The train continued moving, as trains tend to do, cutting its way across the mid-west and toward the Rocky Mountains. The night had been a hard one to sleep through, so Rachel just stayed up. Only in the last hour had Chloe finally gone to sleep, leaving the injured and the exhausted riding in what was clearly a spy-train. One didn't dump this much technology and money into a random train-car, after all. But still, the sun seemed to be sullenly taking its time peeking above the horizon. And it was about a hand into the sky by the time that Samuel Bad Grief finally roused from his slumber. Dean remained conked, as were the injured Bloodsour and Rashmi, who had Val looking after both.
"It's tomorrow," Rachel said, even as Bad Grief turned, bleary eyed, toward her.
"Yeah. Yeah it is," Bad Grief said. He yawned and stretched, pulling his tube of blankets down like a sock and leaving it deposited on the cot that was tucked against the wall along with five others of its ilk, most of which were being used. "And I suppose you're wanting your explanation now?"
"I'm patient, but not infinitely so. I do have a life-span to consider, now," she said.
"Right, right," Bad Grief said. He gestured for her to follow him, past a partition and into a very minimal kitchen area, one that only had a two-burner range and a mini-fridge under it instead of an oven. He hit the button on the coffee machine, and rolled his shoulders, letting out a series of cracks and pops. Though he looked to be about the same age as Rachel's current incarnation – early thirties, roughly – he apparently was quite a bit older, closer to Bloodsour's age. Maybe it was his features, which were distinctly non-Caucasian, which helped disguise his mileage.
"None for me."
"Wasn't offering," Bad Grief said. He turned. "Alright. Before we start this, I've got some questions of my own. So how about we go tit-for-tat until I run out; by then I'll have coffee and I'll be awake enough to answer the rest of yours."
"Fine. Your question?" Rachel asked.
"How many times have you died?" Bad Grief asked.
"Seven times to my recollection, eight if you also count what my hellbound incarnation is going through," she said. "It's always deeply unpleasant. Though occasionally, it can have a bit of satisfaction attached to it. Why were Dean and I targeted by Ultra Sound?"
"I probably should have asked you to go for fundamental questions first, but so be it," Bad Grief muttered. "Ultra Sound is the acting arm of the Cognoscenti, monsters from outside of reality who incarnate as programming and algorithms contained in metallic bodies and in systems with digital logic circuits."
"That doesn't answer my question," Rachel was going to cross her arms, but she had an infant in the way, so she just pulled Chloe a bit closer. The baby, even in her slumber, seemed pleased by the gentle squeeze.
"I'm getting there," Bad Grief said. "These things aren't 'alive' as you or I understand that term. I mean, when they get desperate they can live on a fucking abacus."
"Your point?" she asked.
"My point is that it wasn't Ultra Sound or Kutoba that want you out of the picture, it's the Cogs, their actual thinking brain. And if I had to wager a guess as why they took the recent insanity in California to do it, I'd say it was because of… that," Bad Grief pointed at the medallion chain that passed down into her blouse.
"The Blood Engine?" she asked.
"That's what you've been calling them?" Bad Grief asked, as the coffee machine began to dribble coffee directly into his mug, because he'd swapped it for the carafe due to his haste to have the black fluid in his body. Bad Grief gave his head a shake. "I think you're vastly underestimating what you've got there around your neck."
"It's just a means of giving someone with no magical potential," she gestured at herself, "the ability to use the magic I learned in Hell."
"No," Bad Grief said. "It also does that. What it's actually doing is using a science we don't fully understand yet to make your soul more sturdy, thereby allowing you to 'hold more magic'."
"If these Cognoscenti were so worried about these trinkets, why haven't they attacked the Presbyter's Union? They have actually impressive trinkets," Rachel demanded.
Bad Grief frowned for a second, as though wracking his brain. "I'm sorry, I don't know who those are."
"A guild of mages in Hell," she said.
"Well there's your answer. The Cogs don't have access to Hell," Bad Grief said. "While meanwhile you may claim to have only the most superficial ability to make these things, but that still makes you a beacon of bullshit to the Cog's upper thinking, one too dangerous to be left alive as long as you keep making the tools which makes their machinations easier to resist and deny."
Rachel pulled the rough-cut Blood Engine up from its place against her skin, running her fingers along its gently pulsing surface that shone with faintly orange light. "If they seriously think I'm a threat to their conspiracy-theory-level agendas, then they're vastly overestimating my abilities. I'm just turning gold slugs into something worth more than gold's weight."
"Yes, and you've left my friend Jean Baptiste beside himself with joy to have some new wares to offer to follow his ends," Bad Grief said, pausing to pull his mug and settle the carafe and take his first gulp of coffee. He let out a long 'mmmmm' after it. "I think you're yourself overestimating your impact in the larger picture. Your ability to make those Integrity Bulwarks hardly makes you their overwhelming, drop-everything-and-destroy enemy. I know some people who have been doing that for a few years, and to be frank, I know you aren't on their level. No, what you are, is a pebble in the Cognoscenti's collective shoe. An annoyance that they will remove whenever it is convenient."
"And yesterday morning, it suddenly became convenient," she said.
"Exactly," Bad Grief said. "Now mine: How exactly did you come back to life? What protocol did you use?"
"I didn't do anything. The imps did."
"Imps… small creatures, red skin, black blood?" Bad Grief asked.
"Oh, so you've run into them up here?" she asked.
"One of them tried to have sex with me, so yes," Bad Grief said. He scratched at the back of his neck as he took another drink of coffee. "In retrospect, I probably should have taken her up on it. Ah well. Hindsight."
"That doesn't sound like Millie at all," Rachel said.
"Wasn't a 'Millie'. It was a 'Vera'," Bad Grief said. She gave her head a shake.
"My point is that it was an act of impish magic, one that's specific to their physiology and magical makeup, that allows them to bring back the dead. I had a spare corpse in Hell due to circumstances, and several of them wanted to practice the ritual before using it in-earnest on its intended target. To make a rather strange story short, when they succeeded, I suddenly appear exploding out of the vase my ashes were held in."
"Well that clarifies a few things about your story. And raises a bunch of other questions. I wasn't aware imps could bring back the dead. That must mean they're pretty high up the chain down in Hell," Bad Grief said with a gesture of his mug.
"Near the very bottom, actually. There's only two Imps alive anymore who can do it, because of – and I'm operating with incomplete information here – a recent purge of their magical elite."
"I guess next time I run into One's band of lunatics, I'm gonna have to ask Vera for the details," Bad Grief said.
"So granted that apparently I'll be made safe by simply not doing anything for long enough – a state which I find mildly unacceptable, but preferable to having my family die – what exactly are we doing going to San Diego?"
"Switching engines and heading north," Bad Grief said. "Much as I'd like to get out of America immediately, Tijuana right now is actually worse. So Vancouver is our eventual destination."
"Had I known we were going to Vancouver, I would have simply booked a flight. Why go south at all?" she said.
"And that plane would have had a 'tragic accident' mid flight, and south is the direction this train was headed. No, you took what was probably the best option you had, in staying quiet and close to the metaphorical ground," Bad Grief then upended his cup down his throat, and poured more into the mug from the carafe. "The world is getting wild, Missus Sharpe. And since you're essentially bound by blood to one of my more able agents, I've got to shield you too."
"How magnanimous of you," she said.
"Just being realistic," Bad Grief said. "I can't save the world from its slide in to tyranny. But I can save someone. And in my line of work, sometimes that's the best you can get."
Chapter 53
Graveyard of Empires, Part 2
Blitzø actually decided to stick around, talking all through the night until she actually got tired enough to sleep, since apparently his guy wouldn't be able to do shit until the morning. And even though they threw shade at each other like feuding rappers, that was very much the two of their's dynamic, even during the 'golden days' when they were fucking each other. It seemed as though a switch had flipped in both of their minds, that the hostility of the past was just that; past. So they could insult and rile each other endlessly, and not actually mean harm by it.
Honestly, it was one of the better evenings she'd had in years, and the best one she'd had clothed.
But still, she crashed out on a sofa in the front office having never gone to the apartment, and come the morning, Blitz was still there, loading bullets into a small mountain of magazines that one side of him shrunk while on its other side grew. He mocked her for sleeping in. She called him a little bitch. They went out and got breakfast at Dennys. And since Blitz was using his magical book to move around, that meant they were now in the right city to go and get her injury looked at, according to the schedule that a call from Blitzø had managed to wrangle from the First of the fucking Damned.
In a way, Verosika was shocked how fucking high Blitz was climbing in the world. She knew that he had ambitions, and that he was better than the stereotypical imp who was only good as a warm body in a mall-kiosk or else to die doing something stupid. And she knew that there were still feelings there. Feelings that for quite a few years had turned bitter and angry as she reacted entirely appropriately to his shitty behavior. Feelings made complicated by him admitting and apologizing for that shitty behavior and saving her life from a goddamned Heavenly hit-squad.
Oh, for the ages when she could simply hate his guts. Things were simpler then.
Now she had to actually think about what she felt for Blitz. And that, to a Succubus like her, was a deeply uncomfortable ask.
The taxi which reeked of kimchi, likely from the entire spilled order of it that Blitz's legs weren't long enough to rest in, came to a halt at the gates of a rapidly militarizing district of Inner True North West Pentagram, one that she hadn't seen the likes of in the streets of this town before. She might have been older than she looked, but she still wasn't old enough to have remembered the Pride War, and how the whole city had been cut into thirds and fortified with actual barbed wire and trenches. The guards looked like golems, menacing metal glaring down at her wearing an emblem that showed a sunrise.
"This is your stop. Get the fuck out," the cabbie demanded of them.
"Fuck you, and here's your tip for not bein' a little bitch," Blitz threw some money at him, then got out of the cab. A golem-like thing was staring at her. Even when Verosika was standing properly, she didn't even come close to approaching these metal monstrosities' height.
"Get into the screening line," the voice that came out of the golem sounded distinctly organic, despite its tinny undertone by medium. The golem pointed to a long line of fairly pathetic people who were assembled going back several blocks.
"Fuck you, she's got an appointment with Cain!" Blitz said. The Golem seemed to outright bristle at that. But another golem reached up and laid a metal hand that looked best used to crush cars on the first's shoulders.
"That's the Proxy. Where he wants to go, he goes," the second Golem had a woman's voice. The first turned as though glaring at the second but then grunted something and pointed to another gate, which didn't have a line-up heading to it.
"Cause no trouble or we'll turn you into soup," the golem said.
"As if you even could, big-man," Blitz said, flipping the machine off as he grabbed her by her sleeve and dragged her forward, past the gates and into a region that the newly put up signs marked as New Purgatory.
"It's not like it's gonna care if you flip it off. It's a machine," she pointed out.
"Nuh-uh, that's a suit of armor with an asshole inside it," Blitz said. Wait, since when did he know shit that she didn't? Truly, her life must have been turned entirely upside down.
To walk through New Purgatory was alike to walking The Shimmering District of Crystal Grotto, down in Lust, a place where only the beautiful and the useful were allowed into the streets. Asmodeus made sure that he kept his capital city clean, functioning, and appealing. And though that last was somewhat missing from New Purgatory, she got a vague sense that there was the same drive to utility that Ozzie maintained. This was a place that worked, even during the off days. Even during the bad days. Even during the apocalypse, New Purgatory would keep working. And given the amount of heavily armored soldiers walking around, Verosika found it rather hard to imagine what could possibly offer a meaningful threat to this district right now.
Maybe the rumors about Princess Charlotte being a soft-hearted waste of skin were things of envy rather than scorn. Because this? This was not the work of someone with a soft heart.
The Happy Hotel, the beating heart of the district, appeared suddenly upon rounding a corner. It stood divinely out-of-place compared to the new construction around it, seemingly made of two separate buildings haphazardly smooshed into each other, and then nailed in place with a tanker-ship; and that descriptor was rapidly running its course because the tanker currently was surrounded by scaffolding and cranes, seeking to finally remove that unuseable tumor on the side of the capital of this ad-hoc eighth Ring.
Cain was a hard person to mistake, waiting at the doors in his fine clothing looking every inch of him worthy of a throne and crown. He simply waited for them to approach to a reasonable distance, before he addressed them and gestured within. "Welcome," said Cain. "We should go at once to my suite."
"Not even gonna ask about payment?" Blitz asked.
"Why would I do that? You can work out such with Charlie when the matter at hand is settled," Cain said with a dismissive wave. The former human radiated power in a way that few of his ilk ever did. He could afford to be dismissive of money, because it likely was attracted, gravitationally, toward him. Satan damn it, she was envious of him. She was envious of a lot of people these days, now that she was living in the gutter. Shit, she was even envious of the literal rats sharing it with her, because those bastards had fur enough to keep out the cold.
The three went up an obviously rebuilt staircase, one bereft of frills that a building this old should have had, up to the second floor and its four sprawling suites. Cain opened the door, revealing a human with an incomplete Halo on the inside, tall and built strong like a Fury, but not quite as comically top-heavy. "Please don't mind my wife, Ayla. She is observing to learn the Hymnals in action," Cain said. So Cain actually took a wife? After ten thousand years down here being a dashing bachelor? It spoke to the patheticness of Verosika's circumstances that this was the first she was hearing about it. Verosika of a decade ago would have likely been hired to perform at the service. After all, Cain was regarded by most as 'a very good fuck'.
"You've been sleeping rough, haven't you?" this Ayla character asked. Mayday turned some side-eye toward her. "Its your hair."
"Fucking damn it," Verosika muttered.
"It's also somewhat immaterial, unless you want to offer her a bottle of your shampoo," Cain said.
"I just may. She looks like she had lovely hair," Ayla said, scrutinizing the succubus that she stood taller than. Then she gave a shrug and relented, letting Cain guide them to a chaise-lounge that was oriented toward the big-screen TV on the wall, one that was currently turned off, so denied her something interesting to look at.
"Just sit here while I make my observations. Do you object to some probing contact at your abdomen?" Cain asked.
"You wouldn't be the first guy to ask to get up in her guts," Blitz asked.
"Have some couth," Cain said with a chuckle.
"He's not wrong," Verosika admitted, which pulled a laugh out of Ayla. And just as the imp one city over did, Cain began to prod and manipulate her abdomen, first through her hoodie and then against naked skin when he had her lift it level with her diaphragm, exactly as the imp had before. They seemed to be playing from the same playbook. After a bit of time, he paused, his fingertip pressing on the bullet-scar that caused all this. His brow furrowed down in confusion, then the glanced up at her face.
"Does it hurt when I do this?" he asked, and pressed at the scar. And an instant later she immediately felt incredible pain, one that she only just managed to keep her scream as a nice, contained yelp. "As I thought. The tissue in the wound-tract itself has solidified. It may as well be a skewer, holding your internals into position even without the other malady. It will have to be removed entirely."
"Wouldn't that leave her with a new hole you could see daylight through?" Blitz asked, putting words to a question she hadn't even considered to ask.
"The skin seems least affected, so I would close it over the excised tissue. But I would recommend that if you were to be shot or stabbed again, try to have it happen in the same spot, for there will be nothing for the injury to lance," Cain said with a satisfied chuckle. He then blew on his fingertips for a moment, and a strange music seemed to rise up around him, one that Verosika could barely hear and didn't understand but knew deep down that there was Power in it. Then he shoved his hand into her body, his extremity diving past her skin and into her innards without ripping her body; she could feel it pushing and straining things, a deeply unpleasant process that she still refused to scream like a bitch over.
"Yo, V, are you alright?" Blitz asked.
"Fuckin' dandy," she said through grit teeth. Cain tilted his head, as though confronting something he didn't quite understand. Then he looked up at her.
"This will be painful. Brace yourself and keep your tongue clear of your teeth," he warned.
And by fucking God was he right about that. It felt like somebody was extracting a running chainsaw from her as he ripped his hand back, to a few specks of crimson blood, holding what looked like a mildly horrifying pencil made of squirming worms. It was rigid like a wand, but its surface teemed and wiggled.
"What the fuck is that?" Verosika asked, her voice ragged.
"Scar tissue. Concubus scar tissue, but…" he said, and tried to put it down. It remained in his fingers. He tried to flick it down into the kidney-shaped pan on a tray next to him, but it remained stuck. Then she actually looked closer, and saw the truth. The horror pencil was digging into his fingertips.
Cain seemed to grasp it at that moment, snapping a glance up at Ayla. "Sweetheart? Number seven, now please."
Ayla didn't ask questions. She simply went into the kitchen and pulled a wickedly sharp fileting knife, moving to his side, and putting it just atop the first joint of his index finger. "Grit your teeth."
"I've had worse," he promised her. And then she cut his fingertip off. She then took tweezers to hold the horror pencil away while carving out half of the tip of his thumb as well, finally getting that miserable thing loose and setting it into the kidney pan. When she tried to release the tweezers, they wouldn't let go. She turned a concerned look at Cain.
"One moment, patient," he said. He waited for a few seconds, as his robust Regeneration started to rebuild one finger and fix a thumb, then he picked up the kidney pan and turned it upside down.
The horror pencil didn't fall out.
"Well that's deeply unsettling," Cain said. "It's infesting non-organic material. Thoughts?"
"Set that shit on fire!" Blitz offered. Ayla shrugged and pointed at the imp, not having a better idea. Cain nodded, then had the kidney pan burst into flame in his palm. When he set it down, the horror pencil was merrily burning, burning without smoke, and growing smaller and smaller, having torn chunks out of the side of the kidney pan and tweezers as it did.
"If nothing else we know that fire can harm it," Cain said brightly. "I suppose it now stands to reason that your innards were in such a state, with those things clinging to all of your flesh and infesting you. Actually, considering that could infest non-living matter, I feel it a proper question… how are you alive?"
"What?" Verosika asked.
"It touched my digits for seconds and began to dig into my body to subsume me," Cain explained calmly, as there was a faint pop and the last of the horror pencil vanished and the flame died. "I am not being hyperbolic in saying that had I not cut that thing free of my tissues when I did, it would have overtaken me entirely within a matter of minutes. What manner of creature did this to you?"
"Some woman. Human. Or looking human. What she was doing at the time… definitely wasn't human," Verosika said. There had been somebody getting way too fucky at one of her shows up in the Human World. Humans becoming down-to-clown during her performances was par for the course, to be frank, but there were limits and there were trends. She got them perked up and ready to go, reminded their dicks and cunts what they were hungry for, then she sent out her squadron of sluts to go collect while the collecting was good. Large scale performances like that were truly the marvel of the modern age, the long-awaited freedom of the Concubus Race to actually eat a buffet without dropping corpses and spooking the humans.
But that chick?
That chick was gnarly. Ordinarily, it would be her sluts who would get down and fucking in the middle of a crowded venue, but this chick, having nothing to do with her or hers was down there blowing a dude before Verosika even turned on The Aura. And when Verosika tried to have security tell the crazy ho to do that in the bathrooms like a civilized slut, she outright fucking bit him.
And then the security guy, a few seconds later, shoved his hand into another guy's neck.
And then that bitch in the black tuxedo showed up, and she started shooting at anybody who wasn't from the Human World. Some of her Sluts got bashed or trampled by the panic at the disco, but Verosika? She took a bullet to the gut.
Only, now that she was thinking about it… was it a bullet?
She had turned her back on the madness, helping Billie up from when one of the terrified back-up dancers elbowed her right in the eye, when there was sudden, shocking pain, and a red splat of blood and something twitching landing on Billie's bra-top.
But looking back, she hadn't heard a bang, then. She knew gunshots. She'd been around plenty of them, because of Blitz's particular brand of protectiveness. This was something else. Less a bang, and more of a very loud 'crack'.
"They shot me in the back. What does that injury look like?" Verosika asked.
"There is nothing on your back," Cain said, sounding suspicious and confused.
"Wh… how? This is an exit wound!" she pointed at the scar near her naval.
"And I insist that that doesn't seem to be the case," Cain said. He then frowned, and stood. "Please lay down on your chest, and keep your blouse raised; I will need access to your back."
"Another time that might sound exciting," Verosika tried to break her own anxiety with some lewdity, but the only person who chuckled was fucking Ayla of all people. Even Blitz didn't want to go with it. She did as the First of the Damned asked, and he quickly knelt down and pressed his fingers along the run of her spine, counting upward from where the column connected to her pelvis.
"You were on stage, yes?" Cain asked. She gave him a yes, because that was the case. "A raised stage?" and another yes. "So upward angle."
His fingers retreated, right down to her beltline again, and this time when he pressed in hard, she suddenly had a wave of shocking pain that almost made her throw up. Her skin instantly flushed with cold sweat and her body involuntarily curled as though trying to outright buck away from him, but his other hand held her in place, gently but with the insistence of a vice. "What the fuck did you just push?" she asked, her voice trembling.
"It seems you were right. You were struck in the back, only the weapon didn't cause a typical wound. Do you feel this tugging?" he asked, pushing around her skin near her spine. It felt… well it felt like what she imagined a man's skin to feel like were it on her body rather than under her tender machinations. Course and rugged, not at all smooth or supple, prone to callus and hard as an overcooked steak. "This is the entry wound; it sutured the skin cleanly behind it. So what caused that exit tract?"
He was silent for a moment, staring at her.
"I am going to extract the foreign body."
"The what?" she asked. He then pushed more delicately, and her pores pressed out sweat and she felt a sense of dread that wasn't pain but was screaming 'pain approaching'.
"There is something there, impacted into the edge of your spinal column. I will extract it. Maybe it will give me answers," Cain said. He then reached over toward Ayla. "Gloves? Two layers."
Ayla quickly slipped two layers of latex gloves onto Cain's hands, and he arrayed his hands to her skin again. Again he warned her to pull in her tongue and grit her teeth. But this time when his finger seemed to breach her skin, the dread increased but the pain didn't, and he only took seconds to find something, something which caused a moment of discomfort when it ground against her spine, before there was a strange, stringy popping sensation and he withdrew his hand.
He was holding a pinkish pearl, a sphere an inch across, that he quickly put into the once-burnt kidney-pan. He then moved to her face and showed it to her, confusion on his face. "This was the foreign body you were shot with. And it is covered in a sort of nacre I didn't know your kind could produce." He then created a strange vision floating atop it, revealing the innards of the pearl.
It was an entire human fingertip, freakishly well preserved, missing its fingernail.
"...I see. The fingernail was the infective element, akin to a snake's fang," Cain said. "When the payload struck your spine, the nail was torn free, creating the exit tract and destroying your Glamour Duct and… well, you saw what it did. Your body has been fighting this… this infestation, for the last several years. I can undo the rest of the rigidity of your organs, but it will take time, and be deeply unpleasant. Fortunately, now that I know its source, I can now safely apply narcotics to ease the rest of treatment."
"I didn't know you'd taken up a practice of medicine, formally," Ayla said.
"I've been in hell for ten thousand years. I have had to take up many hobbies to occupy my time," Cain said. He patted Verosika on her shoulder. "Rest for a time. It will take me at least an hour to get to the nearest morphine vending machine and return, because Charlie has banned them from establishment inside of New Purgatory. When I return, and you are properly stupified, we may continue."
He then rose and bade Ayla come with him, leaving Verosika and Blitz abandoned in his suite. A more greedy Succubus would have considered trying to take some of the tremendously valuable 'trophies' that he had lying around and bolting with them. But right now, Verosika was too desperate to have her health back to even consider how stupid a plan that was, let alone to go through with it. Cain had made his first three years in Hell very loud with his reclamation of his former mementos, and only went quiet when the rest were presumed destroyed by time or else lost to living memory. She was not going to be the reason he became loud again.
"Do you… figure that thing's gonna be worth money to some of the egghead Ars Goetia, or is that just me thinking?" Blitz asked, now outright fucking around with the pearl, heedless of how obviously bad the evil pencil had been. It didn't seem to affect him, though.
"Now that you mention it," she said, her voice still trembling slightly. Even now, covered in sweat, she could already feel her breaths coming a bit deeper, and feel a gurgle in her guts as though she had at long last released a death-grip clench of her abdominals, "I think it just might."
She had failed to get Marbas' attention before, as just a random, sick Succubus. But having this thing, and Cain's work to back her up? She might be able to make some money off of this bullshit that had been forced into her life – and her guts.
"Imma go down and get something to drink. You still drink Bathroom Blowjobs or did you finally decide to go all in and try a Crotch Rot?"
"Today I'm feeling like a Crotch Rot," she admitted. Blitz gave her a merry thumbs up and went out the door. She took a deep breath.
It was going to be over today.
She was going to be okay.
She wasn't sure why, but she soon found herself crying.
The train ride north from San Diego was much like the one from Chicago; cramped, lacking in privacy, but at least moderately comfortable. But the entire trip, the squad that had gathered were on edge. Because anybody with any sort of working knowledge about nuclear terrorism (Rachel had macabre hobbies) knew that depending on the wind, there was a chance of highly radioactive fallout being blown into their path. And in that circumstance, Bad Grief had made it clear in no uncertain terms that this train-car was resistant to many things, but being coated in a light dusting of Chernobyl was not one of them.
Day by day, she watched the news of the evacuation of the fourth most populated city of California, and the establishment of progressively larger Exclusion Zones around the carcass of the city. Whatever had been detonated in San Fran had been designed specifically to make the entire city into poison, and had done it spectacularly. It was presumed that in the four days since the bomb went off, 100,000 of the people living there died of acute radiation poisoning, with another 200,000 likely to gain crippling cancers from their exposure to the melange of radioactive cobalt, thorium, polonium, and other radio-pathogens that she hadn't done research on.
It was widely speculated that San Francisco wouldn't be safe to even attempt to clean out for another thirty years. And for those thirty years, they would be constantly dumping radioactive mud into the San Francisco Bay and poisoning the cities south and north of it. The American Government of course jumped into action to offer thoughts and prayers and no actual systemic fucking help, because the assistance of a 'blue city' was immediately vetoed by people who had demonized them as living devils 'out to kidnap children and siphon out their adrenochrome'. So the Californian government had to essentially flip off the federal government and do all of the aid with purely Californian money.
And frankly, they were doing a better job of it than Rachel feared they might. That was a worry all its own. Rachel might have been a psychiatrist by training and by praxis, but that also meant that she had to be, necessarily, able to see disparate parts of a broad problem and understand how they fit together to form a bigger fucking problem. The same thing that enabled her to recognize codependency and behavior disorders, when arrayed against the current United States, she saw something very similar. Like a toxic relationship, or a patient buried under an unsustainable amount of maladaptive trauma responses, America was coming apart at the seams. And of course, when America rolled over in its sleep…
Edging around the Exclusion Zone added a day to their trip north, as they had to get turned around and head for a different entire railway track when the Zone expanded to cover the one they were on. This train had too many cars and not enough engine to simply plow through fast enough to save them from harm, so the long way they went, while Bad Grief got increasingly unhappy, while Rashmi and Bloodsour slowly managed to heal, and while Rachel badly wished she had she'd used cloth diapers, because those were some of the few things this train car didn't have in stock as supplies; she had to use a wash-towel to make an ad hoc diaper for Chloe, and run it through the washer as often as the babe made a chunky mess of it.
But like a shitty driver on the highway with bald tires and a bad ego, they were able to put the Zone behind them and let it fishtail into a culvert behind them where it could cause them no more grief. Intellectually, Rachel knew that she ought to give San Francisco more regard than that, that hundreds of thousands of people were being forced from their homes, many of them sick or dying, due to an entirely human-handed terror attack. Rachel also knew that she had only so much emotional bandwidth, and some of that bandwidth was still admittedly taken up by what was going on in Hell. Add to that, she had Dean and Chloe to worry about. She was essentially tapped out for empathy.
How long had it been since she last talked to her other self? More than a year, she realized. Both of her simply had become so busy.
"He's not doing well, is he?" Dean asked. Beyond a few scabs on his face, he might as well be untouched by all that had happened. Even Val had back-troubles from the car-crash in Chicago.
"I have a hard time understanding his involvement in this. What's his anchor?" she asked of him, turning a look toward Bad Grief, the topic of their very quiet conversation.
"Remember the weirdness of Bloodsour?" Dean asked.
"He's from another world?"
"Even weirder than that," Dean said. "According to Sam – Bloodsour – Bad Grief is kind of… shattered. Spread across many worlds. Including the one where Bloodsour is from. Says that Bad Grief has trouble remembering which past is the one he wants to claim. And says he's from 'the far side of the Abyss'."
"That's impossible," Rachel said. "Only God has ever crossed the Abyss, and it messed Him up royally."
"According to who?"
"According to the imps that resurrected me, that's common knowledge in arcane circles," she answered.
"Well, regardless of its 'impossibility', Bloodsour and Bad Grief are by their admission from worlds on the far side of this 'Abyss'," Dean said.
Rachel pushed out a hrm sound from her throat as she gave that a moment's consideration. Dean asked her what she was thinking. "I'm inclined to believe Bloodsour, in that if somehow he bypassed the Abyss, it was because he was next to something calamitous happening and was hurled here as shrapnel of an apocalypse. Maybe even the last shard of a world unmade, like Clark Kent."
"Just like that? You don't believe anybody," Dean teased.
"People often have lies that they tell themselves," she pointed out. "But Bloodsour? I think he's desperate for answers to questions which have none, here. If it is possible for a man to be hurled intact through the Abyss, it would result in someone like Samuel Bloodsour."
"And I note that you're not agreeing the same for Bad Grief," Dean said, turning another glance toward the Premiere Smuggling Kingpin of North America and Mexico, who was watching a news feed with his mug of coffee in hand.
"Bloodsour is the hapless and helpless victim, someone who circumstance can damn to misery through no fault of his. Bad Grief… I have a feeling that he chose this," Rachel muttered. "Whether he is actually 'shattered across reality', or else just somebody who's willing to let Bloodsour believe that he is in order to have a hook on his psychology, he is here because he chose to be in the middle of things. Be careful of him."
"So don't trust him?" Dean asked.
"I didn't say that. He seemed genuine in that he wants to save people. But don't trust his expressed intents. There's another game he's playing, and as a rule players of games don't have a human level of empathy for the pawns that are lost in the course of play," she said. Dean nodded with a faint sigh, taking Chloe out of her arms just as Bad Grief turned and looked at the two of them. With the noise of their transit on the rails here in the main room, and their own low tones, he would only have been able to hear them if he had wired this place for sound. And though he did stare at them, briefly po-faced, he only did so long enough to drain his coffee and set the mug aside.
"They're closing the borders to California," Bad Grief said. "Which makes it very lucky that we passed them days ago. And other states are following suit. Soon the United States is going to be fifty dissolving hermit-kingdoms with non-existent interstate trade."
"That won't last," Rachel pointed out. "If they don't allow food to move, there are whole swathes of the country that will starve in a matter of days."
"I didn't say it was a wise move. I said it was the move that states are taking, either to 'secure safety', or to 'keep undesirables out'. Federally, they're going to have to overrule the states to keep the economy from nuking itself…"
"Which will incite the states that already hate the federal government to another 'War of Yankee Aggression' narrative," Rachel picked up on where he was going with this.
"Which will spur whole sections of conspiracy-theory-poisoned minds to purge the sane from amongst their ranks, and enter into open rebellion against the government for the first time in two hundred years," Bad Grief said with a nod. "It's American Civil War 2, the sequel the world didn't want, and it'd put money on it opening into gunshots by the end of spring."
"It's already got gunshots going on. Just before now, it was terror attacks against population centers," Rachel pointed out. "What do we do?"
"What do any of us do? We're just people standing in the sand beside Canute, demanding that the tide not come in. The tide will do as it wills, despite our greatest efforts," Bad Grief said. "Frankly, Sharpe, we survive. We survive and hope that some part of America is still intact and whole by the end of 2028."
"Not a big patriot, are you?" Dean joked.
"I'm Mandan First Nation. Of course I'm fucking not," Bad Grief said with a bitter tone. "Look, we'll be crossing the Canadian Border soon. And I'm having to arrange for some people to be there when we arrive. I don't trust the Cogs to not make another attempt at us as soon as they realize that we're on this train, or that we've gotten off of it. How's the shoulder?"
Dean shifted his shirt to one side, showing that his right shoulder was solidly bruise from armpit to pectoral almost all the way up to his neck.
"Well, we should probably get you a gun which doesn't do that. I'll make some calls," Bad Grief said, then recused himself to the information-blender that he'd set up in a corner of the train-car, away from easily prying eyes.
"I've never seen Sam this ruffled before," Bloodsour's voice cut in on her grim thinking. She turned to him, as he held a can of soup that he was eating out of with a spoon awkwardly for his bound up arm. At least it was steaming slightly so he'd heated it on a burner somewhere. He wasn't a complete animal.
"If that's what you call ruffled…" she said, allowing herself to trail off. Dean took a sniff at Chloe and immediately recoiled, and without a word went to change the baby as well as they could under the circumstances.
"I've seen him face down monsters and alien gods. And he did both of those with a laugh in his voice and a smirk on his face. There's something more going on that he's not telling us, something that's got him very worried."
"Considering he's our foremost expert on these strange invaders of the mortal world, it would stand to reason," Rachel said.
"What about your Hell people?" Bloodsour asked.
"What?" she asked.
"You've literally got people in Hell you can talk to. Maybe they've come across these things. Maybe they can tell us something that we don't already know," Bloodsour offered.
"You know, the thought of that completely slipped my attention," Rachel admitted. And come to think of it, it had been at least a year since she'd actually talked to her other self, and for no good reason that she could enunciate. Considering both of her agreed that there wasn't much market between the two of them for idle chit-chat and gossip – that wasn't how Rachel was, be she Scailes or Sharpe. But for a massively important update to the status quo of the world and that she might be dying soon because of Outsider monsters? That probably warranted some call-time. "I'll see what she has to say. Maybe Husk's heard something."
"One day I'd like to meet this Husk you talk about," Bloodsour said with a laugh.
"That's pretty inevitable, considering everybody goes to Hell these days," Rachel noted. Then she reached for her Hellphone.
Her gun was missing. She knew she put it there days before that night in Chicago. She quickly checked her other pocket, the one above her left shoulder that was Sharpe's alone, and there she found it. Why would Scailes move her gun? She then reached into the first pocket, the one that was easiest to open because it was the one of greatest familiarity, and pulled out a Hellphone. But the Hellphone was Sam's. The etching on the back in Angel Steel, it made Rachel's eyes narrow. She unlocked it, and immediately found a message open reading 'why the sweet hell is there a gun in my pocket?'
Rachel sighed. Her other self must have been wondering about that for days. She gave her head a shake and put Sam's Hellphone back where she'd pulled it, and found that Scailes had put her own Hellphone into her pocket next to the gun. She quickly dialed her other self.
There was a long, almost modem-like noise, as the SinLink servers caught her signal and retransmitted it across the barrier between dimensions, dumping it down into Hell where the more ordinary cellular towers could pick it up and send it to its destination. Then came the dialing noises. Rachel puffed out a purging breath. There was a lot going on. She'd best have an idea what order to start talking.
Finally, Rachel Scailes picked up.
Verosika was still passed out, drugged to the gills, on IMP's couch. She had done a bit of screaming as the morphine still worked its way through her, but she shut up and started laughing as the oldest Sinner in Hell arduously picked her guts apart so that they weren't locked into a shitty position up against each other. He had said a lot of medical and magical bullshit, bullshit well above Blitz's paygrade, so he told the beardo to make a summary of it in normal-people speak. Essentially, now she was going to need a transplant of Glamour tissue from a sibling, parent, or child, and in a year or so it would regrow into a functional thingy enabling her to look like a slutty human. That meant she needed to talk to her fossil of a mother. Even Blitz knew she was gonna hate that.
Cain then wrote all that down on the proviso that Blitz hand her the paper when she sobered up. He had it sitting still on his desk, not bothering to read it because it was not his shit to deal with.
"Um… boss?" Moxxie stuck his head in. "Should we… be worried about the incredibly high Succubus on the couch?"
"She just got her guts rearranged. Let her sleep it off," Blitz said, drawing a very flat look from Moxxie at his choice of phrasing that flew completely over Blitz's head. "What's this about? I got a job to do in fuckin… Wow, Ukraine. It's been a fuckin' minute since I was there. I wonder if they've still got that awesome vodka I liked?"
"Yeah, that's kind of the thing, sir," Moxxie said. He had a contrite look on his face. Oh, there was some bullshit, wasn't there?
"Don't tell me those Ruskies cheques bounced or some shit!" Blitz said. Then stopped for a moment. "Actually, tell me now that they bounced so I don't have to do it. What fuckery is afoot, Moxx?"
"It's not about the job, exactly," Moxxie said. "I just got a call from our doctor."
"Not dyin' are you, Moxx?" Blitz jabbed.
"Quite the opposite," Moxxie said. "Millie's pregnant again."
"Well fuckin' congratulations! Here's hoping all the dumb-fucks who might want to steal this one have learned better by now!" Blitz said with genuine good cheer.
"They'd fucking better," Moxxie agreed, his tone cold for that moment, before the smile returned to his face. "So Millie's going to have to do some lighter duty for a little bit."
"Please, that woman killed a hundred crones the day she gave birth. I doubt a human job's gonna' do more than give her skin a scuff," Blitz dismissed.
"Still, I think it would be better if she had a bit of extra time off. If only to get Bea used to the idea that she's going to be a big sister soon."
"Fine, fuckin' have at it. It just means I don't gotta pay you as much," Blitz said, though there was disappointment in his heart. It seemed that the old guard of IMP was slowly drifting apart, following their own ambitions. Moxxie spent more office hours across the hall than he did over here. Millie had one kid latched to her tit and another one apparently growing inside her cooter. Loona had not just a drug empire but a gun empire to wrangle. Only Blitz was still giving everything he had to kill people for money.
Not that he was doing it alone. Maelstrom was damned useful, in that even though he wasn't as strong as Millie, he was still really, really, freakishly fucking strong, and capable of ripping apart targets with his bare hands. You literally couldn't disarm that guy, and that was useful when shit went sideways on jobs. And Vidar, kid though he may be, might not be as precise as Moxxie, and have no magic to speak of, but he was cold blooded, impossible to scare, shock, or stun, and clearly enjoyed the work extremely. And when the target was something that wasn't a human, Blitz now had a fucking Angel of all things that he could call in.
"Maelstrom!" Blitz shouted from his desk. Moxxie glanced behind him.
"He's taking a personal day, sir," Moxxie said.
"Well who the fuck is in, then?" Blitz asked.
"Me, Vidar, Gadreel I think," Moxxie noted.
"Yeah, well, Gadreel doesn't kill humans," Blitz said with air-quotes and mocking tones.
"I can hear you," Gadreel's voice came through the wall.
"Loosen the fuck up or spread your legs for a human, bitch! You ain't making money if you're not spilling blood!" Blitz shouted back.
"I can live with those conditions," Gadreel answered back, somehow being loud enough to be heard without seeming to shout.
"Weirdo," Blitz muttered. "Moxx, grab the shitling and tear us a hole. Gotta earn our bread today for your missus."
"Yes sir," Moxxie said, and moved out to grab the kid who, if his attitude could be met with competence, would go very far in this company. Still, the kid was young. He had time to gain that competence. Hopefully it'd happen before something killed him. And weird that Blitz had reached a point in his life where somebody close to him dying wasn't a horror, but a dreadful inconvenience.
Resurrection Magic really did break your concept of the sanctity of life, didn't it, Blitz pondered?
But since Blitz had a factory limit of about one deep thought per day, he didn't pursue it when Moxx and the kid came back, and Moxxie grabbed the book and opened a portal right up into the human world.
"First job up top. You ready kiddo?"
"I've likely killed more people than you have," Vidar boasted.
"You're young so you're stupid, so I'll be frank," Blitz said, leaning down to the Envyling. "I got a body count in the high hundreds, just in humans alone. Everybody in, it's easily north of a thousand. Did you go 'round emptying those mountains you were living under?" Vidar shifted uncomfortably under Blitz's scrutiny. "Didn't think so. Grab your shit and head through."
He could have possibly left some kind of notice for Verosika, if she happened to wake up, but, as mentioned, Blitz had a factory limit of deep thoughts, as well as one for good ideas. And his good idea would have to wait a bit. He left behind the office of Hell, and entered the shitty, shitty human world.
Only to immediately have a flash-bang go off in front of him, causing Moxxie to let out a yelp of pain and confusion, and Vidar to outright scream and open fire, emptying the magazine of his pistol blindly, while Blitz stood there, not knocked to his knees by the sound-blast because of his false ears and only having to blink the vision back into his eyes.
Oh, so this was an ambush, then? 'Cause there was an entire wall of humans with assault rifles pointed at them. When Blitz glanced back at the portal, he could see that there was another wall of humans with guns behind them as well. Well fuck you too, Ivan, for sending us on ass-reamer of a mission.
"Release your weapons or we will open fire on you," one of them said.
"Big chance of that, big-man, after popping a flash in our faces!" Blitz shouted, using gab-time to allow Moxxie to get his shit together and do something dangerous. Blitz was a damned good ambusher, now that Millie frankly blew him out of the water in terms of melee killing, and a decent close-in shooter, whereas Moxxie had him beaten in sniping. But what Blitz was really, really good at, was getting people annoyed at him and focused on the wrong thing. And every second he bought Moxxie was another human carcass the job left behind.
"I told you he wouldn't," a very different human said, stepping out from behind a ballistic shield-bearing human. "You are the famed impish assassins, the Immediate Murder Professionals, are you not?"
"Damned straight we are. Who the fuck are you?" Blitz demanded, pointing his Luger at the dark-skinned human.
"An enthusiast," the human said. "And one who has been contracted to provide… supernatural defense."
"Sir… there's anti-magic wards on this room," Moxxie muttered.
"So you can't do shit?" Blitz whispered back. He then reached over and grabbed Vidar's shoulder and held him in place so he couldn't launch like it seemed he was wanting to.
"No, I'll be able to work around it, but I need…"
"You will be given time, because this is not a hostage situation. This is a negotiation," the dark skinned human said. He grinned, showing that there was space between his two front teeth much akin to Millie. "My name is Jean Baptist Ngolo. I was hired by a… certain party…"
"Yeah, that comedian all the Russians want dead," Blitz provided, not allowing the human to be cagey.
"Of course they still mock him as a comedian," Ngolo chuckled. "May I ask what price they offered for the assassination of the President?"
"Twenty six thousand," Blitz said. It was a low pay, one that a bunch of Reds had to band together to offer. And a far cry from when Blitz was offing demon-worshipping unfaithful housewives for two hundred bucks per scalp.
"Souls, I presume," he said.
"Damned straight," Blitz said.
"I am willing to pay you double that to abandon this mission," Ngolo said.
"You can't pay us. You don't have Souls," Blitz said. Ngolo then snapped his fingers, and one of the other soldiers came forward and handed him a small suitcase. Which he opened, and extracted a wad of crumpled, battered One Soul bills rebound in new paper bands.
"You will find that we can be rather thorough when it comes to our defense against the supernatural. Down to procuring funds from sources some would find… unnatural," Ngolo said. "Fifty thousand to abandon this mission. And I have been authorized to offer seventy-thousand – total – to offer one of my own."
"Being?" Blitz asked.
"To kill everyone in Hell who placed this bounty on the President's head, collectively or independently," Ngolo said. "To make it violently and messily clear that the politics of the living world will not be decided by the dead."
"You want us to kill a bunch of Sinners?" Vidar demanded, of course sounding like the mouthy shit that he was. "For you. For a bunch of humans?"
"Newsflash, kid, we already are working for humans. And what did I say about good jobs?"
Vidar sighed and shrugged his shoulder out from under Blitz's grasp. "The only way to make a good job better is to get paid twice for it," Vidar said.
"Moxx, check the money. If it's all there, you've got your self a deal, weirdo!" Blitz said.
Ngolo smiled. "A pleasure to do business with the European Union," he said. Then he turned to one of the soldier. "And you owe me one hundred Euros."
"I was so sure…" the soldier muttered, his posture slumping.
"That I was full of shit. Well, the world is a more complicated machine than you believed possible," Ngolo chided brightly. Moxxie finished riffle counting the money at light-speed and gave a stern nod toward Blitz.
"Well, I ain't gonna stand here and get flash-banged again when there's work to be done. Hope you fuckos don't make enemies 'cause if you do and they die, I will allow myself to be hired by them! See y'later, masturbators!" Blitz exclaimed, as he whistled for Moxxie to open the portal back to hell, making this the second shortest job they'd ever done, after the one where they accidentally killed the target by opening the portal through him. Vidar still seethed, but was guided back away from the concrete room and its army of soldiers.
"Are we seriously just going to do the bitch-work of those humans?" Vidar asked.
"Chill with the Supremacism, kid," Blitz ordered, as they returned not to their office, but to neighboring Pentagram City. "Humans are good moneymakers. And killing dead humans is actually challenging. Do you, or do you not want a challenge?"
Vidar grumbled and growled, but nodded.
"That's what I fuckin' thought. Now let's go kill a bunch of Sinners! The most creative kill gets an extra share."
"I have no aversion to killing Sinners," Gadreel's voice was instantly beside him, and both Moxxie and Vidar let out shrieks of surprise at her sudden appearance. Vidar, in his reflex, tried to stab her. She caught his knife between her fingertips. "I trust that the first mission begat a better one?"
"Yep! Paid thrice as much to kill our clients!" He didn't even question how she'd heard of the new job. Must just be some Angel bullshit.
"It doesn't bother you that you are betraying your professional ethics like this?" Gadreel asked, as she rolled her shoulders and her dress became the form-hugging leather wrap that she preferred to wear when killing, her triangular-bladed knife appearing in her hand.
"Professional what-now?" Blitz asked.
The time had come for Rachel to back off. She could tell by the tears in the Sinner's eyes that she'd pushed long enough and hard enough, and anything that she did now might just inspire the poor man to lash out, possibly undoing all of the delicate work she'd done to get him to the place where he could even care about the lives he had ruined in his life, hundreds of years ago, let alone the one's he'd made a hash of down here.
"That will be all for today. Dinner service starts at five," Rachel said, closing her dossier and rising from her chair. The Sinner had been one of the middle-children of the Hotel Project, not quite the ancient Sinners who had their chance to actually surmount the Stone of Farewell and then had that chance taken from them, nor the new landings who, by her own reckoning, were essentially Innocent who were denied the chance to be. He was one of the Centennial Powers, a group which hosted such luminaries as the now dead Valentino, the now dead Jingo, and the very much still a problem Alastor. But this man was not nearly to the Radio Demon's level of clout.
Dane Rickenbocker gave a nod and offered no words as she left his room, probably not trusting his voice in this moment. Well it was a hopeful sign that he still understood what being inflicted upon was, even if he had to be reminded through metaphor and connection to one of the very few people Rickenbocker cared about.
She reached the hallway, and found Husk waiting outside.
"You really must get a better hobby than stalking me," she said with a sideways glance.
"Can't say I could find a better one. This one lets me look at your ass," Husk said with perfect neutrality.
"Well I can't deprive you of that, now can I?" she asked. It turned out that dying repeatedly was inspiring a truly fanatical protective streak in Husk, one that came out when he discerned, determined, or outright imagined that she was putting herself in anything other than a perfectly safe situation. And while the more human part of her found it sweet, the rational part of her knew that he was going to need some sessions of his own to work through it before it drove him to do something truly dangerous to his health and sanity.
Obsession was a terminal illness, down here in Hell.
And worse than that, it was a contagious one.
She made for the elevator, intending to get lunch before the kitchens switched over. Not to say that she didn't enjoy some fine Babylonian goulash, but Angel Dust's lasagna was worth suffering damnation for, and he was off shift soon.
He was doing well for himself, but obsession still had him, too. It was slowly uncoiling itself from around his brain, as it became more and more apparent to him that Molly and Fredo were, in fact, going to stay in the building across the street and he had, in fact, succeeded in 'bringing his sister to safety'. He needed to decompress. And for some reason Rachel doubted that he would consciously do that. Still, it was not an acute concern. As far as boiling pots go, his own had still a fair bit to simmer before it began to spill.
"Tomorrow's Saturday, right?" Rachel asked.
"Losin' track of days, now?" Husk asked back. She gave him A Look, and he chuckled, then told her she was right.
"Any chance of me tagging along to your…" she began.
"You and that fuckin' poker. I'd think you were a goddamned addict the way you keep needlin' me over that shit," Husk muttered.
"Despite my best efforts to be consistently busy, I find myself bored," Rachel admitted. "And, additionally, some small part of me wants to watch the rest of the table sweat when I show up and they wonder who is going to die like Siegel and Piggot did."
Husk gave a chuckle at that, too. "You know what? I kinda want to see that myself," he admitted. "Fine. But if they get ornery…"
"Husk, there is literally nothing they can do to meaningfully harm me," Rachel pointed out. "Even if they kill me, I'll just wake up on Sunday on the Recovery Couch."
"Doesn't mean I'm gonna be happy about it," Husk said.
"Then endeavor to not let anybody kill me," she said, leaning against him briefly just as they reached the ground floor and the doors opened.
"With you, that's a fuckin' full-time job. If you weren't dead I'd swear you've got a fucking death-wish," Husk noted.
"I can afford to be cavalier about my body, because I have essentially an infinite amount of them," she pointed out. And yes, there was once more a carcass in the freezer up in her room. Only this one had a hole in its chest rather than a missing head. She still had a plan for it, one that she, by dint of her currently-living self up on Earth, knew was still possible but needed to be pursued relatively soon. Duchampe was getting old. And like fuck was she going to let him die outside of prison, even if she had to bury her own corpse in her back-yard and sic the police on him to see it done.
She reached into the magical pocket and pulled out her Hellphone, and gave a thought to dialing herself up. Maybe getting it moving now. Although it had been a while since she talked to herself. A long while.
Had it been a year, already?
Whatever her thinking, the phone immediately started ringing in her hand, causing her to pause just inside the dining room, which was about two thirds full of those at the tail end of lunch-service. Husk joined her in pausing, looking at the phone in her hand. It was her other self calling.
"Been a while since we heard from her, ain't it been?" Husk muttered.
"It has," she said. Then she gave a shrug, and took the call, face-timing her other self. "It's you, what's going on?"
"A lot, actually," that Rachel said. And that Rachel looked… different. Her hair was a bit less lustrous, as though she'd gone days without washing it properly, and a slight hunted-animal look to her that Rachel had been fairly certain that she had eliminated from her face a lifetime ago. "Husk? Are you there?"
"Of course," Husk said, sounding slightly insulted by her doubt.
"Do you have any family or people you care about in San Francisco?" other Rachel asked.
"Naw. All my people were East Coast, or in Vegas," Husk simplified. In truth, he had quite a bit of family still living in the American south and up the Appalachian Mountains. It had been something of a surprise to learn that he'd been a black man in life. With his exploits and the time he'd lived, she had presumed he'd be white. But it certainly explained the extra layer of bitterness that he had over essentially everything in his life. A black man living in Jim Crow America had a lot of things to be angered by.
And those kinds of angers were sticky like tar, and followed him all the way here to Hell.
"Well that's for the best, because San Fran is currently uninhabitable," Other Rachel said, pulling both of the Hellbound's attention to the phone.
"What?" Rachel asked.
"Somebody set off the dirtiest bomb they could make in the city center. That somebody being human, unfortunately."
"...as opposed to what?" Rachel asked.
"Oh, Rach, you have no idea how many answers to that there are," Husk shook his head with grim tone.
"I'm glad that you said that, actually," other Rachel said. "Because Dean and I were almost murdered by cyborgs earlier this week."
"Murdered by what?" Rachel asked.
"Cyborgs? Metal guys, wearin' human skin?" Husk prompted.
"Bad Grief calls them Cognoscenti. Does that mean anything to you?" other Rachel asked.
"Ain't heard 'em called that, but some people at the table do mention they got killed by people with metal guts. Seems like they became a thing back in '03," Husk mused. "Why are they after you of all fuckin' people?"
"And for that matter who exactly is 'Dean'?" Rachel asked.
"Oh, right. It's been a year," other Rachel said. She turned her phone so it looked across what seemed to be a converted train-car to a blocky-built man with dark hair and eyes, cooing at a baby as he fed it with a bottle. "That's Dean."
"Playin' mom to another man's kid?" Husk chuckled. "Didn't know you had it in you."
"Hardly. That child is mine, as well," other Rachel said, turning the phone back around.
"You had another baby?" Rachel demanded. After Sam she'd gotten her tubes tied. So how in the hell… oh, Resurrection magic. If it can create an entire body out of a handful of ash, why wouldn't it undo an elective surgery? "Why?"
"Quite by accident I assure you," other Rachel admitted. She shrugged. "Resurrection magic."
"I had the same thought," Rachel said.
"Of course you did," other Rachel said.
"So you moved on from Husk that quickly?" Rachel felt a slight desire to tease.
"I didn't move on, because you still have him," other Rachel said. "But in Dean, I found a different kind of man whom I care about. It's not the same as you two. And it doesn't have to be."
"Well, I guess this is a big prod to the both a' ya's that you should probably talk more often," Husk said.
"He's not wrong," other Rachel said. She then cleared her throat. "So what do you know about these Cognoscenti that Bad Grief is no doubt trying to keep from us?"
"Not much. Only heard it second hand through poker-marks," Husk admitted. "Only that they're showin' up more often now then they did twenty years back. Maybe they've got more numbers now. Can't say for certain. Actually, hold on one fuckin' minute," Husk said and he rose from the table and left Rachel and Rachel on the phone as he went into the lobby.
There was a pregnant pause between the two of them.
"What's the name of our new child?" Rachel finally asked.
"Chloe," she said.
"...you let him name her, didn't you?" Rachel prodded.
"He had his heart set on it," other Rachel admitted. "It's not like we were the best at naming things ourselves. We let our first one be named Phillip Junior, after all."
"Ugh, don't remind me," Rachel muttered.
"Come to think of it, the only name of ours that stuck was Sam, wasn't it?"
"It was," Rachel admitted. She paused again. "Did you visit his grave?"
"For a pauper's grave, it gets a lot of traffic," other Rachel said. "For the record, I almost got stabbed in the ten hours I was in that city."
"I wonder how Sam lasted as long as he did," Rachel mused.
"There's even a 'Samuel Scailes Foundation' that got put together by people down in Maine, Quebec and Ontario," other Rachel related. "Anti-homelessness initiatives, education, violence shelters. It's all pretty rough, because it only got started in '25, but…"
"But Sam is finally having the effect on the world in death that he couldn't have in life," Rachel said.
Other Rachel nodded, sadly. "I don't suppose you had a chance to talk to him in the last year?"
"Are you joking? I'm not going to Heaven until Gabriel's corpse has hung from a Hellish lamppost for a month," Rachel said.
That got other Rachel nodding, still understanding Rachel's reasoning. Gabriel had killed them, repeatedly, before hurling them to Hell. Rachel was not in any position that she could prevent that from happening again.
Why Gabriel had the uniquely bullshit power to override an Innocent's respawn point was one that she had grown to deeply loathe even as she failed to understand, and would happily see it expunged from Creation when something capable of killing him arose.
Maybe Sam would be the one to break Gabriel over his knee?
It was a happy thought for a moment.
"What are you thinking about with that face?" other Rachel asked.
"Just musing that Sam might kill Gabriel for us," Rachel said.
"Oh, that is a comforting thought," other Rachel said. And there was the divergence between them that Cain had warned of. The thought hadn't occurred to other Rachel until Rachel supplied it. And they would only grow more foreign from each other as time went on.
"A dirty bomb in San Francisco, cyborgs in…" Rachel waited for other Rachel to supply the location, "...Kitchener and Chicago, and Wendy doing something up there as well. It's going to be busy for you."
"Wendy's up here?" other Rachel asked.
"Yes she… right, you were already resurrected by then. She has some gambit up on Earth. You might run into her."
"...let me be the judge of that," Jun-Ho's voice pulled Rachel's gaze away from her other self and up to where the Innocent joined Husk in entering the rapidly dwindling dining room's population. He looked to her and the phone in her hand, and hastened to move to a place where he could loom over the shoulder opposite the one home to Husk. "Well. This is a very unusual circumstance."
"Did Cain not tell you about this?" Rachel asked.
"Oh, he did, but still, it's one thing to be told a thing, and another to be party to it," Jun-Ho said. "I was briefed on your issue by my counterpart," he motioned to Husk, "on my way down. Whatever you've done to put yourself in the path of the Cognoscenti, I recommend you stop. They are a slow engine to start, but altogether very, very difficult to stop once in motion, and are resolute to well beyond a fault."
"I've already been told what I did. Note to self, stop making magic items, I don't live in an urban-fantasy novel," other Rachel said.
"Wait, this is over the Blood Engine you made?" Rachel asked.
"Apparently it has other things it can do than 'be a Blood Engine'," other Rachel gave a shrug. The other her paused briefly, setting the phone down and speaking in hushed tones to Dean as the view only took in the roof. Then, after that brief pause, she returned, a distinct look of worry on her face that she didn't speak on. "The point is, my business is closed until they get bored of me, and then get more tempting targets."
"It's refreshing to know that Rachel Scailes is still a reasonable person with prudence as her watch-word," Jun-Ho admitted with a nod.
"It's Sharpe, now," she said.
"You got married, too?" Rachel asked.
"Not exactly. It's just easier this way," other Rachel admitted.
"Did you ever figure out what our surname used to be, then?" Rachel asked.
"Keeche," other Rachel offered instantly.
"Wait, it was that easy?" Rachel asked.
"I've had a year where I only had to work 5 hours a week, be pregnant, and play on the internet. I'd be disappointed in me if I hadn't been able to cross-reference where I'd gotten scooped to the names of people of a certain age who died on specific dates, and then figure out which one was our grandfather," other Rachel pointed out.
Which was a very analytical way to un-erase one's own past, which Rachel hadn't put any amount of thought into.
"There is a small, outside chance that we might be a Weekusk. I'm reasonably sure it wasn't him that was Grandfather, unless Grandfather was ten years older than we thought he was," other Rachel added, which preempted Rachel's question as to her degree of certainty and if there were any other options.
"Are we going to speak on the subject of the Cognoscenti, or should I get lunch while I wait?" Jun-Ho asked.
"Right. You'd think my fourth crack at motherhood would teach me to multitask better," other Rachel said. "Pass me over to him. I won't need either of you two for this."
"Fine," Rachel said, handing the phone directly to the Korean Spymaster. She turned to Husk, who was shaking his head lightly. "She is still so frighteningly like me. It's uncanny."
"I was thinking the opposite, actually," Husk said. "She's changin' faster than I thought possible."
"What, in that she's not pining over you and found a new beau?" Rachel teased.
"That's more significant than you're givin' it credit. How many men have you ever willingly went to bed with, in life or afterwards?" he prompted.
"Two. And of those, one was a compromise candidate," Rachel admitted.
"So you'd say you're one choosy bitch," Husk asked.
"I could be called that, yes."
"And she jumped to that lumberjack-looking motherfucker in less than a year," Husk said with a nod. "She's changing fast. Soon I don't think either of us is gonna recognize her."
Kahr Bommer was an imp that had a lot of really unexpected duties dropped onto his lap rather suddenly, and everybody just kind of went along with it as though there were any sort of validity to making that choice. Bommer wasn't the highest ranked of the contingent that got dog-fucked into showing up on Earth instead of Heaven. He wasn't the best speaker – that guy burst into flames seconds after arriving. No, despite having no qualifications and no rank and no reason other than desperation to do it he found himself as the mouthpiece for seven hundred Hellspawn stuck in Europe after the beginning of the War For Heaven.
There had initially been a few people, namely a pair of Geminon Consumers, who wanted to take Bommer's place, to call the shots on behalf of their exclave, but one fucking day of having to deal with the bullshit that Bommer had to keep on the desk that they gave him – yes, the humans gave him a desk – gave both of that bitch a punch in the liver and caused both of her to recoil back into the mob with her metaphorical tail between her legs. It was thankless work. Bommer had to deal with the humans every time one of his Legionary brethren got too drunk or did something too visible (both frequent occurrences, because lacking all other factors, they were all bored, off-duty soldiers) and shuffle things back into some kind of sense.
And through it all, that weird sensation of lingering doom that he'd had since he came here. As though just being on Earth was a death sentence that was running out its clock. But the weird thing was, the longer he spent here, the more desperate and pathetic that clock started to feel. As though it were trying to scare him, and when he refused to wake up in a cold sweat or spend hours glancing at the doors, it ran out of any kind of hold over him. It was still there, a lingering dread. But it was weak, now. Maybe soon, it'd slip beneath his notice and he'd never think about it again.
Per his conversations with the other Hellspawn, the Fiends felt none of that, being just fine and dandy up here in the human world. The Hellhounds actually preferred it. Said they could 'smell for miles' where the air wasn't choked by smog and brimstone. It was only the other imps who agreed with him in feeling that weird dread. And for them, too, it was getting weaker with the passage of years.
There was a chirp from the computer at his desk, and Bommer sighed, checking it. When he opened his schedule, he found that everything for today from now onward had been cleared out by somebody, leaving only a five-minute 'protocol meeting' on the books. Which was a pain because he knew for a fact that he had a lot of other shit he needed to do. Rex's hip wasn't getting any less dysplasia-y, and the humans here had a surgery that could fix it.
Great. Now he had to bitch to the IT people. Or better yet, send one of the Hellhounds to bitch for him. He'd learned that IT people fucking loved Hellhounds.
Biblically, even.
Bommer wasn't above bribery to get his shit done for his people. Even if they shouldn't have been his people in the first place.
The door opened and a pair of soldiers immediately entered the room, causing Bommer to pause from sending a message to the gayest and sluttiest of the Hellhounds who'd ended up stuck on Earth to go unfuck Bommer's schedule – a duty the man would not find in the least bit onerous, when Rene came in, followed by two others. One of them was a broad shouldered and potato-headed human with his hair cut right down to his scalp. The other was a disheveled and bearded man with dark hair and eyes. Both of them wore one of the hundreds of flags the humans had, only these ones were pretty basic, just being two boxes of one color each.
"The fuck is this?" Bommer asked. The potato-headed human recoiled when he spoke, turning a glare at Desjardins.
"I asked you for help, not… this devilry!" the potato-headed human said. Rene blinked at him, then turned to Bommer.
"What did he say?" Rene asked of the imp.
"He called me a little devil and asked what you're up to. Which frankly I'd like an answer to myself," Bommer said, sitting back in his chair a bit.
"So its true. You can speak any language humans can," the other, sick-of-everything human said. "I presume, Mister Desjardins, you hear him speaking French?"
"You presume correctly," Dejardins said.
"Mister President, what is the meaning of this… this circus?" the potato-headed human demanded, turning now to the sick-of-everything man.
"Betting on a hard six," the other said. He faced Bommer, then sighed and lowered himself into a seat against the back wall that usually was used by Dejardins when the human needed something. "Have you been keeping up with international news, demon?"
"I wish I didn't fucking have to, but it seems that everything in this planet is affecting us, one way or another," Bommer admitted.
"So you're aware of the... condition... of the United States," the tired human asked.
"That people say it's going to do another Civil War soon? What about it? Nations fall apart all the time," Bommer said. It was a trademark of Hell in the Luciferian Age that no nation lasted forever. Except Satan's, but that guy was an anomaly in virtually every way possible.
"America was supplying all of the weapons we need to keep our nation intact under active invasion, until the fool got back in office," the tired human said with a hard look toward the East, as though assigning a curse with a nothing more than a spiteful glance. "They ended the agreements unilateraly in our enemy's favor years ago. Europe tried to fill the gap, but... In four months, my country will run out of munitions, and be crushed under that Moscovite-monster's bootheel. I will not allow my country to die because a bunch of greedy fossils on another continent decided that it's better to rule over slaves than represent the interests of an enlightened nation."
"Don't know what to tell you, bub. We can't just magic up bullets for you," Bommer said, not getting where this was going.
"I don't need industry. Not for what I want," the tired human said. "I need soldiers. Specific soldiers… unnatural soldiers."
"Mister President, we discussed this…" the potato-headed human tried to interject.
"Before the calculus changed, we discussed this," the tired human shot a hot glare at his counterpart. "Now we live in the cold wasteland of the new. And I will take any option, pay any price, to see this war ended."
The potato-headed human sighed, a look of deep fatigue much like that on the face of the tired-human coming to his visage, before nodding. "I understand. I wish I didn't, but I do."
The tired man turned to Dejardins, next. "I know that you've been tossing these demons from one set of hands to another like a ticking bomb. Toss them now to me, and I'll let them detonate in my hands if they do what I want."
"And what exactly is that?" Bommer asked.
"I want you to messily, loudly, violently, and brutally eviscerate the entire upper command structure of the nation of Russia," the tired-human said. "I want you to shatter their upper ranks, to burn their oligarch's holdings to the dirt, and make the most-insulated upper class driving the war in that nation bleed themselves white. I want so many people dead that nobody will even know who is supposed to be left in charge when you're done. I want them shattered so badly that they will tear themselves apart and leave us the fuck alone!"
Bommer sat back in his chair. Ordinarily he'd have laughed this guy out of any room he was in. But he was asking for Hellspawn to be awful little shits, which they were always willing to be, against a specific target, and to have as much fun with their job as they possibly could.
So what was the catch?
"And what are you offering to us to do this insane fucking thing?" Bommer asked.
"Full citizenship in the nation of Ukraine, and amnesty for any crimes committed between your arrival and the time of your agreement."
"That will be a hard thing to ask, Mister President," Desjardins noted.
The sharp eyes of the tired-human turned to Rene once more. "If the Russians stop fighting, there will be no war. If we stop fighting, there will be no Ukraine. Are we, or are we not part of the European Union?"
"Provisionally," Desjardins said.
"And do you want to have Russia on the borders of fucking Poland?" the tired-human demanded.
"Good god, no. They'd start World War Three in less than an hour," Desjardins said.
"Then I'm exercising my option. And my option is them," the tired-human turned to the imp once more. "No more being shuffled about. A chance to put down roots. A chance to fight for a nation that would be proud to have such madmen on its side, to fight against an impossibly overwhelming enemy."
Bommer gave it a bit of thought. He wasn't the smartest imp by a long fucking shot, but his time on Earth had taught him to at least check if there was water below him before jumping off of his cliffs. And it was a ball-ache of royal proportions to constantly be shuffled around. This was the second time they'd been shoved into this east-Italian office building, and denied any access to Venice. It was a shame. According to what Bommer could read, Venice was a bit like Envy. Going there might have assuaged some of his home-sickness.
"We'll need a bit more than that, but we're on the right page," Bommer offered. Never leave money on the table. "After all, how hard can it be to kill a bunch of Russians?"
"It's a lot easier than you'd think," the potato-headed human finally showed a whisper of humor, and it was a cruel, savage kind of humor that certainly belonged with the denizens of Hell. There were still details to work out, but the deal was essentially struck. One more military action by the survivors of the Stuttgart Seven Hundred, and then a place of their own where they didn't have to listen to the bullshit of Hell telling them who they had to be and what they stood to earn. No more slave warriors, no more aristocrats. Just soldiers.
Just soldiers, from another world, toppling empires. That ignited a very petty joy in Bommer's impish heart.
"It's actually rather shocking how much was going on outside of the borders of Mankind's dominion, now that we actually have the ability to look back on it. While we were dealing with a wholesale-collapse of the dual-polar hegemony of America and Russia – even if Russia was a peer of the United States only on paper – you were dealing with a multi-planar war. It grieves me that in my youth I never had the wherewithal or the opportunity to more plainly deal with your kind. I know that the star of Ngolo would have risen far sooner, and I would have had to undertake so many fewer unpalatable deeds to step out of the shadow of my uncle.
Sometimes it's truly and shockingly small things that can shift the course of history in irreconcilable ways. Much like the talk of butterflies and tornadoes, what would the Earth have been were it not for the freak accident that deposited a detachment of Hellish soldiers here? Without them, there would have been no European Revelation, there would have been no Fusion Power breakthroughs… and there certainly would have been no Week Of Red Streets.
The mere presence of a few hellspawn of a mercenary temperament essentially single-handedly penned the story of the end of the First Russo-Ukrainian War, with a collapsing and infighting Russia unable to prevent Ukraine from pushing the Russians out of Crimea and limp across the finish line to a twenty-year armistice which saw of all that Russia had taken during that conflict, they only held a fraction of the Donbas, before the nation of Russia promptly ate itself. Succession is a messy business under normal circumstances. But when a motivated, cruel, and bored company of Hellish soldiers were told to depopulate anybody who might be considered a possible successor? Messy doesn't begin to describe.
Which then set the stage for the Second Russo-Ukrainian War in 2049, where Ukraine, backed by the ascendant European Union, utterly humiliated, obliterated, and gutted the Russian state. Such small things end up making such large impacts on the world. I did my best for the CAF. And I am proud that when I was done, I was voted out of power, and not evicted at muzzle velocity. But I have to wonder if the world hasn't entered some strange new age of historical myth. To have two empires collapse on the far ends of the world at the same time, and see entirely new empires rise from their ashes, is certainly something from a story-book. At this point, I can only hope that history will view me kindly.
No, I don't suppose you would judge me for what I did. But I do. And history might as well."
– Jean Baptiste Ngolo, Former President of the Central African Federation
