by SM Reine
Cèsar laughed too. It was an embarrassed kind of laugh, but it was a laugh. It quickly died off. “What are you going to do about your family?”
“I’ll figure it out. I have to,” Isobel said.
“I wish I could help, but…the Genesis Convention. I’ve gotta be there.”
“To kill that angel on behalf of the Apple?” Isobel asked.
“That’s what Zettel wants me to do. Fritz wants me to get Zettel on the house’s grounds so he can be arrested.”
It seemed silly to arrest a cult leader when demons the size of Zeppelins were soaring out of a crack to Hell.
“Are you more loyal to the Apple or to your kopis?” Isobel asked.
“That’s a great fucking question,” Cèsar said. “You know, Suzy’s parents are big head honchos in the Apple. I’m not jazzed about getting my in-laws arrested.”
“In-laws?” Isobel asked, making herself smile. “Did you secretly marry Suzy too?”
Cèsar still wouldn’t look at her. “Not yet.”
Her heart sank.
That “not yet” was a very depressing “not yet.”
Which was silly. Isobel was already married. It wasn’t like she’d been saving herself for Cèsar all this time.
“I’m in love with Suzy,” Cèsar said in his best attempt to drive the nails deeper into Isobel’s heart.
“So you’ll be going into the Genesis Convention guns blazing, then.”
“Bomb blazing is what Zettel wants. He thinks we’ve gotta guarantee that the angel is going to die, so he’s prepped a bomb that could level Fritz’s entire house. Problem being…” Cèsar seemed to battle with the words he needed to say next. Isobel could feel his heart hammering in his chest. “I love Fritz too.”
A hot tear tracked down her cheek. “Protect him. Please.”
“I’ll always be his shield,” Cèsar said. His thumb swiped over Isobel’s jawline. “Don’t cry. Come on, baby, please don’t cry.”
He pulled her in for a hug. He squeezed her tight, buried his nose in her hair, inhaled deeply. Isobel breathed in Cèsar’s smell too. She let herself drown in it, wishing that she could have remained in that exact spot into eternity.
“I’m going to Malebolge,” she said, her temple against his collarbone.
“Good luck,” he whispered, “and be careful.”
“I will,” she said.
And then Cèsar said one more thing, very quietly, before letting go, turning from her, and walking away.
Isobel watched him vanish down the stairs into the IRD building, feeling like her heart was crumbling into a thousand pieces.
Cèsar’s last words were stuck in her craw.
I love you too.
Isobel wasn’t sure why at the time, but she felt like this was the last time she was ever going to see him.
It wasn’t the last time ever. But it was the last time for two years.
Chapter 16
Suzy returned to the Batcave to find Stephanie Whyte repairing the wards with the Focus. She forgot about her promise to Fritz as soon as she saw Stephanie near her stuff. Stephanie was a good witch, but not with delicate wards.
“Hey! What are you doing?” She descended on Stephanie, flapping her hands wildly. “Get away from that!”
Stephanie stepped back with feline chill. “Is there a problem?”
Suzy’s fingers flew over the crystals on the desk, which had been rearranged to support the new addition. “No, this all looks okay. Not perfect, but okay. You didn’t damage anything. This time.”
“I would have died of the shame if I’d disappointed you.” Stephanie, ever subtle in her expressions of disapproval, lifted her chin and twisted shoulders-first, ensuring that the cold-shoulderness of it all would feel extra frigid. She paused in the door. “Pass my thanks on to that boy of yours. We couldn’t have done it without him.”
She strode out of the room.
Suzy shot dual middle fingers at Stephanie’s back. “Go suck a prick, asshole. Suck on both these pricks. Bang, bang.”
She was still waving her hands at the doorway when her parents stepped through it. May and Sentaro looked characteristically unamused and unsurprised by Suzy’s emphatic gesture.
Suzy holstered her middle fingers. “Both of you at once? What did I do this time?”
“We wanted to see the wards for ourselves,” May said. She stood back as Sentaro peered at the Focus more closely. “It’s impressive.”
“Of course it is,” Suzy said.
Considering it came from Helltown, the Focus was a pearl pulled from the mouth of a rotten oyster. It was beautiful enough to outshine the other crystals arrayed on Suzy’s desk.
Sentaro was making quiet approval noises in the back of his throat as he studied it. The sound sent Suzy flashing back to memories of her childhood. He’d made those same approving noises when she’d showed drawings to him, and when she’d learned to ride a bike, and when her essays got her accepted to prep school.
“That must have been difficult to get,” May said, resting her hand on Suzy’s shoulder.
“Don’t ask me. I wasn’t the one who got it.” Suzy was the one who’d held Cèsar in her arms as he shook, refusing to speak about what had happened when the Apple and the OPA clashed over the Focus. She was the one who wondered if any stakes were worth doing this to him. To the world. To Agent Bryce.
“The Apple members from the Half Moon Bay Coven and the White Ash Coven are leaving now,” May said. “They’re returning home to rally their families. You’ve made this pocket dimension the safest place for all of us to be, Suzume. You should be proud.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Proud.” Her stomach had turned inside out and crystallized. Because the safest place in the world was about to get a lot less safe. She’d already released Cat into Los Angeles, since her pet kitty was surely safer running around alone than in a pocket dimension on the brink of collapse.
Sentaro took May’s hand. “You’ve done well,” he said.
Suzy was gripped by momentary insanity.
She hugged her parents.
“Get out of here,” she whispered into their ears. “Get out of the dimension, California, the entire country. Run and keep running. Don’t tell Zettel.”
She pushed them away, and they watched her for a moment with quiet consideration.
May and Sentaro exchanged looks.
“I already gave the bomb to Zettel,” May said.
Suzy wanted to barf. “It’s okay. I don’t care. Just…please go.”
Sentaro’s hand rested on her shoulder. “We love you too. Whatever you have done, it’s also okay. And we will run.”
Her eyes got hot. Her heart was turning inside out too. “Thanks.”
They left without saying goodbye.
Probably for the best. Suzy couldn’t have handled talking to them for another moment without totally losing it.
The whole dimension shuddered when Suzy took the Focus off the table. The Batcave didn’t like having the Focus removed just when it had started to settle around the warding artifact.
And the dimension wasn’t the only one that knew something was awry.
“Going somewhere?” Gary Zettel asked, barring Suzy from heading up the hallway with his stupid wide body. Dante was behind him—the aspis who had replaced Allyson—and the two of them formed one heck of a wall.
She stuck the Focus behind her back.
“I was grabbing clean underwear,” Suzy said.
Zettel seized her arm. She clenched her fist tightly around the Focus so he couldn’t pry it out.
“Betrayal?” he asked.
“It’s not a betrayal if this thing didn’t belong to us in the first place,” Suzy said. “Los Angeles is a mess. I just wanna put it back together.” She yanked free of him, pushed between the two men.
Dante let her pass.
Zettel did not. He cut in front of her when she tried to exit into the main chamber.
“The fuck is your problem?” sh
e asked.
“The OPA was trying to get at the Focus when we took it,” Zettel said. “If you put it back, they’ll take it. You’ll be helping our enemies.”
“Oh, come on, that’s bullshit. The OPA was trying to fix Helltown’s wards, not steal this shit for themselves. We’re the assholes who left Helltown open to all of LA.”
“Are you siding with them?”
“Not everything is us versus them!” Suzy said. “The OPA is bad. Yes. But not universally, ubiquitously evil.” Just like how the Apple wasn’t universally, ubiquitously good. Zettel proved it all the time.
He would happily kill Fritz Friederling if given the chance.
What surprised Suzy was that she wouldn’t.
She kinda liked Fritz. He was an asshole, but so was Suzy.
“Give me the Focus,” Zettel said.
She rolled the Focus over in her fingers. “I told you I can keep this plane together as long as we don’t get another hit as big as the last one.”
“That’s not good enough,” he said.
“This is just about protecting your ass from apocalypse, isn’t it?” Suzy asked. “Keeping this thing here won’t help us get revenge for Adam. But it will keep your pansy ass safe.”
Zettel’s whole face screwed up in this expression of terrifying anger. “You can’t take the Focus out of here.”
“Watch me,” Suzy said.
When she tried to step past him again, his hand went to her throat.
Not her arm, not her shoulder. Her fucking throat.
So he totally deserved to get an elbow in his throat.
He fell, clutching at his throat and gasping.
Suzy bolted for the stairs.
The other resident members of the Apple were in the process of leaving, so they didn’t realize she was fleeing. Suzy’s heart pounded in her chest and her thighs burned from the effort of climbing so many stairs. “Get out of my way!” she shouted, shoving Stephanie Whyte. “The dimension’s gonna collapse!”
“What?” asked another member, whose name Suzy had never bothered to learn.
“You heard me!” Suzy said.
Magic dilated and Suzy erupted onto Earth. She emerged on the lawn by the library. It was no longer a peaceful grove, but an ash-caked Hell. The leaves had fallen from the trees so that bare branches scraped at the orange sky. Several windows on the library were broken.
An enormous teal RV screeched to a halt at the curb, pointing in the wrong direction for the flow of traffic. Isobel Stonecrow stuck her head out the driver’s window. “Get in!”
The magic at Suzy’s back was dilating and warping again. She was about to have Zettel and Dante on her ass.
She swung into the RV just as Zettel stepped out onto the grass.
“Fuck you!” she roared at him, shaking her middle finger on one hand and the Focus in the other. Suzy also shook her boobs for good measure. “Fuuuck yooou!”
She thought that Zettel was saying something similar back at her, but she couldn’t hear him over the roar of the engine. Suzy cackled and flung herself into the chair next to Isobel. “Hi Isobel, how are you?”
“I’ve been better.” Isobel gripped the steering wheel in both hands as they swerved wildly through traffic. The RV was clearly not meant for such evasive maneuvers. It shuddered from the effort.
They turned a corner and nearly plowed into a line of cars.
Isobel laid on the horn. “Out of my way! Go! Move! I’m trying to save the world, you jerks!”
“I don’t think there are any drivers in those cars,” Suzy said. A lot of vehicles had been abandoned on the streets of Los Angeles once everything started catching fire.
Isobel drove over a curb to get past the cars.
“Is it a coincidence that you came by the library right when I was running?” Suzy asked, yanking the seatbelt across her chest and buckling it.
“Fritz told me you’d agreed to return the Focus to Helltown,” Isobel said. “I’m heading that way, so I figured I should give you a ride.” The RV slammed into a figure that was walking in the street. It shuddered but didn’t stop. “Whoops.”
Suzy swung around to look out a back window. “Was that a human?”
“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t,” Isobel said. “Ninety-nine percent.”
Good enough for Suzy.
She surveyed the necrocognitive from the passenger’s seat. Isobel looked like a pinup, even when she was trucking on her way to Helltown. The glamours of her jewelry made Isobel impervious to the surrounding apocalypse. She’d invested a lot of money into those, which was something the wife of a billionaire could do, and Suzy could not.
“Why have we never been friends?” Isobel wondered aloud while simultaneously wrenching the steering wheel. The RV whipped around a corner.
Suzy felt the nauseating sensation of balance gone awry, her stomach lifting into her throat, and she realized that two of the wheels had come off the ground only when the RV slammed back down onto them.
“Why should we be friends?” Suzy asked. “Is it because we’ve both got pussies and we hang around the same men? You’re a fucking death witch.”
Isobel mimicked her tone. “You’re a fucking member of the Apple.”
“I think I just quit,” Suzy said.
“Well, then you’ve got one up on me, since I’m still a death witch. Even so, I think we should be friends.”
“Why? You’ve never liked me.”
“It has nothing to do with you. I was jealous of your relationship with Cèsar. Lately, I’ve been thinking that’s silly.”
“How lately?” Suzy asked. “Ever since he stopped making his dick available to you whenever you wanted?” She was trying to push buttons, trying to make Isobel angry so she’d drop the conversation.
But Isobel didn’t get angry. She also didn’t drop it. “The prospect of losing Cèsar’s friendship—“
“His dick,” Suzy filled in.
“—has gotten me thinking about you a lot more, yes,” Isobel said. “We’ve got so much in common! For instance, you’re funny. I’m funny.”
“That remains to be seen.”
Isobel slammed into another form on the road. This time Suzy was entirely sure it was a demon, since humans didn’t explode black ichor everywhere.
Helltown rose in the distance. All of Los Angeles looked like it was burning lately, but Helltown looked extra-burny. Suzy had already plunged through that neighborhood to save someone who didn’t need to be saved. She couldn’t believe she was going back.
The RV leaped a barrier and swerved through what had once been a secret archway to Helltown. The welded iron “Welcome” sign scraped the roof of the RV.
“I don’t know if you have a good sense of humor, but you’ve got balls,” Suzy said grudgingly.
“Ovaries are better than balls,” Isobel said. “Another reason we should be friends.”
“You just want to be friends so that I’ll give you permission to fuck my guy,” Suzy said.
Isobel laughed. “See? You’re hilarious!”
“I know I’m hilarious. That was never in contention.” She also hadn’t been joking. “You think you can have anything you want. Swanning around, flipping your hair at billionaires to make them fall in love with you, rubbing your butt on hapless men like Cèsar. How’s he supposed to resist that? Not to go all Dolly Parton on you, Jolene, but it’s not fair.”
“I’d say your accusations aren’t fair,” Isobel said.
“No? You don’t like being faced with the fact that you use your body to get money, power, anything you want?”
Isobel was starting to look offended. “You begrudge me marrying my way into money when you’re the sole heir to your parents’ money as a result of being in a centuries-old cult?”
“That’s different,” Suzy said.
“It is different. Getting born at the top is easier than seducing your way there.”
Helltown looked different when tearing through it at a million miles per h
our. Demons weren’t so scary when they were attempting to dodge an RV smashing through their territory, and Suzy kinda loved it.
“Look, I’m not judging you,” Isobel said. “But I also don’t think you should hate me because I married into money.” She slammed on the brakes. The seatbelt went tight against Suzy’s chest.
The instant it slackened, she unbuckled and stood up. Her boobs felt bruised. “Now you’re going to be even better than me by trying to be nicer and more forgiving?”
Isobel looked exasperated. “I’m trying to be friends! Here, have a knife.” She handed a blade to Suzy.
“Now this is a meaningful gesture of friendship.”
“I’m actually giving that to you because Gary Zettel is going to attack us the instant we get out of the RV. He followed us here.”
“He did what?” Suzy asked.
But Isobel had already thrown open the door and leaped out.
As soon as her feet hit pavement, she ducked under a meaty, swinging fist.
Suzy dived for Zettel. She aimed for the gut but only slashed his forearm.
Zettel yanked back with a shout. “Dante!” Suzy barely turned in time to avoid the witch’s fireball. He was using the OPA’s ribbon magic.
Dante yanked another ribbon from his pocket, hands lighting with flame. Isobel came up from behind and kicked him between the legs. Hard. He collapsed, clutching his genitals.
“Come on!” she shouted to Suzy. “We have to run the rest of the way to the Fissure!”
Suzy glanced back at Zettel. He looked really angry.
Yeah, running off with Isobel was probably a good idea.
She flew after the necrocog. “Don’t go so fast!” Suzy panted at Isobel. “My legs are shorter than yours!”
“One more way I’m better than you, right?” Isobel called back.
“Go fuck yourself, Stonecrow!”
They skidded around the corner. Only then did Suzy realize that they were on the wrong side of the Fissure. The Focus’s cornucopia was on the far end of the square, with a huge bleeding gash between Suzy and the statue.
“Oh, fuck,” she said. “You took us to the wrong place.”
“No, this is exactly where I meant to come,” Isobel said. She teetered on the end of the Fissure, hair tossed around her head by the wind. “I’m going to the House of Belial to free the slaves before Proserpine can hurt them. I need your help to activate the wards magic against her. It takes two people.”