The Song of Ruin

by James Golen

The Demiurge has revealed himself, and declared a vendetta against God. Hell is in turmoil as Lucifer - now with a mere imp as his Proxy - is surely planning a new war against Heaven, to reclaim the throne he calls his own. And those who are stuck on the battlefield have to find a way to survive. This is a story of how good men die. Book 2 of The Silent God Duology.

25. A Hole in the Mind

Blitz was finally starting to admit that maybe, just maybe, his apartment wasn't big enough for everybody.

It'd gotten to the point where most of his nights for the last few months had been spent at Stolas' place, if only so that Barb and Lyve would have a bed to sleep in. It wasn't like Tills and all of her kids who were content with a bundle of blankets on a closet floor, or in Uller's case, the couch. The apartment had been grabbed with the intention of just Blitz and Loonie crashing down after a hard day's killing. Now it was home to a whole clan. Well, little 'c' clan. Possibly big 'C' Clan? He didn't know how people usually went about figuring where the first became the second.

Lyve was a nervous kid, not very chatty and not very wordy, clinging to Barb as though terrified that he'd be parted from her again. But considering that he had indeed been parted from her for half his little life, it was a reasonable fear. Even a couple months did little to calm him. And frankly Blitz didn't spend a lot of those months around Lyve and Barb. Come to think of it, where had she been staying before? He'd never asked, and she'd never said. Was she living on the streets until she knocked on M&M's door?

Eh, Blitz thought. Whatever she'd been doing isn't what she is doing. And he got to have his family around him again.

And then there was Stolas.

When Blitz had marked Stolas out as a target to steal that Grimoire, he'd figured that Stolas wouldn't care because he was pretty thoroughly done with his life and that he might not even notice that it was missing. Of course that turned out pretty flagrantly to be wrong; whereas Blitz had once related that his dick was good but not that good, the events that transpired after a quickie sent Stolas into a sexual awakening told him to reevaluate the value of his piping. After all, he'd managed to dick a succubus so well that she got a tattoo of him. That was a feat to be proud of. And once Stolas' revanchist sexuality started to even and level, he just wanted Blitz around for no better reason than that Blitz apparently made the thirsty owl happy.

Which was new for Blitz.

He was used to having to scrape and scratch to earn any kind of positive regard from the people around him. And Stolas just bombarded it with him as though he could think of nothing better to do with his time. It was weird. And Blitz kinda liked it. A good weird.

"You've got a look on your face, Blitzie; is something wrong?" Stolas asked as they zipped through the sky of Sloth in one of Bathin's more esoteric taxis.

"Just thinking of how shit's gone for the last little bit," he said.

"And?" Stolas asked, pulling Blitz a little closer to him as he shifted his gaze from the near-wall that was the trunk of the Qliphoth and to his impish lover.

"And shit's been suspiciously good," Blitz said. "Something's gonna go wrong, to try to balance the scales."

"Please don't do this to yourself. You don't deserve..." Stolas began, but Blitz waved him off.

"This ain't me trying to sabotage myself, Stolas. I'm just saying that imps aren't allowed to have too long of a good streak before a big old lump of shit falls from the heavens and whaps 'em in the face. It's like a rule of nature," Blitz said, as the car continued to spiral up the impossibly tall trunk of the impossible tree.

"That's rather pessimistic, Blitzie. Nobody would dare."

"You say that; even my fancy fuckin' title didn't amount to shit when it ran up against real resistance," Blitz pointed out.

"Is somebody displeasing you? Would you like me to go and ruin them?" Stola asked in sultry tone.

"Eh, nah. They've gotta do some paperwork from us, and frankly I think they'll suffer more if we leave 'em alone," Blitz said. Few were the people who could look down a gunbarrel and sigh with relief. Blitz didn't know much what to do with their ilk. He paused for a moment as the vehicle continued its spiralling climb, curving upward past bark so thick that one could (and some lunatics in fact did) carve it into a full sized house. Still the spectacle of it was lost on Blitz. You see one big ass tree, you've seen them all.

"You need to relax," Stolas said, gently kneading Blitz's shoulders with his hands. "The past needn't be the sole predictor of the future. I know that from personal experience; I'm supposed to be dead right now!"

"Well, that's what you get for listening to a stupid prophecy," Blitz said. Even uneducated as he was in magical matters, he knew that there were no prophecies for the imps. As far as the visions of the future were concerned, imps were too alien to predict.

"And I don't doubt that I'll be kicking myself for believing it as long as I had... still," Stolas sighed, draping his arm 'round Blitz's neck and splaying his hand across Blitz's chest, "it was very convincing for the longest time. It got almost everything exactly right, even the things I had tried to take pains to avoid."

"And even now that you know it's all bullshit, it's still living rent-free in your head," Blitz pointed out.

Stolas gave a surprised chuckle at that. "I suppose that it is. Thank you, Blitz. Thank you for everything."

"Yeesh, you get clingy when I give you a Noon-er, you know that?" Blitz asked.

"Maybe I'm trying to get another one out of you tomorrow?" Stolas asked with heat in his tone.

"We'll see, Stolas. We'll see," he said. The ascent paused, and whatever fantastical filth that Stolas was about to start streaming directly through Blitz's augmetic ears was called to a halt as they rounded the trunk and saw something... big... growing out of the wall of wood. Stolas stared at it, then gently picked Blitz up and placed him onto his other side so that he could roll down the window and lean out, looking at the bulbous what-the-fuck which was projected away from the bark by a 'twig' which was larger around than an apartment building.

"The fuck?"

"Oh my," Stolas said. He pulled back in and reached to the front panel. "I need you to take me directly over it! Right now!"

The vehicle burned a little higher, then hovered over the 'stem' of this growth. Blitz tried to see what Stolas was so engrossed in, but it just looked like a fucking plant to him. "What's the big biz of this bitch?" he asked.

"Those are sepals," Stolas said. "They haven't unfurled but they're absolutely sepals."

"They're what now?" Blitz asked.

"Oh, the outer petals of a flower, the ones which don't contain the germinative elements," Stolas said, which offered very little explanation to Blitz. He just scowled at the owl until he pulled back in. "This is tremendous. In the billions of years of the Qliphoth's existence in Heaven and the hundred centuries of its existence in Hell, it has never offered a flowering body! We could be on the verge of learning some critical secrets as to what exactly the Qliphoth's intent in Heaven was! And how valuable it is now that we've stolen it down here to Hell!"

"It's... what? A flower bud?" Blitz tried to parse what Stolas was saying and got about that much useful information out of it.

"Not just any flower bud, my sweet; this is the first budding body that it has grown since the beginning of Time Itself. My word if this is a monoecious plant, we might be able to have it self-fertilize!" Stolas was showing an excitement that usually only happened when Blitz was elbow deep in him. "I need to go back to my palace and get some of my tools! This is such a unique opportunity!"

And Blitz just felt as mile creep onto his face, as Stolas took command and bade Bathin's VTOL head for the Elevator. He'd just seen a piece of Stolas that he'd never seen before, and Stolas hadn't recoiled or called him to silence.

"Fuck I like you," Blitz said, lost under Stolas' enthusiasm.

And that meant something. It was easy to love the person you were fucking. It was a lot harder to like them.

---

Chapter 25

A Hole In The Mind

---

Spring break had come and gone again, and just like last year, Verosika didn't have the guts to ask for a rematch. But considering that things between the two of them were if not friendly, at least no longer cut-throat, he could focus on other shit for the time being. "Okay people, let's figure this the fuck out: Why don't dead assholes wanna kill the living anymore?"

Maelstrom, who was in the middle of a bite of some horrifying looking mess of cheese curds, gravy and thick-cut fries, paused and glanced to the others at the table. "We... have been killing people for the dead. For a couple months now. Pretty steadily," he pointed out.

"It's s'posed to be booming!" Blitz complained, slapping the figures that they pulled from that 'half off' sale which showed Mayday her place back in 2021. Even doing work for half the money ended up making them a mint by volume alone. "Spring break is the perfect time to gather a bunch of idiots into one space and then pick 'em off like fish in a dishwasher!"

"Fish in a..." Moxxie muttered.

"I'm just fine things bein' slow like this, Boss," Millie said, having made a rare appearance in the last couple months to the office. Considering she was now as heavily pregnant as Tills had been when Blitz grabbed her and dragged her out of Lust, no great surprise. She could pop any day now. And while Blitz wished he could just bitch loudly and ignore reality, he knew that part of the earnings slump they were in was because Millie couldn't work with that pretzel in her bakery. Not having to pay her didn't even out from the sheer body-count that she was capable of dropping.

"We're having a lazy spring. Those things happen," Loona said from her usual spot near the foot of the table with her feet kicked up and on its surface.

"C'mon, guys, I don't wanna go back to scraping by like we did back in 2020!" Blitz said, stabbing his palm with a fingertip.

"Sir, we've made more in January of this year alone than we did during all of 2020. Our reputation will see us through this thin spot. Just give it time," Moxxie said, while he picked away at a salad which he didn't seem to put much stock in.

"Yeah, very helpful there Moxx," Blitz said getting out the white-board and sliding it between Moxxie and the table that he was sitting at, essentially cutting him off from the conversation. "We ain't got that kind of time on our hands and I won't put this business in the shitter outta laziness. So I need some ideas how to drum up work!"

"We could do more Aristocratic jobs," Loona offered.

"Assassinations or Championing?" Maelstrom asked.

"Why not both?" Loona asked.

"Veto," Maelstrom said.

"Mal, come on..." she said.

"No, since it's going to be me in the crosshairs, I have a right to veto and I veto," he said.

"Okay, what about doing something crazy, like taking orders to kill Angels?" Blitz said with a flourish.

"Veto," everybody in the office said essentially at once.

"Don't be like that; we killed Birch! How much harder could an Angel be?" Blitz demanded.

"A lot," Moxxie said from the far side of the white-board.

"I don't wanna make my lil'un an orphan doing something that brazen, Blitz," Millie said, rubbing her belly which spilled out from her clothes which were not rated for maternal body-shapes.

"Well we gotta do something," Blitz said.

"What about killing on behalf of the living?" Maelstrom asked.

"Say what now?" Blitz asked.

"Loona, remember that guy in Cameroon? Jean something?" Maelstrom asked.

"Yeah, he was way too happy to see we were from Hell," Loona said. But then she shrugged. "I mean, it's an idea but what would they even pay us with? It's not like they've got access to Souls or shit that's exchangeable with them."

"Alright, put a pin in that one. Maybe they got something we care about but most likely they don't. And besides, if we wait long enough they'll die and we can deal with 'em normally," Blitz said.

The door opened then, and Barb came in with two bags of food in her hands. The one that was by far larger she handed directly to Millie, and Millie attacked that thing like a meth-crazed raccoon, tearing apart bag and packaging and consuming a hearty meal of organ-meat sandwiches and nearly black bacon crunched between bread slices. The second bag, smaller by far, she gave to Blitz.

"I thought it was the little shit that was going to deliver these things," Blitz said as he pulled out the broad burger he'd ordered and bit a wedge out of it.

"Krieg's busy doing some sort of ritual magic. Says it will 'change the status quo of Hell' for some reason. I don't even pretend to know," Barb said. She then glanced back and sighed. "Lyve, come on. You know all of these people!"

Lyve glanced between the people in the room from where he was peeking 'round the door, and only at her word did he emerge and toddle toward her, reaching up to grab her fingers in his hand.

"So what's all this?" Barb asked.

"Slow month," Moxxie said from the other side of the white board.

"Why are you over there and not here?"

"It was this or be shoved out of my chair," Moxxie said.

Barb shook her head, then looked at what was written on the white-board. Namely 'We Need Fuckin' Money!' underlined four times, followed by every scheme that Blitz had brought up for the entire slow work-week they were half way through. At the bottom, in Moxxie's hand, were the words 'Let NA cool down'. "You weren't kidding about how much killing you do," she said lightly.

"What, did you think I spent the last however-the-fuck-long just joking with you? I've filled a lake with blood!"

"We have," Moxxie said, leaning around the white-board to show his discontent with that statement.

"Y'know what? I think we're all spinning our wheels here," Blitz admitted, giving them all a reason to fuck off for a minute, because it was obvious that his sister was looking for an excuse. "I'mma be in my office. Don't knock unless you come up with something brilliant."

He started toward the door to his office, then paused and leaned around the door to the meeting room again. Barb was just standing there, looking conflicted.

"Well?" Blitz asked. She started as she finally clued in to what he'd just done (he was a clever one, Blitz was) and followed to the office.

She paused at the door, looking at all of the memorabilia of their second life outside of Clan Cruac, earning money on their behalf as a traveling circus. She especially paused at the poster for the Wonder Twins, which had been taken about six hours before the final explosive argument that drove them apart. Exactly one day before Fizzarolli's catastrophic birthday. One day before Blitz got his Mama killed. Now that Blitz was far enough out from it, he could tell even from looking at the poster that their father's gambit was doomed. In that photographed moment, there was simply too much bad blood.

"I'm going back to Pentagram City," Barb said, stooping down and picking up Lyve. "I thought I should tell you, properly say goodbye, instead of just vanish into the dark like last time."

"Yeah," Blitz said as he leaned back against his desk. "I got that feelin' out of you. Back to the acting grind are you?"

"Well, maybe?" she said with a deep wince. "Blitz, I need to know something before I go any further. If everything goes to shit and something happens to me... will you and yours look after Lyve?"

"After all the trouble we went to get him in the first place? You'd have an easier time pissing up God's nose than keeping us away," Blitz said.

"Thank you. Seriously. Honestly," Barb said.

"Thanks for killing Dad," Blitz pointed out.

Barb jolted back, shock on her face. Not confusion and bafflement. Shock that she'd been caught. Just as he thought. "How... how did you know?"

Blitz shifted his posture, because his back was getting geriatric at an unpleasant rate, and stared his sister down. "I know Dad's dead because you haven't mentioned him even in passing until now, even with how much you hate him. I know that you hate him because I'm not fuckin' blind; I saw that he did to you what he did to Mamma. And I know if he'd gotten himself killed in a way that didn't fuckin' traumatize you you'd have been gloating about it. So I take it you offed him yourself?"

She blinked at him, stunned that he'd shown a working grasp of cause and effect for possibly the first time in his life. "I... It was... it was bad, Blitz," she said, starting to shake. Blitz sighed and reached back to drag his office chair around his desk and send it scooting toward her. She sat down in it, as though her legs had gone wobbly. "The blood is so thick. I was so used to stage blood, and that's runny. But Imp blood... it stained everything. And I had to scrub it off so fast..."

"You're getting ahead of yourself, sis," Blitz said. "From the top. Climb the trapeze before you start swinging."

She sputtered out an uneven and not at all relieving sigh, and nodded. "He was... doing things again. I had work. The call came ten minutes to action. And he said that when I was done that day... he was sending Lyve back to Bal Matheer."

"Fucking asshole," Blitz provided.

She nodded quietly. "I was drunk, of course. And I just... snapped," she shuddered, staring at a hand as though it were a foreign animal she didn't know how to name. "There was so much blood. He fought all the way down. And I had ten minutes. Ten minutes to clean up. To get him into a dumpster; easy enough, just out the window. To get the blood out, easy enough, dump some rancid coffee on it, it'll keep people from asking too closely. But the blood on my hands? It seemed it'd never come off."

"Fuck me. You make killing people sound like a big thing," Blitz said.

"For you it would have been easy. I know," she said with a wistful nod. "I think that's what was what went through my mind I grabbed that spike of a hat-pin and rammed it into his chest. Just act like Blitz for a few seconds. The role of a lifetime. Be my brother for just long enough. My brother can kill anything. He can kill a parent. And it worked."

He felt a stab of pain at that. It definitely showed on his face.

"...I know. She's back. But that's what I thought in that moment," Barb admitted.

"If I'd'a known..." Blitz began.

"You wouldn't have helped me, because by Cash's word I burned that bridge down to its pontoons. And even if I hadn't… In my head, you were still the fuck-head who killed our Mama," she said. "I had nobody who'd save me. And when I was done... I realized just how fucked I was. Maybe they wouldn't even care that my 'agent' was offed by my hand. We're both imps after all. Dying stupidly is what we're good for. But I blew that performance so badly that they actually called an ambulance for me. And then, off to Rehab I go."

"I got stuck in the Human World for twelve years," Blitz said.

"I'm sorry... what?" his sister asked him.

"That's what pushed me down this 'Proxy bullshit' path. Some motherfucker launched me into the past and I got stuck there for a decade," he said. "That's why I feel old and decrepit. I'm practically as old as my own mother!"

"That says more about Mom than it does you," Barb said. She gave her head a shake, a distant smile on her face. "Destiny had some weird shit in store for the spawn of Tilla Nuckelavee, didn't it?"

"Two things: one, destiny can't do shit to an imp," Blitz said, recalling that tidbit that Stolas had mentioned however-many conversations ago, "and two; it's Miller now."

"Yeah. Yeah it is," she said. She glanced up at him. "Is there room in that family for one more?"

"Fuck it, more the merrier as far as I'm concerned," Blitz said. "Now go do that showbiz shit that you're so afraid of. What are they gonna do, send the good-taste police after you?"

"If you don't believe in fate, then I know you believe in luck. And imps don't tend to have good luck," Barb said. She hugged her son a bit closer, which made the kid happy at least. "And I'm taking no chances this time."

"Fine. What's one more rug-rat running around?" Blitz said, even though he was pretty clearly dumping this responsibility off onto the others who lived in his apartment.

"Thank you. Seriously. Thank you," she said.

"Keep that up and I'll start feeling like an asshole and an idiot for stayin' away this long," Blitz pointed out, even thought he did, and for that reason. She nodded for a moment, and Blitz had another rare moment of insight. "It's really fucking with you that you killed Dad, isn't it?"

"I'm not a killer, Blitz," she said. "That was always you."

"Yeah. I was always a violent kid," Blitz said. "But if you ever do need somebody dead, just let me know. You may not be a killer, but me? I fucking am."

---

"By choice actually," Jun-Ho said to her question.

"You chose to come to Hell," Rachel asked her fellow Betrayed with the flattest of tones.

"Well, it was that or do something stupid like Go Numb," the Korean ancient said. He then let out something of a bitter laugh. "It turns out, if you last long enough, even Heaven will take away what matters to you. And when it does, you're left with a choice. Lose everything else, or try something desperate."

"So what, you... jumped?"

"Parachuted," Jun-Ho qualified. "And I wouldn't have gotten ensnared by that slave-taker if my chute hadn't have snarled in those trees. Although in my defense, I was unconscious when I landed. There's little in the way of atmosphere up there."

"Well, I suppose that makes a certain degree of sense. After the first wave of the war, it was raining corpses for weeks," Rachel said.

"Tequila sunrise and room-temperature sake for the lady and the fucking degenerate," Husk said, pushing a drink toward each of them.

"You have not learned the value of a good sake, Husk," Jun-Ho said, tipping his shot back and smiling.

"It's disgusting. Liquor should be either cold or on fire. Not in between," Husk said.

"You need to expand your expectations," Jun-Ho said as he handed the shot-glass back to Husk. "The fact that I landed down here alive is to my benefit. I'm fairly certain my Reset Point is up in Heaven, still."

"So you could go back any time you want? Ain't you lucky?" Husk chuckled.

"Eh, I keep telling myself I ought choose a new one, but who knows? I may need to go back there in a hurry," Jun-Ho said with a shrug.

"It's not like yer kind is lacking for ways to get up there, now that there's a permanent portal set up," Husk pointed out.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Yeah, bunch of construction guys working out at The Edge," Husk said before taking a swig from his bottle. "Building a big fuckin' staging ground – on both sides of the portal! Some are already calling the Heaven-side part of it Fort Abandon."

"As in 'abandon hope all who enter here'?" Rachel provided.

"Probably that, exactly," Husk said.

"Well, that's new news to me," Jun-Ho said. He cracked a grin. "You're wasting an incredible talent for reconnaissance just standing here behind a bar."

"Pass," Husk said, wanting none of it. Sooner or later somebody'd find something that inspired more than a dismissive grumble out of Husk. And Hell itself would likely shudder in the wake of such an event. She glanced to the clock. The hour was growing long, and despite her lack of traditional fatigue, she knew that she'd spent enough time down here around people that if she didn't take off her masks and recover soon, she'd start cracking.

"Any chance of me going to another poker night, Husk?" she asked as she pushed off from the bar.

"Not this decade, woman. Probably not this century," Husk said. She let her laugh carry her away, not feeling it but making it seem that she did, until she was safely ensconced in the elevator and heading up to the third floor where she hung her hat. The portion of the second floor that these elevators reached was cramped and didn't have good views, instead opting for little shops and boutiques, so she parked in the third. And she didn't have to walk far from the elevator's doors to find her own, which she unlocked with a swipe of her card.

The hotel didn't have card locks anywhere but here. She didn't trust keys. Even before Husk's tutelage in lock-picking and lock-bypassing, she held such physical key locks in such low regard that she would never depend on them for something that mattered.

Within, her room was not slept in, but kept her clothes, a deep freezer and a refrigerator, a cramped but fully functioning kitchen, and a long table which currently played host to a wax figure alike to a head. She sat down in front of it, shining the cool mull-light over it, its sheen turning the wax transparent, trying to find any little fracture that she'd missed. When she couldn't, she picked up a piece of an orbital bone with a set of tweezers and carefully pushed it into the wax along with its many shattered siblings.

Husk had found it utterly grisly that she made a hobby out of reconstructing the pulverized skull of her previous body. She found it oddly calming, the act of putting something broken back together. And considering she had a pretty close association with the subject matter that she was taking part with, it made it a fair bit easier for her. She wasn't too proud to admit that the decapitated carcass an Exorcist had killed was currently at the bottom of that deep-freezer. Frankly, it was either this or Tetris, and she was a bit Tetris'd out at the moment.

As she carefully matched the shattered bone fragments and slid them in through the yielding wax to the place where they belonged, she spaced out for a bit, her face becoming expressionless and blank, her eyes dull. The door was locked and nobody would barge in here. Here, reconstructing her own shattered cranium, she could be who she actually was: nobody.

But her reconstruction efforts were called to a halt when she sat back and reached for the long tweezers, and in so doing tilted her gaze to the side enough that she could see a post-it note stuck to the table top.

If it's after 3:00PM on Tuesday, your mind has been wiped.

Rachel stared at the note for a second, then stood to go over there and pick it up. It was closer to 10 right now, so it was long after 3, especially since today was Saturday. And the note was undeniably in her own handwriting. She turned it over. Find your other Hellphone, said the flip side of the note.

Her other Hellphone? Rachel had only one of those things, and could think of no reason why she'd need another. But this was clearly her handwriting, illustrating a grim event and a directive. She tried to think of why she'd need another Hellphone, and came up empty. She tried to think of when she got another Hellphone even without needing one, but that was empty too.

This was weird.

Then again, at no point in her life or afterlife was her existence 'ordinary'.

She furrowed her brow, and gave a think. And then, she took out the Hellphone that she had the location of and sent a text to Husk, bidding him come up for a minute.

She'd faced some puzzles in her life. It was why she enjoyed Tetris as much as she did; an ever evolving puzzle that you had to solve in the fraction of a second before it grew even more devilishly complex. And this one was definitely crafted by a careful hand.

The door eventually opened, and when it did, Husk groaned, upon seeing her hobby sitting on the workbench. "Do you gotta keep that thing right there? It's freaky as shit," Husk complained.

"The act of reconstruction is calming to me," she said. "Husk, how long have you worked for Alastor?"

Husk leaned back, closing the door behind him. "The fuck 'r you on about? I don't work for Alastor. I just owe..."

"You 'owe Alastor certain debts'. Unfortunately that means, whether you are aware of it or not, you work for him," she pointed out.

Husk raised a finger to issue a counterpoint, but her lofted brow and arms crossed before her sweater countered that counterpoint before it even emerged.

"How many years has he had a hold over you?" she asked.

"Fuckin'... I don't know. A couple decades, maybe?"

"Don't be flippant, Husk. This is important," she said. "Try to remember the first time he asked something of you."

"Oh, that's easy. It was back in '91," Husk said. "Asked me to point out some asshole from a crowd. Easy job, and cleared a debt. I don't like owin' debts, particularly to the Scarlet Fucker."

"And yet you now owe several," she pointed out.

Husk stared at her for a second. "What are you saying?"

"Do you remember the nature of those debts? What you did to incur them?" she asked.

"Yeah. Kinda hard not to," Husk said.

"Alright," she said, changing her tack because this was obviously not as blatant as she'd thought, "can you explain to me why you incurred one of your debts to Alastor? Any one will do."

He stared at her. "Well," he said at length, "The fourth Blood Mark was an obvious one."

Again she had to discard a theory, but then she puffed out a breath, and centered herself. "How much do you know about memory magic?"

"Not much. I don't deal with that wizard shit. It's bad for the skin," he said flatly.

"It's a much more involved art than you'd think," she said, sitting down at her desk and pushing her partially reconstructed skull to one side such that the wax became merely translucent again. "Erasing a memory outright is just bad product. If people can guess what's been removed from their own minds, they can fill it right back in again. If you really want to hide something using memory manipulation magic, you have to be much more subtle and much more deft at it."

"Uh huh?" he asked, leaning against the wall, obviously not grasping what she was getting at.

"Let's say... I want to erase the location where you buried a treasure so that nobody can get you to reveal it, even by accident. Just erasing the location will just create a hole in your mind, one that you'll struggle to fill once you feel the edges of it. You'll still remember your feelings about burying the treasure, the sense of loss, of tension. So those will have to be removed as well," Rachel continued. "And not just those. Every material and ephemeral part of the act of you burying a treasure will have to be scrubbed out. Where you got the tools, how and when you got them? Gone. Who you buried the treasure with? Gone. And then to be especially careful, you'd have to go back and erase the fact that you at any point had a treasure to bury."

"What is your point with all this?" he asked.

"My point is that the act of removing a memory isn't like firing a bullet through a paper target. It's like excising a metastatic tumor, having to trace every line of its cancerous growth through the surrounding tissue of your continuity of self. In the end, the hole is a lot bigger than you'd think it was from the onset, but so squamous and extended that you see the edges of the hole in your mind as merely part of the terrain of your memory. The perfect way to hide a memory is to erase it so completely that there's no way to know you ever needed to hide it."

"...You think somebody went and fired a bullet through your memory," Husk said, tone distant.

"I... yes, actually."

"It's funny... I could have sworn you and me had this exact conversation once. Deja vu. Weird," Husk said. He turned to her. "I thought you were less magical than a tree-stump. How d'you know so much about memory magic?"

"This is what I'd have to consider if I were to erase somebody's memory," she said.

"Still a big ask for a stupid feeling that everybody gets," Husk said.

"Or," she said, raising a finger, "we have just seen the edge of the holes in both of our minds. So now we need..."

"The Scarlet Fucker did it," Husk said.

"...Okay, let's hear your reasoning," she said, since he'd jumped a couple steps ahead of her.

"Exhibit A-through-fuckin'-Infinity; he's the Radio Demon," Husk said.

Rachel was about to say that doesn't explain why, but a different set of words came from her mouth instead. "Rule 303," she instead uttered. He tilted her head, not in confusion, but as though subject to another wave of deja vu.

"Who has the power to enact a decision has the authority to enact that decision," Husk said.

"Who can act, must act," she paraphrased.

"So what did you – and potentially I – see that warranted scramblin' our eggs?" Husk asked.

"I'm not sure yet. But I need to find my other Hellphone to find out," Rachel said.

"You do realize he could just pull that, too?"

"Unless I was circumspect about it," Rachel countered. "Which I am, as you can attest."

"You are that," he said.

"I'm going to visit Angel Dust," she said.

"What? Why him?" Husk tilted his head to one side.

"Because Alastor avoids him," she said, getting to her feet. She then paused, glancing down for a moment. "And Husk? Could you put something on? I can see your penis."

"Wait really?" he asked, looking down. "Huh. Ain't seen you in a decade and a half."

"Husk..." she said.

"Fine, woman. Don't get tied up in a knot," he said, pulling a pair of pants out of a magical pocket and jumping into them, snapping suspenders up over his shoulders. "Now let's go talk to a horny queer."

---

Stolas was practically bouncing in his seat with excitement, which confused Blitz to no end. The last time the two of them shared a room with Asmodeus, it had been humiliating, traumatizing, and incredibly upsetting for everybody but the biggest pervert by volume. The current event was being held up in the promenades of High Central, a place full of muckity-mucks and head-up-ass Aristocrats that Blitz would rather be paid to kill than hang out with. But Stolas invited him as a +1, so here Blitz was.

The weather was nice at least. With spring dying and Summer roaring in to take its place, the heat was on and the days were lengthening, so that this venue could be open to the air and not be fuckin' freezing like that extremely, weirdly cold winter that they'd just had. And even with Blitz's impish stature, people were treating him... well... not like scum. Which still confused him, after half a year of acclimation time. Maybe it'd always confuse him.

"Are you sure you wanna be seen here? This place is filled with assholes," Blitz complained, glancing at some of the Aristocratic Houses who glared daggers at him for offing a couple of their members in the last few months. Well, sucks to be you, shitheads; if you'd paid more to keep them alive, they'd be fucking alive! With the Law of Proxy protecting him from their revenge, he got to enjoy a raunchy show put on by those who considered themselves at the very top, giving themselves 'special permission' to go digging into the muck.

"Yes. And these assholes are going to see me and my sweet together!" Stolas said, tracing a finger along his face. Blitz just rolled his eyes. The liquor flowed like water, and the drugs flowed like liquor, so there were a lot of very doped up hoity-toity fucks wandering around, which made Blitz wish retroactively that he'd taken a job to kill a few of them. But the season was lazy, and they only got a dozen contracts throughout the entire March-through-June period. Ordinarily, he'd say 'enough to keep the lights on', but that was neglecting that the quality of the contracts that he'd gotten of late had starkly improved. No more doing shit-heads' dirty work for a wadded up five and a slim-fit condom.

No, he was not bitter that he missed a chance to piss on Cash Buckzo Nuckelavee's body as he died. Fuck you for asking.

"You look unhappy. Is there something I can do to... improve your mood?" Stolas asked, leaning in very close and chuckling in a very heated matter.

"You can wait to suck my dick when the orgy starts. Cool your tits," Blitz said.

"Oh, but it is so very tempting~!" Stolas said.

"Have you been free-basing Asmodean Crystals again? That shit makes you 11/10 horny, and I ain't a young imp anymore," Blitz said.

"Only a little," Stolas said, rather defensively.

"Well, like I said, cool your tits. We..." he began.

"What the shit are you doing here?" a voice cut in on his complaints, and out of sheer reflex he grabbed Stolas' head and mashed it against his still-clothed crotch.

"Hey there, Verosika!" He turned to the succubus who was approaching in a fancy dress, without her usual cloud of whores and fuck-bois. "You're just in time to see me get my knob slobbed by a former angel."

"Ooooh yeeeesss~," Stolas murmured against Blitz's groin.

"Did you come here just to flaunt your... this?" she demanded, gesturing at the vastly incongruent duo that was sitting on a bench in the marble-tiled promenade about a twitch away from sexcapade.

"I ain't the only imp flying his freak flag, Mayday," Blitz shot a glance toward Fizzarolli, who was drapped across Asmodeus' neck and giving him comparatively tiny hickies. "So why are you even here? Did you hear the sonorous wail of fucking and it called to you like a siren?"

"That was... oddly literate of you. Wait, you're actually the Glimpse, aren't you?" she asked.

"The fuck is the Glimpse?" Blitz demanded.

"Asmodeus' Proxyyyyy~," Stolas again mumbled against Blitz's restrained better part.

"Look, I'm here cause he's got it in his head that I'm worth showing off," Blitz gave Stolas' neck a stern squeeze, and the giant bird practically shuddered with lust. Calm down, Stolas. This is getting embarrassing.

"Really. You're not here to rub all of this in my face?" she said.

"Bitch, I ain't thought about you since you cornered me in that stairwell," he said, which was mostly true. "Believe it or not, I've actually reached a point in my life where I can't be a petty bitch twenty-four-seven. I didn't even know you were gonna be here. I'm just here 'cause Stolas got excited about a big plant fuckin' thing in Sloth a month ago and wanted to brag. Only not, 'cause the first thing he did was drink the horny juice and make a bee-line for Big Red."

"Please, it's average at best," she countered.

"You're comparing it to an Incubus. That shit fills me with pride," Blitz countered her counter with a counter-counter.

"Fine. So you're definitely you, because even the Glimpse doesn't get that," she gestured at the two of them, "perverse. And you didn't come here for petty reasons. So why are you here?"

"Like I said. I'm his +1," Blitz said.

"I thought you didn't do public," she said, having to move closer as a knot of beautiful Virgoan Consumers blobbed their way toward the horny drugs which were being handed out a kiosk. There were gonna be a lot of hellspawn with suspiciously similar birthdays a few months from now, by Blitz's reckoning.

"I'm doin' lots of new shit these days. And fuck this interrogation shit; I got invited, why are you here?" Blitz retorted.

"Am I going to get my prize?" Stolas murmured.

"I swear to Satan, Stolas, cool your shit," Blitz answered him, while staring at Verosika.

"I'm here on business," she said.

"You're here at the whore-party on business?" Blitz repeated, having a hard time believing that.

"I need..." she began, only to be jostled even closer to the lovers on their bench by another knot of party-goers. She glared at them as they laughed and joked on their way to the pillow-pile to bone like they had just gotten their dicks back from a pawn-shop. She looked at the bench, sighed, and then sat down on its far edge with a deeply sour look on her face. "I need out of a contract," she admitted.

"The fuck?" he asked.

"You remember that big contract I got... back when you and I met?" she asked.

"The one where you bring out the horny on Earth for a decade and get a bunch of money and fame for it?" Blitz asked.

"No the o... yes, that one actually. How the fuck did you remember that?" She asked.

"Bitch I was there in the room! Do you really think I'm that fucking dense?" Blitz demanded.

"I know at least one part of you that is," Stolas gleefully declared against Blitz's junk. Blitz wasn't even holding him there anymore. He was just stuck there like a burdock.

"Don't be gross," Blitz said to him.

"I thought you were too busy staring at my tits," Verosika said.

"In my defense, they were very nice tits," Blitz pointed out.

"I know. That's why I grew them," Verosika smirked. She gave her head a shake. "Yes, that contract I made to the Big Guy," a glance given to Asmodeus, "is still in effect. And I can't deliver on it."

Blitz furrowed his brow, then glanced from Stolas to Verosika. He'd been told something about this. And after a few seconds he dredged it up, an off-hand comment Loonie had said the day after the Purge Unending began. "Oooh shit, this is 'cause that weirdo shot you, ain't it?"

Verosika flinched, looking deeply uncomfortable and rubbing a spot that was slightly lower than a Succubus' beating heart through her dress. Holy shit, she actually had scars, didn't she? Scars were something that Succu-bitches had a whole cottage industry to remove. It certainly explained why she was wearing the fancy dress instead of the slutty one that was essentially two postage stamps and a band-aid connected by thread.

"I can't use my Glamour. And if I can't use my Glamour, I can't go into the Human World. It should have healed by now. It's not like they had to pull that thing out of me. But I still just... can't," she said so very bitterly.

"And the contract don't give a shit, it still wants you to slut around up Topside," Blitz finished her dilemma for her.

"I thought I could buy some leeway by getting Billie and Dom to take over the performances," she said. "But the contract is the contract. It wants me. And I can't do it. Maybe I won't ever be able to again."

Well shit. Now he felt sorry for Verosika Mayday.

"Look, I can't do anything but..." Blitz began, but Stolas, seeming to finally throw of his fuck-happy fugue, straightened and sat upright, his eyes still slightly fuzzy for the shit he'd injested, but blinking as though he were trying to see something.

"Blitzie, do you feel that?" Stolas asked, neck swinging and spinning as he tried to look in every direction.

"The only thing I can feel is second-hand shame and second-hand fucking," Blitz pointed out. "Why? Is your ex coming or some shit?"

"No. Something worse," Stolas said, his tones sobering as his horniness was replaced by creeping dread. And when Blitz followed his eyes upward it was to the sky turning a rotting-flesh shade of orange-green, and rips forming in the sky.

And then streaking down came a half dozen Exorcists.

Through sheer instinct and no real coherent thought, Blitz grabbed both his Ex and his Current and dragged them over the back of the bench, which by virtue of kayfabe in defiance of physics deposited all three behind the thing and broke line of sight to where the Exorcists landed. They landed with a wash of cold flame, a burst of blood from shattered bodies they landed on, and a trill as through sounded by a trumpet from Heaven.

These ones were different though. Blitz didn't keep up very close on what made one Exorcist different from another, but he could tell there was a difference.

"Oh my word," Stolas said.

"What the shit is..." Mayday said, her body going pale as she started to sweat and shake.

"Those are Type 26's. The newest Exorcist ever made," Stolas said.

Then the faces of them snapped into being, displaying not pixilated grins, but the smug and smirking faces of individuals projected in hologram just beyond the smooth metal of the machine's heads. There was a different face for each Exorcist. They turned to face away from Blitz and his cowering companions' direction, and faced Asmodeus, who grabbed Fizzarolli off of his neck and set the cyborg-imp behind him. "For the crime of High Treason against Heaven, you are to be sentenced to death this day!" the Exorcist declared. "Death to the Traitor Knight!"

---

Rachel paused at the door, because it was obvious that there was something going on inside. But her impatience and her deep-seated concern as to the sanctity of her own mind overwhelmed any ordinary forebearance that she would have shown Angel Dust in his 'personal time'. Alastor had fucked with her memories. And somehow, some way, Angel Dust was a key to figuring out why.

She knocked on the door, but the muffled noises continued on despite her. She even upgraded to pounding the door with the heel of her hand, but likewise got no response.

"I think he's in there fuckin' somebody," Husk said.

"You think?" she turned the flattest of looks back at him. She then reached into her pocket and pulled out the plastic facsimile of Charlotte's master-key that she'd made months ago for situations akin to this one. Husk gave a chuckle when he saw the dull orange plastic go into the keyhole. "I'm not going to bring Charlotte into this until I have proof."

"I didn't say a thing," Husk said, continuing to smoke his cigar and lean against the far wall.

The door unlocked after a bit of wiggling, and she immediately shielded her eyes for what was no doubt going on inside when she swung the door open. The sounds were definitely those of pleasure, coming from two men.

"Angel Dust, I need a minute of your time," she said in her most no-nonsense tone of voice.

"What the FUCK, doll?" Angel Dust demanded, and she could hear somebody quickly drag something into place. Only then did she part the fingers before her eyes and see Angel Dust seated awkwardly on the sofa in his room. It was clear he was naked under the quilt that'd been dragged over a long and suspiciously man-shaped lump that was positioned in line with his groin. "I thought you didn't like watchin' people fuck! What's this about?"

"I'm not here for that," she said. She then turned to the lump under the blanket. "Stewart, is he treating you alright?"

"Better than alright, ma'am!" the call came from the concealed figure. He sounded very pleased with himself.

"What'r'ya doin' under there? You're way too damned pretty to be shy. C'mon!" Angel Dust said with a wave of his arm over the obscured Stewart, but then flinched as though something unseen happened to him. "Or we could keep this up."

"Good. Angel Dust, Alastor has fucked with me and I need some leverage to fuck back."

"Damn, toots. He must'a really wound you up to get you talkin' like that!" Angel Dust offered a laugh. "I thought that was just idle talk!" He still looked as he did since he'd come back from that little walkabout after his failure in Heaven. No taller, but slightly broader, no longer a stringy 'fuckboi', but a muscular and defined 'fuckman'. He was still also colored in stark white and bloody reds.

"And what talk was that?" she asked.

"You tryin' to quiz me, dame? Look, I'll just back out 'a here and..." Angel Dust said.

"No, it's actually imperative that you remain exactly where you are, down to your... intrusions," she gestured at where Angel Dust was in flagrante delicto with one of the prettiest men in Splitwater.

"I mean... I ain't complainin', toots, but I'm a bit baffled as to why. I thought you hated walkin' in on this shit," Angel Dust said, settling into a more comfortable position but thankfully not actually starting up again. He gestured to Husk. "Is this about that otha' Hellphone he gave you a while back?"

"Yes," she said. From him? Hmm. "Where did you put it?"

"Exactly where you told me to put it. Don't you remember?" he asked.

"Pretend I don't," Rachel said. Angel Dust pointed to his room, which was currently closed off.

"Back in my tickle trunk. Buried it right in the middle likes you saids," she said.

"Great. Don't move. It's important that you stay here. You too, Stewart."

"Oh I'm not goin' anywhere!" Stewart enthusiastically declared.

Rachel opened the door, and on the other side of it saw a half-grown Hellpig staring at her with glowing eyes. It just gave a small 'hurnk' and walked away from the door, going back to tip sideways onto the massive pillow embroidered with 'Fat Nuggets' on its face. The 'tickle trunk' was a medium sized tool chest filled with every form of 'marital instrument' that she could think of, and some that beggared her imagination. She ignored her distaste and plunged her hand through the layers of dildos and whatnot until she found something that wasn't smooth-edged and tapered to prevent loss in an irretrievable place. And she extracted a Hellphone that was cut with a distinct pattern, one that seemed familiar to her. And even more than that, the Hellphone itself had a 'vibe' to it. One she couldn't describe but was very familiar.

She left the room and returned to where Angel Dust's coitus was very much interruptus and opened the thing, seeing that it asked for a password of 24 characters split into four words. She frowned at it. Then she looked at the lock screen itself.

It was the password screen for the original Metroid.

"What the fuck, where did you get that?" Husk asked, as he moved to Rachel's personal space and lifted her arms up so he could see the pattern etched into its back.

"Tickle trunk," she said. "Also, you have some... strange tastes, Angel Dust."

"Yeah, ain't it great?" Angel Dust said.

"Rach... this is Sam's phone," he said.

"Excuse me?" she said.

"The one he got from the Goat of the Fuckin' Apocalypse. How did you get this thing?" Husk demanded.

"From you, apparently. I take it you don't remember how you got it?" he shook his head. "As I presumed. And that's probably the point of it," she said. The Metroid lock screen made her think of nothing less than the day that she bought her family a Super Nintendo, and to inaugurate it, she loaded up Metroid one final time, and put in the password that completely befuddled the old NES that they'd had for years until that point. It'd been a rumor she'd read about in Japanese game 'zines a number of times, and amusingly it turned out to be a real thing. She quickly typed in 'ENGAGE RIDLEY MOTHER FUCKER' onto the lockscreen.

And immediately, she had a video of herself and Husk, looking several changes of his visage ago, which started playing automatically.

"If you're watching this you'd better have somebody actively having sex nearby or all of this was for nothing," Rachel of the past immediately said.

"Well, I certainly managed that," Rachel in the present responded.

"Holy shit, you seriously set up me an' Stewart fuckin' for that?" Angel Dust asked.

"The fact is, if I have this phone and he doesn't, it's because things aligned properly, and you've managed to keep it in a place where Alastor wouldn't look for it," her past self said. "You know how he thinks, how he sees the world. And you know how this was the only way to keep this thing secret from him."

"Share with the class?" Husk asked.

"Alastor treats all of reality like it's a big story, one that he can read ahead or behind at to his leisure, heedless of where we are in time," she said. She then shrugged. "And frankly, he might be right to. I don't know how Creation works as well as he does."

"Should I stop, or..." Angel Dust said, finally grasping that something bigger than his newest fling was happening.

"No, it's imperative that you be constantly on the verge of continuing to engage sexually with your newest partner," she said.

"Are we seriously gonna hinge all of this shit on the fact that Alastor finds sex icky?" the Husk in the phone asked.

"We're dealing with something less like a nosy wizard and more like an eldritch abomination in a red suit. You tell me," Rachel of the past answered him.

"I mean... you got his number right off the jump," Husk of the now said.

"It's kind of hard to mistake Alastor for anything else if you have a working brain," Rachel said.

"Hooo there! I thought you weren't freaky like that!" Angel Dust said brightly smiling at the lump in the blanket.

"Take your time and drag it out," Husk ordered.

"Sir yes sir!" Stewart said, but distorted and muffled.

"Is he?" she leaned toward Husk.

"Don't ask. But probably," Husk answered.

"Future me, stop watching whatever debauchery is keeping you safe from the Radio Demon and pay attention to current me," Rachel of the past demanded. Rachel returned her attention to the screen. She didn't like the look of herself there. Then again, the mirror had never been her friend. "I don't know how many times we've had to have this conversation, but I wager it's higher than one. And if you're me, you know why we've had to take these precautions. Alastor is, has, or will be taking away the memories of one or both of us because of something we learned about him, something that he doesn't want us to know but considers it not prudent to silence us in a more permanent manner."

"As to what that could be, yer guess is as good as mine," Husk of the past said. "Speaking of; why all this run-around? Memory magic can't be that involved."

"Oh, trust me, it would be if you were smart," she'd said.

"Example?" he'd asked. Past-Rachel furrowed her brow, then half turned to him.

"Let's say... I want to erase the location where you buried a treasure so that nobody can get you to reveal it, even by accident. Just erasing the location will just create a hole in your mind, one that you'll struggle to fill once you feel the edges of it..." she began, exactly matching, word for word, what Rachel had said in her bedroom a few minutes ago.

"Okay. That's fucking freaky," Husk of the now said.

"Wait... the Strawberry Pimp's actually dangerous? I should probably stop," Angel Dust said, his lust starting to drain.

"Don't even think about it! Stewart, double time!" Husk ordered. Angel Dust gave a pleasured shudder and stopped complaining.

"And you think somebody's gonna fire a bullet through your memory," Husk of then finished, again nearly perfectly matching their interplay minutes ago.

"I do," she said. And then the video ended, and when Rachel minimized it, she saw that there were six other videos, of the two of them sitting together in various brothels or in the dingy corners of a sex-shop. She tapped one, and it started, word for word, exactly the same as this one did. The only difference was the end, when she asked why there was already a file on the phone. She'd already lost her memories once, of making the first recording.

It was date-stamped December 9th of 2022.

The next one was February 3rd of this year. The one after that the 21st. Again and again they'd had this conversation, as Alastor kept finding them, finding that they were looking into his affairs, and resetting the two of them back to the starting point. And because of their due diligence, never finding out how they got back to looking into him again.

The last video bucked that trend. It was a dark thing, as though it had been activated while in her pocket and left to record.

"You're a very tenacious little thing, aren't you?" Alastor's recorded voice came. "Keep coming back in like ants after a cracked honey-bowl. Well, I've got ways to solve that now. So you settle down and be civil. We can all go back to the way things ought to be."

There was a long silence, then a ding of an elevator opening, followed by a meaty whump, as though a body had been thrown in without much care, and a button for some lower floor be pressed.

"Husker, Husker, Husker... you can't keep doing this. It's so very unlike you to be involved in the affairs of anybody, let alone those of the fairer sex," Alastor's words came. So it had been hiding with Husk this time? "It's a good thing you know not to fight. I still have use for you yet. Just like I do with that Striker imp. Do you know something rather droll, my minion? I have read just about the entire story, all the way through to its denouement. And not a single time in any of the post scripti of its myriad meandering chapters am I quoted a single time! Damnation; I'm not even mentioned very often! Just between you and me... It's as though I disappear half way through the story. What a mystery."

The recording ended.

"Well, shit. We've been found out," Husk said.

"Numerous times. That one was at the beginning of May," Rachel said.

"And it's nearly fuckin' June, now," Husk said.

"So what changed? How did I leave myself a note, and what did that note mean? What had I intended to find?"

"Gimme that thing for a second," Husk said, taking the Hellphone from her hand. He quickly dove into the memory, which instantly vomited forth vast swathes of formulae for Angelic utterly useless to either of the two of them (but that Cain would probably pay a handsome price for), to plans and routes through the Rat Towers of Clouds One, Two, and Three, and a number of other strange things. Eventually, he found a picture, drawn by a fairly adept hand. It showed an open window, level with the clouds.

"What is..." she began.

"Oooh keep doin' that," Angel Dust said, now lost in his little lusty world. Let him be. He was keeping them all safe.

"That's my hand alright," Husk said. Wait, Husk could draw that well? How many other talents did he hide behind his shield-wall of apathy? Well the answer was obviously 'more than he had any right to'. "An' that's one of the windows of the Scarlet Fucker's Penthouse."

"Why would you draw an open window? That gives us nothing," Rachel said.

"Not quite," Husk said, pointing to the top corner of the drawing, which showed Heaven's Gate hanging, cleft, in the sky. "It's on the east side a' the building."

"What?"

"I found a note with my handwriting to bury a bag a while back and not to question it," Husk said.

"And you spent all that effort doubting me," Rachel said flatly.

"Yeah, well laugh it up that you got one over me," he said. "I figured I just had some shit I made while black-out drunk that I might need later."

"You never black out," Rachel pointed out. Husk made an equivocating gesture.

"It'll be where I tried burying you," he said. Husk then went back into Angel Dust's bedroom, and when he returned he didn't have the Hellphone. "Rach? Let's go. Try to think about fucking, really hard."

"Excuse me?" she asked.

"If the Scarlet Fucker is reading us like a book, let's give him something so fuckin' perverted it'll make these queers look like Mormons," he said, casting a thumb toward where Angel Dust was now giving himself permission to engage much more actively in the debaucheries that he'd been edging himself with thus far.

"I don't have a lot of good memories of that," she said.

"So invent some. You're smart. You're inventive. Come up with something," he said, and then he guided her out of the room. She didn't know what was going on in his head, but hers immediately went back to La Touque, to a pair of black slacks left ever-so-politely draped over the foot of her tiny bed. Of strange, clammy hands on places she didn't want them.

She gave her head a shake, not willing to dissociate today as she had back then for the sake of her own sanity. If she opened too wide a door for the 'Scarlet Fucker' as Husk had so eloquently pseudonymed him, he would waltz back in. So she did something that she actually hadn't ever done before.

She started to imagine a situation where she would seek out physical intimacy.

It was hard, of course. In all Rachel's life, sex was something that happened to her, not something she pursued from others. Romance was at worst inflicted upon and at best offered to her. Well, she couldn't go around being passive forever, now could she? She'd had a shitty enough life. Her death was way too long for that kind of stupidity.

So she remembered the Florida trip that they'd managed to scrimp for. This had been way back when going to Disney World didn't cost a kidney per family member, and even still, they had only a chance to see a fraction of the park. She had been uncommonly content there. As though a piece of her childhood that had been stolen from her had been dropped on the ground in front of her, and nobody cared if she picked it up. She remembered the night, still warm, and an arm pulling around her.

But that arm had belonged to Philip, whom she... frankly... endured. He had been a decent person, never striking her or being vile with her, but what he made up in that low-bar of basic humanity he lacked in many other things like intellect and wit. It was a miracle and a half that all of her children took after Rachel in terms of intelligence instead of Philip.

No, don't think about that, you're giving Alastor a window.

So if not Philip's arm... why not make it somebody better? Somebody wiser? Somebody calmer and smoother?

So she started with others. People whom at least appeared to have had 'normal', 'loving' relationships with their partners. And she found herself stymied, because she was trying to build a house without knowing its dimensions. So instead, she flicked a glance to the grim-faced Sinner next to her, and ran a little thought experiment.

She made the arm Husk's.

Philip had been eager and demanding, high energy and while not violent per se sexually, he launched into it with a vigor that left her bruised internally. Not to say she never enjoyed the couplings, but typically the ones more her flavor were the ones he started when he was already drained or exhausted, or the last of a series of them. And given how well she knew Husk, she knew that high-energy was not a setting on his dial. He would start slow. Gentle. Calm and measured.

She could imagine in this hypothetical hands made strong through toil and pain being held so delicately, lest they upset and break a spell of intimacy. Husk was a man who loved seldom but incredibly deeply. He had only two sexual partners in his entire lifetime, and not very many more down here. To be in his hands was to be cherished, to be needed as the shore needs the tide.

Rachel found herself warming quite despite herself, not even thinking of the mechanics of fucking but of the background that such fucking would bring given a more mindful partner. And she found herself glancing at Husk more often. In her hypothetical, he knew her, as deeply and as carefully as he knew those few people he had joined to in the past. It wasn't a screw-and-eschew, but rather coming back together like a vine looping away from a tree-branch to sprout a leaf before coming back to what was sturdy and safe.

She watched him dig, and her mind went places Rachel hadn't even been aware that her mind could go. Rachel didn't even mind the fact that he was so hairy; a warm place to rest at the end would be heavenly. The version of Husk that she imagined seduced her, pulling her close with insistence but without grip. She had the power to flee if she wanted. And she didn't. And his fingers began to trace down her body, to gently pull away layers that kept her hidden from the world. To reveal some true her.

That was where her fantasy fell apart.

Her imagination faltered there, at what Husk would see when he tried looking behind her masks. She had no concept or notion of what he could possibly do to react when he saw what she really was.

"Well fuck me," Husk said, which was a very particular choice of words considering where her head had been at for the sake of protection from a sex-averse hostile god. He picked up a plastic bag that had a tiny memory card in it. The kind that fit into a Hellphone. "Should we..."

"Do it now, my mind is a bit frazzled," she admitted. There would be no more shielding herself from Alastor in that manner, not today. He nodded, and slid the card into his personal Hellphone.

And upon the screen was a video of the Radio Demon, standing off of frame slightly with a broad grin on his face. And he was standing in front of The Pride Wall.

---

Moaning quickly became screaming when Exorcists were involved.

From the protective lee of the bench, Blitz could see that the Exorcists looked even fancier than the ones he'd fought back in December, bearing swords and spears and shields facing toward the Embodiment of Lust preparing to kill him.

"What the fuck? What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck?" Verosika said, her skin growing slightly gray.

"If you wanted me so badly, sweethearts, come and get me!" Asmodeus shouted, flexing his arms and having his Hellish Panoply appear on his body, just in time for him to bash one of the incoming Exorcists away with his massive, metal shield and parry another one away with a flick of his spear.

"We should beat feet," Blitz said. "Come on, Stolas!"

"If we leave Asmodeus, he'll die," Stolas said, the thought of it obviously shaking something loose in him.

"Not our problem, let's goooo," Blitz said.

Stolas, though, stood, a stubborn look on his face. "You've done nothing but teach me to be brave, my sweet Blitzie. Now let me be brave."

"Oh for the love of Crowley..." Blitz muttered.

"Face me and die, dogs of Heaven!" Stolas roared, the dark feathers growing darker and the pale ones growing redder, as symbols that he didn't recognize began to orbit and form an aura around him, before there was a loud snap and a banded halo half of black and half of cold white appeared above his crown.

One of the Exorcists turned, spotting him, and immediately broke off from the attack on Asmodeus. "I have a 20 on Hexbreaker Stolas! Kill order?" the Angel said as it rose up on wings made of solid light. "Kill order confirmed."

And then with a mighty crash, it rocketed toward Stolas, who flexed his fists out at his side as though hardening his gut for a stomach-punch. For a fraction of a moment, Blitz could have sworn he saw wings growing from Stolas' back. But what really mattered was that that Seraphic Steel that had been bearing to skewer him like a kebab stopped just before him, impacting against nothing with a crack like thunder.

Blitz had done just about enough being fucking useless for one day though, and took the opportunity to whip the Convertible Rifle out of his jacket and fire a high-powered slug up and into that Angel Machine's chin. The robot, so focused on Stolas, didn't even try to stop the bullet, allowing it to impact and twist its head, before turning a jaundiced eye from Stolas who was in his Black Bird of Armageddon guise, down to the imp.

"Why is it always you scum?" the Exorcist asked. Then, with a flick, lashed down with that blade. But since Blitz wasn't about to be penetrated by the likes of this fucker, he was able to roll out of the way of the thrust, using his tail to drag himself clear of the ripping sweep upward that followed it, and when he was pulled to a squat he fired another shot at the Exorcist. This time, the wing of light flared foward, and the bullet stopped inside of its tissue, dropping uselessly to the ground.

"Don't you dare hurt my Blitzie!" Stolas's voice rattled the ground, a tone he'd only ever heard from Stolas a single time in their years-long relationship (although to be fair, he had just watched Stolas' kid strand herself in Los-Fucking-Angeles at the time). Beams of blazing moonlight lanced from the symbols surrounding Stolas, intent on blasting the machine to spare parts. But when the beams launched, even though they were fucking lasers, they all missed. The machine became an indistinct smear, blurring across about three cubic meters of space as the lasers lashed out, unable to strike the device that they were aimed at.

The instant that the beams ceased, the blur of the Exorcist resolved itself into one single body, a body which launched itself with tremendous force at Stolas, intent on punching straight through him. Stolas swept an arm and a portal appeared, one that caused the ground and the bench that they'd been sitting on to rise up and fly into it, along with the machine itself. The portal was to a horrifying blackness, one that the Exorcist disappeared into the instant it crossed the threshold, as did the bench, a corpse of a waiter, and an entire table of MDMA, and in fact all of the nearby light, all vanishing the instant it passed.

Blitz didn't have the language to describe looking at the inside of the Event Horizon of a black hole.

Stolas snapped the portal shut, and turned to the others. "I am a dead Angel walking! I have surmounted death itself! Face me and try to claim what Prophecy itself failed!" Stolas howled, causing the furthest-out of the five Exorcists delivering a fairly horrifying beat-down to Asmodeus to peel off and look around. The face on the Exorcist was a woman's, and she scowled at their number having been reduced.

"Nice try," the woman said, then made a tearing motion with one hand. Another portal was carved into being where her clawed fingers touched the air, and she reached through it to pull that Exorcist who a smarter imp than Blitz would have said should have spaghettified itself to annihilation. Blitz was just annoyed that a few seconds in that black wherever-the-hell only caused a few cracks of the armor panels at its ankles. "I don't see any metal toys this time, Stolas. Just a broken Hexbreaker."

Blitz gave a glance to Verosika, and saw that she was still curled up on the floor, curled fetal in a ball, weeping in terror. And she was pretty much in the line of attack between the Fallen Angel and the Angel Machines. With a grumbled blasphemy, Blitz hurled himself forward, lobbing a couple of Flash-Bangs out in front of him and turning off his ears an instant before landing over Verosika. He glanced away, but the thud still kicked him in the chest, and when he turned to the Angels, they just stared at him like he was a moron.

"Typical imp scum," the woman in the Angel Machine said, somehow overriding the fact that his ears were turned off. She then twisted her hand as though torquing a big fucking dial, and when she did, there came a shifting in the way light worked between she and Blitz. Out of sheer instinct, he wrapped his tail 'round Verosika's waist and locked his spade in.

When she released the Heavenly Bolt, it landed with such ruinous impact that a battle-tank would not only have been shattered by its impact, but the battle-tank behind it would have suffered the same fate. Heavenly Artillery, a force so powerful that only bespoke Hellish Panoplies costing hundreds of millions of Souls a pop could hope to survive even a glancing hit, slammed into the imp wearing a coat with no defensive enchantments whatsoever.

If Blitz had any idea of how Heavenly Artillery worked, he would have been reduced to a fine, black mist.

But since he didn't, the power of Lucifer's Remit kicked in, and the blast merely picked both he and via his tail Verosika up and sent them hurtling across the entire park. It would confuse Blitz later as to why it even launched him but, as Moxxie would eventually explain; the Heavenly Artillery and Lucifer's Remit pulled from the same wellspring. The protection of the latter against the former was incomplete. At least twice people were smashed into and possibly killed by the impact of Blitz against them as he was rocketing backward – impacts he was also spared the damage from by his Remit, because he didn't see them coming – before slamming into a pillar and cratering into it, followed a moment later by Verosika slamming into his chest. Of the entire attack, that was the only thing of it that actually hurt.

Blitz fell out of his crater, coughing and having to suck some wind back in.

"You okay, V?" Blitz asked as he gave his head a shake and retook his wind.

"How... how did I survive that? How did you survive that?" she asked, or at least his lip-reading resumed she did.

"Verosika, look at me!" he said, grabbing her and dragging her to a sit whether she wanted to go into shock or not. "Seven years ago you hired me to save your ass in a fight. This is a fight. Now how about you let me save your ass and actually earn all that money you paid me back then?"

She blinked, but seemed to snap at least a little bit into the now. "Okay. I'll get out of here."

"Good," Blitz said, giving her ass a swat to put her on her way and moving past her. Two against one was a bad enough fight; he could see that Stolas was not bearing up well under the bitch and her black-hole adjacent fuckboi.

He didn't even spare a glance to Asmodeus. That way-too-big motherfucker had earned exactly no sympathy from Blitz the last time their paths had crossed. Instead, he raced toward the one who was currently lashing with some sort of light-whip at Stolas, a weapon that cut furrows through Stolas' feathers and caused golden blood to drip from thin wounds. That's not what whips are for, bitch!

Blitz outright launched himself at the bitch, but instead of jamming his wing-knife through the thing's synthetic skull, he found himself arrested instantly as its other arm snapped up and caught him by the throat. The head turned, a woman's disgusted expression levelled at him – an experience he was fairly familiar with.

"Why is it that you disgusting vermin simply cannot remain dead?" she asked to his face, and then she hurled Blitz hard to the pavers. The impact drove the breath from his lungs, and she said something else at him, but since Blitz still hadn't turned his ears back on, it was lost to him. He could taste his blood running into his mouth. At some point on his charge-in, that bitch had tagged his forehead with her whip. That shit was gonna scar.

He sucked in a breath, only to have it driven back out when the Exorcist slammed a boot down onto his chest, crushing some ribs and causing him to involuntarily cough-vomit some black blood out of his system. Holy shit those things hit like a fucking tank! Though the pain was immense, it was not insurmountable. He ignored the pulverized ribs on that side of his body and tried to pull a Sticky Bomb from a pocket, only to have that same boot that liquified his ribs snap out and kick him in the wrist. He was lucky the impact only broke his hand instead of cutting it off.

The sheer rumble through the pavers let Blitz know that Stolas was screaming, "Don't you dare hurt my Blitzie!" or something like it. A glance back showed Stolas try to surge past the other Exorcist, but for all his wroth and rage, he was still one Ars Goetia who was outnumbered by Exorcists. The one who'd stomped Blitz lashed out with a strike of her whip across his face, causing him to flinch involuntarily, leaving him open for just a moment to the other one to slam a dirk into Stolas' long back.

Stolas swung hard, smashing the Exorcist behind him away, but doing so exposed his back – and the knife sticking out of it – to the woman in her Exorcist. She flicked her whip in a showboaty way, and the narrow end widened into a hammer-head, one that she spun and slammed into the knife, driving it even deeper. Stolas let out another roar, lost to Blitz's deactivated ears, and then grabbed the cord of the woman Exorcist's whip, dragging her close before driving a savage front-kick straight into the Exorcist's projected face. The combined impact of the pull and the kick, caused the woman to lever like a hinge to slam into the floor, cracking the paver where she did.

And then Stolas coughed, and golden blood frothed from his mouth.

That knife was in his lung.

Both of them were gonna die, weren't they? Blitz didn't like to give thought to mortality, but he didn't like what he saw. Even two of the six Exorcists were enough to slap him down like a spawn at a buffet. Stolas had achieved little, as both Exorcists rose back up on glowing wings, savage grins projected onto their faces. Blitz had achieved nothing at all. With a shaking hand, he made to turn his ears back on. But then didn't.

"Well... It was nice know'n ya, Stolas?" Blitz wheezed, looking his fallen Angel in the face.

"The pleasure was all mine," Stolas answered back, leaning in the direction of his collapsed lung. Well, Blitz wasn't gonna die on his back like a bitch. He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, and pulled out his Luger. Imps didn't usually get a chance to live well. The best they could hope for is to die well. And today, Blitz was determined to die very well indeed.

---

The video showed Alastor, who stood in front of the camera, looking at it in a querulous way, the likes of which Husk had only seen in old-timers trying to figure out a piece of technology that hadn't existed until the current decade of their life. He was trying to make sure it was running. "The fuck is he doin' with a camera?" Husk asked.

"Maybe radio was trying to kill the video star?" she asked.

"Don't get precious," Husk said to Rachel, who was smirking.

Finally, Alastor seemed content with the display, which was nevertheless off kilter, and stepped briefly out of frame.

"Let it be known that I am a very careful man," Alastor said. "I don't tend to leap without verifying there's a pool to land in. That'd be foolhardy! No no no no. Calculated risks are the order of the day and I happen to be extremely good at my mathematics. The recent few months have been enlightening on a number of subjects, many of which have shook the underpinnings by which I have established my axis mundi of natural philosophy. And when my fundamental axioms are called into question, I would have to be a far greater fool than I am to ignore the ramifications thereof."

Alastor walked into the camera shot again, one finger raised as though giving a lecture. "For example, there are a number of fundamental axioms that I had lived under since the day of my demise which I took to be both self-evident and tautological. The first of them, of course, is that a Sinner may not leave Pride Ring under any circumstance. But that proved not to be the case! Not even just with my old apprentice Samuel! Ha! No... No, there were others who made that crossing. Those winners of the lottery of birth that saw them bearing the spark of Angelic Gift were an obvious exception, and allowed many axioms to remain... but those axioms quivered regardless. Obviously, I was overlooking something. Something raw. Something visceral and primal. Something close to the metal, as they say in the parlance of those new machines I know you understand as poorly as I do."

"Who is he talking to?" Husk asked. She shrugged.

"I think we're going to find out."

"For you see, Hell is as old as coherent time, but it is not the only Terra Incognita to the world of the living," Alastor continued, and then gestured in a come-hither fashion, and a portals with a black tendrils extended from it shifted into frame; held tangled in that tendrils were Sinners, one with aquiline features, and the other those of a lizard. The lizard got no introduction, merely being flicked toward the Pride Wall. The instant the Sinner passed that line in the world, he erupted into flame, burning away and leaving a Truly Dead husk just inside of Greed Ring. Husk stared at the one that didn't get thrown out like garbage for a second, then when the recognition hit, his stomach dropped. That was a fucking Dux Bellorim that the Scarlet Fucker had gotten his hands on. "Your own people carved out a chthonic nether to deposit their less-than-ideal souls. It used to hang right up there," Alastor pointed through the Pride Wall and slightly above the horizon. "I'm given to understand that you were not consigned to that place of punishment in the grim pits of Pluto's Dismay. You lived your life with distinction, with honor, and with fidelity of service. In fact, you have done nothing that even the bearded blowhard at the Pearly Gates would find abhorrent, save perhaps that you were a Roman soldier. And yet here in Hell you yet reside. Well, let me tell you something about wise men and foundations of sand."

The tendril quickly snapped and spun, hurling all of the armor and arms that were on Dux Bellorim Agrippa's person onto the dirt and leaving him dangling in front of Alastor by a tendril around his throat. The Radio Demon grinned with abject cruelty as he looked one of the most decorated and highly placed Sinners in all of Hell in the eye. "A wise man rejoices when he finds himself proven wrong."

And then to a snap of the Radio Demon's fingers, the tendril hurled Agrippa, now wearing only one sandal and his tunic, through the Pride Wall.

Agrippa didn't burn when he impacted into a crater on the far side.

"You, despite both dying and taking on Aspect, are not a Sinner," Alastor said. Then he flexed a fist, and spoke a word of power, "Dǚkh," and the Dux Bellorim who was on the wrong side of the Pride Wall stopped trying to rise and fell flat onto his back in the dirt. He wafted with a hand, and the burned up husk of the other sinner broke down into dust and wafted away. Alastor then made another beckoning motion, and spoke "F̶̥̿̑o̸̔͜͝ř̸ͅg̸̰̼͐͗e̶̜̤̔t̶̗̒ͅ.̶̖̂͜͝"

Then, when Agrippa was still, Alastor turned toward the camera, and started to reach toward it.

"...and I'm beginning to believe that I'm not one, either," he said with a small and private smile.

At which point a black-gloved hand closed on the Hellphone, snatching it from Husk's grasp. Out of sheer instinct he pulled Rita from its place and tried to stab who did that, but found a beyond-black tendril wrapping round him, and then slamming him hard into the stone pillar which bracketed the glass walls of the Conservatory. Rachel, who did not immediately choose violence, was left on the ground.

"My my my," Alastor said, having appeared out of fucking nowhere and now holding Husk's Hellphone in his hand. "You are such tediously stubborn little creatures. It seems that no matter how many times I try to impart this lesson, it never really sticks. I really must be more careful about removing proof that I do things around you two would-be gumshoes. I'm making for a terrible Moriarty that such Watsonly Holmeses can keep track with my various misadventures."

"Drop him," Rachel said, eyes cold and demeanor unintimidated by the presence of he Radio Demon. Husk felt some of his bones creak as the tendril squeezed him a bit harder. "Right now, onto the ground."

"And why should I do that? Spare the rod, spoil the child, after all," Alastor said.

"One, he's not your child to spare or spoil," Rachel pointed out.

"I contend otherwise, but continue," Alastor said.

"And two, if you don't, I will let Charlie know that you've declared war on the Goetia."

Alastor stared at her for a moment, his smile minimal as he no doubt tried to take her measure. And he found, just as Husk had found, that her resolve would not break for anything short of God Himself. "I refuse your little gambit," Alastor said, regardless. "Because you have no leverage."

"You can keep erasing what we saw, but it will eventually make itself known," Rachel pointed out.

And at this Alastor let out a sigh, shaking his head with a wistful smile. "Would that it were, my dear. I already know that Sweet Charlotte doesn't take your words as gospel. And since she won't have any proof," he said, crushing Husk's Hellphone in his hands, and then dropping he shards down a wailing portal into darkness, "she would treat your condemnations of me as yet more hysterics of somebody whom she already knows has an axe to grind. You will achieve nothing. This is the shape of the world, social worker."

"So what. You just erase our memories again and this continues until you screw up? AGAIN?" Rachel demanded, trying to thrust a finger at his chest, but he batted it away.

"No, I don't believe that's prudent," he said, turning to face outward. "After all, the previous times, I had merely to use my power on the two of you. Now you're not the only ones who know."

"What are you talking about?" Rachel demanded.

He turned back to her with a patronizing shake of his head. "Oh, nothing you'll need to worry about. My previous mistakes are swept from the board. Be content that you get to remember this, rare victory over me in any field. And know that it will avail you nothing."

"What are you even doing?" Husk demanded, now that the tendril holding him had loosened enough that he could speak.

"Discovering my true nature. And it's not what I thought it was. How deliciously enlightening!" he offered a laugh, then faced turned to Rachel. "I'm torn regarding you. On one hand, you are so beguilingly vexatious. On the other, you are so beguilingly vexatious."

"Don't even think of hurting her," Husk warned.

"Or what?"

"Or I walk," Husk said. Alastor turned to him. And then escaping first as a wheeze came helpless laughter from the Radio Demon, as though he had suddenly and unexpectedly discovered the most hilarious thing in the cosmos. He slapped his knee in delight at Husk's words. "What's so fuckin' funny?"

"Oh, Husker... surely you know by know, you get to leave... w̵̱͗̂͛h̸͕̭̖͊e̴̼̮̐n̶̖̝̠͊̎̚ ̴̞͋̌̊I̵̼͙̿ ̴͕̯̖̓š̶̹̺͕a̸̜̐͆̍ý̷͇̞ ̴͉̈́͆́ÿ̴͎́̈́̂͜o̸̖̖͜͝ų̴̽̔͝ ̶̢̡̤̌̆g̴̢͛e̴̼̞͍͒̀͝ț̴̗̇͘͠ ̸̼̻̞́̄̍t̴̞̂ò̴͈̫̝ ̷̟̆l̸̢̫̫̓̀͝e̷̻̱͔͘a̵̼̼͘ṿ̶̎͑ȩ̸̮̣͂̑," Alastor said, as the world began to distort and crack and wail, as reality rotted and the unspeakable void beyond yawned wide to consume all and leave not even nothing behind.

Then, with a visceral snap, reality was real again.

"But by all means, play your games. Just know that your tokens started behind the starting square... and I'm the one rolling the dice. Ta-ta. Maybe next time I make some trifling mistake in my 'nefarious schemes' you'll actually achieve something," Alastor said, throwing Husk rather unkindly to the ground, and sauntering away until he found a convenient shadow and melted into it.

"What do we do?" Husk asked, feeling a need to do something, after all of that.

"He's right. Charlie already thinks I have it out for Alastor..." Rachel said.

"Which you do and for good reason," Husk provided.

"Obviously," she said. "And without proof, it's my word against his. Even yours won't sway her. He's got us stalemated."

"Fuck," he said.

"Exactly," she agreed. She gave her head a shake, and turned cold eyes to him. "But he's apparently made mistakes in the past. He'll make a mistake again in the future. And next time, if we can get the proof of his malfeasance to Charlie before he can intercept us..."

"We can get her to shit-can him," Husk said, rubbing at his jaw. "It ain't a great plan, but it's a plan. So what now?"

"What else? We go back to trying to Redeem the damned," she said grimly.

---

The death that should have come to the lovers Blitzo and Stolas was waylaid when a portal opened to one side, and a hypersonic slug of metal shot out of it, catching the shit-fucker who stabbed Stolas in the back and shattering much of the armored plating on the Exorcist's chest. Emerging from that portal came two people. One of them was a tall woman, glamorous but stark, arms big and legs bigger, clad in a kind of armor that he saw on the news the likes of which was used to fight against Heaven. She was hot.

The other was Lucifer.

"Well. I thought I sensed somebody using Heavenly Artillery against my minion," Lucifer said at the pair of Exorcists who retreated away from him. "And given I hadn't sent him somewhere you fucks could be expected to appear, that means you're invading my kingdom. First of all, fuck you. Second, get the fuck out or I'll make you wish you came here in person."

"No disrespect intended, but my boss is getting his shit pushed in," the armored woman said. Or Blitz believed she did, since his ears were still off. Which made it weird that he could still hear Lucifer.

"Go ahead and keep them from killing your employer, Glimpse. I'll handle this trash," Lucifer said, casting an arm wide, and manifesting midnight black wings, and the blazing fragment that remained of his halo appearing above his crown. The Glimpse gave a distant nod, then with a blurring of self, she launched herself into the melee between Asmodeus and the four Exorcists that were pounding the piss out of him. There was a crack, and Lucifer seemed to flicker across all of the promenade, for just a split second seeming to be practically everywhere at once. Then, as Blitz arduously turned his ears back on as Lucifer returned to his place just in front of the closing portal and began to slowly approach the Angel machines.

"Well, we came here for silver but Providence gives us gold," the Exorcist man said.

"We should retreat," the Exorcist woman countered.

"In our moment of triumph? Are you a coward, Strigoi?"

"Oh, no," Lucifer said. "You don't get to run away from me today. You are going to stay here, for exactly as long as I want you to. You are going to feel exactly what I want you to feel. And when I'm done with you, the smartest of you will never come here again. And the dumbest of you I'll get to play with all over again."

"You can do nothing to us, Morningstar! We do not fear you!" the Exorcist man said.

"Shut the fuck up, Atheed! I can't eject!"

"What?" Atheed asked. And Lucifer smiled. Then, there was a flash of light, and Lucifer appeared beside Atheed, and raised up a hand of castigation and slammed it down in a knife-edged chop that crushed through armor plating that a black-hole couldn't shatter, leaving one of the Exorcist's arms hanging uselessly by his side. Strigoi retreated, her arms spiraling, as a sigil burned into sight underneath her projected face on the surface of her blank head. Blitz had no idea what it meant. But she was retreating while Atheed was being disassembled, which meant she was probably smarter than he was.

Blitz gave a cough and a shudder, spitting out more blood as he fell to his knees next to Stolas. Sweet unholy fuck. The last time he'd gotten his guts rearranged like that was... oh, wow. He was so hurt that he couldn't come up with a disgusting simile. That was a first. "You okay, Stolas?"

"No. No I'm having... trouble brea... breathing..." Stolas wheezed. Blitz turned his attention away from the shit-kicking that Lucifer was delivering on the invading Exorcists and beckoned Stolas downward.

"Lean forward. I'll get 'ya..." He said. Digging through is pockets awkwardly with the one unbroken arm he had, he pulled out a straight-razor, a cancelled credit card, a drinking straw, and some duct tape. For the first time in his life he was thankful for that time up in the Human World, for it had taught him how to give first aid to a lung-wound.

"I'm... sorrrrryyyyyYYYYYYY!" Stolas' word rose to a scream as Blitz pulled the subtly back-barbed knife out of Stolas' back, and scraped the feathers away so he could duct tape the card against the wound to prevent paradoxical breathing.

"Sorry for what?" he asked, pausing to spit onto the ground. There was less blood in it than before, which was either a good sign or a very bad one. He didn't care which.

"I wanted you to have a bit of AAAH FUCK fun..." Stolas said as Blitz punctured his chest cavity away from the wound and used a drinking straw to allow the air surrounding Stolas' lung to hiss and rattle its way out, giving him a proper breath.

"I told you life was waiting to take a shit on my happiness. As I see it, this shit? There were far worse turds that they could have thrown at us," Blitz said, not knowing the meaning of 'don't tempt fate'. He turned a look to Lucifer, who was now styling on the Exorcists with contempt and ease, inflicting on them injuries which didn't make sense to deliver to a machine, but made a lot of sense if you were trying to maximize pain on a person. "Can you breathe?"

"Better than before," Stolas said.

"Great. Carry me outta here. This shit is too wack for my patience today," Blitz said. He left it unsaid that he wasn't sure he had the stamina to walk to the edge of the Promenade right now, the state he was in.

"He's body locked them into their Exorcists," Stolas said as he picked Blitz up, holding him close. "Well good riddance. Those sanctimonious fucks should feel some of what they've inflicted onto us for a change."

"Yeah, that's great," Blitz said, slowly letting his shock start to catch up to him and overwhelm his pain.

He wasn't sure how long he drifted between consciousness and the other thing when he suddenly found himself being blasted by hot air, a high-priced ambulance thrusting down to land in the street outside the promenade. Wow. He was getting the good shit today. Maybe as a perk of arriving with a Goetia with a crippling injury, but still. And right over there, he could see Verosika, staring at him as he and Stolas loaded themselves in. Staring without venom or bitterness or contempt. He didn't know what to make of that look from her.

Likely, she didn't know what to make of it herself.

---

Honestly, Millie had expected childbirth to be much more dramatic than it turned out to be. All of her panicking and worrying ended up being for nothing, because as July appeared on the calendar and the due date approached, beloved Moxxie made all the arrangements and payed all the appropriate bribes that she could have a bed in Our Lady Of Unreasonable Violence hospital, made sure that she was given the proper medications to help with the birth, and had spent the last month preparing her, mentally, for the event.

She had expected panic, and pain, and damage. Instead, she just had a lot of exertion – which she could easily manage these days, her stamina being what it now was – and a fair bit of time. It was always said that the first spawn an imp had would 'grease the skids' for the ones who came after, making them much easier in the future. It explained why Tilla could have Wayland over the course of a half hour in an apartment bathroom. She'd done it plenty of times before.

Then the moment came, and Mille was giving birth. It was deeply uncomfortable, not at all the horrifying pain that had been described by some fiends and former humans in various media. The best way she could describe it was trying for two hours to flex her abs so hard that a bullet that had slammed into them would be forced out. Only lower. And more like a loaf of bread than a bullet.

In the end, the event turned out to be something of a non-event. Moxxie wept like a li'l girl wen she saw their dark haired daughter come out, had held her close to the mother still attached by umbilicus. "Beatrice," Moxxie said. "We're going to call her Beatrice."

"I love you, Mox-mox," she said, and she gave prods to the face of the shrieking babe which had been extracted from her. "And I love you too, little Bea."

"She's going to start to lose consciousness soon," a strange man with a doctor's coat but a burlap sack over his head said. "There's almost always a period of torpor after impish births. Don't be alarmed."

"I feel fine!" Millie said.

"It's okay, sweetie," Moxxie said. "We'll be right here."

She tried to complain again, but just as though the sack-headed man had hexed her, her eyelids began to grow heavy and her muscles slack.

But just as comfortable as her slide into drowsiness had tucked her in with a big, comfy blanket, the snap of her eyes opening was like that blanket being stripped away to a freezing room. Millie blinked a few times, still hearing the hospital noises of machinery doing whatever hospital-y things they did. She then rubbed her lower belly, feeling how it was still loose and shifty; if Mama was any indicator, it'd take a couple days for her to tighten back up. But she didn't feel weak or even as brain-fogged as she'd been a day ago. In fact, she felt more alert than she had been in months.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed, and in doing so, she spotted the nurse splayed out on the floor. Millie's back tightened, and she hupped down to give the impish medic a shake. He muttered slurringly, as though trying to rouse from a coma but failing. What the sweet Hell? She turned then, toward the door. And out there, she saw her husband.

"No, no no no no..." Millie said, pelting over to the hallway, even though she felt so very strange in her guts. She looked down at her husband, who was on his back with arms splayed to one side. He was breathing. Thank Satan for that. She gave him a shake, then looked up to shout for help.

Everybody in eyeshot was laying on the floor. Doctors, patients, nurses; everyone. "Moxxie! Get up Mox!"

"Mbneghuah?" Moxxie's eyes were unfocused for a moment, but then as though watching an engine finally turn over his mind started firing on all of its cylinders and he jerked up to a sit. "Where's Beatrice?"

"What?" Millie asked.

"The do... FUCK!" he looked over to the other doctor, a Dream Eater who'd given Millie the fun drugs which kept the pregnancy from being 'difficult', and found him with a band of dark metal dug into his throat so hard that it nearly decapitated him without breaking his skin. He, unlike everybody else in eyeshot, was very, very dead. The elevator opened, and another Dream Eater came out, a woman looking confused and alarmed; she wandered away before spotting the imps. "I was going to take her to the Pediatrician's office to have her checked and... and then..."

"Then you fell asleep like them... Moxxie... where's Beatrice?" Millie asked, a horrifying dread settling into her stomach.

There was just a moment where Moxxie looked pensive. Then, realization hit. And confusion was replaced with spectacular rage.

"The Nuckelavees took her. Just like they said they would," he said. And he pulled Millie close as she began to wail inconsolably.

---

"Legends are tricky things to get a handle on, Killjoy. Take me for example: I'm part of what y'all are calling the Legendary Bloodline these days. Just because a few incredible people did a few incredible deeds, suddenly I'm saddled with incredible expectations which frankly I'd have to live two lifetimes to actually live up to. Never mind that I run the most prestigious and lionized killing business in all of Creation – and yes, I have checked. We're better than The Sons of Death up in Heaven – the fact that I haven't literally rewritten the book on how imps are seen in Hell makes me something of a pale imitation of an impossible forebearer.

There's a trick to it, though; I don't compare myself to Uncle Blitz. That man was exactly the right imp in exactly the right spot in history. I came along a decade or so too late. Nothing to do about that. So even though I am a 'pale shade' of a 'better imp', that's because you're comparing me to the Greatest Proxy that Lucifer ever had,, and the only one in all of Hell's history who was permitted to retire. One of the most talked about imps to have ever lived. You're comparing me to the man who started this business by fucking a Goetic Grimoire away from a fallen Angel. To not put too fine a point on things, you're comparing a businesswoman to somebody who may as well have lived in an Age of Heroes.

I'll be frank; even if I am considered the 'worst' of the second generation of the Legendary Bloodline, I don't give a fuck. You're comparing me to a nephew who's a movie-star philosophy professor, an older sister who's the Ur-Crone of Clan Cruac up here in Purgatory, a younger brother who is a goddamned Royal Ambassador to the Humans, and then FUCKING WAYLAND! Being the worst imp in that room is like being the least pure bar of Angel Steel in my vault, and I've gotta tell you, they're all reeeeally fucking pure. So how 'bout you stop with this catty bullshit and ask what you really wanted to know about?

...

Oh my fuck. You wanna know about them? Killjoy... I'm part of the LEGENDARY Bloodline. She's part of the GOLDEN Bloodline. I swear to fuck you people need to get this straight already!"

- Victoria Miller, CEO of Immediate Murder Professionals Cartel.