Warlock Infernal
Author: Christine Morgan
Date: 2022-10-01 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: 6 6 6 Six minutes into the unholy consummation, someone finally thought to cut the live feed … but the momentous events were only just getting underway! As the Hell-Centurion Favius claims his kingdom and queen, as the Wall rises and the Dome descends, the survivors trapped inside will face some critical decisions. Six hours ago, Gregory Nachtwald was holding hands with an angel … and how can anybody go back to any sort of normal life after that? Especially as a newly-awakened warlock with a dark and mysterious family legacy, possessing powers he hardly understands? Six days later, they went f
Publisher: Madness Heart Press

Mdness Heart Press

2006 Idlewilde Run Dr.

Austin, Texas 78744

Copyright © 2022 Christine Morgan

Interior Layout by Lori Michelle
www.TheAuthorsAlley.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

For more information, address:

john@madnessheart.press
www.madnessheart.press

This book is for Edward Lee, again and as always, with my eternal and infernal gratitude.

And for my KillerCon / extreme horror family; love you sickos so, so much.

PART ONE:

Minutes

Six minutes into the unholy consummation, someone finally thought to cut the live feed.

A little late, perhaps, given everything else that had already been broadcast, raw and uncensored, to a nation—nay, a world!—of stunned, aghast viewers.

They had seen, without benefit of blurring or pixelation, a veritable bloodbath of carnage and atrocities: decapitations, murders, disembowelments, mutilations. They’d seen faces peeled from screaming, red-fleshed skulls. They’d seen bodies crushed until liquefied organs squirted out mouths as if from fist-clenched tubes of toothpaste.

They’d seen monstrosities fall upon panic-stricken soldiers in a frenzy, some of those soldiers turning against their own to mow them down with rattling bursts of machine-gun fire. They’d seen a well-known general have his head wrenched from a glistening stub of neck bones and impaled atop a sharp spike. They’d seen limbs twisted off, intestines unraveled, showers of crimson gore.

And no one had thought to cut the live feed. Nor had those with cameras thought to stop filming, as if believing themselves, by virtue of their press credentials, immune from harm. Reporters kept up their commentary, albeit losing a bit of their professional detachment; their blurted “oh fuck!”s and “holy shit”s went unbleeped.

It was BREAKING NEWS, it was trending, it was viral, it went global, it pre-empted everything on every channel and station, it flooded social media. The whole modern civilized planet stood still, thunderstruck, frozen with horror and grisly fascination, riveted in stunned shock.

They’d seen berserker rages and violent rapes. They’d seen people dying in shrieking agony and graphic detail. Dying and worse. Being savaged, being eaten, being toyed with, being tortured. With accompanying sound effects so visceral and wet as to be all but indescribable.

Still, no one had thought to cut the live feed.

They’d seen an old woman hung naked by the wrists from a gantry and gynecologically eviscerated with a marshmallow fork! By her own daughter, no less! Out from between her pasty, cellulite-wrinkled thighs had come the whole works—skewered uterus, fallopian tubes like overcooked strands of pasta dragging the prunes of used-up ovaries with them, shish-kebabbed cervix, inverted vaginal canal—to swing in a pendulous purple-red mess halfway past her knees. The cameras had caught every moment of it in high-def so clear each wiry gray crinkle of the woman’s pubic hair could have been counted.

But no one had thought to cut the live feed then either.

They’d seen the old woman’s daughter viciously stab the bloodied implement up through the underside of her mother’s chin, piercing tongue and palate and sinuses and furiously glaring eyes.

Matricide of the most vicious and personal sort. Right there on every television screen, every computer monitor, every fancy phone. Without so much as a “this video may contain graphic or violent content and subject matter” warning or parental advisory.

Then the matricidal daughter, dropping the marshmallow fork, had turned to the man—being, entity, demon, whatever—who’d orchestrated this nightmarish slaughter on the shore of what had once been an innocuous Florida lake. The man—being, entity, demon, whatever—in Hell-forged Roman-style armor with a mosaic of tormented, animate faces stitched into his skin.

Turned to him with a look of wild insanity and offered herself to him as his queen.

To which offer he’d responded by sweeping her into a brutal embrace, stripping the ragged remnants of her clothes from her thin and unshapely body, splaying her atop a platform to serve as both sacrificial altar and marriage bed, and fucking the everloving daylights out of her.

To which she had responded with . . . suffice to say, the term “enthusiastic consent” fell rather short. Clutching his shoulders, clawing his back, bucking her hips, tossing her head, wracked by a series of shattering orgasms, howling like a banshee in the throes of absolute carnal lust . . .

That was when someone finally thought to cut the live feed. Violence was one thing. But this, this was sex!

***

Meanwhile, in certain secret military installations, political offices, and covert bunkers, the outraged uproar had nothing to do with either sex or violence, but betrayal!

The treacherous bastard! Oh! The sheer audacity! To do this! After all they’d done for him, how well they’d treated him! They’d been on the same side! They were working together! Had a plan! Shared a goal! Made an arrangement, an agreement!

Or, at the very least, he was working for them! He was meant to be their dupe, their tool, their fool, not the other way around!

Who ever would have guessed that a demonic being from actual literal Hell might not be among the most trustworthy of allies? Might, in fact, have been operating on his own agenda and instead playing them for suckers?

All they’d wanted was a mighty army of unstoppable, immortal, fearless, slavishly obedient killing machines. The ultimate army of ultimate super-soldiers capable of going up against entire armored columns and emerging unscathed from the destroyed, smoking rubble.

Was that so much to ask?

To make America great again? To dominate the arms race then and forever, protecting them from enemies foreign and domestic, cement their place permanently at the top of the pecking order and food chain where it belonged? Take that, China. Fuck you, ISIS. Eat shit, Korea. USA, all the way!

Radical leftist antifa protester terrorists might be able to cause trouble for police and true patriots with their sneaky-shit tactics, but just let them try to pull their tricks on an implacable twelve-foot-tall behemoth! Oh, they’d be begging for facefuls of tear gas again after that!

As for even more nebulous threats—probably made-up fake news anyway, but still—like pandemics and climate change? Bring it on! Won’t see any Ameri-Golems pussified, wearing masks, or crybabying into ventilators! If they could withstand a bomb blast, they could walk through any pansy-ass hurricane or wildfire. And melting glaciers? Ooooh scary, yeah, right.

They’d really thought it would work. They’d really thought it was a good, solid plan. The prototype, they’d expected, would be first of many, triumphantly heralded as a decisive symbol of total superiority.

So, the speeches, delivered with flagrant pomp and ceremony leading up to the Ameri-Golem’s unveiling. So, the flags, and the banners, and red-white-blue bunting, and propaganda. There’d been as much stirring music and swelling pride as would be found toward the end of some big-budget action disaster movie where only America’s heroes could save the entire world.

The resources they’d funneled into its making! The concessions they’d shown to that Roman Hell-bastard Favius! They’d housed and fed him, given him access to education and entertainment, provided disposable female companionship, catered to his every whim and desire!

Or, almost every whim and desire; there were a few lines not even they were quite willing to cross. And if they’d always intended to discreetly eliminate him afterward anyway, it’s not like he would have known.

All for the sake of Project Ameri-Golem! The prototype of which had turned out better than imagined, beyond their most ambitious expectations! A thing of patriotic glory and majestic physique! Flawless! Perfect! Hung like a Clydesdale! Sure to stir pride in the hearts of their supporters and strike dread in the hearts of their foes!

Unwavering! Invulnerable! Proof positive of the USA’s total superiority, badassery, big-dick energy, and sheer balls!

The Ameri-Golem . . . theirs to command!

Except, surprise surprise, it didn’t turn out that way. Their prized Ameri-Golem had never been theirs to command. Its absolute obedience was bound not to its designers or creators but to the one who’d given it, there on the shores of what had once been Lake Misquamicus, its first breath of diabolical life.

Favius. To that fucking Favius, who had played them after all.

Those of the team who’d been there for the awakening, in the initial chaos immediately following, had probably died as much from ironic incredulity as from having their faces peeled off.

Suckers.

***

Ecce, novum princeps de inferno, novus rex terrae!

Or something close to it; the Wyrd sisters, as the trio had come to be called, didn’t have much of a formal education. If it was just mock-Latin, little better than that English bitch used in her boy-wizard books, so what? Still got the point across, didn’t it?

Behold, a new prince of Hell, a new king on Earth!

People beheld, all right. Satanic-hallelujah, did they ever! Quite a crowd had gathered on the lakeshore as the most momentous day since AllHell itself slid into a fuming scarlet dusk. And they beheld, bigtime.

AllHell itself, now, that’d been different. The locals and vacationers around Lake Misquamicus that day, they’d had no idea anything unusual was about to happen. Just going about their business, they’d been. The only precursor had been a sudden turbulent storm whipping up out of nowhere . . . but, shit, this was Florida; sudden turbulent storms out of nowhere were as common as ‘gator attacks.

Then, though, the Spatial Merge. Effected by Lucifer’s own personal warlocks, swapping the contents of the ordinary lake for the contents of a reservoir in Hell. And, well, a bunch of crazy fuckery went down in the vicinity over the next few years; not the least of which being a government lockdown quarantine, complete with border wall, gated outposts, and armed guards.

Those who were still caught inside, those who’d survived anyway, well, they’d adapted. Wasn’t so bad, once they got used to it. They’d cobbled up a barter system, converted over to agonicity generators, learned some magic, adjusted their diets, established themselves a make-do society.

After a while, it even seemed kind of nice. No junk mail or bills, no taxes, no laws or regulations. No annual migrations of doddering old folks clogging the roads with those slow-as-Moses RVs, no noisy parties of drunk college kids hooting and hollering, no obnoxious tourists complaining about the heat and the bugs.

A few years went by. How many? No one was bothered to much keep track. Didn’t seem to matter. Time had gone some kind of off-kilter. Folks didn’t age same as they used to. Underwent other changes too. Plenty of other changes.

Every now and then, there’d be news from Outside, courtesy of Heck Bodean when he went on one of his runs. Had a decent working relationship with most of the gate guards, did Heck, as well as with a network of contacts on both sides of the wall. Did a thriving trade in home-brewed hellshine too; there proved a surprising number of so-called normal people who had a hankering for it, as well as other locally-sourced produce and handicrafts.

Other news, though this more like rumor to spread and mutate from mouth to ear like a disease, stemmed from Crawdaddy’s, the roadhouse and bar that’d become a community hub for everything from big holiday ritual sacrifices to the ever-popular Hock Parties. Spot, who’d taken over the run of the place after ol’ Crawdy got his head popped off, had groveled himself in good with General Favius, the killer demon-dude who’d walked out of the lake on AllHell, and now served as some sort of toady-in-chief.

Spot lorded it over everyone else, to be sure, swaggering and puffed up self-important. But no one dared sock him in his sneering, speckled face because he remained in a strange kind of contact with the general, so that when events began to be set in motion, Spot had the inside scoop.

Plus, there’d been portents. Dreams and omens and the like. Anyone with some training could do simple divinations, reading runes or entrails or tea leaves or whatnot.

And, for those who just happened to have already been a trio of aged ex-hippie lesbian spinster would-be wiccans well on their way to crone-dom anyway . . .

Ecce, novum princeps de inferno, novus rex terrae!

They knew, the Wyrd sisters. Like the Fates, like the Furies, like the Norns and oracles of old. Oh, they knew.

***

The live feed may have been cut six minutes into the unholy consummation, but the unholy consummation itself carried on for quite a while.

Favius, former soldier of glorious Rome, former Conscript First-Class in Grand Duke Cyamel’s Exalted Security Brigade, who’d sworn and proved his infernal loyalty among the damned legions of the Mephistopolis time and again, to a fault and beyond, had not in millennia enjoyed such a fuck.

With a virgin, no less! A willing virgin! Not merely fallen from faith but leaped from it, defied and repudiated it in a sinful matricidal bath of her own mother’s mortal blood!

She did not recoil from the sight of him, despite the tormented living faces grafted into his skin. She did not resist nor lie passive in stoic endurance of her ravishment. Far from it! If, in curvaceousness, beauty, experience, and skill, she paled in comparison to the courtesans of Rome or the brothels of Hell, neither did she expect payment or feign her performance.

No, she’d all but pulled him down atop her! Parting wide her thighs, opening and offering her hot and sopping eager cunt! When he, with no preamble, plunged his stiffness to the root, yes, she had cried out, but it was no cry of pain or shame or horror. On the contrary, that first thrust alone, burying length and girth in slick, clasping heat, crashed upon her such a cataclysmic shuddering climax he thought she might fly apart into a million pieces.

Instead, she bucked her hips and clutched and writhed and howled for more. The harder he battered into her, the harder she fucked back in a frenzy of lustful passion the likes of which he’d never known. Wetness gushed from her; whether orgasmic fluids or blood or both, he could not tell and did not care. Nor, it seemed, did she.

He lost count of how many times she came, was barely mindful of the gathered crowds or the cameras or the Hell-power surging around and through him as the ritual reached its peak. Only she, beneath him, urging him, exhorting him to greater efforts and new heights, held his attention.

What a woman!

“You . . . are . . . ” he growled, emphasizing each word with a yet more forceful thrust, “mine!” At that, his own climax overtook him with violent paroxysms, driving him deeper than ever, erupting a torrent within her.

Even then, his erection did not dwindle but swelled all the larger, all the stiffer. He went on fucking with a yet more brutal, pounding pace as June shrieked and wailed and clawed his backside, spine arching, loins quaking, limbs spasming. Finally, with a guttural roar, he loosed into her depths another pumping, jetting flood.

When had he last felt so fully sated? He could not recall. The tension ebbed from him, leaving a suffusing warmth of triumph and satisfaction throughout his body. Rather than exhaustion, he felt exultation. Achievement. Fulfillment.

He had done it. He had, in the name and service of his Luciferic lord, earned and conquered and claimed his place. His kingdom. His crown. His queen.

His queen, who sprawled insensate and unconscious, a dreamy smile upon her face.

Gradually, the rest of his surroundings once again made themselves known to his awareness. Half the crowd appeared engaged in various couplings and orgies, while others indulged in celebrations of cheering, wine, and song. The Golems, the three who’d crossed from Hell with him and their patriotic brother, stood silent watchful sentry, one at each corner of the dais.

Favius rose from June’s spent form and stood, adjusting his tunica and battle-apron, to regard what he had wrought.

Above, spears of bloodfire arched into the sky, meeting at an apex where a baleful scarlet globe blazed like a dragon’s heart. Glassy sheets of rippling smokelight and color curved out and down, meeting the refurbished and remade wall, enclosing the lake and its environs in a darkly jewel-like dome.

He looked, and saw that it was good.

***

A couple miles from the lakeshore, while all the sex and savagery and sacrifice was going on, a hodgepodge of a frankentruck jounced its way along unlit backroads, far too fucking fast.

Like many of the local denizens, it’d begun its life as something else, something fairly normal, long ago and once upon a time. A pickup, nothing fancy, hardly new. A real junker, to be honest; twice the age of its current driver. Over the years, at the hands of various DIY mechanic-types, it’d been repaired and repainted and “modder-fied” numerous times. Replacement parts had been scavenged from junkyards or harvested like black-market kidneys from other vehicles.

So, it’d already been a real mongrel even before AllHell struck. But then, shit got some serious apocalyptic ‘round Lake Misquamicus. Suddenly, there weren’t just ‘gators and feral swamp-hogs and gun-toting rednecks to worry about. Suddenly, there were zombies and demons and frogs spitting acid and all manner of hellacious craziness . . . not to mention a honkin’ huge SKREE-ONKin’ ugly mutant dinosaur turtle called Ol’ Hornyshell, who liked nothing better than bludgeoning automobiles into submission and reaming them with a scaley reptilian double-prong schlong until nothing was left but demolition-derby carcasses of crushed metal, busted glass, blown tires, and buckets of rank, globby cum.

Needless to say, these developments led to further “modder-fications,” including armor plating, reinforced windows, a cowcatcher-type plow up front, metal spikes ‘longst the sides, rollbars, and makeshift weaponry. The end result could have rolled out of a Mad Max movie, or old A-Team episodes where them clever fellas cobbled up a tank out of an ice-cream truck.

The combination of the upgrades and a driver who, despite his plentiful faults and personality flaws, could drive like Dukes-A-Hazzard, meant the frankentruck had thus far gone unmolested by Ol’ Hornyshell and survived many a wild ride.

This ride, though . . .

“Fer Satan’s sake, Heck Bodean, slow th’ fuck down afore’n you gets us kilt!”

“Nope.”

In the passenger seat, his cousin / maybe-half-sister Lorlinda did something neither of them had ever done before: dug out a seatbelt and buckled it ‘crost herself.

Heck, behind the wheel, wasn’t sure he’d even known there were seatbelts still in his rig but wasn’t about to take the time to check on his side. Seatbelts were for pussies anyway; rather be thrown clear, if’n it came to that.

The strap, going as it did from Lorlinda’s right shoulder to left hip, snugged tight ‘tween her tank-topped hooters, reminding him of the “lifts and separates” bra ads papering the walls of Uncle Jeb’s outhouse. Jerked it plenty to those pictures as a youngster, he had. Maybe such a “foundation garment” might have done Lorlinda some good ‘bout then; as it was, her boobs flailed every which way as if tryin’ to escape on their own.

Not that he was complainin’, but he was tryin’ to drive here, saints bless it!

She’d also untucked the Catch’s pod from her cleavage, holding it tight in the hand not white-knuckled onto the Jesus-handle. Good thing for the guy trapped inside it she did; he’d’ve got powerful motion-sick otherwise.

“Hang in there, sugar!” she told him—the guy in the pod, that was, not Heck. Daffy girl’d taken a real shine to the sumbitch who got his soul encapsulated in the blown-glass-like cocoon where the Catch stored its meals to ripen ‘em nice before supper. Carryin’ him, talkin’ to him, fussin’ over him like a babified purse-dog the way them Beverley Hills sluts did . . . only, he didn’t suppose them Beverley Hill sluts used their babified purse-dogs as sex-toys . . . then again . . .

He shook the thought away, along with the recollection of Lorlinda slouched there in the passenger seat outside of Zeke’s trailer, diddlin’ herself with the pod, really goin’ to town. Yelled at him after, she had, when she caught him lookin’. As if he were some sort of pervert.

Which, okay, fair enough, but right now, Heck Bodean had to drive.

***

Chelsea Carmichael had been to her share of rowdy parties before, frat and beach and house parties alike. She was no stranger to noise, drinking, fighting, sex, property damage, drug busts, raids, and having to call Daddy to call his lawyer to get charges dropped.

But, this? This shit right here? This shit was bonkers.

Beyond bonkers. Beyond fucked-up.

The fact that her brother, standing next to her, seemed to be digging it?

Even more beyond fucked-up.

Then again, everything here was. Everything since they’d driven through the abandoned little tourist-trap town once billing itself as “Area 666,” through the checkpoint where she’d had to flash her tits for a grody fatso of a guard, and into the disgusting nightmare surrounding the even more disgusting nightmare that was Lake Misquamicus.

Way beyond fucked-up.

Not a day later and three of her friends were dead, their SUV had been wrecked by a horny prong-cocked turtle-monster, her parents’ lakehouse was something only pretending to be a lakehouse, she’d almost sucked her brother’s dick, been ogled by a mutant hillbilly, met some sick fuck of a writer who lived with a pile of ambulatory boobs and made torture-porn movies with a torso hooked up to a pain-generator, hitched a ride with a couple of backwoods hicks to a redneck roadhouse where the evening’s planned entertainment involved gross dudes spitting on girls, seen more freaks and weirdos than at a comic convention . . . and it had all just been a precursor to the main event!

Way, way beyond fucked-up!

Yet, she hadn’t been able to leave, partly because Trevor wouldn’t—and she was not going anywhere by herself in this crowd; she’d seen how they were looking at her, crazy-hungry with both rape and murder not only on the menu but today’s special!—and partly because she’d lost track of the hicks who’d given them a ride; however much she’d hated that Lorlinda skank on sight, she didn’t want to hike back to the lakehouse (which wasn’t a lakehouse!) through the disgusting nightmare. Also, partly because she had no idea what she’d do then anyway.

So, the two of them basically had front-row seats when the crazy chick with the marshmallow fork did a hardcore hysterectomy on her bitch of a mother—which, okay, maybe had been kind of cool, in a vicious vicariously satisfying way; not that Chelsea’d have done the same . . . maybe . . .

She’d wonder if she was losing her mind except it’d probably happened already. Hadn’t they discussed it, her and Trev, back on Bighead Rock after Kayla fell?

Fell. Yeah. Right.

Anyway!

Front-row seats to the matricide, followed by what would have almost seemed a violent gang-bang, except it was only one guy—one huge, inhuman guy, dressed like they’d done a season of that Spartacus gladiator sex-carnage show but in Hell—and the crazy chick who’d killed her mom had been totally into it.

Then, spectators started tearing each other’s clothes and/or skin off in a spontaneous orgy and/or melee, blood and beer and sweat and more spraying everywhere, creepy old hags chanting, some dude turning into an alligator while biting the junk off some other dude, some girl on her knees gouging out her own eyeballs . . .

Way beyond fucked-up bonkers!

She’d clamped a death-grip on Trev’s arm, as much for personal security as to keep him from joining the festivities, deciding then and there she’d just go ahead and fuck him herself if she had to as long as it meant nobody else made a move in her direction.

For instance, Lester-goddamn-Riggers, the overalled mutant hillbilly who’d shown up at the house earlier and was scanning the crowd as if looking for her right now!

Looking for and spotted. A leering, lascivious grin split his face. The silver one of his mismatched eyes gleamed.

As he headed their way, though, Trevor gasped and said, “Oh, shit,” and she glanced around to see things had just gotten worse.

***

Heck had him some real bitch of a bee up his bonnet, that was for sure. Lorlinda braced herself, hanging on for dear life as they whomped through a sludgepuddle hard enough to kick up a ten-foot wake of muckwater and wormfish, then damn near missed the turn onto Shit-Yer-Pants Road to slew around in a sloppy, skidding half-circle.

“Slow the fuck down, I said!” she hollered. “Gon’ roll us like a bad joint, y’are!”

He grumbled something ob-seen through gritted teeth and stamped the gas clear to the floor. The truck lurched, making an ungodly terrible grinding noise as if about to hork its engine-guts straight out its hood in a smoking metal wad. Tires squealed and spun, but there weren’t no burning rubber out here, only fantails of mud and gravel spewing as they dug for traction. Then they caught, and the truck rocketed ahead with its headlights slashing the dusk-shadows into herky-jerky pant-o-mimes.

“Heck!”

“Zip yer lip, Lorlinda! I’s concentratin’!”

Shit-Yer-Pants Road earned its name for good reason, even before AllHell, even when not racing along it at too-fast-too-furious speed. A narrow, winding track of ruts and bottom-outs, it had trees crowded close on both sides for part of the way, with branches ready to claw the fleshmeat off anybody dumb enough to not keep their hands and arms inside the vee-hicle. Toppled blow-downs blocking the way were far from unheard of, as were new gaps where the surface been warshed away by flash floods.

For about half a mile, trees no longer flanked it, but only because a crumbling cliff-face reared up on one side, from which rocks—and, if their ‘shine-brewing Bodean kinsfolk who lived nearbys were to be believed, the occasional cow—might plummet without notice. T’other side was no better, for there the land dropped away into Dumbfuck Gully, a tangle of boulders and deadwood, rusted hulks of wrecked cars, and prob’ly twenny-some bodies what’d never been recovered.

The direction they was headed, Dumbfuck Gully was to their right, and Lorlinda squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to see how much clearance there fuckin’ wasn’t between them and the edge. A metallic scraping-screeching vibration told her Heck was huggin’ the cliff face mighty close, the truck’s armor and other offense-defense accessories bearing the brunt and no doubt spitting a shower of sparks, but did he ease up at all on the gas? No, he did not.

She gripped the pod holding her ain’t-he-sweet li’l boytoy tight in one hand, cradling it snug against her chest. Or, snug as she could, what with her chest like two Jell-O molds on top a spastic laundry-machine’s spin cycle. Be nice if’n she at least knowed his name, but unless’n they could figure some kind of sign language code, she weren’t sure how to manage it. Poor fella, all stuck like that. But she’d promised to take good care of him and really did mean to try.

The cessation of screeching and Heck’s tight expulsion of breath told her they’d made it past that stretch, enough to let her dare open her eyes again. They were passing through slightly more open, hilly country, by what had been Mr. Keene’s bird farm back in the day, raising eee-moo ostriches. Fields all overgrown now, fences sagging askew, the birds like as not hunting all sneaky in the tall grass the way them dinosaurs did in that movie . . . if they even still were birds, which she doubted.

What it meant, though, was that the lack of tree-cover gave her a better glimpse of the sky, and Satan-have-mercy what the Hell? Fiery beams of red light curving up, a miniature sun hanging as if someone shot the world’s biggest flare gun, colors running in soapy car-wash ripples, if car washes used blood . . .

“Heck?”

“I see it, I see it.”

She looked forward and uttered a little shriek. “An’ the bridge? The broke-down bridge? D’you see that?”

“I see it,” Heck said. “Hang the fuck on.”

***

Chels had her nails so embedded in his bicep he’d need one of those staple-remover gadgets to pry them out, but Trevor pushed the pain to the back of his mind.

He’d gotten surprisingly good at that, better than he would have expected. Must’ve been this place, the lake, working its magic, having its effect on him. Yeah, it’d hurt like a bastard when Andy—Andy! of all people!—busted his nose. It’d hurt when Lester gave him that “good-natured” slug on the arm and hoisted him off the ground in a neck-hold. Their hike from the lakehouse to Bighead Rock hadn’t been a pain-free picnic either, and he might’ve overdone it a little helping that weird writer guy with his latest movie.

But, compared to everything else going on? His sister using his arm for a pincushion was small potatoes. People had been getting killed left, right, and center all around. More than killed. Mutilated. Tortured. Cannibalized. It was wall-to-wall fucking crazy. Shit, they weren’t all even people! Devils, pig-men, some werewolf she-bitch with a litter of pups on leashes, giant clay golem-things . . .

Not to mention the BMOC, this Favius guy, this centurion-from-Hell who seemed to be in charge and more than willing to peel the fucking faces off whoever got in his way.

This Favius guy, now on his feet again and adjusting his Roman-style armor after basically delivering a one-man gang-bang to the woman who’d stuck that old bitch with a marshmallow fork.

He was one serious beast, way too kink-daddy for Trev’s leanings, and those peeled-off faces sewn into his skin were not Trev’s idea of attractive manscaping. Damn, though, he was built. Buff, but not body-builder or gym-rat buff. Buff as in absolute combat machine buff.

And damn, he could fuck. If not for the facts of her visible breathing and blissed-out smile, the woman splayed on the dais could’ve passed for dead. Forget la petit mort. That was la grande mal morte . . . a la mode.

As for the woman herself, she wasn’t much to look at, and she was probably pushing forty . . . still, though, again, damn! The way she’d killed her own mother, the way she’d just gone for it . . . savage!

He and Chels may not have had much in the way of twin-telepathy before—except that, too, seemed to have undergone a change since they’d been here; he was picking up flashes of her mood loud and clear—but they hadn’t needed much of it in order to know what each other were thinking right then.

At this moment, however, she wasn’t imagining their bitch mom shackled up; her primary concern was shouldering his way through the crowd, grinning, hitching suggestively at the front of his grimy overalls. Lester Riggers, part-time caretaker, full-time perverted yee-haw, with his lewd silver eye fixed on Chels as she hissed and dug her nails deeper to try and get Trev’s attention, as if there were fuck-all he could do in a fight against Lester . . .

Until . . .

“Oh, shit,” he said, because all of a sudden, Lester wasn’t his primary concern anymore either.

No, the Carmichael twins’ primary concern strode toward them from another direction, stopping in a commanding stance with feet planted wide and one hand resting on the hilt of his gladius. The many faces patchworking his skin mouthed silent cries of suffering.

The Hell-centurion, Favius, surveyed the two of them as if examining the wares in a butcher’s case. Trev felt Chels trembling beside him. He felt trickles of blood from five crescent-shaped gouges in his arm but felt them as if the arm belonged to someone else.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lester hesitate and shrink back, trying to go unnoticed, the way a would-be hotshot gorilla suddenly remembered an overdue library book when the silverback alpha male hove into view.

“You,” Favius declared, pointing at Chelsea.

She cringed, and Trevor tensed, waiting for the inevitable you’re next.

***

Andy couldn’t see much through the swirled, translucent, glass-like confines of his pod, especially with Lorlinda’s hand curled around it. The interior of the frankentruck as well as the world outside were mostly shadows weirdly illuminated by wavery reddish light anyway.

TBH, though? Dude, he was just as glad. By what he could hear of Heck and Lorlinda’s conversation, and what he could feel of the high-speed rough ride—the pod absorbed a lot of that too—he didn’t think he wanted to know.

It was bad out there. Major league shit going down. Angels and demons and the buildup to Armageddon, from the sounds of it. Heaven vs. Hell in the ultimate cage fight, winner take all.

Plus, this wild road trip.

Plus, him really yearning for a long, relaxing smoke . . . a nice, mellow buzz . . . but the remains of his stash must’ve been miles from here.

Plus-plus, the fact he was kinda dead. Discarnated, or something. The remains of his bod must’ve also been miles from here, that poor gangly skeleton with everything melted down into a puddle of slop, one leg hacked off mid-thigh by his so-called best friend, the skull whacked into pottery shards with a fireplace poker by his so-called girlfriend . . .

What a rotten fucking day it’d been, until along came a honey-twang backwoods goddess to scoop him up. Even if she happened to be the local reigning Hock-Party cham-peen, letting inbred mutant hillbillies spew snot and spit and clots of runny green lung-butter onto her lovely nudity.

Thankfully, Heck dragged them away from the roadhouse before that could get started. Less-thankfully, it sounded like Heck was trying to kill them all in a flamboyant fireball movie stunt special effect crash.

“An’ the bridge?” Lorlinda had cried in a high-breathless kind of shriek. “The broke-down bridge? D’you see that?”

“I see it.” Heck’s reply, grim as death. “Hang the fuck on.”

“Eeeeeee!” Lorlinda pressed Andy’s pod deep into the cushiony paradise of her cleavage, curling herself into a ball around the taut seatbelt.

The engine roared like a lion tagged in the nuts by a taser. It didn’t seem possible for the frankentruck to go any faster, but it did, finding some emergency turbo booster.

Even insulated as he was, Andy felt it when they went airborne, felt the awful suspended crest-of-the-rollercoaster weightlessness—he could have been happily toked up and going on Space Mountain right now, but noooo—and imagined the spectacle in cinematic slow-mo.

“I got this!” Heck said, as if they’d clear the gap by his willpower alone.

Aaaannnnnnnd . . . the drop.

“Oh, Lucifer!” wailed Lorlinda.

Then, impact. Jarring, jouncing, bone-rattling IMPACT—

—followed by the shuddering grab of traction and forward momentum and acceleration, and Heck’s ear-splitting rebel yell as the frankentruck’s back end fishtailed but then sped on its way.

“Fuck yeah! Yeee-haw! What’d I tell ya? Who’s the fuckin’ man?!” He slapped the dashboard. “Attaboy, all right, you go baby, what I’m talkin’ ‘bout!”

Lorlinda carefully uncurled, checking on Andy and doing a quick personal pat-down before rounding on Heck. “You saint’s taint piece of cherub shit! Gonna have a strap-burn ‘tween my tits for a week! Judas fuck, don’t it smart!”

“S’whatcha get for wearin’ one! Don’t see me bucklin’ up like a pussy!”

“Uh-huh, which’s why what I see is you bleedin’ all over y’self!”

“Yeah, well, banged my head on th’ ceilin’ when we landed. Ain’t nothin’.”

“Only ‘cause you gots no brains in there t’ damage!” She peered in at Andy again and petted the top of the pod like it was a little kitten. “S’all right, sugar, don’ you fret none. We’s past the worst of it . . . I hope.” At that, she shot another sour look Heck’s way. “Don’t s’pose you’d mind tellin’ me where as we are goin’?”

“The fuck outta here!”

“Look at that wall, Heck Bodean! Checkpoint won’t still be open!”

“If’n it ain’t, I gots me a back-up plan.”

***

“You,” Favius said.

She blanched a dreadful pallor, tightening her bleeding-crescent grip on the youth beside her’s arm. He—sibling, by the look, likely a twin—had gone tight as a bowstring.

Favius surveyed them, savoring their apprehension as they in turn regarded him.

Despite their somewhat disheveled states, despite a few bruises and scratches and the youth sporting a recently-broken nose, everything about them spoke to health and wealth and privilege. Well-born and no doubt well-educated.

And new to these environs, displaying no visible effects as of yet.

The girl was ripe and shapely, with proud breasts Venus herself would have admired and the manner and attire of a harlot. A jeweled bauble pierced her navel. It would not have surprised him had the soles of her sandals bore inverse lettering to leave advertisements of her services pressed into the earth at every step.

The youth’s lean musculature and grooming suggested more exercise and vanity than combat or hard labor. His fine features, where not marred by injury, were those of one accustomed to a life of comfortable superiority. Yet there was, also, in his eyes, a disaffectation almost sociopathic.

Interesting. Interesting indeed.

Clearly, they expected him to decree some terrible fate upon them. To, perhaps, seize and violate them, plunder their bodies, take the girl as concubine and her brother as catamite. Her gaze darted about desperately, as if in search of some escape. His appeared to briefly weigh the options and reach a resigned conclusion.

“Attend to my queen,” Favius told the girl. “Serve as her handmaiden, and be favored and rewarded.”

She blinked a few times, brow knitting. “Uh . . . what? Excuse me? What?”

“Do it, Chels,” her brother said.

“But—”

He nudged an elbow into her ribs. “Do it!”

“Okay, okay, shit.” Disengaging her fingernails from his flesh, she took a hesitant step forward. “What . . . uh, where . . . I mean . . . how should . . . ?”

Favius indicated the most elaborate of the vehicles that had made up the military convoy, a “motor-home” he believed it was called, where the top-ranking officers and politicians had ridden. “Take her there for now. See to her needs. Whatever she requires.” A gesture summoned one of the dutiful Golems. “Juggernaut will accompany and guard you.”

“Uh . . . sure, yeah, great . . . ” She threw a stricken glance from Favius to the Golem to her brother, the lattermost of whom nudged her again.

“Go on,” he said. A slight sideways tip of his head directed her attention into the crowd. The brutish local who’d been approaching them, then done a none-too-successful attempt at a discreet fade when Favius intervened, now slunk back further yet, scowling sullenly.

The girl caught on and nodded. “Yeah,” she said, her tone more steady. “Okay. Handmaid to the queen. Favored and rewarded. Cool. Cool.”

Favius did not bother with any “or else” warnings. That there’d be consequences for disobeying or disappointing him should, by now, be both obvious and implied.

The girl made for the dais to do his bidding, Juggernaut plodding in her wake. For all its crudeness, the Golem gathered up the insensate June with diligent care, the way it might have handled a precious, fragile treasure. She lolled limp but smiling in its thick clay arms as it carried her to the “motor-home.” A soldier in a blood-stained uniform with a new garland of taken war-trophies—ears and fingers—saluted and opened the doors.

Satisfied, Favius turned again to the brother. “And you,” he said. “Who are you?”

“Trevor Carmichael. Listen, our family, they’ve got money. And connections. They know people. My sister and I, we were just here with some friends to do Spring Break at our lakehouse. We didn’t know anything about what was—”

He raised a hand to quell him. The youth stared, fascinated, at the squirming infant’s face filling the palm.

“A landholder,” he said. “Son of a noble line. Excellent. I will have use for you within my Senate.”

***

“What’d I tell ya?” Lorlinda waved through the muck-spattered windshield. “They’s fuckin’ closed!”

“I swear, th’ way as you nag me, we might’s well be married,” Heck muttered.

“In yer dreams!”

“You wish!”

“Sure as sin do not!”

He let it go, parking the frankentruck and stepping out the driver’s side door to get a better look at what used t’ be known as Checkpoint Urinal.

Oh, its proper handle was Uriel, like the archangel, but the joke was too good by half to pass up. Was where he did his business, weren’t it? B’sides, as some of the checkpoints went, Urinal was a real piss-pot in the back-ass boonies of nowhere.

One guard had lived there full-time for years, like some crazy hermit prophet from the Bible. Looked and acted the part too, by now. Tattered sackcloth robe, shaved head, way too into switches and scourges and whipping his own self bloody. Whoever else got stationed with him had either drawn the short straw or was on punishment detail or disciplinary action.

Which worked fine for Heck’s purposes more often than not; resentful disgruntled soldiers tended to have them a “fuck the rules” philosophy and be easier to bribe. B’sides, they tended to lack for visitors, always glad to have someone else t’ talk to for a while. Conversations with Solomon Shoop-Shoop the Most Fervent and Penitential, as he preferred to be called, got old real fast. Neither did he drink, smoke, gamble, or tolerate idleness or pornography.

No way t’ live, far’s Heck Bodean was concerned. As if things weren’t tough enough on everyone since AllHell. He’d even heard Shoopie—as he would not prefer to be called, and would pitch a righteous fit if’n he was—tried t’ make his partners follow his hermit’s diet of nettlegreens, locusts, and rain-water.

Definitely no way t’ live. And Lucifer alone knew how Shoopie might’ve reacted to Lorlinda, slut-temptress Jezebel that she was. Heck hadn’t yet worked out his plan for broaching the subject, but it was kinda lookin’ like he wouldn’t have to.

Not much point, really. Where the gate and outpost had once been—and even when it’d been brand-new, Heck’d seen better security at the CostCo out by the interstate—there now arose a son-of-a-nun mountain in miniature. Like what they had at Disney, only without the fake snow and erbominal snow men and all that shit. This mountain was barren-brown and desert-dry, a desolate sandstone pile with tenacious spiny weeds growin’ in its crags, scorpion-scarabs crawlin’, and scrawny carrion birds wheeling in a dust cloud around its peak.

And yes, there also was the redone wall, high and black and nightmarish, with its castle-lookin’ parts and catapults . . . there was the stained-glass fuckin’ weirdness of lights and fire in the sky . . . but right smack in the middle of it, this mountain, what would’ve seemed more at home in Arizona or some Muslim Arab place.

He walked a little closer, hearing Lorlinda still haranguin’ him like a fishwife from the passenger side window, demanding to know what was his plan now, he was so smart? Heck tuned her out. He’d seen what might’ve been a trail, the footpath equivalent to Shit-Yer-Pants Road for sure, wending up the steep mountainside. At the bottom of it sat a hut so shabby the trashiest of his Bodean kin wouldn’t have used it for an outhouse, and in front of the hut sat . . . a person? A soldier?

Yes, it was. Hunkered over cross-legged, a shotgun resting on his knees. Naked ‘cept for combat boots, a pair of dirty military-green boxer briefs, and a camo bandanna tied Rambo-style around his head . . . but his flesh had gone the texture of beef jerky . . . and when he raised his face, it was a caved-in scooped-out hollow into his empty skull without eyes or nose or nothin’.

Which didn’t stop him from shouting, “Halt! Who seeks audience with Solomon Shoop-Shoop the Most Fervent and Penitential?”

***

“When you say ‘Senate’ . . . ” Trevor looked the centurion-from-Hell over again.

Up close, he was even more buff and formidable than from a distance, and those living faces grafted onto his skin were not faking their expressions of agonized suffering. Favius here clearly was the real deal.

Drawing a breath, he continued, selecting his words with care. “ . . . we’re talking, ancient Rome kind of thing? Julius Caesar and Marc Antony? Those guys? As opposed to, uh . . . ” He let his gaze drop to the cluster of freshly-peeled facials hanging at Favius’s belt like dripping rubber masks, a familiar Congressional countenance still recognizable among them. His parents had been to some fundraiser dinners, for fuck’s sake, twelve hundred bucks a plate.

“As opposed to this travesty you call a government?” Favius finished for him.

“Pretty much.”

“I have no use for your ‘democracy’.”

“Totally, right there with you, whole system’s corrupted beyond belief anywa—”

Favius scoffed. “Such weak and feeble petty excuses for corruption have no place here! If my Senators mean to obstruct and betray me, let them do so as should be done! Et tu, Brute, and beware the Ides of March! But know this.” He leaned close, which Trevor could have done without, and lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. “I will not be backstabbed so easily.”

Trev gulped, somehow managing not to piss himself. His face might not have been at its best just then, but he preferred to keep it where it was, thanks. “Do I have to wear sandals and a toga?”

“Ha.” Favius’s huge hand dropped heavy upon Trevor’s shoulder, staggering him on his feet.

Since he’d given his t-shirt to Chels after her cat-fight with Kayla, he felt the heat and weight and mass of it, as well as the instinctual seeking-suckling efforts of the prenatal features set into its palm, without so much as a thin cotton barrier. His stomach rolled sickly over. He gulped again, fighting down an unpleasant aftertaste of Collier’s lager and whatever tangy meat had been in the sandwich he’d eaten for lunch at the writer’s cottage.

“In those regards,” Favius went on, “the choice is your own. I require only that you swear fealty, not only to me but to my infernal liege, Lucifer, the Morning Star, Emperor of Hell.”

“Uh . . . ” Whew, he was sweating, and for far more reasons than the humidity. He’d urged Chelsea to go along with the whole handmaid thing because it seemed their best shot at survival . . . plus, the “favored and rewarded” bit had sounded pretty sweet. Now, here it was, his turn. Put up or shut up, Trev. “Sure. Of course. No problem.”

The huge, hot, heavy hand upon his shoulder tightened its grip. The huge, hot, heavy hand not upon his shoulder shot between his legs. Trevor yipped and went on tippy-toe, squinching his eyes shut. If he preferred his face to stay where it was . . .

“Then, do so,” rumbled Favius. “Make your oath and testimony.”

Word Origins for 600, Alex, he thought, once again—more vitally than ever!—trying not to piss himself.

“I swear f-f-fealty!” Damn, he hadn’t hit that octave since puberty.

“To?” Prompting.

“You! Favius!” How had he introduced himself to the crazy chick? First something or other? Shit! All Trev could remember was the old witches braying their bastardized Latin. “Novum princeps de inferno, novus rex terrae!”

“And?” Prompting, now with a squeeze.

“Lucifer!” he squealed. “The Morning Star! Emperor of Hell!”

The squeeze intensified, as if to demonstrate how effortless it’d be to pop them like bubble wrap and twist the whole works off in a pulped fistful of ground sausage.

But only for a moment before it relented, relaxed, and released. Favius stepped back, nodding. “Very well,” he said, as Trevor, stifling a whimper, pressed his knees together. “Welcome to His service, Senator. And to mine.”

Mom and Dad always did want me to go into politics, he thought before passing out.

***

“Stubb’rn angel-suckin’ idjit!” opined Lorlinda, as Heck, instead of doin’ the sensible thing and turnin’ his fool ass right around t’ get back in the truck, went and took a few steps nearer to the beef jerky mummy-man whose head had a big ol’ window into where the brains used t’ be.

And, as if that weren’t foolish enough, started talkin’ to him!

“Curtis? Curtis Thompson, hey, that you, there? S’me, Heck Bodean. ‘Member? We hung’d out a few times, had some ‘shine, played some cards?”

The mummy-man’s hollow noggin tilted over quizzical-like, the way a dog’s did when it was tryin’ t’ figure whether the ball really got thrown or just hid behind the person’s back. “You seek the wisdom of Solomon Shoop-Shoop the Most Fervent and Penitential?”

“Not ‘xactly,” Heck said.

At least he looked t’ be keeping wary tabs on the shotgun the mummy-man held cros’t his knees . . . or what started out a shotgun, maybe. Even from here, Lorlinda could tell it’d undergone its own ugly changes.

“Then you have no business here!”

“Hey, now, my business always been welcome here before.” He took another casual step. “How is ol’ Shoopie, by the—”

Up came the devil-fied shotgun. “Solomon Shoop-Shoop the Most Fervent and Penitential!”

“Fine, whats’ever you say,” Heck said, all placatory. “Solomon Shoop-Shoop the Most Fervent and Penitential, then. How is he?”

“He has ascended the mountain!”

“Yyyyeeeah . . . ”

Lorlinda followed Heck’s gaze, which in turn followed a trail so steep and narrow and precarious it would’ve given a rock-goat the willies. Unless her eyes were mistakin’ her, a couple other mummy-men waited positioned along it, one by a rickety-stick bridge traversin’ a jagged gorge, and the other next to what looked like the kind of hoop of fire a circus-act might have tigers jump through. Further on, at the very top, a pair of sandstone statues flanked the entrance to a cave.

“I knows you prolly can’t see much from in there, sugar,” she said to her sweetie little boytoy, holding out the Catch’s pod anyway to try and give him a look. “But, is it just me, or this some kinda quest shit setup?”

“Ascended the mountain,” Heck repeated meanwhile. “Gone the full hermit-prophet deal at last, has he? Good f’r him, know he’s always wanted to. But, Curtis, listen—”

“Whoso would seek the wisdom of Solomon Shoop-Shoop the Most Fervent and Penitential must pass three trials and the final test!”

“Aw, fuckadoodle.” Lorlinda shook her head. “I knew’d it. I just knew’d it.”

“I ain’t interested in seekin’ his wisdom,” Heck said. “Was only thinkin’ we might use yer gate. Drive on through an’ be gone. Outta yer hair.”

“Poor-ass choice of words,” she murmured to her sugar-pie. “Feller’s balder’n a choir-boy’s nutsack.”

Apparently realizing his gaffe, Heck hustled on. “Make it worth yer while. I never did get a chance t’ unload my last run of ‘shine over t’ Crawdy’s. Fine stuff. If’n you c’n talk, then, you c’n drink, right? How ‘bout I crack us a bottle, we c’n discuss it?”

The hollow noggin, a badly made beef jerky jack-o-lantern, bobbed as if in thoughtful contemplation. The devil-fied shotgun settled to a less threatening position. Heck seemed to take this as a positive sign and eased another step closer.

“There is no gate,” Curtis the mummy-man said.

Lorlinda tsked. “Tol’ him so, din’ I? Tol’ him it’d be closed, an’ now look, a whole bless’d mountain sittin’ there where it oughta be. Gate ain’t just closed, it’s gone.”

In his pod, her sugar-pie nodded.

“There is no gate,” Curtis repeated. “Only the path to wisdom. Or destruction.”

“Ain’t no way this truck makin’ it up that path,” Lorlinda said. “No matter where it ends up.”

“Awright, then.” Heck heaved a sigh. “Sorry t’ve bothered you. No path t’ wisdom fer me t’day, thanks anyways.”

As he turned back toward the truck, the devil-fied shotgun came up again. “Or destruction,” Curtis said, and fired.

***

Whenever the majority of the outside world thought of Lake Misquamicus and the wall, Checkpoint Bethlehem was the image that usually came to mind.

Although not as large as Nazareth, it was the primary official public face of the entire national security and response effort. It was the most accessible and easiest to reach, the most well-known. So, it had to look the part, properly impressive and imposing, a true bastion of defense holding firm.

It made a good backdrop for media events, such as the annual requisite AllHell’s retrospective remembering the tragedy and so many lives lost and “the day known reality forever changed.” Meta-churches would stage religious observations, vigils, and prayer specials. Teams from the Discovery Channel’s paranormal investigation shows filmed the occasional episode, though the pilot for their Demon Hunter series never got off the ground. If a hurricane threatened that section of the country, reporters would always be sent to shoot a little reassuring/fear-mongering storm-front footage. Every now and then, there’d be some sort of bizarre news bit or human interest story. It was where the initial refugee and quarantine camps had been set up, where anxious families would gather on behalf of those trapped inside, where protests would be held.

Though the only approximation of a town anywhere nearby had been clear over on the opposite side of the lake—and that had only been a remote blink-and-you’d-miss-it collection of trailer parks and shops when not enjoying a brief kitschy revival as the touristy Area 666—Bethlehem was closer to what could more arguably be called civilization. Provided, of course, “civilization” meant the pockets of truck stops, gas stations, fast-food franchises, outlet malls, and big box stores along the interstate.

There were even a few small airfields nearby, not that they saw much traffic. The effects of the Hell-Zone on electronics and instrumentation made it far too risky. Unlike the pilot for Demon Hunter, one pilot who’d had the bright idea to do scenic helicopter tours did get off the ground . . . once . . . long enough for his passengers to upload some selfies and video to their social media before, well . . .

For reasons such as this, Checkpoint Bethlehem lacked anything like an airstrip or helipad. Unmanned craft and drones didn’t fare much better. Nor did daredevil hang gliders or parasailers. Migratory bird flocks adjusted their routes to avoid the area, proving they learned their lesson quicker than the humans did.

The passage of time and adjustment to their “new normal” led to a decrease in activity overall, but the commanding officers in charge of Bethlehem were sticklers for keeping up appearances, adhering to rules and regulations far more than at the other checkpoints. It was a place of bugle calls, flag raisings and lowerings, drills, uniforms, salutes, polished boots and buttons, pin-neat barracks, and precise military posture.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, when the situation with the convoy and the broadcast took a FUBAR turn and the Aurora Diabolicus flooded the sky and the earth shook and the wall rose and the transformations began, they all went full lockstep fascist jackboot demons.

None more so than Captain Adler, on duty at the time. Who’d already been in a foul mood after being left in the dark about Project Ameri-Golem and annoyed because she hadn’t been able to do a damn thing earlier in the day when some asshole flew his Cessna over her post on her watch, then crashed somewhere in the Hell-Zone.

Of course, she’d always been an ice-cold Nazi bitch at heart anyway, driven to iron-fisted discipline, keenly aware of the additional pressure and scrutiny placed upon a female military officer. She held herself to a higher standard, demanding the same of her troops. Rumor had it a swastika tattoo was hidden somewhere very personal upon her body, though that wasn’t true.

It was a two-headed eagle, which, ironically enough, had also been popular in Imperial Rome.

And, wings and talons and all, like an avenging harpy, what she turned into.

***

Handmaid to the queen? What the actual pan-fried fuck?!

Chelsea did her best to keep her thoughts to herself as she followed the clay monster dude past the sentry and into what might have been the world’s biggest deluxe custom RV.

Really, “RV” didn’t do it justice. With all of its expandables expanded, fold-outs folded out, and pop-ups popped up, it was a damn McMansion on wheels. On a lot of wheels. A lot of industrial strength wheels. The kind they used on those trailers to haul the Space Shuttle.

Titanic as it was, it still listed to starboard as the clay monster Juggernaut plodded slowly up the steps. Only because the RV had wide and high-arched double doors in the main entry section was the Golem able to squeeze inside, taking care to shelter the unconscious woman cradled in its thick arms.

The queen. Seriously. The queen.

What was she, like, forty? Flat-chested, flat-assed, plain at best if not verging on homely, obviously had had no work done, like, ever, hair by fucking Great Clips . . . a virgin, she’d said, and no wonder!

The queen.

This whole place, this whole day, this whole Spring Break vacation, just got more and more bullshit bonkers by the minute.

Inside, the RV straddled a fine line between elegant and ostentatious. Wasn’t a celebrity’s gaudy Vegas-to-Hollywood ride, wasn’t as government-official as, say, Air Force One, but whoever designed it had plenty of budget to play with. Full chef’s kitchen, upstairs lounge, 110-inch flat screen . . .

Okay, even she had to admit . . . daaaaamn.

She realized the Golem was just standing there, its broad blank slit-eyed face turned toward her as if waiting patiently for further instructions.

What would happen if she told it to break the skinny bitch like a bundle of dry spaghetti?

Nothing good. Best to just go with it for now. Trev was right. If they were going to get through this, they needed to play along. Rewarded and favored sounded a hell of a lot better than being left to fend for themselves.

Lester Riggers’s lewd leer oozed around in her mind. Yeah, no. No thanks. Flashing her tits was one thing, or sucking the occasional dick. But she had some standards, some lines she didn’t want to cross. In this case, kissing ass was preferable.

“Back here,” she told the Golem, locating the RV’s master suite. Queen-sized bed, how fitting. Full bath with jetted tub. Mini-bar.

Chelsea shoved a bunch of suitcases and garment bags off the bed, clearing a space atop the duvet. Whoever all this stuff belonged to was probably dead somewhere outside. She’d have to dig through it later.

The Golem settled the queen onto the bed like it was placing Snow-fucking-White into her glass coffin, then withdrew to loom ridiculously huge in a corner. If there’d been any notions in Chelsea’s head about, say, suffocating her with a pillow, she dismissed them.

Weird, though, having those kinds of notions on her mind.

Not like she was a violent person. She hadn’t enjoyed watching Andy have his leg hacked off or his skull bashed in, or seeing the torso-gimp that sick fuck writer used for a generator. She’d been disgusted when Trev really got into those torture-porn mutilation scenes, and never mind the victims had been . . . humongoloids or simulacins or something . . . magic Live Doll sexbots that screamed and sobbed and bled.

Aside from Kayla, she’d never killed anyone either. And Kayla, well, that had almost been an accident. She hadn’t killed her killed her.

Okay, maybe she would have. And maybe she could’ve cheerfully stabbed that hillbilly skank Lorlinda nineteen times with a broken bottle, the obnoxious twangy gorgeous white-trash slut. That didn’t make her a psychopath!

But then there’d been the scene at the lakeshore, public execution via marshmallow fork, which had been pretty awesome, actually.

Now, here she was, contemplating straight-up murder.

Because of the lake and its ambient evil influence.

Certainly not because she was jealous.

***

As if Andy hadn’t had enough amusement park type rides for one day, everything went spinny-whoopsy-plummet as Lorlinda jumped, screamed, and flipped his pod right through the open passenger-side window.

The shotgun’s blast was still shockwaving through the air by the time he hit the ground, but Lorlinda was already out the door and on the run. She’d undone her seatbelt earlier to rub at the welt between her breasts from their Dukes-A-Hazzard stunt at the broken bridge, and as she ran past him on his first bone-jarring bounce, Andy saw she’d also grabbed Heck’s souped-up baseball bat.

Like the truck, the bat had been altered quite a bit from its original state. It had machete blades embedded in the fat part, a pickaxe bolted to the end, and a six-inch iron spike jutting from the top of the pickaxe. When Andy had first seen it, he’d thought of that bad dude from that zombie show, though that dude’s bat had been wrapped in barbed wire or studded with nails or some shit.

Now Lorlinda, yarn-tied pigtails flying, toned thighs flexing, pert butt jiggling in her frayed denim cutoffs, more reminded him of a redneck Harley Quinn.

“Heck!” she shrieked.

The pod bounced twice more before tumbling to a stop. Any questions he’d had about its durability were answered; not a nick, let alone cracking or shattering and spilling his discarnated whateverness into the dirt. Andy wobbled for a moment, trying to regain his bearings. He wasn’t hurt, just dizzied, and struggled to maneuver himself around enough to get a look at what was going on.

A haze of sulfurous yellow smoke obscured almost as much of his view as did the translucent substance of the pod. Through it, he made out Heck Bodean’s rangy form sprawled headlong, more yellow smoke curling up from the smoldering shreds of his shirt. Still moving, though; struggling to push-pull-drag-crawl.

“In the back, you cowardly nun-fucker?” Lorlinda, brandishing the bat, sprinted past Heck. “I’se gon’ beat you so hard your kinsfolk’s gonna feel it all’s the way back t’ Noah’s fuckin’ Ark!”

The freaky dehydrated soldier with a gaping hole for a face, threads of yellow smoke also rising from his shotgun’s barrel, swiveled in her direction. Andy tried to yell, tried to pound his minuscule fists against the inner curvature of the pod’s wall, tried to do something, anything! Being trapped and helpless like this while Lorlinda charged into certain danger . . . knowing there was no way to brace himself for the second blasting roar, the burst not of buckshot but sulfurshot, which at point-blank range would shred her into crimson confetti—

“Halt!” the soldier called. “Who seeks audience with Solomon Shoop-Shoop the Most Fervent and Penitential?”

She swung with every ounce of her strength, anger, and momentum, connecting bat with shotgun in a sparking explosive clash, and the bat won. Sheared-off chunks of shotgun and mangled metal flew, taking sheared-off chunks of the soldier’s desiccated arms with it.

He waved his ragged stumps, which did not bleed but only waggled with stringy dried meat and sinew. “Halt—!”

“Go baptize y’self!” Lorlinda had let the follow-through carry her around in a strangely graceful pivot and finished by jamming the bat’s iron spike right into the gaping hollow of his face.

The spike’s tip did not punch all the way through, but only because the upper edges of the pickaxe-arms bashed against the leathery edges where cheekbones might have been. The impact cracked off the top half of his head like a broken crockery jar.

He dropped, already starting to wither and flake the way vampires did in the movies. Lorlinda, having none of that, hefted the bat again and went on bludgeoning until nothing was left but dust, boots, and crumpled cloth.

She picked up the camo bandanna, shook the grit from it, and tucked it into her back pocket. Then she rushed to Heck, saying, “You best not be dead, or I will kick your ass!”

***

Favius stepped over the unconscious body of his first Senator and strode to the monument constructed upon the lakeshore. It rose, a columnar stone plinth topped with a goat-headed Mephistopolean dragon wrought from cold blood-iron, the dragon itself topped with a jutting spike.

Onto this spike was impaled the severed head of a general who’d had high-ranking political ambitions and aspirations, angling for a shot at the White House, thinking to get there with a big push from Project Ameri-Golem. Now, frothing at the mouth, eyes bulging in protest and indignation, he could only watch as those dreams went down in flames.

Raising his Voice, Favius addressed the orgiastic crowd. “Soldiers!” he called. “Citizens! Thralls! Hear me now!”

They hushed, all eyes turning toward him with rapt attentiveness. Some of it flavored with adoration, some with fear; both suited him equally well. The surviving media among them jostled for position with their cameras and microphones. He had no idea if the broadcast continued to be conveyed to the millions more beyond the wall, but it hardly mattered.

“This day,” he declared, “this glorious day, most glorious in Lucifer’s name since that when I did first set foot again upon God’s green Earth . . . this day is our new beginning. Our new age. What was once a foothold, a mere pocket of Hell, is now a stronghold! What was once a prison is now our Kingdom of the Damned! The wall they constructed to contain us has become our fortification, our defense! The Morning Star’s own power, in fire and in blood, protects us from above!”

He extended his arms skyward, as if to encompass the seething dome. People cheered and sobbed at its infernal beauty, and flung themselves groveling in the churned mud and viscera.

“For they will seek to end us, faithful followers, make no mistake,” Favius went on, almost conversationally, with no small amount of inward marveling at himself.

Never before would he have imagined such oration from his own lips, addressing so many so eloquently and well. The mere prospect, back during his living life as a Roman or as a humble conscript in Hell, would have been daunting to the point of unthinkable. He gave dark thanks to whichever demonic muse guided his words, silently promising a rich sacrifice later.

“They will attack,” he said. “They will endeavor with all the might at their disposal to destroy us.”

A chorus of booing and obscenities greeted this, along with several defiant challenges and let-the-fuckers-try-it yells, punctuated with emphatic gunshots. Favius allowed them their fervent moment before spreading his hands in a quelling gesture.

“They will fail. We’ll see to that.”

To this, wild cheers and yet more gunshots.

“I have beheld, with my own eyes, their inner workings. For the military,” he inclined his head toward the largest group of soldiers, “I have the utmost respect.”

They stood tall and prideful, saluting.

“As for their much-touted government, however?” Favius grimly shook his head. “The less said of those fattened calves and pigs gorging at the trough, the better! We do not answer to them, not anymore. Do we?”

“No!” surged the reply from many throats as one, with a colorful scattering of still more obscenities thrown in.

“We answer only,” said Favius, lifting a fist toward the baleful burning light overhead, “to our eternal lord and master, who was cast out but never vanquished! In His service, we will triumph! Let the whole Earth fall before us! Let the very gates of Heaven tremble! I shall call upon each of you in these coming days to do your part. Are you with me?”

Roars, veritable roars of approbation filled the red-tinged night.

“So be it! Then go in strength and sinfulness. Prepare. Be ready. In Lucifer’s name. Hail, Satan!”

“Hail, Satan!” they chorused back. “Hail, Favius!”

As they fell again into a celebratory frenzy, he singled out the one called Spot from among them.

“You,” he said. “With me. Now.”

***

“Always knew y’ cared,” Heck groaned as Lorlinda heaved him into the frankentruck’s passenger seat.

“Don’t flatter y’self,” she replied tartly. “Had the fuckin’ keys in your pocket, din’cha?”

“Yeah, but you coulda snagged ‘em out an’ left me there.”

“Thought ‘bout it.”

“Naw, you din’t. ‘Sides, what would you’ve tol’ our mommas?”

“Oh, shut yer pray-hole.” She got his feet situated among the mess of litter in the footwell, then slammed the door.

Heck let his head fall against the headrest. Holy shitballs, but his back hurt a bastard! Fuckin’ Curtis! Blew his favorite flannel all to shreds!

Had even near done likewise to the vest he wore beneath it. How many times he’d griped about the Kevlar, its stifling, sweltering, uncomfortable constriction and weight . . . then again, how many times it’d saved his bacon, just like today.

Like plenty of folks ‘round here who’d acclimated to their new enviro-mint since the AllHell, he was some tougher than he looked. Thicker-skinned, faster-healin’. Still, given how much he traveled the less-than-hospitable portions of the lake region, he’d figgured a little extra wouldn’t be a bad idea. Cost him plenty, that was true, but proved worthwhile over and over.

Was gonna have him one sore starburst of bruises, though, and the smoldering pock-marks where the sulfurshot had penetrated felt like cigarettes stubbed out against his skin. He hitched around in the seat, trying to find a position of the least discomfort.

Lorlinda, toting his apocalypse bat, kept a wary eye on what was left of Curtis as she also scanned the ground. She’d done a job on him, all right. Beat him into beef jerky pencil shavings.

Curtis showed no signs of reconstitutin’, and if he was gonna re-sub-carnate, it hadn’t happened yet, or near enough for an encore. Nor did any of the other Urinal fellas put in an appearance. Up the priesting mountain path, prob’ly, waitin’ their turn to deliver the next r’diculous test or trial on the way t’ visit Shoopie.

Some fuckarow for sure, this day’d turned out to’ve been.

He saw Lorlinda bend down and pick up something, realizing it was the Catch’s pod. How the fuck it got out there, he’d no clue. Ninny dropped it out the window, maybe, tryin’ t’ give her boyfriend a ringside view of Heck gettin’ shot at.

Pod securely in hand, she trotted to the driver’s seat, slung the bat into the space behind, and settled in behind the wheel. “How bad is it?” she asked.

“Ain’t so bad,” he lied.

“Popeshit. You gots t’ be hurtin’ if’n you’re not gonna bitch ‘bout me drivin’.”

“Oh, I am gonna bitch ‘bout it, all right. Rest assured on that.”

“Good. Means you ain’t dyin’ on me yet.”

“Not yet.” He bit his tongue as she began her ponderous do-si-do process of a three-point turn. A hundred damn years later, she had them headed the other way, leaving Shoopie’s hermit mountain in the rearview.

“Mind tellin’ me yet what’s the ak-shu-al plan?” Lorlinda asked. “Said y’ had one if’n this went t’ shit, which in case y’ din’t notice, it just did.”

“I noticed, yeah. Take the left. We’ll go the long way.” The prospect of her navigating them along Shit-Yer-Pants Road back past Dumbfuck Gully, never mind the busted bridge, made his balls crawl clear up t’ his bellybutton.

“Home?”

“Fuck no!”

“Why not?”

“Were you not listenin’ t’ anything before? The gen’rul? The Wyrds? Angels on the loose? A Reckonin’? You not see what’s happenin’ out there with the wall an’ that crazy lightshow in the sky?”

“I sees it! But why’s it got yer panties in a bunch?”

“Zeke, f’r one thing.”

“Huh?”

Heck wished he’d snagged a bottle of ‘shine out the cargo area, even if it wouldn’t have done no good bartering with Curtis. Could’ve used a dose of anesthetic.

“The gen’rul,” he repeated. “You know what he did t’ Zeke. How y’think Zeke’s gonna take it, he hears he’s come back?”

***

Before AllHell, the townlet hadn’t even had a name. It started out as a wide spot in the road, a combination mini-mart / gas station sitting in the shadow of a Visit Scenic Lake Misquamicus! bikini babe billboard, where vacationers might stop for sunscreen, ice, toilet paper, and other such essentials on the way to their campsites or rented cottages.

Over time, other businesses cropped up—stands selling local produce or handicrafts, a bar doubling as a liquor store, souvenir shops with the usual ticky-tacky Florida tourist crap, and a greasy spoon so greasy it’d never be featured on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.

If some of those businesses skirted the boundaries of what was strictly legal, well, no one considered it such a big deal.

For instance, on the surface, the offerings at Peterson Pyrotechnics—who saw their best trade in the weeks leading up to July Fourth but did none too shabby the rest of the year—were of the “safe and sane” variety. With the proper discretion and sufficient flash of cash, however, cherry bombs and bottle rockets could be made available.

As well as, rumor had it, stuff with even more bang for the buck.

Asking around enough might lead to someone who “knew a guy” with access to marijuana, moonshine, meth . . . gambling, girls, guns . . . backwoods dog- or cock- or ‘gator-fights . . . nine times out of ten, the “guy” in question would be a Bodean, though some enterprising others did all right for themselves too.

Then, along had come AllHell.

Along had come the quarantine, the wall, the military checkpoints, the nationwide and worldwide spotlight. While several inhabitants wisely decided to pack up and seek greener pastures, the more tenacious determined to make the best of their newfound notoriety and fame.

They reinvented and rebranded the nameless townlet as Area 666, where tourists could visit for a small taste of Hell. And, most importantly, spend money. There were souvenirs galore: t-shirts, bumper stickers, keychains, ballcaps with demon horns, plastic pitchforks, devil plushies, you-name-it. As well as local hot sauces, chili cookoffs, pepper-eating contests, the works.

The fact that new local varieties of peppers ranged so off-the-Scoville charts as to be fatal . . . well, it only added to the challenge. Members of the audience were known to drop dead just from the fumes, the judges wore full hazmat suits, and the participants had to sign whole stacks of waivers.

One of the Peterson kids, a tall teenager so skinny a stiff wind should have snapped him in half, had basically lived on spicy wings and nuclear-volcano flavored snack chips all his life and knew his moment, his destiny, had arrived. The first year his folks let him enter, he swept every category, hardly popping a sweat. He defended his title for three years running before being barred from official competition.

Even then, his disgruntled rivals kept trying to come up with something too hot for him to handle. Obtaining a live salamander from a trapper near the lake—an infernal Hell-salamander, no ordinary newt—they deep-fried it like frog’s-legs and dared him to eat it. Long story short, the Peterson kid from that day forward could breathe actual fire.

Nor were the rest of the Area 666-ers altogether immune from the lake’s infernal effects over the years. Local oracles and hedge-warlocks emerged to ply their own trades. The moonshine business adapted readily to the addition of supercharged hellshine, thanks to a secret network of communication and commerce between those on both sides of the wall.

Area 666’s stint in the spotlight didn’t last, though. Interest dwindled. Tourism gradually waned. Shops closed. More people drifted away. The townlet took on a more abandoned, deserted-seeming air.

Which wasn’t to say it was abandoned or deserted, though. There were plenty of hold-outs and die-hards for whom staying was a matter of stubborn, tenacious, bull-headed pride.

Plus a chosen select few, entrusted with keeping a certain long-held secret . . .

***

Ritchie Wilkins had been known as Spot long’s he could remember.

First off, for the freckles. Th’ rest of his brothers and sisters comed out normal, brownettes like Ma or dark-haired like Pa. Then, there comes Ritchie, ginger-headed misfit that he was. Just his fuckin’ luck. Led to no end of arguments too. No end of accusations and denials, no end of shouts and backhands and thrown dishware . . . or, no end until there was an end, when Pa up and took off, never to be seen again.

Secondly, the summer he was eight years old, he’d got the chicken pox so bad he couldn’t leave the house for weeks. Lordy, how it’d itched him, despite the calamine with which Gran slathered him top to toe. They’d done duct-taped kitchen mitts on to prevent him from scratching.

As if those weren’t enough, adolescent acne plagued him from age twelve until . . . shit, until even now. Like a pepperoni pizza, he’d been, middle school a misery, high school no better for the few months he bothered before dropping out. Left him pock-marked as the cratered face of the moon.

Might think he’d sunburn something fierce, but no, he only freckled more. For a while, he’d hoped they’d run together into the approximation of a tan, but just his fuckin’ luck on that score too.

Made for a lot of bullying, it had. A lot of name-calling, a lot of being beat-up. Once Pa was gone, his brothers gladly took over—hell, his sisters, if anything, were worse! And his cousins, and his schoolmates.

As for girls? He’d tried to kiss Maybelle Bodean in kindee-garden, and she told him he was the ugliest boy ever and then she’d pushed him down and threw her milk-carton at him. Which, all in all, pert’-much summed up his dating experience. Got so after a while, he no longer bothered trying. Poison, girls were. Pretty, deadly poison.

He did enjoy it, though, when they sharp-tongue cut those other fellas down to size or slutted around behind their backs, cheating and cucking, driving them to drinking and destruction. Or when the fellas they liked did them wrong, smacking them around, knocking them up, walking out on them, fucking their best friends.

Landing a part-time pittance job for that skinflint bastard Crawdy gave him ample opportunity to listen in on the broken-hearted woes or bitter anger of jilted, drunken fools. It put him front-and-center for brawls and barfights, not to mention Hock-Parties. He’d seen snooty college boys get their asses kicked in the parking lot, their snooty college girlfriends dragged ‘round back for another kind of fun. He’d seen a guy stabbed right through the eyeball with a pocketknife one time.

And he’d loved every minute of it. Seeing them suffer. Hearing them beg and plead and cry. Gave him a cozy down-deep glow of satisfaction nothing else could match, though he knew he’d never have the nerve to do anything like that himself.

It’d long been his most secret dream to see someone outright being killed. He kept a mental list of those he’d most delight in witnessing their pain and humiliation.

Then, into the roadhouse that fateful AllHell’s evening had walked Favius, and all Spot’s dreams came true.

Now, here again was Favius, bigger and badder than ever, just as he’d promised.

“Hail, Satan, sir, it’s glorious t’ see you! Welcome back! That was some goddamn show, all right! And the walls . . . the aurorawhatsis . . . and that speech! Holy popeballs, that speech! Oh, and, uh, congratulations on the . . . uh . . . lady.”

“An unexpected but far from unwelcome bonus,” Favius said. “You seem to have managed capably during my ‘captivity’ and absence.”

Spot nodded so vigorously his neck cricked. “Got your messages, did ever’thing like you wanted. People’ve been real cooperative, knowing as I work for you. Gathered up a ton of info. Funny, though; craziest shit’s been happening just today. You hear we have an angel on the loose?”

***

Heck must’ve been doin’ more poorly than she’d thought; not only was he lettin’ her drive, he was hardly gripin’ ‘bout it at all, even when she stalled out once’t and had t’ grind the engine like gravel under a millstone.

Then again, he did have his plate full gripin’ ‘bout other stuff, so Lorlinda decided not to take it too worrisome, not yet.

“Lose his last damn marble, that’s how he’ll take it,” she said, in reply to Heck’s question about Zeke. “You know he ain’t been right in the head since’t.” She spared a glance at her sweetie-pie in his pod, which she’d wedged into a nook on the dashboard. “Toldya ‘bout that, din’t I?” she asked him. “How the gen’rul bent Heck’s big brother Zeke over th’ pool table there t’ Crawdy’s an’—”

“What’d you go an’ tell him that for?” Heck interrupted. “Lucifer wept, Lorlinda! Whole bless’d world don’t need t’ know!”

“We was at his place deliverin’ his groceries! Had t’ give him the context!”

“Context? An’ then y’ diddled him up yer—”

“Which weren’t none o’ yer concern, but there y’ were, watchin’!”

Heck sagged in his seat. “Mebbe been better if’n Curtis’d killed me,” he grumbled. “Least then we wouldn’t be havin’ this conversation.”

“An’ you’d be re-sub-carnated inta who-knows-what, an’ I’se’d hafta tell yer momma.” She huffed. “Anyways, nevermind. So Zeke loses his last marble, so what? Don’t explain why we’se way the fuck out here. Oughtn’t we be headed for his place?”

“Fuck, no!”

“He might off’s himself,” Lorlinda said, hoisting a fist beside her head in a hangman’s gesture and sticking out her tongue, making a glaak noise.

“We sh’d be s’ lucky.”

“Pope’s sake!” She stamped on the brakes, throwing them both forward—she’d neglected the seatbelts this time. “We ain’t budgin’ another fuckin’ inch ‘til you tells me what’s the problem!”

“Tryin’ t’ kill me y’self now?” Heck groaned, levering his way painfully back into his seat.

“Don’t think I ain’t tempted. Now, talk!”

He sighed. “You ain’t been in there t’ visit with him as much as I have. You ain’t heard him go on about it, how if’n he ever sees the gen’rul again, there’s gon’ be Hell t’ pay, how he means t’ have his ree-venge. Now it’s happenin’, now he’s back, Zeke’s gon’ hatch some halfwit ‘sassination plot or somethin’!”

“Oh,” said Lorlinda, exchanging another look with her podded sugar-bun. His miniature expression matched her own. “Oh shit, that wouln’t be good; they’d oh-bliterate him. I’se mean, ferget re-sub-carnatin’, there won’t be nothin’ left!”

“And,” Heck said, sounding like a patient schoolteacher, “he’ll ‘xpect me t’ help.”

“What? Why? No!”

“I’m his brother! You know how it is!”

“Well yeah, but . . . ”

“Which I’d be obligated t’ do, so then the both of us’d be oh-bliterated. ‘Sides, whatcha think’ll happen t’ the rest of Zeke’s kin after that anyways? Gen’rul seems just th’ type t’ make a ‘xample.”

“Oh shit,” Lorlinda said again. “Well, ain’t we oughta warn ‘em, then? Our mommas? Pap-Pap? Cousin Maybelle? The lil’uns? All th’ famb’ly?”

“We ain’t got time. Our only chance is t’ get the fuck outta here before th’ dust settles whilst they’se still gettin’ organized.”

“You mean we’se runnin’?”

He grimaced, pained. “I know. I know. But it’s just you an’ me now, Lorlie.”

The nickname, which he hadn’t used since they were kids, rocked her. “But . . . but, Heck . . . ”

“Our only chance,” he repeated. “You an’ me.”

“An’ him,” she said, nodding toward the pod. “What ‘bout him? We takes him outta here—which you still ain’t tol’ me how!—what happens t’ him then?”

“Mebbe it’ll break the spell, let him loose t’ go on t’ . . . Heaven . . . or whatever.”

“Or he’ll be oh-bliterated.”

“I dunno! I ain’t no warlock! Lorlinda, we gots t’ try.”

“How?” She thumped the steering wheel, waved at the dome.

“Just drive,” he said. “We’ll take the tunnel.”

***

Warlock.

The term gets tossed around a lot, but, in the immortal words of Jack Skellington, what does it MEAN?

In mortal words, in the mortal world, it’s usually taken to mean a male witch or a man who practices witchcraft, because archaic sexism and witches are girls and girls have cooties, or some shit along those lines. It might also be defined as a synonym for wizard or sorcerer, though “warlock,” like “witch,” tends to carry darker connotations. As if bargains with sinister forces were involved, as opposed to just the study and use of magic.

Not as if most mortals would really know, or care. Throughout human history, there’ve been comparatively few true warlocks among the population. Many more occultists, of course, who are the scholarly philosophers of the subject, kind of like the difference between theoretical and applied physics, while, say, a wizard might be more the equivalent of an IT guy.

Maybe. Again, not as if most mortals would really know or care. Still, pedants gotta pedant, and the quibbling debate about definitions could—and probably did—fill entire tomes, or textbooks at musty Miskatonic U (go, ‘pods!).

Now, in the eternal realms, it’s another story. The thaumaturgical centers of higher, or lower, learning in, say, the Mephistopolis, tend to be more strict. Very picky about who gets to just go around claiming to be a warlock. They’re professionals down there in Hell, damn it . . . so to speak. They have licenses and stuff! It’s their version of science and technology. The authorities can get pretty viciously tetchy about would-be warlocks who haven’t paid their diabolical dues.

Up topside, on God’s green Earth, the lines are blurrier. Closer to, say, those between Michelin-star celebrity top chefs and home cooks. Or even, and this is by far the majority of would-be magic dabblers, those ding-dongs they dredge up for each successive season of Worst Cooks in America. Have to wonder how they’ve survived this long; would barely trust them with a can opener, let alone a knife or open flame.

Some schools of earthly thought have it that magical ability, be it mysticism or sorcery or whatever, requires an innate talent and often runs in families. Others claim it can be learned, or blundered into accidentally by any idiot chanting Latin at midnight on Halloween.

Then there’s the whole aspect involving linked objects or places: the Ouija boards, the Tarot cards, crystal balls, creepy dolls, haunted houses, graveyards, ancient temples, ominous circles of standing stones . . .

It’s a whole big complicated age-old argument, likely never to be settled. The main takeaway, as far as the denizens of the Lake Misquamicus area, was just . . . well, hey, after AllHell, some people figured out they could do magic.

And was that so strange? In the greater scheme of things, when other people were sprouting extra body parts or turning into bestial demonic hybrids or surviving as sentient severed heads? Another weirdness to get used to, that was all.

One of the effects of the Spatial Merge, along with physical adaptations and acclimations, was a kind of general cultural osmosis, an intuitive and instinctive understanding of aspects of their altered reality. The new normal.

Shit happens. Roll with it.

So, shit happened, they rolled with it. Various folks got into the DIY warlockery, figuring out how to run generators on agonicity instead of gas or electricity, for example, or how to work protective wards and other spells. A nice elderly couple over on the eastern shore, who used to make rustic dolls to sell at craft fairs, started making homunculi and simulacra instead, which a certain local horror writer with a penchant for indie filmmaking put to messy use. A little boy converted his junior scientist kits into fiendish torture devices. There were home-brew alchemists, amateur oracles, and bush-league spellchuckers all around the lake.

Real warlocks, though? Trueborn, full-blooded, seriously powerful thaumaturges?

Nope.

Until one plane-crash survivor found out his heritage the hard way.

***

Favius paced, deep in thought, troubled for the first time since his return.

An angel?

An angel, here? And he’d had no idea? Nary a glimmer, nary an inkling?

He’d sensed it when the Greater Relic, skull of Duke Azbunael, had been destroyed. Originally cast into the Gulf of Cagliostro by the demon lord’s usurping spawn—as was only right and proper—it had then been drawn into the Reservoir and made the transference, along with considerable other flotsam, jetsam, flora, fauna, and detritus . . . including Favius himself.

When it had washed ashore by the campground then called Bible Creek, a clan of inbreds already well on their way to deformity and cultish cannibalism hauled it out, set it up upon a pole, and began making offerings. Again, as was only right and proper. Thus invoking the Relic’s power, establishing it as one of the six anchor points to hold and stabilize the Spatial Merge.

Then, a bold but foolish young God-kissing believer had lobbed a grenade into the skull’s eye socket and blown it to bony bits.

Favius found himself of two minds about that. Yes, it was irksome and disturbing to have an anchor point eliminated on the very cusp of his claiming this dominion . . . but, as he’d since been informed, Azbunael—by way of possessing another God-kisser—had been about to have his way with virginal June. Which would not have done, not at all. Such an act might have made Azbunael stronger, strong enough to subcarnate entire and anew, posing a rival to Favius’s claim.

He paced, the Golem now dubbed Hulk following him. Juggernaut had been dispatched to guard his queen, the Ameri-Golem stayed sentry by the monument pole on the beach, and Thing provided slow but dutiful labor about the encampment as Favius’s orders—promptly relayed by Spot—were carried out.

Those of the crowd not commanded to various tasks were dispersing, the celebratory carnal carnage now at an end. They would, he knew, spread word of this day’s events to any of his subjects who’d not been in attendance or witnessed the triumphant broadcast. Some might try to flee, for which they could not be faulted, but the perimeter guards would see to them if needed. The Wall and all six Gates stood firm, fortified and remade. No living or unliving being would pass through, in or out, unless he willed it.

Eventful as the past hours had been, much more yet remained to be done. The bulk of his work was just beginning. He had infrastructure to see put in place, law and authority to establish, taxation, justice, commerce . . . the myriad minute matters and machinations of a functioning society. The hard part, in other words. The boring, tedious business of governing and rule. For which he, as a loyal soldier, had never aspired or prepared.

It wouldn’t all be slaughter, sex, and sacrifice. The cross he had to bear, heavy the head that wears the crown, and so on. But he would endure his burdens and tribulations gladly in the service of Hell.

His gaze fell upon the “motor home,” and he allowed himself a smile. Of course, there also would be perks . . . pleasurable perks indeed . . .

Unless divine intervention got in his way.

Spot’s report was haphazard at best, cobbled together from hearsay and gossip and the riddlings of omen-readers. No first-hand accounts as of yet, though there was also a telling piece of circumstantial evidence.

Favius had been aware, peripherally, of the satyric minor demon going by the name of Zilch. Deeming him no immediate threat, he’d permitted Zilch to carry on his vineyard antics. Earlier today, however, in an incident unconnected to the destruction of Azbunael’s skull, Zilch had been violently discorporated.

An act that shouldn’t have been humanly possible.

Inhumanly, on the other hand . . . an angel, say, or a powerful trueborn warlock?

Yet, he could sense no such essence, of either kind, within his borders.

***

“Tunnel?” Lorlinda said. “I ain’t never heared ‘bout no tunnel!”

“Well yeah, not much point, is there, havin’ a fuckin’ secret tunnel if’n ever’body hears ‘bout it!”

“How come you knows, then?”

“Made it my damn job t’know that sort o’ thing, don’t I?”

“How long you knowed?”

“Shee-it, since I been, what, nine or ten? Whenever t’was Uncle Jeb started takin’ me along on his ‘shine runs.”

She paused, brow furrowing and nose wrinkling adorably as she puzzled out the math. Even in his current state of more anxious distraction than ever, Andy couldn’t help but marvel yet again at just how gorgeous she was. Having the pod wedged into a dashboard nook, facing her as she drove, gave him a pretty spectacular view. Spectacular enough to almost take his mind off how totally screwed—and not in the good way—he might be.

Almost, but not quite.

While he still didn’t understand most of what they’d told him about spirits and sub-carnation and the way things worked in this corner pocket of Hell, and while his wits had not been anywhere near their best after the day he’d had, he’d picked up enough of the gist to get a reasonable picture.

Whatever force the Catch had used to trap and hold his disembodied soul, it wasn’t anything that followed the natural laws of the world as he knew it. They were deep into extra-dimensional magic crazy-pants country, the jokers wild and regular rules no longer applying. Shit could happen here that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

So, then, what would happen when shit from here did go someplace else? Out of the demon-zone? Was it like wi-fi? No bars, no network, no connections found? If his pod got taken beyond range, what would happen to it? To him?

Oh-bliterated, they had theorized.

Just . . . click, off like a lightbulb? Poof and gone? Shredded into soul-spaghetti the way matter was supposed to at a black hole event horizon, if he was remembering his Intro to Astrophysics course right? He’d been stoned for most of it, wasn’t sure how he’d ended up taking it in the first place.

Would it hurt?

Okay, there was one question he knew the answer to. Fuck yes, it would hurt! Everything here did! As if everything here was designed to hurt and maim and mutilate!

“You mean, since befores AllHell?” Lorlinda, his goddess, had finally finished her calculations. “Before the wall an’ that?”

“Yeah. Been there ages. Prohibition, Civil War . . . y’know, unnergroun’ railroad . . . prolly far back as them conk-eesta-doors.”

“And when was ya gonna tell me?”

“Wasn’t.”

“Why you dirty no-good son-of-a-fuck.”

“Hey! You din’t need t’ know!”

“Who all else knew, then?”

“Hardly anybody,” Heck said. “This side, anyways. Uncle Jeb, some of th’ other ol’-timers. When AllHell hit, an’ the guv’mint came in balls-first with their wall an’ quarantine, we figg’red as t’ hide it an’ keep quiet in case we’s needed a ‘scape route later. Turned out, had other uses too. I may have me a decent workin’ relationship with most them gate guards—or, did, ‘til this fresh pile o’ cherub-shit—but some of what I brung in or took’d out wouldn’ta made the okay by oh-ficial channels.”

“And they ain’t found it?”

Heck shook his head. “Got Miz Delilah t’ ward it up real good. Would take some serious oracle-ing t’ unravel her spell.”

“Miz De-li-lah? What used t’ be our schoolteacher? Y’ mean, she knows?”

“Now, Lorlie, don’t get all—”

“Who else?”

“Hardly anybody, like I said.”

“On this side anyways . . . what ‘bout t’other end? Where’s it come out at? Where we goin’?”

“‘Bandoned townlet by the billboard, what they was callin’ Area 666.”

“I thought ain’t even nothin’ out there anymore, all moved on ‘cept the fireworks place.”

“Well . . . ‘member Dan an’ Brad we went t’ school with?”

“Oh, no. No, no. Don’t you dare be tellin’ me them two fuckleheads is in on this!”

***

One thing for sure, Trevor knew . . . if he was going to stick around this place, he’d need to acquire some proper transportation.

He’d regained consciousness to find the entire Riggers family looming over him, which was far from a pretty sight in anyone’s book. For a moment, it brought his heart lurching to his throat in a bolt of panic eclipsing the pain in his squeezed balls.

But even Lester made no hostile moves. Instead, it was all fawning and fussing and servile solicitation. Helping him up, dusting him off, asking if he was okay, could they get him anything.

Now, this was more like the world as he knew it, as it should be. His and Chelsea’s exchanges with Favius and accompanying elevation of status had not gone unnoticed. Word spread quickly. Instead of newbie outsiders with victimhood written all over them, they’d been restored to their rightful ranks in the social hierarchy.

Just as he’d been hoping. As soon as Favius singled out Chelsea, talking about rewards and favors, Trevor knew it was their best chance to lock in and make the most of what they had to work with. Play to their strengths, as it were.

Well, sort of. Chels, used to being the center of attention, life of the party, and belle of the ball, was probably pissed as hell over landing a supporting role. But she’d have to suck it up. He knew she was smart enough, if only she could keep her ego from getting in the way.

As for him, okay, fine, he could work with this. Especially if it came with benefits, which he anticipated it would.

And which, judging by the way the Riggerses were acting, it already did. Their puffed-up attitude of importance toward the other locals confirmed it. They were the Carmichaels’ caretakers and housekeepers, after all. They’d known the First Senator and the Queen’s Handmaid since long before tonight.

Yeah, he could definitely work with this.

“I’d like to go back to the house,” he informed them, sinking his teeth to the gumline in the role. “Arrange for someone to give me a lift, won’t you? I’ll be requiring my own vehicle at some point too, and, of course, you’ll need to set up an agonicity generator and all that, but, in due time.”

They bowed and scraped and groveled and assured him everything would be done to his bidding. Seeing Lester so cowed, after their initial meeting, only buoyed Trevor’s spirits further. The hyuk-hyuk oaf would be down on his grimy knees, praying to Satan or whoever for Trev to let grudges slide.

He might. He might not. In the meantime, keeping an open-ended threat dangling over Lester gave him the upper hand. In a way, that uncertainty was better. More powerful.

Work with this? Hell . . . he could enjoy this . . . certainly beat having Mom and Dad pulling the strings, treating him like some spoiled child or trust-fund marionette. He and Chels could position themselves pretty well, as long as she didn’t get bitchy and fuck it all up.

Ronny Riggers, the younger brother Trev and some of his friends had once thrown off the end of the Carmichael dock into the lake, came scuttling back, moving with decent speed despite his rotund bod, missing foot, and the living heads of his parents cradled in the crooks of his elbows. Their neck-stumps had been grafted into his flabby flesh, which was way more family attachment than Trev cared to contemplate.

Nor did his recently-realized amputation fetish extend to the bare, filthy stump upon which Ronny hobbled.

Smooth, rounded nubs of healed-over skin? Moist raw flesh seeping tiny dewdrops of red like a cut of fresh prime meat in a butcher’s display case? Knotted black surgical stitches? Waxy, blister-bubbled cauterization scars?

Sexy.

That, there, at the end of Ronny’s leg? That gnarled mass of yellow-brown callus? Looking more like a malformed hoof capping an elephant’s foot?

Yeah, no. That was just nasty.

***

“Well, shitballs,” Spot said with evident frustration. “I’se swear Heck Bodean was here, seen’d him over t’ Crawdy’s whens th’ Hock Party was gettin’ ready, but bless m’ butt if’n I can find him now.”

“Who is this?” Favius inquired.

“Runs the ‘shine, he does, and the mail. Makes trips around t’ the checkpoints, got hisself a whole network set up for trade an’ infomayshun. He’s a right dickhead an’ for sure, Heck is; I ain’t never liked him, an’ most o’ them Bodeans I wouln’t trust with someone else’s used shit, but anybody knows more’n me about what goes on around here, it’d be Heck. Y’oughts t’ talk with him, Gen’rul Sir.”

Spot had been, amid his other duties, facilitating brief introductory meetings between Favius and those of the more notable local personages who’d been in attendance—property owners, producers of goods, providers of various services, community leaders. This afforded them the opportunity to swear their fealty, while Favius, for his part, assured them the transitions of power should not prove too disruptive.

Granted, their ideas and his of what constituted “too disruptive” may have differed by a wide, blood-swathed margin, but . . .

“Bodean.” Favius repeated. “You’ve often mentioned the name.”

“Aw, sure, they’se all over. In fact,” his speckled visage brightened wickedly at the memory, “was because of a Bodean how we’se met. Zeke Bodean, that day it was you first showed up. Cracked smart about skirts and faggotry, ol’ Zeke, and you—”

“Ah. Yes. I recall. This ‘Heck,’ you say, is his kinsman?”

“Yeah. His brother. Been Heck lookin’ after Zeke ever since’t, takin’ him groceries an’ such on account of how Zeke don’t go out no more.”

“He lives, does he?”

Spot shifted. “Din’t I never mention that? He were some messed up, all right, but I heard they got his, uh, prolasp, poked back in, more or less. Heard too he can’t do ‘cept liquids an’ soft food, puddin’s an’ like, else he might blow his whole guts out his ass.”

“Is he liable to pose a concern?”

“Who, Zeke? Heaven’s bells, no; can barely walk but like a granny, spends his days holed up in some wreck of a trailer off in the fuck-end of nowheres.”

“Hmm.” Favius, seated at the moment in a broad-backed chair, thunked the knuckles of his fists together, idly relishing the protesting scowls of the faces whose lips had been sliced and grafted to fit around his fingers like gloves.

“I’m sure it ain’t nothin’ t’ worry ‘bout,” Spot said, despite sweating in a most greasy and odoriferous fashion. “Not Zeke, an’ not Heck neither. Aside from the groceries an’ stuff, ain’t like they’s close.”

“We shall see.”

“If I’d’a knowed you was interested—”

“Enough. When he turns up, have him brought to me. As well as any of the others of their clan.”

“You gots it.”

“Who else is there you’d recommend I meet?”

“Nobody what’s here right now. The writer fella, maybe . . . I mean, he ain’t very active in the community, like; keeps t’ hisself most th’ time but for when he’s makin’ his movies. Still, I guess Outside, he’s kinda got a name and reperrtayshun. Think I sent you a couple his books when’s you was ‘captive.’” He did the little hand gestures Favius understood to indicate a degree of sarcasm.

“You did, yes.” He well remembered the books, stories of deranged gore-laden smut-wallowing depravity that could only have been brought into words by someone inspired by the deepest and most sordid muses of Hell. “A true master artisan. I look forward to making his acquaintance. But, for now, extend cordial greetings and let him carry on with his great works.”

“Awright. Now, lemme think . . . there’s the lady with the kids, has the lakehouse what used t’ be a hippie commune back in the seventies. Don’t see her much neither, but longtime famb’ly ties. Had orgies an’ say-ances an’ devil-worship out there too, I heard.”

***

“Is it fireworks?” Sherri asked, squishing her nose to the window.

“It’s magic,” Billy said. “Big magic.”

It sure was. Biggest magic he’d ever seen, or felt, since Mom brought them here all those years ago, wanting a divorce because Dad was a stupid jerkface with their babysitter.

That had been a bad day already, a sad day, a scary and confusing day . . . then, WHOOMP, the lake turned to stinky poopblood full of monsters, and the day got badder and sadder and scarier and more confusing.

A big magic day, yes, but back then, Billy hadn’t known anything about magic except the tricks he saw on TV. Only, what happened to the lake had been no trick. It was no birthday party magician making fake flowers pop out of a wand or being all “Is this your card?” and then doing balloon animals until it was time for cake.

Now, it was different. Now, he was different. While physically, his only real change was his eyes turning gold with weird-shaped pupils instead of being ordinary brown, now he could feel things. He could do things. Magic things.

Today had started off pretty regular. Breakfast, chores, performing agonicity experiments on his little sister, wondering if Mom would let him build a treehouse fort in the backyard—he kept asking, and she kept saying he was too young, but whose fault was that? She was the one who wouldn’t let them get any older! Kept him and Sherri stuck as kids, afraid her babies would grow up and move away and she’d be all alone.

Later, right when they were about to have lunch, he’d started feeling something. A pressure, like before a thunderstorm, in his head and chest. A tingling, tiny sparks, as if he’d been scuffing his shoes on the carpet building up to touch the doorknob—

Or zap Sherri on the ear; she hated that!

—but not quite the same. It was omens, portents. Something in the air. Something coming. Something changing. Something happening. A darkly building anticipation, excitement mixed with fear. The way it used to be on Christmas Eve when he’d toss and turn restless in his bed, wanting-hoping so hard he’d get the latest video game console, dreading the disappointment of it being the wrong one.

He’d thought, maybe, when Mom told them about seeing a plane crash across the lake, that’d been all it was. But the feeling had persisted. Strengthened throughout the day, until Mom herself and even Sherri felt it too.

Over the course of the afternoon, there’d been other things. Gunshots and explosions, which Sherri had also thought were fireworks . . . a sudden sinkhole hollow dropping out from under the magic . . . some strange, clear, high-pitched tone not so much in his ears as behind them, again reminding him of Christmas, of choir girls in white robes, and wanting to run into their midst with Mom’s thinnest sharpest carving knife to slice their throats open one by one and make the singing stop in gurgles as blood ran down their robes . . .

There’d also been an ominous a-challenger-approaches sensation, his magic hackles prickling the way a cat’s did when it spotted another cat prowling its turf . . . or, not another cat . . . larger and stronger and dangerous . . . maybe a tiger.

But those feelings, the choir tone and stalking tiger, had gone away, and Billy was glad.

Then Mom did some divinations of her own, surprising them all with the news that Dad was finally coming to visit. So they got their welcomes ready for him, which kept the whole family occupied until—ecce, novum princeps de inferno, novus rex terrae!—suddenly they had a king.

A king, and big magic. Big big magic. Flooding the sky with color and light and power more than Billy could hardly fathom.

He wanted to go see, though he knew Mom would say no.

But Mom was busy making preparations to lay her eggs . . .

***

Heck hurt far too bless’d much to keep arguin’ with Lorlinda, let alone say anything ‘bout her driving . . . though each time she ground the gears, flooded the engine, or stalled them out, he felt the truck’s pained protest as if another abuse to his own injured body. He din’t like to let on, but that blast of sulfurshot had done a real number on him. If not for the vest, it might’ve blowed his spine out through his ribcage in a shower of bony fragments.

At least she’d left off the harpin’ at him, for now. Had gone into a sulk instead, as if that were somehow the worser punishment. The whole I ain’t speakin’ t’ you no more thing, to which any right-headed fella could hardly be blamed for thinkin’, promise an’ for real?

Sulk aside, she still listened and followed his directions. A time or two, he also caught her slidin’ him a sidelong worried-type glance. Which, accourse, only made him try all the harder not to let on how much angel-fuckin’ pain he was in.

The truck lurched on, the familiar backroads weirdly red-washed by that glow-dome in the sky. One gigantic Catch’s pod, it was, with them and ever’body else caught up in it. Ants in a farm. Fish in a ‘quarium. Fireflies in a mason jar, the way they used to scoop ‘em up as kids. Not so much these days, no. Fireflies these days in these parts be just as likely to melt a hole through the glass.

Seen it happen once’t where a couple of Bodean cousins tried it with some empty ‘shine jars. The residue went up in a whoosh, blue-orange flames belching out. How they’d hollered! Hair ignitin’, skin a bacon-sizzle, their ma caterwaulin’ fit t’ split, their pa grabbin’ ‘em by the ankles an’ wallopin’ ‘em into the dirt.

Ah, well, they’d been funny-lookin’ already in the first place. Din’t matter so much ‘round here anyways. Pesky damn rugrats.

Churchbells, but his thoughts were all over the place. How bad off was he?

“Heck? Heck?!” Someone were shakin’ him, callin’ him.

Bad off enough, apparently, he’d done checked out there for a second. He struggled to a semblance of alertness. “Whuh? ‘M’here. ‘M’fine.”

“Like shit,” Lorlinda said. “You’s a country mile from fine and you knows it.”

“Awright, awright, but Judas fuck, give a man a break, wouldya? Where we at?”

“Where your instructions brung us, only I don’t see no tunnel.”

He squinted out the windshield, through mud-spatters and bug-guts and a gooshy eyeball splat what resembled a runny fried egg peerin’ back in at him. “It’s hid, ain’t it? See that tangle of devil’s thornbriar? Y’gots t’ move it—”

“Fuck that! I’m ‘llergic!”

“Ain’t real,” he explained with a weary sigh of patience. “Dan done it up. Think it’s dried punkin-vines with fake thorns an’ a paintjob. Whole thing’s on a track. Right there where there’s them three all in a cluster? Turn that ‘til it clicks, an’ you can roll it aside.”

She threw him a dubious look but hefted the bat and hopped out, tentatively approaching the forbidding obstacle of poison-green leafy hooks and sharp black barbs. After a careful inspection—plus some pokin’ and proddin’ with the bat’s spikey end—she grasped the three interlocked thorns and turned them like a spoked lock on a bank vault door. An inner mechanism clicked, and just as he’d said, a good-sized portion rolled aside easy as openin’ a closet.

Lorlinda walked it on over as far as it would go, then stood with hands on her hips, surveying a dark culvert revealed in the overgrown hillside. It formed a rough arch, maybe eight feet high and ten wide, with a low-grade downward slope. The clearance wasn’t sufficient for anything too big, and certainly not for two-way traffic, but it would accommodate the truck just fine.

“Well, saints,” she said. “I gots t’ admit, this is some clever after all.”

***

While both Riggers boys had changed quite a bit since the last time Trevor had seen them, the parents—apart from being just a pair of severed heads sprouting like mushrooms from Ronny’s pudgy sides—looked fairly normal, and much as he remembered.

Mr. Riggers still had the round, ruddy face and thick white hair and muttonchops of an elderly Civil War colonel. His wife was the same twinkle-eyed, apple-cheeked grandmotherly sort she’d always been. They were eager to please and effusive. Hugely grateful to the Carmichael family for continuing to engage their services even under these peculiar circumstances. Overwhelmingly honored to continue, to maintain and look after the lakehouse, to see to anything Trevor might require. In fact, if he so wished it, they’d cancel all their other obligations to their various clients and devote themselves full-time to his employ.

He’d told them he didn’t think it’d be necessary to that extent; he’d hardly want to start off his stay here by pissing off the neighbors and depriving them of the help they relied on. But he made sure to stress how much he appreciated the offer, as well as everything they’d already been doing. They ate it up, lapped it up like dogs, gushing over how glad they were to have him and his sister home again, how nice it’d be to have a better class of people around, how proud they were to work for the new Senator.

“Lester will be by first thing t’morrow,” Mr. Riggers said. “Get you all set up proper with a gennie, take care of anything as needs sprucin’ up.”

“I gots a team of girls who go ‘round doing the cleaning,” Mrs. Riggers chimed in. “Have them there by noontime, give the place a right good top-t’-bottom. You just makes me a list, Mr. Carmichael, and I’ll’s do what I can t’ stock the pantry an’ household supplies.”

Mr. Riggers took back over. “As for a set of wheels, we’re makin’ some inquiries, should have news for you soon. Though, I reckon, what with all these military transports come in with the convoy and so many of their crew out th’ picture, a word with King General Favius hisself might not be such a bad idear.”

“Nice call,” Trevor said, thinking any of those would sure be preferable to a hillbillymobile or hodgepodge frankentruck like the one they’d hitched a ride in. Provided, of course, suitable Gamera-deterrents could be arranged; he didn’t want to see the SUV’s fate repeated, especially if he was in the vehicle at the time.

The old man preened smugly at the compliment. Ronny, who’d been puffing from unaccustomed exertion too much to do more than stand there, gave his pa a supportive jostle, like a weird conjoined equivalent to a clap on the back.

“Speaking of the house,” Trevor added, “I would like to sit down with you some time and talk about it.”

Mrs. Riggers’ eyes widened in worry. “Somethin’ not to your satisfaction?”

“No, no. More about . . . well . . . its . . . ” He fumbled for a word. “Its nature.”

“Ahhh,” Mr. Riggers bobbed his head wisely. “Yeah, place ain’t quite as it was, but I doubt it’ll give you much grief, once’t it accepts you as its rightful lord an’ master. Still and all, sure we will, can have Ronny bring us over t’morrow when the girls come t’ do the cleaning.”

“Wouldn’t hurt none t’ let them know I’se got my eyes on ‘em, anyhow,” Mrs. Riggers said. “Keep ‘em honest, stop any them trampy hell-sluts gettin’ up t’ trouble.”

“Trampy hell-sluts?” Trev repeated, eyebrows raising.

Mr. Riggers gave him a man-to-man wink. “Well, y’know how it is with some sweet, young, hungry things.”

“Backwoods broodren an’ tourist trash,” his wife tutted. “Wanna-be succubusses, cut-rate lamias at best. But don’t you fret, Mr. Carmichael. I’ll ride herd on ‘em real good.”

“Oh, no need to trouble yourself,” Trevor said, waxing magnanimous. “I’m sure I can handle it.”

***

Favius may have sensed no angelic presence within his borders, nor powerful enemy warlock, but that did not mean relaxing his guard.

Tempting though it was to dismiss such talk as mere rumor, he knew better than to allow himself to become complacent. Complacency was its own form of hubris, and hubris had led to the downfall of greater lords than he.

For the nonce, however, the situation seemed under control. His queen rested, well-guarded and well-attended. His orders were being carried out, his rule and dominion established.

He returned to the site on the lakeshore, the scene of his triumph. Already, it far less resembled a battlefield or slaughtering yard . . . more an outdoor gallery of abattoir art, a museum of mutilation and mayhem. The corpses had been gathered, some parts taken for trophies and put on gory display—intestines strung like bunting, severed hands nailed to walls in starburst designs, freshly-flensed femurs clacking in clusters of bony windchimes, decorative arrangements of genitals and tongues. Many of the heads from which he’d personally sliced the faces had subsequently been detached from their bodies and placed, still living and mouthing voiceless screams of agony through their peeled red rawness, on posts or as hood ornaments upon the various military vehicles.

The bulk of any remaining meat and organs from the massacre would be on the way to the butchery, of course. And, ultimately, the mess tent, of course. Newly-appointed quartermasters had the task of inventorying weaponry, uniforms, and gear. Those of the media who’d survived went on documenting for posterity.

Several children, and what passed for children, ran about with eyeballs on long optic-nerve strands, twirling them, hitting one another with them in wobbly wet smacks. Others scoured the grounds for teeth, brass shell casings, and similar small bits of debris, bringing their finds to a long-fingered sallow man already hard at work on an intricate mosaic commemorating the events of the day.

Any stray souls had likewise been collected, these brought to three crones for bottling in wax-sealed vials. They, called the Wyrds, had been among the first to throw themselves at Favius’s feet, the old beldames hailing him, swearing their fealty, rolling in the mud and blood, tearing at their straggles of hair and rending their garments to such an extent even Favius felt almost uncomfortable.

Still, they were, according to Spot, gifted oracles. Favius made mental note to summon them later for further discussion. Perhaps they’d shed light on this talk of angels and warlocks. Or the whereabouts and intentions of this Bodean Spot had mentioned.

His course, with Hulk plodding along unfailingly in his wake, brought him to the crumpled wreckage of the church-marked van from which June had emerged. Although less than fully familiar with the correct terminology, he believed the word “totaled” was applicable here.

An officer supervised as quartermasters scavenged through it, sorting supplies from what appeared to be personal belongings. Those lattermost, as well as anything that had been in the possession of its occupants, he’d ask June to go over.

On that note, come to think of it . . .

He turned to regard the van’s other survivors. Incredibly, the young God-soldier who’d destroyed Azbunael’s skull yet clung to life. Tenacious. Or, subject to the infernal influences so prevalent in the air. Not healing, by any means, but not dying either.

“Have him secured,” Favius told an armed guard. “Let no great effort be made to treat him, but let him, for now, be kept alive.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“As for these two . . . ”

What a wretched sight they were! Bruised and disheveled, tear-streaked, snot-bubbled, gagged, manacled to a post, they sat in a sodden reek of their own voided bladders and bowels. Favius estimated their ages at near sixty, the man stocky, the woman plump. Something about them said they were sanctimoniously accustomed to having the upper hand to conflict without consequence, because God.

“Lock them up,” he said. “I’ll have my queen decide their fate.”

***

There she’d been, thinkin’ even if there was a tunnel, it’d be some dank, damp equivalent of an oversized swamp-rat burrow full of seepage and leeches . . .

Instead, Lorlinda was surprised to find it looked almost professional-like, with brickwork and concrete, support beams shorin’ up the arched roof, and a set of son-of-a-bishop train tracks runnin’ down the middle.

To be fair, it still was mighty dank and damp and prone to seepage . . . and old, that was for sure. Old and dingy, them tracks rusted, the mortar ‘tween the bricks discolored, the bricks themselves cracked, the concrete crumbling in places.

Dark too. No lights, no ‘lectricity, just a long narrow throat leading away into pitch blackness. Hollow. Kinda echoey, the occasional distant drip-plop or furtive scuttle reaching her ears. A stale, tepid, steady draft wafted subterranean aromas into her face and made the fine hairs stand up on her bare arms.

Easy to b’lieve it had been around since Prohibition, if not earlier. Whatall had Heck said? Unnerground railroad? Well, and there the very tracks were, though she had a dim school-history recollection they hadn’t meant it literal. Din’t quite seem the right size anyways, or gauge, or whatever it was. Too close t’gether. Mine cart tracks, maybe? She could see that. Or little wagons pulled by mules.

The conk-eesta-doors, now, she wasn’t willing to stretch it quite that far. All searchin’ for gold and the Fountain of Youth and such . . . not way the fuck out here at Lake Misquamicus, not in those days.

That aside, though, here was this secret tunnel, just as Heck had said. Its entrance about a quarter-mile from the Wall, extending who knew how far before surfacing again somewheres on the other side.

Call it half-a-mile or more? Creepin’ along that passageway with only the beams of the truck’s headlamps to go on? Too tight to turn around too; was a one-way trip or tryin’ to back out in reverse, more or less running blind. She’d never considered herself . . . what did they call it? clusterphobic? . . . but, the thought of bein’ down there in the dark, all cooped up and closed in and unable to escape? About gave her the shudders, it did.

“Are there ‘gators?” she asked. “Zomberfied dead folks? Is it haunted? Gonna collapse on us and leave us buried alive ‘tils we suffocate?”

Heck didn’t answer.

Panic clutched her heart like scrawny chickens’ feet. She rushed over to the passenger side of the truck, sure he’d be there dead as shit, and then what would she do?

No, he’d only passed out again. Which weren’t good, she knew that, but weren’t as bad as it could’ve been. His skin had taken on a murky yellowish tinge, and the shallow exhalations of his breath smelled of rotten eggs. Not that Heck’s breath were minty fresh at the best of times . . . still . . .

Sulfur poisonin’. Oh, sure, small doses weren’t no problem; plenty folks used it for seasonin’ and such. Like anything, though, too much could make a body sick. An’ Heck, he’d gotten a blastload of it.

She felt her face scrunch, hot tears welling, and knew she was headed for a full-bore ugly-cry meltdown.

“He needs help,” she wetly hiccupped as she plunked her butt into the driver’s seat. “Medical help, magical help, some kind of help! He’s gon’ die if’n I don’t do somethin’!”

In his pod, her sugar-bun pantomimed fretful gestures. The sight of him made her feel even worse; talk about being cooped up and closed in! Anybody had a grief about clusterphobia, it’d be him! And her here havin’ shuddery nerves about a damn tunnel?

“You gots t’ get hold of y’self or ain’t none of ya gonna make it through this, Lorlinda Jo.” Sucking in a watery breath, she gripped a pigtail in each fist and gave her own head a stern shake. “C’mon, girl. Nut up or shut up.”

She started the truck and drove them into darkness.

***

Pain. Pain, pain, and more pain. His whole life was pain. The whole world was pain. Encompassing, consuming, everywhere, everything . . . PAIN.

Its agonizing turbulence was a thunderhead of abrasive typhoon winds shot with nerve-sizzling lattices of needling lightning. Just when he’d think it couldn’t get worse, couldn’t possibly in any kind of sane and merciful universe get worse . . . guess what? It got worse.

Then again, as he’d already learned, this was far from any kind of a sane and merciful universe. This was the living nightmare of a sheer Hell on Earth.

Which he had knowingly and deliberately walked right into.

Well, not walked.

Ridden. In a church bus. With a bunch of religious wingnuts whose megachurch he’d infiltrated in the hopes of doing exactly what they had done: rolled in all righteous to confront the forces of evil. How many of them had sincerely been motivated by true faith, Bill hadn’t really cared. What mattered was they’d gotten in, gotten past the checkpoint and through the wall.

That their leader had also seen fit to load a hidden cargo compartment with body armor, riot gear, guns, and grenades hadn’t hurt Bill’s feelings either.

Hurt his feelings. Ha! What he’d give right now for it only to be his feelings being hurt!

His feelings, though, were hurt. Deeply, bitterly. After everything he’d done! Everything he’d risked! To come all this way in hopes of finally finding out the fate of his family, of at the very least having the closure of truth if not—dare he hope, dream, even pray!—an actual reunion . . .

He’d gotten his reunion, all right. But with a twist. A beware-what-you-wish-for twist. A sadistic fuck-you from the universe twist.

Sharon, out at the end of the dock in the sunset, naked and brazen and beautiful despite also being hairless, fine-scaled, and reptilian . . . her cool creme-de-menthe kisses, her forked and flickering tongue, the undulating constriction of her inhuman vagina, the spreading chill of her paralytic venom . . .

And the kids, Billy and little Sherri, still so little, still so young, unaged despite the years that had gone by since Sharon whisked them away to the lakehouse after his stupid affair, but still the kids, his kids, his son and daughter, his children . . .

Torturing him. Laughing as they did it, having fun as if it were just another game. Refusing to obey even his sternest parental commands . . . mimicking him, mocking him . . .

While Sherri applied caustic powders and acidic creams to his face in a hideous parody of those commercials where Daddy gets a pretty-pretty makeover—do you like my work?—and yanked out clump after gray clump of his hair with a pair of pliers . . .

For a moment, he thought she’d use those same pliers to pry off his fingernails, which would have been bad enough, but she heated up a soldering iron she should not have been playing with unsupervised and gave him a molten-metal manicure instead . . .

And Billy, his Billy, his buddy, his boy . . . Billy, whose eyes had gone strange and golden . . . Billy with a tacklebox one of Sharon’s drunken uncles must’ve left behind . . . Billy, brow furrowed in a studious math-problem frown as he, with careful precision, pierced fishhooks into Bill’s body at calculated locations, tugging each to make sure the sharp barbs were firmly set—six to the head of his penis alone, six in a tiny crown-of-thorns corona, six, he’d felt and counted every pinprick (pinprick! ha!), his genitals trying desperately to retract, as much from what was being done to them as who was doing it!—and then wired the hooks with fishing line to part of a KidScience ElectroCircuits kit . . .

“Wonder if we could run that old Atari off him?” Billy had said. “I mean, yeah, the games are, like, dumb ancient, but it’s better than nothing, right?”

. . . before switching it on.

Pain. Turbulent, nerve-sizzling, needling PAIN.

***

Beggars couldn’t be choosers, the saying went, and Trevor supposed, in a sense, it was true enough. Even a newly-anointed Senator sworn in fealty to a demon king would sometimes just have to make do.

A ride was a ride, after all. This once. Under these singular and temporary circumstances.

“Miz Grady’d be right honored t’ give you a lift,” Mr. Riggers had said. “Her place is a mile or so woods-wise from Bighead Rock, so ain’t hardly much out of her way.”

“Neighborly too,” Mrs. Riggers chimed in. “We’s all do our best t’ look after our own ‘round here, and now’s you come home, why, you’re one of us!”

“Well, more’n that,” her husband hastened to add, offering Trevor an ingratiating sort of chummy grin. “You bein’ a Carmichael an’ such.”

“If it won’t be too much of an inconvenience for her,” he’d said, continuing to lay the magnanimity on thick until both senior Riggerses and their son Ronny were just about falling all over themselves to assure him that, no, hardly an inconvenience at all, far from it! Why, if anything, t’was him doing Miz Grady the favor!

So, lacking other options, he’d agreed. What else could he do? Sure wasn’t going to hike halfway around the lake in the dark, Senator or not. The locals might be eager to kiss up and kiss ass, but he had a feeling the wildlife might not be as accommodating.

Speaking of wildlife, ironically enough . . .

Miz Grady, as it happened, was someone he’d noticed earlier over at the roadhouse. She stood a good six-foot-four with an Amazonian brick shithouse build to match. If she wasn’t as overwhelmingly endowed as the writer-guy’s boobtastic companion Jubblies, or as aesthetically endowed as Chelsea, she did have an impressive set of proud and prominent tits.

Six of them. On full display, turgid burgundy nipples and all, because she went topless except for a many-pocketed cargo vest worn unfastened. Broad hips and thunder-thighs filled out a faded pair of workpants tucked into hiking boots so many times mended they were more duct tape than leather.

She was also rather, um, hirsute. Not merely the unshaven armpits and treasure-trail leading to what had to be—Trevor shuddered to imagine—a denser thicket of bush than would be found anywhere in Australia . . . not only the wild masses of shaggy hair she had tied into a sloppy bun updo with a hank of rag torn from some theme-park t-shirt . . . not just the dark dusting of coarse arm-hairs, or eyebrows that would’ve made Groucho Marx jump . . .

Nor was it a matter of wispy mustache and chin whiskers like a scary old-country grandma. No, this was some legit carnival bearded-lady stuff right here! He struggled to keep from gawking and failed fairly miserably.

“Uh . . . ” he said.

His gaze, desperate to recover, followed the cluster of leashes tied to her belt-loops to focus instead on a scuffling tumble of a half-dozen werewolf-looking pups, snarling and yipping and biting each other.

“Miz Grady,” Mr. Riggers said, sounding puffed with importance. “This is Mr. Carmichael—”

“Senator Carmichael!” Mrs. Riggers said.

“—Senator Carmichael, of course. Senator, this is Miz Grady, who’ll run you on home.”

Her grin revealed a display of teeth almost as impressive as her tits and far outnumbering them. The teeth weren’t sharp, not like fangs or anything, but they sure looked strong enough to rend flesh and crack bone. “Meetcha! Real pleasure too! Hope you don’t mind a bit of sheddin’ and smell. Didn’t know I’d be playin’ chauffeur tonight!”

“If it’s too much trouble—” Trev began.

“Aw, naw! Not at all, Mr. Senator sir!” A spate of particularly nasty growls and yelps caught her attention. She gripped the leashes and gave a hard yank. “Play nice, ya mangy little shits! Else I’ll let your pa eat you all up this time!”

She flashed Trev another toothy grin, which he returned. Politely.

Beggars couldn’t be choosers . . .

***

In his pod, Andy fretted.

For himself, sure; he didn’t know what would happen to the magic holding him here when they passed out of signal range, or however it worked. As sucky as his current situation might be, he still was none too eager to lose what teensy scrap of existence he had left.

Maybe that was why places got haunted and shit. Move on, cross over, follow the light, the woo-woo psychics said in the movies and on the paranormal shows, but how the fuck could they know what really was on the “other side”? No wonder ghosts might hesitate.

Besides, if the scene at the lake was any kind of hint, the “other side” didn’t look so great. If, as seemed likely, given the state of the human race, most of them weren’t exactly bound for harps and halos.

So, yeah, he fretted for his own fate, but he also fretted for his backwoods goddess. As the frankentruck crept along the secret tunnel, darkness swallowed it until the only sources of illumination were its crooked headlights and the dashboard display, casting Lorlinda’s anxious features in a pallid wash of green and bluish-white. Despite the inchworm slowness of their speed, she had the steering wheel in more of a death-grip than ever. Her posture was strained and rigid, craning forward trying to see the path ahead. Every now and then, she’d flick a worried glance sideways to where Heck slumped in the passenger seat.

Andy was surprised to find himself even fretting a little bit for Heck, or at least for Heck by proxy, for Lorlinda’s sake. No matter how they bickered and snarked, she did care; he was family, and she’d be devastated if he died.

Meanwhile, here Andy sat, unable to do anything to help, unable to speak words of comfort, able only to do his encouraging pantomime gestures when she turned her worried gaze his way.

She didn’t say much, but their progress was far from silent. The rounded walls amplified and echoed each grumble and rumble of the frankentruck’s engine, each belch and blat and fart from its tailpipe. A herd of flatulent elephants migrating through a subway tunnel would have been stealthier.

“Well,” Lorlinda muttered, “if anybody’s at t’other end, they’se sure gonna know we’s comin’.”

It seemed like forever, engulfed in gloom and apprehension, bracing themselves with tense dread for something awful to lurch or squelch into view. Mutated albino alligators, for instance. Or a mass of man-sized bloated slugs trailing toxic slime. How about tentacles thick as boa constrictors? Seething around the vehicle, pressing puckered lamprey-mouthed suckers to the windows, gnawing at the glass?

Instead, after that interminable forever, Lorlinda said, “Think . . . think I’se seein’ . . . yeah! It widens out up there . . . some sorta chamber . . . looks like metal glintin’ in the headlights . . . not just these here train tracks we been followin’, but . . . buncha them wiggly-sided storage containers, an’ a couple cars, an’ big warehouse-style shelves, an’ all kindsa stuff! I bet that brassy junkheap’s all from ol’-fangled ‘shine-brewer stills, an’ those over there’s gotta be minecarts, an’ . . . Satan pinch my bee-hind if’n that ain’t a gen-u-ine Dixie railcar cannon! Heck weren’t foolin’ ‘bout the hist’ry! Could be there even was conk-eesta-doors down here, once’t ‘pon a time!”

The frankentruck rolled partway into the larger space, which was hardly cavernous but might as well have been after the tunnel’s close confinement. Lorlinda stopped, cut the engine, and plucked Andy’s pod from the dashboard, holding it so he had a murky fish-eye’s lens view of what she’d described.

He’d never heard of a “Dixie railcar cannon,” but the object in question would’ve been right at home in that Will Smith western with the giant mechanical spider, so, okay, fair enough.

“Heck?” She leaned over to shake him. “Heck, we’s here. Well, we’s someplace anyways, but—”

With a loud snap, a blazing eye glared open, pinning them in a harsh and blinding beam.

***

Maybe beggars couldn’t be choosers, but good God Almighty, Trevor was about to make an exception.

It wasn’t so much the bare-titted, six-titted bearded lady who’d offered to give him a lift. It wasn’t even her noisy and squabbling litter of leashed werewolf pups.

The car, though . . .

He’d been, after riding in Heck Bodean’s mongrel truck and seeing the various other cobbled-together junkyard rejects packed into Crawdy’s parking lot, braced for Miz Grady’s set of wheels to be nothing fancy. On that score, he was soon proved right; she led him toward a 1970-something station wagon, absurdly jacked up onto big knobby all-terrain tires with raised suspension to allow for better clearance on the backroads. Mustard-yellow where it wasn’t spattered with mud and dead bugs, it had side-strips of peeling fake-wooden “paneling” and a luggage rack piled with ramshackle furniture precariously held in place by frayed bungee cords.

A duct-taped plastic tarp replaced one window; the windshield sported a network of cracks suggesting a rock or a baseball; both side-view mirrors were long since snapped off at the root. The bedraggled stuffed animal mascot of some Florida sports team was jammed onto the antenna like a victim of Vlad the Impaler. Faded weather-worn bumper stickers expressed sentiments in favor of the Second Amendment and against taxation. The rear rows of seats had been folded down, the cargo compartment occupied by a chain-link kennel/cage thing, into which Miz Grady herded her litter.

All that, Trev might’ve taken in stride.

Then the breeze shifted.

Hope you don’t mind a bit of sheddin’ and smell, she’d said.

Trevor had lost count by now of how many times today he’d been doubled over, trying—sometimes successfully, sometimes less so—not to puke. But here was another, almost taking him to his knees.

After the first experience—arriving at the house, opening the doors of their SUV, and the full force of the lake-stench sending everyone scrambling to the bushes to empty their guts—he’d gradually found himself getting used to it. Yeah, it was blood and shit and rancid filth, fish and rotting meat, but it’d soon more or less faded into the background. When he, Chels, and Kayla hiked to the top of Bighead Rock, he’d barely noticed the stink at all. Same when he’d sat out on the writer’s deck, enjoying a beer and a sandwich. Same again at the lakeshore earlier in the evening, during the ceremony and its gory aftermath.

This, though . . .

“What the fuck?” he wheezed, clapping a hand to his nose in protest and only then remembering his nose had been broken and wasn’t healed yet. Tears sprang to his eyes for both reasons, the pain and this new ungodly, godawful reek.

“Aw, that’ll be the scent-markings,” Miz Grady said, pausing to inhale an appreciative breath. “My fella, their pa? He’s a musk-wolf. Likes to mark his territory. Sprays every tree ‘round our place least once a week to warn off predators. Does the same for the car because it sure do keep Ol’ Hornyshell at bay.”

He had meant to ask about dino-turtle repellent, but . . .

“Hop on in,” she said, slamming the rear door and tromping around to the passenger side to open it for him. “Ain’t as strong once you’re inside.”

Squinting through watery eyes, he calculated again just how far of a walk it would be. In the dark. Through the marshy monster-infested woods. A muffled little gurgle, not quite a sob and not quite a gag, escaped him. He pinched his nose shut, the pain being the lesser of two evils, and clambered into the shotgun seat.

“Sorry ‘bout the mess,” Miz Grady added, chucking a few fistfuls of trash into the back.

Trev only nodded, not trusting himself to speak. She was right; it wasn’t as strong inside, the skunky-funky musk ameliorated somewhat by eau de wet-dog and puppy piddle.

But it was going to be one looooong drive to the lakehouse.

***

Anyone else might have been driven instantly insane, but not her. Not Veronica Adler.

Of course, the argument could be made she’d been insane already. Just, insane in the efficient, high-functioning, effective, sociopathic way that could—particularly in certain positions of power—lead to usefulness and success. Like, say, in business. Or politics. Or, in this case, the military.

Several of those under her command at Checkpoint Bethlehem had been none too sane themselves to begin with either, but then, none of their transformations involved sprouting an extra head as well as wings and talons and all-over plumage.

The wings, yes; plenty of them did get the wings. They remained otherwise human in appearance, their physiques and features basically identical to before, just with the addition of dark-feathered ten-foot spans bursting from their shoulder blades. Their uniforms, however, did not remain the same but altered into sleek and sinister stormtrooper black, complete with glossy boots and shiny buttons and ostentatious epaulets.

Had to admit, they looked pretty fucking sharp. Pretty fucking evil, maybe, but pretty fucking sharp.

While they’d previously had plenty of practice marching in formation and performing drills, the change lent an extra lockstep cohesion to their movements now. In flight—because hell yes they tried it, grasping the concept instinctively and taking to it at once!—they moved in formation together with the precise unison of a flock of birds.

Fucking sharp!

As for Adler herself? One moment, there she’d been, tall and blonde and statuesque and icy . . . and, the next, there she was, a giant two-headed obsidian eagle harpy-woman, bearing no small resemblance to a certain Nazi symbol once tattooed upon her person in a rather intimate locale.

That was what might have driven anyone else insane, especially the two heads. Each with the same knowledge and memories, but each also with its own sentient consciousness, a mind of its own. Each with its own set of keen-visioned eyes capable of looking in different directions at once. Each head able to move independently while somehow cooperatively controlling the shared body.

Anyone else, maybe, but not Veronica Adler. To her, it was as normal and natural as anything in the world. As if she’d been born this way or was always meant to be this way, her previous human body a mere placeholder until her true self could be revealed.

Her troops may indeed have been pretty fucking sharp, but she? She was pretty fucking majestic!

Never mind that she didn’t have arms or hands anymore. Her talons were as dexterous as fingers, not to mention strong enough to puncture sheet steel. Never mind that it didn’t seem possible for ordinary speech to issue from her warbling throats and clacking beaks. It did, somehow. She could issue orders, make herself understood, clear as ever. She could also unleash a doubled screeching cry audible for miles and knock over targets with a pulsating shockwave of sound.

Majestic.

Best of all, like her troops, she possessed the power of flight, and without relying on technology and electronics that went FUBAR in the vicinity of the lake. Checkpoint Bethlehem’s lack of an airstrip or helipad no longer irked her, nor did her often-frustrated desire to install heavy antiaircraft artillery to ward off any aerial invaders.

Just let some idiot in a private plane or news chopper try to enter her airspace now! Like the one that had gone by earlier in the day, gone by and then gone down to crash somewhere in the Hell-zone.

It’d been futile to launch a rescue effort; even if the pilot or passengers had survived the initial impact, they would have been out of luck long before anyone could reach them. An investigation had also been deemed pointless, a waste of time and resources, an unnecessary risk.

Now, though, the rules had changed. The balance of power had shifted, the chain of command twisting in on itself. Nobody could stop her if she wanted a look.

***

The harsh light flooded in so bright Lorlinda thought her whole face might blister off’n her skull. She cried out, raising crossed arms for some sort of shade whilst pawing blindly for the sun visor Heck never had reason to use. When she found it and flipped it down, a cascade of ancient matchbooks, lottery tickets, and nudie pics rained into her lap.

“Get out the truck!” bellow-boomed a voice through a megaphone, half-deafening her into the bargain. “Nice an’ slow! Try anythin’ funny, we’ll blow your ass straight back t’ Hell!”

“Hey, lissen here!” she yelled back. “Dontcha know who we are?”

“That’s Heck Bodean’s ride, but we din’t hear the special honk!”

“Special honk? Nobody told me ‘bout no special crosst-an’-blesst honk!”

There was a pause, during which the megaphone was lowered and she could only dimly make out the mumble of conversation. It was followed by a different voice, un-megaphoned, incredulous.

“Lorlinda? Izzat you?”

“Sheee-it.” She shook her head, opened the door, and stepped out into the floodlight’s beam, raising her hands. “Who else’d it be, the damn Tooth Fairy?”

“It is Lorlinda! Heck with you?”

“Accourse he is!”

“He let you drive?”

“He’s hurt, ya fucklehead! He’s—” Her throat hitched. “He’s in a bad way. We need help, not t’ stand here playin’ Twenny Questions!”

Another pause, another mumbled conversation, and then they swung the floodlight up so’s it pointed at the ceiling and illuminated the chamber at a more tolerable level. She thought she heard a final sidelong “cover us, kid, just in case” before two largish shapes approached and resolved themselves into—as she’d expected even ‘fore they’d spoken up—a duo she hadn’t seen since . . .

“How long has it been?” Lorlinda said. “Y’all done got old!”

“We ain’t not neither!” Dan retorted. “It’s you what hasn’t aged normal-like!”

In high-school, they’d been the big stocky country-boy types, far more interested in drinkin’, smokin’, snappin’ bras, and raisin’ a ruckus than in any sort of book-learnin’. Aside from bein’ some stockier now, some beardier and grayer, more creased ‘round the corners and grizzled at the edges than she recalled, not much else seemed t’ have changed.

“An’ Heck already is a sarcastic enuff pecker ‘bout it,” Brad said, “so don’t you go needin’ t’ start.”

“He weren’t lyin’ ‘bout you, though,” added Dan, sweeping her with a look and a whistle. “All that and Hock-Party champeen? Lord have mercy!” He threw in a wink to let her know he was just joshin’ . . . maybe.

“The two’a you,” she said, shaking her head again. “All this time, you been at t’other end of this damn tunnel? Standin’ guard or what?”

Brad chuffed a laugh. “Not always, but after the shenanigans went on today? Better believe it. No tellin’ who or what might’ve tried comin’ through.” He turned to a third figure, someone tall and skinny and lurking just enough in the shadows Lorlinda couldn’t make him out. “S’ all right. We’s cool.”

“Who is that, anyways?”

“Peterson kid.” He beckoned, and the tall skinny figure emerged. “I ferget his real name, wants t’ be called Blaze.”

“Hi,” said the kid, who must’ve been all of sixteen, giving her an awkward wave.

While Brad and Dan were dressed about as expected, the Peterson kid had on a red and orange jumpsuit of the kind a NASCAR driver might wear, all plastered with flame decals. Bundles of Roman candles were strapped around his gloved forearms, their business ends jutting out like the muzzles of Gatling guns. A quiver of bottle rockets was slung on his back, clusters of cherry bombs and firecrackers hung from his belt, and bandoleers of M-80s crisscrossed his narrow chest. Knee-high boots, a shiny red helmet, and a fer-fuck’s-sake cape completed the ensemble.

“What’n the blue-eyed baby Jesus are you s’posed t’ be?” she blurted.

By way of answer, he exhaled a long jet of scorching-hot fire and grinned. “I’m one of the good guys.”

***

Ecce, novum princeps de inferno, novus rex terrae, as the Wyrds (and many others) had said.

Repeatedly. Perhaps to the point of being tiresome.

Ecce, novum princeps de inferno, novus rex terrae!

Behold, a new prince in Hell, a new king on Earth, or something along those lines. Yeah, yeah, we get it already; and what kind of half-assed excuse for Latin is that supposed to be, anyway?

All in all, though, not a bad start for Favius’s regime. He’d set things in motion, put things in place. He had his queen—oh, and he’d had her, no joke, and was looking forward to having her again and again. He had fortified his realm, appointed a Senator, been apprised of events, and made aware of a few likely minor and insignificant possible concerns.

Such as the matter of Zeke Bodean, who may or may not have been nursing a murderous bitter personal grudge against a certain Hell-centurion who’d bent him over a certain pool table in a certain lakeside roadhouse on a certain memorable AllHell’s day some years ago.

Not that Zeke, by most accounts, would be in any fit state to do much about it, having never fully recovered physically or mentally from the trauma . . . but, he did have kindred, and ties of blood could be compelling. That brother of his, normally a fixture of the community, being absent? What to make of that? Coincidence? Or something more?

Best to be aware. Best to be on guard. Best to take steps if necessary.

Then there were the rumors of an angelic presence and a powerful warlock on the loose, both of which Favius may have been tempted to regard with the skepticism usually reserved for reported UFO sightings. However tempting, though, he would not discount them. He may have sensed no such presences or power currently active within his borders, but that in itself didn’t mean much . . . especially where Heavenly adversarial forces were involved.

Again, best to be aware and on guard. Best to take steps if necessary.

Might there be other problems brewing, other little pockets of dissent? Might, despite his confidence in the encompassing Aurora Diabolicus and the unbreachable Wall, there be some secret weakness to the defenses, some fatal flaw?

Like, say, a hidden tunnel, known only to a few?

Or a disgruntled handyman or reluctant handmaid who could pose their own potential threats?

Or a deeper instability in the five remaining magical anchor points than Favius realized?

There might be. Oh, yes, there very well might be. Foreshadowing is, as they say, a thing.

Then again, misleading distractions are also a thing.

Like, say, for instance, putting some crazy hermit up on a mountaintop with various trials that must be passed in a classic quest-type deal—answer me these questions three, etc.—but then it’s not gotten back to, just left loose-thread hanging until some unforeseen future date.

How obnoxious would that be?

At any rate, for now, the situation is as the situation is.

With full night having fallen over Lake Misquamicus—not that full night means full dark, not anymore, not with a baleful star seething and the aurora’s bloodlight rippling across the sky and pillars of fire and other eldritch shit going on—and the live feed from the broadcast ended . . .

With a young Senator—who was very glad to see the taillights of a musk-reeking station wagon dwindling down the lane—entering something only pretending to look like a lakehouse in preparation of declaring himself its rightful master . . .

With eagle-winged stormtroopers sifting through the burnt wreckage of a Cessna—turning up a whole lot of pharmaceuticals, including painkillers, insulin, and cancer drugs—while their double-headed commanding officer, via her heightened vision, detects the shimmering traces of a physically incarnate angel . . .

With all that, the stage should be set and the pieces in place to see what further developments unfold in the subsequent hours.

PART TWO:

Hours

Six hours ago, he’d been holding hands with an angel.

Now, here he was, about to add breaking and entering to his burgeoning crime-spree repertoire. Which already ncluded drug-smuggling, burglary, and property damage.

Don’t forget MURDER!

Greg flinched as the thought boom-shouted in his head with all the resonance of a courtroom drama.

Did it technically count as murder? Zilch, Greg had on good authority, wasn’t really dead-dead. Would subcarnate, come back in some other form than a shaggy, satyrical, Shatner-talking devil with a thing for infernal black-grape wine.

So, all right, a savvy lawyer might make a decent case on Greg’s behalf.

Yeah? What about those other people?

He flinched again. Sure, they’d been corrupted, tortured, mutilated, insane, and enslaved, but they were still human. Tourists, once. Vacationers. Retirees. Regular guys only looking to enjoy the Sunshine State. Take the kids to the theme parks. Bask in beaches and bikinis. They hadn’t asked to end up toiling in Zilch’s vineyards with barbed wire twisted around their heads.

Nor had they asked for some punk-ass fledgling warlock to bust in and start shit. Upset the applecart, or the grape baskets, as it were.

Well, okay, he hadn’t started it, he’d only been passing through. He and his guardian angel. Not looking for trouble, not bothering anybody, only wanting to get out of the deranged hellscape surrounding an entire lake of festering bloodshit. They’d started it. Jumped him, trapped his angel, hauled them both before Zilch.

Arguably, given how they’d also attacked him with vine-shears, his imaginary savvy lawyer could go for a self-defense plea . . .

Still and all, the basic fact was he’d killed a lot of people. Using, and here was where any reasonable judge would throw the case right the fuck out of court, magic.

Yer a warlock, Greg’ry, Ethriel’s bad Hagrid impression replayed in his mind.

Him, a warlock. Thanks a bunch, Nachtwald ancestry. Or, rather, thanks a bunch, relatives who hadn’t bothered to mention that aspect of their heritage.

To be fair, most of them probably had no idea. His dad and uncles were the basic nuts-and-bolts, meat-and-potatoes practical sort, his aunt drank like a sailor, and his various cousins devoted their time to stereotypical pursuits like pizza, beer, slacking off, and teenage drama. His grandfather on that side had died before Greg was born. Since nobody talked about him much, he’d formed a mental picture of a stern, domineering tyrant they’d all hated.

Looking back, only his grandmother, a Nachtwald by marriage rather than birth, might have been in the know. Eccentric, according to the rest of the family, she’d had a gardening habit best described as “weird”‘ but a real knack for making potpourri, sachets, and soaps. Had she lived longer, she’d have been right at home on Etsy.

When he got his first car, she gave him a silver medallion with a septagonal sigil on one side and the motto Never drive faster than your Guardian Angel can fly on the other. It hung on a string of beads made from mother-of-pearl and petrified wood, polished smooth, not unlike a rosary and perfect for looping over the rearview post.

At the time, he’d accepted the gift to please her, moving it from vehicle to vehicle, but it had become sort of a good luck charm over the years.

A good luck charm, and then, suddenly, a whole lot more.

She must have suspected, seen something of the Nachtwald legacy dormant within him. Must have realized, sooner or later, he’d need a little extra help.

You were right on that one, Grandma.

Greg curled his hand around the medallion, which rested against his chest on its strand of beads. It also had left its eldritch design flash-seared onto his forehead, branding him for all the world to see, but oh well. There were worse problems to have.

Being alone, for instance. He missed having a little extra help here in person, in the flesh.

Or whatever angels were made of.

***

Turgid, throbbing, thrusting. A redblack tumult of sensations crashing over her again and again, pain and passion, passion and pain, the most painful passion and passionate pain.

His rough grunts, her mindless banshee howls. The hot, wet, eager smack of flesh against flesh. The feel of him, filling, sundering, dominating! So huge and hard and thick, surging within her! The faces on his skin squirming under her hands, upon her breasts and belly, along her inner thighs!

“You . . . are . . . mine!” His voice a triumphant growl, his climax erupting but only swelling his length stiffer, his pace increasing in speed and intensity, churning a gushing flood of mingled fluids to drench her nethers.

And yes, his, yes, she was, though she couldn’t say it, could only shriek and wail and claw, wanting more, wanting more, wanting all of it, all of him, everything, this apocalyptic fuck of the ages to go on forever! Let it split her open, tear her apart, turn her inside-out, kill her; she didn’t care! Only the slippery clasping of her cunt on his cock mattered, only the rhythmic slap of his balls on her ass, only the cascading ecstasy of orgasms building and redoubling until . . .

Was she dead?

Had the apocalyptic fuck of the ages killed her?

Drifting in a warm, heavy darkness without sight or sound, June decided, well, she didn’t care if she was, if it had.

Worth it, she thought. Worth every bit of it.

Gradually, the darkness began to recede, as if she were slowly surfacing from a deep thermal vent or emerging from a plushly enveloping cocoon. She became aware of her body—naked, sore, and sticky. Of a soft mattress, a pillow, a sheet or lightweight blanket. Of a space around her, a space that felt like a room, felt like indoors.

She remembered the dais out on the lakeshore, open to the fuming sky. She remembered the crowd, the cameras. Seeing. Watching. Filming.

What she’d done to her mother with the marshmallow fork, and what came—
and came, and came, and came again!

—after.

June ached all over, she ached in places and ways she hadn’t thought it possible to ache. She felt parched, so thirsty. Her throat hurt with a dull, bruised pulsing as if she’d sprained her vocal cords.

Her groggy eyelids struggled to open. When they did, they took in the view of a ceiling in some sort of dimly-lit room.

If it’s a hospital or a psych ward or my own bedroom at home, June thought, . . . if it was only a delusion or dream . . . I’ll kill myself.

Comforted by this resolution—besides, suicides went to Hell, and if that had been a foretaste of Hell, sign her up!—she managed a better look at her surroundings.

Not her own bedroom. Not hospital, psych ward, or anyplace she recognized. It reminded her of an upscale hotel room, stylish but impersonal, anonymous. Big bed. Big flatscreen television over the dresser across from the bed. Big gray clay Golem bulking in the corner—

Oh, thank God. Or Satan. Or whoever. It all happened. It was real.

Was it the same one who’d hood-punched and then wrenched the door off of the Holy Roller? She couldn’t tell. It stood there motionless, hunched to fit its overlarge size in the space, looking awkward but not uncomfortable. The slits of its eyes held a low, banked-coals kind of glow.

She rolled her head to one side on the pillow, seeing mirrored sliding closet doors, a haphazard stack of luggage that appeared to have been either given a more-than-thorough inspection at airport security or tossed during a police search, various clothes and toiletries strewn about, and an open door leading into a spacious bathroom.

Rolling her head to the other side showed her another door opening onto a short hallway with nice wood paneling, and a girl who looked vaguely familiar.

“Hey,” the girl said. “You’re awake.”

***

There he’d been, sprinting for the wall as it bulged and grew and darkened, sprouting spires and catapult towers, bristling with war-machines, crawling with draconian demonic monsters . . . while, from above, the sky rippled aglow with terrible colors, the Aurora Diabolicus descending in a domed forcefield . . .

There he’d been, running like he had the proverbial snowball’s chance in Hell of somehow getting over or through it . . . thinking how some kind of warlock he’d turned out to be, couldn’t teleport or fly, didn’t even have a cool Dr. Strange cape . . .

Then, out of literal nowhere, Ethriel.

Ethriel, but not as he’d seen her before. No longer a two-foot-tall opalescent sylph, feminine but sexless as a doll, a Disney’s Fantasia fairy on shimmering dragonfly wings flittering at his shoulder . . . Ethriel as avenging warrior archangel, three times her previous size, of a height with him, armored in gold, with wings of crystalline lightning and celestial stars aglow in her eyes . . .

Take my hands! she’d cried, and he’d done so, and they’d been flying again, flying without his plane, flying so fast he wondered if they left a sonic boom in their wake as she shot through the narrowing gap between aurora and wall with barely an inch or a second to spare.

It’d been over so soon, the rough-tumble landing spilling Greg onto the marshy ground a good sixty yards past the perimeter. Bruised, dazed, and shaken, but unhurt. And alone. His hands had gripped nothing but the string of smooth round beads with their silver medallion, the talisman he’d given to his little angel when she began to fade and he set her free.

Free or not, she had come back for him, saved him yet again.

Ethriel, of the Custos Viatorum no more, promoted in Heaven’s hierarchy into something even stronger . . . more powerful . . . and . . . beautiful.

Just that one fleeting glimpse, and he’d suddenly understood what all those Supernatural fangirls were so on about.

The previous times she’d planted a quick affectionate smooch to his cheek or the tip of his nose had been a sweet effervescence of cotton candy and champagne; if she’d done anything similar in her new form, he might’ve fallen down stunned on the spot as if she’d zapped him with a divine taser.

She hadn’t, though. She’d been gone again, only the facts of his unlikely survival and even more unlikely escape, and the medallion, as proof it’d happened at all.

Greg knew she’d want him to keep moving. Besides, what else was there to do? Couldn’t very well linger here in the middle of nowhere. Would be downright stupid to head back toward the wall; he already saw dark-winged shapes circling the nearest parapets. Plus, whatever momentous event that’d been—

ECCE, NOVUM PRINCEPS DE INFERNO, NOVUS REX TERRAE! He remembered the shattering, thunderous, psychic bombardment knocking him flat; some spell, a ritual or Invocation, the magical equivalent of Hiroshima or Krakatoa.

—whatever it had been, it would not go unnoticed by the wider world. Sooner or later, probably sooner, the area was going to be teeming with activity. Media and military, the sky abuzz with helicopters and jets . . . curious onlookers flocking in from miles around to get a look at what was going on . . . while those who’d already been close enough and gotten a better look than they desired would be hightailing it the other direction.

He hadn’t wanted to be caught up in any of that. Or to have to answer the inevitable questions, particularly with an eldritch sigil blazing on his brow.

With no other options, he’d set off on foot and made it a fair distance before exhaustion and hunger really began to set in. Continuing to trudge through the more-or-less-normal Florida wilderness by night had seemed like a not-too-smart plan.

The timely appearance of a hulk of abandoned car up ahead, therefore, he took as an indication someone was still looking out for him after all.

***

“Who . . . who are you?” June asked, throat raspy as sandpaper.

“Chelsea,” said the girl in the hall doorway. “Chelsea Carmichael. I’m . . . uh . . . your handmaid.”

“My what?”

“I know, right? But that’s what he told me.”

“What who told you?”

“That scary badass demon centurion. Your . . . um . . . husband . . . or whatever.”

“Wait,” pleaded June, massaging her forehead and temples. She tried to push herself to a sitting position, but nope, that wasn’t happening yet, so settled for hitching up on the pillows. She rubbed her eyes, blinked, and looked again at the girl.

Young. Shapely. And, yes, vaguely familiar.

From the crowd. Standing with some college-age hottie, both of them apprehensive but impressed by what June had done to her mother. Hadn’t they said something to each other about their own parents? Sister and brother, then, with a snotty privileged rich-kid air persistent despite their bruised, shellshocked, bedraggled states.

Your . . . um . . . husband . . . or whatever.

“Favius,” June said. Hearing his name, speaking his name, made her tingle. Particularly in certain places, however sore and tender those certain places might have been. “He said you’re my handmaid?”

Chelsea nodded. “He was all, ‘you! attend to my queen.’ So, here I am. Here we are. How’re you doing?”

June let her head loll back, exhaling a sigh clear up from the tips of her toes. “I ache all over.”

“Not surprised. You took a pounding.” She said it with a sort of grudging respect. “I mean, damn. You’ll be feeling that for a few days.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Here.” Chelsea approached the bed. Earlier, she’d been wearing short-shorts, strappy sandals, and a t-shirt knotted below star-quality tits to showcase a taut little tummy with pierced navel; since then, she’d changed into a pair of too-big-for-her men’s pajamas and still looked great. Barefoot, she padded across the carpet to bring June a tall plastic bottle of electric blue Gatorade. “You gotta be thirsty, and I bet you can use the ‘lytes.”

No argument there. It was cold too, as if straight from the fridge. June downed a gulp, shivering with a different kind of pleasure as refreshing, revivifying coolness spread through her the way water absorbed into a dry cloth.

“Where am I?”

“Fancy flagship RV from the military convoy. He had me and,” Chelsea hooked a thumb at the Golem in the corner, “that guy bring you in here.”

“I fainted?”

“Fainted?” She snerked. “He fucked your brains out. You’ve been offline for like six hours.”

“Six hours?!”

“Hey, you earned it. I just kind of threw a sheet over you, though. Figured you’d want to wait to get more, uh, cleaned up, until you were awake. Besides, handmaid is one thing. I’m not a nurse. I don’t do sponge baths.”

“No, right, thanks.” June drank more Gatorade. “Is there a shower?”

“Bathroom’s really sweet,” Chelsea said. “Shower and jetted tub. A little small, because it’s still an RV, but top of the line. Full kitchen too, if you’re hungry. But I’m not a chef either.”

“Okay.” June tried again to sit up and made it that time, clutching the sheet to her chest. Not that she needed to worry about modesty now, not after the whole crowd had seen what they’d seen. “Are you sure you want to be doing this?”

“Shit, no. I was here with my brother and some friends to party at our parents’ lakehouse for Spring Break. None of this was in my travel plans. But, scary badass demon centurion says handmaid, attend my queen, be rewarded and favored? Instead of ending up having backwoods hillbillies and hell-soldiers run more trains on me than Central Station? Fine, handmaid it is.”

“Fair enough,” June said. “But, queen? Me? Seriously?”

“You shishkabobbed your own mom up the snatch—which, Trev’s right, was majorly fucking hardcore—and then sealed the deal right there in front of everybody. He wants to call you his queen, who’s gonna say otherwise?”

***

Any hopes of driving the abandoned car had been dashed as soon as Greg got a good look at it. He may have enjoyed, thanks to his guardian angel, a certain charmed automotive luck, but even divine intervention only went so far.

Canted halfway into a ditch, nearly reclaimed by the virulent Florida overgrowth, this roadside relic lacked not only all four tires but all four wheels entirely, leaving just rusty axle-stubs. The front end was a hood-sprung crumple with three or four tenacious saplings struggling up through the remains of the engine.

A shame too; it was an old El Camino that could’ve been fixed up to vintage perfection by a talented enough mechanic with a big enough budget. Why it should have been left out here in the middle of nowhere was just another of those mysteries for which Greg had no answer.

Miraculously, though, the windows were unbroken and the passenger compartment appeared more-or-less intact. He peered in, bracing himself for the sight of a skeleton still buckled into place . . . or, worse, a whole family of skeletons. But, aside from heaps of mouldering trash and road-litter, the interior was empty. Home to nothing more than, he deduced, a few creepy-crawlies . . . and given everything he’d experienced in the past several hours, ordinary mundane non-demonic creepy-crawlies didn’t seem so bad at all.

He tried the door. Though not locked, it resisted with a protesting squall. He gave a hard tug. The handle broke off in his grasp.

“Shit,” he muttered, then saw the door itself had come ajar by about an inch, enough for him to wedge his fingertips into the gap. Eliciting another, much louder and protracted, protesting squall, he pried it open.

The smell wafting out to meet him wasn’t pleasant, but, again, compared to everything else he’d experienced in the past several hours, far be it from him to complain. After Lake Misquamicus, a little mildew and rotting upholstery was no big deal.

If nothing else, at least it was shelter, a place he could sit and rest for a while without having to worry about being chomped by a ‘gator. The day was more than catching up with him. Every ache and pain from the plane crash, every injury from the fight at the vineyard, every blister and sore muscle from the long hike, all clamored to make themselves known.

So, after poking around with a stick to make sure there weren’t any snakes, he’d climbed on in and let gravity clunk the door shut behind him. The El Camino was old enough to have hand-crank windows, allowing him a bit of fresher air.

The trash and road-litter turned out to be primarily crushed beer cans, empty cigarette packs, wads of foil that had once been fast-food wrappers, and rags. A more thorough search turned up a moisture-bloated copy of MAD magazine older than Greg, an eight-track of Kenny Rogers’ Greatest Hits, a pair of lace-trimmed panties stained in ways he didn’t want to think about, one flip-flop, a keychain squeezy-flashlight that—for certain values of the word—worked, the grungiest ballcap he’d ever seen in his life, and a plastic shopping bag containing two unopened bottles of flavored water and a packet of granola bars.

The flavored water tasted like lemon dish soap, but he’d hardly cared, guzzling the first bottle so fast he almost threw it back up. The second, he set aside to save for later. The granola bars were hard as sheetrock and dry as dust. After forcing some down, he had to get into the other bottle after all, but paced himself with careful sips.

“Okay,” he’d said. The tilt at which the car had come to rest made him feel a little sea-sicky, so he crawled into the back seat and stretched out, head uphill. He touched his medallion, rubbing his thumb over the sigil. “Okay, now what?”

“Now what?”, it happened, had soon turned out to be an uneasy but exhausted sleep.

***

On her second try, June was able to stand, wrapping the sheet around herself in a makeshift toga, and did what she’d often thought of as “the convalescent shuffle” to the bathroom. The unreality of the situation kept trying to reassert itself, but she kept right on shoving it to the back of her mind.

As Chelsea had said, the bathroom was really sweet, twice as spacious as the one she’d had at home, with sandstone-looking tile, frosted glass, matte black faucets and handles, a phonebooth-sized shower compartment, and a jetted tub.

And way too goddamn many mirrors! Yikes! She got a far better view of herself than she wanted as she made for the toilet. Hair frazzled out every which-way, skin streaked and crusted with dried blood as well as various other bodily fluids, absolute wild crazy-person eyes.

“I look like Carrie after the prom,” she muttered.

Bruises bloomed dark from her fight with the creeker-freakers and having the Holy Roller stopped short by a single blow from a Golem’s massive fist—even with the airbag, it’d been quite an impact. Probably, certainly, when she dropped the sheet, she’d see a bunch more bruises in very personal places.

She dropped the sheet, and yep . . . bruises, plus blood and those various other bodily fluids. Everything from the waist down ached as if she’d overdone it at the gym doing sit-ups and squats. She thought of cooking shows where some chef spatchcocked a chicken and had never empathized with anything quite so strongly. Her hips felt lucky not to be dislocated, her thighs felt rubbery-loose as overstretched elastic.

And the area between them?

Exceedingly tender, to say the least. Beyond that, she wasn’t ready for a closer inspection.

The RV’s designers, perhaps anticipating the retiree demographic of their customers, had fitted the shower, tub, and toilet areas with helpful handrails. June made use of them as she lowered her butt gingerly onto the seat.

Success! The Eagle has landed! Better than a splashdown in the Pacific, at any rate.

She peed for what seemed like a hundred years, dabbed and blotted rather than wiped, and flushed without looking. A thorough hot shower sounded good, but she didn’t trust herself to stand upright that long even with helpful handrails. A bath sounded better, though she wasn’t sure she could climb into the tub without falling and breaking her neck.

“You okay in there?” Chelsea called.

“I need to clean up,” June replied. “I don’t suppose . . . ?”

The girl heaved a sigh. “I told you, I don’t do sponge baths. But I can get the tub going for you, and help you in and out of it, I guess.”

“Thank you, that’d be wonderful. I’m going to rinse off real quick first, though.”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t wanna . . . soak in it. Damn. That was gross. Sorry.”

“No, you’re right.”

While Chelsea began filling the tub, June figured out the shower’s complex controls. She stood under the spray, just letting the water hit and run off, holding onto the handrails.

“Stocked with the good stuff in here too,” Chelsea said, rummaging in the cabinets. “Bath salts, foaming soaps, herbal oils . . . you more of a Spring Rain, Ocean Mists, Citrus Fresh, or Luxurious Lavender?”

“Lavender.”

“Lavender it is.”

Sinking into the steaming lavender-scented bath was its own form of bliss. The heat permeated her aching muscles, the foam and oil soothed her skin, the relaxing fragrance melted tension from her bones. June submerged to the chin, only her head and knees above the surface.

“I guess I should do your hair for you too, huh?”

Already feeling much better, June almost smiled at the hint of sulky resentment in the girl’s tone. Oh, how this had to go against Chelsea’s grain, contrary to the natural order of things! She was the young, pretty, shapely one . . . having to wait on a homely older woman . . .

“If you don’t mind, dear,” June said, sweetly. “After all, you are my handmaid.”

***

Sleep.

Exhausted and uneasy, but, sleep.

With, unsurprisingly, dreams.

Dreams of his trusty Cessna choking and blatting and veering out of control, the horizon see-sawing, blue sky one way and verdant terrain the next, but then the lake, the horrible crimson lake, and the sickening vertigo of the plane’s dying plunge . . .

“Greg! Take my hands!”

Only that hadn’t been then, that wasn’t what she’d first said. When he’d first seen her, sylphlike and petite. No, that had come later, later as he ran for the wall . . . for the Wall, rising in spires of death while the Aurora Diabolicus sheeted outward and down in its encompassing dome.

Dreams of the vineyard, the laborers shrieking as white-hot barbed wire cut into their scarred, abused, tormented flesh . . . of the grape-vats, overturned, seeping thick dark liquid and pulpy mush . . . the tang of it in his mouth, in his throat—

“Did you swallow?” she’d asked; not a question he usually expected to hear.

And Zilch, horned and shaggy, shagged and horny, wanting an oath-sworn warlock of his very own, else trampled into a different sort of dark liquid and pulpy mush beneath his hooves, such a rare vintage indeed . . .

Dreams of his grandmother, moving about her kitchen, the big house quiet with rooms long since closed off, his father’s old bedroom, his uncles’, his aunt’s, and most of all, his grandfather’s private study on the third floor, the door of which Greg had never once known to be opened, though one of his cousins mentioned having peeked through the window after climbing the terrace to try and retrieve a ball from the roof . . .

“Bunch of musty cabinets and bookshelves and weird old shit.”

“Wear this, Gregory. It’ll protect you. It’ll keep you safe.”

The strand of beads, polished petrified wood and mother of pearl. The medallion, silver, its septagonal sigil on one side and its inscription on the other—Never drive faster than your Guardian Angel can fly—only, hadn’t it changed?

It had, hadn’t it? He’d seen it himself, when the medallion he’d given to Ethriel somehow returned to his hands. Briefly. Fleetingly. When he’d looked again, it said what it always had said.

“Loophole looker,” she’d called him. But with fond reproof, maybe even pride.

Dreams of a monument upon the lakeshore, wrought iron and worked bronze, a Mephistopolean dragon—how did he know what that was, what that meant?—and a still-living severed head impaled on a spike, and bodies writhing in contortions of frenzied slaughter and lust . . .

ECCE, NOVUM PRINCEPS DE INFERNO, NOVUS REX TERRAE!

A figure, armed and armored, terrible, his skin covered with faces torn from his fallen foes, a new prince of Hell and a new king on Earth, and he’d claimed the place now, claimed it with ritual and sacrifice . . .

“Favius,” she said, and she sounded frightened, his fierce and fearless little angel sounded frightened in a way she never had before; even when describing what demons would do to her if they caught her incarnate, she’d been almost cavalier.

Frightened, and he couldn’t stand to hear it, couldn’t stand to think it, and he’d wakened with a gasp there in the back seat of the junked old El Camino—

“It isn’t for you,” hissed the whisper of some hostile stranger in his mind, and no, no, it wasn’t for him; he wasn’t that One, he had other things to do, other places to be, another destiny to fulfill . . .

Destiny? What?

Bleary, he’d fought his way free of the lingering sleep-fug and stumbled out of the car to stand unsteadily in the warm and humid night. Only two hours or so had passed, leaving him achier than ever and far from well-rested.

But knowing he had to get moving again.

Taking the unfinished second water bottle, the last granola bar, and the keychain squeezy-flashlight, he’d resumed his journey, aware of some other destination awaiting him somewhere up ahead.

***

She’d never been much of a one for spoiling herself. Thoughts of spa-days, massages, facials, and mani-pedis seemed like too much of an undeserved indulgence. Not to mention, an unnecessary expense.

And, as her mother would have—hell, as her mother often had!—said, a waste of time, money, and effort as well. Likewise for cosmetics or fashionable clothes.

“Honestly, Junie, what’s the point?” Margaret Goldsmith was wont to reiterate. “All it’ll do is highlight your flaws, draw attention to what you don’t want attention drawn to. There’s nothing wrong with being a humble, modest plain-Jane. No sense making yourself seem desperate.”

After hearing that kind of thing all her life, she even felt awkward about just getting a simple haircut! Let alone having it washed by the stylist at the salon. Leaning back in the chair, head tipped, eyes shut, someone else’s fingers rubbing her scalp, laving the suds from her hair . . .

Decadent! Wasteful! Futile! Sinful!

But Margaret Goldsmith, as far as her only daughter knew, was still hanging from a gantry with her reproductive organs pulled inside-out to swing in the breeze, so fuck her and her snide opinions! Fuck her lifetime of verbal, mental, and emotional abuse!

Well, look now, you old bitch! Who’s queen? How do you like that?

Soaking in Luxurious Lavender, the tub’s jets purring and bubbling, churning the foamy water, drumming the knots of tension from her shoulders and neck . . . basking in warm, liquid comfort . . . a rich, spoiled, pretty girl washing her hair for her . . . conditioning it too . . . smearing a cool, goopy gel over her face that tingled and tightened as it dried into a mask . . .

Peeling the mask off, with its freight of dead skin cells and pore-clogging buildups, reminded her of Favius pulling the faces from his enemies as easily as taking the rind off an orange. Maybe that should have repulsed her, just as maybe the memory of the many similarly detached faces stitched over every visible inch of his body should have done, but it didn’t. If anything, it made her tingle anew in other ways.

“Has Favius been here?” she asked. “While I was sleeping?”

“Yeah.” Chelsea shivered. “And he sent one of his minions a couple of times too.”

“Minions? You mean the Golems?”

“What, the clay monster-dudes? No, this guy’s a local. Some real skeeve-o pimply creep called Spot. I think he also works at the redneck roadhouse? I don’t know. Past few hours have just been bonkers. Quieter now, but, at first? Everyone running around, giving orders, gathering weapons, hauling bodies? Bonkers. Anyway, though, this skeeve-o Spot says they’re working on getting things organized and I should, and I quote, gimme a whistle if’n you or Her Highness needs anythin’.”

“But he was here too? Favius?” June asked. “How did he seem?”

“How did he seem? Pretty goddamn scary, that’s how he seemed! Like he’d cut my head off and use it for a bowling ball if I so much as looked at him wrong. But he checked on you and must’ve been satisfied because he told me to carry on with my duties.”

Hiding another smile, June leaned forward. “Speaking of which, could you do my back?”

She could’ve sworn she heard the girl’s teeth grind together. “Sure. Let me grab the loofah.”

“What else did Favius say?” she asked, relishing the scratchy friction of the rough, sudsy sponge scrubbing in circles along her spine.

“That he’d made my brother a senator.” Chelsea didn’t sound exactly pleased. “I mean, great for Trev, right? He’s a senator, and . . . well, whatever.”

And you, June thought, are handmaid to the queen. Doesn’t set well, does it?

Several seconds of rather acidic silence reigned in the bathroom, and then the loofah plunked into the tub.

“There,” Chelsea said. “What next? Need me to shave your legs for you?”

“I can handle that myself,” June said. “Just see if you can find me something suitable to wear.”

***

At first glance, the motel appeared closed, if not outright condemned.

No cars sat in its weedy gravel parking lot. None of the rooms gave any indication of occupancy. Faded crude or obscene graffiti covered pieces of nailed-up plywood several hurricane seasons old. The only sounds were wildlife night-noises from the dank greenery sprawling downhill toward watery bogland.

The sputtering presence of a neon-pink VACANCY sign and a television’s shifting glow through slatted blinds in the back-office window begged—if only slightly—to differ as to its complete dereliction.

Although he had no intention of renting a room, Greg trudged over for a closer look, doing his best to minimize the crunch of gravel under his feet. Sure, he could have strode on in, dinged the bell, but what was the use? His wallet was miles away, forgotten in the wreckage of his Cessna among a cargo of insulin, pain-killers, and cancer meds. No ID, no credit cards on him, no cash except for some change wadded up in a receipt in his pocket.

Desolate and decrepit as this place was, he still didn’t think they’d go as low as eighty-five cents. While maybe they would have let him borrow their phone, he didn’t know who he’d call anyway.

And that was assuming they didn’t see him and immediately call the local cop-shop. It’d been a long day, in which he’d crashed his plane, been within the blast radius of a frog-monster going Coke-and-Mentos after chomping into the fruit of a utero-gourd tree, dunk-tanked into a wine stomper’s vat full of sludgy black-grape fermentation goo, survived a horrific fight—

(killed a bunch of people and one horny goat demon)

—hiked what must’ve been halfway across Florida through swamps and low-country, and caught a few ragged hours’ unrest in a junked car.

In other words, not at his best. Somewhere on the sharp-dressed-man scale between hobo and zombie. With, lest he forget, that sigil branded into his brow.

Yeah. Forget asking for help or to borrow the phone. Forget hitchhiking.

He crept up to the back-office window and risked a stealthy peek through the slats, just in case the proprietor turned out to be the psycho killer type, waiting for unwary desperate travelers to check in before busting out a collection of chainsaws and nail guns.

The television, on but low, was tuned to one of those home-shopping channels with a couple of pert ladies hawking ugly jewelry. Across from it, on a swaybacked plaid couch, slept a pot-bellied man with a bad comb-over and an equally pot-bellied basset hound snoring at his feet.

Okay, then. Hardly the chainsaw and nail gun type. Not even a Norman Bates. Just as well Greg hadn’t gone in and dinged the bell, really; might’ve given both man and dog a heart attack.

Leaving them to their slumbers, he went around the rest of the building, finding no indications of anyone else. A nook containing a vending machine tucked between an empty attraction-brochures rack and a busted pay phone had him digging into his pockets for that change after all, until he noticed an ‘out of order’ sign.

“Screw it,” Greg muttered. Still with not much idea how this warlock stuff worked, or if it even would work here outside the magic zone, he set his palms flat against the glass and just tried to will something loose from the spiral racks of packaged snacks.

Nothing happened.

He imagined Ethriel’s melodic giggle. Sure, slice Zilch into juicy chunks with your invisible spell-blades; can’t so much as budge a bag of Cheezers? Get it together, Greg!

Thinking it made him sad, but also made him smile. His little—or, not so little—guardian angel. If she had somehow guided his path to this place, the least he could do was make himself useful.

A surge of unseen energy fanned from his spread fingers, and an avalanche of processed unhealthiness dumped down like a slot machine payout.

***

With the bathroom to herself, and the aid of a hand mirror, June finally dared investigate down there.

Wincing in anticipation of pulped raw meat and bloody carnage, she found instead the damage wasn’t so bad at all. Some redness, some puffiness, some bruising, but far from the ragged wound she’d expected. Definitely tender, though, if not nearly as sore as she’d been upon wakening.

She gingerly cleaned her abused, sensitive flesh, then did some quick touch-ups to her legs and underarms and other personal grooming with a disposable razor. Chelsea had laid out a veritable smorgasbord of toiletries from the bathroom cabinets, so once she’d levered herself—with care, though she already felt much better—out of the tub and toweled off, she decided to go right ahead and spoil herself anyway. A pumice for her feet, powder and lotion, travel-sized toothpaste, plastic-sealed toothbrush, mini-bar bottle of mouthwash, deodorant, the works.

A discreet tap heralded the return of her handmaid.

“Yes?” June wrapped herself in a towel so soft and fluffy it might have been made from baby bunny rabbits.

“I went through most of the stuff in the master bedroom earlier,” Chelsea said as she came in, gesturing at her own choice of replacement attire. “Typical military and political sausage fest, which is why the cross-dressing. One of the smaller rooms at the other end, though, I guess somebody brought his ‘secretary’ along.”

“How many bedrooms does this thing have?”

“Four! Plus a loft thing up front. It’s fucking huge! You’re not gonna be roughing it, that’s for sure.”

“And the ‘secretary’? What about her?”

“No idea. Given everything that went on out there earlier, I don’t wanna know.”

“But she had clothes in her room?”

“Yep. Pretty nice too.”

June followed her and found a smart set of efficient travel luggage as well as various articles of clothing strewn across the bed. The ‘secretary’ must have been close to her height, though of course curvier.

“This’ll do for now,” she said, slipping into a peacock-blue satiny robe embroidered with gold, black, and white feathers. It fell to mid-calf, tying at the waist, and felt like a cool whisper against her skin. “Leave the rest here; I’ll look through it later. Anything I don’t want, you’re welcome to, if you like.”

“Thanks.” Again, there was that tone, that can-you-believe-this-bullshit tone. “Mind if I call dibs on that room? Or do you want me to put a cot in the corner, or what?”

“I think it’s fine if you take the room. As long as Favius doesn’t have other plans.”

Chelsea’s smile was thin and a little bit sickly. “Great.”

“You mentioned ‘everything that went on out there earlier,’” June said, returning to the steamy lavender-scented haven of the bathroom to see about drying her hair before it went too crazy. “Such as? What did I miss?”

“Like I said, they’re trying to organize all this shit. Setting it up as some kind of war-camp, with barracks and armories and supply tents and I don’t know what the fuck all. Most of the locals took off after a while, going home or whatever, but some stayed on to join the . . . army, I guess. There are a bunch of prisoners too—oh yeah, that reminds me; the skeeve-o pimply creep? Spot? He said a few of them are being held for you to deal with.”

“Me?” She moved the blow dryer away from her head to make sure she’d heard that correctly. “Deal with prisoners?”

“Yeah. The other people from that church bus, I think.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Shinn? And Ramon? Is Ramon still alive?”

Chelsea shrugged. “Also, they’re sending over the rest of what was in the bus—not food or weapons, but purses and backpacks and stuff—for you to look at.” She paused, scrunching her face in a skeptical look. “What kind of church bus packs guns and riot gear, anyway?”

“That’s . . . a long story . . . ”

***

Drug-running, check. Property damage and burglary, check. He was loaded up with as much as he could carry from the vending machine, as well as what he’d brought from the old El Camino.

Now at the door to the endmost unit of the motel, furthest from the office where a pot-bellied man and pot-bellied basset hound snoozed in front of a home-shopping channel, here he was, about to step it up to breaking-and-entering.

What about MURDER? his ever-so-helpful conscience reminded him.

Shut up, Greg thought.

When, six hours ago, he’d been holding hands with an angel—

Shut up!

God, he was going crazy.

Did that—going crazy, emphasis on ‘going’—count as traveling for the purposes of the Custos Viatorum? Saint Christopher’s or Saint Menas’s or whoever’s cadre of protectors?

Loophole looker.

God. He was going crazy!

The lock was likely as rundown as the rest of the motel, and the guy and dog in the office would be unlikely to hear anything over their own synchronized flappy-jowled snoring, but he still didn’t want to risk forcing it and making noise. He tried the warlock thing again, milder this time, pressing a palm to the door and willing a nudge of—

Magic, Greg, go ahead and call it magic.

—mental energy into the mechanism.

Click went the lock, squee went the hinges, and scraaape went the weather-warped wood of the door against the jamb. Just as with the car, the pent-up smell wafting to meet him was less than pleasant, in this case stale and somehow bleachy as well as mildewy, but still better than anything in the vicinity of the lake.

He shined the squeezy-flashlight’s feeble little beam around the room, not expecting much and therefore not disappointed. Cheap motel everything—furniture, drapes, carpeting, bedspread.

Stepping in, he shut and locked the door, also latching the security chain, then made sure the drapes were drawn tight before continuing his exploration.

Seascape prints for wall decor. TV with cable box. Rotary phone. Clock radio, unplugged. Bedside lamp, also unplugged. No fridge, no microwave. Closet with the kind of hangers that couldn’t be removed from the bar. Flat-as-a-pancake spare pillow on the shelf.

In the bathroom, two palmetto beetles scuttled across faded linoleum and a small thin green snake lay curled dead in the tub. Flimsy shower curtain, mounted combination bodywash/shampoo dispenser. A stack of thin towels topped by a motel soap, a half-empty box of tissues, and a spare roll of toilet paper.

Greg flicked on the bathroom light switch and, to his surprise, found it worked, the bulb shedding a tepid yellowish glow. He tried the sink next and could have wept tears of joy when the pipes groaned, then gurgled, then trickled, then made with an actual decent flow.

The TV also worked, though he couldn’t find a remote and it seemed only to get that same shopping channel the man in the office had been watching. The phone, no dice, not even a dial tone. He plugged in the lamp and the clock radio, fiddled through static-raddled frequencies until he ran across a station clear enough to listen to—classical, but he’d take it— and kept the volume low.

The bed was a double, and after giving it a couple of kicks and the bedspread a shake to make sure no critters were nesting, he spread out his vending machine loot like a kid about to sort through his trick-or-treat haul of Halloween candy.

Three cheers for additives and preservatives! Some of the more dubious stuff, like chocolate bars, he rejected—pained him to do it, especially the Snickers, but he did. That still left him with a stash of chips, pretzels, Cheezers, Happy Grahams, a couple rolls of fruit leather that almost were leather, circus animal cookies with the pink and white artificial-everything frosting, and assorted rolls of hard candies and mints.

“A veritable feast for the ages,” he said, and commenced chowing down.

***

June gave Chelsea the Cliff’s Notes version of the Holy Roller’s mission, omitting certain none-of-your-business details as to her own reasons for being there and reactions to various events along the way . . .

. . . Crusader Markane bringing them to Lake Misquamicus to confront evil in the greater service and glory of God, so on and so forth . . . their crossing at Checkpoint Gabriel, setting up camp at Bible Creek . . . the revelation of the weaponry and tactical gear (“armed and armored with our faith”) . . . the creeker-freaks killing Mr. and Mrs. Gabelman . . .

. . . a very, very glossed-over version of what happened with the altar and Brother Lucas and Azbunael (“ENH, IT’LL DO.” . . . demonic dickhead!) . . .

. . . how David and Ramon rescued her, though David paid for his brave piety with his life and Ramon nearly did the same . . . Brother William’s disappearance, either abandoning them or falling prey to some other menace . . . how one of the checkpoint guards (that bitch!) showed up on her ATV . . . and how the rest of them (after making fucking s’mores!) had piled back into the Holy Roller to try and meet up with the military convoy in hopes of finding medical help for Ramon . . .

“ . . . and, well, you know the rest,” she said.

“That,” said Chelsea, “is some seriously bonkers shit.”

“It is.”

“Did you even get a s’more?”

“No.”

“Assholes!”

“I know!” June’s stomach, on cue, grumbled in hungry protest. “You said the kitchen here was well-stocked?”

“Not sure about stuff for s’mores, but—holy fuck, is that what . . . with the marshmallow fork and . . . ?”

June nodded. “I didn’t plan it. It just . . . was there.”

“Damn. And I thought we had a rough day! Well, I mean, we did; like, three of our friends got killed and a giant horny turtle raped our SUV and my brother’s got a body part kink, but . . . still . . . damn.”

She suspected Chelsea had also edited or omitted various aspects of her own story as well. “Anyway, the kitchen?”

“Yeah. Yeah, right. Fully stocked, fridge and freezer and cupboards. And bar. All the basics. I’m no cook, but there’s deli trays, sandwiches, yogurts, fruit cups, microwave entrees.” Chelsea slid a sidelong glance at the Golem hulking in the corner. “Do they . . . eat? Or . . . talk? Or . . . anything?”

“Can you hear me?” June raised her voice, addressing the Golem.

It lifted its big slab-featured clay head, the sullen glow of its eye-slits brightening.

“Can you talk?”

Slowly, ponderously, the big head swung side to side.

“Do you eat? Drink? Sleep?”

Again, the slow and ponderous negation.

Sharing a look with Chelsea, June shrugged. “Just . . . bring an assortment.”

As her handmaid went to do so, June moved to the nearest window and peeked through the blinds. Full night had long since fallen, though by no means full dark. Between bonfires and torches and the terrible—yet somehow beautiful—scarlet radiance from the sky, she had a clear, if red-tinted, view of the area.

Chelsea was right; they’d done a good job getting things organized during the hours she’d been asleep or unconscious. It did have the look of a war-camp, with tents and trailers arranged in neat rows, crates of supplies stacked, vehicles removed to a makeshift motor pool. Sentries had been posted, while guards walked a perimeter. The chaos of corpses and carnage she remembered had been cleared away, some strung up as trophies or effigies, others hauled off for . . .

Disposal, she told herself. Hauled off for disposal. Whatever activity was taking place at the large canvas pavilion resembling a butchery, smokehouse, and barbecue stall at the county fair surely involved hogs and cattle from local farms, or maybe whatever passed for the Hell-lake’s version of large catfish.

Surely.

Hogs at the slaughter screamed just like humans. She’d read that somewhere, hadn’t she?

Surely that was all it was.

And, if not?

Oh well.

When in Rome, as the saying went.

***

Once he’d sated the worst of his hunger and thirst—refilling his water bottle from the tap after letting it run long enough to clear the pipes—he stowed the rest of the snacks in the bedside table drawer. Also in there was the ubiquitous mass-market motel Bible, these days looking sadly small and flimsy and out-of-date.

Then Greg hauled his achy self to his feet and went to see how much heat and pressure he could coax from the shower. Not, of course, that he was in any position to be too picky. Cold would be a far sight better than nothing.

He chased the palmetto beetles into hiding, moved the dead snake from the tub to the wastebasket, and peeled off his filthy clothes while the showerhead consulted with the water heater. Left to his own devices, he would have piled everything right into the trash atop the dead snake, every article, down to his shorts and his shoes. Or, better yet, burned them.

Instead, lacking other options, he’d just have to make do. If the motel had a coin-op laundry room, great. If not, he’d wash them as well as he could in the tub to hopefully make them moderately less disgusting. Still ripped up, though; there wasn’t much he could do about that.

If he were really lucky, the motel would have a lost-and-found somewhere with luggage and items left behind by previous guests, but he wasn’t hanging much hope on that notion either.

But, ah well, he’d worry about his wardrobe later. For now, the plumbing negotiations seemed to have gone in his favor, the hissing jets of spray filling the bathroom with billows of steam. He moaned aloud with relief as he stepped in and let it hit his skin.

How long he just stood there, the near-scalding barrage beating against his bent head and upper torso, he didn’t know. Or care. Nor did he care he was doing the damn action hero shower scene trope, as if his earlier attempts at Jason Statham stunts hadn’t been embarrassing enough. The stiff muscles of his neck, back, shoulders, and thighs loosened, relaxed.

Eventually, he bestirred himself to make use of the bodywash/shampoo dispenser. The goopy contents had coagulated somewhat but lathered up into respectable suds. He scoured every inch of himself, watching muck and mud and blood and other ungodly residue sluice away to swirl down the drain. He scrubbed his hair three times, until his scalp tingled.

What he wouldn’t have given for a tube of toothpaste, but the best he could do was to crunch up a whole roll of wintergreen mints as a sort of placebo illusion. He opened his mouth to the stream, makeshift-water-pic blasting his teeth and tongue, doing gargle-rinse-spit on repeat until he nearly drowned. If nothing else, it finally got rid of the lingering aftertaste of Zilch’s black-grape wine.

“Did you swallow?” she’d asked.

He had, yes, not much, but a little, the potent stuff roaring through him, helping to awaken his abilities.

“Yer a warlock, Greg’ry,” she’d said in a Hagrid impression.

Which wasn’t quite “I’m a Jedi like my father before me,” but then, his father before him would give him a “lost your marbles, there?” look if he knew about any of this.

By the time he turned off the water, his skin looked practically parboiled, but he finally felt almost clean again. Steam-clouds hung in the air, fogging the mirror, condensation dripping. A mini-sauna on top of the regular Florida humidity; the thin motel towels were hardly up to such a dual challenge.

Greg dried himself as best as he could with the largest of them, then draped it over his head like a damp hood. Tousling excess water from his hair, keeping an eye on his feet to make sure he didn’t step on any beetles, he returned to the main room.

“Good shower?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, exhaling heavily. “Yeah, it—”

. . . wait . . .

***

The dais upon which she’d been so thoroughly and gloriously ravished was still in place, still hung with its bunting. Another of the Golems stood sentinel. Beyond it, June could see the monument rising from the lakeshore, its spike topped with a severed head.

And . . .

There.

The gantry . . . with, yes, her mother’s eviscerated carcass suspended, dangling limply. In more-or-less merciful shadow, but illuminated enough to leave no doubt whatsoever in June’s mind. The nearest torch cast a gleam of firelight over the congealed puddle beneath Margaret Goldsmith’s feet and made glisten the bulbous lumps and nodules of organs hanging in a pendulous cluster between her flabby old thighs. Her head slumped forward, hair a loose gray curtain, sparing June the sight of her slack, dead, hateful face.

Those small, dark shapes creeping through the coagulated mess, crawling over the viscera . . . rats? bugs? Were those crows perched atop the gantry? Vultures?

At least her mother’s corpse hadn’t been dragged off to the butchery tent.

“Would’ve been sour and stringy anyway,” she muttered, then paused, not sure if she was more startled by the thought itself or the fact she’d said it out loud.

“Sorry, what?” Chelsea asked.

“Nothing.” June let the blinds fall closed and turned to see her handmaid struggling through the doorway, arms laden.

A lifetime of conditioning urged her to rush over and offer to help, but she reined it in and only watched as Chelsea laid out a row of trays on the dresser.

No nurse, the girl had said. Nor a cook. And, clearly, never a waitress either. Not at all accustomed to this servile shit, and not at all happy about it.

“Brought an assortment like you wanted. Bagels, croissants, cold cuts, cheese, this crab-dip-looking stuff, shrimp cocktails, mini-cupcakes—”

“Yes, fine, thank you. And something to drink?”

Oh, that tight little pinched expression! Fleeting, quickly masked, but so oddly satisfying!

“Sure. Another Gatorade? Or there’s soda, iced teas, juice . . . a full bar . . . ”

“Iced tea.”

Chelsea left again, and June, stomach still growling, inspected the spread. A lot fancier than the grilled hotdogs and tubs of potato salad they’d lunched on an eternity ago at Bible Creek. Several kinds of cheese, cut into nice wedges . . . turkey, ham, and roast beef sliced thin and rolled . . . the expensive kind of buttery crackers for the crab-dip . . . and the decadent mini-cupcakes went a long way toward making up for any lack of s’mores.

She filled a plate, then settled—still gingerly—into one of the room’s two armchairs, which flanked a small table in the corner. When Chelsea returned with a chilled bottle of peach tea, June pondered sending her back for a glass as well, but before she could do so, the sound of an opening door, a brief conversation of the orders-given-and-acknowledged variety, and a closing door came from elsewhere within the RV.

Followed shortly by a confident tread in the hallway, the creak of leather and the clink of metal, and the alert stirring to attention of the Golem in the opposite corner as Favius strode into the room.

June’s head went giddy and her knees went weak, making her glad she was already seated. Through a warm pulsation of all-over tingle stabbed an icicle of sharp, pure terror . . . not of him, no . . . but . . . what if he’d had second thoughts, changed his mind? What if this insane Cinderella story was about to be upended, the natural order restored?

Favius looked at Chelsea, and June’s heart clenched like a feeble fist.

“Wine,” he said. Then his gaze fixed upon June.

Hers was likewise fixed on him, but in her peripheral vision, she couldn’t miss Chelsea sprinting like a spooked deer, giving Favius the widest possible berth the confined space allowed.

The looming reality of him . . . bloodied Hell-forged armor . . . the stench of sweat and death, sex and fire . . . the living faces stitched into his skin . . .

“My queen.”

***

Greg’s mind did the record-scratch thing. His body tried to jump in seven directions at once. He stubbed a toe, smacked an elbow, rebounded from a wall, knocked over the motel TV, and yanked several strands of hair from his head along with the towel as he frantically bunched it in front of his groin.

“ETHRIEL?!?!”

“Hi to you too,” she said, perched at the end of the bed, full-sized and golden-armored, bathed in radiance, winged in light.

“I’m naked!” he nearly shrieked.

“Normal for taking a shower, isn’t it?”

Some sort of aggrieved, strangled, desperate noise came from his throat as he sought to cover as much nudity as possible.

“What? You saw me naked the whole time we were at the lake.”

“That’s different!”

“How?”

“You . . . you weren’t . . . you were . . . augh!” He made the strangled noise again, started to turn so he was facing the corner between the closet and the dresser, realized that would leave his bare butt exposed, and wondered why there was never a sinkhole opening up when a guy needed one.

“I was only yea-high?” She held her hand at about toddler-height. “And not anatomically accurate?”

“Look, I . . . wait . . . give me a minute, okay?”

“I thought you’d be glad to see me.”

“I am!” He fumbled to get the towel swathed around his waist, finally managing it. “Oh, I am, you have no idea; I was afraid you were gone for good and I’d never see you again! It’s just . . . I’m naked!”

“Yeah,” Ethriel said, a grin tugging the corners of her mouth and an amused twinkle brightening her celestial-star eyes. “I’m aware of that. Here, does this help?”

She shimmered. The golden armor disappeared, revealing opalescent perfection, slender and supple and shapely and . . .

. . . and far from “not anatomically accurate,” he couldn’t help but notice; her formerly Disney-Fantasia smooth nubs of breasts were ample, firm, peaked with rosebud nipples of alluring dusky-pink . . .

He whirled to face the corner after all. “Does that help? Not really, no!”

“But now we’re both naked. Everything’s fair.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” he accused, hearing the mirth in her tone.

“It is kind of funny.”

“Speak for yourself!”

“Greg, hey.” Her tone shifted. So did the ambient light from her wings as she stood . . . as she moved closer. “Sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I . . . I know,” he said, finding it really difficult to breathe all of a sudden.

Having other difficulties as well. Vascular difficulties. Involving blood flow, intensified by the nearness of her presence, the effervescent champagne sensation of her energy, and the subtle fragrance of sweet incense.

Vascular difficulties. Blood flow. Stupid thin motel towel not up, so to speak, for that challenge either.

Forget wondering about sinkholes; how about being smote dead on the spot by a wrathful God? Incinerated with a thunderbolt, maybe, or transformed to a pillar of salt?

He clenched his fists on the towel, squeezed his eyes shut.

Her fingertips brushed the nape of his neck, traced gently down his spine. “You’re shaking,” she whispered.

“ . . . yeah . . . ”

“Why?”

“I’m terrified,” he said with a ragged laugh.

“Of me?”

“Not . . . not only that . . . ”

“Greg.” She slid her arms around him, embracing him from behind, her breasts soft and full against his back. “It’s all right.”

Thunderbolt. Pillar of salt. Any second now.

Her body, molding to his . . . her palms gliding over his chest . . . thin stupid motel towel also not much use as a barrier between his butt and the press of her loins . . . suggesting a silken mound and delicate cleft . . .

“Ethriel . . . ”

“Should I stop?” she asked.

“Probably . . . ”

“Do you want me to stop?” A hand strayed lower.

Greg caught her wrist, biting his lip, uttering an agonized groan.

“Do you?” she repeated, murmuring into his ear.

“ . . . no . . . ”

A moment later, the stupid thin motel towel dropped in a damp heap to the floor.

***

“You are rested?” Favius inquired. “Well-tended? Fed?”

She nodded, gesturing vaguely at the plate and the iced tea, unable to put coherent words together.

“Good.” He went to the trays, regarded their contents, took up a fistful of rolled meat-slices, and tore off a savage bite.

“So . . . ” June said, fidgeting with the embroidered lapel of her satiny robe. “Uh, here we are.”

“Yes.”

If her awkwardness got any more palpable, she’d smother on it.

“So . . . ” she said again, as he followed the meat with a stack of cheese-wedges.

He turned to her, arching an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“Uh . . . here we are.”

“Yes.”

What the hell was she supposed to say? Hi, honey, how was work?

A rattling clatter heralded the return of Chelsea, which was almost a relief. The girl, who must’ve decided to err on the side of too much rather than not enough, came in carrying half a dozen wine bottles at once. “Didn’t know what kind you might want—” she began, setting them hastily in a row with shaking hands.

“Fine,” said Favius. He flicked a hand. “Leave us.”

If anything, her deer-sprint from the room this time was faster than before.

“You, as well,” he instructed the Golem. “Stand watch in the main chamber.”

Silent and obedient, it lumbered out, though how it fitted its massive clay bulk through the doorway, June had no idea.

Favius shut the door, picked up the nearest bottle, didn’t bother looking at the label, bit off the bottleneck’s rim, spat the glass ring onto the floor, pulled the cork with his teeth, spat that to the floor too, and then drained the contents in a series of hearty gulps. Finished, he did not belch but exhaled gustily and tossed the empty bottle aside.

“So,” he said.

“Yes?” At this rate, they were going to end up doing one of those vaudeville routines, who’s-on-first, wakka-wakka-wakka, ha-cha-cha-cha!

“I imagine you must have questions as to the terms of our arrangement.”

“Oh. Well, uh, since you mention it . . . ”

He uncorked another bottle by identical method, offered it to her, and, when she demurred, took another drink before plunking it half-empty among its fellows. “This place, within these walled borders, beneath this infernal dome, is now my dominion. A kingdom of Hell upon Earth, a stronghold, a foothold, from whence we shall prepare for the eventual, ultimate conflict and further the might of our Luciferic lord.”

“I . . . got that part, yeah.”

“I rule and I serve in His cause and His name.” As he spoke, Favius, with utter nonchalance, unbuckled his sword belt and began removing his armor. “You, as my queen, I will expect to do the same.”

“Okay,” June said.

“The soldiers, citizens, subjects, and slaves shall obey your orders as if they were my own, unless countered by my own.”

“Uh . . . that’s . . . fair . . . ”

Beneath the armor, he wore a simple tunic-like garment of coarse cloth, which he, with the same nonchalance and lack of modesty, shucked off over his head as he walked toward the bathroom.

June blinked, thinking about the scene in that Troy movie where Brad Pitt’s character stripped totally naked just to wash his face. Only, this was much better . . . no clever cinematic trickery to keep it safely R-rated, for one thing . . . and for another . . . no offense to Brad Pitt’s undeniably sculpted physique, but . . .

All right, and yes, Favius did have all those agonized living faces grafted into his skin, blind and deaf and mute though still feeling and suffering and writhing in torment, still . . .

Daaaaaaaamn, he looked good.

He talked about senators and “irksome political minutiae” as he scrubbed himself of battlefield filth, leaving behind a pile of soaked and steaming towels. Then re-emerged, saying, “—villa or palace with proper bath-house eventually,” as he crossed the room and sprawled indolently in the other chair.

June tried, and failed, not to stare.

“And now, my queen,” he said, “come to me.”

***

Her touch . . . satiny, exquisite . . . not hesitant, not tentative, but inquisitive and exploratory, curious, intrigued. Becoming bolder, more sure, at his quickened breath and physical responses. One slim hand grasping, stroking . . . while its partner reached lower to caress and fondle.

Her body, molded to his from behind. The lush press of her breasts on his back, the silken mound of her pubis against his bare skin, not even that thin stupid motel towel between them anymore. Her lips, soft and gentle, brushing the side of his throat where his pulse raced erratically.

“Ethriel . . . ” he managed, voice gone hoarse. “If . . . if you keep . . . ah . . . doing that, I . . . I’m going to . . . hnnn . . . ”

“Yeah,” she murmured into his ear. “That’s the idea.”

“Ohhh . . . ”

Her touch . . . the sensation of if as much as the fact of it, the knowledge of it . . . her touch . . . this was her, this was Ethriel . . .

Helpless, he shuddered in overwhelming release, too caught up in the moment to spare more than the most fleeting instant of mortification at its haste. He cried out, knees buckling, and might have collapsed had she not leaned into him, lending support with her embrace.

She held him until he regained enough of his wits and steadiness to keep his balance, then turned him from the corner to look at her. This near, her eyes weren’t just celestial stars but galaxies, her gossamer hair adrift as if stirred by otherworldly winds, the radiance of her wings its own shining corona.

“You all right?” she asked.

Greg nodded; whether he really was all right or not, he couldn’t say, but it hardly mattered. He raised a tremulous hand—and his touch was hesitant, tentative—to trail his fingertips along the side of her face. Then, still with some trepidation and braced for that incinerating thunderbolt, he pulled her close and went in for a kiss.

A real kiss, far removed from the affectionate little champagne-and-cotton-candy smooches she’d previously bestowed to his cheek or the tip of his nose. A real kiss, impassioned and urgent almost to the point of desperation.

His knees nearly buckled again, and this time so did hers, but they somehow held onto each other and kept their footing as they blundered halfway across the room. Greg felt his calves bump the edge of the bed and the momentum carried them both over onto it, Ethriel atop him, and the next thing he knew, she’d positioned herself above his shoulders to offer her angelic cleft to his mouth.

An offer he, of course, was not about to refuse.

Silken, yes, she was silken there, modest downy wisps framing pristine folds, the sweetness of her scent and taste like nothing he’d ever imagined . . . forget milk and honey, forget manna from Heaven . . .

Ethriel quivered, back arching, exclaiming with pleasure as well as what sounded like astonished delight.

The realization—she’s never done this before, she’s never felt this before!—fully struck him then, though it should have been obvious.

Clutching her pert buttocks, he applied lips and tongue with eager vigor, licking, delving, finding the shy tender bud of her clitoris and coaxing it from hiding while Ethriel’s thighs clasped the sides of his head, and either the clock radio he’d left tuned to the classical station was broadcasting something religious or the strains of some unseen divine choir manifested from thin air, soaring in joyous purity toward a crescendo—

—when suddenly, she withdrew, lifting from him, setting her palms to his chest. “Greg . . . ” she panted, “Greg, stop . . . wait . . . ”

He looked up at her, distraught, seeing her flushed and disheveled and literally aglow, the galaxies in her eyes swirling nebulae of desire. “What? Did I . . . was it . . . didn’t you like . . . I thought you were about to . . . ?”

She bent to kiss him. “I am, and I want you inside me when I do.”

***

June approached on wobbly legs, the rush of her blood sending molten heat throughout her body. “What should I call you?” she asked in a quavering voice. “My king? My lord? H . . . husband? General? Favius?”

“Any of those will do, as you like.” Leaning forward, he curled an arm around her waist and pulled her effortlessly into his naked lap. His other hand cupped her chin, lifted her face, turned it side to side. “You clean up well, my queen.”

A host of the usual protests sprang to the tip of her tongue, but for once in her life, she managed to bite them back. He wasn’t taunting or teasing or just saying that; beneath her hip, she felt the swelling, rising proof. “Thank you?”

“Hmm.” He ran his fingers down her neck, over her collarbones, and along her sternum, parting the front of the robe as he went. “Although I do, also, like it dirty.”

She nearly fainted, just nearly fainted on the spot, as much from the husky rumble in his voice as from his touch. “Oh . . . ”

He slid his hand inside the robe. The tiny infant’s face affixed to the center of his palm squirmed and puckered searchingly against her breast, then her belly as he moved it lower.

“Earlier,” June ventured, before the power of speech abandoned her entirely, “when you said I was . . . well . . . yours . . . ”

“Hmm?”

“About that . . . I was just wondering . . . does that mean we’re . . . exclusive? Monogamous? How does this work? I don’t know how this works.”

“Ahh.” He rubbed her thigh. “Well, for my part, a certain amount of violation and defilement is, as they say, in the job description. If, however, you’re referring to the keeping of concubines and catamites . . . ” His fingers curved around her inner thigh. “I have no such particular interest.”

“Really?” She relaxed against his chest, feeling those myriad faces twist and grimace.

“Why would I?” Two fingers probed between her legs, not roughly but firmly, and no matter how sore or tender she might have been, June moaned aloud, opening to him. “When I have this?” he went on, delving in. “This treasure? This hot and hungry cunt to enjoy?”

The power of speech did abandon her entirely then, his fingers buried past the knuckles, the pad of his thumb massaging her clit in a slow, persuasive rolling. More moans, gasps, and an inarticulate cry were all she could manage.

“Now, that said,” Favius continued, his other arm holding her to him and his turgid erection a rock-hard column under her hip, “You are your own being, of God-given free will and choices. Should you require, or desire, more cock than I alone can provide—”

She uttered some sort of protesting bleat of denial.

“—so be it, and so may it be,” he said. “I ask only that you kill them after.”

The tip of his middle finger found and pressed a spot inside her she’d always secretly thought didn’t really exist, just another hoax or unrealistic expectation intended to make women feel inadequate, and she came like a freight train. He held her, smiling not un-smugly, as the spasms subsided.

Catching her breath, and belatedly catching his words, June echoed, “Kill them?”

Favius shrugged. “Or, have them killed. Either way. So long as no other—man, demon, or beast—be allowed to go on living a single day more with the flesh-memory of this hot, hungry cunt.” A third finger joined the other two, his thumb circling her clit, urging on a devastating spate of orgasmic aftershocks. “Thus are my terms. Do you find them agreeable?”

“Yes!” she howled. “Oh! Oh! Yes!”

If she did faint that time, it was just for a few seconds, and she revived to find him savagely kissing the side of her neck.

“What I do also wonder, however, my queen,” he growled against her throat, “is if your mouth is as hot and hungry as well.”

***

Once again, it was an offer Greg was not about to refuse. He doubted he could have even if he’d wanted to, and he definitely didn’t want to.

Despite having just climaxed mere minutes ago, he’d already been stiffening with arousal before she spoke, and those words . . . those words and that kiss and the desire in her eyes . . . as she knelt astride his hips, helping to guide him . . . then eased down, taking him within herself . . . as they sighed together in the satisfaction of fully joining . . .

“Hold still,” she whispered. “Give me a moment. Let me . . . feel . . . everything.”

He did. It took every last shred of his willpower, but he did. He held still. Or, as still as possible; the involuntary surge and throb of his cock, enfolded in her warm and snug velvety paradise, was far beyond his control. Judging by the way her innermost muscles rippled and twitched with fine trembling convulsions around him, no matter how motionless the rest of her body remained, he knew Ethriel was in a similar state.

“Despite” having just climaxed mere minutes ago? Now, he was glad he had, because otherwise, this would have undone him in an instant, being inside her, seeing the ecstasy suffuse her expression as she began, ever-so-gently, to move. As it was, he didn’t know how long he could last.

“Go slow,” she next whispered.

He did that too, holding her by the waist as she rocked atop him and he pushed upward to match her pace . . . the firm, sliding, gliding pressure waxing and waning . . . their breathing synchronized in shallow, shuddering gasps . . . the choir, rising in pitch and intensity . . .

. . . and he felt it happening for her, the delicious storm as it gathered and gathered and crested . . . Greg, swept up in it, carried along, going with it gladly, his cries mingling with hers . . . gathered and crested and crashingly broke . . . tossing them in a turbulence not unlike when they’d burst through the descending aurora . . . but this, this, this, in exaltation and rapture . . .

. . . and in one immense, soundless, intangible explosion, a silent supernova of brilliant incandescence, the world ended and Greg Nachtwald ceased to be.

***

Meanwhile, in the back office at the other end of the motel, the home shopping channel had moved on from two well-coiffured ladies hawking clunky jewelry to a manic tattooed, pierced chef in a headset demonstrating the absolute ultimate in new kitchen gadgets—sure to make cooking a breeze, see how it chops-slices-dices-juliennes? wedge an apple or even a pineapple just like that, and the melon sculptor, your fruit salad will be the envy of the neighborhood picnic! having trouble getting the kids to eat their veggies? check out this spiralizer attachment, butternut squash makes an amazing substitute for pasta; or watch this ricer turn cauliflower into mashed potatoes; even the pickiest eater won’t know the difference; but wait, there’s more, because order in the next ten minutes and you’ll also receive this set of—

GZZZZZTTTT went the television, zig-zag lines of static disrupting the picture, hideously slicing and dicing the manic chef, julienning the toll-free number across the bottom where operators were standing by, spiralizing the countdown clock in the corner ticking away those final ten minutes to get in on this incredible deal.

For a split-second, the screen flashed silver on black in a weird eldritch design, some seven-sided sigil of angles and lines. But the pot-bellied man snoring on the swaybacked plaid couch barely stirred. The pot-bellied basset hound at his feet jerked awake with a snuffling grunt, blinked quizzically at the TV, then lowered its loose-jowled head to its forepaws again, farted, and went back to sleep. At that, the man did stir, grumbling something about no-more-beanie-weenies-for-you, before changing position and resuming his snores.

On the screen, the eldritch sigil faded, leaving a ghostly afterimage. Outside, the sputtering neon-pink VACANCY sign snapped and sparked and went dark.

***

When, as one of Crusader Markane’s Holy Rollers, she’d first gone into battle against the creeker-freakers, June had been both astounded and wickedly gratified to find herself a natural—even a kind of savant—with a shotgun, though she’d never handled one before.

She was even more gratified to discover she possessed a similar innate talent for fellatio.

Needless to say, so was Favius.

He remained in his indolent sprawl in the chair as she knelt between his broad, muscular thighs, gripping his erection with both hands. There, unlike elsewhere on his body, his skin had not been patchworked with living trophy-faces. Made sense, she supposed, in the logical corner of her mind that bothered to think of such things. That part of him needed skin more pliant, more stretchy, more suited to . . . variations . . . in length and in girth.

The rest of her mind cared only for how it felt, between her palms, between her lips, against her tongue, filling her throat. How it tasted, clean from the shower but somehow salty and earthy and meaty, rich with blood, sweat, musk, and battle.

How he groaned with pleasure, stiffening further, engorged, her hair held loosely in his curled fist as her head bobbed eagerly, taking him so deep she surely should have gagged, should have choked, but didn’t and only took him deeper until he was engulfed to the root; circus sword swallowers or professional porn stars could have done it no better.

Her mouth, as a matter of fact, did prove to be as hot and hungry as her cunt. Which, although still tender from the earlier apocalyptic fuck of the ages, although he’d just fingered her halfway to oblivion, was already wetter than ever and clamoring for more.

Later. Later, because now she had him in her power, his breaths ragged, his groans becoming urgent grunts through clenched jaws, a saltier and tangier precursor of what was to come—oh yes, to come!—welling from his turgid cockhead as she teased and plied the urethral slit, as she licked and lapped and slurped and sucked, as his thighs flexed and his hips surged and his fist in her hair tightened to the point of pain and she welcomed it relished it couldn’t get enough . . .

Then he was coming, coming hard and fast, in gush after copious gush, flooding, overflowing, damn near drowning her, and June didn’t care, just kept gulping and swallowing, wanting every mouthful, every throatful, every drop of the jetting, thick, liquid torrent. Favius shouted . . . no, Favius bellowed, Favius roared . . . his entire magnificent body tensing, the living faces covering his skin writhing not in ecstasy but in mindless agony.

The eruption slowed, the tension eased, his impassioned roar settled into a low-chested rumbling of satisfaction, and he relaxed once again into the chair. June, gasping, dizzied as much by lack of air as by the heady rush of triumph and desire, rested her cheek upon his right thigh. The femoral face beneath hers, that of a once-beautiful woman, appeared to be silently weeping.

“Ah, my queen,” he said, stroking June’s hair and the nape of her neck. “Indeed, you are a treasure. Left to my own purposes, I would bear you straight to that bed and ravish you every way imaginable from now until dawn.”

“Mmm,” she murmured, smiling, eyes lazy and half-lidded. “Sounds good to me.”

“Alas, my own purposes must wait . . . before further such indulgence, there is another matter demanding of our attention.”

She raised her head, letting her gaze rove a slow upward course over his loins and torso—sculpted with powerful muscle, marked by war-scars, decorated and defined by myriad suffering visages of inhuman cruelty—to meet his. The last time he’d told her they had other business to attend to first, she’d found herself doing something unspeakable with a marshmallow fork. But the payoff had sure been well worth it.

“Then, lead the way . . . husband.”

***

“Wow,” Ethriel said, after a while. “Now I see what all the fuss is about.”

“Nnnggghhh,” was the best Greg could do just then. He had a vague peripheral awareness that his surroundings were, somehow, inexplicably changed but hadn’t yet bothered trying to open his eyes.

She’d disengaged and lay next to him, on her side while he remained on his back, with her head nestled into the cradle of his neck and shoulder. His right arm curled around her, hand resting on her hip.

“How are you doing?” she asked after another while.

He thought about it. “Stunned,” he said. “Amazed I survived.” He paused, then added, “Forever ruined for all mortal women.”

“Good.”

Chuckling, he turned enough to nuzzle her hair. “And you?”

“Yeah, about the same.”

“I, uh, didn’t think you were . . . you know . . . allowed to.”

“Technically, we’re not.”

“Is . . . is that going to be a problem? With your, um, boss?”

She shrugged, causing her curves to nudge against him in distracting ways. “What with the current state of affairs? I’m not even supposed to be incarnate on Earth, remember, the rulebook’s kind of gone out the window.”

“Hmm. Right.” He pulled her closer, inhaling her scent, basking in the afterglow. After the events of the past day and the few restless hours he’d spent in the back seat of that abandoned El Camino, he would have expected to be in dire need of a solid ten, maybe fourteen hours’ worth of sleep. Instead, far from being exhausted, he felt revitalized, invigorated, all but thrumming with energy.

“Goes all the way back to the O.G. Seraphim,” Ethriel said. “Old Testament stuff. The whole Sons of God / Daughters of Man thing. That’s why the Big Guy had to lay down the law.”

“Seraphim? You don’t mean the archangels? Like, Gabriel?”

“Oh, sure, some of them, back in the day. Talk about fuckbois!” She laughed. “The Olympians, Zeus especially, may get a bad rap about not being able to keep it in their togas, but that bunch? Never mind disguising themselves as a bull or a swan either. They just went for it, multiple wings and eyeballs of fire, the whole nine yards.”

“So . . . ” He ran his hand from her hip to her bottom, giving a playful squeeze. “Do I want to ask?”

“If this is my true form? Don’t stress it. I’m way down the hierarchy from that level.”

“Okay.” Not a very definitive answer, but for the sake of his sanity, he decided to let that one go. “But, angels . . . used to?”

“And it wasn’t just the Daughters of Man they lusted after; those horndogs would just about do anything to anything. The only reason it became a problem was because of the Nephilim.”

“Giants,” he said, not mentioning he’d dredged that bit of trivia more from video games than theological study or texts.

“Giants,” she agreed. “Their offspring. Half-angel, half-human. Which, as the Olympians also could confirm, complicates things. Once you get all these demi-gods running around on Earth, well, there goes your pantheon.”

“What happened to them?”

“The demi-gods?”

“The Nephilim.”

She rolled onto him, gossamer hair tickling his face, and booped his nose. “Now we’re getting way above both our pay grades. I suppose what we should be wondering about is whether or not you can knock me up.”

His eyes flew wide open. “What?!?”

Her opalescent visage occupied and captivated his entire view, celestial stars and angelic smile, backlit by the radiant corona of her wings. No teasing glint twinkled this time; she seemed serious. Maybe not overly concerned, but serious.

“Daughters of God / Sons of Man isn’t exactly covered in the rulebook . . . the rulebook that’s gone out the window anyway,” she said. “We’re kind of in uncharted territory here.”

“Uhhh,” said Greg, as he finally diverted his gaze long enough to look at the absence of any rundown motel room around them. “Yeah, you can say that again . . . ”

***

A quartermaster brought Favius a clean tunic, over which he re-donned his armor. He buckled on his sword-belt, slung a scarlet cloak around his shoulders, and settled his helm into place.

June didn’t bother searching through the scavenged luggage for a change of clothes. The peacock-blue robe would do fine; not like everyone hadn’t seen everything already anyway. All she had to do was slip on a pair of sandals and she was good to go.

“Tidy up, would you?” she said to Chelsea on the way out.

A pained twitch of a tight-lipped smile and a curt little nod were the handmaid’s only answer. June knew she really shouldn’t push it, but for the moment, eliciting that sour expression was too hard to resist.

“She serves adequately?” asked Favius, which turned Chelsea’s sour expression into a grimace of terror.

“Adequately.” June smiled as she took his arm.

They emerged from the RV into the blood-tinted night, dawn still a few hours away. Already, though, the war-camp had come along quite a bit, looking organized and efficient. Soldiers snapped to attention, thunking closed fists against their chests by way of salute when Favius passed. Others—civilians? non-military personnel? she wasn’t sure on the correct terminology—moved deferentially aside, stealing awestruck, even worshipful, glances at their general and his queen.

Damn, but she could get used to this! Nobody sneering or scornful or dismissive, nobody treating her like she was invisible or beneath notice. Nobody reacting to plain-Jane Junie-June, homely old maid who couldn’t get laid. Not now. Not anymore. Not ever again.

Favius pointed out various landmarks along the way, but this wasn’t a sight-seeing tour. He led her past a guarded stockade, where miserable prisoners huddled in the torchlit shadows of various gallows and guillotines and other grim structures of torture and execution.

“What happened to Mr. and Mrs. Shinn, and Ramon?” June asked, remembering something Chelsea had mentioned.

“The old man and woman are being held there,” said Favius, indicating with a jerk of his chin a row of cages like in those free-range vs. factory-farmed livestock commercials. “We’ll deal with them in due time. First . . . ”

He then indicated a cluster of tents ahead of them, the largest hung with a banner depicting a red symbol on a white field, the scene reminiscent of old episodes of M*A*S*H. Except, on M*A*S*H, the red symbol was a cross, while this was more like that winged snake-entwined staff—caduceus, she vaguely recalled—often seen at hospitals.

Only, she was pretty sure the official caduceus featured bird wings instead of batlike ones . . . and the entwined snakes weren’t normally simultaneously fucking and eating each other . . .

She didn’t have long to puzzle over it because Favius strode on to one of the smaller tents, which had two soldiers stationed outside and a third inside. Also inside were what appeared to be a military medic and an offensively caricatured witch doctor on either side of a gurney. The medic fussed with a blood-pressure cuff and an IV line, while the witch doctor rattled fingerbones in a bloodstone bowl and chanted.

On the gurney, secured with chains to the gurney, indifferently draped in a stained and filthy sheet, was Ramon.

When last she’d seen him, the Golems had been hauling his unconscious form out of the wrecked church bus. His face had been split and cauterized in a diagonal wound from the weal of a whip made from his friend’s severed spine, and the same whip had reduced his left hand to a mangle of charred flesh and splintered bone.

“He’s still alive?” June edged closer. “After all that? The crash too?”

“We’ve kept him so, ma’am,” the medic replied. “As ordered.”

“Why?” She turned to Favius. “I thought you wanted to kill him because he blew up that demon relic and took its power or something.”

“Such was my intention,” he said. “But I felt the privilege might be better offered to you.”

***

“Not to change the subject,” Greg said, looking around, “but I’m having one of those not-in-Kansas-anymore moments here. Little help, please?”

“Oh, that.” Ethriel slid off him and knelt at his side, allowing him to sit up. “Yeah. We crossed over.”

“As in, we’re dead after all? Or, I am?”

“No, silly.” She booped his nose. “It’s Liminos.”

How it was, exactly, he could sit up when there was nothing solid beneath him . . . nothing substantial anywhere within view . . . only a pale, pearlescent mist of shifting pastel colors and diffuse light . . . like being suspended in the midst of a fogbank at dawn or moonbeams filtered through faded rainbow silk . . .

It felt simultaneously open and enclosed, an intimate pocket and a floating expansiveness. It felt private, but not empty . . . active, but not crowded . . . hushed but not silent . . . neither warm nor cool, an ambience of temperature so balanced as to be of no notice . . . he breathed, and it was air, clean and fresh but without identifiable scent or taste . . . his sense of equilibrium oriented him, though concepts of “up” and “down” seemed unimportant.

“You mean Limbo?”

“I mean Liminos,” Ethriel said. “Limbo’s a whole other ballgame. Limbo’s the afterlife’s waiting room. It’s being stuck at the DMV where the numbers never change, or the airport where your flight keeps getting delayed. It’s on-hold music with occasional your-call-is-important to us recordings, the spinning circle on a loading website, those chat-dots indicating someone’s typing a reply to your text.”

“Ugh.”

“Yeah, ugh. Nobody, angel or demon, wants to pull Limbo duty. Purgatory’s no picnic either, but Limbo’s fucking tedious.”

He filed that info away for future consideration, returning to the matter of focus at hand. “Then this is . . . ?”

“Liminos,” she repeated. “A between-place.”

“Between what and what?”

“Anywhere and everywhere. It’s a transitory zone, a nexus, a shortcut, a crossroads.”

Greg pressed his fingertips to his temples. “And we’re here . . . how? Why?”

“Magic? Divine intervention? Reality-bending sex?”

He had to snicker a little. “I’ll give you that one.”

“Trust me, you already did.” Instead of another nose-boop, she leaned in for a gentle kiss. “And will again, I hope, several times.”

“As many and as often as possible,” he agreed. “Which is another thing, though . . . wherever we are, we’re still, uh, naked.”

It occurred to him he actually wasn’t quite naked; his familiar silver medallion hung around his neck on its strand of mother-of-pearl and polished petrified wood beads. He didn’t remember putting it on after his shower back at the now-nonexistent motel, but he didn’t remember taking it off before his shower either, and decided to just accept it and move on.

The rest of him, however, was still very naked. No matter how private this between-place might seem, it also had that active feeling of non-emptiness, and the prospect of some strange entity happening along and catching him in the buff was anxiety-inducing, to say the least. It would have been, even had he not just been having reality-bending sex with an angel, an act for which he still expected to be smote with a thunderbolt any minute now.

“Pff, easy enough fix,” Ethriel said. She shimmered, and a whitish-gold garment wove itself into existence to adorn her body, a semi-sheer flowing gown, backless to allow for her radiant wings, belted with a braided silken cord. Soft ballerina-esque slippers appeared on her feet. “See?”

“An easy enough fix for you, maybe—”

She booped his nose again. “Warlock, remember?”

“What, so I can just . . . summon up something to wear?”

“Well, duh.”

“Really?”

“Whatever you want. Your powers work here. Probably even better than in the earthly realm, where the laws of physics are more strictly enforced.”

“Yeah . . . I’m still not too sure about these so-called powers of mine.”

“Okay. Or you can just go naked.” She winked. “Not like I’m going to complain. I just might not be able to keep my hands to myself.”

***

Ramon.

The memories, which felt like forever ago even if the whole thing had happened within the past day, stung her with shame.

Going after the Gabelmans with Brother Lucas. Fighting the creeker-freaks. The altar. The enormous horned skull. Azbunael. Being bound there, stripped and spreadeagled, waiting, helpless but horribly eager. On the verge, at last, of losing her hateful, tiresome virginity, even if a demon had to possess someone to do it because no other man in his right mind ever would. Him looming over her, naked and erect, poised. Mrs. Gabelman’s blood on the altar stone still warm and sticky beneath her back and her buttocks.

And then, at the last possible instant, saved by the bell. Or by David and Ramon, as the case may have been. Charging in to rescue Sister June from defilement and defloration.

Saved by the bell? Rescued? Foiled again, more like. Cheated. Robbed. So she’d thought at the time, nearly furious with her two young would-be saviors, barely caring when golden-boy David met a gruesome end. More-than-half hoping Ramon would be next, either killed or taken over to finish what the corrupted body of Brother Lucas had started.

But Ramon . . . brave, faithful, foolish Ramon . . . had pulled off a nigh-miraculous Hail Mary with a grenade, and there’d gone her chances in one explosive kaboom.

Oh, she’d been so mad at him! Furious! Depriving her of her only opportunity to be rid of her burden, whether it killed her or cost her her soul or not!

Now, gazing down at him, injured and unconscious, being kept alive by the efforts of a medic and a witch doctor, June blinked back tears of gratitude and remorse. If he hadn’t done what he’d done . . .

“Thank you, Brother Ramon,” she said, touching his undamaged hand.

“Would you rather spare him?” asked Favius, in a tone somewhere between skepticism and suspicion.

“No.” She traced her fingertips along the cauterized bone-whip scar splitting Ramon’s face on the diagonal. It felt . . . charged somehow, like a live wire. As if a portion of Azbunael’s power had been absorbed. She had no idea how she knew it, only grasping it on a weird intuitive level, but there it was. “No, you’re right. He can’t be allowed to live.”

Favius gestured. The medic, witch doctor, and soldier all vacated the tent. “How would you have it done?”

She thought of her mother and the marshmallow fork, and grimaced. “Can it be quick? Or does it have to be . . . messy? He did make it so I could be here with you, so, in a way, I owe him that much at least.”

“My queen is merciful.” He drew his gladius, reversing it to offer her the battle-worn hilt. “As you will. A single thrust to the heart should be quick enough.”

June took hold of the weapon, finding it lighter than she’d anticipated, handling it with the same deft and surprising ease as the shotgun. She pulled the sheet to Ramon’s waist, baring his chest.

Only a boy. A fit one, and handsome, but only a boy. To think she’d once entertained silly notions . . . well, she was over that and no doubt!

“Here.” Favius tapped a section of smooth flesh. “Between the ribs.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” She positioned the blade, its point indenting the skin, and fancied she could feel Ramon’s heartbeat vibrate up the Hell-forged metal, its rhythm slow and unchanged.

Curling her other hand around the hilt as well, she inhaled deeply, steeled herself, and drove the gladius down in a single hard push. It punched into meat and gristle with a butcher-shop sound.

Ramon’s body jerked. A glottal cry burst from his lips as a gout of blood, dark and thick as chocolate syrup, burst from his heart. His scars smoked, sizzled. He went limp.

The charged live-wire power she’d sensed before slammed into June like a thunderbolt, flaring and fanning through her, opening new horizons as with a hundred new eyes.

***

Enticing as her flirty, winking remarks were, Greg couldn’t very well go wandering around Liminos—whatever it was—with his junk hanging out. The feeling they weren’t alone here persisted, along with a heightening expectation of purpose. This wasn’t an accident. They’d traveled, or been brought, or been sent, to this between-place for a reason.

A reason for which, yeah, some sort of dress code seemed in order.

He thought of his previous clothes, so torn up and filthy from the previous day’s misadventures they were likely a lost cause. Definitely not those. Far as he was concerned, they could rot on the floor of the motel bathroom. Let the palmetto beetles have them.

Circumstances did seem to call for more than just jeans and a t-shirt, though.

What, then? Warlock, she said . . . but he couldn’t see himself going the full wizard-robe route. And, despite his earlier amused ponderings about a Dr. Strange cape, he doubted he could pull off the look with any real credibility.

Other ridiculous movie-and-TV notions flitted through his imagination. Jedi? Matrix? Anime sorcerer? Flashy Vegas stage magician with top hat and tails?

No. Too much. Too pretentious and crazy. Keep it simple, stupid. Practical, functional, comfortable, normal enough to pass fairly well in most default situations. More along the lines of Constantine / Castiel. Slacks. Button-down. Loosely knotted tie. Long coat for style and dramatic flair. Slightly rumpled but not totally scruffy.

“Niiice,” said Ethriel. “I like it!”

Greg opened his eyes, not sure when he’d closed them, and found himself clad precisely as his mind had pictured. Nor was it mere illusion; he touched his shirtfront, tugged his coat-sleeves and tie. Real. Including belt, shoes, socks, and underwear. As real as anything could be here anyway.

His hair, which had previously been a damp towel-tousled and then sex-tousled mess, was dry and combed enough to be only somewhat disheveled. He hadn’t shaved since before picking up his drug-smuggler’s shipment, so he also had the not-totally-scruffy thing down pat.

Just in time too. A building but subliminal—aha, liminal, liminos . . . okay, he got it, thresholds and intersections and transitions, he got it; maybe not fully, but on some level, he got it—hum or vibration suggested something was about to happen.

Ethriel took his hand. “We’re being called. Summoned.”

“To where?”

“Does it matter?”

“Well, maybe, if it’s someplace bad. Where can we go from here?”

“Anywhere, once you get the hang of it.”

“Do you have the hang of it?”

“Not a hundred percent . . . ”

“Great. And when you say ‘anywhere,’ what kind of anywhere are we talking? Anywhere on Earth, for instance? Back to the motel? Downtown Disney? Cairo? Cape Cod? Nebraska?”

She grinned impishly. “You’re thinking too small.”

“As in, other planets ‘too small’? Mars? Alpha Centauri?”

“Was that a Good Omens reference?”

“Not deliberately . . . ”

“Other planets, other realms, other worlds than these.”

“Was that a Dark Tower reference?” he shot back.

Her grin widened. “Not deliberately.”

“All things serve the Beam?”

She blew a raspberry. “How metaphysical do you want it? There’s the mortal realms, the immortal ones; Heaven and Hell and Limbo and Purgatory, of course, plus all the other mythologies. There’s the astral plane, various spirit and fae realms, dreamlands, parallel dimensions, whole cosmic reaches of time and space—”

“More Hitchhiker’s Guide type, Lovecraftian, Marvel, or Doctor Who?”

“Now you’re just being a smartypants.”

“Wherever we’re going,” he said as the pearlescent mists around them began to thicken and swirl, first coalescing, then opening, like a vortex, like a portal, like a doorway, “I’m just glad to have pants, smarty or otherwise.”

Ethriel laughed and pinched his butt. “Come on, studmuffin. Let’s go. If we’re lucky, we’ll find out what we’re supposed to be doing next.”

“And if we’re unlucky?”

“Is that a Hitchhiker’s Guide reference?”

“This time, I’m serious.”

“If we’re unlucky, we’ll be facing a tribunal of archangels, having to answer some pretty personal questions.”

***

Leaving Ramon’s cooling corpse to await disposal—probably to the mess tent, but June wasn’t going to dwell on that—she and Favius returned to the stockade.

“What happened back there?” she asked, walking unsteadily for several reasons. Several well-earned reasons not begrudged in the least.

“A transference, of sorts. When he destroyed the relic, a portion of its residual power remained with him. Marking him. Under other circumstances, had he survived, it might have made him a more formidable ally to the Opposition.”

“So, by killing him . . . ?”

“You’ve taken it back, denied the other side their full victory, and further proved yourself a faithful servant to our Luciferic lord.”

“Oh. Will it . . . do anything to me? Change me?”

“Perhaps. But, are you not changed already? And in no objectionable fashion?”

“I do feel . . . different.” Which was putting it mildly and in no objectionable fashion for sure.

She’d never dreamed she could feel this way, strong and confident and capable, brave and fierce. It felt pretty fucking fantastic, not to mention the fantastic fucking. Fine, so she was corrupted and probably clinically insane; big whoop. For the first time in her entire life, she was happy.

Happy and, dare she venture a step further, in love.

Curling both of her arms around one of his, she leaned into Favius as he gave orders to the gaolkeepers, and waited while they brought out the certain special two prisoners he’d requested.

Mr. and Mrs. Shinn emerged, yoked together like oxen, bent almost double under its bulky oaken weight. With their wrists manacled behind them and ankles hobbled, it was all they could do to stay upright. Being literally goaded along, their captors prodding at them with iron-tipped rods, didn’t help.

Filthy, muddy and bloody, clothes befouled, reeking of piss and shit and terror-sweat, they staggered and stumbled and bleated piteous livestock noises. One of their captors struck Mr. Shinn across the backs of the legs, sending him crashing forward and pulling his wife with him. They faceplanted into the dirt, then were hauled up onto their knees in front of Favius and June.

Oh, their expressions when they saw her! The shock and horror and aghast recognition were priceless!

The self-righteous loathing and sanctimonious contempt a moment later? Not so much.

“You,” Mr. Shinn said, packing a world’s worth of disgust into a single syllable.

“Oh, June!” sobbed Mrs. Shinn. “Your own mother! How could you?”

“And him!” Mr. Shinn added. “Whoring yourself to that . . . that monster!”

The arm around which hers were curled tensed menacingly. “Say the word, my queen, and they’ll be flayed alive inch by inch.”

The prospect was tempting . . .

As were other prospects dancing through her darkest imagination. The possibilities seemed endless. Torture, mutilation, dismemberment, a thousand hideous and horrible ways to die . . .

She regarded them as they pleaded and blustered, an overlapping babble of begging and threats. Mrs. Shinn all “it’s not too late / can still forgive / don’t have to do this / always were such a good decent pious person,” while Mr. Shinn took a more aggressive tack: “God will punish you / won’t stand for this / burn in Hell with all the babykiller libtards and lesbians.”

“If they weren’t such total hypocrites, they’d probably like being martyred,” she said. “But they never have been the type to put their money where their big fat nosy mouths are.”

The Shinns, startled, shut up and stared at her.

June went on, temper rising. “Can’t mind their own business and let other people live their own lives, no; got to butt in and make a stink whether it’s anything to do with them or not! Protest abortion clinics, sure; but do they adopt or foster or lift one goddamn finger to help? Shit, no! It’s all about harassing desperate women. That’s what they get off on!” She kicked a dirt clod at Mr. Shinn. “Too bad you’ll never know what they’re going through!”

***

It wasn’t a tribunal of archangels.

A tribunal of archangels might have been preferable. And much less awkward. For that matter, standing before the very Throne of God Almighty might have been preferable and less awkward.

They stepped through seamlessly from pearlescent mists into warm lamplight and the scents of brown sugar, apples, cinnamon, and spice. From somehow-substantial insolidity onto patterned tile, faded timeworn pathways marking the high-traffic routes between stove, sink, fridge, and table. The cabinets were mellow ivory, the fixtures bronze-tone and ornate, the countertops toffee-colored granite with paler and darker flecks. The kitchen curtains were edged in aged lace.

The chubby ceramic owl cookie jar sat right where he remembered it.

So did the woman in the homey little breakfast nook, in her usual spot, with her usual cup of tea, her usual book of crossword puzzles, her soft cashmere cardigan, and her antiqued cat’s-eye glasses dangling on a string of amber beads around her neck.

“Grandma?”

“Gregory.” She set down her pen, folded her lined but still delicate hands atop the crossword book, and gave him the kind of once-over that made him feel like an eight-year-old kid who’d just come in muddy and grass-stained and late for dinner.

“Grandma,” he said again. A host of inane follow-ups such as “but you’re dead!” logjammed behind his lips.

“Gregory. I give you a protective good-luck charm to keep you safe, and this is how you end up? Sleeping with your guardian angel?”

“I . . . uh . . . well, I . . . ” he stammered.

“Don’t let her pick on you,” Ethriel said, amused. “As if she never got into any mischief herself?”

“That was a long time ago,” his grandmother said. “I was a very different person then.”

“Oh, I know! You ironed your hair, wore turtlenecks and berets, smoked cloves . . . among other things—”

“All right, enough.”

“Wait, what?” Greg asked. “Grandma? You were a . . . a beatnik?”

“I told you she hitchhiked through Europe when she was nineteen, and if she wants to throw shade about who’s been sleeping with—”

“Enough, I said, enough.” His grandmother drew a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “However it happened, here we all are. Sit down. Have a cookie. Apple cider snickerdoodles, fresh-baked. Your favorite, if I recall, Gregory.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” These, also, proved just as he remembered . . . she didn’t flatten them so they became thin and crunchy but let them bake thick and chewy and just a little bit gooey, with a sweet spicy-fruity tang.

“These are delicious, Sophie,” said Ethriel, adding in an aside to Greg. “And don’t worry, the eating-and-drinking rules are more for the fae realms and the underworld.”

“You haven’t taken my grandson to the fae realms or the underworld, I should hope!”

“Hey, I got him away from Lake Misquamicus, didn’t I?”

“After letting him crash land there in the first place, fighting demons, awakening his powers—”

“Whoa!” Greg made the time-out sign, interrupting their good-natured bickering. “Someone mind filling me in, here? Where are we? What’s going on? Grandma, all this warlock stuff . . . did you know? Is it the whole family, or is it just me?”

“I suspected,” she said. “Even when you were a little boy, I could tell you weren’t quite like your father, aunt and uncles, or cousins. You may have never known him, but you took after your grandfather. Without his influence, I didn’t expect anything much else to come of it. I tried to shield you, guide and help where I could, steer you toward the right path. As long as you didn’t fall in with any of the other branches of the Nachtwald tree . . . as long as you never went dabbling in the occult . . . I thought you’d be fine. Safe. Have a nice, normal life. And you were, Gregory. You did. Until this. If I’d had any idea what was going to happen in Florida . . . but I was already dead and gone by then.”

***

Her handmaid had been right; the local called Spot, Favius’s chief underling, was indeed a total skeeve-o.

But, apparently, a knowledgeable and useful skeeve-o, and quick about it. Less than an hour after Favius had dispatched him on his errand, an hour during which the two of them continued their tour of the war-camp, Spot reappeared with a small glass jar of the type most commonly used to hold homemade preserves.

Instead of preserves, though, it contained a few darkish, pruney objects June at first took for dead flies, or maybe raisins. Upon closer inspection, she saw the second guess was closer, if still not exact. The items in the jar looked like dried, oversized purple-black pomegranate pips.

“Now, when’s you was a kid,” Spot said, “you know how folks’d go all nuts warnin’ you ‘bout what’d happen if’n you swallered a watermelon seed?”

She nodded, having heard the cautionary tales often enough. “Sure. A watermelon would grow in your stomach. Same kind of thing they used to tell us about swallowing bubblegum, how it wouldn’t digest but just collect in a wad in your guts until you needed surgery, or some such crap.”

“‘Zackly! Only, this,” he said, beaming, “this ain’t crap, this ain’t crap ‘tall. See, what we gots here, Miz Your Highness, what we gots here is seeds from one o’ them there utero-gourds!”

“One of them there what?”

He explained with full rustic gusto, graphic details, and gooshy sound effects June could have done without, but she got the gist.

“That is . . . sick, and wrong, and revolting,” she said. Then she turned, beaming, to Favius. “And perfect!”

Favius inclined his head. “The inspiration was by your suggestion, my queen.”

“So, they swallow those seeds and the fruit grows in their stomachs. Only it’s more like they’re pregnant? Both of them? Even him?”

“But, the seeds, they’se’ll got t’ be spunked-up first,” Spot said. “Elsewise, the gourds’ll still grow but be empty. So, if’n you wants ‘em t’ have the en-tire gen-u-ine experience, yeah, the seeds got t’ be good an’ spunked-up.”

“Do I even want to ask?”

“Y’means about the spunk?” Spot chuckled. “Could be from ‘bout anyone. Or anything, really. Pig, dog, ‘gator, don’ matter none. Utero-gourds, they’ll catch preggo off’n ‘bout any kinds’a wigglies. Even fish-spawn an’ bee-pollen, I’se heard.”

“And the . . . babies?”

“Whaddayercallems, high-birds, like.”

“Hybrids?”

“Yeah, that. Half plant-person, kinda, half whatever-else. Freaky-lookin’ li’l fuckers for th’ most part, all dependin’ on who or what did the spunkin’. Never can tell until they comes poppin’ out.”

“Canaanite warlock-priests would inseminate the fruits themselves,” added Favius. “In times of plague or hardship, the natural birth rates often weren’t able to match the demands of Moloch’s appetite. As the gourds ripened far quicker, the resulting offspring, while not ideal, would at least keep him placated, if not fully satisfied.”

“Just add some kinda dicksnot t’ the jar, swirl an’ shake it around some, an’ there ya go,” Spot said. “Gots plenny options ‘vailable t’ choose from, I’d reckon.”

In that old animated holiday special about the Grinch, there was a moment when the mangy green-furred bastard had an idea . . . a wonderful, awful idea . . . and grinned such a deviously malicious and sadistic evil grin it curled not only the corners of his grinchy mouth but his face and his eyebrows and his entire grinchy head, all the way up to the tufts of hair, or horns, or ears, or whatever the hell they were supposed to be.

As a child, that moment had always unnerved June.

Finding herself grinning just such a grin, feeling it twinkle her eyes and crinkle her cheeks with sinister glee, was similarly unnerving. In lieu of tufted ear-horns to curl, her skin prickled into all-over goosebumps. Her nipples went hard and tight enough to serve as drill bits, poking prominently at the thin peacock-blue silk of her robe.

“Whatever it is that you’re contemplating,” said Favius, “already has my complete and utter support.”

***

Greg got up and paced the kitchen, still rubbing his temples. “Okay, listen, I knew there were some weird hush-hush family secrets nobody talked about, but this is getting a little much. Other branches of the Nachtwald tree . . . didn’t Aunt Karen go digging into the genealogy? I’m sure I remember something about that from when I was a kid.”

“Yes,” his grandmother said. “Which is also when she started drinking.”

He paused in his pacing. “Oh.”

“She got through the grave robber, the black widow, and the schoolmistress who led all those teenage girls into a suicide pact, but the ritualistic serial killer and the worm-cult were too much for her—”

“WHAT?!”

“—let alone the colonial blood-coven, and—”

“Grandma, stop!”

“Well, you did ask.”

“Shit.” He dropped into his chair again. “I meant, more like, some great-uncle who was rumored to be gay, and the candle-maker everyone said was a witch because she refused to go to church.”

“Ah yes, your grandfather’s younger brother. Though, I think it was more that he, how do they put it? Swung both ways? At any rate, yes, which is part of why your father and uncles always made such a big deal about being extra manly, into hunting and fishing and football and cars, to escape any shadows of his reputation.”

“And the candle-maker?”

“Now, that one,” she said, picking up her teacup, “that one is not quite true. She was more like me. A Nachtwald by marriage who did what she could to protect others and provide a calming influence.”

“A witch, but a good witch,” Ethriel said.

“Some of her candles are probably still at the house,” Grandma added. “The real house, in the actual physical realm. Up in the attic, I’d guess. For her, it was essential oils and alchemy. For me, well . . . ”

“Your garden,” Greg said. “All the potpourri and sachets of dried flowers, sprigs of herbs, tea. It wasn’t just some typical little-old-lady affectation.”

“Typical little-old-lady affectation? I’ll let you get away with that one, Gregory, because you always were my favorite, but don’t push your luck. Anyway, yes, you’re right. The rose-society snobs with their expensive hybrids . . . bah. They can keep them.”

“Right. Wait. Give me a second.”

“Of course, dear.” She patted his hand. “Speaking of tea, I could use a topping-off.”

As she went to the stove, Ethriel nudged Greg. “You okay?”

“It’s a lot.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

“How much did you know?”

“Not much. Worm-cult was a new one; not sure if I even want to go there.”

“I sure don’t.”

“But, we might have to.”

“Say what?”

“This is your heritage, Greg. This is where your power comes from. The more you learn about it, the stronger you’ll become. And you’ll need to be strong for whatever happens next.”

“Such as?”

“Dunno,” she said. “I have a feeling, though, that damn nasty lake isn’t done with us yet.”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “I have the same feeling. Nice as it’d be to get a new plane and head for Alaska or someplace—”

“They do say Glacier Bay is pretty stunning.”

“—there’s unfinished business we need to take care of in Florida, isn’t there?”

“Looking like. Hey, on the bright side, you can play hero.”

“I’m starting to think playing hero isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“No.” She ran her fingers through his hair, drew his head toward hers, and kissed him. “But it does have its perks.”

“Can’t argue with that.” He went in for a longer kiss.

“Ahem,” said his grandmother, returning to the table. “Not in my kitchen, if you don’t mind.”

“Sorry, Grandma.” Was he blushing? Ah, crap, he was. What kind of hero blushed? “So, uh, I did have one question—”

“Only one?”

“Well, okay, a bunch. But . . . you and Grandfather . . . if you knew who he was, what he was, what his family was, then . . . why? Why would you marry someone like that?”

***

The technical term, June believed, was “orchidectomy.”

“I’ve never performed one of these on a person before,” said an elderly man who managed to be distinguished-looking despite having been rousted from slumber and brought here in bathrobe and slippers. “I was a veterinarian, after all. And I’m retired.”

“Nonetheless,” Favius told him, “you will do so now.”

“Oh, well, yes, of course.” He shot an uneasy glance at his military escort. “Your soldiers did indeed make that very clear.”

In what served as the war-camp’s primary hospital tent, Mr. Shinn had been strapped naked to an operating table beneath spotlights whose stark glare glinted evilly from a tray of stainless steel surgical implements. It was not a pretty sight, particularly with his legs wishboned wide in stirrups as if awaiting a visit from an OB/GYN.

Later, June thought. Time enough for that later. First things first.

Wide awake and unanesthetized, his eyes rolled frantically above a gag. Veins pulsed rapid terror at his temples and throat; if he’d been hooked up to a heart monitor, the beeping would have been playing “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Had he not already pissed himself dry and shit himself empty, he probably would have been making a foul, stinky mess.

Mrs. Shinn, no picture of dignity herself, was bound to one of those upright gurney hand truck things like Hannibal Lecter being carted into court. She was also gagged, also naked. And, evidently, better hydrated than her husband, leaking tears at one end and pee at the other. Her desperate gaze flicked from person to person, seething with pure hate whenever it happened upon June.

The retired veterinarian—who, according to Spot, used to “make hisself a nice fancy living takin’ care of li’l ol’ ladies’ pussies”—insisted on donning a paper smock, mask, and gloves before getting to work. He also insisted on having “the area” prepped, which unenviable task fell to the less-than-thrilled medic who’d been taking care of Ramon.

June stood beside Favius, her wonderful-awful-idea grin eager as the medic swabbed Mr. Shinn’s crinkly fear-shriveled ballsack with alcohol wipes and taped his sorry excuse for a dick to the side. Mr. Shinn reacted as might be expected, but the straps held fast, and a weak fart of protest was the most he could muster.

“It’ll only be a minute,” the vet said in the same soothing-pandering tone he’d doubtless used on many a cat or dog. “A couple of snips, a couple of clips, and then there you go, all done.”

Maybe those long-ago cats and dogs fell for it. Mr. Shinn, not so much.

“Make him watch,” June said.

The medic obligingly cranked up the top half of the bed. One soldier seized Mr. Shinn’s head when he tried to turn it away. Another leveled a far-from-surgical, anything-but-sanitized blade at his face. “You heard the lady. Keep ‘em open or I’ll cut those eyelids right off.”

The vet took a moment to steady himself, nerves as well as hands, then selected a scalpel. “Performing the incision.”

The scrotal skin parted in a nice precise slice—fittingly poetic for the poetic justice about to be served. There was remarkably little blood, a trickle onto an absorbent pad. Once begun, any hesitation or uncertainty fell away, the vet going about his work as if he’d deballed a fully conscious human being hundreds of times before.

What had he said? A snip and a snip and a clip and a clip? It’ll only be a minute? If it wasn’t quite that fast or simple, it was still impressive in its quick efficiency. Through the incision, he eased out the first testicle, a sorry pinkish-purple soggy lump of tissue attached to a thin rubbery tube. The tube got the snip-and-clip, the testicle itself placed into a little metal basin. Its partner received identical treatment.

Moments later, the medic presented the basin to June, its wobbly contents sliding around in their own fluids like the world’s ugliest soft-boiled eggs.

***

His grandmother averted her eyes and stirred her tea, the spoon clinking faintly against china. “Oh, that’s ancient history; I don’t think we really need to go into it now, do you?”

“Aw, go on,” Ethriel said, impish grin twinkling full-force. “Tell him. Or I will.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I would!”

“As nice as it is to finally meet you in person, for an angel, Ethriel dear, you certainly can be a wicked little imp.”

“Hey, whoa.” Greg raised his palms. “Forget I asked.”

Ethriel only laughed. “No, no, it’s great, it’s a classic. You know the whole darkly brooding bad-boy trope where the good girl figures he really must just be a misunderstood loner who just needs to be loved to find his way to redemption?”

His grandmother exhaled and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I was much younger then. Innocent and naive.”

“Innocent and naive, my butt. After Paris?”

“Please, must we dredge up every sordid—”

“See? Sordid! She admits it!”

“I’m beginning to regret calling you here.” She looked at Greg. “Is she always such a sassbox?”

“You’ve known her longer than I have,” he said.

“Yes, but, our previous . . . encounters . . . weren’t quite like this.”

“She means,” said Ethriel cheerfully, “she was whacked out of her mind on acid and opium, and thought I was one of those funky psychedelic black-light velvet posters talking to her.”

Greg blinked. “Grandma?”

“For pity’s sake, Gregory, stop acting so surprised. Fine. All right. Yes. It was in a garret flat in Paris, absinthe may have also been involved—”

“Absinthe was definitely involved,” Ethriel said in a stage-whisper aside.

“—and the figure on the poster seemed to come alive, move, and speak.”

“Starting to feel better about this warlock stuff,” he muttered. “Starting to sound almost normal by comparison.”

“And, yes,” his grandmother went on. “I admit, when I first met your grandfather, I deluded myself into believing he was only a lost, troubled soul, rejecting conformity and turning to occultism as an escape.”

“Are you telling me he was a . . . a Goth?”

His mind reeled, trying to make sense of this insane information, trying to make it match up with what he’d heard from various family members over the years and what images he remembered from old photo albums. In his head, he’d built up a stern, distant, unsmiling recluse, some vague but ominous threatening presence with a cold iron fist. Now he had the brooding Goth bad-boy nonconformist occultism thing to contend with? Edgar Allan Poe by way of those South Park episodes, crossed with Spike from Buffy?

“They probably didn’t call them Goths back then,” Ethriel said. “But you get the general idea.”

“What I get is my brain twisting into a pretzel.” He thunked the heel of his hand to the side of his skull in hopes of jarring reason back into place. “Grandma, really? I mean . . . really? This is legit? You’re not messing with me?”

“No, dear, it’s true,” she said, patting his wrist. “I thought I could convince him to change, to leave all that behind, or at least move away from the darker aspects of it and use his knowledge for a better cause. He was . . . oh, so intelligent . . . spoke and read a dozen languages . . . a learned historian, an expert symbologist . . . ” Her gaze flicked to his forehead. “That very sigil, in fact, was from one of his designs.”

Greg touched it self-consciously. “Is it still glowing?”

“Nah, not right now,” Ethriel told him. “Only when you’re using your powers, or . . . uhm . . . doing something . . . intense.”

There went the blush again. “Oh, gee, great, thanks.”

“And it did work, for a while,” his grandmother went on, as if choosing to ignore that exchange. “He may not have been the best husband, or father, but he tried. He put his skills to good use, working as an archivist, consultant, translator. In the end, though . . . it just wasn’t enough.”

***

Both Shinns, of course, had gone absolutely bugfuck.

To be fair, several of the observing soldiers—many of whom had, earlier, been eviscerating and mutilating with fervent abandon—were none too sanguine about the entire cringeworthy process either. Two threw up. A third fainted. Some hastily excused themselves from the tent.

Others, however, seemed far more into it. Spot, for instance. Spot looked to be getting some serious sadistic jollies from not only the up-close surgical view but the traumatic effects the whole scene was having on everyone else. A couple of the female soldiers displayed a savagely satisfied “fuck yeah, geld ALL the bastards!” reaction that made their brothers-in-arms sidle sideways.

The vet ignored them all, carrying on about his business of sealing off the severed ends of the testicular tubes with an electrocautery device, then stitching shut the scrotal incision as neatly as any spinster ever did her needlepoint.

“You shall be compensated for your service,” Favius told him.

“I should hope so,” he replied, shucking his mask, smock, and gloves. “Highly irregular, this.”

“Yeah well, gets used ‘ter it, Doc,” Spot said. “Ain’t like y’ve not done some weird shit ‘round here already since’t AllHell happened.”

A pained wince flitted across his distinguished features. “Please don’t remind me.”

June, meanwhile, cradled the metal basin in both hands, tilting it this way and that, making the disembodied masses slip and slide back and forth. She carried it over to show Mrs. Shinn. “What do you know, your blustering jackass of a husband had some balls after all! Little pathetic ones, maybe, but, here they are!”

Oh, and if looks could kill! Daggers of fire and ice and venom stabbed from the woman’s tear-filled eyes. Mr. Shinn, still propped up and bent forward, appeared halfway to catatonic, staring into the V of his legs at his deflated skin-sack with its tidy line of tiny stitches.

“It’s not like he needed them for anything,” June went on. “Or, what, do you suddenly have a problem with the idea of someone else interfering in your bodily autonomy and reproductive choices? Is it not quite the same as saying women who get abortions should be sentenced to death? Or telling victims of incest their rape-babies are God’s silver lining? But, don’t worry, Mrs. Shinn. We’re not done here yet. No, not by a long way.”

Indeed, they weren’t . . .

Enjoying herself perhaps too much, playing it up for her audience, putting on a show for the Shinns as well as for an approving Favius, she held up the jar containing the utero-gourd seeds. She shook it, rattling the dark pips against the glass.

“I wonder,” she said, “how you would feel about having something growing inside you against your will. Feeding off your body. Something you’re not allowed to get rid of, even if your own life is in danger. Something you’d have to carry to term and give birth to, whether you wanted it or not.”

Mrs. Shinn shook her head, mumbling pleas and protests through her gag. Mr. Shinn had regained enough of his wits to be doing likewise.

“Spot says these seeds have to be ‘good and spunked-up’ first.” June set the jar in the harsh spotlight of a surgical lamp, then reached into the basin, scooping up a slippery, still-warm lump in her fingers. Hand poised above the jar, she slowly—while making full eye contact—clenched her fist.

The sensation was gooshy and fibrous and crushy-squelchy all at once. Pulp oozed out between her knuckles. Liquid dribbled in thick runnels and squirted in a finer pinkish mist. She thought of citrus, of orange juicers, bartenders muddling limes, chefs with lemons giving the finishing zing-splash touch to a seafood dish.

The squeezings, along with a few clots and stringy bits reminiscent of pumpkin guts, trickled and splashed into the jar. It was viscid, cream-tinged, syrupy.

And, the instant it met the dried, pruney seeds, something amazingly wondrous and miraculous occurred.

***

“I can’t accompany you on this part,” Ethriel said once they were back in the Liminos.

“Why not? If you have to be invited in—”

She crinkled her nose at him. “I’m not a vampire, jeez. No, it’s . . . see . . . there comes a point in every heroic journey where the hero has to go it alone, usually into some sort of underworld for some sort of confrontation with some sort of father figure. Didn’t you ever read Joseph Campbell?”

“Yeah, in college. Well, we watched that Star Wars documentary from back in the eighties, anyway. But, I mean, we were at the lake, which is practically Hell; doesn’t that count as the underworld?”

“Still and always a loophole-looker.”

“And I never even met my grandfather; what kind of confrontation—?”

“Shut up and get a move on, Greg.” She turned him toward a section of the pearlescent mist that looked like every other section of the pearlescent mist, gave him a nudging shove, then slapped him on the ass for good measure.

“Hey!” He jumped, stumbled a little, and next thing he knew was right there in his grandmother’s kitchen again.

Only, not quite. Not the warm, lamplit, cookie-scented kitchen from before. This time it was dim and dusty, the table vacant of teacups and crossword puzzles, the ceramic owl sitting sadly empty.

This was no between-place or other realm. This was the real deal. The physical, mortal world. He’d been in Florida, and now he was here. No plane, no car. Poof, just like that. This was his grandparents’ actual house.

A blanket of silence lay over it, absent even of the subtle but pervasive clock-ticks and occasional muted chimes which had made up part of the background noise of his childhood. Shutters were shut, drapes were drawn, shadows gathered.

“Some underworld,” Greg muttered.

He remembered holidays here, Thanksgiving dinners, opening Christmas presents, running around with his cousins looking for Easter eggs. He remembered helping his grandmother in her garden when he was younger and hanging out with his dad and uncles in the garage-turned-man-cave when he was old enough.

It was still furnished, still laden with the accumulated possessions of decades. Every so often, at a big family get-together like a wedding or reunion, there’d be a vague conversation along the lines of “we should probably see about doing something with the house,” which would then be procrastinated and let slide and not brought up again until the next get-together. None of them were exactly rich, but none of them were hurting for money either, so it wasn’t like they needed to sell it . . . but none of them wanted to live in it . . . and most of all, none of them wanted to have to clear it out.

Once, someone had suggested hiring an estate sale company, but Aunt Karen shot that down hard. “Do we want strangers pawing over everything? Poking into corners? Digging through who-knows-what?” She’d hastily caught herself, gulped down half a martini, changed tack, and gone on to cite several friend-of-a-friend stories about people who’d been swindled, cheated, and ripped off.

At the time, Greg hadn’t taken much note of her initial reaction. Now, after what his grandmother had told him, he understood better. Aunt Karen had known more than she cared to let on. Probably, his dad and uncles had their own suspicions too but weren’t the sort to talk about such things. No, keep it to safe subjects like football.

He roamed the first and second floors, peeking into various rooms, stirring more memories. The giant clawfoot tub . . . the bay window reading nook at the end of the hall . . . the antique wall-mounted phone he’d play with, pretending he could talk to ghosts—

Shit. Maybe his grandmother had been right to suspect something different about him, even when he’d been a kid.

The stairs leading up to the third floor were narrow, dark, and ominous as a grave.

“Okay . . . here we go.”

***

A boy June went to elementary school with had loved raisins but hated grapes, steadfastly refusing to believe they were the same thing from kindergarten all the way to third grade. At which point, exasperated, a teacher conducted a classroom experiment by dumping a snack-size box of raisins into a bowl of water so they could witness the results.

This was like that, only much faster. The time-lapse version of that, or of those plastic grow-your-own-whatever capsules where the sponge expands into the shape of a dinosaur or rhinoceros or firetruck.

A jingle/slogan from some old hot dog commercial also came to mind . . . plumps when you cook ‘em. She thought of the gum-chewing brat from the Willie Wonka movie who ballooned into a big round blueberry.

Like that. All like that.

As soon as the fresh-squeezed testicle juice hit the dried utero-gourd seeds, it was magic time. Miracle-of-life time. It was the purple-black oversized pomegranate pips plumping and expanding, blooming.

Twitching. Wriggling.

Calling to mind nature documentaries of amphibians or aquatic creatures with their clusters of semi-translucent eggs, minuscule embryos in gelatinous globs. No longer purple-black but a violet-veined milky gray. Squirming against one another in the confines of the jar.

“Best t’ gets ‘em implantered quick,” advised Spot.

Easier said than done; Mrs. Shinn was far from cooperative. Even in full restraints, even with nasty weapons poised to carry out nastier threats, she was having none of it. She fought like hell as best she could, wrenching her head back and forth, clamping her jaw, locking her lips like a stubborn kid refusing spinach. It finally took four soldiers to pry and hold her mouth open long enough for June to drop the fertilized seed.

It lolled fat and gooey on Mrs. Shinn’s tongue. She tried to spit it out, but June was ready, pressing the heel of her hand under Mrs. Shinn’s chin the way she’d seen people do when trying to make their cat take a pill.

“Swallow, you bitch,” she said, not un-cheerily, pinching the woman’s nostrils shut for good measure.

The seed itself must have helped, slithering sluglike down Mrs. Shinn’s throat as she urped and gagged and made muffled horking noises. A terrible awareness filled her eyes.

“There, see, that wasn’t so bad,” June said, releasing her.

“No no no get it out!” wailed Mrs. Shinn. “Get it out, get it out, kill it, augh, it’s in there, I can feel it, get it out!”

“You’d kill your own baby?”

“It’s not my baby!”

“It’s your husband’s baby.”

“What?!?”

“His sperm, his baby.”

“You’re crazy! You’re crazy and a witch and the devil’s whore!”

June patted her atop the head in the most condescending manner possible, smiling sweetly. “I’m the queen,” she said. “And you, you’re an incubator. Think of it as God’s silver lining.”

As Mrs. Shinn surrendered to screaming hysterics, June turned her attention to Mr. Shinn. He stared at her with the dull, vacant eyes of someone who’d completely checked out.

“Congratulations,” she said to him, still with the sweet smile. “You’re going to be a daddy. Isn’t that wonderful? But—like they say on the commercials—but wait! There’s more!” She plucked another plump squirmy seed-grub from the jar and dangled it in front of his face. “Open up.”

That dull, vacant stare.

“Open up,” she repeated. “Or I’ll have the doctor undo those stitches and stuff it right in where your balls used to be.”

A barely-perceptible quiver wracked his frame before he complied. Meek and obedient, he swallowed unprompted.

“Good boy.” June gave him a nice condescending pat on the head too. “Now you’re also going to be a mommy!”

Mr. Shinn closed his eyes and began to cry.

“God’s silver lining,” she said again. “Just keep telling yourself, it’s God’s silver lining.”

She stepped back. Favius pulled her into his arms. “Magnificent,” he growled in her ear.

June stretched languidly against him. “Soooo . . . about that ravishing you mentioned . . . ?”

***

At one end of the enclosed, windowless hallway, a pull-down trapdoor offered access to the attic. It would have been great for playing hide-and-seek, but neither Greg nor his cousins had ever ventured up there. A couple of other doors opened onto tiny rooms used as linen closets, where he and his cousins rarely dared venture either.

No, the third floor was all about the door. The heavy and forbidding door. The door with an ornate handle of tarnished silver and a smoky cut-crystal knob. The door with a one-way peephole set into its center and runic designs etched into its threshold, lintel, and frame. The door with dried sprigs of herbs and flowers, so ancient they might have crumbled to dust at an errant breeze, tacked above it.

The door to his grandfather’s study.

He stood before it, musing wryly that he hadn’t felt this trespassy breaking into the rundown motel room, this apprehensive when he and Ethriel had been taken captive by Zilch’s vineyard slaves.

Who you MURDERED—the voice in his head began.

NOT-the-fuck-NOW! he thought.

Surprisingly, it worked. The voice cut off, retreating to some other chamber of consciousness.

Years of ingrained warnings clamored in its place instead. How often had they been told, he and his cousins, that this room was off-limits? That it was kept locked for a reason, and if they couldn’t respect their grandfather’s wishes, there would be consequences?

It hadn’t mattered he’d been long dead by the time Greg was old enough to so much as wonder what was the big deal, why all the secrecy. Some things just weren’t questioned. Some things just weren’t done.

He tried the knob.

The thunderbolt he kept expecting continued to fail to materialize and zap him into oblivion. The house didn’t shake and shriek and spit him violently out into the yard. The smoky cut-crystal’s facets felt cool against his palm, and only after he’d grasped it did he notice it was bereft of dust, as clean as if freshly polished.

He’d also, if much smaller fractionally than half, been kind of expecting it to turn and click and obligingly open, as if it had been waiting all these years just for him. But, of course, it did no such damn thing. It just stayed locked tight.

“Idiot,” he berated himself, embarrassed. “Don’t go buying into the whole damn destined-one hero hype. Pushing it already with the warlock stuff—”

Turn.

Click.

“On come on! For real?”

Open.

Only thin spider-threads of light pierced the shutters, but he saw the room with perfect clarity just the same.

What had his cousin said, after climbing the exterior wall to retrieve whatever ball or Frisbee they’d gotten stuck in the eaves? “All full of musty old books and weird shit.”

Yeah. Yeah, pretty much.

Looming bookshelves laden with weighty tomes, everything from leather-bound antiques to textbooks and vintage paperbacks. Mahogany rolltop desk partially buried under stacks of binders, ledgers, journals, notebooks, papers, and parchments. Hollow-eyed marble sculptures—pallid bust of Pallas, anyone? hadn’t he been thinking Poe earlier? Elaborate ebony and brass clock under a glass dome, its hands probably frozen at the exact minute of his grandfather’s death. Display cases filled with occult geegaws of every description.

It looked, in other words, exactly like it should.

The only missing element—for which, honestly, Greg was just as glad—was the ghostly or skeletal or crypt-keepery form of the Nachtwald patriarch swiveling around in the high-backed black chair to regard his descendant with cold disdain.

An otherworldly oppressive presence did not fill the room. No spirit seemed to be waiting and watching and listening, ready to poltergeist the shit out of everything.

As far as “some sort of confrontation with some sort of father figure” scenarios went, it left a little something to be desired.

Going to the desk, he settled into the chair . . . which snapped shut like a Venus flytrap and yanked him straight to Hell.

***

Cliffhangers can be so bastardly and obnoxious.

Are they ever, strictly speaking, necessary? Or are they nothing more than a manipulative tool employed by a manipulative tool to engage emotions and heighten suspense? A sadistic, malicious, cackling ploy? Or a dramatic way to shift scenes without having to devise some subtler, more clever segue?

But, what if, earlier, a bunch of other stuff had also been going on and was left waiting on similar tenterhooks? Should those storylines and characters be abandoned? Neglected? Their fates rendered uncertain in favor of highly inappropriate and salacious smut?

No!

Of course, some sort of overall recap might be required, to check the positions—not those kind of positions, dirty-mind!—of the various remaining pieces on the board? Where the stage had been set and the metaphors mixed and all manner of unfinished business clamored anxiously for attention?

For instance, there could be the matter of a frankentruck and a tunnel and a critical injury and a desperate journey to seek help. There could be a crucial discovery about to be made amid the strewn wreckage of a drug-smuggler’s crashed plane, a discovery sure to further complicate one particular young man’s already complicated situation. There could be a curious kid sneaking out in the wee small hours when he thinks the rest of his family is distracted or asleep, very likely to land himself in serious trouble.

There could also be a lakehouse that wasn’t really a lakehouse prepared to accept . . . or reject . . . the claim of its new lord and master. There could be a disgruntled jealous handmaid with spiteful murder on her mind. There could be a traumatized backwoods hillbilly recluse about to learn the cause of his suffering has returned, which could either spiral him into psychotic suicidal despair or psychotic suicidal vengeance.

Nor should be forgotten the guard posts, the checkpoints, the ceremony, the Golems, the horrific live broadcast of sacrificial sex and slaughter, the war-camp, the Wall, the Aurora Diabolicus in its horrific splendor, the government, the military, and the likely responses of a shocked nation/public/world already none too thrilled about a little pocket of Hell in the first place but who had been willing to let it go as long as it stayed nice and quarantined so everybody else could ignore it and carry on with their lives. Having what was supposed to be a great and decisive patriotic triumph of epic global domination turn into a bloodbath of betrayal resulting in the formation and foundation of a threatening diabolical city-state ruled by a damned and demomic former centurion of Rome in the service of Hell itself wasn’t exactly the plan.

Well, wasn’t exactly the mortal, earthly plan.

And then there’s the discorporated stoner dude stuck in a magical pod the size of a billiard ball . . . the snake-lady preparing to lay eggs, and the wolf-lady with her litter of pups, and the two-headed black eagle harpy lady . . . various other bit-players and side plots . . .

And what’s the deal with those two good-ol’-boy types at the other end of that secret tunnel? Them and their fire-breathing teenage sidekick, what’s up with that?

As well as the writer, just casually kicking back in the shadow of Bighead Rock, writing his sick books and making his sick movies, with his beer and his boobtastic companion. And the father who risked everything to find out what happened to his family, only to end up being tortured by his own children . . .

It’s a lot to catch up on. A lot to keep up with. Irons in the fire, plot threads, and loose ends.

So, what about all that? What about “previously on” clips to bring everybody up to speed? What about the “what ever happened to”? What about the “what about”?

In an ideal universe, such things would be simple enough. Just have some semi-omniscient narrator step in, all, “Meanwhile, elsewhere in the vicinity of what had once been known as Lake Misquamicus . . . ”

***

Really, though, a lot of them were just sleeping.

It had been a long goddamn day. Long, hectic, stressful. A day of death and terror and upheaval, of having their personal worlds turned inside-out and their accepted places in the comfortable, known universe rudely dashed to pieces. They’d been pushed to their limits and beyond. They’d seen things, endured things, done things no one of right mind could have anticipated.

They were tired, okay? Fucking exhausted! Who wouldn’t be?

For some, however, no matter how tired, sleep simply wasn’t an option.

For Andy, it didn’t even seem a possibility. Trapped as he was in the Catch’s snack-pack pod, he was awake and aware but apparently no longer in need of the basics. Like eating or drinking or peeing or taking a crap. Or breathing, when he thought about it, which he tried not to do because it kinda freaked him out.

So, he kept watch over Lorlinda while she slept, as if there’d be anything he could do should something happen. Thought that counts, right? Not that she slept all that well either: restless, muttering, tossing and turning to the point he was glad she’d set his pod aside on the stacked milk crates serving as a nightstand.

The room was basically a storage closet with a cot wedged among shelves of bomb shelter miscellany and random junk. A long-life emergency light shed a dull greenish-orange glow, which, when viewed through the pod’s already weird coloration, cast the scene in a hue Andy could only describe as “seasick.” Wouldn’t find it on any paint-sample swatches at Home Depot, no way. Unless maybe they had Home Depot in Hell. Maybe they did. Why not? What did he know, anyway?

What he did know was, thus far at least, here they were. On the other side of the wall, if still underground. Safe, more or less.

Brad and Dan, the yahoos Lorlinda had somehow grown up with despite the obvious disparity in their ages, had sent the kid with the fireworks to bring someone named Miz Delilah to try and help Heck.

“One of our’n teachers,” Lorlinda had explained. “School nurse too, sometimes, as them two fuckleheads well know—”

“It were only stitches an’ a coupl’a teeth,” Brad said.

“What ‘bout when you dared each other t’ piss on that ‘gator?”

“Hey, now,” objected Dan. “Weren’t like we done got our dicks bit off.”

“Might’s’ve been better for ever’one if’n you had.”

Brad snorted. “You seen his; be no great loss!”

“Speak f’r y’self!” Dan hitched at his groin. “Ain’t had no complaints.”

Through further enlightening conversation, taking place over a six-pack and canned chili topped with spray-cheese and served with crackers, Andy found out that Dan operated the “Damnation Dan’s Veggie Stand” he and his friends had spotted when they drove through the townlet referred to as Area 666.

“Once’t AllHell hit,” Dan said, “most the other farmer’s markets an’ such shut down, seen’s how the crops took some changes. Know them ‘ugly produce’ boxes what they sell, stuff as ain’t ass-thetickly fit for grocery stores? Like, some apple or t’mater too funny-lookin t’ sell t’ the average housewife? That shit got nothin’ on what we’s started havin’ grow. An’ ferget funny-lookin’; the taste? Not t’ mention the effects, makin’ folks sick, fuckin’ with their heads, even killin’ ‘em outright . . . but there’s always some who’d be wantin’ t’ try. Like with them fish what are poisernus if’n you don’t prepare ‘em just right. ‘Specially the meat-shrooms and the peppers. Went viral on that TikTok a few times. Had orders comin’ in from all over, people drivin’ halfway cross’t country. Then too many died, an’ the kids went on t’ snortin’ powdered moon rock or stickin’ plutonium rods up’n their butts.” He shook his head at the fickle follies of youth, sighed, and cracked open another beer.

“An’ you?” Lorlinda had then turned to Brad. “How you been keepin’ y’self? Or do I even wanna ask?”

***

Some slept better than others. Trevor Carmichael, for example, newly-appointed First Senator, oath-sworn both to Favius and, by extension, Lucifer and the forces of Hell.

Yeah, that swearing-in process was one he’d be in no hurry to repeat. Ever. His balls still hurt from it, though by the time he’d reached the lakehouse, the pain had subsided to more of a dull ache and he no longer felt like he was going to puke. And, hey, he still had his balls, which was more than could be said for some.

Bidding adieu to the werewolf-woman and her musk-stinking car had also helped with reducing the puking urge. He’d watched the station wagon’s lopsided red taillights disappear into the gloom with great relief.

Earlier, upon first arriving with his sister and their friends, the lake-stench that hit them in the faces as soon as they opened the SUV’s doors had sent all five of them bolting for the bushes. Shortly thereafter, that selfsame SUV had been fucked to junkyard scrap by a giant dino-turtle, leaving copious cottage-cheesy splatters to swelter and sour in the afternoon heat. Furthermore, during their decision to leave, a mutated monster swamp-rat with a necrotizing bite reduced Andy’s leg to slick bones as all the flesh from the knee down rotted and liquefied and sloughed off in runny chunks . . . which had done nothing to improve the ambient aromatherapy.

Gross.

He would not have expected to be, a few hours later, standing here breathing those same scents almost happily, because by comparison to the territory-marking spray of a demonic musk-wolf, it was damn near pleasant.

Maybe the fact of his acclimation had something to do with it too. Maybe he just didn’t notice so much, or mind it so much, after becoming more accustomed to the lake’s environs. Many of his perceptions, both sensory and of himself, had undergone their share of changes over the past several hours.

Admittedly, something would have to be done about the wrecked SUV, the scattered luggage, and the now-congealed globs of turtle-cum. He couldn’t have that disgusting mess littering his front yard, spoiling his view. Though he certainly wasn’t going to be the one to clean it up; that’s what caretakers and handymen were for. Let Lester Riggers do it, the big hulking hillbilly shithead.

This resolved, Trevor had—not without some trepidation—approached the house again. Or, whatever it was masquerading as a house. He didn’t quite have his head wrapped around the details. But what he did know was, come Hell or high water, or high Hell-water, he was a Carmichael and the lakehouse was Carmichael property.

Steeling himself, ignoring the pain in his semi-squashed balls and his busted nose and his everywhere else, he’d stepped through the door.

“Honey, I’m home.”

However jokingly he’d meant them, the words came out instead as both declaration and challenge. He’d felt the house scrutinizing him, measuring and weighing and evaluating. Pawing through his memories, poring over his sins, his secrets, his shames.

Were they, though? Were they really?

The fantasies he’d entertained about his old friend Jason . . . having his own twin sister ready to suck his dick . . . the thrill of cutting off what was left of Andy’s ruined leg . . . seeing the torso-man’s stumps twitching in the agonicity generator . . . realizing how much he’d always been turned on by amputees, even if he’d never previously admitted it to himself . . . the writer, who also made movies, letting him help film some mutilation scenes . . . the homunculi, so lifelike, warm and bleeding beneath the hacksaw’s jagged blade . . . pleading and screaming as skin split to reveal raw, fresh, spongy redness . . .

Was all that really so bad?

The lakehouse must not have thought so because a moment later, the sensation of being judged blossomed into one of welcoming acceptance. It embraced him, already altering its dimensions and designs to his tastes.

“Nice,” said Trevor before heading to bed, where he slept very well indeed.

***

His sister Chelsea?

Not so much.

“Tidy up, would you?”

Tossed back lightly, idly, over her shoulder as she sauntered out. Smug smile on her post-BJ lips. Damn near glowing with orgasmic satisfaction.

Bitch. Queen bitch. Bitch queen.

Queen.

Fuck.

What else could Chels do after that but tidy up?

“She serves adequately?”

“Adequately.”

Bitch, bitch, bitch!

Skinny, plain, flat-chested bitch!

Queen. Arm-in-arm with her Hell-lord, wearing that peacock-blue satin robe like she was on her way to a red-carpet premiere.

Fuck and double-fuck.

She’d tidied, doing her best to keep her grumblings to herself because of the slab-faced golem thing’s hulking presence. After a while, two soldiers and a quartermaster had arrived with a handful of shivering survivors—whichever politician had owned this lavish rig hadn’t just brought his “secretary” along for the scenic road trip to Florida but his personal kitchen staff as well. Of the secretary, it seemed there remained no sign, but Chelsea figured even if she’d escaped the massacre, her chances in the lakeside wilderness were slim to fuck-all. The kitchen staff had fared somewhat better, the head chef leading his sous chef and porter to a secure hiding place in one of the refrigerated supply trucks. A good plan, except they’d accidentally gotten locked inside for several hours. Hence the shivering, as much from the chill as from fear. The head chef even looked familiar in that seen-him-on-Food-Network kind of way, someone with a couple of Michelin stars under his belt . . . or however the hell that worked.

Hey, at least it meant she wouldn’t have to cook. As they got settled in, apparently accepting their assigned duties without a peep of objection, that skeeve-o Spot showed up to inform Chelsea “th’ Gen’rul an’ her Highness” were attending to some sort of “ritch-ools an’ punershmints an’ the like” so might not be back for a few hours.

Fine by her. Yes, please and thank you. Let them stay out. Let them not come back at all, far as she was concerned.

Well, except for the part where, if she wasn’t protected by her status as handmaid to the queen . . .

Shit! Shit, shit, shit! And where, just where, was her ass-kissing brother during all this? Trying to think of some way to help them escape? No, wouldn’t you know, he’d gotten a lift back to their parents’ lakehouse, leaving her on her own!

Lucky for Trev her cellphone was useless. Luckier for Trev they still hadn’t developed full-on twin telepathy. When she saw him again, ooh was she going to have plenty to say!

She’d stomped off to the doomed secretary’s former room—who, if she somehow did survive out there after all, would be smart to keep right on going rather than come back—to try and get some sleep.

A long goddamn day, all right. First the drive itself, listening to Andy and Madison and Kayla gripe from the back seat the whole way. Then the checkpoint, Trev’s bribe and her tit-show getting them past the gate. Then the hard pill to swallow of realizing she’d been wrong . . . the lake thing hadn’t been some hoax or jumped-up bullshit but the very real deal.

Then the house, and the SUV . . . what happened to Madison . . . what happened to Andy . . . shoving Kayla from the top of Bighead Rock because she would not shut her yap! . . . the writer and his boobzilla monster and his sick-fuck movies . . . hitching a ride with the hick and the skank-princess . . . the roadhouse . . . the lakeshore . . . oh, the hits just kept on coming.

Handmaid.

Handmaid to the fucking queen.

No wonder she was tired. She’d slid into bed, after locking the door and bracing a chair under the knob, and drifted off . . .

. . . only to be jolted awake by what she first took for an earthquake, but it went on and on, accompanied by loud, very non-earthquake noises.

If the RV’s a-rockin, don’t bother knockin’.

***

Then there were those who, for one reason or another, had already been sleeping.

Who had, in fact, slept through and missed the entirety of the dramatic sunset events, from the arrival of the military convoy to the claiming of kingdom and queen, the subsequent rising of the baleful bloodstar, the aurora’s Dome descending to meet the rising battlements of a new Wall.

Missed it. Slept through the whole thing.

Maybe “slept” in this case wasn’t the right term, but “blotto blackout on high-octane hellshine to the point of near-death alcoholic coma” was, if accurate, excessively wordy.

All Zeke Bodean knew, when he peeled open sticky, crusted eyelids and worked the dry flap of his tongue around the insides of his sticky, crusted mouth, was that he’d been having hisself some messed-up nightmares f’sure, ‘shine or no ‘shine. His thoughts were a clogged toilet full of awful imagery, swirling and swirling, burbling higher in the bowl no matter how many times he pushed the mental flusher.

Echoes boomed in his head: chanting, shrieking, grinding stones, gunfire, sky-shattering explosions.

He groaned. He sat up, wincing as he always did when the posture put pressure on his backside. His trailer, windows covered by tarps, was dank and stuffy, sweltery with humid heat. Its customary dark gloom seemed somehow redder than usual.

Shouldn’t ought’ve guzzled down so much of the ‘shine Heck had brung him. Should’ve mebbe at least et something with it, but if’n he’d et anything more substantial than tapper-oka pudding, he’d’ve had t’ take one of them shit-softeners as well, and then he’d like as not have unloaded a runny mess all over his already none-too-clean mattress.

These days, most times, ‘bout all he could stomach was a diet of broth an’ juice an’ what the commercials called “meal replacement shakes.” Which weren’t, in his erpinion, no kind of replacement at all for a decent meal. Nor a shake, f’r that matter; what he would’ve given for a real proper Oreo shake, with a deluxe burger an’ onion rings to go with . . .

His guts gurgled, though whether from hunger or protest, Zeke couldn’t much tell. He got out of bed, shucked his sweat-stained wife-beater and piss-stained drawers, pulled on somewhat fresher replacements, and made his way to the front room. Moving slow, moving careful, afeared to rouse the ever-present beast of pain what dwelt in his nethers. Afeared even more to move wrong, to rupture or dislodge somethin’ up there, an’ have his ‘testines unravel in a hot wet squitter ‘tween his ass-cheeks.

On the way to his chair, he rummaged a can of chicken broth and a lunchbox-size bottle of cranapple juice from the grocery bags piled along the grimy countertop. He navigated around empty ‘shine jugs to lower himself, again with slow care, onto the ring-shaped donut pillow what rested in the chair’s sunken seat.

The TV din’t get but three channels, one of which was local public access an’ another some shopping thing. The last might ‘casionally get old game shows and sitcoms, Match Game and Hollywood Squares from the 70s, Three’s Company, Facts of Life. He also had a carousel-kind of DVD player loaded with grainy bootlegs of ever’thing from cartoons t’ blockbusters t’ porn.

Zeke clicked the remote. The local public access came on, only, interrupted by urgent graphics all BREAKING NEWS and LIVE and FLORIDA HELL-CRISIS with reporters shoving microphones at no-comment military types and trying to interview frantic civilians, clips of jets and helicopters buzzing a towering spike-studded wall against a backdrop of scarlet stained glass, a bloodfire star hanging in the sky like the eye of an angry god . . .

He sat up a little straighter and leaned closer to the screen, another twinge of ass-pain despite the donut pillow hardly worth noticing, can of chicken broth dropping from his grasp.

The screen switched to a RECORDED EARLIER. There, in full vivid color, was a monstrous figure in Hell-forged Roman armor, and Zeke Bodean began to scream.

***

Heck Bodean also did not exactly “sleep” either. He lay face-down on a cot topped with an inflatable mattress—fine, it was a pool raft, one of the novelty kind made to look like a slice of pizza—in a state somewhere at the three-way juncture of unconsciousness, drugged, and enspelled.

The unconsciousness he’d earned as a result of being blasted with a load of sulfur-shot to the back, which even a Kevlar vest hadn’t been able to block fully. The drugs were courtesy of his old school chum Brad, who’d dosed him up good with morphine from a stash of medical and first-aid supplies. And the enspelling? Well, that was thanks to Miz Delilah when she’d arrived with the fireworks kid.

Their former teacher and occasional school nurse was a petite and plump black woman of uncertain years. Not uncertain because of the weird effects radiating out from the lake, she’d just always been like that. Some said it was voodoo, even before AllHell. Mebbe it was. Whatever her secret, she’d been able to quell a classroom full of yahoos and yokels like Brad, Heck, and Dan with nothing more than a stern look.

She’d come in bright-eyed alert despite having been rousted from bed, flowing patterned caftan-thing with hair twisted up into a matching turban, and took charge of the scene as effortlessly as she’d ever took charge of a post-pep-rally brawl.

Lorlinda hadn’t wanted to leave Heck’s side, but was she gonna argue with Miz Delilah? Saints, no! She’d gone to the kitchen area with the others, carrying her sweetie-pie in his pod and hoping for maybe a chance to bring up his plight a bit later on.

“What’s your story, then?” she’d asked Brad as they followed up their canned chili with packaged snack cakes. “How’s you been keepin’ all this time?”

He’d grinned. “Well, if’n he’s Damnation Dan, I guess that done makes me Bootleg Brad. ‘Member how they used’ta call me that on account of how my family did so much rum and ‘shine runnin’?”

“Popeshit,” said Lorlinda. “They used’ta call you that on account o’ them illegal DVD copies you sold ‘hind the gym-naserum, skin-flicks an’ horror movies.”

“That too, awright, yeah, that too,” Brad said. “But, since’t, I’ve turned it inter a right thrivin’ business. More’n booze an’ movies. Knock-off dee-signer clothes, ‘lectronics . . . toys, dang, toys is big, ‘specially come fair season, the carnies wantin’ prizes fer their midway games but not wantin’ t’ pay fer the licensed goods.” He’d hooked a thumb in the direction of another door. “Got crates of ‘em stacked up in there right now. Baby Yoder’s all the rage.”

“Baby what?”

“Baby Yoder! The li’l green fucker from the Bober Fett show!”

“Give ‘er a break, Brad,” Dan said. “Ain’t like they’re gettin’ quality streamin’ services other side th’ wall, all binge-watchin’ Netflix an’ whatnot.”

Finally, the food and the beer and the stress taking their toll, Lorlinda had gone off to try and get some rest, bunking down on a cot in a storeroom. After some hours of kinda-sorta sleep, she’d gotten up again, took a whore’s splashbath, liberated an imitation vintage Devil Rays jersey from Brad’s inventory, and padded barefoot over t’ see if’n Heck were still livin’ or dead.

Still livin’, thank Satan. Still face-down out cold, but the jaundicy sulfur-yellow had faded from his skin. Its rotten-egg stink had faded too, or been masked by the pungent herbal-mud smell of the poultice slathering him shoulders to waist.

“Picked all the shot pellets from the wounds,” Miz Delilah said. “Gave him a tonic and worked some mojo to clear the rest out of his system. He’ll be a while healing, but he’ll survive.”

Lorlinda set a grateful palm to her chest. “Thankya, Miz D. We owes ya one.”

“Least I could do, girl. Anything else?”

“Well, since’t you mention it . . . ” She held up the Catch’s pod with her sweetie-pie trapped inside. “There is this feller . . . ”

***

Captain Veronica Adler did not sleep. Captain Veronica Adler doubted, in her majestic new form, she needed to sleep.

Vigilance never slept anyway, and who better for vigilance than a black-winged double-headed eagle-harpy? Her two sets of golden eyes, with their keen, piercing vision, could see far better than her original ice-blue pair, could perceive past and beyond the normal visible spectrum.

Her other senses, those of hearing and smell in particular, were also heightened, but sight blew them all away. Microscopic, telescopic, infravision . . . auras, enchantments, traces of magical residue . . . even x-ray vision seemed within the range of possibility.

Now, if she could also manage to shoot laser beams from her eyes . . .

That would be marvelous, but for the time being, she wasn’t about to quibble with the gifts she’d already been granted. Two wickedly-curved beaks, sharp and strong enough to shear through plate steel? Flight, under her own power, borne aloft by the mighty flex of powerful muscles, wind hissing through streamlined ranks of ebony feathers? Her own long, shapely legs, but now ending in extra extensions of back-jointed razor-tipped talons?

Oh, no, she wasn’t about to quibble! Bestowed with such vicious glory, to ask for anything else would just be greedy.

Eye-lasers would still be pretty awesome.

She strutted and preened, supervising as her elite squadron of underlings sifted through the debris field of the Cessna that had, the preceding day, corkscrewed crazily over the Wall and crashed near the lake. If they’d allowed anti-aircraft artillery at Checkpoint Bethlehem before, she could’ve done something about it at the time. Not that firing on innocent dipshit civilian pilots had been, strictly speaking, within her purview.

Another story now, though, wasn’t it? She knew it wouldn’t take long for the military to muster a response, and the busy-bee media would be on the case even sooner. Let them just try to breach her airspace! Let them try! The Dome itself would annihilate anything that came into contact, but she wasn’t about to permit so much as a drone to even get close. Her officers had their orders. The skies above Lake Misquamicus belonged to Captain Veronica Adler. Trespassers would not be tolerated!

Angelic trespassers, least of all.

One had been here. Had been here! An angel incarnate. A minor-leaguer, perhaps, but an angel nonetheless. Wouldn’t it just figure, the innocent dipshit civilian pilot flew with his own personal heavenly guardian? What were the odds?

For the innocent dipshit civilian pilot to also turn out to be a warlock? That was just pushing it! Fucking unreal!

And not nearly as innocent as he may have seemed, once she’d gotten a look at the crash site. A drug-smuggler as well as a warlock. A criminal! It didn’t matter if his cargo consisted of insulin and pain-killers and cancer treatments meant for those who couldn’t otherwise afford life-saving medication.

Criminals were criminals! Trespassers were trespassers! The sick and the weak and the lesser and the feeble had no place in this new world order! Bleeding heart do-gooders only brought the rest of them down!

But not, she thought grimly, if I bring them down first.

How better to show her loyalty and prove her worth? The High General would be pleased with the information she could deliver and would be all the more pleased if she delivered proof of victory.

Trophies. Heads. Corpses.

Live prisoners, even better.

To capture an angel incarnate, minor-leaguer or not, was sure to set her prominently in the High General’s regard.

The same for a troublesome warlock.

She flipped through the battered, tattered, and scorched wallet her superior vision had spotted half-buried in the wreckage. Most of its contents had melted together in a plastic sandwich of bank cards and sleeved snapshots, but the pilot’s license and I.D. were intact enough to be legible.

“Gregory Nachtwald,” she said, four golden eyes shining with laser-like fervor, beaks clicking in unison. “You can’t hide from me, warlock. I’ll find you. And your pet angel.”

***

“You sure on this, sugarbun?” Lorlinda peered in at him, expression concerned. “Ain’t no guarantees one way or t’other. May not be so great for you, all stuck in there like that, but least’s you’s safe, long’s we stay near’nuff th’ magic.”

Andy gestured and pantomimed as best he was able. From what he’d gleaned of Miz Delilah’s explanation, the transference spell to put his discorporated essence into another vessel might be far from ideal in terms of, you know, actually being flesh-and-blood alive, but it had to be an improvement on being encapsulated mute and basically useless inside the Catch’s pod. More importantly, once transferred, he, in theory, wouldn’t be at risk of instant obliteration from straying too far from the lake’s diabolical power source.

If he could, as a result, also move on his own, and maybe communicate for real instead of having to do this stupid mime-show, so much the better! To talk to Lorlinda, or write if he had to, seemed a fair exchange for ending up . . . well . . . ending up in one of . . . those.

“Aw’right, aw’right,” she said. “Any druthers, then?”

He perused his options, none of which were great. Where the hell was a Batman, or even a Bart Simpson, when you needed one? Shit, he wouldn’t have said no to that ice princess from Frozen if it meant being reasonably human.

“I mean, we gots,” mused Lorlinda, picking them up one after the other, “a couple kindsa Pokermons, this here goofball-lookin’ yella sponge guy, Garfields—they still fuckin’ make Garfield?—an’ what must be five hunnert of them Baby Yoders what Brad told us ‘bout.” She held the toy, regarding it quizzically. “Weren’t he the dwarfy green frog-wizard in those space movies? Only, all old an’ wrinkly-like? This’un’s pretty cute, akshully.”

Andy indicated, with some resignation, his agreement. Shoddy knock-off though it was, with avocado-colored skin and a burlap smock, the big dark eyes and pointy ears did make it “pretty cute, akshully.” Could be worse. The fake SpongeBob, for instance, was a psycho-fucking-nightmare waiting to happen. Any kid who won that thing at the fair would be wetting the bed for the next five years.

“You’re decided then?” Miz Delilah asked.

“Reckon so.” Lorlinda handed over the doll. “What else we needs’ta do?”

“Stay still and be quiet while I work the incantations.”

An altar of sorts had been set up, by which a scrap of what Andy hoped was only leather had been draped over the kind of folding tray table people might eat their TV dinners off of. Miz Delilah set the toy in the center of a design made from bones—chicken, fish, rat? he couldn’t tell—and lit greasy candles and sprinkled various colors of powdered grit.

“Now,” she went on, wafting incense in circles to let the smoke spiral up, “hold the Catch’s pod over the manikin, centered just above its chest. Using these tongs; don’t touch either of them or the transference could target you.”

Andy gulped thickly. Much as he might have wanted to get into Lorlinda . . . much as he, in one sense, already had . . . yeah thanks no, not like that. Nor did he want to strand her in the pod, or the doll, for that matter.

Lorlinda also gulped. “Yeah, okay, usin’ the tongs, gotcha.”

“Then, when I tell you, you’ll puncture it with this needle—”

“But it’s unbreakable, ain’t it? Dropped it out the truck winder once’t an’ not a scratch!”

“The needle is Hell-iron twisted with silver and bronze, quenched in the blood of a demonic Arch-Duke, and do you have any other questions, Miss Bodean?”

“No, ma’am . . . ”

Needle, she’d said? From Andy’s small-scale, naked, vulnerable perspective, it was more of a spear or a spike, the kind of thing a serial killer might’ve used to put up his Halloween decorations.

Its sharp, evil point pierced the translucent wall, and the Catch’s pod popped like a soap bubble.

***

A big-magic day! Important stuff happening. Plane crashes, guns and explosions like crazy! Surges and shifts in power. Intruders and rivals, a challenger approaches! The awesome, awful sense of a Presence, something horribly celestial and divine! A king and a queen and a giant star like a permanent firework hanging aglow in the sky! Torture and murder and sacrifice and pain. Hell on Earth, Hell itself! A day bigger than any holiday or Super Bowl ever!

And Billy not getting to see any of it because Mom said he was still just a kid.

Whose fault was that? She’d kept them this way, him and Sherri, refusing to let them grow up because she’d already lost her home and her husband and the real outside world and didn’t want to lose her babies as well.

Only, he wasn’t a baby! He wasn’t! He wasn’t!

He was a warlock! He had rights, and he was tired of being told what he could and couldn’t do.

Eat your vegetables, Billy. Don’t agonicize your sister, Billy. No, you may not have a Copro-Leech, even if you do promise to clean up after it! Finish your alchemy project in the morning; it’s past your bedtime. You’d better not be tracking lake-blood all over this house, Billy. If all your friends jumped off Bighead Rock, would you too?

Jeezle-beezle.

Not fair!

Besides, things were different now. All that big important stuff was happening, with magic and kings and power and sacrifice. Dad had come back, to provide for his family in more ways than one. Mom would have new babies, babies that really were babies—if snake-babies—to fuss over. She didn’t need to keep Billy and Sherri as little kids forever now.

Or, okay, she could keep Sherri little if she wanted; Billy didn’t care. Truth be told, he was kind of sick of having his sister always underfoot, messing with his spellbooks—who crayon-colored in the Necronomicon, for poop’s sake?—and using his potions to have tea parties for her dumb dolls.

None of them understood big-magic anyway. They didn’t feel it the way he did. Mom could do some divinations and dinky charms, but Sherri only wanted to play and be silly. And Dad, well, Dad hadn’t been here long enough to know his butt from his elbow.

After behaving all evening, fixing dinner for himself and Sherri because Mom was busy down in the root cellar, after doing the dishes and brushing his teeth, without complaining even once, Billy had pretended to go to bed just like normal . . . but as soon as the house was quiet, out his bedroom window he went.

Out his window and into the night, the scarlet night seething with strange energies. Feeling it in the air, a brewing crackle, thunderstorms and tornadoes and fire and lightning and blood!

At first, he thought about going toward the source of the big-magic, wanting to see the king and the queen and the mighty war camp for real. The local denizens knew better than to bother him, steering clear as he made his way through the woods. But, the further he went, the more he felt something else tugging at him, a pull, a draw, a magnetism he couldn’t resist. It was the “a challenger approaches!” sensation he’d had earlier, fainter by now but lingering. Changing course, he realized he was approaching the direction of the earlier smoke-plume from the plane crash. Traces of the awesome/awful Presence brushed him too, almost making him wimp out, and a being-watched paranoia tingled in his tummy.

Then, he saw the plane! Busted all to bits, burned and twisted, probably mangled bodies everywhere—

Billy rushed forward, eager to see the carnage. Right as he neared it, there was a gusty, swoopy black whoosh. Claws clamped onto his shoulders, pinching, hurting, making him yell as his feet left the ground.

“You aren’t the warlock I’m after,” something screeched, “but you’ll do for a start!”

***

Or, not straight to Hell . . . Greg found himself yanked straight to Purgatory.

If Limbo, as Ethriel had explained it, was the afterlife’s waiting room, an eternal on-hold / page-loading ordeal, Purgatory was the afterlife’s version of the Groundhog Day movie, where the same span of time kept resetting, repeating itself over and over, an unchanging time loop to leave you right back where you’d started. The more aware of it you were, the more you tried to alter things or do something different, the more torturous it became.

Greg didn’t know how he knew all that, but somehow, he did, intuiting it wholesale as the high-backed chair unfolded to spit him onto the carpeted floor of a study almost identical to the one he’d just been in.

Almost. This one was illuminated by hissing gas lamps, their flames a strange no-color casting everything in grainy black-and-white like an old movie. The ebony clock under its glass dome was ticking, pendulum swinging back and forth. An antique radio he was sure he would have noticed before sat atop a low table, moody jazz issuing from its speakers in accompaniment to a woman’s throaty, sultry crooning.

He wanted to stop and listen more closely—her voice throbbed, so full of loss and longing and emotion!—but there was also the matter of his grandfather, more resembling a middle-aged Vincent Price than the Crypt Keeper or South Park’s version of Goth Poe, regarding him with the interest an entomologist might have shown to a peculiar new species of bug.

“Uh,” said Greg, not at his wittiest. He scrambled upright, glad that the clothes he’d conjured had stayed with him through all these reality-crossings. They, too, were in black-and-white now, as was he. Still rumpled and scruffy, especially compared to someone dark-suited and . . . was that a cravat?! “Hi. Sir. I’m—”

“I know who you are. And I must say, you’ve some nerve, turning up here like this, untrained and ignorant and reeking of angelic sex.”

“I . . . wait, what? Reeking?”

“Nonetheless, one can’t help but be somewhat impressed. You’ve no lack of power or potential.”

“Thanks? I think?”

“It’s also not every day, so to speak, something shakes up the sameness of Purgatory. Novelty makes for a breath of fresh air.”

“I knew it!” Greg said. “Not sure how I knew it, but I did. But . . . what are you doing in Purgatory? Shouldn’t you . . . uh . . . ”

“Have been sent to Hell? Following a lifetime studying the occult and arcane, practicing the darkest of magics, committing untold sins against the laws of Man as well as the tenets of God? Is that what you’re asking, Gregory?”

“Well . . . I wasn’t going to put it quite like . . . ”

“Oh, go ahead, it’s all true. All that and more. The atrocities I indulged in my youth . . . ” He gazed off into some unseen distance, nostalgic, the hint of a smile curving his lips. “But then, due in no small part to the influence and intervention of your grandmother, my scales tipped just enough the other way to cause a karmic dispute. I’m consigned to Purgatory while my case is under review.”

“Which is . . . good, right?”

His grandfather passed an elegant hand in an indifferent Vincent-Price gesture. “A matter of perspective. I am afforded rather more privileges than most who are sent here, serving as a clark of sorts, assisting the Gaolers to keep all running smoothly. The situation, while far from ideal, could certainly be worse. Or better. Again, a matter of perspective.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“A noble offer from a noble soul,” he said, something in his tone suggesting it wasn’t exactly meant as a compliment. “Irrelevant, however. You’re here for my help.”

“I am?”

“Did you think you’d simply stroll into my study, pick up a copy of Introduction to Warlockery, and go from there? Don’t be ridiculous, Gregory. Sit down and pay attention. You have much to learn.”

PART THREE:

Days

Six days later, they went for the nuclear option.

Nothing else had worked. The military leaders and political bigwigs were getting desperate. Worse, they were getting embarrassed, humiliated, and pissed off.

Preliminary flybys had ended in spectacular fireballs of disaster, either shot down by antiaircraft artillery—the gunners at Checkpoint Bethlehem were delighted to have some real target practice—or exploding like popcorn kernels against the protective Aurora Diabolicus dome. Ground forays fared little better, the revamped Wall’s defenses making short work of tanks and troops before they could even come close to engaging with the presumed enemy.

As for diplomatic negotiations . . .

Yeah, good luck with that. Communication attempts went either ignored or rebuffed. Nobody on the Outside knew what was going on in there, and nobody on the Inside seemed inclined to enlighten. Helicopters and drones met the same fates as fighter jets, while remote-operated robots sporting white flags met the same fates as tanks.

One famous reporter, renowned for a career of taking on the most dangerous assignments in the most volatile and unstable regions, was permitted to get almost within interviewing distance of Bethlehem’s gate . . . before a host of black-winged demons shredded him and his cameraman and sound tech into wet red mulch.

Meanwhile, once again, the whole world was watching. Governments held their breaths. International disputes were backburnered, wars called time-outs, otherwise major news stories relegated to the “oh and also this piddly shit happened” category.

The stock market tanked. Gas prices skyrocketed. People mobbed the grocery stores for talismanic toilet paper. Sporting events, highly-anticipated movie debuts, celebrity scandals, and contentious social issues made barely a blip. Nobody gave half a damn about billionaires in space or which fast-food chain had the best chicken sandwich.

The Lake Misquamicus region teemed with media, religious groups, and would-be sightseers, clogging the highways and byways with additional traffic while those trying sensibly to vacate the vicinity had to fight their way upstream. Across the country, survivalists headed for their bunkers, while doomsday cultists committed mass suicide. Even those who’d stubbornly persisted in decrying the whole thing as a hoax finally changed their tunes.

This, humanity in general figured, was it. For real this time. Everything else—natural disasters, pandemics, climate change—had only been the warm-up acts. That they’d figured much the same when AllHell happened in the first place, then eventually got over it and adapted and learned to live with it didn’t seem as likely this time around.

Before, it had been an Event, sure, an aberration, a shock to the collective system, requiring some massive reworkings of accepted reality . . . but the infernal lake had, for the most part, just sat there doing a whole lot of not much beyond its own environs and borders. The awkward unpleasantness had been contained, secured, taken care of. It could, like systemic racism, police brutality, and misogyny, be glossed over by the population not directly affected.

Now, though, was another story. A simple wall and off-limits quarantine wasn’t going to do the trick any longer. This was terrorism. Infiltration. Decisive and definite hostile action. A threat. It could not be allowed to go uncontested. It could not be allowed to remain. Not on American soil! Not on God’s green Earth!

During the hectic six days of scrambling between the initial broadcast of betrayal and the ultimate decision, there was the requisite amount of hand-wringing and hesitation, but mostly as a token protest. Sure, nobody Outside knew what was going on in there, but did anybody really, really want to? After what they’d already seen?

Preparations were made. Caravans of evacuees flooded north, locals and tourists alike. Even stalwarts who’d disregarded every hurricane warning for the past twenty years decided now was the time to nope the fuck out of Florida.

Bring on the nukes.

It had to be done. The lesser, by far, of two evils.

Nuke the bastards.

Nuke the site from orbit, only way to be sure.

***

Meanwhile, Inside the Wall (as opposed to Under the Dome, though nukes eventually factored into that one too and it didn’t go so well for them either), plenty of things had been happening during the days leading up to the launch as the dominion of Favius became well and truly established.

Ecce, novum princeps de inferno, novus rex terrae, and so on.

It was going pretty smoothly, all considered. If some local denizens were reluctant to give up their perception of rugged independence and self-reliance—ain’t we been gettin’ by fine on our’n own? Without no guv’mint interference, nobody tellin’ us what to do?—they quickly realized the benefits of supporting the new regime. They even more quickly learned the pitfalls of not supporting it, with only a few examples needing be made.

Construction of a Senate rotunda and a Luciferic temple were underway, eventually to be followed by a royal villa, a public bathhouse, a gladiatorial arena, and other such ambitious projects. It would be grand, it would be glorious, to rival the empires of Alexander and Nero and Caesar!

Admittedly, the lack of ready access to building materials made for something of a snag. Not as if they could just call in a contractor or hit the Home Depot out by the interstate. Sufficient magic and conjurings did to compensate, and there was no shortage of unskilled labor, willing or otherwise.

The tireless, inhuman strength of the original three Golems, of course, proved invaluable. They’d begun their service working on the Reservoir, after all, before being inadvertently caught in the Spatial Merge. Heavy lifting was what they were made for.

Their Ameri-Golem counterpart was another matter, having been much more designed with super-soldier shock-and-awe combat monster in mind, but it served its own important purpose.

True, the rest of Favius’s troops weren’t the seasoned Roman legionnaires of his long-ago mortal life, and neither were they the fully assimilated demons and Damned he’d served with in Hell. Still, they were, for the most part, experienced veterans, accustomed to following orders and observing the chain of command. Those who weren’t, or who lacked the requisite savagery and bloodlust, had mostly been weeded out in the lakeshore slaughter, with the rest swiftly following suit.

Then there were the ones like Captain Adler, whose zeal was impressive almost to the point of becoming worrisome. She had made herself known to Favius in dramatic fashion, swooping in wide-winged and black-plumaged for a magnificent landing, both heads held high, both pairs of eyes sharp as bayonets, to drop a captive warlock at his feet.

To be sure, it wasn’t the warlock, the one of whom the omens portended, the satyr-slayer who kept company with an angel. But it was a warlock, a boy of budding power and potential, only too glad to accept a position in Favius’s court . . . once his serpentine mother had been reassured and placated and, as a respected landholder of ancestral family, named as Second Senator into the bargain.

As for the warlock? In that, Captain Adler had further proved her worth, presenting Favius with a wallet and other evidence retrieved from the scene of a plane crash. She’d also confirmed traces of an angelic presence. A minor one, a mere traveler’s guardian, hardly a ranking sword-of-light, but no agent of the Opposition should be underestimated. Let alone one joining forces with a warlock.

Another troubling loose end persisted in the form of the Bodeans. Zeke Bodean’s trailer was discovered in a shambles, as if someone—perhaps Zeke himself—had torn through it in a blind rage; yet, of Zeke himself, there was no sign. Neither was there of his cousins Heck and Lorlinda, who had not been seen since the evening of the pre-empted Hock Party at Crawdy’s.

The best efforts of searchers and oracles combined were not, as of yet, having any luck finding warlock or angel or wayward Bodeans, but Favius could be patient. He had his infernal faith.

***

His infernal faith, and his eminently fuckable queen.

Oh, so fuckable! Eminently, insatiably so! They couldn’t get enough of each other. Several times a day, in every possible and more than a few impossible positions, rutting and fucking, glutting themselves on sex, gorging themselves on it!

June had never been happier in her life. Never more comfortable, confident, and proud. She was aware she carried herself differently now, held her head high, strode like a lioness. Owned her space in the world, her place in the world.

She was a goddamn queen!

Better, she had a man! More than a man! A savagely devoted sex-beast! Demon-king, demi-god, didn’t matter. He was hers, she was his, and that was all she cared about. The rest of it was just extra cherries on the sundae.

Such as, having people regard her with fear and respect instead of pity and scorn. Regarding her, as well, with envy, admiration, or even a speculative, smoldering lust. Her carnal prowess was far from a secret, and not only because everyone had witnessed the apocalyptic fuck of the ages on the dais that night. She and Favius made no effort to be modest, quiet, or discreet in their urges.

During his war-councils and Senate meetings, he liked to have her sit by his side, thighs brazenly splayed and cunt on display for all the court to see, as he fingered her to orgasm after delicious orgasm. She’d, in return, expertly work his cock with hands and mouth, sometimes swallowing, sometimes letting the copious jets douse her face and bared breasts.

It was also, he said, because as his queen, he felt she should be aware of and involved in matters of state. He did not merely want a trophy; he wanted a partner, a co-ruler. And June, who discovered over the course of some of those war-council meetings that her hitherto-unsuspected innate skills at gunplay extended as well to matters of strategy and tactics, was glad to oblige.

Then there was her knack for torment . . .

The now-skeletal remains of Margaret Goldsmith still hung from the gantry, ivory-clean as a Halloween decoration. Imps and rats and other carrion-eaters had made short work of her eviscerated organs as well as flesh and soft tissues; blowflies and corpse-maggots and bone-beetles had done the rest. It had become a strange shrine of sorts. Someone had put up a sign commemorating the matricidal event, and people left little mementos of their own mothers—locks of hair, jewelry, photographs, teeth, vials of cremated ash—as offerings, or as warnings.

The actual implement of murder, the sacrificial marshmallow-fork, had, on Favius’s orders, been removed from Margaret’s skull, cleaned, honed, Hell-bronzed, polished, and presented to his queen. It would, he told her, one day be a Relic of its own power. June took to wearing it slung at her hip on a long thin strap; it may not have been the most effective weapon, but it made a great scepter to idly toy with as she lounged on her throne, advising Favius as he made battle plans, settled disputes, and decreed the laws of the land. If she needed to remind anybody just what she was capable of, a simple angling of the fork so its pointed barbs caught the light in a threatening glint usually did the trick.

Should further reminders be called for, well, the unfortunate Shinns provided another good example of why Queen June was no one to mess with.

The couple, already starting to show, had been moved from the medical tent to a pavilion in what currently served as a sort of town square. Sheltered from the elements but open to view, they lay strapped into long leather-padded troughlike wooden cradles.

“That horror writer fella?” Spot had said, gesturing in the direction of Bighead Rock. “He’s the one what comed up with th’ design. We mostly use ‘em t’ hold the torsos fer agger-nicity generators, but it oughta work just as well fer this.”

***

Speaking of agonicity generators . . .

His sister Chelsea might not have been exactly thrilled with the way things were going, but Trevor Carmichael was having a blast!

The lakehouse that wasn’t a lakehouse had accepted him as its rightful master, welcoming him, embracing him, adapting its form to his specifications. Place was long overdue for a remodel anyway, in Trev’s opinion. Their parents had gone for the casual-rich designer look suitable for vacation home magazine pictorials, with just enough seaside-themed kitsch to prove it was Florida. Nice, in an anonymous Airbnb way, but he much preferred its new incarnation as a cool hedonistic party pad.

The Riggerses, making good on their promise, had shown up bright and early the morning after the ritual. Lester, his formerly bullying demeanor quashed, went right to work converting the lakehouse’s generator to run on pain, hooking up not one but two fresh batteries—prisoner-survivors taken in the previous night’s carnage. So fresh, in fact, they hadn’t even been de-limbed yet. For which Lester began to profusely apologize, but Trevor, still doing the magnanimous act, told him was fine, just fine.

More than just fine; not only did it mean the initial amputations would provide a mega-surge of power to jump start the system, it meant he could be there! Tempting as it was to do more than watch, Trev made himself hold back. Being new to the hobby, he didn’t want to screw up in front of Lester and damage his cred.

Too bad, though . . . Lester just went about it with the brusque efficiency of a man splitting logs, without savoring the severing like Trev would have done. Not that it prevented him enjoying the show. Hell, not that it prevented him damn near coming in his pants, but he’d rather not have Lester know about that either.

Chainsaw, rev-rev, vroom, whirr, shearing through muscle, chugging and digging briefly on bone, crimson spray and shredded flesh backsplash everywhere. Off came an arm, an arm, a leg, a leg. The screaming! The thrashing! A flamethrower to bacon-sizzle cauterize the stumps. Then, on to the other guy before the first one’s lopped limbs had stopped twitching on the utility shed floor.

Said limbs went right to the big backyard smoker the senior Mr. Carmichael had purchased but ended up rarely using because it, like fishing or hunting, turned out to be actual unpleasant physical work. As for the resultant smoked meat, well, Trevor simply decided not to stress it, the same way he didn’t think too hard about the thin-sliced cold cuts he’d enjoyed on a sandwich at the writer guy’s place.

While Lester had attended to the gennies, his brother Ronny trundled their ma and pa’s heads around to supervise the crews they’d called in to spruce up the grounds and interior. Including, to Trev’s relief, the hauling-away of the violated SUV carcass and burial of Ol’ Hornyshell’s jizz-splotches.

They found, in the bushes near the mudroom door, some scattered bones he supposed must have belonged to Madison; Andy’d been right. Oh well; like Kayla, late-and-lamented now. At least a good chunk of Andy’s stash had survived.

The “trampy hell-sluts” Mrs. Riggers brought to do the cleaning more than lived up to the description. Some of them, and the hunkier studs doing the yardwork, Trev hired on as full-time live-in unspecified “help,” having the house add a servants’ quarters just off the main rave and orgy room—hey, when in Rome!—and downstairs from the big-screen surround-sound home theater.

To really seal the deal, and let them know in no uncertain terms who was in charge, he dug out the cigar-cutter he and Chels had given Dad as a Father’s Day gift one year. Nice piece, mahogany and titanium steel, set with the family crest in enamel, the blade razor-sharp. Hadn’t been cheap.

Worked as well on human fingers as it did on Cuban cigars.

Only their left pinkies, though.

At least, for a start . . .

***

How life could change so much, so fast, without warning . . . and not for the first time.

The first time had been when she found out her husband was a cheating bastard so she’d piled the kids into the minivan and driven to her family’s old place on Lake Misquamicus, only to then have AllHell happen out of nowhere and strand them amid a living nightmare of monsters, horrors, and blood.

Now, here they were, however many years later, after adjusting to their altered surroundings and situation—many of those changes had been more gradual, like the way Billy and Sherri didn’t seem to age anymore, or the way Billy could do magic, or the way what Sharon initially took to be stress-related hair loss turned out to be the start of her slow transition into a fine-scaled, cool-blooded semi-demoness—having everything suddenly go topsy-turvy again.

The plane crash she’d seen from the kitchen window had been the precursor, setting an unsettling tone for the day. Even so, she never would have guessed that by sunset, she’d be fucking her cheating bastard of a husband on the dock while aquatic abominations cheered them on. Or that she’d then paralyze him with her internal venom and turn him over to the kids to play with while she arranged a sunlamp-warmed sand nest in preparation for laying a clutch of soft-shelled eggs.

To be fair, it probably wasn’t quite the reunion Bill had expected either.

The nerve of him, crawling back so repentant! Their former babysitter must have kicked his aging ass out. Probably bankrupted him into the bargain.

Still, it was nice to have him around again. Nice for Billy and Sherri too; they’d been getting bored with their usual torture games. And, with new babies on the way, she supposed she could loosen the apron strings a little.

But the momentous day hadn’t been done with them yet! A new prince of Hell, a new king on Earth, a new Star Wormwood glaring in the sky, the aurora, the Wall, the resonating Voice ringing with power . . .

The next morning, she’d emerged from the root-cellar after an exhausting but exhilarating night of squeezing out eggs, wanting nothing more than a shower and a big breakfast and nine hours of sleep, to find her daughter eating cereal in front of the TV.

A normal enough scene, except that the television’s agonicity adapter was connected to wires extending from a crown of fishhooks embedded in the head of Bill’s cock as Bill himself writhed and squirmed, chained upside-down to an X-shaped wooden cross with his lips stapled shut.

“He kept screaming and yelling at me,” Sherri had explained. “I couldn’t hear my cartoons.”

“Where’s your brother?”

“He sneaked out last night, the poopyhead, and wouldn’t let me go with him.”

“What? Why didn’t you come and get me?”

She’d shrugged, shoveling more off-brand frootyloops into her mouth. “I didn’t wanna be a brattle-tattle-tattle-tale.”

Well, that had thrown everything into further upheaval, sending Sharon rushing to her neighbors. Sure, her Billy had magic, was a fine little junior warlock, but his body was still only that of a child, and plenty of what lurked around the lake wouldn’t hesitate at an opportune meal.

Finding out he’d been captured by a black-winged Nazi eagle and delivered to their prince’s compound was, while not the worst news she could have received, nonetheless far from reassuring. Leaving Sherri in charge of the house and the eggs, under very strict orders, Sharon had gone charging on over there, ready to raise her own brand of hell.

She’d stormed through the war-camp in full raging mama-bear mode, ready to bite or spit or do whatever it took to get her son back. But, much to her astonishment, General Favius proved more than reasonable. Terrifying, especially up close—those faces!—but reasonable, offering Billy the post of court warlock and Sharon a seat on the Senate.

His queen seemed nice too.

***

Really, though, his queen was not at all nice, a truth to which many by now could testify. The unfortunate Mr. and Mrs. Shinn foremost among them.

Oh, they were well cared for. They were washed and bathed daily, not left to fester in their own waste. Medics attended them on a regular basis. They were given fluids to fend off dehydration, vitamins to ensure their good health.

Feeding was somewhat of a challenge. Mr. Shinn, already demoralized by the loss of his balls, remained catatonic unless forcibly brought to awareness. Even then, all he did was cry, a steady slow leak of abject misery. He didn’t object to whatever pureed nutritive glop was spooned into his mouth, but more often than not simply forgot to swallow, letting it dribble down the sides of his face. Mrs. Shinn was another matter, continuing to resist and spit like a stubborn toddler refusing their vegetables.

“Now, now, Mrs. Shinn,” June chided in a condescending, saccharine-sweet solicitousness. “We can’t have that, can we? No hunger strikes, no self-starvation. After all . . . you’re eating for two!” She’d then ordered the medics to funnel a tube down her throat at mealtimes and pump the glop right on in.

The hellish equivalent of citronella tiki-torches kept flying or creepy-crawling pests away, while guards made sure nothing larger posed a threat . . . and made sure no pity-hearted soul gave in to their entreaties.

Not that there were many pity-hearted souls left in the vicinity. Most who did stop by only did so to mock, laugh, and jeer. The female soldiers and other women around the war-camp were, to June’s approval, particularly vicious. She loved seeing the Shinns suffer as their own righteous rhetoric got thrown back in their faces again and again.

God’s silver lining!

She hadn’t even had their limbs removed, despite Spot’s suggestion it’d make them easier to deal with. No amputations, no lobotomizing, no physical torture beyond what their own bodies were already doing to them.

Psychological, of course, was another matter . . .

“Why, Mrs. Shinn, you look radiant!” June had told her. “Positively glowing! Oh, wait, that’s from the rash, isn’t it? I’d never known there was such a thing as a melon allergy until you bitched so much about the fruit salad Mrs. Gabelman brought to the church potluck.”

Utero-gourds, it seemed, were of the same general botanical family as cantaloupe, honeydew, and various rinded squashes. And, having a pregnant one growing in your stomach was a little more severe than accidentally eating a teeny sliver of cantaloupe.

The rash, a vivid red that damn near did glow, covered Mrs. Shinn from head to toe. In places, it humped up in pustulent hives seeping a clear, sticky fluid. Her face and neck had gone as puffy as someone with the mumps.

“I bet that itches like crazy,” June had said. “Just as well you’re restrained, wouldn’t want you scratching at it. Don’t worry, though. We won’t let you go into anaphylactic shock. That’d be bad for the baby. Your own comfort and convenience aren’t more important than that innocent little life inside you, remember. May be your body, but not your choice!”

She’d ask if they’d felt any kicks yet, if they’d given any thought to names. She’d remind them how wonderful and special and miraculous this was.

“You wouldn’t want to be like those horrible, sinful, selfish girls you used to yell at outside abortion clinics, would you? I remember the signs you waved, the photos of fetuses you’d shove in their faces, the water balloons filled with corn syrup and red food coloring. I remember you boasting about finding a doctor’s home address and leaving a pile of slaughtered piglets in the front yard. You fought the good fight, fought for what you believed in, and you should be very proud.”

Mrs. Shinn would glare impotent fury, Mr. Shinn would gaze vaguely with his tear-leaking eyes.

And June would just pat their bulging bellies and laugh.

***

Chelsea, of course, remained salty as fuck about the whole thing. Trevor was sure she’d keep on giving him no end of shit about it, but for the time being, her role as queen’s handmaid was too choice to abandon. Having an inside-scoop connection could give him a nice senatorial edge, if needed.

His fellow Senators, thus far, consisted of a snake-lady MILF, a retired veterinarian, the dude who used to run the lake’s biggest boat and jet ski rental joint, and a tough-looking, tobacco-chewing Bodean woman built like a blacksmith.

The last seemed a strange choice, given what Trev had learned about the family, particularly the missing Heck’s also-missing brother, Zeke. Still, he wasn’t going to question Favius. If it helped the redneck riffraff contingent feel represented, the transition of power would only go smoother.

The famous local horror writer had also been offered a senatorship but politely declined, citing his desire to just work on his books and movies. Trev had been worried for a minute—he liked the crazy old fuck—and was relieved when Favius respected and abided by his decision. The demented works the writer was doing, Favius declared, works further corrupting and contributing to the downfall of humanity’s morals, far superseded any mundane bureaucratic business. One so guided and inspired by the darkest demonic muses was a treasure not to be squandered on lesser matters.

Which suited the writer fine; as he told Trev one afternoon over another companionable repast of sandwiches and Collier’s lager, his proofreader was on his ass again about a character’s measurements in his latest novel. “Says the boobs are too small,” he’d said, shaking his head. “Ran all these proportional measurement calculations and everything to back it up. Who knew she’d be such a tit-stickler?”

Weirdly, even with the Wall and the Dome and the reinforced magic wards or whatever to keep the lake and its environs cut off from Outside, the writer’s internet connection continued to function just fine. Not that he did much with it except email and upload his manuscripts and movies.

Movies of which, by the way, Trevor had now acquired a complete collection. They were really something on the big screen of his new home theater too! Larger than life and twice as gory! During a viewing of the one he’d helped with, the one featuring the red-headed simulacrum, he got so turned on he ended up using an electric carving knife to shear the hands off one of his servants, then having a nice hot bleeding stump-job.

His transportation needs had been met in the form of a cushy black window-tinted government sedan that had chauffeured some political bigshots who’d gladhanded their way into accompanying the military convoy for the great unveiling of what was to have been America’s ultimate super-soldier. Trev had no idea what happened to them and didn’t really care. The car was going to need some work to make it more suitable for the rougher roads, and there was still the prospect of Ol’ Hornyshell to contend with, but for the meantime, it would do.

Besides, there hadn’t been many shoreward sightings of the alpha dino-turtle lately, the prevailing theory being he was busy defending his title from younger bucks as mating season got into full swing. The defiant SKREE-ONKings of challenge and crashings of combat went on far into the night, the battered shells of the losers washing up in a foamy blood-tide along the cove beach near Bighead Rock, where the females dug their nests in the shallows.

If anything nagged at Trev, it was wondering about his friend Jason, who’d let them through at Checkpoint Jericho . . . and who’d become nicely buff since they’d seen each other last. Trevor wouldn’t have minded inviting him over—mutilation movies and orgies were way better than Netflix and chill—but word had it Jericho had become a fiery fortress defended by volcanic lava-monsters.

Which, while undoubtedly hot, was the wrong kind of hot.

***

The ultimatum had been given.

Surrender immediately or face extreme military sanction.

Favius shook his head. They dared. After their every effort so far had ended in ignominious defeat, after their assaults broke upon the Wall like waves on a bluff? After how many of their aircraft and missiles exploded in fiery starbursts? After how many of their tanks were crushed into flattened wads? After how many mortal soldiers fell to his army of the Damned?

Yet, yes, they dared. Their prides had been stung. They’d been made to look bad in the eyes of the entire world. Made a mockery of on their own sacred soil. And that, oh, that could not be allowed to stand.

“They’re going to what?” June asked, as if hoping she’d misheard the message.

“Drop a nuke up our’n asses, Miz Your Highness, I b’leeve,” Spot said. “If’n I’m translatin’ the oh-ficial lingo right.”

“That would,” said Favius, “appear to be their intention.”

“Shouldn’t we be, well, you know, concerned?” She had taken to wearing, in these war-council meetings, a queenly garment gifted her by local seamstresses, a lightweight but sweeping azure-blue cloak etched with tiny sequins in peacock-feather design, its high flare of rhinestone-bestudded collar framing her face like a fan.

As she spoke, she toyed with her bronzed marshmallow-fork, but this time she seemed to do so with more nervousness than menace. Favius, to assure her, slid a hand under the cloak, massaging her thigh.

“Have faith, my queen. Our defenses are strong. It will take more than a mere ‘nuke’ to challenge the Luciferic might of Hell itself.”

“Oh, I know,” she replied, already melting into his caress. “But, how? Will it bounce off? Blow up like the missiles did?”

Captain Adler scoffed, huffing derisive snorts from the nostrils of both beaks, and June shot her a malevolent look. Favius made mental note. While his queen got on well thus far with the female Senators, this animosity between her and his chief military officer boded ill.

“Have faith,” he repeated, slipping a forefinger between her labia, already slick with her inner oils of readiness. June sighed, melting further, letting her knees fall open and take the cloak with them. The young warlock, Billy, goggled at her nudity for a moment, then looked away as if worried he might get in trouble.

Adler rolled two pairs of eagle-eyes and turned to the map of Lake Misquamicus, pinned on a corkboard with the perimeter and checkpoints clearly marked. “Whether it bounces or blows up, it’ll do far more damage to their own troops Outside. Not to mention the civilian casualties and other damage. My reports indicate they’re getting a lot of pushback from environmental groups concerned about fallout, especially with hurricane season on the way.”

“Will they, in your opinion, follow through?” asked Favius. “Or is it more posturing and bluster?”

Her two heads swiveled to exchange a glance with each other, then focused on him. “They’ll do it,” she said. “At this point, they have to, if only to . . . ” The double gaze flicked to his patchwork skin. “ . . . save face.”

Billy snickered. “Save face,” he echoed. “Nothing’s gonna save their stupid faces. The old ladies and me, we did all the divinations. They can throw twenty nukes and it won’t make any difference.”

“You see?” Favius told June, whose loins quivered as his fingertips circled her clitoris.

“All right,” she said, breath hitching. “But won’t people panic? Try to . . . ohhhh! . . . try to leave?”

“No,” he said. “They won’t, and even if they did, there is no way. Our borders are secure.”

“Um,” Billy said, fidgeting guiltily in his seat. “Me and the old ladies, we’re not so sure about that. Some of the omens are kinda cloudy and stuff.”

Favius paused, two fingers knuckle-deep in his queen’s clasping cunt, and regarded the boy. “The other warlock, perhaps? The . . . angel?”

“Maybe? All we get when we try is, I dunno, like, a tunnel, I guess.”

***

The tunnel . . . Jeb Bodean could have told them about the tunnel.

But Jeb Bodean, known to at least three generations of kinsfolk as “Uncle” Jeb whether he was in fact their uncle or not, was six years in the ground before AllHell came along.

He’d gone the way he’d always wanted, getting a tag-team blowie from a couple buxom sluts who’d been hoping to score some ‘shine and meth. Busted so good a nut, his brain popped an annur-ism and killed him stone dead. Still had a smile on his face when the coffin lid got nailed down.

Jeb, oh, he’d known plenty of secrets and took more than a few of them to the grave along with him. Others he’d dispensed to those as seemed worthy, such as tricks of the distillin’ trade, good ol’ three-card-monte and poker cheatin’ for the faster-handed, and similar useful skills.

His nephews—or close enough by whatever reckonin’—Zeke and Heck, for instance, he’d let in on one of the avenues of the family business, involving at the time mostly guns and electronics, plus the occasional foray into human traffickin’. Zeke, it turned out, lost interest soon enough, preferrin’ to spend his days drinkin’ beer and shootin’ pool over to Crawdy’s place. Heck proved much more the ambitious type. But the both of them, he’d taken out to the tunnel, even if there hadn’t been much use for it at the time. Still, never hurt to be prepared; who knew when something like that might just come in handy?

Zeke may have only been out that way once or twice, his dislike for the place amplified by being what Lorlinda would’ve called “cluster-phobic.” Nonetheless, he remembered it well enough. Its existence, if not any upgrades as what had been added since AllHell, that is. He knew nothing about Damnation Dan’s concealing facade of slide-away thorn briars, for instance, or the numerous spells and wards hedge-warlocks such as Miz Delilah had put into place to shield it from pryin’ eyes.

Nor did Zeke have any idea that selfsame tunnel was Heck’s current whereabouts or the sulfur-shot state Heck had been in when Lorlinda brung him there. All Zeke knew and cared about just then was going into hiding whilst he planned his revenge against the Hell-Centurion who’d done him so wrong.

The tunnel seemed a sensible place. Thing was, being barely able to walk more than ten steps without needing to sit—carefully—down made it a real hindrance trying to get cross-country halfways ‘round the lake. He hadn’t driven since they’d moved him into his trailer, his old pickup a wheelless rusted hulk in his yard. It was all he could do to duct-tape his donut pillow onto a folding canvas camp chair and begin the long, painful, precarious hike toward his nearest relations, geographically speakin’, in hopes of askin’ for help, rather than waitin’ on Heck’s next visit.

The local wildlife, plant and animal alike, left him alone. As if they could smell the shame on him, could tell somehow he was marked. He was Favius’s bitch-boy, and not one of ‘em wanted anything to do with him . . . even killin’ him would’ve been beneath ‘em somehow.

Days and days he trudged, seat of his pants soaked with blood, towing a little wagon of supplies. Days and days, driven on as much by sheer stubborn tenacity as by vengeance and hate.

The shame factor kept tryin’ to rear its ugly head, remindin’ him how everyone was apt to point and laugh and jeer over what had happened. Even some of his own kin, like Maybelle, spread the lies he’d got a boner during that brutal reamin’, while Pap-Pap just gave him the awfulest pitying you-ain’t-no-man-no-more looks, as if Zeke might’s well put on one of Gammy’s ol’ housedresses. He’d barely had a thing t’ do with most of ‘em, ‘cept Heck, in ages.

Where else, though, could a fella turn if not to family?

***

The highest concentration of Bodeans near Lake Misquamicus could be found within a two-mile radius of the Yard. Which wasn’t to say they lived in a close tight-knit community; their cabins, trailers, and shacks tended to nestle aways apart from each other, in the backwoods and bayous where their ancestors had been brewin’ ‘shine and poachin’ ‘gators since time immemorial. But the Yard marked the unofficial heart of their territory, and its particular branch of the family tree was as close to being regarded as respectable as any Bodeans could.

The Yard was a sprawling dirt-and-gravel lot packed with the carcasses of vehicles and appliances. There were piles of tires, teetering Jenga-stacks of wooden pallets, even a few busted carnival rides lurking derelict and creepy. At one point in the Yard’s history, an enterprising Bodean had attempted to revamp it into a drive-in movie show, but a storm took out the screen and snack bar; only some old sideways-canted speaker poles remained to tell the tale, poking up like relics of a lost world.

A hodge-podge of workshops, warehouses, garages, sheds, refurbished railcars, and salvaged shipping containers housed everything from auto-shops to storage of “acquired” goods. Most of the post-AllHell “modder-fications,” such as those done to Heck Bodean’s frankentruck, had taken place here, as had the early generator agonicity conversions and other necessary mechanical adjustments to the new local lifestyle.

More often than not, these days, it was all but deserted, its own personal post-apocalyptic wasteland. Buster Bodean, who used to run the place, had been among the first to encounter Ol’ Hornyshell, while driving his tow truck to the scene of a crash during the initial panicked tourist evacuation. What witnesses survived had never been the same after that. Buster’s boys, more interested in scavenging abandoned campgrounds, met their own bad ends over towards Bible Creek. And Buster’s half-brother, BoJo, may have been strong as an ox but was dumb as one too. In the end, Buster and BoJo’s half-sister Clarabeth stepped in and took over.

She’d always had a knack for tools and machinery and metalwork, Clarabeth had. Not only built like a blacksmith, she’d taken first prize at county fair contests twice in her youth, gone to welding school, and could drink, spit, swear, and brawl well as any man . . . and better’n some.

Most thought she must be one of them lesberines. Clarabeth didn’t bother to correct them. Let them think as they would. She weren’t no clamdigger, but she had no interest in gettin’ a dickin’ either. Or any kind of ugly-bumpin’, for that matter. Just didn’t appeal. She far preferred hammer and anvil, the forge and the quench, makin’ things, fixin’ things.

That said, damn-and-bless if’n her snatch weren’t still sore! That there Gen’rul Favius had given it a right brutal squeeze, grabbed her by the cooter in a very non-preserdential kind of way when he’d sworn her in. Last time some jackhole tried stickin’ his hand ‘tween her legs, she’d left him with a broken arm and a skull fracture into the bargain, but this had been different. Senator Clarabeth Bodean, thank you very much and how about that? Hail Satan!

It was some long overdue respect and representation for the family, who had roots dug deeper than ‘bout anyone in the vicinity, had just ‘bout everyone in the vicinity beholden to them one way or another, yet still got treated as barely a step up from creeker-freak trash. Well, enough of that!

Her only moment of concern—aside from the cooter-grabbin’—had been when the Gen’rul set her some questions as to her semi-cousin, Zeke.

“Shee-it,” she’d said. “Ain’t seen him in years. Wimpy-ass crybaby fucknut gone all ree-cluse. He was on fire, wouldn’t piss on him t’ put it out.”

It was, therefore, a bad surprise to turn from her welding table, push up her mask to arm the sweat from her brow, and see the wimpy-ass crybaby fucknut in the doorway of her workshop.

***

His mind kept drifting off into a murky yellowish haze that stunk as if a passel of skunks had gotten into a rotten-egg fight. Kept drifting, kept taking him places, showing him things. Familiar places and faces. Familiar people and things.

Only fever-delirium dreaming, Heck knew, brung on by sulfur-poisoning, drugs, and whatever mumbo-jumbo Miz Delilah’d been working. Din’t mean he was crazy or havin’ visions or none of that shit. Just meant he was right and proper fucked up. It’d pass. It’d end. It’d all go away.

When it happened, though, it sure ‘nuff seemed real, felt real. As if he were actually there, but not-there. Floating invisible-like, unable to do anything ‘sides watch and listen.

Such as seeing his momma and Lorlinda’s, both sitting at that godawful pink-and-chrome Formica table in Pap-Pap’s farmhouse, snapping marrow-beans into a big bowl just to have something to do with their hands as they fretted. Soldiers had come, soldiers an’ that pope-kissing weasel Spot, questionin’ as to their childrens’ whereabouts, making obscure but ominous threats. Where’s Heck at? they’d asked. Where’s Zeke? What’re they up to? What’re they plannin’? Be better for ever’one if’n you speak up now, save a ton of trouble later on down the line. Questions to which their mommas had no answers.

Nor did Pap-Pap, puffin’ his corncob in his rocker out on the porch next to Gammy’s rocker, where her unearthed bones, still in her buryin’ dress, sat propped like a toothless, grinnin’ scarecrow. Accourse, these days, Pap-Pap rarely had the answers for much of anything; he’d been ancient long as any living Bodean could remember and seemed like he might just go on being ancient forever.

Heck even watched, with no small amusement, Spot tryn’ta act all big an’ important at Maybelle, her havin’ none of it. There he’d gone, the fool, struttin’ up to the converted school bus where Maybelle hung her hat as if now she might realize what an opper-tunity she’d missed out on all those years ago in kindee-garten . . .

Well, Maybelle may not’ve had a milk carton this time, but she’d hucked a half-full beer can at Spot’s head, scorin’ a dee-rect hit. Makes you think I’d tell you anythin’ even if’n I knew, pimple-dick? she’d retorted. Heck’s allus been a shifty no-account, an’ Zeke don’t have nothin’ to do with the rest of us since’t AllHell, so you c’n take your army guys an’ fuck right off! Go on back t’ bein’ the Gen’rul’s new fave-ritt butt-boy!

Fever-delirium or not, it sure was Maybelle, no doubt. Half the soldiers damn near fell down laughing, while Spot went brick-red. But then, a black-winged gloss-booted Nazi-uniformed type, who’d been standing back, pushed past the others, drew a silvery bayonet, and—

Heck bolted up from that one with a holler, scarin’ the shit outta Lorlinda, who’d been tryin’ to spoon-feed him canned applesauce.

“Saints’ taints!” she cried. “The fuck’s wrong with you?”

“Maybelle’s dead!” he said before he had his wits fully together. “Sliced her in half longways like a fuckin’ b’nanner split!”

“What?”

He scrubbed his eyes with his fists, peering around to make sure he was where he thought he was. The sulfur-tinted memory clung to his brain—the blade flashing, Maybelle staying upright for a second or two with a shocked look before peeling apart down the middle.

“Nothin’,” he said. “Nightmare is all.”

“Nunshit,” said Lorlinda. “You been seein’ clair-o-voyant.”

“Have not! I ain’t no warlock or oracle or nothin’ of the sort! It’s that expired discount morphine Brad had in his stash.”

“An’ what if you’re wrong? What if it’s true an’ Maybelle really is dead?”

“Quit an’ git, an’ take that applesnot with you. I’se tired.”

She flounced off, leaving Heck to settle back onto his cot. As soon as he did, the yellowish egg-stinking haze returned—

“Aw, no, c’mon, devils bless it,” he muttered.

—and he found himself with a weird’s-eye view of another familiar place, and two familiar people.

***

Clarabeth stared at him as if she’d been served up a fresh dog turd on a bun, but Zeke reckoned it was irritation at the interruption. She’d always took her work real serious, Clarabeth had.

He’d followed the sounds of mechanical activity through the Yard’s cluttered maze of stripped cars and defunct dishwarshers, having found the main garage empty of anything larger’n scuttling centipede-rats. Any other night, should’ve been five or six Bodeans hangin’ around, drinkin’ and smokin’ and shootin’ the shit. While Zeke hadn’t been relishin’ the prospect of steppin’ in on such a scene, already trying to brace himself for the ribbing he’d be bound to get, he nonetheless found the absence of it somehow unsettling. He couldn’t remember the garage ever being so quiet. Abandoned, like. Desolate. Gave him the creeps. As if ever’one else had up and vanished off’n the face of the earth, leaving only him.

But here was Clarabeth, proof not ever’one else had up and vanished after all. Even if she din’t look very pleased t’ see him, the relief he felt at recognizing her when she pushed up the welder’s mask was a weight lifted from the shoulders of his soul.

“Zeke,” she said. “What’n the red-eyed baby Antichrist are you doing here?”

“C’n I has a sit-down?” he asked. “Been a long walk.”

She did a curt nod, removing her mask and gloves.

Zeke left the wagon outside, untaped his donut-pillow from the folding camp-chair, made his laborious way to a bench beneath a calendar at least a decade out of date, and eased himself onto his suffering backside with a weary sigh.

“You’re bleedin’,” Clarabeth said, like he hadn’t noticed, like he hadn’t been bleedin’ a slow leak most of the way here. “Need a change of britches? Maybe a maxi-pad?”

“Fuck you! I come here for help an’ that’s what I get?”

“I din’t mean it that way, fer Satan’s sake. Anyhow, where you been? Heck and Lorlinda with you?” She leaned out the workshop door for a look-see.

“Naw, Heck stopped by a few days ago. Before . . . ” Zeke gestured skyward. “Before whatever all this new shitshow started up. Before . . . ” He gulped, shook his head, couldn’t finish.

“Oh,” said Clarabeth. “So you don’t know where they’se at?”

“How would I know? I don’t know damn near anything!”

“You got that right,” she said. “But you said you come here for help?”

“Yeah. Went to the garage, thinkin’ Buster an’ the boys—”

Her look, laden with contempt and disgust, stopped him cold. “You don’t know damn near anything, do you? Hidin’ away all this time, ignorin’ the rest of us, livin’ by moochin’ off Heck’s goodwill, not givin’ a single thought t’ anyone else!”

“I’se been in a bad way!” He hated the whiny tone in his voice but hated the way she was lookin’ at him more. “After what I went through—”

“What you went through.” She spat a wad of chaw at a dented coffee can in the corner. “We had’ta use a bulldozer to put Buster in the ground ‘cause we couldn’t extract him from what was left of his tow truck after that turtle done had its way!”

He blinked, caught too flatfooted to speak.

Clarabeth, on the other hand, was gettin’ into high gear. “As for the boys, them creeker-freaks cannibalized their bodies down to teeth an’ fingernails, so don’t you crybaby to me about what you went through! Din’t Heck keep you up to date on family affairs at all?”

“No . . . I . . . I told him not to,” Zeke said. “Was too painful t’ hear about when I—”

“Boo-fuckin’-hoo to your fuckin’ feelins! The rest of us been out here doin’ our devil’s best to get by while you was sulkin’ in that trailer with your special ass-pillow! Not so much as a single word for your own momma the entire time? And now you gots the gall to show up lookin’ for help?”

***

Zeke gave her one of them hurt, reproachful, pouty-type looks she hated to see on anybody, let alone a so-called man. Like as if he expected her to apologize for bein’ such a bitch, console and reassure him. Mebbe offer to fetch him a beer whilst she was at it.

Well, shit to that!

“Where were you when Gammy dug herself out’n her grave?” she flung at him. “Where were you when BoJo fell in that vampire-leech pit an’ needed blood donors? Where were you when the lil’uns got burned so bad tryin’ t’ catch hellfireflies? You ain’t been here for none of us, now you ‘xpect us t’ be here for you?”

“I done toldya!” he sniveled. “I was too traumer-tized!”

“Traumer-tized. Like you an’ the rest of them yahoos down t’ Crawdy’s ain’t done the same? I heard ‘bout the college kids y’all worked over that time—”

“That were diff’rnt! They come in actin’ all better’n us, thinkin’ themselfs pool-sharks, then tryin’ t’ back outta their bets; they deserved a thrashin’!”

“And their girlfriends? They deserve what they got? You don’t think they was traumer-tized?”

“Them haughty sluts? Like they ain’t never had dicks in ev’ry hole before?”

“But when it’s your hole, it’s diff’rnt?”

“‘Course it is! Ain’t right! Ain’t natural!”

Clarabeth heaved an exasperated sigh. Just plain weren’t no talkin’ to some people. “Fine. But you still got some gall. I oughta turn you in and be quit of it.”

“Turn me in?”

“How deep in the sand you had your damnfool head buried? They’se lookin’ for you, Zeke. You an’ Heck both. Soldiers been goin’ around! They killed Maybelle, sliced her clean right in two when she sassed off at them!”

“Soldiers?” He blanched a sickly greenish-gray. “His soldiers?”

“Who the fuck else’s, Colonel Sanders? Seems they think you might be hatchin’ some dipshit revenge plot, Heck in on it with you. I had t’ swear on my life an’ soul that I hadn’t seen hide nor hair, but now here you are t’ fuck up the whole works!”

She thought he might puke, faint, or both. Instead, he lurched to his feet, leaving a fresh maroon butt-print on that ridiculous pillow. “You gotta help me, Clarabeth! You gotta! I don’ know where Heck is neither, but you gotta help me!”

“We was finally about to have a chance,” she said. “Make somethin’ of ourselves, somethin’ better’n the trash they all thinks we are. He made me a Senator, right alongside same level as the rich folks with the fancy houses!”

“He . . . you . . . you’re in with him? With him? After—”

“And if’n he finds out about this . . . that’s why I oughta just turn you in.”

“You cain’t do that! We’se kin!”

“I know, cross-an’-bless it! But what about the rest of the fam’ly? Pap-Pap, Jammer an’ Sadie an’ the lil’uns, your momma an’ her sister?”

Zeke’s panicked expression showed an absolute lack of concern for her position, their prospects, or the rest of the fam’ly. “He’ll kill me! He ain’t human, he’s a monster, a demon from Hell, and he’ll kill me!”

“Worse’n that,” Clarabeth said. “He’ll wanna make a ‘xample of you. Have you tortured. He don’t like dissent, don’t wanna leave no problematic loose ends.” Like the one he left you with, she thought but didn’t say; no point bein’ unnecessarily mean.

“An’ you’d turn me in? Your own flesh-an’-blood?”

“I ain’t got much other choice, now, do I? He finds out I helped you, it’d be both of us on the meat-hooks, an’ prolly ever’one else as well!”

“Awright,” Zeke said. “Awright, then, I’ll just go. Ferget I was here, tell ‘em you still ain’t seen me, I’ll go.” He turned to retrieve his pillow from the bench.

In one fluid motion, she seized her trusty smith’s hammer, hefted it high, and brought it down hard on the back of his head.

“Sorry, Zeke,” she said. “Was the kindest thing I could do.”

***

Heck burst from the subterranean storeroom where his cot was like a wild man, never mind the lingering aches and stiffness from being peppered by sulfur shot. Never mind Miz Delilah’s instructions he needed to go easy.

In the tunnel-bunker’s larger chamber, he found Lorlinda seated at a card table with her boy-toy alien-baby doll like a little kid havin’ a sodapop-an’-Oreos tea party.

“Lorlinda!” It came out a shout, echoing and loud.

She jumped half out her skin, spitting cookie crumbs as she whirled, nearly tipping her chair. “Th’phuck?! Nowwhayainthpothbeeyup!” she sputtered.

Never mind that either. “Zeke’s dead too! Zeke an’ Maybelle both!”

And never mind any cherub-shit he’d been spewing earlier about drug-deliriums, bad dreams, him bein’ no warlock or oracle! Insane or not, this was true, this was real, and he knew it.

Heck came over dizzy again, would have faceplanted on the cold concrete floor had Lorlinda not sprung up to steer him into a seat. He clutched the table’s edge, waiting for the world to stop corkscrewing.

“Whoa, dude,” piped the doll in its weird robotic voice. “You okay?”

Damn thing reminded him of them Furbys, big eyes clicking as they blinked, tiny mouth opening and closing. Or, what was it, Tickle-Me-Elmo? Yeah. Like one of the lil’uns had begged for so hard for Christmas only to then be scared of it and chuck it down the outhouse hole. Nothin’ woke a body up faster than goin’ for a nice peaceful morning shit only to have “hee-hee-hee-oh-boy” drift from the dark, stinky depths. Some long-life batteries they must’ve put in it too; lasted a good month or more.

And why was he thinkin’ about that, anyways? How fuckin’ addled were his brains? He dimly heard Lorlinda’s anxious queries, felt her pattin’ at him, and swatted her hands away.

“Gimme a baptizin’ minute,” he said. When the spinny haze passed, he took a deep breath, then looked at her. “They are, though. Dead. Zeke an’ Maybelle.” He told her what he’d witnessed, their mommas shelling marrow-beans, Pap-Pap on the porch, Spot and the soldiers, the black-winged Nazi, Maybelle. Then, after helpin’ himself to a gulp from her sodapop—orange-flavored, but he din’t much care—he told her about Clarabeth and Zeke.

“No! You’se gots t’ be wrong!”

“I know what I seen an’ what I heard.”

“She killed him?”

“Smashed his skull wide open.”

“An’ called it a kindness?!”

Heck rubbed his temples. “Which I guess it was, given what worse they’d’ve done to him otherwise. An’ she thought she was doin’ what’s best for the family, protectin’ ‘em, like.”

“Protectin’ her own bee-hind!” Lorlinda said tartly. “Gen’rul went and made her a Senator? Clarabeth an’ her social-climbin’! Remember how she lorded it over us when she got her weldin’ school degree? Bein’ so educated an’ all?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure? Hunnerd per-cent?”

“Hunnerd per-cent.”

“Then what’re we gonna do? We gonna go back, make her answer for it?”

“I dunno, Lorlie. I dunno.”

“He was your brother! My cousin! Mebbe my half-brother too!”

“I know, but . . . we come this far already, we oughta just keep goin’.”

“Cut an’ run? Leave our kinsfolk?”

“If Clarabeth was right, they’ll be okay—”

“An’ we go where? Do what?”

“I told you, I dunno!” He took an Oreo, looked at it, set it down again.

“That really sucks,” chirped the doll’s electronic baby-voice. Andy, that was what Lorlinda had told Heck his name was after Miz Delilah mojoed him from the Catch’s pod into the carnival prize.

Speakin’ of which . . .

“Where’s ever’one else at? Miz D? Brad an’ Dan?”

“Went out; that skinny fireworks kid said there’s some kind of big news—”

“There is,” said Brad as he and Dan came in just then. They wore the dismayed expressions of men who’d bet the bank on a sure-thing cockfight only to end up with a mess of feathers and guts.

“There is,” Dan agreed. “There sure is, and it ain’t good.”

***

Lorlinda couldn’t hardly believe her own ears. A glance shared with Andy, her sweetie-pie in his just-too-dang-cute new subcarnation, showed her he felt much the same.

First, in had charged Heck, who’d never been anythin’ but prosaic when it came to magical hoodoo, havin’ done a sudden one-eighty on the notion of visions. Telling her how he’d seen their mommas, and Maybelle, and Zeke and Clarabeth—Clarabeth, always so strident ‘bout how Bodeans had to stick together!—and wantin’ to hightail it, leave their entire lives in the frankentruck’s rearview once and for all.

Then, there came Brad and Dan with their and-it-ain’t-good news.

“Evacuatin’?” she repeated, hopin’ she’d just misheard.

Nope. She hadn’t. Evacuatin’. Most everyone within sight of the Dome, accordin’ t’ Brad. Clearin’ out, haulin’ ass, gettin’ gone. Miz Delilah among them, her granddaughter having insisted.

Evacuatin’ because the guv’mint was gonna drop the nukes. Blow Lake Misquamicus an’ its denizens straight back to Hell wheres they belonged. If it meant annihilatin’ a fair chunk of Florida into the process, well, chalk it up to “acceptable loss.”

“Will it even work?” she asked. “Ain’t the new magic a shitload stronger?”

“Who knows?” Brad said.

“Then we gots to go now!” Heck smacked the table. “‘Fore it’s too late!”

“You’d never make it,” said the skinny fireworks kid, ambling in with a plate of jalapeno poppers. They was frozen, but he din’t let that stop him none, simply toasting each by blowin’ a firejet on it an’ then poppin’ the popper into his mouth. “Already too late. County road’s a traffic jam.”

“Fuck the county road! I been backroadin’ it since’t before you was born!”

The kid—Blaze—did a shot of Holocaust Hot Sauce straight from the bottle, hiccuped a smoke ring, and shrugged. “Hey, I’m just saying.”

“Why you still here then, anyways?” Heck demanded. “Shouldn’t you an’ yours be evacuatin’ too?”

“My dad says they’re just gonna shelter in place, ride it out.”

“Ride it out?” asked Lorlinda, more than a little askance. “Ride out a nook-lee-ur bomb?”

“Sure. Why not? Everything’s fireproofed, field tested for explosions.”

“Fuckin’ Peterson Pyromaniacs,” muttered Heck.

“Peterson Pyrotechnics,” the kid corrected. “Finest fireworks in—”

“I said what I said.”

“Okay, whatever.” Taking another swig of Holocaust, he wandered over to poke through the shelves of snack-chips in search of something suitably spicy.

Heck rolled his eyes, then turned toward Brad and Dan. “What ‘bout you two?”

“Nowheres else much to be,” Dan said.

“Safer here, b’sides,” added Brad, indicating the reinforced cavern walls. “Unnerground, won’t get the fallout. Plenty of food, water, medical supplies. Could survive a fair while.”

“An’ we dunno what’ll happen either inside or outside that damn Dome,” Dan went on. “Figger an in-between like this is best.”

“Liminal,” said her sugar-bun Andy in his too-dang-cute baby-voice. Then looked s’prised at hisself for havin’ said it, as if he or any of ‘em knew what it meant.

Only, Lorlinda thought she did, kind of. Liminal. In-between. They weren’t in the Hellzone, but they weren’t all the way into the reg’lar normal world. Had a foot within each, like. All’s a tunnel was, was a way to go from one somewheres to another. Same as a bridge or a doorway. Was a transitional thing, neither here nor there.

Brad, Dan, and Heck was all noddin’, as if on the same wavelength. So was Blaze, munchin’ from a packet of ghost-pepper pork rinds.

“Liminal,” she said, tryin’ the word out, rollin’ it around on her tongue. “Then shouldn’t we oughta bring people in?”

“No time for rescue missions,” said Brad. “Could hit any minute.”

A grim mood descended, which Dan tried to break with an exaggerated wink. “Hey, leastways we gots a woman if’n we need t’ repopulate!”

“Eat a dick!” Lorlinda flipped him the bird.

Everyone started laughin’, until the most terrible, brilliant, unearthly light flared, as if the very world itself were endin’ right then an’ there.

***

Elsewhen, at a different sort of liminal space, at a property chosen for its proximity to a juncture of eldritch forces, in a house no longer lived in but not quite abandoned, a wing-backed desk chair opened like a Venus flytrap and spat Greg Nachtwald onto his grandfather’s study floor.

It was the same study he’d just left, yet, it wasn’t. This was the version in the real world, dim and dusty, quiet but for the sigh of wind in the eaves. The one he’d just left had been illuminated and clean, a radio perpetually playing smoky demonic jazz.

Groaning, he pushed himself up. “There has got to be a more dignified way to do that,” he said over his shoulder to no one at all. Another difference: his grandfather hadn’t occupied this office, in any corporeal form at least, in Greg’s entire lifetime.

Nonetheless, he sensed, across the barrier or through the veil or whatever, the old man’s sardonic parting chuckle.

“Bastard,” he grumbled, not without a grudging affection. He wouldn’t say they’d grown close during his visit, but they’d gotten along well enough, developing a sort of mutual—if semi-adversarial—respect.

“You could, with further study and practice,” his grandfather had told him, “become a force to be reckoned with, even in Hell. You’d thrive there. Wealth, prestige, power, rewards of unimaginable variety.”

“Uh, yeah, no,” Greg had replied. “I don’t think I’m ready to throw in with the Dark Side yet. Besides, isn’t teaching me supposed to be part of paying off your karmic debt, earning your way uptown?”

“The young and the living think they know everything. You don’t fool me for a moment, Gregory. It’s that angel of yours, isn’t it?”

“You got me there, Gramps.”

“Call me ‘Gramps’ once more and I’ll shunt you into Limbo for a few hundred years.”

He rose, brushing dust from his clothes. The outfit was the same he’d been wearing when he crossed over in the first place, the outfit he’d conjured, going for a roughly Constantine/Castiel look—slacks, button-down, loosely knotted tie, long coat—but he understood the thaumaturgical mechanics of it much better now. He understood the thaumaturgical mechanics of a lot of things much better now.

Still, his grandfather had definitely been right about a certain primary aspect of his motivations.

He shut and locked the study door, spell-sealed and warded it for good measure, and went downstairs to his grandmother’s kitchen. This actual version, too, was dim and dusty and quiet, though the ghost-echoes of warmth and fresh-baked cookies lingered like childhood memories.

Greg closed his eyes, focused his will. He set his fingertips to either side of the septagonal sigil branded into his brow. It tingled with quiescent eldritch energy.

“Ethriel,” he said, putting his Voice behind it, making it an Invocation.

The sigil, and the matching amulet he wore around his neck, pulsated. Even through closed eyelids, his sight filled with lines of silvery fire as the seven-sided symbol flashed bright. A crackling electrical snap raised the fine hairs on his forearms and the nape of his neck. A brief whirlwind scented of ozone and incense stirred his already-unkempt hair. Scintillating chimes sounded as if from afar, accompanied by distant strains of a celestial choir. Then . . .

“Hey, look who’s here! Welcome back. How’d it go?”

He opened his eyes, and there she was. That angel of his, big as life, ten times as beautiful, shining and iridescent. Her wings of light shone, her gossamer hair billowed. Her smile was nothing short of radiant. Dressed incongruously in yoga pants and a crop top and sneakers with slouchy socks, as if she’d warped in directly from a divine aerobics class.

“Damn, I missed you,” Greg said.

Ethriel’s smile twinkled, impish. “Prove it.”

He swept her into his arms and kissed her with a pent-up eternity of desire, which she passionately matched. When they parted for breath, she met his gaze in playful challenge.

“Prove it more.”

***

The magic! The rival! A challenger approaches!

Billy jerked wide-awake with a gasp, catching himself just before he fell right out of bed.

It would have been a long fall too; General Favius had told him he could sleep wherever he wanted, so of course, he’d chosen the cool loft-style bed area up above the driver’s seat at the front of the ginormous RV. There was a ladder to climb up to it, a window, and a low shelf where some previous occupant left behind a stack of comics. Weird comics, okay; Japanese comics where the girls had super-short skirts and super-big bazoombas, and the octopus-monsters had way more than eight tentacles. His mom probably would have pitched a fit. But beggars couldn’t be choosers, and what his mom didn’t know wouldn’t get him in trouble.

He sat up, ootched back from the edge, and clicked on the cone-shaped reading light. The rest of the RV, as much as he could see of it anyway, was dark. If not silent; the usual sex-noises from the master suite told him the general and queen were still awake. At least they weren’t rocking the whole place like an earthquake this time. They even had the door closed for a change.

Not that it mattered after what they did during the war-councils and Senate meetings. His mom wasn’t wild about him seeing that, either—though, jeezle-beezle, like she could talk; he and Sherri and half the things in the lake had watched her and Dad do the dirty-dirty down on the dock. And they were his parents, which only made it extra icky!

Nudging all that from his mind, he concentrated on the surge of sudden alarm that had jarred him from sleep. Alarm? Almost terrorshock, racing his heart and squirting fear-taste into his mouth and cramping his bladder with the need to pee. It reminded him of waking up late for school with his homework not finished and a forgotten-about project due.

The magic. Big magic. The rival, the challenger. The other warlock, the one scary bird-lady Captain Adler had been looking for when she swooped down on Billy by accident instead. The one he and the creepy old witch-ladies hadn’t been able to find with their divinations. They’d resorted to weaving a web of tripwire-spells, casting the net as far and wide as they could, in hopes of it giving them some sort of early-warning system.

Okay, so, it was working, which was both good and bad. Good because it meant they’d done it right. Bad because now it had been triggered. It didn’t feel near, for sure not inside the Wall or the Dome; it didn’t feel far enough away to not worry about. The other warlock, wherever beyond their reach he’d been, was back.

As if they didn’t already have plenty of stuff to deal with, like the army guys about to drop nukes!

He dug through a pile of tentacle-comics until he found the wallet, which scary bird-lady Captain Adler had retrieved from the crashed airplane and given to General Favius, who’d then in turn given it to Billy to help as a focal point for his spells. Flipping it open, he looked again at the driver’s license. The picture only showed what seemed like a regular, ordinary guy. Still, seeing him made Billy’s tummy feel sick, as if he were going to simultaneously barf and poop himself.

“You’re not gonna get me,” he whispered. “I’m not afraid of you.”

Another surge of power and a stronger vibration along the network of tripwire-spells made him flinch. He shivered, now sensing the enemy Presence as well. The awe-full, awful, celestial Presence.

The warlock and the angel.

Together again. Reunited.

Billy snapped shut the wallet, scrambled down the ladder from his bed-loft, and dashed for the little bathroom in the hall.

Where he did simultaneously barf and poop himself—peed himself too—missing both toilet and sink with the explosive, expulsive triple deluge.

***

“Mmm . . . wait . . . not here,” Greg said, not without considerable difficulty and reluctance, as Ethriel grasped at his belt buckle.

“Why not?” She paused, his shirt already partway unbuttoned, his loosely-knotted tie pulled askew.

“Remember what my grandmother said? Not in her kitchen.”

“This isn’t her kitchen anymore.”

“This is always her kitchen. Always has been, always will be, that’s just the way it is. Same as the study upstairs is my grandfather’s.”

“Where, then?”

It was his turn to pause, weighing options. Nowhere in the house seemed right. Too much family, too many memories, plus, he wouldn’t have put it past his grandfather to play voyeur. He’d claim it was solely scholarly interest, the better to understand the physiology of divine beings, but Greg didn’t buy that for a second.

Come to think of it, he did have a vague, persistent nerve-prickling sensation of being watched.

“There’s a treehouse out back,” he said.

Ethriel crinkled her nose, giggling. “A treehouse?”

“My dad and uncles built it when they were kids. Or there’s a gazebo in the garden.”

“Which is closer?”

“The gazebo.”

“All right, then.” She kissed him again, deep and yearning, both hands roving inside his half-open shirt.

He almost changed his mind and said to heck with it then and there, might have done if not for that nagging being-watched feeling. Something about it was . . . unfamiliar . . . fearful and hostile at the same time . . . so he spun a quick shielding-ward as he led Ethriel to the side door.

His grandmother’s garden, though untended, thrived whimsical and profuse, thick with clusters of flowers and herbs. Climbing vines entwined the gazebo, the paint of which was flaked and faded, a few slats missing from the latticework.

Only now did it occur to him it wasn’t built in the traditional classic octagonal shape. Septagonal, of course; he should have realized—

Then Ethriel sprang lithe as a deer up the steps ahead of him, and he forgot all about the shape of the gazebo in favor of the view. Once, at Thanksgiving, when they’d gone around the table saying what they were most thankful for, a cousin had cited “yoga pants.” While some of the aunts had been scandalized or offended, Greg’s dad and uncles and Greg himself had lifted their glasses and said a hearty “hear hear!”

These yoga pants, though? Encasing sheer perfection in snug-hugging pure white, smooth as a coat of paint? With . . .

He burst out laughing.

With the word ANGEL scrolled in shiny gold calligraphy across the butt.

“Okay, I gotta ask,” he said, following her into the gazebo’s vine-curtained sweet-scented shadows. “What’s with the new look?”

“Don’t you like it?”

“Oh, I like it all right! It’s just a little different.”

“I’m being inconspicuous.”

Greg laughed again. “You don’t think the wings might be a bit of a giveaway?”

She flicked the tip of his nose. “Most mortals won’t notice. They’ll only see me as a normal person.”

“Their loss; lucky me!” He pulled her to him again, cupping her backside, running his palms over the stitched golden letters and the firm curves beneath.

“Lucky you, indeed! I almost didn’t get to come back.”

“What? Why?”

“Remember that tribunal of archangels you were worried about? Well, guess what I was doing while you were having warlock lessons?”

“Whoa, shit, really? Are you okay? Is everything okay?”

“I’m here now, aren’t I?” Stepping back, she removed her crop top to bare her glorious rosy-tipped breasts, gracefully managing to kick off her sneakers in the same motion. “We can talk about all that later.”

“Later,” he agreed.

They hastily shed the rest of their clothes, helping each other undress, spreading his coat on the gazebo’s wooden floor in lieu of bed or blanket. Her wings fanned out in radiant rays to either side as she reached up for him, as he lowered himself, as he slid with blissful ease into the welcoming warmth of her silken, velvety innermost embrace.

***

“You have got to be fucking kidding me!”

Chelsea had seen, heard, smelled, felt, and tasted way more gross disgusting stuff just over the past few days than in the preceding two decades of her life, but when the door to the RV’s little hall bathroom swung open, the full immersive sensory experience hitting her square in the face put them all to shame.

Which was maybe kind of weird because this didn’t even involve blood or disemboweled guts or severed body parts, two-pronged dino-turtle dicks, or copious amounts of diabolical jizz. This could have happened just about anywhere. This kind of thing, according to parents, was fairly normal.

Fairly normal, her ass!

If she’d ever needed another reason not to reproduce—like the utero-fruit preg and m-preg situation on display out at the central pavilion wasn’t lesson enough?—that reason huddled miserably in front of her. Piss- and shit-saturated Ninja Turtles pajama pants were bunched around his knees, the matching pajama top was plastered with puke, and the rest had gone everywhere. Fucking everywhere!

Correction: fucking everywhere except for the toilet bowl or sink basin. He’d gotten it up the walls, in the shower, on the goddamn ceiling! Veritable gallons of it! How the body of an eight-year-old boy could have held that much liquid and semi-liquid volume . . .

“I want my mom,” he whimpered.

“So do I!” said Chelsea, recoiling from the ungodly sight and stench before she added to it. So much for having gotten up for a snack. She wished she’d ignored the noises from the bathroom instead of deciding to take a look.

Now what the fuck was she supposed to do? Handmaid, okay, not great but she could live with it; no one had said anything about being a babysitter! Or cleaning up a disaster like this!

The brat was important, though. Favius’s pet magician, spoiled, treated like goddamn royalty, fawned over by those Wyrd Sister hags. His mom, one of the Senators, was the lady who owned the property Chels and Trev always referred to as “the hippie-house,” which had been in her family long before the Carmichaels moved in.

She couldn’t very well leave him there, crying in his own grody mess. Go back to bed, pretend she hadn’t noticed.

Send for his mom? Get one of the guards or the Golems or that skeeve-o Spot to deal with it? As if any of them would, as if “the hippie-house” wasn’t clear across the lake.

Unreal. Fucking unreal. What a nightmare!

“Get in the shower,” she said, covering her nose and mouth, pinching her nostrils shut. “Get in the shower, hose yourself off.”

“I want my mom,” he repeated.

“Heard you the first time. Go on, move!”

He began to uncurl, discovered to his further mortification his pants were down, and scrabbled sideways into the shower compartment like a crippled crab. The pebbled glass door slid shut, the water hissed on, and Chelsea stood in the doorway with her fists clenched so tight they hurt.

Unreal. And unfair, talk about un-fucking-fair! Over at their lakehouse, her brother was living like a king, with servants and sex-slaves, having orgies! At the other end of the RV, “Queen” June was going for the world record in multiple orgasms, by the sound! Not to forget that harpy-bitch Adler, strutting around, second in command, ready to peck someone’s eyes out if they looked at her funny . . . and Senator MILFy McSnake-Mom, turning her son over to these use-the-term-loosely “people;” talk about runner-up for Mother of the Year, after the picked remains of Mrs. Goldsmith at her grisly shrine!

While here she was, trying to figure out the best way to get shit and puke off the ceiling!

Fuck.

Almost enough to make her wish the nukes would launch already, solve all the problems in one big mushroom cloud.

“They’re coming,” the brat said from the shower.

Chelsea started. “The nukes?!”

“Those too, but I meant the warlock and the angel.”

***

Which, as it happened, they were.

Or, at least, the angel was; quivering and gasping in the throes of climax, divine radiance coruscating around her, the refrain of heavenly choirs ringing sweetly through the night.

The warlock was trying with all his might not to. Not yet. Not too soon. Thoughts of this reunion had sustained him during their time apart, and he didn’t want it to be over with, didn’t want it to end.

All right, so, it was a losing battle, but he intended to go the distance.

He was also, truth be told, a little apprehensive after their earlier conversation about Sons of God and Daughters of Men and the Nephilim, whether or not he’d be able to knock her up, and how much wrath-of-God trouble they’d be in if he did.

Ethriel’s hips rose to each of his thrusts. She gripped his upper arms, clutched his shoulders, drew his head down to hers for kisses, folded her radiant wings around them both. Her pleasure transcended and amplified his own, sweeping him inexorably toward the edge.

“I . . . I should . . . ” he panted, shifting preparatory to pulling out.

“No, oh, no, don’t!” Her legs wrapped around his waist, and she raised her hips higher, taking him deeper instead.

“But I’ll—”

“I know.”

“You might —”

“Do it, I want this, love me, be with me, yes, ah, Greg, yes!”

As before, as ever, how could he refuse or resist? They cried out together, lost in the moment, lost in each other. He no longer cared who or what might be watching; his grandparents, archangels, every demon and damned soul in Hell, every living creature on God’s green Earth.

Some time later, when his breathing and heart rate resumed more normal levels, he lifted his head from her breasts and murmured, “I do, you know.”

“Hmm?”

“Love you. Maybe it’s only been a couple of days, real-time, but—”

“Greg.”

“What?”

“Shut up. Don’t diminish it with qualifiers.”

He smiled. “All right.”

She stroked his hair, his back. “Love you too. Are you still ruined for all mortal women?”

“More than ever.”

“Good.”

“Hey,” he said, risking a glance around, “at least this time it didn’t catapult us into another realm.”

“Speak for yourself, mister.” She nuzzled his neck, and he grinned. “Seriously, though, we’re past that point now. The rules have already been broken, judgments made, dispensations granted.”

“Is this to do with the tribunal you mentioned?” he asked.

“Partly. And partly to do with your visit to Purgatory.”

They began gathering their hastily-discarded clothing and getting dressed. Greg’s earlier feeling of being watched had gone away; looking back on it with a somewhat clearer frame of mind, he didn’t think it had anything to do with voyeuristic lecherous old occultist grandfathers or disapproving Seraphim after all. He wasn’t sure what it actually had been but made a mental note to be on the alert.

“How long was I there? Relatively speaking?”

“Almost a week,” she said. “Relatively speaking; I was elsewhere for most of it too.”

“Wow. Seemed like a lot longer.”

“Purgatory does that. Was it weird?”

“Very weird. On one level, it was the same thing day after day, only, there weren’t days, as such. Repetition and routine. He always had the radio playing, and it was always the same program, always the same songs. I’d go in, sit down—this antique, uncomfortable wooden school desk, right out of Dickens—and then there’d be lessons. Which was where the other level came in; the routine was the same, but the lessons weren’t. The conversations weren’t. The books weren’t. All that was different. But, in the background, there’d be the same sameness of everything else. The radio, the music, the songs. Always the same.”

“Not quite typical Purgatory, then. He must’ve swung a special deal.”

“Some kind of karmic dispute having to do with my grandmother’s good influences. And . . . ” Greg gulped. “And me supposedly saving the world.”

***

Chelsea got the brat cleaned up, then decided the rest of it was way the fuck out of her pay grade and closed the bathroom door on the abominable mess. Someone else could deal with that literal shitshow.

Anyway, if what the brat was saying was true, in a few more hours, it might not even matter. Why go to all the trouble of scrubbing shit off the ceiling when the whole RV could very well be a pile of radioactive slag or destroyed in some bonkers magical final battle? Sure wasn’t how she wanted to spend her last day.

Not that much of this was how she wanted to; she could have been on a sunny beach somewhere with sexy surfer dudes vying for her attention. But nooooo, playing handmaid, playing goddamn babysitter . . .

“Our old babysitter,” the brat informed her, once dried off and into a fresh set of jammies—Jurassic Park—as they waited in the main living area for His-and-Her Majesties to make themselves more or less decent, “she did sex with our dad. That’s why Mom brought us to the lake. They were gonna get a divorce.”

“Pff,” Chelsea scoffed. “Our dad probably banged all of his secretaries, and our mom, her personal trainers and tennis instructors. So what?”

He studied her with his weird goat-pupiled eyes. Gave her the creeps. Freakin’ Damien kid in dinosaur pj’s. “You’re not a very nice person.”

“Who the fuck around here even is? We’re in Hell!”

“Only almost.”

“Only almost? Hell-adjacent, then, big whoop, close enough!”

“Why are you so mad?”

“I . . . ” She bit back the tirade she dearly wanted to launch. “Mind your own business, why don’t you?”

The weird goat-pupiled eyes regarded her a moment longer. “I want a soda pop.”

“Good for you, go get one.”

“Okay.” He trotted off to the kitchen and rummaged in the fridge.

Chelsea went to the window, looking out at the night. It wasn’t dark, exactly, wouldn’t ever be fully dark, not with the rippling stained-glass aurora overhead and the baleful star-thing seething and burning at its apex. By day, the scene became brighter, but she couldn’t see the sun, the sky, the clouds. Couldn’t see the moon, the regular stars, the winking lights of passing planes.

Would they even see the promised incoming nuke? Which, according to Favius, would be headed their way sometime around noon? He had a speech planned for the morning, fucking State of the Dominion Address, my fellow Misquamicans, or whatever the crap, but seemed otherwise unconcerned. Just as he’d been unconcerned about the assaults at the gates, which that harpy-bitch Adler had taken as a personal affront.

Emerging from the master suite, a short toga-like garment showing more of his thickly muscular thighs and face-patchworked skin than Chelsea felt comfortable with, Favius now did seem concerned. Not about the nukes or the military, though; his attention zeroed in on the kid.

“Tell me,” he said.

June, trailing after him in a satin robe, appeared less concerned than annoyed, shooting Chelsea a glare as if she were to blame for the coitus interruptus. Before Chels could retort—which would have been unwise—June’s attention also shifted to the kid, upper lip curling in irritation and distaste. On that much, at least, they were on the same page, neither of them thrilled with the latest addition to the household.

The kid, who’d come back from the kitchen with a can of 7-Up and a packet of graham crackers to settle his tummy, sat down with Favius and started going on about translocation this and invocation that and a bunch of other magic-talk shit that made zero sense to anyone else.

Chels tuned them out, wondering how Trevor was enjoying what might be their last night on earth. Over at the lakehouse—as much her rightful property as his!—probably having another mutilation orgy, amputations and stump-fuckings to his heart’s content, the selfish prick.

***

“Saving the world, huh?” said Ethriel. “Tall order.”

“I know, right? And, sure, maybe that’s exaggerating a bit, but there could be more than just part of Florida at risk here.”

“Oh, definitely. Whatever happens will have drastic, far-reaching implications. Not only for this realm either. We’re talking Heaven and Hell and everything in between.”

“So, it’s not exaggerating?”

She traced his scruffy jawline in a gentle caress, then patted his cheek. “Welcome to the bigtime, loverboy. Think you’re ready?”

“Christ, no.” He caught himself. “Uh, sorry.”

“Ooooh, Lord’s name in vain, naughty naughty. What are we going to do with you? But seriously, under the circumstances, I’m sure they’ll let it go. Hardly the worst of your sins, after all.”

“Yeah . . . about that . . . ”

They’d left the gazebo, left the Nachtwald place to its semi-haunted non-sanity of whatever walked there walked alone, and were, themselves, walking along the side of the road. A ghostly, tree-filtered moonlight shone down. A cool breeze rustled the leaves. Crickets chirped. The air smelled sweet and fragrant from recent rainfall. Nothing howled or screamed or attacked from the shadows. A far cry from their previous hike together, in other words.

“About what? Your sins? Mine?” She slipped her arm through his. “The tribunal of judgmental archangels looming over me from their pulpits, all eyes and wings and rings of fire?”

“Uh . . . ”

Her laugh trilled crystalline in the blameless night. “Nah, it was fine. They just each had to do their share of posturing, have their say, and argue for form’s sake. Like any board meeting. There were a few ruffled feathers—” he snickered and she elbowed him, “—but they ultimately all agreed, however uncharted the territory, however outside the playbook, it must still be part of the plan.”

“The ineffable plan?”

“Smartass. Good Omens did get a lot right, though.”

“Okay. So, we aren’t in trouble?”

“Nope. We could be, if we did something like fuck off to Alaska or Alpha Centauri and leave this situation to fend for itself—”

“We can’t do that. No matter how tempting. If for no other reason than both my grandparents would haunt me forever.”

“They would. An eternity of we’re not mad, Gregory, we’re just very disappointed.”

“Ouch. Rather take my chances against Hell’s Centurion.”

“You can say that now,” Ethriel said, levity fleeing. “You haven’t met him yet. We aren’t the only ones who are a lot more than we started out as. Favius is strong. Far stronger than he used to be. And he has allies. Soldiers. A powerful queen.”

“While we’ve got . . . the two of us? No chance of your bosses dispatching a couple divine legions? Angels with spears of holy fire?”

She wryly side-eyed him. “If you’re referring to the passion of Saint Theresa, that wasn’t a spear piercing her entrails and making her moan.”

“Yeah, story always did sound kind of sketch.”

“But, to answer your question, no . . . they can’t. I’m allowed here because I got here by accident, thanks to your grandmother’s intercession.” She tapped the silver medallion, which rested against his chest on its strand of mother-of-pearl and petrified wood beads. “They can’t send anyone else across without breaking the rules.”

“While the other side has a damn army.”

“A Damned army.”

“Any ideas how we’re supposed to do this, then? For that matter, any idea how we’re even supposed to get back? Once we get there, what about that Wall and that Dome? Assuming we somehow do get inside, what’s the plan? Ineffable or otherwise?”

“One thing at a time,” Ethriel said. “As for traveling, we don’t need a car or a plane.”

“You’re going to fly us all the way to Florida?”

“Ha, ha. Nope again. You’re going to translocate us there. You’re going to get us inside.”

“I am?”

“Yep.”

“How?”

They’d come to a bridge over a slow-coursing river. Ethriel led him to the middle of the span and stopped. “Liminal spaces,” she said.

***

The unearthly light flared, terrible and brilliant. In that instant for Andy, time itself seemed to stop.

So much for Brad and Dan’s confidence in the tunnel protecting them from the blast or fallout. So much for food and water and medical supplies.

This was it. Game over, man, game over. The big Kahuna, Armageddon, so long and thanks for all the fish. Everybody out of the pool. Elvis has left the building. Repent, the end is near. Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!

He waited for his life to flash before him. Not that he was exactly looking forward to it; his life hadn’t been much. Slacker, coaster, burnout, stoner. Could’ve made something of himself if he hadn’t taken the comfortable and easy way. He’d probably see his parents just doing a doleful headshake. They’d given up on him when he was about fifteen, putting their efforts toward their other and more productive offspring. He’d probably see the fellow basement-dwelling losers he’d hung out with in high school before somehow landing in college and blundering his way into Trev and Chelsea’s circle of friends.

Shit . . . Trev and Chelsea . . . and Kayla, who’d been his maybe-sorta girlfriend until she bashed his skull open with a fireplace poker! After Trevor sawed off his leg and cauterized the stump! Okay, the leg had already been a goner, the meat rotting and liquefying and sloughing right off the bone after that whatever-it-was demon swamp rat bit him . . .

Was he going to have all that flash before him? It was only supposed to be your life, right? Not your death? Except, given he was still kind of here, did it even really count as death? Everything since then . . . the Catch’s pod, being rescued and coddled by his honey-twang hillbilly goddess . . . the latest change of scenery into his current situation . . . was he going to get a slideshow retrospective of those too?

Bizarre as it sounded, some of it might not be so bad. There were worse ways to go out, to bid the final adieu, than doing so immersed in memories of Lorlinda pleasuring herself with the pod, rolling its smooth glassy surface along her sweet pink slick wet pussy lips, then inserting it entire to give him a view they never showed you in sex-ed videos or porn.

The past few days wouldn’t be so bad either. Yeah, it was far from ideal, being in the doll-body of a knockoff Baby Yoda, but at least he’d finally been able to communicate, albeit with the cooing-chirping electronic voice box. He’d been able to move under his own power, if limited to a stiff-jointed toddle.

Best of all, he’d been able to cuddle up with Lorlinda when she went to bed at night, cradled in her curvaceous cleavage . . . and, in what would probably get them sued to the moon and back by Disney, nestle between her legs to rub the doll’s adorable big-eyed babyface all over her plumply pouting clit, occasionally tease-nipping at it with the doll’s rudimentary mouth while pumping the doll’s stubby fingerless green arm in and out, shoulder-deep, until she came so hard she almost popped the arm out of its socket.

That part of his life flashing before him? That, he wouldn’t mind. The rest of it, yeah, no thanks.

He tried to brace himself, guessing from the startled cries and cusses and exclamations from around him the others were doing the same. Lorlinda’s arms tightened around him, mashing him again into her breasts—no complaints!—as the unearthly light flooded the chamber, drowning out the battery-operated lamps.

Would it be quick? Would it hurt? Would the tunnel collapse in on them, crushing and burying them in radioactive rubble?

Why was it a cool and silvery electric crackle? Why did it smell of ozone and sound like a dramatic musical crescendo?

Why weren’t they all dead?

Where had those people come from? The guy in the coat, and . . .

. . . was that an angel?

***

Judicium de caelo! Extremum proelium incipit!

Something like that, anyway. The Wyrds were hardly Rhodes Scholars when it came to dead languages and formal education. They conveyed the gist of it, though. Judgment from the sky, let the final battle begin!

Another momentous day about to dawn there on the scenic shores of Lake Misquamicus. Beneath the churning bloodfire of the Dome, in the baleful glare of the malformed Star Wormwood seething at its apex, ringed by the rearing spikes and spires of the mighty remade Wall. Another momentous day, pivotal, decisive.

Everybody felt it, an uneasy pressure in the air, building, intensifying, foreboding. The calm before the storm, only, anything but calm. Anticipation, apprehension, excitement, dread. Nerves on edge, they woke—those who’d slept at all—to ready themselves as best they could for whatever the next few hours would bring. Terrible or glorious, annihilation or victory, not even the Wyrds could predict the outcome.

Over by what had once been known as Bible Creek, the surviving remnants of a freakishly inbred red-eyed cannibal clan huddled gibbering by their cracked stone altar in the shadow of their destroyed demon-god’s shattered skull. Out at an erstwhile vineyard, pus-colored worms feasted on a rotting windfall of fermented black grapes and the corpses of slave-thralls left in a warlock’s wake.

At Crawdy’s place, an early crowd of locals had begun to gather, the gravel parking lot gradually filling, the roadhouse itself bleak and shabby-looking in the thin aurora-filtered daylight. They gathered not for any raucous Hock Party this time either; they gathered silent and solemn, draining beer cans and jugs of hellshine, trying to fortify themselves against whatever came next.

Others, such as Miz Grady and her musk-wolf mate and their litter of cubs, stayed hunkered down at home . . . as did most of the Bodeans.

And as did a certain writer, whose primary concession to the possible looming doomsday was getting his latest manuscript finished up and sent to his nitpicky proofreader before zero hour. Then, he planned to kick back with a nice cold Collier’s and watch the show. He had, from the deck of his cabin, a panoramic view of the lake, as well as the rearing promontory of Bighead Rock. Atop its dark silhouette, there now arose the columns and scaffolding of construction-in-progress, the half-finished Senatorial rotunda bustling with activity in preparation for the upcoming speech.

All of the Senators were, of course, expected to be in attendance. Togas optional, as Trevor Carmichael had joked, the humor falling flat among his fellow dignitaries. They really, in his opinion, needed to lighten up. Especially Clarabeth Bodean, who showed up with her cousin’s skull-cracked severed head in a tupperware lettuce-keeper as further proof of her loyalty, or some shit. Trev hadn’t paid much attention to the backstory. It meant bad news for that hillbilly asshole with the fucked-up truck one way or another, which was just fine with him.

The prissy old vet appeared disapproving and aloof; nothing new there. The guy who’d owned the biggest watercraft-rental outfit on Lake Misquamicus—a florid used-car-salesman type in the most garish aloha shirt Trevor had ever seen—had the nervous hot sweats. The snake-lady MILF was last to arrive, scales twitching and forked tongue flicking in irritation, apologizing because her daughter hadn’t wanted to stay home and tend to the eggs.

“It’s not like she’s totally unsupervised,” Sharon added. “I mean, her father’s there, even if he is chained upside-down to a big wooden X. Still, what with Billy being so busy with his duties too, I suppose I should look into hiring a nanny.”

Trev had already heard plenty on that subject from Chelsea, who was less than thrilled about having to play babysitter as well as handmaid. Less than thrilled about a lot of things lately, himself included, but what else could they do? She’d get over it.

Or, the nuke would wipe them all out, and then it wouldn’t matter anymore.

***

The translocation portal, a septagonal sigil etched in silver fire, a design so familiar to Greg it might as well have been branded on his forehead—oh, wait, it was!—lingered briefly, suspended in midair, before winking away and leaving its afterimage to dance magenta on their retinas.

Before clear vision returned, he was conscious of the changed atmosphere, the air pressure, the lack of breeze, the ambient temperature and humidity, echoing acoustics, the sense of enclosure. Underground. A cavern, a tunnel. Scents of limestone and rust . . . and . . . hot peppers?

Then there they stood, in some kind of subterranean chamber, but the scene wasn’t only illuminated by the radiance of Ethriel’s wings. Not just the two of them did sharp intakes of breath or startled exclamations. They weren’t alone.

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. They all stared at each other for a long, wary, intense moment. Everything felt on a razor’s edge, poised and waiting.

Greg’s gaze flicked over the people gathered around a folding card table: two big burly guys who might have stepped right out of a Discovery Channel program about enterprising rustic do-it-yourselfers, a lean-and-mean but unwell-looking guy whose shirtless torso was plastered with yellow-tinged bandages, a busty hillbilly beauty in skimpy denim cutoffs hugging a Baby Yoda doll against a tank top so thin her nipples showed as prominent and round as the doll’s overlarge eyes, and a skinny teenager wearing an arsenal of fireworks strapped to some kind of red and orange flame-patterned jumpsuit.

For another long, wary, intense moment, nobody moved or spoke. It was a weird tableau, a Schrodinger’s showdown of potential violence . . .

. . . broken when the fireworks kid said, “Daaang, way to make an entrance!” and then stuffed a fistful of extreme spicy pork rinds into his mouth with a crispy crackle and crunch.

Somehow, his casual remark diffused all the tension, hostile energy evaporating in an almost audible releasing hiss.

“Awright, what the fuck’s this about?” asked the lean-and-mean guy. Two seconds earlier, it would have rang as a challenge or threat; now the words were just laden with exasperation.

“Am I seein’ what I think I’m seein’?” One of the burly guys turned to the other. “Tell me you’s seein’ it too and I ain’t gone loony tunes.”

“You long since’t gone loony tunes,” the other said, snorting derisively, “but if’n you mean . . . ”

“I see it too.” The young woman with the doll cradled between her breasts took a hesitant, wondering half-step forward. “Shee-it. A real live angel!”

“I thought you said no one would notice,” Greg muttered sidelong as Ethriel’s grip tightened on his fingers.

“I said ‘most mortals,’” she murmured back. “Out in the regular world.”

He raised his free hand in what he hoped was a peaceful and placating manner. “Uh, hi,” he said. “Sorry; wasn’t sure exactly where we were going to end up, and certainly didn’t know anybody was going to be here. I’m Greg. I’m, uh, well, a, uh—”

“Warlock,” the lean-and-mean guy finished for him. “Yeah. We c’n tell.”

“We can?” The woman made a skeptical face. “Heck, you sure you’s—”

“Fine, I can, the power, feel it comin’ off him like a live wire, whatever, who gives a shit? Point is, all’s a sudden an angel an’ a warlock pop outta fuckin’ nowhere! Never mind what Brad an’ Dan said ‘bout this place bein’ safe, never mind what hoodoo wards Miz Delilah spun up.”

“That’s some strong mojo,” the second burly guy said, casting a glance at the walls and ceiling as if expecting to find a gaping breach.

“That’s some angel,” said the first one, staring at Ethriel. “Are we dead?”

“You will be, you keep gawpin’ like a slobberdog,” the woman chided. She took another half-step forward, her expression still childlike and awestruck. “Don’t mind them rude fuckleheads none. My name’s Lorlinda, an’ this here’s Andy. Pleased t’ meetcha. That is, providin’, I hope, we’s on the same side?”

***

Judicium de caelo! Extremum proelium incipit!

The Wyrds insisted on leading the way, preceding the royal procession. Hags on parade, hags in rags, hair like masses of dirty cobwebs. Each clutched in one gnarled hand an equally gnarled walking stick adorned with rodent bones, feathers, and Blair Witch-y ornaments of twigs and dried grass. With their other hands, they gestured extravagantly, forking hex signs at the spectators lining the path. They cackled and screeched their faux-Latin, and seemed to be having the time of their ancient lives.

Captain Adler, who’d wanted a lockstep-marching armored vanguard and a winged squadron in precise formation overhead, was disgusted, but managed to keep her opinions inside her own heads.

She was further disgusted—insulted, even—by General Favius retaining his trio of ponderous Golems as bodyguards for himself and the queen instead of her chosen elite. And, as for the Ameri-Golem, that ridiculous star-spangled slab of dick-swinging propaganda . . . to say she was disgusted or even insulted fell short. Offended and outraged came closer. But she bit those reactions back too, bit them back with both sharp beaks.

After all, this was hardly a real military venture. This was for show. Not as if they’d be waging actual war here, no matter how those decrepit madwomen went on about final battles. There was no great army poised against them, thousands strong, for an epic clash such as to darken the sky and redden the earth.

At most, most, the rogue warlock and angel might turn up in some stupid token last stand. Which, knowing Favius, he’d want to face in some personal mano-a-mano boss-fight duel, rather than simply unleashing the full onslaught of his forces. Mortal, damned, diabolical, or divine, that male ego always got in the way of sound strategy and good sense.

She had, of course, in their war-councils, already made her stance known. Now, she would be the dutiful soldier and follow orders. Pomp and circumstance, dramatic speeches from atop that giant butt-ugly rock formation, silhouetted against the Dome’s bloodfire backdrop, spotlighted by the unholy rays of the miniature star, proud and defiant as the oncoming missile streaked toward its target . . .

Just give her the chance when this part was over to find out which sub or silo had launched it, and she would make such an example of them! Them, and then the Capitol, White House, and Pentagon reduced to ash and rubble; let that be a lesson to any who would presume to attack Hell’s crowning glory!

Judicium de caelo! Extremum proelium incipit!

The hags shrieked their portent again, bringing her back from her destructive fantasies to the far more tedious reality of the procession’s slow ascent. Favius and June rode in an open chariot, cobbled together by motor-pool mechanics under the direction of Senator Bodean. In lieu of horses, it was drawn by yoked and hobbled slaves, the strongest survivors taken prisoner that first night on the lakeshore. They trudged, bent low by the weight of their harnesses, naked and bloodied, with the glazed eyes of those unable to wake from their worst nightmares.

Between them, the plodding Golems, and the cackling hags gimping along on their walking sticks, it was just as well they’d begun the trip before dawn. The absolute last deadline to capitulate and surrender was ticking close; if they didn’t comply, the codes would be given, the keys turned.

And then?

Favius hadn’t said. Adler hoped with every ounce of her now-inhuman heart for retaliation, brutal and swift. How she yearned to lead the airborne battalions, soaring above the ironclad gargoyles from Nazareth, annihilating anything in their path! To rip the world open and plunge it into Hell!

When they finally reached the top, she did have to admit it was a striking scene, the Senators waiting solemnly on the steps of the unfinished rotunda, and the lake, teeming with creatures, roiling below.

“Hi, Mom!” called Billy, grinning and waving.

Kids just had no respect for protocol.

***

“Y’all do realize this is fuckin’ insane, an’ suicidal t’ boot,” Heck said.

“Yeah.” Greg, the guy in the long coat—who surely was a warlock if’n ever there was one, resonatin’ with power such as to put any other magic-slinger Heck had met to shame . . . let alone whatever pissant ability bein’ sulfur-shot and then hoodooed by Miz Delilah had awakened in him—lifted upturned palms and shoulders in a kind of it is what it is shrug.

“Really think you can take him? Th’ gen’rul? Even with a fer-Satan’s-sake angel for backup?”

“I think I have to try.”

“That’s some dumbfuck ballsy you got goin’ on.”

“Thanks?”

The fer-Satan’s-sake angel, whose radiance Heck could barely bear to look at, stepped up beside the warlock and took his arm. Radiance, yeah. Purity? Not so much by the way they b’haved t’wards each other. Someone been knock-knock-knockin’ on Heaven’s door, if’n he were any judge.

“Which is why,” she said in her voice like moonlight and crystal bells, “we’re glad of any help we can get.”

“An’ you gots it!” declared Lorlinda, thwacking the business end of Heck’s apocalypse bat against a dented metal barrel for emphasis. She’d rigged a baby-sling for the doll, Andy ridin’ on her hip, peerin’ around goggle-eyed. Her only other changes of attire had been to lace up some proper hikers, buckle into a Kevlar vest, and don a racer-type bike helmet she’d found somewheres in the stockpiles of random shit.

Heck had objected, an’ strenuous, to her participation, but she was havin’ none of it. Meetin’ Ethriel had turned her into a giddy ninnyhead, like them little girls goin’ t’ the Disneyparks t’ see their favorite princesses. All’s she needed was a costume, frilly tutu an’ tinsel halo an’ strap-on wings. He was right glad none of that was to be found amid Brad’s inventory or Lorlinda might well have done it.

Not that Ethriel was in tutu an’ halo neither. Nor was she, anymore, in the getup she’d arrived in—good thing, far’s Heck was concerned; as if him an’ Brad an’ Dan hadn’t already been Hellbound? Lucifer take the wheel!—having swapped the sports bra and yoga pants for a bodysuit of shiny golden mesh reinforced with fancy-designed armored plates.

“Lorlinda—” Heck began, meanin’ t’ try one last time.

“I’se doin’ this,” she said. “You may’ve been all set t’ cut an’ run, leave our mommas an’ the rest of our kin, let what happened t’ Maybelle an’ Zeke slide by ‘thout a word, but if’n there’s any-bless’t-chance t’ help, I’se doin’ it!”

“That’s right!” piped Andy. Explainin’ his sitcher-ayshun to the warlock an’ the angel had been a convoluted thing, one which, despite the boatload of crazy fuckery they must’ve already seen, brought serious a-skance expressions t’ their faces.

“Oh, balls,” Heck said, and spat. “What’re you gonna do, ya green li’l Furby fuck?”

“Heck Bodean, you take that back!” Lorlinda glowered at him. “‘Least he’s willin’ t’ try!”

“Yeah!” The fireworks kid had topped off his arsenal, lookin’ like a post-rodeo skyshow finale ‘bout to happen, so long’s he din’t blow hisself up first. “We’re the good guys!”

“Twelve days o’ Christmas.” Heck sank his head into his hands. “An’ you’re takin’ my truck? Why’n’th’ pope-kissing Jesus did I agree t’ that?”

“B’cause,” said Dan, mopping his brow with an oily rag, “now’s we’ve got that Dixie rail-cannon mounted, you wanna see what that bad boy can do.”

“‘Specially,” Brad added, spanking the frankentruck’s tailgate like it was a diner waitress’s bee-hind, “if Mr. Wizard here really can make it fly.”

Greg and Ethriel exchanged a glance what din’t ‘xactly fill Heck with confidence. Nonetheless, he pushed up from his chair, ignoring the twinges in his back.

“Awright, fine,” he grumbled. “I’m in. No way I’se havin’ any of you dingleberries drive.”

“Do you have a pilot’s license?” Greg asked.

“Ain’t got a driver’s license neither; never let that stop me.”

***

Once again, Favius looked out upon that which he had wrought and found it good. For certain values of the word “good,” that was. He found it gloriously evil, a dominion already, a testament to the might and majesty of his infernal lord. A kingdom, yes, and his kingdom, though he held the title with awareness of its inherent bestowed honor.

His kingdom, and his queen. Such a transformation she’d undergone, rising bold and proud and brazen from the ashes of the undesirable spinster she’d thought herself to be! To see her here, now, like this, head held high and regal, was as satisfying as seeing the Wall, the Dome, the assembled audience eager for his words.

Many, not just his own war-camp and household, had followed the procession to the pinnacle of this rearing promontory of stone. Others gathered on the beaches or out on their decks. His Voice would be conveyed even to those at the perimeter and the checkpoint Gates.

Under other circumstances, the prospect would have daunted anyone, the most skilled speaker or statesman inwardly quailing with nerves. But Favius, his faith in his unholy master, entrusted the performance to those dark muses who had hitherto inspired his rhetoric and guided his oration.

He moved into position where a podium had been erected, draped in swags of human skin with strings of severed ears as bunting. A smaller version of the dragon-topped monument arose behind him, absent of any impaled heads. Two of the Golems flanked him, while the third remained by June. The fourth, the Ameri-Golem, had been stationed at the rocky outcrop’s most precipitous point, face raised toward the Dome’s apex and the baleful, burning Star.

As he waited for the anticipatory babble to settle into anticipatory hush, he observed his queen’s handmaid shooting sour looks at her brother and him doing his best not to meet her eyes. By all accounts, young Senator Carmichael had taken to his new role in a manner such that Caligula would have approved. He observed his junior warlock fidgeting with either impatience or excitement. He observed his lackey, Spot, holding the plastic seal-top bowl which Senator Bodean had presented . . . Spot’s mood alternated between sulky disappointment and ghoulish interest whenever he inspected the gory contents.

A tickle at the nape of his neck and a fluttering in his belly brought an unaccustomed dryness to Favius’s mouth. He had his faith, his queen, his utmost confidence in the dark muses, and knew it wasn’t anything so simple as stage fright or nerves.

Something, someone, some else, some Other, was out there. Was near. Too near. As Billy had warned. Somehow, some way. Against all odds, the Adversary meant to make a move.

Very well, then. So be it. Bring it on.

“Citizens, denizens, soldiers, thralls,” Favius proclaimed, his Voice strong, his words resonant. “Not but six days ago, we met upon the lakeshore, there to make, together, a new beginning!”

Cheers arose, but what most seized his attention was his queen, gazing at him with a hunger suggesting she wanted nothing more than to, in that very instant, be thrust full of his pounding cockmeat. Her arousal was such that he could feel it, smell it, slick cunt-juice warming and readying. And he, for his part, wanted nothing more, in that very instant, than to be buried hilt-deep. Had he not gripped the edges to steady it, his erection would have pushed over the podium.

“Six days!” he repeated. “And behold what we have in that time accomplished! When, before, those who had claimed to govern and serve you had left you to your own devices! Ignored you, neglected you, turned a blind eye to your suffering and a deaf ear to your pleas!”

Their cheers turned savage, a clamor of boos and “fuck them”s.

“They treated you,” Favius went on, “and this place as a shameful aberration to be locked away, forgotten.” He paused, then slowly smiled. “But you showed them, didn’t you?”

***

The frankentruck rolled into crimson-tinged dawn light, and potent demonic energy walloped them head-on.

“Shit!” Greg recoiled. “Was it this bad before and I was just too ignorant to notice?”

“No,” said Ethriel, wincing grimly. “It’s stronger now. A lot stronger.”

The two of them rode in the back, standing in the cargo compartment amid crates of Mason jars nested in old newspapers and straw. The jars’ contents sloshed, a liquid with a viscosity somewhere between gasoline and nail polish. Greg guessed it would taste about the same and give the black-grape wine of Zilch’s vineyard a run for its money. No wonder that fat, shaggy bastard had wanted to eliminate the competition.

Lorlinda perched behind them at the controls of the Dixie rail-cannon, which resembled a cross between a Gatling gun and the “long nines” found on old-timey sailing ships. It had a waist-high pile of belt-fed ammo folded neatly beside it, one end loaded into the chamber and ready to rock. Although the doll’s face couldn’t convey much expression, Greg thought Andy looked kind of unsure about this, and didn’t blame him at all.

Along with the demonic energy, a Voice thrummed as if emanating from invisible concert-sized surround-sound speakers. It spoke with strident, stirring, impassioned fervor.

“Then,” the Voice intoned, “they came in convoy . . . the military, the politicians . . . to use this place, your home, for their own selfish ends! Thinking only, as their kind always do, of power, and profit, and themselves!”

“That’s the guy we’re supposed to fight?” Greg asked, though he already knew.

Ethriel nodded. “Favius. None other.”

The liminal nature of the tunnel, and what spells various local mages had spun over the years, had shielded them from the brunt of it. Out here, they had only his wards and Ethriel’s divine protection, which Greg hoped would at least be enough to cloak their presence and give them a buffer against the infernal influences.

An ordinary mortal, dropped suddenly into the thick of things, would have been instantly overwhelmed, subsumed and consumed, driven mad or destroyed outright. Even Brad and Dan, semi-acclimated as they were because of having lived in proximity for so long, might have found it too much to bear.

Blaze, riding shotgun with his head stuck out the window like a dog on a car ride, was another story. Maybe eating hell-salamanders wasn’t the wisest idea, but Greg was just as glad to have the extra firepower as backup. “Whoa!” the kid cried as he got his first real view of the scene this side of the Wall. “This is wicked!”

“Yeah, that’s one way to put it,” Greg said.

Behind them, Brad waved farewell as Dan trundled the door shut again, its disguise of fake thornbriars melding with the landscape so seamlessly as to leave no indication of the hidden entrance. Pretty slick, really. The whole setup was; a tribute to ingenuity and a reminder never to underestimate backwoods cunning.

Or Heck Bodean’s driving. Wounded or not, he knew the roads, he knew his vehicle, and he knew what he was doing. Even with a guardian angel by his side, Greg wouldn’t have wanted to try and navigate this tangled maze. Hence the original idea to take it airborne, but the closer they could get without drawing unnecessary attention, the better.

Not to mention, he still wasn’t a hundred percent sure it’d work.

The Voice went on, Favius commending his subjects—though he didn’t use that term—for their resilience, their determination, their tenacity. “ . . . as your own people, your own so-called countrymen, first turned their backs on you . . . then tried to use your misfortunes for their own gains . . . and now, with that failed, they deliver ultimatums, demand surrender, threaten to attack!”

“He kinda does gots a point,” said Lorlinda. When Greg and Ethriel glanced around at her, she flushed, hugging Andy snug against her bosom. “I ain’t sayin’ I’se havin’ second thoughts! Just . . . he kinda does gots a point.”

***

He had them. Oh, he had them in the neonatal-face-grafted palm of his hand, for the glory of Lucifer and the eternal reign of Hell! Won them over, brought them together! Remade them from a rag-tag scattering of misfit survivors into a single, loyal, unified host!

Under one purpose, in one dominion, in Satan’s name now and forever hereafter!

And all accomplished in a mere six days, the same timespan within which God may have created firmament and foundation, Heaven and Earth . . . but, on the seventh day, he, Favius, would not rest! On the seventh day, the next phase would begin!

Once this mortal world had experienced a sampling of what awaited them, their punishment for such presumptuous arrogance—their “nukes,” ha; he had read up on their “nukes” during his period of “captivity,” not so much for his own learning as for those who learned through him; a conduit was a two-way street—they’d know the full extent of their folly. The uselessness of their armies and weapons, both of which were so readily corrupted against them . . . the paltriness of their technology against diabolical magics . . . yes, they would know. They would know in full, inescapable measure.

They would know, as well, the full futility of their prayers. As their pain swept the globe, so too would their despair. Each bastion of belief crumbling, each lifelong faith renounced, each condemnation of the churches that had failed them . . . every lost soul, every suicide, every murder . . . all of it, all of it, only more fuel for Hell’s fire!

Where, they might wail, where was their kind, loving, benevolent God? Where were the miracles? How could He sit by, idle and indifferent, watching them suffer?

“Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear,” Favius said, his Voice continuing to carry across his realm, “just as they did to you. While they held me prisoner, interrogating me, regarding me not as a man but a beast, a brute, monstrous, a freak, a devil—”

Bellows of indignant outrage greeted this, although Favius deemed it all true enough, and more compliment than insult. In it, however, many of them saw themselves as they had become to normal eyes: bestial, brutish, monstrous, freakish, tainted, twisted, devils.

He paused to let them vent their indignation, further cementing the group’s solidarity. To be sure, many were more or less physically unchanged, but even the most human-looking among them had experienced some inner warping of the psyche or deformation of the mind.

“And yet,” he said, “when I came among you—” Here, his queen licked her lips in a most lascivious fashion, and he had to restrain a smirk. “When I came among you, returning to that place upon the lakeshore where I’d first stepped forth from Hell, you welcomed me. You accepted me. Almost as a brother or prodigal son.”

“Ecce, novum princeps de inferno, novus rex terrae!” clarioned the Wyrds in unison, as others in the crowd shouted their own approbations. Hail, Favius! and you the man, man! and fuck yeah! rang prominently in the general clamor of whoops and cheers and rebel yells.

As if he had not, that first evening, committed murders and atrocities at the roadhouse . . . for all there were those in this very crowd who’d witnessed those events. As if, should further grisly token of remembrance be needed, Spot did not hold Zeke Bodean’s severed head in a plastic bowl even now!

He had them. They were his.

“We, together, took what they meant to be a prison of quarantine and isolation, and remade it into something new, something greater! A stronghold, a fortress. A force to be reckoned with and a power to be feared!”

After pausing for another cacophony of cheers, he swept the assembled with a sober look. “Oh, yes, they fear us. Make no mistake of that. They fear us, and they are right to do so. But, now, they also seek to destroy us.”

***

Heck wanted to ignore the motherfucker, but it weren’t easy. That Voice, it rang some powerful an’ persuasive. Plus, like Lorlinda’d said, he did kinda have a point.

Bodeans had never been fans of the guv’mint to begin with. Demandin’ taxes but doin’ precious damn little to help the poor folks . . . leastways, the poor rural folks workin’ hardscrabble to keep a roof over’n their heads an’ food on the table while them big-city welfare types kicked it back nice an’ easy. Pullin’ out all the stops when natural disasters hit the hotels an’ resorts an’ high-rent districts, but the nowhere shitsplat towns goin’ weeks or months without no sort of relief.

Then along came AllHell, and how did the guv’mint leap into action? Walled ‘em off from the rest of the world without so much as a by-your-leave, throwin’ the occasional pity-bone of supply drops but otherwise ignorin’ the entire situation to let ‘em live or die on their own.

Only, when’s they’d lived, when they’d survived an’ thrived an’ was doin’ fine . . . when’s they got strong, got power, become a threat . . .

Why, bomb ‘em into oblivion, wipe Lake Misquamicus clear off’n the map, as if they was furrin’ terrorists or hostile invaders.

Mebbe Gen’rul Favius din’t just have a point. Mebbe he was right—

“No!” Heck shouted aloud, slappin’ himself in the head.

The Peterson kid jumped, emitting a sputter of sparks fairly alarmin’ for someone with that much bang strapped to his bod. “Hey! Whoa! What?”

“Nothin’. Fucker tryin’ t’ get t’ me, is all.”

“Oh. Yeah, that. I wasn’t listening.”

Heck side-eyed him. “How the fuck’re you not listenin’?”

Blaze shrugged. “Tuned it out. Politicians, speeches. It’s always the same blah-de-blah load of crap, isn’t it?”

“Huh.” He returned his attention to the road, or rather the muddy track, they were traversing.

It weren’t the quickest route, but it’d get them close as possible t’ Bighead Rock without breakin’ cover. Normally, he’d’ve been worried having anybody ridin’ open in the back since’t the trees could get grabby an’ the underbrush an’ overgrowth nasty-mean, let alone what critters called this part o’ the place home. But them usual hazards seemed unusually quiet t’day. Had a waitin’ kind of feel. A dark, ‘spectant kind of feel. Hunkered down, like. Bracin’ for it the way things did ‘fore a big bad storm.

Or, could be even the landscape was held by the spell of the Gen’rul’s Voice. Or shyin’ from the angel’s nearness, or warded off by the warlock’s magic. Or, who knew, who cared, who gave half a damn? If’n it meant they could get where they was goin’ without bein’ bothered, so much the better.

Heck tried, as the Peterson kid said, to tune it out. Same blah-de-blah load of crap, an’ when you got right down to it, prolly it was. Sounded compellin’, but what ‘bout those the Gen’rul put a personal hurt on? Them who got butchered at Crawdy’s? What ‘bout Zeke, who might’ve been better off butchered then an’ there rather than left t’ years of misery an’ pain . . . only t’ have one of his own kin take a hammer to the back of his skull?

He thought ‘bout Lorlinda too, ridin’ high on that Dixie rail-cannon, eager as a kid at a carnival shootin’ gallery t’ cut loose with some mayhem. Drug her into this whole mess, hadn’t he? Owed it to her, and their mommas, to bring her home safe. Shoulda pushed harder t’ make her stay with Brad an’ Dan, though he knew it would’ve been futile. Girl had her a stubborn streak. Best as he could do now was look after her.

Ahead, the trees thinned out and the lakeview opened up. There loomed the lumpy an’ juttin’ ugly-ass landmark of Bighead Rock.

“Awright,” said Heck. For the first time ever, he dug out the driver’s side seatbelt an’ buckled it cross’t his waist. “Whatever mojo you gonna do, do it now.”

***

“They fear us,” Favius reiterated. “Although we have, as of yet, done nothing but defend ourselves . . . reinforce our borders . . . repel attacks by those intent on doing us harm.”

That Voice of his! June wanted to climb him like a tree, ride him like a bull, fuck him until they couldn’t fuck any more. His Voice might as well have been his touch, firm and sure, caressing and penetrating, filling, making her wet, making her weak, making her pulse race and her breath quicken.

“And so, yes, in their fear, they seek to destroy us.” He glanced upward as if checking the position of the sun, which could barely be seen except as a brighter patch tracking a slow course up the Dome. “The deadline given for our surrender has passed. They mean to soon strike. To unleash their mightiest weapon against us, a weapon that has eradicated cities, left large swathes of land poisoned and uninhabitable. A weapon so terrible, the mere threat of it alone has held entire nations, if not the entire world, hostage for the better part of a century. Great sagas have been written, epic films made, of the devastation that would result from an all-out conflict and its aftermath. Its effects not only upon civilization but the very planet itself. This is meant to be the ultimate deterrent, the ultimate punishment.”

He even made nuclear holocaust sound sexy. Scorched earth, skies blackened by ash and dust, the globe a smoldering radioactive cinder spinning dead around the sun . . . fine, as long as she got some more savage ravishing before it happened!

“Are we to simply sit by?” Favius asked the crowd. “Do nothing? Bow our heads and accept their judgment?”

A resounding roar of negatives and obscenities followed, which Favius let go on for a bit before raising his hands. The tiny faces in his palms flinched and cringed unhappily, unborn babies caught in the throes of neonatal nightmares.

The sight made June wonder briefly how the Shinns were doing with their own unborn spawn growing unwelcome in their bellies. Growing and ripening at a phenomenal pace; their midsections had swollen into grotesque bulges, stretching their skin near to the splitting point. The displacement and compression of their other organs was its own torture, as had to be the sensation of independent movement. Plus, of course, Mrs. Shinn’s delightfully tormenting melon allergy! By now, if they were still sane enough to know what was going on, they’d probably be hoping the nuke strike would be successful and end their misery.

“Yet, I say unto you,” Favius continued when the crowd’s defiant rancor had subsided, “for now, yes, yes, we are.”

Some outcries of disbelief arose. Inasmuch as it was possible for eagle beaks to curl in scowling disapproval, Captain Adler’s did. Billy the bratty little warlock pouted like he’d been denied a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.

But most of them, trusting, hung in anticipation of Favius’s next words.

“We are going to let them do what they feel they must and let their arrogance and egos be their undoing. They have no idea of the reckoning they are about to bring upon themselves and, by extension, every living human soul. The pain and the terror and the deaths soon to follow will be the result of their own actions! They shall find, to their sorrow, their own ‘ultimate’ weapon turned against them, and learn in full measure the folly of fucking with Hell!”

His Voice rose into a bellow that shook the very Dome, sending his audience into paroxysms of rock concert exultation . . . and sending June into paroxysms of another kind. She came so hard her legs went total overcooked spaghetti noodles, body jolting as if electrocuted, a wailing cry bursting from her throat louder than the tumult around her. If she hadn’t reflexively grabbed at the Golem for support, fingers clawing deep into tepid clay, she would have collapsed in a twitching, epileptic, orgasmic heap.

***

Son of a bishop, they was flyin’! Honest t’ Satan an’ for reals! Not just a jump this time, like when’s Heck went for it at the downed bridge out Shit-Yer-Pants road, which itself had been about heart-stoppin’, but soaring high an’ wide an’ bird-free through the open air!

Lorlinda squealed in mixed incredulous excitement an’ pants-wettin’ terror, glad that Brad had rigged a harness onto the rail-cannon’s seat, which itself was nothin’ but a repurposed office-type chair bolted to the swivel mount. Her pigtails flapped under the sides of her racin’ helmet, and her stomach did a giddy flipsy-dipsy-doodle. She clutched the cross-bar tight with one hand an’ held Andy pressed close in his sling with the other.

“Makes Space Mountain seem like a kiddie-coaster,” he warbled in his cuteish little robot-voice.

“I ain’t never even been on a rollercoaster before!” she replied. “Let ‘lone an air-o-plane!”

The thrill was enough t’ take her mind off the resounding Voice, the Gen’rul goin’ on ‘bout devastation an’ judgment an’ somesuch just fadin’ into the background.

Up front of her a ways, Greg an’ Ethriel rode it on their feet, grippin’ the truck bed’s sides, swayin’ with its every bank an’ dive. A design of silver light, lines an’ angles makin’ one of them geometric shapes she halfway remembered from her schoolin’, shined bright from his forehead. It shot out laser-thin prism-rays revolvin’ in a widenin’ pattern t’ trace the same shape kind of in a cage aroun’ the truck. Next to him, Ethriel gave off this diffuse soft-gold heavenly glow, almost as beautiful as the angel herself.

Up in front of them a ways, Blaze hung half out the passenger window, whoopin’ an’ wavin’ his arms as if’n he was on a zip-line. The fact they was skimming above a blood-shit-bile lake filled with monstrous critters din’t bother him none. If anythin’, when some giant zomberfied serpentine shark-hagfish thing launched up to have a chomp at them, all maw an’ teeth an’ rottin’ meat stink, he just whooped all the louder.

The ‘ttempted chomp failed spectacular, the critter recognizin’ the magic an’ angel powers too late to change course but tryin’ anyways, wrenching its long slimy part-skelertal body in a desperate twist. The “oh shit!” look on its fugly face made Lorlinda laugh aloud. It fell, writhin’ and knottin’, to smack the surface in an ungainly slap that must’ve stung like a bad bellyflopper.

“And the judges give it . . . oh, ouch, a two-point-seven! There goes their shot at the gold!” Blaze yelled as the flyin’ truck zoomed on past.

Heck, meanwhile, in the driver’s seat, was more serious an’ focused than Lorlinda had ever seen him. Which wasn’t to say she could see much of him now, only his siller-ette through the cab’s dingy glass, but his posture was tense, bent over the wheel.

At the start, when the truck first took airborne, oh but he had unloosed such a torrent of swears! Outdid himself, outdid anyone’s she’d ever heard! Lorlinda had been fair to mortified, him cussin’ fit t’ split what with a real-live angel right there! Only, Ethriel just went and busted up laughing, an’ Greg did too. Blaze and Andy was just left awestruck.

He got over it quick, though, Heck did, an’ took to drivin’ with his usual capability. Never mind the lack of solid ground unnerneath; soon’s he regained his bearin’s an’ wrapped his head aroun’ the notion, he was in it t’ win it. Dukes-a-Hazzard, Fast-anna-Furious, ain’t none of them had a scratch on Heck Bodean now!

“Do a loop-the-loop!” shouted Blaze.

“No!” shouted Greg and Ethriel and Lorlinda and Andy all as one.

“Awww.”

“Mebbe later,” Heck said, gritting the words through clenched teeth. “If’n there is a later—”

“ . . . the folly of fucking with HELL!”

The Gen’rul’s Voice busted through full-force, a freight train hitting dead-bang head-on with shattering power, an’ Heck kneejerk reacted the truck into such a steep climb they did a loop-the-loop after all.

***

“And the crowd goes wild,” one of Captain Adler’s eagle heads muttered wryly.

The other said nothing, but dipped a sharp nod. If beaks had lips, both sets of hers would have been pressed together in thin lines. She kept her glossy black feathers flat through sheer discipline, kept her crests from rising like a dog’s hackles.

This part was necessary, she knew. A necessary evil. Perhaps even more necessary here than in the Outside world. There, whether it was “rallying the base” or “gaining public support,” whether it was for reasons political or military or as mundane as inspiring the audience at a concert or football game, getting the fans fired up, in the end, it didn’t make much of a real and tangible difference.

Here, though . . . where faith intersected magic, where word could be deed and will could become reality, where thoughts and prayers actually fucking mattered and accomplished something . . . here, being able to inspire, fire up, and draw upon the spiritual or psychic energies of the masses did make a difference. Every soul, however tainted, was a source of power. Power which could be used to fuel rituals, reinforce spells. Power which Favius meant to use to the fullest.

If that meant having to endure these kinds of spectacles, the end result would be worth it.

Still, she was eager for the talking to be over so the ass-kicking could begin. Her talons thirsted to pierce flesh, to pluck eyes, to disembowel steaming and slippery masses of guts! To take the strongest of those chariot-pulling slaves to the edge of the stone promontory, slash his throat to the glistening neckbone, and pour the blood in unholy sacrifice to the churning whirlpool vortex below! Something! Anything! Some sort of action beyond waiting around!

The link she shared with the troops told her most of them felt the same. Bring on the battle-lust! Bring on the slaughter!

Favius, after giving his civilian yokels another moment to yeehaw—a moment he, meanwhile, spent leering unspoken carnal promises to his fuck-fiend queen—again signaled for silence, preparing to go on.

Before he could, their pet junior warlock suddenly, violently projectile-vomited. Chunky jets of semi-digested breakfast shot from his mouth, both nostrils, and maybe even his ears, like a broken fire hydrant, spewing all over himself and the queen’s handmaid.

At the same instant, the three old witch-women went complete Section 8, up and over the high side, to FUBAR and beyond. They threw themselves prostrate to the ground, rending their garments, tearing their hair, screeching incoherently as they clawed their own skin with ragged, grimy fingernails. One pissed herself, but not in any normal piss-yourself fashion; her convulsions and flailings sprayed it everywhere like a garden sprinkler. Another let loose a shotgun blast of a fart, the rancid skunk-drowned-in-sewage stink of it hitting a split second after the sound, bad enough to make denizens who’d lived on the shores of Lake Misquamicus for years exclaim in revulsion. The third, with a horrific crackling of vertebrae and bone-joints, bent into a backwards-over spidery crab contortion, scuttling madly in circles with matted locks dragging.

Everyone else faltered, suddenly uncertain.

“Uhhh . . . lookee there,” said the sycophantic weasel called Spot, pointing past Favius and the podium, pointing out into the open space beyond Bighead Rock with the arm not cradling a lettuce-crisper containing a human head.

Captain Adler lookeed there, inwardly berating herself for not having noticed the anomaly first. Her with not one but two pairs of actual eagle-eyes? Within the very airspace under her scrutiny and jurisdiction? Sloppy! Inexcusable!

A gabble of it’s-a-bird/it’s-a-plane/it’s-Superman chatter arose, though more along the lines of: “Izzat the nuke already?” / “Gol-blurmed UFO!” / “Dragon?” as people squinted to try and make out details, but the backdrop of the Dome made it difficult to discern.

For them. Not for Captain Adler, who put those eagle-eyes to use, and . . .

. . . and what the fuck kind of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang shit was this?

***

Greg suffered a brief deja-vu flashback to his original flight, which seemed so very long ago. A lifetime ago, another world ago. He remembered cruising along, everything fine, until suddenly, everything went the opposite of fine. The bloodshit red of the lake, the dense green foliage, and the then-blue of a balmy Florida sky swapping places in a rapid kaleidoscopic spin . . . his stricken Cessna corkscrewing crazily to its ignominious crash-landing.

The helpful part of his mind seemingly devoted to movie quotes, pop culture, and trivia dredged up a bit of Bruce Willis: how can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?

Just as he’d done in the Cessna, he fought to stabilize, only this time he wasn’t fighting with the plane’s out-of-control controls but the eldritch energies propelling Heck’s junkyard experiment through the air. That final wallop from Favius’ Voice—” . . . the folly of fucking with HELL!”—had shattered his defenses, sucker-punched him, knocked him for a loop of his own even before the truck went up-and-over.

As bad as it was for him, it hit Ethriel even harder. She went galvanized and rigid, jittering like someone being electrocuted, the light of her wings sputter-stuttering, her ambient radiance flickering. He threw his arms around her regardless; if it jumped to him, so be it . . . if they fell, so be it . . . he wasn’t going to lose her again!

It didn’t jump to him. They didn’t fall. He didn’t lose her. Whether due to magic, miracle, or science—three cheers for centripetal force!—they made the loop without anybody getting ejected.

Some untethered trash was jettisoned, the neatly piled ammo-belt beside the rail-cannon snapped around like a bullwhip, and the interior of the cab briefly resembled a snow globe of road-litter confetti, but everything else stayed put. Including the crates of ‘shine, which had been secured with bungee-cord netting.

Then they were through it, in the clear, Heck leveling them out as if he’d done this sort of thing a hundred times. Guy really could drive! Would, for that matter, make a good pilot too. Provided they lived through the next few minutes.

“Wicked!” Blaze, who had somehow not pitched headlong straight out the open window, pumped a victorious fist in the air. “That was awesome!”

“Fuckaroni an’ cheese!” gasped Lorlinda. “We’se all still here? Andy, sugarbun?”

“I think I peed a little,” the doll said.

“You’n’me both, sweetie! Heck?”

“What, you wanna know if’n I peed? Mind’yer own beeswax, woman!”

“He’s fine,” Lorlinda said. “Y’all?”

“Ethriel?” Greg asked, as she shuddered against him.

“I’m okay,” she said, sounding far from. “I’m okay; whew, thought I was ready but . . . yeah . . . whew . . . you?”

“Same.”

Her glow steadied, regaining strength. She collected herself, touched his face and patted his chest as if to ensure he was real. The hint of a smile curved her lips. “Did you pee a little?”

“Hey!”

The smile became a sobering look. “We slipped. Only for a few seconds, and maybe they were too distracted to notice, but . . . ”

He nodded. “But probably not.”

“No, probably not.”

His arcane Spidey-senses tingled, picking up distinct signals. Other mages, oracles, another warlock—not at his level, but far more powerful, experienced, and trained than the newly-catalyzed Heck—various lesser gifts and knacks and talents.

Then, of course, there was Favius, confident and commanding, wreathed in the captive, tormented souls of his defaced victims. And something else, some demonic aura of greed and rage and murderous lust, pent up as a turbulent, terrible redblack cloud.

The being-watched feeling he’d experienced at his grandparents’ house returned, only different this time. Much sharper. Intent and intense. Hostile. Eager for battle and bloodshed and the kill.

“Definitely not,” Greg said. “They know we’re here.” He thunked on the cab’s roof. “Heck! Great driving, man, or piloting, or whatever you want to call it! Bad news, though . . . that was only the warmup. It’s about to get nasty.”

***

They dared.

Of course they dared. Favius would have expected nothing less.

That they’d done it, though . . . that they’d somehow gotten through, gotten in, breached his dominion’s defenses! The boy and the crones must have been right after all. A cave system or secret tunnel, burrowing under the Wall, known only to a few, and its existence kept further hidden by warding spells.

Clever.

As had been their effort to shield themselves from detection, an effort which had not failed but which had briefly faltered at the moment his Voice reached its strident pinnacle. Had he not been so caught up in his own oration, and lascivious thoughts of his queen, he would have—should have—felt their presence sooner.

Felt her presence sooner, the angel’s, and the Adversarial Presence pulling the strings behind her. Just that brief instant of insight told him she was no longer such a minor player as he’d initially been led to believe. No mere rules-bound drone of the Custos Viatorem, not anymore. Precisely what her role, what her powers, he could not surmise.

A quaver of what he told himself was sensible caution and consideration, certainly not anything even resembling or approaching fear, cooled his marrow and tightened his skin. The myriad faces grafted into it grimaced, disturbed into fresh torment, as if aware even in their blind and deaf incoherence of the delicate brush of the Divine.

For the first time since he’d had the grisly trophies added, he found their squirming movements unpleasant. Loathsome. Like scabs and scars somehow coming alive. They itched. He wanted to scratch at them, gouge bloody furrows into their lips and cheeks and brows, dig his nails under their patchworked edges and peel them loose in ragged flaps.

He did no such thing, however maddening the urge.

“You,” he said to one Golem, “with me. You,” he then told the other, “join your brother and protect my queen.”

Their stoic clay heads nodded. Hulk trudged dutifully over to bulk imposingly on June’s left, while Juggernaut already loomed at her right. She, between them, threw Favius a look both concerned and confused, and somehow so wifely, it almost made him smile. Just then, she was for once not consumed with her ravenous lusts . . . and an unfamiliar different desire struck him as well. To hold her, comfort and reassure her, as she held and comforted and reassured him in turn.

A passing strangeness, no doubt brought on by stress. Amid the stirs of unease and apprehension besetting the crowd, no one else seemed to notice. Not even her handmaid, who stood stock-still as if petrified, expression a rictus of revulsion, staring down at the deluge of steaming, stinking vomitus coating her from collarbones to ankles. Her clothes were saturated with it, her face and hair spattered.

What had the boy been eating to produce such a noxious outpouring? The color of it was an unnatural, nearly glowing yellow-green, streaked vivid red-magenta-purple, marbled with whitish curds and brownish chunks. Its stench, when a gust brought a whiff Favius’ way, was likewise unnatural, somehow cloying-sweet with artificially fruity notes, a yeasty tang, acrid chemical overtones, and soured milk mingling with bitter stomach-bile.

As for the boy, he’d gone to all fours, wracked with horking and urking heaves until only stringy dregs dribbled from his mouth and nose. His mother had rushed to him in the spirit of maternal solicitousness, but he swatted away her hands with an embarrassed, “Mo-o-om! Stop!” as he got up, wiping his face. He cast a mournful glance at his caked, dripping shirt, which sported the image of a fanciful and bespectacled child wizard Favius vaguely recognized from some absurd series of movies, then raised his gaze.

“It’s him,” he told Favius, shaky but resolute. “It’s them. The warlock and the angel. They’re here.”

“Hang on,” said Spot, peering at the approaching peculiar shape. “Suck my dick if’n that ain’t Heck Bodean’s truck! Flyin’ through the sky! Like magic!”

***

“‘Bout t’ get nasty?” Heck echoed, mostly to hisself. “Yeah, thanks for the news flash; as if’n it ain’t been nasty already.”

He knew what Greg meant, though; they’d been seen. Jig was up. So much for anymore el’ment of surprise. Best’s they could try for now was t’ finish whatever the fuck they’d gone and started before’n the others could get much of their shit t’gether. Hit ‘em whilst they was still scramblin’ around.

Only, soon’s he put the truck on a direct course for Bighead Rock, he saw someone over there already had some of their shit t’gether. A dark mass rose up in an arching wave, not one single form but sev’rul, movin’ with the synker-nized coordination of a big flock of birds.

A big flock of big damn birds. Big damn black birds with human bodies. Wide, feathered wings sproutin’ out their backs beat in unison, snappin’ like whipcracks.

“Incomin’!” Heck hollered. To the Peterson kid, he added, “Strap in, hotshot; y’might get s’more loop-de-loops an’ barrel rolls an’ Devil knows whatall else.”

“Cool!” The kid did buckle his seatbelt but continued leaning out the window far’s he could, clusters of Roman candles an’ bottle rockets aimed at the ready. “Aerial dogfight! Let’s do this!”

Cool? Lucifer wept. Just bein’ aroun’ the crazy-ass firecracker made Heck feel older’n his years. In what fucked-up kind of world should the likes of him get stuck as the responserble adult?

Talkin’ of which . . . he craned his neck t’ yell over his shoulder. “Lorlie?”

“I sees ‘em!” she called back. “Hope this thing them two fuckleheads rigged works how it’s s’posed’ta!”

“What are they?” Greg asked Ethriel.

She spread her own bright-shinin’ wings, risin’ on a golden haze of light, ‘ccompanied by a swell of crystal chimes an’ heavenly choir that gave Heck the shivers right down t’ his bones. “Does it matter?”

“Not really,” Greg said. “They’re wearing Nazi uniforms. I guess it’s pretty clear whose side they’re on.”

Then he rose, on more a silvery-outlined flat disk in the same shape as the design branded inta his forehead, ridin’ it like a pro snowboarder . . . showoff, hair an’ coat blowin’ all dramatic in the wind.

“Y’all both best’s stay clear,” cried Lorlinda. “Ain’t never gonna f’rgive m’self if’n I shoots ya!”

“You won’t,” Ethriel replied so warmly it made Lorlinda blush. “I have faith in you.”

Greg swooped his silvery not-a-pentagram disk over to Heck’s window. “Keep them off us as long as you can,” he said in a low tone, “but, stay safe, and haul ass out of here if the worst happens.”

“Don’t go tellin’ me how t’ haul ass, magic-man. ‘Sides, if’n the worst happens an’ you an’ angel-tits there both gets oh-bliterated, I figger haulin’ ass be the least of our problems. W’thout your spellwork holdin’ us up, most I’se can do is hope t’ get us t’ the ground in one piece.”

“Yeah, been there done that, I hear you.”

“But, hey,” said Heck, pitching it extra-conspiratorial so’s nobody else would hear, “if’n I eats it, an’ you has the chance, do whatcha can t’ look after Lorlie an’ her damn doll-baby an’ this flamin’ loony over here, willya?”

“I will.” He extended a hand. Heck clasped it, and they shook, prolly both of them thinkin’ it had t’ be one of the more surreal moments of their lives. Sure was for his.

Ethriel glided over as they released their grips, a kind of benign beatific unnerstandin’ emanatin’ from her almost unbearable eyes. “Aww . . . are you two swearing the noble heroes’ pact?”

“Funny,” Greg said to her.

“No, really, I mean it!”

“Go on, now, git.” Heck waved irritably at them, trying not to show how her praise affected him. “I ain’t no hero, an’ if’n we lollygags aroun’ discussin’ it, won’t make no nevermind anyhow.”

As if to prove it, a shrill war-screech split the air, leading the oncoming wave of feathery black Nazi-bird death.

***

“Mom, c’mon, stop, I’m okay, jeebers!” Billy twisted and turned, mortified, as she mopped upchuck from his chin.

It was a fib; he wasn’t okay. His tummy, abruptly empty of what felt like everything he’d ever eaten, ever, still did little seasick somersaults. The aftertaste of the variety pack of toaster pastries he’d found in one of the RV’s kitchen cupboards—the good kind too, frosted with sprinkles, strawberry and blueberry and chocolate fudge and funfetti and key lime—clung grossly to his teeth.

He probably shouldn’t have scarfed them all, washing them down with real milk instead of the powdered stuff for a change, but they’d been right there, and none of the grownups told him not to. They’d been too busy getting ready for the procession and the speech anyway to pay much attention to what he was doing.

At least he hadn’t pooped himself this time, or peed himself. Wrecked his shirt, though. And the way Chelsea was glaring at him . . . if his mom hadn’t been with them, she might have strangled him with her bare hands.

“Sorry,” he said to her, still struggling as Mom tried to work the soiled garment over his head without smearing more of the mess into his hair.

Chelsea’s fists curled, Billy certain she was imagining his neck clutched in them. Her eyes promised payback, and plenty of it, later. Some ribald wolf-whistles as she began peeling off her own puke-soaked clothes didn’t put her in any better of a mood. It wasn’t like she was left naked-naked; she had a bra and panties on at least!

Too much else was going on, but Billy sneaked a peek anyway, trying not to let Mom catch him at it. He’d seen a lot more than he should have seen already—Mom and Dad on the dock, for starters, and all the sex-stuff Favius and June did—but they were old, while Chelsea was even prettier and curvier than their babysitter Brittney had been.

And there was a lot else going on. The Wyrds rolled on the ground, foaming and scrabbling and speaking in tongues. The scary two-headed bird-lady had taken off at Favius’s order, whistling shrilly for her squadron to follow, their flapping shadows briefly blotting out the glare of Star Wormwood. The landbound soldiers readied their weapons, standing their ground. Some onlookers scattered, others jostled for better views. Queen June had a Golem on either side, the bronzed and enchanted marshmallow-fork gripped tight. Behind them, the chariot-puller slaves stood hunched under the weight of their yokes, heads down, not seeming to care about any of it.

The rest of the Senators stayed where they were, on the steps on the unfinished Rotunda. Chelsea’s brother looked curious, the doggy-doctor looked tired, the blacksmith lady looked seriously peed-off, and the guy from the boat place looked like he wished he was somewhere else.

After making sure Billy wasn’t about to barf himself inside out or something, his mom returned to join them. On her way, she hurled the wadded-up, sodden mess of his shirt over the edge, which annoyed him. It could have been salvaged, maybe. There was a washing machine in the RV.

Favius had gone to the promontory, one of the Golems plodding in his wake, Spot pointing out the flying truck. It did seem to be the same one Heck drove; he’d swung by their lakehouse now and then on his not-quite-a-mailman rounds. Mom never let him stay long. She said he was trouble, a bad influence, and didn’t want Billy or Sherri talking to him very much.

The truck flying, that was new. That was his doing, the big warlock, the capital-W Warlock. Billy could feel the eldritch crackling energy even from here. Could pinpoint him too, balancing easily atop a silvery sigil, surfing the sky while the angel soared on wings of golden light.

It would have been super cool if they hadn’t been, like, mortal enemies and stuff.

***

With a final touch, nod, and meaningful look, Greg veered one way as Ethriel veered the other. They swept wide, diverging arcs to either side of the dark flock. A few rogue outliers at each edge split off in pursuit, but most held formation and kept their course.

So did Heck, plowing headlong straight at them, hollering something along the lines of “hey you crow-ass shitbirds wanna play chicken?” before Blaze and Lorlinda cut loose. Blaze may have even yelled “Leeeeeeroy JENKINS!” as he unleashed a pyrotechnic barrage—the tumult too loud for Greg to be sure, but it would have surprised him not at all. Lorlinda mostly went with “yaaaaaaaah!” as the rail-cannon barked its staccato rat-ta-tat.

Whatever resistance and fight-back the attackers had expected, it clearly wasn’t anything like this. Within seconds, the scene was a chaos of bullets, bloodbursts, flashbangs, and fireworks. White-hot magnesium, bright reds and yellows and orange, brilliant greens . . . smoke and gunpowder . . . clouds of shredded, smoldering feathers . . . perforated corpses tumbling toward the red lake below . . . flaming figures shrieking in jerking spasmodic mid-air dances . . .

Those who’d broken off to follow Greg faltered, looking back in alarmed shock, and he wasted no time taking advantage of their distraction. Silvery bolts shot from his fingertips, silvery scythe-blades slashed. The nearest, he sliced in half at the waist; its uniformed legs and highly-polished boots plunged away while the rest of it, on frantically beating wings, flapped in crazy circles, trailing tangles of bloody viscera, grabbing at the free-swinging mess with both hands as if to somehow cram the guts all back up inside. Another took an eldritch bolt to the sternum and entirely disintegrated into crackling tendrils amid a whiff of ozone. Some shot at him, some stabbed at him, but his wards deflected their efforts with showers of silver sparks.

Over in the direction Ethriel had gone, similar effects spoke of a similar battle. Fear tightened his throat, more for her than for himself; he remembered all too well what she’d told him in their initial meeting, the fate of any angel unlucky enough to fall into demonic clutches. If they took her captive . . . if Favius got hold of her . . .

No. Not going to happen. He wasn’t going to let it happen, even if it cost him his own life and soul.

The bulk of the flock, a turbulent black cloud, closed around the truck as Heck plunged into their midst. For a moment, Greg could see nothing of it, aside from muted flares of Roman candle color, though he still heard the rail-cannon through furious bird-screeches and the shattering kabooms of what had to be something bigger and far less legal than cherry bombs.

Then the truck erupted out the other side, climbing and banking in a move so smooth he had to give another mental tip of the hat to Heck’s driving skills. Doused in blood, plastered with feathers, it rose from the chaotic mass. Half a dozen impaled bodies, dead or dying, clogged the spiked cowcatcher on the front. A bird-demon splayed across the windshield, clinging desperately, its broken wings making fitful twitches.

Another tried to squeeze in the window at Blaze, only to get a string of lit firecrackers whipped around its neck, enveloping its head in a flurry of miniature snap-pop explosions. Blaze then heaved himself up and out and onto the roof of the cab to try and pry loose the one on the windshield, even as Heck hollered for him to get his damn fool ass back inside.

A third managed to land in the rear of the truck bed, inside the rail-cannon’s range. Lorlinda laid into it with a wasteland-surplus baseball bat, while Andy jabbed his blunt little doll-arm in a crude but effective Baby Yoda punch to the nuts.

But then, talons-first like a striking hawk, a double-headed black eagle-woman ripped the driver’s side door clear off its hinges and went for Heck with both razor-sharp beaks.

***

The corrupted souls screamed silent and helpless bodiless screams as they discorporated, falling like pollen to be subsumed or consumed or subcarnated in accordance with the random whims of Hell.

Truth be told, Favius had not anticipated so many casualties quite so soon, each striking its own minor but telling blow to his concentration. Yet, he paid them little mind. Nor did he spare many thoughts for the mongrel vehicle caroming across the sky under the determined assault of Captain Adler’s remaining troops, or for its ill-fated passengers.

Even the warlock, threat though he might be, paled in comparison to the angel, golden and radiant in impossible Heavenly perfection, hovering above him.

“Favius,” she cried, her Voice a clarion. “Former Conscript First-Class of Grand Duke Cyamal’s Exalted Security Brigade! Former Centurion of the Third Augustan Legion! Servitor of Hell! Lapdog of Lucifer! Your trespass upon this world and violation of the Divine Covenant is at an end!”

“Ethriel,” he replied, curling his tongue around the hateful morsel of her name as if it were sweet poison. “Not even a member of the lowly Custos Viatorem anymore, no better than a third-rate Cherubim. Renegade. Fornicatrix. Yet you speak to me of trespass and violation?”

“Oh, okay, so that’s how you want to do this?” She popped him her middle fingers. “We both got unexpected field promotions, big whoop. However it happened, whoever’s pulling the strings, here we are. Shall we just get on with it before we’re reduced to ‘yo mama’ insults?”

“Get on with it?” Favius threw back his head and let roll forth a menacing laugh—in his peripheral vision, he saw his queen succumb again to climax, digging deep troughs into Juggernaut’s clay slab of an arm. “Get on with what? You are a defender, a guardian. Not a warrior. You cannot fight me.”

Precisely on cue, the warlock glided up beside her. “Yeah, that part’s my job,” he said.

“Gregory Nachtwald,” said Favius, sizing him up. “So, this is the best the Adversary could do?”

“On short notice,” he quipped, trying to appear wry, witty, jaded, and battle-hardened . . . and, perhaps, to the casual observer, not doing too bad a job of it.

To the not-so-casual observer? To a veteran of a thousand such conflicts? Bah. Favius could all but taste the warlock’s fear, his uncertainty. His delicious awareness of how high the stakes, not merely his own life and soul hanging into the balance but that of his angelic companion, and quite possibly the fate of the world into the bargain.

Nonetheless, he cut an imposing enough figure, put on an impressive enough show—

“NO!!!” howled a new Voice, breaking into splintered adolescent octaves.

On its heels came a concussive torrent of raw, unchanneled, never-before-fully-tapped power, barreling over Favius with such force it staggered him and made even the Golems rock in their solid stance.

A charging Behemoth would have struck with less impact. Nachtwald’s wards dashed to scatters of silvery chaff. His head and neck snapped with whiplash. His breath coughed out in a grunt. His sigil flipped like a tiddlywink, tossing him in a ragdoll cartwheel of flailing limbs and belling coat.

As he twisted in mid-air, he lashed out as much by instinct as design. A jagged whirl of energy unfurled into a jagged net of electrified diamond-edged wire, speeding toward the source of the attack in less than an eyeblink.

Speeding toward, enwrapping, cocooning, and pulling tight. Passing through skin, flesh, and bone with next to no resistance. The target had not even the time to scream before falling apart into a jigsaw-puzzle pile of bleeding pieces.

In the instant before gravity seized him, Nachtwald was granted a clear, inescapable, unavoidable look at what he had done . . . and to whom.

Seeing his aghast horror dawn in full realization gave Favius almost as much satisfaction as would personally plucking the warlock’s heart from his breast, then making the angel eat of it while it yet throbbed.

***

Tore the door off his fuckin’ truck!

Claws puncturin’ metal, the hinges givin’ a godawful tortured rusty squeal, an’ there went the whole damn thing! Ripped clean away, chucked aside, spinnin’ down toward the lake, where it likely wouldn’t never be recovered!

Crosswinds whipped through the cab, stirring up more dervishes of wrappers an’ cig butts. What with the body of one bird-devil smeared across’t the windshield like not-quite-dead-yet roadkill, not t’ mention the carwash of blood an’ feathers they’d been through, he couldn’t see out the front for shit.

Then another bird-devil filled the gap where the door used t’ be, some two-headed screechy black eagle, wings battering, one set of talons diggin’ into the seat, th’other latchin’ onto Heck’s thigh, piercin’ in so deep he felt them grate against legbone, double beaks dartin’ in, goin’ for his face . . .

A flashback took him over, some poster-matic memory from when he’d been little. No more’n five or six, gone t’ collect eggs from Gammy’s henyard, wantin’ t’ surprise her, bein’ a good helper an’ all, but he’d forgot ‘bout Strutter. That rooster’d been Satan’s own since’t looooong before AllHell, meaner’n fuck, utterly fearless. Forget weasels or swamp-rats in the coop, Strutter had taken on dogs, ‘gators, an’ grown men. He was on Heck in a flurry, flappin’ and scratchin’, peckin’ fit t’ split. Heck, never so scairt in his life, huddled in dirt an’ chickenshit gravel, bawlin’ for help with his arms wrapped ‘round his head, sure he was gonna die.

His momma had saved him, stormin’ in with a broom, swattin’ hens every whichway. She’d done a few swats at Strutter too, but when that din’t have no effect, she’d grabbed on with her bare hands and wrung the rooster’s neck.

“Been wantin’ t’ throttle that cockadoodle cocksucker for years!” she’d said later, patchin’ up Heck’s injuries. “Gammy wants t’ be pissed at me, she c’n go right ahead!”

He could still smell the iodine, feel its sting. Remembered his big brother Zeke snickerin’ in the background, same as he’d done the time he convinced Heck t’ whack a beehive with a stick. Remembered Lorlinda, barely more’n a toddler, peepin’ anxious from her momma’s arms.

Judas fuck, he hadn’t thought ‘bout that day in forever, but now here it was comin’ back in technicolor 3-D!

Only, this bird was a fuckload bigger an’ even more determined to flay him wide open. This bird had two beaks, sharp as scythes, stabbin’ an’ jabbin’. One strike just missed his left eye, skiddin’ along the side of his skull in a lightning bolt of pain, tearing a patch of scalp halfway loose to wave like wet laundry on a line. The other damn near punched a hole through his forehead, jigged lower, split his eyebrow, and—

There was another explosion of pain, a blinding red sheet of it. Next he knew, his right-side vision was fucked seven ways from Sunday, a ping-pong yo-yo bounce-around making him think of number balls tumbling around inside a bingo cage.

Someone was screamin’, and it weren’t just him.

Also, somethin’ was wrong with the truck. It pitched and yawed, sputterin’, close to stallin’ out. They was losin’ altitude rapidly while pickin’ up a speed that had nothin’ t’ do with whether he floored it or hit the brakes.

“Move it or lose it, hotshot!” he heard Lorlinda yell. He saw her too, in a brief crazy glimpse, which was weird because she shoulda been outta his line of sight—

Same as the fireworks kid, at an impossible angle as he rolled off the cab’s roof into the truck bed—

Then he was seein’ the bird-devil again, beaks bloodied, poised to go in for the kill—

Then the empty passenger seat and the dashboard and a twisted funhouse view of his own mangled visage—

Shee-it, his eye! Damn thing plucked entire, right from its socket, swingin’ around at the end of its optic nerve like a fuckin’ tetherball!

***

“Greg! Take my hands!”

Ethriel. Diving, diving for him as he plummeted, diving and reaching, fraught with panic and desperation.

“Greg!”

The loose plunge of freefall . . . time seeming to slow, to stretch and thin and elongate . . . his senses heightened and enhanced . . .

Every geological striation in the rugged bluff of Bighead Rock in clear detail, every pubic weed-tuft bristling from its crevices, every crusted or fresh splat of imp-shit, every nest or burrow tucked between outcrops or under sheltering overhangs . . .

The humid, body-temperature updrafts from the lake, a vile steaming exhalation of rot and sewage and bile and blood . . .

The sloshing churn of the wide whirlpool vortex, a gurgling and gulping Charybdian maw eternally eager to glut its hunger . . .

“Greg, damn it!”

His coat snapping around his legs, his loose tie trailing like the tail of a kite . . .

Receding uproar above him, diminishing in volume but not lessening in anguish, the agonized wails of what could only be a mother . . . a mother who’d just witnessed her child murdered before her very eyes . . . not merely murdered but mutilated . . . fragmented . . . an unrecognizable heap of fleshy chunks . . .

“Take my hands!”

He didn’t. He couldn’t. She should let him fall. Let him go. Let the vortex have him, engulf him, swallow him whole and digest him in whatever seething cauldron passed for its infernal guts. She’d seen what he’d done. She’d seen. She knew. He’d seen, he knew; how could she still be trying to help him?

“Fuck it,” Ethriel said, as if to herself.

Good. Good, yes, good, fuck it, let it happen, let him get what he deserved.

Greg closed his eyes so he didn’t have to watch her turn away from him, turn her back, fly away. He’d wait for the fetid splashdown, the sinking submergence—

A golden effervescence suffused him, radiance permeating his eyelids, the sweet scents of myrrh and the tingling rush of champagne and the soft but clear strains of a choir, and then she had hold of him. Was catching him, lifting him, supporting him, as her wings of light flared brighter and fanned wider and arrested his descent.

“Ethriel, no—”

“Shut up.”

“But I—oof!”

She unceremoniously dumped him onto a rocky ledge, and before he had sorted out which way was up, crouched before him and seized him by the lapels, giving him a firm shake that hurt his already whiplashed neck and made his teeth clack together. His eyes flew open, startled.

“Don’t you even think of pulling that crap on me!” She gave him another shake for emphasis.

“It was a kid! A kid, a little boy, just a kid! And I . . . I . . . ” He shuddered.

“Yeah.” Her demeanor gentled. She released his lapels and pulled him into an embrace, which he resisted at first but then collapsed into, burying his face in the cradle of her neck and shoulder, nestling into her gossamer hair. She stroked his head, his back. “I know. It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right! How can it be all right?”

“Plenty of reasons. He attacked you first, it was self-defense, he was one of the bad guys—”

“He was like eight years old! With Zilch, sure, and even those thralls at the vineyard, but—”

“Greg, hey. It happens. It sucks, and I’m not telling you that you have to be happy about it or proud of it. There were innocent kids in Sodom and Gomorrah. Job’s kids didn’t deserve what they got. What about the Flood? And you think Azrael’s not still fucked up over the first-born of Egypt? Shit, if angels could be alcoholics . . . ”

“If this is your idea of making me feel better, it needs work.”

“Maybe it does. Right now, though, we need you. We can’t leave this unfinished, one way or another.”

He leaned against her, wanting only to stay there forever, then straightened. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Let’s get it done.”

***

To Lorlinda’s relief, Blaze chose “move it” rather than “lose it.”

He did one of them fancy par-koor somersault flip-rolls off the cab’s roof, stuck the landing, snagged a foot into one of the bungees securing the ‘shine crates, and barreled headlong into the just-staggering-upright bird-devil she’d whaled on with the bat. The two of ‘em fetched up in a tangle of limbs at the base of the rail-cannon’s mounting.

Whether Blaze was hurt or not, she couldn’t tell, but it din’t matter just then. What mattered just then was, he was out of the line of fire.

“Duck an’ cover, Heck!” she yelled. Whatever the pan-fried fuck was goin’ on up there did not look good. Looked, in fact, like a pope-fuckin’ bloodbath, with Heck providin’ the blood.

She saw, or thought she saw, or hoped she saw, him pitch over sideways toward the passenger seat. On purpose? Or dead?

Again, din’t matter just then. She only had her a couple-dozen-so shots left, an’ she meant to make ‘em count.

The rail-cannon juddered and jerked as it loosed its thunderous string of rattle-bangs, jolting Lorlinda so’s her skeleton jitterbugged inside her skin. What with the way the truck was also jitterbuggin’, her aim was a bit off, shootin’ out the cab’s rear window in fractured shards.

She pulled the barrel hard to the left, strafing into the black-winged two-headed form what had latched onto where the driver’s side door used t’ be. More blood an’ more feathers flew. One of the eagle-heads snapped up, whipped around, an’ fixed her with a drill-bit stare of pure killin’ hate just before she totally oh-bliterated it, leavin’ only a spoutin’ neckstub. The other head screeched twice as mad, and kept on screechin’, even as Lorlinda blasted the rest of its—her? was them a pair o’ titties clinched in that tight black leather Nazi-suit?—body into smithereens.

Lordy, though, did that upset the rest of the flock? Did it ever! They wheeled about in a big dark mass, regroupin’ despite their losses, readyin’ to kamikaze the truck all at once’t.

The truck which was not ‘zactly soarin’ along near as well as it had been. On account of Heck bein’ outta commission, or somethin’ else? She’d lost track of the warlock an’ the angel, but if’n Greg’s mojo wasn’t keepin’ ‘em airborne anymore, they were right quick gonna be hurtin’ for certain!

“Oh, shit,” piped Andy, ever-dently reachin’ a similar conclusion.

Blaze thrashed his way free of the wounded bird-devil, which had recovered enough t’ try an’ resume the fight. Both of ‘em fast-drew, the bird-devil a sinister-lookin’ pistol from one of its glossy black boots, Blaze a fistful of them spinny ground-flower things what danced around in changing colors. He elbowed the pistol aside just in time, grabbed its belt, yanked outward, an’ crammed that fistful of ignited ground flowers down the front of the bird-devil’s pants.

It recoiled, crotch explodin’ orange an’ green flames, reelin’ toward the truck bed’s edge. Blaze added a kick to help it along, then leaned precariously over to watch it drop away beneath them.

“Peterson Pyrotechnics!” he shouted after it. “Florida’s Finest Fireworks!”

The truck lurched, almost pitchin’ him off too. He yelped, showin’ a touch of fear or good sense for once’t, an’ scuttled sideways like a gangly long-leggedy crab, grabbin’ onto the base of the rail-cannon for dear life.

They dipped into a nose-dive, suddenly weightless. Not flyin’, but fallin’! The harness kept Lorlinda locked in place, but Andy popped out of the sling at her hip. The doll’s big eyes went bigger with terror an’ surprise, stubby limbs wavin’ in mid-air.

“Nooo!” Lorlinda grabbed wildly, caught one leaf-shaped green ear, and pulled him to her chest.

The lake looked both dreadfully close an’ a long damn ways down. The murderflock only looked dreadfully close. Huggin’ Andy near tight enough to squish his stuffin’ out, Lorlinda screamed for Heck so hard she felt somethin’ rupture in her throat.

***

Jeez, the way the brat’s mom was carrying on, you’d think she’d dropped her new iPhone down an elevator shaft!

And the mom, unlike Chelsea, hadn’t even been caught in the fucking splash zone! Again!

The brat had run forward, run toward Favius, so if anybody should have gotten the brunt of it, it should’ve been him . . . but nooooo, some malevolent quirk of physics or fate hit Chels with the money shot, bloodspatter bukakke, when she’d only just peeled off her clothes and swabbed away the worst of the puke-geyser!

This whole thing had gone way beyond ridiculous. For reals. She’d had it. She’d just goddamn had it!

On the plus side, if there was a plus side, she’d gotten to see the brat julienned like a potato in a food-gadget commercial. Even if the warlock hadn’t meant to do it, it had been pretty impressive. So, for that matter, was the warlock himself. Not her usual type, somehow both scruffier and more bookish. Still, ten-out-of-ten, would bang. Could hardly blame the angel, if what Favius implied was true.

And the way the angel rocketed after the warlock when he fell sure made it seem to be the case.

The angel, though . . . the angel . . . wow. Most of the gathered crowd couldn’t bring themselves to look directly at her. Like a solar eclipse, deadly and strange, but at the same time, compelling, eerily beautiful. Even the Golems ducked their big stupid clay heads in aversion, or in fear.

Favius, noticing this, growled something at them in a language Chels couldn’t understand, but the meaning was clear: get your shit together or I’ll annihilate you myself! He also ordered his troops to stand ready, those of them who hadn’t decided cowardice was the better part of valor, or however the adage went, and booked it along with some of the spectators.

“Bill-leeeeeee!” banshee-wailed the new Mother of the Year, tears spilling down her fine-scaled cheeks as she knelt over the quivering mound of chunks that had been her son. Her precious baby boy, so precious she’d let him sign on with a demon warlord and now had the nerve to be surprised something bad happened.

The other Senators, Trevor included, shuffled their feet as if embarrassed by her distraught, overwrought public display. June rolled her eyes in an oh-for-fuck’s-sake exasperation. Spot fidgeted awkwardly. Even the POW beefcake slaves yoked to the chariot looked uncomfortable.

Then the grieving ninny took it a step further, springing up and whirling on Favius, her pale minty-green skin flushed with hectic verdant blotches.

“This is your fault!” she cried, forked tongue flicking between thin, curved fangs. “My Billy is dead because of you!”

“Senator—” he began.

Lizardy frills fanned out on either side of her neck as she hissed. A membranous sac bulged under her chin. She reared back, cobra-esuqe, poised to strike.

Favius, with an impatient ain’t-got-time-for-this huff, swung his gladius and lopped off her head. It spun in a high, soaring arc, spraying greenish ichor from one end and the milky venom she’d been about to spit from the other . . .

And guess, just guess, who fucking got doused with both?

“Seriously???” Chelsea shrieked.

Seriously.

She swiped irately at this latest unwelcome mess. The ichor was clammy, slightly cooler than normal human blood would have been, cooler than the coagulating stickiness of Billy’s still was. The venom was another matter, not cool but downright cold, so cold it spread a chilling creme-de-menthe numbness wherever it struck.

Or . . . no . . . wait . . . shit . . .

A spreading, chilling, paralytic numbness . . .

That bitch! That snakey, reptilian, annoying bitch!

That snakey, reptitilan, annoying bitch’s severed head sailed on by, bounced off the chariot, struck the ground, and rolled away down the path. Her body stayed upright for a moment, then did a slow, not entirely ungraceful, collapse.

Chelsea’s collapse, on the other hand, was anything but graceful . . . but at least she didn’t feel much of the landing.

***

Greg wasn’t okay. Was light-years from okay. The antihelpful guilt-voice of conscience, which had berated him mercilessly on the subject of his previous crimes during his lonely walk to the motel—had that only been six days ago? plus or minus the weird time-dilation of his Purgatory-adjacent visit with his grandfather—now returned, with a vengeance.

A kid. Killed a kid.

Right in front of his mother.

Left him in pieces. In pieces.

Way to go, hero.

Killed a kid.

And they want you to save the world?

Yet, here he was, once again holding hands with an angel.

They rose up together, their auras a mingling of eldritch silver and shimmering gold, spreading brilliant as a dawning new sun. It threw dazzling rays, scintillating, prismatic. It cast Bighead Rock and everything atop it in bright clarity and stark-edged ugly shadow.

The scene greeting them as they reached the top was somehow even more screwed-up than before.

Favius, gladius drawn and freshly dripping, stood over the headless corpse of a greenish-skinned, reptilian-scaled matronly woman. It could have been the iconic Perseus-slays-Medusa pose, lacking only the head held aloft by its serpentine locks.

Well, that and Perseus, in no depiction Greg had ever seen, resembled a cross between Spawn and Titus Pullo from the show Rome as drawn by a fetishist for a Garth Ennis gladiator-porn graphic novel set in Hell. Covered with the animate, suffering faces of his victims, their souls bound in eternal agony to his demonic flesh.

She was the mother, his antihelpful inner voice informed him. The kid’s mom. The kid you killed, remember? Remember, kid-killer? Remember and remember, because I’m never going to let you forget.

The kid who’s dead right there, dead and in more pieces than an IKEA bookshelf, some assembly required. In fact, to hell with “some” . . . all the king’s horses and all the king’s men and Doctor Frankenstein couldn’t put that together again.

Ethriel squeezed his hand. “Stay with it, Greg.”

He took a deep breath. “Trying to.”

A second woman lay in a contorted, stiff-as-a-board rictus a few feet away. Clad just in skimpy panties and skimpier bra, splattered with dubious gooey fluids, she might have been one of Medusa’s petrified victims, except that she’d not been turned to stone. Her eyes—alive, awake, aware, and absolutely furious—put even the deadly stare of the Gorgon to shame.

“Had a nice cry?” Favius inquired, regarding Greg with a sneer.

“Get fucked,” Greg said.

“Oh, I shall.” He exchanged a lewd glance with yet another woman, forty-something and unremarkable bordering on plain except for the lustful queenliness of her posture. “Thoroughly and often, and I can hardly wait.”

The woman, the queen, licked her lips as if to say she couldn’t either. To say she was, in fact, ready to go right then and there. Two huge Golems flanked her as an honor guard, a peacock-blue satin robe swirled to her ankles, and she held . . . a marshmallow-fork?

Probably better not to ask. Of greater concern were the Golems, those two plus the third near Favius, and the garish sculpted Adonis at the promontory’s point, back to them all, arms raised to the baleful Star Wormwood at the apex of the Dome.

Also of concern were the more normal soldiers, corrupted converts from the military, arrayed behind Favius, armed with everything from spears and shields to assault rifles.

Waiting. Waiting for him to make the first move. Which better be a damn good one or it’d be his last.

“And we’re supposed to take on all these guys?” he asked sidelong.

“Yep.”

“Got any tricks up your sleeve?”

“You’re the warlock.”

“Oh, shit, right.”

“Though,” said Ethriel, “I might be able to finagle a secret weapon or two.”

“That’d be a miracle.”

“Smartass.” She nudged him with an elbow. “But first, be ready to get out of the way.”

“Out of the way of what?”

“One big crazy incoming doozy of a distraction.”

***

. . . tore off’n his door . . .

. . . shootin’ up his fuckin’ window . . .

. . . whole truck prolly raddled with bullet-holes, Lorlinda goin’ gonzo back there playin’ tailgunner . . .

. . . engine makin’ the most unholy-awful noise . . .

. . . wind whistlin’ through the gaps, an’ some kind of almighty terrible screechin’, or was it the fireworks kid settin’ off a bunch of them pickle-o petes . . . ?

. . . an’ the hell was he doin’ keeled over sideways? Layin’ in a warm, wet, tacky puddle? With his vision gone all cockamamie as if his eyeballs was pointin’ in two different directions?

Heck hauled himself upright behind the wheel, overcorrected, damn near tipped himself out the gap where’s the door used t’ be, realized the seatbelt he’d buckled on for the first time ever had been slashed to ribbons—along with his left pantleg, the thigh beneath resemblin’ a fancy spiral-cut holiday ham wallowin’ in thick red barbecue sauce—and wondered why’n the fuck wasn’t he just dead already.

Lorlinda, that was why. Lorlinda, screamin’ his name loud as doomsday after perforatin’ and shreddin’ the nightmare bird-devil what had reminded him so bad of Strutter in the henyard.

Lucifer’s nutsack, his everything hurt! An’ one of his eyes was most decidedly fucked up, danglin’ in a pendulum swing halfways down his chest on the tough tendony cord of its optic nerve, lookin’ into the footwell whilst its partner squinted through the gore-gunked windshield.

The other bird-devil what had been stuck there must’ve finally slid loose, but the more revealed view wasn’t reassuring. Nor was what his newfound rudimentary mojo instincts gleaned from the laborin’, falterin’ state of his truck. The flyin’ spell had run out, or was gaspin’ on magical fumes. With nothing t’ lend even the ‘llusion of plane-style wings, their trajectory was only too obvious. Plunge like a stone, kersploosh into the lake.

Fuck.

He tried to focus. No luck. Tried to close his right eye. No luck on that either; couldn’t even blink it because his right eyelid was still up where it b’longed!

For some reason, likely from rememberin’ Strutter an’ that day in the henyard when she’d done saved him, an image of his momma filled up his mind, makin’ pancakes on the selfsame griddle as had been in the family since’t the War ‘Tween Th’ States, warm an’ buttery golden pancakes drizzled with maple syrup.

Come on, Heck. You got this. I din’t raise no quitter, now, did I?

“No, ma’am,” he said, scooping up his stray eyeball and, when he couldn’t poke it back into his head, pointing it so’s he could at least see more or less where he was lookin’.

Mebbe he weren’t no real warlock, but he had somethin’, an’ if that somethin’ wasn’t sufficient to keep the truck movin’ a little while longer, he’d do it on sheer fuckin’ orneriness alone! Long enough, anyways, to try an’ bring it down on dry land.

Heck threw the gearshift into a gear what din’t actually exist, stomped the gas, an’ revved the engine. The belabored truck’s chassis groaned as it wrenched out of the steep dive. Its sudden change of course threw the pursuing bird-devils for a tizzy, forcing them to regroup just when they’d been about t’ strike. They rallied fast, on his ass again almost instantly.

A safe shore-landin’ wasn’t in the cards, no matter the mojo or orneriness. Leavin’ only one option . . . the high, outthrust promontory of Bighead Rock, where the gen’rul an’ who-the-fuck-knew-all-else had gathered. Outta the fryin’ pan, but beggars cain’t be choosers, as Gammy always said!

A dazzlin’ gold-silver cloudshimmer hung in the air, preventin’ Heck from seein’ anythin on th’ other side . . . an’ also, he realized, preventin’ anybody on th’ other side from seein’ him.

At the last second, the cloudshimmer parted, two bright forms zipping away, revealin’ the partly-finished building an’ a whole bunch of surprised-lookin’ folks right straight dead ahead.

“Bite the pilla!” Heck hollered. “We’se goin’ in rough!”

***

They wished to confront him as one, fight him as one?

Very well, then. He would destroy them as one.

Favius shook off his gladius, casting droplets of ichor in a wide spray. He thunked its blade against his Hell-iron breastplate in both salute and invitation. “As these mortals might say,” he declared, “bring it.”

The angel and the warlock, hands linked as they hovered, bathed in their respective and mingling lights, regarded him evenly with what might have been contempt . . . or, even more insulting, pity.

“Last chance,” said the warlock. Either he had recovered from his crisis of conscience or was making a very good show of faking it. “We don’t have to do this.”

“Are you trying to negotiate with this dickhead?” the angel asked.

“Thought it was worth a shot.”

“Fool.” Favius spat. “I will take your living face as a trophy and have it grafted upon her loins so that you might both be defiled by legions of demons.”

The angel glanced at the warlock, wrinkling her nose. “Gross.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “That’s some sick shit, right there.”

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

Favius braced for their attack, his bloodlust not the only thing eagerly rising. “Come on, then!”

“Now!” cried the angel, releasing the warlock’s hand.

But they each darted sideways, taking their shining auras with them. Through the diffusing haze of the dispersing glow hurtled the mongrel truck turned flying war-machine—flying, if not for much longer—barreling directly at those assembled atop the promontory.

In a heartbeat, Favius threw himself flat. It passed overhead with mere yards to spare. Thing reached up, massive slab-arms moving too slowly to do more than clip the rear axle. Favius heard a man shouting, heard a girl shrieking, heard panic erupt from the onlookers. Some of his soldiers opened fire and lobbed spears, but bullets and bronze spear-points alike caromed off its crude armor plating.

Close on the vehicle’s heels roiled a black, raging mass of wings and talons and senseless battle-frenzy . . . the remains of Captain Adler’s troops, too far gone in their fury and vengeance to heed anything beyond the pursuit of their crippled prey. Anyone in their path, including Favius himself, might not sway them. He’d sensed Adler’s end and assumed she’d gone out in triumphant glory, taking her foes down with her; clearly, he’d been mistaken on that count.

The truck hit hard enough to blow all four tires. It bounced, landed again with bare rims carving divots in the earth, and skidded so its back end slewed around in a looping semi-circle. Those not quick enough to spring out of the way were bowled over or plowed under. Body parts, red chunks, and screams filled the air.

Somehow, it didn’t roll, slamming into the rotunda’s steps with stone-cracking force as the remaining four Senators scrambled for cover behind scaffolding and unfinished walls. The impact catapulted a figure from the truck bed; from Favius’s perspective, it appeared to be an outlandishly-clad youth, pistoning his limbs like a cartoon character who’d run straight off a cliff. The way he struck the ground would have left a grown man in traction, but he sprang up again with only a slight wobble.

“I’m okay!” he shouted to no one in particular.

The truck, meanwhile, had come to rest askew at a slant, its back end angled against a column, its carcass a mess of dented metal, hissing gases, trickling automotive fluids, and the biological detritus it had picked up along the way. One of the crates jettisoned from its cargo compartment had split open, spilling several glass jars amid clumps of straw and crumpled newspapers.

A girl, who’d been belted into some kind of gunnery chair at the rear, unhooked herself and fell gracelessly out. “Heck? Heck, you ‘live? Sugar-bun, where’s you at?” Then she saw the deadly black wingstorm bearing down, yelped, “Satan’s taint!” and scooped up a jar.

“Awright, hot-stuff!” she cried, lobbing it to the youth. “Let’s see whatcha got!”

***

He caught the jar, looked at it, looked at her, an’—cross-an’-bless his li’l heart—protested, “I’m not old enough to drink!”

“Betcha ain’t old enuff t’ be huckin’ illegal ‘splosives neither! This no time t’ be worryin’ ‘bout that!”

Blaze hesitated, looked at the jar again, looked at her again. “Don’t tell my folks?”

An’ them with the screechin’ Nazi bird-devils from Hell swoopin’ in clamorin’ t’ peck them t’ pieces . . . not t’ mention the scene what they’d crash-landed in on, with the Gen’rul hisself right there starin’ at them all slack-jaw astounded as if’n he couldn’t believe what he was seein’ . . . many others she reckernized, some as she’d known since’t she was a baby . . . plus a whole bunch of army-types equally clamorin’ for the kill . . .

“Pinkie swears I won’t tell ‘em! Jist hurry!”

“Okay.” He thumb-spun off the lid, took him a big ol’ swig, stepped forth t’ meet the charge, an’ exhaled the most co-lossal fireball she ever did see. A gen-u-ine conflagration, rem’niscent of when two tanker trucks collided on the interstate . . . people’d seen an’ heard an’ felt that one from miles away!

It lit up the whole sky brighter’n noontime. The backwash of heat scorched dry grass-tufts brown, crisped eyebrows an’ arm hairs of them nearest, an’ flash-baked one of the Golems faster’n a clay pot in a supercharged kiln.

Most important, it swallered up the entire diving flock, not givin’ ‘em time t’ react, much less dodge. A stench of burnt feathers was followed by that of a massive cookout—smoked brisket, pulled pork, ro-tisseried chicken, roasted meat fallin’ fork-tender right off’n the bone—and then a gigantic whoosh of cinders, soot, and ashes as charred skeletons dropped like pick-up-stix.

If’n that din’t stun ever’body gobsmacked, Lorlinda din’t know what would. It got dead-quiet for a second, aside from the clatter an’ patter of what fell.

“Whoa,” said Blaze. He giggled, blinking owlishly at Lorlinda. “Whoa! Zhooo see whaeye dih?”

The swig of ‘shine he’d taken might’ve floored a bull ox; poor kid went from zero to drunk-off’n-his-ass in a tenth of a second. He attempted a step backward, flubbed it, seat-planted, spilled the rest of the jug all over hisself, hiccuped out a teensy flicker of flame, an’—

“Holeee shit!” Lorlinda crouched, wrappin’ her arms ‘round her head the way they’d been taught durin’ ‘mergency drills at school.

Mebbe he’d used up most of his arsenal already in the aerial battle, but he was still packin’ plenty, an’ next she knew it was a hunnert Fourth-of-Julys crammed into one! Oh say can you see!

Only, she couldn’t see much of nothin’, nor hear much of nothin’ neither, aside from bursts an’ blasts such as made the rail-cannon seem no more’n a cap-gun! Rockets an’ fountains an’ sparklers, firecrackers, ground-flowers, an’ spinny pinwheels went shootin’ off in all directions in all kindsa colors.

An’ if any struck them other ‘shine jars . . . or the truck, leakin’ gas as it prolly was . . . while she still din’t know if Heck had survived the landing or not, or where her sweetie-pie Andy’d ended up on account of she’d lost hold of him at that first tire-poppin’ bounce . . .

The ‘splosions began easin’ off, sputterin’ out. Coughing on the gunpowdery aftersmell, she cautiously lowered her arms. Some sporadic snaps an’ bangs, some few sparks an’ fizzles, a couple places where small fires had ignited, but, for the most part, the show ‘ppeared over. She fanned at the smoke, eyes waterin’.

Where Blaze had been was now a fair-size charcoal crater strewn with the husks of spent pyrotechnics. Smack in the middle of it sprawled Blaze. His jumpsuit hung in smolderin’ tatters, leavin’ him next-door to nekkid. His helmet lay upended an’ half-melted ‘bout five feet away.

He sat up, lookin’ poleaxed but otherwise unharmed, not so much as a hair on his goofy head singed.

“Whoa,” he said again, then passed on out.

***

“Secret weapon?” Greg asked, speeding to Ethriel as the impromptu fireworks grand finale wound down.

“The distraction, actually,” she said, “though more than I expected! Come on. We’ve got to move fast.”

Move fast, they did, but Favius moved faster. He’d already leapt to his feet, taken one quick look to assure the safety of the queenly woman—the two Golems flanking her had used their large clay-slab bodies to block the explosive blasts—and rounded on Greg and Ethriel with a war cry that had shivered souls since the days of ancient Rome.

A tremor of dark power pulsed. Suddenly, there were a dozen identical Hell-Centurions where there’d been only one, all of them with crimson-and-gold enameled shields overlapped in a perfect phalanx. A legion of skeletal spearmen and archers, a la Sinbad movies or Army of Darkness, appeared out of nowhere, launching a volley of deadly bronze-tipped missiles.

“Shit!” Greg flinched by reflex, even as the barrage deflected off their combined wards. His return volley of arcane bolts met the phalanx with similar results, the shield formation living up to its historical reputation.

“Cheater!” shouted Ethriel, eliciting only malevolent laughter from the dozen duplicates of Favius.

“Guessing he has some secret weapons too, then?”

“The old fucking dragon’s-teeth trick with the skellies. Can you take them?”

“We’ll see. What about the other soldiers?” He jerked his head toward the rest of Favius’s troops, those who’d survived the “distraction,” and were rallying to their commander’s banner—when the fuck had the banner manifested?

“Leave them to me.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m not sure about any of this,” she said. “We’re basically making it up as we go along.”

“Story of my life.” He focused on the legionnaires, jeering naked jawbones beneath half-helms, ribcages rattling beneath boiled-leather cuirasses. Despite having hurled their spears, the spearmen were armed again, and he supposed the archers had cornucopia quivers of never-ending arrows too.

Cheaters indeed. Ethriel had it right.

Then again, none of them were exactly bound by the rules of fair play here, were they?

He swept his arms in a broad cross-front arc like a baseball umpire who wanted to make it very clear the runner was SAFE. A sheet of eldritch energy flared from his hands in an expanding fan-shape. It took a lot out of him, but the effect was gratifying—bowling for boneheads! Skeletons, knocked off their feet, went scattering and clattering and breaking to pieces amid a hail of mismatched bits of armor.

Ethriel, meanwhile, had soared above the phalanx of Faviuses, extending her wings to their fullest and most radiant, magnificent span. “Let broken be the bondage chains!” she called, her Voice a resonant clarion. “Rise up, the oppressed, and for freedom fight!”

Golden light flashed. The heavy manacles, yokes, and leg-irons hobbling the chariot-slaves fell away. Released, they wasted no time springing into action. Never mind they were naked, whip-wealed, weaponless, and abused; they more than did credit to legendary berserkers of old as they rushed their former brothers- and sisters-in-arms. A chaotic bloodbath total melee commenced.

The phalanx broke apart. Favius, all twelve of him in unison, smote gladius blade upon shield, the sound a terrible Hell-metal thunderclap a dozenfold stronger than his earlier shout had been.

And at much closer range; the stunning force of it broke Greg’s concentration, gravity serving him a sudden harsh reality check. He slammed to earth at the promontory’s rocky edge, missing the longer lake-drop by inches. Bruised, scraped, dazed, and bleeding, he struggled to cling to some semblance of consciousness.

An angelic shriek of pain and despair snapped him fully alert. Through an icepick-stab of horror far worse than any fear for himself, he realized what must have happened: the Hell-metal clangor’s shockwave had struck Ethriel as well, swatting her head over heels in mid-air, disrupting her wards.

In that vulnerable moment, the real Favius vaulted high, caught her ankle, and yanked her down into a brutal, crushing, full-body hold.

***

Some serious, epic, world-shakin’ shit was afoot, but right then, it seemed faint an’ far away.

Lorlinda was okay; he knew’d that much at least. She an’ the fireworks kid had survived the landin’, which was more’n Heck was about to say for hisself.

Years of temptin’ fate, near-misses, close calls, an’ lucky escapes . . . then, in the span of less’n a week, from a back full of sulfur-shot to this pope-fuckin’ debacle . . .

Well, but hadn’t he allus said he’d go out behind the wheel? Just never ‘xpected it t’ be on such a grand scale.

The seatbelt, shredded though it was, had held enough of its fraying strands together to keep him from bein’ thrown clear before givin’ up the ghost, so’s he ended up slidin’ into the footwell on a slug-slime of blood. His own an’ that of the two-headed bird-devil. He felt bent an’ folded in ways he’d never been meant t’ be bent or folded.

Same could prolly be said for his truck; what of it his tetherball-strung eye made out, as he manipulated it around with the less-busted of his arms, looked half past demolition derby o’clock. It pained him almost as much as his own pain pained him, which was considerable.

Ever’thing seemed tilted uphill-downhill-sideways. The askew view out the windshield was mostly filled with a marble pillar, reinforcing scrambled memories of the fancy round capitol-building style affair under construction atop Bighead Rock an’ how they must’ve slammed right into it after that last loop-skiddin’ Tokyo drift. Between the Italian tower crooked lean of the pillar an’ the cracks fissurin’ across it, was a wonder it even held up.

For that matter, factorin’ in the fumes of leakin’ gas an’ spilled ‘shine, he din’t know how they’d avoided goin’ up in a furnace-flame into the bargain.

As the truck had come in, he’d caught a crazy panorama of people at the top of the steps under the rotunda, scramblin’ out of the way. He reckernized each of ‘em—even that spoiled rich fuck college boy what they’d given a lift to the night the Hock Party din’t happen, him an’ his titsy-bitch sister—but the one who really riveted his ‘ttention …

Clarabeth. Approachin’ the truck cautious-like, peerin’ at the wreckage. With that ratfuck weasel Spot slinkin’ behind her—damn near hidin’ behind her—carryin’ some kind of lidded keeperware bowl.

“Ho-leee shitballs,” Spot said, awed-soundin’. “You see that crash?”

“Couldn’t hardly miss it,” Clarabeth retorted. “Almost brung the whole place down on our heads. Ain’t no way he survived that—”

“S’prise, cuz,” Heck croaked.

“Heck?!”

“None other.” Slowly, painfully, he levered himself into the driver’s seat. “An’ we gots us some unfinished business.”

“What’re you—?”

“Don’t you play dumbnuts with me, Clarabeth. I know what you did.”

To her credit, she din’t dissemble no more or try to deny it. Her expression went stony. “Oh. Y’mean this?” Taking the bowl from Spot, she popped the lid and tipped it toward Heck so’s that its contents rolled out like a half-squashed Halloween punkin an’ dropped into his lap.

An’ there was his brother, there was Zeke, dead face greenish-gray, hair a clotted mess of browned blood, dried brains, an’ skull fragments.

“You traitor-ass goddamn kin-slayin’ bitch,” Heck said. Mildly, as if no more than commentin’ on a card game, but she took it in the full spirit intended.

“Oh, fuck that, fuck Zeke, an’ fuck you too! We was about t’ have somethin’ here, some decent ree-spect for this family in the first time since ever! I did what had t’ be done!”

“Fair ‘nuff; so’m I.”

The ruined, belabored engine coughed to roaring life. Heck wrenched it into gear an’ gunned it. Ragged rims screeched on marble, shedding sparks before catching traction. The truck lurched forward, rammin’ into the cracked column.

“Better ‘member your promise, magic-man,” Heck said, as the sparks ignited the spilled gas an’ ‘shine, an’ the roof came crashin’ down,

***

He had her, he held her, pinned and pinioned in his arms, a glorious perfect angel of God! His prisoner! His victim! How the annals of Hell would resonate with tales of this day, this battle, this tremendous victory for the forces of—

She punched him in the groin and headbutted him in the chin, twisting out of his grasp. “Keep your damned hands to yourself!” she cried, elbowing him in the throat for good measure.

Favius stumbled back a step, choking for breath, spitting blood from a bitten tongue. His armored battle-apron had deflected the worst of the groin-punch, but it still had the effect of a horse’s kick. Even as he reeled, he swung his gladius in a vicious arc, which would have been lethal had he not turned his wrist to use the flat of the blade. It struck her a ringing blow to the temple instead of cleaving off the top of her skull.

They both fell, but she was no warrior, and he recovered first. “You are a feisty thing, I grant you that,” he said, striding toward her as she feebly, dazedly squirmed. “I’d keep you for my own, had I not already my ideal and oh-so-eminently-fuckable queen. But, rest assured, little seraph, you’ll make a fine gift for some Archduke. Perhaps even the Morningstar himself! And win me greater favor in Hell than any since—”

“Didn’t anybody ever warn you about monologuing?” Nachtwald’s query was followed by a cage of silver-wire energy springing into being around Favius in a cold-electric crackle. “They ought to cover that in Villainy 101.”

The cage zap-snapped with galvanic force when he smote at it, jarring his gladius from his grip. The trusty blade clattered through the wires to land in the dirt a few yards away, sputtering with tiny silver arcs. He struck then with his fists, the same galvanic force jolting up his limbs and jittering through his body.

Nearby, his troops and chariot slaves were engaged in violent conflict, the sky sifted with a black snow of charred feathers, and—as if just to add to the chaos—the half-finished rotunda simultaneously collapsed and exploded. Favius spared a moment to wonder how it had all gone so wrong so quickly but shook off the thought. Later. A brief setback. Triumph was yet within his reach!

The warlock, meanwhile, had rushed to the angel rather than pressing his advantage. Perhaps he could have benefited from a few advisory lessons as well, Heroics 101, but Favius was not about to say so.

Avoiding the cage, he crossed his arms over his chest, bowed his head, shut his eyes, and dug deep. This formation, Bighead Rock, served also as an anchor point for the infernal magics that had affected the Spatial Merge in the first place . . . infernal magics that were his to draw upon as needed. So, draw upon them, he did. Up, through the permeated earth and stone, from the lake. Power channeled into him, flowed into him, filled and overfilled him.

A single huff of air, like a child blowing out candles on a birthday cake, reduced the warlock’s cage-spell to fading flickers of pixie-dust. Favius inhaled, chest swelling, muscles bulging. No, more than swelling and bulging . . . increasing . . . growing . . . his entire frame and mass doubling in size . . . tripling . . . making a giant of him, a colossus, a demonic god!

The very Golems became as dwarfs before him, the humans as dolls in miniature. He loomed above the warlock and angel, who huddled together, so small, so helpless, regarding him with renewed dread.

Or . . . were they?

Was that dread?

The angel, a dark blemish marring her perfection where he’d struck her, enfolded the warlock’s hands in her own. She whispered unto him something Favius could not discern, but the effects of which he sensed at once . . . a coursing transference, suffusing Nachtwald with golden light.

“Do it,” she said. “Go get him, tiger.”

***

Trevor Carmichael may not have been into actual sports, but he’d always believed in keeping fit, if primarily for looking good. Health, strength, and stamina were, of course, helpful in other ways . . . at sex-slave mutilation orgies, for instance.

Today, they helped save his ass.

His remaining fellow Senators, on the other hand? The elderly vet and the floridly out-of-shape watercraft salesman? Yeah no, not so much. Those poor old bastards had no fucking chance.

Even for Trev, it’d been something of a close call as the rotunda’s domed roof caved in with a gigantic crash of arches, columns, and slabs. Luckily, he’d booked it for a smaller side exit, so the falling rubble served to block him from the brunt of the frankentruck explosion.

Fitness and luck still hadn’t let him escape entirely unscathed; he’d gone flying amid chunks of broken marble and mangled metal, hit the ground hard, bounced, tumbled, skidded, and ended up splayed akimbo.

Ow.

Beat the alternative, though. He doubted they’d be able to find much more than tomato paste and teeth left of anybody else, unless that skeeve-o Spot had also made a break for it.

Ears ringing, head spinning, Trevor sat up to take inventory. His amputation fetish was kinda one-sided, thanks; he didn’t care for the idea of losing any of his own personal body parts.

All present and accounted for. Whew.

The pile of debris blocked his view of the main stage, where the boss battle scene was evidently playing out. Devils, angels, warlocks, whatever. None of his concern. Why should he get involved?

Well, politics and power-plays and being a Senator and all . . .

Hey, come to think of it . . .

There’d been the five of them, the sixth seat not yet filled—Favius and Trev alike holding out hope the writer would change his mind. Now, with snake-lady MILF out of the picture after the mess with her kid and the others pulverized to the aforementioned tomato paste and teeth . . .

“And then there was one,” Trev said, grinning. “Nice!”

Well, nice depending on how things turned out. He supposed his prospects if Favius got taken down wouldn’t be the greatest. It’d be a real shame to have to say goodbye to the lakehouse right when they were getting to understand each other. Not to mention saying goodbye to the mutilation orgies! The rest of the regular world might let rich, privileged white boys like him get away with a lot, but . . .

Something moved nearby, not far from the edge of the burning debris field. Something small with stubby limbs and an oversized green head above a shoddy tan-colored robe. Something that looked a lot like a knockoff version of a Star Wars toy from that show people said was better than most of the movies.

Trev blinked, wondering if he’d bonked his head harder than he’d realized. Nope, there it was, toddling stiffly right toward him.

“Okay,” he said. “You know, I’ve seen plenty of weird shit this week, but that takes it to a new level.”

The writer’s explanations rolled through his memory, citing the differences between homunculi and simulacra and manikins and so on, but Trevor shook them off. Creepy doll was creepy doll, regardless of type.

It stopped and stood looking at him with its huge dark eyes.

“Hey, little guy,” Trev said, not knowing what else to say. He picked it up.

“Hey, Trevor, you prick,” it peeped, and socked him in the nose.

“What the shit?!” He leapt to his feet, holding the doll at arm’s length.

“What? Don’t recognize me after you cut off my leg and left me to rot?”

“Andy?!?” A cascade of what/but/how/why spun through his brain, washed away by a single immediate and emphatic oh-FUCK-to the-NO.

The Andy-Yoda doll opened its tiny slit mouth again, but Trevor just whirled and, with a throw that would have done a college quarterback proud, yeeted it right the fuck off the edge of Bighead Rock.

***

Do it . . . go get him, tiger . . .

Yeah. Go get him. Great. Spiffy.

Ethriel’s potent rush of angelic effervescence coruscated through him, adding to and amplifying his own power. If they’d tried this a week ago, before his training, Greg suspected he would have whiffed apart like a dandelion puff. As it was, he still wasn’t about to entirely rule out the possibility.

He let go of her—not wanting to, especially not with her hurt and weakened and vulnerable—and rose. Favius, grown to giant if not kaiju size, towered over him. From this angle, the Hell-Centurion’s Roman-style armor gave him an unfortunate upskirt view, reminding him of how Zilch’s mighty leap showed more shaggy satyr undercarriage than anybody should ever have to see.

Disturbing as that sight was, however, the faces were worse. They’d expanded accordingly, stretched wide and three-times bigger than life . . . but their agonized, tormented suffering seemed exponentially increased. He could not only see in vivid detail how they’d been physically grafted to Favius’s skin but magically discern each and every minute spell-thread stitching them into place. Their empty eye sockets squinted and widened, revealing not skin or raw meat behind them but a moist gray-black tissue somehow fungoid and spongy. The nostrils and gaping, grimacing, pleading mouths revealed the same.

Yet, worst of all, despite their mindlessness, there was awareness. Consciousness. Spirit or soul, human or hellborn, they felt. They knew. They bore the horrors of every atrocity Favius inflicted, the weight of his every sin.

Myriad other patterns of magic made themselves apparent to his enhanced senses, from the minor flutters of latent talents to the full-on bombardment of the monstrous baleful star seething at the Dome’s apex. He perceived the webwork of force radiating out from it, down from it, curving to meet key anchor points around the lake.

Again, a week ago, before his training, it would have overwhelmed him. Driven him utterly mad, left him raving like a character from a Lovecraft story who’d looked the universe of cosmic horrors square in its indescribable visage.

And, again, even now he wasn’t sure it wouldn’t have that precise effect.

“Get him?” thundered the colossal Favius. “By what means? You’ve lost. You’ve failed. You have neither spell nor weapon to save you.”

“Maybe not,” Greg said. “But what about them?”

“Them?”

He raised his hands, the first two fingers of each forming a V, the other fingers and thumbs tucked in. Brilliant, shimmering light sheathed him from the elbows down, extending into long, narrow, silver-golden blades.

“Them,” he repeated and flicked a dual-scissor-snip gesture to cut the delicate embroidery of eldritch threads.

To cut, and cut they did, a thousand cuts as of a thousand pairs of scissors, snipping in sharp, decisive unison. Mingled divine and arcane energy surged from him in a torrent greater than anything he’d thus far experienced, all he had and all she’d loaned him and then some . . .

To cut, to cut the spell-threads, and cut they did. The stitches unraveled. Faster than a poorly-sewn seam, the patchwork of faces came undone around their edges. They peeled loose, parting the way orange rinds did, with wet Velcro-noises and fine misty sprays of some substance not quite blood.

“Them,” confirmed Ethriel, her Voice weakened but sure. “So shall the subjugated and suffering be released from imprisonment, to be delivered unto their own eternal reward!”

Favius, instantly diminished to his former height, screamed in ways the mortal world had never heard nor witnessed as the faces tore from his flesh. They pulled themselves free, trailing ghostly gray-black ectoplasmic tendrils, spectral squid or jellyfish with blind eyeholes and mute mouths, their expressions contorting from agonized torment to exalted relief. The gaps they left behind oozed beadlets of the not-quite-blood. Between those ragged, roundish spaces, only thin shreds of Favius’s actual skin remained.

Then, their expressions transformed again, from exalted relief to immeasurable wrath, and as one, they descended in a vengeful swarm.

***

Release!

Freedom, freedom at last, the tearing loose, the parting from his hated, hateful, hellish form! No longer merged with him, melded with him, passengers and bystanders and participants by proxy in his multitude of evil deeds!

Some, hapless victims, murdered, slaughtered, butchered. Women, ravished as they wept and pleaded amid the death and destruction of everyone and everything they’d ever known, ravished even after, even as, he’d flayed the faces from their skulls, leaving raw muscle and tendon and red, seeping flesh.

Some—many, most—trophies taken in battle, the spoils of war, fallen foes and vanquished enemies. Hostages held and betrayed during negotiations of truce. Captives taken, taunted, tortured. Gladiators, soldiers, conquered kings.

Some, as innocent as innocent could be, newborn or even unborn, seized from their mothers’ arms or cut half-formed from gravid bellies to have their tiny faces patched into the skin of his palms, the soles of his feet, the crooks of his elbows. Two, neonatal demonlings, broodren bastards, grafted to the cheeks of his own face, silently squalling their tiny infernal fury.

Human or hellspawn, mortal or damned, peasant or noble . . . once he’d claimed them, bound them to him, blind and voiceless yet still so terribly conscious and feeling and aware . . . those old divisions no longer mattered.

Nor did they now, in this moment! Freed! Released! Tugging the tendrils of their tarnished, tattered souls—unwinding, unraveling, insubstantial and solid and fluid all in one—from the dense meat of his body. Leaving oozing divots, him cratered head to foot like the shadowed side of the moon as he jerked and spasmed and shrieked in convulsive fits of pain and disbelief.

Freedom! Release! Relief! Exultation! Joy!

And then . . .

As one, as with one mind and one will . . .

Revenge.

However wicked or innocent at the beginning, however goodly or godly or peaceful they might once have been, yes, they turned as one, and fell upon him.

Favius.

Their tormentor, their captor, their killer, the author of their suffering.

They lashed at him, slashed at him, burrowed into the very holes their detachment had just created, digging deep, penetrating and sundering, piercing his organs, drilling into and hollowing the marrow-channels of his bones.

Revenge!

Payback!

Take that, motherfucker!

Wetting the stony earth with a viscous rain, letting slap moistly to it a hail of purplish chunks and strings of tissue so that the figure contorting madly within the Hell-forged armor was a half-dissected cadaver, a shredded scarecrow flapping with scraps of skin!

Punctured eyes, leaking in gelatinous globs from their sockets, rendered him as blind as his passengers had long been. Ectoplasmic tendrils, snaking into his mouth to uproot his tongue and down his throat to enwrap and constrict and crush his voice box to pulp, made him mute. They unmanned him of genitals, disemboweled him of guts, and what was left of him, they pulled to pieces.

Revenge!

Followed by . . .

A cloud of light, beaming. An unearthly choir. A comforting, embracing warmth.

Deliverance, just such as the angel had spoken. The chance to see their slates washed clean, their scales balanced, their sins forgiven. Absolution. Salvation. Redemption. The chance, finally, finally, to move on! To transition to Limbo or Purgatory, there to await judgment, and their own eventual, eternal, ultimate reward.

Even the originally demonic among them were granted the option, this strange martyrdom offering them a fresh start. Had they not endured above and beyond? Had they not paid their dues in full price and then some? Why should they not, then, be granted certain clemency?

The intangible gateway opened, as if countless gentle hands beckoning unseen ushered them into sanctuary, welcomed them home.

And, again as one—there was no hesitation, even for those originally demonic among them—they flowed through it, a jubilant torrent of ecstatic souls.

Dragging behind them, on ectoplasmic tendrils like chains, the thrashing remains of Favius’s corrupted and ruined essence to stand for judgment himself.

***

Silence held. A terrible silence of abject, awestruck shock.

Nobody moved. Nobody dared, or nobody could.

Everything seemed stilled, paused in an endless moment of forever-time. The flames engulfing the collapsed rotunda might have been Chihuly glass-sculptures, shining and glistening but immobile. The smoke rising from them hung mid-air in stationary wisps and plumes.

Then, with a dreamlike slow-motion fade, the gateway drew closed, the cloud of light evaporating. The freed souls, taken with it, were gone.

So was Favius.

His empty armor, sandals, and tunica lay in a heap, faintly steaming. The viscous puddle had vanished as if absorbed into the bare stone, the shredded bits of flesh shriveled into nothingness. Not so much as a hair or a fingernail had been left behind.

He was gone!

Favius, her Favius, was gone!

“You bastards!” The words burst from June in a Voice of her own she hadn’t known she possessed. Her heart thundered, pulsating waves of violent energy through her veins, suffusing her with strength to match her rage.

Weakened warlock and exhausted angel both looked at her, wearily baffled.

“I was happy!” The two Golems, whose immense bulk had blocked her from seeing the final grisly dissolution in full detail, shunted aside as easily as cardboard standees when June shoved her way between them.

“For once!” she went on. “For once in my whole stupid miserable life, I was happy! I had someone! I was happy, and desired, and loved! But you assholes just had to come along and fuck it all up!”

Glancing at the bronzed marshmallow-fork she gripped white-knuckled, June scowled. She tossed the frivolous ceremonial novelty to her handmaid, who’d shaken off the paralytic venom effects but still looked woozy. “Hold this.”

Favius’s gladius, when she picked it up, still held the heat of his hand. And it still, maybe even more than when she’d used it to kill Ramon, felt right and powerful in her grasp.

“Look, ma’am—” began the warlock.

Ma’am? After all else he’d done, he had the fucking nerve to call her ma’am?!?

A red-black haze dropped over her vision. At first, she thought it must be metaphorical, but it sheathed her limbs and surrounded her body in a shifting, smoldering furnace-glow.

Ashes. Sacrifice. Blood.

Azbunael, June realized. The demon-duke whose skull relic had presided over Bible Creek before Ramon blew it up and gained its power, but then she’d killed him and . . . and who gave a shit about the metaphysics right now? She had Azbunael’s power, that was what mattered, that was what counted! She had power, and she was going to goddamn use it!

The gladius flared, its steel taking on an obsidian-garnet sheen. Menacing vibrations of deadly potential thrummed up her arm.

With an inarticulate snarl, she went for the warlock. A single solid swing and she would have his head off! Which was a quicker and cleaner end than he deserved; he deserved a thousand years in the deepest dungeons of Hell, but—

“Greg!” The angel yanked him back by the collar. The blade’s tip grazed his jaw in a scratch no worse than a shaving cut.

Fine; the gladius was meant to be a stabbing weapon anyway! June thrust for his heart, but the angelic bitch interposed a golden, shielding shimmer; feeble, it nonetheless proved enough to deflect the blow.

“That’s how you want it?” June feinted another thrust at the warlock. Then, as the foolish God-creature moved to defend him again, she sidestepped and lunged, striking at her true target.

Demon-imbued Hell-bronze pierced celestial armor like tinfoil, sank into celestial flesh like softened butter. The angel’s startled, hurt gasp was more satisfying than any number of screams, filling June with savage delight.

She withdrew the blade with a vicious yank. The angel, still gasping, luminous eyes wide and astonished, dropped to her hands and knees.

Then, throwing every ounce of Azbunael’s diabolical red-black power behind it, June pivoted, slashed, and sheared clean through both wings of radiant light.

***

Ethriel didn’t scream, but Greg screamed for her as she fell with her gossamer hair hanging around her face and a pale-golden substance the texture of mercury spilling from the wound in her side. Screamed as the mad queen, a lithe battle-frenzy warrior goddess, struck at her wings, somehow severing their intangible radiance to leave glowing nubs from which more of the mercurial substance welled, this time thicker and a richer, darker gold.

The explosive outrush of energies—heavenly and infernal, matter and anti-matter—would have bowled Greg over even if he hadn’t been so depleted from his own spellwork. As it was, he went sprawling, skidding toward the promontory’s edge again . . . where this time there’d be no one to save him from the precipitous plunge into the roiling bloodshit vortex below . . . but he dug in, clawed for purchase, splitting fingernails to the quick, abrading fingertips into hard-used pencil erasers, and caught himself with his feet and shins hanging over the drop.

And barely felt the pain, barely noticed gravity’s tug, barely cared, because all of his focus was on Ethriel.

Ethriel, quivering and helpless, as the queen—despite reeling from her own expenditure of force, the ghostly afterimage of a huge demonic skull with sharp teeth and great down-curving red-black ram’s horns fading from where it had been superimposed around her—somehow staggered forward with the gladius raised, poised point-down to deliver a final, fatal blow. To drive it into Ethriel’s back, impaling her the way an amateur entomologist would pin a crippled butterfly to a corkboard.

If that happened, he might as well let himself drop—

Oh, get up, Gregory, he heard his grandfather say, not scolding but impatient, exasperated. I didn’t put all that effort toward your training for you to just roll over at the first little setback.

Little setback?!

But it worked; he was up and on the move almost before he knew it. A fresh strength, warm and sweet with a spicy tang redolent of his grandmother’s apple cider snickerdoodles, welled up in him. He summoned a grapefruit-sized softball of silvery force and shot-putted it at the queen just as she brought the gladius down.

The silvery sphere caught her in the midsection, bending her double and knocking her back. The gladius, for a second time, went flying. The queen collided ass-first with one of the Golems, which caught her in its thick arms. Its partner lumbered at Greg with colossal earth-shaking footfalls.

His arcane bolts could have been Nerf darts for all the effect they had. Each slice of his magical energy blades only carved furrows that swiftly filled in and sealed over. He backpedaled from the swing of a haymaker hammerfist, dodged another, then caught a hit to the shoulder that, although glancing, felt like it pulverized every bone on the right side of his body, leaving his arm numb and limp.

Think, Gregory.

Don’t badger him, dear. He’s doing his best.

Well, he needs to do better.

Great, now he had both grandparents in his head . . . but the old man was right . . . they’d covered some basics on Golems, if he could just concentrate . . .

It swung at him again. Out of room to back up, he stepped closer, crowding the creature, inside its reach. He formed the fingers of his non-numb left hand into a narrow pincher-shape and extruded crackles of cool-silver energy from them. These eldritch wires, he drilled into the Golem’s slablike abdomen, snaking them through solid clay, burrowing and seeking and rooting and . . . aha! Finding!

Finding, seizing the way those arcade claw-game machines did, and pulling. And, unlike most of those arcade claw-game machines, actually holding onto the prize. Withdrawing it, intact, to plunk into Greg’s palm.

A stone. A small, smooth, time-worn river stone. Etched with an ancient glyph meaning LIFE.

The Golem instantly went motionless, inert. All animation drained from it. The dull red flicker of its eye-slits extinguished, dark, and dead.

***

“Put me down, you numpty!” June swatted at Juggernaut, just following its last order from Favius—protect my queen.

That it had also been the last-ever order from Favius . . . that he was gone . . .

No. She still couldn’t. Couldn’t deal. No.

She didn’t expect the Golem to obey, but, to her surprise, it lowered her to the ground and unwrapped its tree-trunk-thick arms. The moment it let go, her knees buckled and her legs, limp as overcooked noodles, gave way under her, and she had to claw again at its bulk for purchase.

Her head whirled, her senses flickered off and on. If her body’d been equipped with a “check engine” light, it would have been shining bright yellow-orange. Shit, all the dashboard indicators . . . low battery, oil change . . . the needle on the gas gauge way over past the E . . .

The world went fuzzy. Hissing radio static rushed in her ears. Vertigo did her an upsie-daisy-over-and-around. She felt weightless, she was falling, she was hollow and drained, Azbunael’s power all but spent . . .

But she hung on by spite and sheer force of will, tottering in place until something approximating balance had been achieved.

Juggernaut’s broad back made a wall in front of her, shielding her, blocking her view. June craned for a peek around the Golem’s chunky bicep.

She saw Hulk, or the vaguely humanoid-shaped gray-brown slab that had been Hulk, now just a big crude deactivated statue. In the olden days of pogroms and Jewish ghettos, the empowering glyphs had been inscribed on the surface, on the forehead . . . Favius had explained to her how this exploitable Achilles’ heel had been corrected, the glyphs engraved instead onto stones to be embedded deep within the clay, making them almost impossible to get at.

Almost impossible.

Like how the Golems were almost impossible to damage, immune to injuries and incapable of feeling pain or fear, able to withstand the most destructive attacks and keep on going. Biblical Terminators. Energizer Bunnies from Hell. He’d shown her, proudly, videos of military testing in which the trio went unscathed by gunfire, explosives, flamethrowers, even napalm.

Yet there was Thing, flash-baked to a kiln-hard finish. Still moving, but in a stiff and brittle manner, as if it might just crack apart to pottery shards at any moment. It reminded her of those terra-cotta warriors from China or Egypt or India or wherever; she’d seen them on some history-mystery travel documentary. Even if Thing could be of any use, by the time it got close enough, the fight would be over.

And the fight was not over, not while she had anything to say about it, not until the warlock and angel who’d robbed her of her happiness were fucking annihilated! Along with the fire-breathing lunatic and anybody else who’d helped them!

“Kill that bastard,” June ordered Juggernaut, pointing at the warlock as he collapsed beside the broken angel, the dregs of his own power sputtering, his “check engine” light no doubt shining bright too. “Stomp his head into pulp and bring me his heart!”

Again, she wasn’t sure if it would obey, but with Favius gone—gone!—the chain of command must have shifted. Juggernaut plodded toward them, slow but unstoppable as its namesake.

Everything else around her was chaos and panic, slaves fighting soldiers, the rotunda a pile of burning rubble, bodies and body parts all over the place. The absurd Ameri-Golem remained in position at the outcrop’s edge, reaching skyward, every literally-sculpted muscle on display, patriotic bootyshorts indecently tight, like a pro-wrestler basking in the spotlight.

What a disastrous clusterfuck! Not at all, she was sure, what Favius had intended!

Well, she’d do what she could to—

A sudden, stabbing pain plunged into her back. June sucked in a choked breath, looking down to see twin metal tines emerging, bloodied, from her chest. The twin metal tines of her own goddamn marshmallow-fork.

“Oh . . . you . . . treacherous . . . little . . . bitch!”

***

The earth shook some more as the second Golem made its relentless approach. Greg knew he was too tapped out to do anything about it this time. Too tapped out to do anything about anything, his entire right side a deadened wasteland, his collarbone cracked if not fractured, fingernails split, fingertips abraded, a mass of scrapes and aches and bruises from head to toe . . .

And none of it, not one bit of it, was a patch on the anguish of seeing Ethriel huddled and shaking, hearing her soft, plaintive whimpers.

Her celestial armor had vanished, leaving her naked, fragile, so terribly vulnerable and exposed. The wound in her side still trickled a thin golden liquid. The wounds on her back, the stubs of her wings, were congealed into semi-opaque amberlike lumps, marbled whorls of darker gold and paler cream, milk-and-honey.

He touched her shoulder, leaving bloodied and clay-grimed fingerprints. Cold, she felt cold, cold and fading. When he spoke her name, she didn’t raise her head, only trembled, curtains of gossamer hair obscuring her face.

THUD-shake, THUD-shake. Jurassic Park impact tremors as the Golem closed in.

If he could just summon enough power to root out one of its glyph-stones . . .

A wan grayish fizzling pffft was all he got. The sad trombone of spellcraft.

“Ethriel,” he repeated. “Look at me, please.”

She did, peering through mussed strands, her eyes enormous sorrowing pools filled with pain and despair. A small, hurt sound slipped from her lips.

“I blew it,” he said. “Failed you. I’m sorry.”

Her hand crept up to enfold his. A crystalline tear spilled down her cheek. “We both blew it,” she whispered. “I’m sorry too. But you didn’t fail me, never failed me.”

And onward marched the Golem, inexorable as fate. Its eye-slits burned furnace-red with purpose. The monstrous bludgeons of its fists clenched.

“Hey! Mudbutt!” came a slurred shout, followed by the flaming lid of a Mason jar hurled like a pint-sized Frisbee or makeshift ninja throwing star. It struck edge-first into the Golem’s leg and lodged there, burning. Blaze was on his feet, sort of, capering drunkenly and waving both arms over his head. “Hey! Over here!”

“Yeah, how’s bout’s you back it right th’ fuck off?” Lorlinda jumped in front of Greg and Ethriel and took a mighty swing. The apocalypse bat walloped the Golem with a solid wet smack, its various spikes embedding so deep in the clay she couldn’t wrench it back out.

“Are you both nuts?” Greg yelled. “Run!”

“Shit, no!” she yelled back. “We’s in this t’gether!”

“Hells to the yeah!” added Blaze. He belched a wad of molten glop that sizzled when it hit the ground.

Greg appreciated the sentiment, but . . .

The Golem paused, as if trying to assess these new threats. An idle backhand swipe cuffed Lorlinda aside, almost knocking her over. A glance at Blaze, weighed perhaps with the knowledge of what he’d already done, seemed to give it a moment of, if not fear, at least apprehension.

Then its red-eye-slit gaze fixed upon Greg again. It took another earth-shaking step.

He’d regained a smidgen of energy, but the third Golem had by now somehow reached its brother. With a sinking sensation, Greg realized even if he could work the same trick, he might not be able to get through that magically hard-fired outer layer.

The four of them had grouped up, him and Ethriel and Lorlinda and Blaze.

“So, we’re all going to die together?” he asked.

Lorlinda sniffled and gave a brave shrug. “Heck’s already dead. Him an’ Andy. I ain’t gonna lose th’ rest of y’all, nor get left behind neither.”

Two large shadows fell over them.

An engine chugged, revved. The eerily-glowing spectral form of a mongrel frankentruck roared out of nowhere, plowing full-tilt into the Golems.

As it toppled the one and smashed through the other, a jumper-cables jolt of arcane energy leaped to Greg . . . carrying with it a ghost-echo message:

‘Member your promise, magic-man.

***

“Chels, what the fuck?!”

Trevor had come back around from the far side of the ruined rotunda, wincing as he probed at his bloodied nose while trying to determine if it had been broken again—

Or, indeed, if any of that crazy business had really happened; punched in the face by a knockoff Baby Yoda doll? An animated, talking, knockoff Baby Yoda doll claiming to be Andy? Easier to believe he’d taken a ricocheting chunk of rubble to the head and hallucinated the whole thing!

Hell, for that matter, easier to believe he was still hallucinating, that he hadn’t just seen his puke-beslimed, venom-woozy sister step up and ram the ceremonial queenly-scepter-ified marshmallow-fork into June’s back. Not just into but clear through, its tines poking out slightly below and between the queen’s insignificant middle-aged tits, blood dribbling down the front of her satiny peacock-blue robe.

Seriously, what the fuck?! What the actual fuck???

“Oh . . . you . . . treacherous . . . little . . . bitch!” June said and keeled over.

Meanwhile, the other end-game drama was playing out, with the Golems and the warlock-guy and the angel, plus the nutjob with the fireworks and the Hock Party cham-peen, some of which Trev couldn’t be sure he wasn’t also hallucinating.

He made the Senatorial executive decision to ignore that for now and hurried to Chelsea, reiterating his previous remark.

“What the fuck, Chels?!”

She grinned at him, a total psycho-chick grin, brandishing the marshmallow-fork. “I had to!” she cackled, mimicking Kayla from their last visit to Bighead Rock. Which, given the Andy thing from a few minutes ago, didn’t do his boggled state of mind any good.

“It was my best chance,” Chelsea went on, minus the Kayla-crazycackle. “She’d shot her wad, used up everything she had. And with him gone . . . with all these other distractions . . . when would there be a better opportunity?”

“To backstab her? Literally?”

“Don’t you goddamn even! You don’t know what it was like, having her boss me around, treat me like a servant! First handmaid, then babysitter?” She gestured at herself. “Look what I’ve had to put up with! Puke, shit, piss, and now poison? Favored, my ass!”

“We knew there’d be—”

“Oh, shut up! You, lounging around having orgies?”

He started to say something about Andy breaking his nose again, however insane it might have sounded, but the sudden engine-revving appearance of a mongrel ghost-truck was just too much weirdness to ignore. It hit the Golems like a runaway train, shattering the one that had been caught in the fireball and sending the other one sailing maybe ten feet to land with a damp, heavy WHUMP measuring at least a 2 on the Richter Scale.

Silver lines of light appeared, drawing a seven-sided symbol around Warlock and Friends. The symbol flashed, there was a mild pop of air pressure change, and the four of them vanished. Just, poof, buh-bye, see ya see ya wouldn’t wanna be ya.

Before Trev could even begin to comment on that, feeling more and more as if he was experiencing bad lag in a video game, a pained groan issued from the body on the ground in front of Chelsea.

“ . . . bitch . . . ” June mumbled, stirring.

“Are you fucking kidding me?!” Chels shrieked. She raised the marshmallow-fork high in both hands like she was about to stake a vampire in a schlocky B-movie.

“Chels, no!” Trev got in her way, grappling for her wrists.

Shooting him a look of incredulous oh-no-you-didn’t, she hiked a knee into his balls. Hard. Really, really hard. Next thing he knew, he was curled in the fetal position, clutching himself and making mindless animal noises.

“I am done with your bullshit, Trevor! Done with all this bullshit!”

As she stepped over him, raising the marshmallow-fork again, a different pair of hands grappled her wrists. Big hands. Huge, gray, clay hands.

Golem hands, which—protect my queen—wrenched Chelsea’s arms from their sockets in twin showers of crimson gore.

***

What a day, what a day, what a momentous day! Given everything else going on, it might have been easy to forget the whole reason Favius and his court had been gathered atop Bighead Rock in the first place.

The demands. The threat. The ultimatum.

When the appointed deadline arrived, still with no signs of capitulation or negotiation, or even any communication at all . . .

With indignant politicians and military officials champing at the bit, the nation’s reputation on the line . . .

With protesters protesting the decision to take such a drastic action against what was technically sort of mostly still American soil, while supporters rallied in favor of forcibly rooting out infernal invaders and traitorous sympathizers by any means necessary . . .

With megachurches oddly silent on the subject, not wanting to take a stance either way for fear of it derailing their religious revival gravy train . . .

With millions waiting in expectant, breathless tension, the media’s attention once again focused on what, until a few years ago, had only been another scenic but remote unremarkable Florida lake, just another blip on the map . . .

With the world watching, history to be made, and the future at stake . . .

Well, it wasn’t as if they could wuss out and back down and let the terrorists win now, was it? How would that look? The greatest nation, all bluff and bluster, all bark and no bite?

And sure, maybe it meant further endangering the servicemen and -women in the vicinity, but they’d known the risks when they signed on. As for the fleeing evacuees and innocent civilians? Pff, their own fault for not leaving sooner, for sticking around . . . and besides, how many of them were “innocent” anyway?

So, they did it. Gave the order. Pushed the button. Launched the nuke.

It went perfectly. No hitches, no problems, no delays. Arced straight and true on its projected flight course, a glinting dart tracing a contrail through the clear blue sky of a Florida late-spring morning. It struck its intended target, the highest apex of the diabolical Dome, bullseye dead-center.

Or, it would have, had not the rippling bloodfire aurora irised open, revealing the terrible, baleful, seething mass of hellish light that was Star Wormwood. And, into the heart of that terrible, baleful, seething mass, the missile plunged . . . was engulfed, swallowed up . . . Star Wormwood bulging and bloating like an actual star in its pre-supernova death throes . . .

Far below, oblivious to the scenes of chaos and conflict around it, oblivious to mage-battles and angels, hellshine fireballs, treacherous bitch handmaids, ghost trucks, and everything else . . . the Ameri-Golem stood poised and ready.

For this. Its crucial moment of purpose, the moment for which it had not necessarily been created—its designers had had rather different objectives in mind—but prepared, subtle spellcraftings woven into it as a failsafe against just such an eventuality.

Linked both to the military command networks and the intricate web of infernal thaumatology, it . . . look, it’s magic, okay? Magic and alchemy and ancient eldritch stuff. Just go with it.

The concept of agonicity, turning human pain and suffering into energy, was, if not entirely understood, a known and commonly accepted factor to the denizens of Lake Misquamicus. Cut off from the power grid, most of them had adapted their household generators, appliances, and various gadgets to run on that alternate power source.

But, sometimes, under the right circumstances, that conversion could go both ways. Instead of pain-to-energy, energy-to-pain.

With the Ameri-Golem serving as conduit, the full force of the nuclear explosion’s energy was absorbed by Star Wormwood, converted, and expelled in a shockwave of pain . . . rolling outward, expanding, widening . . . to encompass the entire planet.

To affect every living human soul beyond the Dome with a sampling of agony, a foretaste of damnation. To turn the military’s “ultimate” weapon against them.

And to demonstrate, once and for all in full measure, the futility and folly of fucking with Hell!

EPILOGUE

Minutes

It took approximately six minutes for the Painwave to circumnavigate the globe. No corner, so to speak, of God’s green Earth went untouched.

The Painwave.

The shot felt ‘round the world.

Radiating outward in a ring, Lake Misquamicus at its epicenter, but not diminishing as it went. Losing no strength or intensity so that the effects were the same from Florida to Australia to the Arctic to Tibet. Distance didn’t matter. Nor did terrain, climate, or elevation—within reason, anyway; the ISS got a lucky loophole pass. On land or at sea, aboveground or below, indoors or out, made no difference.

There were also, to be sure, a handful of very few, very rare exceptions. But, overall, overwhelmingly, every other living human soul else got equal treatment. Age, race, gender, religion . . . none of those mattered, either.

The Painwave.

The PAIN.

Absolute, all-consuming, indescribable, debilitating, encompassing PAIN.

With little warning, no defense, and no escape. New York and California viewers, for instance, watching those reporting live from Florida suddenly contort and drop in unbearable agony, barely had the chance to comprehend what they’d seen, let alone realize what was happening, before it reached them too.

No time to panic. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

The PAINWAVE.

Just humanity, though. Arguments aside over whether animals had souls, never mind how many All Dogs Go To Heaven movies there were or how many saintly golden retriever books Dean Koontz wrote, no matter how intelligent apes or dolphins might be, they were spared. Lucifer had no particular gripe against most of them anyway. Humans, on the other hand?

They had it comin’. They had it comin’. They only had themselves to blame.

Well, themselves and their favorites-playing, indulgent, indifferent, hypocritical sky-daddy.

Now, the Painwave on its own didn’t directly kill many people. Its actual physical effect only lasted about six seconds. Even so, about six seconds of sheer, utter, unimaginable PAIN could seem like forever. Long enough to convince the recipients that they were dying . . . long enough, maybe, to make them wish that they were, hope that they would, anything, anything, to make it stop!

There were some, sure, whose health was too compromised to withstand such a shock, who did up and die when their systems couldn’t take it. But they were a minority. The majority of the deaths were a result of the Painwave, but not strictly or solely due to the PAIN.

For instance, while those who were sleeping, sitting, or otherwise relaxing, tended to weather it okay, those standing or walking were much more likely to sustain various injuries. The severity depended on the riskiness of their circumstances—in the shower? on a flight of stairs? crossing the street? in the kitchen with lit burners and knives?

A lot of people were behind the wheel when the wave struck. One moment, traffic whizzing along at the speed limit . . . the next, vehicles veering every which way in cataclysmic pile-ups. There were doctors in the middle of major surgeries, patients laid open on the operating table. There were bomb disposal crews, armed standoffs and hostage situations, wildlife wranglers, athletes and acrobats and high-wire acts. Pilots bringing planes in for landings. Parents at the beach, dandling their toddlers’ bare footsies in the rushing surf. Virologists working with fragile test tubes in top-secret government doomsday labs. Et cetera.

Even once the initial wave passed, the repercussions and fallout continued . . . and would continue . . . far-reaching and long-lasting . . . enough for a full book or maybe anthology, who knows?

At any rate, it made one bad, fucked-up, game-changing day for planet Earth. Worse, in its way, than the original AllHell had been because this time it hit everywhere, leaving no one unaffected, and couldn’t be as readily tucked away, glossed over, walled off, quarantined, ignored, or forgotten.

That said, there still were those very few, very rare exceptions. Those not within the Dome but nonetheless sheltered or protected.

Those, say, in certain liminal spaces . . .

***

The septagonal sigil’s eldritch silver light faded out, leaving them in an echoey-quiet subterranean dimness of battery-powered lamps and a television tuned to a live news network.

After the chaos and carnage and explosions and screams of the past several minutes, the change might have been jarring, had Greg been in any fit state to be jarred. As it was, he just flopped backward onto the tunnel’s concrete floor, heaving for breath, totally drained.

More than totally drained. That final translocation . . . Heck’s jump-start parting shot of energy had been almost enough, but the rest felt like it had taken ten years off his life. Maybe he would end up with distinguished Dr. Strange sweeps of gray at the temples after all . . .

He groaned, twisting his head to the side. Ethriel huddled beside him, hands over her face, naked and quivering, silent but for shallow, shuddering gasps. She emitted not even a wisp of celestial radiance, except for the faintest glow deep within the amberlike lumps congealed on her shoulder blades.

He heard the “holy shit!” exclamations from Brad and Dan, heard their barrage of questions and Blaze’s drunken attempts to tell them what had happened, complete with exuberant sound effects: “the Nazi-bird-demons swooping in all SCREEEEEE and I go pew-pew-pew with bottlerockets and Lorlinda’s ratta-tatta-tat tailgunnering them, and the centurion guy gets way big, super giant big, and—”

He heard Lorlinda sobbing, “you all’s seen’d it too, I knows you did, that were Heck’s truck, that were him, he done come back, saved our bacon, but we popped outta there an’ left him, him an’ mebbe Andy too—”

From the television, he heard missile this and military that and imminent impact and “wait, I’m being told something is happening with the dome . . . is it . . . part of it . . . opening? The missile went into it?” and a background gabble of “where’s the blast? / did it hit? / was it a dud? / shouldn’t there be a mushroom cloud?”

Then he sensed it, the vast absorption-conversion-expulsion, followed by the expanding, concussive wave of arcane armageddon. The shockwave, the painwave, whatever it was, whatever it would come to be called . . . he sensed it, but didn’t feel it, sensed it rolling by, passing them over like a strange and ominous version of the Angel of Death . . .

Ethriel, in his memory, . . . think Azrael’s not still fucked up over the first-born of Egypt? Shit, if angels could be alcoholics . . .

But there was no sense of Azrael or any other Upstairs kind of divine power at work here, no Old Testament righteous Wrath of God stuff; this was all Satan, all diabolical, the folly of fucking with Hell!

Passing them over, here in their liminal safe sanctuary. Rolling on by. The rest of the world might be in for it, and he thought briefly of his family—Mom and Dad, aunt, uncles, cousins—but there wasn’t anything he could do and no damn time.

Turning again toward Ethriel, he found her looking at him. Tearful. Beautiful. Wounded. She’d sensed it too, she understood. Nothing they could do. No time. And, for the two of them, right here and now, did it even matter?

“Hey,” he said, hitching his way over to crouch beside her. His right side ached, though was at least semi-functional instead of numb deadweight. His collarbone didn’t seem to be fractured after all. Small blessing, but he’d take it.

“Hey,” she whispered. “Did we win?”

“Sort of? I think so?”

“Yeah.” She blinked away crystalline tears. “It’s over.”

“Ethriel?” He reached for her, and she shied from his touch. “Ethriel, what?”

With delicate fingers, she lifted the silver medallion he wore around his neck, running the pad of her thumb over its inscription.

Never drive faster than your Guardian Angel can fly.

“Greg . . . ” Her gaze met his, heartbroken. “Greg . . . I . . . I can’t fly.”

He caressed her cheek and gently kissed her. “Then I won’t drive.”

***

Hours

Six hours later, nothing much moved atop Bighead Rock. Not even the scavengers were nervy enough yet to come out and pick at the leftovers. They, like everyone and everything else around Lake Misquamicus, remained pretty shaken up by what had happened that morning.

In the years since AllHell, folks’d adapted and gotten by okay on their own, made it work. Established a society and community and economy of sorts. The flora and fauna settled into and redefined niches of the altered ecosystem. It was going, if maybe not great, at least tolerably well. They were tough, they were independent and resilient, they could deal.

Then, the major events over the past week had gone and changed it up again, changed it up sommat drastic, as the locals might have said. The return of Favius, the Wall and the Dome—Ecce, novum princeps de inferno, novus rex terrae!—and all that jazz. But, like before, they’d adapted. Rolled with it. In many cases, embraced it.

And, right when they were feeling pretty confident, pretty proud and smug, well, surprise surprise, along came another great big ol’ monkey wrench, a real shit-hit-the-fanner, a complete ass-up fuckadoodle for sure.

Who was in charge now? What were they supposed to damn-an’-bless do???

Most of the civilian survivors had made themselves scarce, leaving the dead and heading home to hide out or hunker down and wait and see. The remnants of Favius’s troops beat a hasty strategic retreat, the chain of command in shambles. The unshackled former POW chariot slaves either went after them, still half-berserk and hot on the warpath, or seized the opportunity to scatter, regroup, and bide their time.

“Sheeee-it,” summarized Ritchie ‘Spot’ Wilkins, surveying the aftermath.

He’d escaped the collapsing rotunda by the skin of his teeth—fuck you very much, Heck Bodean; talk ‘bout bringin’ down the house!—then laid low to watch the finale unfold.

What a mess that’d been! Gen’rul Favius torn to shreds an’ carried off, oh-bliterated fer sure! Her Highness goin’ into a vengeful angel-wreckin’ harridan rage, only t’ be struck down cowardly-like from behind by her own fuckin’ handmaid! An’ then, t’ top it all off, along came Heck an’ his truck again, back from the dead in some ghostly last hurrah!

Spot looked over at Lester Riggers an’ the small group of not-’zactly-volunteers who they’d drummed up to go see what was what. Lester, big an’ dumb as ever in his biballs, nudged with a dirty hornnail-toed foot at the corpses of the Wyrd Sisters.

“Crazy-ass ol’ cunts,” Lester said. “Cain’t barely tell if’n they shit themselfs t’ death or clawed out their own eyeballs an’ throats.”

“An’ them s’posedly knowin’ the future,” someone else said. “Couln’t they see this all comin’?”

“Yeah, might’a fuckin’ warned us,” another chimed in.

Others picked through the battlefield fallen for weapons and valuables in an age-ol’ tradition of which Spot reckoned Gen’rul Favius would’ve fully approved. He’d already personally retrieved a certain gladius, as well as a marshmallow-fork, on the reasonin’ they might have some power an’ shouldn’t go fallin’ into the wrong hands.

Lester had moved on to inspect the decapitated lady Senator. “Still a purt-fine piece,” he said, unhooking his biball straps. “Shame t’ let it just go t’ waste.”

Spot snorted. “You wants t’ stick yer dick in a paralyzin’-poison snakewoman, that’s yer own lookout.”

He paused, sighed. “Guess’n you’re right.”

Bits of broken pottery crunched as they walked through the debris of one Golem—Spot paused to pick up its glyph-stones—to check on the other. It held its inert, immobile stance, lifeless as a turd an’ about as good-lookin’. He regarded the loose glyph-stones, speculatin’ . . . then decided it was better just not t’ be fuckin’ around with big magics he din’t half unnerstand.

Of the Ameri-Golem, there weren’t nothin’ left but a star-spangled puddle of red-white-an’-blue melted sludge.

“Good damn riddance,” Spot said. “Never did care for that dumb fuckin’ thing.”

***

She opened her eyes to familiar surroundings and realized it had only been a dream.

A vivid, prolonged, full-immersion, extremely graphic dream.

The nightmare to end all nightmares.

Jeez. How wasted had she gotten? How much did she drink? What had she smoked? Andy always brought primo stash, but leave it to him to lace it with something extra.

Prick.

Whatever it was, it sure had fucked with her head bigtime.

Chelsea lay there, watching the lazy twirl of the ceiling fan, not even trying yet to move. She didn’t remember going to bed, but at least she appeared to be alone in it, far as she could tell.

What she did remember was muddled and mixed-up, nightmare fragments slopping over into actual memory, making it hard to sort out what was real. The drive, okay, sure, she remembered the drive, and the checkpoint, and her certainty that the stuff about the lake was just some bullshit hoax.

The rest of it, though, had gotten twisted and fucked up in her mind. Dreaming the lake stuff hadn’t been a hoax, the six billion gallons of fresh water really was replaced by a stinking cauldron of blood and bile and shit. Dreaming there really were demons and monsters.

Dreaming about Madison, Kayla, Andy . . . meeting that sick fuck writer weirdo with his torture porn movie studio and his ambulatory-pile-of-boobs companion . . . his backyard shed with a torso-guy hooked up to a generator . . . the hillbillies in their redneck frankentruck . . . hadn’t she even dreamed about getting into a slap-fight with Kayla over sucking Trevor’s dick? Before dreaming she shoved Kayla off the top of Bighead Rock? After Kayla smashed in Andy’s head with a fireplace poker?

Seriously fucked up. What had she been drinking and/or smoking???

As if all that wasn’t enough, then there’d been the nightmares of the lakeshore, the Hell-Centurion cutting peoples’ faces off, feeding frenzies of rape and murder and cannibalization, gruesome sacrifices . . .

Plus, the handmaid bullshit! And playing babysitter for some puking warlock brat!

Eeeeyuch.

Hadn’t the nightmares even culminated with her stabbing the queen, then getting her arms yanked off like overdone turkey drumsticks? Which had fucking hurt!

Which still fucking hurt!

She must’ve pulled a muscle or pinched a nerve or something in her sleep. Jeez, she couldn’t even move them . . . couldn’t even feel them . . .

Oh, no . . . fuck, no . . .

Dreaming. Nightmare. Not awake yet. Had to be.

Chels squinted a sidelong peek from the corner of her right eye. A large padded white mass blocked her view of her shoulder.

A large padded white gauze mass, secured with surgical tape, stained here and there with maroon blotches.

No . . . no, no, no . . .

She did the same peek from the left eye and saw the same thing.

Wiggle her fingers? Make a fist? Bend an elbow?

Nothing.

Her chest and throat tightened as if clamped by iron bands. As soon as she could get a full lungful of air, she was gonna scream . . .

Or not, because only a hoarse gusty exhalation wheezed out.

Fuck this!

An attempt to sit bolt upright resulted in an awkward body-buck, forestalled by some kind of a restraint keeping her secured to the mattress.

“You finally woke up.” The voice was as familiar as the room. A voice she’d first heard, squalling from the next bassinet, the day they were both born.

Trevor—nose swollen and bruised—appeared at the side of her bed. She tried to speak but had no more luck than with the failed scream.

“Oh, yeah, about that.” With an abashed grin, he said, “I had them paralyze your vocal cords after they sealed the stumps. Figured otherwise, you’d yell and cuss a lot.”

She stared at him and couldn’t have spoken if she’d been able to.

“It’s okay, though,” he went on, gaze straying to her bandaged shoulders in an uncomfortably un-brotherly way. “They did a nice job. A real, real nice job.”

***

Days

After six days, the official national death toll topped six million. The unofficial, worldwide death toll was, and would likely always be, incalculable. There simply was just no way to know.

No government, organization, or agency was equipped to deal with such a crisis, not on the large scale or the small, let alone on the global. Car crashes, plane crashes, injuries, heart attacks, fires, falls. Even if a 911 call could get through, what was the use? The police and paramedics were as affected as everyone else.

Everyone—barring a very few, very rare exceptions—was as affected as everyone else. The richest and most powerful suffered the same six seconds of incomparable, incomprehensible, excruciating agony as the poorest and most destitute. Convicted murderer or innocent newborn babe, sweet little old lady or juvenile hoodlum, saint or sinner, it didn’t matter. The Painwave didn’t discriminate.

As was usually the case with disasters of such magnitude, the cities and areas of higher population density fared the worst in terms of overall damage. More people in less space, more traffic, overwhelmed emergency response services, incredible demand upon scarce resources . . . the panic, the chaos, the terror . . .

Even once the physical torment had passed, the psychological and societal fallout continued. And, in many ways, the fallout was far worse, setting not just matches but flamethrowers to the fuses of powder kegs of blame, paranoia, insanity, greed, and hate.

Smash-and-grab looters ran rampant, followed by opportunistic spree killers and roving rape-gangs and live-action Purge wanna-bes. Several had long been waiting, either eagerly or in grim prepper expectation, for the inevitable collapse of civilized society. Armed survivalists seizing and barricading strongholds . . . post-apocalypse cosplayers busting out their studded leather and Mad Max gear . . . bitterly disappointed zombie outbreak fans . . . scourging flagellants and virgin sacrifices, mass-suicide cults . . .

None of it exactly made humanity look good. Oh, there were occasional examples of heroism, goodness, and nobility . . . but these, also, were rare, few, and far-between.

A six-minute Painwave, affecting every living human soul with six seconds of pain, and the whole world went bugshit.

None more so than the megachurches.

For years, they’d been riding high, flush on cash and converts and self-satisfaction, thanks to what had happened at Lake Misquamicus. It was, their rationale went, irrefutable proof Hell was real. And if Hell was real, that meant Heaven must also be real, which meant God was real. Q.E.D. Maybe the specifics and details varied from religion to religion, but, overall, suck it, atheists and agnostics, the devout had been right all along.

Sure, they’d pitched a bitch fit when they got tapped to pay their fair share of taxes, but their smug rub-your-nose-in-it attitude gave them consolation. Thing was, during those years, the hellish phenomenon had been localized. Only a small garbage corner of a trashy garbage state, right? Florida Man had been making the news long before demons and devils got involved.

Now, though . . .

Now, it was another story. It wasn’t localized anymore. Not even they, in their vaunted “faith,” were immune. Which led back to the age-old obvious question: if God was real, why hadn’t He intervened? Why had He sat back and let them all suffer?

As if this weren’t the same God who’d drowned the entire planet in a fit of pique, sparing one rickety boat full of animals? As if this weren’t the same God who’d done nothing when an asteroid took out the dinosaurs? Q.E.D. on that.

At any rate, to say the Painwave shook the megachurches to their foundations would be putting it mildly. Not since the fall of the Tower of Babel had there been such a scattering schism.

On another note: for some, for those of particular masochistic inclinations—true masochists, not the casual spanky pull-my-hair kind—the Painwave’s incomparable experience proved an altogether different kind of torture for an altogether different reason.

Them? Oh, they went bugshit in an altogether different way . . .

***

When Mommy didn’t come home that day, Sherri guessed something bad must have happened.

At first, watching from the end of the dock poking out into the lake, it was better than a movie. There’d been bird-people, and a flying car, and fireworks, and explosions. And, if she hadn’t understood most of what the demon-king was saying, she’d giggled fiendishly when he yelled the F-word so super loud it echoed back and forth across the lake.

But then, yeah, there was a lot of screaming, and something went weird with the angry star in the sky, and after that, everything got all ominous and quiet.

No Mommy by dinnertime, or bedtime. No Mommy the next morning, making breakfast. No Mommy at all.

Sherri wasn’t a baby, though, jeezers; she could take care of herself! She ate a can of cold sgettios for dinner, put herself to bed, and made her own breakfast of frog-jelly toast. And it wasn’t as if she was all alone at the house. Daddy was there.

Not that Daddy was much fun anymore. All he did was hang upside-down on the wooden X, muttering and drooling. He wouldn’t eat or drink anything. His ouchies had gotten all oozy and gross, especially the ones on his weener-neener where Billy had hooked the fishhooks. The last time she’d checked, she saw eensy pink-black squirmy-wormies moving in the yellow pus. Eew.

Finally, some soldiers knocked at the door and told her about Mommy and Billy. One of them had a squishy pig nose and snuffle-snorted when he talked, which might have made her laugh if not for the bad news. Another had little pointy red devil-horns showing through her army hairdo.

They said things were still getting sorted out, but the queen would eventually decide what to do with her. Maybe put her in a foster home or have a neighbor adopt her. Sherri did wonder, but didn’t quite dare ask, why the queen didn’t adopt her herself. Then she could’ve been a princess!

In the meantime, they also said, she should just stay here and stay safe and behave, and people would stop by to check on her and bring groceries and stuff. Which was okay by her, if pretty boring.

Nobody to talk to, nobody to play with.

She’d hoped it might change when Mommy’s eggs hatched, even if it meant she’d have to take care of babies and do diapers. She made sure their heat-lamp stayed on, turned them over in the sand the way Mommy had showed her, and sometimes picked them up and shook them to make them hatch faster.

But, when they did hatch . . .

Okay, Billy could be a boogersnot, but he’d never tried for reals to actually kill her kill her. As soon as their shells cracked, it was snake-baby fighting time, hissing and biting and spitting poison and wide-stretching their little jaws to swallow each other whole. By the end, only two were left, and they escaped into the backyard before she could stop them.

Then she was alone again, alone and bored. Nobody to talk to, nobody to play with.

Once, she found a ragged black bird-wing washed up on the beach, and kept going back, thinking if she found another, she could put them on and learn to fly, but, no luck so far.

Instead, she saw something else bobbing facedown amid the skull-rocks in the blood-yucky shallows. It looked like . . . a dolly?

She snagged it out with a stick, and it was! A funny-cute greenish elf-goblin dolly! Soggy and stained from the lake, but a trip through the washing machine would take care of that; it always did for her stuffed animals after playing with Daddy.

When she picked it up, its eyes—big, dark, and round—opened. So did its little slit mouth.

“Whu . . . who are you?” it asked in a piping cartoon voice.

A talking dolly!

“I’m Sherri,” she said. “And you’re my new bestest friend!”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to Brad Tierney and Dan Johnson, fanboys extraordinaire; I know I only promised cameos, but I may have gotten a little carried away.

And to Becca Morgan, for letting me borrow Blaze; hope I did him justice, he was crazy fun.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Well, here we are again, and what a bumpy ride it’s been! Thank you for accompanying me on this strange journey, for the love and support and encouragement that helped keep me afloat during some difficult times. These past few years have been among the roughest of my life. Without this, without writing and reading and our community, I really don’t know if I would have been able to hang on.

Just having been able to write Lakehouse Infernal in the first place was and is a dream come true. Having it then go on to win the Splatterpunk Award? Those of you who were there for the ceremony and witnessed my blubbering wreck of an acceptance speech saw first-hand how much it meant to me . . . the validation, the acceptance, the knowledge that, whatever the fuck it was I was doing, I was doing it right.

So, of course, it only made me want to do it MORE! It gave me the confidence boost I needed to push myself further, challenge myself, really cut loose and go nuts and have fun. Like with Trench Mouth and The Night Silver River Run Red and several sicko ambitious short stories I might not have had the nerve to try otherwise.

And it also meant, for many reasons, I HAD to do a sequel. I mean, come on, the way Lakehouse ended? No damn way could I just leave it like that. Not when there was more story to tell! I needed to find out what happened next as much as I hope my readers did. I needed to follow up with these seriously fucked-up characters I’d so grown to love.

(Side note: it delights me, though it should probably concern me, how many folks were just rooting for June to finally get laid already; I hope, even with the way this one ended, it lived up to expectations.)

I initially wrote Lakehouse while enduring my living nightmare of sinus cancer and facial surgeries and radiation and hospitalizations and dental reconstruction. There were times I thought I wouldn’t be able to finish, wouldn’t be able to write anymore. But the book gave me something to hold onto—when you’re going through Hell, keep going!

Fast-forward a couple years, and things are looking better, things are settling down, I’m crawling out from under mountains of medical debt, I’m mostly a functioning person again. I’m roaring along on Warlock Infernal, having a great time, really starting to feel good about myself and my career, as in, even actually being able to think of it as a career.

Cue another massive monumental life-upheaval. Naturally. Because, fuck you, Christine, that’s why. Only it wasn’t my health taking a critical hit this time, but my mother. With the end result being I quit my night-shift job and moved myself and my cats from Oregon to California to be her full-time live-in caregiver . . . and to deal with sixty years’ worth of packrattery and neglect at the house that had once belonged to my grandparents (I shit thee not, they bought it in 1960 for $21,000; we found the original deed).

Needless to say, it’s been incredibly stressful, to the point I was starting to fear I wouldn’t be able to finish the book (sometimes, to the point I thought I’d have a complete mental breakdown, a possibility I still won’t rule out). My muse, however, insisted and persisted. I couldn’t abandon my various dynamic dysfunctional duos—Greg and Ethriel, June and Favius, Heck and Lorlinda, the Carmichael twins. I couldn’t let Lee down, or my readers, or myself.

Somehow, I did it. I made it. With the “written in 666-word increments” thing too; still gimicky as fuck, but, hey, it works! I hope you’ve enjoyed this second foray into my little pocket of Hell on Earth as much as I have. Will there be a third? Infernal Queen, maybe? I’d like to think so, but am a little leery about tempting fate!

—Christine Morgan

La Mirada, CA

February, 2022

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christine Morgan is a shameless Edward Lee fangirl who's been lucky enough to be allowed to play with his toys, as she's done in the Splatterpunk Award winning novel Lakehouse Infernal and now its sequel, Warlock Infernal.

Her works include the deep-sea chompy Trench Mouth, the pioneer snow monster White Death, the splatter western The Night Silver River Run Red, and enough short stories to fill several collections with everything from Vikings to steampunk to really nasty smut.

She currently lives in Southern California as her mother's full-time caregiver, where she also reviews, takes on edit gigs, gets bossed around by her cats, and makes weird crafts.

Table of Contents

- Part One: Minutes
- Part Two: Hours
- Part Three: Days
- Epilogue
- Author's Note