Rachel was deeply aggrieved by the loss of her Hellphone. After all of the work that she'd put into building that magical pocket (with Husk's help, obviously), she had lost one of her most important tools. And while she wasn't nearly so sentimental as to be left poorly by something that she could replace at an off-hand request, it still irked her. That the magic that she had put all that time and effort into learning, had for reasons that nobody involved could tell, just decided to fail.
More than that, the phone itself had belonged to Sam, if even briefly. It irked her to lose it.
"You got a look on yer face like a thunderhead. Anything I need to be worried about?" Husk asked as she approached the bar.
"Still annoyed," she muttered.
"Ah. The phone thing," he said. He likewise scowled, as it grated on his professionalism and his own level of magical mastery to have something that he thought he knew so well simply not work. "I'mma have to do some more homework on it. That shit shouldn't have happened."
"And until then, I am vexed," Rachel said with a grim undercurrent of outrage.
"I talked to Addam, taught him the trick. It works for him," Husk said, shaking his head, his frustration clear on his face. "And Jun-Ho keeps most 'a his shit in pockets just the same. This just don't make any fuckin' sense."
There was a long moment of companionable if frustrated silence between the two of them, but since the hour was fairly late and the hotel was moderately quiet, nobody intruded on them. She finally puffed out the last, most angered breath that she had in her lungs, and forced her mind onto other things. "How is the table?" she asked.
"They don't trust me, and likely ain't gonna for a decade or two," Husk said. Rachel sighed and nodded. From their perspective, there was only one result to the equation they had seen. Husk asked for a word with Siegel and Piggot, and later that evening both of them are dead, and a bunch of their shit is stolen, besides.
"Yet they're still willing to play with you," she asked.
"'Becca knows I ain't takin' a swing at her. As far as the table goes, hers is the only opinion that matters."
"I have no idea how you've so thoroughly endeared yourself to that Walmart Matriarch," Rachel shook her head.
"We landed in Hell near-enough the same time," Husk said with a shrug. "We got history. Most of it better than bad."
"Has there been any friction?"
"By friction do ya' mean gonks trying to gack me? This is Hell, dame. Idiots are always pullin' steel on each other down here," Husk said around a chuckle as he took a deep drink of his bottle of vile liquor. "They ain't succeeded, of course."
"Obviously not," she said. If there was one thing that the last half-year down here had taught her, it was that you could never go broke betting on Husk's ability to survive. "Well, how about something to fight the heat, and some news that I won't hear on that thing?" she gestured toward the television, which was currently being used by a bunch of people to play Mario Kart, of all archaic games.
"I thought you didn't care 'bout politics and shit?" Husk asked, while making her a margarita.
"With the way things are looking out past the barricade, I'm beginning to think that perhaps I should be," she said.
"That's a fuckin' broad question, then. Too broad for me to answer," Husk said.
"Then pick something that you think would interest me," she said, settling herself more comfortably onto her stool. Husk wheezed half of a chuckle, then plunked the fancy drink in front of her. He certainly wasted no time with it.
"Alright. You like dogs?" he asked.
"Dogs?" she asked.
"Yeah, you like dogs?"
"They're… alright. Most of them are skittish around me but I've never found them to be aggressive."
"Fuck me you really were a… I'm talkin' about Hell's dogs," Husk seemed to course-correct in a hell of a hurry. She didn't find it particularly insulting. Animals knew when there was something wrong with people. There was certainly something wrong with her. She wasn't blind to that fact. Cats, blasé creatures that they were, were more companionable to her by far. Didn't stop her from making sure that her children had a dog growing up. Some things were just to be expected.
What was that dog's name? She frowned for just a moment. Strange that the shaggy, slow-moving mongrel eluded her memory, at least to what they named it. The thing was essentially a friendly sloth in dog form, given to yodeling rather than barking. What was it named?
Bah. Not a thought worth pursuing.
"Fine. What's going on with the Hellhounds?"
"Word is they're getting ready to pitch another shit-fit and rebel," Husk said.
"Another, as in…"
"Yeah, 'parently that's something that Hellhounds do every millennium or so; get it in their heads that they deserve the same rights as the rest of us people, and try fighting for it."
"Hellhounds are conscious, sentient and sapient. Based on those factors alone, de facto they deserve those rights," Rachel prompted.
"Hell don't see it that way," Husk gave his head a little shake. She sipped at her drink, finding it excellent as all things were that came from Husk's hand. "There's a whole economy out there about owning those poor fucks. I doubt they're gonna see shit your way."
"So another pointless waste of life and potential. Hell seems to've cornered the market on those," Rachel noted.
"No kiddin', Rach," he muttered.
"So when do you figure I should start ducking for cover?" she asked.
"The fuck you think I am? The weatherman?" Husk snapped back.
"You've got to have some kind of prediction."
"I ain't got shit. I just hear things," Husk said, settling back to lean against his wall of liquors. "I hear that dangerous Hounds are startin' to clump up together. I hear that people are startin' to get nervous, 'cause 'a that fact. I hear that people are buyin' weapons. Don't know what other shape that looks like to you but another fuckin' rebellion."
"Maybe," Rachel said. Even though this was the first she'd ever heard of this whole situation, the whole of it reeked to her. It reeked of manufactured consent and excuses for crack-downs. There were major events happening behind closed doors to the Hellhounds' collective detriment, mark her words.
And while maybe – maybe – there was some collectivization going on on the part of the Hounds, what better reason did they need than the fact that there were so many ruinous forces arrayed against them to group up in pacts of mutual self-defense?
She was about to mull on that point more deeply when she had a very odd feeling. It felt like catching somebody in the moment of them pickpocketing you. A strange pressure inside your clothes that you didn't put there. Only the pressure was outside of her body, outside of her clothes even. She stopped, half way to taking another sip of her drink, and blinked. Wait. What?
Husk seemed to notice her shift in expression. "Somethin' come to mind?" he asked, tones low and a bit less harsh than they had been.
She didn't answer him, though, feeling the invasive sensation retract and leave. How bizarre.
Rachel reached to her neck, and ran her thumb along the Blood Engine that Husk'd procured for her (and taught her how to replace, if it came down to it), and felt that it was still warm and pulsed against her thumb in a sympathetic heartbeat. Then without having a good explanation as to why, she reached her hand into that magical pocket that she'd built.
She felt something hard in it.
She withdrew, and her Hellphone was in her hand.
"What the fuck?" Husk asked, staring suspiciously at her phone.
"You took the words right out of my mouth," she said. When she flicked its screen, it showed that it was merrily at 95% charge, which, having been out of her grasp for the better part of a week, it shouldn't have been. She turned a glance up to her very unofficial other half. "Maybe we need to talk to some wizards."
"Fuckin… fine. I should'a punched out hours ago anyways," Husk said, flipping the switch with turned off the neon lights of the Hazbin Bar. "Ain't like either of us sleep very much anyway."
Chapter 33
The Two Rachels
Jess had expected that she'd spent a bit of time with her last living brother, to get Dad's affairs in order before he finally shuffled off, and then go back home. But then the world stopped making sense.
The night that the woman claiming to be Rachel Scailes came under PJ's roof had been a sleepless one, with her constantly wondering what kind of scheme or scam that this pretender woman would be trying to run. After all, Jess was not exactly a poor woman. She always knew that she had a ruthless streak in her. But having met this might-be-Rachel, it made it fairly clear that she'd come by it honestly. If she was who she said she was, then she'd had an apple that dropped straight down to become Jess.
Simon had, just as his father always did, gotten up at the very break of the day, and she awoke to the sound of him making his favorite; a mountain of scrambled eggs with cheddar in. He had much of his father's palate, that one. Jess preferred omelets to the random fluff of scrambled.
And when the impossible woman finally awoke herself, grumbling and zombie-lurching into a closet in confusion before blinking and realizing where she was, she finally went to the bathroom at something of a waddle. There were so many things which should have instantly disqualified her as being Mom, so many things which would have been clear proof to heave her bodily out the door. But PJ believed her.
PJ was not, in her experience with him, the most credulous of people. None of the three of them had been. There was a reason she owned exactly zero NFTs, even at the height of the very brief craze.
When the woman came back out, she immediately started stealing Simon's excess eggs and began to consume, before pulling that now glowing piece of metal – which didn't seem to discomfort her in the slightest, and then reaching out, and extracting a smartphone out of thin fucking air.
That had been pretty much the final nail in the coffin of her nice, simple, sane, and supernaturally-absent former life.
"Jess? Are you alright? You look a bit scattered," Greg asked, his face pulled into an expression of worry on her screen.
"I'm just having a lot more to deal with than I thought I'd have to," she said. Greg was not her husband, per se, but she did have two children with him, they lived together, and pooled their finances, and owned a business together. So they might as well have been. "Say what you will about Philip; he certainly doesn't make dying easy."
"Look, Jess, if you don't feel up to this, I can always tag in," Greg said, giving her a somewhat pleading look. He was a good man, Greg Waites was, narrow and slender both in body and in face, his hair pretty much going grey as one while refusing to give an inch of ground to alopecia. With his hair as it was, he looked like he was ten years her senior, whereas in fact he was three years her junior. But best of all of his qualities (and he had a great many good ones) was that he was able to match her wavelength, to be able to talk without talking to her. To have arguments pass without a word because a look could do all of the work, and leave them without the rancor, instead bypassing it directly to the part where they fix the fucking problem. It was why they worked together so well, professionally.
"No, this is something I have to see through for myself. Besides, Simon's having the time of his life 'slumming with the lower classes'," she said with a chuckle.
"I really hope those words didn't come out of his mouth," Greg sighed, palming his face.
"Oh, I've learned a lot of shocking shit about my brother, too," she said. "Turns out, 'lower class' isn't exactly the descriptor that I thought it was."
Greg squinted at her. How does she explain this to him? The man's mind was all data-tables and calculators. Did he even have room for magic in his world view? She decided not to cross that barricade. Not yet.
"I'm serious. He's got money squirreled away everywhere. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear he was a wizard," she said.
"Well, that's good news at least. I know you love your brother, but I am not going to open our home to an alcoholic, and I'm certainly not opening our finances to him."
"His pride wouldn't allow that anyway," she said. She then spotted PJ coming out of his 'workshop' which was a room that nobody else was allowed into except for 'Rachel'. "Gotta go. Love you."
"I'll be waiting for you," Greg said. When she hung up, she saw the room beyond, looking like a better-organized meth-lab, but producing something much more valuable and debatably even more dangerous. After all, her big brother had proven he was capable of turning scrap-metal into gold. The sheer chaos his science was going to unleash on the precious metals market was enough to beggar the imagination.
"Done with Greg?" PJ asked.
"He always checks up," she said.
"So he does," PJ said. He paused from heading to the kitchen. "You still don't believe it, do you?"
"Believe what?" she asked.
"That Mom is alive again."
"Well, forgive me for having a bit of incredulity at the thought of our mother, who's been dead for more of our lives than she's been alive in it, suddenly just saunters back into our lives!" Jess pointed out.
"You saw the pictures," PJ said without being ruffled in the slightest. She had seen the pictures. There were dozens of them, maybe as many as a hundred. Some of them of fairly mundane things. Buildings, vehicles (in particular their plates), or furniture, or clothing draped over furniture. But those were outnumbered five-to-one by unspeakable, twisted beings with horrifying forms, not even attempting to appear human. She was not a superstitious person, not like her father was, but even she knew a demon when she saw one. Not that she'd admit it out loud. She did have her pride, after all.
And then there were the other humans. One who looked like a more slender Jessica, beautiful and rosy-cheeked with most disconcertingly bright red eyes. A sallow, grey woman with very long hair who wore an eyepatch and had a seemingly perpetual scowl on her face. An Asian thug-looking man who always looked low-key delighted. Three Middle Eastern people, who looked to have been family to each other. Those last four all had haloes with a notch taken out of them. A green-on-green-eyed older man with horns like a goat.
And of course, there were pictures of Rachel Scailes, all of them candid and taken obviously without her permission and by another's hand. She too had that gapped halo in those pictures, her expression usually blank as though deep in concentration and thought.
"Photoshop is a thing, PJ," she pointed out.
"And the videos?" PJ countered. There had been a few of those as well. A lot of them involved a bird-cat-demon thing with a grumbling and surly sounding voice, talking about some kind of radio demon and the threat he represented and talking about 'memory magic'. She didn't have the first clue as to what it meant. One of the videos was of demons falling from the sky and splatting in gore onto the ground. There were videos of that strange place, just showing more demons in strange and horrifying forms going around being monsters to each other. She had seemingly with only passing interest taped a horse-headed demon get into a fight with a tiny, black horned red pygmy demon, only to get swarmed by the pygmy's allies and be torn limb from limb.
And the cat-demon, constant companion to that version of Rachel Scailes, laughed and declared, "That's what he gets for being a dumb fuck. When he comes back, he won't be doin' that again."
"Videos can be doctored, too," she said.
"Jess, I get it," PJ said, abandoning the kitchen to plop down on the sofa across from her. "You don't want to accept that this is really happening because it unmoors your entire worldview that reality is simple, sane, and naturalistic. Trust me, it's not. And the sooner you can accept that, the better off you'll be."
"Says the man who was obsessed with magic to bring our mother back to life," Jess muttered.
"Bitch I can turn lead into gold," PJ pointed out.
"How?" she demanded.
"Turns out Alchemic Precursor is liquid at room temperature and ambient pressure, and once you have that it can just strip nearby molecules for fermions and hadrons," he shrugged. "It's not an actual Lapis Philosophorum; that shit's blatantly magical, but to get one of those you need things I just can't get for that."
"Those are just words to me," she said.
"I've literally got a nub of Thousand Year Ginseng in there. If you don't believe me, eat some of it and you'll de-age by ten to fifteen years," PJ cast a thumb over his shoulder toward the work room. Then he stopped. "Actually don't eat it all, I don't have a lot and that shit's hard to come by now that China's pretty much locked down."
"The fact that you're so serious about this is so goddamned weird," Jess said. She was used to her brothers being 'fuckup's. She knew that Sam drifted through life like a ghost, unable to set down roots and build a life for himself, and that PJ was little better. She knew she wasn't perfect by any stretch, but trying to compare how far she'd come to how her brothers turned out, it was obvious to her at least that there was something wrong with the 'Y' chromosome in this family. Only it turned out that she was trying to look at the whole without understanding the parts.
Her older brother was an alchemist. Someone who used science to do literal fucking magic.
And apparently her younger brother was some kind of angel thing, and made a mess of Hell.
While she tried to limit her pridefulness as much as she could, it was still a difficult thing stomach. That there was an entire other layer of life that she had been blithely ignorant of, that her brothers whom, despite how close to her heart they were, she nevertheless considered fuckups and failures, were interfacing with and making into strength that she would never understand.
"I've had to be. It's Mom. I'd wager all the gold I've got in the walls. Hell, I'd wager Ed's life on it," he said.
"Then why isn't she like how we remembered?" she asked.
"How much do you really remember about how she acted?" PJ asked. He gave a faint shrug. "I'll be the first to admit that she didn't treat the three of us the way she treated literally anybody else on Earth. She was a good Mom to us, but that didn't make her a good person to everybody else."
"Then why did Philip obsess over her for two and a half decades?" Jess asked.
"Because Philip was obsessive and Mom was way out of his league and he knew it," PJ said. It seemed nobody in this family really respected the man who sired them all. Considering how he treated them in the wake of their mother's death, no great surprise. It was hard to hold warm regard to a cruel, petty, and cold man. PJ puffed out a breath. "And to be frank, I'm not that different from him."
"So what…" she began, but there was a knocking at the door. PJ motioned for her to hold that thought, as he got up and checked the door. On the other side of it a man that she'd seen often in PJ's various pictures of his life, one of only middling height and dark hair, face host to a beard, his eyes very, very dark.
"Hey, Dean, what are you doing here?"
"Is it true?" this 'Dean' asked him, grabbing PJ by his upper arms.
PJ was silent for a moment. Then he nodded. "It is."
Dean broke into a grin and gave PJ an excited shake. "You got her back!"
"I didn't get her back. I'm fairly certain that whatever it was that brought her back was initiated in the afterlife, not here," he said, stepping back and inviting the other man into the room. PJ turned, and realized that his sister was still here. "Oh right. Jess, this is Dean Sharpe, my smuggler. Dean, my sister the bigwig."
"Oh damn. I didn't think that you'd grace us with your presence. If I had I would have worn a shirt with fewer stains on it," Dean said evenly, but with a merry twinkle in his eyes. His flannel was slightly discolored, true.
"Smuggler?" Jess asked.
"I use ingredients that need to be sourced from all over the planet. And it's not like I can just call Jean Ngolo anytime I want something," PJ pointed out.
"Yeah, Jean Baptiste has been busy as shit for the last few months. I think his uncle is finally dying," Dean said.
"No kidding," PJ said.
"Who is… any of that nonsense?" Jess asked.
"Don't mind her. She makes all of her money in the normie-world and doesn't want to admit to herself that we exist," PJ said.
"Ah, denial. My second favorite river in Egypt," Dean said.
"Second?" Jess asked.
"Yeah, Duat is better. It's water's worth caaaaash," Dean said.
"Am I the only person in the fucking world who still thinks that normal is normal?" Jess asked, slumping in her seat.
"Maybe?" Dean offered.
That was the worst part of all of this, in her opinion. While she still had her reservations as to the veracity of the woman calling herself Rachel Scailes, it faded in the face of the fact that her entire naturalistic framework for how the world worked was provably false. Magic was real. She had touched it.
Maybe that meant Heaven and Hell were real, too.
"You've got to meet her. She's… admittedly not like I remember her being, but considering what she'd been through, it doesn't surprise me," PJ said.
"Then by all means. Where are you keeping her?"
"Oh, she's… not eating eggs anymore. Simon? Where is she?" Simon chirped the answer and pointed, "So she's in the work-room, building a thing maybe," PJ said, turning and heading for his forbidden zone. He even looked less jaundiced today than he had days earlier, as though this Rachel's mere existence in the world of the living was undoing the harm that hard-living had done to him.
"You never let anybody in there," Dean said.
"First time for everything," PJ said, and the two entered into the room. "Mom! I want to introduce you to somebody."
The door shut, and Jess exhaled. Magic was real. Hell might be. And there was even a chance that Rachel was in fact Mom. But Jess wasn't going to accept that until it was as verifiable as the apparent existence of magic. Supernatural claims require supernatural evidence. So, for the foreseeable future, she was just going to have to start scrounging up some supernatural evidence.
"You will have to forgive my terse nature; I'd believed that noone would call on my for the rest of the night," Cain said, sitting in his comfortable easy-chair wearing only a bathrobe which was currently displaying his hairy chest. There were occasional noises coming from his bedroom, muffled though they were, that Rachel did her best to not hear. She knew the game Cain and Niffty played.
"And ordinarily, I would have let this wait until morning, but circumstances are what they are and I need somebody who understands magic better than either of us to explain this," Rachel said, with a mea-culpa nod.
"I suppose then that it's fortunate that one such as I dwells in this edifice. You would have been done poorly by having to go to Alastor," Cain said with a chuckle. He extended a hand, and Rachel placed her Hellphone into it. He raised his other hand, gently touching the bridge of his nose with his middle-finger, pressing his eyes shut. When he opened them again, they were not green-on-green, but instead a sort of runny black-on-black, with bruising beginning to well up on his eyelids and around the eyes themselves. Husk looked uncomfortable watching him do that, which probably meant this was not an easy or pleasant magic to use.
He then took a look at the phone with his new, oozing eyes. His head tilted immediately to one side slightly, as though surprised to see what he saw. "Well that's an oddity," Cain said.
"What is?" she asked.
"I'd thought I sensed an odd odor to this. Now, I can outright see it," Cain said. He looked up to her, some black ichor leaking out of his eye and running down his cheek like a strange, oily tear. "Tell me, Innocent of Heaven; are you able to go back to the world of the living?"
"I've not exactly tried," she said.
"Well, that is exactly where this has been," Cain said. "I can't localize it any more than that, but it has the particular aroma of being somewhere upon the Earth of my birth."
"That still doesn't make any sense. It just vanished outta her pocket," Husk said.
"A magical pocket which you and she built, to which only she, and by extension you, should have been able to access," Cain said.
"Well, yeah. Though she can 'parently reach into other people's pockets. How the fuck she manages that I dunno," Husk said.
"It's a function of the extremely low levels of innate magic she has," Cain said. "Her kind make for spectacular magic-thieves, in my experience."
"I thought more magic made you better, not less," Husk grumbled.
"There are benefits of many kinds at both extremes of the spectrum," Cain said with a nod. "So if only the two of you could access it, I wonder what that could mean…"
Rachel just stared at Cain, who was peacocking almost worthy of Alastor. "If you have an idea, by all means, say it. Don't jerk us around like the dickhead upstairs," she said.
"What I'm saying, Miss Scailes, is that the magic that I felt transpire in your room perhaps was not as failed as you claim," Cain said, and the black began to ooze out of his eyes, returning them to their green-on-green. The black ooze-tears dissolved away, anathema to the open air. "Have you looked at its contents?"
"It's got all of my files," she said.
"Are you certain about that?" Cain handed her Hellphone back to her. She frowned for a moment, then unlocked it. And her familiar screen was there. She quickly flipped to the second, which had the overflow of programs that she didn't use as often. But before she could do a single thing more, she was arrested by a new program in the bottom right.
Tetris.
Her entire time in Hell, she'd had to use a smuggled Gameboy to play her favorite game, because Hell's knock-offs had a bunch of gamey BS tacked onto them. Now it was on her phone. And when she checked its properties, it was apparently downloaded the day that it vanished from her pocket.
She then went to the camera folder.
And there she saw a picture of a deeply suspicious looking woman, tall and curvy like some ancient goddess of fertility, blonde and blue eyed. She saw a red-headed and unwell looking middle aged man. She saw a pair of teenaged boys. And then, a few dozen pictures in, she saw a picture that seemed to have been taken with extreme begrudgingness, a picture of a third figure.
Herself.
That was clearly Rachel Scailes, with her freckles and unusual facial structure, her cloud of utterly untamable red hair, and the cold look in her icy blue eyes. It could have been any picture that anybody down here in Hell had ever taken of her, but for one specific lack. She had no Gapped Halo.
"What the fuck?" she allowed herself a rare vulgarity, because in this moment it was absolutely warranted.
"Holy shit, Rach? Ain't those your kids?" Husk asked, leaning over her shoulder.
"Yes, yes they appear to be," Rachel said, feeling utterly flabbergasted. She glanced up at Cain, who was sitting quietly with a distant smile on his face as the bruising around his eyes receded under his Regeneration. "How is this possible?"
"Forgive me if this sounds like an aside, but believe me when I say it isn't," Cain said, with a calming gesture. "Do you know the nature of the human soul?"
"Yes. It's petty, base, and corruptible," Rachel said.
"Ah, so you know nothing, then," Cain said. She scowled at him. "The nature of the human soul is one of The Great Mysteries, along with such things as the nature of the Abyss, where God Came From, and until very recently who Yaldabaoth was."
"Yeah, that one got answered pretty definitively," Husk muttered, striking a match and lighting his next cigar.
"Exactly, barkeep mine," Cain said. "A few things are known about the Soul, though. Namely, how amazingly difficult it is to destroy."
"That's bullshit. Souls get wiped out all the time down here," Husk said, streaming out a blast of smoke as he did.
"Sinners get wiped out, because of what Damnation does to the Soul, and my, what extremes must be used to cause that damage to them," Cain coached. "Consider that the Steel of Angels could do the same to anything short of an Innocent. Even to an Angel. Even to an Archangel."
"So what does this have to do with the fact that I now have a doppelganger masquerading as me on Earth?" Rachel asked.
"Faulty presumption," Cain said, and she leaned back at that. "You see, that impish Wyrd that they performed? It is… harmful… to the soul that it brings back to the living. It is why many times there need to be 'corrections' done after the fact. But such harm to an Innocent's soul? Mayhaps it cleaved just the slightest piece of your soul off, the tiniest fragment of a fragment, and sent that to Earth?"
"Wouldn't she just keel over dead? Like that old Imp said?" Husk asked.
"Human souls are resilient things. The privations they endure in the living world are proof to that," Cain mused. "It seems likely that even that scrap of a scrap could regrow into an entire soul, and in not too long a time."
"So you're saying that… whatever's up there in the living world is not a doppelganger," Rachel began. And Cain nodded.
"It is an instance of Rachel Scailes, every bit as human, as vital, and as valid, as you are," Cain said.
"That's gotta be against some kinda rule," Husk muttered. "I know for a fact that God wouldn't want that shit happening."
"What God wants now is irrelevant," Cain gave a mocking laugh.
"Then why hasn't it happened before?" she asked.
"How many times has an Innocent been in Hell long enough to leave a corpse?" Cain prodded. He gave a shrug at their silence. "I suppose there may be more factors in play than we know. For all I know, this hitherto unprecedented event is not simply because you are Innocent, but because you are a former Bearer of Gifts. Which means that if this were to be done on fair Rozarin, perhaps the same result would occur for her, Judged Innocent or not."
"So we know nothing, other than that there's apparently another me running around," Rachel noted.
"You do have one advantage over your other self," Cain noted, sitting back as a thin, frustrated, and muffled scream came from his bedroom. He smiled for a moment at its content, then turned his attention back to the two of them. "You, unlike your currently living self, are aware of the dual existence you now have. She likely is, as yet, blissfully unaware that you are still down here in our ranks."
Rachel gave that a moment's thought. "If that's the case… she's going to try to contact you."
"Me?" Husk asked, confused as to how he factored into this.
"Yes, I and by extension she is rather fond of you. And the thought of leaving you behind is something neither of me would countenance," she said.
"Well… we ain't heard from her yet," Husk said. Rachel, though, checked some of the other messages she'd gotten. Namely that she now had dozens of misconnected calls and owed about 32,000 Souls in roaming-fees for this Hellphone. She hadn't expected that she would be returning to Earth, so the SinLink was only the most basic version, and subject to brutal nickle-and-diming.
"That's because she didn't have the infrastructure," Rachel said. She pointed out the outgoing calls, of which there were a dozen, all of them Husk's number. None of them connected, because SinLink Copper was a poverty-trap like that. "I'm guessing if I were to upgrade my SinLink, and this thing gets… oh of course now I grasp it," she said, as the penny finally dropped. "My magical pocket is collocated on both of me."
"Well ho-lee-shit," Husk muttered. "You're a livin' smuggling corridor."
"Indeed so," Cain said with a nod as he poured himself another cup of orange juice and drank deeply of it.
"Husk, are you up for taking me on some very impromptu late-night shopping?" she asked.
"Depends what for," he noted.
"I need to get my original phone, and I need to upgrade my SinLink on both of them," she said.
"You're gonna give her a phone?" he asked.
"Yes. I want to talk to this other me so that we can get a few things straight," Rachel said.
"I recommend against trying to impose the 'fact' that you are real and she is not," Cain said, swishing the cup of orange fluid around. "Because in a way she is more real now than you."
"I refuse to believe that my existence is merely a failed coin-flip," Rachel said.
"That is the problem with continuity of perception," Cain said wistfully. "Had you not gotten this phone back, had you not learned of her… would that coin-flip still be failed?"
"Speak plainly," she demanded of the First of the Damned.
"You and she are currently both Rachel Scailes, as you are very close to the instant by which you parted," Cain said, holding up identical and mirrored fingers. He started to draw them apart. "But the longer the both of you continue to exist, the more difference there will be between you. There will come a day when, despite both of you coming from exactly the same place, with the same memories, you will no longer be the same person in near any way. Accept that, and you can still call the coin as it falls through the air; there is more than one way to win a coin flip."
Rachel nodded. While his philosophy was dense, she could see the point of it. "Fine. As you say, I'll have to figure out which Rachel Scailes I'm going to be. Now I think I've used up enough of your time. I'll leave you to your… business… with Niffty."
"Oh, that is the farthest thing from 'business', dear Miss Scailes," Cain couldn't help but laugh, as he got to his feet. "And if nothing else, the enigmas you bring me never cease to delight my mind. Good luck contacting your other self."
She gave him a nod, and left his suite as he, chuckling under his breath, made for his bedroom where Niffty had been subjected to some… things that Rachel couldn't see the appeal of.
"That guy's such a fuckin' weirdo," Husk muttered, puffing out a breath of cigar smoke as he did.
"We're all weirdos, Husk. Or the best of us are, at least," she said.
"You're jealous as hell of her, ain't ya?" Husk asked, following her down the single flight of stairs to the lobby area.
"She's alive again."
"And fool she is, she's probably jealous a' you, 'cause you've still got me hovering around like a bad fart," Husk noted.
"Both of me are a very sentimental person, as it turns out," Rachel said. Charlie was in the lobby, looking almost done not just with the day, but with life in general. When she saw the two of them on their way out, she moved to intercept.
"Rachel, what happened to Vigo?"
"I caught him trying to crack your safe and make off with your petty-cash. I had the soldiers throw him outside the barricade," Rachel said.
"You can't do that to my patients!" Charlie pointed out, her ire clearly rising.
"He wasn't a patient, Charlie. He was a leech, who was quite literally breaking both the law and your trust. I don't have time to argue this right now."
"We have all night," Charlie's expression was a little manic, her eyes a little bloodshot, as she placed a hand on Rachel's shoulder.
"No we don't," Husk said, gently pulling her hand off. "But tomorrow's a whole fuckin' new day, now ain't it?"
"You're just going to…" Charlie's eye twitched, as an almost volcanic wrath boiled under her surface, before physically shuddered, took in a deep, deeeep breath, and puffed it out. "This conversation isn't over, Rachel. And I am going to go find Vigo."
"You're welcome to. I'll still recommend to all of the other service providers here to not serve him until he makes personal amends to you," Rachel said. And then she moved to exit the hotel. Husk, though, lingered behind, watching after. Charlie looked truly in a snit.
"She is so frustrating some times," Charlie said.
"That she is," Husk admitted, rolling his cigar in his teeth. "Tell me something… D'you actually mean what you say 'bout protectin' them's under your wing?"
"Of course," she sounded outright insulted at that.
"And if I was to ask for it?" Husk asked, his tone perfectly flat.
"What did you do now, Husk?" Charlie sounded deeply disappointed.
"Not from what. From who," Husk said. Charlie just stared at him, confusion on her face. "That's what I figured."
And then Husk followed after Rachel into the night of Hell.
Albany was a bust in exactly the ways that Birah had feared it would be.
He shouldn't have expected that the humans would know the answers to all of his questions, because they weren't Eistibus, and he wasn't a moron. But the fact that their possession over the Shards of Ruin that they had jealously stockpiled was becoming lax, and even porous, told Birah that as in Heaven, so on Earth. In the wake of the Prophecy's destruction, things were becoming unwound.
Infiltrating the Priory had been child's play; even though as an angel, he could have perhaps 'gone loud', announced who he was and what he was, and been let in, he knew that doing so would lead to them hiding things, and with all the sneaking around he'd been doing of late, there was little the humans could meaningfully do to get in his way.
The Priory was under a pall of apprehension, he sensed. The Catholic Church, so much reduced in power and influence compared to what it had been only half a millennia before, nevertheless claimed moral authority to hold those innately magical things which even a fool could tell were not Of The Earth. But the moral authority they used in service of clinging to devices they barely understood frayed and gave way when the more magically potent of their number (not that any of the priests would admit magic was real, for that, apparently, belonged entirely to God. Birah knew that wasn't correct by an eighth, let alone a half.) could feel that reality was changing shape around them. To them, it must have been like watching the tide recede fatally distant as the Tsunami races toward the shore.
Freedom from what?
The question knocked around in Birah's head, even now, as he sat in the dark, illuminated only by his own halo, reading biblically denounced Apocrypha, trying to get some clue as to what Azazel had meant by that particular turn of phrasing.
The humans had built an entire faith around subsuming their wills to God's directive. They gave up freedom on the promise of Grace. But that didn't answer Birah's question. What was so monumentally important that a Grigori was willing to suffer even greater punishment than the murder of their children, in service of a man pursuing 'freedom'?
Birah sat in the dark, letting the book flop onto the desktop. The humans had no answers here. Not in the place where their faith was strongest and their doubts fewest. A blind man would claim that the beating heart of the Faith Of Joshua was based in Rome. The truth was that the Joshuite faith had several hearts, and one of them beat here, quietly, in Albany, New York. A place where the more public, louder heart could put things that it didn't want to think about, but didn't dare destroy. Like old Apocrypha, or magical items that they had no facility to break.
Terrifying freedom. Well, the Angels already had that in spades. Now that the Prophecy was gone, there were no more knowns about the future. Only guesses, of varying degrees of accuracy. Some, like those of Eistibus, would be better, but most would be worse. So why was the Demiurge pursuing 'terrifying freedom'? And again, it rounded back to the question which now drove Birah to distraction. Freedom from what?
"If it were any but Azazel, I could have just said it was an inexact turn of phrase. If it were any but Azazel," Birah muttered into the dark. It was obvious that Azazel wanted him to know, but dared not to say. Birah wasn't a fool. In being dragged into the conspiracy over the Nephilim of Hell, he'd secured a sort of confidentiality which neither Angel would dare to breach. There was something that the Demiurge was pursuing that frightened Azazel, but at the same time, he wanted it desperately.
The only thing that Birah could think of, off hand, which would elicit that pairing of desires in Azazel of all people was a chance to hold his daughter in his arms again. An impossibility.
"So where does Raguel fit into this?" he asked, his eyes skating along words in Aramaic which his mind instantly translated, but didn't really rip into. He'd scanned a million words this hour alone. Maybe they were starting to dull his senses, but he couldn't exactly stop. Raguel was the wrinkle which turned the entire thing from an enigma to a Goddamned Problem. Even with all Birah knew of Azazel, if there was some outside and offset chance that this was about some impossible promise to have Tauthe returned to him, that would do exactly nothing to endear The Godfriend to the Demiurge.
There was something missing. Parts of this puzzle not revealed to him and leaving the whole of it gaping and incomplete and tenuous.
So Birah focused on that. He sat forward, his elbows on the desk, and focused on the shape of the puzzle before him. What could bind together The Taxiarch, the Godfriend, the Grigori of Arms, and the Demiurge, in a covenant of silence?
But then he had the thought… maybe he was overreaching. Maybe he was making the critical mistake of critical thinking with regards to people's actions, and was stacking intention atop of assumption. He assumed that Michael was in lock-step with Raguel in all matters regarding this conspiracy… but what if he wasn't? What if there were parts of this that The Godfriend were keeping the Taxiarch in the dark about?
After all, Michael and Raguel were far from unified, these days. They avoided each other; though they didn't show acrimony, it was obvious some falling out had transpired. So perhaps Michael was only in on part. On the part of knowing about Charlie.
Michael did fight the Demiurge with all he had. He only stopped because his health failed him.
Alright, he decided. Remove Michael from the conspiracy in question. What do…
"Grandson," Birah muttered, the memory returning, along with the rare glimpse at the burned and broken face which lay behind Raguel's mask. The Demiurge was in some spiritual sense a 'Grandson' of Raguel's. He hadn't elaborated on that, but Birah wasn't stupid. He knew that the other angels were still following Penemue's Recipe, in hope of creating more Thirdborn. The fact he didn't say 'son' was perhaps a face-saving gesture.
No wonder the Demiurge had so many features in kind with the Archangel; he was the Thirdborn equivalent of one. And the Thirdborn were notorious for their utter unwillingness to adhere to orthodoxy with regards to how they interacted with the layers of Heaven.
So the Demiurge, a Thirdborn of monumental power, who had promised to kill God. Mere filial connection wouldn't stay Raguel's hand. And it hadn't stayed Raguel's hand when he faced Samael on Cloud One. Confound it all! Why were there so many misleading facets to this?
Because this was a real thing which was happening, and reality had no impetus to make any kind of coherent sense.
But then Birah saw something, a single phrase on the bottom of the page. It was part of a post-scriptum in Greek. 'The maker's ways are strange and subtle'.
And in Greek, 'the maker' was written Demiurgos.
Those ways were subtle indeed. And he flipped the page to look at it again. Another apochryphal story, this one alike to Job, but even more mean-spirited. A story of God unleashing pestilence and woe onto a family who displayed all righteousness, but refused devotion. The story ended with the last member of the clan stubbornly continuing their good works, but refusing to offer so much as a glance to the Heavens as he slowly died. And that he was damned for that 'show of defiance'.
It was no surprise that this tale hadn't made it into the humans' holy-book. The whole affair was a grisly one, one that left a sour taste in Birah's mouth, even forty centuries later.
Demiurgos.
Birah blinked.
What were the ways of the Demiurge? That he knew because it had been taught. The Demiurge was the maker of all of the physical world, a god of the physical things, a being without spirit and tethered of soul. A petty, clinging, and jealous thing, demanding subservience above all other virtues.
Why would the Demiurge be pursuing 'Freedom' in any shape, let alone its most terrifying incarnation?
The thought raised two possible solutions.
One: He was intentionally misled as to the nature of the Demiurge. That it was not an enslaving force, and thus would be capable of pursuing a goal of radical freedom.
Two:
Two had Birah swallowing, his mind outright rejecting the thought at first, but he was not a meek fool; so he forced it to the fore again.
Two: He was intentionally misled as to who the Demiurge was.
He sat up in his chair, and felt a sinking sensation in his stomach, as though he'd eaten something that was struggling to revisit his mouth. No. No, that couldn't be. Could it?
Must it?
What if they were calling the wrong person 'The Demiurge'?
What if Yaldabaoth and the Demiurge weren't the same person, but got lumped together in the common consciousness?
What if Samael wasn't the Demiurge?
He stood up, and dared himself to think the last question.
"What if the Poison of God is here to kill the Demiurge?" he asked in the darkness.
It was a terrifying thought, but deeply in line with somebody who was seeking terrifying freedom. And it didn't need to be true, even; it just had to be something that Samael genuinely believed. As someone who'd fought him, it was clear that, to Samael, his quest was right, and good, and necessary. Whether they were in truth was beside the point. Samael would pursue his agenda, the murder of God, believing himself justified in doing so.
Despite the fact that killing God would destroy reality.
"Being smart about a suicide mission," were Birah's next words. Again, having to depend on assumptions was a tenuous and dangerous prospect, but it was all Birah had right now. Granted that Samael believed his own rhetoric, granted that Samael was The Equal And Opposite, the Yaldabaoth, the Child of Chaos, granted that he truly seemed to care about the continued existence of Creation even over the speedy resolution of his quest… What did that make his next move?
"He's going to unchain Creation from God," Birah said. It was a perfectly stupid and senseless sentence that had just come out of his mouth, something so bereft of real meaning that it could have come from an illiterate human and sounded exactly as foolish. And that was exactly why Samael was going to do it. Because to the Spellbinder, it was as impossible in his eyes to unchain Creation from its Maker as it was to ignite a green star in the Universe or to find virtue in the soul of Lucifer. But to The Equal And Opposite?
He flexed his wings, and there was a fluttering noise, the room dropping back into utter darkness. There was only one place left he could check. And there was little subtlety in it. With the shuffling of flapping wings, Birah was gone from Albany as though he'd never been there at all.
Philip Scailes Senior had finally died.
And exactly as Rachel had predicted on the day she married him, she didn't feel anything about that whatsoever.
She hadn't visited him in his hospital room, because that would have raised impossible-to-answer questions. But by the same token, neither of his surviving children had visited him either. It would have been pitiful if she hadn't easily seen it coming. Philip was not a smart man, and didn't cope well with losing something he cared about. And now he was a corpse, likely on his way to Hell right now.
It felt a bit unfair, still, that a paltry and mediocre man would face damnation by default. Well, there was nothing to do about it. If he were fortunate, Philip would be able to reach Charlie, and she'd at least put a roof over his now-dead head. That thought drove a spike of annoyance into her, though; thoughts of her great endeavor, which now she was fairly definitively divorced from before she could see it to its end.
That seemed to be the way of things when she was involved. That she was always starting grand projects that she was forced to abandon when life (or death) swerved her away. It was frustrating. When would she ever be allowed to finish something? God only knows if Charlie would be able to keep that Hotel project going without her to provide her with good ideas.
And the absence of Husk stung rather badly, too.
Not enough that she wanted to kill herself to rejoin him, but still it stung.
"So… what are we going to do about his will?" Jessica asked her.
"With regards to what?" Rachel asked.
"He wasn't exactly rich, but he still had things which were… sentimental, to all of us. I mean, you stole a lot of them on your way out the door, but there's probably more that he's got tucked into storage somewhere," Jess said.
"Whatever he's divested will be in his will no matter what we want. I don't see any point in being worked up about it," Rachel said, stretching out on the couch. Her feet didn't even reach the far arm of the sectional, and this thing was not very large.
"But knowing how petty he is, he's probably got provisos to prevent 'ingrates' from getting anything," Jess muttered.
"Man, you really don't like Grandpa, do you?" Simon asked.
"You'd be hard pressed to find anybody alive who had a good opinion of him, with the way he acted the last two and a half decades," Jess pointed out, pulling her boy close and giving him a kiss on the top of his head. He squirmed a bit, uncomfortable at his age to be subjected to such displays of affection.
"Just be thankful that you've got one of your grandparents around," Edgar said.
"She looks younger than Mom!" Simon pointed out.
"Looks can be deceiving," Rachel said. "You're right, though. I wouldn't put it past Philip to be petty. So who wants to draw straws to show up at his memorial?"
"Wow, that's dark! I like it!" Simon declared.
"If I go, can I insult him?" Edgar asked.
"No, you don't speak ill of the dead," Jess said, seemingly on instinct.
"Then he shouldn't have been such a shitter when he was alive," Edgar rounded. Rachel liked Edgar. Simon was a good boy, good natured and kind. Edgar, though, took more after his father, and was sarcastic, crude, and had backbone for years. While Simon, in Rachel's opinion, was en route to living a happy life, Edgar was gearing up to live a glorious one.
"Don't talk about… actually no, I'm not even going to defend against that. Dad was a Shitter alright," Jess said.
"Why exactly did you marry him, then?" Simon asked his grandmother.
"Low hanging fruit is still fruit," Rachel said with a shrug, then finally got her feet. "I'm gathering that Edgar is all-in on crashing his memorial."
"To be a shit-disturber," Jess said.
"So I say we let him. And if Philip has any pettiness-clauses, let's see him try to litigate his way around being mocked to his casket-side," she said.
"I presume you're not going," she said. Jessica now was able to look at Rachel without her eyes narrowing into a suspicious squint, but it was clear that it would be the work of years, if not another decade, to get the prideful woman to admit, aloud, that Rachel was in fact her mother resurrected.
"Of course not. The only thing weirder than his dead ex-wife showing up at his bedside would be his dead ex-wife showing up at his graveside," she said. "Besides, I've got business I need to deal with."
That business being forming Blood Engines out of Junior's excess gold (yes, that was a concept she was coming to terms with), for sale on the mystical black-market. Junior's specializations seemed to fixate on the topics of alchemic theory, such that his friend Dean was the actual business-partner in this, more blatantly magical endeavor. Dean, at least, could grasp what fundamentals she was laying down. And he didn't carve the lines into the gold in the wrong order, which would have invalidated the whole construction.
She plucked her phone out of her magical pocket (why didn't people ever give women pockets? It was like there was a conspiracy about them) and started to dial Dean's number, because life on Earth was a capitalist hell-scape and she was only worth as much as her last paycheck. But before she even had a chance to, the phone immediately started to buzz, and spoke.
"Mother fuck why are you," said the phone.
In Husk's voice. Which was his ringtone when he was calling her. That caught her attention and stilled her hand. The caller ID simply said 'husk', all lower-case. There was no picture attached to the call, as per his wishes. And she for an instant stared at it in disbelief. This wasn't Sam's old phone. It was the one she got upon landing in Hell. Then it buzzed and shouted at her again, and she answered it.
"What took you so long to call me?" she demanded, ignoring for the moment what could not be explained.
"Alright, who the fuck is this?" Husk's voice came through the other end.
"The number you called. Obviously," Rachel said. There was a pause. "Husk, you need to listen to me. Whatever those imps were doing, it worked. I'm up here now. So you can calm down, I didn't disappear or get snatched. And frankly even if I did get snatched, the ticket home was one snapped-neck away."
"Fuckin… I think you gotta see this," Husk said, but his voice was somewhat muted, as though he weren't talking into the phone itself.
"Husk, what's going on down there?" she asked. Jessica was leaning away, a look of utter suspicion on her face.
"Wait a minute, are you talking to those demon guys?" Edgar asked, trying to peer into the thin gap between Rachel's phone and her ear.
"Yes, now hush," Rachel said.
"Uhhhh, Rach? You're probably gonna want to turn on yer camera," Husk said.
Rachel pulled a face, but did as Husk requested. She turned on the camera, and held the phone at arm's length. Instantly her feedback screen showed Edgar and Simon both rubbernecking around her. A moment later, the other camera turned on.
The scene was the lobby of the Happy Hotel, near the back where the grand staircase up to the second floor suites resided. Husk was there, still visibly an androsphinx, his wings tucked close at his back and his face having a deeply uncomfortable look on it.
"Wait… is that you?" Edgar asked.
As another goddamned Rachel Scailes leaned into frame, still having the gapped halo over her head, and looked into the screen.
"You've got to be kidding me," the other Rachel said.
"What is this?" Rachel asked.
"This is fuckin' nuts," Husk answered.
"Husk, children are present," the other Rachel managed to beat Rachel to saying that by a split second.
"Who are you?" Rachel asked.
"I'm the real you. You're just…" the still-dead Rachel pointed out. Then, leaning into frame opposite her came Cain.
"Neither of you is the real one, and both are. So please, dispense with the uninteresting part of the conversation where you accuse each other of duplicity," Cain prompted.
"Startin' to sound like the Scarlet Fucker, there, Cain," Husk groused.
"Husk, language," Rachel said.
"Christ almighty, now I'm gettin' it from two a ya's!" Husk barked.
"How?" Rachel asked.
"A hitherto unforeseen magical interaction," Cain answered. "I shall have to consult with the assassin-imp; he is a wellspring of useful thaumaturgical knowledge."
"So why are there two of me?" the other Rachel asked.
"Nobody's ever tried raising the likes of you from the dead," Cain said.
"Grandma, is that what Hell really looks like?" Simon asked.
Edgar, though, was scrutinizing Husk. "Why does that guy look like Other Grandpa?"
"That's between you and your mother," Rachel said. Edgar's home life was… complicated, considering he was being raised communally by five people amidst seven other children.
"This answers some questions," the other Rachel said, "and it raises a lot of other ones."
"Where yer phone went to, for one thing," Husk said.
"I'm sorry, I'm just having a hard time taking this in," Rachel admitted. She then turned to her grandchildren. "Right. Other me? These are two of your grandchildren. You've got four others, ranging between the ages of 18 years and 18 months."
"Hrm. Are any of them Sam's?" the other her asked.
"No, he died childless," Jess said.
"Who is that?" other Rachel asked. Rachel turned her phone, and when Jess saw what was on the screen of the Hellphone, she recoiled as though somebody tazed her. "Jessica? Is that you? Wow. I was worried you'd be short forever," other Rachel said.
"I shot up," Jess said. "What is happening?"
"I'm currently in Junior's apartment. Did you know he's an alchemist?"
"A what?" other Rachel asked, but Husk let out a low whistle. Both of Rachel turned to him. "Explain."
"Not many 'a them these days. People go for other, easier paths to usin' magic for shit," Husk said. Then he shrugged. "But like Imp magic, there's some shit that comes reeeeal easy to an Alchemist that other people have to be the best of the best to even scratch at. How good is he? Hold on one fuckin' minute, is that a Blood Engine?"
"Do you think returning to life stripped me of everything you taught me? Be serious, Husk," Rachel said flatly, showing the faintly glowing golden bauble.
"So he's got the whatever-into-gold thing? Yeah, he'll be fine when he gets here," Husk said, and lit a cigar. The other Rachel swatted him in the shoulder for saying that about her son, exactly as Rachel wished she could.
"He's not coming to Hell at all, if I have anything to say about it," other Rachel stated.
Jess had backed up to the easy-chair, and dropped into it, looking pale and aghast.
"Well, if you got a way to take over Judgement, you're free to fuckin' do it," Husk said.
"Husk, language," Rachel reminded him. Edgar still giggled a bit every time Husk broke out one of the worse words. Simon just watched the whole affair with shocked fascination.
"G'et-dammit," Husk muttered. "It was bad enough when there was one of ya's."
"So," Rachel said. This, while perfectly unexpected, and thoroughly undemanded, was if nothing else a means of putting her at ease. If the other Rachel was indeed another Rachel (which was essentially tautologically true), then she had nothing to fear about the Hotel Project falling into disarray and ruin due to the lack of her involvement. She could progress, knowing that there was a Rachel to see things through. "Where does that leave me, in the grand calculus of the universe?"
The other Rachel was silent for a moment, no doubt coming to the same conclusions that Rachel did, but from the other direction. She still looked at Rachel with just a sting of envy in those cold, almost robotic eyes. That some part of her wanted to be where Rachel was. Well, that was fair; Rachel in some small part of her wanted to be where Other Rachel was, with a defined task, and a man she was inordinately fond of. Up here, all she had was a beating heart, a lot of freedom, and a whole lot of nothing to do.
"You get to do what I couldn't. Which in this case is 'whatever you want to'," other Rachel said. She then pointed at the phone that Husk was still holding, even though he'd clearly checked out of the conversation. "And I want to get some quality time with both my kids, and all…seriously? I have six grandkids?"
"Simon and Edgar," Rachel introduced the ones who were still huddled around her.
"No, I'm saying that I've done the math. I would barely be sixty right now," other Rachel said.
"So? We had two of ours before we were even out of our teens." Rachel countered.
Edgar turned to her. "You never get to lecture me on teen-pregnancy!" he declared, in a realization of victory.
"I was married to your grandfather when I did," Rachel pointed out.
"You don't get to lecture us on child marriage, either," Simon added in. Oh, for all his good nature, he had some sass to him. That had to come from his mother. Cain, seeming to be content with the degree and particulars of the madness that was on Rachel's side of the phone, gave a smile and a nod, and departed from view, leaving only Husk and other Rachel.
"Yes, I can believe he's descended from me," other Rachel said.
"He's usually much more polite than this," Rachel turned a very clear Mom Look at the boy, who did withdraw under its might.
"Well, teach him not to be," other Rachel said. "History seldom remembers the polite."
"And it seldom punishes them either," Rachel said.
Other Rachel narrowed her eyes. "That's a bit conservative, coming from my own mouth. Are you sure the imps didn't leave a bit of your backbone down here in Hell?"
"I have no idea what happened in Hell, you tell me," Rachel said.
"This is fuckin' nuts," Husk tweezed the bridge of his nose as he furiously smoked.
"Language, Husk," both of Rachel reminded him.
"Please, I know way worse words than that," Edgar promised.
Other Rachel chuckled at that. "I don't remember any of my children being hellions like this."
"Except for Jess," Rachel said.
"Riiight. The Hair," other Rachel said, nodding with a distant, and oddly warm smile on her face. Jess, who realized she was going to be dragged into this conversation whether she wanted to be or not, had a look of confusion for a moment, then dawning dread as the memory percolated up from her deep subconscious. Really, the hairstyle was a mere capstone on the ridiculous phase she'd gone through. But it certainly was memorable.
"Well, since I've sprung for a Hellphone package ordinarily only used by Succubuses…" other Rachel began.
"Succubi for women, concubi otherwise," Husk muttered.
"I think I need to be brought up to speed about what's been happening in the mortal world. Not just since my death, because obviously a lot happened to have a daughter dressed in that kind of clothing…" other Rachel said.
"What's wrong with my dress?" Jess asked.
"...and the fact that I've got a half dozen new descendants to commit to memory. But also from the fact that I apparently have a magical, living clone up there. Where did you even go? Did you have to crawl out of our grave?"
"No, I was luckier than that," Rachel said. "I just fell off of Philip's mantle, and cut my back up on the vase he had me in while doing it."
"He didn't even bury me," other Rachel slowly shook her head.
"Dad is a s… was a sentimental man," Jess said.
"And as for the rest, there's little to say, other than Fredericton doesn't know how to stay in its lane, and apparently Halifax has become a sty."
"Yeah. Don't go there unless you're looking to buy drugs or get stabbed," Jess said around an uncomfortable laugh.
"You're still going there, though," other Rachel said. And Rachel nodded, instantly understanding her thought process. Halifax was where Sam was buried. While Philip would be dropped into the dirt without ceremony or grief, as a mother, she owed it to Sam to visit the last place he rested before becoming Heaven's Problem. "Good to see I don't need to explain myself."
"We're the same person. For the moment," Rachel said. She knew about the Ship of Theseus. She knew that time would only separate the two of them. But for now, they were one person in two places, like a Geminon Consumer Demon. Might as well use it to its best effect while the effect was still active.
"Well, now that that's settled, hand the phone over to my grandkids," other Rachel demanded. And Rachel relented to do exactly that.
Maybe there was something new under the sun, and Shakespeare was only mostly correct?
Whatever the case, she felt light in this moment. The freedom to do what she willed, without the nagging regret that her works would fall into ruin in her absence (because there was no absence).
Rachel, nee Rachel Scailes, was free.
And just like that, she resolved to learn what her old surname used to be. As much as she enjoyed the connection to her children, now that Phil was dead, it felt like time to actually discover something about herself for a change. She was back alive, was technically less than 35 years old, and had the entire internet to find out what the Church had tried to erase from her history.
It wasn't like she would just lounge around doing nothing.
Even with all the freedom in the world, Rachel had to be doing something.
"Quite the specimen, isn't she? Our Redeemer General? I can honestly say that nobody expected things out of her. Frankly, for her first year in Hell, most people didn't even know she existed. And I only learned about it long after my own personal rise to power. A woman of singular will and tenacity, who would throw herself against insurmountable barriers and batter them with her own brow until they came crumbling down. A lot of my contemporaries thought her a fool for aligning with the works of the Redeemer Princess, just another agent of mediocrity peddling the snake-oil of false-hope to the Damned and destitute. But her track record quickly made it clear that she was no rank amateur at the delicate art of Redemption.
Even you, miss Killjoy, could possibly come out a lighter and better person if you had the wherewithal to actually follow through with the things that Rachel Scailes would ask of you. They're not even onerous things. But that's the great fulcrum of Hell in the Fifth Dynasty; while it is certainly possible for just about anybody to shed their sins and become Redemptor – even those not Damned! – it requires a certain wellspring of personal willpower, and a desire to actually change.
The overwhelming majority of people even now aren't able to go through with the Redeemer General's plan, because they aren't capable of it. And of those capable, a surprising number will not be Redeemed because frankly, they do not wish to be. I can think of one whom Hell is happy to be without who was that way. I don't care what happened to him or where he's gone. That he's not here makes Hell better by default.
And for the rest, well, of those capable, and those willing, there's another subset, who are just too insane.
Hell doesn't exactly pander to positive mental health. And though the woman who, as you've rightly pointed out, is technically my grandmother certainly did what she could to right that ship, Hell still has a lot of rebuilding to do. The Second Heresiarchy was bad for Hell and Earth alike. We've got a lot of graves to dig before we can start putting down foundations and building up again. Fucking Archangels, Killjoy. Is there any more wretched a being than they?"
-Arthur Mayberry, Disdain Incarnate and President of Heck