by eden Hudson
“Tough?” Dad said.
Tears soaked into my t-shirt sleeves. I didn’t need to breathe anymore, but I was sucking in huge, shuddering breaths that hurt my chest and stomach. I wished I could curl up and hide. I wished I could disappear. I wished I’d died fourteen years ago, back when I was still young and good.
Dad touched my elbow. “Tough.”
If I could’ve talked, I would’ve told him how sorry I was. For not trying harder. For not being a better man. For fucking up everything I touched.
“Go ahead, love,” Mom said. “I’ve got him.”
Dad squeezed my arm once, then he was gone. His footsteps ran off to my left. A coyote barked. Dad whooped back.
Mom was still there. I could feel her watching me.
Swords clashed, guns shot, human and inhuman voices screamed. Pain and death and anger all wound together like the endless hook for a song of war. Any minute now the bass riff would come rolling in like a tank and the distorted lead guitar would scream in agony.
“Get them out of the sky!” Clarion yelled, his voice turning into a growl by the end.
“Too fast!” a crow crawked from overhead. “Too fast!”
Tongue-clicking. Then Ryder hollering, “Fuck yeah! Nice one, Sunshine!”
“Are you all right?” Colt yelled.
“Fine,” Tiffani said. “Behind you!”
“Tough.” Mom took ahold of my wrists.
I wrapped my arms tighter, sure she was going to try to pry them open.
“Tough?” Mom said, drawing out my name like she used to when she woke me up to get ready for school. “Wakey, wakey. Open those beautiful Whitney blue-greens.”
By then I was hiccupping from bawling so hard. All she had to do was put a little pressure on my arms and they would’ve slid right off my face.
She let go.
I let my arms fall and opened my eyes.
“There’s my baby boy,” Mom whispered.
She was smiling at me.
Colt
Dad, Ryder, Sissy, and Tiff fanned out through the battle in front of me, cutting paths to the perimeter.
One alpha started to fly away, but Sissy took a running jump off a twisted chunk of metal that used to be a Hummer and chopped off his right wing. He veered to the side and hit the ground in an unbalanced hop like an injured bird. I sprinted after him and sliced open his side. The Gatekeepers grabbed him before he even realized he’d been cut.
Ryder clicked off to my three. A hamstrung foot soldier. She saw me coming.
“No!” She threw down her rifle, dropped to her knees, and held up her hands. “No, please! Please don’t!”
It was too late to beg. I was the executioner, not the judge.
I brought the sword down on her shoulder. The blow cut to the bone. The foot soldier screeched and scrambled in the dirt, trying to get away. The Gatekeepers descended. A second later, she was gone.
“Dad, your six!” Sissy called.
I spun around just in time to see another foot soldier flying away, carrying a coyote by its broken leg. The coyote yelped and tried to bite, but he couldn’t pull himself up.
Dad was out of reach. He took a second to consider it, then launched his sword in a straight-arm throw at the foot soldier’s back. It stuck in the base of the foot soldier’s skull, severing his spine, and dropping him like a rock.
“Hot damn, what a shot!” Ryder yelled. He couldn’t help it.
“Ryder, that’s enough.” But Dad was smiling.
I got to the paralyzed foot soldier a few steps ahead of Dad, stabbed it, then pulled his sword out of the soldier’s neck. I flipped it around and handed it to him hilt-first.
“Thanks,” Dad said.
“It really was a good shot,” I said.
Dad smiled again. You can’t imagine how good it is to see your dad smile when all your earthly memories of him are either worried, stressed, or out of his mind with grief.
The heavens exploded.
I hit my knees and opened my mouth out of habit. Beside me, Dad had done the same. The concussion hit the ground, then spread out in a wave of dust and ash. All around us, mortal combatants were knocked to the ground. Fallen angels who’d been thrown out of the air touched down, then pushed off again, beating their wings as hard as possible to get out of reach before one of us could get to them.
A scream like a hawk about to strike cut through the air, rattling the molecules and setting off cracks of thunder. Bloody red streaks burst through the heavenly tear in the sky. On the ground, the wind kicked up, swirling around us, and picking up debris like a tornado.
My eyes locked on Kathan. He had his back turned to the battle and was watching those bloody red streaks with a wide smile on his face. The center of the streaks was growing into a core so dark that it glowed purple-black.
A body appeared inside the purple-black core. Arcs of electricity and bursts of sparks rolled around its arms and legs like a downed powerline.
The Destroyer.
“Be ready to do whatever you have to,” Dad said.
“She used to be someone else,” I said. “Grace.”
This time the name wasn’t the product of a half-corroded brain. It was right. The Destroyer was Grace.
A muscle in Dad’s jaw tightened and the lines around his eyes cut deeper. “Whatever you have to do, Colt.”
I clutched the hilt of the Sword of Judgment.
If the Destroyer wasn’t with us, she was against us.
Tough
I stared at Mom. She looked exactly like I remembered, but completely different. She didn’t just have the red hair and the green eyes and the momness from every day and night of my life age zero to eight. She was also at least as young as me, as young as she’d been in every video I’d ever watched of her Lost Derringers concerts. I’d never thought of Mom as anything but a mom before, but she was pretty. Really pretty.
“It would’ve been so much easier if you’d taken after your father.” She swiped her thumbs across my face, wiping away the tears, and I realized the blue-black tattoo sleeves I’d spent most of my childhood taking for granted were gone. She rested her hand against my cheek. “I wish I could’ve been there to make it easier for you, to tell you what not to do…but you wouldn’t have listened. I never did, either. People like you and me, we have to learn the hard way or not at all.”
A brain-rattling screech shattered the air. Mom looked up. Dark red streaks had started to leak through the white rip in the sky. The wind picked up, whipping Mom’s hair around her face. Ash and dust swirled around the armies of Heaven and Hell.
“Well, kiddo, I think your babymama’s back,” Mom said.
I stared at her.
“Oh, come on,” Mom said. “You think you can just have sex with anything that moves and never have an oops-baby?”
Are you serious right now?
“Don’t you look at me like that, Tough Isaiah Whitney. At least when I was self-destructing, I knew to use a condom—alive or undead.”
Holy shit. I have never wanted to talk about something less than this.
Mom sighed like she used to when I was little and driving her crazy. “Whatever. Just listen. That Destroyer up there is partly your fault. You helped make her into what she is. If she goes berserk and tries to destroy the world, you’re going to have to stop her.”
I threw my hands up. How am I supposed to do that?
“I don’t know.” Mom looked across the battlefield at something I couldn’t see. “But you’d better figure it out. If you don’t find a way to stop her, Colt will. And if he has to…” Mom glared down at me. “She’s pregnant with your baby, Tough. They’re your responsibility now. Man up and protect them.”
Colt
Grace streaked down through the sky toward Kathan.
I clutched the Sword of Judgment until the grips creaked in my fist. It didn’t matter who she used to be; if the Destroyer sided with Kathan, then she had turned on God. Grace or not, I would have to send
her to Hell.
Kathan opened his arms as if to embrace her.
I got down, crouched like a sprinter waiting for the gun. She might be able to destroy the manifestation I’d been sent back to Earth in, but that didn’t matter. God could send me again. He could send me however many times it took to finish the job.
Grace sped up as she got closer to Kathan. When she hit his chest, the sound cracked across the solar system. On the horizon, a red-orange sunrise flickered and dimmed.
They shot toward the ground in the front pasture, moving so fast that jet streams of fire burned the oxygen around them.
I dug my fingers into the dust and braced myself.
Their impact threw up dirt, rocks, debris, vehicles, weapons, and bodies. The shockwave rippled through the ground, tearing up the concrete parking lot and breaking apart the burned-out foundation of the Dark Mansion. My hands and feet scratched long lines in the dust as the concussion shoved me backward.
As soon as the shockwave had passed, Dad yelled, “Colt!” But I was already in motion.
Faster than I’d ever been while I was alive, I sprinted across the ruined parking lot, hopping over debris and bodies. I could hear the Gatekeepers of Hell—their entire legion—following along behind me.
At the lip of the crater, I stopped. Grace was at the deepest point, pinning Kathan to the ground. Her arms were embedded to the elbows in his chest. He roared and shifted—from his angelic manifestation to an enormous horned beast and back again—but he couldn’t break free.
I slid down the slope and ran for them.
Inhuman squealing and screeching sounds filled the crater like sludge, slowing me down. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t move any faster through the noise.
“Father of Lies,” Grace intoned, her voice carrying through his shrieking. “Lawless serpent. Corrupter of innocence. Arrogant, unrepentant, blasphemous creation. Your Judgment has come today.”
As I got closer, I raised the sword over my head. I brought the fiery blade down with every ounce of strength in this heavenly body, an all-or-nothing killing blow. Kathan shifted back into his angel form just as the strike landed. The head of his earthly manifestation rolled away.
Grace pulled her arms out of his chest.
Kathan’s headless body shifted into the beast again. Black flames roared from his nose and mouth as he bellowed.
The Gatekeepers closed in. He pawed at the scorched dirt of the crater and spun in a tight circle, trying to keep them from surrounding him, but there were too many. He fought them, goring and tossing and howling with fury.
It took every single one of them to drag him to Hell, and it was going to take every single one of them to keep him there.
Tough
When the wailing and roaring and screeching died down and the greenish-blackness of Hell finally burned away, Desty—what used to be Desty—rose up out of the scorching crater and hung in the air. She looked around, her body shooting off sparks like fireworks. That bloody purple-red light around her swelled until it took up half of what used to be the sky.
Fallen angels scattered, flying off in every direction, trying to get away. Dad, Sissy, Ryder, and Tiffani chopped and hacked and stabbed. They drove some of the fallen angels back, but they couldn’t stop them all.
Desty spread her arms out wide and opened her mouth.
“This world is evil and broken.” Desty’s—the Destroyer’s—voice was cut with high and low notes that made my brain crawl. The sounds were huge and thick and scary as hell, and they kept on playing in the air, even when she stopped talking.
Colt climbed out of the crater, holding that flaming sword.
I grabbed Mom’s wrist and almost tipped her off balance. She caught herself just in time and hauled me up.
My legs were fighting rigor mortis—one more benefit to being a stupid fucking vampire—but I forced myself to stumble into a stupid-looking run.
What’re you going to do, genius? You can’t talk. Even if you could scream, there’s no way she’d hear you over all this noise.
I kept running, trying to ignore my brain. If I didn’t do anything, Desty would destroy the world and Colt would send her to Hell.
Colt, can you still hear me? I tried to think-yell it at him. You got to wait. Please, just let me try to stop her first.
“Tough!” Sissy tried to grab me as I passed, but she wasn’t fast enough. “Tough, what are you doing?”
I shot past her, Ryder, Clarion, and a couple of Naomi’s fighters who had survived the battle. I hopped over bodies of people and NPs I had grown up with and ones I had never met before tonight.
The Destroyer’s eyes rolled over the blasted-out Dark Mansion, but it felt like she was seeing all of Halo, the whole countryside, probably everything in this whole shitty world.
“The sentence for your transgression is death,” Desty said in the Destroyer’s voice.
I skidded to a stop at the edge of the crater, and started clapping my hands and whistling, trying to get her attention.
Should’ve grabbed a gun.
Yeah, right, like a couple gunshots would matter to something like her. She probably wouldn’t even hear them.
I waved my arms over my head and jumped up and down, clapping my hands together. How was I supposed to get her attention? How could I get her to notice me?
Look at me, Desty, I begged deep down inside. Please just look this way.
She turned toward me. From that distance, I couldn’t see if her eyes even had pupils anymore—the whole things looked bloody purple-red and electric—but I felt it when they focused on me. She was looking through my skin, all the way down to the inside of my soul, to the worst parts of who I was and everything awful I’d ever done. She could see everything.
I didn’t know what else to do. I stood up on my tiptoes and stretched my arm over my head as far as I could, holding my hand out to her.
The image of her holding out her hand to Colt when he’d started to freak out popped into my head, then memory of how soft her palms had felt on my face while I was losing my shit over killing Jax. The things she’d been whispering in my ear came back with that, the lies about how everything would be okay, it was all going to be okay.
It’s not going to be okay, I thought, half wishing she could hear me, half hoping like hell that she couldn’t. I’m sorry. There’s no point to saving this shitty world. It never gets better, it only gets worse. But please don’t destroy it. I can’t stop Colt from coming after you if you do. I’ll try, but I won’t be able to and then we’ll both end up in Hell. Please.
For a long time, she just stared at me.
“You’re the reason,” she said.
That bloody purple-red halo of light around her sucked inward, then exploded off her skin.
Every fallen angel on and around the battlefield disintegrated into a cloud of black bugs that rained to the ground. None of them reformed.
I blinked my eyes, trying to get rid of the afterimages glowing in my field of vision. I was still standing—me and every other surviving human, crow, coyote, and soldier of Heaven on the battlefield that used to be my home.
About ten feet away, Desty sat on the crater’s rim of dirt and rocks with her face on her knees and her arms wrapped around her legs. Naked, covered in human and angel blood, and shaking like crazy. But alive. Not in Hell and not destroying the world.
So that was something.
Colt
A burning hand clapped me on the shoulder.
“I knew you were the man for the job,” He said.
I sheathed the sword in Hell. The flames barely touched my hand.
“I’m just glad I didn’t have to fight Grace,” I said.
“Me, too,” He said. “You would’ve won.”
We watched Tough take a step toward where she was sitting curled in on herself.
“Is she going to be all right?” I asked, scratching my hand through my hair.
“She’s not one you can protect, Colt. She’s
not your responsibility. Never was. She’s more like…the opposite side of your coin. Or a close relation.”
The memory of the way she had smiled at me back in the cabin flashed through my brain.
“Like a little sister,” I said.
He nodded. “Just like that.”
I took a deep breath. “So, I’m done here?”
“Forever,” He said.
I let the breath out in a rush.
At the other edge of the battlefield, Tiffani was standing alone, staring at the slice of red-orange sun coming up over the tree line.
“Go ahead,” He said. “We can talk later.”
I gave Him a smile, then picked my way back through the wreckage and corpses to Tiff.
She didn’t turn to face me, but she must’ve heard me coming.
“It’s been so long since I could look at it like this,” she said over her shoulder. “Since I could feel it on my skin. I missed it.”
I slipped my arms around her waist. She leaned back against my chest and tucked her arms inside mine.
We stayed that way for a long time, watching the sun come up.
Tough
I took a step toward Desty, then stopped. The hair hanging down around her face and over her arms wasn’t Desty’s hair, it was Tempie’s—long, with orangish highlights—and there were wings tattooed the full length of her back. Desty hadn’t had any ink.
Maybe she wasn’t even in there at all anymore. Maybe it was just Tempie now.
Doesn’t matter who she is. She’s still naked and shivering and maybe crying. I swallowed and tried to make myself take another step.
“Hey, Tough,” a voice behind me said. “Wait up a second.”
I turned around, glad for any excuse not to go over there yet.
Then there He was. He put His hand on my breastbone like Lonely had done earlier to wake me up, except instead of a fist, He pressed His open palm to the bullet holes in my t-shirt that were still sticky with blood and vamp venom.