The Long Night of the Gods: Lilith Awakens (Forgotten Ones Book 2)

by M. H. Hawkins

  Lilly huffed then her face turned sad. “Here. Let me get that.” Lilly lifted up Mea’s head and wiped away the drool hanging from the corner of Mea’s mouth with her thumb. “You know… You and Azazel, you were given Elysium, the crystal kingdom. Blackwell, he got the underworld. Me? You know what I got? The misery of women, that’s what I got. That’s what I’m the god of, misery. I’m the goddess of misery. That’s it.”

  “Mea,” Lilly said, now wiping away the dirty sweat that was sticking to Mea’s forehead and fixing Mea’s hair the best that she could. “Look, promise me that you will stand down, and I’ll let you go. You can go spend whatever time is left with your new family, and then… just let it happen.”

  She held up Mea’s head and looked into her rolled-back eyes and waited for an answer. Sounding like she was dying, Mea forced herself to answer. Her words were more of a mumble but still clear enough. “No.”

  Insulted, Lilly threw up her hands and grew angry. “Fine, have it your way. But I mean, really, what was your plan? How did you plan on stopping me? Stopping us? How did you plan on killing me—how’d you plan on killing the others? Huh? I can’t hear you.”

  Mea’s head hung limply in front of her, and her eyes were half-shut. Drugged and weakened, Mea’s lips twitched, mumbling something incoherently. Then she mumbled something else.

  Lilly moved closer and propped herself against the wall, leaning on her forearm while grinding her elbow into one of Mea’s wing. Lilly cocked her head to the side and leaned in, closer to Mea. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you.” Mea mumbled again, and Lilly moved her ear even closer to Mea’s dangling lips. “What was that? How did you plan on killing me?”

  Lilly scratched her cheek as she waited for an answer.

  Mea’s lips pursed quickly and quickened. “In pieces.”

  Mea’s sword leapt across the room and into her hand, and as she ripped half of herself off the harpoons that were pinning her to the wall, her blade was already swiping upwards.

  And Lilly’s hand, the one she was using to scratch her cheek, it was suddenly limp and falling. And the arm attached to it was suddenly not where it was supposed to be, and it was dropping as well. It frosted blue and a cold fog was forming around it. And Lilly’s razor sharp crimson ribbon (that was once-again attached to her wrist) crisped and made a crackling sound as it hardened into a brittle, curved sheet of red stained glass. It began steaming with cold air as it frosted over as well.

  And Lilly saw it falling before she felt it. Then the shock hit her before it hit the ground. But as it shattered, it finally registered. Her arm was gone.

  Lilly’s arm shattered against the marble floor and into a million icy shards. Her ribbon shattered into even more ruby-red slivers of shattered glass.

  Mea was already collapsing onto the ground, at the edge of the now-ruined Persian carpet. With everything becoming a poisoned blur of reality, Mea only knew that her blade had met its mark when she saw the mess splattering across the penthouse floor. Her sword rolled out from her limp hand, and her newfound energy was gone. But her wit wasn’t. She forces a smile and looked up at Lilly. Weakly, Mea said, “Can gods grow back body parts?”

  “My arm!” Lilly screamed with an unholy screech that sent her wispy banshees scattering in-and-out and around her. Lilly looked at the ground, shocked and in disbelief, and her eyes darted around at all of the shattered frozen shards that had once been pieces of her. “My… my… my arm. Wha-wha… what did you do?”

  “Huh,” Mea gasped. “I guess it wasn’t such a bad plan after all.” Now on her hands and knees, Mea did her best to stand after getting out the words. But while the words came easy, standing didn’t.

  She bounced off the wall before collapsing and crashing towards the ground the ground again. Then, on her second attempt to stand, Lilly caught her by the neck with the one good hand she still had and slammed Mea back against the wall and back onto the same harpoons she just pulled herself off of. Lilly’s tail peeked over her shoulder and now looked even more like a red scorpion’s tail. “You’ll pay for that,” Lilly told Mea, angry and acidly. “When you wake up, it’ll be too late. Everything you love will already be dead. Everyone you love will be dead. The world will be dead. Everything you ever cared for with be nothing but fire and ashes.”

  Lilly’s eyes narrowed and her lips wrinkled with ferocity. “And when you wake up, you’ll ask yourself, ‘Why did I do it? Why did I think I could win? Why am I such a stupid little girl?’”

  Lilly’s tail plumped up with poison and began drifting lazily behind her. “But all that will come later. For now, sleep tight.” Lilly’s tail jabbed Mea in the chest and began emptying itself. When Lilly tail finally retracted its stringer, Mea was already woozy and sleepy with euphoria.

  “Stupid girl. Rest now. For tomorrow, it will truly begin.” Then Lilly left.

  Mea was left pinned to the wall. She saw the blur of Lilly’s shadow grow and vanish in the night. She saw the banshees whipping around her, laughing, mocking her, before they left to follow their master. Lilly’s newest dose of venom was more potent than the earlier doses, and Mea’s thoughts clouded even more and almost nothing was making sense. Any and all of the lights in the penthouse became nothing but well-lit blurry streaks of light that left trails across her eyes. The busted tiles on the ground began spinning and swirling and began looking like a oceanic whirlpool. Still, Mea did end up seeing something that was real, that she knew was real. Outside and out over the horizon of the city, she was a flash of lightning. Another flash of lightning followed, and another, brighter flash. And the lightning lit up the sky, and it started to look like a golden fisherman’s net. A storm’s coming, Mea told herself, not knowing what she meant.

  CH 37: Return to the Stone Tower

  “He’s gone,” Blackwell said. “The reaper that stabbed you, he’s dead.” Looking less-than-victorious, Blackwell grabbed onto one of the cold iron bar of Azazel’s prison cell and tugged at it sadly.

  “Impressive,” said Azazel, his jet-black wings flapping loudly and strongly behind him before they disappeared into his shoulder blades and into the blackness surrounding him. “I’m surprised. I almost didn’t think you had it in you. It was starting to seem like you’d gone soft in your old age, like you wouldn’t have the stones to do it.”

  “It had to be done.”

  “Did it? Does it?” Azazel asked, his glowing emerald eyes dimming into a dull lime-green shade as he stepped nearer the iron bars and into the flickering light of the torches lining the stone hallway. Noticing that Blackwell’s suit was littered with dust and tattered, Azazel sympathetically said, “You don’t have to do this. There’s…”

  “—There isn’t. There isn’t another way. If there was…”

  Both gods seemed more melancholy than usual, more than what was in their nature.

  Blackwell chuckled lightly. “Blood and power, right?”

  “Yes, blood and power.”

  “Yes, blood and power,” echoed another voice from behind Blackwell. A red-and-black harpoon shot out of his chest then yanked itself back out. Lilly’s one good arm slapped over his shoulder and grabbed his face, pushing it down and away from her and exposing his neck. “I know, I’m early.” Lilly opened her mouth, and her fangs stretched and sharpened. She went to bite down and her fangs sunk into the fat, pulsing vein on his neck, and Lilly began sucking, draining Blackwell of that black sludge that ran through his veins.

  Blackwell’s skin paled and began to look like some sort of paper-thin parchment, and his veins shone through like weeds growing out of concrete. His eyes grew shaky, and they were starting to dim. Still Blackwell lifted his gaze and looked at Azazel. He whispered, “It’s okay,” then again he whispered weakly, “It’s okay.” His pale and flaky hand reached through the iron bars and towards Azazel, his old friend.

  Hesitant at first, Azazel eventually reached out for Blackwell’s hand. But as he grabbed it, it exploded into gray and black ashes and crumbled in
his palm.

  The rest of Blackwell followed. His suit turned flaky and crumbled away. Blackwell’s face turned even paler and cracked like dried desert dirt. Then, thinning into ashy flakes of gray and white, Blackwell’s skin started shedding, flaking away on its own, and drifted of and away in the cold air of the stony hallway. While most of the flakes drifted away, the rest found the flames of the hallway torches and lit up like flint. And within seconds, the torch that Blackwell was holding fell as that hand also turned to ash. And the rest of him dissolved into nothingness.

  Azazel said nothing. He bit the inside of his lip and tried to conceal any feelings he had or might actually be feeling.

  Lilly was less stoic. She ran her tongue through her mouth and over her teeth and smacked her lips—like she had just finished eating a peanut butter sandwich. “Huh?” Lilly said, finally breaking her silence. She jabbed her index finger into mouth and picked at her molars and liked her lips again. “Huh,” she said again before shrugging. “Guess we’re not immortal. Who would’ve thunk it?” She wiped her lips with the back of her hand, the only one that she still had left. She smacked her lips again. “Hmm, he tasted empty, kinda chalky… Yeah… Yeah, it was definitely a chalky taste, a little bitter.” For a moment, Lilly seemed confused and was scanning the ground. “Huh, I didn’t expect that to go so smoothly. I was, ah… I was kinda expecting him to put up more of a fight, but...” Nodding, she shrugged to the side. Oh well. “I’m not the one to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  Her eyes finally rose to meet Azazel’s. “Hey, haven’t seen you in a while. Heard you lost your wings.”

  “And you seem to have lost an arm.”

  “Yeah, don’t ask—the little lion caught me off-guard, but I don’t have to tell you about that, now do I?”

  “Nope,” Azazel chuckled. “No, you most certainly do not. But they did come back—my wings.” He pointed over his shoulder then showed them to her.

  “Nice, but I don’t think that I’ll be so lucky. Lost the arm upstairs.”

  “Unfortunate. Strange rules they got, up there.”

  “Yes, strange. Didn’t have a problem with my tail, but the arm… she iced it, it shattered, you know, pieces everywhere.” Lilly glanced at the floor, where Blackwell just died. “Thought draining some juice from him would help but... Hey, I heard you threatened to kill the girl’s family.”

  “Yeah,” Azazel answered hesitantly and raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

  Lilly swiped her hand through the air, and the iron bars to his prison cell clanged and slid aside and disappeared into the stone wall. “Feel like finishing the job?”

  “Sure. I got nothing else better to do.”

  “Good.” Lilly smiled and stepped aside to let Azazel out. This time, he did step out of his now-opened cell.

  A little later, Lilly exited the corridors and stepped to the edge of the black hole in the center of the stone tower and smiled. Why take half when you take all of it? The sound of shifting iron bars—both near and far—rang out and multiplied. The mechanical clanging started up and began echoing rapidly throughout the stone tower and up-and-down the black hole in the center of it. “The stone tower is mine, ours. The time for retribution is here.” Lilly held out her hand and said, “Come and see.”

  The ghost-like banshees shot out of her chest and her back and from everywhere else on her body. They swarmed around her and through the stone tower until it seemed to be filled with swirling smoke. The banshees, like restless gusts of winter wind, shot through and around everything. They streamed upwards and downwards and into the newly opened cells and all the while they whispered, “Come and see.”

  Lilly smiled. Down one arm, she was now in control of all that the stone tower held, all of its inhabitants, all of its power. Once gods, now monsters, she reminded herself. And men that became monsters. Either way, they were all hers. “The king is dead,” she said, smiling and shrugging. “Long live the queen.”

  CH 38: Guess Who’s Back?

  When the police arrived at the wrecked penthouse, they were beyond confused. It was demolished, like a bomb went off. Everything was covered in shattered glass and marble. The two corpses of the previous tenants were gone; their sparkling remains gone as well, off to somewhere better.

  The rest of the penthouse was a disaster. Lilly’s venom had burned ratty holes in the Persian carpet and left pockmarks into the marble floors. The crystal chandelier was a mangled web of gold-plated metal and sharp edges. And where Lilly’s onyx spear had stuck the wall, a long slit was burned into the hard stone, but the spear was completely gone.

  Lilly’s shattered arm was no longer a shattered arm. It had become nothing more than thousands of long shattered shards that looked like sparkling diamonds and rubies. Yet, as the police went to pick them up, the icy diamonds burned their skin and sizzled like acid. And with their structural integrity disturbed, the cold diamonds melted instantly, transforming into tiny bubbling puddles that would quickly evaporate into nothingness.

  The droplets of Mea’s blood that had been splattered about sparkled like rubies. Yet they were far more brittle. As one officer toed at a rather large ruby-like splatter of blood—from Lilly’s first harpoon—the ruby blood splatter shattered, bursting into a cluster of even smaller rubies before they crumbled into sparkling red dust and became nothing at all.

  Law enforcement was left dumbfounded by the wreckage, and they knew that any answers would be hard to come by. In fact, they wouldn’t find any answers—not today, not any time soon.

  And Mea was gone. Where she once hung, pinned to the wall, something else was left in her place. Deep slashes in the wall, claw marks, charred patches of stone, blackened suit. These only added to the mystery.

  The markings that were scattered throughout the penthouse and over the rooftop terrace varied in size, but they were all very similar. They all looked like tiny, leafless, black trees. Some were painted on the marble retaining walls of the outside terrace. Some were splattered across the outside railing. A larger one was painted on the side of the building. Inside the penthouse, even more were etched in whatever walls were still standing. Paintings of tiny black trees. Investigators would later discover that the charred markings and tree paintings were from electricity burns. That much, the fire chief had told them. Still, they found all the markings quite strange, and the fire chief had said that the voltage needed to sear in marking could’ve only come from a flurry of lightning bolts. Strange but not impossible was his final conclusion.

  Back home, Diana mulled over the disappearance of her daughter. Mea was nowhere to be found and wasn’t answering her phone. And Diana worse fears were fed when she called her daughter’s phone—for the hundredth time—and found it vibrating, on Mea’s bed. After that, Diana’s hopes of finding her daughter were crushed.

  Still, she forced herself to keep going, to keep looking, like any good mother would do. Unfortunately all she found was dead ends and more dead ends. She would have called Mea’s friends, if she had any—but she didn’t. Anna remained her only friend, but Anna was long gone.

  Strangely enough, as Diana panicked, Mea’s little brother Ryan was oddly calm. It wasn’t even a day since Mea went missing when Ryan had already started stepping up and helping his mother cope, comforting and reassuring his mom that his older sister was okay. It was all quite strange. Acting years older than he truly was, Ryan’s positive outlook and maturity bordered on denial.

  He’d say, “It’s okay, Mom. She’ll be back soon. Trust me.” Then he’d pat her on the back and would try to take her mind off it. Tossing a comic book onto her lap, he’d say, “Here. Come on and read me a story—C’mon.”

  While both of them knew the gesture was more for her than him, they both had enough sense not to mention it. Instead, Diana would force back her tears, mustered a smile, and played along.

  On the night of the third day after Mea was missing, the weather flared up something fierce. And as Ryan lied down in his bed for the nigh
t, his mom sat next to him—sad and thinking about her missing daughter, and she read a story to her eight-year-old son—a Captain America comic that both of them had read many times before and one that they both knew Ryan already knew by heart.

  Outside Ryan’s bedroom, sheets of rain were coming down and the thunder was crashing with such violence that it startled both of them, making them jump in their seats with each explosion. Then the lightning joined in and lit up the heavens along with the darkness outside Ryan’s bedroom window. And even as the lights inside the apartment flickered and it went dark, the lightning flashing outside was so bright and frequent enough that each burst turned the night into day.

  Darkness followed, and the lightning outside and the electricity inside died. Then there was only darkness. An eerie silence filled Ryan’s bedroom and seemingly the rest of the world too. The two Harris’ felt it too, the heaviness of the silence. Through the darkness, Diana and Ryan shared a slack-jawed, shocked look then scooted a bit closer to each other.

  The silence broke, and strangely enough, they heard a trumpet. Though it was beyond belief and far away, it was clearly the sound of a trumpet. And both Diana and Ryan heard it and shared another confused look. Is that a trumpet? They both wondered. Yes, clear as day, it was a trumpet. Diana grew worried and pulled her son even closer into her arms, but Ryan was less afraid and his lips were curling into a giant smile. His eyes lifted and his gaze drifted up towards the ceiling.

  Then it was over. The lights flipped back on. The trumpet was silenced. The rain stopped, and the lightning and thunder were gone. Then something else strange happened. Muffled voices came from the living room. The television. Diana was puzzled by the sounds. The TV was off; I know I turned it off. But again Ryan was the calm one—and he was still smiling. “Hey, Mom.” He nudged Diana and looked up. “She’s back.”