by S T Branton
Chapter Thirty-Seven
This time, instead of sneaking around like a hunted animal, I brought the tide of hell into Delano’s temple. No sooner had I taken the first two steps down the wide aisle of the center hall than the pillars on both the left and the right came to life. They spilled out of their uncomfortable, tightly bound formations and shambled toward me with obvious intent to fight. Fortunately, all that time in suspension had weakened them severely while I was at the top of my game.
The Solis spear blazed a vengeful trail and branded its permanent mark on every emaciated body. I kept a special eye out for the silver nymph with the hole in her face, whose terrified eyes I had gazed into not so long ago. The spear’s intrusion had half blinded her and she attacked with a scream of rage, one eye uselessly opaque.
I plucked her out of the air like a fly on the tine of a fork. Her body dropped to rest with the others, completely free at last of Delano’s control. I hardly considered myself a saint for dispatching so many of Delano’s thralls, but I wouldn’t lose sleep over it either. They had made their ultimate goals clear in no uncertain terms and it was my job to make sure those goals never reached fruition.
Still, there were a lot of those frail, desperate entities that scrambled madly for their second chance. A grotesquely beautiful arachnid goddess somehow managed to slip behind me and lunge at my back with her sharp, barbed front legs. The first sting burned on my neck but I was momentarily deafened by an inhuman death screech in my ear. As I turned and cringed away from the terrible shriek, Deacon pulled his claws from the thorax of the huge black spider.
He grinned at me and shook slime from his hands. “And that,” he said, “is why you keep me around.”
“I can think of a few other reasons,” I answered.
There was nothing left of the pillars now. The temple floor was strewn with bodies and slick with innumerable shades of blood. The last surviving holdout, an archaic, uncanny, almost-human creature, fled halfway down the hall before the door at the back banged open and Delano swooped out.
He snatched the god in his flabby clutches, seized it with his innumerable pairs of hands, and sucked its life force dry. Like so many others, the remaining husk was tossed aside. A moment later, each crooked, jutted limb began to elongate and elevate his disturbing corpulence too high in the air. The limbs were imbalanced in strength and perhaps too weak to support his bulk. He swayed dangerously atop his new supports and maneuvered to face us. Deacon and I gaped at him, a reaction he mistook for shock and awe.
“Power,” he said. His voice was uneven and warbled a little, bordering on incomprehensible. Whenever he spoke, a chaotic mix of teeth flashed in his mouth. “Strength.” He raised his arms like bristles across his body. “I can feel it. I can taste it. So close. So sweet.”
“So fucked,” I said. “You know as well as I do that it’s time to end this madness. And I’m right here, right now.”
The god’s many eyes narrowed into glittering slivers. His face had lost all sense of structure. It was now merely a mess of features squashed together in a way that would have been extremely unsettling if I hadn’t been so determined to kill him from the get-go.
“Very well,” he declared at long last. “As you wish. Let us settle this petty, meaningless score.”
The whole time, he’d gradually inched forward and now lashed out with one of his huge new legs. I dodged its cruel sweep only to have to leap aside again as it impacted the wall. The impression it left in the stone was deep and wide. He was terrifyingly fast now, as well as terrifying in general. I honestly didn’t want to go near him, but I knew I had to. The tip of my spear needed to bury itself all the way down into that black heart.
After a few minutes during which we danced around one another, Delano finally seized an opportunity to attack and the impetus forced the air violently from my lungs. I severed a few of his legs as he charged, and the uneven distribution of weight finally began to hinder him. He now walked with a crooked gait and jerked around like a broken marionette.
Before I could anticipate his next move, he reared back and flames brimmed at the corners of his mouth. He spat them directly at Deacon and me. I threw myself out of the way, not at all fazed that I landed prone on the floor of the temple. I expected one of those snaky limbs to wrap around me at any moment and braced myself to slice straight through the flesh. But Delano had chosen to take Deacon out of the game and he did so with one swift blow.
“Deacon!” I couldn’t keep myself from calling to him as he slumped onto the cold floor. Delano pushed his former Apprenti away like a pile of trash. “Fuck you! I’ll make you answer for what you did to him.”
“What I did to him?” The monster made the closest approximation to a smile that he could. “Darling, I improved him. You should thank me for that skin, those horns, and his increased longevity. All he had to do was admit that I’ve been right all along.” He tucked his head into his tank-like body and launched himself toward me like an artillery shell. I scored his flesh as he passed.
“You made him an Apprenti!” I yelled. “You took everything from him and made him empty promises.” I charged at the god’s grotesque form and hurled the spear from a distance. It stuck hard in a flesh crease on his side and more grape-hued blood trickled from the wound. The spear disengaged at my silent call and returned to my hand. “And for what, Delano? So he could defy you for real in the end anyway? Nice plan.”
Delano frowned. “Humans are weak,” he hissed contemptuously. “The earthworms of the universe. No magic, no strength, no speed. Nothing to set them apart from every other completely trivial race that’s ever been created. I threw away the dreary chains of humanity so that I might have a chance to elevate myself and learn more about how to fix the regrettable circumstances of my birth. I yearned to be something greater.”
I motioned to his whole face as I danced barely of his reach. “I’ll be honest with you, man. This whole hybrid thing you have going on isn’t actually greater. You went too far. You crossed like fifty lines. There’s no way to get this back the way it was.”
“Silence!” he bellowed. The array of hands snapped out again in an attempt to snatch me. “I wanted everything for Deacon. I would have treated him like my own, as Lorcan did for me. He had potential to learn the ways.” He paused, then smiled. “That’s not true. I wanted to hurt you as badly as possible. And I did, so it wasn’t a total failure. That’s my favorite thing about humans.” He smirked. “They have so many soft spots.”
“Shut up!” Even the mention of Deacon’s ordeal still threw me into a rage. “What do you know about pain and weakness, you scumbag fucker? You were never fucking human. That’s why you could give Lorcan your heart in the first place. Because you didn’t need it. You were already empty.”
If I had expected Delano to be offended or hurt, it was a naïve hope. He beamed with pride instead. “Perhaps that is true,” he admitted. “And what a wonderful Apprenti I was. Lorcan couldn’t have asked for better, really.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “Because we both know what happened to him.”
A spark of anger flashed in Delano’s eyes. He ran at me on those creepy, multijointed legs and tried to sweep me forward into a hug of death. His teeth gnashed relentlessly like a portable meat grinder that simply waited to chew me up. I didn’t doubt for a second that he’d swallow me whole if he caught me.
But he now had a hard time adjusting to his latest modifications. The legs he had taken from the last god in the pillars slowed him immensely. He relied on far-reaching, area-of-effect attacks to keep me at bay, but I darted in and out of his personal space more quickly than he could strike.
We pushed and shoved our way out onto the front terrace of the plateau again, where the war still burned hot. Delano had his back to the fierce clash. He seemed to lose energy and patience. His body required massive amounts of fuel to function, and he realized that he’d eaten every god already—or, at least, the ones he could catch. His power seem
ed to be a finite resource, like a bright but short-lived star. The look in his eyes gradually shifted from supreme arrogance to something closer to anxiety.
“You will lose!” he screamed at me. “Why do you even fight? Not even Kronin could defeat me now.”
I stared at the abomination in front of me, my spear leveled at his head. “You’re right,” I said. “Kronin couldn’t win. But he fought his war with only half an army.”
Delano’s face contorted. “What is the meaning of that?” he demanded.
I pointed over his shoulder and waited patiently while he heaved himself around. The legs made small snapping sounds as if they had begun to break beneath his weight. Delano stared in silence. In the short period we had been outside, the fighting had petered out to a small skirmish here or there. The gods he had recruited were dead, gone, or captured. Every other eye atop that mountain now focused on him.
My crew stood stone-faced in the front and glared at him.
“It means I have all of Earth on my side,” I said.
“No!” Delano whirled and lashed out with the sword. I swung my spear at the exact moment. The Gladius Solis shattered in his hand, an ignominious end to a noble weapon that had brought me so far. Before the pieces struck the ground, I leveled the spear at his chest. It burned brilliantly with Solis energy that thrummed to be released. The blast struck Delano right over the place where his heart had once been.
As heavy as he had become, Delano remained no real match for a Solis weapon. I watched him catapult back and be subsumed by the horde as if in slow motion. The last glimpse I ever had of him was his horrible, monstrous face and his mouth twisted open in a scream.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“It isn’t like this the first time,” I said and paused on the side of the mountain to admire the crystalline blue sky. “It figures that the weather would behave better for an actual demon, I guess.”
Brax laughed. “My reputation precedes me,” he replied. He wore no special equipment for the climb, only his clothes and boots—and, of course, his glasses—and carried his hammer on his back. On mine, I carried the Solis spear. On my belt were the broken pieces of the Gladius Solis. The two of us had embarked on a special mission at my request. Months after Delano’s fall at the temple in Indiana, we now headed to Carcerum one last time.
I didn’t expect that there would be much to see there. Most of the deities who came to Earth had been at the temple that day, and the vast majority had fallen in the fight. The handful of survivors had fled or surrendered, which meant that the great halls of Carcerum still stood empty in their grandeur. We had considered the possibility of returning the few gods who were left to the home where Kronin kept them, but as acting head of the brand-new Human-Forgotten Alliance, Jules objected.
I remembered that day as though it had happened minutes before, so vivid was the arguing, the passion, and the bickering. The other members of the Alliance, better known as the rest of my crazy friends, couldn’t agree on where to send the last living gods. Dan and Veronica thought that since Carcerum had been set aside for them, that was where they should return but under different supervision. Frank and Steph yelled at each other about whether or not gods deserved to be treated humanely. Luis sat back, shook his head, and grinned silently.
Jules and Maya, however, had a new solution.
“Let’s send them to Asphodel,” the Were had said. Faced with a host of puzzled stares, she elaborated. “Look, what they’ve done is completely reprehensible. No one can dispute that. But if we simply stick them back in their happy golden fantasyland where they have everything they could possibly want, they won’t learn squat. And maybe they’ll multiply somehow, and maybe in another few millennia, they’ll be pissed about something and this will happen all over again.” She paused to let her words sink in. “If we put them in Asphodel, they will suffer. It might teach them some empathy, and if they have empathy, they might not act like such crazy jerks all the time.”
“I agree, I think,” Jules chimed in after a moment’s thought. “I mean, I believe they deserve death, but we as humans are capable of mercy. Asphodel will be a place of repentance for them.” She glanced at Brax. “Would you be willing to keep an eye on them while they serve their sentences?” Each god faced several centuries of time for literal crimes against humanity.
The demon had looked at her for a minute, classically impassive, and finally dropped his shoulders and started to giggle. The sound made us all a little uncomfortable, and it continued for a long time. But when the fit finally abated, he had agreed to be the jailer of Asphodel. He had also agreed, with some reluctance, to allow Jules to visit him on the weekends. When he told her it was too dangerous, she’d simply smiled and said, “Even jailers need conjugal visits.”
I had never seen the demon shut his mouth so fast.
After that last meeting, we all went our separate ways for a while. Frank and Steph embarked on the most tempestuous, dramatic relationship we’d ever seen. The last I heard from them, they were on breakup number eleven, Frank planned to start a numbers racket with a gang of satyrs he’d met in the temple dungeon, and Steph vowed to shut them down before they even started.
Deacon and I went on cleanup duty and rounded up the last of the gods from the far corners of the earth. We found out from Namiko and others that a good number of them hadn’t shown up to the final conflict. These beings proved to be mostly resigned to the whole situation, so we were able to take our time and have a vacation while we worked. We never really had the chance to relax together before that trip—not fully, anyway. A significant amount of time was spent in hotel rooms and he may have been tied up once or twice—by request.
Maya, in stark contrast to our debauchery-filled working vacation, continued to act as our moral backbone and dedicated her time to working with the newly freed Forgotten. She spent hours and hours at therapy centers and reached out to all kinds, but especially Weres. These learned how to deal nonviolently with their powers, how to control them, and how to channel them in a positive way. She was freaking amazing at it, to no one’s surprise, and was uniquely qualified for the position.
Smitty and Amber traveled back to the Pacific Northwest after things stabilized in Indiana. Their camp inside a church exploded into a thriving community. Amber sent me pictures of a city in the early stages, minus skyways and buildings above the clouds. She said it was weird and wonderful to watch the place they’d built in the wilderness take on a life of its own. She still kept in touch with Namiko, who now ran all over the place and compiled every scrap of god-related information she could find. “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it,” she said. “We’ll never forget about this again.”
Victoria.
“Huh?” I snapped out of reverie and back into the clear, cold, sunny day. We were close to the summit, now, and perhaps an hour out from the peak. “What’s up, Marcus?”
I still do not understand the reasoning behind this return to Carcerum. It is a relic of history now. It serves no practical purpose.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said as I’d done since the idea for the trip came into being. “It’s no big deal. There’s merely something I have to make right.”
I stood by the forge in Carcerum and stared at the surface of the smithy. The broken pieces of the Gladius Solis lay arranged in front of me. They no longer swirled with Delano’s black energy. His death had caused that influence to ebb over time. The telltale veins of orange had begun to return to the surface of the stone. With some skill and a lot of patience, I was certain the sword could be good as new.
But I wasn’t there to repair it. I gathered the pieces and gave them to Brax, who melted them down in the forge’s furnace. He removed the molten stone and poured it into the mold I had found. The shape of it was strange, ethereal, and foreign. If it didn’t work, I told myself, it didn’t work.
I had a feeling it would, though.
While the metal cooled, I removed Marcus’s medallion and set it
in there. The Solis Stone coalesced over top of the medallion and consumed it entirely. I drew a deep breath and looked to my left.
Marcus stood beside me in the flesh. He looked around, flexed his fingers, and patted himself down. “You could have restored anyone,” he said to me. “Anyone you wanted. Yet you chose me?”
I shrugged. “Don’t get all touchy-feely about it, okay? It has nothing to do with me or you, or whether I think you’re super cool. Carcerum needs someone to stand watch, even if no one is here.” I reached over my shoulder for the spear and withdrew the shard of the mirror from my pocket. I handed both to the old centurion.
“I’m sorry it broke,” I said. “I hope you can fix it. And that you’ll keep an eye on Earth.”
Marcus bowed his head. “It would be my honor, Victoria.” He paused. “What will you do now?”
I took a deep breath and glanced at the demon. In true Brax fashion, he offered nothing more than an unhelpful shrug.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’m through being the captain of the ship. It’s time for someone else to step up to the helm.”
“That is fair,” said Marcus. “You have done so very much for this world and its people.”
“I have one last request,” I told him. “And you can’t laugh.”
“I will not,” he swore solemnly.
I smirked. “Could I get a lift back to Earth? The door in the palace is like, so far away.”
The Roman smiled in response. “This is a trick you never did learn.” He raised the spear and used its tip to cut a perfect shining circle in space and time. I reached out, grabbed his free hand, and squeezed it tight.
