by Dick Denny
“Well, the bad news…I believe Uriel is going rogue.” Lucifer nodded his thanks as he took the tumbler.
“There any good news?” I clinked my glass to his.
“You’re no worse off than you were yesterday.” His manner was comforting, but I’ll be honest, that bit of information wasn’t comforting at all.
“So, what do we do?” Gretchen asked as she took her feet off the desk and leaned her elbows on it instead.
“Well…” he shifted in the seat and for the first time in my life, I saw Uncle Lew as what I could only call, uncomfortable. “The long-term solution is to protect the Wrath by getting it away from Nick.”
“Wait,” I said, half-angry the other half-confused. “That’s been a goddamned option?”
“Well…” Lucifer shifted in the chair again.
“We could just give it to the Dalai Lama!” Gretchen burst as she bounced excitedly in the chair. I must have shot her a confused look. Her eyes were wide as she shrugged. “Well, we don’t want to give it to the Pope. He’d just give it to an archangel. But why should the Dalai Lama care? He’s freaking zen.”
“For starters, he’s old,” I offered. “Like really old. FDR gave him a watch, for crying out loud.” I glanced at Lucifer. “Right?”
“That’s true.” Lucifer nodded in agreement. “Plus, even if you gave it to the position of the Dalai Lama and not just the person of the thirteenth…” He paused. “No, sorry, fourteenth Dalai Lama. Anyway, the next Dalai Lama will be chosen by the Pancham Lama, who has more or less been the hostage of the Chinese government for years now. So the next Dalai Lama is more or less going to be a puppet of the Chinese state.”
You could see Gretchen chew the inside of her cheek before asking, “And why’s that a particularly horrible thing?”
“They’re communists,” I offered, and Uncle Lew nodded in agreement.
“So?”
“A good communist,” Lucifer offered, “even if most Chinese nowadays are bad communists, but regardless, a good communist is, for lack of a better term, evangelical. Evangelical politically, not religiously. Regardless, I wouldn’t want any evangelical, regardless of creed, to wield the Wrath of God.”
“So a Muslim is out, right?” I said.
Lucifer laughed. “I’m sure any Twelver Shia you gave it to would instantly be proclaimed the Mhadi.”
“Huh?” Gretchen grunted. It was odd seeing her lost in a conversation considering she was more or less smarter than me.
“Twelver Shia,” Uncle Lew said.
“Iran more or less,” I interjected.
Lucifer nodded and continued where I left off. “…Are more or less praying for a mythical figure called the Mhadi to come and lead them and bring about the end of the world.”
I added, “It’s some real Frank Herbert Dune shit that they’re downing with the intensity of a Scientologist masturbating to Battlefield Earth.”
That got a laugh out of Lucifer. “Sadly, giving to Wrath to just anyone is out of the question.” Then his eyes fell solely and intensely on me. “But you could give it to a child.”
Uh-oh… “You mean like an orphan kid?”
He shook his head no.
Shit… “Or some stranger’s kid?”
He shook his head no.
Goddamnit… “So what are you saying.”
He shrugged his shoulders meekly like he was trying to sink his head into his torso like a turtle. His voice matched the physicality of his action at that moment perfectly. He gestured between Gretchen and me. “Well, if you two—”
Our hands shot out like a crossing guard. “You can put that on pause,” Gretchen interjected.
Simultaneously a, “Oh, hell no!” erupted from my lips.
Lucifer held his hands up in surrender. “I didn’t think it was a viable plan either, but I don’t want you walking off with bad information.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Well, as it stands,” Uncle Lew said with a sad tone, “if you die, the Wrath goes up for grabs. Before, neither side could find your mother, so the world was safe. You, Nick, are deemed uncontrollable, so the world is safe. If a known quantity had the Wrath, that would be the end of things.”
“That doesn’t sound like a suggestion.”
He chuckled. “You’re right, it’s not. So the best I can offer is for you to keep the Wrath out of anyone else’s hands.”
Gretchen’s features darkened suspiciously. “You keep saying it like that. Why?”
“Like what?”
“The Wrath, not the Sword.”
He paused, thoughtfully for a moment. “Well, it’s the more accurate of the descriptions.”
“How so?” I started feeling cautious. I didn’t like it when Uncle Lew got technical in his details.
He lazily waved his hand. “Well, all pistols are firearms, but not all firearms are pistols.”
I instantly chewed on that. I’d used the Sword as a one-handed affair and had it instantly shift into a two-handed deal. “So you’re saying it could be any kind of weapon I want?”
“Somewhat. It isn’t a range weapon. You can’t project it beyond your grasp, so you can’t make it the pistol Painless from Hellboy.” He smiled as if this were something I should have known, like telling a kid to not put his finger in another kid’s nose. “But any kind of hand weapon—sword, knife, club, flail, whip…” He twisted his finger as he listed them off. “Really anything you’d find in the melee section of a Dungeons and Dragons manual before the fourth edition.”
Gretchen’s eyebrows almost came together. “Why just versions one, two, and three?”
“And version three-point-five,” Lucifer added as he chuckled to himself. “Oh, Gary Gygax was alive for those; after he died my people stepped in. All those moms who thought their kids were worshiping the devil while playing D&D wasn’t true until the fourth edition.” He shrugged his shoulders and sipped his scotch.
“So you’re saying I could be Indiana Jones-ing shit with a whip made of fire?” I could see the image in my head and knew it was cooler than any reality would be. I could barely deal with the Sword. I’d end up fucking myself up with a whip.
Lucifer smiled. “You could, I guess, but you’d have to start carrying a custom Smith and Wesson 1917 Hand Ejector cut from a six-inch barrel to four, as opposed to your normal 1911.”
Gretchen reached over and patted my hand. “You could pull off the hat.”
“Just remember, Nick, it’s a weapon, but it’s also a shield. You know it’s made you stronger, tougher, et cetera, and it also functions as protection for you.” Lucifer paused to let that sink in.
I thought about all the near misses I’ve had since all this bullshit started. I thought about Zadkiel kicking me through that window. Apparently, the Wrath of God was enough to save me, but Jammer was still dead…Switch was still fucked up.
I grabbed my phone and thumbed through the contacts that Agnes kept updated and shot a text. Not twenty seconds after I hit send there was a knock on the door. Lucifer looked over to it with a raised eyebrow that oozed bemusement.
I got up and walked around the desk to the door. I opened it with a smirk and Gabrielle stood there in a light blue vest and matching skirt with a white silken blouse. The hallway fluorescent lighting made her golden hair shine; I wasn’t sure if it was an accident or not, with the illusion of a halo. Her blue eyes went wide as they fell on Lucifer sitting in the chair sipping a Scotch.
Again, Lucifer smiled and raised his glass slightly in salute to the lady archangel at the door.
“Baalberieth is taking a census and trying to figure out what the fuck Uriel is up to.” I didn’t see a reason to fuck around at the moment so I just got to business.
Gabrielle obviously decided to not fuck around either. “Census of what?”
“Nephelim,” Lucifer threw out there offhandedly before adding in a friendly but slightly chastising tone. “You could have just asked me you know instead of bothering Nick abou
t it.”
Gabrielle’s eyes darted from Lucifer to me as I demanded. “Now, fix Switch.”
Back on the desk, my phone rang.
Gabrielle’s eyes were locked to mine as if we were in a having a staring contest and the loser had to do the other’s taxes. The phone kept ringing and behind me, I heard Gretchen’s voice.
“Hello?” There was a pause. “Nick…it’s…it’s for you.” She waited a second. “You need to take this.”
I stepped backward, keeping my eyes locked on Gabrielle. I didn’t break the look until I took the phone and glanced at it. The contact showing was Saul’s Pistol and Pawn. I put it to my ear. “How’s it hanging, Yuri?”
The voice that answered wasn’t Yuri’s. The voice was soft and feminine, but feminine in the way that a brick wrapped in a silk scarf and used to bludgeon someone with was feminine. “Sorry to disappoint, Mr. Decker.”
“Who the fuck is this?” My voice had gone frigid. Uncle Lew was standing, setting the glass down, face full of concern. Gabrielle stepped into the office and shut the door, face full of worry.
I heard the galvanization of hate and desire even through the phone. “Uriel.”
Chapter Twelve
Racing The Clock… In a Ferrari…
“Winterborn” Cruxshadows
The song started with heavy guitars and driving piano beat before slowing and the operatic voice of the singer beginning The fires are burning and the engines are howling way down in the valley tonight.
The tachometer jumped into the red and the tires peeled and I didn’t care that the Ferrari fishtailed coming out of the parking deck and onto the street. Gretchen sat next to me with her revolvers strapped to her thighs. My .45 was under my arm and Jammer’s nickel-plated Kimber was stuffed in the back of my pants under my jacket.
Lucifer told me it was a trap. Gabrielle had agreed with him. Gretchen had assumed it as a matter of fact. I had zero fucks to give.
Uriel was at Saul’s Pistol and Pawn.
Lucifer had told me to run. Gabrielle had again agreed with him. Gretchen had my back. Yuri had had my back and now he and Mary Jo were in a shitstorm. Switch had had my back and he’d been laid up in the hospital for six damned months. Jammer had had my back and now he was dead. I knew I should have ran…
Because the fate of everything was sitting squarely on my shoulders.
Academically, I understood that.
But the other more subtle voice whispered in the back of my head, A man’s got to stand for something.
I dropped from fourth gear to third as I drifted around the corner from Fifth onto Main and slammed the throttle, clutched back into fourth and quickly into fifth as I threaded the car between a beer truck and a mid-sized economy car. I made the yellow light but wouldn’t have stopped for the red regardless.
What did I stand for? I wasn’t in the Army anymore. I had gotten out when the shit that shouldn’t matter seemed to matter more than the shit that should. If I were honest, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about other people’s John Lockeian rights of life, liberty, and property.
I could feel the Wrath in my gut wanting to break free and burn the world, and there was an overly large segment in the pie chart of my mind reading: fuck it, world has it coming. I would look at humanity and see an at worst, “brutal”, and at best “worthless” shitshow that I just couldn’t seem to find a care to give about whether it starved, flooded, or burned.
Yet as apathetic as I was, I knew exactly what I had to stand for. Yuri had sniped from a rooftop, killing Heaven’s Hotdogs because I’d needed help and he’d had my back. Switch was laid up because he had had my back. Gretchen sat next to me hurtling toward a confrontation with an archangel because she had my back. Jammer was dead because he had had my back.
What did I have to stand for? The fucked-up family I’d found along the way. There was a responsibility to stick your ass in a crack for the people who were willing to stick their ass in a crack for you.
Had I ran, it would have been better for everyone. Lucifer and Gabrielle both knew and pointed this out. Gretchen knew this and yet she was hurtling into the shit with me into a situation that would be, as Jammer once said, dick-deep in stupid.
We jacked my phone into the radio. It didn’t have Bluetooth as it was a 2005 car and the radio hadn’t been upgraded. Over the speakers we were playing the only song I could figure was appropriate for the moment. O Fortuna We might as well have been on an Arthurian quest for all the hope we had. And at the same time we’d had hope. To be fair, I had fought an archangel before and won. The bad news was I was still the only person ever to have done so.
“Do we have a plan?” Gretchen asked as her head bobbed in time with the music. As heart-pumping and violence-inducing the tune was, we had no idea what the operatic voices were saying, thus singing along would have felt odd.
“Same as last time.” I sped past a cop car without a damn bit of notice or response.
Gretchen looked at me incredulously, even though I wasn’t paying attention because I was trying to not fucking kill us as I drove. “You had a plan the last time?”
“Kinda,” I said, tearing past a Smart Car.
“‘Kinda’ isn’t the most inspirational of words, Nick.” In a world falling to shit, Gretchen tried to keep things light. She was too good for me.
“Kinda sorta?” I offered.
She laughed, and that helped. “What are you thinking?”
I glanced at her then back to the road. The streetlights we passed casting shadows across her face, which was partially lit by the interior controls of the Ferrari. “I’m thinking that no matter what I do, at best this gets messy and at worst the people I give the most shit about could end up dead.”
“Don’t think about it.” She reached down and put her hand over mine on the gear shift.
“Little hard not to.” I dropped from fifth to third gear and cut a wide arching turn putting us onto Shoreline Drive.
“Nick,” she said slowly, like she was looking for the right words and elongating each letter to buy time. “You are at your best when you’re not thinking.”
“Uh, thanks?”
She squeezed my hand on the shifter. “What I mean is, some people are thinkers. Some people think so much that they never get anything done because they’re too busy thinking and wondering what could go wrong. Some people don’t make decisions. They just drag things out till circumstances make the decisions for them. Neither of them are you.”
I wanted to say, No, I’m the guy that gets his friends killed in circumstances where both Heaven and Hell have decided to fucking tag team me like a cheap Nick’s First Fire-Spit Fuck Session porno, but I didn’t. Her insane optimism was comforting, even for a cynic like me.
“So if we don’t have a plan, do we have something like bullet points, a vague outline, a riff…or are we Indiana Jones’ing the whole thing?” She pulled one of her revolvers and checked all six cylinders before holstering it and drawing the next to do the same.
“You’re going to get Yuri and Mary Jo clear.” I passed a Porsche whose driver thought we were going to make a game of this. But he wasn’t willing to push his German machine as much as I was willing to push my Italian one. His license plate had read, FKURMOM, so I lept to the assumption of a great quality human being there.
“What about you?” There was concern in her voice. She already knew about me, but was really hoping I’d say something other than the obvious.
“I’ll deal with Uriel.” This wasn’t a pastry, so there was no reason to sugar coat it.
“So, you’re going with the Indiana Jones plan again?” She holstered her second pistol.
“Stick to what works, right?” I flashed her a smirk I secretly hoped seemed way more confident than I felt. We parked a block back and over from Saul’s Pistol and Pawn. I took Jammer’s 1911 from the back of my pants and thumbed the hammer back. Gretchen had the collapsed Spear in her left hand and one of her custom .357s in her right as we ran dow
n the road.
We saw two college girls dressed like fucking targets for the part of town they were stumbling through, drunk. I ignored them as we jogged past, having bigger things on my mind and all.
But Gretchen turned her head and gave them a chipper, “You have forgotten the face of your Father.” I tossed her a confused look and she gave an exasperated sigh. “Nick, you need to read more Stephen King.”
“I read The Shining.”
“You liked the movie better, didn’t you?” She was mocking me, I could tell.
We slowed to a walk as we approached the back door to Saul’s Pistol and Pawn. “Yep.” I grabbed the knob and thought about the shitty naive life choices of the girls we’d passed and gave the door a yank. The Wrath gave me strength and I tore open the door, bringing a section of the frame with it.
I entered first with Gretchen checking our six before rolling in behind me. We moved down the hallway and I kicked open the door that led into the store, putting us behind the counter.
Whatever it was came at me in a blur before Gretchen could even get out of the door. It tore me over the counter and I grabbed what turned out to be a wrist, dragging the blur with me as we crashed through a drum set and into a stand, bringing down several guitars that had been left at the Pistol and Pawn by dreamers who had awakened to reality.
She was above me, both hands at my throat as her bright red hair cascaded into my face. I reached up and grabbed a handful of hair and punched where I guessed a face should be with all the strength the Wrath would muster. The first punch did a little, the second did a little more, and the third caused the grip at my throat to loosen enough for me to breathe.
Gretchen vaulted the counter and thrust with the now extended Spear. The ginger above me let go of my throat with one hand and twisted, grabbing the shaft of the Spear as it passed where her side had been only a second ago. I glanced at the Spear tip between us and was happy that had it gutted me it would have only been stomach, liver, kidney, and intestine that would have been jacked up instead of my junk.
