by Andrea Speed
The demon called, and Ceri put the phone on speaker and placed it in the center of the table, signing the conversation for Alex’s benefit.
“Okay, so, I can’t talk long,” Bucket said. “And I haven’t gotten a coup started yet. But a lot of guys are really unnerved by Cthulhu picking a side here. They know there’s no way that’s good for us. Or anybody really. What you need to know is we’re going after the cursed artifact supposedly buried in Aokigahara. It’s a trap.”
Logan snorted. “Of course it is.”
“How exactly do they expect to take Cthylor out of the bargain?” Ceri asked.
“I dunno,” Bucket responded. “I asked, but I was told it was above my pay grade. They seem to think they can neutralize Cthylor. Gotta go. Remember our deal.”
“You don’t try to kill us, we won’t try to kill you,” Ceri said, before ending the call.
Everyone was now looking at Alex. “What can neutralize Cthylor?” Ceri asked.
“Nothing,” Alex replied.
“Hell seems to think they have something.”
“They’re full of shit.”
“What’s in Aokigahara?” Logan wondered.
Ahmed waved a hand dismissively. Today he had modified himself so it looked like he was wearing a red-and-black plaid suit with a black vest and a gold watch chain dangling from a pocket. Alex had to imagine his outrageous fashion choices were a way of making his interminable life less boring for himself. “Rumor has it a black-magic artifact of great power is buried there, hence its ‘suicide forest’ reputation. But it’s horseshit. There’s nothing there. It’s an attempt to explain why so many people go there to die.”
“They’re unhappy isn’t reason enough?” Logan asked.
Ahmed shrugged. “People like simple explanations for complicated things.”
Beyond being a true oddity, Ahmed had his likable characteristics. Alex was aware the others probably found him depressing, but he had true insight into human nature. It wasn’t his fault that most of those insights were incredible downers.
Logan looked around the table. “So we walk into this trap and see what they’ve got?”
“It’s risky as hell,” Ceri admitted. “No pun intended.”
“But that’s the only move we have,” Lyn pointed out. “We need to find out if they do have anything to neutralize Cthylor. ’Cause if they do, that changes everything.”
“I can tell you now they don’t,” Alex said. “It’s probably part of the trap. They know we’ll come because of that.”
“Maybe so, but I vote we check it out,” Ceri said.
Lyn nodded. “We gotta see. And hey, best case scenario, we get to kick their asses again.”
Alex had to admit that was fun. Showing up and kicking ass was the best thing they did.
No one actually voted for not going, even Ahmed, who seemed indifferent to it all. Esme and Ceri discussed who was going to bring everyone else there, while Alex stepped out into a pocket Cthylor opened for them and was instantly moved to Aokigahara. Cthylor took them closest to wherever she picked up demon signatures.
Alex had stepped one foot on the soft dirt when the ground lit up in bright blue-white patterns that looked like some obscure language. Which was exactly what it was.
It was Enochian, the language of angels, which looked like a combination between chicken scratch and Norse runes. The words were written in circles, and while Alex couldn’t read what they said, it was easy to assume it had something to do with freezing, because Alex found themselves unable to move. They couldn’t even put their other foot down. They were frozen in place.
The others showed up and faced a similar fate as the whole forest floor lit up in blue-white graffiti. The forest here was thick, with tall, dark trees, the branches above so tightly interlaced that the daylight above was barely visible, and the glare from the spell was almost blinding. It did allow them to briefly see the demons in the trees. Hell was working with Heaven now? Well, it was only a matter of time until that happened. They both wanted the end to come sooner rather than later.
“You motherfuckers,” Ceri said. He was probably the only one who could talk, as the runes beneath him were still bright and looked like they were straining to hold him, which made sense. He was the strongest among them, so he’d take the most resources to hold still.
An angel walked out of the trees. He looked like all the angels so far, which meant dressed like a hippie-dippy and pretty pale. Alex had spotted nonwhite angels, but angels generally took the white-bread approach, as it generally suited their wardrobes better.
“Did you really think we were going to allow this nonsense to continue?” the angel said. “I will admit, pulling in Cthulhu was a worrisome touch, but this apocalypse is happening. We’ve tried to get you to see reason—”
What’s wrong? Cthylor’s voice asked in Alex’s head. Again, there was a sound behind the words—a slight echo and a noise like wind or water.
The angels have frozen me in place, Alex responded. It was ridiculous. They would have laughed if they could have. The angel was still debating Ceri, but Alex had looked away and completely lost the thread. Lipreading, however easy, was a bunch of horseshit. With some kind of spell drawn on the ground.
They’ve done what? From what Alex had discerned, Cthylor was not an emotional creature. There wasn’t much inflection in the “voice,” and it was clear that emotions as humans knew them were foreign to her species. And why not? They were gods. It was probably beneath them.
But Alex heard a tinge of something like anger in Cthylor’s voice, something hard enough to make them shudder. Oh, the angels had fucked up. They’d fucked up big-time.
The first obvious sign of it was the light went out. It wasn’t a fading. It was a dramatic stop, like someone had put out the sun. The angel looked up, brow furrowed in consternation. Alex thought he said the word “eclipse,” which was probably what was happening. Never mind that one wasn’t supposed to happen today.
Ceri had figured it out. “You stupid bastards,” he snapped. “To quote a wise man, ‘You come for the king, you best not miss.’”
Wasn’t that from the TV show The Wire? Oh, funny. Who would have guessed Satan’s son would have a sense of humor?
The angel was looking at Alex, eyes narrowed in scrutiny. “You can’t do this,” he said. “Cthulhu isn’t psychic. How are you doing this?”
A vibration began deep underground, a tiny tremor that took on the aspect of a tsunami in milliseconds. The demons had already started running, and the handful of angels around seemed genuinely alarmed. But showing how unaccustomed they were to having their lives threatened, they stood around, strengthening the holding spell as the towering trees began swaying back and forth in an ungodly rhythm.
The ground split, fissures growing like cracks in ice, and the pressure of the freezing spell disappeared as the ground revolted, breaking the circles of symbols. Vines whipped from the chasms and wrapped around the angels’ necks, thorns digging in, until their heads popped off like special effects. Now Alex could laugh and did. They also signed a quick “Fuck you” at the space where the angels had been a moment before.
The lead angel now seemed to understand what his mistake was, and he shouted something before he winked out of existence. Now another vibration made itself known, but it was different from Cthylor breaking the ground. As the eclipse ceased and the light returned, a wall of water came for them, shoving down the trees in its path.
The water was maybe two rows of trees away when it froze, as if it had hit some invisible wall. “Nice spell,” Lyn said.
Esme shook her head, hands still raised to cast. “I haven’t thrown one yet.”
They glanced among themselves before they all turned their gazes on Alex.
“Cthulhu sleeps at the bottom of the ocean,” Alex said. “He wouldn’t sleep in an element he couldn’t control.”
As they spoke, another crack opened in the ground and the wall of water began to disappear i
nside it. It didn’t make sense, as it seemed like some of it would have splashed over the top, but even physics couldn’t resist the call of Cthulhu or Cthylor.
“Well,” Logan said. “I think I’m about to piss myself in terror. She can cause a fucking eclipse and stop a tsunami?”
“I told you, the protogods are ludicrously over-powered,” Ceri said. “If Cthulhu wanted to crash the moon into Australia, he could. If he wanted to make Canada an island, he could do that too. The fact that the angels thought they could do a work-around was sheer hubris on their part. Did they really think freezing the messenger was a solution? They’re desperate. And that whole trying to drown us at the end? What the hell was that?”
“We need to go after them,” Alex said.
They all stared at Alex with expressions ranging from disbelief to shock to Lyn’s reaction, which was to burst into laughter.
“Are you crazy?” Esme asked. “You can’t really be advocating we storm Heaven. Even if we can find a way there, we’ll be slaughtered.”
“We have Cthylor with us,” Alex pointed out. “We won’t.”
“Actually…,” Ceri began.
Logan’s head snapped around so fast, it looked like he nearly gave himself whiplash. “What? Fuck no. You can’t be seriously considering this.”
“It’s not a completely horrible idea,” Ceri told him. “The angels won’t see it coming, and if the angels were Hell’s last resort—which I bet they were—this will really throw them into panic mode. We can force their hand and make them give up this whole ridiculous end-times shit.”
“We don’t know that will work,” Logan argued. “Nothing we’ve done has made them give up. And hey, I didn’t think Heaven was that accessible to humans.”
Yes—the greatest joke to emerge from all of this, although there were several, was that humans didn’t go to Heaven when they died, or Hell. Those were other-dimensional places, and not usually accessible to humans in any respect. As it was, it was easier for humans to access Hell, because Hell wasn’t one to pass up a free meal. But angels were snooty motherfuckers, and usually the only way for humans to get into Heaven was to have angel blood in the family and agree to become an angel before they died. Then they were reborn as angels, which was a whole bunch of complicated bullshit that neither Cthylor nor Alex had any time for. Honestly, the only thing angels were good for was to be an annoyance.
“I know a way in,” Ceri said.
Logan widened his eyes in surprise. “You do? How?”
“Lucifer was an angel, eons ago. He’s always known a way in, but he’s never cared to go back. According to him, Heaven is super boring.”
That made sense. As beings, angels were relatively boring. You’d think they wouldn’t be, but nope. They never did anything fun with their powers.
“I thought no living human could go into Heaven anyway,” Ahmed said. “Not that that applies to me. I’m neither alive nor human.”
Lyn held up a finger. “Not human either.”
“Does having angel blood get me in?” Logan wondered.
“I can probably cook up a spell that gets us in the door,” Esme said to him, shrugging.
“Satan’s son,” Ceri said. “I’m probably grandfathered in.”
When they looked at Alex, they repeated what Cthylor had said. “No doors are closed to us. For long.”
Logan shook his head. “Nice and creepy.”
“Maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves here,” Lyn said. “I for one want to go and kick some feathered asses. But we have to be smart about this. Fighting them on our turf is one thing. Fighting on theirs? That’s a whole lot of guesswork. Before we run and gun for them, we have to identify main weaknesses and make a plan. Because I have a feeling getting in will be the easy part. Getting out will be the hardest.”
Alex smiled faintly and wondered what it was like to worry about your mortality. Or anything. Alex didn’t think twice about that. Why should they? They were the child of Cthylor in just about every way but physical. And no other love could compare to that.
GILL BARELY remembered dying anymore.
It was more an impression than an actual memory. A feeling of heat, a flash of light, and then… emptiness, until the light returned, full and blinding and magnetic. They warned her being reborn would mean she’d forget her time as a human “more or less,” which was close to a lie. It was guaranteed, which the angels hadn’t mentioned when she was a mere human. But still, she held on to fragments. It helped that as soon as she was reborn and realized how fragile her remaining human memories were, she started writing them down.
Some of it was simply data. Her mother had been named Amanda; she had an older brother named Logan. Mom was mentally ill and an alcoholic, and she was afraid her brother had been going down the same addict path, mainly from the pressure of growing up taking care of her and their mother both. Logan’s birthday was February sixth; hers had been October twenty-seventh; their mother’s had been December sixteenth. Gill’s favorite class in school had been drama, and she’d written down she’d been sort of a theater kid, but she no longer knew exactly what that meant and had decided not to ask Logan about it. She’d written at the top of most of the pages, Don’t hurt Logan!
Emotions were abstract for her now. She knew she used to have them, but she no longer did, or at least she was pretty sure she didn’t. But that phrase kept rattling around her head, and she knew it still meant something to her. They used to be siblings, and she wanted no harm to come to him. She wasn’t sure Logan felt the same way, judging how their usual meet-ups in the dream plane went, but Gill had figured out that maybe those acts of violence were due to the fact that Logan felt betrayed somehow by Gill’s decision to become an angel. Why he felt that way was a bit of a poser, since it was essentially their destiny. But Logan had been especially resistant to it.
And he was involved with Ceri, which struck her initially as odd, and then it struck her as perfect. Among the notes she’d written was the fact that her brother used charisma like a weapon, and when they were growing up, often charmed people into helping them in some fashion. She’d also written that Logan always said he got items via shoplifting and money from pickpocketing, but there were times she wondered if he got money in other ways, such as prostituting himself. Logan denied it, but she wasn’t sure she believed him. Not that it mattered anymore.
Angels were energy beings that didn’t need to be physical ones unless they chose to be, and yet, they did have a physical space. They existed in a pocket dimension that abutted Earth’s dimension and would probably be called Heaven by humans. Certainly the angels had adopted the nomenclature. But it would meet no one’s idea of Heaven.
It was all white and silver, and when Gill first saw it, the word that popped into her mind was Ikea, which turned out to be some store on Earth. Why she thought that, she still didn’t know—it looked nothing like a store. It was sterile, and there was little in the way of anything. Just snowy white and pale blue light and silver accents. There were walls, and you could have your own dwelling if you wished, but these seemed like concessions to the empty echoes of their once-human existence. From what she’d written in her notebooks, Gill was glad she’d lost a lot of these memories. Such as the night when her mother tried to commit suicide and she wrote about seeing blood and glass everywhere as Logan tried to keep her alive until the ambulance came. She wrote she’d never seen so much blood until that night, and Gill wondered why she wrote it down, since it sounded horrific. There were notes that Logan had been calm and collected, even with his face and his shirt marred by their mother’s blood, and Gill had worried about him. Until she heard him later in a hospital bathroom, crying. Logan always tried to hold it together for Gill. Was that why she recounted the incident? To remind herself that her brother was worth saving?
There were other things she’d written down that she couldn’t figure out. They’d lived in a car for a bit, squatted in an empty house. She was sure Mom was spending her rare s
ober/sane moments trying to turn Logan into some kind of martial arts/self-defense robot, a hellish fate she resisted as much as she could, although in the end, Mom was right. Why did Gill write those down? Those seemed like things worthy of forgetting. But that thing with Logan explained why he got a reputation as the only human able to go toe-to-toe with various demons and beat them. It was what he was trained to do.
Angels were big on rules and regulations, which didn’t seem surprising. And there were rules about when “new” angels could travel to the Earth dimension. They wanted you to be able to control your powers and yourself, because an angel without control was a dangerous thing indeed. But since they were energy beings, they didn’t have to talk. They were all connected, in a weird sort of way. You could protect your thoughts if you wanted, but it was hard, and few did. Which was how Gill learned, despite being left out of the mission to Earth, exactly what Raphael had done.
Raphael had his own place in Heaven. He referred to it as his “office,” but it was more like an atrium. It was a large white space with well-tended plants along the sides in huge containers, and in the center, a bigger-than-life-sized carved marble statue of some muscular young man with a sword held aloft, nude save for a drape of cloth that covered his groin and about half of his butt. Gill recognized it as in the style of Michelangelo without quite knowing who that was anymore.
“I thought we had a deal,” Gill said, walking down the rows of greenery, looking up at the statue. She couldn’t currently see Raphael, but she felt his presence.
“Why are you saying that in the past tense?” Raphael replied. Gill found him on the far end of the atrium, making flowers open and close with errant finger gestures. Gill had never been sure if these plants were real or simply manifestations, and this didn’t clear up matters. She looked at the purple-and-orange blossoms that opened at Raphael’s will, and wondered if she ever knew their names.