by eden Hudson
Tough
By the time my body was awake enough to blink, Clarion and I were in the driveway of the Dark Mansion. I couldn’t move my arms, but something deep down in my gut was reaching out like a ghost-hand toward the mansion’s busted down front doors, screaming, Get Desty! Leave me there to burn, I don’t give a fuck, just get Desty out!
My fingers twitched. I tried making a fist. Pins and needles prickled in my fingers. If I could keep going like that, I might be able to get moving in time to watch one of Lonely’s TBG-7s turn the Dark Mansion into a pressure cooker with Desty inside. I tried to work my hand faster.
In the parking lot, Clarion ducked behind an armored Hummer with shot-out tires and rolled me off his shoulders. “Wave one is falling back. Send in the crows.”
“Got it.”
Somebody whistled, then the sound of flapping took off from every direction. Black flashes passed over the lighter blackish-orange of the sky. Somewhere outside my field of vision, something was burning.
I put everything I had into moving my fingers. This time, I was able to make a fist.
A coyote woman from Clarion’s pack leaned over me. “What happened? Garlic? They couldn’t have gotten their hands on holy water. Could they?”
“I don’t know,” Clarion said. “He’s coming around, though. Must be leaving his system. Where’s Lonely?”
“Set up with launcher-one in the oak by the road,” she said.
“Call him down. See what he can do. If the prophecy’s right, we’re not going to get anywhere without Tough.”
“What about you?”
Clarion glanced toward the mansion. “They’re just kids.”
The woman exhaled a puff of breath. She leaned over my body and bit Clarion on the cheek. He turned his head hard and kind of knocked into her with his face. She smiled at him, then he took off.
Clarion’s girlfriend moved to my peripheral and started shooting, probably covering her boyfriend. Without missing a shot, she whistled again, three staccato notes.
A few seconds later, Lonely swooped down in front of me and shifted.
“Clare said you might be able to help him,” the female coyote said, still firing on the Dark Mansion.
Lonely grinned sideways at me. “You sleep at night?”
If you say anything about entertainment, I’ll shoot your dick off as soon as I can move again.
“Don’t shoot.” He raised black-gloved hands and chuckled. “Ah, hell, you are such a fuck-up. Come here.” Lonely jerked one of his gloves off and planted his fist on my chest, over my heart. “Huh.”
What?
“Warm. You’re going the wrong direction, tarnished one.” Lonely pulled his fist back, screeched a high-pitched crow screech, then punched me so hard that I felt my breastbone crack.
Icy blue lightning shot down my arms and legs. All my muscles spasmed at once. My lungs sucked in a breath and my heart stuttered like it was trying to make up for the last few days’ worth of missed beats. That fuck-you cold poured back into my bones.
I sat up, shivering and shaking so bad I was almost vibrating.
“Better than cocaine,” Lonely said, grinning.
Get me a gun, I told him.
Tempie
Are they here? I asked.
Yes. For a moment, Kathan pulled back his protective barrier and let me listen to the confusion of shooting and yelling and running boots. An acrid smell like burning plastic flooded my senses.
I felt a tear slip down my cheek. It’s time, then.
He wiped away the tear-track, swept the wet hair out of my eyes, and kissed my forehead. If I could keep you with me always, Temperance, just like this—
I know you would.
Outside the protective barrier, I heard foot soldiers yelling to their leader. Alphas and enforcers, looking to their commander for orders, saying something about another wave of troops.
Your body is safe here, Kathan told me as he left to join them. Stay.
I didn’t answer him. It was time.
There was a trick to staying separate and sovereign like Kathan did, but that was something I’d never been able to figure out. My pieces couldn’t move perfectly independent of one another. What my right hand did, my left hand knew all about.
One part of me screamed for Kathan. It begged and gibbered and whimpered for me to stay right where he’d told me to. It dug in its heels, trying to hold the other part of me back.
You need him. You can’t do what you’re trying to do. You’ve already ruined so much, now you’re going to ruin the one good thing that’s ever happened to us? What about tomorrow? What about next week? What are you going to do then? When you have to live with yourself and who you are and everything you let happen? Without him, there’ll be no one to shut off your brain. Every single second, every single minute of every single day, you’ll be stuck in here, stuck with yourself.
The worst thing was, that screaming junkie part of me was right. I did need Kathan. Without him, there wouldn’t be any escape from the thing I hated most in the world—myself.
At the edges of the junkie’s shrieking, I could feel the bowstring stretching. My mind wobbled and tried to slip. But if I let go now, I would never make it to the basement.
Kathan’s essence was right there, so close, so strong. The junkie howled, dying for the peace of nothingness, needing to be obliterated by his love and shattered by his too-intense way of looking at the world.
We could die in him and none of this would matter anymore! she wailed.
She was right. Oh, fuck me, she was right. The essence was right there, sweet, beautiful black fire to burn away all the pieces of me.
The bowstring wavered and I almost let go.
Don’t think about the essence. Don’t think about what it can do. Don’t think about how it makes you feel. Don’t think about tomorrow or next week or two seconds from now. There’s just right now. There’s just walking. Just keep walking.
The bowstring stretched tight again.
Go back, the junkie screamed. Go back! Please!
We can’t, I told her. It’s too late. It’ll never be like it was. Johnny went marching off to war.
The junkie shrieked.
The other piece of me kept walking.
The bow shook at full draw.
I only had to stay separate for a little bit longer. Just a couple more minutes. If the effort destroyed what was left of my brain, I wasn’t going to spend much time crying over it.
Desty
I felt like I’d just woken up from the deepest and most restful sleep of my life, then chugged a gallon of coffee. I was strong. My muscle fibers were twisting and snapping with electricity.
Power, Tempie had said. But she thought the power came from Kathan. That was the lie he’d wanted us to believe—that we needed him to become the Destroyer. But “bound as one” didn’t mean “bound as one to a fallen angel commander.” It just meant bound together, maybe in purpose or spirit.
Or fury.
I half-saw, half-felt my way through the darkness and blood to the door. I hit it. The cell’s padding muted the thud. I took a few steps back, felt the power zing through my body, ready to unleash hell. I rammed the door. Wood cracked and the padding on the inside split across a seam.
That door was the only thing standing between me and them. The only thing between me and revenge. I wasn’t going to be stopped by some padding and wood. I was the Destroyer. I rammed it again. The Godkiller. I was the answer to the prayers of every innocent who had been destroyed before me. A door was nothing.
On my next impact, the wood caved outward. The blood flowed through the rip in the padding. I dug my fingers into the tear and jerked the canvas and sound-proofing material away from the cracked door. Then I pulled my fist back and hammered the weak spot until I could force my arm through.
Metal bands had been riveted to the outside of the door as reinforcement, but they didn’t matter now. I felt around until my hand found the padlock and
latch. I jerked the padlock. The screws ripped out of the wood.
I shoved the door open with my hip and stepped out into the basement.
Movement on the stairs caught my attention. I snatched the largest splinter of door from the dirty cement floor—a club about a foot and a half long, tapering to a jagged point in my fist.
But the body on the stairs was Tempie. She was slumped over about halfway down the steps, holding her head in her hands. She looked up at me. I lowered the door-club. Blood ran from her nose, down her chin, dripping onto the step between her feet. The drops sounded like rain.
Blood swirled around us like smoke in a burning house. Blood poured from Tempie’s nose, probably coming straight from her brain. Blood dried on my legs, on my body, on my lips, reminders of the bloody gashes and bite marks I’d healed.
Tempie reached one hand out to me. It shook as if she didn’t have the strength to sustain the pose for long.
Her hand started to drop.
I lunged forward and grabbed it.
The second our fingers touched, Temperance Joann and Modesty Blaine McCormick ceased to exist as separate entities. The fury bound us together. We became one in the knowledge of our purpose.
All this time Kathan had been lying to us. He told us that by becoming his familiars, we would be given power like no human had ever known—that when he was commander of legions, he would elevate us to Destroyer—but the enthrallment was just his way of wielding the greatest weapon ever created. It was we who would have elevated Kathan to commander when we became the Destroyer, not the other way around.
We were the weapon. We were the power. We always had been. With or without Kathan, we were the Destroyer of Worlds, the Godkiller.
Angels, NPs, humans—they had done this to us. By degrees, by turns, they had systematically destroyed us. They turned our minds and our bodies against us, used us against each other and against ourselves. They enslaved us, raped us, tortured us, trapped us. They broke us until there was nothing left to break.
The whole time, God sat back and let them do it. He watched us bleed.
As the Destroyer, we knew the truth. We were created not only to destroy this world, but all worlds. Earth, Heaven, Hell. No one and nothing would survive.
Blood must be paid for with blood. Rivers of blood.
Anyone who didn’t die in the first hemorrhage was going to wish they had.
Tough
The Dark Mansion’s front lawn had turned into a siege zone. Every now and then you could see a muzzle flash, but most of the fighting outside seemed to be our people hunkered down behind the fallen angels’ vehicles and piles of debris. That firelight I’d seen was coming from a ball of flame that used to be one of the helicopters.
Once I was on my feet and the shaking had worn down to a low hum, Clare’s girlfriend handed over her rifle.
“I’ve got a backup,” she said when she saw me staring at her. She pulled a pistol-grip sawed-off shotgun out of the holster on her hip. “Here’s where we are—phase one’s inside. You just saw phase two go in. Everyone who couldn’t operate a traditional weapon is dug in out here, covering exits. No one’s seen the sword or the foot soldier you said had it yet. Unless something gives in the next five minutes, I’m calling in phase three.”
I pointed at her, then at the Dark Mansion to ask whether she was going in with the last phase.
She nodded and held up her sawed-off shotgun. “That’s why I brought my little buddy. Much better for close-up work.”
Five minutes until the last phase went in. After that, they could retreat at any second and then it was TBG Time. I needed to find a way to get to Desty and get her out right the hell now.
I looked over the hood of the Hummer. Nothing directly between me and the Dark Mansion but bodies. I tried not to see who they were, but I thought I recognized Tawny Hicks’s clothes and the black hoodie and black jeans that a kid Scout’s age had been wearing.
The mansion’s stone siding had taken a beating—scorch marks, broken tiles, scratches, and a couple lines of blue-white alcohol fire burning out. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail, but not far enough. It hit the ground a few yards from the steps. The glass exploded and blue-white fire spread out in a halo around the impact. It’d been so dry all summer that the scorched grass turned black almost immediately. The fire kept spreading, looking for new fuel.
The bottom half of one of the two arched Hell Windows on the south wall of the mansion was busted out. Through it I saw wings and fur and bodies. I tried to listen past the roaring of the chopper’s flames. Barking, yipping, screeching, yelling, gunshots.
Going in the front wasn’t an option, but phase one and phase two were keeping the fallen angels busy. Maybe I could sneak around the back and bust out a basement window, get in that way.
The nearest corner of the Dark Mansion was the east wing, the one facing the old fence row. With the light from the windows and that Molotov-fire messing up my night vision, I couldn’t make out anything but shadows over there. I thought I saw movement.
I checked the smashed-out Hell Window and the doorless front entry for shooters, then I hugged the rifle to my chest and ran for the east side of the mansion.
The thing I’d seen in the shadows over there started running at me. A body, long orange-red hair, pale skin, and a .45 with mother-of-pearl grips.
Willow? What the hell?
She stopped short when she saw me, raising the .45 into a shooter’s stance before she realized who I was. Just before she put a round in my face, it registered.
“Tough?” She lowered the gun, then took two running steps and pistol-whipped me.
I stumbled back a few steps.
“You jerk!” she yelled. “Let me think I was a part of this and then try to keep out? If Dodge was in on this, too—”
It was probably a good thing I didn’t have a voice anymore. Otherwise, I would’ve yelled at her for leaving her fucking kid with Owen while she ran off to get herself killed like Dodge. I grabbed Will’s arm and dragged her back into the shadows she’d just come out of.
“Where’s Dodge?” she asked. “Has anybody seen Rian or the sword yet? Which phase of the attack are we on? Where do I need to be?”
I really didn’t want her near the serious fighting or any place she might accidentally catch sight of Dodge’s body, so I touched her shoulder, pointed at the ground where we were crouching and slapped myself on the shoulder.
“I don’t…”
I pointed to my eyes, then over my shoulder at my back.
“Watch your back?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Where are you going?”
I pointed along the east wing of the mansion, then hooked my hand around.
“Okay.” She got up and held the .45 pointed at the ground. “Lead on.”
I shook my head, pointed to the ground where she was crouching, and mouthed the word Stay.
She opened her mouth to argue.
Something was moving behind her. Angel wings, black riot gear, rifle. I grabbed Will by the back of the neck and shoved her to the dirt.
No muzzle flash, just a burst of too-quiet shots. The rounds shattered my breastbone and fragmented in my chest.
Maybe it was because the bullets liquefied my heart and blew tunnels through my lungs, or maybe it was because I’d been focused on arguing with Will, not expecting to get shot. Whatever it was, the pain caught me off guard. It hadn’t hurt that bad when the foot soldiers filled me full of lead earlier. This time the pain radiated out from the bullet wounds in waves of hot and cold. My arms were dead weight. The rifle fell out of my hands. I dropped to one knee in the dirt.
“They’re coming around front!” Willow screamed. She scrambled to get to her feet and bring her .45 up to firing position. “Foot soldiers coming ar—”
The foot soldier who had shot me put two in Will’s forehead. Blood, bone fragments, brain, and orange hair exploded out the back of her head and splattered across my face and neck.
She dropped, all crumbled in on herself.
I tried to go after the foot soldier, but my legs wouldn’t move. The pain in my chest was getting worse, throbbing until I felt like I was going to puke. My head hung forward. Vamp venom and saliva dribbled out of my mouth onto my jeans. Except the venom didn’t taste right anymore. It tasted like blood.
I heard the thud of heavy boots hitting the ground and wings rustling. I managed to turn my head just enough to see the line of soldiers creeping toward the pasture.
The quiet, flashless shots—they had suppressors. That foot soldier had shot me and Will with a suppressor because he didn’t want to attract attention from up front. They were going to sneak around back of where the barn used to be, surround the humans and couple of NPs still dug in out front, and pick them off from behind. That was why Willow had been yelling—she’d been trying to warn everybody.
But who knew if anyone had heard her over the noise of everything else going on?
I had to stop the foot soldiers or at the very least attract enough attention for somebody up front to realize what was happening.
I couldn’t yell. I tried to reach for my rifle, but it felt like my arms were made out of ice blocks. They wouldn’t move.
The pounding in my chest was getting worse. Waves of pain washed all the way down my arms to the tips of my fingers now. My vision blurred with every wave, then sharpened back up.
The foot soldier who’d shot Will and me came my way. It took until he pulled out Mikal’s flaming sword for me to realize which dipshit he was.
“Enjoying that Destroyer blood?” Rian asked, a big dumb-fuck grin on his face. “Took it out of your girlfriend’s hide—and trust me, she did not want to give it up easy.” He chuckled. “There were a lot of things she didn’t want to give up easy. It got a little rough.”