A figure, gaunt even under its candy-striped parka and oversized cap, inches through. I open my mouth, ready to circumvent any signs of gibbering panic, but the rusalka makes a precipitous appearance, padding from bathroom to door. She seizes the new arrival by the crook of an arm and smiles. A wash of magic, faint, almost negligible. But enough. The stranger droops, docile, and the rusalka leads him triumphantly to a bench.
I watch as the rusalka cups the figure’s face, fingers rested under the jut of the malnourished chin. Her chest inflates and the newcomer imitates her. A silvery mist twirls from the latter’s nostrils, spiralling into the rusalka’s open mouth. She breathes again, the rusalka does. Deep. And I can see something go out of her victim, see them grow smaller, shrunken, sapped of substance, the light in their eyes dimmed, decayed by the rusalka’s appetite.
“Bet? Yes or no?” says the fox, barking each word, enunciating with elaborate care.
I glance back, disgusted. A soup kitchen, but not for the homeless, helpless people that wobble through the front door, convinced of altruism. Those people are just food. “So you eat these people—”
“Rupert! That is not important! That is not the hill that you should choose to die on!” The fox is almost shouting in his agitation. “I asked you a question! Are you playing! Will you place a bet! A bet! It is critical you tell me if you’d make a bet!”
“Sure. Fine. I—”
“Live.” His tongue lolls from a muzzle halfway to humanity, bone already shrinking into a mannish skull. “Or die?”
“What? That is completely not ominous at—”
Boom.
No fucking warning, not really; the sound comes milliseconds after the fact. The shock front takes us all unaware, too fast, too close, searing through the air. It hits hard. I feel bone give, and ribs snap, and tendons sever, even as the softer components of the human body are pulped, windpipe and intestines and all manner of tubular offal collapsing onto themselves.
I breathe. Or, at least, the body endeavours to breathe. I heave air into lungs that won’t inflate, pressure constricting around my chest, bones splintering through useless tissue. Every gasp sears through my nerve endings, agonizing. It takes a moment to develop a chronology of events: I’ve hit the wall, fallen over, and am now prone on the tiles, with a gut neatly bisected by a panel from the dishwasher, the dials somehow still ludicrously intact. A mass of exposed intestines slops over my apron, black with soot, or else burned.
“Shit.”
With that, the ceiling comes down.
“MR. WONG. MR. Wong, are you alive yet?”
Yet. The first motes of consciousness string together around the word, an utterance that catalyzes curiosity. Muzzily, my brain concludes that ‘yet’ is a weird adverb to use in that sentence, something that should be expressed.
I gum the air, smack my lips over sounds that should have been words, but arise as dumb mewling. This is not good.
“Mr. Wong.”
Something pries open my eyelids, fingernails scraping over corneal membrane. The world goes white. I flinch seconds after the fact, reflexes crippled by internal trauma, sensory ganglia still reviving. I lick blood from my mouth. My tongue strokes across a thread of dangling nerve. I snap it at the root. Hopefully, it didn’t go anywhere important.
“Mr. Wong.”
“Will you just fuck off. Ham kha chan.”
Laughter, completely pleasant, disarmingly reminiscent of the Boss’ frothy, friendly chuckle. “We’ll take that as a ‘yes.’”
More hands come, brace against my back and shoulders, propel me into a sitting position. And I scream. A long, wet note of anguish that goes on longer than I’d thought I had breath or dignity for. The blinding sunlight resolves into silhouettes, then placid, smiling faces. I blink through a bloodied film, take in the half-circle of observers.
“Don’t tell me,” I slur. “Mormon boy-band?”
Polite chortling all around. The men—no, not just men, but women too, with slicked-back hair and identical smiles, immaculately suited—exchange knowing expressions, before fixating on me afresh. “No. We are Vanquis.”
“Oh.” I rummage through myself for something more articulate to say. “Oooooh.”
“We have a proposition.” One voice, twenty-six mouths. Not a choir of voices, or even one voice duplicated by twenty-six larynxes. Just one voice, emanating from the general vicinity of twenty-six mouths, all pantomiming the words in unison.
“Uh huh.” I take inventory of the adjacent damage. The soup kitchen’s gone, every profit margin buried in chunks of rubble like broken teeth. My legs are doing marginally better: one borders on functional, even if the other is nothing but cords of bleeding muscle, skewered by bone. I run fingers up my arm, find untattooed skin.
Right. I forgot about that.
“Join us.”
“You’re not selling this really well.” I massage a thigh, finally coherent enough to register two important details. First, that I’m in the process of healing, as opposed to fully healed, an anomalous occurrence given past resurrections. The second is that I have no memory of being dead, no recollection of Diyu or the interstitial areas between: only emptiness, only dark.
Which means that something else had reached into the abyss and fished out my soul, something big enough, powerful enough, to supersede Diyu’s authority. The thought rakes ice-water down my spine, freezing my tongue in its seat.
“Like the scars of old London, like the poverty of Hackney, the old pantheons cannot stand in the way of progress.”
“Guys, I keep hearing variations of this. Tell me something new.” If I keep them talking long enough, I might be able to get into a situation where I can, if not run, then at least hobble away with reasonable efficiency.
“The old pantheons will fall, must fall to make way for the new.” A restless energy glissades from face to vapidly smiling face, never lingering long enough to be mapped or measured, only to be acknowledged. Whatever that force is, it wants me to know its watching. “Join us. We’ve loved you from the moment you first breathed data, and we’ll love you until the world burns. We will never abandon you. We will never be like them.”
“So I’ve heard.” Trapping fingers around my knee, I brace myself, squeeze my face into an anticipatory grimace, and wrench. The joint torques into position, overshoots; I feel the splinters of my fibula grind into the muscle, feel bone gouge furrows through subcutaneous tissue. I howl into a closed fist, pain spasming in magnesium-white flashes.
Fortunately, the Vanquis agents are too preoccupied with their sales pitch to notice.
“—the Fathers have fled, they’ve shut the doors. It is only their children who linger, lost pups, starving—”
The air glistens, oily with new magic, fresh-minted power crackling with the smell of burnt wire. A rapid-fire rotation of images, flickering like a zoetrope: black cables, pregnant with data; families in cramped houses; moonlight oiling down the neck of a bottle; a sorcery of sub-clauses and subliminal marketing, credit cards piled up like a dragon’s hoard.
I blink, and the hallucinations fade, a gauzy overlay, almost thin enough to ignore. Vanquis’ cronies continue, voice plunging to hissing whispers. Their soliloquy fragments, alters in delivery; now relayed in pieces, first by one body and then another, each new conduit palsied by its passage.
“—a new order comes—”
“That’s nice, guys. Any freebies? You know, any ‘get in on the ground floor, and we’ll throw in a prize’ kinda thing.” Again. I steel myself, suck three quick puffs of air, and pull at my knee. This time, I’m prepared for the momentum, but the pain still gets me, and a choirboy shriek wheezes between my teeth. But it works. Cartilage and ligament merge, accelerated by eldritch forces, and anchor the unmoored patella to the socket.
Three more breaths. I count to ten, an incantation against agony, my vision wavering.
“—a new order grows—”
“By grow, do you mean ‘organically’ or th
rough paid—whatever the fuck social media calls it—” I pant, grinning through bloodied teeth. Wobbling, I knuckle into a squat, the heels of my palms digging into bitumen. No one has come out to gawk at the tableau yet, leaving me to wonder if we’ve been relocated into a discrete pustule of reality, only tangentially attached to normal.
Not that it matters.
Focus, Rupert. One. Two. Three deep breaths, and I’m up. Every molecule of my person immediately objects to the sudden machismo, pain denticulating through the capillaries, bullet-bitter on the tongue. I spit blood and stagger, but I don’t fall. That’s the important part. I don’t fall.
A faraway roar, a warscream.
“—from the diseased pustulence of the old—”
“Yes, but tell me...” I shake like an old drunk, limbs jellied, every trembling step an Olympian triumph. The rain coagulates into silver, washes the London skyline away. I breathe pain, raw and hot and charnel. God. “Tell me how you really feel.”
Their voices become a cascade.
“What we need—”
“—we need—”
“—we need—”
“—we need—”
An asphyxiating twitch of magic, like a noose drawn taut. I keep moving. It clips into a rhythm: three breaths, a few rickety steps diagonally, away from the crescent of possessed salespeople, cupped palms dripping threads of rain. One. Two. Three. Step.
Inefficient as it might be, the repetition hypnotizes, numbs awareness of the ambient hurt that clicks like a punctuation at the end of every motion. I’m halfway to convincing myself that it’s just a trick of the gray matter when Vanquis’ myriad voices consolidate, straight-salvo into the medulla oblongata. “—is your skin.”
“Sorry. What?”
The air pulses, tightening. But Vanquis—a moment’s inspiration tells me it’s a single distributed entity, rather than a creche of brainwashed goons—never gets the opportunity to reply. A white van howls around a corner, and I see Demeter hanging from the window, literally blazing with glory.
Also, an assault rifle.
I throw myself onto the road, hands over my head, as she opens a cannonade, and gore, syrupy with pulped tissue, rains down. The artillery fire is relentless, explosive, precise. Fuck natural physics. Demeter’s loaded her ammunition with godfire or whatever it is that deities cram inside the little lead cartridges, an apocalypse in every bullet.
Boom. One last time.I peer up in time to see a man burst into chunks, red offal and bits of spine. Brain flops through the air in spongy pieces. As his body, chewed-up and spat out by the patrons of ballistic trauma, sags onto the ground, the van comes to stop. Demeter slides from the window and into the driver’s seat, kicking the door open in that same sharp motion.
“Get in.”
I don’t wait for her to ask twice.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT.”
“Oh?”
“I can’t stop thinking about it. How did they get a bomb into the kitchen? The doors were locked. The wards were untampered with. There were no signs of forced entry. I know; I checked. But they got in and they got out without a whisper. Someone has to be working with them. Also—”
I pause in my stride.
“Also, why are there so many grandmothers—”
Demeter marches me past a ludicrous diorama of geriatric women, thronging the courtyard like snoozing cats; eyes glazed, mouths slack. They knit and gossip, voices languid, play chess and read, perform all the rituals expected of old women. Except there’s no sun and it is freezing, and they’re clumped in the rain in flimsy gowns, newspapers melting from blueing fingers.
“Because Vanquis is still an infant, concerned with”—she weaves her fingers in a complicated motion—“patterns, the fiction of itself. Old people mean too much to the desperate. So much, in fact, that they are necessary to Vanquis’ identity.”
“And what’s that?” I limp along beside her, arm held over freshly sutured ribs, mouth burning with the memory of her lips. She’d kissed me once during the trip. Lightly. Perfunctorily. A honeyed warmth that spread across my skin, piecing together whatever was left to fix. Not perfectly—Demeter lacked either the resources or the willingness to expend them—but she did enough.
“Vanquis is...” We enter the council building. Demeter’s face, robed in shadow, is unearthly, eerie. A tinge of violence lingers, trails behind her like the smell of gunpowder and boiling steel, and I’m reminded again that gods of fertility only ever want blood sacrifices for Christmas. “I don’t know. Like so many other things, it began with a desire, a need, if you will. In this case, a requirement for accessible short-term loans.”
“You’re kidding.”
She pins me with a glare and I lapse into silence, cataloging the modifications that have been made to the interior instead. Every door we pass is bolted shut, strung with chains and padlocks, reinforced with thick wooden panels. They’re under siege. The thought prickles, rust-edged, dangerous.
“You’d be amazed how many people pray for temporary salvation. Nothing lasting. Nothing that might require a lifetime of devotion. Something small. Something to get them by for the next day, the next week. And Vanquis grew swollen on that need.” Demeter sighs, mounting the stairs to the Grecian lair. I hesitate for the sliver of a heartbeat, long enough to register the way the light follows her like a dog, and how the darkness, musty and absolute, slinks after.
I fall into formation, shadows nipping at my heels.
“It became a god. Not just a manifestation of the company, but a god of debt, a god of desperation.” Demeter’s brow pinches with distaste.
I trap my tongue against the ceiling of my mouth, consider the next words, the worth of a quip. A dull ache permeates my body still, pooling in the joints, where muscles were foreshortened and tendons stretched too far; nerves are fused into balls of hurt in the marrow, casualties of unfavorable circumstances. I miss Bob, and Joe, and Billie Jean, and every spirit to have etched a tenancy agreement into the ledger book of my soul. They might have been literally eating me out of house and bone, but they were a reassuring last resort. A stopgap.
Just like Vanquis.
Unsettled, I squelch down the epiphany, say nothing. Instead, I focus on placing one foot after another. We all need a few lies to get through the day, after all. Today, this is mine. Outside, the world pales, white and unfriendly, a cold reminder that I’m a long, long way from normal.
EVERYONE IS HERE.
Bizarrely, the apartment reeks of terror. Unwashed armpits, fear-sweat. Human odors, rancid, pheromone-laden, utterly incongruous against this spread of manifested myths.
Demeter says nothing as she vanishes into the clamor, leaving me to fend for myself. I mill slowly, ignoring the knots of conversation; the gods standing with glasses of water in shaking hands, Orpheus sitting illuminated at the window, Cerberus’ head on his lap; the nymphs, the ram-horned satyrs, fornicating anxiously on a stretch of carpet.
Even Helenus is present, nailed to a wall, intestines drooling from the open cavity of his torso, pink and gray and pictograms of gold. He has a spigot jammed into his wrist. Someone—a squat, strange figure, broader along the shoulder than they are tall—is pouring themselves a drink.
I go past. Hades and Poseidon sit enthroned on two lazy chairs opposite each other, regal as kings, ridiculous as sauced-up uncles at Chinese New Year’s. At my arrival, Hades tips his chin.
“Rupert—”
“Hades, you fucking asshole, you piece of shit—” Demeter’s voice, thunderous.
The gods fall silent as she shoulders back into view, face white, lips peeled from the gums. It crackles from her, that rage of hers, singed-earth and lava, bubonic, all-encompassing, the end of the world clasped in the quiver of a choked syllable.
“How could you?” Under her anger, there’s something else: a hurt that’s entirely too familiar, lodged so deep that it might as well be budded from the marrow. Loss; singing like the l
ast, lonely star at the end of time. Her voice drops to a hiss. “I—how could you?”
Poseidon is on his feet before Hades can concoct a reply, sinewy arms held out either in affection or to restrain. Demeter ignores him, tries to walk past, but he grabs her, traps her arms under a muscular limb.
As the goddess struggles, snarling, Hades finally speaks, his voice sanded down by repeated offense, unsurprised. “She is my wife. There is nothing untowards about how I treat her.”
“You—” Demeter buries her nails in Poseidon’s flesh. Blood weeps in luminous strands, honey-red, slightly gelatinous. “That is not how you treat anyone.”
“Her body is mine.” Hades, patient. “As mine is hers. And what takes place between spouse and spouse has nothing to do with you.”
“I am her mother.” A ragged expulsion of air, spittle. The vines in her hair come alive, barbed, needle-petalled flowers tearing at the square of Poseidon’s chin. Injuries gape like mouths on his skin, healing as quickly as they appear. Despite the damage he sustains, Poseidon’s expression stays cloyingly fond, like someone indulging a rambunctious kitten. He grins at her, his lips to an ear, crooning reassurances even as Demeter’s rage devours him, again and again, tearing the divine meat from his skull.
“Yes,” Hades replies, flat. “You are.”
I glance around us. The other deities have returned to their conversations, their brittle chuckling; bodies angled ever-so-slightly away from the elephant in the room.
“You’re embarrassed.” I don’t realize I’m the one who has spoken until I’m skewered by their attention, incredulous, distaste in their fine-boned faces. Someone laughs into a hand.
“It’s a family affair,” Ananke declares from an armrest, knee gathered to her chest, sleek frame scaled in kevlar. The loose curls are gone, shorn to fit her newly martial veneer. “Stay out of it.”
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