Angel Souls and Devil Hearts

by Christopher Golden

  Cody went to the right, and Azag-Thoth followed with it’s wolf’s jaws snapping shut. Meaghan jumped up, even as the demon’s poisonous tail slashed at the spot in which she’d been only a moment before, and she landed on the wide body of the huge worm-beast. She wrapped her silver amms around it, under the head, and pulled back as hard as she could. It did not have any bones to break, but she could stop its movement at least for a moment.

  “Now, Will! Tear the bastard open!” she screamed hysterically, and Cody slashed down with his silver sword, along Azag-Thoth’s body, slicing at least seven feet of its flesh before the demon-lord’s tail whipped around and knocked Meaghan off its back.

  She was lucky. She didn’t know what the demon’s poison would do, and she was battered by the beast’s tail, but the stinging portion had missed her. Instead of falling to the ground, she held tight with both arms and slid around the front of the creature, its slavering jaws snarling in her face. With a searing sound and a terrible stench of fur, she took its face in hoth her silver hands and dug in. It could do no more than yelp now, and strike with that stinger, but she dodged it easily.

  “Will, the heart!”

  “Where?” Cody yelled. “Where do I cut?”

  “Go in and find it, damn it!” she shouted, and though she knew he must have thought she was crazy, he dodged the wildly thrashing stinger again and transformed himself into fire, entering the huge wound he had slashed in the demon-lord’s belly and simply burning the thing’s vulnerable guts.

  Will had done it. He was sure to get the thing’s heart if he kept up the flames. Meaghan turned away then, to help Peter destroy Lord Alhazred, which would then leave only—

  “Time to die, Nazarene!” Beelzebub screamed above them, and Meaghan looked up to see Courage being lifted toward the demon-lord’s mouth. She knew he could not transform into flame or fire, for fear of being absorbed through the demon’s skin and thus consumed. But there must be . . .

  “Yes!” Courage shouted, and Meaghan was stunned as he broke the demon-lord’s grip, finally. “But not for me!”

  Meaghan watched, realizing Courage had only been waiting to get close enough to Beelzebub’s face, and now he changed himself into a winged creature the likes of which she had never seen, with two legs and six arms, all with claws the size of a bear’s—and formed completely of silver. John Courage had transformed his entire body into silver!

  In this new form, the Stranger latched his legs and two arms into the face of the Lord Beelzebub, and with the other four arms, all of silver, he began to burrow a hole through the demon’s face, tearing out its eyes even as the demon howled in a sound that shook the ground.

  Silver was poison to vampires! Transforming a small portion of the body was painful. To change the entire body would likely be fatal. And then Meaghan realized that it would be fatal, and that that was part of the plan, the sacrifice of the Stranger. Of . . .

  “The Nazarene!” she said loudly, to no one but herself.

  And yet Peter was there, at her side, even as he tore first one and then another heart from the open chest cavity of Lord Alhazred. She saw the fire die in Alhazred’s split skull and knew it was truly dead.

  “You understand then,” Peter said, slumping to the ground and cradling his face with his left hand. His right hand was little more than a stump, but already the fingers were regenerating. Meaghan wasn’t really paying attention to any of that.

  “No!” she shouted at him. “I don’t understand. I can’t understand.”

  And now Cody had joined them, standing over Alhazred’s corpse, apparently having finally destroyed Azag-Thoth. He, too, was greatly weakened, and his wounds were healing slowly.

  “You do understand,” Cody said. “Even Allison understood, sort of, and she had no reason to.”

  “But he can’t be the Nazarene!” she said.

  And then they were running, scrambling to get out of the way as Beelzebub fell once again, off balance from pain and blindness, insane with hatred for John Courage, for them all. It scratched at its face, trying to pry Courage off, but it was painful for it even to touch the silver beast that now burrowed into the hole where its left eye had once been. At the north end of the plaza, a building crumbled, and Meaghan barely noticed.

  “It’s not what you think,” Cody said, and his face was lit up with the pleasure of sharing the truth with her. “At least, not exactly. He’s called the Stranger because that’s what he is, to Heaven and to Hell. The body and the mind are the Nazarene, but there is nothing of God in him now.”

  “Nothing of God . . .” She shook her head. “How? And how did you . . .?”

  “It was the only answer,” he said. “All the clues led there, and Allison figured it out, or at least part of it, as well. John gave us enough clues. Plus, when I was almost dead, I was a part of the magic, of the power that exists in the nature of the world, that Mulkerrin tapped. I . . . I knew things, then. As to how it happened to him, it’s also how we came to be.”

  “Will is correct,” Peter said, and Meaghan had almost forgotten he was standing there. “I learned all about the Stranger under the demon’s loving care. When the Stranger’s body was still inhabited by the Spirit of Heaven, he did battle with all kinds of demonic things. It is with him that the magic in The Gospel of Shadows originated. But even that magic couldn’t control the pure vampires, the things that you saw this morning. Instead, he destroyed them, every one, and they haven’t existed on Earth until today.

  “The last Hellish thing he fought, nearly two millenia ago, was a true vampire, and it wounded him badly. Only the Spirit, that which was divine in him, saved his life. But he had been tainted by the vampire’s attack. After he was crucified, and finally died, the Spirit left him to continue its work.

  “A normal human being killed by one of these vampires would eventually return to life as one of them, a mindless wraith. But the Spirit had also tainted him, his human shell. Whatever had been divine in him while he lived now merged with the taint of evil, of the vampire. He became a shadow of his former self, a shadow of humanity, and he lived in the shadows between Heaven and Hell. He was the first of us, forever and always. With an angel’s soul and a devil’s heart.”

  “But then, can we expect . . . divine help? Surely he must mean something . . .,” Meaghan began, and Will Cody only looked at Peter for the answer.

  “No,” Peter said with certainty. “I’ve thought about that a lot. Heaven has no special place for him, though he carried their greatest gambit to fruition. He’s tainted by evil, as we all are, imperfect, like the humans we once were.”

  “But . . .,” she began, and then was interrupted by the Stranger’s voice barking harsh orders in her brain, in all their brains, for though Beelzebub was down, and thrashing, he could not defeat the demon-lord alone.

  Meaghan! the voice came into her head. Warriors of Charlemagne! I need you now. The demon is at the edge of defeat, and you must follow my example. Change your forms, enter the wound in the demon’s chest, and from there we will kill it!

  “I love you both,” Meaghan said, and took off toward the demon.

  “Meaghan!” Will called to her even as she grew wings for the first time. “You don’t have to go! You can’t make that change!”

  She looked back, smiling, and called loudly, “I know what I am, Will, and what I have to do.”

  “She can make the change,” Peter said. “Lazarus trained her, in Hell.” “What about us?” Cody asked quickly, but Peter Octavian was

  already pulling him away, dragging him to the north.

  “We are incapable, right now, of doing what must be done. Our job

  is to survive,” Peter grimly replied.

  Salzburg, Austria, European Union.

  Wednesday, June 7, 2000, 11:16 A.M.:

  Allison Vigeant had seen the helicopters fly above her, and heard the gunfire and explosions they had rained down upon the battle. She prayed then, that Will was still alive. As she entered Residenc
e Plaza from the northeast corner, where it led into Mozartplatz, Lord Beelzebub was falling for a second time. Though it looked different, still she remembered the demon from Venice, remembered its stench and its effect on the air around it. The impact as the demon hit the cobblestone plaza sent her flying to the ground, and Allison’s face slammed hard into stone with a crack. Behind her, a building was crumbling, and a cloud of dust moved out to envelop her. Had she walked through that alleyway ten seconds later, she would have been crushed.

  As it was, she thought her nose was broken. She held a hand up and touched it, and came away with sticky blood which gleamed bright red in the sunshine. It occurred to her again that events as dark as those unfolding in Salzburg had no right to occur in the light of day.

  But for Allison, the day had lost its illusion of safety long ago.

  She brushed herself off even as she picked up her steps. Scanning the plaza, she realized how many had died. Peter and Meaghan were standing over the corpse of some kind of demon, and John Courage had apparently fallen under Beelzebub, for she had seen him attacking the demon’s face before it fell. And then, finally, she saw Cody, coming up behind Peter and Meaghan.

  Thank God!

  Over the noise of the demon’s screeching, they would never hear her call out, so she picked up her pace. She watched as Meaghan took off, joining a few of Charlemagne’s warriors who still lived, in their attack on the demon. And then Peter and Cody were headed toward her, practically holding each other up, it seemed. Whatever else had happened, Will Cody was alive, and Allison could survive any other tragedy.

  They were not far away from her now, but still she had to call out several times to get Will to look up. Finally he did smiling despite his pain, despite all that had happened—was happening—around them. Allison kicked something heavy that clanged hard on the stones. It was a sword made of silver, and she reached down without thinking and picked it up. Beelzebub wasn’t dead yet, after all.

  She was perhaps ten feet from them when the black, dripping, lance-like thing rose from behind them. It wavered in the air above their heads, and Allison screamed even as she threw the sword toward them.

  The scorpion sting tail of the demon-lord Azag-Thoth whistled as it shot down toward the heart of the demon-lord’s murderer, Will Cody, but when it found its mark, slashing through Peter Octavian’s arm on the way, Will was gone. Leaping to the side, he used all of his strength to bring the sword down across the tail of the torn-open serpent-thing, which had slithered behind them, leaving a trail of gore. Cody sliced off the stinger portion of the tail with a burst of green flame and a terrible spray of black fluid.

  Peter had been wounded, and Allison and Will met over him where he lay in the street. Octavian’s eyes were open.

  “It’s just a scratch,” he said. “Poison, though, even to us. I’ll be sick for a while, but I’ll live. A youngster like yourself, however . . .”

  Allison looked at Peter and saw that, though he was kidding Will, he was also serious. A sting from that creature might have killed the old storyteller.

  “God!” she yelled. “Please just let this all end!”

  Meaghan had the answers now, the answers she and Peter had fought so hard for, answers that Cody had searched for years to find, that Alex had died for. And she was proud. The Stranger had sacrificed himself once so that others might be cleansed of an evil taint, and now he was prepared to do it again.

  Could she do any less?

  Blind and screeching its pain, Lord Beelzebub had nevertheless understood its vulnerability, understood something of what the Stranger was doing. It rose unsteadily to its feet. John Courage had dug his way into the demon’s face and disappeared there. He was completely inside the demon’s head, and he had instructed them to enter the rapidly healing wound that was open on both sides of the thing’s body, blown through its incredible hide by the missiles of a human army.

  In the thing’s pain, both external and internal, they backed it south. Now, blind, it teetered on the edge of the seemingly bottomless crevice that Mulkerrin’s final earthquake had opened up.

  And fell in.

  Claws grasped the edge of the crack in the plaza, lodging themselves where shattered cobblestones had once lain. The demon pulled its head and shoulders out of the hole, a new, green-black mucous pouring from the hole where its face had been. Its roar of agonized fury resounded off the crumbling buildings on the edges of the plaza, even as vampire warriors closed in on the creature’s back. Still it hauled itself out farther, until its chest was on the ground and it only needed to pull its legs out.

  And that was when they struck, Meaghan and the six surviving warriors of Charlemagne. They flew, transforming themselves in the air, all seven of them screaming their pain as their bodies turned to the one thing that would most certainly kill them over time: the poison metal, silver.

  Meaghan nearly lost consciousness as she slammed into the wound in the demon’s back, but the voice of John Courage in her mind snapped her back to reality.

  Now! it said. Follow me!

  She realized then that he was there, inside the demon’s chest cavity. He must have torn his own path from the creature’s head to its chest, down its throat perhaps, and then out again before he could be consumed. Then the Stranger, who was no longer a stranger to her but someone she had known all her life, began to tear at the demon’s guts from inside, ripping a hole large enough for all of them to fit inside, and revealing two huge, pulsing organs that Meaghan recognized immediately for the demon’s two hearts.

  And finally she understood John Courage’s plan. If the demon could not be sent back to Hell, banished from Earth once and for all time, and they were not certain they could truly end its life, then they had to be certain that it would never threaten human or vampire again. If Lord Beelzebub did not die, it would wish it had. After the suffering the demon had put Peter and infinite others through, on infinite planes and dimensions, Meaghan could think of no end more fitting.

  Come, take my hand, John Courage said, in the cramped confines of the demon’s flesh, which burned and steamed at the touch of their bodies, melting from around them. The creature shuddered and bucked where it lay, half-in and half-out of the crevice in the plaza, but they were tightly packed inside it.

  And Meaghan reached out and took John Courage’s hand, then slid her other hand at an awkward angle until one of her vampire brothers could grasp it. They gave themselves over to him, to the Stranger, and with his mind leading them, they began to flow, quicksilver, a liquid metal that burned everything it touched.

  They had become a virus, Meaghan realized, a deadly virus infecting the demon’s system. Sharing Courage’s knowledge, and each sharing the pain the others experienced by keeping the body of silver they had adopted, they flowed into one enormous pool, then split into two groups, each surrounding one of the demon’s hearts.

  And, in the heat and stench of evil that was the heart of the demon for all intents and purposes, seven vampires including Meaghan Gallagher and the shadow king, a stranger known as John Courage, made the ultimate sacrifice.

  Meaghan was dying; she knew that. When the poison they had become had killed them all, the silver would cool and the demon’s hearts would be preserved, would burn forever in the shell of its body.

  Meaghan! John Courage’s voice called out to her mind, and through her pain, Meaghan Gallagher managed to feel pleasure. I’m sorry it came to this. You were too young. Had I thought of it sooner . . .

  But you didn’t, she thought, hoping that he could understand her still. It doesn’t matter. It’s done now, and I can feel the pain of vengeance, the pleasure of sacrifice.

  And I’ll be with Alex again, won’t I?

  This very day, the Stranger thought. I promise you that.

  And then Meaghan Gallagher died.

  Without a howl, a scream, a cry, even a whisper, the demon-lord Beelzebub reared up on its hooves, which had little purchase in the depth of the crevice, and, sliding fa
rther down, fell on its back on the other side of the hole. Its hands beat the air silently, then lay over the hole at the center of its chest. The demon began to pant, to strain against its pain, and then its hands leapt away from its chest as if burnt.

  Cody knew when it was done because the demon stopped moving completely. Seconds later, it began to rot, and soon it was a dozen streams of viscous flesh and blood, which ran across the stones and joined together in the indentations its legs had made in the ground as it fell, running eventually into the crevice that Liam Mulkerrin’s earthquakes had opened at the south end of Residence Plaza.

  Cody’s bones were already knitted, but he was in pain, and his flesh wounds would take longer to heal, especially his eye. He and Allison helped Peter to stand, and they made their way to the edge of the hole. Looking down, they could not see the bottom, could not see where the demon’s remains would eventually rest, and Cody said a prayer to God, his first in a long time, that the humans would be smart enough to seal the crevice up tight somehow.

  When he looked up, only puddles of blood remained of Beelzebub, that and two perfect ovals, each six feet long which looked for all the world like nothing more than huge eggs made of silver. But God forbid they should ever hatch.

  And they wouldn’t, for even now they were shrinking. The living silver that was his brothers and sisters was contracting as it cooled, crushing the demon’s hearts, and small holes had appeared from which the essence of the creature, its last blood, sprayed in spurts, its acid so much stronger than the rest, eating its way down into the stone and soil of the plaza. And Cody knew it was also eating away at the silver, even as the silver poisoned it. The hearts were shrinking not simply because the living silver was contracting, crushing the hearts to a pulp, but because the silver itself was being eaten, consumed by the acid before it burst out through the tiny holes in the “eggs.”