Authors: Nancy A. Collins
“Damn it!” Lucy groaned. “We’ll
never
get a cab in time!”
Suddenly one of the yellow taxis swerved from across two lanes of traffic to come to a screeching halt beside Ezrael. The cab driver rolled down the passenger-side window and smiled up at Lucy.
“You are the lady-friend of my tribesman, are you not?” said John Madonga. “I was just about to go off duty—but then I saw you...Do you need a ride, Miss?”
Joth followed Meresin to the center of the dance floor. At a gesture from the
sephirah,
the prerecorded music halted in mid-beat and the gathered
daemons
and their human
confreres turned to face him.
“Greetings, my brethren—and fellow travelers. I, Meresin of the Sephiroth
,
bring before you Joth of the Lesser Elohim, for you to welcome as your nature commands. Let the Harrowing begin.”
A mixture of growls and coarse laughter arose from the assembly. Meresin glanced at Joth, who was standing beside him, its attention once more fixed on the crystal chandelier dangling over its head. The daemon then glanced at the tip of the cigarette it held between index and middle fingers, causing it to ignite.
Joth was still smiling up at the chandelier, oblivious to the danger it was in, as the group moved forward, forming a tight circle around the captive angel. Meresin stood apart from the others and silently watched while smoking his black cigarette.
“Milord, why aren’t you taking part?” asked one of the witches, clearly baffled by the sephirah’s behavior.
Meresin rolled his eyes. Warlocks and witches always felt it necessary to address him as ‘milord’ or ‘your satanic majesty.’ “It is enough that I brought the angel here,” he replied. “My work is done.”
The Harrowing began somewhat tenuously. At first all they did was push and poke at the elohim. When it became obvious the angel was incapable of physically defending itself, the group became more aggressive, tearing at its clothes until its hated form was fully revealed.
An imp with shaggy legs and corkscrew horns fluttered forward and spat on Joth, its fluorescent green saliva striking the angel full in the face. A pig- snouted Machinist with curving boar tusks muscled its way forward and with a squeal of devilish glee, cut loose with a stream of scalding piss that struck the elohim square in the chest. But it wasn’t until an oni the color of boiled shrimp boldly jumped forward and snatched free a handful of feathers that the angel finally flapped its wings in a belated attempt to escape, but by then there were too many hands holding it down.
A daemon with the head of a three-horned black goat roughly caressed its prodigious member to erection while laughing at the angel’s attempts to free itself. “What’s the matter, elohim?” taunted the goat-headed Machinist. “Is our company not to your taste?” The Machinist’s laughter dissolved into raucous bleating as semen shot from its monstrous penis like water from a fire-hose. Joth coughed and spat as the vile green mess splashed its face.
The Machinists’ screams of delight grew louder and wilder as they continued to pummel and insult the helpless angel. They struck it with clenched fists, kicked it with hooves and feet, butted it with their heads, pinched it with their talons, yanked on its hair, pulled out its feathers. They spun it around and around and pushed it back and forth as if playing a vicious game of Blind Man’s Bluff. They even knocked it to the ground and dragged it across the floor by its heels. Whichever way Joth attempted to dodge or run, the Machinists and their human attendants blocked its way. Their twisted features filled its vision, their shrieks and brays of laughter stuffed its ears.
Joth tried to shelter itself with its wings, but it was no use. There were too many of them. It had battled imp
s
while on Repair Patrol, but always in the company of a squadron of fellow elohim. And then the imperative was not to protect itself, but to protect the Clockwork. Confused, frightened and surrounded by an enemy it was unable to escape, Joth cried out for deliverance with a piercing cry like that of an eaglet calling to its parents for help.
Nybbas clamped its hands over its ears and grimaced. “It’s calling the Host! Silence it! Shut it up before it’s too late!” shrieked the imp.
One of the warlocks, driven wild by the frenzy, grabbed an empty beer bottle from the bar and smashed it against the foot-rail. Shrieking maniacally, he lunged at Joth, slashing the angel’s throat from ear to ear.
There was a hideous wail—horrible beyond all comprehension—but it did not come from Joth. “You
idiot!”
Gaki screamed at the bottle-wielding warlock. “You’ve
ruined
everything!” The oni opened his mouth wide enough to swallow a basketball and bit the warlock’s head off at the neck, leaving the body to drop onto the floor.
The pig-snouted daemon shrieked in pain as it staggered past Meresin, its eyes and upper torso smoldering as if doused with vitriol. The sephirah sighed and dropped its half-finished cigarette and ground it out with a swift twist of his heel. Leave it to deathlings to screw things up.
By the time the cab reached the block where the Seventh Circle was located, Lucy had finally managed to get her shoe on her foot. She’d heard various stories about the Seventh Circle, some of them intriguing, all of them sordid. Rumor had it as a genuine no-holds-barred sex club, where the rich mingled bodily fluids with the famous, and the Beautiful People did ugly things to each other’s persons. Only now it seemed that some of them were neither beautiful not people.
She leaned forward and tapped on the Plexiglas partition between driver and passenger. John Madonga reached over and shot the divider back. “Yes, Miss?”
“Look, Mr. Madonga,” Lucy said. “My friend—your, um, tribesman—is in that club. He’s in trouble, and he needs help.”
Madonga’s eyes grew serious. “Should I call the police, ma’am?”
“No!”
Ezrael interjected. “No—that shouldn’t be necessary. We just need you to wait for us to come back out. Can you do that?”
John Madonga nodded solemnly. “Of course. We are of one blood, your friend and I.”
“Good to hear it,” Ezrael said. “We’ll try to get in and out as fast as possible. C’mon, Lucy!”
Lucy hesitated as she caught sight of the bouncer. “Sweet Jesus!” she whispered. “How are we supposed to get past
that?”
“Leave it to me,” replied the Muse.
The bouncer scowled at Lucy and Ezrael as they approached the velvet ropes, holding up a webbed hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. “Members only,” Spitter growled.
“There must be a misunderstanding,” Ezrael smiled up at the bouncer. “We’re here at the invitation of one of your members—a Mr. Meresin.”
Spitter blinked. “Meresin?”
“Yes, he assured us he would leave our names at the door. If you check your clipboard, I’m sure you’ll find us there—Ezrael and Lucille Bender—?”
As the bouncer reached for the guest list, Ezrael motioned for Lucy to slide past while the daemon’s head was turned.
Spitter turned back around, frowning down at the clipboard.
“I don’t see your names here—” the hulking daemon looked around, a suspicious look on his face. “Hey—where’d the girl go?” The daemon dropped the clipboard, his throat sacs swelling as he bared its fangs in a fierce growl.
Ezrael narrowly dodged the stream of venom that arced from the daemon’s mouth. It struck the wall behind the Muse, causing the bricks to smolder. Moving incredibly fast for his size, Spitter caught the front of the Muse’s shirt in his ham-sized hand.
“You ain’t gettin’ past me, bastard,” he rumbled as he drew Ezrael towards his dripping fangs.
Suddenly there came the sound of screams and smashing furniture from inside the club as a living wall of flesh, scales, and claws smashed its way through the front door. The stampeding club-goers knocked Spitter to the ground, trampling him underfoot.
Ezrael pushed past the panicked daemons and witches, trying his best to avoid the bouncer’s fate. He found Lucy just inside the door, pressed against the cigarette machine, her face pale and her body trembling.
“Are you okay?” Ezrael, asked, giving her a quick visual check. “None of them spat on you, did they?”
“N-no,” she managed to gasp. “They—they didn’t seem to notice me. Jesus, Ez! Did you see them? They looked like something out of Bosch! And there were so
many
of them!”
“Like I said—it’s a popular place. This is one of the few clubs where they don’t have to worry about keeping up appearances. You’re not going to faint on me, are you?”
Lucy shook her head and pushed a stray lock of hair out of her hair. “M-maybe later. But I’m okay for now.”
The interior of the Seventh Circle looked like a tornado had touched down on the dance floor. Tables were overturned, chairs toppled, stemware smashed. The club’s trendy torture equipment had been reduced to expensive kindling during the mass exodus. Lucy wrinkled her nose in distaste. The place smelled like a cross between the monkey house at the zoo and a distillery. A human body, minus its head, lay sprawled in a pool of blood near the bar. She grimaced and quickly looked away, but not before noticing that the corpse didn’t have wings. As she scanned the ruins of the club, she caught sight of the angel, cowering with its head tucked under its wing beneath a huge crystal chandelier.
“Joth!”
The angel lifted its head from under its wing and looked about uncertainly.
“Ez! There he is!”
Lucy started to go the angel’s side, but Ezrael grabbed her arm and jerked her back. “Don’t touch it!”
“What’s the
matter
with you? Are you nuts? Let me
go!”
She tried to yank her arm free of the Muse’s grasp, but his grip tightened further.
“I
said
don’t touch it!” Ezrael repeated, his voice hard as steel. “Look,” he said, pointing at Joth by way of explanation.
Most of the angel’s body was glowing greenish-yellow, as if it had been splashed with day-glo paint. Lucy glanced up at the ceiling, but did not see any black-lights suspended from the lighting tracks.
“Ez—what does this mean?”
“Nothing good,” he replied. “Neither one of us can physically touch Joth until I can work a cleansing ritual. That will take a little time.”
“Time you’ll never get, Muse,” said Meresin. The daemon was seated in a booth in the far corner of the bar, smoking a foul-smelling black cigarette and sipping a pink martini.
“You
bastard!”
Lucy shrieked. “What did you
do
to him?”
“ ‘Him’?” Meresin raised an eyebrow as he finished his drink. “Oh—you mean the
elohim
?
I assure you, Ms. Bender,
I
did nothing to your precious angel. I didn’t have to. My lesser kin and their, um, companions, were all too eager to welcome Joth to our ranks. Think of it as a fraternity hazing, if you would.”
Without taking his eyes off Meresin, Ezrael whispered in Lucy’s ear. “I need you to go over to the bar and find a bottle of white rum.”
“You want me to fix you a drink?” she asked, baffled.
“Just
do
it, okay?” Ezrael let go of Lucy’s arm and moved slowly in the direction of the daemon, all the while keeping Joth between them. “Looks like things got a little out of hand,” he said to Meresin, pointing to a wide stretch of the black floor that was now bleached white. “Somebody got a little too rough during the Harrowing, am I right?”
“You
could
say someone lost their head,” Meresin smirked, flicking a half-smoked cigarette in the direction of the corpse sprawled near the bar. “They panicked when the elohim called for the Host. You know what witches and warlocks are like, Ezrael. They think its all black sabbats, orgies and icy semen. Morons! The material we have to work with nowadays is so shockingly shoddy! I never thought I’d see the day I longed for alchemists and corrupt priests! You have no idea how trying it is to work with quasi-literate headbangers, bad poets and politicians.”
“My heart bleeds, sephirah,” Ezrael replied frostily. “But if you think you’re going to claim this sojourner as your own, you’re sadly mistaken.”
“Oh, am I, then?” Meresin slid out of the booth with the grace of a panther. “Those are bold words indeed, Muse, considering your batting average. You’ve lost the last two of your kinsmen to the Machine. You’re getting old, Ezrael—best to stick to your white magick and hanging out at East Village coffeehouses.
“Face it—the elohim is
ours!
Why don’t you and the lovely Ms. Bender simply leave while you still can? I’ll guarantee you safe passage. Come the dawn, it will be as if none of this ever happened—at least as far as the fair Lucille is concerned. Or Joth, for that matter.”
Ezrael shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Meresin.”
“No more talk, then,” agreed the daemon. Meresin snapped his left wrist, as if shooing away a bothersome fly, sending a tongue of black flame arching towards the Muse.
Ezrael lifted his hands, palms outward, and a disc of blue aether appeared in mid-air, shielding him from his opponent’s fiery whip. Tendrils the color of sky wrapped themselves about the daemon’s upper body like fingers of ivy. Meresin growled throatily and flexed his muscles, causing the aetheric restraints to shatter.
Lucy didn’t know how long Ezrael could keep Meresin busy, but something told her it wouldn’t be for long. Careful to avoid slipping in the pool of blood from the headless corpse, she made her way behind the bar, hurriedly scanning the display of liquor bottles for white rum. But as she reached for a bottle of Bacardi, a blue-gray hand with long, black nails closed about her wrist.
“What do we have here, Nybbas?” Gaki growled, the eye in his forehead looking in the direction of its partner while the others were fixed on Lucy.
Lucy gasped and tried to wrench herself free of the oni’s grasp, but its grip was unbreakable.
“Looks like we got us a gatecrasher,” the imp chittered from its perch atop the bar, its pinions opening and closing like a butterfly drying its wings.