by Levi Black
“Huh,” I grunt. “Who knew?”
“Historians.”
Ephraim brays at this, his laughs turning into choking coughs.
“Nobody likes a smartass,” I say.
“That was some funny shit,” Ephraim says. “Especially coming from such a dour god like him.”
The Man in Black tilts his head. “She and I were discussing my humor just outside of your ward earlier.”
“She doesn’t think you’re funny at all, I take it?”
“She fails to appreciate the joke her existence is.” The Man in Black shrugs. “It is one of her shortcomings.”
I move, making the chain attached to me rattle loudly. “Enough talking like I’m not right here.”
They both look at me.
Time to get back on track and figure out a way to get free.
“So, you have a book, some gloves, and a shitty barbeque joint in the middle of nowhere. What’s the point?”
Ephraim drops his pipe into a pocket on his apron. “I also have my Baphomatic 12-gauge pump shotgun—”
“That’s the gun that spits fire?”
He nods. “You’ll allow the clever title as it is mine.” His fingers drop and brush the handle of my sword at his waist. “And now I have Oathbreaker.” He points at me. “And once we start the butchering of you I’ll have that fancy bit of jewelry around your throat. I don’t know what it is, but I bet it ain’t a fashion accessory.”
I swallow and feel the metal torc against my throat.
If he finds a way to use the magick of the torc he will be able to find more gods, wish them here to his wards, and keep building his power.
I don’t know what his game is and I don’t care; we’ve talked enough for me to know that Ephraim having more power is not a good thing. He’s a collector of magick objects.
Oh shit.
“Where’s my coat?”
Inside my coat are the Aqedah and the soul gem of Cthulhu and who knows what else. I don’t know what Ephraim could do with any of it, but again, nothing good.
He points to one of the tables and there sits a box made of some form of clear glass and held shut by a flip clasp with a pin in it. Darkness roils around inside it, slamming against the walls of it and folding back into itself to try again. Each time it throws itself against the lid the clasp of it jiggles, but the pin stays firmly in place.
He steps to it, places his hand on the lid, and touches the pin.
The darkness goes crazy.
It thrashes and flails and from the box comes a high-pitched whine that makes the teeth in the back of my mouth ache because I feel it more than hear it and it makes me acutely aware that I don’t have the voice of the coat in my mind and the loss of it cuts like a glass shard.
He pulls the pin with blunt fingers, keeping his other palm flat on the top of the box. Once the pin is removed, the clasp falls and the lid rises just a crack, but it is enough for the whine to blossom in my brain as a wild alien scream of longing and fear and anger and it all wraps my head like a wet towel and I recognize the voice, the one I have lived with for weeks now, lived with it babbling at me anytime I am awake.
The coat surges out of the paper-thin opening in a long ribbon, spooling out in an eyeblink toward me. I lunge toward it, wanting the comfort of it back around me, the protection.
Ephraim slams the lid shut with a grunt.
The ribbon of coat falls from the air, cut off from the host body. It flutters to the floor as Ephraim pushes the pin back in place.
I shout in rage before I realize it.
Box secured, Ephraim picks up the scrap of coat, fingers working to roll it into a tube of blackness. He winks at me and tosses it into his mouth.
He chews and swallows.
“That was just divine, even raw,” he says. “I can imagine the crowd will go wild tomorrow if we offer fried Seraphim skin.”
The tears are in my eyes. “How could you do that?”
“Cut it into strips, batter it in a buttermilk and egg wash, roll it in flour and salt and pepper, dip it in the wash again, roll it one more time and then into the deep fryer for, oh”—he looks up at the ceiling, calculating—“probably eight minutes.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Not likely, little girl, not unless I choke on my Brunswick stew tomorrow, but I don’t anticipate that happening.”
Pain sears my ears as the room fills with a spike of howling, undulating sound.
Shupnikkurat screams out and as it fades I turn to look. She jerks in her chains, scooting lower on the rack.
Her stomach rolls.
Her labia convulses, parting like a gigantic flower, and from inside her comes one dripping hoof attached to a long leg as spindly and multi-jointed as a spider’s.
Ephraim grins.
“Showtime!”
58
EPHRAIM IS IN front of the Black Goat Goddess, one hand clasping the hoof of the leg flailing from her birth canal, the other waving in the air and throwing yellow sparks of etheric energy as he howls out an incantation that turns the air thick like a soup of humidity. It smells electric, the burnt-ozone scent of coitus rising up through the air and rolling out even to where I stand.
“What’s happening?” I ask the Man in Black.
He stares eagerly at the scene as it plays out, wicked sharp teeth biting into his lower lip as he watches. “You call it the miracle of birth.”
Is he … breathy?
Another leg and a weird thing that flails like a tentacle squelch their way out of Shupnikkurat.
Ephraim grunts and leans back, pulling, muttering the incantation through clenched teeth.
“Why are you excited?” I ask.
“There is nothing more chaotic than the birth of a godchild. Sliding into existence on this realm where it will kick and scream and bite and thrash its will out on the reality around it. It will do everything in its power to form its life into what it wants it to be despite the fact that this reality will be resistant, will oppose the very existence of it from the get.” He pulls his eyes away from the spectacle. His face has drawn narrow, almost skullish; the dusky skin goes shiny over the ridges of cheek, chin, and brow. His eyes glitter in their caves, tiny firelights of reflection in a mosaic as if they were segmented like that of a fly. “And it is the culmination of lust we watch, the crescendo of coitus. It … arouses me.”
Ew.
I did not need that information.
His face jerks back toward Ephraim and Shub Niggurath.
A bouquet of spindly legs flail around Ephraim’s arms and shoulders, and the sleek haunches they are attached to hang out. Some of the hooves clatter on the floor, beating out an abstract tattoo of sound that is anything but music. The tentacle is a tail, or where a tail should be, and whips around, suckered mouths gaping and closing, slinging amniotic ichor in long, flimsy strings.
I look away, my eyes finding Ashtoreth.
She’s awake and weeping, tears the size of my thumbnails rolling down her cheeks and splashing off her jawline, and she makes some low moaning sound that combines with the bang and clatter of the hooves on the floor and the grunting squeal from the fertility goddess giving birth and all of it climbs into me and makes me clench deep inside, not in a sex way, but similar, a hollow ache that settles behind my pelvis in the drum of my empty, never-used uterus.
Jesus fuck.
I close my eyes and breathe through it, shutting everything down to get control of my own body, following all the training I did for so many years after that horrible night long ago.
When I open them Ephraim is hauling the offspring free.
It falls to the floor with a squelch and a gush of amniotic fluid that fills the air with the sickly-sweet odor of spoiled honey. It’s not much smaller than Ephraim, who looms over it, still holding it up by one leg. It kicks with the others, jerking in his grip and slipping free.
“You’re a wriggly little bastard, ain’tcha?!” Ephraim chuckles.
&nbs
p; The offspring lurches away, driven by flailing limbs and sliding on the linoleum lubricated by its own afterbirth. It has too many legs to stand, like someone has taken a half-dozen newborn fawns and bound them together as a sick joke. Its face is long and divided above its snout with a ridge of bone. Curling horns form a crown above a pronounced brow line, swooping over and around a scattering of wide almond-shaped eyes that roll about in their sockets full of too much intelligence to not know fear. One side of its face smears across the floor; the other blinks in the fresh light.
It mewls a thin, choking mewl and it almost bends me in half with the raw terror it encapsulates.
Ephraim’s hand closes on one of the horns and he hauls the offspring up to his chest as if it weighs nothing.
Oathbreaker glitters in his other hand.
I scream, “No!” and lunge forward, legs driving me toward them.
The shackle on my ankle jerks me short, yanking me to the floor as he slits the offspring’s throat in one swift stroke.
He laughs at me as black blood spurts into an arc, leaping from the offspring to strike him across the chest, glistening like black ribbons as it runs down his apron.
Behind him the Black Goat weeps.
As I rise off the floor I am hit with the realization that she isn’t screaming or thrashing or reacting anything like a mother should who just watched her child be slaughtered in front of her.
She is defeated. She’s seen it too many times and she’s given up hope.
This is her existence now, reduced from a goddess of birth and life to a mere meat factory. Giving birth each night to watch that child be killed and cooked and offered up to humans who should worship her, should fear her, should tremble in their own piss and shit if she were to even glance in their direction.
Ephraim tosses the carcass of her offspring into the pit.
She turns her face away as the sparks rise and the heat begins to crackle against the wet fur of her dead child.
Ephraim moves toward Ashtoreth holding the dripping Oathbreaker.
“Time to get started on the other entrees,” he says. “So much prepwork.”
My eyes lock on his back and I let all the hate for him that is in my heart bring my magick to a boil.
The torc cuts deep into my throat as I let it go and wish like hell.
The magick leaves me in a rush and a blink later the shotgun appears in my hands.
It’s heavier than I would have thought. I’ve never held a shotgun, but I didn’t think they would weigh so much.
The wood of the stock is smooth under my palm. It’s dark, some kind of black walnut or black oak, and there is a crook to it that fits the web of my thumb and right hand like it was carved there just for me. My fingers wrap securely and comfortably around it and it feels like I have held this gun before. It even feels as if my Mark fits somehow into the form of the stock. The barrel stretches out from there in a dull iron gray and this close to it I can see that it is inlaid with a pattern of symbols and sigils that have been etched as if by minuscule fey hands. The power of them radiates up at me as heat. The slide rests in my left hand and the fingers lie in grooves that feel completely natural for them although mine and Ephraim’s hands are nowhere close to the same size.
He turns in my direction as my finger slips over the trigger.
I snarl. “Leave my goddamn friends alone.”
My finger pulls.
The shotgun tries to buck out of my hands as it spits a fist-sized blast of fire and brimstone.
Ephraim twists as if he doesn’t have a spine, throwing up his hand and screaming some word that isn’t English, isn’t any language spoken in the last two millennia, and the hellfire from the shotgun, my shotgun now, deflects off an invisible shield and pinwheels, whirling away. It smashes against the deep fryer and the oil inside it explodes in a gout that ignites into a dull orange spread of flame along the steel appliances beside it.
Ephraim straightens. “You think you’ll be able to use my weapon against me? You think I’d allow that from some cheap little piece of trim who doesn’t even know how to use her own magick?”
I rack the slide on the shotgun, like I’ve seen in movies all my life. Immediately I feel the hellfire inside the gun building, as if I am holding a living thing that just wants to spew combustion.
“You don’t even know how to hold that thing, you silly little git.” Ephraim sneers. He rolls Oathbreaker in a lazy spin, the black blade gleaming at the edge. “I’m going to come over there and take that thing and when I do—”
Darkness explodes behind him and the Man in Black is just there, looming chest to Ephraim’s back. The Man in Black’s red right hand clamps on Oathbreaker, plucking it from Ephraim’s grip as his left arm comes over Ephraim’s shoulder and wraps the man’s throat in a choke hold.
Ephraim barely has time to sputter, “Wh, wh, what?” before the cursed black blade slides through his back and out his chest in one long spit of blood that splatters hot and bright crimson across the linoleum at my feet.
59
I DON’T KNOW how the Man in Black freed himself.
How long he had the ability to do it.
If he waited till his moment or if he just finally was able to.
It doesn’t matter.
Because he is standing there, spattered in blood, with Oathbreaker in his red right hand.
Fuck.
His eyes slide sideways.
Toward the box that holds the coat.
The coat he used to wear, the skin of an archangel he took and made his slave.
My coat.
I take a step and am jerked short by the chain still on my ankle.
I put the shotgun to my shoulder; the barrel is warm on my cheek and magick crackles like static electricity as my skin touches the tiny swirling glyphs. “Don’t, motherfucker.”
He smiles. “Charlotte Tristan Moore.” He doesn’t take a step, but he is closer to the coat.
“I said, don’t.”
“It seems fitting that I would have my mantle again since I have my weapon back.”
“Take the sword and fuck off. The coat is off-limits.”
“It is not your slave.”
“Yours either.”
He tsks at me. “If poor dead Ephraim could deflect that do you not think I can as well?”
“Move toward me, the coat, or Ashtoreth and we will find out.”
“You do not even know what you hold in your hands, Twice-Marked. You have no idea, the potential of that weapon.”
“Been there before. I’ll figure it out.”
“Its former owner”—he points at Ephraim’s corpse with the sword—“not this one, the true previous owner, never learned all it was before it drove him insane, and he was the host of a vengeance demon for decades before it found him.”
Curiosity rises inside me. I want to ask.
Stay on point. Work, Charlie.
He moves without moving again.
I pull the trigger.
60
THE SHOTGUN KICKS me hard enough to slew me sideways, my feet slipping across the blood-spattered linoleum. I rack the slide as I right myself, my body intuitively working with the new weapon.
The blast of hellfire worked; I didn’t hit the Man in Black, but he turns away from the coat.
And turns toward Shub Niggurath in her chains.
Horror dawns on me and I know what he’s doing.
I pull the trigger again, racking and pulling and riding the kick, chasing him around the fire pit in the center of the room with blast after blast of hellfire.
His left hand waves at me, the fingers twisting as if they were snakes having sex instead of bones and joints.
The bloody corpse of Ephraim rises in the air and absorbs every fireball.
It jerks as it is struck, doing a horrible shimmy and shake that makes its loose limbs flail, and I hear the blood that sheets the apron dangling from its neck sizzling. It swings as if on strings, some kind of broken fucked-u
p dead-man puppet/pinata. The hellfire sticks where it strikes and burns, blue balefire licking its way up the body, consuming it like paper in fire. As the flesh burns it blackens and curls.
Behind it the Man in Black is beside the Black Goat Goddess. Still holding the sword, he brushes her cheek with the back of his hand, the left one still outstretched and magickally controlling his corpse shield. The tears of the fertility goddess glisten in the flickering light from Ephraim’s burning corpse.
I yank on the chain around my ankle.
Nyarlathotep raises the sword.
Ashtoreth screams.
As I turn the shotgun down to the floor and pull the trigger to destroy the chain that holds me hostage, the Man in Black lets the sword fall like swift and terrible lightning.
The cursed sword cleaves deep into the chest of the captured fertility goddess.
The shotgun blast disintegrates the chain and the concussion of it striking the floor so close stumbles me sideways and the world slews as I struggle to keep my eyes pinned on the Man in Black.
He’s elbow deep in the gaping wound he has made, fishing around inside Shub Niggurath as she screams in her chains.
The sucking sound of him pulling his arm free is loud enough to hear over the screams of the goddesses and the burning of Ephraim and the offspring. He holds up something that looks very much like a piece of coral except it is translucent and glows with an indigo light that lays harsh highlights across his saturnine face.
The soul gem of the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.
When we worked together he harvested one from Yar Shogura, the cancer god, and one from Cthulhu. He kept the cancer god’s, but I wound up with Cthulhu’s in our last fight.
If he gets three he can free his father, the Mad God Azathoth, who will eat this world.
He purses his lips and blows across its surface and the dripping ichor from the Black Goat Goddess’s body cavity dries to a powder and softly flakes away.
He looks at me and winks.
And disappears with a stuttering out of existence.