by Andrea Speed
Ceri was able to conjure up a pure version of the drug, because who needed to buy it when you could make your own, and Logan didn’t know how you got ready for this, but he got a bottle of water before retiring to the bedroom, having heard it could be dehydrating. He also stripped down to his boxers, because he was going to be sleeping at some point, right? Or sort of? Really, he didn’t know how this was going to go.
He was sitting up when Ceri came into the room, still dressed as he was earlier, but now holding something in his hand. He smirked slightly, noting Logan’s state of undress. “How do you think this is going to end?”
“Well, dream-walking, right? That sounds like sleeping is involved. Although the ecstasy-taking might mean sex, so I’m ready for anything.”
Ceri smiled, blushing slightly, which was always weird. Who knew it was possible to make the son of Satan blush? “That isn’t exactly what I meant by open.”
“Maybe not, but I hear ecstasy sex is great.”
“Not if you’re too drugged up to consent.”
“What are you talking about? I’m consenting now. Let’s get freaky, baby.”
Ceri laughed, as Logan hoped he would. He sat on the edge of the bed, still smiling. “Leave it to me to pick the most ridiculous human to fall in love with.”
“The straightlaced are so boring.” He brushed hair back from Ceri’s forehead, and not for the first time, he wondered about the feeling of his hair. He would swear it changed. Sometimes it felt like feathers, and other times it almost felt like fur. Soft and alien.
Ceri handed him the pill, and Logan didn’t even look at it before tossing it in his mouth and washing it down with a couple of swallows of water. Once he replaced the water bottle on the nightstand, he asked, “So are you going to start the house music or not?”
Ceri shook his head. “Aren’t you the punk-or-die person?”
“No, I like angry music. Metal, punk, rap, even experimental is fine as long as I can hear the rage.” Ceri pulled himself back on the bed until he was sitting beside Logan. This room was a haven of blue and green tones, because Ceri found them soothing, and Logan hadn’t had a strong opinion on it. But it was actually nice to have this calm, quiet room where they could tuck themselves away and breathe after days of fighting demons and angels and the end of the world.
Logan rested his head against Ceri’s shoulder. “Is there a reason why you haven’t dropped your glamour?”
He sighed. “I didn’t know if I should. I mean, you’re doing mind-altering drugs, and….”
“What, you think I’m gonna freak out because of how you are? You know I think you’re beautiful.”
“You’re just saying that to be kind. I mean, it’s very sweet of you—”
Rather than have this conversation again, Logan grabbed Ceri’s face, turned it toward him, and kissed him. He ran his hands through that ridiculously soft hair and then broke away. “Listen, you idiot. I am not saying this ever again. You are beautiful.”
“I’m cut in half.”
“And both sides are stunning. It’s not fair. Some of us can barely squeak by with the one side.”
“Says Mr. Male Model.”
Logan patted his stomach. Okay, it wasn’t big, but it was definitely there. “I don’t have the abs for that.”
Ceri touched his stomach, deftly avoiding the ticklish area. “Six-packs are way overrated. I mean, if I wanted to have sex with a statue, I would.”
“Ooh, are we uncovering a new fetish?”
Ceri poked him in the stomach. “Don’t smart-mouth me. Remember, I’m the Destroyer.”
“Yeah, well, supposedly I’m a nasturtium.”
“Nephilim.”
“Whatever. You’d think that would at least come with an iTunes gift card or something.”
“But it does. You could become a full-fledged angel when you die.”
“Oh, fuck that noise. Who wants anything to do with those self-righteous bastards? And besides, how is that a prize exactly?”
Ceri shrugged. “Immortality?”
“As one of those winged farts? Again, how is that not a punishment?”
“Got me.” He took off a ring he was wearing. It looked like a serpent biting its tail, carved with great detail. You could even feel the scales on it. It was a ring he stole from his dad before saving Logan and fleeing Hell. It had some sentimental ties to it, if nothing else. As soon as he put it on the nightstand and looked back at Logan, Ceri was back to his usual self.
Logan cupped his jaw and ran a thumb over his crimson skin. He liked its smooth but leathery feel, although Ceri never believed him when he told him that. “Sure we don’t have time to fool around before the drug kicks in?”
“I have to concentrate, and you are way too distracting, mister. Especially half-naked and showing off all your tattoos.”
Logan glanced down at himself, checking to see if he had more tattoos than he thought. He really didn’t have that many. He had the No Gods, No Masters tattoo encircling his left bicep, the three warding sigils that Esme gave him—a sort of pentagram-looking one for general protection, a knife-looking one specifically for protection from negative energy spells, and one that had the look of a shield that was supposed to help him withstand physical attacks, though considering how many times he’d had the shit kicked out of him, he wondered if that one worked at all. He also had his newest tattoo, other than his helldragon tattoo, down near his right hip. It was a tiny heart that was half-black, half-red. That was his love letter to Ceri, although you had to know about his actual bifurcated appearance to know it was. Ceri loved it and was trying to think of a similar tattoo he could get for Logan. They were still brainstorming.
“I don’t have that many,” Logan concluded.
“I sometimes count your scars as your tattoos. I could get rid of them, you know.”
“Yeah, but I earned every one of them. They add character, don’t you think?”
Ceri brushed his fingertips lightly over Logan’s most impressive scar, a three-and-a-half-inch pale gash between his ribs and left hip where a demon had once slashed him. His other scars were less showy, such as a pockmark from a childhood bout with chicken pox and a tiny purplish crescent that was left behind from a violent clash with a vampire who wore steel-toed boots, which Logan felt was unfair since it was stealing from his playbook .Logan was kind of glad Ceri had healed all his Hell torture damage, or he might be one big mass of scar tissue. Like The Thing, but infinitely grosser. “Actually, I do. I didn’t get it at first.”
“Yeah, but that’s before you realized how weird people are.”
Ceri gave him the faintest of smirks. “Especially you?”
“Especially me. I was raised by a haunted mental patient. The fact that I don’t throw my own shit around is a testimony to the resilience of the human spirit.”
Ceri laughed, as Logan hoped he would. “You are too cute.”
“Then why don’t you make out with me?”
The emotional blackmail worked. Ceri leaned in and kissed him, and Logan quickly kissed him back. Ceri cupped the back of his neck and deepened the kiss. Logan loved kissing Ceri. He was such a good kisser, and the discussion of this had previously led to Ceri revealing his deeply fucked-up sex education. It seems demons were all in on hands-on learning, which was creepy as fuck, and yet Logan couldn’t deny Ceri had skills. It was probably best he didn’t think about how he’d gotten those skills.
Ceri put a hand on Logan’s chest and gently pushed him back. “See? This is what I mean by distracting.”
Ceri’s hand flat on his chest felt really good. It caused goose bumps to erupt across his chest and down his arms, and he shuddered. “I think the drugs are kicking in.” Looking at his arm, he definitely saw the hairs standing on end.
“Let’s be sure,” Ceri said and then breathed on the side of his neck. It was only air, and yet it hit Logan like the softest, most sensual caress. He shuddered, and the goose bumps exploded again.
“Hol
y shit. I’m pretty sure I’ve never felt anything that good in my life.”
Ceri looked deep into his eyes, and Logan thought he was going for a kiss, but Ceri sat back instead. “Yeah, your pupils are blown. I’d say you’re pretty stoned.”
“Are you sure? ’Cause I’ve been stoned, and it felt way better than this. Except when you touch me. That feels tremendous.”
“Ecstasy is an odd drug. Now close your eyes.”
“Okay.” He did, and Ceri put his fingers on Logan’s temples. It felt good, if a bit strange.
“Now I want you to concentrate on my voice. Don’t say anything, just listen.”
Logan wanted to point out this process resembled hypnotism, but Ceri had asked him not to talk, right? So he kept his mouth shut.
“Imagine your mind is a dark, empty void. No jokes, Logan. Imagine it. Now imagine you are inside that void. You’re not doing anything. You’re simply there, concentrating on the dark emptiness all around you.” Ceri paused, seemingly to let Logan imagine this, and weirdly, Logan sort of felt like he was falling forward in his own head. Surely it was because of the drugs. It was a sense of movement without any movement, like being caught in a spell again, and he wasn’t crazy about it.
But Ceri was still speaking to him, and Logan trusted him. So he lived with the terrible feeling and listened to him. Was Ceri actually trying to hypnotize him? As far as Logan knew, he couldn’t be hypnotized, but maybe that’s where the drugs came in.
“Now, imagine a safe space. A place where you are comfortable, where you feel most at home.” That was a tough one. Logan almost balked until he realized there was a place that felt like home. It was here. He imagined the room around him, with Ceri on the bed beside him, although now he was sort of in front of him. Straddling him? You’d think so, given the position of his thumbs on his forehead.
Another pause ensued, and Logan waited for the sound of Ceri’s voice. He was somehow tired and wired, but not in his usual way. That had to be the drugs. “Okay, Logan, let me in.”
“You are in,” he replied, because he had already imagined Ceri in this space.
In his mind he saw Ceri straddling his legs, his fingers on his temples, and Ceri smiled at him. It was funny, but the demon side of his mouth always seemed to be smirking. “So I am. Hello, sweetheart.”
Disoriented again—that was going to keep happening, wasn’t it?—Logan said, “Wait. Are we in my head?”
“We are.”
“When did I fall asleep?”
“You didn’t. Technically, you’re in a kind of trance.”
“Once I was told I couldn’t be hypnotized. Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Not really. Especially since you’re as high as fuck and I have the ability to sway people into believing anything I say.”
“I don’t recall being swayed. Should I be worried?”
Ceri kissed him. Was that cheating, kissing him and not answering the question? But then Ceri smoothed his hair back from his forehead and said, “Please tell me you know I’d never sway you without cause or harm you.”
Logan sighed and leaned his forehead against Ceri’s. “Of course I know that. This is all so weird. I don’t think I’ve fully dealt with the bullshit Gill was trying to feed me.”
“What if it’s not bullshit?”
Logan sighed and leaned back, meeting Ceri’s odd eyes. “Yeah, I don’t know. Does it matter? Our parents are dead, and now she’s dead, although not in a way that can bring anyone any peace, most especially her. I don’t want to think about this. I really just wanna fuck and forget about it.”
“You’re going to have to face it at some point.” Ceri smiled and wrapped his arms around his neck. “But the rest is totally doable.”
“You mean I’m totally doable.”
He shook his head but continued smiling all the same. “You’re so corny.” But he kissed him again, this time not holding back, and the crush of his body against Logan’s tingling skin was almost too exciting for him to bear. So this was ecstasy, huh?
Logan made a mental note to do it more often.
4—Five Feet And A Hammer
LYN WONDERED how old she was.
She knew most people assumed, when they knew she was a harpy, that she was being coy about her age, like supposedly all women were. But the real reason was far more embarrassing—she had forgotten.
Apparently a brain could only retain so many bits of information before losing some others. Maybe The Simpsons was right, and learning something new inevitably pushed out another thing, because that had been Lyn’s experience.
It wasn’t a total blank. Every now and then, a fragment surfaced, but nothing that helped give her any context. She was alive in the nineteen hundreds, clearly. Harpies could live to a thousand, because, as Logan had once described her, they were tanks. Hard to hurt, harder to kill, with a natural immunity to most human diseases. Because, despite their ability to look like any human woman, they were not human. They weren’t birds either, despite their natural winged state.
It was hard to say what they were. Her mother honestly believed that whole thing about them being blessed—or cursed, depending on the interpretation—by the gods to wreak vengeance for all wronged women, but Lyn always had a hard time believing in gods. Never mind that she was a gender-based shape-shifter living in an isolated part of the Italian Alps with other gender-based shape-shifters. Gods still seemed like a tough thing to swallow.
Her mother was named Lucia—she knew that—and she had very vague memories that the springs and summers in the mountains were beautiful and the winters were fucking brutal. But much of her childhood was gone. It was a blur of training and an occasionally weird solstice festival, which she quickly learned was not a thing in the wider world.
She also wasn’t sure why the harpies were hiding their true nature, although years in the human world had taught her the why of that, in that women were generally ignored and hardly considered human. After all, males seemed to be determining what history was, making a harpy a term for a shrill woman, not a fierce warrior for justice; mythical instead of real; birds with tits instead of the shape-shifters they were. Human male history was decidedly wrong and pretty much went out of its way to exclude women, as if they were props and not people. Lyn could still remember wondering how humanity continued, since men were so disdainful of women as a group. Why would any woman agree to breed with them? That was before she learned that human women couldn’t control their pregnancies like harpies. They only became pregnant when they wanted to. Human women got the shit end of the deal all the way around. Also, harpy procreation was purely parthenogenesis, which meant they were all basically genetic clones of the original harpy, but because they could change appearance at will, no one looked the same, so you really couldn’t tell. Human reproduction was just fucking bizarre.
But her age. She couldn’t remember her exact birthday because the harpies had a different calendar than much of the western world, and the months didn’t exactly match. She had decided, at some point, on August fifth, but she couldn’t remember why now. It felt close enough, maybe? Or maybe there was some other reason, now lost to her retrograde memory. Not that it mattered exactly, but it seemed like a petty thing to lie about. Except she’d done it so long, it wasn’t a lie anymore. It had taken on a sheen of truth, thanks to repetition.
She remembered having to train herself to ignore the constant sexism, because there was a shit-ton of it everywhere. It got better slowly, but men seemed to be constantly under the impression that things were fine for ladies. Occasionally some women would think that too. Human society as a whole was fucking weird.
It wasn’t the first time she’d found herself wondering why she was trying to fend off the apocalypse. Humanity was kind of done here and could do nothing but take the Earth down with them. But her girlfriend was human, and she liked her. Also, harpies did live on Earth, even if most people didn’t know they existed. Lyn had to be in this fight, no matter how hopeless
it was. And also, angels and demons were dickbags. No offense to Ceri, who was the best half-demon she’d ever met. Usually they were up their own asses and convinced of how good or evil they were. Better than everyone else. Although those were arbitrary markers on which to stake your ego, but okay. Some people thought having a big car was important too. People’s priorities were way out of wack.
Lyn sat on the couch with her second cup of coffee, hoping the caffeine would finally kick in, as she watched Esme setting up more wards and protection spells on the house.
Of course, it was protected against everything up to sea beast invasion, but psychic attacks were another thing entirely. Were harpies immune to those? She assumed, but only because harpies were immune to so much. Maybe not that, though.
The problem was everyone was vulnerable to something, and sometimes you didn’t know what that was until you were up to your waist in it. And an invisible attack—which was essentially what a psychic attack was—was easily the scariest of the bunch.
“Anything I can do to help?” Lyn asked.
Esme shook her head as she drew a protective sigil on the wall in lamb’s blood. One thing you learned early dating a witch was the most powerful spells had blood in them. Sometimes a metric ton of blood. That was barely hyperbole. “Nope. Just tedious spellwork.”
“Have you done a lot of psychic fighting in your life?”
“Sadly, no. Few people have that power, and those who do are probably insane. Or supervillains. I mean, if you could wander through people’s minds, you’d want to wipe out the human race right quick. Not that I’m projecting.”
“Oh, of course not.” Honestly, not wanting to kill the entire human race was a constant battle for the nonhumans. Humanity had no idea.
Esme paused and made the vague pointing hand gesture she always made when something occurred to her. “Hey, yeah—astral projection.”
“What about it?”
“I know how to do that.”
“Does that help in a psychic fight?”
“It could. The problem is, I’d need a target.”
