The air was thick as they returned to the Ring of Lust, heavy and damp. Moxie could feel sweat pounding out of his pores with every second he spent in this place, but it didn't even give him the relief of evaporation and cooling. Instead, he just felt like he was going to melt into a pool of former-imp. Millie had abandoned her normal outfit for beachwear, it even then she seemed to be suffering greatly under the heat of the land of all desires. Blitz, of course, was wearing what he always wore. While he was as slick with sweat as any of the rest of them, he didn't seem to care in the slightest.
The long drive across the rings gave Moxie time to read the 'journals' that he'd pilfered from Purson's horde. They were a bewildering array of seeming letters between two people, with the statements on one page answered on the facing page. And the subject matter of those letters was as diverse as the hides of imps. They would veer from matters of theology, divert into notions of infrastructure and architecture, devolve into lurid prose, descend into the pits of rancorous pornography, and then just as swiftly digress into developing a schematic for something called a 'scramjet'. Whoever the other person Purson was talking to was obvious very in tune with the Great King Purson, and just as debauched. By the time the van reached Lust's bayou, Moxie figured he had learned almost nothing about magic, and entirely too much about the Ars Goetia's King of Secrets.
Unlike last time, when they'd zipped directly into the big city and its air conditioning, this time they took the first dirt-path off of the highway and plunged into the mangroves of Lust's great bayou. Moxie had voiced concern that they were going to crash into something and die if they went much further off road. Blitz had, in typical caustic fashion, called Moxie an idiot and started driving even more like a maniac than usual.
The van then tear-assed through areas that had never seen a paved road in all of Hell's existence. The panic at the maniacal fashion by which Blitz navigated between patches of relative dry, fording through sections that occasionally saw water leaking into the cabin, drove Moxie into the back seat where at least he wouldn't be forced to know every dangerous gamble that Blitz was making as he drove.
"Are you okay, Sweetie?" Moxie asked.
"I thought Wrath was supposed to be the hottest ring in Hell," she groused idly, trying to fan herself with a hand.
"It is. Lust averages two and a half degrees lower than Wrath year-round. The only reason the temperatures are unbearable is because the humidity is so high that we're dealing with wet-bulb all the time."
"I have no idea what that means," Millie muttered, swiping away a sheet of sweat from her forehead and flicking it out the opened window. Her brow was saturated again within seconds.
"It's too wet for sweating to help us keep cool," Moxie simplified.
"I don't like this ring," Millie bemoaned.
"Ah, you get used to it. You should see it durin' the Summer! You can pretty much sous vide a motherfucker by standin' outside on a good day!" Blitz said with a note of pride in his voice.
"Why would anybody want to live here?" Millie asked.
"Oh I dunno, not havin' to pay taxes, not havin' to obey anybody's laws, bein' left the fuck alone by assholes, a distinct lack of assholes tellin' us what we can do with our dicks. Lotsa reasons," Blitz rattled off.
"Of course nobody wants to impose themselves on Lust. Lust is awful!" Moxie said.
"Hey, I will NOT have you badmouthin' my native soil! My gramma-ma died in this Ring. It's special," Blitz said, staring back at them while driving recklessly forward.
"I'll stop just look where you're driving!" Moxie shouted.
"That's what I thought," Blitz said.
"Do you know what we need to find here? Besides a cold drink and some shade?" Millie asked.
"Thaumaturges. Or maybe something they left behind. I mean, I'm glad that we're not going anywhere near the Crystal Grotto, but the things we need aren't going to be out here in the boonies."
"So why are we going out here?" she asked.
"Could you tell him to stop?" Moxie pointed at the back of Blitz's seat.
Millie frowned at him then sighed, leaning out the window trying to get some wind on her face. Since the wind was just as warm out there as it was in here, it didn't help much. "Maybe we can treat this like a li'l vacation."
"We don't have time for a vac..."
"Listen to your ho, Mox," Blitz said.
Moxie stewed in his own annoyance, then shifted closer to Millie where she lolled out of the van's window.
"As soon as Blitz has got whatever it is out of his system, we can sneak into the Grotto and see what Cruac left behind when they left for Pride."
"What who?" she asked.
"Clan Cruac? The most famous imps in Hell?" Moxie asked.
"Oh, I didn't pay much attention in history class," she said, her attention not wholly on him. But then again, given the heat, it was obvious her attention wasn't wholly on anything.
He just gave her shoulder a squeeze, and let her try to radiate some heat away. That was the greatest hope that he could muster. If he could find some of the relics of the old Matriarchs, or some scraps of thaumaturgical lore that they'd gathered before they made their power play in the ring of Pride, that would probably be able to fill in the gaps in necessary knowledge for Moxie to replicate the 37 Oaths.
Moxie didn't even want to think about the kind of fallout that completing the 37 Oaths would put on them. After all, they were imps. They were the bottom-most rung of Hell's ladder of being. The dangling link on the chain of creation. How many outraged eyes would fall upon them the moment that others realized the power that mere imps had stolen from the people who considered themselves 'above'?
"Alright M&M, hold onto your balls! Or lady balls!" Blitz said. And the van lurched unpleasantly, water blasting Millie in the face and dumping her across the bench seat and into Moxie's lap. She sputtered and flapped, wiping mud from her face and letting it plop to the floor.
"Blitz What the FUCK?" Moxie demanded loudly.
"Y'holding on yet?" Blitz said over his shoulder as he raced along a mat of mangrove roots, directly toward a tree as wide as a house.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" Moxie demanded.
"Well, too late now," Blitz said. He then reefed on the hand-break and spun the van into a J-turn before slamming it into reverse with the transmission grinding in protest the entire time, and rammed the thing backward into that tree, his grin wide as he stared through the back windows of the van. Moxie cradled his wife and braced for impact, to be thrown hard into the back of the bench and possibly straight through the back doors.
Instead there was a single sizable thump, which pitched them several inches up, then a crash as the van spun again, spitting Moxie against the door and having Millie splay atop him, getting mud everywhere when she did so. Moxie just sat there, the van now at a halt, stewing in outrage at this latest stunt that Blitz had pulled on them. His teeth ground as he tried to process just the sheer bilious wave of his own outrage. And when he finally had enough of it bound together for a proper explosion, the door behind him was slid open, dropping him backward onto...
Tarmac.
Moxie looked up, seeing something impossible beyond him. It was all upside down to his perspective – Millie was luckier in that she didn't need to mentally translate what she was seeing one hundred eighty degrees – but it was nevertheless a stark and unthinkable change from where they'd just been.
Buildings made of Dyed Weepstone rose up out of the bog, standing on stilts of creosote-blackened brickerwood. Streets made of pale gray asphalt, cut with symbols of ancient power the likes of which Moxie had only read about (most of them only since his quixotic quest to bring down the Proxy of Lucifer began) cut their way to an honest to Satan city, sized and scaled exclusively for imps. The people who had paused in their daily routines – all of them imps – were four-toes, the hoofless clade of imps native to Lust. They wore loose clothing, most of it saturated with sweat. Most of the men and some of the women had no hair on their heads, instead sprouting small numbers of thick, black spines. The womens' horns were in many cases a stripeless, solid black, and like their mens' were far longer than a Wrath Imp's.
The place reeked of Power. Not just Dichotomous Magic, the powers endemic to Heaven and to Hell, but other powers as well. Moxie pushed himself to a stand, as the people looked at the three of them. Only one of them was prepared for that scrutiny; Blitz was of course preening himself, straightening his red glass brooch, and clearing his throat, while Moxie helped Millie to her feet. "What..."
"The shield is broken!" a man shouted, fleeing into the city.
"Invaders?" a non-plussed, pregnant young woman asked.
"Wrathlings. You do a failing by these, boy," an older looking Lust Imp said at Blitz with a derisive look at Moxie and Millie.
"Mind your tongue, dullman," the younger woman said sharply at him. Her eyes were locked on Moxie. "Potential this one has. More than most Wrathlings. You there, boy. Why come you by these sun-baked?"
"Would y'all just shut the FUCK UP for a second I'm TRYING to introduce you to my people, godDAMNit!" Blitz snapped at her. The woman recoiled as though he'd just slapped her, and several of the men nearby closed ranks around her as though preparing to catch an actual attack instead of just a verbal one. Blitz finished his preening and turned to his employees.
"Sir, what..." Moxie began.
"Since those fuck-heads decided to interrupt me, I gotta do this like a second-run ASSHOLE instead of like the returning champion you fuckwits should be treatin' me like," Blitz said. "Mox? Mills? Welcome to fuckin' BAL MATHEER! My old hometown!"
"But... why are... how is..." Moxie tried. This was altogether too much. He'd never even heard of a place like this. And yet...
"Get the Matriarch. Let her know that a blood has returned unannounced," the pregnant woman said.
"Don't mind me, I'm just here to..." Blitz began, but was cut off when everybody within eyeshot pulled a flintlock and pointed it at him. "Stand here and wait for y'all to do your shit, I guess."
"Blitz... what's goin' on?" Millie asked.
"Yeah... I kinda... didn't leave on the best of terms," Blitz admitted.
"You? Noooo. What are the chances?" Moxie asked dramatically. Of course, Blitz's idea of a 'vacation' was one where they go to a place where people want to immediately kill him.
Chapter 18
Beware The Wyrds Of The Imps
"Sam? Are you alright?" Charlie asked as she spotted him.
"I'm fine," he lied.
"You're lying," she could spot the obvious.
"I'm also going to work," Sam added.
"Sam!" she got into his path. Then, she did a purging breath, steepling her fingers in front of her face. "Sam. Something's on your mind. Something big, or you wouldn't be practically gray. I want to help you, Sam. But I can't do that if you keep ducking me."
"I don't think you can help with this one," Sam said. In the day since he'd told Husk, Husk hadn't spread it to so much as a single other ear. Which was probably exactly what Sam should have expected out of the cat-bird demon that so vocally decried his utter apathy in the affairs of those around him.
"Don't you trust that I'm..." she began.
"Do I trust that you have my best interests at heart? Absolutely. Do I trust that you have them in mind? Not even close," Sam said. She looked hurt by that, and Sam sighed, rubbing at his face in dismay. "Look... it's not that... I'm not calling you incompetent. It's that I don't know if there is a solution to the problem I'm dealing with, and it's one that I'm better off bearing alone."
"You don't know that," she said, again skirting into Sam's path and blocking his exodus.
"This is the kind of thing that the wrong people knowing about could get people killed. And would bring ruin to all the good that you're trying to do. I respect what you're trying to do here, Charlie. I won't be the cause of that kind of destruction. Not again."
Charlie grumbled under her breath as he tried to skirt her again. And again, she slipped into his path, blocking him. "You aren't to blame for what happened to Angel and Vaggie," she said sternly.
"What?" Sam asked.
"When that Exorcist got out, it hurt a lot of you. Angel more than most. But it wasn't your fault. It was my..."
"And this is the part where you try to undo my responsibility by shouldering it yourself, despite the fact that you were anatomically unable to see the trap that lay in the middle of your hotel," Sam cut her off, this time. "I opened the door. I activated the Exorcist. What followed is on me, not you. If a general takes every precaution to safety a nuclear bomb, but some idiot comes in and hits all the buttons anyway, who's responsibility is it for the explosion?"
"The general's," Charlie said without hesitation. Sam just frowned at her for a moment. "Because there's more than just the two of them at stake. When that bomb goes off, it's not just the idiot – and please stop calling yourself an idiot, Sam – that will get killed by it. The general will too, as well as everybody on the general's base... and maybe the city nearby as well. If the general can't protect his weapons against idiots, he shouldn't have those weapons."
Sam sighed, and could see her point. He still disagreed with it, but he understood her reasoning. "This isn't about the Exorcist, Charlie. This is something else. Something personal," he said.
"Did one of your family end up in Hell?" Charlie asked, her rock-headedness fading now that she wasn't involved in a verbal tug of war with somebody as stubborn as she was.
"God I hope not," Sam said. "I..."
He was cut off from explanation as the door shook and splintered, a spray of buckshot penetrating it and peppering one of the nearby pillars. Somebody just shot the door? Charlie instantly looked as livid as her body would allow, striding toward the entrance with fury on her face and Sam trailing in her wake if only because this was the one way out which wasn't surrounded by dumpsters.
When Charlie threw open the door, it was to a street that was teeming with Sinners and Fiends and hoodlums. One of them had a big, double-barreled shotgun pointed at her. She didn't look in the least bit intimidated. All of them were dressed in either fancy, almost doll-like attire, or in the most abject slutwear this side of Angel Dust's closet. The limousine that Charlie usually rode around in was a burning wreck – which even Sam could see was slowly pulling itself together and unburning itself in the background – and a different, hot-pink limousine dominated the street in front of the Happy Hotel.
The door was open. And upon Charlie's introduction to the street, its occupant rose from his place and stood towering above the taller Sinners. He wore a gaudy, fluffy red outfit lined with white furs festooned with pink markings in the shape of broken hearts. Atop his head rest an almost comically vertical top-hat, the same eye-watering shade of red as his suit. The coat's hem was lined with zebra fur. Actual fur from actual zebras, from Africa on Earth. The being wore spectacles with solid gold, heart-shaped frames.
Even without Looking Within, Sam knew his name, because it haunted Angel Dust's nightmares.
Valentino.
"So this is the piece of ass which is housing my little Angel Cake? I heard the princess was doin' something stupid, but thees? Hm," Valentino said, his voice deep but smooth, a clear Andalusian accent to his voice. He cracked an unkind smile. "You know, I make a lot of money out of girls that look like you. You work for me for a day – no just two hours... I might be willing to rent Angel Cakes to you for a while..."
"I beg your pardon?" Charlie said, her fury raising and her hair parting to show the red horns that sprouted from her skull.
"Well that eez a shame," Valentino shrugged. "Have to keep usin' copycats for a while. But since you're not going to pay me what Angel Cake's culo is worth, you'd better send heem out... before I go in and get him."
"Angel Dust is under my protection," Charlie said, her voice very low, very quiet.
"And what can you do to stop me?" Valentino asked. "Spoil't princess you are? Are you gonna stand watch over heem every hour of every day?"
"She won't have to," Sam pointed out.
Valentino snapped his eyes to Sam, a glare trying to nail Sam to the sidewalk. He didn't let it. Rage pried those nails out before they even set. "Who the fuck said you could talk to me, you six piece Chicken McNobody?"
"Another doomed asshole in Hell," Sam said.
"This puta madre talked back to me twice. Vigo? Feed him his fucking teeth," Valentino said. 'Vigo', a massive reptilian Sinner who probably weighed at least twice what Sam did, laid a long arm on Sam's shoulder, cracking his knuckles on his other fist and preparing for a haymaker. Sam, though, focused on his rage, down out of his guts, and bore it up, bore it out.
The sound that came was reminiscent of a flamethrower. Not the sanitized version that got slotted into movies or games, but instead the gutteral, roaring fury of kilograms of naphtha getting blasted out of an aperture and set ablaze every second in a terrible torrent. And it while it started high pitched, the roar of it made it seem like the mouth of the flame thrower was almost a foot across.
The flame blasted up the reptile Sinner's arm, blasting it away in electric blue fire and evaporating it down to the bone. The Sinner howled in pain and confusion, clutching at the blackened, crumbling bones of his left arm. Another of Valentino's goons, thinking that he could capitalize on his 'friend's' incapacitation. That one swung a tire-iron at Sam, one that Sam could effortlessly dodge out of the way of. Since the fight against Alastor and that imp, his body just... moved with him, better. Sam grabbed the bludgeoner, who looked oddly reminiscent of a shaved gorilla with tusks, by both sides of his jaw. And again, staring into the Sinner's eyes, he felt the flames well, swell, bellow, and blast.
This Sinner was blasted into flames from the jawline out. His body instantly went slack as his brain was boiled in his skull, before that skull was burnt to bone-ash and the body slipped from Sam's hands. A group of Sinners who had been about to launch in hesitated, turning wary looks back to their master. Sam struck the ash from his hands as the cadaver settled on the street. He turned to Valentino. "I'm just any other doomed asshole, protecting my roof. You wanna see what she's capable of?" he cast a thumb at Charlie.
The silence was thunderous. Then, a slow clap sounded from down the street. "And you said you had no head for theatrics. Masterfully done, Sam," Apoc said.
"How long you been standing there, Goat?" Valentino demanded.
"Long enough to wonder why you were stacking up in front of my employee's place of residence, not long enough to do something about it," Apoc said. There was another pause. "Samuel? We have business to attend to."
"Don't think this is over," Valentino promised, glowing eyes narrowed at Sam.
"Nothing ever ends," Sam said. "Charlie?"
"Yeah, Sam?" Charlie said, her glare still on the Overlord.
"Do what you've got to. This is your home, too," he said. He turned to Apoc. "So who are we going to meet?"
"This isn't over between me and you, either," Valentino said, turning a glance to Apoc.
"As my employee informed you, nothing ever is," Apoc said. "Let's get a taxi and leave these idiots behind. I have a busy day ahead of us."
Moxie had expected that Blitz's people would have been something... other than this. From the way he described them, he understood the urban flare that many of the tales wove, but still, perhaps from the lingering remnants of his prejudice against the Four Toes, he had expected teetering hovels, dilapidated estate houses, mud-washed barracks, and a small subset of them living in caves.
The architecture here was unlike the structures in Imp City. Moxie had so long lived in structures built around an assumption of six feet plus change in verticality, that the close in ceilings were nostalgic and homey. And there were no true 'urban' nor 'rural' traditions built into the healing-stone that these structures had been erected from. This was something... different. Foreign, even to an imp. Or at least, foreign to an imp from Wrath.
"Would you fuckin' get to the GODDAMNED POINT? GodDAMNit this is startin' to piss me off," Blitz muttered from the pillow that he'd dropped himself into. Chairs were few in here. Pillows took their place for most occasions, meaning that the typical pose for a Four Toe was either standing straight, or laying on the floor. Moxie, alarmed by the amount of flintlocks that were even now pointed at them, stayed standing. "Bad enough I'm surrounded by a bunch of cocksucker's more inbred than a BLT, so many fuckin' folds in their sheet they might have two fuckin' tails," one of the imps around them shot a nervous glance to one side, but Blitz kept going, "standin' around spending our FUCKING TIME!"
"I could stay here for a while longer," Millie said with a beaming smile. Air conditioning was clearly the fastest way to a woman's heart.
"The matriarch will see the bloods now," the man said from the ornate doors at the end of the long, heavily guarded room. The guards themselves made motions that they were to enter, and Moxie wasn't about to get shot again over temerity. The doors themselves were made of moonsilver that had veins of green and grey running through it. Moxie actually came to a halt, staring at the metal. He didn't feel any purity from it. No overwhelming essence of The High in the metal that occasionally fell through the Fundament. This was... an unholy moonsilver. His confusion was interrupted by a brusque shove. Millie caught him from his stumble and shot a positively venomous glare at the one who'd shoved him. The room beyond was dimly lit, black silk drapes three thick over the windows and two thick along the other walls. A low altar was set up with a haruspicy plate and lit by gas lamps. Waiting for them was what had to be the oldest looking imp that Moxie had ever seen.
Her back was stooped, obviously, but her skin was still tight to her bones. Her horns were massive, curling back on themselves at least five times. Near the tips, they were black, but they faded as they moved closer to their root, until they were an ashy almost-white. She had no hair, only some dull, black spines on the back of her head and neck. And her eyes were so rheumy that they looked blue, of all unnatural colors.
"So the wayward blood comes home," the woman said, her accent thick with that creole of Satan's English, Enochian, and another language that Moxie couldn't even name. She shuffled a set of square cards with her crooked hands as she stared at them. "And with the stink of outsiders on your skin. You reek of fallen angels and humans, boy."
"Yup, just got done fuckin' one of each," Blitz said proudly.
"And despite the reach of your cock you cannot do your duty. How typical," her words came out slowly, as she finished shuffling the stack of cards and laid them out in three stacks of three. "You would do rightly to follow your sister's example... She at least knows her place in the Chain."
"Barbie ain't ever comin' back here, after the way you treated her," Blitz snapped. The woman scoffed.
"I would not have her dull blood. I speak of Tilla. She is a bright-girl. She gave us much bright blood."
"And then she FUCKING DIED!" Blitz roared, instantly rock hard and seething, and Moxie had to get in his way to keep him from advancing on the crone.
"Did she?" the crone asked. "The grave couldn't keep me. Why should it keep my granddaughter?"
"She's... Tilla's alive. She's alive! YOU BROUGHT HER BACK FROM THE DEAD JUST TO KEEP FUCKING HER?" Blitz was about to explode, it was painfully obvious.
"Sir, we're surrounded by people looking for an excuse to kill us!" he pointed out the problem.
"Um, excuse me? I don't think we've introduced ourselves," Millie took a more diplomatic tack. She extended a hand. "My name's Millie. This is my husband Moxie. I guess you already know our boss, Blitz?"
"Blitz? What is Blitz?" the crone scowled. She turned to the imp bearing that name, then sighed. "You forget your name as well, child? Pathetic. No wonder you would hold to no covenants. You break the Chain with your very being."
"Hey, I'm Blitz now. Didn't ask for that stupid ass name you dropped on me, so I gave it away the first chance I got," Blitz said easily, his rage draining slightly and putting on a smug grin. "You should'a seen how much I got for it. You'd think that name actually was worth a dick's-dribble," he glanced to Moxie. "Taking the name Blitzø was the one good idea my inbred kiddie-fucker of a father ever had!"
"That name was passed through a thousand brightmen before it was given to you. And it would have passed a thousand more into the future."
"For FUCK'S SAKE Gramma-ma, this is EXACTLY WHY me an' Barbie left this fuckin' place!" Blitz shouted.
"Gr... you said your grandmother died!" Moxie shouted.
"Evil never dies around here. It always gets brought back." Blitz said. He pointed a finger at her. "One a' these days, you're gonna have to get it through your fuckin' skull that the entire impish species ain't yours to fuck around with. It ain't your FUCKIN' PLACE to get people fuckin' their kids and bringin' em back from the dead if you ain't gotten all you wanted out of 'em. Not every imp in this goddamned town is exactly happy knowin' that their lives are set in stone from before they're fuckin' born!"
"I hear no complaints," the crone grinned, showing sharp, yellow teeth.
"You didn't listen to me growin' up, and I complained plenty!" Blitz bit out, that cold, abiding anger that he'd cultivated since his time in the Human World starting to press to the surface. "I had dreams. I wanted to be more than just another sperm-jockey in your fuckin' breeding program. And for the first ten years of my fucking life, you told me..."
"That you would never amount to anything outside of Bal Matheer. And I see that I was right to make that prediction," the crone said. She turned over the top most of the center stack. It showed the Fool of Pride, a figure that looked oddly reminiscent of Blitz, but wearing a clown costume, juggling a bunch of bombs that were all about to explode. "In your years, what glory have you earned? Any? What future have you carved? What children will speak your name in the long lines of lineage after your vanish back into the Abyss whence we all come? Have you any children at all?"
"I got Loonie!"
"What name is 'Loonie' for an imp?" the crone asked in distaste.
"She's a hellhound," Moxie provided. The crone's distaste turned to disgust.
"Fuck you, she might be adopted but she's mine. No four toed runts, though, I'm DAMNED sure of that," Blitz said proudly. He leaned in to Moxie. "That's what twenty years of fucking everything but imps'll get ya."
"Disgusting," the crone said, and then turned the topmost of the two flanking cards over. One showed the Fool of Despair, and the other, the Fool of Wrath. Moxie did a definite double take at them. The Fool of Despair was clearly himself, in the midst of a fit of furious apoplexy. And the Fool of Wrath, covered head to foot in blood black, scarlet, and golden, was undeniably Millie, her face set in lunatic fury, the likes Moxie had only seldom seen. Moxie looked up at the crone.
"What is this?" he asked. The crone smirked at his confusion.
"Your blood is oddly bright for a Wrathling," the crone said. "How highly would you value it? I will pay you the black brains of fifteen night-fiends to couple with one of my granddaughters."
"Excuse me?" Moxie asked.
"And you," the crone turned to Millie, "Not perhaps nearly so bright as his, but I would gladly pay five black brains for a child you bear of one of my sons' or grandsons'. It would be an easy birth at least. Your hips are wide."
"The fuck you say?" Millie demanded, her face twisting in anger until she was starting to resemble herself on the card.
"You can knock it off with the bribery. They've got this bullshit 'Monogamy' thing goin' on," Blitz even threw air-quotes around the word like it required translation. The crone looked confused at him, then to them. When she finally put it together, her expression shifted to one of disgusted disappointment.
"You do no favors to the impish race with your selfishness," the crone said to Moxie. She turned to the cards again. "The offer stands."
"Not interested, thank you," Millie said hotly.
"What about IFV?" Moxie asked.
"Moxie!" she said, her glare settling on him for a moment.
"Resources are resources," Moxie had to admit. And while he didn't know what the black brain's market value was, there were enough rituals he'd read where they were considered 'the lynchpin ingredient' that it had to be substantial.
"Pfeh!" the crone said. "Without the generative act, the seed is as potent as spit. I withdraw my offer, you single-minded perverts." She then deftly flipped the tiles, revealing the second one of each stack in the first's place. Moxie became The Dragon Fettered, depicting as its name suggested. Millie became The Ruin of Wrath, a statue of a fiend crumbling to bits. Blitz, flipped last, showed The Chain, but rotated. If Moxie knew the rules of Scoil'chaim divination – which because of this insane quest they were on, he absolutely did – The Chain Anticlockwise indicated that whatever tribulation it showed, it wouldn't be the one on its corresponding First who had to pay for it.
"You mighta pushed me and my sisters around when we were kids, but that shit ain't gonna fly now," Blitz ignored the symbols in front of him. "Now I'm gonna go back out there, M&M are gonna ask their magic-y bullshit questions, and then we're gonna leave. And hopefully the next time I come back here, you'll be properly dead this time."
"Your time with these outsiders has twisted your brain," the crone said. "I could untwist you. I am tempted to."
"Yeah, how 'bout we don't do that?" Blitz pointed out.
"What does this mean?" Millie asked, looking at the cards.
"She's trying to intimidate you with random magical bullshit. Don't let it get to ya'," Blitz said.
"I think..." Moxie began, but then didn't continue, because there would be little or no good to revealing the target of their suicide mission to these people. If the first cards were the three of them, then the next three might be the people protecting Birch. The Dragon Fettered was obvious; Birch's personal valet was a former Overlord who was now utterly under Birch's control. The Chain was, too; Birch was known to own a Hound. But the Ruin of Wrath was new to Moxie. Maybe Birch had picked up another agent?
"You should not be paid to think, wrathling. Breed, perhaps, but not think," the crone said. Her weird eyes locked on him for a moment. "A daughter of yours could be a worthy miracle-worker, I think. I think I may have to take your firstborn."
"Excuse me?" Moxie asked, ire rising. A feral sound escaped Millie's throat, as her outrage peaked. "You won't do anything of the kind. Millie and I aren't planning on having spawn any time soon, and even if we did, the last thing we would do is give them to somebody as obviously maleficent as you are!"
"Yeah!" his wife chimed in.
"See?" Blitz said, a smug look on his face. "Anybody with a working brain gets the fuck away from the Clan the first chance they get. And as soon as I say hi to a few ex girlfriends and boyfriends and get a proper meal into me, I'mma do the exact same thing."
"If you are so set on being a disappointment in all things, then so be it," the crone muttered. "You, who were born Balor Sulak Mazzikin Baal Alukah Nuckelavee, are no longer welcome to the clan of your foremothers. When you leave, the doors will be locked behind you. You will never know the succor of your family. Your name will be stricken from the lineages and you will die alone and unremembered."
That seemed to get under Blitz's skin, but not in the way that she expected. If Moxie's estimation of the woman was on point, she'd expected this to be devastating for him, to leave him forlorn and crestfallen. Instead, it made him angry. Because perhaps without realizing it, she pushed the biggest berserk button Blitz had... and Blitz had a lot of them.
Moxie prepared for Blitz to strangle the woman, to explode with fury. But instead, he let the cold well up again. Moxie breathed a little easier seeing that. Thank Satan for twelve years in the Human World, if only for the miracle it'd done to Blitz's temper. Blitz, eyes locked on the crone, reached out and slapped the stacks of Scoil'chaim cards off the table and let them fall to the floor, ruining whatever divination she was trying to create.
"I'm going to say goodbye to my fucked up knot of a family. Don't stop me," Blitz promised, his voice low and filled with poisonous anger.
"You are already cast from the Clan," the crone said to his retreating back as he barged out of the room. "See you don't make an enemy of Cruac as well!"
"What?" Moxie asked. The crone turned a dismissive to him, then snapped her fingers. A number of middle-aged imp women came and helped her out of her chair and bore her toward a back door. Cruac? But Clan Cruac had been wiped out.
"We should follow Blitz before he gets into trouble," Millie pointed out the most pressing matter. And she was right to. As Moxie moved to the door, though, he spotted the cards on the floor. The last cards had all managed to land face up. Calamity, depicting Exorcists descending. The Hungering Forge, which had some manner of hellspawn being thrown into the mouth of a foundry. And the last was Pride Incarnate, a shadowed illustration of a man, holding the Fruit of Knowledge of Good And Evil.
He didn't know which belonged to who.
And there was no possible combination of those three which was good.
This place itched. The instant that Loona walked out of the bathroom in this building, the antiseptic stink assaulted her nose, mingling with barely contained traces of piss, shit, vomit and blood. The last time she smelled anything half so bad as this was during one of the very first jobs I.M.P. had ever done, clinging to Blitz and the others when the brought some kid through the portal with them.
"Hey, uh," Loona said to one of the humans in blue scrubs. "Can I get a bit of help here? I'm looking for someone."
"D'fuck dje get in here from?" the human said, eyes snapped to her. "There's only the one doorway in, so why d'fook din't ye talk to the front desk?"
"Excuse me?" Loona asked, but the human rolled her eyes and kept moving. The building didn't look like one of those human hospitals. In fact, it was much more in keeping with the structures that Hell produced in their stead. Still, the people working in this building – which seemed to be a tenement block that had been gutted and rearranged without changing its outside – reeked of human medicine and had a lot of humans running around in blue clothes. And a lot of people were dressed as informally as Loona, so her human disguise fit right in. She moved to the nook which ordinarily would have been an entry lobby, but had been turned into something of a triage-waiting room. "Hey. I'm looking for somebody."
"You an' everybody else d'ese days," the old, white bearded human behind the desk said. He rattled a few clackering keys on his keyboard before turning his eyes on her. "Wha's the name?"
"Tex," Loona said.
"Tex what? Is 'e loik fookin' Madonna, only got the one name to 'im?" the man clipped.
"Tex... Pedigree?" she tried, taking a wild stab in the dark.
"Soun's like a name roit out the pornos, that. I'll check and... yup he's here alroit," he gave a nod, and flashed a grin which was missing a fair number of teeth. "Floor one, room twelve."
"Thanks," she said, rolling her eyes.
"An' since yer obviously a Yank, floor one means it's one floor up! Dis the ground floor!" he shouted after her. With a destination in mind, she was able to navigate a bit better. She wished she could just follow her nose and not have to deal with the humans, but Tex's human disguise was a lot better than hers. It masked his scent as well as his canine features.
When she reached the second floor, she was given a moment's pause, though. She saw a bunch of succubi and incubi sitting in chairs. Some of them had bandaged burns or cuts or bullet holes. Others sported broad bruises. Their disguises were still up, too, which let Loona know just how badly they were injured. Most minor things didn't manifest to the mortals through the glamour.
At least one incubus spotted her, and then immediately looked away. Smart on him. The last time he tried to work his pelvic sorcery on her, she changed the position of his nose. The door wasn't locked, because this wasn't a 'hospital' as such. Inside was an apartment that had been retrofitted into something of a recovery ward. A number of beds lined each of the walls.
The most obvious landmark was the seven foot tall redhead with heterochromia who fussed around the bed of a large, half-blind black man. Well that explained Tiff's borderline incomprehensible text message. "Tiff!" Loona said. The half-blood turned and almost wilted with relief seeing Loona there. "What the fuck happened to these people?"
"Did you bring your people? Your company?" she asked.
"The office is closed today. Why?" Loona asked. "Is Tex alright?"
"He was shot. Quite a few times," the presiding doctor, who looked just as old as the guy at the 'front' but was clean shaven and utterly bald, the only hair on his face being a pair of incredibly bushy grey eyebrows. "By... silver bullets, if you'd believe it."
"Why would somebody shoot him with silver?" Loona asked.
"Maybe they thought he was a werewolf. Well, if he's a werewolf, he's the most stolid one I've ever seen in my life," the doctor said. "As for his prognosis, it's good. Nothing major hit, which was a miracle because at least two of those bullets should have perforated his spleen and liver. Per instructions we're not transfusing blood, but keeping his pressure up with saline. He should be fit to be smuggled out of the country in a week or so."
"Smuggled... I thought this was a..." Loona began.
"Hospital?" the man gave a cough and then a laugh. "This was built during the Troubles to help our boys fight the Bastard English. Keeping it up is... something of local heritage. I–" he began, but was cut off when his phone rang. He hefted it up, moving it too and fro in his sight until his eyes could focus sufficient to read it. "If it's not one thing it's another. I'll be back in a trice."
The doctor left, muttering under his breath about 'Pikeys', 'Bastard English', and 'fookin' anti-vaxxers' as he went, leaving the hellhounds the room, more or less. The other people in the room might wake up, so the disguises had to stay. "What really happened?" Loona asked.
Tiff sighed, rubbing her hands across her face. "Mayday was having another performance, at a cult dedicated to Asmodeus here in Derry. But right as things were starting to hit their peak, so to speak, a bunch of suit-wearing assholes burst in and started firing guns at everybody. Those that tried to tackle the gunmen ended up being beaten down by some blonde woman. Mayday tried to split, but they nailed her with... something. She's in the next room over."
"So... why did you text me, exactly?" Loona asked.
"To get us back to Hell before those humans find us," Tiff said.
"Why are you afraid of humans? You can rip them in half with your bare hands. Even I can, and you're twice as big as me!"
Despite Tiffany wearing a human face, the dread was plain on it. "Whatever that blond woman was... it wasn't human. Or it wasn't just human."
"Oh. Well," Loona said. If this was who she thought it was, then it was just a D.H.O.R.K.S. kook. But she'd never even heard anything approaching fear from the massive half-blood before now. So either she was thinking it was the wrong person, or the right person had suddenly gotten a lot more dangerous. "I've got the book. We can get back to Hell right now if we need to."
"You're a life saver," Tiff said.
"You have a way back?" the door slammed open, and a bandage-mummified Verosika Mayday was standing in its aperture.
"How did...?" Tiff began.
"Desperate people have sharper ears than ours," Loona said flatly. "Yes, we can go back to hell. Get your people."
"Thank Asmodeus for that," Mayday said, her usual haughtiness utterly absent and her voice honestly shaking. But considering the sheer state of her – her human disguise was cracking under the yet-unspecified damage that she'd taken. Every now and then, for just an eyeblink, you could see her horns when she moved. "Get my people out of here. I'm never coming to this fucking part of the world EVER FUCKING AGAIN. C'mon, sluts!"
A snap of her fingers, which briefly caused her entire glamour to shut down, before sparking back into place. The others of her crew quickly crowded the doorway, all looking afraid and confused. With a bemused shake, she pulled the book from its place, floating near her tail, and flipped the thing open. It was such a pain in the ass that the spell erased itself from your mind every time you used it. It meant that you always had to re-read it, couldn't memorize it, couldn't meaningfully practice it, and were dependent upon the book. Probably a piece of magic Blitz's fuck-buddy put on to keep them all dependant, now that she thought about it. Then, she smeared the indigo light and created a portal that lead to the hallway outside of I.M.P.'s office.
Mayday gave a begrudging look of thanks before she limped into hell, her cadre of honey-pots and stunt-cocks following after her. The looks they gave were less begrudging and more honest about being glad to not be stuck surrounded by humans that they weren't engaged in coitus with.
When Loona turned around, the bald human was watching the last of them depart the plane with an extremely flat expression. Loona's heart fell into her stomach. "I can explain," she began.
"Sinead owes me fifty pounds," the human said, mouth twitched up in a smirk. "I told her there's no reason a woman like that'd come to Derry otherwise."
"You... know?"
"That hell-beasts walk the world of men? Of course. I call them Englishmen," the doctor said. "Now since you've emptied some beds, take your maybe-werewolf and leave me to my winnings."
"Thank you," Tiffany said, picking up Tex in a bridal carry that only made sense because her glamour might have subtracted several feet of height and at least an entire Tex of body mass, but she still looked like a singularly massive human woman. She started toward the portal, but Loona had a notion.
"You're a doctor, right. You can cure diseases?"
"From time to time," the doctor said, one-finger texting on his phone with an 'I hate any technology developed in the current century' look on his face.
"I've got a disease, and I'd like not to have it anymore," she said, flinching, and feeling lamer and lamer with every word.
"You'll have to be a lot more fookin' clear on what it is," the old man shot a humorless look at her.
"It's a blood disease," she said.
"HIV, Leukemia, Sickle Cell, Haemophilia, Aplastic Anemia, or Lupus?" he said, then he paused. "I'm fookin' exhausted. Lupus is autoimmune."
"Syphilis," she provided.
"Red or brown rashes that don't itch?" he asked.
"What?"
"No rashes, fever or, yup no hair loss, probably latent. How are you paying? We're not exactly part of the NHS," he said.
"Umm," she said.
"I'll pay anything she asks," Tiff said from the other side of the portal. She then pulled a finger sized strip of solid gold and threw it into the sick room. The doctor picked it up, blinked at it, then shrugged. He pocketed the thing, moved to a nearby cupboard, and started to dig through it. He pulled up two bottles and tossed one at her.
"Two in the morning, two in the evening, until the bottle's empty. If you don't finish the bottle, it won't work. When that's empty," he held up the smaller bottle. "One of these with each meal until it runs out. You should be cleared up completely in about two months."
"That's... that's it?" Loona asked, incredulous.
"It's not brain surgery. It's just a piece of Syph," he said. "Now I need to talk to a fence to see how I can spend two ounces of solid fookin' gold."
The change had been stark. From the moment they left the crone's ritual house, the eyes that had watched them with concern, now stared with spite and disgust. Just like the saying went, bad-news got to the bottom of the Pit before good-news had its shoes on. Still, they weren't being aggressive. Not yet, at least. Millie was staying incredibly close to his side. As much as they'd disarmed her after mobbing them outside the van, Millie had nevertheless gotten her hands on a fountain pen. With such small beginnings, she could massacre an army. "I think we should make this a quick as possible," Moxie said.
"I'll spend as much time with my m... my big sister as I fuckin' well please, thank you," Blitz said, and not as acerbically as Moxie would have expected.
"What are we gonna do about the magic stuff, now?" Millie asked quietly, as they walked in Blitz's wake.
"We'll have to go back to our original plan. Sneak in to the Crystal Grotto and try to steal something. This place was never going to give us what we needed."
"They probably didn't know what we needed to, anyway," Millie tried to soothe him, but at the moment, Moxie didn't accept it.
"Why didn't you tell me you were a Cruac? Why didn't you tell us that Clan Cruac still existed?" Moxie demanded of his boss.
"Huh? Oh that? Didn't think it mattered," Blitz said. His face twisted into a deeply scornful grimace. "They wanted me to just do my bit fuckin' my cousins and never achieve anything in life, 'cause I was born a man and not a woman."
"Ain't it usually the other way around?" Millie asked.
"In Clan Cruac, all of the leadership was female," Moxie noted, dredging up that little tidbit.
"Yeah, they don't teach men how to do that magical bullshit unless you're that once-in-a-generation wonderchild. The rest of 'em are just kept around as dicks-on-legs to fuck some real wizards into the girls of the Clan. Fuck me; if M– Tilla hadn't had fuckin' pity on me, I wouldn't'a even learned how to fuckin' read."
"And why is Clan Cruac still here? They were wiped out to the last!" Moxie pressed.
"Maybe in Pride, Mox. Not everybody went out there, as I hear it," Blitz said. So there had been a schism, and the ones who made their power-play to grasp control of Pride ended up wiped out by the Radio Demon. And that meant that every secret that the Cruac of Pride was here, tantalizingly out of reach now that Blitz had gotten them banished. But even in the moment, Moxie couldn't blame Blitz for saying what he'd said. If half of the things – no, if even a fifth of them! – said about Clan Cruac were true, Moxie would have run just as hard, just as fast.
This increasingly left one, desperate, suicidal course for the knowledge they needed. And Moxie didn't even want to put words to it inside his own mind, because to do so, would be to invite an insanity that would be with him for the rest of his days.
Blitz raised a fist to pound at a door to a building that had the look of a barracks to it. When the door opened, a teenaged girl with unusually long horns was on the other side of it. She rebounded back, as she obviously hadn't expected to find somebody on the other side of the door and thus it knocked her in the mouth. Her shoulder had a laundry-bag dangling from it and another pair of them fell of her back as she recoiled from taking a door to the face. She took a look at the three of them.
"What want you here?" she asked while rubbing her brow, her creole accent incredibly thick.
"Who the fuck are you?" Blitz demanded. He then shook his head. "I don't have time for..."
"I could ask you such," the girl snapped over him. "Move or get walked over."
"Don't let me stand in your way, kiddo," Blitz stepped aside and let the girl start picking up the things she dropped when Blitz opened his door into her. He then turned to Moxie, and there was a strange look on his face. Something Moxie had never seen before. Bone deep seriousness. It was so out of character that anything Moxie could have come to say died in his throat. "Now listen up, fuckos, my family's the kinda fucked up that will twist your head. My older sister ain't got the same Mom as me, 'cause she was a fuckin' loonie and fucked off to squirt out wizards. And Barbie and me, our mom is... well..."
"Is she... dead?" Millie asked.
"That would be simpler," Blitz muttered, looking distant, haunted. "She's um... my... ah... Sister."
"Your what?" Moxie asked. Was he saying...?
"Morgan, don't you dare step out of that door!" a woman's voice cut through the spartan hallways, its creole much lighter in comparison. That got the girl's lips to tense and her look to get even more stubborn. "I swear on the Black Tar that you will regret it!"
"I will regret nothing!" she shouted back.
"Morgan, if you go out, I swear on your father's grave..." the voice said.
"Tilla? 'S'that you in there?" Blitz said, shoving 'Morgan' to the side and taking a step into the building. His eyes welled slightly, as though he were on the verge of tears.
Emerging from one of the side rooms, having to stoop low to get through the door, was the tallest imp that Moxie had ever seen. At five feet tall, she was probably taller than some humans. She stared at Blitz, her mouth slightly agape. "Balor?"
"Blitz, Blitz, Blitz, it's fuckin' Blitz now. It's been Blitz for almost thir...twenty fuckin' years!" he snapped. Yup, he was weeping. "If you read any of the post-cards I'd sent you, you'd know that!"
"I thought you were dead!" Tilla said, rushing up and hugging her smaller sibling... slash child? This was weird. He had to embrace wide, due to a bump in her belly. "Gramma-ma said that you got swallowed up whole by Asmodeus, like that boy from Bohta you liked... what was his name? Fizz?"
"If you gave Gramma-ma an enema she'd be buried in a limp condom," Blitz countered, managing to keep his voice steady and wiping his eyes quickly. "What have you been doing all this time? You were right there with me an' Barbie in the beginning. How did they get you back here? After you... well... died... I just," he paused, then puffed out a breath. "Are they keeping you here? What bullshit are they using to chain you to this shithole?"
"Well... I..." Tilla said with a guarded expression.
"The fuck is this?" 'Morgan' said from the door.
"You've met my daughter, Morgan," Tilla said, gesturing to the teenager who in retrospect looked suspiciously like...
"Daughter? No fuckin' way. There's no way you've been back here for..."
"Around seventeen years?" Tilla prompted with a clear 'Mom is disappointed' face. Blitz obviously did the math in his head again, and then turned to Tilla, and got a deeply sad look on his own mug. Morgan, though, barked a laugh.
"Ah. So this is Blitz, is it?" Morgan said. "Does this make me your niece or your half-sister?"
"This is... nice?" Millie asked, looking deeply uncomfortable and holding Moxie's arm.
Tilla looked to them, then to her rebellious daughter, then to the room in the back. "I'm going to make dinner. Come inside. Especially you, Morgan. If nothing else, you can greet your... relative before you break your mother's heart."
"You strike me now, in the seat of my power? You upstart princeling? Pfeh! You will learn what they say in Lust, boy; Beware the Wyrds of the Imps."
-The Arch Crone Cruac, to the Radio Demon