"Guys, I just figured out who exactly Birch's hound is," Loona said as she came into the office. She was caught short, though, by the other imp in the room. There was just something about Krieg that didn't sit well with Loona. Like she was a cat-person or something. The young Lust Imp didn't react, though, since she was busy doing something her uncle never would; reading for the sake of education.
"Well don't leave us edging, Loonie, spill your guts!" Blitz said, shoving his niece out of the way on the table and practically dumping her onto the floor so that he could actually see the doors to the hall.
"Are... we not open?" Loona asked.
"It's complicated," Millie said with an equivocating gesture.
"The hound?" her husband asked.
"Right," Loona pulled out her phone and flicked through a couple of pages until she reached the pedigree that Reggie had given her. "His name is Maelstrom. He's actually not much older than I am. Birch took him from an orphanage back when he was, like, fifteen or so."
"That's awful," Millie said. And she probably meant it, because the Rough family was like most lineages in Wrath in that it never used indentures. Anywhere Satan held sway, slavery was frowned upon. "Has he been doin' that fighting all that time?"
"It seems so," Loona said. "I talked to Tex and Tiffany, and they said that..."
"You talked to who, now?" Blitz asked.
"My friends? The ones you dropped me off at despite my bitching when all this shit started?" Loona asked.
"That was Tex? The big fucker who worked for that sonorous snatch back at Spring Break?" Blitz said. Then he sat back. "I can't remember, do I still hate him or are we cool?"
"You're cool," Loona said flatly.
"What the fuck kinda name is Tiffany?" Blitz asked.
"I know!" Loona agreed. She gave her head a shake, which had the side effect of throwing some of the rain off of her and spraying the imps nearby. "Look, the guys looked at the way he fights, and... well, I don't have good news."
"What style does he use? Karate? Judo? Jiu Jitsu? Pankration?" Moxie asked.
"Hysteria," Loona said grimly. Moxie frowned in confusion at that. "The guy's terrified out of his mind and he's doing literally anything he can to not die. Bobbart called it 'catch-as-catch-can'. I mean, look at this!"
She showed a video of Maelstrom fighting against a pair of Terrors, beasts from Wrath that were thrice as big and likely sixteen times as strong as him. And with reflexes honed through nothing but unending peril down to near clairvoyance, he slipped through their raw, sweeping attacks and ripped out their eyes with his bare fingers, opened an artery in one's arm-pit with his teeth, then ran the fuck away for ten minutes flat until one of them bled to death, before the video cut off because there was a 'more interesting' fight going on in another Pit. There was no elegance in his movements, no style in his attacks. Just a desperate kid who wanted to see another sunrise, explosively using everything his body had to offer.
"That was messy," Millie said.
"Are you really allowed to run away like that?" Moxie asked.
"Usually not," Blitz said, leaning in to view the thing. "Somebody paid to make the door-keepers take a nap so nothing else would come in to fight the big fucker while the little fucker was still standing."
"You watch this savagery? There are half a hundred ways you could better waste your time." Krieg said, piling in to the point where there was no essentially no room for anybody to stand, so Loona rolled her eyes and walked to her desk, swept Krieg's shit off of it and turned the computer around so that they could watch that instead. "There are a hundred more that you could use to expand your business!"
"Yeah I don't really care right now, kid," Blitz said. He turned to the others. "So what are y'all gonna do about about that tile?"
"What tile? Why do I smell dust?" Loona asked. The lovers shared a look, then Moxie went and picked up a fallen ceiling tile from his desk and showed it to her. It had some sort of magical bullshit on it. "Uh huh? And what's this?"
"Look at that!" Millie pointed at where tubby's handwriting was telling him to find some guy named Sam. Loona's brow drew down. Why was that name familiar? Oooh, right.
"So he made a voodoo tile into a post-it. What about it?" Loona asked.
"I didn't write this," Moxie said. "This tile hasn't been disturbed since we moved into this building! That means the only way..."
"You break the arrow at some point in the future to fuck with the past. That's kinda how our luck is going these days," Loona finished for him, with more annoyance than dismay. "So why'd you make a note to past you to find that former client?"
"Who?"
"The guy who literally broke the rules and went to the Living World to kill a dude on his own dime?" Loona prompted. Blitz seemed utterly clueless, and even Tubby was having a headscratch trying to recall. "The three-fer that resulted in one getting killed twice!"
"Oh him!" Blitz said. "The guy who blew up Verosika's yeast-infection on wheels!"
"Do you guys seriously just forget everybody's name the minute they leave?" Loona asked. Blitz just shrugged.
"I imagine there are few repeat customers for this business model," Krieg opined.
"So..." Moxie began.
"I have a fucking spreadsheet. Do you think I seriously sit around here doing nothing all day while you idiots are out there merc-ing people?"
"Yes," Moxie said.
"Uh huh," Millie added.
"As long as you're doing your best it's fine by me, sweetie," Blitz said with a big grin. Loona sighed, and thumped her head on the desk. If Birch didn't kill these morons, she would.
Chapter 27
No Friend Is Beyond Price
The Hotel was still quiet.
The aftermath of the reading of the will was still settling in on people, Sam knew. For one thing, Charlie suddenly becoming an independent trillionaire on the word of somebody she barely knew probably seemed more absurd than actual. That Vaggie now was legally obligated to deal with soldiers and their war-gear probably annoyed her to no end. And as for Husk? He was quiet. Not even staring surly at the doors as though actively dissuading social interaction through osmosis. He seemed introspective. Sam didn't Look Within on him, nor with anybody else, because what they dealt with was their own burden to bear.
They would have to carry it without him.
He still didn't know what he was. That part of his existence still eluded him. A would-be-angel, sure, but even as he stared at his reflection in the mirror of the long abandoned hair-boutique on the second floor, and how it cast back his wet-ash colored skin and his curling horns, it was clear that he wasn't going to find answers in what. Who, was more useful. And who was a question he was starting to get a handle on. While he still didn't know what he was, he did know who he was.
And who he was, was not a victim. It was a lingering shackle, much like Wendy had informed him of, that he had carried through his entire life, and into his afterlife. To be a victim was to be the one whom the world acted on, the one who did what they could, while the world did what it willed. Well, no more of that bullshit. Whether it was because he finally accepted his power, or because he could no longer stomach being in that place, he made a decision. I, Sam thought, am not a victim. I am a fucking sorcerer. And it was well past time that I started acting like one. A victim was lost in the tide of Hell, dashed against the rocks of cruelty and misfortune at every passing hour, hoping for respite that would never come. A sorcerer, though? A sorcerer was the tide.
Sam paused in his moment of observation, then snapped his fingers. There was a twist in gravity and he felt himself pulled upward and back, Skipping into his bedroom and leaving him a bit dizzy for the passage. Everything he needed was already packed. It hadn't taken long at all. Just a bunch of shirts in one case, a bunch of everything else in another, and a bunch of bandages in a third. Sam sighed, staring at the three cases which contained his entire life. He'd managed to do it again. Winnow down his entire existence into less than a cubic meter of space. He'd been forced to do this before, so he knew exactly what corners to cut, what articles to leave by the wayside. And now, he was almost ready to vanish.
But not quite. Sam cleared his throat, then moved to Wendy's door. He gave it a knock. No answer. He tested the knob, found it still open, and pushed. The exact same scene as before. An empty room and a shattered window pane. She must be actually out of the building.
The thought of that actually gave Sam a smile. Another chain off of her, by her own words. She'd been honestly afraid of leaving the building for any reason for the longest time. And now... now she was free. Free in Hell, but that was still an improvement to be cherished. Sam walked in, feeling the cooler air that pulsed through the broken pane, moved to the pool of rain that snuck in.
Sam looked out, over the expanse of Hell's capital city. Pentagram City was starting to wink itself alive, night falling and admitting defeat against the cooler rain. He couldn't see far, in truth. The clouds hung low, making much a haze. But when Sam looked down, almost straight down, he could see the conservatory in bloom. And outside of its doors, he saw yellow. That widened the smile on Sam's face. Dandelions in bloom, in naked defiance of Hell, against the lashing of the rain. With a moment's thought and focus, Sam described a circle in the air with a fingertip, and it shimmered until it showed the things close, the rain-soaked yellow of the weed-flower. Sam reached through and plucked one, held it in his hand as he let his natural heat dry it out over the course of seconds. He stared at it for a moment, then pocketed it.
He pressed his eyes shut, then felt gravity shift again. This time downward and forward. But since he was increasingly becoming used to the sensation of his stolen teleportation, he merely took a step forward upon finishing the Skip down to the second floor. As he regathered his balance and composure, he looked at the claw-foot tub of the bathroom he was standing in. Now that he had the eyes to see such things, he could see that there was actually a vast extradimensional space wedged into the floor of this room, leading to the pillar which edged the bar. And Sam didn't need to look too deeply to know that the entire space was filled chock-a-block with bottles of vile liquor. Sam stooped down, puffing out a breath that lit with dark grey smoke, smoke that he twisted with his will into runes of transgression and interjection. Then, he reached into that extradimensional space, his hand disappearing just above the floor. Questing fingers pressed between bottles until he found the lowest of them. He retreated one bottle, then drew a sign on its glass, before reaching over and drawing the same sign above the tub with his other hand. Foul alcohol dropped out of nowhere to pool in the tub, before the thin pipe descending into the floor in truth allowed it to drain away.
Sam pulled back, and pulled out his pad and pen, quickly scratching a note. When he finished, he sighed, burned it, and tried again. This time, he took a bit of time to actually get what he wanted to say to the person he wanted to say it to, and to deliver a message worth sending. He stared at his second, better message for a quiet while, before nodding, and pushing the note into the hole in space that the bottle had drained through, before cutting off both and leaving the second bottle in the stack devoid of alcohol, but bearing something sobering instead.
He felt cowardly doing it like this. But he had a feeling that if he had to tell Charlie to her face, she would convince him to stay, and he simply couldn't. He couldn't do what he needed to do while entangling her in his business. And he couldn't live with himself if he didn't do what needed to be done. When this job was over, he might be able to return safely, having sheltered the best person in Hell from the fallout of his actions. But until then, all he could do was hurt her, and by extension hurt the best chance for Hell to become something better than it was.
Sam concentrated a moment, then snapped his fingers. His body became weighed down as the two backpacks teleported onto him, looped over his back and forward like a papoose, while the third duffle now dangled from the other hand. Sam was going to have to be careful with Magic. It stood a very good chance of making him lazy, being able to just call things to him like this. But if things were going to go how he imagined they would, he wouldn't have a chance for that to matter.
Sam recentered himself, and focused on the flow of magic not just in the building, but in the whole of Pride Ring. It was like watching smoke drift through a sheltered room, twisting in subtle vortices and reaching out in strands. And as soon as Sam felt the one that he needed drifting by, he reached out to it.
There was a loud metallic snap.
Then Sam Scailes was gone from the Happy Hotel. But for the repairs he'd made, there was no material trace that he'd ever been there at all.
"There. He's called 'Wretch'," Moxie said, pointing out the Proxy's bodyguard on his Hellphone while he waited for Millie get into position for the assassination. Moxie had been confused by this job when it was offered. Sure, killing the heads of Charities was to be expected, because few people liked being mocked by the charitable. But then he had to remind himself that very few actually believed in the Supremacy of Charity, as few of them were Satanists. They didn't want this man dead because he was showing off. They wanted him dead because they felt he owed them money. How unbelievably petty.
"A fuckin' gargoyle? I ain't ever fought one of those before," Blitz said, before going back to watching through his spying binoculars.
"That explains the Ruin of Wrath card at least. And Gargoyles are nearly the only form of Sinner that has Resilience. It might be hard to kill, even for us," he said. He then left his phone on the rooftop and continued to stare through his rifle-scope.
"I killed a guy who was supposed to be immortal. This shit-licker doesn't stand a chance," Blitz said. "There you are Mills. He's standing to your right."
Moxie's scope swung down and spotted the window just as it was coated from top to bottom in crimson. A dim form moved past it a moment later. He looked ahead, and there was a guard who was standing at the window, smoking out of it. After only a few seconds, he let out a surprised, pained expression, then tried to pull back in, only to have his head fall off and have his body tipped out of the window a moment later, draining gore as it fell into the bushes below. Millie poked her head out of the window and blew a kiss at where she believed he was, which made Moxie smile for a moment, before she closed the window and continued through the mansion.
"Look, gargoyle or not, this shit-bag stands between me and Birch and I'll rip him a new shitter for me to fuck my way through," Blitz said. "One floor up, two left."
Moxie's scope jumped to the spot his employer mentioned and he saw that there were two people who had just put themselves in an ambushing spot at the top of a staircase, so that they'd shoot Millie in the back of the head as she ascended. It was so strange to Moxie that when he'd started at this place, he only had an academic understanding of firearms and how to use them. His parents had been surprisingly non-violent for denizens of Wrath. They didn't kill using their fists. They killed using influence, reputation, and the attrition of disdain. It took longer for the body to hit the ground, but when it did, even a master Thaumaturge couldn't bring them back. So all of the murderous skills he'd picked up were entirely work related.
He squeezed the trigger, the muffled snap slamming his shoulder back hard as he used the recoil to hop the reticle to the second target. By the time he had the gun stilled again, he fired a second time; the second bullet passed through the same breaking window a split second after the first, and the second target likely didn't even realize his partner had died before the round drilled through his skull above his left eye. Moxie scowled for a moment, because that wasn't where he wanted it to go, but the fact was, the target was dead. Moxie cozied the rifle up to his shoulder again and started to pan again, snapping back for a moment as he saw Millie dart up the staircase he'd rendered safe, then back onto patrol.
"Have you given thought to the Overlord?" Moxie asked.
"The who now?" Blitz asked. Of course he hadn't.
"Fiona O'Daire?" Moxie asked. Blitz, still looking through the binocs gave a shrug. "The dragon!"
"Oh the one who can't ever wear all of a single dress? Yeah, she's probably not a problem," Blitz said.
"She used to rule dozens of blocks of East Pentagram, and fought under Jingo in the Pride War. She will be a problem, sir."
"She don't rule them now, which means she's come down in the world," Blitz pointed out.
"She's not magically lost the power she had when she was still an Overlord. She's just been... well... restrained. And if Birch thinks that he's in trouble, he will tell her to fight with her full strength. Which is considerable."
"Fancy becoming a dragon slayer, eh Mox?" Blitz asked.
"If I have to, I guess I will," Moxie admitted. He almost panned past a woman in her underwear setting up a belt-fed machine gun behind a door that overlooked a hallway that Millie was going to have to go down. She was out of sight most of the time, though. He could only see her occasionally. So Moxie did the math in his head, made his best guess, and aimed directly at the wall. Another muffled crack, a hole punching through the exterior wall. The barely clothed human did not appear to Moxie again. "Has Loona managed to contact that Sinner, yet?"
"Give her a bit. If he's doin' time bullshit then he's probably cagey as fuck and right to be," Blitz said. "Idiots comin' in from the right. Must'a seen your window break."
Moxie swivelled the rifle down, to see that there were two of the perimeter guards who were now running toward the building. One of the was trying to say something on his radio. With a snap, Moxie took the shot and pounded his heart out through his ribs. The others now probably knew that something was wrong but not what exactly. The other turned, saw that his buddy had died, and then threw himself behind a hedge. Moxie practically rolled his eyes, pointed where the guy had to have landed, and fired right through the topiary. He didn't get back up.
Moxie from two years ago wouldn't have recognized Moxie today. He swapped the nearly-empty magazine of subsonic rounds for a full one of AP Incendiary, now that it was properly time to go loud as he considered not just the skill he'd picked up, but the kind of decisions he was making. Old Moxie would be in a constant panic attack at the awe-inspiring peril he was now constantly under, not just from doing this job but from the notion of going up against Lucifer's Proxy, and all of the insane dangers that lead up to it. Old Moxie would have just fled, grabbed Millie and ran all the way down to Sloth and hid there until Blitz died either of old age or his own idiocy – more likely the latter, frankly. Old Moxie would have been a coward, and a long lived one.
"Runner to guard-house," Blitz said.
Now, though, New Moxie was here. A Moxie that was going to transgress against the Chain of Being itself, because that was the only way to win an impossible fight. A Moxie that would become something that his parents wouldn't recognize in their baby boy, but would beam with pride to see. True to Blitz's spotting, somebody tearing open the door to the guard house. Moxie pulled the trigger, and killed, but not the one on the outside. He fired through the wall at where the other one would be sitting, then fired twice more, and the inside of the guard room began to catch fire. The guard outside staggered away in confusion and terror, leaving him open for Moxie's fifth bullet. Five left.
"Yup they're shitting themselves now," Blitz said. Moxie quickly panned his rifle across the grounds, but didn't find any convenient targets. It was unfortunate that their vantage only covered the front and one side of the building. I.M.P. just didn't have enough people to have two snipers with spotters on this one. So if the target made a run for it, there was a chance that there'd be a building between them, and the imps trying to shoot him. "They've called in backup. Gonna have a lot of fuckheads down there soon."
Moxie turned to the windows again, and there was Millie again, her torso out the window waving vigorously. While she still had her human disguise on, even from the distance her skin nearly looked its usual scarlet pallor, so coated was she in human blood. "She's gotten him."
"Thank fuck for that, let's get this shit moving," Blitz said, then hit the speed dial on his Hellphone. "Loonie? Two portals, get Mills out first."
Even these in-depth assassinations were starting to become routine. If that didn't tell Moxie that, despite the bald-faced audacity of it all, there was some non-zero chance of executing the Proxy of Lucifer, he didn't know what was. As Moxie packed up his rifle, there was a strange calm in him. He would succeed or die, but either way he would be proving himself to a level that nobody – not even himself – thought possible.
The portal opened, and Moxie stepped through. He was immediately greeted by the metal stink of human blood and a liplock by his beloved. Despite all the rest, this was still Hell, and life was good.
"Have you seen Wendy?" Charlie asked. Vaggie turned from the accounting she was doing and gave a shrug.
"Did you check the conservatory?" she asked.
"I've looked everywhere, but I can't find her. And it's not like her to wander off without telling somebody."
"Maybe she's out with Sam. She seems to like being around him," Vaggie said.
"Maybe. I can't find him either. I think he's taking the Goat's death harder than even he thought he would," she said, sitting on the corner of Vaggie's desk.
"He was a Dealmaker," Vaggie said, but her heart wasn't in it. Because the Goat had essentially single-handedly floated the Hotel for the next two centuries off of the money he'd given to Charlie. Vaggie couldn't look inside the dead man's head and see his intentions, but... even jaded, cynical Vaggie had to admit that in the end the results trumped the intention behind them. No matter why The Goat of the Apocalypse gave Charlotte Magne a bequest in her specific name of more than a trillion Souls, he had still done it. "And he might have been the best of them," she then admitted.
"He believed in me enough to give me everything he had. He believed in redemption," she said.
"He told me that he did," Vaggie said.
"Really? Why didn't you say so?" she asked, leaning in a bit closer.
"Because I thought he was lying," Vaggie said. "He said that 'he found the impotent rage of evil people deeply satisfying'. And what we're doing here? It's going to cause a lot of truly irredeemable people a lot of anguish when they realize that we're giving something to people that they can never steal, buy, or destroy."
"Nobody's irredeemable," Charlie said.
"Not even Alastor?" Vaggie asked with her brow raised. Charlie flinched at that. While she might have the kindest of all possible hearts in Hell, even Charlotte Magne had a limit to what her imagination could contain.
"Hey boss? I think yer gonna wanna hear this," Husk's voice came through the cracked door. The two women shared a look, then rounded and dismounted the table respectively to join the gambler at the bar. He was holding an empty bottle in one hand and a long, unfurled piece of paper in the other.
"What is it?" Charlie asked.
"It's Sam," Husk said.
"What about Sam?" Angel Dust asked, coming out of the kitchen with an apron on. Honestly, the whole lobby smelled great right now, so having him back there was good news for everybody.
"He's gone," Husk said. His words hung in the air, like the appealing and present odor of fresh bread and cooking pasta. "Says that he can't stay here and do what he needs to do now. Fucking..."
Husk then turned and punched the pillar that supplied him with liquor. The thing exploded into flinders at his strike, and his subsequent kick into the marble pad shattered it into chunks. Husk looked... genuinely upset.
"Goddamn it, Sam, I told you, I TOLD YOU!" Husk shouted. "You can't climb that mountain! You'll just die if you do and what's the first thing he does when he gets back? He gets his fuckin' ice axe and goes out the FUCKING DOOR!"
"Husk, it's okay!" Charlie said, clearly off-put by the way Husk was acting. But then again, Angel Dust was staring in agape shock, and even Vaggie had to consciously close her mouth after viewing the display. This was like watching fish climb a tree. Husk eventually dropped to a squat with his back against a wall and his wings clenched tight around his torso, fists clenched tight. Charlie picked up the message that he'd left behind, and began to read it. "Oh. Oh... oh."
"What does it say?" Angel Dust asked.
"It says... 'Nathan Birch is responsible for not just my death, but the deaths of friends in my life before, the rape of another, the mutilation of yet another. As long as Birch continues to exist within Hell, he is a poison which will render Hell and Earth alike a wasteland in the name of his ambitions. I cannot abide that. And since any action I take against your father's chosen voice will definitionally drag you into conflict with him, I have to'..." she paused, one hand coming up to her mouth for a moment. "...'I have to distance myself from you and the Happy Hotel. I'm not doing this because I feel you incapable of helping me, but because I believe in what you're doing, in the good that you're building. And I will not be party to cruelty tearing it down because I was thoughtless in pursuit of my vision of good. I might be wrong. I might be a fool. But I will not be a cruel fool."
"He's... gone?" Angel asked. "That don't seem possible."
"...'When Birch is dead and the evil he inculcates is ripped from the fabric of Hell, I can come back. I might come back. Increasingly I'm beginning to believe that there is no redemption for me. That the things that Hell now forces me to do are revealing my nature as somebody who was never going to walk invited into Heaven. But I'm not sad, and I'm not afraid, because it was never my intention to blissfully sit at the foot of God. From the first day I came into this building, I swore an oath to my mother and upon my pain that I would work until the day that I could tear down the walls of Heaven and topple the throne of God. That path will lead to my annihilation at some point. I just hope that I can cause some good, either here or elsewhere, before that ruin comes. You don't need me. You shouldn't mourn me. Instead, make Hell into something that Heaven will envy. You have that power. You just need to realize it. I'm sorry. Sam."
Charlie put the thing down on the broken bar and looked crestfallen. Vaggie didn't understand. Sam might have had a poor choice in friends, but... making war against God? Was he insane? Sam didn't even realize that he'd jumped onto the rawest nerve that Charlie had about this whole project, the notion of somebody leaving things half-finished. And worse still, not because they fell back into their old, unkinder angels. Sam was doing this out of a belief – even if a foolish one – that he was being self-sacrificing.
"Would you mind coming up to the fortieth?" Alastor's voice was suddenly at Vaggie's side. She let out a strangled noise and turned to see him, but couldn't. "I've found something... unexpected."
"Where are you?" she asked.
"Like I said, the fortieth," Alastor's voice said. And sounded... distracted. Vaggie turned to Charlie who was trying in vain with Angel Dust to comfort Husk, who just looked... drained and beaten. Vaggie left her better half to deal with him. She couldn't think of any comforts she could offer. And leaving Alastor unattended probably wasn't safe. She rode up the elevator to the floor Wendy and Sam pretty much had to themselves. When the grate rattled open, Wendy's door was open, so Vaggie took that as her cue to walk into the botanist's domain, although she nevertheless gave the door a knock as she did.
Alastor was kneeling down next to to the chair that faced the multi-paned window that even now was having rain leak through it. When had it broken? And why hadn't it been – right, it wasn't fixed because Sam was gone. Vaggie moved closer, and Alastor picked up the blouse that Wendy had worn on karaoke night. It was ripped slightly at the neck. "So what do you want up here?"
"Does this strike you as strange?" Alastor asked, his voice lacking the usual mocking superiority and knife-twisting malice.
"She got lazy before going to bed. I've done that myself," Vaggie said.
"Where is the glass?" Alastor then asked. Vaggie stared at the back of his head, then to the window. Then, she looked down to the floor at the window's base. And true to Alastor's word, there wasn't so much as a flake of broken glass on the inside. She then got up on her tip-toes and looked at the break. It wasn't a break. It was like something bored through the sheet of glass.
"Did she throw something out?" Vaggie asked, unable to come up with a better way of putting it. She looked down, to where dandelions were starting to sortie into the battlegrounds of hell's vegetation. But that wasn't a break, and there were no cracks. Just an odd, bored hole in the glass. She turned around, and saw that Alastor was gathering up a pile of something faintly reflective and grey, a mound perhaps two inches tall and made of tiny prisms that split light into moody shades. Then she looked up at Alastor.
Alastor wasn't smiling.
That caused her brain to hit the breaks harder than anything she'd ever seen since she landed in this abyss of suffering. Alastor, the Radio Demon, the Beast That Grins, not smiling. He simply looked at the powder, then up to her. "Do you know what this is?" he asked.
"I'm sure it's something mind blowing," Vaggie said.
"My question wasn't rhetorical, my dear," Alastor said, turning his openly baffled expression to the dust, then to the window. With alacrity befitting his terrifying reputation, he rose and pushed past her to the window, scrutinizing the hole, then turned to the dust again. His eyes flit around, as though plumbing the depths of his twisted and broken mind for an answer. And slowly, as the moments peeled into a minute, he started to smile again. This time, there was something almost... innocent... about his smile. "Of course."
"What is the powder?" Vaggie asked, taking a nervous step back as he started chuckling, then laughing. He laughed, and reality began to crack and bleed, faint trails of black ichor leaking from his eyes, before he schooled himself, letting reality reseat itself and stooping down to gather up the most of the dust between his palms. He stood up, smile now... victorious.
"This is a most unusual day," he said. "Who would have thought she'd be right?"
And then, with chuckles rising in his throat, his body broke apart into motes which drifted away and vanished in the shadows of the room. Vaggie had a sinking sensation. It felt like a storm sweeping in off of the coast, tingling her skin, completely divorced from the rain outside the broken window. Even if she didn't know the shape of what was coming, her instincts told her it was bad. And that was enough to be afraid.
From one hotel to another. While this one lacked the spacious grandiosity of his room at the Happy Hotel, this more humble abode in Imp City still gave Sam everything that he needed for his ends. And it meant that he was simultaneously not subject to Razzle and Dazzle's cooking, but also unable to benefit from Angel Dust's. Prices needed to be paid. This was to keep that dream alive, after all.
Sam sat, as he often did, in the chair in the corner of the room. The window dominated his right side, looking out on horned buildings and great concrete edifices to how little Hell cared about imps, the corner of the room at his back, the big-screen TV on in front of him. Relating how in the wake of the sudden destruction of the V Triarchy, what had been one undisputed king of the sex-trafficking trade had exploded into violent and open warfare between a half hundred would-be Overlords, and the Clothiers Union was now eating itself trying to replace Velvet. All that work. Nothing changed. He certainly hadn't made anything better. He just turned the cruelty from an industry into a battlefield – made what was once focused, suddenly broad and indiscriminate. Fuck me, he thought. I might has well have not done anything. He turned the TV off in disgust at his own incompetence, and returned to flicking through the various contents of this Hellphone.
He'd already absorbed the angelic magic that Apoc had given him. There was so much that Apoc hadn't told him, things that he hadn't prepared him for. But Sam wasn't a child and he wasn't an idiot. He would figure it out. And now he knew exactly why he could True Kill people with his bare hands; it was a form of Angelic Magic named, uninspired though it was, Purge. There was little marginalia to find in the works that Apoc had left for him, but even still, with the wide basis in magic that Sam had managed to scratch for himself since landing in Hell, he managed to string something like a narrative through the Angel magic that he found.
Angel's magic was made pure by their halos, carried in their hearts and flowing through their golden blood. It was why ripping the wings from the Ars Goetia made them weakened; they had less blood, and thus less power. In a way, Angels and imps were two ends of a strange spectrum. Angels grew less powerful as their bodies were carved away. Imps lost nothing, instead gaining higher and higher blood pressure as the same amount of blood was packed into a smaller frame, until the black blood which was their soul overwhelmed and exploded their hearts.
Sam's magic had to come from his guts, then, since there was nothing in his heart. The Gift of Glory had been pulled away from him. And he always seemed to have more blood than he needed, because it kept leaking out of him at inopportune moments. At least his shoulder wound had finished scabbing over. It itched furiously. He ignored it.
Through reading between invisible lines, Sam gathered that Angels always had one or two magicks that came more naturally to them than breathing. For Sam, it was Purge. Apoc, now that Sam put some thought to it, likely had Dead Body, the magic of numbness and freedom from pain. It was the only one that made sense, considering a chunk of Apoc had to be shoved into Sam, and that same chunk would thereby be forever missing, and equally unhealing, in Apoc. And there were other abilities unique to Angels that couldn't be codified into magic any more than one man's genius could be given whole to another. That probably explained Looking Within for Sam. He wondered if Apoc had something similar. If cherubs even could.
All told, with what Sam knew, he could have been a force to be reckoned with. The kind of person who, if he put his mind to it, could have conquered the ring of Pride with proper effort. But he wasn't. And though it didn't bother him that he lacked such ruinous ambition, he was a bit confused as to why he didn't.
"Because of your empathy," Apoc's voice came.
"Fucking Christ!" Sam started, seeing Apoc's incomplete form gently boiling away into shadows nearby. "Are you going to keep doing this? And how are you doing this?"
"You're in the liminal space between awaken and asleep," Apoc said, gesturing to the dark outside his rain-struck window. "If I waited until you were asleep, you wouldn't remember our words. When you accepted my anger, you accepted me. And here? Here in this place between tick and tock, here I remain."
"So you're going to be around forever? I thought you would be just a memory, at this point," Sam said.
"We are both going into uncharted territory," Apoc admitted. He gave his head a shake. "Whatever the case, consider the degree of empathy you have. How empathetic were you in life?"
"As much as I could afford to be, I guess," Sam said. Alright, though weird, he could deal with this.
"And now, even though the first thing that happened to you upon entering Hell was getting butchered for meat by cannibals, you still want to help a family of them reunite."
"What are you talking about?" Sam asked.
"Martha and Ralphie. You still think about them," Apoc said. Sam realized he was right.
"That does seem... odd," Sam agreed.
"Empathy is a failsafe, I'm starting to realize," Apoc said. "Your deepest power is the power to change the nature of someone. And you refuse to do it because you see it as an unforgivable violation, something that it is impossible for somebody to actually consent to in the same way that you cannot sanely consent to having your child sacrificed. Power, meet restraint."
"So I find the power abhorrent so that even though I can use it, I won't," Sam said. He gave his head a slow shake. "That doesn't help me. Even realizing the trap, I still can't get out of it. And I'm not sure I want to. If I can just turn people into something they're not any time it pleases me, I would be worse than God, who at least gives people the olive branch of Free Will. I would be taking that away from them. I can't accept that."
"And thank the Demiurge for that," Apoc said. "Because if you hadn't the restraint that your empathy, empowered to ridiculous heights though it may be, gave you, you would be the most dangerous being in Creation. You who could, with an act of will, turn anybody into anything. Turn your enemies into fanatical devotees. Turn imp children into suicide bombers. Turn the devout into the faithless and turn the righteous into the base. You would be the Beast From The Earth, with the horns of the lamb and a Red Right Hand."
"No. I won't," Sam said.
"Of course you won't. Like I said, no prophecy speaks of you, because you chose to defy this path," Apoc said, still pacing as his head slowly boiled away into shadows. "Free Will is the most confusing of God's creations, if it is even, as I suspect it is not, a creation of God at all. You chose to not walk the path of the Second Beast, and thus the path is ripped up before your toes and denied you. Another will come along that will choose that path. Choice is power, Sam. Never forget that."
"It doesn't feel like I have any choices at all. I'm just running from one problem to another and making it out by the skin of my teeth," Sam muttered.
"The fact that you don't entertain the choices you find fundamentally unacceptable doesn't negate the fact that they are there," Apoc said. "For example; during my first Default against Red Sugar, you could have secreted away some objects of worth before I counted them, granting you a larger portion of my earnings. Instead, you acted with perfect ethics. And why?"
"Because I didn't know what was worth what, because I didn't want to screw over the guy paying my cheques, because I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to actually hide anything from you..." Sam rattled off a few of the reasons.
"And because you knew it was not fair," Apoc said, halting in his pacing. "If anybody told you the Gift of Angels you have is the most valuable thing you've brought to hell, they're wrong. They're wrong, because the only thing that makes you worthy of that power, the only thing which made me willing to put a piece of myself into you, the only reason I think you can choose the right path... is because you brought your moral compass into Hell with you..."
"Lots of people do that, nowadays," Sam said.
"And you didn't let Hell break it," Apoc finished. Even his gradually dissolving form looked deeply saddened by that.
"...Why did you kill Celeste Wormwood?" Sam asked.
"She chose Lucifer over our mission," Apoc said. He turned to look at Sam, his eyes reforming long enough to give a very genuine stare. "I knew her for years. She was the first like you I'd ever met. And I thought she would be true to me, be true to the mission, to break the walls of Heaven and topple the throne of God. But I didn't realize that her moral compass wasn't pointing north anymore. She'd lost her way to greed, to vainglory. Lucifer learned of her. Wanted her to be his new Proxy. So one day, as we left Pride to go to a job... Well... I have my ways."
"And since her?" Sam asked.
"There have been others. Dimitri, Soren, Amelia and Emily and Emil, Rajesh and Stanley and Mariana. And every single one of them was going the same way that Celeste was. So I killed them, as well," Apoc said. "I was a lot more discrete with them. Lucifer never even learned of them by the time they were gone."
"And all that makes me special is that I haven't lost my way yet. Christ, Apoc. It was just inevitable that I was going to be your next Celeste, wasn't it?" Sam asked.
"I don't think you can," Apoc said. "Strength, corrupted, remains strong. Glory, corrupted, remains glorious. Plenty, corrupted, remains plentiful. But justice? The moment that justice is corrupted, it is no longer just. The paradox of that sits in your mind, a building block of your own identity that you are as unlikely to give up as I am to return to life... Although, I would ask that you not try to bring me back to life, if you ever find yourself in the presence of a High Thaumaturge. I've lived longer than this universe, Sam. That's long enough."
"So... what do I do now?" Sam asked.
"What you choose to. Just like you always have," Apoc said.
And then, like a dream, he was gone.
Friends earn you money. Enemies cost you money. Make sure to have more friends than enemies. Remember that no friend is beyond price.
-Excerpt from the Credo Bohta