Never Just One Apocalypse

by Karen L Mead

  He made an irritated noise and pulled her closer, so she was right up against him.

  “How did we meet again? Did I prey on you out of the blue like some cunning, evil beast? Oh, that’s right,” he said, scratching his chin like he’d just remembered something. “You summoned me. You made a deal with me. You’ve never been an innocent victim in your life, and you never will be, you bratty witch. Now, cooperate.”

  He forced her chin up so she was looking in his eyes, and then he could see into her mind. Unwillingly, she began replaying images she’d seen for the last week or two, but seemingly in random order: Devin, surrounded by purple-blue ice, his uncanny eyes glittering at her as delicate flakes of snow landed on his eyelashes. Miri, bursting into tears at the hospital. Awkwardly throwing herself into Sam’s lap, only to be pushed away. Waking up in the middle of the night, being startled to find Teddy’s head nestled against her stomach, and going back to sleep.

  After reliving some moments from The Daily Grind and school, she found herself back on that sundrenched rock in the ocean, where she’d met the Nameless Ones. Except she wasn’t seeing the scene from her own perspective, but from about thirty feet away; she could see her naked body jump off the rock and into the water, outside of herself. When she bobbed to the surface, one of the wretched creatures between Cassie and this second self, this self viewing the dream a second time, turned its misshapen head. It had no eyes, but it was clear it was staring; Cassie felt its lack of eyes looking straight through her, and through Sammael with her.

  “What foolishness is this? You are not welcome here, brother,” a thrumming voice undulated, saying the last word as though it were the vilest curse.

  To Cassie’s horror, the oddly shaped giant began to advance on them, the foam-flecked water moving in pooling shapes around its nearly fleshless thighs. When it was almost upon her, and she could feel its hot, stinking breath on her face, she felt a painful shove, almost as though someone had kicked her full-force in the chest, and she came to, panting on Sammael’s kitchen floor.

  Sammael was sitting in front of her, having been knocked backward. His breathing seemed normal, but he had a blank look on his face that looked like shock. Unsteadily, he got to his feet, while his expression remained stony. Cassie struggled to get to her feet, trying to think of something, anything, to explain what had happened.

  “That was, that was a dream I had…only back in the dream, he didn’t move like that…last time, he sensed us, but he didn’t move. This time, it’s like he knew we were there….”

  Feeling like she was babbling, she trailed off. The demon was silent for a few more moments, just looking at her blankly. Finally, he flicked her forehead with his index finger, and she winced.

  “Rude. Letting me in there when you already had so much company. Good thing I wasn’t in my pajamas,” he said.

  His tone sounded calm, but Cassie had the sickening feeling that what he was saying didn’t reflect what he really meant to say at all.

  To her surprise, he took her by the shoulders and spun her around. “Go get dressed, we have a lot of work to do today. I didn’t bring you here just so you could eat all of my bacon.”

  “Wha-?” Cassie started, but Lisette appeared from seemingly nowhere and took her arm, leading her back toward her room. She turned and tried to look at Sammael, but he already had his back to her, looking out the window behind the kitchen table. There was a stiffness to his back that she didn’t like, as though at any moment he might uncoil all at once and destroy something. But then Lisette pulled her around the corner and into the hallway, and she could no longer see him over her shoulder.

  When they returned to the guest room, Lisette took a garment bag out of the closet and put it on the bed.

  “Take off your dress, it’s time for training.”

  Cassie obeyed, seeing no point in resisting. She looked at the serving girl with a quizzical eye.

  Sylvia says Lisette’s in love with him. Sammael. How could you be in love with that? What does she see in him?

  She almost asked Lisette out loud, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. As harsh as Lisette had been with her the previous day, she didn’t want to ask a question that would likely cause the girl pain.

  When Lisette had the garment bag unzipped and the new outfit laid out on the bed, Cassie frowned; it wasn’t what she’d been expecting at all. The clothing Sammael wanted her to wear for “training,” whatever that was going to be, looked like some kind of black vinyl catsuit. Considering the fact that everyone here was wearing period clothing (albeit, not all the same period), the outfit seemed incredibly out of place.

  When Cassie picked it up, she noticed something else. Though the outfit had a high collar, there was a large cut-out area, right over the chest.

  “A boob window? Seriously?”

  Chapter 34

  Eugene took Sam back to his apartment in his car, so Sam wouldn’t have to experiment with taking mass transit while still covered in blood and grass clippings. When he arrived at his apartment, there was no sign of the fairy, so he immediately stripped off all his clothes and threw them in the trash. He rummaged under the sink in the bathroom and sighed in relief when he found a container of a certain kind of body wash, which he hadn’t been positive he’d had on hand. The fluid was bright fluorescent orange, and the intense citrus scent of it tended to overpower the smell of anything else.

  When you need to get out the smell of blood, use Blood Orange Bodywash! That would be a terrible commercial, glad I’m not in marketing.

  After a long shower, where he used almost the entire bottle of wash on himself, he collapsed into bed. He wanted to go see Serenus, but Miri should be with him by now, and he still desperately needed sleep. Apparently sleep was part of the process of absorbing another being’s essence, or something like that; he hadn’t been fully conscious while Dot was explaining it. In any case, for reasons made clear at The Daily Grind earlier, it was safer to be asleep at the moment.

  It’s not that I expect everything to be back to normal once I sleep for a few hours, but at least for now…at least for now, the easiest thing to do is actually the right thing. Why doesn’t this happen more often?

  He drifted off to sleep.

  His sleep earlier on the couch at the shop had been a leaden, dreamless sleep; whatever was going on in his mind while he was unconscious, he’d had no memory of it when he’d woken up to the sound of Dwight and Khalil arguing. This time, he wasn’t so lucky: he immediately slipped into a vivid dream, a dream re-creating a life he had never lived.

  In the dream, he was soaked with rain, his coarse garments weighed down by water. Ahead of him, through the mist, he could see a huge wooden structure—a cathedral, or at least it would be in another fifty years or so. Right now it was like a giant wooden skeleton, spindly brown fingers reaching through the moonless night as though looking for someone to strangle. Dozens of serfs, dressed in the same brown robes he was, ran about the building site, fetching more wood and carts full of stone.

  “Why were you here?” Sam asked out loud. “Why would you have ever been in a place like this?”

  “The cathedral was my design,” Azazel said, stepping out from behind Sam as though he’d always been there. He was wearing the same robes as everyone else. “Sometimes I was here as an overseer, whipping the slaves who disobeyed; sometimes, I laid the stone myself.”

  Sam looked around, trying to get a better sense of where they were, but it was like the area was devoid of habitation; other than the structure itself, they were surrounded by nothing but grass and mud. Presumably there was a town somewhere nearby, but Sam couldn’t see it through the fog.

  “When was this? Fourteenth century?”

  “Not even close,” said Azazel with a smirk. “It’s hard for your tiny little mortal mind, isn’t it? To truly grapple with the scale of time?”

  Sam turned and faced Azazel—or rather, the apparition that had once been Azazel.

  “My tiny little mort
al mind seems to be up to the task of keeping you shut down.”

  The demon smirked at that, then crossed his arms, looking over at the cathedral. His expression was that of a craftsman enjoying his handiwork.

  “You think you’ve won, and I’ll admit, you surprised me. Your father and that cursed witch, they created something in you that never should have been allowed, and we all realized too late. But this isn’t the end. I’m still here; It’s only a matter of time before I hollow you out, become you. I’ll never be quite what I was, too many memories are lost…and for that, I’ll make sure you suffer. But I’ll survive.”

  He turned to look at Sam again with a grin that showed his teeth.

  “You, however…you get to deal with my voice in your head for the rest of your life. Not every day perhaps, not every moment, but whenever you think I’ve gone quiet, whenever you think you’ve escaped, that’s when I’ll whisper to you, put ideas in your head so wonderful and horrible that you’ll convince yourself they must be yours, and that’s how I’ll get you. And I have all the time in the world.”

  Somewhere, there was a scream; one of the slaves was being whipped. Azazel laughed, and his laugh melded with the scream, creating an odd sound.

  Sam tilted his head. “So that’s your big threat? You’re going to be the evil voice in my head?”

  Azazel shrugged.

  “Scoff all you want, it’ll make no difference in the end. Maybe you’ll be able to ignore it for a few years, a decade even, but eventually, it will affect you. The way this building was once a sad pile of sticks, but now it towers over even the highest belfry. That will be the way I rebuild myself within your shell.”

  Sam was silent for a moment, thinking. He was wet, but it wasn’t cold, and it wasn’t altogether uncomfortable, standing there and watching the Dark Ages play out in front of him.

  “Tell me, as a great medieval architect, would you build a cathedral on top of a volcano?

  The demon sighed.

  “Oh, what are you on about now?”

  Sam pointed at Azazel’s chest.

  “You want to be the evil voice in my head? Take a goddamned number. I’ve had evil voices in my head since I was three years old, and they’re all louder than you.”

  “Oh, I doubt that highly,” said Azazel, still smiling.”

  “See, I don’t,” said Sam, turning toward the cathedral. He pointed at it and mouthed a word, and the structure was in flames. Dozens of serfs began screaming, some in pain, most in fear.

  Azazel seemed momentarily stunned by the sight of the cathedral in flames, but recovered quickly. “You think that will hurt me, to burn my handiwork? We are only in a dream. Nothing you do here has any consequence.”

  “What makes you so sure?” Sam asked thoughtfully. “So far, I’ve never been able to mess with anything that happened before I was around to see it. But that’s changed now, hasn’t it? Through you, I have access to lots of choice moments in time now,” he said. The burning cathedral looked strangely beautiful against the pitch-black sky. “This is a dream, but it doesn’t have to be. At any moment, it could become reality. Your beautiful cathedral, your crowning achievement in this world, not just burned, but unmade. Erased from history before it ever had a chance to exist.”

  Azazel seemed to struggle for words for a moment, then his face distorted in disgust.

  “Even if you could, you would not do that; it would do irrevocable harm to the timeline. Don’t be absurd.”

  Sam brushed some dirt off his robe nonchalantly.

  “Oh yes, human history, full of so many wonderful things, like constant plague and wars and raping and pillaging. Would be such a shame if anything were to happen to it.”

  Azazel stepped closer so that he was in Sam’s face, their noses nearly touching.

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  Sam let out a gentle sigh.

  “Are you beginning to see the problem with your grand plan? You can’t be the little devil on my shoulder, Azazel. I come up with more evil all on my own than you can, because that’s the human in me. You’re not going to corrupt me, you’re going to lose whatever’s left of your mind trying to hold me back.”

  It seemed like Azazel was having trouble processing this information. He blinked, twice.

  “I don’t…I don’t understand this…how can you have no respect for the mortal world? Your own world? You’re just like him…like Satan….”

  Sam leaned in as close as possible; a drop of water fell from his bangs onto Azazel’s chin. “And this is just the normal version of me you’re having trouble with; wait until you meet my angry side.”

  With that, he pushed Azazel. He couldn’t push him out of his head entirely, but he could push him out of the dream, to somewhere else. A graveyard of half-finished cathedrals, abandoned by plague-stricken peasants, would do as a prison for now. When the demon had been shut away, Sam took a deep breath; somehow, the smell of the burning wood was intoxicating to him.

  ***

  When Sam woke up, he felt incredibly refreshed. He practically jumped out of bed, then his movements slowed as the events of the last twenty-four hours came back to him.

  Oh right, Serenus. Now that Azazel is out of the picture for a while, I need to go make sure Ser’s okay. God only knows what that bastard did to him.

  He thought of Cassie briefly, then shook his head; there was nothing he could do for her now. He would have to focus on the people he might actually be able to help. Remembering her situation irritated him, though, and he accidentally ripped a T-shirt while he was getting dressed. Dot was still nowhere to be found.

  After a quick bus ride, he was bounding the steps in Serenus’ building in his old, scuffed hiking boots. Since he had kicked in the door last night, there was nothing to knock on, so Sam just walked in.

  Serenus was on the couch, not unlike where Sam had left him hours ago, only now his chest was bandaged with gauze and he had a patch over his left eye. Before crossing the apartment to the professor, Sam picked up a legal pad sitting on the kitchen counter, filled with a few lines of delicate script.

  See if you can get him to eat something. I bandaged him up and gave him some pain meds, but all he wanted to have was coffee. He’s being really stubborn.

  --Miri

  When Sam looked up, Serenus’ one visible eye narrowed.

  “What have you done?”

  His expression looked grave. Sam decided to ignore it.

  “How are you feeling? I would have been here sooner, but I had to sleep off something I ate.”

  With more speed than Sam thought him capable of, the professor picked up an empty coffee mug on the table next to him and threw it at Sam’s head. Sam just barely ducked in time, and the ceramic mug shattered against the wall.

  “You think this is funny?” Serenus sputtered, clearly livid with anger. He struggled to get up, then gave up and collapsed back onto the couch. “I told you, months and months ago! I told you that if you started killing your own kind, they would gang up on you and put you down like a rabid dog! Now what have you gone and done?”

  “What, so I was just supposed to let him torture you?”

  “Yes!” Serenus said, through gritted teeth. This time, he managed to sit up, so he was propped up against an arm of the couch.

  “Now it’s only a matter of time before they come to you, and they’ll do to you what you did to Azazel.”

  “Let them try,” said Sam evenly. He hadn’t even really thought about it, but he found he wasn’t afraid.

  Serenus grunted in aggravation. Sam couldn’t remember ever having seen the man so angry.

  “How arrogant can you be?! I know you’re Helen’s son and thinking you’re God’s gift comes with the territory, but think for a moment! Do you really think you can fight off all the Lords of Hell single-handedly? Not even Satan could do that.”

  “I don’t think I’ll have to,” Sam said. It was true; it wasn’t that he was so sure he could fight off an army of demons. It
was that he honestly didn’t believe it would ever happen. That’s why he wasn’t afraid, even now. “I think they have bigger problems than me right now.”

  “When has there ever been a bigger problem than you?” Serenus asked rhetorically.

  Sam shook his head. “I’m serious. Whatever they think of me, I’m not planning on destroying the world anytime soon. Which is more than I can say for Cassie’s relatives.”

  Serenus was quiet for a moment, his anger starting to dissipate as he processed what Sam was saying. “What have I missed, this past month?”

  “It’s uh…it’s going to take a while to explain.”

  Serenus gazed at him with a tired look. It was the look of a college professor evaluating a poor student who had failed, yet again, to do his homework. “Then you’d better get started.”

  Sam sat down on the couch by Serenus’ feet and began telling his mentor everything: about the Watchers, about Cassie, about the Arcane Phantasms. He didn’t really expect Serenus to be able to come up with a solution for anything, but somehow, just talking to the professor again filled him with an overwhelming sense of relief. Maybe the world wouldn’t end, after all.

  Chapter 35

  When Lisette escorted Cassie toward the back of the house, the setting had changed. Instead of being a wide expanse of grass and trees, the backyard had become some kind of odd, post-apocalyptic environment, complete with crumbling buildings and rusting vehicles. It looked like something out of a videogame, and that realization filled Cassie with a sinking feeling.

  “He’s not going to do what I think he’s going to do, is he?”

  “There you are,” Sammael said, walking toward her. He was adjusting some kind of device on his wrist.

  Cassie nearly did a double-take when she saw him. To match her black catsuit, he was wearing a skin-tight black outfit that showed off his physique. Parts of the outfit were even semi-transparent, so she could see well-sculpted chest and thigh muscles. She nearly blushed and looked away, then remembered that the demon could change his appearance.