“But it was really –”
“No.”
They walked on. “I found this big corpse, size of a bull, and it was bloated with spider-frog hatchings.”
“That's not unnerving, that's disgusting.”
“Well, the movements under the skin made it look sort of bubbly. And the hatchlings kept crawling out of its various orifices like maggots, but black and a foot long.”
Lalael shuddered. “Still repulsive.”
“You're right, the Naga was definitely more startling. The head was kind of this rotting, pale green-gray color, with long stringy black hair, and its tongue was black and hanging out of its mouth, and its teeth were all green, and its eyes were rolled back in its head. I nearly walked into it, 'cause like I said, it rose up right in front of me.”
“Shut up!”
***
They returned to Frog around midnight. Lalael was yawning, “Are you sure there's a Naga?”
“Positive. You didn't notice the smell?”
Lalael stopped yawning. “There was a smell?” he asked, dismayed. “I didn't smell the smell!”
“I didn't tell you, but when I was telling you monster stories under that one dock? There was a Naga skin floating in the water. You didn't notice it and I didn't want you to freak out.” Lucien hopped aboard and hugged the aft mast again. “Hello, Froggie my sweet. Did you miss me?”
Lalael, who had frozen on the dock, scrambled after him. “Don't leave me out there! I can't fight them off!”
Lucien hummed. “Well, if a Naga comes after you, it's not a good idea to fight it directly anyway. The best thing to do...”
“Yes?”
“Don't run.”
“Don't run, don't fight. What do I do?”
“Well, it's faster than you when you're fighting, and there's no way you can outrun it. When a Naga attacks you, you fly. It is earthbound, after all.”
Lalael only relaxed for a moment before he hissed, “But we can't fly around here! Someone might see.”
“That is a problem.” Lucien nodded solemnly. “I'm going to bed.”
***
The days passed swiftly during their time in the marina – demon possessions dropped to nearly zero once they had briefed the watchmen about proper safety procedures. It was those humans, it turned out, who had been most often infected, a fact which Lucien and Lalael were not at all surprised about.
It was a good time. Antichrist got a little pudgy on imps and soul-eaters and became king of the stray marina cats, earning a few more scuffs to his fur and notches in his ears along the way. Lalael had enough practice on drawing out demons that he got quite efficient at it, although even after a month of practice, he still didn't have the effortless ease with it that Lucien did. Lucien himself flirted indiscriminately with everything in the marina, including the boats. Perhaps especially the boats. In any case, they earned their place, and they did good work, and even though Lalael still felt a little queasy when he was below-decks on Frog, when he went to bed at night, he slept soundly, without dreams, rapturously happy in the knowledge that for once in his life he was making a difference.
The wonder and ease of life here in the marina was not consistent through the whole city. Every day it seemed like they got wind of another gang raid on a supply of clean water, or another murder that had occurred over a packet of beef jerky. In the marina, they were protected from some of the shortages – they had access to the sea and the resources with which to feed a whole community, so they ate a lot of fish, and had experimental seaweed dishes, and they were slowly figuring out effective ways to make salt, but at least they ate. The gangs of humans even left them relatively unscathed, recognizing that the denizens of the harbor were at present the only ones likely to provide any influx of food to the surrounding communities.
In the end, it was the humans that killed the Naga, not Lucien or Lalael. A lucky, panicked swing with a machete at exactly the right angle had been the only thing standing between the watchman and a gruesome death. When Captain Joe saw the corpse, he groomed his moustaches for a very, very long time and then announced he'd be taking a few extra watch shifts at night. Three days later, he brought the second Naga's corpse to the Frog, slung over his shoulder, along with a brand new story about the epic fight he'd had with it. Lalael had no trouble believing that every word of it was true.
***
“Now. You,” Captain Joe said, jabbing one thick, callused finger at Lucien, “are deliberately not saying something. You know something about this?” His voice rose and fell in the characteristic singsong of his accent.
The Naga stank even worse now it was dead. It was nearly sixteen feet long, and now it was dead, Lalael could see the rows and rows of jagged teeth in its mouth.
“No,” Lucien said. “Not really. What do you think it is?”
“Bullshit,” the captain said vehemently. “And I think it's a goddamn demon.”
“That's not a demon,” Lalael said quickly.
Captain Joe shot him a withering look. “If you boys think I'm going to fall for any of your stories, you're spitting into the wind.”
“I guess it looks like a demon to me,” Lucien said. “It could be.” He got one glance from the captain and amended: “Definitely a demon.”
“You've seen these before, ja?”
“I never saw any here before That Day,” Lucien said. Absolutely true, and Captain Joe nodded.
“They are all like this?”
“Nnno,” Lucien said slowly. “Not all of them.”
“Because I hear some scuttlebutt about two big ones a lot of people saw in the city.”
Lucien nodded. “I saw them too.”
“I heard they have giant bat wings,” Lalael supplied, a little desperate.
Captain Joe looked skeptical. “Kouji didn't say anything about that.” Kouji was one of the city folk who traded with the sailors. “He said they can hide their wings so they just look like people.”
“That doesn't make sense. Bat wings or none at all, I heard they escaped from a burning building, so they must be impervious to fire.”
“Ja!” Captain Joe said. “That's what I heard, that a mob tried to burn them.”
“But there's only two of them, so they probably won't cause many problems... It's ones like that one –” the Naga, “– we should worry about. We found two of those already, and pretty easily, so there's probably loads of them. We should strengthen the watch or put up better barricades or do a really thorough sweep of the marina to find all the places they could possibly hide. Clean 'em out.”
The captain paused the conversation to groom his beard; a habit which evidently meant he was thinking seriously about something. “The diseases are related,” he concluded after several minutes.
“What? I don't know what you mean,” Lucien said, so casually that Lalael himself almost believed him for a moment.
“How do you cure them?”
“Hmm? Um. Well, it's complicated. You have to train for a really long time...”
“A really long time,” Lalael nodded.
“Yes, so long that – Laurie here is sort of my apprentice, you see.”
Captain Joe squinted at them. “I thought you were the same age.”
“I had a natural gift for it. It's like acupuncture. You know... with chakras. And. And the humors. And leeches.”
“What?”
“I meant no leeches. Ever. Not a single leech.”
“Poison,” Lalael said suddenly.
Lucien froze. “What?”
“The demons – they're poisonous and people get sick when they're bitten.”
“Yes, wow, good job failing to explain it. Clearly I can't graduate you from your apprenticeship yet. It's not that the demons are poison. It's the red tide. Some people are just naturally more sensitive to it.” Lucien gathered himself up importantly. “It involves a neurotoxin. Tetrodotoxin, you know, found in – ”
“I don't want to hear your medical school babble,” C
aptain Joe interrupted. He had a low tolerance for jargon in any form, and vastly preferred plain speech.
“We just didn't want to tell you it was that easy to fix because then you might not have let us stay.” Lucien grimaced. “Sorry.”
The captain harrumphed. “Well, you're pulling your veight and more, so we'll forget about it this time.”
***
It might have continued going as well as it had.
It happened in the wee hours of the morning. Lalael was on watch that night, but it had been quiet all evening and he had let his guard down. There were huge racks of curing fishskin on the boardwalk, since it was the only place both roomy enough and steady enough to house the operation, not to mention far enough away that the smell wasn't too much of a bother. On the other hand, it attracted herds of stray animals, especially at night, hence the two guard posting. If they didn't shoo the animals away, they would have chewed all the skins to bits, or more likely devoured them whole, and none would have been left over for experiments in fish leather.
Unfortunately, as they found out that night, the food chain didn't stop there.
Lalael was drowsing at his post. He had been smelling rotting fish skin for so long that he had stopped smelling anything at all. And then, very suddenly, everything began happening at once: He heard a scratching in the dark, but he and his fellow guard had been driving away a particularly persistent pair of dogs for most of the night, so he yawned, picked up his broom, and turned to whack some noses.
Except they were the wrong noses, and there were too many of them. At least twenty pairs of glowing eyes reflected in the faint light from the watchfire that Lalael's fellow guard was standing next to. The nights were getting colder, but Lalael couldn't go too close to the fire without giving himself away, or so Lucien said.
All that didn't matter now. The eyes were shifting, coming closer, and Lalael backed slowly away. There were more of them appearing in the dark. Dozens now. Something hissed, and then Lalael knew what they were – spider-frogs. They had four legs, toed like a frog, but the joints were bent above their backs like a spider, and although their heads were barely discernible from their necks and torsos, they still retained a vaguely humanoid shape to them, but with bulging yellow eyes, slitted noses, and poisonous mandibles on either side of their pale, fleshy mouths – they killed by paralyzing and strangling their prey.
A few of them held dead or half-eaten animals – squirrels, raccoons, cats – in their front claws, but one by one they were losing interest in these, their eyes fixed on Lalael and the other guard, who had finally noticed.
“Mother of god,” he said. “We're surrounded.”
“If you can convince yourself to believe in a higher power, right now would be a great time to start asking for favors,” Lalael replied quietly. “Do you have any weapons?”
Alyosha pulled a nine-millimeter Beretta out of his waistband, mace out of his jacket pocket, and hefted a length of two-by-four he kept for a club.
CHAPTER TEN
Something startled Lucien awake moments before he heard the first echoing report of a gunshot. And then another. Another. Another. He flung himself out of his bunk, scrambling into a shirt and pants as he dashed through the galley, grabbed his daggers from the cupboard they were hidden in, scrambled up the companionway, into the cockpit and out onto deck. Then he heard the screams and the shouting, and four more gunshots. There were lights on the boardwalk, not just torches but – flashlights. If he hadn't known it was an emergency before, that would have told him more than he needed to know.
Boardwalk. Tanning racks. Watch. Lalael's shift.
Lucien was in flight and hurtling towards the boardwalk before he knew what he was doing.
Lalael was in the midst of chaos. He had overtipped the garbage can that held the watchfire and scattered the embers out into a wide circle around him, which was helping a little to keep back the enormous horde of demons that surrounded him. There was a crowd of harbor people on one side of the horde, doing a fair and admirable job of holding their own, but their rescue mission was already failing: Lucien himself was seconds too late to save Alyosha: The man was swarmed. A moment later he stopped screaming.
And Lalael stood in the middle of his circle of embers and, to Lucien's utter bewilderment, shot four demons in quick succession exactly between the eyes. This was clearly not something Lucien needed to be asking questions about right now: He didn't know anything about guns except that they had rounds, and a limited number thereof, and he hadn't been keeping track of Lalael's shots, so he needed to get Lalael out of there, and then in quick succession get both of them out of there because their cover was entirely blown. He landed heavily on two demons at once, snapping their spines, and jumped off into the air again.
Lalael didn't exactly need rescuing, though: His face was cold and calm, and his shoulders straight, and he was doing this thing that Lucien did not understand, looking for his next target almost before he had finished shooting the previous one. He wasn't even flustered to see Lucien there; he just shot next to Lucien's head. Lucien's back and wings were splattered with demon brains a millisecond later.
“Lalael, fly!” Lucien yelled. He snatched up a half-burned length of wood and clobbered a nearby demon with it, drawing one of his daggers and stabbing to finish it off. He hopped himself over the embers with a flip of his wings and got his back against Lalael's. Lalael did not appreciate this.
“You're in my way,” he said, petulant. “I need to shoot where you're standing.”
And the firelight was lighting him – both of them – from every angle, and Lucien had seen the shine on Lalael. It was brighter than the last time, and flickers played over his clothes and hair like he had an aura of flame or lightning. “You're going to run out of bullets!”
Another two shots. “No, I think I still have a couple left. Duck.”
Lucien ducked and Lalael shot over his head at a demon that had been about to pounce.
“The humans have already seen us, Lalael.” Lucien swung the makeshift club; the demon skittered back quick enough for his shot to miss, and Lalael, without looking, shot it in the eye. “You know what you look like right now? Not human. You know what else is around us now? A whole lot more not human. If you don't get your wings out and fly, I'm going to pick you up and carry you off myself – see if I don't!” Lucien was snarling by the end of this tirade.
“Do I have four more left or three? I've lost count.” Lalael shot. And shot. And shot. And – ran out. He took his eyes off the horde around him to calmly load a new magazine. Lucien stabbed and clubbed three demons that immediately attempted to pounce on the idiot. “The humans won't hurt me,” Lalael said when he had finished and shot again. “I'm killing demons and so are they. It's fine.”
Lucien promptly dropped the board, sheathed the dagger, caught the angel around the waist and heaved. He couldn't carry him long, but at least he wasn't working against quite as much physics this time. On the other hand, this time Lalael was struggling. Well, if he wanted to be like that...
Lucien judged that he had gained enough altitude that firstly Lalael's instincts would kick in to save him, and secondly that they would have time to save him.
He let go.
It really was a shame that they had to keep ruining clothes by bursting their wings through the seams. That had been a really nice warm coat once, and now Lalael was wearing it in tatters around his shoulders as he righted himself in midair.
A shot rang out. It wasn't from Lalael's gun (which he still held as he ascended, already wearing his scolding face). Lucien heard the bullet whizz by, uncomfortably close, and Lalael froze in the air, hovering. Was he insane?
“Don't be a stationary target!” Lucien screamed at him.
“But they can't be shooting at us,” Lalael said, looking back on the human crowd in shock. “We helped them.” Another shot. This time, it punched through a few of Lucien's secondary feathers, uncomfortably close to wing bones and the side of his t
orso. “Well, don't just stay there!” Lalael shouted. “Go!”
And then they were gone.
***
The rocky overhang under which they had spent the first night after the end of the world seemed as good a place as any. It was remote, concealed.
They landed, and Lalael went to start a fire.
“Not a good idea. We could have been followed,” Lucien said.
“There's no one around for five miles in any direction.”
“Still.”
Lalael scowled. “It's cold. I'm freezing.”
“That's your own fault, isn't it. I gave you a chance to keep your clothes intact.” Lucien's shirt was in better condition. He had only managed to do up one button before he'd brought his wings out, so that was all he lost; he hid his wings and did the rest up now. Lalael wrapped his wings around himself and shivered, glaring at Lucien. He still had his gun, which Lucien eyed uncomfortably. “That thing isn't good for you,” he declared.
“Excuse me?”
“That.” He waved at the gun. “You should have dropped it or gotten rid of it.”
“Excuse me?”
“You weren't yourself.”
Lalael bristled. “I see.”
“Oh. Good.”
“It's because I was good at it, wasn't it?”
“No...?” Lucien frowned. “It's because you shot brains all over my back and didn't bat an eye.” They were beginning to smell.
“Next time I'll let the demon rip your spine out, then, fine.”
Lucien sighed. “That's not what I meant.”
“Right. What you meant was that you're allowed to decide what's good for me.”
“Well. Yyyes.”
Lalael stood up and did a fair job of looming over Lucien despite their four inches' difference in height. “Absolutely not. You never get to decide what's best for me. I do. Do you understand.”
“Calm down.”
“No. I'm not helpless, and I'm not an idiot, and I don't need a nursemaid, thank you. I was good at something. I was good at that. Without trying. Alyosha handed me that gun and said 'Full magazine,' and I said, 'How many does that mean?' and he said 'Twenty,' and I said, 'Okay.' And then I turned and thought to myself, 'This is probably how this thing works,' and it was. I was good at it like I should have been good at music or fighting or healing. I didn't have to think about it. It was like I'd known how my whole life. It was like I was meant to do that.”
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