Authors: Tim Marquitz
There was the distinct odor of burnt
gristle, a smell you usually only get with napalm BBQ; when it’s people that
are being roasted. Most civilized folks who eat meat cut the fat and bone off
before putting it to flame. And those who aren’t that civilized and like to eat
folks, well, they don’t usually bother to cook their dinner.
A slight tremor twitched down Rala’s back
and set her hands to shaking. I’d watched it start at her neck. She was
probably thinking something similar to what I was. It was just one more example
of the cruelty visited on the Felurians.
“You okay?”
She nodded, but didn’t turn to look at me.
Wisps of dark smoke hovered just a few yards from where she lurked inside the
alleyway. “The Eidolon group should be just on the other side of this block.”
She pointed.
“From exactly where this lovely stench is
creeping up from.” I didn’t need her acknowledgment to know I was right.
With stealthy motions out of her line of
sight, I unzipped my jacket and gave my hands easy access to my guns. While
Rala had seemingly led me here of her free will, there was no telling if that
was the case, especially after all she’d told me. This could well be the same
trap her and Vol had been setting us up for before. It could also explain why
Rala was there at the other Eidolon location. And why Cyrill led me there…and…
Ah, damn it.
I just had to go and think about it, didn’t
I? The floodgates opened, and skepticism poured right in. I had this sudden
vision of Cyrill and Rala working together, Vol the mystical seer masterminding
some grand scheme to have me grabbing my ankles. The visuals that accompanied
that thought weren’t pretty. If they’d already managed to take down Longinus,
even as weak as he was, there was no way I would walk away from this. A wispy
sigh slipped out, and I made a decision.
“Take me there.”
Rala swallowed hard and nodded, turning
away slowly before walking out of the alley at a cautious pace. Her hesitation
didn’t tell me anything. But it didn’t matter. Karra was counting on me to find
her. The minute I’d realized she was pregnant, I knew how Gorath managed to
take her without a fight. Karra was all about family. She’d risked her life,
and mine for that matter, in her efforts to resurrect her father, DRAC, Baalth,
and everyone else be damned. If she thought Gorath would hurt the baby, or
she
would by defying him, I could see
her giving in until she could figure a safe way out. Here on Feluris, there was
no safe way. She was trapped like everyone else.
Karra couldn’t have known Gorath would
bring her across a bunch of universes to hide her under the nose of God and my
father. She might not have realized what the alien wanted from her, what his
plans were, but she had to know we would come after her. Or at the very least,
Longinus would. She had to trust in him even if she didn’t me. And here I was,
possibly walking into a trap that might have already taken the life of her
father. I pulled my guns and set my senses loose before we’d even gotten across
the first street. If something was coming for me, I wanted to be ready.
Rala continued walking, but kept her pace
slow, her head darting from side to side. She was as nervous as I was. I stayed
right on top of her as I weighed the risks. If she was leading me to slaughter,
maybe her companions would have some sympathy and wouldn’t risk hurting her
trying to get to me. However, the girl could turn into a dragon—wyvern; whatever—so
being right on top of her posed its own problems. If the speed she changed forms
in the alley was her normal rate, I’d have time to put a bullet in her before
she turned on me…at least if I was paying attention. Any little distraction
would give her the opportunity to shift and bite my fool head off. Maybe she
was bulletproof.
Crap. I had a sudden memory flash of all
the Prozac commercials I’d ever seen and wondered if it had any effect on
demons. I could use a steady does of chemical fuck it all. The corner of the
building came up fast and pushed my wistful thoughts of sanity from my head.
The smoke hadn’t really grown thicker, but
it had become more fragrant. There were definitely bodies cooking nearby. Rala
stepped around the edge of the building and gasped, her hands going to her
mouth. I darted out behind her, guns leading the way, before slipping them back
into their holsters. No one there would be causing me any trouble outside of giving
me a raspy case of lung rot.
I eased Rala back around the corner so she
didn’t have to see any more than she already had. She was either one hell of an
actress or she had no clue there would be roasted corpses at the site. There
was too much raw emotion on her face for me to believe she was faking it. I
used to screw a succubus. Trust me when I say I’ve been faked out by the best.
Besides, judging from the frenzied chaos of the scene, which I saw spread out
before me, I’d bet Baalth’s right nut this was Longinus’ handiwork. There were
simply too many bodies and too much carnage for it to be anything else.
Pieces of aliens lay scattered all over the
place, sticking up wet and colorful from the ruin of what was some sort of
building before Longinus had arrived. There was nothing left but the foundation
and a couple of random, metal pipes, which had survived the holocaust, and now
stood up out of the mess as lonely markers to the deceased. And there were a
bunch of them.
There were scorch marks on the street and
sidewalk and the residual char of magical energy. It looked as if it had been
relatively lower energy stuff, explosives and simple blasts before the melee
started, but there was sufficient evidence to show Longinus was still running
on fumes. At full power, there wouldn’t be any bodies left to smell, let alone
see. There’d be a blackened pit in place of the wreckage.
It looked as though he were still alive,
though. Judging by the blast marks, he’d caught the Eidolon group by surprise,
a point in Rala’s favor. If she and Vol had been setting us up, the group would
have been a little more prepared, you would think. Then again, Longinus isn’t
your average, ordinary victim.
I shook my head before I could get caught
up in more circular thinking. A deep breath later, to steady my nerves, I
crossed the ruin to take a closer look. There wasn’t anything there I hadn’t
seen before, me and death go way, way back, but I didn’t relish manhandling a
bunch of drippy bits as I searched the place. Longinus hadn’t given me much of
a choice, so I grabbed a piece of broken piping and used it to overturn the
alien chunks that were still solid enough to be somewhat recognizable.
“What are you doing?” Rala whisper-shouted
from her perch near the wall.
It was a good question. I wasn’t sure, so I
just shrugged. On the surface, I was looking for tattoos, but there was
something else that was drawing me in; a deep, subsurface tingle, which kept tapping
at the door of my senses. There was nothing overt about it, just a consistent
peck
,
peck
,
peck
letting me
know something was there. It was driving me nuts.
I kept flipping gushy chunks of meat over
as I made my way around the place. Here and there, I found the phoenix tattoos
I’d been looking for, as well as bits and pieces I thought were the same markings
but were just too mutilated to tell. The Raven poked and prodded until I
knocked over a severed lump of thigh and spied a golden something or other underneath.
Nevermore.
I snatched the thing up and took a closer
look. It was a piece of a weapon. The pommel of a dagger, I guessed, or a small
rod of some kind. It had obviously held a mystical charm before it had been
destroyed, but there was no telling what it was for. I had a good idea as to
who it belonged to, though. It reeked of Longinus’s essence. The chill of his
magical presence lingered like a shadow on a cold day. He’d definitely been
here and laid a beating on these clowns, but where he was now was a mystery.
Where the hell were Scooby and the gang when you needed them?
Once more I tried to reach Longinus through
the gem, but there was no sense of it working. The thing sat silent in my hand,
so I put it away and returned to where Rala leaned against the building. She
hadn’t vomited, at least. That was good. I didn’t have to worry about stepping
in it.
“Do you know where Ulverton Square is from
here?”
She grunted an affirmative and started off
without saying a word, ready to go.
“Hold on,” I called to her.
Rala spun to face me, her stripes sickly
pale against the orange of her cheeks. That was the last thing she wanted to
do.
“How about you just tell me how to get
there? It’s probably best if you went home…just in case, you know?”
She drew a breath and nodded, clearly
grateful for any reason to not have to see more toast-
crispies
.
Can’t say I blamed her. We walked off together, but it was a while before she
found the energy to say anything. She gave me directions in a monotone voice,
repeating the way several times to ensure I had them memorized, and then I was
on my own. About a block from where she’d taken us to meet Vol, she gave a
terse goodbye, directed me once more, and darted into the shadows.
I watched her go, wanting to feel bad for
her, but I just couldn’t get there. Karra was all alone…no, that wasn’t quite
true. She and the baby—our baby—were together. Wherever they were, a psychotic
fucking alien held them hostage. My head swirled at the thought, but my feet
kept their course, slapping the concrete one step after another. The gray of
Desboren flitted by, the emptiness of it understandable now. The Alitereans had
been using the place as a staging point from early on in the conflict. And now
God was doing the exact same thing; raping the planet and its people to fuel
the war machine. Some things never change. Head down, my stomach fluttering, I
went on, trying not to think about it all. Fortunately, Ulverton Square
appeared just a short while later.
I darted over to the gate and was surprised
to see Calar standing within its circle. He stared at me through his golden
eyes, his perfect face with just the slightest hint of disgust tinting the
edges of his expression. It looked as if he’d expected me.
“I need to send a message to Lucifer.”
He sneered. “I’m no messenger service for
demons.”
“God damn it,” I spit back and felt his
magic ramp up.
“Do not take the—”
“Yeah, yeah, buddy. Blow it out your pristine
starfish. If you won’t pass a message on to Lucifer, then maybe you’ll pass one
on to the Old Man or his boy.”
Calar stiffened and took a short step
forward. His hands were clenched tight, and I could see the budding of his
wings, their energy peeking out from behind his shoulders.
“Maybe I’ll just let myself upstairs.”
I suspected provoking him wasn’t the most
rational way to summon a supervisor, but I wasn’t gonna get anywhere with
Mister Perfect. A threat to the gate, however, would warrant a response. They
couldn’t let that go unanswered.
A sudden wash of energy set Calar on his
heels, and I smiled. Mission accomplished.
The smile fell away when I realized who’d
come to deliver the spanking.
Fifteen
“Come now, Frank. Have you nothing better
to do with your time?” Lucifer asked as he waved the angel away with a polite,
and obviously manufactured, smile. The old animosities were still in place,
which was an odd comfort given how much else has changed. Calar gave me a dirty
look and gated out of sight without another word. Daddy Dearest looked back to
me after he’d gone. “Still the rebel without a cause, I see.”
“No, I’ve plenty of cause these days. Seems
you left some rather large shoes to fill back on Earth.” I really hadn’t
expected him to come down in person. It threw me off a bit. This wasn’t how I
wanted to start off, but I couldn’t seem to help myself.
He smiled. “Indeed I did, and I hoped you
might have grown to fill them by now, but it seems I’ve spit into the wind all
these years.” Lucifer came to stand before me, his eyes narrowing, but the
smile still clung to his lips. “Good to know I could count on you.”
Fifty years ago, a jibe like that might
have had me scrambling to apologize, to make up for being a stupid twit in a
world I wanted nothing to do with, but not now. I straightened and met his
eyes. “I’m just following in old daddy’s footsteps, pissing on trees and
marking my territory so everybody knows the scent.”
“Admirable job, Frank.” He gave me the slow
clap.
The slow clap.
Seriously?
I grunted. We were getting off track…and fast. “Damn it!
I don’t want to do this.”
“Then don’t,” he answered with a dismissive
shrug. “I have no intention of apologizing for the things I’ve done, my reasons
my own. It’s also clear you have no intention of letting go and washing the
sand out of your vagina, so get to the point of why you needed to see me so
badly you were willing to shit on God’s emissary.”
Well,
since you put it that way.
My resistance gasped a dying breath
and crumpled beneath the surgical strike of his apathy. “I—” A quick swallow
put some words in my mouth after the false start. I decided I might as well do
as he asked. “How do you feel about being a grandpa?”
Lucifer stared at me, his upper lip inching
back into the Elvis sneer. “I’d have to say, it’d mostly be the same way I feel
about being a father.”
He wasn’t gonna make this easy. “This isn’t
about me,”
not really
, “it’s about
you.”
“Do tell, Frank”
“You remember that alien you kept locked
away in a magical containment case down in Hell? Gorath. Yeah?”
He nodded, the smile growing.
“Well, he’s the reason I’m here. He intends
to draw you out.”
“Gorath?” He barely managed to get the name
out before he started to laugh. “You came all the way here to warn me of him?”
His laugh boiled over and spilled out into the square in a basso rumble.
I hadn’t expected him to be scared, that
just isn’t in his nature, but I also hadn’t expected him to crack up like I’d
pulled my pants down, either. “He’s dangerous, and he’s coming after you.”
Lucifer shook his head. “He might well have
been dangerous once, Frank, but he is no threat to me now. His time in the
containment chamber will have worn upon him. It will have drained his energies
over the years, burning it away so he can never recover it.” He shook his head
as if he pitied me. “It’s a shame the scum has broken free, as I had such
glorious plans for him, but he is of no consequence…certainly not to me.”
That lit the fuse. “No consequence? Fuck
that! He has my woman, the mother of your grandchild to be…
my
child!”
“And thus we come to the truth of why you
were so insistent.” Lucifer drew an easy breath. “Are you still so enamored by
that little gash between a woman’s legs that you can’t see the truth of its
poison?”
Kaboom
!
“What about my
mother? What about Charlotte? Are you gonna sit there and lie and say she never
meant anything to you?”
The smile fell away. “No.” He drew closer,
his gaze drilling into mine. “She meant everything to me…once, which is why I
stand here and bear your affronts. And now she’s gone and the truth of it all
is leaking out of the cracks.” A sharp finger pressed into my chest, and I felt
his strength through the casual gesture. “Blood was spilled for your mother,
the blood of her people, the blood of my own brother, and all for what, Frank?
Do you know?”
I shook my head.
“Nothing but
betrayal
, boy.” He pushed me back with an easy poke. I stumbled to
catch my balance. “Your mother played Arol and I against each other, set us to
war for that tiny slice of Heaven on Earth, for this
love
you so casually speak of but know so little about. She drove
the sharpened point of it into my chest.
“That is God’s greatest joke upon mankind:
love. It’s nothing more than a siren’s call, a trap set out to ensnare even the
greatest of us, drowning us in the depths of a warm grave, ecstatic until the
end. God’s curse brought upon the world through Eve’s curiosity, the blame laid
forever at
my
feet.”
Unable to speak, I just stared. I’d never
seen him direct such animosity, such hostility, at my mother before. He’d
always been quiet about his feelings, leaving me to assume she’d meant more to
him than he let on. Apparently that was true, but in the opposite of everything
I’d imagined. “She—”
“She was a whore, Frank. A worthless,
fucking whore. She deserved her death.”
The words were arrows piercing my heart. A
red fugue filled my skull, fury spilling into the wounds, and I leapt at him.
That was as far as I got.
His fingers seized my throat, and I was on
my back, the ground vibrating beneath me. My vision tunneled, and then
exploded, white dots filling my eyes. Lucifer’s blurry form appeared through
the haze, sharp and menacing.
“For too long have I catered to your
insolence, your childish tantrums, but no more, Triggaltheron.” He tightened
his grip and his visage swam before me, my hands clasped vainly about his
wrist. “You are the true seed of your mother, a failure in flesh with no
purpose but to destroy those foolish enough to stand too close.” His hand
pulled away and I gasped to draw air as he stood and stepped back.
“The Hell I left to you was no inheritance,
but rather a punishment. You are nothing more than a reminder of my foolishness
and it is only just that you wither in the world I left behind.”
I met his dark eyes, barely visible through
the rain of my tears, but the weight of his words settled over me like the lid of
a stone sarcophagus. He turned his back on me and stared at the gray sky. I
could only lay there and listen.
“
I
killed your mother when I found her with Arol.”
The confession stole my breath. My stomach
roiled as my heart pounded to be free of my chest. A sudden, sharp agony
thrummed at my temples.
“You were in the fields when she stole away
with my brother, Azrael having led him to her after all the years. She gave in
to Arol without resistance, welcoming him into her once more as if they’d never
parted. The smell of their deceit filled the barn, the rancid stench of their carnal
betrayal. Arol left her to her fate and fled when I arrived, and Azrael turned
tail and told me where my brother had gone.” He spun back to glare at me. “After
that moment, all that was left of my
love
,
of my family, was the bitter ash of memory in my mouth…and
you
; my spent and wasted seed.”
The declaration was a physical blow. I
slumped to the ground, as wounded as I’ve ever been.
Lies!
Everything I’d believed was a lie. All this
time, I’d been living with the man who killed my mother. Arol had been a
distraction, a means for Lucifer to use me, to focus my anger and to keep me
from learning the truth, to keep me docile and under control. I hadn’t revenged
my mother as I’d been led to believe, but had only been used as a puppet,
slipping the leash about my neck without resistance. It felt like a noose, and
I was dangling in the gallows of my own stupidity.
Lucifer came over and knelt beside me. I
tried my best to shrink into the ground, but it held fast. My breath froze in
my lungs.
“If you would submit to the lie of love,
Triggaltheron, I suggest you do it soon.” His voice was a jagged knife. “If
Gorath truly came here to use your seedling against me, then it won’t be long
before he realizes he’s made a mistake and has no further need for Longinus’
daughter.” His hand clasped the back of my skull and pulled my face closer to
his. I could hear his steady pulse in the wrist that lay across my ear. A
whining hum filled my head, waves lapping against the shore. “God has a mission
for me, far from this universe, from which I might never return. I will be gone
before you pick yourself up from the dust of your shame.” He smiled and
released me, the reverberations of his echoing voice slipping away as he rose
to his feet. My head thumped to the ground. “My last piece of advice to you is,
be careful whose words you let slip serpentine into your ears. I am not the
only snake to whisper lies.”
Lucifer returned the gate, stepping into
its confluence of energy. The circle glistened, and I felt the cold chill of
the portal coming to life. “When you’ve done what you must, go home, Frank.
This world is not for you. Hell is your home now.” He tossed something just
before he disappeared, the thing clinking to the ground beside me. The image of
his face lingered in the flux of power for just a moment longer. I thought I
saw a hint of sadness there before that, too, faded away. Calar stood in his
place, golden eyes bright with amusement.
Numb, too weary to think, I reached over
and snatched up what Lucifer had thrown, some instinct inside telling me to be
sneaky about it. I pulled it to me and cast a furtive glance. It was nothing
more than a small, red gemstone. It was beautiful, swirls of ebony in its
depths, but I felt no magic in it, no life at all. I pulled myself to my feet,
turning away from the angel so I could slip it into my pocket unseen. There was
plenty of time to worry about it later.
My expectations had been low when I set out
to speak with my father, but even those had been stomped into the ground and
skull-fucked without the mercy of lube. His admission struck me once more, and
I couldn’t help but remember my mother, dismembered, her pieces cast about the
barn like refuse, trash to be thrown away. A slow, trembling breath forced its
way past my lips.
Lucifer had killed my mother, and I was
nothing to him.
A strange flicker of satisfaction settled
over me at the thought. I couldn’t place its source, but it was if I was
suddenly free. Free of the expectations put upon me, free of the shadow over my
life that was the Devil. Free of everything. He was gone.
Baalth’s words came back to me then. God
had failed and wanted nothing more than to rein in his mistakes and begin anew.
The demon lieutenant had said God would turn on Lucifer when the opportunity
presented itself. Was this that moment?
Why
should I care?
The question was a pinball, clanging about
inside my head.
Why?
I had no answers, but where there should
have been burning, murderous hatred for my father and what he’d done, I could
only muster a vague emptiness, an abysmal void barren of feeling. There just
wasn’t anything there. It was if I’d been drained of my anger, my disgust...sadness.
It was just gone, embers at the death of fire.
My visit with Lucifer had done nothing but
waste more of Karra’s precious time, the clock winding down every second Gorath
still held her. With no target for the alien’s rage, I could see Karra falling
into the crosshairs. He didn’t know she’d been fed to the wolves by Lucifer,
but he would soon enough. I didn’t want to imagine what would happen to her
then, to our child. My heart sputtered as a stray thought broke through my
defenses,
its
sad, pitiful voice wishing for a quick
and painless death for them both.
No!
They weren’t going out like that.
I staggered off to find them, leaving Calar
and his cruel stares behind. My one last hope lay with the Eidolon. They
had
to lead me to Karra. If ever there
was moment to prove I was nothing like Lucifer, that not all the love stories in
my family ended in blood and ruin, this was that moment.