by SM Reine
Agent Bryce was aware. She was working as hard as she could. But spells were a finicky thing, dependent on the turn of the Earth within the galaxy and the passage of heartbeats, and the most basic laws of magic couldn’t be broken for convenience.
The shadows billowed, building around them like drops of ink in a water glass.
“What were you doing with that phone?” Fritz asked.
Cèsar pressed his back against the jagged asphalt. “What? Phone? Who has a phone?”
“Tell me that you’re not going to blow this operation. I need to hear these words.”
“Fritz,” Cèsar said, like it was the beginning of a sentence, except that nothing came afterward.
He started sneezing again.
The wards snapped shut around them with a zing of magic. The hair on the back of Fritz’s neck stood up. His leg throbbed within its prosthesis.
“Done!” Agent Bryce crowed.
Which was when the inky shadows congealed into humanoid figures.
Much like the statues, they resembled human shadows elongated by sunset, though they lacked the swollen sexual characteristics. These weren’t incubi, but immature nightmares freshly grown from Malebolge. Weak. Barely corporeal. Virtually impossible to kill.
Fritz leaped between the nightmares and the team. “Restore the Focus!”
His M5 would do nothing against demons of this persuasion. He dropped it and drew a charm from his pocket instead. It was a charm prepared in advance by one of the OPA’s witches. Even non-witches could use the new magical tech the OPA had been producing.
Fritz thrust the charm at them.
It blazed like the sun. His eyeballs seared, even though he squeezed his eyes shut. But whatever he felt was incomparable to what the nightmares must have been suffering. Their screams shook his marrow.
That flare lasted only a moment. Barely a blink. The geode used for the charm could contain only so much power.
When he peeled his eyes open again, the charm only glowed dimly. It washed Helltown in shades of chilly blue.
The nightmares had dissipated.
They weren’t safe yet. The perimeter Agent Bryce built was imperfect. The side nearest the Fissure shivered visibly—a silver shimmer across the flames. That circle wouldn’t hold anything back from Hell.
Agent Bryce and her people were now working together to lift the sixth statue into position with the help of ropes. They struggled and heaved at that figure to no avail, like it was glued to the earth.
“I’ll help,” Cèsar said.
“No, wait here.” Fritz didn’t want Cèsar running around. God only knew what he’d get up to.
Fritz lobbed the spent charm at Cèsar and joined the witches by the statue. The bronze was hot to the touch, as though it had been in the summer sunlight for hours.
“All at once,” he said, looking between the faces of his agents. Good people. Young people. Why did he feel so old when he looked at the agents of the MVD? “On the count of three. One…two…”
“Intruders!” Agent Bryce leaped away from the statue, fumbling through her pockets, most likely looking for a charm of her own.
She would need something much scarier than daylight to fight the next wave of the attack.
Figures leaped out of the barbershop, one after another, carrying guns of their own and gagging on the air out of Hell. Fritz’s kopis senses could tell no lies. These were humans.
His first assumption was that these were slaves of demons who lived in Helltown, beset upon the OPA by their infernal masters. But no—these people were too clean, too well kept. They couldn’t be enslaved.
“Keep pulling!” Agent Bryce said. She stood over the tangled cornucopia, bodily guarding it from the intruders.
Fritz pulled on the ropes to try to lift the statue, but he had no help. The agents were focused on the new assault.
There was an attractive woman with strawberry-blond hair carrying a Prada backpack loaded with herbs. Her companions wore silver pentacles. Collectively, they carried bats and at least one fireman’s axe.
Fritz glimpsed a tattoo on a short, dark-haired man. It was in the shape of a crimson apple that was dripping blood onto a fringe of bright-green leaves.
The Apple had arrived.
They dived toward Fritz’s team.
“Don’t hurt them if you don’t have to,” Fritz told Agent Bryce.
At the same time, Cèsar was saying, “Don’t hurt them!” Anyone else would have thought he was repeating Fritz’s order, but Cèsar was looking toward the members of the Apple. He knew them. He thought they would obey his command.
“Aim to disable and fire at will!” Agent Bryce ordered.
The agents turned guns on the oncoming group.
But nobody fired.
“Jammed,” Agent Wilson said, turning his gun to inspect it. He didn’t see the baseball bat coming for his head. And when it cracked against his pate, he saw nothing at all. His eyes blanked. He dropped to the pavement.
The Apple swarmed around them.
“No!” Fritz roared.
It was too late. A member of the Apple had plunged her hand into the mass of wire forming the cornucopia and jerked a diamond free.
Through his bond to Cèsar, Fritz felt the magic surrounding Helltown snap open.
The Fissure ripped wider.
A burning line dragged toward Fritz’s feet. He leaped backward, and back again when the Fissure kept extending.
Wind blasted out of the Fissure, momentarily clearing away the black smoke. It was no longer the City of Dis waiting on the other side. Fritz would have recognized its spider-web shape, Dead Forests, and craggy Mount Anathema through any amount of smoke.
The city awaiting Fritz was a rotten yellow rather than desert orange. There were no trees, no mountains. Just an enormous cadaver big enough to house a city within its crumbling pelvis.
Malebolge. Home to the House of Belial.
Fresh black smoke whirled, obscuring his view.
“Hey! Fritz!”
He looked up. Cèsar was on the other side of a new crack in the Fissure, a few hundred feet and an entire Hell dimension away from his kopis. Nightmares billowed behind him. The Apple showed no interest in his plight, and none sought a way to reach Cèsar. Those pieces of shit.
“Wait there!” Fritz yelled. “I’ll find a way to get to—”
Something exploded out of the Fissure. In the instant before it smashed into his chest, he glimpsed a familiar, leering face that looked like it belonged on a clown.
He flew backward, hit the ground, and his head bounced.
Fritz blacked out.
Chapter 11
June 2015 — San Francisco, California
“This guy sounds like a pud,” I said.
Fritz had been about to take another drink of his bourbon, but he choked on it. “What?”
“Julius Eagle is a total pud,” I said. “He betrayed you, lied to you, blew your op in Helltown. You sure you want me to bring him to you? I could just shoot him in the foot.”
Fritz’s mouth spasmed into something that could have been a smile. “You would shoot someone in the foot?”
“Just checking,” I said. “Foot-shooting is an option, so, you know…putting it out there.”
Fritz set his glass down, steepled his hands in front of his face. He gave the offer serious thought. But eventually, much to my relief, he said, “We’ve all made mistakes.”
“Is it a mistake when someone’s a willfully deceitful jerk consistently for months on end?” I asked, hooking an arm around one of the ropey things that they used to secure bits of the ship to other bits.
Isobel laughed. “Oh, Cèsar.”
“What?” I asked.
She shook her head.
It was Suzy who said, “It’s not his fault. This, uh, Julius guy…he’s loyal. I was telling him one thing, and everyone else was telling him this other thing, and he didn’t know what to do. I’m due some responsibility.”
Isobel smiled. “Next thing I know, you’ll be admitting that you only ever colluded with the Apple because you were clawing for approval from your parents.”
“Look, I’m not gonna make excuses, but I didn’t have a lot of places to go after I went into hiding from the OPA,” Suzy said. “I was really fucking alone. The Apple was there. It wasn’t because I want my mommy to love me.”
“Of course it was,” Fritz said, not unkindly.
Isobel lifted her hands in a placating gesture. “The point is that we forgave Julius a long time ago, just as we forgave ourselves, and we want him home with us.”
“All right. So that enormous pud called the cult in to come to the same place where you were trying to perform an OPA operation,” I prompted. “Then what?”
The memory sucked the mirth out of Fritz’s expression. He became thoughtful—and gloomy.
“I’m not sure,” he said, “because it turned out the whole thing was a trap, and that was when I got abducted.”
Chapter 12
August 2013 — Los Angeles, California
Fritz woke up tied to a chair, accompanied by the clown-like demon from Malebolge that had attacked him.
Her name was Proserpine. She was a demon, but not a beautiful one; the blood running through her veins belonged to a nightmare more powerful than the wisps he’d deflected in Helltown. Proserpine was giving him a comically wide grin, baring every single one of her yellow snaggleteeth.
“Hello, Fritz.” Her body oozed over the chair opposite his. It was an egg-shaped piece of furniture, an expensive antique. The couches were covered in plastic to protect them from the dust blown out of Hell. A gold standard in property protection from the sixties. This must have been one of the Friederling-owned properties inside Helltown.
“My arms are tired,” Fritz said in lieu of greeting. “Would you do me a favor and untie me, cousin?”
Proserpine’s hair and dress were a black mass surrounding the rubbery mask of her face. “It’s presumptuous of you to ask for a favor from me when you haven’t sent me a birthday card for the last…ever.”
“I only send birthday cards to people I’m glad have survived another year of living,” Fritz said.
Her stringy eyelashes fluttered. “Ouch.” She swept to her long, bony feet, drifting to the window on legs that would have looked suitable for a praying mantis. She was naked within the cloak of her aura. “This isn’t the reunion our parents would have wanted, is it? But nobody’s really enjoying what’s happening.”
Proserpine tossed the curtain aside to bare Helltown on the other side. They were on the fourth floor of the building. It meant they had an aerial view of the square where the Apple and the OPA were still battling. At that distance, Fritz could only see flashes of magic, leaping flames, and wispy nightmares swirling around it all.
“Don’t tell me you have anything to do with the Breaking,” Fritz said.
“Only as much as you do,” she said. “Did you hear about Daddy Friederling?”
Fritz had the copy of Lolita with the Purple Heart inside his ballistic jacket. Its hard corner pressed against his breastbone. “Was that you too? Maybe I should be sending you birthday cards.”
“Oh, Fritz.” Proserpine settled her hips back against the windowsill. She was water in a glass, filling the square space with the entirety of her form so that Fritz could only see magical flares beyond her like starlight in a nightmare-black sky. “I didn’t do anything to him. You know I can’t without being disinherited.”
That was a rule that the family had instated generations back, not long after Great Grandpa Alfred Friederling fell in love with the nightmare at the head of the House of Belial. Anyone in the family who killed another would be disinherited. No access to the money, the magic, the properties.
Murders within the family were rare these days. Even demons, creatures of chaos as they were, managed to discipline themselves into order when billions were at stake.
“I don’t need to ask whether you did anything to him,” Proserpine went on. “I know for a fact that you’re still in the line of inheritance. I can smell it on you.”
She was across the room in a blink, her enormous face in his. It was worse up close. She had a broad slash where lips should have been. When she smiled, she revealed the crevices of her mouth from the purple veins underneath her slimy black tongue to the rib-like ridges on the roof.
“Literally, Werner Friederling is all over you.” She trailed a hand over Fritz’s forehead, down the bridge of his nose, around the point of his chin.
He had spent far too much time around the nightmare side of his family to be effected. Plus, he had an aspis now. Her poisonous aura couldn’t touch him, even though her fingers could.
Those bony fingers of hers slid down his ballistic vest. She undid the strap, pulled out Lolita.
“Werner’s favorite book,” she said. “He loved the narrator’s ambiguity.”
“There’s no ambiguity to pedophilia. My father loved the idea that a man can paint the worst aspects of himself as heroic. He was disgusting.” On multiple levels. Just like all members of the Friederling family.
Proserpine opened the cover. The Purple Heart fell out. “What’s this?”
“A human military award,” Fritz said.
“Werner’s?” She tilted the Purple Heart so that the light from Hell’s fires glinted off of it.
Proserpine glared at it in silence for a long time—that ribbon resting on her palm, its outline visible through her flesh and bones.
“Werner loved you,” she said quietly. “He loved you as all fathers must love their sons.”
“Common misconception. Love takes more effort than sending one’s child to boarding schools with his nanny.”
“Would he give this to someone he didn’t love?” She dangled the Purple Heart above her upturned face. Fritz only realized what she was going to do an instant before she opened her mouth and let the heart fall onto her tongue.
Proserpine swallowed it.
Fritz was rigid.
He was empty.
He burned.
“What do you want from me?” Fritz asked.
Proserpine burped into her fist and said, “The House of Belial, of course.”
He laughed. “The world is ending, and you want the damn House?”
“What do you think are the odds of this actually leading up to the end of the world?” Proserpine ghosted around him in sinuous black lines. Her nails settled briefly on his shoulders then disappeared. “Dozens of potential apocalypses are thwarted worldwide by kopides like you. Wouldn’t you bet on the kopides in this too?”
“Typically, but these aren’t typical times. This is going to end in a genesis, Pros.” He said it like her name ended in a Z. Prozz. What he’d called her when he was a child who found her name too difficult to say in its entirety.
Invoking their past was a mistake. It made her clay-like nightmare face twist into the nastiest scowl that he could imagine.
“The fuck is a genesis?” she asked.
Fritz would have loved to be as clueless as she was.
Unfortunately, he was the Secretary of the Office of Preternatural Affairs. Cluelessness was not one of the privileges afforded to him by that position. “Geneses occur every few thousand years. It’s a natural process, like death and reincarnation, on the scale of the entire universe. Our current gods will sunset away and others will take their position, at the cost of all lives on this and every other plane.”
Proserpine considered his words. “Are you lying to me?”
“I’d never tell anything but truth about the end of everything.”
“Ba’al predated Adam and Eve,” she said. “There couldn’t have been a genesis when they took over as the pantheon.”
“Oh, but there was. The new gods in a genesis can choose to retain whomever they want. Our new gods may decide to have mercy and bring us back, but we can’t count on it. The only thing we can count on is the world torn asunder. And new
leadership, with which tends to come…” Fritz gave a very thin smile. “Reorganization.”
The Genesis Convention was meant to subvert the gods’ ongoing cycle of death and rebirth. Fritz would meet with Makael and Lady Tresor to devise an escape plan.
Assuming, of course, that the gods intended for anyone to escape.
They were helpless in these matters. Events had been set into motion. A genesis was going to happen, whether or not Fritz liked it, and his choice was to attempt to usher it in as befitting his role as the last heir of the Friederling fortune or hide from it.
All of that would go over Proserpine’s head if he tried to explain it to her.
She was an ambitious nightmare. Fritz could tell her that it was likely the House of Belial wouldn’t survive the next genesis and it simply wouldn’t matter to her.
The world existed at the moment. The House existed at the moment. Proserpine wanted it.
“I’d give you the House of Belial if I could,” Fritz said. “I don’t want it.”
“You can give it to me. All I need is your blood. I’ll untether the soul links from the human side of the House, then tether them to mine.” Proserpine brandished a knife and a glass vial in the shape of a teardrop.
“If you untether the soul links from me without observing proper inheritance procedure, the entire House will fall apart,” Fritz said.
“To be built anew. Newer, better…without Friederlings.” She set both knife and vial on the table in front of him. “Give me your blood.”
The teardrop-shaped vial resembled the Purple Heart that Proserpine had devoured. Fritz couldn’t cut it out of her belly without getting disinherited.
Proserpine’s cold fingers moved over his wrists, and the ropes released. “Cut yourself,” she said.
He considered the knife and Proserpine’s proximity. He considered the House of Belial and all the slaves who lived there—the humans who had built the property with their lives, their blood, their bones. People whose contracts would pass to Proserpine if he relinquished his inheritance.