by Andrea Speed
As grotesque a mental picture as that was, Logan couldn’t hate it.
“Are you all right?” Esme asked. “Where did you go?”
Alex shrugged and ran their hands over their locs, although they looked fine to Logan. “In orbit of some planet, not in our galaxy. Maybe not in our dimension, I don’t know. Cthylor wasn’t sure.”
Esme opened her mouth to say something, but she paused and exhaled instead. Of course Alex could survive raw vacuum. They were constantly protected by the shadow of Cthylor. And Cthulhu and company were space creatures, right? So space was nothing to them but home turf.
“Hey, can your friend do something about a bunch of volcanoes?” Lyn asked. As always, Ceri translated it into sign language.
Alex’s simmering rage seemed temporarily abated by confusion. “What do you mean by that?”
“Satan’s secondary end-of-the-world plan is setting off enough volcanoes to bury the planet in ash,” Esme said, shorthanding it. “We’re trying to think of ways to stop him, but we don’t have much time or many options.”
Alex cocked their head, like they were listening, but since they were deaf that was unlikely. No, wait—they were listening, only to a voice the rest of them couldn’t hear and probably would have been driven instantly crazy if they did. What was Cthylor saying? “How many volcanoes are we talking about?” Alex asked.
“One in every country and the entire ring of fire,” Ceri said.
Alex let out a low whistle and nodded to something only they could hear. “Okay. It is possible to shut it down. But….”
“But?” Ceri prompted.
“This is Satan we’re talking about. Black magic is his thing, and we expect it won’t be easy. To take away complete control, Cthulhu will have to wake up.”
More concerned looks pinballed around the room, with the added spice of confusion. “What exactly does that mean?” Esme asked. “Assume we’re stupid and have no knowledge of elder gods.”
“It means he will rise from his slumber. Everywhere his shadow falls, people will die.”
Oh great. A lethal version of Groundhog Day. “How many people are gonna see his shadow?” Logan asked. “He’s down in the fucking Marianas Trench, isn’t he? That’s pretty far from land.”
Ceri waited until he finished signing to Alex before looking at him. “Hon, this is metaphorical as well as physical. Cthulhu is the Thing That Should Not Be, and the physical world will react accordingly. It’s something it wants gone immediately.”
Logan shook his head. “That sounds bad, yeah, but you’re gonna hafta break that down for me further. I’m just a stupid human.”
Sharpness glinted briefly in Ceri’s odd eyes. “You are not a stupid human. Quit putting yourself down. Think of it as a kind of immune system response. It’ll be like… a wind of death. If he’s only up for a moment or two… maybe hundreds?”
“Thousands,” Alex corrected him.
Esme groaned and put a hand to her face, as if trying to physically hide from the response. “Shit.”
Ahmed suddenly appeared, drifting out from underneath the door again and forming into his human shape. He’d changed his suit to something asymmetrical and black-and-white. If not a Miyake, something akin to it. “There’s no question we have to do it,” he said. “Losing a few thousand over losing the entire globe? There’s no contest. We have to do it.”
Ceri closed his eyes for a moment, as if meditating. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
“This really isn’t the time to be quoting Star Trek,” Logan said. Although Ceri was right. They were condemning thousands of innocent people to death, but if they didn’t, billions would die. It was a terrible choice but the only one on the table.
“But it’s true,” Lyn replied. “Kill some or kill us all. It’s not really a choice, is it?”
Logan looked toward Alex, whose eyes seemed almost incandescent with rage. You’d think being teleported into the orbit of a distant planet would have scared them or freaked them out, but being the adopted child of an elder god probably prepared them for such weirdness. They either embraced the madness or went insane. “Cthulhu won’t be permanently awake, will he?”
As soon as Ceri translated, they shook their head. “No, it’s not his time. He’ll return to his slumber as soon as he and Cthylor regain control of the volcanoes. But that leads to a potential complication. It may take Cthylor some time to wake him up. He will not want to.”
Esme finally stopped covering her face. “How long are we talking about?”
“Unknown. As short as a few minutes or as long as half an hour.”
Lyn rolled her eyes. “That narrows it down.”
“But we could do that,” Ceri said. “Keep my dad preoccupied with fighting us, so much so that he never notices Cthulhu until it’s too late. Make him think we’re doing a last stand.”
“That could work,” Ahmed said. “There was a spell in the codex about keeping a devil where it is. A sort of anti-teleportation spell.”
Esme turned toward Ahmed, her eyes alight with curiosity. “Did it name the devil specifically?”
“No. But it said any supernatural being and didn’t exclude any.”
“Bring me that spell,” she said, running a hand through her hair. “If we can trap him here, we have a good chance of stopping him.”
“I plan to,” Ceri said.
“We want to help,” Alex said. They didn’t need to clarify the we, as everyone knew by now that they and Cthylor were a package deal.
“You can. But to keep him from realizing how screwed he is, why don’t you wait to join us until Cthulhu rises. I really want him to know how fucked he is.”
Alex grinned in a way that would have made lesser beings run screaming from the room. “I like that.”
Before charging back at Satan, they worked out some quick strategy. If this was going to work, and they were going to survive until Cthulhu woke up, they had to have a semidecent plan. And that was really all they could hope for, as a fully decent plan would take much more time than they had. Possibly also more people and a shit-ton more luck.
While they were working out their shock-and-awe plan—because Lucifer would expect them to come in hot, throwing everything they had at him in some quasi-suicidal last stand—Ceri’s phone rang, and a quick glance at it revealed it to be Bucket. He put it on speaker before answering. “Hell of a time to be calling,” Ceri told him. Pun probably wasn’t intended.
“Things are going apeshit in Hell,” Bucket said. It did sound like something was going on in the background, but it was hard to say what. “He’s actually ending the world.”
“That was the whole point of the apocalypse.”
“Yeah, but… he wasn’t supposed to kill all the humans. I mean, what are we supposed to do once everything has died off?”
They all shared a look with varying levels of disbelief. All demons couldn’t be that stupid, right? “There will be angels left,” Ceri said.
“Yeah, and they kill us.”
“Also harpies,” Ceri added.
Bucket made a noise somewhere between a scoff and a grunt. A demon thing, maybe? “They kill us and eat us.”
Nearly everyone looked at Lyn, who shook her head. When they were still hooking up, she had told Logan that harpies liked to play up rumors about them because it was funny. She’d said the most successful one had been the one implying that harpies ate their prey, like hawks and eagles. Of course they didn’t, but many beings were too afraid of harpies to actually find that out. Logan hadn’t been sure how that was funny before, but now he sort of was.
Ceri rubbed his eyes. “I mean, it seems a little late for you guys to have objections.”
“Yeah, but… he told us some would be saved aside for us.”
“He’s the King of Lies. And you’re shocked he lied to you?”
There was a reasonably long pause, during which Logan heard something heavy hit the ground with a thud and a slight tinkle o
f broken glass. Were the demons rioting? Destroying his things was sure to make Ceri’s dad mad, but it probably wasn’t wise.
“Uh, yeah? I mean, he’s king of the liars for people, not us.”
Lyn clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. Oh man, Bucket probably didn’t realize how pathetic he sounded.
Ceri sighed. “Look, it’s a little late to offer your services, but you could do something that would really fuck with him.”
“What?”
“He has an old spell book, something like the Necronomicon. Take it and find some way to get it to me. That’ll really piss him off.”
“Okay, yeah, that’s doable. Think you can stop him?”
“I’m gonna try,” Ceri said and hung up.
“We really could have used that yesterday,” Esme said.
Ceri shrugged as he pocketed his phone. “Yeah. But if Dad never gets his hands on that book again, it’ll still be too soon.”
If Lucifer survived this—and they had no way of killing him, unless Ceri and Godslayer could really turn on the jets—it would be a boon for him not to have the book. But life would remain terrible for them all. He wouldn’t stop hunting them, would he? He’d lurk and wait to hit back as soon as possible. It really wasn’t good to have Satan as an enemy, even if you were his son.
They’d worked out what they were going to do, and when they were going to do it. As plans went, it wasn’t the worst, and certainly Lucifer would expect no better of them, but Logan would bet they could have done better if they weren’t simply buying time for Cthulhu. And if they had more time, but that probably went without saying. Ceri asked to talk to him in private for a moment, and Logan almost asked why until he recognized the look in Ceri’s odd eyes. He appeared to have realized something that horrified him, but for whatever reason, he didn’t want to tell everyone yet. Logan agreed and followed him to their bedroom.
“What’s wrong?” Logan asked as soon as he shut the door. “Well, besides everything.”
“I know how I become the Destroyer,” Ceri said. He started pacing nervously and running a hand through his hair. “You know I felt weird after absorbing Astaroth, and after Raphael, and that’s what twigged it for me. This volcano plan isn’t Plan B—it’s still Plan A.”
Logan did his best to try to figure that out, but he was stretched thin at the moment and didn’t have the brain cells to grapple with this. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“When I absorbed Astaroth, I felt… weird. It passed, so I ignored it. But when I absorbed Raphael, it came back twice as hard. It’s my demon side, and the more life force I absorb, the stronger it gets. The only way we can even attempt to kill Lucifer is if I stab him with Godslayer and try and channel his energy into me. He knows that. And if I do it, as soon as his energy’s in me, he will take over, and I’ll become him two point oh. The Destroyer.”
Logan did his best to follow this, he really did, but it was hard. “Wait—you’re saying the plan all along was for Lucifer to take you over and become the Destroyer he supposedly wanted you to be?” Ceri nodded. Logan thought his brains might slide out his ears. “How… how did you come to this conclusion?”
“He was way too cocky and full of himself when we confronted him. It was like he was goading me to stab him.”
Okay, Logan could kind of see that. But wasn’t Lucifer always an arrogant prick? In his experience, yes. But there might be gradations of that. Ceri was his son—maybe he knew his moods better than the rest of them. Actually, that was a certainty. “So wait—his making you the Destroyer is simply becoming you and being the Destroyer?”
“I think so, yes.”
Logan shook his head. Did that make sense? Fuck it—he had no idea. He was the stupid human. But he trusted Ceri, and if he said this was what was happening, Logan supported him 100 percent. “Okay, well, he is an arrogant prick, so I suppose it makes sense to him. What do we do about it?”
“Well, to start, I can never use Godslayer again. The more energy I channel, the more my demon side grows.”
Logan flinched at that. Their most powerful weapon sidelined for the boss battle? “Should I use it?”
Ceri stopped pacing and looked at him. “No! My dad could use it to kill you way too easily.”
“But if you don’t bring it, he’ll know instantly you figured him out.”
“Shit! Right.”
Logan felt dumb even saying this, but he felt he had to ask. “Is there anything we could do with Godslayer that doesn’t involve stabbing him?”
Ceri stared at him in a manner that was slightly insulting, until he walked over, took Logan’s face in his hands, and kissed him. “You beautiful man. That’s it. Come on, we need to discuss this with the others.”
“Discuss what?” Logan asked but followed him out anyway.
As it turned out, he had no idea how Ceri got to where he did from what Logan had said, but he didn’t understand the Lucifer stuff either. And he figured maybe that was the problem with human thinking. But as soon as Ceri determined that Esme was strong enough to attack Godslayer with a spell, it was all systems go on the plan. A ridiculously risky, sure-to-fail plan—but again, they had no choice in the matter. Do nothing and die. Do something and probably also die. Sometimes a shitty choice was the only choice.
Ceri closed his eyes and concentrated on locating his father, while Logan worked on shoving all his feelings aside and compartmentalizing them to deal with later. He was good at that. He’d spent most of his life pretending not to feel things when they were inconvenient. He knew it was a bad thing to do. Didn’t stop him. He was trying to tell himself it didn’t matter if Lucifer was telling the truth; it was irrelevant. His love for Ceri was genuine, and he had no doubt at all that Ceri loved him too. And also, Lucifer was a massive fuckhead. That was a constant no matter what.
There was a spot of running off to the bathroom and then having constitution-fortifying belts of alcohol for the drinkers or pills for the pill poppers—in his case, it was both, because this was a smoke ’em if you got ’em time for sure—and then they were ready to go. Actually, they probably weren’t, but they had no choice in the matter. It was go time. They were going to kill part of the world to save the rest of it and maybe die themselves. The survivors would have to find a way to live with it.
Before taking them there, Ceri warned them Lucifer was in Hawaii, and there was a good chance they’d be jumping into a lava-fueled hellhole. Esme was certain her protection spell would keep them from burning or suffocating, but she shored it up with a secondary incantation, just in case. There was no point in not being cautious, especially since, if everything worked as it should, this would be their last battle. As such, Esme and Lyn shared a good luck/goodbye kiss, and so did Logan and Ceri. Before he let Logan go, Ceri whispered, “I love you more than anything, Logan Fox.” Logan blinked away some tears that threatened to appear, and wondered if it was due to the fact that he was reasonably sure no one had ever said that to him before. He didn’t come from an emotionally demonstrative family, unless you counted stress as an emotion, and then yes, he did. But it wasn’t ideal.
No one was really ready, but they said they were, so they all joined hands—save for Alex, who wasn’t showing up until Cthulhu was rising—and jumped straight into Hell.
Or at least it seemed like it. They were on black rocks, a small island in which several crisscrossing rivers of lava flowed like severed arteries. They were almost blood colored, angry red-orange, and the air shimmered with heat waves. This was a zone of death, and if it wasn’t for the protection spell, they’d have dropped dead on the spot.
As soon as they spotted Lucifer, still impossibly groomed in his pristine white suit, he grinned at them and opened his mouth to speak, but he never had a chance before they attacked.
Esme hit him first with a major power-disruption spell, while Lyn charged and jumped into the air, her wings sprouting instantaneously and her bare feet morphing into thick, scary talons seconds b
efore they sank right into Lucifer’s head.
Yes, his body was technically optional, and it wouldn’t be as devastating to him as it would to someone else, but Logan still cringed as Lyn took to the air, dragging Lucifer along by his face. About five feet up, Lucifer got something in his hand and jabbed it in Lyn’s leg, making her let go. He fell to the ground and landed on his feet, but he had huge holes punched into his jaw, his forehead, and his cheek. They were leaking the glistening gold ichor that passed for his blood.
As he straightened up, Ahmed yelled the words that activated the amulet and clearly started hitting him with an energy drain, while Logan put his fingers on his new tattoo, which he absolutely didn’t need to do, and said, “Come on, Talon, I’ve got a job for you.”
The Scourge appeared beside him, a twenty-foot dragon made of wispy black smoke, and even though it worked by will, Logan said, “Do your best to kill him.” It actually roared as it charged, although it was difficult to hear over the crackling of fire and collapsing of rock. They weren’t all that far away from the remains of an old town. Very old, as most things that could be burned were already ash. Knowing an eruption here wasn’t new provided some comfort, but it was very slight.
Lucifer raised a hand and seemed to try to command the Scourge—Logan could actually feel the tug of it from where he was on his tiny rock island amid the sea of lava—but it was tied to him now, and Lucifer couldn’t break the bond.
“Obey me!” Lucifer demanded. “Kill him!”
The Scourge ignored his commands—like ordering Talon to disobey any order given it by Lucifer wasn’t one of the first things Logan did—and roared/hissed, a sound like a maraca filled with bones and teeth, and spat black ooze all over him.
According to Ceri, the Scourge didn’t spit fire but void—the empty between the stars, the thing waiting for most beings after they die. It was corrosive and consumptive and seemed to dissolve people, although all it really was doing was pulling people into it. The great big empty.
It wasn’t going to kill Lucifer, but from the way it sizzled on him, it still wasn’t pleasant. “Motherfucker!” Logan heard him exclaim before Ceri said something that grated against his ears like metal on a chalkboard—the very black magic Lucifer had used. What was good for Satan was good for the Destroyer.
