by Andrea Speed
“Well, daughter is not exactly correct. Please understand that the Old Ones don’t have specific genders like we do, and the word is used as an approximation. As for Lovecraft, I’m with you. He was a horrible old racist. But from what I’ve been able to gather, he had probably gotten hold of a real memory stone.”
“Memory stone?” Esme looked down at that strange dark rock on her floor. Was that what it was? It was deeply unpleasant. It also made her wonder what happened to the person(?) who created that stone. She had a feeling, if it was an actual person, no way in hell could they have survived Cthylor opening her eyes.
“Why do I get the feeling this isn’t a total surprise to you?” Alex asked, cocking their head to the side.
Esme wondered how they’d figured that out. She was completely flabbergasted by all of this, and only her insistent bladder was telling her she was awake and not dreaming. “I did a Tarot reading that was really confusing… except, it kind of jibes with everything going on here. Is Cthylor as powerful as Cthulhu?”
“In what way?”
How did Cthulhu operate? What did he do? She could barely recall the fiction, which she stopped reading because Lovecraft was a horrible racist who also wrote very purple prose. It had to be your thing, and it wasn’t hers. “If she rose, or whatever, could she end the world simply by showing up?”
“Oh, I see. If she wanted the world to die, it would. She wouldn’t actually need to rise for that.”
Esme had a sudden flash of a comedian on some show or other doing a bit about how his mother would say, “Don’t make me get out of this chair,” when she was really mad. That was Cthylor, wasn’t it? If she had to show up, someone had hosed something up so massively, it was hardly worth the telling. She didn’t need to get out of her chair to kill them. She’d only get out of her chair to massively fuck them up first. “Could Heaven or Hell stop her? Or them?”
Alex scoffed. “Oh no. The Old Ones are protogods, gods that existed before the gods. They are tied to the universe… well, this universe. There’s a multiverse, actually, but that’s neither here nor there. They will die when this universe dies. But not before.”
Holy motherfucking shit. Did that mean if Heaven and Hell teamed up in their masses to take on Cthulhu and Cthylor, they would lose? Esme envisioned the picture of the Two of Swords, with the blindfolded woman holding two perfectly balanced blades. Stalemate as a figure. “Shit. Come in, please.”
“Thank you.” Alex did and closed the door behind them. They seemed chipper and spritely, which seemed a bit odd for the messenger of an eldritch death god, but hey, sometimes you had to make your own fun.
“Are you a witch, by chance?” Esme wondered. The Magician could have been a reference to Cthylor, who obviously had mystical powers, but it could have referred to Alex as well.
Alex shook their head. “No.”
“So how did you end up as Cthylor’s messenger on Earth?”
“I was taken as a child to be sacrificed in the name of a dark god by a cult that thought it could get some favor from him,” they said, chipperness still in place. “Cthylor took pity on me and decided to make me her messenger.”
“What happened to the cult?”
“She killed them all.” Now Alex’s smile took on a dangerous edge. “Cthulhu finds worship beneath him and would never grant any favor to a human. Except in this case, Cthylor would rather the world didn’t end before her father wakes up.”
“He’s not waking up anytime soon, is he?”
Alex shook their head. “He will wake before the death of the universe. I think that’s a few billion years off.”
That was a relief. So, not their problem. They didn’t have to fight Heaven and Hell and then Cthulhu. She honestly wasn’t sure how they’d survive the first two; the third sounded impossible.
“Okay, so, I hafta go pee before I bust. Why don’t you sit down, make yourself at home, and I’ll also go wake up my girlfriend and we can talk strategy, okay?”
Alex gave her that bright grin again. “Okay.” They sat on the couch, hands on their knees, and continued smiling at nothing.
Yes, they were a bit creepy, but that wasn’t their fault. Alex didn’t ask to be the messenger of an insanely over-powered protogod any more than they’d asked to be sacrificed to one in the first place.
Now they had an ally that might make a difference in the coming apocalypse. Esme could only hope they could trust them.
LOGAN ASSUMED he was in for a sex dream when he found himself in a subway car. But things immediately took a turn for the shitty.
He wasn’t alone in the car, and not in the fun way either. He knew exactly who was in this car without having to see her. “Gill,” he said, not turning around. “I told you not to visit my dreams again.”
“We need to talk, Logan. I can’t have you constantly hanging up on me.”
Logan tried to do as he did last time, imagining a chainsaw in his hands, but this time nothing appeared. He tried to imagine something simpler, an axe, but it still didn’t appear. “What the hell, dude? Are you doing this?”
“Your juvenile reenactment of a horror movie is over. Again, we need to talk, without your usual jackassery.”
Logan turned and scowled. “You used to find me funny.”
Growing up, Logan always heard he looked more like his mom, while Gill looked more like their dad. Gill had a more slender build, a sharp jawline, light brown hair, and pale blue eyes. Gill was often called attractive, whereas Logan was called pretty, a semantic difference that still seemed to mean something to people.
Angel Gill looked the same as human Gill except her hair was neater. She also dressed better, although in this dreamscape, she was dressed as the human Gill—more casual, in jeans and hiking boots and a Pink Floyd T-shirt that Logan was pretty sure was the last outfit he saw her in as a human being. She probably thought this familiarity was a kindness, something to put him at ease, but it made Logan instantly furious.
Gill picked up on it, because she said, “I’m not going to fight you. In a dream, it’s a pointless waste of time and energy.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass, you—” Logan began, stomping toward her. But he stopped the instant he slammed into an invisible wall. “Oh, what the fuck? Really? You put me behind a fucking sneeze guard?”
“Yes, until you calm down.”
“Calm down? Fuck you, drama queen. I’m not the one who ran off and cut a deal with the angels while I was stuck in Hell.”
“Becoming an angel was the only way I could get you out.”
“But you didn’t get me out, did you?”
Gill frowned. She was standing with her hand on a suspiciously clean and sparkling pole, the kind that told you whoever was conjuring up this scenario wasn’t going for authenticity. “I was too late. The Destroyer made his escape first.”
“Don’t call him that. That’s not his name.”
She met his gaze with one of her own, and for the first time since Gill had switched sides, he saw a bit of the old Gill in there, self-righteous and snappish. “His name isn’t Ceri either. It’s Cerberus, the fucking three-headed dog of Hell.”
“Yeah, we’ve been through this.” Logan retreated to one of the empty subway seats and sat. If he couldn’t do anything here, there was no point in standing up.
“Only because you’re not listening. Do you really think this ends well in any context, Logan? Come on, you’re smarter than that.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Oh please, don’t trot out this bullshit again. Hell won’t let their Destroyer be happy, because if he’s happy, he can’t play his role. Hell will destroy you, and Cerberus will be unable to stop it.”
Logan shook his head, concentrating on the ground. Very slowly, fuzzy green carpet started spreading over the floor. So he did have some control in this dreamscape; it was simply limited. Good to know. “He killed Astaroth today, you know.”
It was the silence that made Logan look back at his now-an
gelic sister. She looked genuinely taken aback. “Astaroth? Really?”
“He came for the codex. He left a pile of ashes.”
“I didn’t realize he was that powerful. But surely you know it’s not going to be enough. The amulet, the codex, whatever other artifact you’re after. You can’t even slow this process down.”
Logan wondered if he should tell her he’d figured that out already but couldn’t just roll over and let the end happen. But that might make her happy, so he decided not to. “Then why did the angels want it? If it doesn’t matter, they shouldn’t care if we have it or not.”
Gill rolled her eyes, like she always had. “Except it’s extremely dangerous. That book is evil, and you know it.”
“And that doesn’t matter if the world is dead within a week anyway, does it? Be honest with me, Gill—what is the fucking point of any of this? Why are angels so hot for destroying the world?”
Gill continued frowning at him. Logan wanted to tell her if she kept doing that, her face would get stuck. “We’re not… it is the way it is, Logan. Everything has a beginning and an end. This is the end. You can fight it all you want, but you won’t stop it.”
“If that’s true, why this showing up and telling me I need to quit? I think we’ve got you scared.”
“Oh please. I’m trying to save you. You’re still my brother.”
“Save the world, not me. Weren’t you always the one telling me that most people were good and decent?”
Gill threw up her hands, like Logan was being deliberately obtuse, but Logan felt he had her. “They are, but prolonging their survival past the end point is cruel.”
“And why would I want to survive past the end point if no one else can? Seems kind of… privileged, doesn’t it?”
Now Gill gave him her pissy look, the one she’d perfected when they were teenagers and everything Logan did seemed to mortify her. “You have to understand, this was fated. We—”
“Oh, don’t give me that fated bullshit. All I’m fated to do is break my foot off in your ass.”
“Don’t be crude. This is your destiny, Logan. You can’t run from it.”
“Fuck you, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
Finally, that spurred her into showing some rage, proving she wasn’t a complete Stepford bot. Mostly, but not all. “You know what? I’m going to tell you. I figured it’d crush you, but fuck it. If you’re gonna insist on being an asshole, so be it.”
“Does this mean you’re going to leave me alone now?”
“It means we have no choice, Logan. We don’t have angel blood in our family line. Only we have angel blood.”
Logan made a point of mentally dissecting that sentence, but nope, it made no sense. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying our father was an angel.”
Now Logan laughed, shaking his head. “Oh wow, you’ve full-on chugged the Kool-Aid, haven’t you?”
“I’m serious, Logan.”
“Our dad was a deadbeat who fucked off shortly after you were born. He was as far from a goddamn angel as you can get.”
Gill shook her head and gave him an infuriating look of pity. “Investigate him. His cover is very flimsy and falls apart easily. Augustin Gabriel Fox never existed. Our birth signaled the beginning of the end, just as Cerberus’s birth did. Equal and opposite reactions.”
Logan had this sudden and terrible feeling in his gut, one that made his blood turn to ice. “You’re fucking joking. We’re not half-angel.”
“I didn’t want to believe it either, which is why, when they told me, I investigated him. I wondered why I never had. And it’s so terrible. The angels knew nothing about forging documents. There has never been a Saint George’s Hospital in Greenford, Maine. Also, there’s no such town as Greenford in Maine.”
Logan was vaguely aware that that was where their dad was born and raised. But… no. How could that be true? He remembered their father; he was—wait, did he?
“You don’t remember him, do you?”
“Of course I do. He….” Logan struggled to recall him. A lot of his childhood was a blank now, with a couple of traumatic instances highlighted, but all he could remember of his dad was a vague image of him. He couldn’t remember doing anything with him, or even talking with him, which was crazy. He’d pissed off not long after Gill was born, leaving them all high and dry and sending their mother into her first alcoholic tailspin, from which she never recovered. But he was there for the first few years of Logan’s life, he… why couldn’t he remember him? “This is a trick,” he snapped. “You’re fucking with my mind.”
Gill held up her hands as if in surrender. “I wouldn’t do that even if I could, Logan. With Cerberus existing, we had to exist too. We were born to fight the son of Satan on the final battlefield. You know, your boyfriend.”
Logan stood, hands balling into fists at his side. He so wished he could punch her. “That’s a motherfucking lie.”
“I wish it was. How do you think I felt when I realized the angels were telling the truth? We were doomed from the start.”
Logan shook his head. He didn’t believe this fate bullshit, because no one had to do anything. Entropy ruled the universe—all was chaos. The fact that Heaven and Hell actually existed seemed to support this theory more, because what random bullshit. One of the first tattoos he got was the No Gods, No Masters one tattooed in lovely script encircling his left bicep. Ceri got a matching one in honor of him, only on his right bicep. They were a matching pair of fucked-up losers. “The angels are liars. They are more than capable of ret-conning our dad, from our memories, from fucking existence. They hoodwinked you.”
She was shaking her head, looking sad. “I wish that was true. But think about it, Lo. Mom started going off the deep end after Dad left, right? That’s when all this demon nonsense started? Because Dad must have told her what he was and what we were. She knew demons would hunt us.”
“Listen to yourself! We can’t be half-angel! We have no powers! We’re only fucking humans. Well, I am.”
“Our powers are latent until we die and are born again as angels. But that might be why you’ve managed to best demons in a fight.”
“No, the reason I can do that is because Mom spent a fuckload on getting me trained, and I always go for the weak points first. There’s nothing paranormal about it.” Right? That certainly felt true. He was the powerless, mediocre man in the group. Nothing had happened to change that.
Gill was looking at him with pity, which infuriated him. “I think there is. It makes sense.”
“None of this is sense. This is bullshit. The angels are manipulating you.”
“For what reason? Listen to yourself. They already have me. There’s no point to lying to me now.”
“Yes, there is. They want me too, for some fucking reason.”
“Because you’re half-angel. Because you’re destined to be here.”
“Do you really wanna end the world, Gill?” he snapped, leveling a glare at his supposed sister. “You were the one who told me that people weren’t all bad, that there was a reason to save people. Now you can’t wait to kill them all.”
She sighed, shoulders sagging. “You know that’s not true.”
“No, I don’t.”
“The apocalypse can’t be stopped. But we have to win it. Otherwise Hell wins. And you don’t want to see what happens to the Earth in that case.”
“It’s all death. Whether Heaven or Hell tends the ashes is semantical, and no one will be alive to care. Except maybe Ahmed.”
“Is he the mummy…?” Logan nodded. “Okay, yeah, the angels aren’t sure about those. You find the weirdest people to fraternize with.”
Logan glared at her. “Oh yeah, my friends, who are the only people brave enough to defy you clowns.”
Her pissy look came back. At least there was enough of her left that she could do that. But the look quickly faded and fell away. “Maybe you count them as your friends, but we’re family. I don’t want you to die for nothi
ng, Lo.”
“Trying to save the world isn’t nothing.”
“You won’t get the chance. Hell won’t let you. They’re going to want to see Cerberus take on his role as the Destroyer, and as long as you’re alive, he can’t. Join us before it’s too late.”
“Do you have any lines that don’t sound like a canned villain speech?”
Gill’s frown deepened. “You’re not stupid, Lo. Think about it. You know where I am if you want to talk.”
Logan woke up and found himself staring at the darkened ceiling for a moment—actually several long moments, as he had to reacclimate to being awake—and considering what Gill had said.
Angels were liars. So were people and demons. Lying apparently was the glue that held the universe together. That made sense.
He sat up and realized Ceri wasn’t in bed. Logan got up, went to use the bathroom, and wandered out into the living room. Ceri was sitting near the window, looking out at the dark. “Is something wrong?” Logan asked.
Ceri shook his head and gazed back at him. “No. I just had a hard time sleeping. I’m literally full of energy. Absorbing Astaroth really hit my system like a twelve-ton burrito.”
“Hopefully not that bad.”
Ceri considered that, probably remembering how things affected a human digestive system. “Okay, not quite that bad. But you know what I mean.”
“I think so.” Logan sat down beside him and glanced out the window, in case Ceri was actually looking at something. Didn’t seem like it.
Ceri put his arm around his shoulders and leaned into him. “So why are you up?”
“Oh, Gill decided to invade my dreams again.”
“Did you resume your horror movie scenario?”
“No. This time she took control of it somehow, kept me from doing it.” First time Gill decided to talk to him through his dreams, Logan thought he’d teach her a lesson by going all Evil Dead on her—dismembering her with a chainsaw, whole nine yards. But Gill had refused to play along and mostly made it a bummer. Much like this time, but worse.
