Wendy waited for Sam at the door to the hotel. The news choppers continued to circle overhead like the social vultures that they were, but they would soon be driven off. The storm had arrived. The lot of them pulled themselves out of the stolen limousine onto the Happy Hotel's front door. The ornate V had been vandalized and had spray-paint plastered over it turning it into the base of an upraised middle finger. It seemed her grandmother was not the subtle type.
"Aren't you a sight for sore eyes," Wendy said as Sam emerged from the front seat, naked to the waist even still. He turned her a very flat look. "You've got a new thing," she motioned to his shoulder.
"I'm aware," he said, catching the bandages she threw first. With speed that was born of constant repetition, he rebound his chest wound, and then quickly bound up the one on his arm as well. The one on his arm didn't look nearly as bad. It'd probably stop bleeding in a week or so. "Got Angel Dust's... things?"
"Yeah, I wanna do this proper like!" Angel Dust said. Wendy pointed to the corset and 'skirt', and the thigh high garters that he'd wear with them. Angel Dust got a surprisingly genuine smile on his face, grabbing them and retreating into the limo. Arackniss then departed, standing in the part of the street only dry because it was in the lee of the Happy Hotel.
"Yup, I don't need to watch that," he said.
"Holy hell your hand," Wendy said.
"Hm? Oh yeah," he held the bisected extremity up before him. "I figure losin' two fingers is worth ripping that motherfucker's head off."
"Was it difficult?" Wendy found herself asking.
"There was another fuckin' Exorcist!" Angel Dust shouted from the limo.
"Two exorcists in the middle of the year? That's... a bit odd," Wendy noted.
"When did you learn you could do that thing you did to them?" Arackniss asked. Sam paused from where he was now putting on a shirt.
"I didn't," he said, continuing to do up buttons.
"Bullshit. You had to have..."
"I'm not lying," he said. He turned to Wendy. "Is Charlie around?"
"She's moping because she thinks that Angel Dust is going to abandon the program," Wendy said.
"Yeah, he's not," Sam said with a smirk on his face.
"Free room and board with a bunch of mooks who don't ask him to either turn tricks or sleep on the bricks? Yeah, he's gonna stay here for a while," Arackniss agreed. He paused. "Do I gotta worry about radiation or shit?"
"From a Davey Crockett? Just stand in the rain for a bit and don't ever wear those clothes again, and you'll be fine," Sam said.
"Is that Sam out there?" Charlie's voice came from the lobby behind Wendy, before a blaze of light filled the air followed a fraction later by the deep thud of the thunderclap. The pounding of rain against the sidewalks a stone's throw away heightened as the storm grew more fierce. In its wake, she joined the group that teemed on the sidewalk "Sam?"
"Charlie! Good, good. We've had a productive day," Sam said. Charlie flinched at the choice of words.
"I don't think that's the kind of 'productivity' that we should be aiming for, Sam," she said.
"Two despicable individuals, one of whom has been making Hell a markedly worse place since the 1700's and the other being a literal Nazi, are now Double Dead and on their way to Double Hell. That's as much of a win as Hell usually allows," he said. In the car, Angel Dust laughed at his term continuing to spread throughout the people in this strange community he was now a part of. "As important as it is that you build up good in people, sometimes, that simply cannot be done until you destroy the evil that blocks its path."
"I know, I know," she hung her head for a moment. "I just thought that..."
"Hey, Charlie, baby, you still got my glasses? I wanna look spectacular for my debut!" Angel Dust's voice carried from the hot pink limo.
She sighed, reached through the door to the stack of Angel Dust's things that had been placed here so that he could grab them and go – which Wendy knew wasn't going to happen – and handed Sam his rose-lensed glasses. Sam passed them into the car. "I'm sorry that things didn't work out here, Angel," she said.
"Whatta' y'talkin' about?" Angel Dust asked. "Things are workin' out great!" he then emerged from the car, looking about as slutty as a man could look. Wendy could only lean back from the spectacle of it. "How do I look, Sugar Tits 2.0?"
"You look like I could rent you by the quarter hour," Wendy answered him evenly.
"Fantastic! That's exactly what I was goin' for," Angel Dust said. "Hey, babe? Why's all my shit in the hallway? You ain't kickin' me out, are ya?"
"I... well, I thought that now that you don't have to stay here because Valentino is hunting you, you'd want to..." Charlie stammered, twiddling her fingers.
"Fuck that noise! This is my home, I ain't leavin' shit," Angel Dust said with a dismissive gesture. "You lookin' presentable yourself, Sammy boy. Now onward! We got a club to demolish!"
"I guess I'm still driving?" Sam asked.
"You bet yer sweet ass you are," Angel Dust then got back into the Limo, slamming the door and having the thing start to pull away. Husk, who'd slipped out at some point, now joined Wendy's scrum. Wendy, though, got a smile on her face.
"Alright, when they get back, they're going to be in a celebratory mood," Wendy said. "Which means that tonight, lady and gentlemen, we have a mission."
"Oh fuck me what's this about?" Arackniss asked.
"We are going to get Sam drunk enough to sing Karaoke," Wendy said, planting her fists on her hips in her best superhero pose.
Everybody was silent for an uncomfortable amount of time. Then, Husk shrugged, lit up a cigarette and said, "Eh, fuck it, why not?"
Chapter 25
All Good Things Come To An End
The party today was a more sombre affair. While the Hounds were still drinking, and the music still played, they were subdued compared to the last time Loona had joined them.
"Is... everything okay?" she asked after a couple of minutes into the doldrums. Vortex shifted in his chair, scowling somewhat bitterly.
"Lost another friend," he said.
"Damn. Why are you still holding the party, then?" she asked.
"Because I know Journey would prefer that we drink in his memory to crying over his absence," Tiff said from her place sitting on the floor beside Vortex's chair. She was still taller than him. "That's the inevitability of being a Hound in Hell. We don't get choose to get born. And we don't choose when we die. So make the best of the bits in the middle."
"That sounds like bullshit to me," Loona said, folding her arms before her chest. "What even happened?"
"You'd have to ask Reggie. Reggie!" Vortex shouted. The one-handed Hound came over, looking noticably worse for wear than he had the last time she saw him. His missing hand now ended even shorter, making it just past the elbow that the limb came to an abrupt halt. He had a patch over his eye, but it was the kind they used to hold balms so she was fairly certain he hadn't lost one of those, too. And he moved very stiffly, like he had a broken rib that he couldn't pay to set.
It was things like that, watching how Reggie moved, that actually told her she ought appreciate Blitz more than she did. Only once since her adoption did she break a bone, and when she did, he dropped everything and paid through the nose to get it fixed. Not every Hound got that kind of consideration.
"Wow. You look like shit," She said. Then she flinched. "Wait, I didn't mean it like that, I..."
"You're right. I do," Reggie said. He picked a spot on the wall and carefully leaned against it. "What ya want, Tex?"
"Tell Loona what happened out there. She's just got in."
"Yeah, I can see that," he said. He turned to her. "Our boss is running a silver mine up in the Human World. Don't know why, ain't paid enough to care. The miners got uppity, so he sends us and some Fiends to break some strikers' knees. Things were going well. Work seemed like it'd be starting up again. Then some black choppers showed up."
"I'm guessing the miners had some friends?" Loona asked. Reggie just stared at her like she'd declared that Heaven was made of cheese.
"Miners don't tend to have friends with whirly-birds," he finally said, his eyes growing distant. "No, what came outta them... I don't know what to call them."
"Government?" she asked, an uncomfortable feeling settling into her.
"I dunno, maybe. But I swear to the moon they fought like they were Angels. No matter how hard you hit them, they got back up. If you cut them, they stopped bleeding almost instantly. Journ fucking decapitated one and in about a minute he regrew his fucking head. Now that was bad enough, fighting people who won't fucking die. But then Two showed up."
"Two of what?" she asked.
"Not 'of' anything. Just Two," Reggie now shook a bit, his tail tucked so tight between his legs that it snaked around one leg. "I don't know what Two is. It looked like a human, a woman... but it wasn't. Fucking moon help me it wasn't."
"Easy, Reg," Vortex reached over and patted his shoulder. "I believe you. I saw what Two did in Derry."
"Thanks, Tex," Reggie said. After a moment, he puffed out a purging breath. "Once Two was there, it went to shit so fucking fast. The fiends went down like dominos. The other hound – you know a girl named Rugburn? Yeah, her – she was next, riddled with holes. Our boss thought he could take Two. She ripped 'im in half. And since the boss was dead, my escape clause hit, and the portal started to open. I tried to grab Journey... Journey didn't have his own escape clause. He had to use my portal. And I had to get him. But..."
The silence was deafening, broken only by jazz and quiet conversation in other parts of the apartment.
"You did all you could," Tiffany said.
"No I didn't. I could have gotten him. But I... in the end I just ran like a fucking coward," Reggie said, face dropping.
"You're not a coward for running away from death," Tex said, grabbing him and turning to face the still recovering Hound whom they were partying in the apartment of. "I faced her too. And when push came to shove, I ran the fuck away too. So if you're a coward for that, then you're a coward with a lot of good company."
"I... I guess," he said.
"Yeah... I'm gonna order some bacon," Loona said, practically cringing into her own shadow. That got Reggie's ears to prick up.
"I could have some bacon," he said. When she pulled out her phone, though, his brow drew down. "Wait a second what was that?"
"What was what?" she asked, already half way to the Denny's Delivery site. He scooted closer to her, looking at her screen. She frowned, but bipped back a few screens, until she reached her work shit. And notably her research onto that unnamed hound.
"Wh... why do you have a picture of my brother on your phone?" Reggie asked. Loona turned from Reggie, who was a big, brown hound, to the black and tan picture in her hand.
"This isn't your brother," she said.
"Yeah, that's my brother," Reggie said. He pulled it closer to his nose. "I haven't seen him in years, I thought he was dead!"
"Your brother," she repeated.
"Yeah. Littermates," Reggie said. "I mean, most of my brothers and sisters are dead now but that's just Hell. Maelstrom made it?"
"You're sure," she said. "He's... different..." she began, but when she ignored the color of their pelts and simply compared their frames, the shapes of their heads, the similarity became apparent, then inescapable. The two of them even had the same arrangement of crooked teeth in the front. "Holy shit the unnamed Hound is your brother."
"Where did you find this?" Reggie asked, swiping back to another picture, of him holding a nearly black beer with an exhausted, fearful look on his face. "The Bleeding Pits? Who the FUCK has been sending my little brother to the Bleeding Pits?"
"Nathan Birch," she said. Reggie glared with all of the shame and pain in his heart transmuted into blinding hate.
"Then I'm going to kill him," Reggie said. "No slaves, no masters."
"No slaves, no masters," Tex echoed, but grabbed his shoulder again. "But think this through. He's Lucifer's Proxy."
"I can't just sit back and do nothing! He's sending my brother to the Pits!" Reggie snapped.
"You won't have to do nothing," Loona said. "I'm already getting ready to kill him."
"Really?" Reggie asked.
"Why?" Tiffany asked.
"Sent me back in time to murder the Radio Demon, and dad – FUCK! Blitz! – isn't going to let that stand," she said.
"When you do what you're doing, I'll be there. Just tell me when and where," Reggie swore.
"So will I," Tiffany added.
"I'm pretty sure all of us would if you asked," Tex said smoothly. He cracked a smirk. "So what do you need us to do?"
Sam had only put the stolen limo into park when there was a rap on the passenger window of the driver's compartment. He rolled it down, revealing Wendy there, waiting with her arms braced against the roof of the vehicle. "Not what I expected to welcome me back. I had expected Vaggie, and a death glare," Sam said.
"Get in the back," Wendy said.
"Is this a hijacking?" Sam asked with a playful note.
"Sort of. We're going out tonight," she promised. Through the bulletproof glass and hardened steel, Sam could hear some sort of muffled goings on in the compartment behind him, so he cleared his throat and pulled himself out of the seat. He'd only gotten out of the door – getting lashed by rain in the process – before Wendy quickly darted around the nose of the car and into the protective and dry driver's seat. Sam had to stoop low to keep the worst of the rain off of him, quickly crossing the distance to the back and pulling himself into the back of the thing.
He was given a moment's pause when he saw what that hubbub was. It was every single person in the Happy Hotel having piled into the long, luxurious land-yacht. Alastor sat with his back to the driver's compartment, and the other denizens sat with a good arm's span of distance between them and the Radio Demon, their long history with him not immunizing them against the aura of crippling danger that Alastor emitted with every breath and shift of his grin. Next from him were Angel Dust and Cherri Bomb, for as much as they were willing to be 'next' to Alastor. Charlie and Vaggie were then on one side of the limo, with Wendy's spot having been taken over by Niffty while Arackniss looked a bit uncomfortable at her side. Smart man. Charlie kept giving Cherri Bomb dirty looks. Maybe there was some bad blood there? Sam hadn't asked, though it probably wasn't that bad. It was Charlie, after all. That left the back bench for Husk... and for Sam.
"So... what's going on?"
"It's a celebration!" Angel Dust declared. "We've just shoved an enema into the worst that Pentagram City has to offer, so now we're gonna have a gas now that the shit's on its way down the tubes!"
"Uh huh, I thought that was what Club 666 was about," Sam said, as he felt the vehicle start to move.
"Oh no, baby, that was just foreplay. Now we're goin' to the deep dickin' that this kind of event desoyves," he said with a waggle of his brows.
"Oh god, could you please not talk about it like that?" Vaggie asked.
"I could. But that wouldn't be as fun as keepin' going," Angel Dust said.
"So you're actually staying," Charlie gently pushed Vaggie back into her seat. "In the hotel. In the program."
"Baby-doll, you did me a solid when I needed it. It's only kosher that I stick around 'till I can pay it back somehow," Angel Dust said evenly.
"Look at you bein' all sensible and shit," Cherri said.
"There's plenty of room in that hotel," Sam piped up from the back. All turned to him. "Cherri, you rooted your feet against the V Triarchy at the height of their power for the sake of a porn-star with no social cache and no connections. That kind of loyalty is more divine than demonic."
"Fuck that noise. I just stood up for a friend," she said.
"And how many people in all of Hell would have done the same as you have, were they put in the same straits?" Sam asked.
"None, because they all suck," Cherri said.
"So you admit that you've got a greater fidelity than most," Sam noted. He shrugged. "Now I don't know if Redemption is possible now that Purgatory is gone. It might even be impossible. But that doesn't mean that reaching for it is wasted effort. If every Angel Dust in Hell had their own Cherri Bomb, there would be so many fewer victims of depravity in the gutters, and so many fewer Overlords snapping the whip over them."
"Yeah, newsflash, pal. There's tonnes of me out there," Cherri Bomb said. "You can't even flip a pizza box without two a' me scuttling out from under it."
"Don't sell yerself short, sugar-tits," Angel Dust said. "What you did for me? That ain't common."
"But it could be," Sam stressed. "I might not have had decades down here that you have, but even the slice of Hell I've seen tells me that the worst of it is other people. And the best of it is other people too. If Redemption is impossible, then fuck heaven, and build one right here."
"Building Heaven in Hell," Charlie said, a pensive look on her face.
"That is a monumental effort that you're espousing, Samuel," Alastor chimed in from the front of the limo. "One that requires an entire populace to forego their own worst angels in favor of their better ones. And there are not many better angels left in Hell, current company notwithstanding."
"It shouldn't take an angel to make things better," Sam said. Damnit Alastor, Niffty's sitting RIGHT THERE.
"And yet that is exactly what we've borne witness to today," Alastor added. "A feat that should have failed a dozen different ways finding the singular path in all possible possibilities that it did not spiral into abject failure. Had you not brought exactly the motley crew that you had, you would have failed, and Angel Dust would be Valentino's prisoner once more."
"Hey, we would've figured it out," Cherri cut in, but Arackniss shook his head.
"The Radio Demon – fuck me for havin' to say it – is right. If this fuckin' lunatic," he cast a thumb at Sam, "hadn't thrown a nuke at his own feet right when he did, we would'a got mobbed and lost."
"Shit, Sam, if you hadn't nuked the buildin', Val would'a thrown so much more, so much worse shit at you," Angel Dust added, and not missing a beat, Arackniss continued.
"If you two," he pointed at each of Cherri Bomb and Husk, "hadn't have kept Vox away from Porn Studios, then we'd'a lost. I might be strong as fuck but there ain't shit I can do against the kinda bullshit that Vox can do..."
"You give that bureaucrat entirely too much credit," Alastor said, inspecting his sharp fingernails. "He's all bark and no bite. Always has been."
"Compared to you, maybe. Compared to us gutter-dwella's?" Arackniss said. Alastor turned a look at him, which Arackniss wilted from but the Radio Demon then gave a shrug of accession. The younger spider then turned to Sam. "How did you even do that shit with the Exorcist anyway? I thought we was goners when that fucker showed up."
"I have no idea," Sam said.
"Don't be coy, Sammy," Angel Dust said.
"No, you don't understand," Sam said, leaning forward in his seat. "When I'm like that, I literally have no brain. I don't think. I just act."
"Wait, what happened? Another Exorcist?" Charlie leaned forward. "Did anybody get hurt by it?"
"Nobody important. Well, except Velvet. You should'a seen it. This fucker goddamned took one over. How does that even work?" Arackniss asked. And because Sam was in the position where he could see it, he noticed the grin on Alastor's face grow a bit wider.
"Yes. How did you undertake that little piece of insanity, Samuel? After all, it recognized you," Alastor said.
"What are you... you weren't even there!" Sam pointed out.
"I have ways of knowing things, Samuel. You know that about me by now," Alastor said. "So answer me why the Exorcist let you pilot it."
"I... can't answer that," Sam said. At least Niffty seemed to have no fucking idea what they were talking about. A little information in her hands was a dangerous thing.
"Fascinating," Alastor's grin grew Cheshire-cat wide.
"Can we not talk about things that I have literally no answer for?" Sam asked. "Because we'd be here all night and honestly I'd rather play patty-cake with the business end of a garbage shredder."
"Consider it tabled, but not forgotten," Alastor promised. "Still. You've managed to do something of vanishingly small probability. There is power in being improbable, Samuel. While given a large enough sample size and a long enough time, anything that is not literally impossible, is inevitable, dwelling on the long tail of things tends to reap benefits. You overturned a modern day power bloc, not perhaps on the level of what I achieved, but as close as the modern day would allow."
"Yeah, how did you even do that, Smiles? You were just one guy in Hell," Angel Dust said. Cherri looked like she was trying to distract him or forestall him, but he talked over her. "I mean, you just said that what we done was just this side of impossible. How'd you do it all by yer one-sie?"
"Naked spite," Alastor said.
"You have a Remit," Sam said, putting the pieces together at last. Alastor's head tilted. "Whose? Satan? Or one of the other Deadly Sins?"
"Don't be absurd. Do you really think I'd lower myself to be de jure subservient to any power other than my own curiosity? I am loyal to myself. I am a power unto myself. And I am the most real version of myself."
"Look at that," Husk said idly. "He's all 'self actualized' and shit."
"You'll learn what I mean by that soon enough, Samuel. But for the time being, we're starting to close in on our destination," Alastor said settling more casually into his seat. The limo started to slow, then came to a halt, and Alastor snapped his fingers. Sam, closest to the door, opened it. Directly at the back of the stolen limo was a grand, shining barrier that extended about a hundred yards into the air, festooned with runes to Sogbo, shepherd of storms. The water that hit it dropped straight down on the street, leaving a stretch where they wouldn't be drenched immediately by the thunderstorm overhead.
They were in front of a seedy club.
Sam frowned for a moment at that, but Husk shoved him out of the way so that he could exit the limo. "Hey, this place isn't utter shit," he said, which from Husk was high praise for a place that offered liquor. Sam had only a moment of bafflement when Charlie ducked out and broke into a wide grin at looking at the venue.
"Oh I love this place!" she exclaimed. Vaggie, who was in her wake, looked at it and sighed, tweezing her nose. "You've got to try their karaoke! It's to die for!"
"Yeah, no," Sam said. "Nobody needs to hear me sing," he said.
"We'll see how your tune changes when the night goes on," Husk promised, continuing to lightly shove Sam ahead of him until the club swallowed them whole.
"If you do that, you'll explode," Krieg chimed in from her place at the reception desk. Moxie grumbled under his voice, his hand halting in the sharpie-drawn symbol that he'd been making on the whiteboard.
"And why exactly would I do that?" he asked, his patience tested. It wasn't just that he was here in the office long after the shift should have ended, but he was being gainsayed on everything he did by a girl who by all rights should have been still in school. But after a calming breath, Moxie reminded himself that not every imp finished school. In fact, in Wrath, Moxie was almost unique in actually graduating. Millie certainly hadn't. And Blitz hadn't seen the inside of a classroom until he cheated his way into a community college.
Which was honestly a viable way into community college. Sometimes Moxie wondered if his parents, fanatical Satanists they were, didn't quite understand how the rest of Hell worked.
"You're investing when you should be extracting," Krieg said. She jumped over the desk and swiped the marker from his hand, scrubbing out a section of the symbol he was prototyping. "The flow of power has to be tapped at particular points, or it will swell you like a boil, teem like an abscess, and then pop you alike to a zit."
"That's not what I learned about..." Moxie began.
"What you've learned about the art of Miracle Making is paltry and incomplete at best. What are you even doing with this?"
"I'm trying to find a way to get around this," he pointed to the page of the Treatise.
Krieg stared at it for a moment, then scowled. "Why get around it? There are no shortage of children to be sacrificed to this end."
"I am not going to sacrifice another child!" Moxie said. "Not for my sake!"
"It is a far simpler thing," Krieg said. "And considering that you will need no less than three... Find some children you do not much like, and shuffle off their coils. It will save you from a fairly gruesome end."
"Unacceptable," Moxie said.
"Inevitable," Krieg countered. She then furrowed her brow at him. "What do you mean... another child?"
"I don't like killing children, alright?" Moxie said.
"You are an assassin," Krieg pointed out.
"Assassins have to have standards!" Moxie countered.
"An assassin who does not slay children is making themselves poorer to no good ends," Krieg said flatly.
"I'd rather be poorer with my integrity intact than richer without it," Moxie said, crossing his arms before him.
"Then it is upon your own head and your own pocketbook. But for the record; there is no escaping this sacrifice. If you do not use the deaths of one child for each ritual, it will fail, and you will die."
"Four," Moxie said idly.
"No, three," she countered. "You are no doubt including the Hound in your accounting so I should tell you, you must not do this for my uncle."
"Wait, why?" Moxie asked.
"I have read into the nature of this covenant," Krieg said. "It is a feat of Remit making. Do you know what happens when somebody holds two Remits, from two sources, at once?"
"...nothing good, I imagine," Moxie said.
"It is grisly indeed. Uncle will have to discover his own security from this Birch fellow. The covenant must not bind him. To succeed in this endeavor is to accept, tacitly, the Remit of Lucifer. I will not have my uncle explode into gore upon the moment of his success."
"So... is there any way around this? Killing another victim instead? We have plenty of targets we could 'sacrifice' for this if we find the right client!" Moxie stressed.
Krieg leveled a flat look at him. "From what I've read, this already requires the blood of a willing virgin, a hard commodity to find in Hell. Why should there be a simple way to 'get around' the death of a child?"
Moxie still wasn't happy about it.
Sam had honestly expected something different. Being that this was Hell, that clubs catered to the worst that humanity could possibly offer, and it literally looked like the kind of place that hack gornography directors would send teenagers to get chainsawed to pieces, he had expected some level of abject depravity. Instead he found a pretty ordinary seeming karaoke bar with drunken demons belting out Sinatra with all of the earnestness that their lack of talent could allow.
He sat in a large booth with most of the rest of the Happy Hotel crew. Alastor sat alone at a small table that was next to it, the workers and waiters of this place flowing around him like water sliding around a greased spot on porcelain. The staff seemed... trepidatious, regardless. As though they were from the moment that the group of them came in expecting something unpleasant to happen. Of course, if Sam's knowledge of the Radio Demon was accurate, there were about a handful of places in all of Hell where that wasn't the case.
Sam tipped back another drink from his cup, feeling the pleasant sensation of rum sliding down. It was strange rum, down here. It wasn't spicy, like the cheap crap with the pirate on it. It was slightly sweet, and had a bit of odd smokiness to it. Honestly, tasting slightly burnt agreed with his palate.
"I'm serious. One of them came into my Homecoming party," Charlie said, snuggled close to Vaggie. "And since it was ruining my party I threw it out."
"That ain't how Raguel tells it," Husk answered, plunking his second empty bottle down on the table.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"He tells me you blocked a couple hits, then he pissed off all on his own," Husk said.
"Well, maybe he's just trying to save face," Charlie said with a prim expression. She had only had a small amount of liquor, so this was showcasing that, Nephilim or not, she was the lightest of lightweights.
"The closest I ever came to something like that was when I got captured in Ecuador by guerrillas," Wendy said.
"You got snapped up by apes?" Angel Dust asked, leaning in. Oddly enough, he didn't seem to be drinking even as much as Sam was.
"G-U-E guerillas. And Silverbacks aren't even endemic to South America," she pointed out.
"Why did a bunch of soldiers capture you?"
"Ransom," she shrugged. "Honestly though, I'd probably be in better company back there than I was at Stanford. I'd certainly have a lot less creepy old men wanting to grab my ass."
"Yeah, when yer poor and desperate you don't shit on your money-maker," Arackniss said, then he reached over and elbowed his brother. "Unless your money maker is your shitter..."
"Knock it off," Angel Dust said, giving his smaller brother a swat. Arackniss just chuckled and went back to his gin. "What about you, sugar-tits. You ever find yourself up shit creek like that?"
"ATF raid," Cherri Bomb said. "And unlike you, I didn't get out of it. I managed to blow up at least, like, four of them, but then one of 'em got a lucky shot on me and quick as you like here I am in Hell."
"Hah. You got killed by the IRS," Wendy said.
"And fuck you too!" Cherri said.
"I'm going up next," Charlie said, struggling her way out of her spot, pushing past the others at the booth until she could slightly unevenly walk toward the machine which noted the end of its song with a timer counting down from six. When the singer didn't leave the stage, there was a metal 'ping' sound, and a spring-loaded section of the stage launched the singer into the crowd before ratcheting back down into place. There were no encores at this venue.
Another drunken patron had rose to take the next song, but everybody at his table grabbed him and pulled him back down upon spotting Charlie meandering her way to the stage. Sam's brow drew down. Vaggie sighed, but had a resigned expression. When Charlie made it to the machine, she turned it on... and then hit 'random'.
"Oh fuck me you might wanna duck," Husk said, sinking into his seat.
"What's going on?" Sam asked.
"I drea~med of a He~ll of kindneeeee~ss," she began, the lights going out and leaving her in a spotlight. Which didn't exist, Sam noted. And that there was no way that all those lights should have gone out. He took another drink of his rum. "A place to be, a place to grow, a place to hee~al. And when the worst befalls uuuuu~s, says our hopes were never rea~l... we won't beg and we won't cry, ignite our anger, we'll defy; if those Pearly Gates won't open then I'll build it myself."
And with that, the entire building faded from sight, showing a Hell that was and wasn't. A vision of Hell at its worst as only seen by somebody who had spent centuries growing up in it, and a vision of Hell that only somebody never damned by seeing the worst of the Human World could imagine it being.
"What the hell is..."
"Angelsong," Alastor said, grinning wide. The scene continued to shift as she launched into verses of facing down enmity and derision, of being dismissed and ignored and mocked for actually having the bald-faced audacity to give a shit about people. "There is a reason why God fears the Nephilim, Samuel."
"So I'm not just seeing this," Sam said.
"I wish she wouldn't do this all the time. We're going to get thrown out," Vaggie said, more exasperated than afraid.
"Oh no, Samuel. That is a reality of being made of living song. The fight between her father and Michael was a musical the likes of which has never been matched in eons," Alastor said, drinking in how Charlie was now wearing armor and fighting off spontaneously manifesting hordes of her opponents, without dropping so much as a note. "Angels are the first children of God, who is the most real thing in all of Creation. They are, therefore, more 'real' than the humans that god made in their wake. The song that is their being is fundamentally in tune with the harmony of reality itself. Their songs, as you are bearing witness, can reshape what is real according to their whims."
"Wait... they can just sing things into being, like God?" Sam asked. On the stage, a depiction of Saint Peter hung his head as she repeated her audacious claim that if Heaven would deny her a route of kindness, she would create one in defiance of them here.
"Not as easily, nor as completely. Angelsong cannot create something more 'real' than the one who uses it. Note how her figments all fade so soon after she stops paying attention to them," Alastor said, motioning to wretched masses that she moved through now, ministering to them as she sang. True to Alastor's words, they faded into nothing not long after she left them behind. Sam bottomed his glass, and found that Wendy already had another waiting for him. Well, considering the rate that all others – including of all people Alastor – were drinking, and considering the enormity of what they'd achieved today, Sam felt no particular desire to teetotal.
"But if she weren't drunk, would they linger?" Sam said with an aftertaste of pleasantly burnt rum.
"She is not an Archangel. Her figments are always ephemeral, not lasting," Alastor said, swirling a martini-glass. "Or so the conventional logic goes. I hold a differing theory. Notice the edge."
Sam looked at the boundary of the manifestation. It was... slippery. Like his eyes refused to stay on it, slipping left or right or up or down rather than fixate on the point where threnodic delusion became karaoke bar. "What about it?"
"Have you looked at the edge, at a transition, at the exact point where one becomes another?" Alastor asked, suddenly sitting beside him and motioning broadly to the spectacle that occasionally snapped up one of the other patrons of the bar to play a bit part before being spat back out according to Charlie's singing. "Like the main one you don't talk about. The fracture where tick becomes tock. Where here becomes there. Can you see it?"
"Of course not. It's instantaneous," Sam said. Then the drink-dampened brain managed to make a connection that he either would have made far sooner sober, or not made at all. "Is she creating a genius loci around herself?"
"That is my belief," Alastor said with a nod, leaning back in the booth. "I have some trifling ability to change the world around me to musical cadence. But to outright overwrite reality? That is a more rarified skill than I possess. At least, a higher one than I possess as yet. Time, as it so often does, has a way of changing things."
Sam had no answer to that, so he drank, and waited for Charlie's song about building her own private Heaven in the depths of Hell to come to its close.
The Goat of the Apocalypse paused in his bolthole, head tilted to one side, as though listening for something.
The only warning that the victim got was the crack of a piece of metal bursting through the wall before it impaled him, launching him back and pinning him to the bricks opposite. His small body tried to pull away from the grisly injury, but he found he could no more dislodge the Seraphic Steel harpoon that now impaled his chest into the building behind him than could Lucifer spend a quiet day in a room with Michael.
Seeping down from the sagging ceiling, oozing down as a form of black, liquid evil, came the stuff of nightmares, which mounted up on the floor in the middle of the small room that the Goat of the Apocalypse had taken to hiding in. There was a flare of blinding light, one that the Goat had likely seen coming and shielded his eyes from, as the foul fluid took a more conventional shape, standing prim and bright in a shining white and blood red suit, a wide grin across his beautiful, pale face.
"Ah," the goat said, and stopped fighting against the harpoon. Despite the fact that he was literally nailed into place, he didn't look in too much pain. Lucifer was a bit annoyed at that. He preferred his targets to be in pain when he killed them. "What brings you to my office?"
"Brave words for a dying liar," Lucifer said, leaning down at the goat, who was leaking a strange, runny mixture of black ichor and golden fluid from the wound that ran through him. "Even if I did nothing, you'd still likely expire in an hour or two. But I have it in mind to do a great many things. And my kindnesses can be very cruel indeed."
"And despite your introduction, I still don't know what you want," the goat said, restraining a cough with the back of a hand. It came away slick and black-gold. "If you're looking to renege on a few of your contacts, there are costs associated with that which even I cannot waive."
"No, I'm not here for your business, Goat. I'm here to keep you from denying me what is mine," the King of All Hell said. "You managed to stymie me once a few centuries ago. I didn't even realize it was you that'd done it until very recently. But then again, you've practically drifted through my realm like a ghost, haven't you? You're all but impossible to find if you don't want to be found. Even by me. Me!"
"I don't step on toes," the goat said evenly.
"Enough glibness," Lucifer said. "Enough playing tough. Enough lying to my F̶̛̯͎̱͊̋͌̈́́͘͠À̵͖̺̜͉̪̲̲̠̎͗͐̍͊̾̃̈́̓͋̚͜͠͝͝ͅC̵̯̜͇͎̼̞͇̓̒̅͐̈́͐̄̓̽̅͆Ẽ̷̦̳̦̮̋̎́̓͛͑̿̓̅͋̌͘͝!̷̧͔̺͈̖̮͙͐́͂́̅̓́͌̆͝" he roared. With a twist of his song, he began to strip away illusions, break away through glamours. And strangely, despite expecting them to be wrapped a thousand deep around the goat nailed to the wall, he found none. So instead, he picked a different assault. "It took me centuries to find out what exactly you were. Who you were. You didn't just sell your name, as most like you do when you come to my domain, you destroyed it. Or you thought you did," Lucifer straightened his back, his grin returning to his visage. "You see, I am the King of All Hell. Every eye that decorates every adornment in this plane of existence, it is my eye. I see all things. And I can call upon history's lessons at any time of my choosing. So when you destroyed your name, I already got to see what it was before you did..."
Lucifer leaned in very close, and turned back time on the Goat's body, watching how grey fur bleached, curled, and turned white, and emitted a faint smell of lanolin.
"Collin," he said.
The Goat just stared at him, and despite Lucifer's actions, his fur returned to its more contemporary shade as though reality outright demanded it. Then, the Goat rolled his free shoulder and cracked his neck, a halo blazing into being above his horns. "I destroyed that name three centuries ago. It has no hold over me anymore," the goat said, his voice starting out several octaves higher, but descending with a sense of inevitability to its more modern timbre.
"A creature of Heaven has fallen to Hell. A tragic and familiar story," Lucifer said. "But it was what you did next that shocked me. You cut the wings off of your own back... and then ate them. You absolute madman. That's the kind of naked defiance I can get behind."
"You were cast down by Michael. I chose hell," the Goat said. Lucifer was annoyed that even inside his own head he couldn't call the wayward cherub 'Collin'. "And would you please stop with the condescension? I'm older than you are."
"You were just a cherub," Lucifer said. "And now you're not even that."
"I am one of God's Firstborn. Just like you," The Goat glared hard at the King of All Hell. There was no pain in his eyes. How exquisitely frustrating. "So I will ask you again, 'King of All Hell'... why did you decide to finally visit me in person?"
"You have something I want," he said.
"I might surprise you," the Goat said.
"Like you surprised... what was her name again... Miss Wormwood? When you killed her?" Lucifer chided. "So petty, Goat. Just because she saw more of a future as my Proxy than as your... whatever it was you were doing with her. No. I want the Demiurge. I want Yaldabaoth."
"And I cannot give it to you," the Goat said.
"You might want to reconsider obduracy right now," Lucifer said, leaning in on the once-angel he shared a room with.
"I'm not saying that I won't. I'm saying that I can't," the Goat said. "Although, for the record, I would rather kill Yaldabaoth than put them into your care. I have seen the world that you would build with the power of the Demiurge. It is petty, base, and without virtue."
"And gloriously decadent, I know," Lucifer said. His outrage began to boil. Again he was denied at the gates of glory. "There are ways to extend your suffering long beyond what you think possible. Tell me who Yaldabaoth is, and you will die quickly. Don't... and you will die so slowly that you will be the last light in all Creation to go out, and wishing you were dead the entire duration."
"It is beyond my power to give you the Demiurge," the Goat said, coughing and spitting out a stream of frothy gold. He then held up a finger. "But there is one thing I can offer you."
"Do tell," Lucifer let him have this moment. When he did something crude, he'd just punish the cretin harder.
"Yaldabaoth will come to you. And soon," the Goat said, instead of empty, worthless defiance. And that honestly put Lucifer slightly off balance.
"Soon means something quite different to a Firstborn," Lucifer began, and the goat raised his finger again, asking for a moment of clarification. Since he was still nailed to a wall, not showing agony but probably feeling it, Lucifer felt a moment of largesse and allowed him to speak.
"Soon as in before the next Purge. Yaldabaoth will be revealed to you, by their own hand," the Goat said. "And when they do, I guarantee you... they will break the Fundament with their fury."
The smile on Lucifer's face became a touch more genuine at that. Not very long at all. Only a few months at the outside. "Congratulations," he said. "You've earned a long overdue death."
"I died in 1665. Today I stop moving," the Goat said.
Lucifer didn't know what he meant by that.
It didn't stop him from finishing the job.
Things were progressing nicely, in Wendy's opinion. Of the entire crew, the only ones still debatably sober were Vaggie and Alastor, and the latter was simply because she wasn't sure; even though the emptied glasses of sweet liqueurs were assembling on his table, she had never actually saw him drink one, and he didn't look in the least bit inebriated for their intake.
Wendy was of course drunk. She knew it. She wasn't going to deny it. Call a spade a spade, and dig with it. Charlie had gotten to the tippling point where she was just giggling constantly and poking Vaggie from time to time in her sides and back, before collapsing into another giggling fit. Angel Dust was far more sober than Wendy, likely only buzzed, but he also locked eyes with a burly looking fellow at the other end of the bar, and declared that he was 'going fucking'. The spider demon and the Giant then picked an out of the way booth where there were less people watching it than the stage and started going at it like the first Australian convicts when the first boat of women arrived.
And then, inspired by whisky and seeing Angel Dust in such a good mood, Cherri Bomb snuck into a bathroom and proceeded to bone Angel's brother. Arackniss emerged looking a bit battered but quite pleased with himself, and Wendy's grandmother launched into more drinking. Niffty kept trying to 'seduce' Sam, but he was thoroughly distracted by the cups of rum that Husk was dutifully handing him, and the conversations on topics of poker and other games of chance. Husk seemed as delighted as he ever got to have somebody who was willing to talk, even drunk, about the strategies of poker. Niffty then got distracted by a waiter and started to try to seduce him, too. He quickly realized exactly what he was dealing with, and stayed safely the fuck away.
She felt safe. She felt... whole.
For the first time in decades, she wasn't bowed under dread and despair. She was out, drinking heavily with a bunch of people who would see her safely home. People who knew her name, knew her drives. She wouldn't say that they loved her, but they certainly accepted her as one of their own. She slotted into their lives as though there had always been a her-shaped hole in it, waiting for her.
"You should give it a try," Husk said, nodding toward the stage, again. Sam usually waved him off without a second thought. This time, in his unsteady, red-glowing way, he stared at the machine which was currently being used by a tone-deaf lizard performing a hell-produced song about a love-affair between an imp and a succubus with low standards. Since it was coming to an end, the rain of glasses that were being thrown at the singer stopped and they gave a bow, promptly tipping over forward and falling off of the stage without even the spring-board's assistance. Sam took that as his cue to stand.
He immediately tipped over and face-planted on the floor, before popping back up with a hand raised, a cup of rum still half-full in it. "I'm okay!" he declared, then he began to unsteadily weave his way through the tables until he reached the machine.
"I really hope this was worth it, kiddo," Husk said, shifting along the booth so that he was now sitting at Wendy's side. "'cause that shit he was drinking wasn't cheap, and he put away a lot of it."
"Oh, you absolutely need to hear this," she said.
"What'd I miss?" Angel Dust said as he returned, standing a bit unsteadily both because he was slightly drunk and because he'd just gotten plowed harder than Wrath in the month of March.
"Sam's about to sing," Wendy said smugly.
"Oooh, this oughta be good," Angel Dust said, throwing himself onto the bench onto his side, watching the events unfold from an unusual angle. She wasn't going to judge. Today was her victory. Today, she would show them all what she had hitherto only been privately party to.
"Hey they got songs Prince of Egypt on here!" Sam declared, too intoxicated to moderate his voice.
"Boo! Get that Disney shit outta here!" somebody in the crowd heckled.
"Fuck you, it was Dreamworks, not Disney!" Sam countered. Standing unsteadily, he carefully pushed buttons until the thing hummed to life, and the spring-trap under his feet clicked as it set itself into launch mode with a timer exactly six seconds longer than the song he was about to perform.
For a moment, horns came from the machine, a trumpet that began the song proper.
Then, with a blast of wind, the horns seemed to explode in scale and scope. What had been tinny and weak, fighting against the hubbub of the crowd, now overtook all things. And the entire room was awash with beating heat and stinging sun, as though somebody'd just ripped off the roof at high noon on the hottest day of the decade she'd died in.
"What the fuck is goin' on?" Angel Dust asked, sitting upright even despite his understandable tenderness.
With the sting of the whip on my shoulder,
With the salt of my sweat, on my bro~w;
Elohim Adonai, can you hear your people cry?
Help us now, this dark hou~r!
This wasn't what Wendy had expected. She had expected everybody to hear the clarion call that whistled straight through the paper-thin walls of the shower. He didn't always sing in the shower, but she had taken to timing her own ablutions so that she'd get the chance to listen in. It was always spectacular. But this? This was...
Well, let's start with the sand.
As he sang the first chorus, he began to stride forward, and sand mounted up under his feet, until he stood a good twelve feet higher than any point that this karaoke bar had to offer. The tables were displaced gently by it, not tipping or dumping their contents, but now everybody nearby found themselves with their toes in hot, coarse sand and the path to the bathroom now hidden in bullrushes.
Deliver us! Hear our call! Deliver Us!
Lord of all; remember us, here in this burning sand!
Deliver us!
There's a land you promised us!
Deliver us to the promised land!
Now the wind swept through, blasting hot like an oven, carrying with it the smell of sweat and blood. At the base of Sam's mound of sand, a spring issued forth, sending a river out though the scene which now erased the entire karaoke bar and replaced with with a desert dotted with monuments to tyrants. He stepped down, his expression showing he was lost in the music, that he didn't even seem to notice what was happening around him. When he touched the waters, they turned red, and the reek of blood redoubled. He spoke some words in a language she couldn't understand. The song called for Hebrew, but the words Sam was speaking didn't translate to Wendy's Damned ears. So whatever he said, he said in Enochian, if not another of the Most Ancient Tongues, before returning to English.
My son, I have nothing more to give
but this chance that you may live.
I pray we meet again,
if He will
Deliver Us!
Now, in the distance, Wendy could see armed men barging into the hovels of the slaves. When they emerged, their blades were bloody. And with every passing moment, that horde of violent men was drawing closer to Sam, and to the rest of the denizens of the karaoke bar.
Hear our prayer: Deliver Us from despair!
These years of slav'ry grow to cruel to stand!
Deliver Us!
There's a land you promised us!
Deliver us out of bondage, and
Deliver us to the Promised Land!
Now, Sam was standing up to his waist in the waters, and they turned blue once more, flowing swiftly away from him, the mound that they sprang from now lost in the distance. There was quiet, and peace. And where sun had beaten down mercilessly a moment ago, now the sky was filled with ancient stars. She felt an inexplicable sorrow in her. And from the looks of everybody watching nearby, they did too.
"No way," Vaggie said.
"What?" Wendy asked of the other cyclops who wasn't enraptured – because Niffty looked transfixed.
"How... There's now way..." she stammered. Then, she stood in the sand, barely supporting the borderline incapacitated Charlotte Magne as she did. She thrust a finger at Sam, who stood in the midst of the river. "That! That is Angelsong!"
"No kidding," Wendy said. Alastor sat silently, bearing a sadistically gleeful grin.
Hush now, my baby, be still love, don't cry.
Sleep as you're rocked by the strea~m.
Sleep, and remember my last lullaby
so I'll be with you when you drea~m.
Then, Sam leaned back, his voice exploding across the night, the river surging around his legs.
River, O River! Flow gently for me!
Such precious cargo you bear!
Do you know somewhere, he could live free?
River: deliver him there.
The river grew gentle, and another was beside him now, laying a basket into the steam. As it was pulled down and out of sight, Sam was silent for a long moment, and for just a drunken instant Wendy thought that the song was over. But then, with is voice a near whisper compared to the bombast that had preceded it, he went on.
Child, you are safe now, and safe may you stay,
for I have a pray'r just for you:
Grow, my sweet child, and come back some day.
Come and deliver us, too.
Sam, still lost in the music, began to stride again, the water falling away as he mounted first sand, and then limestone that was thick-gilded with gold. When he summoned his breath, he didn't sing into a microphone, because he'd abandoned it two choruses ago, but still his voice carried not just to the scene of impossibly opulent palaces that stretched out under the blazing sun, but to all corners of the karaoke bar that contained it, and leaked out into the street as well. Sam cast his arm wide.
Deliver Them
I'll be the shepherd, to shepherd them,
to Deliver Them, out of cruelty, and...
Deliver Them... to the Pro~mised Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaa~nd!
Then, there was a snap, and the spell of it all broke. Sam was still for a moment, standing on a gilded dais. Then, with a nod of drunken satisfaction, he cracked a crooked smile. "Yup, nailed it," he said, before taking one step off of the dais and crashing through the nearest table.
"Alright, that's fuckin' enough!" a voice cut in on the spectacle, as the sky vanished into ceiling lights and the entire floor was awash with sand. Wendy turned to see a lanky Fiend wearing a pinstripe suit homing in on their booth like a rocket. He stopped at the foot of it, and pointed at Charlie. "You and me had an agreement! No more than one Angelsong per night! That was fuckin' two, so get the FUCK OUT!"
"Fine. We were leaving anyway," Charlie slurred, trying to primly stride past him, only to immediately tangle her feet and drag Vaggie down onto the sand with her as she fell.
"What the fuck just happened?" Cherri asked, now standing ankle deep in warm, golden sand.
"Told ya you'd want Sam to sing," Wendy said, just drunk enough that she didn't question what she saw.
Vaggie was the only one sober enough to drive them home. Alastor said not one word the entire way back. He merely smiled as wide as the mouse who'd eaten the cat. There was some talk in the drive, but Wendy conked out for most of it, only rousing when Husk offered a shoulder to get her back to her room. Once he closed the door, she didn't even consider undressing. She just moved to the windows that watched the storm, and the chair that sat before them. Even in her hellish time on Earth, she always loved listening to rain against glass.
There was a smile in her heart. Contentment she hadn't known in either life or death. No matter what came, it could never take away tonight, nor could it ever take away what lead to tonight. And deep within her, she made a promise, a vow, something so unbreakable that you could have balanced a Dealmaker Oath on top of it. That she would never, ever, allow despair to choose her path again. That she would go down fighting for things like this. That even a moment of joy was worth fighting for, even against the tides of hell's worst influences. With the smile of her heart on her face, she let her eyes slide closed, and fall into slumber.
The storm outside continued to send forth lightning bolts, but the thoroughly pickled denizens of the Happy Hotel slept through them all. Even the worst and loudest of them, one that roused nearly paralyzed Sam to a fleeting moment of cogence, were quickly forgotten. Sam grumbled only for a moment, then rolled over in his chair and returned to sleep. With his unspoken declaration against the storm, there would be no other awakenings.
Tonight, the Hotel slept in total victory.
"And I say to you that the war in Heaven is not a boon to hell. What will come of it? Should God be slain, what will the Successor do to us? Will they cast their defeated enemies into our lands? Or worse, consign them to oblivion, whence they ooze into our lands alike the imps writ large? And what if they fail? Were the rebels cast here by God's Hand, what would we do then? It would be the worst of possible outcomes, for I have a weighing of Lucifer the Morningstar. He will not bow to any king of Hell. When he comes, he will come to conquer. The time to act is now. All good things come to an end. Now, we muster to war."
-Satan to Betrayal Incarnate, before the Luciferean Invasion.