Axes and Angels: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Novel (Better Demons Series Book 1)

by Matthew Herrmann

  Almost.

  He had ordered his peeps to drug and kidnap me after all.

  “So that’s why you put me in the creepy doll room? As punishment?”

  My employer confusedly stroked his disfigured face. In a way, it resembled some of the dolls’ cracked terra cotta faces. “That is one of my most comfortable rooms,” he said in an indignant voice. “The dolls remind me of my birth country. I am a collector, you know.”

  “Oh, um, right.” Me and my stupid mouth. “Uh where’s your butler Gan?” I asked, my eyes instinctively searching for the nearest exit.

  “Ganymede is, ah, on special assignment.”

  “Special assignment? I just had a run-in with him and spoiler alert: he’s one of Typhon’s lieutenants.”

  “He is undercover with the enemy. The last time you saw Gan here he was filling me in on Typhon’s latest movements.”

  Hmm. That made sense … but it didn’t make up for the fact that these guys had kidnapped me. I mentally gauged my chances of sprinting past my employer to the now-unguarded front door leading to the massive cul-de-sac. They seemed good.

  Someone cleared their throat from atop the stairs and I turned to see Blue Rag dabbing at his nose with a handkerchief.

  “James,” my benefactor said with a sigh, the tension in the air easing. “You did well for bringing Miss Apollonia to us. I do,” he took a breath, “apologize for her actions. She doesn’t understand our mission. Our cause. But she will. She will.”

  Blue Rag/James laughed softly. “Yes. She will.” He gave me a lascivious glance, eyeing me up and down and said, “She’s having dinner with us. Right?”

  Not one to have others decide my fate, I clenched my fists. “Oh, I’m not staying. See, in two nights, my partner Orion is going to be thrown into Typhon’s Arena … I have to find a way to prevent that, not do odd jobs for you people.”

  My employer took another breath, steadied himself against the gold handrail at the staircase’s side. “I am sensitive to your plight. We are partners, now, are we not? You should have trusted me.”

  I scoffed. “In my experience, when someone tells you to trust them, you shouldn’t.”

  “You misunderstand me. I wish to be your friend. Friends help each other when they are in need and call for help. I helped you with your … ah money issue. Surely I’ve proven my sincerity. You need not rescue your partner on your own. I have resources. Let me help you.”

  I hesitated; this guy might be pulling my strings, trying to indebt me further to him. Also time was running short and I still hadn’t made contact with Arachne and LK. As per usual in such situations, my mind played through all the worst possible things that could have happened to them. Had they been killed? Did Typhon have them? Had the zombie apocalypse finally come and they’d been eaten alive?

  I didn’t have time for this. I rounded on my benefactor like a wild tiger. “And what is it you’d have me do? Steal another priceless artifact for you?”

  “No, no, no,” my employer said soothingly (creepily), and placed a charred and calloused hand upon my arm. “I wish only to tell you a story. Followed with our plan to strike Typhon down once and for all, of which you are instrumental in its implementation. My sources say he is nearing the completion of his plan.”

  Plan? I thought as I glanced toward the door at the bottom of the step. So close. But my employer was dangling the solution to my problem in front of me like a carrot. Was he just telling me what I wanted to hear to get me to stay?

  “I know what you’re thinking,” He said. “It’s too good to be true—a panacea right when you need it most? Hear me out first. Enjoy my hospitality. Break bread with me.”

  My stomach grumbled. “What do you say? Do we trust them?”

  Garfunkel stared at my employer. “I don’t.”

  “I don’t think we have a choice,” Simon said.

  My employer cleared his throat. “Well?”

  “Fine. Lead the way.”

  The dining hall was big as a church. My employer’s minions sat at several long tables, the food already in bowls at the center of the tables. It seemed that the Zeus gang liked to eat family style; also, they loved their lemonade. While my employer drank thick red wine, everyone else drank lemonade along with their late-late-night dinner. Or was it breakfast? I guess they’d been waiting on me all night but I’d given them the slip at the club and made them follow me to the mine. (Sorry not sorry.)

  Dinner looked really good. I say “looked” because no matter how hungry I was, I stuck to my guns and didn’t eat any of it. Also, I was dying for some lemonade to quench my terrible thirst, but like I’ve said, I didn’t want to indebt myself further to them. (Didn’t want them pulling the ol’ “Remember when we gave you a glass of lemonade … now go steal this priceless artifact for us …” stunt on me at a future date.)

  Curiously enough, Blue Rag/James and Spider Face didn’t eat or drink anything either. They were posted up against a wall with walkie-talkies clipped to their belts. James also had his gold dagger sheathed at his side—I’d been politely requested to give it back before I’d sat down.

  While I sat and watched, I recognized some of the gang members as men and women I’d fought at the club. They didn’t even look at me, only ate their food so I guessed they didn’t hold anything against me (just James since I smashed in his nose). My employer really had his people under his thumb …

  Every now and then, one of the hooded acolytes would give me an inviting look and pass me a bowl of beans or a bread basket. I bit my tongue and passed the food farther down the table. It all looked so good: roasted lamb and veal, oily vegetable casseroles, authentic Greek yogurt … The smells reminded me of my mother’s kitchen and Amir’s bodega.

  Garfunkel, like me, refrained from the food although Simon kept reaching for the bread basket and I had to keep smacking his tiny hands away. If the gang members noticed, they didn’t show it.

  I was seated halfway down my table, hemmed in at either side by acolytes. Across from me sat my employer, close enough for me to see the fogginess of his eyes up close. He ate in silence for a time, pausing at intervals to admire the zeal and calm focus of his underlings before returning to his own plate.

  When he finished eating, he set down his fork and turned to me but didn’t say anything.

  “Look,” I said. “We’ve got to start somewhere. Maybe we could begin with your name? I can’t quite decide between Stormy Eyes and Snake Face.”

  The clattering of forks stopped. Hooded faces turned in unison toward me.

  My employer gave a slight chuckle before instructing his acolytes, “It’s quite alright, everyone. Carry on.” Shrouded faces returned to their plates. My benefactor turned back to me. “You may call me Don. I am quite fond of that human name.”

  I looked at him blankly. “Don? As in mafia Don?”

  “I am ancient Greek, not Italian,” Don said.

  “So it’s not your real name?”

  My employer raised both arms. “I don’t remember my original name. I … ahh … lost it when Zeus honored me to serve in his palace on Mount Olympus.”

  “Whoa …” I said. “So you actually knew Zeus?”

  He nodded.

  “OK, then what did he call you?”

  My employer stroked his chin as if fondly recalling the memory, his cloudy eyes rolling in their sockets. “Zeus did not call me anything. I was but a servant. We did not have names.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “How’d he differentiate between you all? Servant #1? Servant #2? Servant #3?”

  “You jest. But it was not like that. We were the Nameless. Mere humans brought up to serve in the gardens and kitchens and palaces of the gods. It was an immense honor. Us servants knew our place. Next to the gods, humans were nothing. Humans were—”

  “I’m going to cut you off right there,” I said, and for a moment, all forks again ceased their activities. I rolled my eyes at the acolytes. “Humans are not ‘nothing.’ We can be whatever we
want to be.”

  Don/my employer shook his head sadly. “Not back then. That kind of thinking got the gods’ attention. And when that happened, examples were made.”

  Examples … That got me thinking of my friend Arachne and how the goddess Athena had turned her into a she-spider after besting her in a friendly weaving contest.

  I massaged my dry throat. Man, that lemonade really looked good … “The gods were egotistic pricks,” I said, picking up my glass and setting it out of my periphery.

  “The gods taught humility.”

  I laughed. “Is that what they called it? Wait, no. Is that why your face is all messed up? You tried to ‘defy’ them and they taught you humility?”

  Don shook his head sadly and touched his cheek. “I was born this way. Mostly,” he said. “I spent most of my life in a remote system of caves, living like an outcast, labeled ‘unclean.’ If not for Zeus adopting me when he had, I’d have been killed. Zeus healed me.”

  I blinked. “Uh, doesn’t look like it. What happened? You made him mad and he smote you?”

  My benefactor’s sullen face hardened into a snakelike scowl. He clutched at his face as if he couldn’t say the word. Then he dropped his hand and lifted his unseeing gaze to my forehead. “Typhon.”

  At the mention of the name Typhon, the acolytes seated on both sides of us beat their breasts and intoned in a dead, clearly rehearsed (or brainwashed) monotone: “Typhon must die. Typhon must die. Typhon must die.”

  I shuddered at the venom in those dead-sounding voices, at the menace. These men and women fully believed in what they had just said. Also, they were batshit crazy.

  “Theo, can we leave now?” Simon said.

  Ordinarily, this was the part where I’d walk away. However, with Orion’s fate on the line, I had to remind myself that their cause aligned with mine, and after this final job my employer was working up to, I wouldn’t have to see them again.

  “You will be our instrument in delivering Typhon to us,” my employer said.

  “How?” I asked.

  The acolytes sitting around me suddenly dropped their forks and beat their chests again. “Prophesy! Prophesy! Prophesy!”

  I scratched behind my head. “Um …”

  My employer leaned forward onto his knobby elbows. “With the axe you recovered for me from Typhon’s storeroom. The axe, whose true name is God-Slayer, forged by Typhon himself with the power to kill a god, to kill Zeus.” He paused and glanced out at his acolytes before reciting, “After the gods leave, and by the hand of a woman …”

  “Typhon must die. Typhon must die. Typhon must die,” the acolytes intoned.

  Great. So now I was Prophesy Girl? How unoriginal.

  Again, I had to remind myself what was at stake here. And if they thought I was the answer to some millennia-old prophesy, all the better. “You guys must really hate Typhon,” I said.

  Don bowed his head solemnly. “I wonder … will you, too, when I tell you what Typhon did to me? To Zeus? To the world? What he plans to do to it now?”

  I kicked back in my chair, willing to play the part of Prophesy Girl. “I don’t know. But I’m eager to find out everything I need to know to uh, complete my sacred task.”

  “Mo’ Beef!”

  “Typhon … Where to begin?” my employer said.

  “He was a meddling human?” I suggested.

  He shook his head. “Typhon was no human although he walks in the guise of one. He is a demigod.”

  “Oh, like Hercules?” I asked.

  My employer laughed. “Typhon would make Hercules cower like a babe, like a little cupid. No, Typhon is … well, there is a reason he is called ‘the one-hundred-headed beast.’ ”

  “Hundred-headed beast?” Simon asked with wide eyes, a bread crumb suspended right before his mouth. “Theo, I draw the line at two-headed beast—"

  I smacked the bread crumb away.

  “I’m likin’ this Typhon guy,” Garfunkel said, rubbing his hands. “Keep the details comin’, Don.”

  Glancing up at the ceiling, I said, “Typhon’s got a hundred heads? When I saw him sitting smug in the Arena, he had only one.”

  “Ah,” my benefactor rasped. “But that is not his true form. You have not seen him when he is in a fury.”

  I nodded slowly. “You mean like when he’s hangry?”

  “I am not familiar with the term.”

  “OK, look. Can we just get to the part about me killing him and rescuing Orion?” Gotta love straight-to-the-point me.

  Don continued, “You should not underestimate Typhon. He is a ravaging beast. He was so strong-headed, so full of ambition that he thought he could take on all the Greek gods on Mount Olympus. It became his life-mission to kill them.”

  “Sounds like a badass,” Garfunkel said. I nodded in agreement.

  “Typhon made several preemptive strikes against the Palace of the Gods on Mount Olympus, testing its defenses. Many other Nameless servants were killed by him as he poked and prodded, searching for a vulnerable spot. He carried the God-Slayer, forged in the fires of Tartarus. So foul was it, so powerful, that its victims literally boiled from within when it pierced their skin.”

  I thought about what the lava axe had done to Leo and Scorpio in Typhon’s Arena when I had barely nicked them in self-defense.

  My employer paused, seeming on the verge of tears. “One night, during one of his forays onto the palace grounds, Typhon felled my lover—I watched his insides melt from his orifices as Typhon glared at me, trudged right past me.” After a moment of silence, Don sat up straighter with resolve flickering in his cloudy eyes. “Ever since that night, I vowed not to let him succeed. I vowed to protect my master Zeus.”

  Simon wiped a tear from his eye as he reached for another bread crumb. Smack! He didn’t get it.

  Garfunkel reclined on my left shoulder, filing his fingernails.

  Don continued. “It was a dark and stormy night when Typhon mounted his final attack …”

  “Of course it was,” Garfunkel said.

  I felt Simon shutter. “I don’t want to hear the rest.”

  “… and he didn’t come alone. The Hundred-Headed Beast brought an army of monsters that poured through the servants’ quarters and kitchen, causing a worthy distraction while Typhon stalked unfettered through the palace.”

  My employer paused. “I was hiding beside the stone archway leading directly to Zeus’s sleeping quarters. And I … I …” He paused again, picking up his wine glass. His fingers tightened and the stem shattered like … glass. He turned to face me, his eyes glowering as if their cloudy surfaces concealed pillars of fire. “I fell asleep!”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Zeus punished you?”

  His hand shot up into the air. “No! Typhon struck at me like a thief in the dark. I managed to open my eyes just as he raised a large bundle wrapped in impenetrable dark cloth. He ripped off the covering as I reached for my dagger … But I was too late. Typhon held the egg of a thunderbird in his gloved hands …”

  My employer let his words hang in the air. It seemed a bit melodramatic.

  “Simon,” I whispered. “Typhon held up a giant bird egg. Is that supposed to mean something?”

  Simon shrieked, managing, “His face!” before diving into his shoulder pad.

  I turned back to my employer, his face taut with horrible stretch lines and untold agony, like that one famous painting of the screaming woman on the pier. His voice came like a keening wail. “Mortal eyes are not meant to partake in the fury of a thunderbird’s egg. The sight melted my eyes, singed the skin of my lips, left my face in ruin. It felt like a thousand wasp stings boring into my eyes and face, and I collapsed to the floor as Typhon laughed and ambled toward my master sleeping on his bed, his face turned peacefully to the open palace window to the raging storm outside.

  “I was still rolling in agony, deformed worse than when Zeus had adopted me, when Typhon drew his axe and stood over Zeus’s sleeping form. I screamed, and Zeus
woke at the last possible moment. The assassination attempt failed, but as Typhon’s monsters overran the palace, Zeus and the rest of the gods fled to Egypt. You cannot possibly imagine the torture and humility I and the rest of the surviving palace staff had to endure.”

  Don nodded to Blue Rag and Spider Face, both wearing dour expressions on their faces. So they were thousands of years old as well? Who’d have thought?

  I glanced at the hooded acolytes gathered at the tables. How many of them were Nameless servants of Zeus as well? It explained how they were able to use magic.

  I turned back to my employer. “I’m guessing Zeus got the last laugh?”

  My employer nodded grimly. “After several years of exile, after Typhon and his wife Echidna had made the palace their own, ruling together as king and queen, Zeus mounted a counterstrike and cast Typhon down into the fieriest hold of Tartarus for the rest of eternity.”

  “Except that eternity only proved to be a few thousand years and now Typhon’s back to reclaim his former glory?” I finished.

  My benefactor nodded and bowed his head.

  “How does Gan fit into this?” I asked. That silent, creepy, beautiful butler who just happened to be, ahem, working for Typhon too …?

  Don wiped a napkin across his lips. “Perhaps we should go for a walk and I will tell you the part about your involvement in the plan?” He rose and motioned for me to do the same.

  With a final glance at my untouched lemonade, I followed him out of the dining hall and down a first-floor hallway lined with closed doors. At least now I knew why there were so many rooms in this place and why it had such a large cul-de-sac out front. My employer was a cult leader and needed a place big enough to house his acolytes.

  Creep. But he truly hated Typhon, and with good reason. And if he thought I was predestined to lead his army in some final battle with Typhon, all the better. That just meant Orion and I wouldn’t have a mob boss trying to off us for the rest of our lives …

  When we were sufficiently out of listening range of the grand hall, my employer pulled me aside, his voice a harsh whisper. “You saw Gan on Typhon’s side at the club, correct?”