Never Just One Apocalypse

by Karen L Mead

  “You shouldn’t be so confident that I require you to repel them. I have many at my disposal.”

  “How many of your lieutenants do I have to eat before you stop trying to make me feel insignificant?”

  There was a pause, then Azreal smiled. At first, Sam thought it was a trick of the (limited) light, but no, that was an actual smile on his face.

  “God, what an idiot he was,” Azrael muttered, looking off to the side. “Getting himself consumed by an upstart, and all for some ridiculous plan to jockey for position that never would have worked. In a way, you did us a favor.”

  “So, truce?” Sam asked.

  Please. Go along with this. I can’t keep track of how many enemies I have right now, I need to cut back.

  “Don’t trust him!” Devon snarled.

  Sam almost jumped, having nearly forgotten that the Devil was still on hand.

  “He’ll abandon you, just the way he abandoned me! He cares about nothing except his own skin. Not even my sisters! Not even my mother! Kill him! Consume him!”

  Sam felt a bizarre rush of pity for this strange, tortured creature. He didn’t know how much of his pain was self-inflicted, and likely would never know. But in all likelihood, Sam himself had played some role in Devon turning into a monster among monsters (or rather, he would in some foreseeable future), and he couldn’t dismiss the shame of that. He felt responsible, despite his better judgment that told him that the circumstances that had created Devon were far beyond his understanding.

  “Can he escape?”

  “Only if some miscreant summons him. Tell me, how does it feel to have the Devil himself tell you that he thinks you’re an awful person?” Azrael asked with a sneer.

  “I don’t know. Do you think he’s a good judge of character?”

  His companion looked annoyed that his insult hadn’t had more impact.

  “I tire of this,” the Demon Lord said, looking at Devon with no small amount of disgust. “You are correct; it would be beneficial for us to work together, at least temporarily. Whatever issues I have with you and yours—and trust me, they are legion—they can wait until after Sathariel and his brood are successfully repelled. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Good. Get out of my sight,” said Azrael. Then he was gone.

  Sam was about to leave himself, when Devon renewed his screaming.

  “Go ahead, turn your back to me, you coward! That’s what you always do! It’s all you know how to do! Go ahead and leave me, just like you left Mom when she was dying!”

  Sam almost took the bait and asked Devon what he was talking about, but stopped himself in time. He had no way of knowing if what the Devil said to him was true, or if he only said what he knew would hurt the most, regardless of what had really happened, or would ever happen. He would never know, and that was perhaps the beauty of the Devil’s torment.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said, then disappeared. He knew his apology would ring hollow, since he didn’t even know what he was apologizing for. But he was pretty damn sure he should apologize for something.

  Chapter 53

  “I have to go! The world could end on Saturday, so this could be the last tournament of my life!”

  Ethan thrashed around in bed while Miri tried to shush him. Given Miri’s history, Mike half expected her to hypnotize the boy into slumber, but instead she just tried to soothe him normally. He supposed it would be weird to do that to someone you thought of like a sibling.

  “Eeeth, you’ve got a 103-degree fever. You’re too sick.”

  “I have to go!”

  “No, you don’t,” Eugene said, leaning against the doorframe to Ethan’s room. “Mr. Peglioni will go and win the card in your stead.”

  Jay looked down, nervous. They had all had about ten minutes of normalcy after Sam had gotten rid of the Devil, which had been nice. Then Ethan woke up Wednesday morning monstrously ill, and now the fate of one of the Fantastic Foil cards they were collecting was up in the air.

  Ethan blinked back tears.

  “But Jay’s not—” he started, then looked away, embarrassed. Mike was sure he was about to say “but Jay’s not good enough!” but was far too nice to say something that honest.

  “Jay doesn’t play all the time like I do, it’s not fair!”

  “Life isn’t fair,” said Miri. “I know, baby, it’s lame, but there’s a reason why everybody says that.”

  “Even though I’m sick I can still play. I can still see the cards.”

  “You want to give everybody else the flu? Then if the world does end on Saturday, you just made a bunch of people sick for the last days of their lives. Pretty crappy.”

  Ethan made a pained face; clearly, he had forgotten that he was contagious.

  “I think you should have a little more faith in your friends, child. Now you relax; I’m going to go make you a cup of tea. With lemon, the way you like it,” said Eugene.

  A moment after Eugene had left the room, Ethan called after him.

  “Make me the one with mint!”

  Then he turned over and faced the wall, muttering. Miri began stroking his hair. He shook her off at first, then gave up and let her do it.

  Jay and Mike walked out of the boy’s room, concerned. Not so much for Ethan (who would surely recover soon enough), but for the tournament.

  “Why didn’t you register for the tournament?”

  Mike didn’t even bother to shrug.

  “Why should I have? I don’t usually play competitively. Not my scene.”

  “Now I have to win,” Jay said grimly. Mike rolled his eyes.

  “No, you don’t. If someone else wins it, we can just steal it from them. Like we’ve been doing.”

  Jay frowned at Mike. His expression was so intense that he suddenly looked older to Mike.

  “Yeah, but isn’t it a lot safer if we just win it outright? Every time you guys rob somebody, you’re taking risks.”

  Mike did shrug at that.

  “Well…yeah. But if someone gets all the cards together, they could destroy the world. We can’t let that happen. It’s worth the risk.”

  Jay sat down on an overstuffed couch. “Is it, though?”

  Mike raised an eyebrow. It was unusual for Jay to question him like this, at least about something important.”

  “I mean it’s hard to collect all the cards. We might not even be able to do it,” he said, looking up at Mike. “What if it’s safer to leave them out in the wild? If someone else tried to collect them, they’d probably need a hacker at least as good as you, right? And there aren’t any as good as you.”

  “Well I don’t know about that….”

  Mike just didn’t have it in him to disagree with Jay about his own supremacy.

  “And once we collect a bunch of them, what if someone steals them from us? Then we’ve just made everything worse than if we’d just left them alone!”

  “Uh….”

  Mike felt like he should have really good answers to Jay’s questions, but none were forthcoming.

  “Look, I can’t promise on a stack of Bibles that won’t happen. But people know about the cards: obviously, the Liddell vampires knew. We don’t know who told them. We don’t know how many other people know. If people know, there’s always a chance they could be used. We need to destroy them while we have the chance.”

  “Or maybe the Liddells were the only ones who knew, except Azazel. And the Liddells won’t do anything now, and Azazel’s dead. In that case, the only ones who might cause the world to end by getting the tablet together are us.”

  “Let’s just drop it for now, okay?” Mike said. There was a reason why he didn’t want Jay to continue down this particular road. “How’s your purple deck?”

  Jay took a moment to think. The light from outside reflected off his glasses, eerily.

  “It’s good. I almost beat him with it the other day.”

  “Are you still having the speed problem though?”

  “Kind of.”
>
  “Okay. Let’s skip school and go over all your decks before the tournament tonight.”

  “You know, if the world doesn’t end soon, all these cut classes are going to get us in trouble.”

  Mike thought about that for a moment.

  “I think it’s a damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don’t sort of thing. If we bother to go to school, the world will end just to punish us.”

  ***

  Later, Mike surveyed the ballroom at the Morse Center. Now that they were over halfway through the tournament, the crowd was thinning out. Some people liked to watch the later matches out of curiosity, but others wanted to go home and lick their wounds.

  He offered Jay one of his onion rings.

  “Want one?”

  “No thanks,” said Jay, looking stern and serious.

  Jay had been doing surprisingly well, overpowering opponents with his deck of strong creatures. Luck played a role, but he was doing a good job with the hands he was dealt too. Mike was actually kind of surprised to see Jay play so well, then felt bad that he’d doubted his own friend’s intelligence.

  I know he’s smarter than he acts sometimes, but like…I didn’t think he was this smart? Maybe he’s just got a talent for Sorcery? Or maybe somebody blessed his cards with magic or something?

  Of course, in the world Mike now inhabited, the idea of cards being charmed with a spell really wasn’t that outlandish. The part that made it unrealistic was the idea that something could be blessed instead of cursed. Presumably, blessings existed, but Mike was a lot more familiar with hearing about curses.

  It was the interregnum between matches. Everyone knew their next opponent, but they weren’t starting for another five minutes. Jay’s opponent found their table and shook hands with Jay. He was a fairly tall, heavyset guy, not handsome but well-groomed.

  “Hi. It’s Trepkowski, I know, but I don’t think I’ve played you before.”

  “I’m kinda new,” Jay said. He still looked incredibly serious, like he was guarding a nuclear reactor rather than playing in a card tournament. Of course, from his perspective, that’s pretty much what he was doing. “I’m Jay.”

  “Hey, Jay, I’m Mitchell.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  Mitchell sat down and looked around.

  “Is Buckley still here, or did he get knocked out? I don’t see the little weasel.”

  It took both Mike and Jay a moment to realize that Mitchell was talking about Ethan.

  “Actually, we’re friends with Ethan Buckley,” said Mike.

  Mitchell turned back around and raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh really? Sorry, no offense. It’s just, when you see enough of your friends get spanked by an eleven-year-old that many times, you start to get annoyed, y’know?”

  “Hmmph,” said Mike, not elaborating on whether or not he did know.

  “Honestly, between you and me,” Mitchell continued, looking around to see if anyone was looking. “That kid is using the Pay-to-Win method. His uncle just buys him thousands of cards, it’s insane. I could win every tournament too, if I had an unlimited budget to buy every rare card in the world.”

  “There’s a difference between having the cards and knowing how to play them,” said Jay.

  “C’mon,” said Mitchell. “Having all those cards is a huge advantage.”

  “It is, but Ethan would still win even if he didn’t have it. That kid spends all day coming up with new decks.” Mike said.

  He was tempted to tell Mitchell that he was an asshole who should mind his own damned business, but he was trying to keep it polite. It was already idiotic to even attend a Sorcery tournament, given that he was involved in what was essentially a high-level conspiracy to steal people’s rare cards; the last thing he should do was draw attention to himself by starting a fight in public at a Sorcery event.

  “Whatever you say, man,” Mitchell said, shrugging. “I’m just tired of these rich assholes who buy their victories because they can’t win outright. All those pricey cards, he still hasn’t beaten me.”

  Mitchell’s lips curled into a sly smile. Mike stiffened.

  Was this the reason Ethan had wanted to play in this tournament so badly? Because he wanted to finally beat this guy?

  Mike looked at Jay to warn him to calm down, but realized there was no point: Jay looked outwardly calm, but seething inside. The way Sam got when he was really angry.

  “Maybe Ethan hasn’t won against you yet,” Jay started. Mike was shocked at the sound of his voice; it seemed to have gotten deeper, all of a sudden. Steady as a rock, Jay touched outside the rim of his glasses with two fingers, then put his hand down on top of his purple deck.

  “But next time you guys play, I promise you, you are not going to beat him. Tonight, you won’t even beat me.”

  Chapter 54

  Devon was buried up to his clavicle in a lake of ice, unable to move. An icicle pierced the back of his head, cleaving his brainstem.

  Belial walked up to where Azrael observed from afar, amused.

  “I appreciate the homage, but isn’t it unwise to encase a water elemental in ice?”

  Azrael gave the other demon lord a side-eyed glance. Belial had always been his ally against Sammael, but with the former Archangel out of the picture, he had less reason to trust the Fly Lord.

  “We erred by imprisoning him with fire. He may have been drawing strength from it by virtue of it being the opposite of his nature, somehow. This ice is too adulterated with other things to be of use to him.”

  “Or so we hope,” Belial mused.

  “Are you prepared?” Azrael asked. “To see Sathariel again?”

  Belial frowned, the deep lines in his face growing deeper. He had worn that aged face because Sathariel liked it, and never stopped, even now.

  “Never. But I will somehow.”

  “He chose them over you. It’s not something that can be forgiven, I suppose,” said Azrael softly.

  The other demon lord gave him a sad smile.

  “It’s not that. I can’t fault him for picking the humans over me. Look at this,” he said, gesturing to where Devin was imprisoned. “You got this scenario out of the mind of Dante, a frail human scribe. Yet he, and others like him, create scenarios more interesting than anything we of the Lower Realm achieve, and then they attribute them to us. We’re so charmed, we appropriate their ideas. Thus they inadvertently become seers, predicting the future by creating it, over and over again. Who can resist that?”

  “And you tried to do the same thing.”

  “Yes, with my son. I thought if I told him the prophecy in the Book of Succession was about him, he would make it so. And he tried, damn him, he did try.”

  Azrael puckered his lips at the name of the book. He turned away from Satan’s cold prison and began walking back down the hill, with Belial at his heels. Casually, he kicked a rotting skull out of the way. It was odd to find a rotting skull here; most of the parts had been here too long for there to be anything left to rot. It was almost an anachronism.

  “Did you ever find out who wrote that thing? It was always so…intriguingly wrong…I always thought it had to be one of us.”

  Belial made an irritated click of his tongue.

  “Not yet. The last time I saw him, Azazel boasted that he knew, but I can’t ask him now.”

  “Give Sammael’s abomination of an heir a few hundred years[GW8], he may remember yet.”

  “Are you really going to honor your truce with him?”

  Azrael had been expecting the question, and dreading it.

  “I haven’t decided. He may be more dangerous than the Watchers, and he’s coming to realize it.”

  “He could be the end of us,” said Belial. “If you see a chance, take it.”

  Azrael didn’t know how he felt about that, so he said nothing.

  Once they were far away from Satan’s prison, the scenery changed to a field of wheat, under a pale orange sky.

  “Can you imagine it? Being consu
med? Your essence, merging with another?” He exhaled, having the strange feeling that he wished that he could drink down the sky.

  Azrael had never been this candid before, not even with Belial. Yet right now, it seemed like guarding his emotions was foolish, pointless.

  “I long for it.”

  “We’re talking about two different things.”

  “Are we?”

  “If you want to die that badly, I can’t count on you to fight.”

  “Yes you can,” said Belial, disappearing into the fields. “Just because I long for it doesn’t mean I deserve it.”

  “Does Sathariel know you blame yourself?” Azrael asked.

  But Belial was already gone.

  Chapter 55

  Cassie petted Teddy on the head and moved toward the door. She took one final look at the living room. It felt like she’d lived here for much longer than a week, which was odd considering that part of that time had been in Realm. Satisfied, she turned to go.

  “Goodbye,” Aeka said from the top of the steps. Cassie turned around, scowling.

  “You’re awake.”

  The blond girl didn’t answer, just stared. Cassie tried again.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me about what’s going to happen? Since you obviously know something?”

  Aeka didn’t say anything.

  Cassie opened her mouth to say something snarky, then felt a pull in her stomach and changed her mind. She knew what it was like to have secrets you absolutely could not share.

  “Goodbye. I wish I could have gotten to know you better.”

  When Cassie turned back around, she saw something gleam out of the corner of her eye. Turning back toward Aeka, she saw her resplendent in her holy armor, just for a fraction of a second: the beautiful Knight, standing at the top of the staircase, still as a statue. Cassie looked silently at the only other living Watcher’s Daughter for another few seconds, then walked out the door.

  Many of her friends hadn’t wanted her to go. They didn’t see the point of going to sit for the test when they knew that the Watchers would attack as soon as the skies began to weep. Cassie didn’t want to explain, had simply said that it was something she had to do. Now, she, Jay, and Mike were all going to sit for the SATs like everything was normal.