New Title 1

by Dru Pagliassotti

  “We’re okay.” Ally did her best to sound encouraging. “Let’s go, huh?”

  They lifted their borrowed bikes and started down the sidewalk again, taking wide detours to avoid the spots where the snakes had burst through and left everything broken.

  “Hey! Hey!”

  Ally pumped the brakes and dropped a foot to the sidewalk. A wide-eyed man stumbled up, looking young and frightened.

  “Oh, man, I’m glad to see you,” he said, voice shaking. “Where is everyone?”

  “I think they went to the chapel,” Ally said, pointing across campus to where a faint glow could be seen beyond the trees in the park. “The library fell, and they dug people out, so now the chapel’s kind of base camp.”

  “Do—do you think its safe? From the snakes? And the earthquakes?”

  “It’s God’s house,” Jarret pointed out.

  “Yeah, like churches don’t fall down all the time.”

  “I don’t know how safe it is, but if you’re looking for people, that’s the best place to go.” Ally gave the boy a sympathetic look. He was probably a freshman, he looked so young. “We think the snakes track by vibration, so walk really soft, okay?”

  “Aw, man.” He looked on the verge of tears. “Can I come with you? You look like you know what you’re doing.”

  “Better not,” Jarret said, solemnly. “We’re going toward the snakes, not away from them.”

  “Are you crazy? Why?”

  “To kill them,” Ally said, forcing herself to sound tough and confident. “’Cause we can’t sit around waiting for the police to rescue us.”

  “Aw, man.” The boy shook his head. “Aw, fuck.”

  “Anyway,” Ally said, getting ready to push off again, “you should go to the chapel. Don’t try crossing the moat—people are getting killed that way.”

  “The moat?” the boy asked, confused, but Ally was already on the move. Peter and Jarret wished the boy good luck and headed after her.

  They took a left and parked next to the science building. It seemed like the right place for a bunch of mutant snake monsters to hide out. Better yet, the quakes had already broken the plate glass in its front lobby, so getting in was easy.

  “Maybe we can find something useful in here,” Peter said, looking around. “Like, killer chemicals or something.”

  “What grade did you get in org chem?” Ally asked.

  “A C-plus, but that’s because I missed a lot of classes for football.”

  “Jarret?”

  “I took bio and oceanography. How about you?”

  “Same,” Ally replied. “You weren’t in my oceans class, were you?”

  “Last fall?”

  “No, I took it spring.”

  “Did you go on the dive?”

  “Yeah, you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Hey, guys, shut up,” Peter growled. “What if the snakes can hear us?”

  “I don’t think talking makes a strong enough vibration,” Ally said, but she took Peter’s point and let the conversation drop. Stupid thing to talk about, anyway, in the middle of the apocalypse.

  They proceeded quietly to the stairway, finding that it did, indeed, lead down.

  Ally held her breath, half-expecting to find sleeping serpents and a bunch of slime-encased students, but Jarret’s flashlight beam revealed nothing but old air-conditioning parts and boxes, some shelves of dusty lab books and manuals, and a pile of camping supplies.

  “Hang on,” she said, squeezing through the boxes to the camping supplies. In a moment Jarret and Peter were next to her, rummaging through dirty canvas bags and old cardboard boxes.

  “All right!” Peter said as Ally found a flashlight and flicked it on. The beam was yellowish and weak, but it held. They dug out two more that worked and put the ones with dead batteries back.

  “Guess this is all of geology’s field-trip gear,” Jarret said, holding up a small propane camping stove. “Can we use this?”

  “Well, it burns, right?”

  “If you’ve got a match or a lighter.”

  “Let’s see.” A little more digging unearthed a battered tin of matches. Ally checked them, then tossed them to Jarret. “You know, storing those down here just can’t be safe. Isn’t there, like, spontaneous combustion or something?”

  “They’re safe as long as they’re in the tin.” Jarret slid it into his front pocket. “Anything else?”

  “No, but if we get stuck here a few days, we should grab those sleeping bags,” Peter said, shoving everything back into the boxes. “If all the dorms are down.”

  “Someone will come get us before then,” Ally said, feeling a nervous prickle run down her spine. “People will notice all the broken roads when it gets light.”

  “If they aren’t fighting snakes,” Peter said, darkly.

  “They’ll rescue us. There’s a campus emergency plan.” Jarret stood. “And your mom will make sure we’re okay, too, right?”

  Peter looked up at him, then gave a crooked smile.

  “Yeah. I pity the snake that gets in Mom’s way when she’s mad. She’s a total bad-ass lawyer.”

  “Scary.”

  “You bet.” Peter stood, picking his sloshing backpack up again. “Ready, Ally?”

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “Let’s go check out the art trailer and social sciences.”

  XXXI

  Todd turned, ready to order Jack to start his invocation, but the occultist was down, pale and covered with sweat. Next to him, the ex-priest was speaking quietly.

  Annoyed, Todd turned. The white spheres were gone, and so was Penemue.

  “Amon, can you follow them?” he asked.

  Amon slunk toward him from the back of the chapel, where it had been cowering throughout the fight. Todd didn’t blame it—a blessed chapel probably wasn’t the most comfortable place for a demon.

  “I don’t want to,” it groaned, its eight legs stepping over Jack as if the fallen man were nothing but an obstacle. “You heard the Watcher. They are the dragons ofרוקניא . They are the enemy of human and mal'akhim.”

  “Dragons of...the void?” Todd hesitated, remembering the emptiness Amon had shown him. He let the shining doorway vanish and hoped he’d be able to open it again. “Is Penemue dead?”

  “Do you want me to search hell for its soul?” Amon sounded eager.

  “No.” Todd ignored the demon as its head drooped. “If it was right, you wouldn’t find it.” He rubbed his chin, then strode back down the aisle to Markham and Jack. The former priest looked fretful, pulling his phone out of his pocket. “Is he dead?” It seemed to be the question of the minute.

  “No.” Markham raised his head. “But he had a stroke two months ago, and this looks a lot like another one.” He dialed three numbers, listened, then snapped the phone shut again with an unpriestly oath.

  “Amon, is this man dying?”

  “No.” The demon snapped irritably. “Not yet. Do you want him to die, beloved? I could make him die. May I please make him die?”

  Markham’s expression hardened, but Todd was already shaking his head.

  “Relax, Amon. He’s on our side for now.”

  The demon settled on the floor, its claws snagging and tearing at the dark chapel carpet, leaving darker smudges of ash behind. It muttered testily to itself, too low for Todd to hear.

  “Tell me, Markham—what was Penemue doing?”

  “Besides getting ready to kill all of those students?” The former priest glanced away from his friend to the far end of the chapel, where the students stood in a fearful huddle. “I don’t know. He seemed to think their deaths would keep the creatures from manifesting. I don’t understand why.”

  “The dragons of rokanya. The void. Have you ever heard of them?”

  “No.” Markham sounded distracted. “They sound like something Crowley might have made up.”

  “Nobody made them up. They’re real, and they’re here. But why would they need humans to bring them into o
ur reality?”

  “Human are always tampering with things they should leave alone. Right, Jack?” Markham laid a gentle hand on his friend’s forehead.

  Todd looked down, but the long-haired biker didn’t seem inclined to join the conversation, his eyes flickering back and forth as though seeing something invisible to the rest of them. He seemed to spend a lot of time looking at Amon. Todd leaned over and laid a restraining hand on the demon’s skull. Amon hissed, rolling a silver eye up to look at him.

  “Like devils, for example,” Markham said pointedly.

  “You relax, too.” Todd patted Amon and straightened up again. “We’re going to need all of the resources we can get to defeat those things. One of them just destroyed a Watcher.”

  “It came through your tunnel.”

  “Yes. Which means we won’t be safe walking the betweens anymore.”

  “They came from hell.”

  “The doorway those spheres came through wasn’t coming from hell. Penemue dismissed my hellwall so easily that I called a barrier from heaven.”

  “I heard Penemue call you Hellbender.”

  “And we called Penemue a Watcher. The signifier can never adequately encompass the signified.”

  “What are you?”

  “Just a man, like you.” Todd plucked at one of the unraveling threads of his sweater. “More or less. Traveling the limis can change a person. I’ve been traveling through it for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Several hundred years.”

  “Impossible.” The former priest’s voice was flat. “I would have heard of you before this.”

  Todd lifted a shoulder. His sweater was probably irreparable. Too bad. He’d bought it in a small, upscale shop in Knightsbridge, and he’d been fond of its soft lambswool.

  “The kind of people I reveal myself to are the kind who can keep secrets.”

  Markham studied him a long moment, frowning, then looked back down at Jack.

  “We still don’t know what’s going on.”

  “The Gudruns summoned something very old and very alien. At the last moment, something stopped them. Whoever laid down the goetic seal, I presume; their nephew, the pastor’s grandfather, or some wandering occultist like you. Now the seal has been removed and the energies of their summoning have started to flow again.”

  “The dragons of the abyss.” Markham closed his eyes. “Tell me the truth, Edward. Did you send that email to me, about the angel hunt?”

  “Amon told me about the hunt. I thought you might be interested. The angel’s name was Melech.”

  “Why did you think it would be important?”

  Todd hesitated, then decided there was no harm in answering honestly. “I knew something was going to happen here. The probabilities all pointed toward it. I wanted to learn more about you. Sending you to face a pack of nephilim seemed like a good way to find out if you were a fraud or not.” He paused. “And the odds were high that you’d learn something useful from it. Does the angel’s vision make any more sense now?”

  “The field of blood, I think we can interpret easily enough, by now. Worms seething through meat—that could be a metaphor for those serpents, especially given the way they like to crush bodies. A bone staircase going down into darkness, and doors closing. You said you knew a bone staircase.”

  “There is a passage of bone through the limis. We could travel through it to the nearest staircase—but it would be dangerous.”

  “And the doorways could be real or metaphorical.” Markham looked down at his friend. “What do you think, Jack?”

  The lanky man nodded. Todd wasn’t convinced he understood what was going on around him, but he seemed to be breathing more easily.

  “When he’s well again,” Todd said, “we can have him try to capture one of those dragons. I’d like to see what it is we’re dealing with.”

  “The orb shape is an illusion?”

  “I think the orbs are cross-sections.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Todd shrugged off his shredded sweater. His white Oxford shirt was torn and pinpricked with blood.

  “If I’m right, the dragons come from a hyperspace. What we’re seeing is the part of the creature that pierces our three dimensions.” He ran a finger through the unraveling weave of his sweater. “Your friend’s invocations might be strong enough to translate the dragons entirely into our axes of reference, however.”

  “Hyperspace? We’re not talking space aliens again, I hope.”

  “Dimensional aliens, perhaps. You do know that there are many more dimensions than our three?”

  “I’m aware that time is the fourth dimension.”

  “A fourth dimension. There are others. And they have nothing to do with spaceships traveling from galaxy to galaxy.”

  “What makes you think those creatures are from another dimension?”

  “They’re too alien to come from our own.” Todd paused. “Flesh, strange organ-like shapes, spheres of hair or scales, a flash of claws—all we’re seeing are our own sensory interpretations of the creatures’ cross-sections; the rest of the creatures extend into dimensions we can’t perceive.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No,” Todd admitted. “But there’s a very high probability that I’m correct.”

  “If you are, I don’t think Jack’s invocations will do us any good.” Markham squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “If those creatures come from another dimension, couldn’t they just—warp-drive—back into their own space again, to escape us?”

  “If we tried to trap them physically, yes. But magick reverberates through more dimensions than our three. I hope that if his conjurations are strong enough to trap nephilim and b'nei elohim, they will be strong enough to affect these dragons.”

  “Which you don’t think belong to either God or Satan.”

  Todd let the sweater fall to the carpeted floor.

  “After what Penemue said, I think they’re the original enemy of both.”

  XXXII

  Jack was barely aware of the conversation above him. He was trying to cling to consciousness and keep an eye on Amon, which seemed much larger and more dangerous than it had before. Scraps of tunes kept running through his mind, all dark.

  I looked to the East, I looked to the West, I saw his coffin coming.

  Lay down, lay down his cold, clay corpse, And let me gaze upon him.

  His head pounded, and his vision was blurry. He felt a modicum of hope, though. He didn’t feel the same sense of paralysis that he’d suffered in the bar outside Reno. The tingling in his arm was starting to fade, not into numbness, but into normality. Andy’s hand and voice were comforting presences, although Edward Todd’s deep, rumbling voice echoed strangely in his ears.

  Amon turned and looked at him, its mirroreyes revealing his tattered reflection. Jack stared at himself in its gaze, counting his breaths. His warding spells were setting his nerves on end.

  Andy was saying something about the angel-ash vision, and Jack heard his name. He managed to incline his head to show that he was still aware. He wondered what Todd’s vision had been, after he’d bitten down on the devil’s flesh. What visions would angels and devils see, if they were to eat a human’s flesh?

  Maybe that was why Amon had bitten Todd. To establish communion.

  Did b'nei elohim ever feed off humanity? If he offered an angel his flesh, would the angel finally see him the way he saw himself?

  Had those spherical creatures—the things that Todd was calling dragons—eaten Penemue, and if so, what had the Watcher’s flesh shown them?

  If he ate the flesh of a dragon, what would he see?

  Andy squeezed his shoulder, and Todd’s ragged sweater dropped through the air like a black bat. Jack started, thinking for a moment that Amon had attacked. The devil snapped its beak at him, mockingly. Now that Jack’s vision was clearing, Amon didn’t look so large and fearsome, after all.

  “Jack? Are you all right?” Andy asked
.

  “Yeah....” Jack lifted the hand that wasn’t tingling to his forehead. He closed his eyes.

  “I can’t reach a hospital,” Andy said, sliding an arm around Jack's shoulders to support him. “All I get are busy signals. And nobody in Campus Security is answering.”

  Todd said something. Jack counted his breaths again, his hand still over his face. The pain was receding.

  Magick. People thought it was all-powerful, but in fact it was very limited. Jack had never run across a spell that could cure cancer, stop a heart attack, or even stave off a common cold. Devils promised good health, but all they did was numb pain so their victims thought they were in the prime of health until their bodies collapsed. Control over mortality was the Creator’s alone.

  That fact had been driven home to him in a hospital bed in October, and now he recognized it anew.

  He dropped his hand and opened his eyes.

  “Andy....”

  “I’m here.” Andy leaned forward.

  “Angel...”

  “What?”

  “Need an angel.”

  “Yeah. Penemue didn’t make it. I guess we’ll need to talk to one of the b'nei elohim.”

  Todd walked back, holding a paper cup of water. He crouched and held it out. Surprised, Jack took it.

  The theologian’s dark eyes held his.

  “This would be a bad time to die.”

  Jack smiled weakly at the ridiculous advice and drank. He was feeling stronger. Good. He still had work to do.

  “How—” He paused and drew in another breath. “How do we summon a dragon?”

  “I suggest,” Todd said, “that we find your bone staircase and see what happens then.”

  “God save us,” Andy murmured.

  Jack hoped so.

  A few more minutes passed before he was able to stagger upright. The students remained clustered by the front door of the chapel foyer, staying well away from them. Todd frowned.

  “They’ve seen too much,” he muttered. “It could cause problems tomorrow.”

  “Let’s just hope we’ll all be here tomorrow.” Andy gave Jack a worried look. “Ready?”

  “I could really use a drink and a cigarette,” Jack muttered.