, take it,” the demon said, shoving something across the floor toward them. It was a chunk of purple stone about the size of a snow globe, and it came to a stop before reaching Ceri’s foot. “I give up. Whatever. Please don’t feed me to Cthulhu, or whatever the fuck that thing is.” The red demon was next to the toilet, arms wrapped around his knees, looking as defeated and bereft as Logan had ever seen a demon look.
Ceri picked up the amethyst chunk. “You’re not afraid of my father?”
“Of course I am, but he can only kill me. Those chthonic fuckers—” He ran a hand over his face. He was one of those demons that looked like he had a severe underbite, with fanglike lower teeth sticking out over his thin red lips. Since he was sitting scrunched up, it was hard to get an idea of his size, but he was built like a fireplug. Logan guessed he was of the type of short and stocky demons that were surprisingly strong and generally decent fighters. He’d never seen one give up before. “—they can do anything to you. And they usually do. Torture and death aren’t enough for them. They enjoy mind-fucking you until you eat your own hand and aren’t sure if you’re alive or dead.”
“Have you sent word back to Hell about this?”
He scoffed. It would have been a laugh if there’d been any strength in it. “Yeah, I’m sure there’s been a dozen ‘SOS, we’re completely fucked’ messages sent back home. For all the good it will do. You can’t defend against Cthulhu. All you can do is hope you never cross his radar.”
“So you all knew this was a real thing?” Lyn demanded. “How did I not know they were real?”
“Because your life never depended on avoiding them,” the demon replied.
Ceri handed the chunk of amethyst to Logan. He took it and was kind of surprised it felt warm and a bit heavier than he expected. Should have been a warning sign for whoever bought it, but nope. Most humans were oblivious to the supernatural happening right under their noses.
Crouching down, Ceri addressed the demon. “I assume you want to live through this and not end up Cthylor’s chew toy, yes?”
The demon bugged his eyes out at him. “Of-fucking-course, man. Haven’t you heard what I’m saying? I ain’t gonna fuck with Cthulhu.”
“Then go back to Hell, warn them who we have on our side, and tell some sympathetic demons that, if they want to avoid an apocalypse showdown with Cthulhu and his kind, maybe it would behoove you to change leadership.”
His eyes bugged out again. Logan hadn’t believed that was physically possible. “A fucking coup? In Hell?”
“Either that or Cthylor. Your choice.”
“Oh man, I fucking hate politics.” The demon made a fist and slammed the floor, but not very hard. He was fucked here, and he knew it. “I don’t get killed, and I don’t get turned over to Cthylor, okay?”
“Don’t fuck us over and we won’t fuck you over.”
He nodded. “Okay, good. I can’t promise a coup, though.”
“Try your best… what’s your name?”
“Bucket.”
Lyn barked a laugh but quickly slapped a transformed hand over her mouth. Demon names could be really odd because Lucifer named most demons and clearly got bored at a certain point, because a whole bunch of them were simply nouns. So Ceri’s name being Cerberus wasn’t actually the worst possible result. “Okay, Bucket, I’m counting on you. Don’t let me down.”
The demon’s electric grape eyes were more snugly nestled in their sockets now. He didn’t look comfortable but more like he understood he wasn’t going to die in a second. “Don’t turn me over to Cthylor and we’re all good.”
They left Bucket sitting on the floor of some executive’s office bathroom and found Alex waiting in the hall. “He lives,” Ceri told them. “At least for now.”
Alex shrugged. “Whatever.”
They decided to take the elevator down because they didn’t need to walk through any more demon blood or corpses, and Lyn was still barefoot. But they hadn’t even reached the ground floor before Ceri canted his head to the side in the way he did when he picked up something strange, and Alex scowled as if they’d just had an awful thought. “It reeks of divinity,” they said as the elevator finally stopped.
“Was there a point to that non sequitur…?” Ahmed wondered.
Alex didn’t reply, but the door opened, and Ceri immediately put an arm out, shoving Logan behind him. While being moved, he saw why.
The lobby was full of angels.
It was like a convention of yoga teachers. Man-bunned Raphael was there, front and center, joined by six more angels, mostly in the guise of white people who really liked flowing tunics and yoga pants in earth tones, with a breakdown of three men and three women, although outer guise was never a tell on gender.
Ceri had a hand on the hilt of Godslayer but hadn’t pulled it yet. “You can’t win this fight,” Ceri told Raphael. It was 100 percent true, even before Cthylor was added to the group.
“You’ve gotten away with too many artifacts as it is,” Raphael said. “And we cannot allow the Scourge to be released. Give it to us and we will destroy it.”
“It isn’t yours,” Ceri replied. “It belongs to Hell. Which makes it mine.”
One of the angels with Raphael, a brunet woman who looked like she was one or two bad days away from a midlife crisis, leaned over and whispered, “There’s strange chthonic energy here.”
Alex sounded like they were whispering their invocation in the back of the elevator, and Esme was casting a spell under her breath. Logan had dipped a hand inside his jacket, where he had an unholy Molotov. They probably wouldn’t need any of those defenses once Cthylor showed up.
Raphael and the other angels all held their hands up, palms facing them, and Raphael said something in angel voice.
Much like true demon language was guttural and abrasive, true angel voice was bombastic and had the bass cranked all the way to eleven. It hit them like an invisible wrecking ball, and they all collapsed in the elevator, the pressure of the noise like a dropkick to all of their inner ears and internal organs. Even Ahmed was reduced to a pile of sand in the corner, and Alex, who may have not been able to hear it, certainly felt it and dropped to their knees. They were all stunned.
Save for Ceri, of course. He took a step back, but that was his only reaction. Again, son of Satan—he was made to take anything. Although Logan could hear nothing but a sort of high-pitched whine, he saw Ceri’s lips move and knew he’d probably said something like, “Is that the best you’ve got?”
The strangest thing of all? No matter the fact that they’d partially deafened him, when the angels spoke again, Logan could hear them as clearly as if they hadn’t tried to rupture every eardrum in the room. “Give us the Scourge and we won’t hurt the mortals any more.”
Logan imagined Ceri gave them a hearty “Fuck you” as he emerged from the elevator, pulling out Godslayer. Raphael produced a sword of his own, one made of nothing but fire. Hell wasn’t the only one with a weapon that could kill anything.
The other angels made room as Raphael’s and Ceri’s swords clashed, Raphael’s flaming sword more than a match for Godslayer, as they were somehow polar opposites while still being swords that killed everything. One was simply made of all-consuming darkness, while the other consisted of all-consuming light. To Logan, it didn’t matter if the swords were made of darkness or light—the fact that they were both all-consuming should be fucking worrisome regardless.
Looking around the elevator, he saw Alex had recovered enough to put their hand on the wall and was saying something he couldn’t hear. Hell, Alex wasn’t hearing it either, but that had never stopped them before. Ahmed was still a pile of sand, but Lyn had her feathers and talons out and waded into the fray, despite the blood leaking from her right ear. With a single swipe, she disemboweled an angel, the guts falling slippery and red to the floor. You couldn’t kill an angel like that, since they didn’t have true bodies in a physical sense, but you could traumatize them for damn sure, and Lyn had seemingly done just that.
Esme was still sitting on the floor of the elevator, but she had unleashed her evil eye, and one of the angels’ faces was melting like candle wax next to a red-hot radiator. Logan’s friends may have been temporarily deafened and knocked on their asses, but there was a reason both Heaven and Hell were still battling them, despite their being mostly mortal. They could kick some major ass.
Except for him. Logan always felt his mortality acutely in these situations, but he would follow Lyn’s lead anyway. If he couldn’t hurt them in this form, maybe he could stun and traumatize them. He stood up, pulled out his machete, and jumped into the fight. The first angel that crossed his path got a machete in the head. He looked so surprised about it.
Logan’s hearing was leaking back, a sort of trickle of noise that let him know Lyn and Esme were successfully traumatizing angels by tearing them to pieces and melting faces respectively. That guy with persistent irritable bowel syndrome was never going to know how lucky he was. Lyn also kicked one angel across the room and through the back wall, where he left a roughly angel-shaped hole on his way out.
As swordfighters, Ceri and Raphael were evenly matched. Whenever one of them got an opening, the other would parry or gracefully dodge out of the way, and the looks on their faces remained deathly grim. There was no trash talking, no banter—they each wanted to kill the other. What was there to say?
Logan had just beheaded an angel, who seemed deeply confused by this development, when the windows turned black. This time, out in it, Logan could see it wasn’t a dimming, more that it was like a bloom of ink over the windows, rapid and gloomier than true darkness. Gooseflesh busted out all over his body, starting from his scalp all the way down to his toes, and he could taste something like ashes in his mouth. His muscles instantly weakened, and it seemed to take everything he had left to keep from collapsing. Cthylor’s approach was something he could feel right down to his marrow. It was death coming for him, as inescapable and unavoidable as being tied to the tracks in the path of a speeding train. This must be what a bug feels like the millisecond before it’s squashed beneath a heel. It was so much bigger than him, and there was nothing he could do to make it see him. He was simply nothing to this monstrous thing. Humanity, angels, demons—all of them nothing. Humbling wasn’t the word for this feeling. It was far too weak and could not capture the empty despair at the base of it. The void was alive, and it was coming to eat him, and there was fuck all he or anyone else could do about it.
“Cthulhu is coming,” one of the few unharmed angels shouted, sounding equally fascinated and horrified. “Why is Cthulhu coming?”
Raphael stopped his sword fight with Ceri long enough to shout, “Leave, now!”
Those muscular black tentacles burst through the walls and the windows. Most of the angels winked out, fleeing the scene, but a couple weren’t fast enough, and Cthylor did the same thing she did to the demons—popped the heads off their bodies. But unlike the demons, the bodies fell and did not bleed. Angels only had blood if they bothered with that detail, and most didn’t.
Logan shivered like he was about to fly apart, his teeth clacking together painfully, and felt his air passages seeming to constrict. It wasn’t actual cold; his body was simply translating it as such. The sense of doom Cthylor dragged in her shadow was suffocating. If he didn’t die from her touch, he might die from hopelessness. He had dropped to his knees but was only aware of it belatedly, as his head was packed full of cotton wool and terror. He had to remember to breathe because he wasn’t sure he was doing that.
Suddenly Ceri crouched beside him and put his arms around him, holding him tight and giving him a kiss on the forehead. Warmth spread over Logan from his scalp down, and he was pretty sure he was breathing again. “The chthonic gods drag an aura of fear with them so powerful, it alone could kill a person,” Ceri told him. “Next time, maybe stay back, huh?”
Only as the chills left him did Logan realize Ceri had healed him with that kiss. That was nice of him. “You know I can’t promise that.”
Ceri stroked the back of his neck. “I know. But try for me, huh?”
“I will.” With warmth returned to his entire body and that feeling that he was suffocating gone, Logan could think objectively again. No wonder the return of Cthulhu would be the end of the world. Who could function under that sway? It was somehow worse than death.
“Nobody saved me an angel to kill?” Ahmed asked. He was back in his human form, straightening his sleeve cuffs, like that was a thing he ever needed to do.
“Once Cthylor shows up, the party’s pretty much over,” Esme admitted.
“She clearly isn’t into sharing,” Lyn said.
“You guys are really good,” Alex said, emerging from the elevator. “I see why Cthylor chose you.”
“We’re pretty much the only game in town,” Logan said. Ceri turned toward Alex and translated it into sign language.
“Perhaps, but Cthylor would want nothing to do with you if you sucked,” Alex replied.
That seemed fair. No one joined a team to lose.
Although their ears were still ringing a bit, no one was actually hurt. The only thing Logan gave the angels was that they didn’t seem to want to hurt them that much—save for Ceri. They wanted to full-on murder him, but they couldn’t quite figure out how to do it. Maybe Raphael’s sword could, if he could stab Ceri, but so far he hadn’t been good enough. Logan was glad about that.
Logan, Lyn, Ahmed, and Esme re-formed their trust circle, and Ceri took them home again, or more accurately, to his and Logan’s home. Technically, it was Ceri’s place, but bought under an alias so no demons with paperwork skills could track him down that way. (His alias was Chris Johnson, a name so anonymous he may as well have called himself John Doe.) They didn’t have the good taste of Lyn and Esme—mainly, Logan let Ceri decorate it however he wanted, because Logan didn’t give a good goddamn about any of it. He’d slept in cars, trailers, and once he’d squatted in an abandoned building. As long as the place had electricity and indoor plumbing, he was happy.
Ceri’s tastes tended toward the dramatic and abstract, with a touch of the whimsical. Therefore, their living room walls were a bright, grassy green, and their carpet was an exceedingly faint blue-gray. They had a blue plaid couch, a burgundy armchair, a coffee table that looked like a frosty bend of acrylic (which is what it was), and a tall spiky black tree in the corner that looked like some kind of medieval torture device but was in fact some smartass’s idea of a coatrack. While it wasn’t nearly as heavy as it looked, Logan still thought he could kill someone with it if he absolutely had to.
Ceri also had a burgeoning multimedia collage going on one wall of their living room (there was one in their bedroom as well). Ceri didn’t frame art, or at least wasn’t accustomed to. He picked up strange postcards or pictures and put them up on the wall. It was a bit college-dorm-room style, but it was kind of charming. Ceri probably had a career as a performance or mixed-media artist awaiting him, assuming he survived the apocalypse.
Despite Alex not being part of the circle and not having been to their house before, they somehow followed them there. But Logan was willing to write this—and all further feats by Alex—off as Cthulhu myth magic. No matter that it probably wasn’t magic, they were still the overly powered boss at the end of the video game. Fine, whatever. Logan didn’t care as long as Cthylor didn’t get close to him with that fear aura ever again.
Ceri put the amethyst chunk of rock on their bluish-white plastic coffee table, and they all stared at it a moment.
“So how do we get the Scourge out?” Ahmed asked. “Do we break it? I can get a hammer.”
Ceri held a hand up at him. “No. There’s a ritual.”
Ahmed groaned and hung his head. “I hate rituals,” he muttered.
“We all hate rituals,” Logan told him. Esme cleared her throat. “Almost all of us hate rituals. But they’re a necessary evil sometimes.”
“Do we even want to wake it up?” Lyn asked. “Should we have the Scourge running around loose?” She had a few stray feathers on her arms, but her hands were back to normal.
“I think it’s better awake and imprinted on us,” Ceri said. “If it remains in this form, it is much easier to steal.”
Logan had to admit that was a damn good point. Truth be told, though, he was simply ceding this to Ceri because he had to know what was best in this scenario. The Scourge was still a new concept to Logan, but hey, hellhounds and hellcats had to come from somewhere.
“Okay, so what does the ritual entail?” Esme asked. “If you need stuff for it, I’ve probably got it.”
“We’re going to need a Seal of Solomon drawn in blood,” Ceri said. “My blood.”
“Oh, fun,” Esme said like it wasn’t. “Okay, so, I can draw the seal, but the blood thing I’m gonna leave up to you.”
“Probably for the best,” Ceri agreed. “After that, I have to say a few words and bleed a bit more on the stone. My blood should activate the Scourge and free it from its prison.”
Lyn nodded. “And that doesn’t sound creepy at all.”
Ceri rolled his eyes. “It’s Hell. It’s all about blood rituals.”
“If there’s anything I can do to help, I’d be happy to,” Alex said, smiling.
While the rest of them exchanged wary glances, Ahmed simply cut to the chase. “We barely know you. You seem to be on our side, but we really have no idea of your intentions.”
Lyn sighed. “And I thought I was tactless.”
Rather than smite him, or whatever they could do, Alex shrugged. “Ask me whatever you want. I assure you my end goal is the same as yours.”
“All right,” Ahmed said. He did like gossip, so this was a good chance for him to find some, assuming there was any to be had. “Do you have family?”
“Left alive? No. Cthylor is my family now.”
Ahmed must have picked up on the thread of this. “Did Cthylor kill your family?”
Alex nodded. “They tried to have me killed. It was only fair.”
Ahmed dipped his head as if that was reasonable. Maybe it was. Child abusers deserved everything they fucking got, and if letting your kid be ritualistically murdered by a cult wasn’t child abuse, Logan didn’t know what was.
But Ahmed had clearly hit a wall as far as questions went. It was difficult to imagine Alex would reveal something like they were an avid knitter or something, although that was possible. “Where’d you get your boots?” he finally asked. “I like them. Good focal piece.”
“Thank you,” Alex said, looking down at them. “I got them at a thrift shop in San Francisco.”
“You’re bound to Cthylor in some way. How?” Esme asked.
Alex’s eyes, which were usually so dark they were nearly black, seemed to now be the mellow amber color of aged whiskey. It could have been the lighting, but Logan didn’t think so. Their eyes had changed color. Did that mean something? “Wasn’t I clear? As I said, Cthylor came to me while I was being sacrificed. She agreed to keep me alive and kill my enemies as long as I functioned as her messenger.”
“So she gave you some of her energy?” Esme guessed.
Alex shrugged. “Maybe. I’m not sure anything’s quite that straightforward with beings of her ilk.”
“That’s correct,” Ceri agreed. “A human couldn’t channel energy of that level without immediately exploding. Even the tiniest bump of it would obliterate the entire West Coast.”
“So what happened?” Esme asked. Logan was curious too. “How are you still alive and acting as Cthylor’s messenger?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Ceri broke in before Alex could answer, if they were going to. Logan and the others all stared at him with the same puzzled expression. Save for Alex, who kept smiling. “Cthylor altered reality around Alex. Altered it until they were alive again.”
“Okay, I’m just gonna say it,” Lyn said. “What the fuck does that mean, exactly? I mean, how did those tentacles burst through the walls and kill all those demons without breaking the walls, and yet still render the demons dead? It makes no fucking sense.”
“Cthulhu—and by extension, Cthylor—drag an aura of fluctuating reality with them,” Ceri explained. “Think of it as a field of unreality. Anything can happen in it, and what happens is real, even when the field withdraws. As for the tentacles bursting through the wall, we can’t actually look upon Cthylor and survive. You realize that, yes?”
“So what did we see?” Logan asked.
“A hallucination,” Ceri said. “An approximation of Cthylor’s unreality field, reaching out and decapitating everything deemed enemy.”
Alex was smiling and nodding through all of this. “Even I can’t really see Cthylor. I might be the messenger, but Cthylor is too grand a presence for our inferior eyes.”
“Did I mention the protogods are really full of themselves?” Ceri said.
“Aren’t all gods full of themselves?” Ahmed countered.
No one responded to that; it was true. Even Ceri threw his hands up in defeat.
They decided to do the ritual in the kitchen, since it had a washable floor and there was going to be a lot of blood. Logan didn’t like the sound of that, but Esme assured him she could throw a healing spell if she had to. Ceri pointed out he was Lucifer’s son and pretty fucking indestructible, so maybe not worry about him so much. Ceri gave Logan a kiss on the cheek and leaned into him for a few seconds, which was enough for Logan to stabilize. He thought of Ceri as human, mortal, fallible, like most of the rest of them. But was he immortal or not? Which of Lucifer’s rules applied to him, and which didn’t? Their application seemed random. Being a hybrid organism made him singular in ways that even Satan himself probably hadn’t expected.
Logan held the bowl while Ceri cut his hand and bled into it, and it was nearly half-full with a distressing amount of blood before Ceri slapped a large gauze pad over the cut and tied it off. He could heal much faster than anyone else, but Logan still hated seeing it.
The symbol was complicated to make, so both Esme and Ceri drew it while the others looked on. Lyn helped herself to a beer from their fridge, and once Logan gave her a dirty look, she tossed him one. He figured what the hell; it might help him cope with all of this.
Ahmed got bored and wandered off. Logan didn’t like the idea of him snooping around the house—which he was obviously doing—but he couldn’t think of a way to stop him unless he chased after him with a vacuum cleaner. He let the idea of confining Ahmed to a Shop-Vac amuse him for a few minutes.
Alex sat quietly, watching everything as if memorizing it for later. Logan offered them a drink, but they declined. Much like Ahmed, they could reach a stillness that seemed virtually impossible for a living being, and yet, Alex wasn’t made of sand. Were they? He couldn’t say what reality alteration Cthylor had made to Alex to make them a living messenger. Or undead messenger? Now he wondered.
Finally, Esme and Ceri finished the symbol, and Lyn brought the chunk of amethyst in and put it in the center of the thing. Ceri cut his hand open again, speaking some of that demon language that, while not as painful as Alex’s protogod tongue, still sounded guttural and unpleasant. He bled on the rock and intoned words Logan had no hope of understanding while the rest of them watched and waited, Esme standing off to the side, ready to jump in with some magic if necessary.
After about a minute, the amethyst cracked, so loudly it almost sounded like a gunshot. Black smoke began pouring out of the crystal, first slowly and low to the ground, but gradually picking up speed and height. “Everyone stand back,” Ceri warned. “I’m going to try and control its size, but this thing can get big.”
“How big?” Logan wondered. Their kitchen wasn’t huge.
“Uh, maybe jumbo-jet sized? I’m not sure. It’s been a while since I heard about the Scourge.”
“You couldn’t mention that first thing?” Well, at least Ceri was the Prince of Hell. He could probably afford to get their roof fixed.
The smoke began to take on a shape. At first Logan was pretty sure it was horse-shaped, but then the legs shrank and the body lengthened, and then he began to see the dragon. Ceri said some more demonic things, and it contracted once its half-formed head hit the ceiling. It didn’t leave any damage, which was good.
Now details started to emerge: scales and teeth, claws and wings, and a crest like a mohawk on its head. It was still roughly intangible and see-through, but it shoved the kitchen table into the far wall.
Ceri managed to talk it down to the size of a quarter horse, but that must have been the limit because it shrank no further.
What stood before them now was an ink-black dragon. Its all black features made it seem oddly faceless while still remaining fairly detailed. At least you could see its scales more clearly than its eyes. When it opened its mouth, smoke escaped, but it was mostly translucent.
Ceri managed to stroke its chest somehow, and he said something in demon, gesturing at Logan. Now Logan was curious. “What are you doing?”
“It’s yours. How do you feel about a new tattoo?”
These shifts of topic left Logan mentally reeling. “What do you mean it’s mine? And I guess it depends on the tattoo. Why?”
“I don’t need another weapon,” Ceri explained, grabbing his arm. “I have Godslayer, and I’m the son of Satan. But I worry about you. This will put my mind at ease, at least.”
Something was happening to his arm where Ceri was touching him. It didn’t hurt; it just felt weird. But before he could ask, Ceri let him go, and Logan saw he had a new tattoo on the inside of his right forearm. It was a small deep-black pentagram, reversed, with a few minute details, such as something that looked like a tiny wing and another thing that looked like claw marks. “Now it’s bound to you,” Ceri explained. “You can summon it at any time. Although, if it senses you’re in distress, you won’t have to summon it.”
Logan looked at him, surprised. “Instant backup?”
He nodded. “You are its master. It will protect you to the end of its life.”
Logan was awestruck, and it took all his willpower not to tear up. “And it can hurt anything?”
Ceri nodded. “It’s a hellhound/hellcat times a thousand. It can hurt demons, angels, gods… maybe even Cthulhu, for a bit.”
“If you’re really lucky,” Alex added.
Ceri nodded at that. “Protogods are ludicrously over-powered.” Ceri went back to the Scourge, patted its chest, and with a tilt of his head, tacitly asked Logan to join him. He did, but cautiously, as he still wasn’t sure how this worked.
Once he was close, Ceri grabbed his hand and put it on the helldragon’s chest. It took a moment to solidify under his palm, but it did, and something that was half-stone, half-flesh pulsed beneath his palm. Feeling the sharp edges of its scales, he realized its skin alone was a weapon. There was heat within the beast, but there was extreme cold as well. It nearly throbbed with dark, ancient energy, like some terrible abyss barely contained within stony skin.
Its muzzle-shaped head darted down, and it licked Logan’s hair. It had breath like brimstone and a snake-shaped black tongue. He relaxed as he realized it wasn’t tasting him, simply attempting to groom him.
“You should give it a name,” Ceri said, as Logan continued petting the Scourge. How he wasn’t slicing the shit out of his hand was a mystery. Ceri continued translating all of this in sign language for Alex. Logan was dying to know what helldragon looked like in sign language but decided to ask later.
“Is it male or female?” Logan wondered.
“Yes,” Ceri said.
“Oh.” Not helpful, but okay. Ceri taught him quite early that humans were the only ones who tried to adhere religiously to a gender binary. The universe and everything else in it didn’t behave that way. Only stupidass humans, which made all kinds of sense.
“Rover’s good,” Lyn suggested.
“It needs personality,” Esme said. “Something drag-queenish. What about Amanda Huntandkill? Mandy for short.”
“How about Tineen?” Ahmed, who had returned from poking around the house, said.
“I like Nyarghathal,” Alex said. Either that or they had something stuck in their throat.
Logan looked at the hellbeast, which seemed to waver between semisolid and translucent, and tried to think of what you could possibly call such a magnificent and terrifying thing. There wasn’t a word for it in English, which seemed like such a limited language. After a few more seconds of thought, he decided on the first thing that came into his head. “What about Talon?”
Ceri nodded. “Talon. Sounds good.”
“I still like Amanda Huntandkill,” Esme said.
“We’ll name our next cat that,” Lyn said, giving her a reassuring pat on the shoulder.
Logan got brave enough to try to pet Talon’s muzzle, and it lowered its face to allow him to do that. Up close, he could see its onyx-black eyes, the same color as its stony skin and fearsome clutch of fangs, and he detected no hostility coming from the great monster. No ill will at all, but in the back of his mind, he still got a sense of the void, of the abyss this thing was simply the extension of. This was power, as frightening and devastating as Godslayer. No wonder the angels wanted it as much as the demons. This was Godslayer with its own intent.
“Do we need to clean out the garage so it has a place to stay, or…?”
“No. It doesn’t exist normally in the same space we do,” Ceri said and then said something else in demon language. Talon seemed to wink out of existence.
“Did you send it to Hell?” Logan asked.
Ceri shook his head, and to all their surprise, Alex answered. “It exists between spaces, between dimensions. Which is why its tangibility is always in flux. It’s essentially a monster of quantum mechanics.”
Logan knew he wasn’t smart enough to understand that, but he did know a little something about quantum physics. “So you’re saying it’s Schrödinger’s Cat, but back for revenge?”
“Not really, but that sounds great,” Ceri replied.
“How do I summon it?”
“You just say its name. Command it. You can send it away the same way. The tattoo is your connection to Talon. Physical and metaphysical.”
Logan nodded. He didn’t completely understand, but he didn’t have to, not as long as it worked. And having his own guard dragon sounded hella cool. Wait until the angels got a load of this.
After the excitement of releasing a new helldragon, they had to get to the more mundane realities of cleaning up. Esme cast a spell that got rid of everything—all the blood and the evidence—while Ceri went upstairs to see if he could contact any of his squealers in Hell, to see what they made of the situation. He usually did a special ritual for that, and Logan knew to leave him to it. Ahmed wandered off again, as he usually did, and Logan poured some mint iced tea for himself, Lyn, and Esme. As for Alex, they had disappeared when Logan wasn’t looking.
As they sat at the repositioned kitchen table, he couldn’t help but ask, “Can we get a reading now, see if anything’s changed?”
Esme frowned slightly. “We could. But are you sure? I can’t guarantee there’s been any change whatsoever.”
Logan knew it was kind of dangerous asking Esme to read the cards for him. Unlike most “spiritualists,” Esme’s Tarot cards would actually tell her correct things about the future. Most Tarot cards were fancied-up playing cards and couldn’t be said to be anything special, but Esme’s charmed Tarot could tell the subject of the reading how they were going to die, if they were stupid enough to ask. She would only do readings occasionally, and only related to specific, preapproved questions, because cards that were actually truthful could be a weapon. It was weird how most people counted on fortune-tellers being wrong.
Esme moved her tea aside and pulled out the purple velvet bag that held her cards. She didn’t always have it with her, but she could produce it out of nowhere with a spell for that purpose. She held the cards in her bare hands for a moment and then shuffled them three times. After that, she started laying them out in a Celtic cross pattern.
She had long readings and short ones, with the long giving a bit more detail. This was one of the longer ones, as Logan had requested.
She’d done this specific reading for him three times, and in all those times, the cards had been the exact same ones, predicting the apocalypse and ruination. This time, as he had hoped, the cards were different.
The first few cards were the same, which Esme quickly pointed out, setting the rest of the deck aside. “As before, we still have the World as the base card, with the Lovers and Two of Pentacles crossing. And there’s Gill, lurking in your past,” she said, tapping the Page of Cups, another returning card. “But here’s where it starts to deviate. The Four of Swords appears, indicating a period of rest, probably connected to the High Priestess, who is Alex. The Nine of Wands follows, suggesting a long battle, but one that’s definitely winnable. Your fears are the Tower, which—duh, no shit—is complete ruination, and the Chariot is your hopes, which is conquest or the winning of the battle. The ending card… hmm.”
“What?” The card was the Moon. Simply by being around Esme, he knew more about Tarot cards than he’d ever wanted to know, but he really didn’t know this card.
“The Moon suggests unforeseen perils. Maybe there’s something we’re unaware of that could tip things against us?”
“I thought nothing beat Cthulhu.”
She nodded, tapping the Moon card against her bottom lip. “Nothing does. It might be more personal, something that would give the apocalypse side the edge.”
“That makes sense,” Lyn interjected. “If you know you can’t win the wider war, you start focusing on smaller battles.”
Esme nodded. “You carve little places out where you can.”
Logan nodded along, pretending he was as good at strategy as Lyn, which was fucking impossible. Lyn had worked a long time as a mercenary. She was their go-to strategy expert. “So since Heaven and Hell both know they can’t kill Cthulhu, they’re going to microfocus on the weak spots of the team. Which is us.”
Lyn gave him a big sarcastic smile and tapped his arm. “You mean you.”
“I have a helldragon now, thank you very much.”
“I also think it isn’t physical weakness that they’ll be targeting,” Esme said, holding the Moon card out at Lyn. “This is often a card of psychic energy.”
Lyn sat back with a scowl. “So they’re going to attack us psychically?”
“I think that’s a good possibility, yes. They’ll leave Ceri out, because he could defend against that, and I doubt either of them could get to Ahmed.”
“What about Alex?” Logan wondered.
She considered that, fanning herself with the card. “If they have any kind of psychic link with Cthylor, neither Heaven nor Hell will come out of that alive, so I doubt they’ll chance it. Which leaves the rest of us.”
“How do we fight something like that?” Logan wondered. Gill walked into his dreams whenever she wanted. If Heaven could do it, Hell could too, and who knew what they would try?
Esme shrugged and grimaced, an expression twofer that was never good. “I can attempt some protection spells, hand out some charms, but honestly on that level? It’s difficult to fight.”
“Which makes it perfect for them,” Lyn said, hanging her head with a sigh. Yes, that wasn’t a positive development.
Ceri returned, and Logan looked at him hopefully. “So how goes it in Hell?”
“Full red alert,” Ceri reported. “They really don’t like that Cthulhu is now playing favorites, at least via his daughter, and everyone’s in panic mode. Again, no wants to deal with Cthulhu. For perhaps the first time ever, we have them running scared.”
“Any news on Heaven?” Esme wondered.
Ceri stood behind his chair and casually put a hand on Logan’s shoulder. “They’re radio silent, which, as we know, is super weird for them.”
“Of course they’re fucking scared,” Lyn said. “I’m scared, and Alex is theoretically on our side.”
“Theoretically?” Ceri asked. “You think they might betray us?”
“No. But we have to face facts that Cthylor is working with us only because it’s convenient. The moment it’s not, we might have a problem.”
“One disaster at a time, please,” Logan said, sitting forward and scrubbing his hand through his hair. He was tired, and he wasn’t sure why he was tired.
“Did the cards have good news?” Ceri asked.
Esme shrugged. “We’ve turned the tide in our favor. But we may be more open to psychic attacks and other small-guard actions.”
Ceri squeezed Logan’s shoulder, reassuring him without words. “We always knew they’d be more dangerous once we turned up the heat. Heaven and Hell are both big enough that losing seems unfathomable to them. They’re not going to take it well.”
Logan reached up and put his hand over Ceri’s. It was simply comforting to know he was there. “And it’s hard to argue that Heaven or Hell wouldn’t sink so low, because we know they would.”
Esme nodded and gulped down the rest of her tea in one go before standing up. Lyn did the same. “Okay, I’ll see if I can find some charms or spells to help us. Maybe we can even think up ways to go after them. Counteroffensive.”
Ceri nodded. “Sounds good. Tell me if you find anything.”
“Back at ya,” Esme said and then threw a spell that had her and Lyn blink out in an instant.
Logan sighed and laid his head on the table. “I think I’m tired enough to sleep, but I know if I do, bad shit’s going to happen.”
Ceri pulled out a chair and sat down beside him. “What if I have a solution to that?”
Logan raised his head. “You do?”
“Maybe. Angels can walk in dreams, and so can demons. But there’s a caveat.”
“Of course there is.”
“You have to be susceptible to a demon walking into your dreams for that to happen.”
Logan frowned as he considered that. Did he have any idea what that meant? He tried to fake it, but no, he couldn’t. “Which means what, exactly?”
“Yeah, I was pondering that myself. Supposedly you have to be open.”
“Open? What does that mean in this context?”
Ceri grimaced in a way that Logan didn’t think was positive. “It could mean a few things, only one of which I think we could work with. Have you ever done ecstasy?”
“The club drug? No.”
“Have you ever wanted to?”
Logan grinned. “I have, actually. Will that leave me open to demon dream-walking?”
“It’ll be a big help. I should be able to get you the rest of the way.”
“Then let’s go do some drugs.”
Of course he was being flippant, but Logan had never said no to a bit of a chemical vacation. It was basically the only kind of vacation he ever had. Not that he went crazy with it. He knew better than that. It probably wasn’t fair to think, but he didn’t want to end up like his mother. Although she was right about the angels and demons stuff, she was still probably mentally ill. He blamed the demons and angels for that. They were enough to drive anyone crazy.
Ceri was able to conjure up a pure version of the drug, because who needed to buy it when you could make your own, and Logan didn’t know how you got ready for this, but he got a bottle of water before retiring to the bedroom, having heard it could be dehydrating. He also stripped down to his boxers, because he was going to be sleeping at some point, right? Or sort of? Really, he didn’t know how this was going to go.
He was sitting up when Ceri came into the room, still dressed as he was earlier, but now holding something in his hand. He smirked slightly, noting Logan’s state of undress. “How do you think this is going to end?”
“Well, dream-walking, right? That sounds like sleeping is involved. Although the ecstasy-taking might mean sex, so I’m ready for anything.”
Ceri smiled, blushing slightly, which was always weird. Who knew it was possible to make the son of Satan blush? “That isn’t exactly what I meant by open.”
“Maybe not, but I hear ecstasy sex is great.”
“Not if you’re too drugged up to consent.”
“What are you talking about? I’m consenting now. Let’s get freaky, baby.”
Ceri laughed, as Logan hoped he would. He sat on the edge of the bed, still smiling. “Leave it to me to pick the most ridiculous human to fall in love with.”
“The straightlaced are so boring.” He brushed hair back from Ceri’s forehead, and not for the first time, he wondered about the feeling of his hair. He would swear it changed. Sometimes it felt like feathers, and other times it almost felt like fur. Soft and alien.
Ceri handed him the pill, and Logan didn’t even look at it before tossing it in his mouth and washing it down with a couple of swallows of water. Once he replaced the water bottle on the nightstand, he asked, “So are you going to start the house music or not?”
Ceri shook his head. “Aren’t you the punk-or-die person?”
“No, I like angry music. Metal, punk, rap, even experimental is fine as long as I can hear the rage.” Ceri pulled himself back on the bed until he was sitting beside Logan. This room was a haven of blue and green tones, because Ceri found them soothing, and Logan hadn’t had a strong opinion on it. But it was actually nice to have this calm, quiet room where they could tuck themselves away and breathe after days of fighting demons and angels and the end of the world.
Logan rested his head against Ceri’s shoulder. “Is there a reason why you haven’t dropped your glamour?”
He sighed. “I didn’t know if I should. I mean, you’re doing mind-altering drugs, and….”
“What, you think I’m gonna freak out because of how you are? You know I think you’re beautiful.”
“You’re just saying that to be kind. I mean, it’s very sweet of you—”
Rather than have this conversation again, Logan grabbed Ceri’s face, turned it toward him, and kissed him. He ran his hands through that ridiculously soft hair and then broke away. “Listen, you idiot. I am not saying this ever again. You are beautiful.”
“I’m cut in half.”
“And both sides are stunning. It’s not fair. Some of us can barely squeak by with the one side.”
“Says Mr. Male Model.”
Logan patted his stomach. Okay, it wasn’t big, but it was definitely there. “I don’t have the abs for that.”
Ceri touched his stomach, deftly avoiding the ticklish area. “Six-packs are way overrated. I mean, if I wanted to have sex with a statue, I would.”
“Ooh, are we uncovering a new fetish?”
Ceri poked him in the stomach. “Don’t smart-mouth me. Remember, I’m the Destroyer.”
“Yeah, well, supposedly I’m a nasturtium.”
“Nephilim.”
“Whatever. You’d think that would at least come with an iTunes gift card or something.”
“But it does. You could become a full-fledged angel when you die.”
“Oh, fuck that noise. Who wants anything to do with those self-righteous bastards? And besides, how is that a prize exactly?”
Ceri shrugged. “Immortality?”
“As one of those winged farts? Again, how is that not a punishment?”
“Got me.” He took off a ring he was wearing. It looked like a serpent biting its tail, carved with great detail. You could even feel the scales on it. It was a ring he stole from his dad before saving Logan and fleeing Hell. It had some sentimental ties to it, if nothing else. As soon as he put it on the nightstand and looked back at Logan, Ceri was back to his usual self.
Logan cupped his jaw and ran a thumb over his crimson skin. He liked its smooth but leathery feel, although Ceri never believed him when he told him that. “Sure we don’t have time to fool around before the drug kicks in?”
“I have to concentrate, and you are way too distracting, mister. Especially half-naked and showing off all your tattoos.”
Logan glanced down at himself, checking to see if he had more tattoos than he thought. He really didn’t have that many. He had the No Gods, No Masters tattoo encircling his left bicep, the three warding sigils that Esme gave him—a sort of pentagram-looking one for general protection, a knife-looking one specifically for protection from negative energy spells, and one that had the look of a shield that was supposed to help him withstand physical attacks, though considering how many times he’d had the shit kicked out of him, he wondered if that one worked at all. He also had his newest tattoo, other than his helldragon tattoo, down near his right hip. It was a tiny heart that was half-black, half-red. That was his love letter to Ceri, although you had to know about his actual bifurcated appearance to know it was. Ceri loved it and was trying to think of a similar tattoo he could get for Logan. They were still brainstorming.
“I don’t have that many,” Logan concluded.
“I sometimes count your scars as your tattoos. I could get rid of them, you know.”
“Yeah, but I earned every one of them. They add character, don’t you think?”
Ceri brushed his fingertips lightly over Logan’s most impressive scar, a three-and-a-half-inch pale gash between his ribs and left hip where a demon had once slashed him. His other scars were less showy, such as a pockmark from a childhood bout with chicken pox and a tiny purplish crescent that was left behind from a violent clash with a vampire who wore steel-toed boots, which Logan felt was unfair since it was stealing from his playbook .Logan was kind of glad Ceri had healed all his Hell torture damage, or he might be one big mass of scar tissue. Like The Thing, but infinitely grosser. “Actually, I do. I didn’t get it at first.”
“Yeah, but that’s before you realized how weird people are.”
Ceri gave him the faintest of smirks. “Especially you?”
“Especially me. I was raised by a haunted mental patient. The fact that I don’t throw my own shit around is a testimony to the resilience of the human spirit.”
Ceri laughed, as Logan hoped he would. “You are too cute.”
“Then why don’t you make out with me?”
The emotional blackmail worked. Ceri leaned in and kissed him, and Logan quickly kissed him back. Ceri cupped the back of his neck and deepened the kiss. Logan loved kissing Ceri. He was such a good kisser, and the discussion of this had previously led to Ceri revealing his deeply fucked-up sex education. It seems demons were all in on hands-on learning, which was creepy as fuck, and yet Logan couldn’t deny Ceri had skills. It was probably best he didn’t think about how he’d gotten those skills.
Ceri put a hand on Logan’s chest and gently pushed him back. “See? This is what I mean by distracting.”
Ceri’s hand flat on his chest felt really good. It caused goose bumps to erupt across his chest and down his arms, and he shuddered. “I think the drugs are kicking in.” Looking at his arm, he definitely saw the hairs standing on end.
“Let’s be sure,” Ceri said and then breathed on the side of his neck. It was only air, and yet it hit Logan like the softest, most sensual caress. He shuddered, and the goose bumps exploded again.
“Holy shit. I’m pretty sure I’ve never felt anything that good in my life.”
Ceri looked deep into his eyes, and Logan thought he was going for a kiss, but Ceri sat back instead. “Yeah, your pupils are blown. I’d say you’re pretty stoned.”
“Are you sure? ’Cause I’ve been stoned, and it felt way better than this. Except when you touch me. That feels tremendous.”
“Ecstasy is an odd drug. Now close your eyes.”
“Okay.” He did, and Ceri put his fingers on Logan’s temples. It felt good, if a bit strange.
“Now I want you to concentrate on my voice. Don’t say anything, just listen.”
Logan wanted to point out this process resembled hypnotism, but Ceri had asked him not to talk, right? So he kept his mouth shut.
“Imagine your mind is a dark, empty void. No jokes, Logan. Imagine it. Now imagine you are inside that void. You’re not doing anything. You’re simply there, concentrating on the dark emptiness all around you.” Ceri paused, seemingly to let Logan imagine this, and weirdly, Logan sort of felt like he was falling forward in his own head. Surely it was because of the drugs. It was a sense of movement without any movement, like being caught in a spell again, and he wasn’t crazy about it.
But Ceri was still speaking to him, and Logan trusted him. So he lived with the terrible feeling and listened to him. Was Ceri actually trying to hypnotize him? As far as Logan knew, he couldn’t be hypnotized, but maybe that’s where the drugs came in.
“Now, imagine a safe space. A place where you are comfortable, where you feel most at home.” That was a tough one. Logan almost balked until he realized there was a place that felt like home. It was here. He imagined the room around him, with Ceri on the bed beside him, although now he was sort of in front of him. Straddling him? You’d think so, given the position of his thumbs on his forehead.
Another pause ensued, and Logan waited for the sound of Ceri’s voice. He was somehow tired and wired, but not in his usual way. That had to be the drugs. “Okay, Logan, let me in.”
“You are in,” he replied, because he had already imagined Ceri in this space.
In his mind he saw Ceri straddling his legs, his fingers on his temples, and Ceri smiled at him. It was funny, but the demon side of his mouth always seemed to be smirking. “So I am. Hello, sweetheart.”
Disoriented again—that was going to keep happening, wasn’t it?—Logan said, “Wait. Are we in my head?”
“We are.”
“When did I fall asleep?”
“You didn’t. Technically, you’re in a kind of trance.”
“Once I was told I couldn’t be hypnotized. Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Not really. Especially since you’re as high as fuck and I have the ability to sway people into believing anything I say.”
“I don’t recall being swayed. Should I be worried?”
Ceri kissed him. Was that cheating, kissing him and not answering the question? But then Ceri smoothed his hair back from his forehead and said, “Please tell me you know I’d never sway you without cause or harm you.”
Logan sighed and leaned his forehead against Ceri’s. “Of course I know that. This is all so weird. I don’t think I’ve fully dealt with the bullshit Gill was trying to feed me.”
“What if it’s not bullshit?”
Logan sighed and leaned back, meeting Ceri’s odd eyes. “Yeah, I don’t know. Does it matter? Our parents are dead, and now she’s dead, although not in a way that can bring anyone any peace, most especially her. I don’t want to think about this. I really just wanna fuck and forget about it.”
“You’re going to have to face it at some point.” Ceri smiled and wrapped his arms around his neck. “But the rest is totally doable.”
“You mean I’m totally doable.”
He shook his head but continued smiling all the same. “You’re so corny.” But he kissed him again, this time not holding back, and the crush of his body against Logan’s tingling skin was almost too exciting for him to bear. So this was ecstasy, huh?
Logan made a mental note to do it more often.