by Andrea Speed
Ceri nodded. “I should be able to.”
“I can meet you there,” Alex said, standing up. “Cthylor takes me wherever I need to be.”
“Okay,” Ceri said and signed, and Alex winked out of existence. Logan thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye.
He turned, searching the living room for it, and Esme asked, “What?”
“Did anyone else see that?”
“See what?” Esme replied.
“A tentacle. I swear I saw a tentacle.”
“You probably did,” Ceri said, giving him a pat on the back. “With the protogods, it’s always tentacles.”
Esme had retrieved her own leather jacket, which was a pearlescent pink with a few too many zippers and honestly was really awesome. “So they really are a thing. I thought this might be a con job.”
“They’re not, but it would be nice if they were. They are stygian and unreasonably powerful life-forms. Which is how most of them ended up banished to another reality,” Ceri said.
Esme raised her eyebrows at that, running a hand through her asymmetrical bangs. “Is banishing Cthylor a possibility?”
Ceri sighed. “Oh, I wish. But Cthulhu banished the others because he wanted to sleep and didn’t want those assholes cramping his style.”
“These dark gods are nothing but bad news,” Ahmed said. His messenger bag was gone, but he’d probably reabsorbed it since it was made of sand. Technically he was never wearing clothes; he was simply replicating them. When he was still, he had a tendency to disappear. Or Logan continually forgot he was in the room. It was simply that no normal living being could approach the level of total stillness that Ahmed naturally achieved. Being made of sand made him as frozen as a statue if he didn’t move. “If we get into bed with them, it’s just as bad as sharing the covers with the devil or God. No offense.”
Ceri shrugged. “None taken. And you’re right, but what choice do we have?”
“Oh, I never said we could refuse the shit sandwich,” Ahmed said. “I’m merely pointing it out.”
Yep, that was classic Ahmed. He’d single-handedly convinced Logan that being immortal must suck donkey balls.
Lyn came back dressed in stretchy yoga pants and a loose, sleeveless orange hoodie, and she was barefoot. It was an outfit made to stay on during transition to full harpy. She had quite a few of them. “Okay, time for the trust circle.”
Which meant they all held hands, Ceri taking one of Logan’s hands and closing the circle by gripping Lyn’s hand on the right. Holding Ahmed’s hand was always weird. Logan was afraid of clasping it too hard and making it crumble into sand, but according to Ahmed that couldn’t happen. Logan was still worried, though. And Ahmed’s hand was always dry—as you might expect—and absolutely temperature-free. It was like an inanimate object attached to a living being. Ahmed took Esme’s hand on his other side, and Esme grasped Lyn’s hand, completing the circle. It never failed to be a little strange.
But Ceri did the thing again. One blink and they were out of Esme and Lyn’s decorous living room and in the baking-hot parking lot of some building. It wasn’t a skyscraper by any means, but it was tall enough to look exhausting.
There were a lot of cars in the parking lot but no people, so that was a bit of a break. “Damn, the pavement is really hot,” Lyn commented.
“Should have worn shoes,” Ahmed said unhelpfully.
Lyn glared at him. “Next time I’ll wear Crocs.”
“Don’t you fucking dare,” Ahmed snapped. He hated Crocs and flip-flops with an equal passion. Mainly because they were so damn ugly. Logan agreed with him, but honestly, he didn’t care either way. Not true for Ahmed, who seemed to take every fashion faux pas personally. Except he’d given up complaining about Logan’s wardrobe, having already declared him a hopeless case, and once, very meanly, accusing him of having straight-man taste. Which seemed out of line.
They crossed from the parking lot to the sidewalk, talking about how they could get people to evacuate the building, when a man walking down the sidewalk made obnoxious kissy noises and leered at Esme. “Hey, mamacita, give us a smile.”
Esme glared at him, and Logan saw, out of the corner of her eye, a golden glow, suggesting she’d just activated her evil eye. “That burrito you had for lunch isn’t sitting very well, is it?”
The man looked briefly confused, then grabbed his stomach and looked mortified. “Holy shit,” he muttered, duck walking away at a good clip. Logan noticed the back of his jeans was wet.
“Did you make him shit himself?” Logan asked. As punishments went, that was ingenious—and well deserved.
“Yeah. And I cursed him with hellacious irritable bowel syndrome that will only flare up when he’s a fucking asshole.”
Lyn chuckled, and Logan shook his head.
“He’s spending the rest of his life in the toilet,” Ahmed noted.
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” Ceri said.
“Rest of his life?” Lyn replied. “I’m willing to bet he shits himself to death this weekend.”
Oh sure, there were worse people in the world, but no one needed to go out of their way to be obnoxious. That was a low-level, but extremely pervasive, evil in society that was better off gone.
The group decided Esme would cast two spells. The first made them invisible to everyone. The second was for once they were inside the building.
The Wantanabe building was air-conditioned to within an inch of its life, and people were in the lobby, which was what they were afraid of. Demons didn’t give a shit about collateral damage.
Despite the floor-directory sign on the wall and people behind the front desk, Logan couldn’t have told you what the Wantanabe building did if his life depended on it. It was super unclear, and the sterile white-and-blue lobby gave no hints. They could sell edible pianos or custom beards for the balding hipster, for all he knew.
Esme cast the second spell, which set off all the fire alarms in the building. They watched the people behind the counter jolt at the noise, and then it was their turn to almost jump out of their skin. “I could have done that,” Alex said.
After they all settled, Lyn hissed, “Of all groups of people you could sneak up on, we’re the most lethal.” Ceri quickly translated it into sign language.
Alex kept smiling at them. Since no one filtering out of the lobby paid them any mind, presumably they were all unseen, Alex included. “I fear nothing,” they said.
No one had anything to say to that. Good for them? But who would be scared if they had an omnipotent, immortal protogod on their side? Nothing in the universe could touch them without paying dearly for it.
“So how do we find this thing?” Esme asked. “Should I throw a locator spell?”
“No need,” Ceri told her. He then closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath. Logan knew he was probably “feeling” for it. Demons had more senses than humans did. Ceri had tried to explain it once, but it was really confusing, and Logan told him he was fine living with the mystery. Expecting a being with five senses to understand ten others was a big ask.
After a moment, Ceri exhaled and opened his eyes. “Fifth floor.”
“Great,” Lyn said. Her arms were now feathered, and her fingers had become thick, razor-sharp claws that could cut through metal. So now wouldn’t be an optimum time to hand her something fragile.
“Any way to tell how many demons we’re facing?” Esme asked.
Ceri both shook his head and shrugged, a twofer of pointless gestures. “A lot is all I can say.”
“Good,” Alex said. “Cthylor is hungry.”
Alex waded through the crowd heading out of the building and walked into the stairwell, avoiding the man currently holding open the door, who didn’t see them or any of the others.
“Well, that wasn’t creepy at all,” Lyn said.
“We might want to hang back and let them take the lead,” Ceri said.
Logan frowned. Ceri was usually eager to go in first because
he could kill most demons as easily as look at them. “Why?”
“Because… well, you’ll see. And you should know what the power of the protogods really is.”
“Dare I ask, why do we need to know?” Esme wondered.
Ceri gave them all a look that was almost pitying. “In case we ever have to go against them.”
Yeah, that was not ominous at all. They all shared a what-the-shit look as they followed Ceri up the fire stairs. Logan pulled out his minimachete, although between Ceri, Esme, and Lyn, he usually did nothing but bat cleanup. He was actually good with this. It was nice not to be in constant peril, although he had to admit, he did miss it from time to time. You did get kind of addicted to the adrenaline rush of not dying.
Alex decided to start on the second floor, which was odd, because why not start at the fifth, where the item was? But once Esme cast the spell that removed the glamours from the demons in the hallway, Logan realized they had to start here.
There were ten, and now that they knew they’d been rumbled, they pulled out guns and knives. Most of them were leering in their direction but largely ignoring Alex, who was ten feet ahead of them.
“If it isn’t Lucifer’s wayward son,” a green demon with a cheek piercing snarled, “and his pack of fellow mongrels. You think we didn’t know you might show up?”
“Okay, I know the witch and the birdwoman and the pretty boy,” a reddish demon said. “But who’s dreadlocks in the front, there?”
Alex said something in reply. But Logan thought he’d misheard them at first, until they repeated it. They said something in a language he’d never heard, with syllables he was sure couldn’t exist. It not only sounded wrong to his ears but started to make them hurt. All he could make out of it was something that sounded like “cffthyt rig nfary.” Was it Welsh? Alex was repeating it, and it got no clearer.
The demons looked among themselves, obviously confused, but they also winced and raised their weapons. “What the fuck language is that?” the green one asked, holding a hand to one of his ears.
Then the lights in the hall dimmed, which was odd because the light was all coming from the windows. It was like a sudden eclipse had occurred, occluding the sun. They all looked, and that was how Logan saw what was happening to the walls.
They were ordinary white walls, nothing special, except now Logan could see veins in them, full of poisonous black blood. They seemed to throb, push to the surface, crack the paint. The engorged black veins were coming out, three dimensional and pulsing with grisly life, like the building was a living thing they were hiding in.
“What the motherfucking shit…?” the green demon exclaimed, a second before one of those veins burst from the wall, wrapped itself around his thick, nearly unseen neck, and popped his head off like a bottle cap.
The other demons didn’t have time to react, as the same thing was happening to all of them almost simultaneously. What Logan took for veins were in fact tentacles, as thick and as long as giant anacondas, with white claws where suction cups would be.
“Oh my fucking God,” Lyn exclaimed. “What the fuck is going on?”
Logan was too stunned to say anything. This couldn’t be real. It had a disorienting dreamlike quality to it that convinced him maybe this was a nightmare or a defensive sigil gone horribly wrong. Something, a deep hum or a pulse almost beyond hearing, vibrated along his spine and produced an electric buzz in his head. It was like they were suddenly inside the aorta of a giant.
And then it was over.
Alex stopped speaking those painful nonsense syllables, and the tentacles and the darkness seemed to vanish at the same time, along with that electrical hum, which released them like it had been holding them immobile. Logan wavered on his feet, almost collapsing into Esme. Looking around, he expected to see holes in the wall from where all those tentacles punched through, but the walls were completely intact. The paint wasn’t even flaked. It could have been nothing but a hallucination.
But the demons were all on the floor, dead, in pools of black blood. And there wasn’t a single head anywhere. Much like the tentacles, they were simply gone.
Esme took a breath so deep it was the opposite of a gasp, and she pressed a hand to the center of her chest. “That was a reality warp,” she said, sounding panicked. “How… the power necessary to….”
“Which is why I thought you should see it,” Ceri said. He sounded low-key and grim.
Alex looked back at them, still smiling. “Cthylor is the best god.” They then went on walking, deftly avoiding the headless bodies and pools of blood.
“What were they saying?” Logan asked, since Ceri spoke all known languages. “And what language was that?”
“Unknown to Earth,” Ceri replied. “It’s the old tongue, a language specific to the protogods. They were doing a summoning invocation. ‘Cthylor break their bones, Cthylor swallow their souls, Cthylor destroy your enemies.’”
“Oh, we are fucked,” Esme said. “I mean, fuuucked. We can’t fight that kind of power.”
“Well, right now we don’t have to,” Ceri said. “And now this is Heaven and Hell’s problem. We just have to hope it remains that way.”
“What if it doesn’t?” Logan asked.
“Then we’re fucked,” Esme repeated.
Okay. As long as they were all on the same page.
Logan put away his machete, because after that display of power, it was clear that Alex and Cthylor were wiping out every single demon on each floor. How did you escape a god who could twist reality? The answer was you didn’t, if all the headless demons they kept finding were any indication. Cthylor could come out of the walls, the ceiling, the floor—anywhere. Logan imagined they could be in a solid steel bunker one mile underground and they still wouldn’t be safe. If Cthylor wanted in, she was coming in, and there was fuck all they could do about it.
But while this was as chilling as fuck—and under any other circumstance, Logan would probably be shitting his pants over it—he actually felt relatively good. Until he saw Cthylor work, he hadn’t believed Alex pushed them into a stalemate with Heaven and Hell. But now he believed it. Heaven and Hell both had enormous weapons at their disposal, but something about Cthylor was inevitable. Like the tides. Like death. Nor could he forget that weird background hum and the feeling they had been inside a humongous organism, cells in a body that honestly didn’t care if they lived or died and wouldn’t notice either way. Was that what ants felt like, whenever they found themselves among people? Afterthoughts in a world not made for them?
Finally they reached the fifth floor and more headless demon corpses. Alex stood in the center of the hall, waiting for them. “There’s still one alive, hiding. I thought you might have wanted it.”
No, that wasn’t creepy either.
No one asked where it was; they simply followed Ceri as he walked into one of the side offices. It was an office like any other, with a standard desk-and-chair setup and a tinted window looking out on the bleak downtown Seattle landscape. Ceri headed for a small room off the office and opened it to reveal a tiny private bathroom with a red demon sitting on the floor.
“Here, take it,” the demon said, shoving something across the floor toward them. It was a chunk of purple stone about the size of a snow globe, and it came to a stop before reaching Ceri’s foot. “I give up. Whatever. Please don’t feed me to Cthulhu, or whatever the fuck that thing is.” The red demon was next to the toilet, arms wrapped around his knees, looking as defeated and bereft as Logan had ever seen a demon look.
Ceri picked up the amethyst chunk. “You’re not afraid of my father?”
“Of course I am, but he can only kill me. Those chthonic fuckers—” He ran a hand over his face. He was one of those demons that looked like he had a severe underbite, with fanglike lower teeth sticking out over his thin red lips. Since he was sitting scrunched up, it was hard to get an idea of his size, but he was built like a fireplug. Logan guessed he was of the type of short and stocky demons that
were surprisingly strong and generally decent fighters. He’d never seen one give up before. “—they can do anything to you. And they usually do. Torture and death aren’t enough for them. They enjoy mind-fucking you until you eat your own hand and aren’t sure if you’re alive or dead.”
“Have you sent word back to Hell about this?”
He scoffed. It would have been a laugh if there’d been any strength in it. “Yeah, I’m sure there’s been a dozen ‘SOS, we’re completely fucked’ messages sent back home. For all the good it will do. You can’t defend against Cthulhu. All you can do is hope you never cross his radar.”
“So you all knew this was a real thing?” Lyn demanded. “How did I not know they were real?”
“Because your life never depended on avoiding them,” the demon replied.
Ceri handed the chunk of amethyst to Logan. He took it and was kind of surprised it felt warm and a bit heavier than he expected. Should have been a warning sign for whoever bought it, but nope. Most humans were oblivious to the supernatural happening right under their noses.
Crouching down, Ceri addressed the demon. “I assume you want to live through this and not end up Cthylor’s chew toy, yes?”
The demon bugged his eyes out at him. “Of-fucking-course, man. Haven’t you heard what I’m saying? I ain’t gonna fuck with Cthulhu.”
“Then go back to Hell, warn them who we have on our side, and tell some sympathetic demons that, if they want to avoid an apocalypse showdown with Cthulhu and his kind, maybe it would behoove you to change leadership.”
His eyes bugged out again. Logan hadn’t believed that was physically possible. “A fucking coup? In Hell?”
“Either that or Cthylor. Your choice.”
“Oh man, I fucking hate politics.” The demon made a fist and slammed the floor, but not very hard. He was fucked here, and he knew it. “I don’t get killed, and I don’t get turned over to Cthylor, okay?”
“Don’t fuck us over and we won’t fuck you over.”
He nodded. “Okay, good. I can’t promise a coup, though.”
“Try your best… what’s your name?”
