Darlings of New Midnight

by Andrea Speed

  Logan held the bowl while Ceri cut his hand and bled into it, and it was nearly half-full with a distressing amount of blood before Ceri slapped a large gauze pad over the cut and tied it off. He could heal much faster than anyone else, but Logan still hated seeing it.

  The symbol was complicated to make, so both Esme and Ceri drew it while the others looked on. Lyn helped herself to a beer from their fridge, and once Logan gave her a dirty look, she tossed him one. He figured what the hell; it might help him cope with all of this.

  Ahmed got bored and wandered off. Logan didn’t like the idea of him snooping around the house—which he was obviously doing—but he couldn’t think of a way to stop him unless he chased after him with a vacuum cleaner. He let the idea of confining Ahmed to a Shop-Vac amuse him for a few minutes.

  Alex sat quietly, watching everything as if memorizing it for later. Logan offered them a drink, but they declined. Much like Ahmed, they could reach a stillness that seemed virtually impossible for a living being, and yet, Alex wasn’t made of sand. Were they? He couldn’t say what reality alteration Cthylor had made to Alex to make them a living messenger. Or undead messenger? Now he wondered.

  Finally, Esme and Ceri finished the symbol, and Lyn brought the chunk of amethyst in and put it in the center of the thing. Ceri cut his hand open again, speaking some of that demon language that, while not as painful as Alex’s protogod tongue, still sounded guttural and unpleasant. He bled on the rock and intoned words Logan had no hope of understanding while the rest of them watched and waited, Esme standing off to the side, ready to jump in with some magic if necessary.

  After about a minute, the amethyst cracked, so loudly it almost sounded like a gunshot. Black smoke began pouring out of the crystal, first slowly and low to the ground, but gradually picking up speed and height. “Everyone stand back,” Ceri warned. “I’m going to try and control its size, but this thing can get big.”

  “How big?” Logan wondered. Their kitchen wasn’t huge.

  “Uh, maybe jumbo-jet sized? I’m not sure. It’s been a while since I heard about the Scourge.”

  “You couldn’t mention that first thing?” Well, at least Ceri was the Prince of Hell. He could probably afford to get their roof fixed.

  The smoke began to take on a shape. At first Logan was pretty sure it was horse-shaped, but then the legs shrank and the body lengthened, and then he began to see the dragon. Ceri said some more demonic things, and it contracted once its half-formed head hit the ceiling. It didn’t leave any damage, which was good.

  Now details started to emerge: scales and teeth, claws and wings, and a crest like a mohawk on its head. It was still roughly intangible and see-through, but it shoved the kitchen table into the far wall.

  Ceri managed to talk it down to the size of a quarter horse, but that must have been the limit because it shrank no further.

  What stood before them now was an ink-black dragon. Its all black features made it seem oddly faceless while still remaining fairly detailed. At least you could see its scales more clearly than its eyes. When it opened its mouth, smoke escaped, but it was mostly translucent.

  Ceri managed to stroke its chest somehow, and he said something in demon, gesturing at Logan. Now Logan was curious. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s yours. How do you feel about a new tattoo?”

  These shifts of topic left Logan mentally reeling. “What do you mean it’s mine? And I guess it depends on the tattoo. Why?”

  “I don’t need another weapon,” Ceri explained, grabbing his arm. “I have Godslayer, and I’m the son of Satan. But I worry about you. This will put my mind at ease, at least.”

  Something was happening to his arm where Ceri was touching him. It didn’t hurt; it just felt weird. But before he could ask, Ceri let him go, and Logan saw he had a new tattoo on the inside of his right forearm. It was a small deep-black pentagram, reversed, with a few minute details, such as something that looked like a tiny wing and another thing that looked like claw marks. “Now it’s bound to you,” Ceri explained. “You can summon it at any time. Although, if it senses you’re in distress, you won’t have to summon it.”

  Logan looked at him, surprised. “Instant backup?”

  He nodded. “You are its master. It will protect you to the end of its life.”

  Logan was awestruck, and it took all his willpower not to tear up. “And it can hurt anything?”

  Ceri nodded. “It’s a hellhound/hellcat times a thousand. It can hurt demons, angels, gods… maybe even Cthulhu, for a bit.”

  “If you’re really lucky,” Alex added.

  Ceri nodded at that. “Protogods are ludicrously over-powered.” Ceri went back to the Scourge, patted its chest, and with a tilt of his head, tacitly asked Logan to join him. He did, but cautiously, as he still wasn’t sure how this worked.

  Once he was close, Ceri grabbed his hand and put it on the helldragon’s chest. It took a moment to solidify under his palm, but it did, and something that was half-stone, half-flesh pulsed beneath his palm. Feeling the sharp edges of its scales, he realized its skin alone was a weapon. There was heat within the beast, but there was extreme cold as well. It nearly throbbed with dark, ancient energy, like some terrible abyss barely contained within stony skin.

  Its muzzle-shaped head darted down, and it licked Logan’s hair. It had breath like brimstone and a snake-shaped black tongue. He relaxed as he realized it wasn’t tasting him, simply attempting to groom him.

  “You should give it a name,” Ceri said, as Logan continued petting the Scourge. How he wasn’t slicing the shit out of his hand was a mystery. Ceri continued translating all of this in sign language for Alex. Logan was dying to know what helldragon looked like in sign language but decided to ask later.

  “Is it male or female?” Logan wondered.

  “Yes,” Ceri said.

  “Oh.” Not helpful, but okay. Ceri taught him quite early that humans were the only ones who tried to adhere religiously to a gender binary. The universe and everything else in it didn’t behave that way. Only stupidass humans, which made all kinds of sense.

  “Rover’s good,” Lyn suggested.

  “It needs personality,” Esme said. “Something drag-queenish. What about Amanda Huntandkill? Mandy for short.”

  “How about Tineen?” Ahmed, who had returned from poking around the house, said.

  “I like Nyarghathal,” Alex said. Either that or they had something stuck in their throat.

  Logan looked at the hellbeast, which seemed to waver between semisolid and translucent, and tried to think of what you could possibly call such a magnificent and terrifying thing. There wasn’t a word for it in English, which seemed like such a limited language. After a few more seconds of thought, he decided on the first thing that came into his head. “What about Talon?”

  Ceri nodded. “Talon. Sounds good.”

  “I still like Amanda Huntandkill,” Esme said.

  “We’ll name our next cat that,” Lyn said, giving her a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

  Logan got brave enough to try to pet Talon’s muzzle, and it lowered its face to allow him to do that. Up close, he could see its onyx-black eyes, the same color as its stony skin and fearsome clutch of fangs, and he detected no hostility coming from the great monster. No ill will at all, but in the back of his mind, he still got a sense of the void, of the abyss this thing was simply the extension of. This was power, as frightening and devastating as Godslayer. No wonder the angels wanted it as much as the demons. This was Godslayer with its own intent.

  “Do we need to clean out the garage so it has a place to stay, or…?”

  “No. It doesn’t exist normally in the same space we do,” Ceri said and then said something else in demon language. Talon seemed to wink out of existence.

  “Did you send it to Hell?” Logan asked.

  Ceri shook his head, and to all their surprise, Alex answered. “It exists between spaces, between dimensions. Which is why its tangibility is a
lways in flux. It’s essentially a monster of quantum mechanics.”

  Logan knew he wasn’t smart enough to understand that, but he did know a little something about quantum physics. “So you’re saying it’s Schrödinger’s Cat, but back for revenge?”

  “Not really, but that sounds great,” Ceri replied.

  “How do I summon it?”

  “You just say its name. Command it. You can send it away the same way. The tattoo is your connection to Talon. Physical and metaphysical.”

  Logan nodded. He didn’t completely understand, but he didn’t have to, not as long as it worked. And having his own guard dragon sounded hella cool. Wait until the angels got a load of this.

  After the excitement of releasing a new helldragon, they had to get to the more mundane realities of cleaning up. Esme cast a spell that got rid of everything—all the blood and the evidence—while Ceri went upstairs to see if he could contact any of his squealers in Hell, to see what they made of the situation. He usually did a special ritual for that, and Logan knew to leave him to it. Ahmed wandered off again, as he usually did, and Logan poured some mint iced tea for himself, Lyn, and Esme. As for Alex, they had disappeared when Logan wasn’t looking.

  As they sat at the repositioned kitchen table, he couldn’t help but ask, “Can we get a reading now, see if anything’s changed?”

  Esme frowned slightly. “We could. But are you sure? I can’t guarantee there’s been any change whatsoever.”

  Logan knew it was kind of dangerous asking Esme to read the cards for him. Unlike most “spiritualists,” Esme’s Tarot cards would actually tell her correct things about the future. Most Tarot cards were fancied-up playing cards and couldn’t be said to be anything special, but Esme’s charmed Tarot could tell the subject of the reading how they were going to die, if they were stupid enough to ask. She would only do readings occasionally, and only related to specific, preapproved questions, because cards that were actually truthful could be a weapon. It was weird how most people counted on fortune-tellers being wrong.

  Esme moved her tea aside and pulled out the purple velvet bag that held her cards. She didn’t always have it with her, but she could produce it out of nowhere with a spell for that purpose. She held the cards in her bare hands for a moment and then shuffled them three times. After that, she started laying them out in a Celtic cross pattern.

  She had long readings and short ones, with the long giving a bit more detail. This was one of the longer ones, as Logan had requested.

  She’d done this specific reading for him three times, and in all those times, the cards had been the exact same ones, predicting the apocalypse and ruination. This time, as he had hoped, the cards were different.

  The first few cards were the same, which Esme quickly pointed out, setting the rest of the deck aside. “As before, we still have the World as the base card, with the Lovers and Two of Pentacles crossing. And there’s Gill, lurking in your past,” she said, tapping the Page of Cups, another returning card. “But here’s where it starts to deviate. The Four of Swords appears, indicating a period of rest, probably connected to the High Priestess, who is Alex. The Nine of Wands follows, suggesting a long battle, but one that’s definitely winnable. Your fears are the Tower, which—duh, no shit—is complete ruination, and the Chariot is your hopes, which is conquest or the winning of the battle. The ending card… hmm.”

  “What?” The card was the Moon. Simply by being around Esme, he knew more about Tarot cards than he’d ever wanted to know, but he really didn’t know this card.

  “The Moon suggests unforeseen perils. Maybe there’s something we’re unaware of that could tip things against us?”

  “I thought nothing beat Cthulhu.”

  She nodded, tapping the Moon card against her bottom lip. “Nothing does. It might be more personal, something that would give the apocalypse side the edge.”

  “That makes sense,” Lyn interjected. “If you know you can’t win the wider war, you start focusing on smaller battles.”

  Esme nodded. “You carve little places out where you can.”

  Logan nodded along, pretending he was as good at strategy as Lyn, which was fucking impossible. Lyn had worked a long time as a mercenary. She was their go-to strategy expert. “So since Heaven and Hell both know they can’t kill Cthulhu, they’re going to microfocus on the weak spots of the team. Which is us.”

  Lyn gave him a big sarcastic smile and tapped his arm. “You mean you.”

  “I have a helldragon now, thank you very much.”

  “I also think it isn’t physical weakness that they’ll be targeting,” Esme said, holding the Moon card out at Lyn. “This is often a card of psychic energy.”

  Lyn sat back with a scowl. “So they’re going to attack us psychically?”

  “I think that’s a good possibility, yes. They’ll leave Ceri out, because he could defend against that, and I doubt either of them could get to Ahmed.”

  “What about Alex?” Logan wondered.

  She considered that, fanning herself with the card. “If they have any kind of psychic link with Cthylor, neither Heaven nor Hell will come out of that alive, so I doubt they’ll chance it. Which leaves the rest of us.”

  “How do we fight something like that?” Logan wondered. Gill walked into his dreams whenever she wanted. If Heaven could do it, Hell could too, and who knew what they would try?

  Esme shrugged and grimaced, an expression twofer that was never good. “I can attempt some protection spells, hand out some charms, but honestly on that level? It’s difficult to fight.”

  “Which makes it perfect for them,” Lyn said, hanging her head with a sigh. Yes, that wasn’t a positive development.

  Ceri returned, and Logan looked at him hopefully. “So how goes it in Hell?”

  “Full red alert,” Ceri reported. “They really don’t like that Cthulhu is now playing favorites, at least via his daughter, and everyone’s in panic mode. Again, no wants to deal with Cthulhu. For perhaps the first time ever, we have them running scared.”

  “Any news on Heaven?” Esme wondered.

  Ceri stood behind his chair and casually put a hand on Logan’s shoulder. “They’re radio silent, which, as we know, is super weird for them.”

  “Of course they’re fucking scared,” Lyn said. “I’m scared, and Alex is theoretically on our side.”

  “Theoretically?” Ceri asked. “You think they might betray us?”

  “No. But we have to face facts that Cthylor is working with us only because it’s convenient. The moment it’s not, we might have a problem.”

  “One disaster at a time, please,” Logan said, sitting forward and scrubbing his hand through his hair. He was tired, and he wasn’t sure why he was tired.

  “Did the cards have good news?” Ceri asked.

  Esme shrugged. “We’ve turned the tide in our favor. But we may be more open to psychic attacks and other small-guard actions.”

  Ceri squeezed Logan’s shoulder, reassuring him without words. “We always knew they’d be more dangerous once we turned up the heat. Heaven and Hell are both big enough that losing seems unfathomable to them. They’re not going to take it well.”

  Logan reached up and put his hand over Ceri’s. It was simply comforting to know he was there. “And it’s hard to argue that Heaven or Hell wouldn’t sink so low, because we know they would.”

  Esme nodded and gulped down the rest of her tea in one go before standing up. Lyn did the same. “Okay, I’ll see if I can find some charms or spells to help us. Maybe we can even think up ways to go after them. Counteroffensive.”

  Ceri nodded. “Sounds good. Tell me if you find anything.”

  “Back at ya,” Esme said and then threw a spell that had her and Lyn blink out in an instant.

  Logan sighed and laid his head on the table. “I think I’m tired enough to sleep, but I know if I do, bad shit’s going to happen.”

  Ceri pulled out a chair and sat down beside him. “What if I have a solut
ion to that?”

  Logan raised his head. “You do?”

  “Maybe. Angels can walk in dreams, and so can demons. But there’s a caveat.”

  “Of course there is.”

  “You have to be susceptible to a demon walking into your dreams for that to happen.”

  Logan frowned as he considered that. Did he have any idea what that meant? He tried to fake it, but no, he couldn’t. “Which means what, exactly?”

  “Yeah, I was pondering that myself. Supposedly you have to be open.”

  “Open? What does that mean in this context?”

  Ceri grimaced in a way that Logan didn’t think was positive. “It could mean a few things, only one of which I think we could work with. Have you ever done ecstasy?”

  “The club drug? No.”

  “Have you ever wanted to?”

  Logan grinned. “I have, actually. Will that leave me open to demon dream-walking?”

  “It’ll be a big help. I should be able to get you the rest of the way.”

  “Then let’s go do some drugs.”

  Of course he was being flippant, but Logan had never said no to a bit of a chemical vacation. It was basically the only kind of vacation he ever had. Not that he went crazy with it. He knew better than that. It probably wasn’t fair to think, but he didn’t want to end up like his mother. Although she was right about the angels and demons stuff, she was still probably mentally ill. He blamed the demons and angels for that. They were enough to drive anyone crazy.