by Jenn Stark
Beside me, Nikki hummed a small murmur of concern. I could feel her. I wasn’t strong enough to take on the entire Council, dammit. That wasn’t what this was about.
I studied Kreios’s broad smile, though, and the answer came to me as clearly as if the Devil had delivered it up. Which maybe he had. He was, after all, the lord of seduction.
Kreios made a show of studying his manicured nails, but I tore my gaze from him and stared out the far window, my mind working overtime.
This wasn’t about power. It was about persuasion. I could never overcome the Council by coercion or force, not without risking myself or my people. That wasn’t the way I should go. Instead, I had to strike at their most sensitive point, where they were most vulnerable after thirty, three hundred, or three thousand years of walking this earth as a god but without most of the benefits of a god. They'd been forced to sit on the sidelines of the world’s sputtering magic and watch and wait and do nothing, all in service to this ephemeral concept called balance.
These people were bored. Even the prospect of fighting the gods had barely penetrated their ennui. This wasn’t a functional team, it was a collection of petty tyrants with nothing left to rule.
Worse, I couldn’t just shoot them an invitation to my playdate. The Council knew I needed them to fight this war. In many ways, they were honor bound to help me, but that didn’t mean they actually would fulfill that bond. Some of them wanted to be coddled, some to be cajoled, some to be validated. Every one of them was certain of their worth: entitlement jacking through them all the way to their toes.
I could work with that.
“We’re going to need a bigger conference room,” I muttered.
Instantly, the walls of the Magician’s meeting space underwent a renovation, the space expanding by a factor of three. While the bank of windows behind Kreios remained, it was now flanked with two facing walls painted in gleaming platinum blonde, arches cut into them showing only darkness beyond. Totally better than HGTV. As everyone but Kreios and Nikki gaped, I held one thought in my mind, a simple, clear, and incontrovertible thought.
“Only the mightiest must come.”
For a long moment, nothing happened. The non-Connecteds in the room shifted uneasily, their hands planted on their guides as they fought to make sense of the expanded room, the impossible vista lying well beneath us, the undercurrents of energy snaking through the chamber, hissing just out of their visual field. But the gamers—the gamers who were only here because of their Connected ability—they didn’t seem surprised. I wondered for a moment if there had been a room in Simon’s elaborate predictive game that had envisioned this meeting.
I refocused on my command, pushing it out to the four corners of this plane, all the way to the crippled, shattered veil.
“Only the mightiest must come.”
But by then the darkness behind the arches had already started shifting. Slowly at first, then with gathering speed, lights and shadows streaked across the open portals. Some of the doorways were filled with fire, some with smoke, some with light so bright, guards and gamers alike flinched and averted their eyes. And a gradual creaking built up, far distant, like the bones of the earth responding as the call reached down to her darkest depths.
A call I repeated a third and final time.
“Only. The mightiest. Must. Come.”
And they did.
The Emperor appeared first, striding through a door in full Emperor armor and a long red cape, his face dark with rage as if he’d been compelled. Viktor Dal. Special skills: crimes against humanity. Dungeons & Dragons alignment: Lawful Evil. Despite his recent reunion with the better part of himself, he was, and ever would be, an asshat.
“You have no right to make such a summons,” he growled at me. “You hold no power in the Council.”
“I don’t. You do. And you are among the mightiest, and so you came.”
Eshe stepped through next, the High Priestess, gorgeous in a Greek-style toga and gold braided sandals, her long, flowing dark hair framing lush features and perfect skin. Special skills: oracular sight and astral travel. D&D alignment: Chaotic Evil.
Simon followed, looking slightly abashed. The Fool, dressed in a short-sleeved tee shirt over a long-sleeved tee shirt, a Where’s Waldo knit cap pulled tight over his head, and his pale skin sporting the same faint blue tinge of a computer screen. Special skills: tech. Alignment: Chaotic Good…now that he was back in one piece again.
The Hermit came next, looking more bemused than anything. Willem of Galt’s gaze met mine across the conference room, and I wondered at what must be going through his mind. My ancient, white-haired father, his skin the color of sun-bleached wood above his simple monk’s robes, a man who’d bedded a goddess and produced…whatever the heck I was. We totally needed to have that talk one day. For now, he was one of the mightiest of all Connecteds on the planet, and so he was here. Special skills: guarding the veil between the worlds. Alignment: Chaotic Good. He did hook up with a goddess, after all, and that was strictly against Council policy.
Hera and Zeus didn’t appear, their powers apparently still negating each other’s. That was okay, I decided. Both of them were likely more of a danger to themselves than to any god or monster struggling to find entry in this earth.
But that wasn’t all who came. A moment after the Hermit entered, through another door stepped Gamon, the leader of the House of Cups, her face flat with fury. A third door shifted, and Danae entered. Still another and, well, a demon entered. A demon I had not seen in the daylight for far too long. Warrick, head of the Syx. He looked no less pleased than Gamon that I had summoned him, and his eyes glowed with a golden amber malice. I hadn’t noticed the glowing thing before either.
Neither had Nikki. I was close enough to her to hear her sigh of pure appreciation. She and Warrick had a sort of a connection, you could say, since she’d been possessed by demons when the Syx had first hit town, but she didn’t seem to hold it against the guy. Clearly, there was still a lot to appreciate here.
After them, the Hanged Man strolled through a doorway, ascetic and dressed in his trademark early-nineteenth-century style. Nikola Tesla. Special skills: all things electric. Alignment: Lawful Evil…or at least lawful asshat. He mainly abided by the laws of electrical engineering. Now he surveyed the room with consummate satisfaction, his eyes lighting up with particular interest as he took in the gamers.
They, as one, stared at him. Kreios had definitively been replaced as superhero of the hour. That didn’t mean the Devil wasn’t still thoroughly enjoying the show, of course. Aleksander Kreios. Special skills: illusion, truth telling, manipulation. Alignment: Chaotic Neutral, emphasis on the chaos.
Neither Death nor the Hierophant had arrived, or at least they hadn’t arrived by the time the Magician stepped foot in the gallery. He glanced at me, nodded, but his smile was darker and more mysterious than I would have liked. The Magician. Special skills: great and powerful Oz, only with magic that actually worked. Alignment: Lawful Neutral. Favorite word: balance.
“You passed the test,” Armaeus said, and the words resonated in my mind so clearly, I was sure he had spoken aloud, but no one else flinched. No one, that is, except the High Priestess.
And she wasn’t looking at me.
“Oh, Sara,” she murmured, the horrified lilt in her voice impossible to ignore as she stared toward the bank of archways. “What have you brought into our sacred space?”
I turned to where she was looking, and I saw it too. The shadows behind all the portals were still roiling, lights rushing by like a subway train. A scream shook from the depths of the space, making everyone jump, then Armaeus was speaking again, this time in his outside voice.
“No one may take on the might of the Council, but any may summon,” he intoned. “As Danae and her coven summon the undead, as Gamon and her House summoned Lilith, and as we have been summoned here. But not us alone. And so, the time has come to decide. Who among us are ready to fight?” His smile tu
rned to one of pure wickedness. “Because now you shall get your chance.”
With another wail, every single one of the doorways burst forth with a roil of demons. Warrick leapt over a gamer rooted in his chair and bolted for the nearest portal, a hooked dagger suddenly appearing in his hand as he roared something that, despite my advanced linguistic skills, I couldn’t quite make out. With a half-dozen slices of his weapon, the demons spilled away, leaving an oily track behind them. But as Warrick twisted and spun, a one-man whirling dervish of destruction, I realized that the demons were no longer the most recent arrivals to the party.
Now in their midst was a figure I thought I’d known, thought I’d understood. A figure who even now remained vaguely familiar, in the way a skiff of snow resembled an avalanche of ice.
Michael the Archangel stood before us, brandishing his sword.
Chapter Sixteen
The Hierophant. Special skills: warrior angel, commander and killer of demons. Alignment: Lawful Good…as long as by good you meant God.
The only ones among us who didn’t seem shocked were the Magician—and Warrick, who took the momentary distraction of the Hierophant’s arrival in stride, felling another quartet of demons with what seemed like a mere two swipes of his curved dagger. I’d never seen anyone move quite as quickly and efficiently, and he certainly seemed to know his target. Whatever the metal blade was made of that he wielded with such force, it didn’t merely kill the demons it touched, it exploded them in all directions. The gore layering over the Magician’s pristine conference table would never fully come off, I was certain.
As a new scream sounded from deep in the bowels of eternity, however, Michael lifted a hand. “Enough, demon,” he breathed. Demon, I picked up immediately. Singular, not plural.
Nevertheless, his command affected every demon in the joint—including Warrick. The leader of the Syx was frozen in place, only his eyes moving, and those still shone an eerily intense golden-amber light. The look they fixed on the Hierophant was a mixture of hatred and reverence so agonized, it took my breath away.
Michael didn’t seem to notice. He turned back to the table of Council members, all of them staring. “Through all the incarnations of the Council, there has been but one member who has not been replaced, one member who existed since the very dawn of mankind, the fall of the angels, and the rise and fall of Atlantis. That member is me. Did you never stop to consider that? Did you never stop to wonder why, after all the other Council members had died and gone to their reward, only one would not give up his mantle?”
He was addressing the Council, I supposed, but his attention was fixed on me. Me, not Armaeus, though for the record, I wasn’t the one who’d gone and hauled Michael’s angelic backside out of Hell. “Did you never wonder why I allowed myself to be incarcerated in the bowels of the one place the God of all gods had created as a sop to mortal faithlessness?”
“You said you were studying us,” I said. “Learning.”
“Studying.” His lips curled around the word, and I was struck again with how different he looked from the wide-eyed, joyful Hierophant who’d walked the streets of Vegas, reveling in carnival food and all the bright lights and chittering noise, the rush and tumble of humanity. Had that all been a lie? Was that even possible?
“It did not take much studying to discover what bestial horrors mortals were capable of. The endless rush to progress without the desire or interest to grow. The insatiable need to conquer without the reasoned hand to rule. Over and over again, through wars big and small, I witnessed the baseness of your kind. And gazed in horror as the Father suffered abominations of his creation to live.” Here he flicked a glance at Warrick, who was still caught in some kind of thrall, then over to Danae. As his glance touched the queen of the Deathwalkers, she flinched, and I felt my own blood begin to boil. That same damning gaze turned to me, and his lips twisted. “Abominations in all their varied forms. And then your Magician chose to free me—the only one who could. The need was great, he said. The time had come. He was more correct than he knew.”
I forced myself not to look at Armaeus, and to my surprise, none of the other Council members did either. Ordinarily, I got the sense that this group would pile on each other like zombies trying to suck out the last mouthful of brains, but there was something so intensely foreign about the Hierophant I had never really noticed before, something so alien, that it quelled everyone to silence.
Well, everyone but me.
“Did you know?” I asked, turning to the Magician. “Did you know the truth about Michael when you went down to Hell?”
“I knew several truths,” the Magician said, his voice steadily unperturbed. “The Hierophant had been approached many times throughout the millennia to return from his exile in Hell, and not only were none of those attempts successful, they were not recorded in any fashion, in all the annals of arcane history. And they would have been. That alone was sufficient reason to be…aware of the possibilities of his effect on the Council.”
That stirred Eshe to respond. “And yet you brought him out anyway? Without understanding the full impact of what his return could be?”
“Oh, he understood,” Michael said. “He understood and accepted it, just as those who came before him understood. But before, it was not time. It’s a testament to the strength of those of you standing in this place that the time has now arrived. The mightiest must come indeed.” His eyes narrowed, once again taking in the sweep of ordinary Connecteds, Danae, Warrick. Me.
I mentally replayed Jimmy’s warning. The Hierophant wasn’t a bad guy—he wasn’t—but he played by different rules. And he cared even less about humanity than Viktor did. I had to remember that.
Michael’s next words bore me out.
“The time for mortal reckoning is at hand,” he said. “There will be three fronts on which the battle will be waged, three and only three. The first will be the tearing of the veil. That has already happened. You all have helped it, and you”—he turned to the Hermit—“have not hindered it.”
Now all eyes shifted to Willem of Galt, the one-time stonemason elevated to the Council in the Middle Ages, and then to the role of guardian of the veil. To him fell the task of keeping the worst of the gods at bay, and by all accounts, he’d done his job reasonably well. But at the Hierophant’s accusation, he made no reply.
Michael continued. “The full tearing of the veil will occur in no less than three days’ time, the blight of the seven suns upon you all. The plague of the demon horde preceding it, as in the days of reckoning.”
He turned to Warrick, his brows lifting. Unlike the other demons, Warrick was not simply held fast in the Hierophant’s thrall. He fought against it, his eyes practically pulsing with the strength of his effort.
“You who must serve when called now walk this earth with your brethren, Syx, and the call will be increased a thousandfold. But do not think you will repay your debt because of it,” the Hierophant fairly snarled. The sudden heat of his anger was so intense, I was surprised Warrick didn’t go up in flames. Instead, the leader of the Syx gave that same heat back, loathing and rage commingling in his glowing yellow eyes. “There is no salvation for you, only death.”
Warrick hurled back an epithet of a language I couldn’t decipher, his mere ability to speak at all a seeming miracle.
It didn’t serve him, though. The moment the sound passed his lips, he jolted in pain, his eyes clouding and his head slumping as his body lifted from the floor, hanging in the air.
The Hierophant continued. “The second battle will be waged between the forces of humanity, assuming any of you are left. I hope there are. I have waited long centuries to see how depraved the children of God have finally become. I trust you will not disappoint.”
This forthcoming human-on-human assault did not come as a surprise to me, of course, even if it hadn’t been first predicted by Danae and now by the Hierophant. A battle with the gods was one thing, but the Connecteds did not just have the gods to fear. In
fact, for most of recorded history, it wasn’t the gods who were even our primary adversary. SANCTUS was no god. Neither were the dark practitioners. And neither, most especially, were the shadowy groups who sat in the background, watching and waiting, maybe even using Connecteds when the need was right, but doing nothing to protect us from our enemies or each other.
Once again, I wondered who those groups were…who would emerge to challenge the Connecteds, to fulfill Danae’s prediction of Connecteds vs. non-Connecteds. Surely, it couldn’t be simply SANCTUS, or any legitimate government group. But it had to be someone…I felt it in my bones.
I couldn’t focus on that right now, however. Instead I squared my shoulders and addressed the Hierophant. “And the third front of the war?”
Michael’s cool gaze turned to me.
“The third front almost certainly will not matter, as your own Magician can tell you. If the forthcoming test to your kind plays out the way I expect it to, the Connecteds of this earth will not survive the second.”
We stared each other down for a long moment, his eyes achingly beautiful for all that they lacked the wonder I had come to associate with him as he’d first exited Hell to walk in the sunlight again.
“Why now?” I asked suddenly, causing a flare of interest to spark in that gaze. “It can’t merely be the threat humanity is facing from the gods. We’ve faced worse. We’ve faced nuclear war. The veil is tearing, but it could’ve been ripped to shreds any number of times before now. Why did you choose now to come out and play?”
“The answer to that is simple enough.” Kreios spoke from the bank of windows, the light from the sprawling bright day silhouetting him. “There was balance before. There isn’t anymore. The role of the Council has always been to balance the magic that we have on this earth, but the reality of the Council was that we were diminishing it.”