Darlings of New Midnight

by Andrea Speed

  “Are you saying they have an entire language built around sarcastic heckling?” Esme asked, appearing caught somewhere between being appalled and being in awe of the concept.

  Alex shrugged, while Ahmed nodded. “Seems on-brand for them,” he admitted.

  Well, sure. They did seem to be wide-awake nightmares. Why wouldn’t they make their language the death rattles of their prey?

  Alex looked around the room before their restless eyes settled on Ceri. “Are we ready to go?”

  Ceri glanced around, and Logan just shrugged. It was now or never, he supposed. Damn, this still seemed really stupid. But hey—wasn’t fighting the apocalypse stupid? Not a single bit of this was smart. It was too late to start getting a brain now. “As ready as we’ll ever be, I guess.”

  Alex stood and faced Ceri. “If you told us where the back door is, we could meet you there.”

  Ceri shook his head. “It’s too hard to explain. I’m going to have to take you there with everyone else.”

  Alex frowned, and the change of facial expressions was startling. Logan had been beginning to think they’d smiled so hard their face froze that way. “Must you?”

  “Yes. Come on, people, trust circle,” Ceri said, and Logan took his hand before Esme took Logan’s. And so it went, all of them joining hands in a circle and feeling a tad ridiculous, which got worse when Ceri said, “Okay, we need to crouch.”

  “Beg pardon?” Lyn asked.

  “It’s a rather cramped area.”

  Esme sighed. “Please tell me you’re not teleporting us inside a coffin.”

  Ceri clicked his tongue and rolled his eyes. “No, of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. If the back door to Heaven was easy to access, it wouldn’t be a secret.”

  There was no arguing with that logic, or anything else. Although they were likely all feeling some shade of embarrassment about it, they all crouched, save for Ahmed, who shifted his sand around until he was much shorter. Only then did Ceri teleport them out.

  Right away, it was clear they were in a strange place. It was very dark and humid, and there was both the sound and smell of water. It took a moment for Logan’s eyes to adjust, but he still wasn’t sure where they were. He reached up over his head, feeling something close, and ran his hand over stone.

  “Okay, Ceri, what the fuck…?” Esme asked, and her voice echoed in a curious way.

  “We’re in a hidden underground cave in Thailand,” Ceri said. “We’re on a tiny rocky outcropping above a small lake that forms after the rainy season. In the dry season, it’s just a sinkhole.”

  “Charming,” Ahmed said. “And this is Heaven’s back door? Which, by the way, still sounds irredeemably filthy.”

  “I wish. But no, there’s a dimensional rip, which probably none of you can see, that’s basically halfway between us and the water. That’s Heaven’s back door,” Ceri said, gesturing vaguely below them. Logan did his best to try to find it, but it was too dark to see much of anything. Even the water was a very vague shape, with only the sound letting you know you weren’t looking at more rock.

  “I can see it,” Alex reported. Of course they could.

  “So how exactly do we enter it if it’s halfway between the water and here?” Ahmed asked. “And don’t say what I think you’re going to say.”

  “We dive in,” Ceri said.

  Ahmed sighed. “I told you not to say that.”

  “Dive into a hole we can’t see?” Esme asked. “You know that’s bananas, don’t you?”

  “You actually don’t have to worry about that,” Lyn said. “I’ll fly you in.”

  “Does that go for the rest of us?” Ahmed asked.

  Alex crawled forward to the edge of the thin rock shelf and said, “Follow me.” Without so much as a glance back, they dived off toward the water but disappeared into thin air, with the slightest blink of light.

  Logan would have admired the guts of that if Alex didn’t have an elder god guardian angel. It was hard to say where exactly they had dived, so Logan asked Ceri, “Can you point out the exact location?”

  He did. “It’s right below us.”

  Logan nodded, taking a deep breath. He trusted Ceri, and if worse came to worst, he’d just be in for a cold, unexpected swim. He braced himself as best he could and threw himself forward, ready to tuck and roll as soon as something solid came into view.

  To say it was weird was an understatement so massive, words actually failed him. If asked to describe it, Logan imagined he’d be reduced to hand gestures and grunts. He was swallowed by darkness, and reality twisted and twisted him with it. It was like falling down and up simultaneously, and both his stomach and his brain threatened to revolt, but neither seemed to know how to do that under the circumstances, so it remained threats only. It took one second and an eternity. He was moving forward and backward, up and down, sideways and diagonally. He was everything and nothing—a small, compressed atom and a planet that dwarfed the sun. Logan was relatively sure his mind was going to snap like an overstretched rubber band when suddenly he landed on his feet in an empty room of luminous white. It was the negative of space: something vast, eternal, empty, and rather than dark nothing, it was light nothing. And yet it couldn’t have truly been nothing, because he landed on something.

  Alex was several feet ahead of him, walking into the nothing. They turned back, and for the first time, Logan saw they were covered in shadow.

  The shadow was far larger than Alex—in fact, he was sure he was seeing only a tiny portion of it. There was no head and no feet. It was a bulky shadow that became thick tentacles that gradually tapered to whip-thin ends that also disappeared through the walls(?), dotted with what could have been thorns or claws? Were they fangs? They moved independently of Alex, who was either unaware of them or so accustomed to them they didn’t notice them anymore. The shadow continued through a theoretical floor and a theoretical ceiling, but who knew what this place was. Logan could now see the shadow cast by Cthylor on Alex, and it was so terrifying he wasn’t even capable of running away screaming. He was frozen in place, a mouse hoping the hawk overhead hadn’t spotted him. He had no ability to fight back; his only hope was to be ignored.

  Alex looked around, not at all bothered by the larger-than-life thing surrounding them. “You might want to wait a minute or two before following me in. Things are gonna get messy.”

  Oh, he bet. He didn’t have a chance to respond in any way before the ground jolted like there was an earthquake. But didn’t you need earth for a quake? “What was that?” Logan asked warily.

  “An unnatural disaster,” Alex said. Was that a joke? “They’re getting attacked from all sides now. I’d almost feel sorry for them if they weren’t all judgmental pieces of shit.” With that, Alex turned around and walked straight forward, the shadow tentacles seemingly ripping open a space in the white that Alex disappeared through.

  Holy fucking shit, what was that? He was still wondering if Heaven was letting him see what Ceri probably saw when Lyn flew in with Esme on her back, hands around her neck and legs around her waist. As Lyn landed, Esme climbed off. “This is Heaven?” Esme said, looking around. “This is disappointing.”

  “It’s not Heaven precisely,” Ceri said, dropping in. He opened his hands, and sand spilled from them. Ahmed re-formed into a more human shape. “It’s a dimensional pocket right next to Heaven. That’s how come Heaven’s never found it. It’s its own separate bubble sitting right on top of them.”

  “Am I feeling something shaking?” Ahmed asked.

  “Alex said they caused an unnatural disaster but didn’t say what that meant,” Logan said.

  Ceri crouched down and put a hand on the floor as he closed his eyes and concentrated. He had been doing this for barely two seconds before he gasped and his eyes flew open. “Holy fucking shit. Cthylor’s opened a singularity.”

  “A singularity?” Esme repeated. “As in a black hole?”

  “Yes.” Ceri straightened, biting his lower lip nervous
ly. Logan suddenly realized he could see Ceri’s demon half beneath the ghost of his glamour. No one else was reacting, so maybe he was the only one seeing things that way? Why? “That’s… wow. I’m going to assume that speeds up our timetable.”

  “Can Heaven be affected by a black hole?” Esme asked. “I mean, saying it aloud, it seems fucking ridiculous.”

  “Yes, it can,” Ceri replied. “Black holes are multidimensional sinkholes. You’d think they’d be unable to affect something mystical, but you’d be wrong. Reality breaks down around a black hole. That includes all realities. If the angels can’t figure out a way to stop it or shut it down, all of Heaven will be shredded like Trump’s tax returns.”

  “Which begs the question, can they shut it down?” Ahmed wondered.

  Ceri both shook his head and shrugged, which wasn’t super helpful. “I don’t really know. Archangels are extremely powerful—look at Lucifer—but black holes feel more like a protogod thing.”

  “At least we know that Cthylor won’t let Heaven be completely destroyed while Alex is here,” Lyn said.

  “Yeah, but Cthylor could remove them at any time,” Ceri pointed out. “Hence the moving up of the timetable.”

  Esme sighed. “They never needed a back door into Heaven, did they?” It was then Logan noticed he could see her tattoos glowing. Most of them were covered by her Bikini Kill T-shirt, but a few tendrils of one protective sigil were visible on her left arm, and they were glowing green. Some of the symbols glowed bright enough to be seen beneath her clothes. That made him look down at himself, at his own arms, and yes, his were glowing too. The mark of the Scourge on his wrist was a deeper black than black—it was like neon black, if that color existed, which it didn’t.

  Again, no one else was reacting to this. Did this mean they saw this all the time and he didn’t? Or they simply weren’t seeing it at all? Logan considered this, and the answer suddenly hit him like a two-by-four—he was supposedly a full-on Nephilim, right? What if proximity to Heaven was activating his latent angel powers? Was that even possible? Or was he just going crazy? It would be a hell of a time and place to finally lose his marbles. No pun intended.

  Ceri looked at him curiously, coming close. “Is something wrong?”

  “Is it possible that proximity to Heaven is activating my latent angelness?”

  Ceri frowned, eyes scouring him for clues to what was going on with him. “I don’t know. A living human has never been in Heaven before. Or dead ones, for that matter. Why, what’s going on?”

  “I saw the shadow of Cthylor around Alex, and I can see my and Esme’s sigils glowing. Also, I can see through your glamour. Can anyone else see these things?”

  Lyn and Ahmed shook their heads, while Esme shrugged. “I could if I used my curse eye,” she said. “But I see no reason to use it that way right now.”

  “So maybe proximity is making them unlock,” Ceri said. ”Be careful, okay? We don’t know what the other fallout will be.”

  Logan nodded, as that was true, but also? He felt amazing. It was like the Scourge and the blade of Alastor were not the only things he was bringing to the party now.

  Ceri looked at them all and said, “Don’t forget the anchor, all right? Trust yourselves.”

  They nodded, and Esme’s curse eye started glowing as she also called up a spell that made a ball of green energy glow in her hand. Lyn had not put away her wings, and her hands were now talons, with claws so thick as to be absurd. The angels who were keeping physical forms were going to be very sorry about that decision.

  Ceri pulled Godslayer from its sheath and used it to stab into the white, which seemed like an impossible thing, and yet Logan could see him splitting the seams of reality somehow. He couldn’t see what was beyond the cut, simply more white energy, as bright as a flare.

  But somehow he could hear something. It was like…. It was hard to explain. It was like a combination of a hum and whispering voices, speaking a language he didn’t understand. Was that angel language? He’d heard it once, and it was like painful radio static. It didn’t make sense as a language at all; it was noise. Except… now he could make out words. They were still nonsense to him, but he could see how it was an actual language. God, this was strange. But that wasn’t the biggest problem.

  The biggest problem was the fact that he could feel the power in his body now. Like he was filled with molten light and could punch through the walls of the world. Did angels feel like that? If so, no wonder they were such arrogant bastards.

  Having split open the dimensional pocket, Ceri stepped into Heaven, sword held high. Logan followed, aware Esme and Lyn were right on his tail.

  And he knew he was in Heaven the moment he heard the screaming.

  It was a combination of the singularity ripping at the heavenly firmament and Cthylor tearing away everything else. The ground(?) was shaking more here, but it was deep, almost more like a sound than a sensation. Strange.

  Not quite as weird, however, as seeing the landscape shift like someone had hit the slide-show setting on a laptop. The white was replaced by a black void, like space, with the distant glow of a faint yellow star. Swinging closer was a chunk of rock, maybe the size of a limo, coming straight for him in a lazy arc. Logan actually felt cold, like he was in space, and he unconsciously held his breath as if lack of oxygen would be a problem. But that was ridiculous. It was all a lie.

  He’d been hoping his angel awakening would mean this wouldn’t affect him, but clearly not. Logan closed his eyes and tried to anchor, but he honestly wasn’t quite sure what Ceri had meant by that. So he did what he always did when he felt like his consciousness was about to get away from him—he bit the inside of his cheek.

  It hurt, and that was the point. What he had learned over the years of fighting demons was that sometimes you needed a little pain to keep you from giving in. Pain was terrible, but there were moments when it could be very focusing. He also stamped on the ground to remind himself there was one. No matter what his traitorous brain was insisting, he was not in space.

  When he opened his eyes, it looked like he was back on Earth. On a beach, to be more specific. He didn’t recognize it, but why would he? He’d never been to a lot of beaches—he wasn’t that kind of guy. He didn’t know why exactly, except his life hadn’t been full of vacations. Or family outings that somehow didn’t involve the police, mental health professionals, or both. But it was nice, as these things went. Although it must have been low tide, as there was a lot of sand and the water seemed very far away. He also saw some sea life scrambling as if caught off guard, fish flopping for air.

  Come to think of it, hadn’t he seen a picture like this before? It took him a moment, even as the blue water started to swell and seemingly rise up, but Logan finally recalled it. It was before a natural disaster. A tsunami.

  Oh, fantastic. The angels were trying to reenact what they’d fucked up on Earth. Great.

  He could hear it now, the roar of water as it started coming back with the force and speed of a bullet train. Although his fear spiked, he closed his eyes and chomped on the inside of his cheek, drawing blood. He hated the sour taste of his own blood in his mouth, but it was a necessary evil, no matter how many bad memories it brought up. He could still feel the throaty roar of salty air coming for him like a runaway semi, and he shouted, “Ceri!”

  Suddenly he felt a warm hand on his arm, and he opened his eyes to find Ceri looking at him with concern. “Everything okay?” he asked.

  They seemed to be standing side by side, as they had been before the landscape started changing. They also seemed to be in a white corridor of nothing, and Logan could hear the screaming again, although it had a strange finish to it, like the distant chime of a bell. “I didn’t go anywhere, did I?”

  “No. As I said, they enjoy mind-fucking people. And with Cthylor attacking, it might be the only weapon they have left.”

  Logan could feel something like a shiver, something manifesting physically, but it was a sound. W
as it because his angel powers were activating now? Seemed like it. The shiver was a call to arms. It wanted to pull him somewhere deeper into this bland white space. He was about to tell Ceri this, but something else caught his attention, something like an oncoming tide. “He’s coming,” Logan said, not completely sure who he was.

  But wasn’t it obvious? A disruption in the air announced Raphael, who suddenly appeared in front of them, wielding his flaming sword. Luckily, Ceri had positioned Godslayer so if Raphael wanted to bring his sword down, he’d have nowhere to go.

  Here in Heaven, he looked different. Raphael wore silver metal armor—a breastplate, some silver panels that ran down the arms and legs, and slightly thicker metal panels that made up a sort of a skirt—that looked like it was filigreed, so finely made it could have been woven. His hair was a long fall of white over his shoulders. Not old white, but ghost white, like snow, like marble. His eyes were irises and whites only, and those irises were a molten gold. Besides the sword, he had no other clothes or adornments. He looked ageless and ethereal, and a hell of a lot more ripped and intimidating than he did on Earth.

  “Abomination, is it not enough that you mock the natural laws?” Raphael boomed. He really did boom. The ground shook with the bass in his voice, and Logan imagined that if his angel powers weren’t activating, his eardrums would have burst. It was painful enough as it was. “Now you bring these filthy creatures into our world!”

  “Who was the stupid asshole who thought he could attack the messenger of Cthulhu and not pay for that in blood? You brought this on yourself, Raphael,” Ceri snapped.

  Raphael didn’t appear to like that remark. Hard to blame him. “Leave it to you to find the only being more depraved than Lucifer.”

  “Go say that to Cthulhu’s face. It’ll be a hilarious way to die.”

  Goddamn. When divine beings trash-talked, they didn’t pull any punches, did they?

  Several things happened at once, and only in retrospect could Logan put them in any order. Esme threw a spell, which Raphael deflected simply by holding out a hand and shouting something. But that alteration of his attention was enough for Ceri to swing Godslayer around, trying to dislodge Raphael’s flaming sword from his hand, slicing a thin line across his silver breastplate. Lyn soared into the fray then, flying overhead and ensnaring Raphael in her talons, and Raphael squirmed while shouting something that made the floor open up beneath Logan, and before he got the barest glimpse of Ceri’s eyes widening in horror, Logan was plunging into darkness.