Even Death May Die

18 MAY

Back at Fairwood, once Theo was safe in a deep, drugged sleep in a guestroom where they could be sure he wouldn’t be getting underfoot or into trouble, Wes got changed in his own designated room and re-joined the remnant of his family.

He wasn’t expecting a warm reception from his sister, and he didn’t get one.

“Prick,” Katy snapped, as soon as he set foot in the kitchen, but it wasn’t entirely unaffectionate. He got a hug, too, so he didn’t dwell on the mixed messages.

“You could have told me.”

Ricky snorted. “She was good enough to fool you in the dark, that’s all we needed.”

“Pair of wankers,” Katy muttered, thinking Ricky meant this for her, throwing herself back into a chair. “You gave me a fucking heart attack.”

Wes played along. “It had to look believable.”

He took a seat and drummed his hands on the table. “Ointment’s all gone, they used it all and your missus has the jar, so that’s done. Cult’s gone, your missus killed them all except the lad upstairs, so that’s done. Shrine’s proper smashed, so that’s done. The only thing left capable of opening a portal is that.” He pointed at the Pendle Stone. “Do we know how many of the family are still alive, or…?”

“All the ones at the exile ceremony tonight, but apart from that, not many.” Katy plaited her hair, affecting nonchalance. “I’d say, maybe only a hundred.”

“They’ll breed,” Ricky said grimly, eyes heavy and tired.

The clock said it was three-thirty. In his party days, Wes would just be getting started.

“I’ll put some coffee on, shall I?” he asked, slapping his knees and getting up.

“She’s got instant, that’s it.” Ricky gestured to a cupboard. “Don’t drink it, do I? Tea’ll do. Black.”

“Fair enough; one black tea. Katy?”

“Coffee, yeah, please.” She rubbed her face and yawned. “Fuck. Does it matter if we do this tonight or tomorrow?”

“I want it done.” Wes stretched, getting his second wind. “My glory’s properly wearing off, and I need another dose while the severed bits are still fresh.”

Ricky paused. “Mebbe you ought to sit this out and leave it to Katy an’ me. No need for you to come through with us.”

“Do I not get to redeem myself?” Wes asked, unable to tell Ricky in front of Katy how seeing ‘him’ dead had made him feel. “I helped the avatar in the warehouse. Power went to my head a bit, that’s all.”

Katy frowned. “What d’you mean?”

“Nothing.” Wes willed Ricky silently not to explain. “I just… I still feel this is all my fault, and I want to draw a line. I want to be there when you kill Him.”

“It’s not like he’s going to fuck us over now he can Change temporarily, is it?” Katy asked, and Wes had to turn around and make the drinks, in case she could remember his expression. “Like, what’s he going to do? Bring Grandad through and end the whole world just to get his glory back and rule over absolutely nothing? It’ll be a wasteland. Everyone will die. There’s no point.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s really about ‘ruling’,” Ricky said, and Wes glanced over his shoulder to see Ricky looking right at him, chair tipped back on two legs, hands behind his head. “I think it’s more… how the glory makes him feel.”

“Tell him,” Katy said to Wes. “Nothing could make you feel that good. Let him come. I could really… I kind of want him there.”

There was a pregnant silence as he got down the mugs to play mother, which he couldn’t break.

When he turned back around, he knew she was right, and he’d been an absolute cunt for no bloody good reason. Tina was right. Grand had been right. He was selfish. He was intemperate. He was impulsive. He’d never amount to anything. Ricky ought to break him in half the way the avatar had broken the Foreman in the warehouse, and he’d deserve it.

“If you want me, I’m right here,” he said to his sister, and he meant every word, although he didn’t know how good his follow-through would be, when it came down to it. He looked Ricky in the eye as he set the mugs down. “Give me a chance to have your back? I did in the warehouse. I did exactly what you told me, and then I made sure none got away except that Shaw lad upstairs. Ask her.” His heart seized. “God, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, please. Let me be there with you.”

“What’s going on?” Katy asked, looking between them.

“Nothing,” Ricky said shortly, after a pause. “He’s being dramatic. If you want him there, he can be there.” He flashed Wes a dirty look. “Maybe that Circle of yours will give you what you want, instead of Grandad, who knows?”

Wes sank into his chair with weak relief. “You won’t regret this, I swear to Gr— I swear.”

“Do we have to do all the chanting again?” Katy complained, sipping her coffee. “I’m so tired.”

“You don’t know what ‘tired’ means,” Wes retorted, seizing a shred of normal conversation. “Wait until you’re knocking on thirty and you pull a muscle in your sleep. Anyway, you two’ve got no stamina, that’s your problem.”

“You won’t let me go out!” Katy crossed her arms and pouted at him. “You can’t complain I’m tired at three o’clock in the morning when you literally never let me go anywhere past midnight.”

You bet I won’t, Wes thought, determined to spare her his own litany of mistakes and all the shit that came with them, but masked that with a tight smile. “Well, when you’re living here you can do what you want.”

That was already worrying him, but he contented himself with thinking of all the nightspots Pagham-on-Sea had to offer, and how Katy wouldn’t be going to any of them.

She can’t go clubbing somewhere everyone thinks she’s dead, and he won’t take her anywhere.

“Let’s get this over with, shall we?” Ricky turned his attention to Katy. “You ready, love?”

She nodded, but Wes wasn’t convinced.

“You sure?” He’d almost gotten used to her looking grown up and mature, but all of that was gone and all he saw was a young, worried kid shrinking into herself. “Really sure?”

Katy managed a wobbly smile and straightened her back, the outward air of maturity returning.

Wes didn’t buy it.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. It’s all fine. This is, like, destiny, right? It’s all fated, so it doesn’t matter.” She blew a breath out. “We’ll go in there and kill him. No more Grandad, no more apocalypse. Piece of cake.”

“All right, then.” Wes wasn’t convinced, but now wasn’t the time.

Whatever gets her there, I guess.

Destiny was a slippery beast. If this was anybody else’s story there’d be a mountain full of gold at the end of it, but he was willing to bet in their case they’d get nothing but a face full of ash and the business end of a dragon.

“For what it’s worth, I’ll miss you both if he kills you,” he said.

Katy and Ricky exchanged glances.

“Right then.” Ricky nodded as if this was decided. He returned to the table with the teapot, a clingfilmed piece of a Wend-McVey, and a tub of something homemade. “Better finish these biscuits off now, hadn’t we?”

Wes grinned.

He took a biscuit as they chanted over the teapot for him, milking the severed glory into it. The words hummed with power in such close proximity to the Pendle Stone, which seemed to be listening and echoing the chant back to them.

Wes drank down the tea, convinced it would be more potent here, and let the glory take control.

The fever was quicker this time, shorter, harder, faster, and when it broke, he found himself slumped on the table and hadn’t even needed to lie down.

“I’m not sitting on the Throne yet,” Katy whispered. “I’m not ready for that yet.”

“If we do this, you might change your mind.” Ricky grinned, but Wes inwardly cringed at the ‘if’. They couldn’t afford to think in ‘ifs’, not now. They’d just massacred a good chunk of their remaining family and exiled another. Everything felt like it was running out.

“My turn again.” Wes stood and hunkered down by his sister. She shuffled sideways to give him space. “Let’s bypass the Throne for now and go in via my place, shall we?”

It was easier this time, smoother, like slipping into something slick and green and familiar, coating himself with the energy of it, pulling the dimensions together until they collided, and the portal opened.

He took a couple of towels with him for when Katy and Ricky Changed, and a change of clothes for them both. He was the responsible one, after all.

This was his place, and it was different now.

Wes entered a circle of burgeoning parasitic plants growing up the monoliths, interlacing and flourishing around the central slabs of altar rock.

They were sprouting from the bands of symbols he’d traced, pollinated by his fingertips, released from the rock. Wes crossed the circle to inspect some of the stalks, and found they were spongey to the touch, like the stalks of toadstools. Flowers were beginning to bloom, scooped petals lurid, putrid yellow.

Wes inhaled the results of his potency, and it filled him with heady perfume.

“Oh my god, what is that?” Katy demanded, muffled, holding her nose. “It smells like the boys’ changing rooms at school.”

“How would you know?” Wes asked, spinning around.

Katy rolled her eyes. “What are they?”

Ricky was equally unimpressed. “We’re not here to smell the roses, we need to draw our old gaffer out.”

“I can summon anything that’s seen me,” Wes said quietly.

He had nothing to fear here. The energy of the place raced through his blood, his hairs prickling to attention. He drew himself up to his full height, shoulders rolled back, and smiled at the sky.

The ground hummed under his feet.

Everything vibrated, resonating and reverberating through his body, and he drew the secrets of the Stone Circle into himself. The monoliths shook.

Wes closed his eyes and focused, reaching into the rock itself, dragging the spores to the surface. The rocks cracked. The air was thick with musk. Every breath he took filled him up with more of himself, but he didn’t have a name for it. He didn’t need one.

The musk had its own texture, filling his nostrils with a peppery heat. He could feel it in his lungs, coating his airways, filling his tear ducts, his throat, his stomach.

He didn’t know what it was doing, but it was irreversible. He did know that. It was pollinating something already inside him, and he was growing, changing, Becoming.

Wes balanced in the centre of a vast web, every thread leading back to him. He could feel every movement of every trapped soul, betrayed by a single glance, entangled forever and with no idea they were already his. His image was a tiny hole in their mind, a doorway for him to open and close at will. He could torment them with visions of his own sensuousness, the seductive, addictive taboo of his endless possibilities. He could offer ecstasy at the end of the world, relieve the crushing weight of sanity and responsibility and duty, and beckon them into the freedom of the infinite dance.

He could—

“Hell’s bells and buckets of blood, will you get on with it, Wesley?” Ricky snapped, breaking his perfect concentration.

Wes ground his teeth.

You’re on hallowed ground, Richard. Mine.

“Give the boy a cult and he thinks he’s bloody Aphrodite,” Ricky muttered. “Hurry up.”

“Anxious to find out whether you die or not?” Wes snapped, losing the threads altogether.

Ricky was fidgeting, keyed up in a way Wes hadn’t seen for a long time. He glared. “As it happens, yes. Yeah. I bloody well am. An’ I want it over. One way or the other.”

Wes relented. “I can’t control him,” he said, feeling the shape of their Grandsire’s mind. “Not him. He’s too… I don’t know, it’s a texture, not a feeling, I’m not sure how to describe it.”

“No, but you can get him here?”

Wes nodded.

Katy was silent, hands still cupped around her nose and mouth.

Wes sighed. He supposed he should check in with her too, but they were committed now. Asking if she was ready was pointless, since it didn’t matter either way. There was probably never a good time to kill your progenitor.

He closed his eyes.

Grandad was a slick, dense mass, solid as whale blubber, firm, tough and fibrous. Wes pushed through this layer to draw him in and slipped below his surface. He felt Grandad in his head, swelling against the sides of his mind, flayed raw and dripping, sliding into the crevasses and from one gap to another.

Wes pierced him like uncooked meat, hooked himself in, and tugged.

Grandad noticed.

Wes pinched, a flea driving a dog.

Grandad shook him off, throwing him back into his own body and leaving him gasping on all fours on the rock, but it was done. Wes picked himself up and dusted his hands off.

“He’s coming,” he said.

Katy was shivering.

Ricky only nodded, tugging his clothes off with bad grace and leaving them where they fell. He marched out to the edge of the circle, only to be confronted by an impenetrable wall of interlocking fungal stems.

Wes was loath to let him pass. For a moment, he almost didn’t. This might be the last time he saw his cousin alive, and he didn’t know how that was supposed to make him feel, or what would happen next.

Same for his baby sister.

He didn’t look at her, she got so embarrassed about him seeing her naked, but this was it.

He exhaled and let them go.

The stalks untangled enough for Ricky to awkwardly part and make his way between, Katy following.

Wes stayed where he could govern the portal, but the stalks opened like a latticework for him to see what was going on.

Beyond the Circle, the landscape of volcanic black rock looked the same as before.

The mountains loomed above in the direction Wes guessed was north, and jet outcrops peppered the landscape in the other directions. It was flattest to the west (if he was right about the mountains being north), and that was where Grandad was most likely to come from. The same direction as last time, in fact.

Was it his imagination that there was a flat, pale face, an oval disc with inhuman features in the grey of the sky, peering down on them?

Wes dropped his gaze, hoping it was just the light playing tricks. He scanned the mountains, and wondered if there were parallel ridges dusted with snow or if those were impossible fingers wrapped around the nearest peak.

Fuck, this place. He shook his head, blinking hard. It’s enough to drive you out of your mind.

His siblings were tiny. No. Sister and cousin.

“Fuck.” Wes took a seat on the central slab of stone, bracing himself, and watched them Change.

Ricky’s form tore itself out of his skin, rising up off the ground in a whirlwind of coils and eyes and eel-slick power. The Beast unfurled in that disturbing way, discarded human flesh flopping off the back of the gigantic monster that reared its great neck and opened four petals of serrated teeth.

Wes felt it before he saw it – the approach of their Grandsire, a god of the dark and chaos before the gods of Earth had learned how to talk, a monster of nightmare before the sun had been old enough to dream.

Take their minds, its Voice whispered in his head. Take control, give them to me. And I will give you everything.

The young gods were pups before it, and if it weren’t for Katy’s scornful remark the first time she’d seen Grandad in all his glory, he would have given up right there.

What the fuck is that supposed to be? Katy had asked, with all the rude bluntness of a teenager who thought she was indestructible. It’s like a squid fucked a dragon!

Wes blinked, and looked again.

It was an unnatural mess, something that should never have been, and that’s all he fucking was. A useless chimera of finned reptilian bullshit, a plateful of ditch water calamari. Everything fucked up about his life, about their whole fucked-up inbred existence, was here, in the cephalopodic cat’s-cradle of coils and scales and lies.

In that moment, safe in his Circle, Wes realised he would rather cannibalise his own kin for temporary fixes for the rest of his life than be in the old bastard’s good graces, and he would rather have Katy and Ricky alive and irritating the shit out of him than not have them at all.

“Fuck you,” Wes murmured, brimming with venom, hatred burning all the fear away. “Fuck you.”

Their Grandsire emitted a terrible sound from a tubular throat, a sharp-edged, roaring shriek, like a mountain screaming. It thundered around the rocks, bouncing and echoing, until Wes couldn’t stand it, hands pressed tight over the stabbing pains in his ears, as if the sound alone had given him an infection.

Before it faded into a ringing silence, the Thing-That-Was-Ricky shrieked in answer, and the Beast attacked.

Wes felt the Beast’s mind, hot and fast and fuelled by rage. Beside her, the Thing-That-Was-Ricky fed from Grandad’s aura, slowing down his reactions as the Beast fastened its jaws on its flank, above the splay of tentacles and octopoid arms.

Wes found Grandad’s mind, the tiny hole his image had bored into it, and burrowed inside. As the old bastard tried to swipe the Beast off, Wes tugged him off balance, tilting him. The Beast ripped a chunk of thick flesh away, leaving a ragged, circular wound.

STOP.

Wes heard the monster in his head, but he clung on.

YOU HAD A TASTE OF POWER. I CAN GIVE YOU MORE.

I don’t want what YOU can give anymore, Wes snarled, rage keeping him focused. I want them, and I can take what’s mine without you.

Wes fastened himself deeper into those slick, slippery thoughts like a meat hook. He filled those thoughts with his own, everything he’d been robbed of, everything he’d robbed Charlie of, the pain of forgetting, the ache of his non-existence, and the wounds tore open all at once and poured their pus into the head of the arsehole that had made him what he was.

FUCK.

YOU.

Grandad lurched back, but Wes didn’t have time to do it again, although he was far from done. He found himself winkled out, tossed away with another roar-scream that nearly burst his eardrums, and physically threw him off the slab, across the circle, and against a monolith.

Stunned, Wes pulled himself up, barely able to stand. He put his hand to his ear and it came away bloody. His head rang, the world spun, and he threw up.

He missed the Thing-That-Was-Ricky taking advantage, but when he looked again, it was drinking Grandad’s aura down, coils fastened around the thick lizard neck, and Grandad was visibly weakening.

Wes staggered to a better vantage point between two of the standing stones, the plants burgeoning around him in a protective hammock. He tried to focus on Grandad again, but couldn’t get a good grip on him.

Grandad, however, had a good grip on the Thing-That-Was-Ricky. Despite the Beast, their Grandsire ripped him off like he was made of nothing.

Wes couldn’t shout. Nothing came out.

The mass of eyes and thrashing lengths of thirsty tendrils was a smudge across his vision, and then it was gone. Wes couldn’t see – an outcrop blocked his view.

The Beast withdrew, snarling, dancing back on clawed, fused feet.

Wes let the spongey plants take his full weight, trying to focus, but Grandad was not having it.

He opened his eyes and saw the Beast sniffing the ground. He entered her head instead. It was feverish, burning up, almost too much for him to connect with. Her hate matched his.

Wes saw what she saw, Ricky returned to his human form and lying in a pool of slick mucus on the ground, new skin already nicked and scraped from the rocks.

Wes felt her hunger, sharp and keen and unsatiable.

Their cousin’s blood drew her close.

Wes tugged urgently, but her mind twisted and boiled around him, impossible to hold on to. Wes tried again, but as Ricky rolled onto his side to stand, the Beast’s maw closed over him and Wes couldn’t stop her.

Behind them, Grandad roared.

The Beast whirled and charged, Wes learning how to anticipate the flames of her thoughts, and he saw why she hadn’t swallowed.

She slashed at the underside of their gargantuan sire with her front claws, and the ancient thing bellowed. A coil wrapped itself around the Beast’s middle and squeezed until her body crunched and crumpled. The Beast screamed, spitting its vital cargo into the great maw, and folded up with petals of flesh flopping into a bud of raw, pulsing agony.

Her smaller, human-passing shape slipped through the coil’s grip and plummeted to the ground.

Katy slid down the coil, landing with a thud and rolling out of the way, cushioned by the unfolded petals of flesh still protruding from her body like a beetle’s casing. Her tail thrashed, spiked bone keeping the coils away from her, until she had the space to unfold again.

Her Grandsire jerked back, emitting an unholy noise.

His priests swarmed from the mountains, hurling their insectoid bodies down in a rain of grasshopper joints, equine snouts and gauzy wings.

The Beast unfurled again, snapping at the priests and licking up a legion of them with its great tongue, crunching them to pulp in its petalled jaws. The clawed hooves reared, kicking at the coils of its adversary, but the Great One was distracted.

Something burst through its underbelly, a dark, round tendril, anaconda-thick, strong as a tree root. Then another, and another. One ripped out of his side, and Grandad roared, trying to regurgitate.

The tendrils withdrew and thick, viscous fluids heaved out of Grandad’s jaws.

The Beast leapt, shaking off the priests like so many bothersome flies. It dug its claws into the holes, narrowly missing being punctured itself by another tendril bursting out of Grandad’s bucking body, and fastened its jaws into Grandad’s neck.

The Thing-That-Was-Ricky was swelling inside Grandad’s stomach, bubbles of him writhing and stretching the scaled skin the way that it did inside Ricky’s human-passing torso.

Wes felt it sucking at the energies pulsing through the great being. The Beast felt it too – she, it, Wes wasn’t sure which was appropriate anymore, clicked all the teeth lining her throat down to her second stomach and gave a bark of mirth.

Greedy bastard.

The Beast peeled open its muzzle and all four petals sank deep into Grandad’s neck, pinning him down. The claws sunk deep into the tough hide, Grandad sinking into a weakened semi-stupor, and The Thing inside it burst out.

The Beast jerked out of the way, wrenching the head partially off the neck, ripping off a chunk of flesh and swallowing it down, grinding and mashing with a satisfied growl.

Wes felt her satisfaction.

This was real flesh, better than the adulterated scraps it had been living on. This was what it really craved, the meat of its ancestors, power like it had never tasted, coursing through it and set its blood on fire. It tore another chunk off, then another, and another, as the wheezing breaths of a dying god echoed around the rocks.

The Thing-That-Was-Ricky was the Thing with a Thousand Faces, insectoid eyes set deep in coils that leered and smiled with savage mouths, churned in a whirlwind of dark, visceral hunger. Its upper part rose in a tower of dark, majestic beauty. Thorny tendrils ringed its three-eyed head like a crown.

Wes could feel how the Beast almost hungered for a taste of him, too, but this feast was more than enough for her.

Wes squirmed with jealous desire to join them.

The priests scattered.

The Beast tore into the tenderised belly, gut-ooze leaking everywhere, strange organs scattered over the jagged rocks, and wolfed down more.

It fed until it was satisfied, and made room for the rippling, three-eyed King.

The last of the old god’s energy drained into the gaping mouths of the coils swirling around the being that sometimes called itself Ricky Porter. They exuded a golden residue, gilding the dark form. The tendril-crown glimmered, and the three central eyes stared in three directions at once, fixed upon the strange sunset that shaded the sky in a faded spectrum of vermillion through to tangerine.

The Beast took the flesh for itself, picking the ribs clean.

The portal shimmered behind them, and Wes’s exulting yell bounced off the pillars of the stone circle.

The Gilded King turned.

The Beast, the God-Eater, gave a coughing bark of warning.

Next to them, the third of their kind was not as intimidating, but his size was unimportant. It was also deceptive. They both occupied one form at a time: he, meanwhile, was the Legion of Chaos, embedded like fungal spores in the minds of all who saw his flickering layers, deep within their waking thoughts and the fabric of their nightmares.

The God-Eater swallowed down the remains of the old god and folded back into itself. Claws and haunches contracted, twisting into a familiar, smaller shape, and the Gilded King followed suit.

Excess shed flopped and splashed around them, dripping liquid human skin.

Katy shook the petalled maw back into her body, like the wings of a rabid dragonfly.

Ricky was looking more himself, healthier, his coils bound to the usual number of limbs and a torso, but a little of the golden sheen remained. It stuck to him in powdery patches.

“We only bloody did it,” he murmured, staring at the carcass. “Shit me.” He raised his hands behind his head, cupping his back lips and exhaling slowly.

Wes was beside himself, his whoops ragged and hoarse. “You beauties! Get the fuck over here!”

Katy grinned, wincing as the rocks cut her feet. “Ow, sharp, ow, ow, ow…” She made it over to Ricky, avoiding the splashes of Grandad all over the rocks. “Ow…”

Ricky grinned, and before she could cringe away from him, he’d grabbed her and tried to pick her up. She slipped through his grip and he nearly dropped her on the jagged ground. When he caught her, Wes burst out laughing, drunk with relief.

“Shit!” Katy squealed and latched herself around his neck, both of them dripping with new skin mucus. “This is such a bad idea, put me down, oh my god…”

Ricky giggled wickedly and adjusted his grip, and carried her to the Stone Circle. Katy screeched with embarrassment and every jolt, and when he dropped her, Wes wrapped her in a large bath towel.

“And one for you, you gorgeous bastard,” Wes said, throwing another at Ricky and gripping him around the back of his neck.

Ricky’s gleeful laugh rebounded around the pillars, and Wes kissed the remains of their Grandsire from Ricky’s lips, licking the blood off his chin, broke away, and swallowed.

Now that was a proper meal.

Katy squealed. “Oi! Get your own!”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s his lot.” Wes clapped Ricky on the back.

Ricky grinned drunkenly at him as if he wasn’t sure what had just happened. He ducked his head and wiped his mouth slowly with the towel, a flush spreading up his neck to his cheeks.

“Here.” Katy offered Wes a chunk he hadn’t noticed her carrying, a misshapen round handful like a soft, rotten, pale-fleshed apple in her palm.

He took it immediately and tore into it, his molars barely up to the task. It was rubbery and fresh, oozing juices that coursed down his throat and over his chin. It filled him up, coating his insides and seeping into his soul.

“Oh, fuck. Hold up. I need more of that.” He broke away from them at a run and sprinted over the rocks. Here was the answer – not only the glyphs on the stones, but here, in the flesh of his sire.

The carcass was mountainous, an immensity of burst juices and thick folds of otherworldly meat. Wes tore into it with his bare hands, clawing chunks of it away and forcing it down. The taste was irrelevant; the muscular tissue fought with his molars and resisted chewing, so he tore off smaller bits with his teeth and swallowed them whole.

He sucked the thick, cooling pools of whatever had pumped through Grandad’s system and drank it down, along with all the wriggling things it contained.

He felt the Change in himself, coming over him in a storm. His glory lashed itself to his will, buckling to his control, breaking him down into molecules of pure, raw energy and blossoming into something insidious and new.

Wes turned, licking his lips.

“Tastes good.” He came back to them with sure, steady strides, the Head of the Family, the True Face of the Crawling Chaos, the Faceless Man of Blood.

“Come here, Sis.”

He wrapped his arms around her, enveloped as she was in the enormous towel, and crushed her into his chest. “I’m so fucking proud of you.”

“We did it!” Katy exclaimed, muffled by Wes’s shirt. Her excitement radiated through him. “I can’t believe it, we actually did it.”

Ricky was breathing hard, almost panting, pale with disbelief. Wes released Katy to drag him into a hug as well.

“We killed him,” Ricky said.

“Yeah.” Katy tapped his bicep. “Hey. How d’you feel?”

Ricky shook his head. “On fucking fire.”

Wes reined in his enthusiasm. “Hey. Really? In a bad way?”

“No.” Ricky swallowed. “I feel… I feel amazing.”

“Same.” Katy examined her body beneath the towel, shielding it from the boys. “I feel really good. Like, finally, a proper meal.”

Wes hesitated. “You don’t think we should’ve gone easy on the devouring bit, do you?” It was far too late to think of this now. “It’s not going be like in those films where you start off feeling great and then turn into like, ravenous monsters?”

“We already are ravenous monsters,” Katy said straight-faced, and Ricky sniggered.

Wes rolled his eyes. “No, but really.” He was starting to worry. Something was happening to him. It was building like a wave, a growing, oncoming tsunami about to crash and break and flood him with cataclysmic power.

Wes had no idea what would be swept away.

A darkness scudded over Ricky’s face, and he looked away, as if something had just occurred to him. His brow furrowed.

Wes clapped Ricky on the back, hoping to jolt him out of it, worried he would change his mind. “Hey. Let’s go home, and do this properly. No more Grandad, no more Voice, no more…”

“Changes?” Ricky said.

Wes froze. “Oh shit.”

They slowly turned to look back at the mess of their progenitor.

Katy glanced at her brother. “You don’t think…”

Wes moistened his lips, trying to hide the fact his whole body was burning up. “Well. I don’t… I don’t know, but I mean, the Changes are all signs of his favour, his glory, so, without him… what… what happens now? Will anyone else be able to Change?”

Ricky shifted, uneasy. “I don’t know.” He frowned at Wes. “You alright?”

Whatever was building inside Wes was about to burst.

Oh fuck, it’s happening…

He moved away from them and lay down.

“I think I’m Changing,” he managed, but his breath stopped as something ripped through every pore, every cell of his body, his lungs bursting, heart buffeting his ribs.

It broke with an eruption of energy that tore through his whole frame, and Wes lay on the stone staring at the sky, his own ragged gasps in his ears.

It was over in a flash, faster than the creature in the well. He couldn’t remember his own Changes from the first time, but perhaps they had been this quick. He just remembered waking up on the cellar floor, his own mother unable to remember his face.

“Wes?” he heard Ricky say, as he stood up slowly. “Hey, should you be trying to stand?”

“I’m all right,” Wes said.

He was better than all right.

He could throw himself out of a seventh storey window and it wouldn’t matter: he’d crowd surf over everybody below, letting his worshipping legions break his fall. They’d grind their firstborns’ bones for his bread, tear their hearts from their chests and offer them to him, still beating.

He could fuck up the laws of physics.

He could wreck the fabric of the cosmos.

He could make constellations dance to his beat, the flickering pulse of his True Face, and set his devotees on fire for fucking mood-lighting.

There wasn’t a single thing he couldn’t do, and for a wild moment Wes wanted to it all, wanted to return the universe to a state of unformed chaos, just because he could.

Then Ricky kicked him in the leg and brought him back to a reality where destroying the universe wasn’t really an option, or in his best interests.

Ricky jerked his head at the portal.

“Let’s get home first, then we’ll worry about whether or not we’ve fucked the family.”

“Well, we’ve all fucked the family,” Wes gasped, and howled at his own joke.

Ricky smacked him across his back, but not hard.

“I bloody haven’t,” Katy snapped, swallowing her own laughter. “We deserve to go extinct. Especially you.”

“There goes your cheque for student accommodation,” Wes said.

Katy was high on blood, flesh, and victory, and couldn’t stop laughing.

Wes stared between the blooming monoliths at the massive, broken corpse on the rocky wasteland beyond. There was something zipping through his blood that hadn’t been there before, something sweet and rich, setting every bit of him on fire.

Grandad tasted good.