Darlings of New Midnight

by Andrea Speed

  “It’s his by right, and he’s the only one I trust with it.”

  She made a disgusted noise. “You know, I’m actually proud of you. I know it took you a shockingly long time to figure out you were pansexual, although I always assumed you were bi. But whatever. At least you figured it out. But why… him?”

  Logan sighed, staring up at the darkened ceiling. “We’re not having this discussion. You’ve made your feelings about Ceri quite clear.”

  Gill snickered. “Ceri? His name is Cerberus. You know, like the three-headed dog?”

  “Because his father’s a complete fucking cockwaffle.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you that.” Gill was quiet for a moment, and Logan wondered if she ever missed being human, or missed being siblings. What about beer—did she miss beer? Or ice cream? When she was a kid, she couldn’t get enough of that. “But you can’t throw everything away, Logan. You have a gift. And the apocalypse is going to happen whether you play your role or not. I want you to survive. Join me here and you can. Two beings will never stop an apocalypse.”

  “We’re not just two.”

  She made a noise Logan thought of as an old Gill noise, a sort of disapproving click of the tongue. “Oh yes, the ragtag misfits. Altogether, they don’t even equal one whole person.”

  “Were you always a snob?” Logan asked, sitting up. “’Cause you always had a tendency.”

  “I am not a snob, I’m a realist.”

  “So that’s your excuse for treachery, is it?” Logan snapped. “Realism?”

  “You’re never letting that go, are you?”

  “You were brainwashed.”

  “I am fulfilling my birthright,” she snapped, and the line crackled with energy. She must have realized what she was doing since she took a breath and steadied herself. “Fulfill yours, Logan. Before it’s too late.”

  Logan despaired for his sister but did wonder if he was to blame. Maybe if Gill had more faith in him, in their fight, she wouldn’t have succumbed. In the end, maybe it was Logan’s fault. “I’ve made my choice, Gill, like you’ve made yours. Now we have to live with them.” He cut the connection and put his phone on the nightstand.

  Ceri put a hand on his thigh. Logan could feel both his soft human skin and the rougher demon skin on his hand. “You okay?” Ceri asked, his voice partially muffled by the blankets. He knew how horrible this was for Logan. He knew Logan hated facing off with his sister.

  Logan put his hand over Ceri’s and said, “Yeah, I’m okay.” He thought he was. Mostly.

  He had to be okay. He was sure Gill was okay with things as they were now, so it was high time Logan got okay with it too, he thought as he dozed and remembered….

  MOM HADN’T had much in the way of family. They were all dead, more or less, although those who were alive, mostly extended family, wanted nothing to do with her. They thought she was crazy and a drunk, and while she may have eventually been driven to the former, mainly she was the latter. But she was mostly a functional alcoholic in that sometimes she seemed perfectly sober while being completely drunk off her ass. Eventually, they would discover that the reason their mother kept them moving from place to place all the time was because the demons were after them. It led to her first hospitalization and the first time Logan genuinely had to look after himself and Gill as a full-time thing. But he didn’t find out the demons were real things, not sick hallucinations, until one attacked him.

  Logan had been seventeen and had snuck out to a club he was too young to be in, but the owners played fast and loose with the carding policy, and anyone who had cash got a pass. He was there seeing a punk band—or were they post rock (whatever the fuck that meant)?—but it didn’t really matter. Logan was tired of babysitting both his mother and Gill and wanted time to himself. Getting wasted and laid were things he was hoping for, but he wouldn’t be depressed if they didn’t happen. They’d simply be gravy.

  He had some pills he’d bought at the last school he went to. He wasn’t quite ready to do any of the club drugs, but painkillers he could do. Logan was good and numb, and while he still hated the taste of beer, the warmth was nice. Eventually he had to find the place’s gross bathroom and take a piss.

  Mom might have been a drunk, but she was big on both him and Gill learning about personal safety. Wherever they lived, she enrolled them in martial arts classes, kickboxing classes, boxing, even simple self-defense courses. She told them she always wanted them to know how to take care of themselves, even though she didn’t say why. She had a sawed-off shotgun she taught Logan to shoot when he was ten, and she found some guy who was willing to teach him how to knife fight. Only in retrospect did Logan realize she was worried she’d be killed and he and Gillian would be vulnerable to both the demons and the angels, so she wanted them ready. Although at the time they’d thought she was overly paranoid, it had saved their lives time and again.

  Logan hadn’t really noticed the guy who entered after him, as he’d been having a piss. But once he went to the sink to wash his hands, he noticed the man. He looked very straightedged, like a narc or someone’s freakishly young guidance counselor, a clean-cut, clean-shaven young man in a Black Flag T-shirt that didn’t fit him, and jeans that were probably a smidgen too tight. Still, that wasn’t Logan’s tip-off that there was something deeply wrong with this guy. It was his face.

  It was blandly handsome, not really noteworthy, except his skin was flawless in a way that people’s faces weren’t. He had no zits, so scars, no big pores, no grease or grime, no stubble of any kind. His white-bread face was perfect in a way that was completely unrealistic. He wasn’t even sweating.

  Logan didn’t know it then, but that was his first encounter with a glamour. Demons had to wear them to walk around; otherwise their appearance instantly gave them away. They were bipedal, and that was pretty much where their similarity to humans ended.

  Logan was drying his hands when the guy attacked.

  Since he had him in the corner of his eye, Logan saw him coming and managed to get his elbow up so the guy basically ran into it. It sent a jolt of pain through Logan’s arm, but he heard a crack and warmth suddenly gushed upon him. He’d broken the perfect bastard’s nose.

  As he reeled back, all of Logan’s training flashed through his mind, but what it had settled on was that what was simple was best. Got a good shot? Take it. Which was why his next move was to kick the guy in the nuts and, as he bent over, grab his head and knee him in the face. Not once, but four times, until Logan was tired of getting all that blood on his jeans. As soon as Logan let him go, he staggered and fell against the sink, cursing him out, but it was hard to hear what he was saying through a mouthful of blood.

  “I don’t know why you attacked me,” Logan said. “But I do know if you don’t give up now, I’ll flatten your skull into a pancake.”

  Logan took a step toward him, and his boot kicked a metal charm that had fallen on the ground. Most demons couldn’t do most glamours themselves. The job was literally outsourced, either to higher demons—as a higher demon, Ceri was able to glamour himself—or to witches, who sold the demons physical charms. While they had it on them, their glamour was in place. When Logan kneed the guy in the face, he somehow lost his charm.

  Logan didn’t really pay attention to it in the moment. It was when the guy straightened up that Logan’s world as he’d known it ended. Mr. Perfect Face was now a being with leathery dark green skin, and his mouth was a fucked-up mess of teeth. His hair was strawlike and barely concealed what looked like a nubby series of yellowish-white horns atop the crown of his head, which also kind of looked like teeth growing out of his skin. (They were horns of course. On demons they seemed to be optional, but some were really strangely shaped.) Logan did a hard double-take. “What the fuck…?”

  The demon wasn’t yet aware he’d lost his charm, and he lunged at Logan again. Training overcame his shock, and he turned into a spinning kick that caught the ugly guy flush in his fucked-up jaw. It was pure action movie,
and as the demon slammed headfirst into a bathroom stall and collapsed on the filthy floor, Logan suddenly remembered his mother’s drunken rambles about “demons,” and the first thing that flashed through his mind wasn’t that she had been right, but maybe he’d caught her madness too. Was it hereditary? He was concerned he was having a psychotic break in the messy bathroom of a punk club. He was about the right age for it, right? Schizophrenia supposedly hit around the late teens for most people.

  He went back out into the club, belatedly remembering he probably had blood on him, but in what he assumed to be the lighting, Logan saw it looked black—on his hand, on his shirt, on his jeans. It turned out when he initially saw it as red, it was part of the glamour. Most demon blood actually was black.

  But again, learned in hindsight. At the time, he sat at the bar and drank until reality didn’t matter anymore. Logan was positive it was his last sane night. He had no idea how he got home—someone put him in a taxi and sent him on his way. Later, he would learn it was Lynneia, who was apparently at the club keeping an eye on him, but he didn’t know that, and he didn’t know her yet either. It would be about a year from then that he would meet her in a social context, in what he assumed was their first meeting. It would also technically be the last opposite-sex relationship for either of them, which was kind of hilarious to think about now, although Lynneia always knew she was bisexual.

  He didn’t find out she wasn’t human until a little later on. Wow, all his relationships were fucked up from the get-go, weren’t they?

  LOGAN WAS woken from his dream, memory—whatever it was called when sleep and remembrances became entwined—by Ceri, who leaned over and kissed him on the top of his head and stroked his arm until Logan opened his eyes. He didn’t want to open his eyes.

  Ceri had put his glamour on again. He looked like a bronze-skinned Greek god, with wavy black hair and golden hazel eyes, but he remembered to put some flaws in his glamour, so he had an acne scar or two, which somehow just added to his beauty. And while he was extremely sexy, Logan sort of preferred his real self, bisected and all.

  “Lynneia and Esme are back,” Ceri said.

  “Oh, excellent,” Logan said, sitting up. He really wanted to pull Ceri into bed, but the sun was clearly up, and the birds were trilling their hearts out beyond the windows. Logan personally didn’t care for being up in the morning, was best suited to nighttime living. He honestly didn’t know how anyone functioned in daylight.

  Logan grabbed some sweatpants and stepped into them—not sure if they were his or Ceri’s and not really caring—and pondered putting on a shirt before figuring fuck it. Lyn had seen him naked, and Esme had seen him shirtless before, so it was no big deal. Besides, it allowed him to show off his tattoos.

  Magic existed, but it was really weird. It worked for some beings and not for others, and the rules weren’t wildly consistent. But there were a few bedrock things that couldn’t be shaken. First of all, the talent for it really did seem to run in families, and protective sigils would only work if drawn—or tattooed—by a genuine magic wielder. So Esme was responsible for the wards tattooed on his body. A non-magic-using tattoo artist was responsible for the No Gods, No Masters tattoo on his left upper arm, because it wasn’t a spell, just a statement.

  Logan padded into the kitchen to find Lynneia and Esme sitting at the table with mugs of tea in their hands. Lynneia was in her human form. He could smell something good cooking on the stove as Ceri was in chef mode. Logan poured himself a cup of french-pressed coffee—of course Ceri, being a major coffee snob, had already prepared it—and took a seat at the kitchen table.

  “So how did the hunt for The Blackburn Codex go?” Logan asked Esme.

  Esme sighed, putting down her mug. She was an attractive Latinx woman with short blue asymmetrical hair, longer on the right than the left. Her left ear had about a half dozen different earrings in it, mostly studs all along the cartilage, and she also had a pierced eyebrow. She was the first genuinely punk-as-fuck witch Logan had ever met, and he appreciated that. Not that it mattered what he thought. She was Lynneia’s girlfriend, and he was irrelevant. “Well, it was pretty fucked-up, but eventually we found its last known hiding place. Delacourt Manor.”

  Logan pondered that while sipping his coffee. Ceri might have been a coffee snob, but that made him the best at making it. “Is it that weirdass supernatural death house?”

  Esme tapped the side of her nose and pointed at him. “That’s the death trap.”

  He gave Lynneia a skeptical look. “You couldn’t just fly in there?”

  “I could fly to the property, but whoever set it up was aware more than demons and witches would be looking for it. Its traps have traps.”

  Although at first he’d thought it was a joke, Lynneia was a harpy. A genuine one. One of those mythological Greek bird women. She was quick to point out the myth wasn’t exactly spot-on. It had a definite sting of misogyny, and every tale told over time loses many of its facts and ends up in the land of opinion. In human guise, she looked like a very attractive Korean woman, which she was, although it was really a disguise. Lynneia had tried to explain it to him once, but it was complicated and made his head hurt. The gist was she could appear as any female, old or young, any race or size. Harpies were gender-specific shape-shifters. She was also cagey about how old she was but had dropped that harpies lived about a thousand years. She had been working for Heaven at first, keeping an eye on Logan, but in the end she decided they were manipulating her and walked away. They initially sent angels after her, but the thing about harpies was they were fierce warriors. So after a couple of dead angels, they decided, wisely, to leave her the fuck alone.

  “Do you know what we’re gonna be facing?” Logan asked.

  “Not completely,” Lyn admitted. “But I think we can handle it, since the traps probably aren’t made for us.”

  “We could also ask Ahmed if he wants in on this.”

  “What’s in it for him?” Esme asked. “Would he even give a shit?”

  “It’s part of stopping the apocalypse. He’d rather the world didn’t end.” But Ahmed could be fickle. He was extremely old, and a guy that old was bound to be cranky. Especially when he had Ahmed’s issues.

  Ceri finally came to the table and put a plate of scrambled eggs and grilled toast in front of Logan before sitting down next to him with his own food. Ceri was demon enough that eating was optional, but he’d come to appreciate human food. Usually the junkier the better, but Logan’s love of breakfast sandwiches in all their iterations—burritos, biscuits, quesadillas—had led Ceri to appreciate those foods as well.

  Logan took a bite of the grilled toast and savored both its crunch and buttery goodness. Ceri knew every possible way to his heart.

  Lynneia raised an eyebrow at the both of them. “You realize you’re eating eggs in front of a birdwoman, don’t you?”

  “These aren’t harpy eggs,” Ceri replied, and Logan spluttered out a laugh.

  Lynneia glared at him. “We don’t lay eggs.”

  “I know, but you said—”

  “We’re still working on humor and its variables,” Logan told Lyn. Ceri had been raised pretty much as a demon, as his father hadn’t wanted him to get “tainted” by humanity. But he hadn’t been able to quell Ceri’s curiosity about humans, and then, when Logan ended up in Hell, the rest was history. Ceri had to come see his father’s human prisoner, and while it wasn’t exactly love at first sight, it was at least lust. That was when Logan realized he was kinda sorta sometimes attracted to dudes. And others. Not just women, which seemed like a major thing to acknowledge to himself when he was essentially Hell’s prisoner. But thanks to Ceri, he wasn’t Hell’s prisoner for long. Although it had been long enough for Gill to do the stupidest goddamn thing she had ever done. No help for it now.

  They sketched out a loose plan for penetrating Delacourt Manor, and Logan figured he’d bug Ahmed after this and see if he wanted in. If, that is, he was in the basement, wher
e he lived. If he wasn’t, it wasn’t like Logan could call him, because he didn’t keep a phone with him regularly. For one, he hated most modern tech, and besides, sand got everywhere and ruined everything. It seemed like he could control that better, but again, old man. Maybe it was to be expected.

  As soon as he was done with breakfast, Logan headed to the basement. He knocked before he opened the door and called out, “You here, Ahmed?”

  He lived in their basement, even though he had a crazy amount of money, because Ahmed neither had a place to live nor seemed to want one. All he had in the basement was an armchair he probably didn’t use, a table, and a flat-screen television bolted to the wall. Ahmed had to have his shows. But he didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, and wouldn’t have sex if it was offered to him, being a total old-school—no pun intended—asexual. He saw humanity as a whole as pathetic and not worth a damn, except for two things: he loved fashion, and he didn’t want to be the only thing left alive on Earth after an apocalypse. He would talk about being alone in some places when the Black Death ravished Europe, and he realized he’d had more than enough alone time. It was probably also why he lived in their basement, even though they rarely saw him.

  “Ahmed?” Logan called again. There was a little sand about, but not enough to be him, so Logan wrote him a note and left it taped to his TV. He had no idea if Ahmed would get it in time or not. Not that it mattered; they’d planned around him. Him showing up would be a bonus.

  Esme and Lyn said they’d meet them there, and in the backyard, Lyn transformed into her true harpy form. It was sudden, and Logan always felt it should be more dramatic than it was. She held out her arms, and feathers suddenly burst from beneath her skin, metallic silver and sleek, like she was some cyborg angel, while her arms seemed to grow another foot. Her fingers curved into thick black talons, and if she was still wearing her boots—which she wasn’t; she’d kicked them off inside the house—they would have exploded as her feet became wide three-toed talons, scaled like they belonged to a dragon. Her face remained the same, but feathers erupted from inside her tank top, filling it out like she was smuggling pillows. Some fun facts Logan had learned about Lynneia in her harpy form—she was strong enough to pick up a bus, her claws could cut through concrete, and she flew at about eighty miles an hour at top speed, more if she could catch a favorable breeze. This was why angels didn’t bother with harpies. Even though they didn’t look it, they were tanks. They could lay waste to anyone and their brother so fast they’d have little idea what had actually hit them.