by Hunter Blain
Swiftly lowering his head to face Lilith, Father Thomes spoke confidently and with haste.
“Go. Travel to Hell and seek out Ulric. Prey on his vanity and convince him that saving Earth from the sorcerer would please his master.”
Lilith snapped back to attention at his words before asking, “How do I get to Hell? I don’t have John’s armor.”
“I leave that to you, my dear. As I said, I will reach out to Gabriel and see what can be done. Now go! Quickly, now!”
Lilith stared at the priest before a pained expression crossed her face, and she said, “I love him, you know,” before she winked out from the earthen plane.
“I know,” Father Thomes confirmed as he picked up his thick glasses and set them back in place on his face.
The priest stared into the fire as something shimmered to view from the corner of the room.
With eyes weighed down with guilt, Father Thomes couldn’t summon the strength with which to lift his gaze toward the twelve-foot-tall archangel who approached with confident, heavy thuds of angelic armor on the stone floor.
All Father Thomes Philseep could see was the large angel’s lower half as he continued to stare into the hypnotic flames.
“It is done…” was all the priest could say to the archangel, his tone dragging through the dirt with shame. “John, forgive me.”
43
John
Lifting my ivory shovel, Depweg pulled his eyes off the hole his family rested in and saw what I was offering. I knew—without any hesitation—that he would want to bury them by himself. But it still felt proper to offer.
Still staring at my manifested shovel, Depweg slowly shook his head with absent eyes and wordlessly gestured toward the ruins of his house before silently making his way through the backyard.
Letting my shovel wink out of existence, I turned to watch the defeated man walk with immense strength. I don’t mean he power walked to the back door. Instead, I could tell he was fighting tooth and nail to not collapse into a fetal position and let the floodgates of grief burst open.
I silently willed any remaining energy to flow into my best friend, knowing it was a simple gesture conceived from hope and not actually literal. Heck, now that the battle was over, I felt beyond exhausted, and was surprised I had enough mental acuity left to manifest a simple shovel.
Looking toward the west, I saw the sun had fully set a while ago and offered no semblance of its existence. Only twinkling stars dotted the sky, filling me with a new sense of wonderment at knowing how truly far away they were.
From inside the home, my preternatural hearing picked up the muffled cries of unimaginable anguish. I winced as I instantly knew what was happening.
A part of me wanted to rush to my friend’s side and embrace him until he expelled all the tears his body could create. But I also knew this had been all my fault. I had brought Jose to this time stream, and Depweg would figure that out sooner or later. Even if I didn’t say a damn word, he would piece together our arrival within minutes of each other.
My heart sank as I played the conversation in my mind.
“Hey, buddy. Really sorry that the guy that, like, totally killed your family was brought back in time by me. Wanna hug it out?”
If I could sweat, my palms would be shimmering like a hot pan full of bacon grease. Even with just the thought of sweaty palms, I rubbed my hands down my coat in an empty gesture of drying them.
A tiny whine escaped my parted lips as I looked back and forth between the hole in the ground and Depweg’s house. I was going to have to tell him the truth.
Or was I?
My mind raced as I began crafting a story of how and why Jose and I had ended up in the same place at almost the same time.
I began to pace when I heard rustling debris, and I shot my eyes up to see a fully clothed Depweg pushing through the wreckage of his house with an old shovel resting over one shoulder. He wasn’t wearing funeral attire, but his shirt, jeans, and shoes were all black.
Seeing his thousand-yard stare as he moved closer to me, my immediate thought was that he was going to kill me with a shovel. Then the absurdity of that notion almost made me chuckle.
He wouldn’t use a shovel. Oh no. He’d transform into his feral were-pire and rip me limb from limb. And at that moment…I’d let him.
Guilt ate at my core like rust weakening a structural support beam that held up my heart.
With each step Depweg took toward me, the support beam became thinner and more fragile, placing my heart in a precarious situation. If it plunged into my guts, so, too, would my will to live. And without that, why even bother stopping the gates of Hell from opening.
As my brother came within ten feet of me, I could see how red the whites of his eyes were. And not from the virus. He had been crying with a pain I could only imagine.
“I…” I tried to start, but my words failed me. Depweg continued past where I was standing with my mouth agape and stepped to the mound of dirt.
The tip of the shovel slid in with a thump before Depweg let go of the handle and turned to face the grave. Even though his body faced the hole, his eyes stared into the distance, unable to lower and see what lay beneath.
Depweg swayed on his feet as his eyes looked up, and he began rapidly blinking the building tears away while his mouth worked wordlessly.
“Dep—”
A hand shot up to stop me from speaking while he continued to fight an internal battle that he was clearly losing.
A few times, Depweg sucked in ragged breaths as if he had been dunked in a frozen lake. All I could do was watch, unable to act, the burden of guilt weighing my limbs toward the ground.
Seeing how much my best friend was hurting at that moment and knowing his pain was by my hand, I wanted nothing more than to trade places with his family.
“It should be me,” I said just below a whisper as I forced myself to bathe in all of Depweg’s radiating anguish.
Depweg seemed to still at my words, and I looked over to see him staring at me with empty eyes.
“Why are you here…” Depweg asked with a flat tone that sounded more like a statement than a question, almost as if he didn’t have the strength to pitch his words up at the end.
“I…I came to…to save…you…” As I spoke the words aloud, I realized how they sounded and what message could be implied.
“Save…me…” Depweg said with frozen words, his gaze sliding to the hole at our feet.
“Ye-yeah. Gabriel sent me to-to-to bring you back, man.” My words sounded unsure, and I realized it was because I was now questioning Gabriel’s motives.
A scowl crossed my features as I fought the urge to clench my fists. Once again, the Archangel Gabriel had manipulated me.
“Jose…” I whispered before I could tell my mouth to shut the hell up.
Depweg shot a furious face in my direction as I slammed both hands over my stupid, stupid mouth. Stupid! He took note of this, and the air grew hotter between us.
Forcing my hands back to my side, I realized what I had just done, and tried to explain an entire book’s worth of motivation into a single sentence, knowing Depweg was racing toward incoherent rage.
“Gabriel sent us back to find you. He-he-he said that if we didn’t bring you back to our river of time, that th-this stream you landed in might break off and crash back into the real universe. Whi-whi-which would be, ya know…bad. For everyone. Both universes, I mean.”
Depweg’s eyes were red, but not from crying.
“You…brought him…here?!” a voice sprinting toward complete madness inquired.
“Gabriel told me to! He-he said I’d need his help to get you back!” As the words left my mouth, I processed the meaning at the same time as Depweg. “Oh shit…”
Depweg’s teeth were just a little too sharp at that moment, and I fought the urge to take a step back. I needed to talk some sense into him, or he would surely kill me with how empty my will to fight was. Guilt filled my muscles with
lead.
“Depweg,” I sighed while grabbing either side of my face in exasperation. “If you shift…I won’t be able to fight you. You’ll kill me, and then be stuck here, forever. That is, until this time stream crashes into our universe and everything is destroyed.”
Breaths came out like huffs as fingers began to lengthen ever so slightly.
“Meli still exists, dude!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, throwing my hands to the sky with an all-or-nothing mentality brought forth by surging desperation. “The real Meli is alive, right now. She’s probably back at the mansion as we speak. And she doesn’t know it, but she’s waiting for you.” I took a step closer, daring Depweg to mistake the royal flush I held in my hands for a bluff. “If you kill me…you kill her. Not to mention everyone else waiting for you to come home. Locke. Magni. Taylor. Papa T…and Meli.”
Depweg’s glowing yellow eyes faded to the dull, red-rimmed orbs of sorrow as he ripped his gaze away from me and turned to face the woods. Fingers slowly shrunk back to human size as the man wrestled control from the beast inside.
Without a word, Depweg angrily snatched the shovel out of the mound, breaking the wood off with his new virus-enhanced strength.
Lifting the broken handle up in disbelief, Depweg backhand tossed the wood into the trees. I expected a few of them to explode with the force with which he threw the shovel, but was surprised when it shattered instead.
I thought of the dog running through my leg, and then of my bomb which had only affected Lolth because of its light. The woods had been untouched by my explosion.
My armor suggested that it was only living things that couldn’t be changed while I was attuned to my universe, and I shrugged, not caring enough to question it further. At least not while Depweg needed me.
The thought of Lolth and Jose being able to attack me while leaving me helpless nagged at my mind. In my heart, I instinctively knew it had something to do with Samael bending the rules of the differing flows of time, but I didn’t care. I was too exhausted, and thinking about how the Devil was able to best me over and over again would only serve to drain what little mental energy I had left.
Looking at the pile of dirt, I could see Depweg mentally debating with himself about whether or not to ask me for my ivory shovel.
In answer to his internal struggle, an obsidian shovel popped into life in his hands.
“Whoa!” I cried out, pointing my index finger at the manifestation.
Depweg lifted the tool toward his face, and I could see him fighting the urge to say whoa as well.
“He-he-he-hey! Looks like you got all the cool tricks, huh?” I said in excitement, forcefully trying to lift the damp mood that hovered in the air around us like a thick fog.
Something about the virus crossed my mind, and I briefly thought about the black of Jose’s eyes turning crimson and his ability to be in the light unlike Stripe, whose eyes had only flashed red. I filed it away for later, hoping Depweg wouldn’t be stuck in the darkness. Not after I had been given the gift of the light.
Without a word, Depweg shoved the tip of his manifestation into the mound of dirt and hoisted the first of it above the hole.
Looking down, Depweg set his chin, nodded once as if he had just agreed to something in his head, and turned the shovel sideways.
Dirt landed on Meli and the boy whose name—I just realized—I didn’t know.
After several passes of dirt, I became aware that Depweg was avoiding their heads. They were covered from their toes to their shoulders, and I saw Depweg pause with another load ready to drop. There was only one place left before the dirt started sliding to fill the bottommost portion of the grave.
Depweg’s breath quivered, and I paid him the respect of not lifting my head to look at him. Instead, I turned and stepped away from the grave with my hands clasped in front of my waist and my head lowered.
From behind, I could hear the manliest badass to ever live…squeak as his shovel was slowly turned and the dirt began to rain on his family’s faces.
My heart ached as I knew he was trying to hold it together to give his family a proper burial but was losing the fight. With a chest and throat tighter than a freshly tuned piano’s wires, air was forced out, which resulted in the pained squeak.
After a few more minutes, I could hear Depweg patting the soil flat, and I turned to see him standing above the brown patch with an empty expression on the side of his face that I could see.
Another gentle breeze glided from the backyard toward the woods, and I could see Depweg’s skin prickle on his large arms.
Holding the obsidian shovel out in front of him, Depweg turned it over as if looking for the off button.
“Just…just think about it vanishing,” I called out as I began slowly walking toward him again.
Without glancing at me, Depweg stopped turning the shovel in his hands and seemed to focus on it. There was a pop as the manifestation winked out of existence, slightly startling Depweg.
As I approached where he stood, I said, “Yeah. You’ll learn to control that.”
“Don’t talk to me, John,” Depweg responded coldly without looking at me. His eyes seemed permanently fixated on the grave.
The support beam inside my chest crumbled, and I could feel my heart plunge into the murky depths of my stomach.
Hurt, I nodded my head several times before about-facing and quickly walking toward the destroyed house, fighting back tears of my own.
Ignoring his request, partly because fuck him and partly out of necessity, I called over my shoulder with a shaky voice, “We leave just after dawn.”
44
Locke - The In-Between
Shooting to his feet, Locke sent the reading chair he had been sitting on skittering backward. The thick furniture briefly teetered on its back two legs, trying to decide on falling over or righting itself.
By the time the chair made up its mind and returned to all fours, Locke was already rushing down the hall and toward the main lobby, deciding to use his feet rather than the coin in his pocket due to how close he was.
Fingers smacked into the elevator at least a half-million times before the metal doors slid open.
Stepping in, Locke spun around to first search for, and then press the button leading to his floor. Looking up, he made eye contact with the librarian, who appeared to be smirking as she stared back at the apprentice.
The doors closed with a barely audible mechanical hiss that was fabricated in much the same way electric cars pumped sounds from a combustion engine through the speakers. This gave the illusion of familiarity that users were accustomed to.
Locke thought about this in the brief moments before the door was going to open again. He knew the elevators were powered by magic and not by mechanical means; or at least, he assumed they were.
There was a pop, and Locke squeezed sideways through the opening doors rather than giving them the few seconds to open fully.
Now that he was in the mostly empty dorms, Locke abandoned all semblance of civility and wildly sprinted toward his room, feet slipping on perfectly waxed floors at every sharp corner.
Reaching his door, he nearly broke his own handle before remembering his room was locked. Taking in a deep breath, Locke steadied his focus, and both removed the locking spell along with undoing the tether that hadn’t been broken by an intruder during his absence.
Finally getting his room open, Locke did a spin maneuver and slammed the door closed.
Now in the solitude of his own dorm room, Locke let his back thump into the door as palms were lifted to press into eye sockets.
“Magni…what have you done…”
Locke’s mind raced with different scenarios wherein he asked various allies for guidance. The Elders would surely know how to deal with a sorcerer, but Scymanky and Tafoya had guided Locke to this discovery, which strongly hinted that he was on his own in regard to the Council.
Hecate would know what to do, but probably was in no shape to help. The s
ame went for Warden Broadway.
“Bollocks,” Locke hissed, letting his old British accent slip through. This simple lapse made his heart go cold, as if the singular word held with it an entire lifetime of pain.
Shame bloomed in his cheeks like a barrel of blood spilled onto a white, frozen lake.
In the darkness of his mind, a door creaked open that led to vivid memories of Commander Godwin’s life. And thanks to the Archangel Gabriel, those memories were two-sided. On one hand, Godwin had mercilessly devastated countless people in pursuit of riches and power, uncaring of the tortures and torments he inflicted either personally or with his commands. On the other, Locke had personally experienced every moment of pain he had caused a thousand times over, to the point where his strong mind had been forced to the shores of insanity, the tide lapping at his toes.
Locke shook his head, hard, in an effort to slam the creaking closet of memories closed. He both reviled and appreciated what the memories had done for him, but had absolutely no desire to relive them. Godwin was now Locke, and he was proud of who he had become with the help of his friends.
Friends.
Worry gently blew a steady, cold breath on the back of Locke’s neck, making his skin crawl as he understood that it might only be John who could save…or stop…Magni. But he was searching for Depweg, which Locke knew John would never stop doing. With a shudder, the wizard understood that John would choose Depweg over Magni if given the choice. Or, perhaps, he would be torn apart with a lose/lose situation.
Father Thomes came to mind, and Locke warmed at the thought that the priest was slowly becoming a friend to him.
But what could a priest do against a sorcerer?
Throwing his hands up before letting them fall and slap against his thighs, Locke pushed off the door. He briefly marveled at how clear everything was around him with his depth perception having returned thanks to Elders Tafoya and Scymanky.
Not knowing what he would do, but understanding he had to do something, Locke turned back to his door, opened the portal to the mansion, and stepped through.
