When the Villian Comes Home

by Gabrielle Harbowy

  He leads me once more to the parapets, far past the watchtower, to a corner I’ve yet to visit. At a spot that, so far as I can tell, is no different from any other, he stops and extends a hand. “Look.”

  So I do, and for an instant I’m not certain what I’m seeing. Just another world, of earth and oceans and sky. Yet nothing crawls upon it, nothing swims or flies. And even stranger, beyond that world, and its sun and its moon, lie…

  Nothing. Darkness. Void.

  “As the universe expands,” Raphael tells me, “new worlds appear at the edges of Creation. Sometimes, those worlds are inhabitable. At which point, it is up to God—” and there can be no mistaking the sarcastic tinge, to both the title and the meaningful glance he gives me—“to shape that life.”

  “I am not Him, Raphael.” I wonder how long he’s been waiting to hear me say that.

  “As I’m well aware. But He put you in His place, for the nonce. This duty is yours.”

  “I don’t have that sort of power.”

  “You’re looking at the expanding edge of Creation itself, Lucifer. The power is there. All you need do is shape it.”

  It takes a short while, as he instructs me in the methods of concentration and sculpting of possibilities, but in the end, he’s right. The power’s already there. It’s almost…easy.

  Again, I could design the race to suffer, to live and die in torment. And again, I’m fairly certain—despite the lack of explicit instruction to the contrary—that doing so would violate my agreement.

  And I still don’t want to go back.

  I do not start with the end result, of course. No. Tiny creatures, primitive fish and crawling things. But I cast and build the energies around them, shaping the evolution of things to come. The height of the plants just so, the gravity and tectonics like this, the early predators like that. If I’ve done the job properly, the end result—some many thousands of millennia from now—will be a bipedal race somewhat akin to the monkeys. They will never be as intelligent as, for instance, humans—but neither will they be as unhappy. Their lives will be short, and likely without meaning, but pleasant.

  It is not, I’m sure, what He would have done. But neither is it what, only a short while ago, I would likely have done, either.

  It feels…

  I shake my head, offer Raphael a shallow nod, and walk away. For some reason, I suddenly don’t want to watch that world anymore.

  5

  For a moment, I can actually see through the priest’s eyes, feel the flush of sweat and fear and unshakable faith on his skin.

  As long as I’ve been here, holding down the fort on His behalf, I’ve never answered a prayer like this one. I rarely answer any; the overwhelming majority are from people asking for luck or fortune of some sort or another, and it was made quite clear to me that that’s not my purpose here. For the most part, chance and nature run their course, for good or ill.

  But then came this one. Rare, or so Raphael and Gabriel have told me, but not unheard of—and not, necessarily, to be ignored. Apparently, the forces of Heaven are permitted to act against the demons of Hell.

  Strangely, I knew that already.

  I watch the priest intone the ritual phrases, wave his hands and rosary and Bible through the proper rites. I even recognize the demon inhabiting the old man currently held against the mattress by the sobbing, terrified members of his family.

  Tamiel. How long has it been since Tamiel bothered to possess a mortal? What, precisely, has been going on below in my absence?

  Well, no matter. The priest’s faith is strong, his use of the rites proper. Again my duties and obligations require me to take action where, left to my own devices, I very well might not. I see through the priest’s eyes, and my power—or, at least, the power I currently represent—surges through him. The old man screams, the room quakes, and Tamiel plunges back into the depths of Hell.

  I wonder if I am imagining a brief look of recognition and betrayal in his expression as he plummets from sight.

  I open my own eyes, and I am back upon the Throne, with a line of souls before me and two of my brothers standing to either side. Raphael smiles at me; Gabriel nods his approval.

  Their hatred and resentment are, if not gone, then certainly diminished. They are pleased with my decisive action, and with how I’ve been executing my duties to the waiting souls. The same holds true for nearly all my brothers, greater and lesser. Only Michael, of them all, yet clings to his anger, refuses to speak to me unless circumstances demand.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been here. And I realize, with no small surprise, that today—this exorcism—is the first time in a very long while that I’ve even thought of Hell.

  5

  “Hello, My son.”

  I cannot say I’m surprised, not in the slightest. Somehow I knew, as soon as I had my earlier revelation, that it would not be long before His return.

  “Father. Is it time, then?” I try to keep the quaver from my voice; it’s as difficult as keeping myself from squinting as I gaze into the light.

  “It is.” A portion of the floor disappears from off to my left. I feel the rush of heat even before I see the coiling, greasy smoke, or hear the pitiful chorus of screams. I cringe away, and hate myself for it.

  “Perhaps.”

  I cling to that word with both hands. Staring, I no longer find it difficult at all not to squint. “Perhaps?”

  “You can stay, Lucifer. Remain in Heaven, perhaps even work to regain a place at My right hand.”

  I see it coming, before He even utters the words.

  “All you have to do is refute what you have done. All you have to do is apologize.”

  And that’s really what this has all been about from the beginning, isn’t it? He knew I’d never acquiesce, not when He first summoned me. But He’s given me the “gift” of perspective. He’s allowed me time to live outside the fire, to live free of pain. Even to see, for myself, a sliver of His perspective.

  All you have to do…

  I’ve been manipulated, and I bitterly resent it. Yet the bile burns in the back of my throat, threatening to choke me, before I can spit it out.

  I don’t want to go back.

  All you have to do…

  I feel a terror of the Pit like I haven’t felt since the chains first closed. I have my freedom—freedom to act, freedom to live, freedom from pain. I know what awaits me below, and the notion of returning to it, of trying once again to grow accustomed to it, makes me tremble.

  All you have to do…

  I have, if not everything I could ever want here, then at least a vast preponderance of it. And I can keep it, all of it.

  All you have to do…

  If I give up being who I was. But after my time in His Throne, am I not, already, someone other than who I was?

  All you have to do…

  Either way, in a sense, it’s over. Either way, I lose.

  I take a deep breath, and I think I surprise neither of us when I give the only answer I can.

  ARI MARMELL is a fantasy and horror writer, with novels and short stories published through Del Rey/Spectra, Pyr Books, Wizards of the Coast, and others. His most recent novels are Thief’s Covenant and False Covenant, from Pyr Books, and Darksiders: the Abomination Vault from Del Rey. Although born in New York, Ari has lived the vast majority of his life in Texas-first Houston (where he earned a BA in Creative Writing at the University of Houston), and then Austin. He lives with his wife, George, two cats, and a variety of neuroses. You can find Ari online at mouseferatu.com.

  THE BLEACH

  Karin Lowachee

  The runway disappeared into the white desert. He rode his bicycle until the front wheel rubbed into the sand and stopped him. He looked over his shoulder but only the wavering heat of the pale horizon glared back. An endless tapering line of cracked and f
aded gray tarmac stretched out like some forgotten ancient road long neglected by the conquered. He was alone and he was safe. He looked up at the cotton heavy sky, and a pure haze made of some combination of sand and moisture weighed like gauze on his eyelids, and the round incandescent sun blared down at him with relentless insistence: You can never go home again. You can never go home again.

  5

  The white arrow on the runway pointed to the Bleach, as if to offer the inevitability of death to anyone who found themselves this far from civilization. Just in case the one hundred miles through desolate nothingness hadn’t told you. He sat with one black sneaker pasted to the cracks and pocks of pavement, the other resting on the pedal, and he rubbed bruised palms on his black jeans and pushed at the tails of his shirt as they clung to his ribs. The white T-shirt underneath was covered in sand, sand in the straggles of blond beard on his chin, sand between his teeth and on his tongue, sand that made every blink feel like the world at which he looked was made of finely ground shavings of some god’s dirty fingernails. He felt the stab of it even in the squinted wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

  Sand in the grooves of the gun tucked into the waist of his belt. And on the front of his T-shirt, blood.

  Congratulations, you’ve just killed the King.

  So where, he’d said, is my money?

  5

  He waited. The jagged gaps in the runway spread serpent-thin and struck across what was left of the yellow track lines. These dark rivulets lacking water, parched by the air. He needed water, he’d emptied his bottle and tossed it fifty miles back. He’d passed all the caches he’d buried over time and used up that water too. He’d come here to the end of civilization at full tilt, on his own steam, because anything mechanized would have been detected. Now he waited, and thirsted, and thought of the hailstorm of gnashing he’d left behind.

  In the distance the sand dragons moaned.

  5

  The Barrurian helicopter kicked up tornados in its landing, forcing him to cover his face with the folds of his shirt. He climbed off the bike just as the heli’s black struts touched down, and he picked up the bike and took it over to the passenger bay. A helmeted door gunner lifted the bike from him and he climbed on, and before his ass hit the seat they were in the air.

  Across from him the fat man mopped at his pink forehead with a velvet piece of snakeskin, as if he’d been the one to hike those miles under the sun. “I’m surprised you’re on time.”

  He said, “Where’s my money?”

  “Patience, patience.”

  He thought that patience was for fat fucks who couldn’t pull the trigger themselves. He withdrew his gun and laid it against his leg, the barrel facing the Barrurian.

  The snakeskin stopped its patting progress across the round folds of skin. “No need for that, my boy.”

  Boy? “I want those units now or you’ll be next.” A look at the door gunner. “Don’t.”

  The gunner had a sidearm, but it was in a holster. The pilot had one too but by then it would be too late.

  The fat man said, “Hold out your arm.”

  “No. Let me see it.”

  So the fat man reached into his suit’s side pocket and revealed the data syringe. He waved it a little then held it out. The door gunner watched with eyes like the shells of beetles and when the sun caught them they flickered opaline. He had seen eyes like that on statues, but these eyes saw as clear as day in the night and if you were on the surface of the earth when this gunner put you in his sights, you were dead where you stood. He took the data syringe left-handed and didn’t look away from either Barrurian. Instead he reached inside the front pocket of his shirt for the globe of blue putty, and he laid the putty on his thigh where it stuck to the warm material of his jeans. Then he stabbed the syringe into the putty and loaded the data. When the putty turned blood orange the fat Barrurian breathed a sigh.

  He lobbed the empty syringe at the sweating man, then tucked his gun back into his waist and the putty back into his pocket.

  “I told you it was good,” the fat man said, fumbling the catch.

  He didn’t answer. He wasn’t going to let political killers stick a needle in his arm, not even for twenty million.

  “How does it feel to start a war?” the fat man said.

  He didn’t answer that either. He hadn’t been hired for conversation.

  5

  Smoking and age had made his voice rough, like words were an endangered species or dune-dwelling creatures too solitary to be found. Kind words were virtually extinct. He was thirty-one and his eight-year-old son hugged him at the door. “Did you hear?” Jatey was crying. “The King is dead.”

  The heli had dropped him outside the Wall. He’d taken his bike and ridden into the town. The Barrurians had left and nothing stood between him and the thing he’d done but the Bleach, where no communication passed and the city-states didn’t cross, not even to towns technically under their jurisdiction. Technically the Wall kept them out, even though technically previous kings had razed and owned the town, and owned it now. But who remembered those things? Only the dragons. He kissed his son and said, “I’m home. Go wipe your eyes. Where’s your aunt?”

  She came from the side door that led to the cement slab behind the house that she liked to call a garden. She was always trying to make things grow. She had a flower mien, a delicate head of red hair that bent toward him in greeting and he put his hand on the stem of her arm and kissed her cheek. “Hello,” she said, as if it had only been two hours and not two weeks. “Go clean up for dinner,” to Jatey, and by then the boy had dried his eyes and looked at them, and went off down the narrow hall toward the bathroom.

  He left his sister and went to the kitchen sink and washed the sand from his hands. His sister said, “There’s blood on your shirt.” So he removed both his shirts and wadded them up and stuffed them in the garbage under the sink, and returned to the tap to splash water up his arms. “He’s going to see the gun,” she said, but he was listening to his son in the bathroom. He shut off the water and just listened, the boy splashing around in there, taking joy in water like he had since he was a baby. A fish born in the desert.

  He removed the gun from his waist and walked by his sister, down the hall and past the bathroom to his bedroom that he shared with the boy because they just had two rooms for sleeping and when he was home he always wanted the boy near, like a talisman. He set the gun in his bedside drawer and turned around, and his sister stood in the doorway. She didn’t want to ask out loud, but she asked with her eyes.

  So he turned his back on her and took the blood orange putty from his pocket and put that in the drawer too. His son would never want for anything and his sister could take her silent judgment and go fuck herself.

  5

  He held a strange pleasure in watching his boy eat. Jatey shoveled the mashed potatoes and peas into his mouth like they were going to sprout legs and leap off the plate. He tried to ask his son about school, what he was learning, what he liked, because even if his jobs only took him away for a couple weeks at a time, he went often and came back usually at night. Sometimes he took Jatey into the dunes so they could look for sand dragons and they’d stay out overnight and listen to the mournful howls of the creatures calling to one another or calling to their gods like the feathermen claimed. He would sign off on the boy skipping school because being back home meant he was the father who could do such things, he wasn’t his sister who made the boy memorize mathematics even after classes. But Jatey didn’t want to talk about learning or sports or games—or even about sand dragons. He said he and Auntie Lida had watched the news break about the King and couldn’t tear themselves away for hours. “Did you see, did you see how the King was killed?”

  Lida stared across the table at him and he said, “You let him watch that?”

  She said, “I thought he should. It affects us all. The
y’ve canceled school for three days.”

  “You were supposed to come in for Parent Day,” Jatey said.

  “I was going to go in.” Lida touched the boy’s arm.

  “I wanted Daddy to, but now there’s no school.”

  The boy was still at an age where he liked school. That was a time he wished the boy would never lose, even though he didn’t know what he would possibly say to a room full of kids and he had forgotten all about it. But he watched his sister with her hand on his kid and he said, “When school starts up again, I’ll go with you for Parent Day.”

  “You know you can’t,” Lida said.

  “I’m his parent.”

  This made Jatey so happy he dismissed it from his eight-year-old mind as a done deal, and went on to the other thing that was in his thoughts. “Now the princes have no daddy or mommy. What’s gonna happen to the princes?”

  “They’re rich,” he said. “They’ll be taken care of.”

  “But who’s going to play with them?”

  Jatey was a sensitive boy and forgot all about his food and instead concentrated on the upsetting idea that nobody would play with the Royal Princes, even if they had a shit ton of servants and relatives and nannies and advisors, not to mention the Council and the Royal Guard to look after them and give them anything they wanted. Tragic figures, they were even going to have the sympathy of an entire city-state. Maybe all of the city-states, except Barrur and the northern tribes that hated everyone and plagued the borders of the balding mountains.

  “Don’t worry about them,” he told his son. “Eat your dinner and we can go play afterwards.”

  5

  He watched through the window above the sink, how the boy rolled the ball on Lida’s concrete garden with his feet like he was dodging away from unseen predators. Agile and showing that confidence with growing limbs that said he might be an athlete when he was older. He had been good at sports as a kid too, but he’d decided to use his hand-eye coordination and physical intelligence for other things. Now he washed their plates at the sink with methodical rhythm, circling each one with a rough sponge. The sun had dimmed and the air and light outside sat bruised and blue over the boy’s pale skin.