“What did you see in there?” Lenny asked. He clutched my forearm like a bizarre parrot.
“In where?”
“The red doorway.”
“You saw that?”
“I saw you tumble into your anima crystal.”
“I thought I was just getting my power back, but something tried to break me. It was him. Yaotl!”
“You fought him off?”
“I’m here, aren’t I? I started to fight back, but something distracted him. A voice. And then you reached in. What happened while I was gone?”
“I saw something charging for you through the Mirror. I think by standing in front of it, I hid you long enough to distract whatever it was.”
“What happened then?”
“I saw the crystal floating, saw you sinking into blackness. I did the only thing I could think of, jumped in and made a grab for it. Nin-Agal caught me by the hair before I got sucked in. And the crystal just kind of…ate you? The power shot through me, out of me and back into you. Everything flared red, you came back from the crystal, and Nin-Agal’s heart exploded. Hence the blood.”
“Hence the blood. Well, you know, thanks, I guess.”
A loud crack shook the hallway and rust flakes began to snow down from the ceiling. We kept running until we passed into Nin-Agal’s forges. All of the fires had gone out and the vats were growing cold. So the Smithgod was well and truly gone. His supplicants were kneeling on the floor at their workstations, utterly bewildered and lost. I yelled at a few of them for directions, but I only received blank animal stares in return. Some of them began to keen and growl in pain, others had already died. After they’d been gilded, it was Nin-Agal’s sheer will that had kept them alive. With him out of the way, they had little left to do but suffer and die.
“So how do we get out of here?”
“We keep moving until we see daylight. These towers are huge. Fifty stories at least, and all metal. Judging by the looks of his helpers, I think anything made by Nin-Agal is going to cease functioning quickly. We don’t want to be inside when it happens.”
We climbed a ladder next to the platform that had lowered us and bounded into the main hallway.
“Over here, ya big red pansy!” Goliath was standing sentry at the exit door. When he saw us round the corner he waved us towards the light. When we reached him, he asked no questions, just joined us in a jog. “What happened back there?” We turned a corner and Goliath led us down into a sunken garage. “They were great hosts while they lasted. I made sure they didn’t last too long. We’re borrowin’ us a new car, new weapons. Whatever they had what wun’t nailed down.” He pounded out a few more yards, then slowed a bit. “What’re we runnin’ from?”
I slowed down as we approached our new car. It was a low- slung roadster. The doors and hood looked to be made of gold, and the main body of brass. The chassis raked up in the rear, and the wheels and tires were made of a segmented alloy. The front end hugged the ground, and the interior looked spacious. The seats were made from metal as well from what I could see.
“Sit down, strap in, and shut up!” Monkey was already behind the wheel, cranking the engines up to speed. Eve was in the back seat, looking all the more shaken for the sudden death of everything around her. I hopped in the back with her, surprised at the comfort of the metal. It was soft, pliable, smooth as silk.
“Is Lenny with us this time?” Monkey sneered. He didn’t wait for Lenny’s protest. The car roared up the garage ramp as the ground around us began to buckle and shake. The road rusted and snapped, and the whole city tremored with the collapse of the first of Nin-Agal’s towers.
I slid the Mirror of Smoke out of my back pocket. Nin-Agal had warned us that it was powerful, addictive at a single touch. I felt nothing coming from it…no. I felt it pushing me out. It was just a cold piece of rock in my hands, but I could sense that it was telling me that it was just a cold piece of rock. Then the tide would shift, and I could feel it growing warm, seductively smooth, demanding to be held. There was some kind of fight raging inside of it, and I knew now that inside was just a concept. There was a universe in there, or at the very least a potential for one.
We tumbled across the back seat as Monkey swerved hard to avoid a toppling flock of steel falcons. The alloy birds were pelting the sidewalks and road ahead of us. Monkey gunned the car across an intersection and found some open road. We left Copperopolis behind us, a once proud city that was choking the wastelands with rust and debris.
Eve appeared to brighten as we pulled further away from the city, but she was only human, and this far from Angel Falls was where even the strongest started to break.
“Monkey, where you headed?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” he replied.
The sky rippled overhead. Over the horizon behind us, somewhere near where Hecate had collapsed, the rift was growing. Darkness was pouring across the sky.
Eve moaned softly. “Can we go somewhere with trees? I want to go home. I want to see Adam.”
Monkey grunted and accelerated. That would have to do for a yes. I grasped the Mirror in my pocket again, trying to will some answers out of it, but nothing came. I leaned over to ask Lenny a question, but he was passed out, rolling around the footwell. Guess the excitement was too much for him. I closed my eyes to rest and think.
“I can show you what you need to see,” a whisper in my ear, a voice like smooth black stone. “See! Come inside, and let me show you everything.”
I blinked twice, and the sky filled with fire. Snapped awake – to my left, nothing. To my right a pillar of flame. I wasn’t in the car anymore. The world began to resolve itself. Massive crossbeams looped before me, and between them I could see a room.
“Is she ready to move?” A voice rumbled around me.
“As ready as she’ll ever be. Stupid trollop. Do you know she asked me if I would ever consider doing a spa day ? A spa day!”
I knew the voices. The Brothers. I seemed to be floating in one of their chests. From the sound of things I was lodged somewhere near Abel’s aorta. He was moving through a hallway towards a door.
The floor looked familiar, something I’d seen before. A seemingly endless checkerboard pattern that got finer and finer the more you stared at it. Streaks marked the walls from various attempts at passage: paint, chalk marks, blood, string. This was the vestigial Underworld, the Hell that existed below mine where time slowly digested the old gods and legends. We called it the Under/Under. Many souls had passed through here, some on their way to damnation, but a few had forged the unfriendly darkness in an attempt to rescue their loved ones from the bonds of death. Herakles, that big dumb bastard. Theseus in his quest to slay the Minotaur. Even The Boss’s son. There were a lot of lines that never made it all the way through. Now I knew where they were, but where were they going?
Abel reached the door, opened it, and the flames of his heart flared higher, lighting the darkened room in a Hellish glow.
Aspen sat on the floor before him, looking bored out of her mind. She trailed a finger in the dirt. When she saw Abel approach, she got to her feet shakily.
“More,” she said. “Please…I need to see more.”
“We have work to do,” Abel grumbled.
“Please,” there were tears in her eyes. “They were having a sale . I have to get back. Please. Shoes. So many shoes and purses.” Abel paused. My vantage point twisted, as if he was looking back over his shoulder. He reached a hand forward and beckoned her closer. She approached him and sank to her knees before him.
She licked her lips. What was I about to witness?
She reached up and hooked both hands around Abel’s belt, then drew her face in closer to his ribs, and consequently, much closer to me. Aspen’s eyes lit up. Her face was drawn, more gaunt. Her skin had taken on an unhealthy tone. I was slightly taller than her nose. Her eyes were as large as my head. I wonder if she saw me in here, or if the Mirror was just giving me an astral projection view through A
bel’s heart.
She opened her mouth wide and Abel’s heart exploded like a furnace. Tendrils of flame shot past me and through me towards her face, curling around her lips, into her nostrils. As soon as the fire made contact, her pupils dilated and her eyelids fluttered. Her neck grew slack and Abel reached out to support her head.
Her eye wandered aimlessly. I could only see one from my vantage point. I reached up and waved a hand before her eye. She gave no indication that she could see me.
I crouched and wriggled through one of Abel’s ribs, reaching out to poke a finger into Aspen’s cheek. No reaction. My new right hand glowed and pulsed faster as it came closer to her eye. I reached out and hooked a finger around her eyelid, tugging down. I reached my other hand up and pressed it into her eye, hoping that I really was just an astral projection and that I wasn’t about to blind this young social buffoon. As soon as I felt a finger pierce the membrane of tears in her eye, my perspective shifted.
The world turned blue and I was floating high above an outdoor mall. I descended to ground level in a rest area, where a young woman was surrounded by a veritable pyramid of shopping bags and shoeboxes. I approached her.
“Aspen Breckenridge,” I said.
“Wha’?” She had that annoying ability to turn the word what into a three note, monosyllabic slur that always set my teeth on edge. “Try Biltmore. What rock did you just crawl out from under?”
“Oh, a snake joke, never heard that one before.”
“Wha’?”
“An Angel of the Lord has come unto you today.”
“Whatever.”
This was going to be a long astral projection.
Chapter Fourteen
Nothing made me miss Hell as much as trying to talk to this girl. I know, I know, I was probably letting my ego get the best of me, but truly, this contest of wits was growing tiring. We’d each reverted to the same salvo, fired again and again until the other broke:
“Do you know who I am? I can’t believe you’ve never heard of me!”
I raised a hand to stop her. She was already wound up, arms folded, foot tapping – her perfect dream of shopping interrupted rudely by someone who didn’t even know who she was.
“You’ve got some explaining to do,” I looked around the mall. “I usually don’t like doing this kind of thing on someone else’s turf. Let’s grab a lemon ice and get comfortable.”
“I’m not sitting with you. I don’t have to. I have a spear now, okay? You can’t do anything to me while I have it.”
I lifted my new right hand, the glow bathing both of us in a deep crimson light. I willed it to glow brighter, then waved it at her shopping bags. I focused, thinking of heat, thinking of cleansing, and got… nothing. Then, a thin wisp of smoke appeared from one of the bags.
“That was supposed to burst into flame,” I said.
“You’re pathetic. And you’re old . Why don’t you go try picking up some younger chicks at the arcade, perv?”
Okay, if flame wouldn’t work, we’d just have to do this the old-fashioned way. I lifted the nearest bag of shoes and dropkicked it towards the courtyard fountain. It tumbled end over end, not too impressive, but one shoe did spill free and bounce into a nearby potted plant. Aspen was slack-jawed. I reached into another bag and pulled out the first garment I could find, a pink chiffon sweater.
“That’s a Calvin Klein original, the last one they had. Put it down!”
“Oh, I’ll put it down. Way down!” I shoved the sweater down the front of my pants, grinding it into my crotch. I pulled it out and blew my nose on it and threw it at her feet.[22]
She picked up the Spear of the Requiter. It was wrapped in ermine and fancy scarves. She shook the covering loose and an eerie green glow pulsed forth. She swung it directly at my head. I reached up with my right hand, hoping it would at least be able to parry her attack. The shaft of the spear slapped hard across my palm, hard enough to rattle the bones in my shoulder, but it held. I clutched the spear and forced it downwards, bringing my face close to hers, hoping she would see me as an overpowering force and not an equal match. The look on her face told me that nobody had been able to challenge her spear.
“How did you do that?”
“I can do a lot of things, sugar. Now let’s stop fighting, put the toy down, and grab a lemon ice?”
She kicked her way through the forest of bags and slumped down onto a bench. We were still for a moment, she watching nearby butterflies as they danced and changed colors, me staring at her with my arms folded.
“They told me to watch out for you.”
“ They who?”
She widened her eyes in a you-ought-to-know gesture. “ Them. ”
“What else did they tell you? Did they tell you it would be a good idea for you to steal other people’s anima crystals?”
“I had to get back to him.”
“Listen girlie, you need to stop talking in circles and give me some straight answers. Drop the dumb act. The universe relies on you not playing the dumb poptart right now.”
“I’m just trying to buy time,” she said.
“What?”
Her voice dropped two octaves and her right eye began to trickle blood. “She said she’s just trying to buy herself some time. And you friend, it’s time for you to go.”
A finger poked out of her pupil, followed by a horrible wet stretching as Abel pulled himself through her eye socket. He brushed himself off and looked around. “I give her ten minutes to shop, you know, just to keep her happy, and look what happens. You’re lucky Cain’s not here, you are.”
“And what, pray tell, do you think he’d be able to do to me that you couldn’t?”
Abel’s mouth opened and closed. He thought about it for a minute. Aspen sat behind him, rubbing her eye gingerly. She flicked a few drops of blood away, blinked, and was good as new. She stood up and grabbed her spear.
Abel raised a hand. “No fighting. Not here. It’s just going to cause a big psychic mess, and it won’t accomplish anything for any of us. You’ve leapt from my mind into hers, and now I leapt into hers , which means I’m also somehow inside of my mind while you’re in mine and hers and this whole thing has just gotten too existential. Really now, Morningstar, you should be on your way. We’ll see each other soon enough.”
“Where?” I snapped.
“On Purgatory Lane just outside the gates of – oops.”
I smiled. “You always were an easy mark. I will see you there. And the best part is, you can’t really tell Cain about this, can you? Because if you do, you have to tell him where we met, and you have to tell him you were letting Aspen off into her mental playground instead of preparing her for…what was it you said you were doing again?”
Abel frowned. “Morningstar. I’m not as dumb as I look.”
“How could you be?” I smirked.
“Get out!” Aspen screamed, brandishing her spear. Her eyes were glowing turquoise and her hair was whipping in a divine wind generated by the glowing tip of the Requiter ’s weapon. “You can’t stop me. I will be in Heaven in the next seven days, and I will see my boyfriend! Nobody can stop me from seeing Lenny! Daddy couldn’t do it on Earth, and you sure as Hell won’t do it here!”
My hand blinked out and my knees buckled. “What did you say?”
“Get out!” She slammed the butt of the spear into the floor and the entire mall fractured like glass, sending us all spinning into a vast purple void.
Chapter Fifteen
The rocking sensation I felt as I settled back into my body wasn’t from astral travel. The car was slowing down over some rough road, approaching the Brink of Insanity. Everyone else in the car was asleep, including Monkey. I reached over the seat and slapped him on the head. He squawked awake and slapped his hands and feet around the steering wheel before slamming on the brakes with his tail. The chasm yawned wide before us, then contracted to a mere crack in the ground before expanding again to an infinite canyon. If I had woken up a minute later
, we would have been swallowed whole. Monkey pulled off the road and under the shade of some pine trees that danced and swayed to the rhythm of the tinny music emanating from the chasm. The forest here was alive, mobile, growing, dying, being reborn every second. Some trees grew backwards, others grew from a floating point in the sky until their roots found soil.
“Geez. Guess I needed a nap worse than I thought,” Monkey muttered.
“Why did you drive us out this way?” I asked.
“You’ve been moaning about the Brink for the past thirty minutes. You’re not a quiet sleeper, you know.”
“I wasn’t sleeping. I was astral projecting into Abel and the Biltmore girl,” I said. “That’s a good sign though, that means I was pulling you all under with me into somnambulation.”
“And almost killing us.”
“You’re the driver. You could have pulled over. Anyway, I don’t exactly know what they’re planning to do, but they’re going through the Under/Under to get to Heaven’s Gate. The girl is a pawn. They’re using her, and she’s letting them because she thinks she’ll get to see—” I slapped my hands around in the footwell until I found what I was looking for. I grabbed a good hank of Lenny’s hair and jumped out of the car, dumping him down onto the ground.
“Why does everyone keep dropping me?” he shrieked.
“You sold us out, Lenny!”
“What? No!” He looked a little paler than normal.
“Whuz happnin’?” Goliath grumbled. “Ah, just another cat fight, huh?” He leaned back in his seat and continued to sleep.
“You’ll never guess where I just was and who I saw, Lenny. Go on, guess! It would make your day!”
“It’s not what you think.”
“What is it then? What am I supposed to believe? How do I know you haven’t been working with them this whole time to bring about an end to my reign? And for a girl?” I lifted him out of the dirt and yanked him over my head, striding as close to the edge of the Brink as I thought was safe. “Why don’t I drop you now, huh? What’s gonna stop me from dropping you now?”
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