by Matt Turner
Good luck against the Beast, Lao thought nastily. Of all the demons the Master had collected, it was the mightiest…not even all of the Prophets together could possibly hope to bring the monster down. I hope it eats the bitch. Heartened by the vengeful thought, he clumsily pulled himself away from the tank’s treads. The lower half of his body, still pinned beneath the machine’s weight, broke away from his upper spine with a wet, sucking sound. Compared to what he had just been through, it hardly hurt at all. He rolled over to a small ditch (likely the remnant of a drainage pipe) and did his best to hide himself within it.
“C’mon, hurry up,” he hissed under his breath as he stared at his spilled entrails, willing them to grow back. For once, the Master’s gift seemed to be working more slowly than usual—he could see the stumps of his thighs slowly re-forming, but—
There was a sudden screech of metal, and an explosion so close that it ruptured one of his eardrums. Lao glanced up just in time to see the tank, rushing through the air in a blur of motion, dash itself into a thousand scraps of half-melted iron against the ground. The nearby soldiers fled the scene as a lumbering behemoth lurched through the wall of flame. A howitzer shell hurt it dead-center in the chest, shattering itself to bits against the demon’s dark fur. Its two mouths, separated by a bald area of pink, scarred flesh, contorted into a smile.
The Beast. Lao had never heard of the thing ever leaving Judecca, yet here it was. In the shadows of the Master’s prison, it had been a dark, filthy thing, but somehow it was even worse out in the light of Dis. For the first time, Lao noticed the coarse matting of the demon’s dark fur, as though it had washed itself in a baptism of excrement and blood. It was so emaciated that the demon’s loose skin seemed to be closer to a cloak—just one mighty pull would be enough to strip it of its outer layer. And what’s inside? Lao hysterically thought.
The half-dozen wings that protruded from its back dragged on the ground like ragged leather cloaks, bringing up a wave of dust that clouded the rest of its features in smog. What little Lao could make out of the Beast’s two ape-like heads made him grateful for it.
The idiots are doomed, he thought with relish. The Beast is the mightiest demon that ever lived.
The Beast raised a clawed hand to its mouth—and to his surprise, Lao saw a familiar figure in its grasp: a trembling, wretched old man. Adam. But why? It opened its mouth, extending out a stump of a tongue, as it opened wide to swallow the First Man whole—
“Give him BACK!” a voice thundered.
Lao blinked, utterly confused, for he felt someone passing by—a gale of wind that nearly knocked him down, and suddenly one of the Beast’s severed claws crashed down into the ruined street. A familiar figure leapt down from the Beast’s hand, Adam slung over his shoulder. Seth, Lao realized. The heaven-man!
And if Seth was here, that meant… He only had enough time to let out a groan before the Horsemen rushed in around him. The Beast let out an inarticulate bellow and smashed its bleeding hand forward, seeking to wrap Seth in its talons—and quite suddenly, one of John’s trees spat up from the street, neatly impaling the Beast’s palm with its own momentum. It let out a human-like scream and ripped its hand back, tearing the tree from the street, roots and all, but Simon was already there, the blade in his hand singing like a song. He tore it deep into the Beast’s hand, taking off another talon.
No, Lao thought in despair. No!
The Beast swatted at him with its free hand, just as the grenades that Vera had tossed under its flank detonated. It wobbled forward, off-balance, as Amaury danced among its legs, blasting upward with his twin machine-pistols. It lashed at him angrily, but he was even more agile than Seth; the devil couldn’t even touch him.
Bullets won’t work, you fool, Lao thought in triumph… and then he saw the flames licking at the Beast’s fur. Fucking bastard is using incendiaries. Out of the corner of his eye, he suddenly noticed the line of howitzers that Salome was ordering into position.
This can’t be happening, he thought in disbelief as the first shell exploded just next to the Beast’s head. It slashed at its own face, trying to make the pain go away, and narrowly avoided another shell that slammed into the ground beside it. They must have put a timer on the shells, knowing that they wouldn’t detonate against the Beast itself.
This was all Salome’s doing. By the Master, he loathed that bitch.
The Beast let out a scream and lumbered forward, crushing rubble with every step of its great claws. Bits of fire and burnt fur splashed across the ground from where Amaury had hit it, spreading a foul odor that brought tears to Lao’s eyes. Shell after shell exploded around it and now Lao could see that some of the shells were loaded with dazzlingly bright phosphorus that further spread the flames around the demon’s body. It can’t even see, he realized.
“Over here!” Lao screamed out. His legs had finally grown back, and he wrestled his way out of the ditch into the street. “This way!” he howled at the Beast, gambling that it would remember his voice.
The Beast seemed to respond. One of its heads spun downward to regard the small man rushing toward it. Its wrinkled, fanged mouth extended itself into a grin.
It can fly me back to Judecca, Lao thought hopefully. It’ll take me to the Master and then—
In one step, the Beast crossed the twenty meters between itself and Lao. Hateful yellow eyes glared down at him, and then its grin opened up. Lao was briefly aware of darkness enclosing him, then the stench of death and rot, and then the sharpness of teeth.
22
“There’s never a goddamn break!” Simon gnashed his teeth together furiously. He looked as half-crazed as the dumbass who had just run out into the street and gotten himself eaten by the monstrous new arrival. “Why is there always something?”
“It is Hell.” Amaury grimaced. He glanced back around the corner and shot off a few more rounds at the bat-winged thing. It had suddenly stopped in the middle of the street as though it were lost in thought. “I think we just pissed it off, team. What’s the new plan?”
Seth gently laid Adam down on the ground. The ancient man barely responded; his breathing was faint and ragged, and only the whites of his eyes were visible. “You all need to stay here and protect him,” Seth said firmly. He tightened his grip on the burning sword that he had retrieved from Lamech. “This Devil is exactly what I was sent here to fight.”
The way he emphasized Devil made Vera glance at the others. “Is that with a capital D?” she wondered. Just like Amaury, she stole a glance at their new adversary. Shells hammered the ground around it, throwing up tufts of fire and smoke that made its twin heads roar in fury. It stood on its hind legs and extended its leathery wings, casting an entire city block in shadow. A small dot circled around it like a mosquito. Was that Podarge? The harpy was even crazier than she looked.
“Maybe.” Seth frowned. “The Devil has three heads…” His voice trailed off as he sadly looked down at his father. His brow furrowed, and he steeled his grip on his sword. “I’m going to ask it.”
“Wait,” Vera barked. “Down!”
She seized Amaury by the nape and dragged him down to the street just as the Beast brought its wings against its body. It shot up into the air, propelled by a gust of freezing wind so powerful that it rattled the very stones in the pavement. One of Salome’s howitzers was tossed aside by the gust like a child’s plaything, nearly crushing several soldiers, and all around them, buildings shook and trembled. And with that, the Beast was gone nearly as swiftly as it had arrived.
For a moment, there was nothing but silence, broken only by the few ragged fires and a hint of the foul reek that the Beast had left behind. At last someone spoke. “What the hell was that?” one of Salome’s soldiers shrieked.
Vera glanced up to see that Salome was again approaching them. It was difficult to tell underneath her bandages, but it looked as though there was a smile of triumph on her face. “I’ll head her off,” she muttered to Seth. “You get your father out o
f here.”
“Thank you.” Seth nodded. He quickly gathered up Adam in his arms and quietly slipped away during the conversation.
“You see?” Salome laughed as she drew near. “You see? You—” She suddenly stopped, and for a moment Vera was afraid that the Prophet had seen Seth taking Adam away. Instead, Salome reached inside her silks and pulled a syringe out from between her ample breasts. The steel plunger had been completely depressed, but that did not stop the Prophet: Vera watched in disgust as a single drop of amber liquid dripped from the steel tip and landed on the Prophet’s tongue. The shudder of relief that passed through Salome’s ravaged body only further confirmed her suspicions: She’s a junkie.
“W-wait,” John stammered as he gazed at the syringe. “I-is that…?”
“Relax, tree-boy,” Salome said, the slightest hint of slurring present in her speech. “I gave you the smallest possible dose. I save the good shit for myself.” She let out a weak giggle and cracked the syringe open to suck out the droplets of liquid inside.
Do her men see this? Vera wondered. She glanced over at the gathered soldiers, trying to probe their thoughts. It took her only a moment to realize that most of them were far too preoccupied with the second nightmarish monstrosity to attack their capital city in less than a day; they couldn’t give a damn about their commander’s drug habits.
“The Master is coming, and I’ve got the only weapon in Hell that can stop him,” Salome said when she was finished with the syringe. “But since that fucker Legion and that bastard Lao fucked everything up, there’s only one way I can use it…with your help.”
“What weapon?” Simon demanded.
“The Xipe Totec,” Salome said with obvious relish. When Simon gave her a blank stare in response, she laid a reassuring hand on his chest. “Trust me, Crusader, they’ll hear it on Earth.”
Simon glanced over at Amaury. “A chance to fuck over Cain? I’m in.”
“It’s a chance to save all of Hell,” Salome said to the others. “But I’ll need your help. The Master will move quickly—we likely have only a few days at most.” She continued on, speaking of plots and war and bloody vengeance against the man who had torn her face away.
Vera found that she couldn’t concentrate on the Prophet’s words; her thoughts kept drifting to Seth and the state of his father.
“Can we trust her?” Amaury asked John.
John raised his bark-crusted shoulders upward in bemusement. “You heard the Master’s words—he’s coming for everything, whether we like it or not. I say we use the weapon.” He glared reproachfully at Salome. “Even if she did drug me.”
Beneath the bandages, Salome rolled her eyes. “And you kept jabbering on through the whole process. Believe me, I won’t be wasting any more Zaqqum on any of you. Hey—where are you going?” she demanded when Vera began to drift away from the group.
“I’m going for a walk,” Vera said over her shoulder.
“No, you’re not,” Salome snapped. “You did just see the giant devil that attacked us out of the blue, no? None of you are leaving my sight until this is all said and done. If the Master is able to get his hands on just one of your Marks—”
“Vera can take care of herself,” Simon growled. “Let her go.”
“You’re all idiots,” Salome grumbled, but she made no move to intercept Vera.
The rest of the Prophet’s words faded away into the distance as Vera rounded the corner and began to look for Seth. It took her a few minutes, but she finally found him sheltered near a half-collapsed bridge. Adam lay beneath the structure, nestled on a rough bed of rags and sand, greedily sucking in harsh, ragged breaths. Seth knelt on the ground beside his father, his eyes closed and raised to the sky as his lips moved in silent prayer. A single tear trickled down the angle of his broken nose through the maze of slashes and bruises that had been left behind.
For a moment, Vera stood there, trying to find the words to say. Before she could articulate them, Seth opened his eyes.
“Vera,” he said gently. “Care to join me?”
Vera blinked. “Am I allowed to?”
Seth raised his cracked lips in a weary smile. “I don’t see why not.”
“Um, all right,” she agreed. With that, she awkwardly lowered herself to the ground and tried to imitate his pose. She had never been one for prayer; she felt like a fraud and a fool. “Seth,” she said as he started to close his eyes once more. “You can go.”
“What do you mean?” he quietly asked.
“You can go back,” Vera repeated. “You should go back.” She sighed when he turned his head to face her, revealing the latticework of blood and wounds that had been beaten into him. Even the way he knelt—was that the pale whiteness of bone she could see peeking out from one of his legs?—revealed the tremendous pain that he was in. “You don’t deserve to be in this place.”
“It’s not about what I deserve, Vera,” Seth said. “It’s about what’s right. The living world itself may be at stake. I have a duty—”
“A duty to fight your brother? To see your own father tortured?” Vera reached out for his hand. “Please. Just go. Let Heaven send someone else.”
“Any archangel could have done this,” Seth admitted. “Easily. But I…I volunteered. I wanted this, Vera.”
“Why?” she pressed. “Seth, you’re—” She grew uncomfortably aware of the flush building in her face and sent up her first real prayer—that no one else was watching. “You’re the best man I’ve ever known. You have nothing to prove. Go back to the Paradise you deserve.”
Her fingers brushed up against his, and she had a peek inside his mind. She saw pain—his wounds were even worse than they appeared—and cold fear. But beneath that, there was something far more powerful, an emotion that she did not quite understand.
“My father used to speak to us of Eden.” Seth gently laid a hand on Adam’s forehead; the other man instinctively cringed away from his son’s touch. “When the work was over and the day was done, my siblings and I would gather by the fire as he described the first paradise…the waterfalls, the fruit, the blissful contentment of life… Those were the only times he ever smiled. Even then, I think he still had hope.”
His fingers tightened around hers. In spite of all the agony, physical and emotional, that Vera could sense coming from him, there was something reassuring about the warmth of his grip.
“And one day, we found my brother Abel lying in a field, his skull crushed by a rock. None of us ever saw Cain again. I cannot imagine his pain—what does a father do, when one son kills another?” A cold steel hardened Seth’s eyes. “My father’s Hell began long before he died—it began the moment that Cain brought murder into the world. The curse of violence that my brother wrought took him in time, too. And that’s why I keep telling all of you, Vera—” He leaned toward her and pressed a finger against her forehead. “Hell is on the inside.”
“Then they’re both lost forever,” Vera said softly. We all are.
“I have to know,” Seth said. “I have to look into my brother’s eyes and see if there is any hope—for salvation, for peace, for anything, even if it’s just the tiniest shred of remorse. I have to be here. This is where I belong.”
“Then you’ll need all the help you can get.” Vera grinned. She stood up, pulling Seth with her. He grimaced as the wounds in his body flared up, and she gladly allowed him to lean on her.
“I have to confess, Vera,” Seth smiled as he grabbed her shoulder for support, “without you, I may have given up already.”
“Please, do tell,” she said in her sweetest voice.
“You’ve changed a great deal since I first met you—more than I even thought possible for one of the damned, to be completely blunt. If you’re no longer the selfish, malicious killer you once were, perhaps there is some small scrap of hope for my brother after all.”
Men, Vera thought scornfully. She rolled her eyes. “Thanks.”
Something stirred in Seth’s thoughts, a sma
ll scrap of knowledge that tore at him. “There is one more thing,” he said in a low voice as the two of them began to trudge back to the others. “My father said something before the others took him—the Devil has three heads.”
“That thing that attacked us just now—it only had two,” she said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Seth frowned. “I don’t know. But there’s something wrong here—I can feel it. We’re missing something…”
In the skies overhead, Podarge the Harpy let out a single sharp cackle.
23
Signy loosed an arrow into each of the soldier’s hands before he was even able to halfway raise his two pistols. He winced in pain but somehow managed to hold on to one of his guns just long enough to blast off a few shots in her direction. The small compartment screamed with the reverberation of gunfire, and she dodged to the side, her bow momentarily forgotten. The other soldier—the one with his head horribly twisted around so that it faced the small of his back—used the opportunity to scuttle toward the door. He slammed his fist against the keypad, frantically punching in numbers, and the door hissed open.
Signy leapt up, ignoring the bullets that whistled around her, and drew her bowstring, hoping to send an arrow through the backward-headed freak’s balls—but the first soldier stumbled into her line of fire and took a third arrow in his shoulder.
“Fucking bitch!” he howled in rage.
“Intruder! Intruder!” the backward-headed man squealed in fear. His legs pounded like a crab’s as he forced his way through the narrow doorway. The machinery let out a hiss as the door began to once again slide shut behind him.
“Babin, GET BACK HERE!” the younger man screamed. For an instant, his eyes slipped back to his fleeing companion.
It was all the opening that Signy needed. She lunged forward, smashing her knee up into the soldier’s face. His head whipped back with a satisfying crack, and she followed up by using her long legs as a spring to bury her shoulder into his guts. He flew back like a puppet with its strings cut and crashed to a halt inside the doorway.