Darlings of New Midnight

by Andrea Speed

  It was a chaotic scene, and while it didn’t last long, time kind of stood still as the angels disappeared one by one, subsumed by tentacles that seemed to get larger by the second, until the magically expanding white hallway was a black mass of writhing, toothed tentacles. It was like watching some helpless marine life get tangled in weirdly multiplying seaweed, until only the binding weed was left. Even though it kept them from having to deal with a bunch of avenging angels, the rapidity of the slaughter was horrifying. Ceri briefly wondered what would happen if he started up with that whole Cthulhu chant, which he did know some of simply because idle curiosity about his new battle partners made him look up some lore on them. The fact that it was all considered fictional muddied the waters a bit, but no more than the Bible, which most people assumed to be true when it was anything but.

  Raphael was trying to keep an eye on them, and on his army behind him, which was super difficult. But clearly he was managing, as he did something Ceri had never seen an angel do—he visibly paled. “Did you forget that Cthulhu can be in two places at once? If he can transubstantiate, so can Cthylor. Nothing could breed with Cthulhu—she must be an asexually spawned clone. As for the gender swap, Cthulhu technically doesn’t have a gender as we recognize it. I doubt Cthylor does either.”

  Raphael’s eyebrows furrowed, and his glare was overflowing with contempt. “So you know the nature of the monsters you’re working with, and you work with them anyway?”

  “Considering you’re working with Hell, I could ask you the same thing, couldn’t I?”

  Raphael didn’t have a comeback for that one. Instead, he lashed out with his sword, the flames flaring, in a move so telegraphed Ceri hardly needed to adjust his stance for it. In an extremely muted way, he felt bad for Raphael. For almost an eon, he’d been the unquestionable power around these parts, and now not only was he being supplanted, but his entire house was burning down. On the other hand, he was an arrogant bastard who wanted to murder his boyfriend, so fuck him.

  The hallway faded out of existence, taking its ton of writhing tentacles with it, as their swords continued to clash, metal on metal and power on power. As Raphael’s sword sliced the air near him, Ceri felt the sizzle and hiss of the angel energy, while Godslayer’s hunger seemed to thunder in his ears. It wanted the angel.

  But it was a stalemate. Raphael was a good swordsman, and while Cthylor eating his backup must have shaken him, it didn’t really show. They were both sweating and breathing hard, because fuck if sword fighting didn’t take a lot out of you. And they were supernatural beings. How humans did it he would never understand.

  The slight but constant rumbling beneath their feet had turned up a pitch in both sound and intensity, and Ceri wondered how many minutes Heaven had left.

  It was then that the ceiling disappeared, and a horde of armor-clad angels dropped in from above.

  Lyn launched herself at them and cut through them like a bowling ball in midair, sending a few angels into suicide spirals into the remaining walls and floors while she grabbed two and took them with her. Her talons nipped the arms off the few unlucky enough to decide to have a physical presence today, splattering blood on all the white. Esme threw a couple of spells in energy-ball form that hit their mark and sent the survivors falling like they were bugs hit with insecticide.

  Still, there seemed to be a whole lot of them falling from the theoretical ceiling. Lyn continued flying through them, slashing at will, causing limbs to fall like especially grisly hail, but not all the angels were physical or affected by that. Several of the energy-form-only angels had dropped down to what passed for the floor and started approaching, flaming swords raised, ready to back up Raphael in the fight.

  A slight tremor in the floor, different from the constant hum of the singularity tearing Heaven into pieces, caught Ceri’s attention, and before he could look around to see what was happening, an odd noise sounded. It was like the roar of a lion crossed with a deep, angry hiss, and Ceri realized he knew that sound, even if he couldn’t immediately place what it was.

  Fear blossomed on the faces of all the angels a millisecond before the dark smoke figure of the Scourge came charging in, scooping up some angels in its gaping jaw and trampling others as it ran through the fray. Since it too was an energy creature, tearing angels into constituent parts was no problem.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Logan said. “Got a little sidetracked.”

  “You okay?” Ceri asked. He was too busy trading thrusts and parries with Raphael to look back for a visual confirmation.

  “Fine. Now let’s clear these bastards out and head home.” The Scourge continued farther down the corridor, making more hiss/roar noises, and now the angels were fleeing. Yep. Like that bear at the all-you-can eat buffet. It was tossing angels left and right, sometimes shaking them in its maw before spitting them out and going for a new toy, like a big dog. A dog that looked like a dragon and was made of smoke. You know, those kinds of dogs.

  While doing his best to focus, Ceri found all this distracting, and while he managed to dodge one swipe, Raphael’s sword sliced his arm on the second pass.

  It wasn’t deep or much more than a surface wound, but the angel energy hit him like a lightning bolt. It seemed to reverberate through his system, traveling down his nerves, briefly whiting out his vision and leaving the taste of metal in his mouth as his teeth vibrated. Ceri had dropped to one knee without realizing it, but he knew it when his vision faded back in again and Raphael was standing over him, his sword raised high above his head.

  Before Ceri had a chance to react, a cloud of dust obscured Raphael’s visage.

  He coughed and sputtered, waving his hand in front of his face, but it did no good. He basically had a dust devil concentrated around his head. He stumbled back, but it followed him tenaciously, and nothing Raphael did helped.

  His hand lit up with white light, but how could anyone blast sand? Raphael must have realized he’d only blast himself, and the light died without use. Ceri raised his sword as he jumped to his feet, lunged at the preoccupied Raphael, and drove Godslayer straight through the center of his torso.

  The swirling sand re-formed into a much bigger pile that became Ahmed in his haute couture. He eyed Raphael, who was staring in shock at the sword in his chest. “When you meet your god, tell him Ahmed says go fuck yourself.”

  Ceri wondered what that was about, but he was now a little diverted by the power funneling through Godslayer and into him. It was a brilliant white, tasted like ice and fire, and made him feel like his blood was becoming effervescent, filling his head with helium. He was becoming giddy with power.

  Raphael sank to his knees and grabbed the blade of the sword with both hands, but it wasn’t only Ceri’s grip that kept him from pulling it out—Godslayer was fighting him too. It liked feasting on angel energy. Honestly, Ceri couldn’t blame it. It was a hell of a rush. If it were a drug, Ceri would have happily mainlined it.

  Raphael poured on the strength as he attempted to pull out the sword, but the more energy he used, the more the sword drank, and the more power flowed through Ceri.

  “Abomination, you will live up to the prophecy,” Raphael said. His skin was becoming waxy and gray. “You cannot fight destiny.”

  “Watch me,” Ceri said and pulled the sword upward. With all the new energy infusing him, it was nothing for him to force Godslayer through superhumanly strong muscle and bone and slice Raphael perfectly in half, bisecting his skull last.

  Ceri expected the usual, meaning blood and guts, but that’s not what happened. Raphael exploded into a blinding burst of white light that sent Ceri flying backward. He collided with someone, but he didn’t know if it was Esme or Logan. Maybe both.

  It took a moment for the light to fade, but as it did, the trembling beneath them seemed to be getting worse. Heaven was falling, and they probably didn’t have much time.

  Logan grabbed his arm, and while it was comforting, it was also a bit of a shock, as Ceri still had angel ener
gy coursing through him, and there was more of the stuff in Logan’s veins. Ceri felt a tremendous urge to spill it, drink it, but he managed to fight it off. “Are you okay?” Ceri asked.

  “Always, but I think we gotta go now.”

  “Yeah, it feels like the roof’s about to cave in,” Lyn said from close by. “Well, metaphorically, at any rate.”

  Ceri’s vision recovered enough that he was able to see everyone was there—well, save for Alex, who would be fine since Cthylor was with them—including Ahmed, who was building back to human shape since the angel blast had reduced him to sand again. They joined hands, and Ceri warped them out of there.

  They ended up in the living room of the house he shared with Logan. Seeing this, Esme sighed. “Oh, thank Hecate. I thought you were gonna put us back in that cave.”

  Ceri almost replied that so did he but managed to stifle it at the last second. Why had he brought them here?

  Oh, right. He’d just absorbed the life force of an archangel. It was the same reason he was jittery and wired. He was probably lucky he hadn’t exploded. He could feel all that energy was still boiling within him, and he realized something kind of distressing—his dark side, his demonic side, was flaring up. It was feeding on all the energy, and it seemed to be getting fat with nourishment. That wasn’t good.

  Ahmed dusted off his sleeves, like he even had real sleeves or a need to do that, and said to Logan, “Where the hell did you get off to? You certainly took your time coming back.”

  Logan frowned at him. It was his special Ahmed frown, for when Ahmed vaguely or directly insulted him. It happened enough that he had a special facial expression for him. “Hey, I was thrown into an abyss. I probably ended up in Heaven’s basement.”

  Lyn scratched her head. She was mostly back to human form, save for a few stray feathers. She had blood on her clothes, but none of it was hers. “How do you know it was a basement? Was there a water heater?”

  He grimaced at her terrible joke. “I got there as soon as I could, okay? Just in time.”

  “It was Gill, wasn’t it?” Ceri guessed. Not a hard guess.

  Logan nodded. “But she didn’t want to fight. Raphael totally disillusioned her. I told her to grab any good angels, if she knew some, and go.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Lyn snapped. “I’m sorry, Logan, but she’s gonna forget you, and when she does, she’ll be part of the angel horde gunning for us.”

  “And when that happens, I’ll deal with it. But I wasn’t going to try and kill my own sister. Not while she’s still my sister.”

  Ahmed rolled his eyes. “You kicked the can down the road. Do you actually think it’s going to be easier when she can’t remember you? You’ll always remember her.”

  From the way Logan’s shoulders stiffened, Ceri knew he was about to lose his temper. Gill was a sore spot and would always be so. It wasn’t that Ahmed wasn’t right, because he was, but he didn’t need to be a dick about it. Of course he’d argue it was his personality, but now was not the time for any of it. Ceri put a hand on Logan’s arm and stepped between them. “Hey, we have bigger issues to deal with right now.”

  “We do?” Ahmed replied. “What?”

  Ceri was on the verge of telling him to stuff it when suddenly something wrenched deep inside of him. It was like a bolt of lightning had hit him at the base of his soul, and he hadn’t realized he’d dropped to his knees until Logan’s arm went around him and he heard him saying, “Ceri? What’s wrong? Did Raphael hurt you?”

  He shook his head, trying to banish the fog that seemed to have settled in his brain, as if a part of himself had been amputated. That wasn’t true, though. He was just full of Raphael’s energy. “Heaven’s gone. I felt it fall.”

  As if on cue, Alex appeared in a dark corner of the living room. “So that’s done,” they said.

  “So Hell’s next?” Lyn asked.

  Alex smiled. “Sounds good to me.”

  “Wait a sec,” Esme said. “We have homeless angels walking the Earth now. Do we really want homeless demons joining them?”

  Lyn, who seemed ready to get into a new fight, appeared deflated by that. “Oh shit, I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “If we kill them all, we don’t have to worry about strays,” Alex said cheerfully.

  Logan stared at them like they’d shoved a red-hot poker up his ass. “Look, we all hate demons, but you can’t be advocating genocide.”

  “Of course not. There are always many on Earth. There will be some left.”

  Logan gave Alex a glance that suggested he found that less than comforting. But Cthulhu wasn’t known for restraint or logic.

  “I’m going to need a break, okay?” Ceri replied. “Besides, if I know my dad and his endless capacity for self-preservation, he’s going to hear about Heaven’s fall and want to negotiate a better end for himself. We may not have to destroy it.”

  “Have to doesn’t really come into it,” Alex said. “It’s more like want to.”

  “Still, my dad is going to make a move. He’s not stupid, and with Heaven gone, he has to know the prophecy can’t come true, not as it’s sketched out.”

  There were nods all around, save for Ahmed, who looked dyspeptic. “He’s your father and you still don’t understand his main power? It isn’t getting people to do things they wouldn’t do. It’s getting people to destroy themselves willingly, even happily. He could still use that against us.”

  “How?” Lyn asked.

  “Wrong species asking. It’s humans with the infinite capacity for self-immolation. You harpies have more dignity than that.”

  Logan sighed. “Look, Ahmed, I know you have a low opinion of humans, but why do you have to be such a downer when we got a win?”

  “I’m not being a downer. I’m warning you. Now isn’t the time for complacency.”

  Esme groaned. “Dude. Give us all a minute to have a drink and contemplate the fact that we just destroyed Heaven. I don’t even think we knew that was an option.”

  Ahmed grimaced and quickly glanced around the room. No surprise to Ceri, the only person who looked happy was Alex, who always looked happy. “Look, I know I don’t know the devil as well as some of you, but I do know strategy,” Ahmed said. “Satan will probably pretend to be shaken, and as soon as our guard is down, come in with knives. This battle isn’t won. It’s barely begun. And the prophecy isn’t completely off the table.”

  “Fine, Captain Downer,” Logan snapped. “We got it. Paranoia glasses on. Can you cut us a break now?”

  Ahmed scanned the room once more and then generated a dark blue scarf, which he threw dramatically around his neck. The gesture lost some of its impact since everyone in the room knew it was made of sand, like his neck. There was a sandman joke in there somewhere, Ceri thought, but he could never quite find it.

  “Just be ready,” Ahmed cautioned. “This is about the time when everything falls to shit.” And with that, he formed into a human-sized dust devil and blew away beneath the front door. Somehow, he never left a grain of sand behind.

  “Well, what are we gonna do now that the life of the party is gone?” Lyn said.

  “He knows he’s unliving proof that immortality itself is a curse,” Alex said. “His hell can never end.”

  Well, that was a cheery thought. Correct, but still.

  Maybe that’s why this victory, such as it was, felt so hollow.

  5—Are We Saved Or Are We Damned

  ESME FOUND it difficult to sleep, which probably made sense. Stormed Heaven, destroyed it. She probably had to expect a sleepless night or two. But at least it allowed her to go through some of her family’s super-obscure spell books and dig up some new warding sigils to draw on the inside of her house in her blood. Which was icky, sure, and probably unhygienic, but her blood juiced the spell. After all, like her mother used to always claim, she was “magical royalty.”

  Not that such a thing actually existed. But her mother really liked to call her the “Queen of the Br
ujas,” which was not a thing and sounded vaguely racist. But her mom was a pretty old-school bruja, so she didn’t see it that way.

  The problem with Satan—beyond so many obvious things—was that he could burn through almost all demon sigils. Angel ones didn’t work on him either. He was one of a kind, a tarnished archangel who became a demon, but only kind of. So warding against him was very difficult. The church would probably be mortified to know crucifixes, rosaries, and holy water didn’t do dick to Lucifer. They were symbols of a faith that meant absolutely nothing to him, no matter how much the faithful believed in them. But, interestingly enough, Stars of David did work, or at least he really didn’t like them.

  Ceri was also hard to ward against—his being a hybrid organism meant they might repel half of him but never all—although the heavy, redundant warding at the Delacourt place proved it could be done. It simply wasn’t easy, and black magic was your best bet, as long as you didn’t mind sacrificing some life energy in the process. She wasn’t quite there yet, but she kept it in the back of her mind.

  She was down to the bottom of the barrel as far as symbols went, but she needed to try everything, within limits at least. Hell would hit back hard, like any man who was about to lose everything. That was probably sexist—it wasn’t really a gender thing. Although men did have a tendency to do something stupid when shoved into a corner. That was why more women were needed in power positions. Women could be stupid too, but to fuck up on a truly epic scale took a man. Or that was her chauvinism talking.

  Esme finally put a bandage on her cut finger and stashed the mildew-scented book back in its enchanted case, where only those of the Navarro/Martinez bloodline could touch it without instantly dying. Not so much an enchantment as a curse, but enchantment always sounded nicer. She put the case itself in an old footlocker that she had also cursed to shudder and make growling noises if someone other than her or Lyn touched it. It was fun to scare the shit out of nosy bastards.