Sam felt old.
He was sitting in a lawn chair, glaring at young people, with a condensation-coated can in his hand. He knew that if he actually said 'get the heck off my lawn' then his hair would turn grey and he'd get an instantaneous case of lumbago. But for all he was embracing his late middle age, he was also dead, and his lounging had a purpose. Charlie wasn't in. So he was on duty. And thus, he kept swinging his glare between the thug on the street corner making his position known, and the window of the building a street over who'd set up there thinking they were covert.
In a way, what he'd said to Wendy still wasn't a lie, in that it wasn't magic that gave him something approaching telepathy. It was pure Elemental bullshit. By watching the goon with the nail-riddled baseball bat, he could look into the man's being and see the worry, the concern he had for the other good up in the room. This guy was afraid. Of Sam, even. And when Sam delved into why, the only answer he got was, 'because that Elemental over there is a fucking lunatic'.
The limo turning the corner and starting toward the hotel told Sam that his vigil was almost up. Charlie had her own business to take care of, and couldn't be at the hotel 24/7. And she shouldn't have to. For once, Sam knew that what was happening now, to this place, was no fault of his. Valentino didn't give a rat's dick that a Sinner had escaped Pride. He just wanted to take – and break – Angel Dust. And despite Angel being a selfish perverted glutton, there was still some good in him. He would claim until he passed out from hypoxia that he was a ruthless killer... but Angel Dust liked these people. And he hated seeing them in pain.
Sometimes, that tiniest seed was all one needed to grow a mighty tree. By Husk's admission, most held a pitiful opinion of Angel Dust's chances of redemption, but Sam knew better. Angel might be drinking a fair amount, but he'd actually gone all the way through withdrawals for heroin and came out the other side, and in the months he'd been in this hotel phased down his methamphetamine use to a trickle, and cut the hallucinogens entirely. Small steps in the great scheme of things, but that was apparently a seismic shift in his attitude toward the narcotics of his life.
And he did it without so much as an uttered complaint.
As flippant as he was toward the program that Charlie had him on, despite his grousing and his occasional outbursts and tantrums... it was working.
And that came down to the fact that Angel Dust had decided at some point that any escape from Valentino would be worth the price of admission, no matter how high.
"Did anything happen?" Charlie asked immediately upon leaving her dubiously living vehicle.
"Just got stared at for a while," Sam said. He rose and folded the chair with a flick of his wrist, finishing his can of rootbeer and idly biffing it into a nearby bin. "So what was this about?" he asked. Despite knowing.
"You know what it was about," Charlie said, gloomily. The Dealmaker's Conference had come to Pride, and she had spent the entire afternoon trying to find Vaggie's Potential, that had been stripped from her by a Dealmaker not long after her arrival in Hell. It was still out there, being used as currency, depriving the one eyed Sinner of what Hell owed her as price of admission. The fact was, compared to the others in the hotel, in a brawl of strength for strength, even Wendy could beat Vaggie, because Wendy, despite forty years of torment, still had all of her own strength.
"And from the look on your face, it was no good," Sam said. "I'm sorry."
"It's still out there," she said. "Vaggie deserves to be as safe as you are, to be strong, able to protect herself. I owe it to her."
"If the Dealmaker's Conference doesn't have it, then it's in somebody's hoard," Sam said. She turned a look at him. "Say the word and I'll start dropping some eaves."
"First of all, aw, that's so thoughtful. Second, you'd do that for me? Third, don't do it that would be suicide!" she said.
"As for the first and the second, of course. As for the third, they wouldn't even know," he said.
"They'd know," Charlie said as they crossed the lobby and paused in front of Husk, tending bar. Wendy and Angel Dust were there, talking about big band music from the sound of it, while Niffty drifted around murdering every dust-bunny she could locate. "Dealmakers deal with Naked Law. Which means they have the same kind of trickster voodoo stuff that you do."
"Would you or would you not pay any price to have your lover made whole?" Sam asked. She paused, stared at him with those bright, expressive eyes.
"No. I wouldn't," she said quietly. "Some prices... they're unacceptably high. I won't pay Vaggie's freedom in exchange for her power. And I won't ask you that you pay on my behalf, either."
And again, Sam was reminded why Apoc called her The Redeemer Princess. In all of hell, she would make that statement and mean it. "One day, somebody's going to take advantage of your faith, Charlie. It's going to be bad when they do."
"It's never wrong to help people, Sam," Charlie said.
And if she was anywhere but Hell, she'd be right in saying it. Here, though? Here it was somewhat more complicated. He sighed, hung his head, and walked past her. The lift clattered open and he stepped into it, hitting the button to send it upward.
He had gotten about two floors upward when the hatch to the cables opened, and a cyclops dropped in. Sam turned to her, fists clenched and preparing to call his flame, but when she swiped her hair away from her large, red eye, and she didn't immediately attack, he reconsidered. "You're a bitch and a half to get alone, you know that?" the Sinner said.
"People tend to try to murder me when I'm alone," Sam said. "What are you doing here?"
"Having a long overdue talk," Cherry Bomb said.
Chapter 20
What Can Change The Nature Of A Man
The elevator dinged and opened the gates, and Sam motioned her to go ahead of him. He didn't trust this timing, her showing up during what amounted to a very quiet siege of the Happy Hotel. She backed out, trusting him exactly as much as he trusted her. While she superficially resembled Wendy in so many ways, in terms of personality she was night to Wendy's day. "Alright. Speak your piece," Sam said, not heading for his room.
"Not going to your room?" she asked.
"Why should I?" Sam asked.
"So people won't overhear us."
"The only people on this floor are myself, Wendy, and depending on his inclination Alastor," Sam said. "This is as private as the hotel gets, unless you're willing to hide in Angel Dust's closet."
"Why Angie's?"
"Alastor finds sex distasteful," Sam said. In life he'd been perplexed by the 'lunatic fleshy urges' of the people around him that distracted them from the higher things in life, such as the arcane mysteries, radio theory, or being a serial killer.
"I'm not looping Angie into this until I have something more hopeful than a bucket-full of 'maybe's. But he spoke about you in pretty glowing terms, about the magic that you can do. So I have to ask; getting out of Pride. How do you do it?"
Sam was silent for a moment, forcing a glance down and to the side, making it seem like he was racking his brain when he was instead stifling another unpleasant jolt of shock. How goddamned many people knew his secret these days? But when he looked up again, he risked Looking Within. And he could see not condemnation and accusation, but tightly, iron-fist-clenched fear, there. He then took a moment to think about her words. Getting out of Pride. How do you do it. Not 'how do you do it'. How do you do it.
"For a Sinner, it's supposed to be impossible. And I've never learned any magic that's told me otherwise," he said. "The Pride Wall is part of Lucifer's living will, more than any other Ring Division in all of Hell. Even if I used True Teleportation to take a Sinner to Greed, we'd burst into flames the instant we emerged as though we'd just walked into the Pride Wall itself. Skipping, same problem. Translocating? Same problem. It's not that Sinners are black-listed at the Pride Wall, it's that Sinners are white-listed in Pride and auto-killed everywhere else."
"Somebody got out," she said. "Somebody from Pride. A Sinner, like one of us."
"Rumors are rumors," Sam shook his head. "Rumor says that Octavia Goetia isn't Stolas's daughter, that doesn't make it true. It just makes it an absurd rumor, because look at the two of them."
"I'm not talking about rumor. I'm talking about history," she said. She then pulled out a scratched daguerreotype photograph from somewhere in her seminally punky outfit. It showed in greyscale an amazon of a woman with vein-riddled skin that definitely wasn't white, with four wide and twisting horns, wearing a dress that had a gunbelt built into it, holding a pair of loaded flintlock pistols one one side, and an obviously oversized saber hanging opposite them. And at her side was the Goat of the Fucking Apocalypse. "Do you recognize this woman?"
"Never seen her before," he said.
"Her name was Celeste Wormwood. Landed in Hell back in 1820 or so. Notice the background," Cherry pointed at the photograph. And Sam saw the Wrath Sun leaking magma into a mountain in the distance.
"This was taken in Wrath," Sam said. Impossible. Apoc had said...
"This was taken in... wait how the fuck did you know that?" she said, almost over him.
"The Wrath Suns are the most famous feature of that Ring. Everybody talks about them; they make it possible to grow crops year round, from the heat and 24/7 daylight," Sam said. "I didn't pick up Magic by being an idiot."
"Yeah, I guess not," she said. "If this bitch could take this picture in Wrath, it means the most obvious fucking thing in Hell. She had a way to get out. And I'm willing to bet my left tit that she told the Goat of the Apocalypse what it was."
"And why would the Goat of the Apocalypse tell me? And why wouldn't she tell me herself?" he covered the obvious base. That Apoc had lied about Celeste's fate was just fucking typical of him at this point.
"She disappeared around 1830, as quickly as she appeared. Maybe she got Purged. Maybe something else happened. Fact is, she's not here, but the Goat is," Cherry said. "And since you work for him, maybe you can figure something out."
"He wouldn't..."
"You don't seem to grasp what I'm willing to pay for this," Cherry said, grabbing him by the shoulders. "Angie is the best friend I've ever had, in life or in death. And Valentino broke him. I need him to be safe."
"It's not a matter of price," Sam said. "I'm not sure what you're asking is even possible, short of a personal boon from Lucifer himself. I will ask, of course I will. Despite his best efforts to the contrary, I consider Angel Dust a friend, too."
She didn't seem mollified by that. Instead, she snarled and said, "Fuck. FUCK!" she turned and threw a flash-bang down the hallway. Sam sighed and shoved his thumbs into his ears for the thing to go off. It still felt like getting kicked in the chest.
"What the fuck was that?" Wendy stuck her head out of her door. She then spotted Cherry Bomb and grumbled. "You know what? Not my problem."
"Yeah you'd better run," Cherry muttered with a middle finger thrust out as the door swung shut. She glared at that door for a moment, then turned back to Sam. "If there's a way out of Pride, I'm going to find it. I don't care if it takes every fucking penny I have, every favor I've ever earned. I'm going to get him to safety."
"And killing Valentino isn't an option?" Sam asked. "He's just an Overlord, it's not like he has the protections the Ars Goetia have."
"He might as well have them. He's got Vox and Velvet watching his back. Those three are worth one Ars Goetia," she said.
Sam almost said something but quieted himself and gave a moment to think. There was only one Overlord in Hell who could fight one of the Fallen Angels on equal footing, and that was the Radio Demon. But getting Alastor into this fight, despite Sam thinking at it from myriad angles, just seemed outside the realm of possibility. He had no skin in this game, and he would reap just as much enjoyment watching somebody else doing it as he would doing it himself, so there was no leverage that Sam could use against him. As if leverage would even work; Alastor was still the fucking Radio Demon. The only people who could force him to do what they wanted to were literal archangels.
It felt hopeless.
And that set a light in his guts that he couldn't ignore. If it felt hopeless for Sam, who was still nominally on the outside of this fight, how much worse must it feel for Angel?
And then Sam had a strange sensation. A memory bubbling to the surface, of when he was alive. It was so strange, that it would come up like this, so out of context, so out of place. But he relived it all the same, sitting in Alle's dining room, surrounded by a bunch of kids. The youngest was about twelve, the oldest almost twenty. And all of them were homeless to one degree or another. They would ask questions to the 'adult' in the room, for his advice on things. Teenager things, usually. School. First romantic partners. But then one asked him if there was any way that he could stop being gay.
"Whatever you believe can change the nature of a man, can," Sam muttered. He'd told the boy that the opinions of homophobes were worth less than garbage, and that the only person he should be true to was himself. Why did he remember this now?
"What was that?" Cherry asked.
"Sorry. Got lost in the reeds for a second there," Sam said. That was weird. "I get that you're looking for Angel Dust's best interests. In a way, that makes you a perfect fit for this building, actually."
"Oh spare me," she wafted the notion away, as the elevator gave a ding.
"The fact is, getting out of Pride might not be possible at all. But the upshot of that is that it makes killing Valentino the infinitely more likely possibility," he said.
"That's a fucking funny way of looking at things," Cherry said.
"May be that it is," Sam said. "Overlord warfare is a daily fact of life in Pentagram City, and in Pride in general. If you have any allies, it might make things a lot more possible," Sam said.
"I'm a solo act," she said.
"And you're now seeing the downside of that," Sam said. Cherry Bomb glared at him for a moment, then growled and nodded her affirmation. "But unless we have an army, we can't..."
And then, another memory.
Of himself, holding a harpoon away from his guts with an arm made of living white flame.
Again, he blinked it away. Alright, once is circumstance. Twice is coincidence. If it happened a third time, then something fucky was going on. But even then, he found himself staring at his hand. He then looked to Cherry Bomb, then to his hand.
"Hey, Sugar Tits, I thought I heard a flashbang going off up here. Yo Sam... what's he doin'?" Angel Dust said in the background, emerging from the elevator.
"I'm not sure," Cherry said. Sam, though, ignored both of them and moved to his room. He opened the door, and moved into the kitchenette that was tucked into a nook of the room. The other two, sharing a look of concern, followed after him. Sam just... knew. He wasn't even sure how to elucidate what he knew. But he knew, and he needed to prove it. Prove it to himself.
He moved to the knife block, and pulled the big cleaver from its place. Then, not giving himself time to second-guess himself, he laid his forearm on the countertop. Angel let out a clipped yell of shock as Sam swung the cleaver with a full armed chop down onto the bones of his arm, just after the elbow. The pain was stunning, but ebbed almost instantly, the red blood pulsing out only once.
Because after that, Sam felt the fury that made its home in his guts swell, billow, bellow, and blast, roaring out of his body and in less than a second replacing the meat that he had cut away with a clawed hand made of solid, living white flame. One that he flexed and tensed, feeling it in a strange, fleshless way. There were no nerves to send sensations back to him, but he felt nonetheless.
"What the fuck, buddy, what did you just do to yerself?" Angel asked, taking a few furtive steps forward. Sam, though, clenched a fist of white flame and looked at him. This hand was his. It was more truly his hand than the chunk of meat that was sitting on the counter-top. It felt more truly him than he had ever felt in his flesh while he was alive, let alone dead.
"This is my hand," Sam said. He motioned toward the dismembered limb. "That isn't."
"I think your magic guy's just lost his fucking mind, Angie," Cherry said at a stage whisper.
This power was inside of him. It was in his guts. He could feel it there, a flame that never went out. And its extremity was a flame both white and hot.
"If I lose all of my flesh, this will still be here," Sam said.
"Sam, you're startin' to scare me buddy," Angel Dust took another step toward him, reaching out with one of his hands and gently placing it on Sam's other shoulder.
Sam then looked up. Instinct hadn't taken the wheel, per se, but it was sitting in the passenger seat reading the GPS. If this flame was in him, if he could see inside other people, see the fires which drove them... no. Impossible. And yet, he still had to know if it was true. "B̵̨͈̀̍e̶̡͘ ̶̹̌n̵̛͇͘ǫ̷̃̃͜t̶̤͘ ̸͈͚̽̏a̷̼̞͌̒ḟ̶̫̫̀r̷͍͘a̶̼̪̒̂i̴̟͈̾̈́d̸̹̄ͅ" Sam's voice rattled the walls. And then, he Looked Within into the heart of that which was Angel Dust.
He was so very afraid.
In his mortal life, he'd been fearless. A murderer and a hedonist without peer, who softened the edge of scarlet in his life with liquor and drugs. A homosexual who was pushed to further and further extremes of conformity until he could take it no longer. The man Angel Dust had been left a woman at the altar. The man who Angel Dust had been became more violent, trying to deny to himself his nature. Then, when he couldn't, trying to bury it under intoxicants.
By the time he accepted who he was, he was already on his path to overdose and death. And in Hell, he took that pain, and turned it into power. Power he used to raise a criminal empire in his wake. Power which he fuelled with shame and guilt, and anger. And even as he came to make that power his own, there was the darkness that snuffed out that power's light. The moth who swallowed the spider.
Sam didn't pay close attention to the specific depravities that Valentino had inflicted upon Angel Dust, because the sheer volume of them would have rendered them as static. But over months, then years, Valentino methodically pick-axed all of the confidence and strength that Angel Dust had ever in his existence had, and left him as a pile of loose scree on the street. Just because he could. Just because it pleased Valentino to have a dangerous mafioso as a timid pet.
Sam touched that fear, that terror, that unthinking flight from mind and sanity that manifested with every mention of Valentino's name in Angel Dust's presence. He touched it and felt the shape of it, the heat of it, the volume of it. The unknown stuff of souls had dimensions, obviously. Sam could feel them. There was Weight to Angel Dust's pain, his fear. It had been turned into a fundamental cornerstone of his entire personality, wedged into place by a cruel boot and stomped flat against the ground. But what if it wasn't? What if the stone had other attributes? Other dimensions?
The enormity of Angel Dust's fear of Valentino blinded him to all options regarding him except for naked flight. So what if that fear became something less flight, and became more fight?
Sam was now an autopilot, his mind's eye seeing the heart of Angel Dust and his mind's hands touching the edges of it. He felt his mouth moving, words come out of it, but he didn't know what he said. He felt words hit his ears, but he didn't hear them. He simply began.
With actions more notion than motion, he bent that fear. He turned it. He inverted it, everted it inside out. He twisted and unfurled it. And then he saw what he was looking for, without even realizing it. Anger. Pure, bilious spite. Outrage. Defiance.
Like he'd just gotten a cattle-prod to the dick, Sam jolted back, only realizing what he'd done in the moment it was too late to undo it. His eyes snapped back into focus, and he found himself bolting back from where he had been holding Angel Dust's face close to his own, almost close enough for a kiss. When he did, he saw that his white flame hand was now burning cold, so cold that waves of mist drifted down from it with each heartbeat.
"What the fuck did you just do, magic man?" Cherry demanded, holding a handgun probably taken from one of Angel Dust's pockets aimed at Sam's head.
"I'm fine, Cherry, don't you worry about a thing," Angel said. "He just got a little grabby. Not that I can blame him; I'm gorgeous!"
"Didn't you hear what he asked you?" Cherry asked.
"He asked me sumthin'?" Angel asked, his asymmetrical eyes cocked in amusement. Cherry just gaped at him. Then she turned to Sam, her aim not wavering.
"What the fuck exactly is the Gift of Rage?" she demanded, taking a stride forward, gun still leading.
"That won't hurt me, you realize," Sam said offhanded.
"The Gift of Rage, fuckhead!" she manually pulled the hammer back. Okay, not going to piss of the girl with a literal hair-trigger.
"It's... just something my mother told me about when I was a kid," he said. So that was what his mouth said? Something about the Gift of Rage? "When I was young, I–"
"Short version or you catch some lead!" Cherry said.
"The Gift of Rage is defiance against the unjust," Sam said. "It is not to deny your anger, because your anger has a cause and that cause is injustice. Instead, put that anger into tearing down evil and building something better in its place."
"Cherry, baby, calm down. Sam didn't do a thing to me. I'm fine," Angel said, gently pushing her – well, his – gun down until it was pointed at the floor. Then with a deft move, he disarmed her of it.
Sam blinked, staring at his Angel Dust, then to his hand. By clenching his abs and focusing his will on his arm, he watched as the flesh regrew at an incredible rate, meat replacing flame at a centimeter a second. When his fingertips finally tensed and flexed, he finally looked up at the people he had possibly fucked with in a manner that he couldn't unfuck. Then he grabbed his spare arm from the countertop. "Listen, can we talk about this later? I'm having something of a mental breakdown, and I don't think I can afford to have it in front of you," Sam said.
"Don't gimme that. If you got problems, spill 'em and I'll sort 'em for ya! I owe ya that much at least," Angel Dust said.
Sam stared at him, particularly at the corners of his mouth. Then he said a single word. "Valentino."
If Angel Dust was terrified, as Sam knew he should be, from his times Looking Within, the corner of his mouth would pull down into a grimace, just for an instant. Just the slightest twitch of fear on his face before his bravado and machismo stuffed it down again. But if he wasn't, then the lip would turn up, into the quickly quashed beginnings of a sneer. A sign not of terror, but of primal, visceral hate.
And Angel Dust's lips did jump for that moment into a sneer.
"The fuck you bringin' him up for?" Angel Dust asked.
"I have to go," Sam said, and pushed past them. Angel Dust grabbed him by his trailing arm before he could. "Let go."
"Not until I know you're not gonna do somethin' stupid. And I know all about stupid," Angel promised. Sam just stared at him. And he willed his heat to flare from his guts. Not out and down into Angel Dust's arm, but into the air around him.
There was a pulse of blistering heat, one that both Angel Dust and Cherry Bomb flinched back from, giving Sam the time to turn and exit his room, carrying his dismembered limb with him as he did. The elevator was already there, so when he got in, and pushed the button to the ground floor, the thing just began rattling away. Angel Dust came into the hall after him, shouted his name. He didn't have the luxury of listening right now. Good god. What had he done?
The descent felt eternal, with confusion and shame and fear roiling in Sam's mind the whole way down. When the lift finally stopped and opened, the lobby was empty but for Husk, who drank sullenly at the bar. Sam moved without a word to Vaggie's office, and pulled the slightly cracked door fully closed. Then, he turned.
"Alastor?" Sam asked of the shadows. When they didn't answer, he clenched his jaw and roared. "ALASTOR! WHATEVER SHADOW YOU'RE HIDING IN, SHOW YOURSELF!"
"Swimming pool," Husk said flatly. Sam turned his glare to him. Husk just shrugged. "Went in there a little while ago. Seemed distracted."
Sam gave the cat-bird a nod, then stormed through the hotel, taking the critical left before emerging into the conservatory and instead entering the indoor pool. While it was no longer a swamp in all but name, due to Sam's efforts, it still played host to a large black caiman who floated langorously in the still non-functional hot-tub. Sam may have liked the notion of a jacuzzi, but not enough to fight an alligator for it.
Standing at the side of the pool was the Radio Demon, but at the same time, he seemed indistinct. Similar to the 'smear' he used when fighting the Exorcist, he seemed intangible, spread too thin to block all of the light shining through him from the lights overhead and the dappling of the pool. Sam rounded the corner, to face him. His eyes were empty, not even radio-dials in their sockets, but instead gateways into a wailing, hungering nothing, and he stood, as though rapt, with a broad grin on his face. A few seconds after Sam took his place in front of Alastor, the Radio Demon adjusted his monocle, and his eyes unfolded out of the nothingness and returned to his head. With an audible pop, his body slammed together, becoming crisp and distinct.
"Ah! There you are! I thought I heard somebody shout my name," Alastor said pleasantly.
"What were you doing?" Sam found himself asking, his confusion beating his alarm for a moment.
"Looking down the paths we didn't walk," Alastor said, with a wistful look on his face. "How much do you know about reality, Samuel?"
"I'm not here to talk teleology," Sam cut him off, holding up his arm as he did. Well, holding up the dismembered arm.
Alastor looked delighted. "Aha! You've finally started to do some more experiments on yourself! Kudos, Samuel, kudos!"
"My Regeneration isn't this good," Sam said.
"And yet you managed to pop your hand back on before your limb even stopped dripping. Which implies that you've been doing some other experimentation beyond the petty physicalities of it. If you had simply done that, I doubt that you, in your current fit of pique, would have brought it to my attention. Perhaps our darling in her office, but not to me. So you've done something else. Something more intangible, something that you can't physically show me," Alastor loomed over Sam, his grin losing some of of its joviality and gaining a cruel edge. "You did something you're afraid of."
"What am I?" Sam asked.
"It even got you to throw away your shackles of banality! What a day, what a day," Alastor said. "You finally accept that you are not run-of-the-mill. That you likely never were. Not even when you were alive were you just some dull and unimportant cog in a machine beyond comprehension. No, you were never a cog. You were always the key. Here I was thinking that you were just a meat-sack with a Power From Outside crammed into it that Lucifer was going to have to get around to killing. How foolish I was! Knowing what I do now, I realize that I've seen your kind before, when I was still alive, but I never saw one here."
"What do you mean?" Sam asked, as he chucked his arm into the hot-tub. The caiman snapped it up and erased the physical evidence of Sam's transgression in a heartbeat.
"Don't think I'm dodging the question when I ask you this, but how much do you know about the Angels, Samuel?"
"Created by god, sung into being," Sam said.
"And how are they made nowadays?" Alastor asked.
"I'm presuming they're not. God's AWOL," Sam said.
"That's where you're wrong, my boy!" Alastor said. "I had a word with Purson yesterday, and it seems that the Angels are trying to play a fast one on Hell. And they're using humans to incubate angels; have been for some time, in fact! All it would take is a fragment of an Angel in a mortal shell, and given enough time, they would begin manifesting that angel's Gift. Raguel's Gift of Justice, Gabriel's Gift of Strength, Michael's Gift of Glory, Israfil and Israfil's Gift of Music. And if I were to take a guess, just a wild stab in the dark as to your gift, Samuel..."
"The Gift of Rage?" Sam asked.
"Don't be ludicrous. There's no such thing as the Gift of Rage," he said chidingly. "No no no no; if I were to put my chips on the table, I'd say yours was the Gift of Glory. Hence why you claimed that Michael was so ardent to the notion of ripping your heart out; you had a piece of him in you."
"So what? I was supposed to be an angel?" Sam asked. "Didn't exactly show much angelic glory in my life..."
"Did you though?" Alastor tilted his head to one side. "The shackles of perceived banality also served as blinders for your entire mortal life. You saw yourself as ordinary, because the world that had entrapped you refused to let you blaze as brightly as you'd ought. How many people gravitated to you, Samuel, when you were alive? How many people valued you, depended on you?"
Sam took a step back. He couldn't be right. But as he combed his own memories, yes, he always was at the heart of groups. But he didn't start those groups. He just joined the things that other people had the initiative to start, and in his wake those things grew bigger. He was just... And even then, he could see the shackles that Alastor described. The notion of 'just doing' instead of admitting that, in that shithole city, in the places he'd drifted, doing what he did at all was actually a big deal.
"Alright, fine. So I had a chunk of an Angel in me. I can't be the first one to fail. Michael wasn't saying 'this cannot be, this has never happened before', he was just tired and disappointed," Sam said.
"There are likely other failed angels throughout Hell's recent history. You're not the first, true enough. But what you have, that they didn't have, or at least that all in my time didn't have... was this," he said, jamming his finger hard into Sam's navel.
And when he did, there was a pulse of heat that blasted a layer of steam off of the pool next to them, and caused the caiman to grumble discontentedly. "You see, Samuel, when the Taxiarch ripped your heart out and reclaimed his Gift, he never thought for a moment to check for a second one."
Sam staggered back, clutching his now roiling guts. His shirt smoked, as though it were on the edge of burning. But how in the hell could he have two gifts? Unless.
Mom.
"Are you saying?" Sam asked.
"That you inherited a spark of one Gift, and the flame of another? And that with the flame gone, the spark remains?" Alastor prompted. He grinned wide, leaning forward until his face was on a level with Sam's own. "You, Samuel, bearer of the Gift of Glory... are the son of a woman who bore a Gift all her own."
"Mom had a Gift?" he asked. And the question was the answer. Of course she did. Rachel Scailes had been somebody truly special, someone who could have changed things, had she not met a premature and ignominious end.
"Congratulations, Samuel; without even realizing it, you've managed to do what even Lucifer Himself could not. You've managed to smuggle the Gift of Angels down into the pits of Hell," Alastor said, and then broke out into uproarious laughter. And Sam could do nothing but stare, feeling even more doomed now than he felt when he was nailed to that alley-way wall.
Delilah was fucked.
She hadn't slept in two days, and the coffee as starting to wear off. But still, she had to drive. Because if she stopped long enough to sleep, they were going to find her. It was fitting, after all. She had gunned down the Chief of the HRP in his own office, killed another in her flight, and no doubt sent at least four others to the hospital. But it was only with the clarity of hindsight that she saw that, honestly, that probably was one of the worse decisions she could have made in that moment. She could have just quit. She would have been able to walk away, and the Chief would have forgotten about her in a month. But no. She had to get angry, and do the stupid thing. And now she was wanted dead – not alive, because now she was a cop-killer.
"Myew?" Smudge chirped from the back seat. The cat seemed utterly unperturbed by her murderer of an owner. Then again, the fluffy little beast was exactly as loyal as one missed meal. He yawned, eyes sliding closed in his carrier. A petty part of Delilah wanted to blame this on Smudge. If the cat hadn't gone through that portal... then Delilah would have been killed when Chief Sumter blew up her apartment. So not a great option there. She was tired.
There was a brrrpt sound of a key into the lock on the passenger side, and the door opened. In swung a man. With a reflex more confused terror than planning she pulled her now stolen gun from the doorwell and fired four shots into the man who was now in her passenger seat. He took them in his chest and neck with barely a flinch. He did not bleed, and even the clothes' holes closed in the wake of the bullets.
"Good reflexes," he said evenly. She stared at him, then to the highway, then to her speedometer.
"What the fuck?" she asked.
"It's lucky I got you. If you keep going this direction, you're going to run headlong into a police checkpoint," the stranger said.
"HOW THE FUCK DID YOU GET INTO THIS CAR? I'M GOING NINETY!"
"I jogged," he said.
"You jogged?" she said, still holding her gun on him.
"It was a brisk jog," he said. He stared at her, and as he did, his skin twisted and cascaded, changing color and his features warping, his face transforming into one that looked vaguely similar to her own. "Take the next turn off."
"I shot you!"
"Please," he said, and then he reached up to his mouth and spat out four bullets, not even deformed. "I'm not here to cause you any harm. Quite the opposite in fact. I think you're the kind of person that I could definitely use."
"Explain," she demanded.
"The turn?" he said, pointing to the approaching ramp. She glanced from him to the ramp, then with a growl hit the turn signal. "Thank you. You managed to panic and throw your entire life away. And I'll be frank, I can't give you your life back, now that you've demolished it. Nobody can," he paused, staring into the distance. "Well, actually, there's one person who could, but you wouldn't dare deal with the likes of him," he faced her again. "What I can offer you is a different path than the one that you were heading down. Instead of ignominious death at the hands of former comrades, you work for me, and you get a chance to see the day after tomorrow."
"Who the fuck are you? WHAT are you?" she asked, as she left the highway.
"First possible left," he said. She started signalling. "Names tend to be ephemeral to people like me, but you can call me Hare. As for what I am? I'm a human being, like you. Well, more or less, a human being," he then reached out and touched the broken radio. After a moment, it started to emit music. What? "I represent some interested parties in this world. There used to be more of us but... Well... Now I have to recruit the locals. Which is your lucky day, Delilah Patel."
"And if I say no?" she asked.
"Then I get out of the car and I leave you to the fate that your luck leaves you," Hare said with a nonchalant shrug. She took the turn. "Right two stop-signs from now, then immediate left."
"What do you want with me? Why me? I'm just..." she said.
"Specifically you? You've been to a place I haven't. I believe you call it 'Hell'," Hare said. He cracked an unsettling smile. "As for why recruiting you instead of just harvesting you? Well... I think you would be of great value to my comrades who dwell... let's call it... outside."
What can change the nature of a man?
Ḭ̸̩̣̯͔̑͝ ̴̨̧̨̣͕͕̩̫̣̬̤̼͈̪̙̆͛̓́̅̒c̵̡̢̧̨̧͈̺̝̯̬̞̬̝͆̎̔̑́̓͆̽͋̌̿͜a̷̢̛͖͛̒̌̑̉̾͘͘n̴̗͇̺̙̠̒̒̾.̵̝̹̯͈̉́͗̊́̄̐
-Samuel Scailes