by M. K. Gibson
“Extra-dimensional forces?” Myst asked. “Like . . . Dmitrius and other celestials?”
Y’olly pondered the notion, setting the folder down on his desk. “Very possible. A lot of those folks hate you and all mortals. And you said it yourself, like those prophecies, he called you a god that was never meant to be. Maybe he’s part of a splinter group bent on universal destruction?”
“Then I need to find him.”
The old-style rotary phone on Y’olly’s desk began to ring. The demon picked it up. “Hello?” A moment went by and that’s when the demon looked at me. “It’s for you.”
I walked over to his desk and he handed me the comically large phone. Putting it to my ear and speaking at the same time was impossible.
“Hello?” I said into the transmitting end, then shifted my ear to the receiver.
“Sir?! Oh sir, I’m glad you’re there!” Sophia’s voice came over the line.
“Sophia?”
“I can’t hear you, sir, you sound so far away.”
I looked up at the demon. “Can we not do this bit right now? Funny, sure. We’re kind of beginning the third act climax of the story.”
“Sorry.” Y’olly smiled and snapped his fingers. The phone turned blessedly human-sized in my hands.
“Go ahead, Sophia.”
“Oh there you go, much better. Sir, you need to get home right away!”
“How did you get back to the company?” I asked. “What happened? Did Dmitrius--”
“Sir, I’ll explain it all later,” she said, cutting me off. “You need to get back home now.”
“No,” I said. “I need to find Valliar. The arrogant asshole is the one who took Evie. I’m going to find him and rip his righteous head off, then--”
“SIR!”
“What?!”
“Valliar is here! In your office, now! He’s--”
“He’s what?”
“He’s seeking asylum . . . in your dimension.”
I turned back towards my demonic host. “Pardon me, Y’olly, but I must leave.”
“Trouble?”
“No,” I said with a shake of my head. “There’s a high god that I have to punch in the face.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Where I Am Greeted by a New Employee, Confront an Old Enemy, and Smash Teacups
“What’s the play, boss?” Myst asked as we stepped through the downstairs closet portal, leaving the Never Realm and entering my dimension. “Are you going to kill him?”
“I don’t know,” I said as I stormed up the stairs towards my waiting room. “I know I want to, but that doesn’t get me Evie back.”
Or Lydia, I thought with an intense pain in my heart.
Lydia . . . damn it.
I’ve done a lot of horrible things. Well, horrible to someone like you. To me, it was mostly business. But in all my dealings, in all my nefarious activities, I’d never done anything quite like that.
Sure, I fake married a deity once for the insurance. And, yes, I was the one who rigged certain elections . . . for both sides. But I’d never done anything like I had to Lydia. That level of betrayal was . . . new to me.
Because it wasn’t business. It was personal.
I entered my waiting room and saw the normal fare of villainous denizens politely sitting and reading out-of-date magazines. All eyes went to me. But I didn’t look at them. Instead, I looked at the individual sitting behind the receptionist’s desk.
And it wasn’t Sophia.
“What . . . the fuck . . . are you doing?”
Morakesh looked up from behind the computer. “Trying to keep your business afloat! You’re out running around doing gods above and below know what while I’m rearranging your calendar!”
“What . . . what are you wearing?”
The undead Lich had abandoned his ceremonial death shroud and was wearing khaki slacks and a black polo shirt with my company logo embroidered on the left breast pocket. His remaining wispy hair was pulled back in a ponytail. He looked like an aging hipster too stubborn to admit he was going bald. I was willing to bet that if I looked under the desk, he was wearing sandals with socks.
“What?” Morakesh asked, looking down. “This is the uniform my supervisor gave me.”
I blinked. “Supervisor? What supervisor?”
“Office manager Sophia, of course,” the lich said. “Speaking of, she and some elderly man are waiting for you in your office. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to get back to work.”
“You know I could kill you, right?”
“If you’re unhappy with my performance Mr. Blackwell, please take it up with my supervisor. In the meantime, you have an appointment.”
I opened my mouth, then shut it. With a shake of my head, I walked away towards my office door and opened it. Ahead of me, my desk was empty. To my left, I saw Sophia sitting on my leather office couch. In the recliner, Valliar, dressed in a contemporary business suit, sat sipping from a teacup.
I didn’t even know we had teacups.
“Sir!” Sophia said upon my entry.
“Jackson, I am sure you are angry,” Valliar said as he set the teacup down and stood to face me. “And you have every right to be. But there are issues that you are not aware of. We must talk. You see--oof!!”
Before the elderly white-haired god finished whatever the fuck it was he wanted to say, I planted a Spartan kick right into his sternum. Backed with the god-power of my dimension, the kick launched his righteous ass across my office and into one of my trophy display cases. Broken glass rained down on the confused and injured High God of Justice.
“Don’t move,” I instructed Valliar. “I’ll get to you in a minute.”
I picked up the teacup and turned to face Sophia. “Teacups? When the fuck did you have time to order teacups?! Hmm?”
“Sir, calm down.”
I whipped the teacup across the room, smashing the fragile porcelain against Valliar’s face.
“Ow!”
“Shut up,” I scolded the god, then turned back to Sophia. “And why the fuck is Morkesh out there doing your job? Who gave you the authority to hire anyone?!”
Sophia held up her hands in a pleading gesture. “Sir, please, calm down.”
“Don’t tell me how to feel!” I yelled at my oldest friend. “You have no idea what I’ve had to do! You disappeared and I thought you were lost in the cosmos, only to find out you’ve made unauthorized decisions while having a goddamn tea party with the enemy!”
“I can explain,” Sophia said, narrowing her eyes.
“Wait . . . is that one of my suits?” I asked, looking back at Valliar. “It IS! Why is he wearing one of my suits?! Is this your plan then, to bring me down? Are you going to replace me with this second-rate fantasy realm Valar knockoff?”
“Six weeks!” Sophia screamed back at me.
The sudden scream made me pause. “What?”
“Six weeks,” Sophia repeated. “That’s how long you’ve been gone. When the Umbra jumped out of Horreich, I was immediately transported back here. For the last month and a half, I’ve been worried sick! I never lost faith that you’d come back, but the business was failing. So I’ve been running the regular operations and I needed help. That’s why I hired Morry full time. I bought the tea set out of my own expenses for entertaining highbrow guests.”
“Oh,” was about all I could say.
“This isn’t about the tea set, your suit, or Morry,” Sophia said. “I know what happened. Valliar told me. I . . . I’m sorry about Lydia. Truly, sir. Yes, I will one day destroy you, but not like this.”
Sophia crossed the distance between us and put her arms around me. “I am so, so sorry.”
I held my friend and fought back the emotion welling up inside me. “Me . . . me too.”
I released the hug and looked at the remaining teacup. “They are nice.”
“Yeah, they were. Expensive too.”
Oops. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she
said. “I’ll just bill the company.”
“Hey boss, you realize that Morakesh is running things out there?” Myst said as she walked into my office. “Whoa, what happened in here?”
“A difference of opinion on office decor,” I said with a sigh. “Now, would you be so kind to help Valliar up, see him to my desk, and then hold a knife to his throat?”
“Sure?” Myst agreed. It was clear she was confused, but she obeyed.
Transforming herself into a hulking brute, Myst picked the god up as if he were a child and set him into the chair across from my desk. She then shifted her hands into wickedly sharp blades and held them at Valliar’s throat. “Hold still.”
“I intend to,” Valliar said.
I went to my desk and sat down. Opening the ornate wooden box, I retrieved one of my black and silver cigarettes. Lighting it, I took a deep, settling breath. I closed my eyes, held the burning smoke, then softly blew it out. I let my emotions go. There would be time to reflect on the empty quiet of my dimension. What was once a place of business had become a home. And that home would have one fewer voice.
Two, if I didn’t get my head on straight and find my daughter.
I took one more puff. “Better,” I said aloud.
Opening my eyes, I leveled my gaze at the high god. “Now, Valliar, would you be so kind as to explain to me why the fuck you thought it would be a good idea to orchestrate a cabal of gods with the express purpose of kidnapping my daughter?”
Valliar said nothing at first, but Myst applied gentle pressure against his neck with one of her knife-hands.
“Answer him.”
“Because,” Valliar said, looking me dead in the eye, “I was trying to save the multiverse.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Where I Exercise My Second Amendment Rights, Morakesh Breaks the Tension, and Truths Are Revealed
There are times when someone says something so dumb, you just want to punch them in the face the moment they open their goddamn mouths. You know who I mean. Flat-Earth people. Whole Foods shoppers. People who dress their pets. You just want to come over whatever barrier is between you and them and slap some sense into them.
With your ring hand.
Valliar telling me that he helped to kidnap my daughter to save the multiverse was one of those moments. But I did not punch Valliar in the face. No, that would be . . . uncouth.
I shot him the face instead.
Lifting the Colt 1911 from my desk, I squeezed off the entire magazine directly into Valliar’s smug bearded face. Myst jumped aside once I brandished the weapon and covered her ears until the firing stopped.
The impacting rounds knocked the fallen high god tits over teakettle and onto my office floor. But as this was my dimension, and I still needed this twerp, I did not allow the bullets to kill him.
But they hurt like a sumbitch.
“You want to repeat yourself?” I asked the prone god as I reloaded.
“I . . . was . . . saving . . . us . . . all,” Valliar groaned as he rose from the floor.
The god rubbed at his face where the bullets had impacted. He used a portion of his power to return his swollen face to normal. Then, in as dignified a manner as possible, the god returned to the chair across from me.
“Now, may we continue?” he asked. “Perhaps conduct ourselves as proper gods?”
I nodded my head. It was a fair question, after all. “No.”
And I shot him again. This time, I allowed the bullet to penetrate his right shoulder.
“Nng.” Valiar grimaced, clutching at his shoulder with his left hand.
“That is called pain,” I told him. “Get used to it. Unless you tell me what I want to know, then I have oodles more waiting for you. Considering what I’ve had to do to get here—well, let’s just say I have some repressed anger that needs to be worked out.”
“Jackson,” Valliar said through gritted teeth, “you don’t have time to torture me.”
“I disagree,” I said, shooting him in the left shoulder. “I have nothing but time. And I still have the Blessing of The One. So, if you want to see what I can do with that, keep talking nonsense.”
“Any why do you think The One gave you that blessing?”
“To get my daughter back from you jealous, treacherous, child-stealing high god ASSHOLES!” I screamed and put three rounds into his stomach.
Valliar doubled over and fell onto the floor once more. His nearly useless arms were pressed to the holes in his guts. I came up out of my seat in a flash. All sense of my calming self-meditation was gone. I only saw the “man” who’d taken my child. And the comfortable weight of the gun in my hand made the decision so, so easy.
Standing over the god, I put the barrel of the Colt to his right temple.
“No,” Sophia said, crossing her arms. “Don’t. You’ll be setting a precedent. Not to mention the bounty on your head from the remaining gods.”
“Bring ’em on,” I sneered.
“Don’t be an idiot, Jackson,” Valliar moaned. “You’ve been set up, sir. Think about it.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, not looking away while I held the weapon.
If the Colt’s trigger only needed two and a half pounds of pressure to fire, then I was holding the trigger steady at two pounds and forty-nine percent. It would be so, so easy to finish the job. Not to mention satisfying. But . . . his death, while justified, did nothing to get Evie back.
Tension hung in the air. No one spoke for several long, aching moments.
“Does anyone need a drink?” Morakesh asked as he walked into the office carrying a tray. “I have scotch, coffee, water, and wine.”
Everyone in the room, to include myself, watched the undead hippie come into the room, walk past me, step over the fallen high god, and set the tray down on the office’s coffee table. He even took a moment to set a small cylindrical vase in the middle with a single orchid as a place setting.
“There, better,” he said, satisfied with the result. Then Morakesh put his hands on his hips. “Okay, who broke the teacup? Hmm? Do you know how hard it was to get Amazon to deliver here?”
“Morakesh,” I said with a sigh.
“Yes, Mr. Blackwell?”
“What, in the name of all that is holy, are you doing?”
“Serving drinks?” Morakesh said. “The gunfire and kerfuffle scared away your clients for the rest of the day. I assured them it was completely normal.”
“Good job,” Sophia praised the lich.
“Wait, what?” I said, confused. “Don’t praise him!”
“He followed my training manual to the letter, sir. That’s the kind of can-do initiative the Blackwell Corporation appreciates in an employee.”
“I am the Blackwell Corporation!”
“And do you appreciate that kind of spunk in an employee?”
“Well . . . yes.”
“Then I stand by what I said,” Sophia said.
“If I may, Mr. Blackwell,” Morakesh said, coming towards me with a tumbler of scotch, neat, “I also came in here to break the tension.”
“Mission accomplished,” Myst said, taking the scotch from Morakesh and knocking it back in one swallow. The lich gave her a sideways glare, then went to retrieve another glass.
“Mr. Blackwell, I also overheard what Valliar told Sophia. The reason she’s advocating for him is because she knows he is telling the truth. He, Branwen, and Hermov did conspire to kidnap Evie.”
“I knew that already,” I growled.
“However, they did it to keep her away from the real threat.”
“Who?” I asked, looking down at Valliar.
“The One,” Valliar said in all sincerity. “The One wants Evie. The One no longer wishes to be The One.”
“Then why not simply step down, like King Stanley did?”
Valliar shook his head. “You don’t understand. The One doesn’t want to simply ‘step down’. The One is tired of . . . well, everything. The mortals. The w
ars. The repetition. The constant cycle of each universe repeating itself, over and over. You, a mortal from the Prime Universe, have free will in ways that we high gods do not. As a god that was not meant to be, you have a will and a freedom that I do not. Your child, being a demigod, has even more freedom and power. With her, he can break the cycle of all creation and all existence.”
“Then what would happen?” I asked.
“Honestly?” Valliar said. “I do not know. But without The One maintaining the cosmic flow, then each universe could become like the Prime Universe.”
“That’s not so bad,” I said. “Amazing what true free will can get you.”
“Or,” Valliar said, “each universe could simply implode in a crushing cascade of entropy and oblivion.”
“Oh. That’s bad.”
“Agreed.” Valliar nodded. “When your child was born, we High Gods of the Trinity, of Fantasy, Horror, and Science, knew the possibility of such an outcome. We also knew that The One had grown . . . listless in the responsibility. Therefore, we made a pact.”
“A pact you all broke,” I said. “Branwen killed Hermov.”
“No, she didn’t,” Valliar said. “A high god cannot kill another high god without a sanction from The One. You know this.”
“Then who . . . oh,” I said, realization dawning on me. “The One.”
“Yes,” Valliar nodded. “The One Gave you his Blessing. A blessing that allowed you, as more mortal than god, to enter each realm and dispose of the reigning high god while you conducted your crusade.”
“I was set up to take each of you out.”
“And you succeeded,” Valliar said. “The One killed the weakened Hermov in a way that led you to Branwen. You banished her, powerless, to another dimension. Once it was revealed that Evie was in Caledon, a legion of Celestials invaded. All the lands were plunged into immediate war. Khasil and I were forced to . . . commit to a cataclysm, destroying our world in the hopes of stopping the invaders.”
“Where is Khasil?” I asked.
