by Andrea Speed
As they went down the stairs, Logan couldn’t help but notice the changes in Cujo/Ralph. He was still a black specter translucent at the edges, like smoke holding a form, but the body had lengthened out, as had the tail. “Uh, is Cujo a cat now?” He didn’t look like a dog; he looked like a panther.
Lyn shrugged. “Hellhound, hellcat—it’s the same thing.”
“It is?” This was news to him.
“Technically, they are creatures of pure psychic and mystical rage,” Ahmed said. He was following them, still cradling the book in his fashionable hands. “They can be any shape they want. But dog and cat are the classical ones.”
“Could they be a frog?” Admittedly, being attacked by a hellfrog would be a hilarious way to die.
Lyn shrugged. “I guess. But they’re usually not that creative.”
Missed opportunity in Logan’s opinion. He would have loved to see helltoads and hellgiraffes, and what about hellmoths? Who wouldn’t be flummoxed, and then terrified, to die by the claws of the hellcrab? Hell really should pay him for these ideas.
As they approached the front door, which had shut at some point, the sounds from outside had died down, which could have been a good sign or a very bad one. Lyn gestured that she’d go ahead, and he let her but followed close behind. Yes, Lyn could take a whole lot more damage than he could, but Ceri was out there. He wasn’t going to hang back and do nothing.
Feathers and claws sprang from Lyn’s arms as she opened the door to reveal the tableau on the front lawn. A handful of dead demons lay splayed on the grass, along with something that looked like a living, bleeding boil on two legs, which, ick. But more importantly, there was a seven-foot goat-monster demon having a power battle with Ceri, although Esme occasionally threw a spell goat monster’s way, probably aiming to annoy him at least. Magic couldn’t do much more to a demon than that, but Esme being as powerful as she was, she had a bit more punch than most.
Ceri seemed to be banging against an invisible force field surrounding the goat monster, but there was an odd noise afterward, like ice cracking on a lake somewhere upwind of them. He was hitting something, but Logan couldn’t see what.
The goat demon, for his part, was throwing punches from behind his invisible shield, and there was no way they were connecting, but they still made massive dents in the ground around Ceri. Sometimes it sucked being the mediocre human—Logan couldn’t see a damn thing. But he recalled what he had, pulled Godslayer out of its sheath, and shouted, “Your backup’s here!”
Ceri hardly even glanced behind him, simply reached out his hand, and the sword seemed drawn to it. He caught it by the hilt and instantly slashed down, which caused a sound like distant thunder, and then thrust, burying the sword deep in the midsection of the goat demon, who seemed genuinely surprised.
He wrapped his hairy hands around the blade and said, “Do you really think this enough to kill me, boy?”
“With my help?” Ceri replied. “You bet.”
It wasn’t obvious what was going on at first, but the goat demon tried to shimmy off the blade while Ceri drove it forward, and it was when the goat monster’s eyes widened and his chest fur started turning gray, as if all color were being leached from him, that Logan understood. Ceri was pulling energy from the goat demon, using Godslayer as a conduit.
It was a one-two punch that the goat demon couldn’t handle. He wasted away before their eyes, becoming desiccated and shrunken, like what most people thought a mummy looked like, sans bandages. Finally he crumbled as if made of ash, and Ceri leaned on the sword like it was a cane.
LOGAN FOLLOWED Lyn out of the house and glanced back to see Cujo/Ralph dissipate at the threshold. Bound to the house? Or did it only exist to guard the book, and with the book gone, it was gone? Hard to say. But any of those rules could have applied, and he didn’t honestly care which one. He was glad they weren’t leaving behind a cursed house where someone could get savaged to death by a mystical monster.
“You okay?” Logan asked, approaching him.
Ceri held up a hand to make him stop and looked in his direction with eyes as red as burning coals. It was a little unnerving and suggested he’d absorbed a fuckload of energy. Was the goat monster a higher demon? It must have been.
“I need a minute,” Ceri said. Even his voice sounded different, like he had a backing track or something, giving him a little extra bass and grit.
Lyn had gone back to human and hugged and kissed Esme. Logan was a little jealous. Ceri was still too radioactive to touch. “Who was that asshole?”
“Astaroth,” Esme said. “He kept calling Ceri his nephew.”
“Holy shit.” A relative of Lucifer’s? That meant he was a major-league demon. Ceri hadn’t killed one that high up before. No wonder he seemed like he’d swallowed a star. He had, in a way.
“Oh, I’m fine too,” Ahmed said, rolling his eyes.
“Of course you’re fine,” Lyn snapped. “Nothing kills you. Sorry we’re not more concerned about the immortal guy.”
Yeah, it was a little hard to worry about him. Also, he would rub in his immortality from time to time, so it felt right giving him a bit of shit about it.
Ceri’s eyes focused so intensely on Logan he briefly felt nervous. “You’re hurt,” he finally said, in that newly weird voice of his.
Logan was about to explain how that came about, when Ceri waved his hand at him, and he felt this rush of warmth overcome him. It was there and gone in a second, but Logan still thought it was really weird. And he looked down at his gunshot wound to see it was gone. While he was glad about that, Logan was also a little freaked out, because usually he had to touch him to heal him.
Finally, the red glow started to dissipate from Ceri’s eyes and he was himself again. Logan went to him and hugged him, wondering, not for the first time, if someday he’d lose him to that energy.
He hoped not. But he also knew there was fuck all he could do about it.
3—Lost Arts
YOU’D THINK after having to call up so much energy to use on spells, Esme would be tired. But she was the opposite. A spell-slinging fight always left her feeling jazzed.
Much like Ceri after he absorbed the life force of a bunch of demons, which was unsettling to think about. Wasn’t that sort of evil? Although Ceri was such an adorable puppy, it was hard to say that and mean it. At least he only absorbed energy from the bad guys. That they knew of.
Okay, yeah, Esme really hadn’t been on board with this shit at first. How could anyone trust the son of Satan when he said he didn’t want the apocalypse? But the thing was, Ceri was so fucking sweet. He was polite and thoughtful, and it was clear he’d blow up the universe if someone hurt anyone he cared about. And he was also clearly head over heels in love with Logan. Which was another weird thing, since Logan was King Machismo, and yet Ceri seemed to bring out his marshmallow core.
She knew Lyn and Logan used to be a thing, and that disturbed her a little, but that’s what she got for being with a bi girl. Lyn used to sleep with a man, Mr. Macho Pretty Boy himself. It gave her the shudders if she thought about it too long. But while he was still a cocky little shit, Logan had grown on her. Even though he was a human, he was the amazing fighter his reputation claimed, gifted with technique if not exactly strength, and she knew he’d go balls to the wall for his cause. Even when he was clearly outmatched, he didn’t quit. Why else was he leading this charge to circumvent the apocalypse? It was foolish. How could they possibly stop this fucking thing? But they had to try.
They had several items, including the codex, that might help them avert it, but Esme had this sinking sensation that it wouldn’t—and couldn’t—be enough. When Heaven and Hell wanted it done, who were they to stop them? Yes, she was the world’s most powerful witch, with an evil eye to boot, and while Logan didn’t bring a whole lot to the table, Lyn made up for him, being an incredibly hard-to-kill harpy. Then there was eternal Ahmed, although he was fighting out of fear of loneliness at being left behind on a
dead world, nothing else. His enthusiasm was lacking. But Ceri did tilt things in their favor, being Lucifer’s son and the fabled “Destroyer of Earth.” Esme tried to look on the bright side, but… it wasn’t enough, was it? She feared it wasn’t and couldn’t be. Technically, she and Ceri were the heaviest hitters on their team, and while she had little doubt that Ceri could take on Heaven and Hell, she didn’t think the rest of them would survive it. They needed more power on their side to make this even remotely doable.
She and Lyn went home and had dinner, along with a decent bottle of frou-frou ale. Unlike Esme, Lyn was usually tired after the big fights and went to bed, while Esme remained up and busted out her Tarot cards.
Yes, they were hokey, and hardly more than playing cards. But this was a special deck. They looked like your standard Rider-Waite Tarot cards, except these were haunted. Well, sort of. Technically she’d cursed the cards because her evil eye gave her the ability to curse anything. She’d made them a bridge between this world and the veil, the place that stood between life and death. These could tell her the immediate future or the consequences of certain actions. She had stopped asking whether or not they’d be successful in halting the end of the world, because every time she did she ended up with the Tower, a card that meant the end of the fucking world.
With the TV tuned to overseas rugby—New Zealand, maybe? She didn’t have the sound up enough to tell—Esme sat on the couch, shuffled her cursed cards, and asked, “What’s the result of what we’ve done so far?” Kind of vague, but it was best to leave some room when asking the cards for answers.
She laid out three cards on the coffee table. Immediately, she knew they were weird.
She got the Page of Wands, the Magician, and the High Priestess. Pages, if not referring to a specific person, were often messengers or envoys, especially in the case of Wands. The Magician could be referring to an actual magic wielder, although the High Priestess threw that in doubt. A mystical being? Something not human? But where did the messenger come into this? “Okay, what the hell does this mean?” she asked, shuffling the remaining cards. “Is this good or bad?”
She laid two cards over the three. They were the Seven of Wands and the Two of Swords. The Seven of Wands was basically saying this thing, whatever it was, gave them an advantage; the Two of Swords was the card of stalemate.
“What the fuck…?” Esme said out loud. If she was reading this right, they were about to be joined in battle by someone—possibly a her, if you could assign gender to it—of immense power. A power so great it pushed them from a losing side into a force to be reckoned with, something Heaven and Hell couldn’t simply crush and sweep aside. The appearance of the sword card here—although one of the better sword cards, since all swords pretty much meant violence of one kind or another, and it was usually best to avoid them in a reading if at all possible—indicated this being could be extremely dangerous, even if it was on their side. What the fuck did that mean? Did Heaven or Hell have a major player who’d decided they weren’t down with the end of the world after all?
She shuffled the cards and asked, “Heaven or Hell?” This time she laid down a single card. The Moon.
“Fuck you,” she snapped. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
There were obvious Heaven and Hell cards in the deck. Judgment, with its giant angel astride the world, was Heaven. The Devil was Hell. The Moon was… what the fuck was the Moon? Aliens? Why the fuck not at this rate? It was bad enough living in a world with actual gods and monsters. Maybe aliens would make for a nice change.
She tried a second shuffle and draw, just to make sure, and all the same cards came up. She figured that would happen but had to check. Afterward, Esme put the cards aside and watched the game halfheartedly, drinking a second beer. She found rugby kind of fascinating for unclear reasons, although she did like it when scrums looked like humongous human spiders, moving with shambling force across the field until they all fell apart.
At some point, she dozed off, and a knock on the door woke Esme with a jolt. It took her a moment to realize it because she was distracted by a terrible need to pee. But the person knocked again, and she heard it very clearly.
She got up and whispered a few words of enchantment under her breath as she approached the door. She had a temporary paralysis spell ready to throw in case this person was some sort of bad guy. It could be Logan or Ahmed, but that was unlikely, as Logan usually knocked on the door like he was punching it, and Ahmed rang the doorbell. She hadn’t ordered a pizza and completely forgotten about it, had she? That had actually happened once, but she’d had a lot more than two beers.
Esme cast a small reveal spell that made the door translucent to her alone and saw a young woman(?) or man standing on the doorstep. They didn’t look familiar at all. They were dark-skinned and striking, maybe twenty-three or so, with a silver septum ring. Their dark, red-streaked hair was done up in dreadlocks tied behind their head like a ponytail made of tentacles. Their clothes were aggressively gender-neutral—loose jeans, oversized promotional T-shirt for Evil Dead 2, a nongendered Army surplus jacket in olive drab, also too big—and made Esme wonder if they had a gender at all. Maybe not. She/he/they had awesome bright yellow boots, though.
Esme opened the door, holding her right hand behind it, ready to cast the spell if necessary. “Yes?”
The person smiled. “Hello. You’re Esme Navarro?” They said this, but also signed, their hands moving with great speed and fluidity. They were apparently deaf or hard of hearing as well.
She nodded. “I am.” Esme wished she knew sign language, but she didn’t. Seemed like a grave oversight on her part.
“Great. I’m Alex Rayasi, and I’m the spokesperson for Cthylor.” Alex kept smiling, like that meant something to her.
Esme shook her head. “I don’t know who that is. What are your pronouns, by the way?”
“Oh! Thank you for asking. I am they/them. And Cthylor is the daughter of Cthulhu.”
Esme stared at them a moment, wondering if she’d misheard. Their speaking voice was very clear, so she didn’t think so. “Um… Cthulhu has a daughter?”
“Yes, and she is quite distressed about the upcoming apocalypse. She’d rather it didn’t happen, and word was the world’s most powerful witch was opposing it. Cthylor would like to help you.”
Okay, Alex was a crazy person. Or at least Esme entertained that idea for several seconds until she remembered the Tarot cards. Powerful female, not human, tips the scale into stalemate territory. Oh. Oh shit.
Esme was still processing this when Alex reached a hand in their pocket and pulled something out. “She knew you might have a hard time believing this, so she gave me this to give to you as proof.”
Esme looked at it warily. It looked like a small dark stone with some kind of shell impression imprinted in it. How did this prove anything? Esme picked it up—
—and suddenly she was in a room full of stars. No, not a room—space. She was in boundless space, surrounded by stars and nothingness. Her mind reeled, and her body started to panic about lack of gravity and air when suddenly she was plunged into the water, into a vast and ceaseless ocean, bizarrely empty of everything. Except when the bottom finally came into view, a large rock that seemed to take up a good bit of the sea floor stood there. Except… no, not a rock.
It was a leathery, tentacled thing as big as a skyscraper on its side. There were knots of muscles, or maybe undeveloped eyes or tentacles, all over the thing. The more she looked at it, the more it seemed to be escaping her scrutiny in a way she couldn’t understand. It was like the water was filling up with something that made it gauzy and caused her eyes to glide over the thing on their way to something else. It was almost a force, trying to push her gaze away. As if her mind refused to allow her to see the whole thing in front of her.
Finally Esme came to stand on the silty bottom of this fathomless ocean, in front of this vast and ungodly thing. It was giving her a headache trying to look at it. And t
he moment she decided this was probably its face, a handful of eyes opened, shedding golden light that flared as bright as a supernova—
—and she gasped, dropping the stone as she reeled backward, somehow still in her house. Esme inhaled and exhaled deeply several times, unsure if she’d been holding her breath or it just felt that way. “What the fuck was that?” she finally gasped.
“Sorry,” Alex said, still outside. They hadn’t assumed Esme’s retreat as an invitation to come in. “I know the visions can be overwhelming. But Cthylor means you no harm. If she did, you’d be dead already.” They said this with an innocent smile that almost made it creepier.
“Was that… thing Cthylor?”
“It’s possible. She can appear as many things, as she has her father’s powers. Which is also why you probably couldn’t see her clearly.”
“I couldn’t.”
Alex nodded. “That’s because seeing her or hearing her in full automatically renders you insane.”
Esme nodded. “Okay. Good to know.” That probably explained why she needed a messenger (Page of Wands). “But you’re telling me all the Cthulhu mythos gods are real?”
“Pretty much, yes. Most exist on another plane of reality. Save for Cthulhu, who sleeps, and his daughter, who is here watching.”
That sounded as ominous as fuck. “Watching for what?”
Alex shrugged. “She’s never said.”
Esme almost asked where Cthulhu was sleeping, exactly, since you’d think he’d have been discovered by a submarine or something by now. But maybe not. Contrary to what most people thought, not all oceans had been thoroughly explored. Many of the deepest depths were far too dangerous to venture into, and even where it was possible, it was dark and crushing and not something anything could handle for long periods, even cameras. To this day people were still discovering sea creatures that hadn’t been seen before. If Cthulhu was asleep at the bottom of the Marianas Trench or something, there was a good chance no one knew, even if he couldn’t disguise himself in some way. “But wait—how is that even possible? I mean, how in the hell does Cthulhu have a daughter? And oh yeah, wasn’t H.P. Lovecraft just a horrible old racist?”
