Time was starting to get under Cherri Bomb's skin.
Her usual way of doing things was to blow down the front door, then blast shit apart from the middle of things. And here she was, despite that proven strategy, laying on top of a pile of explosives, under a shaped charge, waiting for an obscure 'signal' to set off the single largest kaboom she'd crafted in her entire afterlife.
If it had been for anybody but Angie, she would have told Sam to pound sand. But it was what it was. This was for Angel Dust's safety. Fuck, man, this was for the good of his soul. She could stomach boredom and anxiety for a couple hours for that.
"He's goin' through the door," Angel's voice came to her phone, which was laying on the giant fuck-off bomb she was luxuriating on. "Fuck me I think this might actually work."
"Any sign of Vox?"
"Not a fuckin' thing," Angel said. "You alright down there? You sound pent up."
"I just want to get this shit moving. Did he tell you what the signal was going to be? 'Cause he was fucking vague with me," she said.
"He said we'd have to be a fuckin' moron not to know it when it happens," Angel said.
"Again, fucking vague," she said.
"Don't call y'self a fuckin' moron. You're betta' than that," Angel said.
"Are you sure you're going to be able to do this? I mean... this place..."
"Oh I've got an afterlife's worth a' nightmares waitin' for me on the otha' side a' them doors. And I'm gonna spend the next couple a' minutes gunning them the fuck down," Angel said.
"Would you two old bitties quit yammering? You're worse than French privates fighting over the radioman!" Husk cut in. The conference call was a first-of-its-kind for Cherri Bomb to be a part of. She'd never needed to talk to more than one person at once, before.
"Any bums up there playin' with landmines?" Angel asked.
"No, they're staying good and far away," Husk said with as pleased a tone as apparently ever came to the Swindler Incarnate's voice. Which was to say you had to specifically listen for it to even know it was there.
"And you're sure you'll be fine doin' this?" Angie asked.
"I'm literally immune to explosions," Cherri Bomb said.
"Yeah, but you're not immune to getting smacked by shit," he pointed out.
"I was an anarchist long enough to learn a few things about shaped charges, Angie. I got this," she said.
"He's coming back out the doors," Husk said. There was a chirping noise, and then Angel Dust's brother joined the call.
"Alright, I delivered 'im. You better be fuckin' sure 'bout this, cause Valentino's gonna be fuckin' livid when he realizes you ain't in that bag, bro," Arackniss said.
"Let him be mad," Angel Dust said. "He'll be dead soon anyways!"
"So did he tell you what the signal was going to b–" Arackniss began.
And they were all cut off when a bass thud filled the floor and walls of the sewers, shook the pavement above them, danced concrete sidewalk blocks out of their footing, tilted street-lights and street signs, and sent a thunderous roar down into the sewer itself.
Cherri Bomb didn't hesitate. She made an educated guess that this was the signal, and hit the detonator.
It happened so fast that only somebody who knew exactly what was going to happen could describe it. First, a shaped charge blasted a roughly Cherri Bomb sized cut of concrete, reinforcement steel, spell-weaved tarmac, and as chance would have it the back end of a van passing over the incident zone, not quite exactly straight up. It was directed so that the chunk of heavy shit would arc out of the way and land somewhere that was about to be ruins anyway.
The next charge that went off, a fraction of a second later, was directly under Cherri Bomb's back. The blast hurled her upward, her decades of explosives experience sending her whistling through he hole she'd cut an instant before without coming within an inch of its sides, rising from the sewers to street level so swiftly that she completed a twenty foot somersault before she even reached her apex.
And then, as she lingered for that moment when momentum fought gravity to a tie with the battleground of her body, every other charge went off, and the streets in every direction she could see buckled and leapt, no longer solid in any measure, but now a chaotic wave of flying stone and concrete and asphalt and crumpling steel and terrified meat, turning first-world infrastructure to a third-world laughingstock in less time than most people could click a stopwatch twice.
She landed with not so much grace as purpose, and she stared into the distance, grenades appearing in her hands. Somewhere on the outskirts of this mire of ruined streets was Vox's limo. She had to find it, and blow it the fuck up.
Chapter 23
Stay Out Of Overlords' Business
Part One
Kicking the door open felt better than sex on MDMA.
He'd been under Valentino's thumb so long, so fucking long... What had been the last gasp, the dying spark of defiance in Angel Dust was now a blazing inferno, one that thundered in his chest harder than his heart, blasted through his veins stronger than a speedball. Today, as no day before, Angel Dust had done something unique. Today, Angel Dust had not had a drop of liquor, hadn't touched a flake of cocaine, he hadn't even lit up a ciggy. Because the power of rage was a drug that he was intending to ride to the highest high he would ever experience in his life, or his death.
He had barely gotten in when he pulled his Tommy from the Seven and Eight. A door nearby cracked as the hexwarding shut down, and the doors burst open. Goons wearing the finery of Velvet's Dolls and bearing shanks of many description came, confusion and alarm on their faces. Angel didn't even give them a chance to realize what they'd just walked into; with a hail of Stygian Lead .45, he put them onto their backs, clawing at wounds that hurt them almost as badly as Valentino had hurt so many.
"Shift ass, bro!" Arackniss shouted, shouldering him aside and launching himself so quickly as to blur into a badly burnt Sinner who somehow survived the nuke going off. Arackniss grabbed the now-one armed and one legged sinner by his horns, and then heaved them apart. The sinner split open like a banana peel, dumping scarlet onto the floor.
"VALENTINO!" Angel screamed from the bottom of his balls. "I'm comin' for you you fuckin' rat bastard!"
Angel stormed from the security annex into the lobby proper. And there he saw Sam. It didn't look anything like the torch-topped Sinner that Angel Dust had gotten to know over the last months. All it was was a being made of living, white flame, glaring at the moth himself, with Velvet standing before him as though she were his bodyguard. For all intents and purposes, she was. Angel raised his Tommy.
"Well, if it ain't Angel Cakes? Got a bit of a rebellious streak to you yet, don't you?" Valentino said.
Angel Dust responded by shooting him.
The bullets impacted Valentino's immaculately crafted, fur-festooned suit, twisting him slightly and utterly failing to penetrate. Then, the click of an empty drum.
"I'm gonna have fun workin' that out of you, Angel Cakes," Valentino said.
"I will never–" Angel Dust began, but the beast of White Flame that stood between them leaned down, and then launched himself at the pair, heedless of Angel Dust's desire to be the one to off this son of a motherless whore.
Velvet once again intercepted Sam, deftly looping a band of something around his arm and neck as she did, and then heaving him to a halt. Sam stopped, glaring at Valentino who had taken a few steps back and thus was now out of the burning reach of his arms. Instead, Sam turned to face Velvet, a blast of red flames seeping out of his side as the wound even with no flesh at all to surround it opened and began to emit a fire. As Velvet started to realize just what she'd done, and that she was holding a bonfire on a leash, that red flame stopped burning, and began to drip something golden onto the floor, still from the wound.
"Boys! I got a new specimen!" Velvet shouted. Sam flexed his shoulders, and then there was a blast that lifted Angel Dust from his feet and threw him into the back wall.
The floor where Sam had been standing had been bleached almost white when he stood there. Now, it glowed orange, the granite blocks partially molten.
"Fuck this noise!" Valentino's voice cut in through Angel Dust's moment of wooziness. The three of them were out of sight behind the elevator pillars, only Sam's harsh white light showcasing his proximity and location. "Release Calamity!"
"Are you outta your fuckin' mind?" Velvet shouted.
"Can you kill that?"
"...Release Calamity!" she echoed.
Then, there was a cracking of the floor, sections of ruined granite parting and separating, and rising up from the floor came something that made Angel Dust's stomach settle into his boots for the second time since he'd started living in that hotel... and for the same fucking reason.
There'd always been rumors that the V's had spent some of their unimaginable wealth and influence buying weapons and defenses against all possible threats. Angel Satin as close to virgin as they could get it. Seraphic Steel. Stygium, Moonsilver, and Carmine. It was even said that they had bound Revenants to their service, something that the dead were supposed to be utterly unable to do. But there was one rumor that Angel Dust had always discounted as both obviously fucking impossible and incredibly masturbatory for them to claim. After all, as per Smiles' comment, there were only nine beings in all of Hell who could win a fight against them.
But as it rose up from the floor, emerging from a solid tube of titanium that likely underpinned the entire ground floor, that lie was proven to be a truth. Because bound by spectral chains, bearing no clothing, its wings damaged, its halo split, was a fucking Exorcist.
The face blinked on, showcasing the serial killer smile and gleeful white eyes, and the halo over its curving horns sputtered into something like life. For a moment, its mouth was replaced with the words with 'connection failed, try again later', then the grin returned.
With a thud, it launched itself at Angel Dust. And Angel Dust dodged it. Because it moved exactly the same way as the last Exorcist he fought but, for reasons he didn't think about seemed somehow slower. Now wasn't that a fucking terrifying precedent that he now held in his personal history; he was using the lessons of fighting one Exorcist to fight another.
And those lessons held true to the letter. The thrusting punch was followed by the twirl and backhand, a strike so swift it could have been used to cut grass. And because Angel Dust was already in the process of ducking when it came, it barely touched his hair. Next would come the circle kick... yup, there it was. Angel took the moment that it was off of its balance to simply bull-rush into the thing and knock it onto the floor, before vaulting over the remains of the reception desk. It didn't even occur to Angel Dust in the moment that the only reason he could perform on this level, act with this near-supernatural level of reflexes, was because for the first time in decades, Angel Dust was utterly sober. The receptionist's charred cadaver was still hiding in the nook next to him. It might have protected her from most explosions, but not a fucking nuclear bomb.
The desk shuddered as the Exorcist tried to punch straight through it and into Angel Dust's back. It failed for reasons that Angel didn't put a lot of thought into. What he did put though into was the handcannon that was strapped to the top of the nook the incinerated receptionist was hiding in. When he pulled it from its clasp it was cool to the touch, as though it hadn't been at ground zero for a nuke going off. If this was what he remembered, then it was something he could definitely use.
There was a shriek of metal being torn as the Exorcist abandoned punching for ripping, sundering the desk and putting its face directly into Angel's line of fire. He pulled the trigger, and the recoil sent him sliding more than a foot back along the warped, partially molten floor.
The Exorcist's hand blurred to catch the bullet, but a fraction of an instant later the head recoiled, sparks spraying from impact between a variable-speed bullet and the thing's dome. Angel Dust didn't have the first notion of how the thing worked, how it made the bullet not travel as a physical object but instead as a probability function hitting its target as a function of time instead of ordinary ballistic theory. He just knew that this gun fired big fucking bullets that hit in really weird ways.
Angel back-rolled, shoving off with two of his arms to spring to his feet, and fired again. He immediately fell onto his back again, the recoil was so tremendous. The Exorcist rattled as it tried to get its wings into the path of the bullet, but they were fettered so they couldn't. Thus, the bullet hit the thing in the chest, driving it back a step and making a hairline crack in the carapace over its chest.
"Bro! I could use some fuckin' backup here!" Angel Dust shouted.
He'd never felt so mighty in his entire fucking life.
Arackniss twisted aside ever so slightly, then grabbed the arm that tried to stab him. With a thrust of two more arms, he launched the Sinner who'd tried to shank him across the room, covering it in a spray of scarlet blood from the limb that he had just been dismembered of. With ease that he had never known until waking up from getting his ass set on fire, he sidestepped a blast of a shotgun that had been aimed at head level. It blew the hand off of the dismembered arm instead, spraying bone fragments and blood onto another Sinner trying to rise. Arackniss then grabbed the limb a bit harder and ripped, disarticulating its elbow, before leaping at the shotgunner and slamming the forearm into his sternum, followed a moment later by driving the gore-drizzling upper arm through the gunner's skull.
It was so easy. So fluid. So effortless. Time was, he would have lost against one of these mooks. Now, he was taking on an entire room of them and the worst they'd managed to do was shove him a little, and that was achieved entirely by accident. With a twist no harder than pulling the cap off of an already-opened bottle, he removed the gunner's head, then hurled it at the last Sinner who was able to stand. The protruding arm drove like a nail into the man's head, and the cranium that followed that nail turned his face from convex to concave.
"Bro! I could use some fuckin' backup here!" Angel Dust's voice was muffled, coming through the building, but he could still hear it. And guess where it was coming from. It would have taken but a few seconds to go through the door, through the annex, and then into the lobby. Arackniss didn't feel like using a few seconds. He squatted low, hands on the floor in a runner's start stance, then with a grin, he hurled himself at the fullest speed he was capable of – which was now really fucking fast – at the wall between him and his fairy of a brother. The wall was hexwarded, true. But after taking a blow the likes that it just had, it needed time to reactivate. So when Arackniss charged, the wall gave way, depositing him into a scene that put truth to some of the sillier rumors he'd heard about the V's.
"The fuck d'they got an Exorcist for?" Arackniss snapped, as he slowed in the thing's orbit. Sure he might be fucking strong right now... but that was still a fucking Exorcist.
"Oh I dunno, maybe SHIT LIKE THIS?" Angel Dust retorted, then he took aim and fired. The recoil sent him back a couple of steps, but Arackniss thought at first that he'd missed, only a second and a half later to have the slowly advancing Exorcist to twist and emit sparks as though something hit it with tremendous force.
"Well, let's make history Bro. First Sinners to two-v-one an exterminator!" Arackniss shouted.
"This just in, there's bedlam in the streets of Pentagram City!" Katie Killjoy exclaimed gleefully, her broad red eyes displaying all of her pity for the people affected by such madness – none – as she continued to read. "There's word that there's a major Turf War going on at... Porn Studios! Well that's something you'd know aaaa~ll about, eh, Tom?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about, Katie," Tom Trench answered her, no obvious expression to him because of the gas-mask which was bonded to his face. "First face on the scene is none other than our old news generator, the Spunky Powerhouse Cherri Bomb!"
An archival picture of her in the process of flipping somebody off appeared off to one side of the feed, while Katie gave her newswoman laugh. "Still lusting after the impossible, Tom? You should know that she only goes after real men. And you left your better half up on the Living World."
"...annnyway..." Tom said. "There are also reports of... and forgive me if I'm being a bit presumptuous but... will you look at that, it's Pride's own Swindler Incarnate, my old squadmate, Husk!" As he said that, an archival picture of Husk, also flipping somebody off, appeared beside Cherri Bomb's. "You know we killed a lot of Krauts back in the day. And if you're one of the Krauts I killed, then please send your death threats and bombs to our dedicated hate-mail box!"
"You want a piece of him, too?" Katie drawled, invading Tom's personal space and almost falling out of her chair.
"How drunk are you right now, exactly?" Tom asked, tone resigned.
"Who the fuck cares? We're in Hell!" she asked. Tom Trench could only sigh and pull at the mask which was now a part of his being.
"You did the best you could, Charlie," Vaggie said, from where she sat beside Charlie, watching the grim news on the screen before them.
"This shouldn't have happened," Charlie said.
"I don't think you're right about that," Vaggie said. "From the moment we picked Angel Dust up, this was always going to happen."
"Vaggie, I could have..." Charlie began, but Vaggie shushed her with a finger on her lips.
"Maybe it wasn't going to happen exactly like this, or happen as soon as here, but Valentino was going to come for him. Somehow, at some time, he was going to do what he did. And what would you have done when one of your clients was threatened?"
"Protect him," Charlie said unhappily against Vaggie's finger.
"And you getting into Overlord war would have undermined everything that the Hotel stands for. We need to be neutral. We can't step on any toes. Not the Overlords, not the Ars Goetia, not Baphomet."
"I know," Charlie said, snuggling closer. "I still want to do... something. I want to help them. To stop this wanton cruelty that is turning my people into monsters... and I don't know how to do it. I don't even know if they're going to come back. Once you kill an Overlord, what do you do next? You become one."
"If he doesn't come back, then you've done the best you could. And we've still got other clients," Vaggie reassured.
"One other client," Charlie lamented, nestling against Vaggie like a lonely kitten.
"Who isn't going to get us entangled with Overlords, Deadly Sins or Fallen Angels," Vaggie said, tipping the sole Nephilim in all Creation's chin up so she could look into her sad, watering eyes. "You always pick the hardest battles. Angel Dust is just a perfect example of that. Now you've got somebody who could actually be redeemed. Wendy will be in Heaven in no time flat."
"She shouldn't be the only one," Charlie muttered.
"Maybe Sam will be next," she said. "After all, he's staying away from that fucking Dealmaker these days. Maybe he's breaking some bad habits as well."
Charlie clamped onto Vaggie with the kind of desperation that once Vaggie did to Charlie. And Vaggie could do nothing but make soothing noises, pat her head, and say 'there there', and 'everything will be alright'. It might have even helped.
The Exorcist was faster than the one he'd fought before. It's reactions quicker, its movements more nimble. But at the same time as all of that, it was so incredibly predictable that Angel Dust had at first no notion of how these things could kill millions of people each year. As he launched himself backward out of the way of a knife-handed chop followed by a sweeping kick that would have nailed him if he'd only reacted to the chop, he saw the message replace the exterminator's mouth with 'connection failed, try again later', and for once he learned something without somebody pounding it into his head.
This thing was running on autopilot. The ones during the Purge were piloted.
Arackniss tackled the thing into a support wall, cratering the Exorcist almost a foot into the solid stone, before the Exorcist turned its attention from Angel Dust, who was shooting it with a gun it couldn't block, to Arackniss, who could fight it strength-for-strength. It tried to grab his arm and rip it off, only for two more of Arackniss' to grasp the thing and peel its fingers off of his limb, a grin on his face, as he levered the thing head-first into the floor. There was a spray of partially molten rock and sharp granite chips from that impact, and the thing's foot snapped around Arackniss' ankle like a raptor's talons, then with a dance-like spin, slammed the spider demon into the same crater that it had occupied a moment ago.
Arackniss let out a grunt, and then instantly brought up his limbs to shelter him from the blows that the thing rained into him. Angel Dust rooted his feet and leaned forward, anticipating the recoil. The Exorcist deflected away a split second before Angel pulled the trigger, the bullet defying causality to hit the exterminator automaton before it was finished firing. The recoil sent Angel Dust staggering back two steps, but he'd gotten the thing's attention back on him. It launched a straight kick into Arackniss' guard, which sounded like it broke bone when it did, then turned to face Angel Dust.
He tried to get his footing, to fire another shot, but he quickly had to pretty much flop onto his back to avoid the drop kick that probably would have turned his beautiful face inside out. And when he rolled to his belly to avoid the next attack – the same stomp that had fractured his nose last time – the thing carried on, launching itself beyond Angel Dust at another target. A confused Sinner in the lace and leather of one of Velvet's Dolls didn't even have the chance to scream before her head, neck, and spine was extracted from her body and mangled into pulp. Confused and fearful screams then dragged the Exorcist's attention further away from Angel Dust and his brother.
"Bro, you a'ight?" Angel said, running to Arackniss and carefully picking him up to his feet as he shoved the gun into the Seven and Eight. He looked in pain, but not nearly as damaged as somebody who tried to 1v1 an Exorcist ought to have been.
"I think I broke sumthin'," Arackniss complained. He grabbed his slightly bent arm with two others and lurched it straight to a wet crunch. After a second, he gave a slightly bloody grin. "And now I don't. Fuckin' hell, I shoulda' got this done fuckin' decades ago."
"Decades ago, we didn't have Sam," Angel Dust pointed out. A sound like ringing chimes played well against the screams of the mutilated as the Exorcist scythed through its new targets, being as it had no intense reason to fixate on the sons of Henroin. "Now let's get that jacket-eatin' motha-fucka' and force-feed him his own cock!"
Vox had to abandon his limousine at the edge of the rubble, as there was no way in all of Hell that his conveyance could make it across all of that scree without getting stuck, and the rubble was piled almost a storey tall against the buildings adjoining them. "Boss?" one of his underlings asked of him in a crisp, trans-atlantic accent. "I think we can make it if we go through the alleys."
"Then lead the way," Vox said, striding into the dingy armpit of the city as though it were a ticker-tape raining promenade. In truth, the only thing that was raining now was the cold drizzle which promised coming thunder, and an end to the heatwave that had stretched on too long as it was. His flunkies in the first two cars in his motorcade had been consumed by the blast. If he had been a bit hastier in leaving that meeting, he would have been buried under rubble with them, which was something Vox was not going to countenance. He had places to be. People to be seen by.
The alleys were pristine, without so much as a fire-cracker marring their already shitty, pock-marked surfaces. Litter and debris concealed concrete, piled up in mounds because there'd been no rain in a while to wash it away. Well, the rain would come, and from the feel of it, it was going to be a good old fashioned storm. Vox's wandering mind paused, though, when he saw a bit of an odd square of cardboard on the path of his underling. He swelled his eye, telescoping his vision. The cardboard was sagging in the middle. Sagging lower than alley level.
And then the first underling's foot landed on it, and fell through it, and the rest of his body followed after, dropping seven feet with a scream of surprise and a wet, penetrative splat at the end of it. Vox hurried his stride minutely to reach the edge of the hole, finding it a dead-fall with a ragged edge, over a pit that was festooned with sharpened spikes of metal. The one who had spoke turned to him, nerves evident on his porcine face.
"Why are you stopping? Go around," Vox ordered. The hog demon gave a nod and skirted the edge of the hole. And there, as his foot fell onto a pile of rubbish, there was a faint metallic click. Vox immediately recoiled. In movies, landmines armed when you stepped on them, and detonated when you stepped off of them, because that made them more dramatic. In reality, as this one did, the arming happened days ago, and the detonating happened within the span of an organic blink.
The toe-popper blew off the hog's hoof, dropping him with a scream of confusion and pain into the hole that he'd tried to step around. He landed on the first one in, impaling him even deeper down the spikes while the hog was now joining him amidst the metal. Vox gave his head a shake, static filling his 'vision' for what for him was a resetting blink, then he turned to another of his underlings. "Don't just stand there, find me a way back to the studio! I don't pay you to waste work hours."
The underlings gave a glance amongst themselves, but they feared Vox's wrath more than the pain of being impaled on rusty metal. So another moved where the hog had gone, his eyes hard on the ground before him, trying to avoid anything that didn't look like perfectly ordinary concrete. So much so, that he didn't notice the fishing line that only revealed itself to Vox's heightened senses when he started to tug at it. And the start was so close to the finish that there was no meaningful difference; there was another metal ping, this time from above, as a glass barrel dropped from a fire-escape, landing just barely in front of him, and immediately erupting into a blaze of blue-hot flame. The monkey demon let out a shriek, and ran forward, only to hit another trip-line and then have his head turned into a sieve by an antipersonnel mine concealed behind an advertisement for a brothel. The flame dripped back and fell down into the hole with the two impaled Sinners, turning the pit into an open-air barbeque.
Vox stared at what he had just witnessed, how three of his twenty five underlings had just been unmade and unmanned by a few toys left behind by a maniac. What an annoying delay. Val would never let him hear the end of it, at this rate. He looked to the near hundred yards of alleyway yet to cross. Then, he straightened his back, forced a grin onto his face, and turned to face the rest of his lackeys.
"We're going down a different alley," Vox said confidently.
The next one was worse.
This was very bad.
Velvet knew what she was. She was an aesthete of transcendent sensibility. She was a prima ballerina, who only killed those other bitches because they were plotting behind her back. She was a fashion designer with the best of all possible taste. And now that she was in hell, she was getting what she was owed, unlike that fucking French cunt who managed to skate away from the noose that she deserved a hundred thousand times more than Velvet did. She was quick witted, her feet moved with grace, her hands with poise. And as a dancer, she had surprising strength in a compact frame. Since coming to Hell, that strength let her disassemble Sinners twice her size with grace and efficiency. She had tools of the trade to dissect a man while he still walked, so subtly that he wouldn't realize he was missing organs until he sat down for supper hours later. She had the cloth of fucking angels in her pocket.
And she still couldn't get a bead on this burning bastard.
Spinning the sheers in her fingers she snapped them into her grasp like a karambit, darting in to rip and slice the flaming flesh of this beast. The blades were Seraphic Steel. They could kill anything. And while it stymied to have to use her best scissors in so vulgar a manner, she needed tools of this caliber for her work. But the cut and rip that she'd attempted, though it seemed to pass into the flame, withdrew effortlessly and with even less resistance than the Angel Steel ought to have. The flames swelled back up an instant later, and when she twisted the blades again and plunged them in a stab, the flames simply billowed out of the way, leaving her with her arm through its chest, the knife on the far side of it. Then, with an empyrean roar, it swung both arms down into a hammer-blow that landed on Velvet's shoulders, slamming her to the floor. Then, a blazing hot foot caught her in the face and punted her away. It was what she imagined being clocked with a hot-iron felt like.
She growled as she picked herself up from the mostly atomized furnature that she'd landed in. The burning fool had disregarded her, turning to focus its attentions on Valentino. Despite only nominally having a face, made of living fire, the hate radiated from its visage with an intensity that she wished she could bottle and sell as eau de parfum. The imagining of bottling this kind of raw enmity brought a smile to her face and rekindled her spirits, driving the pain of the blows she'd sustained away and allowed her to ignore the second degree burns on her face.
"Don't think yer gettin' away from me that easy, mista!" Velvet shouted after him as there came the sound of a terrible impact, then Valentino grunting in pain, followed a moment later by the sound of a door being blasted off of its hinges by something slamming through it. Velvet quickly slipped into the burning Sinner's 'shadow', which technically was a non-entity 'cause this guy was casting so much light. The room that her partner had been chucked into was one of the number of hexwarded 'bolt rooms' that littered the building. As such, it was filled with her Dolls. "Don't just stand there ya' bunch of idiots! Kill this guy!"
They stood no chance. Considering that Velvet couldn't get grips on him, their interference was utterly hopeless. But it would buy her time. Some of them pulled guns from the various hidey-holes in the break room, firing hot lead into a hotter body. At least one of the bullets that lanced out went straight through that thing and impacted Velvet, making her flinch a touch; the bullet was molten when it hit her, and the lead dripped off of her clothing rather than clatter out. With that lesson in point, she sidestepped so the rest of the bullets that were fired in a great salvo through the debateably physical body didn't ruin her dress. And as she did, she started to pull a spool of twine from one of her dress's most important features – her pockets.
The beast rooted its feet, its fists clenched and crossed before it. Then, with another infernal howl, there was a blast of heat that set much of the furniture in that room on fire. Velvet, despite her desires, flinched at the impact of it. She liked to claim she was immune to pain. And for the most part she was. She found pain too fascinating to be hampered by it. But at the same time, no matter her... peccadilloes, or her couture, or her protections, being set on fire wasn't fun. It was hilarous when it happened to other people, but not so much when done to her.
Most of the Dolls were rolling on the floor, their clothes, hair, and skin on fire. A few who were luckier than most stood their ground, clothes aflame but immune to the heat. They continued firing, and one enterprising one threw a coffee caraffe at the flaming Sinner. The intruder caught the caraffe and set it onto the table that was next to the door. Then, without a word said, it pointed behind it, past Velvet. Was it offering them a chance to run away? What the fuck was this business?
She was ashamed to say one of her Dolls took the beast up on the offer. Now disarmed of the caraffe she'd thrown, she sprinted for the exit. Velvet rolled her eyes then slammed her scissors into the Doll's neck as she tried to flee. "No dodgin' this dance party, girl. What did I tell ya' 'bout that?" she demanded.
The Doll gave a gurgling noise, as the Purified edges of her wound stolidly refused to Regenerate. She fell to the floor the moment Velvet tore her sheers out, taking the windpipe with them, clutching uselessly at the wound.
"You had one fuckin' job and you couldn't fuckin' do it! This is what you get!" Velvet shouted at the faithless whore on the floor. "I oughtta turn you int'a a fuckin' toilet!"
The doll continued to gurgle, until she finally fell silent and still. There was another scream of confusion, pain, and then death, and another blast of flame that filled the office. Velvet glanced up, and the burning Sinner was immolating one of the Dolls who hadn't run. By the time it was done, there was only ash on the floor, thick, grey, and slightly greasy. Velvet had a moment's pause at that. How in the fuck was that possible? She only knew one way to make Demon Bone Ash, and that was to True Kill a Sinner. It had no weapons. It walked in naked, fought naked. Which meant that its hands were made of Infernal Talc.
Was this thing a fucking Infernal Talc Elemental?
Oh, now she really wanted his body.
She finished unspooling the twine, so when the flaming Sinner tried to advance on Valentino – who was still trying to recover from the twin blows of being launched through a door and then set on fire – she was able to loop a lariat over the thing's head and around its neck. The rest of the line she threw hard 'round a pillar, then set to reefing as hard as she could. Again her dancer's build hid a dancer's power, and with the power of pulley on her side, she was able to drag the sinner backward away from her partner.
The flaming Sinner tried to grab the line, to ignite it as completely as it apparently ignited Sinners' flesh. And it failed to, because this line was made of something that even Velvet didn't know the source of. It was neither of Heaven nor Hell nor the world stuck between them. But it was everything-proof (she had thoroughly tested), and couldn't be snapped by anything under an Archangel. So she reefed hard, stomping toward it and the causing the ad hoc pulley to drag the Sinner backward toward her. It finally stopped ignoring her, turning those barely darker eyes at her, and the sense that she felt radiating off of it shifted from undiluted hate to undiluted frustration. Which she could bottle as well, given a chance.
The instant it stopped fighting her, her hauling on the line stopped being a drag up hill and became a drag down. She instantly assumed her balance, and flicked her scissors so that that they jutted up between her knuckles as a punch-dagger. And this time, when she lashed out, she felt a tiniest tick of resistance against her thrust, as the Sinner flinched out of the way of the edge but still had it slice along the edge of its shoulder. Golden ichor began to drip from the wound. And as the attack had necessarily overextended her, she could only begin to get out of the way of its counterattack before the Sinner, faster than a body of flesh would have allowed, drove a circle-kick into the side of her head.
She was sent flying across the room, dropping the twine. She crashed into a wall so hard that she went through the inactive hexstone. For a moment, she lay in the rubble, wondering how that thing was able to dodge her attacks, to strike her at all. She'd not gotten hit in a fight in thirty fucking years! When she sat up, she realized her hair was on fire. With an expression of petulance, she struck the cinders from her hair and got to her feet. How dare he?
She stormed out of the ruined room she'd been blasted into, grabbing the twine on the floor and shoving it back into her pocket – she loved having pockets almost as much as she loved denying the chance for other women to have pockets – and stalked after the bleaching white glare that moved toward a stairwell. Going up? The door was melted off its hinges, the lock still engaged. As she began her hasty ascent, she watched as two people in a row tumbled down through the open middle of the stairwell, burning away to nothing as they fell past her into the basement.
She paused at the landing to the third floor, as her eyes fell on something. She stooped down, running her fingers through the golden fluid on the floor. Strange. It was the odd ichor that the Sinner excreted. It burned her fingers quite painfully, like sticking her hand into an alkali slurry, but it smelled of metal. Not gold, obviously. And it didn't even have the iron scent of blood. More like copper or uranium. Weird. She wiped it off on the Angel Satin of her dress. It was absorbed in without even leaving a stain. Weirder.
Screams ahead. She wasn't going to lose her partner over some burning weirdo. She set her jaw, spun her scissors into her fist like a dagger, and plunged into the fourth story of Porn Studios, on the trail of the fucking lunatic who spiked a nuke in her lobby.
To Be Continued