by C. T. Phipps
“Well, I don’t think you’re Yukie’s dad,” I said, staring down at him.
“No,” the man said, looking up at me. “I am, however, an archdemon.”
“You mentioned Magog was one too,” I said, wishing I could summon a cross or pray but God had no skin in this fight. We were both damned, after all. “You a friend of his?”
“His father,” the man replied. “I am Gog. In the Book of Revelations, it says: When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the Earth—Gog, and Magog—and to gather them for battle. In number, they are like the sand on the seashore. It’s a bad translation of the fact my son and I are to be the generals of the armies of the damned.”
“Sounds like a nice gig. Does it come with health insurance?”
Gog’s lip twisted into a sneer. “I’m impressed, Peter. I would have thought you would have run off to tell your master about me.”
“I have no master,” I said, glad he was pissing me off. That made me less scared, or at least more able to deal with it.
“Do you know my kind created vampires?” Gog said, looking up at me. “During the First War when Azazel and the other Elder Gods were cast down from the Light, we shared our blood with humans to make servants. Beings who would help us to feast upon the worship and souls of the still-developing mortal race. The vampires and shifters betrayed us, though, and when we prepared to reclaim our birthright—they sealed us into the dark places of the Earth. It’s why humans think of hell as underground.”
“You look fine,” I said, grabbing a blood-filled martini glass off a waitress’ tray as she passed.
“This is but the tip of my finger,” Gog said, looking down at his body. “A body that contains a fragment of my power while the remainder lies cocooned miles beneath the Earth, waiting for the day it will break free to feast upon humanity and rewrite the universe to its liking. I’m rather fond of it, though, I have worn it for over a million years.”
I blinked and threw down my blood martini. It was artificially made and not at all nutritious, but I could keep it down, unlike other liquor. “That’s where I recognize you from! You’re a homo erectus! Like a pre-Neanderthal man.”
Gog blinked, surprised.
“What?” I asked. “Read a fucking book. It’d be good for you.”
I could tell Gog was irritated with me, but I wanted to distract him and find out just what the hell he was here for.
Then he smiled. It was worse than Lucinda’s. “Oh, Peter, I’m not here. Any more than you are.”
Uh oh.
Gog looked over the crowds toward a breathtakingly handsome Japanese man with long black hair, a white suit, and features not too dissimilar to Yukie’s. He was talking to Thoth and Lucinda before he started to depart for a nearby exit. I felt a little buzzing from the rock in my pocket as it happened. I saw Enil, Ashura, Dead Debbie, Jackson, Colonel Bellefonte, and a cowboy dressed vampire all start moving through the crowd to other doors.
“Wait, Jackson is involved in this?” I asked, wondering how he’d gotten recruited and I hadn’t.
“Yes,” Gog said, frowning. “Through his criminal associates and the miracle of the internet, he managed to steal all the necessary relics to bind my son. To strip him of his power and let the vampires kill him. I only managed to find out who was involved from Enil when I threated his family, but until now, I had no idea the circumstances of the event. Thank you for letting me watch through your vision, Peter.”
I snarled. “Screw you, you ain’t gonna mess with my head. This is the past, and the past can’t be changed.”
“So trusting of your mentor,” Gog said, almost pitying. “He is not the powerful authoritative vampire you think he is but a lovestruck fool. He follows Lucinda like a puppy and supported her desire to reveal humanity to the masses simply to please her. This despite the fact he knows humanity will eventually turn on your kind, as they always do, and wipe you from the face of the Earth.”
“Thoth killed Himmler.”
“Yes, he and his teacher Kim Su fought against the Nazis quite fiercely. An alliance of monsters, shifters, and wizards. Who could have seen that coming? We almost broke free during World War Two before the Nazis lost their campaign. If you’d lived longer, you might have eventually joined the Thirteen to throw your life away fighting against the inevitable.”
I had no idea who the Thirteen were, but the supernatural world was full of dumbass secret societies with spooky names. “I’m not dead yet.”
Gog looked out at the many guests present and chuckled. “Eat, drink, and be merry, little vampire because in a month’s time, I’m going to end you. Not just the people involved in my son’s defeat but also the entire vampire race. I will destroy New Detroit and begin an inquisition the likes the world has never known. When all the mages, fae, and bloodsuckers are gone—then I will lay waste to humanity. Nuclear Armageddon, plague, or maybe just a slow slide into environmental collapse so the humans turn upon each other when the food runs out.”
“Ambitious, aren’t we?”
“I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again. The apocalypse is not a single event but a cycle that I have repeated. Your kind made the mistake of overstepping your station, and now they will reap the whirlwind.”
“You sound like the old guy who used to yell at me when I made deliveries to his house in high school. Dude lived on nothing but Fox News and mac ‘n’ cheese. Had a Confederate flag emblazoned on everything.”
Gog narrowed his eyes. “You are starting to annoy me, insect.”
“Died because he couldn’t afford dialysis.”
Gog grabbed me by the wrist, and I felt an intense, painful burn as he drove his fingertips into my skin. “I am going to kill you last.”
My face contorted into an effigy of pain. “You...sound...like an audition for...a bad movie.”
Gog let go.
“I’ll be seeing you,” Gog said, letting go.
My hand didn’t heal, instead remaining injured by the burns he’d left on them. “I wonder if this damage will stay when I wake up? Ever see Eddie Murphy’s The Golden Child? It had Charles Dance in it, and something exactly like this happened. This was Beverly Hills Cop Eddie, not Haunted Mansion Eddie. We need to rescue him from the Disney Corporation.”
Gog vanished. There was no puff of smoke, no crack of thunder. One second he was there, and the next he was gone. It was like I was watching still frames of a movie from one scene to the next.
“Huh,” I said, looking at him. “That was damn weird.”
Gog’s appearance had answered most of my questions but not all of them. For example, it explained why he went after Dead Debbie, Jackson, and Colonel Bellefonte. It also explained why he would probably go after Thoth and Lucinda. I wasn’t sure why he’d compelled Enil to murder Rebecca Plum, though. Maybe archdemons hated vampire porn for tweens?
I waited for something to happen, for the vision to end, but it didn’t happen. It made me wonder if I’d have to spend the next three weeks waiting for time to catch up with me. If that was the case, I decided I would totally spend it trying to break the timeline. If I had time travel powers, I was going to try to figure out how to exploit them for own selfish gain anyway I could.
That was when an earthquake happened. The entire building rumbled, the lights went out, and a little bit of plaster fell from the ceiling. Just about everyone looked alarmed by the development, starting to speak in a terrified hush as the music stopped.
I dropped my empty martini glass and raised my hands, “I was kidding about breaking the timeline!”
I felt something raw, terrible, and vile beneath the marble floors. Running to the door I saw Thoth and Lucinda descend, I was almost immediately speared by a hideous black set of tendrils. These were made of the same shadowstuff that had shot forth from Enil back at Jackson’s. I wasn’t so lucky to dodge it this time, though, but was speared through the chest.
I crawled on the ground, eventually managing to force myself to the edge of the steps that I threw myself down. I rolled and thudded on the ground, unable to heal the painful injuries I’d sustained. Eventually, I landed with a thud at the bottom of the stairs and saw an open door leading into the basement.
“Finish it!” Enil hissed, standing over the kneeling form of Yukie’s father.
Magog was naked, with his flesh bulging from where the tendrils of darkness had been forced back into his chest. His face was grossly deformed and missing one arm. The terrible aura of evil I’d felt upstairs radiated off of him as it was no longer covered up by whatever magic demons used to hide their nature.
He was standing in the middle of a pentagram with several objects forming the five points and a vampire standing at each of them: Dead Debbie, Lucinda, Colonel Bellefonte, Jackson, and the cowboy I didn’t recognize. Thoth was standing over Magog, missing one arm, and holding the Tooth of Azazel in his remaining hand. That was a sword of bone made from, I kid you not, the actual tooth of an Elder God. It had been used to slay literally thousands of vampires and demons over the years by Renaud. I’d thought Thoth had handed it over to the Council of Ancients and their Magistrates.
I should have known better.
“You are bringing hell itself to your doorstep,” Magog said, his every word choked and inhuman. “All for the sake of a dhampyr whore.”
“She’s was my dhampyr,” Lucinda hissed. “No one’s whore.”
With that, Thoth severed the head of the Archdemon, and it died. I was washed over by a wave of demonic energy that called to the monster inside me. It seared the soul and caused me to scream out in pain like every other vampire present.
And then I awoke in the present day, shaking with agony.
Yukie slapped me across the face.
I stopped screaming. “Okay, you don’t slap a man. That’s not cool. As Charlie Murphy said, they had gunfights after that in the old days.”
Wow, I was referencing the Murphy brothers a lot lately. I wondered what that was about.
“You were screaming,” Yukie said, clenching and unclenching her fist.
“You’re damn right I was screaming,” I said, checking underneath my shirt to see if I had any markings from where I was speared by Magog’s tendrils. Thankfully, there was no sign it was real. “I have been put through some serious hallucinatory shit.”
“So, no insights?” Yukie asked, disappointed.
I saw Gog’s burns were on my wrist. “Ah, dammit. It was real.”
“What?”
I looked up at Yukie. “Big Daddy Demon is not only merely dead but really most sincerely dead. However, your grandpappy on your hellish side is after you. He’s like an evil Tyrion Lannister with a side of Cthulhu.”
“I have no idea what the fuck you just said.”
I thought about my words. “Maybe I watch a little too much TV.”
“A little too much?” Yukie asked, incredulously. “You sound like my hacker, Toshiro. He’s an Otaku, and that means something very different in Japan than in America.”
“I can’t help it. There’s not much to do but watch streaming shows in-between waiting for my jerk-ass customers at the Qwik and Shop.”
“You work at a convenience store?” Yukie asked.
I opened my mouth to defend myself when both David and Sam arrived at our sides. David had a severed hand in his grip, looking like it had been recently thawed out.
“I heard you scream!” David said, taking a bite out of the hand to my horror. He then spoke while chewing, “What’s wrong?”
I stared at him. “What the hell? Where did you get that?”
David swallowed. “Oh, yeah, Sam gave it to me. She was starting to look appetizing. I’m starting to think I was wrong about zombies not wanting to eat people.”
“You don’t say,” I muttered.
“I brought some Tupperware of fleshy bits just in case,” Sam said, lifting her purse and rattling it. “Also, a couple of blood bags but I’d hope you’d eat someone else if it came to that. I also keep an Om holy symbol, ziplocked verbena, holy water, and a bottle of liquid sunlight.”
“I am offended,” Yukie said, softly. “Peter says he knows who is responsible for the murders and why they are attacking.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, trying not to watch David tear into human flesh and eat it like a hotdog. Unfortunately, vampires had enhanced senses, and I could hear every little crunch he was making. Goddamn. You’d think I’d be less grossed out as a vampire, but I tended to find eating as a whole disgusting now, let alone when it involved human body parts. I’d have thrown up if I was biologically capable.
“Who?” Sam asked, looking down. “Is it someone we can fight?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, frowning. “Unless you know a way to defeat an Archdemon. It’s Gog.”
Yukie and Sam paled. Well, not really, since both were pretty damn white to begin with, but they looked a helluva lot more distressed than David. He had a beatific smile on his face as he chowed down.
“I could totally get into this on a regular basis,” David said. “You want to try this?”
“Fuck no!” I said.
“Spoilsport,” David said, continuing his meal. “Where to?”
I was tempted to suggest the airport as this was way out of my league. However, I wasn’t about to abandon Thoth. I was conflicted about my feelings regarding my creator: he’d done his best to prepare me for undeath, but it was still a condition I hadn’t fully understood when I’d taken it on. He also was a cheapskate who had kept secrets from me that interfered in the course of my duties as bellidix.
He was also my dad.
Weird, I know, since we hadn’t met until I was in my twenties. However, Thoth had proven to be more of a father than I’d ever got out of my actual old man. He’d loved and supported me through a lot of difficult shit. I loved the guy back, and I was 90% sure that wasn’t because creators could mentally influence their progeny the way Enil had done Jackson.
Okay, maybe 85%.
“We go on to the Fisher Building. Then we call Thoth and tell him the whole story. Maybe he’ll have a plan.”
“To kill Gog?” Yukie asked. “He is far more powerful than his son was, and his son was an enemy of all the peoples of the Earth.”
“No, to hide us and get us out of town.” I paused, looking down at the marks on my arm.
Everyone looked at me.
“Oh right, I wasn’t supposed to say that out loud.”
Chapter Eighteen
Surprisingly, there were no more interruptions getting there. Dead Debbie’s death had been broadcast across the country, so the police were already present, but there were no objections to us going up. The fact I’d gone from one set of murders to another without being detained by the police was a surreal experience.
Being the bellidix came with perks, despite paying shit.
The elevator doors leading to our destination finally pinged open about half an hour later, and I was immediately assaulted by the smell of blood. Blood, organs, viscera, and worse spread everywhere. It was choking, really, both beautiful and terrible at once. I immediately covered my mouth as I saw police officers, BOSS agents, and vampires all arguing over shag-carpeted wooden paneled hallways covered in splatter.
“Hey, Peter,” a green-haired punk girl said. She had olive-colored skin and a surprisingly bright smile for someone who worked for the undead. It was Mina Murray, one of Thoth’s Bloodsworn and a woman I’d once worked with when I was part of his security. Nice girl, if a bit too ambitious. She was one of the ones who’d taken to drinking vampire blood purely on th
e desire it might eventually lead to her being created.
“Mina,” I said.
“Here.” Mina proceeded to hand me a breath-mask for both my nose and mouth. Vampires didn’t breathe but we were excited by the smell of carnage, and it wouldn’t do for me to start licking the walls. Not that I’d do that. Honest.
“Thanks,” I said, taking it and affixing it to my mouth.
“Thoth is here,” Mina said. “There wasn’t any chance of keeping this quiet.”
“No shit,” I muttered. “How bad is it?”
“Bad,” Mina said. “The BOSS agent in charge is a real hardass. He’s throwing everything at the city and bringing in massive amounts of reinforcements. By tomorrow this is going to be on all the talk shows, and they’re going to demand a look at everything that might even be tangentially related.”
I looked back at Sam who was cursing in Hindi. “Just like they would have been doing if Rebecca Plum had been found murdered.”
Gog had mentioned he was going to destroy vampiredom and this was a good way of doing it. Somehow, I didn’t think he was particularly concerned about that element. It was more of a bonus in the grand scheme of things. No, this was all about avenging his dead son in the most painful manner possible.
“Any word about Jackson?” I asked.
“No,” Mina said. “He was transferred into BOSS protective custody. I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to get him to make a deal or he dies in police custody from them leaving him in a room with a window facing the sun.”
“Well, I’ll play him the world’s smallest violin.” I wanted to be the one who killed him, and this was decidedly less than satisfying.
“Sadly, the BOSS agents did confirm he alibied out, and we didn’t have any time to get rid of witnesses.”
“Dammit.” That meant I didn’t have anyone to blame Plum’s death on. I might try to pin it on Enil, but in vampire society, that was equivalent to saying the President did it. Much like mortal society, vampire society’s wheels of justice turned best when they were on the poor and disadvantaged.
“Yeah,” Mina said. “It gets worse.”
