by Tim Marquitz
Longinus had come here thinking we would be dealing with demons and angels, magical snack packs he could use to refuel and heal his wounds with, but we’d been dumped onto the barren planet of doom. These folks we were fighting were nothing like Xyx. They were the indigenous species of Feluris. They might as well be human for all the power they wielded. That’s why Gorath was plundering the last of the magical resources.
Weaker than Longinus before he’d come through the gate, all that time spent in the containment case, he was probably sucking wind. Longinus had to have thought of that and probably figured he’d still be the stronger of the two even after all the mileage. It didn’t look like he counted on Gorath having minions already. And we weren’t gonna get anywhere if these schlubs tore up the ex-AC before we got to Gorath.
While I wanted Karra back as much, if not more, than he did, we both knew this was his show. He’d be the one to take out Gorath. I was just the assist, and this looked as good a time as any to get on that.
I put my guns away and drew on the tiny ball of energy that wormed inside me. While just a pipsqueak on the ruler that measured magical dick size, what I lacked in girth and length, I made up for with imagination. My power sputtered and roared to life. I couldn’t help but smile at the feeling. It was like eating Häagen-Dazs and getting a blowjob at the same time; fan-fucking-tastic.
My arms out to my side, I started walking toward the mass of aliens that were harrying Longinus. The ground trembled beneath my feet as my magic swirled around like a billion-armed octopus. Mystical tendrils snatched up every rock and stone and piece of rubble they came across, gathering them and drawing them back to the glistening cocoon I’d woven about my body. The debris stuck, each piece clacking into place before the tendrils ran off for more. After just a moment, I was completely covered in the wreckage that littered the field. Focused on Longinus as they were, the aliens didn’t even realize I was still there.
“Hey, assholes!” I shouted, amplifying my voice with a dab of magic. The sound echoed off the surrounding buildings and drowned out everything. The world went quiet as the echoes died away. Every eye turned in my direction. I took one last step, my stony footstep thumping loudly in the silence. “I suggest you duck, Longinus.”
I smiled, willing the stones at my face to mimic the movement all while imagining I looked like the Thing from the Fantastic Four. “It’s clobbering time!” With no other warning, I charged forward and lit the imaginary fuses behind each and every single piece of rock. Then I set them off.
It was like Motorhead played a concert in my head.
A sonic boom erupted in my ears and the debris flew in every direction…almost. Knowing how much it would suck if I ripped Longinus’ head off his shoulders with my little display, I aimed the wreckage so it stayed a couple feet above the ground. As long as he stayed down, we were good. The aliens stared like inebriated lemmings, not even realizing Longinus had hit the deck. By the time they figured out what was happening, it was too late.
The pieces of stony shrapnel ripped into them. There was no time for screams. Holes appeared all across the orange and black flesh of the aliens, dots of daylight that suddenly gushed with green fluids. The aliens danced with frantic rhythm under the barrage, unable to fall. The bloody stones traveled through to ricochet off the nearby walls. From there, they clattered to the ground, bouncing and rolling to collect once more on the field. The bodies were the last to topple. They collapsed like boneless sacks of soup, wet splats resounding until the last of the corpses oozed to earth. A gloomy hush settled over the area.
Longinus raised his head and looked around at the mess. “It appears you’re not completely worthless, after all.” He grinned as he climbed to his feet, obvious amusement brightening his face and muting the sting of his barb. After surveying the scene, he walked over and slapped me on the back with a meaty hand. “Well done.”
He didn’t say anything about his condition or why I’d had to go nuclear to keep him alive, so I didn’t either. Pride was a sin us demons really took to heart. We both understood then that our jaunt into the otherworld to rescue Karra was far more dangerous than we’d anticipated. We weren’t gonna be strolling in on Gorath and handing out an easy ass-whooping. We were in for a scrap.
A muffled grunt rumbled from under a nearby pile of dripping corpses. Longinus spun about and stared after the source, my own eyes tracking it down. A flutter of movement drew our focus and both of us walked over to it. Longinus’ grin flared up full force.
“Look what we have here.” He reached down into the puddle of alien glop and grabbed something that put up futile resistance, pulling it out of the wet wreckage. It was the big alien’s arm, followed by the rest of him. On the ground when I’d blasted his buddies, he’d escaped being stoned. He’d still been shot, mind you, but that hadn’t killed him. Not yet, at least.
“Why did you attack us?” Longinus asked, his tone of voice triggering disturbing images, which bubbled to life in my mind.
The alien just lolled in his grip. He was conscious, but not really all there. Not wearing armor like the others, his side was a bloody mess. His shirt was ripped free of the wounds I’d given him, and he’d wadded it up and used it to stanch the blood flow until he’d gotten too weak to hold it. It lay beside him, soaked with green.
“Lonn-loong—” he stuttered, finally raising a finger at his inability to form the word. He pointed at Longinus. “Yuuu. Afff-tur.” Longinus let him drop, and he slumped to the ground with a quiet, bubbling sigh.
“Why would he be after you?” I asked, the alien’s attempt at speaking having finally made some semblance of sense.
Longinus shrugged.
“He is one of the Eidolon.” A quiet voice snapped our heads around. Rala stood there amidst the ruin, the old man no longer with her. She pointed at a small, black spot almost invisible under the flow of the alien’s gory side.
I leaned down and wiped the blood away, revealing what looked like a tattoo. It was an image of a phoenix, its flaming wings rising up out of the smoking ashes portrayed at the bottom of the tat. The edges were reddened and slightly swollen, as though it were fresh ink.
“That is the symbol of the Eidolon.”
“Your master mentioned them earlier, girl,” Longinus said. “Who are they?”
“They are the servants of the alien, the one who steals the life from our world.” She hocked up a nice phlegm ball and spit it at the alien. He groaned at its impact but did nothing to wipe it from his cheek.
Longinus yanked the alien back up, crouching so their faces were just inches apart. “Tell us where the rest of your people are.”
The alien stared for a moment, saying nothing, and then a shudder rolled through him. He went limp a second later, his eyes rolling upward. Longinus growled low in his throat and let the Felurian fall once more.
“I can tell you where more of his kind may be found,” Rala offered, “but only if you intend to kill more of them.”
Longinus nodded with enthusiasm. “That we do, girl.”
And with that, we were committed.
Nine
After Rala told us what she knew about a sect of Eidolon who had taken up residency relatively close by in recent days, I shooed her off. While my instincts weren’t red-flagging her as someone I shouldn’t trust—no more than my usual paranoia opined—there was just something about all this that felt weird.
Longinus and I had searched more of the bodies and found more of the phoenix tattoos scattered about the dead alien bodies. They didn’t all seem to have them, but then again, it’s not like I was picking up squishy meat divots to check. There were still enough to make it obvious these folks were all part of the same crew.
Rala had said the Eidolon had come to Feluris about a week back, which corresponded with Gorath’s arrival. While the timing was perfect, it still seemed kind of coincidental unless he was packing more power than we suspected. It didn’t seem possible he could have gathered anyone to his side so
quickly without a show of force, of some kind. Of course, he could well have set things up ahead of time, somehow. My head spun with the possibilities.
“These aliens carry nothing to show their purpose.” Longinus shook green goop from his hands. It hit the ground with a moist plop.
That was something else bothering me. “The big one said they were after you.”
“We’ve established that.”
I rolled my eyes at his obtuseness. “Why?”
“Perhaps they are tracking us. In a world devoid of magical energy, I suspect my presence is an obvious beacon.”
While I didn’t want to say it, Longinus wasn’t but five feet from me and I could barely feel his energy pinging off my senses. Someone would have to be looking for him specifically to notice his power, and only if they themselves were charged up. I changed tack. “Okay, that’s possible, but how would the Eidolon know your name?”
He turned and stared at me as though I’d asked the dumbest question ever, but the glimmer in his eyes told me he was thinking about it, at least.
“Gorath has no idea who you are.”
“I’m Karra’s father, damn it.” He spit the words out.
I sighed. “How would he know that? Do you think she told him anything?”
“Of course she wouldn’t.”
“Exactly. Karra wouldn’t tell that bastard shit, and we both know that.” I let that sink in for a few seconds to emphasize what he already knew but was simply too angry to accept. “And since none of the aliens we’ve encountered since we’ve been here have survived to report your presence, how the hell would Gorath know you were here in this universe, let alone trying to save her?”
He harrumphed and paced in a tight circle. “It doesn’t matter, Triggaltheron. We need—”
“It does matter, and that’s what you’re not getting.” He stopped and glared at me but I went on. “Gorath doesn’t even know you exist. He wants Lucifer and…” I started to say what I believed was the purpose of kidnapping Karra, but decided against it, “…for whatever reason, he thinks Karra is good bait.” I went on before he started thinking too hard about that last bit. Realizing Gorath was likely holding Karra so he could collect the real chum—which was me—wasn’t a road I wanted to go down just then. Longinus would have made the swap so fast it would have given me whiplash. “It makes no sense that he would send people to hunt you when it was me that screwed up his plans on Earth and sent him scrambling here in the first place. This,” I spun in a circle, waving my hands to encompass the chunky chaos strewn across the field, “is all wrong.”
Longinus shook his head. “The why doesn’t matter.” His voice was like a rumbling river freed from a shattered dam. “I’m going to tear these Eidolon limb from limb and find my daughter.”
As smart as he was, it always came down to power in his world. Hulk smash! Longinus had never had to scrape by on his wits or contacts, never had to rationalize a problem from the ground up because he’d always been able to muscle his way through it. Strength was his answer, as it often was with the supernaturals in his league. Since it succeeded every other time, he didn’t feel the need to change his tactics.
I didn’t live in that world and never have. More often than not, I’d gotten by with being smarter (or luckier) than the folks trying to kill me, slipping through a situation by the hair on my shriveled nut sack rather than whipping them out and beating folks down with them. None of this made sense from that perspective. If Gorath had sent the Eidolon after Longinus, he had a reason and it wasn’t that he thought they’d succeed in killing him. The aliens we’d fought were grunts, the big one just a larger variety of cannon fodder. None of them packed the kind of power to take out Longinus. They could wear him down, but…
And there it was.
“Damn it. He’s trying to weaken us…you.”
“With this?” He motioned to the corpses. “He’s throwing flies at a bull.”
“This particular bull has had his horns dulled.” The words were out before I could think to filter them.
Longinus’ eyes narrowed, and I could feel his power building like the red at his cheeks. “I hear cowardice in your voice, Triggaltheron, not wisdom.”
I chuckled, unable to hold it back. “Well, I sure as fuck don’t want to die. That’s what you’re hearing, and this feels like a setup to me.” As dim as I could be sometimes, I’d been setup enough times to know what one felt like. This had setup written all over it.
“We came to face down this Gorath. If he is leading us closer to him, then what do we have to lose?”
Besides our lives and Karra’s, our pride, and quite possibly our watertight anal fortitude? I guess nothing. “If he’s figured out we’re here, hunting him down, he knows, firsthand in fact, just how taxing the journey is. It seems to me like he’s trying to wear us down, you specifically seeing how you’re the real threat, before we make it to that final confrontation. Can you not see that?”
“So you would risk my daughter’s life while we chase the tail of Jesus’ pet rather than follow the clues we’ve uncovered?”
It was like arguing with a wall; a really, really, really, thick one. “That’s not what I’m saying…not exactly.”
Longinus drew a deep breath and let it out in a huff. He held his hand out before him, and I felt a sudden spike of magical energy. A blue dot glimmered to life in his palm as his power faded. He tossed the blue thing to me, and I caught it, realizing it was a mystical gem similar to the one I’d used to draw Mihheer out of DRAC headquarters.
“It appears we have different ideas as to what is best for Karra, and we’ve no time to argue which is best.” The inference was that my way sucked. “I will follow the Eidolon scum to their hive and find what I can there. Do what you think is best.” He motioned to the gem. “Should you need assistance, you can use the gem to contact me.”
The blue dot throbbed in my hand so I slid it into my pocket. This was stupid, but we’d wasted enough time arguing already. Longinus was dead set on chasing after the phantom bread crumbs that had been laid out before us. There was nothing I could do to convince him it was a mistake, so I just nodded. He stared at me for a long moment, as if waiting for me to argue some more, and then turned away when he realized I wasn’t gonna. Longinus stormed off without another word.
I stood there until he walked into the shadows of the buildings and slipped between them to disappear from sight. As much as I didn’t want to be left alone on this alien planet full of people out to kill us, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Gorath was leading us into a trap and Longinus was walking right into it. The trail might eventually lead to Karra, but by the time we got there, we’d be too weak to save her…or me.
My stomach fluttered, but it wasn’t the cowardice Longinus had ascribed to me; it was the sad pang of guilt and uncertainty. I hadn’t been afraid to follow him. Well, not afraid for me, at least. If what I suspected was true, Gorath was leading Longinus to his death, but without me there, he’d have nothing to use against Lucifer, which was his ultimate goal. That bought me—and Karra—a little more time to figure something out while he and Longinus went at it.
A stranger in a strange land, I only had two sources of information available to me. The first had led Longinus on his way so that was covered. It was up to me to check with the other.
Ten
It hadn’t been that long since we’d talked to Jesus’ go-to-guy, but I wasn’t exactly spoiled with options. He might not have had time to figure anything out yet, but Longinus had been too busy arguing with him earlier to ask anything beyond the obvious. It was possible he knew something even if he hadn’t heard anything specific about Karra or Gorath. Just by living here and being an information merchant, he would have knowledge that might help me to understand what the Eidolon were and the deeper reasons as to why they were here. Maybe there was a clue in all that to lead me in the right direction.
I made my way through the city as discreetly as I could, wishing I had my ho
odie with me. It’s hard to be inconspicuous when you’re pinkish and everyone else is orange and striped. As before, most of the people I came across darted off in the other direction or crossed the street to avoid me once they realized I was there. They cast sneaky glances my direction, but none of them bothered to look outright or engage me in any way.
With all the fighting and the arrival of the Eidolon to scour the remains of Feluris, they must have been shell shocked. I couldn’t blame them. At least it made things a little easier on me. The general populace—unlike that of Earth—wasn’t gunning for each other out in the open, every stare a challenge. The Felurians wanted nothing to do with different right now; they’d had enough. Back home, however, different would have made me a target. Maybe this place wasn’t so bad, after all.
Then again, in all my wanderings, I hadn’t seen a single liquor store or titty bar anywhere in town. That sure as shit knocked it down a few pegs on my all-time favorite vacation hotspot list. It might be an okay place to stop for gas and cookies, but you damn well didn’t want to be stuck here. Sadly, that’s what we were until we’d scooped up Karra and returned to God’s cloud bunker with Longinus reporting for duty. That would make for an interesting reality TV show. If I didn’t die in the middle of the conflagration, maybe I could sell the rights and get out of the supernatural business for good.
Yeah, and donkey shit takes like chocolate.
Now, more than ever, I realized why life had been so interesting since Lucifer went on hiatus. It might not have been public knowledge I was his son, but there had to be some damage magnet sewn into my ass, which drew his enemies to me. That was why he’d offered me the position of Anti-Christ, why he wanted me to be more active in the politics and powers of Hell. He knew, sooner or later, people would find out who I was and they’d come after me. I’d inherit the burdens of Hell whether I wanted them or not.