She stepped forward. Mother stepped back, fear replacing the doubt on her face. Albert had never seen
that
before, either.
Dust swirled, as tongs and hammers and swages and chisels flew in a hornet-swarm around Mel’s head. Her winds blew them away to clatter and thud and ring off other metal. Flame blossomed in the dust and then died, lacking fuel, blown out. Mel stepped again. Mother retreated again.
The floor shook, not impact but cracks opening in the concrete, nipping at Mel’s feet. Bricks shattered and dropped from the pillars. Screams overhead, heard through the wood flooring, an earthquake.
Oh, God. The pizza shop. Don’t know what time it is, what day it is, but I can smell their ovens, the sauce, the cheese. They’re open. People up there, working, eating, picking up take-out. What did
they
ever do, to get caught up in a war of goddesses?
Albert couldn’t breathe. Dust settled. Mother stole the air, to kill Mel’s winds?
His ears popped, air returning. Idiot Broadway tune ran in his head, “Anything you can do, I can do better.”
Albert slipped down the pillar, brick by jerky brick, his knees giving out on him. Tired. So damned tired. Price of that forging. Mother’s magic didn’t hold him up, just kept him from commanding his own muscles. His tailbone thumped on the concrete floor with a stab of pain. Something in his balance and the pull of gravity turned his head enough that he could still see Mel, see Mother, as they angled away from him.
Blue lightning flashed between the goddesses. It touched neither. He couldn’t tell who had thrown it. Thunder followed, as if the bolts had flamed half a mile away rather than less than twenty feet. The floor shook again, rocks falling from the foundation wall. Something larger thudded down in the shadows to one side, he tried to map what. Nothing of his, nothing of the forge. It had the ring of dry hard wood, splintering.
Must be a floor beam. The whole building was caving in around them. Dust, fine dark brown mummy-dust of old floors and beams and horse-hair plaster walls and brick and mortar, centuries of dust showering everywhere. Dust billowed between him and Mel and Mother, and when he could see again, they were close together.
Shrouded in fire, as if that dust had exploded in frozen time. Fire leaping from the blade he’d forged for Mel, purple into ultraviolet, it hurt his eyes but he still couldn’t turn away.
Mel raised the blade and thrust without effort. The point caught Mother square between her breasts. Sprouted from her back. Fire blooming, Mother’s fading shape blasting out in the same purple light that threatened to burn his eyes to blindness. The floor bulged above them, exploding upward. Gray daylight peeked through cracks as the building tore apart.
The people. May God have mercy on the people. We’ll survive. We’re gods. But they’re doomed. Take a miracle to save them. How much of the city will die with Mother? Sodom? Gomorrah?
We’re gods.
WE are gods.
WE make miracles. As well as the wrath of God that melts cities into radioactive glaze.
The shattered wood froze in mid-air. Albert could move again. Could speak. Mother’s spell had died with her. He remembered the fire in his apartment, the stench of his own charred flesh, the demon moving through frozen time with a curl of smoke caught in its golden nostril.
“Legion! I command you!”
The air hung silent. Mel turned. She also moved outside of time. Nothing else could. Until . . .
Golden air condensed into the shape of a human.
“Who dares to command us?”
Ah, this is the point where I get my head ripped off. Never used it that much, anyway.
“We are gods. We outrank you.”
That was why Legion couldn’t stop Mother, couldn’t punish her. Why it had to trick
them
into acting. Gods outrank demons. Are more powerful, if they know who they are. And Mother had still remembered who she was.
Legion glared at him. Albert didn’t know how a blank face of glowing ectoplasm—it hadn’t bothered with eyes, with mouth, with nostrils this time—could glare. But Legion did it.
“Prove that you have such power over us!”
Albert lay there, half dead and propped up on the collapsing brick with tons of shattered building poised to fall on him, staring up at an angry demon, and almost laughed. He looked beyond the sexless golden form.
“Mel?”
She lifted the sword. Legion grew a second “face” on the back of its head and saw, however it was that it could see without eyes.
The demon cringed. “We obey.”
About damned time . . .
If damnation is possible.
“Demon, I command you. Repair the damage. Heal the humans. Wipe this from their memories, as if these minutes were cut out of time.”
Albert sagged back against his brick pillar. Surreal bits of golden light chased splinters of wood and steel and brick. Legion really
was
legion. The main shape stood between him and Mel, no visible change. But, those bits unbound by space and time, each was also the full demon. The building reformed overhead. Smoke vanished. Char vanished. Dust sucked back into the cracks between floorboards. Video reversed, except he and Mel and Legion kept moving forward. Thought couldn’t follow it.
Dizzy. Tired. Hungry. Tired. Thirsty. Tired.
Mostly, tired.
Words pulled him back from his fog. “We cannot repair what the blade has cut. All else is as you command.”
What the blade has cut. That’s okay, we don’t want Mother back. Dead goddesses tell no tales.
He tried to focus. The anvil still lay on the concrete floor in two halves, the cut faces shiny. Some other tools also lay in separate pieces. Got in the way. Collateral damage.
Cut face of the anvil looked . . . strange. He found enough energy to crawl across, rough concrete grabbing at the knees of his pants, tearing, but that was the pair he’d already ruined. No big deal. He still had Legion’s pile of gold. Could buy another pair.
Unless that gold was a demon joke.
Steel. Just below the working face of the anvil, the steel body . . . pockmarked. Honeycombed. Crystalline. He’d ruined it, forging Mel’s sword. Too much heat.
And. The finished sword had weighed more than the Seal. His hands remembered. He’d drawn metal out of the anvil into the blade. Part of the alloy. Part of the soul.
Part of the magic.
The blade had forged itself. He wondered what
he
had given to it. Would he ever lift a hammer again?
Would he ever lift a hand again?
Focus through gray swirls, golden demon. “Take us upstairs. My kitchen.”
He
felt
the wood passing through his flesh and bones, him through the wood, through the ovens of the pizza kitchen, up through each floor in turn. He was lying on cold vinyl flooring over wood, against plaster. In between the seconds of time.
Stale air. Moldy bread. A sour hint of rotting oranges.
Don’t even think about what’s mutating inside the refrigerator.
“Make the food fresh.”
Air cleared. He could get used to this, having a demon at his beck and call. Perquisites of godhood.
Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.
“Give Mel back her gun. Exactly as it was when you took it.”
He forced his eyes to focus. The Colt materialized, a vague floating transparent shape that turned solid, blued steel and checked rubber grip. Mel plucked it out of the air with her left hand, sword still in the right, and hefted it, sighted it, glanced at the engraving and the serial number, flipped the safety on and off and on again. She nodded. All present and correct, to the gram.
“You want Legion to lick your boots?”
Horror flashed across her face. “God, no. Take the polish right off, probably ruin the leather.” She paused and grinned. “Nice thought, though.”
“You insult us. You treat us like common djinn. We are not servants!”
Albert shook his head, a serious effort the way he felt right now, and forced his eyes to focus on the demon. “I treat you the way you treated us. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ You knew what you were doing. You knew we were gods. ‘As ye sow, so also shall ye reap.’ I should tell you to go fuck yourself and die.”
He didn’t have the strength to wonder if demons
could
die. Or, for that matter, fuck themselves. Sure, that ectoplasm could take any necessary form, but the physics wasn’t the same as the metaphysics.
Too tired for theology. Fall asleep right here.
Work left unfinished. Sword. Deadly. Cut the moon from the vault of heaven. “Make a sheath for that blade. A sheath suited to Mel. Safe. Will only give the blade to us. Mel. Me. No one else may draw it. Not even gods.”
Copper sheet formed from the air and wrapped itself around the blade—the demon knew Albert’s mind. Wood, pale wood, close-grained, and then leather, dark leather, black like Mel’s cop belt and boots. But not official, not uniform issue—gold at the sheath’s throat, a handgrip wide, he could feel the weight of it hanging in mid-air, ounces of pure gold, engraved, with silver inlay, a scene of high snow-capped mountains and clouds. And an emerald for a green sun over the mountains. Big as his thumb.
Sheath.
Much more than simple. Much more than his command. Was Legion . . . grateful? Rewarding them? Did such concepts even exist, in this world between moments?
Hungry. Tired. Too tired.
Food. Image, on his palate. “Onion soup. Double-reduced chicken stock, yellow Spanish onions sautéed in butter, sourdough bread toast, fresh grated Parmesan. You know how I like it, damn you. Enough for a second meal, leftovers, for both of us.”
His big stockpot materialized on the back burner, which had turned itself on to simmer heat. Warm chicken/onion savor filled the air, overlaying the sharp tang of Parmesan cheese,
good
Parmesan, steaming on top of hot sourdough toast, from bowls on the counter. Albert sorted through the aromas.
Yes, Legion knows the right recipe. Probably read it straight off my brain, like a laser reading a CD.
“Now. Be gone. Don’t come near either of us ever again unless we summon you.”
The demon vanished, far faster than it had come.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
He couldn’t tell if he had said that, or Detective Lieutenant Goddess Melissa el Hajj. Not that it mattered.
He crawled over to his kitchen table on hands and knees and pulled himself up on one of the chairs. Sat. A bowl of soup appeared in front of him, steaming, golden transparent butter dotting the surface. Beautiful. Fragrant.
Mel was talking, somewhere off in the fog. “I think I’ve changed my mind on that long-term commitment thing. If this is your version of onion soup, I’ll hire you for live-in cook any day you’re willing.”
He was still staring at the soup, holding his head up with his hands, elbows on the table. His spoon sat there, an immeasurable weight.
Mel pulled a chair up beside him. A spoon, full of soup, nudged his lips. He opened them. Soup. Good.
More soup. Sometimes the spoon came to him, sometimes to Mel. Still good. Same spoon. No problem. They’d shared other fluids. A second bowl. Empty.
She reached out and lifted his chin. Stared into his eyes. “If I scoop out another bowl, you’ll collapse face-first in it and drown.”
Something wiped his lips. He moved, rose, without effort. She was bigger than him, and strong, those whipcord warrior-goddess muscles. Carried him to the bedroom. Stripped off his clothes.
Grunted. “Can I throw these out? Not even worth washing up for rags . . . ”
He opened his eyes. Pants, torn. Shirt, torn. Not just torn. Buckshot holes in both, with singed edges, sparks from the forge. No leather apron . . .
The whole right arm of the shirt burned off, from armpit to cuff. He checked his own right arm. No burn. Not even the hair singed. Had the salamander done that?
Bloodstains on shirt and pants. He wondered whose.
He nodded. Yes, she could throw those out. Although the service they’d given, should be a burial with full military honors. Rifle salute and all. Where had that scene come from? Smoke from the salute, black powder, century or more ago. It hurt, but he couldn’t remember why.
Memories still jumbled.
Maybe, he’d fixed the Seal, it would take memories away again. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Mother wouldn’t admit to bad memories. She’d never done anything she regretted. That would have required her to care about what her actions did to others. Her brain didn’t work that way.
“Ah, sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care.” Mel had asked him to switch to Shakespeare . . .
Singed sleeve, in this case.
“Go ahead and sleep. I’m on guard.”
She had the sword, and her pistol back. She could summon Legion. She was Mel.
Nothing could touch them.
Albert woke in darkness, streetlights in the right places glowing through shades on windows in the right places and in the right number. He didn’t keep a clock in
his
bedroom, either. After all, he didn’t have to get to work at a certain time.
Mel was awake. He could tell by her breathing. Then she moved enough, just a little shift of hips and shoulders, to say that she knew that he knew, that he would be welcome over on her side of the bed.
He reached across the bed and met her hand reaching for him. No words necessary.
This time, they made love. The last time, it had been some kind of mutual consensual rape, not even as genteel and refined as fucking. She hadn’t asked before she did things. Neither had he. Must have burned off enough of that pent-up need.
And now they didn’t have to worry about waking up the downstairs neighbors . . .
Afterward, snuggled, he noticed something. “Where’d you get the pillow?”
He hadn’t had two on his bed for centuries. It felt like a silk pillowcase . . .
“Other bedroom.”
Oh, shit. “That’s Mother’s. She’ll . . . ”