by R. E. Vance
“Not this again!” I cried out. I ducked, the gargoyle’s hands grabbing at nothing. Pan, Greg and Stewart ran toward the helicopter, Greg clutching to his laptop.
I drove into the sand and, using the sleeve of my jacket, cupped up the gem that had been responsible for stonifying The BisMark. Then I spit out the gum and squished it on the gem.
ScarFace swooped down and grabbed me. Hell, I wanted him to, because as soon as his stone hands were on me, I attached the gum-covered gem to his forehead.
What happened next was better than I expected.
The thing about the Others’ talismans was that, under the right conditions, they always had the opposite effect. The prince turned into a frog, the frog into a prince. An instant two-way evolution.
Others can evolve at will. Before you get all technical and say that’s not evolution, I challenge you to this: Weren’t we all some version of frog before we evolved into royalty?
ScarFace turned to a creature of flesh and blood, with taut muscles, searing breath and a huge scar across his face.
After thousands of years of being stone, flesh must have felt strange and foreign to him. My hand grabbing his arm, the feeling of the sand beneath his feet, the light cool breeze that came in from the ocean—all so new, so overwhelming. It was more than that—he had never sensed his heart beating within his chest, or what the blinking of an eye felt like. He had never known what a breath was, the cool air that filled the nostrils and the throat as the air expanded the chest.
“Weird, isn’t it?” I said, and added pain to his new experiences with a headbutt. ScarFace screamed in agony and dropped me, clutching his nose.
Before ScarFace could get up, I scraped the gem off his face with my jacket’s sleeve. He turned back to stone, still holding on to his aching nose.
Greg jumped into the helicopter, switching on the propeller as Pan and Stewart jumped in the back. The helicopter started to lift.
Amongst the many things I took from Greg’s apartment was the slingshot he used to awaken the rancor. I pulled it out, quickly loading it with the gem—still sticky with gum—took careful aim and waited until the helicopter was about fifteen feet off the ground.
Then, I let the gem lose.
My shot rang true. The gem hit Greg square on his cheek. The little Sith wannabe turned to stone, and his toy helicopter came tumbling down … Pan, Stewart and all.
Chapter 2
It’s Raining Frogs! Hellelujah!
Michael was one of the most powerful beings in existence. As much time as Pan put into the giant hand, it wasn’t enough. The archangel broke free and with preternatural speed launched at the falling helicopter. In one seamless move, he stopped it from careening into the beach. Once it was safe on the ground, he tore the hull apart and grabbed Pan, disarming him from Poseidon’s trident. Pulling out a spindle, he wrapped a thread around Pan—once, twice, three times—before the trickster satyr could so much as think about burning more time.
I ran over and pulled a stone Greg out of the helicopter. I thought about unfreezing him, but then thought better of it. The little guy looked good in gray.
Two minotaur cops rushed over and pinned down Stewart and, before you could say “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” all three bad guys were detained.
“There,” the police chief said, handing Pan over to an officer. “That should hold him.”
“Sure,” I said, looking at my own handiwork. “But it looks to me like you only tied him up with thread. At least I turned mine to stone.”
Michael grunted. He did that a lot. “It’s a thread from Rumpelstiltskin’s spindle. Others can’t burn time when tied with it.”
“Rapunzel is real? Never mind. Don’t answer that.” I pointed at Tiamat who stood frozen on the shore of Paradise Lot. “What do we do about that?”
Michael sighed, which sounded like a semi-truck downshifting. “I honestly don’t know.”
The BisMark put his hands over the Crystal. It glowed under his power. “I can use this. But not for long.”
“Good. We only need magic to hold it long enough for us to dismantle Tiamat, piece by piece.”
Atargatis shuddered. “My girl.”
“Your girl,” The BisMark said dispassionately, “will kill us all … including you.” He looked hard at her, his stare charged with warning and accusation. It was a look I knew well. It was a warning and a threat. Don’t stand in our way, or else …
And it was a look that was not lost on Atargatis. She nodded.
“Good,” The BisMark said.
“OK—that’s all fine and dandy,” I said, “but how do you plan on doing that? The creature is as big as the Statue of Liberty.”
Michael huffed. “Bigger, I suspect. But you forget how good your kind is at destroying things.” He nodded over his shoulder at the beach, where a group of scared soldiers trembled, holding onto the giant bananas like they would their guns. “They just have to find new weapons, which shouldn’t take long. There are whole stockades just over the bridge.”
All this time Michael knew that the Army had amassed just over the bridge, and still he stayed. I guess that’s what made him Michael: he lived and worked in Paradise Lot, upholding mortal law to show the human world that Others were nothing to fear. He also knew that if he failed, the humans wouldn’t hesitate to invade the island. I had to hand it to Michael—as much as I personally did not like the archangel, he gave a damn. And that, if nothing else, earned him my respect long ago.
On the beach, those of the media who had returned were filming the frozen Tiamat and giving their take on what was happening. I cringed at all the “theories” they threw around. Whatever they said, I doubted it would help the Others’ situation.
Stewart, Pan and Greg sat handcuffed, several of Michael’s police officers standing over them with pointed shotguns and itchy trigger fingers. Conner and the other police officers were pushing back the crowds, which had turned into an angry mob that wanted nothing more than to tear the time thief apart.
From the corner of my eye I saw Enkidu. He crouched on all fours at the edge where the man-made concrete sidewalk met the god-made sandy beach. The rancor sat next to him, panting. Evidently, Enkidu earned the rancor’s loyalty when he pummeled the creature. Enkidu’s cold eyes stared at the unfolding scene, and I got the feeling that he was trying to assess whose side he was on in all of this.
“Jean!” Medusa came up to me and took my hand. “I saw what you did. So brave.” She squeezed it, and several of her snakes patted my head with theirs. Only Marty gave me his usual distrustful stare.
“How’s it going, Marty?” I said. The snake stuck a forked tongue out at me.
“Medusa,” Michael said. “You’re not where you’re supposed to be.”
Medusa turned away. “I’m sorry, Captain. You’re not going to fire me, are you?”
“We’ll determine your fate later,” the archangel pronounced. “As will we decide the fate of the fugitive you’re holding onto. For now, we have bigger problems to address.”
“Great,” Medusa muttered. “I’m going to get fired!”
“You’ve got to be kidding me …” I started, then caught myself. Michael wasn’t going to overlook the fact that I ran away from the law and broke Medusa out from jail. If we were lucky, he’d exercise discretion by giving us the minimum punishment possible, which would come later … and later might not come at all if we didn’t figure out a way to get rid of Tiamat. “Fine, we’ll deal with my fate later,” I said in a mocking tone. “Do we have enough time to hold Tiamat for a few hours? With all the chaos at the bridges, it will be some time until the cavalry arrives.”
“They’ve already been called in,” Michael said.
I followed his eyes to a weary commander, who nervously spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Super-hearing?” I asked.
Michael grinned. “Super-hearing. And speaking of super-hearing, your pocket is buzzing.”
“Huh?” I said, looking down. Sure eno
ugh, my pants pocket was vibrating and a muffled blue light emanated from it. I pulled out the Bluetooth earpiece and stuck it in my ear.
“Ahhh, Jean-Luc …” Brian’s voice said.
“Hey, Brian,” I said, touching the earpiece. “Is this important? I’m kind of busy here.”
“I know. I’ve been watching the news. Umm … I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s something you forgot.”
“Yeah, what?”
“Frogs.”
“Excuse me?”
Brian’s voice hesitated. “The seventh sign … We’ve only had six. The earthquake, the sky falling, the sour wine, the matricide, the Blood Moon and Tiamat appearing. Six. According to the Grimoire of Metatron, there are seven. In other words—frogs.”
“GoneGodDamn,” I said. As if to punctuate my sentence, a trident flew out of the water and landed in the sand before us.
Atargatis pointed at the water. “It seems my daughter is the least of your worries. It’s my grandchildren that are of concern now.”
“Grandchildren?”
“Yes,” Atargatis said, pulling the weapon out of the ground. “Grandchildren.”
She pointed at the shoreline, where hundreds of humanoid creatures with bulbous heads, big round impassioned eyes and scaly green skin emerged from the ocean, armed with tridents, barnacle-laced swords, shell-covered whips, nets and a whole host of underwater weaponry. And as they marched forth, they croaked—it was their battle cry.
Hey, apparently everyone gets a battle cry, even frogs.
“Oh, great,” I sighed. “FrogMen.”
↔
The FrogMen—a.k.a. Astarte’s great-nieces and -nephews—poured out of the ocean in a platoon-like fashion, with one objective in their minds.
To save Momma.
Although they did not fall like raindrops from the sky, they were just as plentiful and just as wet. I was a fool to think that the frogs would literally fall from the sky—just like I was a fool to assume that they would be normal-sized frogs.
Regardless, the Seventh Sign poured out from the ocean.
Forming row after row and standing shoulder to shoulder, the FrogMen advanced. I’d seen this tactical formation before, mostly in Civil War reenactments. The basic strategy was that when a soldier on the front line fell, someone in the row behind replaced him. A great strategy, if you didn’t care about suffering heavy casualties. And given the sheer number of FrogMen that emerged from the ocean, I was guessing “heavy casualties” was quite low on their list of concerns.
“They’re going to try to destroy the Crystal and free Tiamat,” I said, meeting the front line of the FrogMen together with Michael, Astarte and Atargatis. We stood between them and the Creation Crystal. The BisMark was behind us, one hand on the Crystal that kept Tiamat frozen and the other holding Poseidon’s trident.
The FrogMen advanced, and the four of us attacked. Michael dealt the first blow, unfurling his wings and swatting a dozen FrogMen away like flies. Astarte and Atargatis used a combination of acrobatics and brute strength to push back the advancing lines. I pulled out the Highlander sword and charged at the nearest FrogMan. The damn creature leapt right over me—ever play that game Leap Frog as a kid?—and went for the Crystal. I managed to grab him by his hind leg and yank him down. He plopped to the ground. Just as I was about to squash his face, another FrogMan jumped on my back, knocking me over.
Eating a mouthful of sand, I turned around and saw that Michael, Astarte and Atargatis were faring marginally better than me. There were simply too many FrogMen, and already several of them were at the Crystal. The BisMark fought them off, doing that weird thing of his where he couldn’t be touched. He swung Poseidon’s trident, and for the first time I understood what it meant to “smite” someone. The FrogMen felled by the GoneGod’s trident didn’t simply die—they disintegrated, their wart-covered green flesh turning to dust as soon as the weapon touched their skin. It reminded me of a child popping soap bubbles. And as he fought, his left hand never let go of the Crystal. The BisMark was magnificent.
But as magnificent as The BisMark was, as agile and vicious as the Assyrian sisters were and as powerful as Michael was, we had no hope in winning this battle. Not when it was just the four of us. So I did what years of Army training told me to do when the situation looked hopeless: retreat.
Retreat and regroup.
I ran to the Army, still standing around holding over-sized bananas, and got in front of their commander. “Come on!” I barked, mustering my old command cadence. “Organize your men and defend that Crystal!”
The commander stared at the invading army without blinking, evidently unfazed by my old military voice. Either I lost the touch or my touch wasn’t strong enough to break through his shock. And given his wide-open eyes and gaping mouth, my bet was on the latter. An invading army of soldiers ready and willing to die for their cause was one thing. He had trained for that. But a monster looming in the background waiting to eat them whole, while they stood with only bananas for weapons—that was something they’d never trained for. Hell, I doubted there was a crisis military think tank in the world that could have anticipated this scenario for OPT. This was every human’s worse nightmare. Monsters, and being helpless.
Except they weren’t helpless. Not with all those artillery weapons at their disposal.
“Come on!” I growled, grabbing him by the shoulders. “Pan didn’t disable those Humvees. Give the order. Attack.”
The commander’s eyes flickered from the FrogMen to me, his stupefied gaze faltering as his training kicked in.
“We got to fight these guys,” I repeated.
“Fight? Against that?” His voice wavered before it found some steel behind it. “Fight, you say. For what? To save their city?”
It was the way he said “their city,” with all the belief that the Others’ city was not his city. It was not a place he would lay his life on the line. Not for an Other’s home. Not for Paradise Lot. Fine, if he wasn’t going to fight for them, maybe he’d fight for himself.
“It’s not for them,” I said. “You really think that creature is going to stop after destroying Paradise Lot? Don’t you get it? Everything is at stake.”
“We’ll deal with that later. Once it’s done here, we’ll drop a bomb on its head.” He whistled and raised his hand in the air. “Fall back, boys!”
“No, you can’t! You’re condemning them to death. If we—”
“ ‘If’ nothing,” the commander said. “Let them die. They never belonged here in the first place.”
The soldiers began retreating. I could see on many of their faces that their commander’s decision didn’t sit well with them. But they were scared, and orders were always the easiest excuse for running.
This We’ll Defend. The motto of the United States Army. Apparently, they weren’t thinking of Others when they came up with that one.
↔
As the Army pulled back, Michael and the other Others were slowly being overwhelmed. This was not a battle we were going to win.
So, I thought. This is it. I turned to face the invading FrogMen. There were thousands of them. All armored and carrying swords, tridents, nets and whips. They were endless.
It would have been easy to falsely believe we could persevere. After all, we had an archangel on our side. But even an archangel gets tired, and as far as I could tell, these guys were limitless.
A silence grew over the invading army as they sized up the ragtag band that stood at my side. A thousand versus … seven.
From their ranks rose a FrogMan who was a head taller than the rest. He was dripping with water and algae. Barnacles littered the parts of his body not covered by armor made from seashells. He looked at us, pointing his trident at the Creation Crystal.
The gesture was obvious: “Reverse the spell and meet your fate or face us in battle and meet your fate.”
So be it, I thought, I’d rather try and fail than let Kermit’s evil brother win. I pointed my
own sword at the creature and shook my head. I swear to you, the frog smiled. He didn’t come all this way to chat.
The FrogMen’s leader raised his trident above his head and croaked. What followed was a deafening chorus of Ribbit!s as a thousand leaping frogs bounded forwards with one thought in mind: Free Momma.
So, I thought, this is how it all ends for me. So be it. This is as good a way to die as any.
I charged into the fray and struck down the first FrogMan that got in my way.
Swinging my sword in a fluid arc, I cut down two more.
I needed to clear a path in all this chaos to get to the Crystal and help the Others defend it. Chances were, by the time I’d get to it, it’d be too late.
And that’s when the cavalry arrived.
Chapter 3
On a Prayer and Wing—Well, Two Wings
Miral descended, followed by Penemue with EightBall in his arms, a host of valkyrie and a legion of other angels. Fairies and pixies adorned with thimbles and syringes glittered the sky around them. And that was just Paradise Lot’s air force.
Land forces emerged from the streets. Wraiths, ifrits and jinn flowed to the beach, creating a fiery mist that shrouded centaurs, giants and goblins. Harpies, wendigo and orcs lumbered out of the alleyways, brandishing homemade weapons.
Then I heard an ominous “WAAN, WAAN, WAAN!”
I swear to the GoneGods, the battle stopped for a moment as the FrogMen trembled in fear at the Yara-Ma-Yha-Who’s battle cry—something I’ll never understand. You see, the Yara-Ma-Yha-Who is a four-foot nothing, red Australian vampire with wafer-thin arms that make him look like one of those inflatable balloon men in front of used car dealerships. Yet his battle cry inspired fear in all Others—and I’d seen the little guy in action before. He was fierce!
