by Andrea Speed
“Bucket.”
Lyn barked a laugh but quickly slapped a transformed hand over her mouth. Demon names could be really odd because Lucifer named most demons and clearly got bored at a certain point, because a whole bunch of them were simply nouns. So Ceri’s name being Cerberus wasn’t actually the worst possible result. “Okay, Bucket, I’m counting on you. Don’t let me down.”
The demon’s electric grape eyes were more snugly nestled in their sockets now. He didn’t look comfortable but more like he understood he wasn’t going to die in a second. “Don’t turn me over to Cthylor and we’re all good.”
They left Bucket sitting on the floor of some executive’s office bathroom and found Alex waiting in the hall. “He lives,” Ceri told them. “At least for now.”
Alex shrugged. “Whatever.”
They decided to take the elevator down because they didn’t need to walk through any more demon blood or corpses, and Lyn was still barefoot. But they hadn’t even reached the ground floor before Ceri canted his head to the side in the way he did when he picked up something strange, and Alex scowled as if they’d just had an awful thought. “It reeks of divinity,” they said as the elevator finally stopped.
“Was there a point to that non sequitur…?” Ahmed wondered.
Alex didn’t reply, but the door opened, and Ceri immediately put an arm out, shoving Logan behind him. While being moved, he saw why.
The lobby was full of angels.
It was like a convention of yoga teachers. Man-bunned Raphael was there, front and center, joined by six more angels, mostly in the guise of white people who really liked flowing tunics and yoga pants in earth tones, with a breakdown of three men and three women, although outer guise was never a tell on gender.
Ceri had a hand on the hilt of Godslayer but hadn’t pulled it yet. “You can’t win this fight,” Ceri told Raphael. It was 100 percent true, even before Cthylor was added to the group.
“You’ve gotten away with too many artifacts as it is,” Raphael said. “And we cannot allow the Scourge to be released. Give it to us and we will destroy it.”
“It isn’t yours,” Ceri replied. “It belongs to Hell. Which makes it mine.”
One of the angels with Raphael, a brunet woman who looked like she was one or two bad days away from a midlife crisis, leaned over and whispered, “There’s strange chthonic energy here.”
Alex sounded like they were whispering their invocation in the back of the elevator, and Esme was casting a spell under her breath. Logan had dipped a hand inside his jacket, where he had an unholy Molotov. They probably wouldn’t need any of those defenses once Cthylor showed up.
Raphael and the other angels all held their hands up, palms facing them, and Raphael said something in angel voice.
Much like true demon language was guttural and abrasive, true angel voice was bombastic and had the bass cranked all the way to eleven. It hit them like an invisible wrecking ball, and they all collapsed in the elevator, the pressure of the noise like a dropkick to all of their inner ears and internal organs. Even Ahmed was reduced to a pile of sand in the corner, and Alex, who may have not been able to hear it, certainly felt it and dropped to their knees. They were all stunned.
Save for Ceri, of course. He took a step back, but that was his only reaction. Again, son of Satan—he was made to take anything. Although Logan could hear nothing but a sort of high-pitched whine, he saw Ceri’s lips move and knew he’d probably said something like, “Is that the best you’ve got?”
The strangest thing of all? No matter the fact that they’d partially deafened him, when the angels spoke again, Logan could hear them as clearly as if they hadn’t tried to rupture every eardrum in the room. “Give us the Scourge and we won’t hurt the mortals any more.”
Logan imagined Ceri gave them a hearty “Fuck you” as he emerged from the elevator, pulling out Godslayer. Raphael produced a sword of his own, one made of nothing but fire. Hell wasn’t the only one with a weapon that could kill anything.
The other angels made room as Raphael’s and Ceri’s swords clashed, Raphael’s flaming sword more than a match for Godslayer, as they were somehow polar opposites while still being swords that killed everything. One was simply made of all-consuming darkness, while the other consisted of all-consuming light. To Logan, it didn’t matter if the swords were made of darkness or light—the fact that they were both all-consuming should be fucking worrisome regardless.
Looking around the elevator, he saw Alex had recovered enough to put their hand on the wall and was saying something he couldn’t hear. Hell, Alex wasn’t hearing it either, but that had never stopped them before. Ahmed was still a pile of sand, but Lyn had her feathers and talons out and waded into the fray, despite the blood leaking from her right ear. With a single swipe, she disemboweled an angel, the guts falling slippery and red to the floor. You couldn’t kill an angel like that, since they didn’t have true bodies in a physical sense, but you could traumatize them for damn sure, and Lyn had seemingly done just that.
Esme was still sitting on the floor of the elevator, but she had unleashed her evil eye, and one of the angels’ faces was melting like candle wax next to a red-hot radiator. Logan’s friends may have been temporarily deafened and knocked on their asses, but there was a reason both Heaven and Hell were still battling them, despite their being mostly mortal. They could kick some major ass.
Except for him. Logan always felt his mortality acutely in these situations, but he would follow Lyn’s lead anyway. If he couldn’t hurt them in this form, maybe he could stun and traumatize them. He stood up, pulled out his machete, and jumped into the fight. The first angel that crossed his path got a machete in the head. He looked so surprised about it.
Logan’s hearing was leaking back, a sort of trickle of noise that let him know Lyn and Esme were successfully traumatizing angels by tearing them to pieces and melting faces respectively. That guy with persistent irritable bowel syndrome was never going to know how lucky he was. Lyn also kicked one angel across the room and through the back wall, where he left a roughly angel-shaped hole on his way out.
As swordfighters, Ceri and Raphael were evenly matched. Whenever one of them got an opening, the other would parry or gracefully dodge out of the way, and the looks on their faces remained deathly grim. There was no trash talking, no banter—they each wanted to kill the other. What was there to say?
Logan had just beheaded an angel, who seemed deeply confused by this development, when the windows turned black. This time, out in it, Logan could see it wasn’t a dimming, more that it was like a bloom of ink over the windows, rapid and gloomier than true darkness. Gooseflesh busted out all over his body, starting from his scalp all the way down to his toes, and he could taste something like ashes in his mouth. His muscles instantly weakened, and it seemed to take everything he had left to keep from collapsing. Cthylor’s approach was something he could feel right down to his marrow. It was death coming for him, as inescapable and unavoidable as being tied to the tracks in the path of a speeding train. This must be what a bug feels like the millisecond before it’s squashed beneath a heel. It was so much bigger than him, and there was nothing he could do to make it see him. He was simply nothing to this monstrous thing. Humanity, angels, demons—all of them nothing. Humbling wasn’t the word for this feeling. It was far too weak and could not capture the empty despair at the base of it. The void was alive, and it was coming to eat him, and there was fuck all he or anyone else could do about it.
“Cthulhu is coming,” one of the few unharmed angels shouted, sounding equally fascinated and horrified. “Why is Cthulhu coming?”
Raphael stopped his sword fight with Ceri long enough to shout, “Leave, now!”
Those muscular black tentacles burst through the walls and the windows. Most of the angels winked out, fleeing the scene, but a couple weren’t fast enough, and Cthylor did the same thing she did to the demons—popped the heads off their bodies. But unlike the demons, the bodies fell and did not bleed
. Angels only had blood if they bothered with that detail, and most didn’t.
Logan shivered like he was about to fly apart, his teeth clacking together painfully, and felt his air passages seeming to constrict. It wasn’t actual cold; his body was simply translating it as such. The sense of doom Cthylor dragged in her shadow was suffocating. If he didn’t die from her touch, he might die from hopelessness. He had dropped to his knees but was only aware of it belatedly, as his head was packed full of cotton wool and terror. He had to remember to breathe because he wasn’t sure he was doing that.
Suddenly Ceri crouched beside him and put his arms around him, holding him tight and giving him a kiss on the forehead. Warmth spread over Logan from his scalp down, and he was pretty sure he was breathing again. “The chthonic gods drag an aura of fear with them so powerful, it alone could kill a person,” Ceri told him. “Next time, maybe stay back, huh?”
Only as the chills left him did Logan realize Ceri had healed him with that kiss. That was nice of him. “You know I can’t promise that.”
Ceri stroked the back of his neck. “I know. But try for me, huh?”
“I will.” With warmth returned to his entire body and that feeling that he was suffocating gone, Logan could think objectively again. No wonder the return of Cthulhu would be the end of the world. Who could function under that sway? It was somehow worse than death.
“Nobody saved me an angel to kill?” Ahmed asked. He was back in his human form, straightening his sleeve cuffs, like that was a thing he ever needed to do.
“Once Cthylor shows up, the party’s pretty much over,” Esme admitted.
“She clearly isn’t into sharing,” Lyn said.
“You guys are really good,” Alex said, emerging from the elevator. “I see why Cthylor chose you.”
“We’re pretty much the only game in town,” Logan said. Ceri turned toward Alex and translated it into sign language.
“Perhaps, but Cthylor would want nothing to do with you if you sucked,” Alex replied.
That seemed fair. No one joined a team to lose.
Although their ears were still ringing a bit, no one was actually hurt. The only thing Logan gave the angels was that they didn’t seem to want to hurt them that much—save for Ceri. They wanted to full-on murder him, but they couldn’t quite figure out how to do it. Maybe Raphael’s sword could, if he could stab Ceri, but so far he hadn’t been good enough. Logan was glad about that.
Logan, Lyn, Ahmed, and Esme re-formed their trust circle, and Ceri took them home again, or more accurately, to his and Logan’s home. Technically, it was Ceri’s place, but bought under an alias so no demons with paperwork skills could track him down that way. (His alias was Chris Johnson, a name so anonymous he may as well have called himself John Doe.) They didn’t have the good taste of Lyn and Esme—mainly, Logan let Ceri decorate it however he wanted, because Logan didn’t give a good goddamn about any of it. He’d slept in cars, trailers, and once he’d squatted in an abandoned building. As long as the place had electricity and indoor plumbing, he was happy.
Ceri’s tastes tended toward the dramatic and abstract, with a touch of the whimsical. Therefore, their living room walls were a bright, grassy green, and their carpet was an exceedingly faint blue-gray. They had a blue plaid couch, a burgundy armchair, a coffee table that looked like a frosty bend of acrylic (which is what it was), and a tall spiky black tree in the corner that looked like some kind of medieval torture device but was in fact some smartass’s idea of a coatrack. While it wasn’t nearly as heavy as it looked, Logan still thought he could kill someone with it if he absolutely had to.
Ceri also had a burgeoning multimedia collage going on one wall of their living room (there was one in their bedroom as well). Ceri didn’t frame art, or at least wasn’t accustomed to. He picked up strange postcards or pictures and put them up on the wall. It was a bit college-dorm-room style, but it was kind of charming. Ceri probably had a career as a performance or mixed-media artist awaiting him, assuming he survived the apocalypse.
Despite Alex not being part of the circle and not having been to their house before, they somehow followed them there. But Logan was willing to write this—and all further feats by Alex—off as Cthulhu myth magic. No matter that it probably wasn’t magic, they were still the overly powered boss at the end of the video game. Fine, whatever. Logan didn’t care as long as Cthylor didn’t get close to him with that fear aura ever again.
Ceri put the amethyst chunk of rock on their bluish-white plastic coffee table, and they all stared at it a moment.
“So how do we get the Scourge out?” Ahmed asked. “Do we break it? I can get a hammer.”
Ceri held a hand up at him. “No. There’s a ritual.”
Ahmed groaned and hung his head. “I hate rituals,” he muttered.
“We all hate rituals,” Logan told him. Esme cleared her throat. “Almost all of us hate rituals. But they’re a necessary evil sometimes.”
“Do we even want to wake it up?” Lyn asked. “Should we have the Scourge running around loose?” She had a few stray feathers on her arms, but her hands were back to normal.
“I think it’s better awake and imprinted on us,” Ceri said. “If it remains in this form, it is much easier to steal.”
Logan had to admit that was a damn good point. Truth be told, though, he was simply ceding this to Ceri because he had to know what was best in this scenario. The Scourge was still a new concept to Logan, but hey, hellhounds and hellcats had to come from somewhere.
“Okay, so what does the ritual entail?” Esme asked. “If you need stuff for it, I’ve probably got it.”
“We’re going to need a Seal of Solomon drawn in blood,” Ceri said. “My blood.”
“Oh, fun,” Esme said like it wasn’t. “Okay, so, I can draw the seal, but the blood thing I’m gonna leave up to you.”
“Probably for the best,” Ceri agreed. “After that, I have to say a few words and bleed a bit more on the stone. My blood should activate the Scourge and free it from its prison.”
Lyn nodded. “And that doesn’t sound creepy at all.”
Ceri rolled his eyes. “It’s Hell. It’s all about blood rituals.”
“If there’s anything I can do to help, I’d be happy to,” Alex said, smiling.
While the rest of them exchanged wary glances, Ahmed simply cut to the chase. “We barely know you. You seem to be on our side, but we really have no idea of your intentions.”
Lyn sighed. “And I thought I was tactless.”
Rather than smite him, or whatever they could do, Alex shrugged. “Ask me whatever you want. I assure you my end goal is the same as yours.”
“All right,” Ahmed said. He did like gossip, so this was a good chance for him to find some, assuming there was any to be had. “Do you have family?”
“Left alive? No. Cthylor is my family now.”
Ahmed must have picked up on the thread of this. “Did Cthylor kill your family?”
Alex nodded. “They tried to have me killed. It was only fair.”
Ahmed dipped his head as if that was reasonable. Maybe it was. Child abusers deserved everything they fucking got, and if letting your kid be ritualistically murdered by a cult wasn’t child abuse, Logan didn’t know what was.
But Ahmed had clearly hit a wall as far as questions went. It was difficult to imagine Alex would reveal something like they were an avid knitter or something, although that was possible. “Where’d you get your boots?” he finally asked. “I like them. Good focal piece.”
“Thank you,” Alex said, looking down at them. “I got them at a thrift shop in San Francisco.”
“You’re bound to Cthylor in some way. How?” Esme asked.
Alex’s eyes, which were usually so dark they were nearly black, seemed to now be the mellow amber color of aged whiskey. It could have been the lighting, but Logan didn’t think so. Their eyes had changed color. Did that mean something? “Wasn’t I clear? As I said, Cthylor came to me while
I was being sacrificed. She agreed to keep me alive and kill my enemies as long as I functioned as her messenger.”
“So she gave you some of her energy?” Esme guessed.
Alex shrugged. “Maybe. I’m not sure anything’s quite that straightforward with beings of her ilk.”
“That’s correct,” Ceri agreed. “A human couldn’t channel energy of that level without immediately exploding. Even the tiniest bump of it would obliterate the entire West Coast.”
“So what happened?” Esme asked. Logan was curious too. “How are you still alive and acting as Cthylor’s messenger?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Ceri broke in before Alex could answer, if they were going to. Logan and the others all stared at him with the same puzzled expression. Save for Alex, who kept smiling. “Cthylor altered reality around Alex. Altered it until they were alive again.”
“Okay, I’m just gonna say it,” Lyn said. “What the fuck does that mean, exactly? I mean, how did those tentacles burst through the walls and kill all those demons without breaking the walls, and yet still render the demons dead? It makes no fucking sense.”
“Cthulhu—and by extension, Cthylor—drag an aura of fluctuating reality with them,” Ceri explained. “Think of it as a field of unreality. Anything can happen in it, and what happens is real, even when the field withdraws. As for the tentacles bursting through the wall, we can’t actually look upon Cthylor and survive. You realize that, yes?”
“So what did we see?” Logan asked.
“A hallucination,” Ceri said. “An approximation of Cthylor’s unreality field, reaching out and decapitating everything deemed enemy.”
Alex was smiling and nodding through all of this. “Even I can’t really see Cthylor. I might be the messenger, but Cthylor is too grand a presence for our inferior eyes.”
“Did I mention the protogods are really full of themselves?” Ceri said.
“Aren’t all gods full of themselves?” Ahmed countered.
No one responded to that; it was true. Even Ceri threw his hands up in defeat.
They decided to do the ritual in the kitchen, since it had a washable floor and there was going to be a lot of blood. Logan didn’t like the sound of that, but Esme assured him she could throw a healing spell if she had to. Ceri pointed out he was Lucifer’s son and pretty fucking indestructible, so maybe not worry about him so much. Ceri gave Logan a kiss on the cheek and leaned into him for a few seconds, which was enough for Logan to stabilize. He thought of Ceri as human, mortal, fallible, like most of the rest of them. But was he immortal or not? Which of Lucifer’s rules applied to him, and which didn’t? Their application seemed random. Being a hybrid organism made him singular in ways that even Satan himself probably hadn’t expected.
