"Outside in the cold distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl..."
-Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower
Four tired shadows slid through the pre-dawn darkness of ground-level Khazan, lit by the torchlight of burning buildings and the clear beam of a motorcycle headlight. A woman with brilliant red hair lead the way, followed closely by two men, one middle-aged, the other little more than a teenager. The fourth stumbled close behind, breathing hard, a slender figure in what once had been an exquisitely tailored night-black suit. He lacked the conditioning of the three leaders, but still kept going, strung along by fear and force of will, if nothing else.
Stella walked with purpose, trying to look like she knew where she was going. Sam's motorcycle seemed to know, but discouraged any questions with a low, warning engine growl. Seryph could give a list of possible destinations as long as her arm, and none of them would necessarily be the right one. Bryn had been gone from Khazan for over forty years, and Lester didn't seem to care where they went, as long as they could get some rest.
Emerald eyes searching the shadows and side-streets that lead off from their vacant brick alley, she slid her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket. The jacket was still warm inside, and tingling life sluggishly returned to her long, pale, half-frozen fingers. The sky was clouded, as it should be in late winter, but no snow fell. She expected that it was afraid to.
Behind her, Seryph trotted amiably, his slender, careful-boned face passive, but she knew his half-lidded eyes were casing the alley with the practice of a prodigy of the sword, a man who had spent much of his life on the battlefield. The sword that hung at his side had been bloodied many times tonight. Bryn, behind and to her right, betrayed his exhaustion a touch more normally, but despite a yawn every few minutes, the fifty year old adolescent was holding up remarkably. All three were covered with small cuts and bruises. She had expected that. The hazard of walking through a war zone was, of course, that you would get involved in the war.
It came as no surprise to anyone that Lester was the one they had had to worry about. After the first hour, they had tried to put him on the motorcycle, but the machine had left no doubt in anyone's mind that it was meant to be ridden by one person, and that person was not currently in attendance.
Sam. Where was he? Her pink lips tightened into the hint of a worried frown. He could take care of himself, of course. If what they had run into so far was any indication, there was nothing he was likely to meet that could harm him. But there was always the risk that he had run into his brethren. This was their time, after all. In which case not only was Sam lost, but Phil as well, which left three of them. And she still had no plan.
She was about to quicken the pace, before Lester stopped and turned his narrow, elegant head to one side, thin, dark hair falling away from his face. "Did you hear that?"
She turned, one eyebrow arched curiously. "What?"
Lester shivered in spite of himself, but held her cold, green gaze with his own. "It sounded like music, far off. Getting closer, though."
"Music?" Bryn was incredulous. "What would someone be playing music out here for?" Seryph silenced him with a shake of the head, and pointed courteously to Stell
She was listening, eyes closed, head thrown back so that hair streamed down past her shoulders. In her companions' silence, she could hear them breathing, hear the quiet thud of their heartbeats and the thrumming eagerness of the spirit bound up inside Sam's motorcycle. Of course, there was the orange crackling of distant flame, and the screams of the wounded and the dying, never far from her ears in this place. But music? Not-
There. Her brows drew together as she caught the strains of a distant, trumpeting melody, echoing through the sky, tugging at her flesh, her bones, urging her to cast aside the weakness of the flesh and take to the sky, take to the hunt of the righteous. Skies stretched above her, the final battle of the Righteous Host below, and she could feel the battle-lust burn in her chest, the aching longing for wind against her wings, and the blood of enemies on her hands...
Her eyes snapped open, and her head fell forward to face the others. They waited, the silence only disturbed by the sudden eruption of a nearby skyscraper and the remembered cadence of the music. "A Hunt has been sent for us."
"How large?" Alone of all her companions, Seryph was completely unmoved. There was a strange impression of distance in his eyes, and his hand rested comfortably on the sharkskin hilt of his katana. Bryn was trying to look confident, and Lester was panicking outright, but Seryph stayed cool, and calm, and asked how many people... things... he would have to kill.
This had been going on for far too long. It was getting to them all, no matter how well they could hide it. Seryph wasn't even bothering to hide his own situation. He was becoming cold, hard, like a machine, but machines sometimes broke, and turned against their owners.
"Fifteen, perhaps twenty. Mostly lesser angels, but a few Archangelae, and one Cherubim." Her eyes levelly scanned the small party.
"No chance, then?"
She shook her head. "Not alone."
Lester was firmly settled in the midst of angry asphyxiation. "What the hell are we doing standing here, then? Let's get out of here!"
Stell's eyes slid away from Seryph to pierce the small, dark-clad businessman. "Mister LaCroix, they have a Cherubim with them. The Cherubim are the eyes of the heavenly host. They could follow us to the ends of the earth, and the ends of any other earth, if they wanted to. If they are looking for us, and they most certainly are, we could no more hide from them than we could outrun them." Lester cringed back from her stare. A long silence followed. In the distance, the sound of the Choir approached.
She took a long, ragged breath. The night was getting to her, as well. Dirt and blood, none of it her own, caked fingernails, hands, face, and feet. A long tear ran down her pants leg, where a claw had come too close for comfort. Her muscles ached, and her mind was rough, and she could feel the Voice coiled inside her, just waiting for an excuse to let itself out. The scary thing was, she admitted to herself, that she was looking for a way to let it out as well. The consequences of that, though, were something best not comtemplated for the moment. Heaven never forgot a slight, and if she started broadcasting her location throughout the ether for all to sense, she was going to be in a lot more trouble than one Choir could bring.
Above them, clouds roiled through the sky, flashing with flame and lightning, obscuring the stars, and even the black vault itself, from the city below. A flash of lightning illuminated a great, batlike silhouette for a moment, before it swept down for the street like a hunting falcon, wings tucked back to allow for greater speed, and disappeared into the night. The Choir grew louder. The others would be able to make it out distinctly any moment now.
Finally, Bryn cleared his throat, his katana sliding out of nowhere with the faint sound of tearing tissue as its edge pulled apart the small holes in Time itself. "So, want to place any bets as to how many we'll take down with us?"
Lester opened his mouth, presumably to say something like "You people are crazy", but the words never came out. That moment, the world was filled with an intensely negative growl from behind Stella. She whirled, and found the motorcycle sitting there, brights facing away from them into the night. The lights illuminated part of a sign, one of the kind that instructs one to follow directions to the next sign to get the full advertisement, and is generally passed on by motorists and pedestrians, each of which assume the tourists will keep up the sign-following slack.
These lights fell upon the word, F
Stell turned back to the others, who shrugged. She shrugged in response. In the silence, the music swelled, and far in the distance, she could just hear the sound of wings. By the look on their faces, they had heard it, too.
The motorcycle's engine roared, and it shot forward, a gleaming black lozenge in the pre-dawn alleyway. They raced after it, blood splashing on their pants legs as they ran through puddles of dark red fluid, leaving footsteps clear as day to any who could follow them. Of course, considering who their pursuers were, they would need no footprints. The wings grew louder.
Just as they nearly passed a side alleyway, the bike pulled a hard right, tilting so far over that it nearly collapsed onto the broken, blood-wet pavement. Stella, Seryph, and Bryn followed it effortlessly, but Lester slipped and fell, letting out a cry of surprise and pain. Immediately, he stumbled to his feet and ran after them, pants leg rent from knee to ankle, but the damage had been done. The song had changed. It was more urgent now, swelling, thirsty for destruction. Effortless wings of light streaked across the starless sky. They had heard.
And in the distance, another song joined the first: the howl of a pack. Demons had joined the hunt.
Stell swore under her breath, and quickened her pace, almost matching the motorcycle for a moment before it gunned into a higher gear. Her legs burned, lungs ached, and she felt something worming deep inside her mind, something she had not felt in a long time: fear. Fear, and power. The power whispered to her, between pained, rushing breaths. It would be so easy, to slip over, to burst from the human shell, to show these small creatures how a true angel worked for itself...
A growl rose in her throat, and the voice vanished, receding to its hiding place once again. The music was almost unbearable now, shivering the air around them into little splinters. Far behind them, a skyscraper erupted in a shower of broken glass and crystal as the Chorus passed, leaving trails of flame in the sky.
She glanced back, and groaned. Too close. Everyone was keeping up, even Lester, but they were too far from help, not that help would do them any good against a Chorus, especially with demons coming in to join the party. She turned her attention back to the road, and her breath caught in her throat. The motorcycle had lead them down a dead end. If anyone had chosen that moment to look, they would have seen twenty dots of brilliant light grow larger and larger in the sky behind them, like diving bombers...
The motorcycle roared straight at the wall... And THROUGH the wall... They followed it moments later, the holographic field prickling against their skin, and were inside.
But inside where? The cycle's headlamps glinted off of metal in the darkness, cold, inert, and old. Some of the buildings of Khazan were said to have been built in the First Days of the world. This one felt as though it was born eons before then, and it had seen much more in its days of life than most structures would in their dying. Light from the motorcycle's lamp shone through the dust-filled air as if through murky water.
She turned to Seryph, little more than a darker shadow in the blackness. "Where are we?"
He raised one eyebrow and shrugged.
Even here, the music followed them, muted, but still present, pounding in her chest. The Chorus had to be almost upon them by now, and the demons, too... They could cover ground almost as fast as the angels could sky, and evil was everywhere.
A voice boomed through the room, drowning out the music. BEHOLD
She turned to face it, and as she moved, the room faded about her, losing color, substance, and, finally, all reality. She stood upon an empty lot in the middle of Khazan, surrounded by buildings. The brick wall through which they had passed was gone as well, leaving a clear view of the dank, blood-splattered alley beyond. A pack of imps rounded the bend several hundred yards away and loped towards them, eyes burning, tongues lolling out of slack-jawed, sharp-toothed mouths.
And above.
She looked up, and blinked in terror, like a deer transfixed by the headlights of an oncoming truck. The Chorus descended, lightning crackling about their perfect forms, leaving a wake of ionized air. In their center, the Cherubim burned, its sleepless, tireless eye scouring the earth, locking the besieged city of Khazan into reality with a gaze that pierced through the soul. They fell in a perfect V formation, and she could feel the heat of their swords as they descended. She knew that she should fight, should run, and yet for some reason she remained rooted in her spot.
The angels fell closer...
The demons ran on...
And everything happened at once. Nebulae of pure darkness opened up in the center of the Chorus, sucking in light, souls, life, everything. The music struck a dischord, missed harmony echoing through the spheres like iron nails scraping upon a chalkboard. The Cherubim pulsed once, frantically, and erupted in darkness that spiraled inward to consume itself.
Down on the ground, the imps ran forward, and died, sliced into thousands of pieces, chunks of flesh, hair, and claw hanging from the nanofilament wire as it decayed and floated away on the fire-born breeze. A few stragglers managed to see, and avoid, but the apparently-seamless alley sprouted machine guns, seventy-caliber rounds tearing through the fleeing creatures before they moved more than a foot.
The room closed around them once more. The process, as a whole, had taken less than five seconds. Overhead lights erupted into full brilliance, and they stood in what appeared to be an elaborate hotel lobby, all white marble and red carpets, with a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Steps led up to the second floor, and a side hallway declared its purpose with the standard, backlit "RESTROOM" sign. Stell felt as if she really needed one right at the moment.
In fact, there was only one incongruity about the welcoming appearance of the place. Instead of a reception desk, there stood in the center of the hall a scale model of an immense building, rising out of the depths of Khazan, high and huge enough to rival the JLA Towers themselves. Of the person who had spoken, there was no sign.
Seryph cleared his throat, turing about in search of their benefactor, his katana unsheathed and gleaming in the light. "Who are you?"
The scale model of the building glimmered, and spoke in a voice that echoed and issued from every corner, every stair, every leaf on every fake plastic plant.
I am the Grimspire. I bid you welcome, Mister Gibbons, into my house.
Azaquiel lay naked upon a bed of flames and made love to the Lady of Lust. Her nails raked in ecstasy across the white skin of his back, and he licked the sweat of her belly with a long, serpentine tongue. Their groans of pleasure were consumed by the crackling of the inferno.
Then there was silence, and the crackling of smokeless flames.
Some time later, the sound of metal striking metal shivered through the chamber of desire. Azaquiel raised an embossed silver lighter to the tip of his cigarette, and breathed deeply. Sheets of fire rolled about him, and about the relaxed, luxuriant body of Astarte reclined next to him, and they were not burned.
Astarte smiled, and stretched like a cat, one finger idly feathering down the curves of her body. Her voice hovered halfway between a purr and a sigh. "It's been so long..."
Her lover turned his knife-boned face towards her, and nodded, black eyes content. "Yes." Traces of black hair clung to his forehead, cemented in their place by sweat and joy. She reached for him again, and he flipped the cigarette off to one side. It traveled less than an inch before the fires consumed it, and they danced once again in each other's arms.
A long time. More sighs. Another cigarette.
Astarte pushed herself up upon the headboard of bone, her long red hair falling in sweat-slick curtains about her body. "Do you have another?"
Taking a long drag from the Lucky Strike, he breathed out a smoke ring which hovered in the air for a moment before the fire tore it apart. "Of course." He raised one bare, strong-muscled arm, made an intricate gesture of fingers and wrist, and a rectangular white box with a red dot upon the front sat in his palm as if it had always been there.
He shook out a Lucky Strike and handed it to Astarte, Maskim of Lust, who lit it with a flame brighter than suns that emerged from the tip of her forefinger. She took a drag, and breathed out a cloud of smoke that split into thousands of demons, who ran and dreamed and copulated in the brief moments before the hot winds of Hell tore them apart. "What have you been doing all these years, one who walks?"
Azaquiel smiled. "You know, the usual. This and that."
She laughed, and he laughed with her.
"I get around."
"So do I." Her pink tongue wet dark red lips as she shook some ash off onto the floor, where it flared brightly and vanished.
"I noticed, Lady. I, however, am not burdened with being an exemplar. I go when I wish, where I wish, and none stop me. I stayed for a time on the planet Earth, moved through the core of the Milky Way, walked through the place of crystals and light, where beauty is cast in a shadow. I love a little, I learn a little, I fight for a cause, if there is one worthy to fight for. I work in a pizza parlor, I work as a courier, I work as a killer. Last year, I learned to play the banjo." He shrugged. 'It's a good life, all things considered."
There was a long pause. Astarte watched in interest as one of her homunculi of smoke leaves its partner and walked calmly into the nearest bonfire, then obliterated the remaining figures with the fire that pierces. She breathed in the noxious smoke of the Lucky Strike, and thought. After a while, she spoke. "Do you ever..."
She trailed off, and he turned to face her, bottomless black eyes staring into bottomless green. "Of course, Lady. Every day. But, still, it's better this way. I walk in my circles, you walk in yours, and whenever the twain shall meet, we can at least look forward to some great make-up sex. But in the meantime, we walk our own paths."
She smiled, and her green, emotionless eyes sparkled wetly. "Of course. But, now, the circle in which you walk is about to come to an end."
He nodded, his attention focusing for a moment entirely on the cigarette between his thin lips. "I noticed. Kind of hard to miss, you know, with your imps running around rending everything in sight."
"Not my imps. I abhor the little creatures. Despicable, crawling things. This is the twenty-first century, after all..." Her smile widens, and the flames highlight every curve and swell of her perfect body, licking alabaster skin as tenderly as Azaquiel himself might, were he not currently smoking a cigarette. "And, I must confess, I've always preferred the succubi."
"I never would have guessed."
She opened her mouth to make some reply, but cut off before the words could escape her lips. Her jaw hung limply for a moment, mouth a dark O of surprise.
"Hold that thought..." Azaquiel smiled and moved in, but before he could make any progress, her eyes hardened, and her face assumed a decidedly businesslike cast. She pulled away, and sat straight up, swearing. "Something wrong?"
"The angels are mobilizing. They were going after LaCroix, as were we. Our forces appear to have collided."
One of the man's eyebrows arched in question. "And what do the Lords of Heaven and Hell want with a simple mortal?"
"He possesses a great deal of control over the outer levels of reality. It would be preferable for us to use his armies to destroy them, without having to distract ourselves to make war over petty pieces of intercosmic real estate."
"You may find it difficult to capture him, Lady."
"And why is that?" Her eyes narrowed again. "Is this-"
"Not my doing. But it is given to me to know that LaCroix has protection. The Last Horseman is with him, as is the Avatar of Time, the former Avatar of the Universe... And one who is ancient of days."
She smiled. "How interesting. I am sure the Horsemen will be glad to find that I have discovered what they lost. And I am sure the Legions will be looking for a challenge."
He shook his head. "Be careful, Lady. The last of those of whom I speak..." He shrugs. "She has power. Great power."
"Whatever it is, it cannot match the might of Hell." She paused, and pierced him with the stare that burns. "She?"
"A woman I knew a long time ago. Don't trouble yourself, Astarte. Ours was a business relationship, nothing more."
She smiled a crocodile's smile. "All my relationships are business relationships."
He grinned, and reached for her, and she gasped as his touch played like electricity upon her flesh. The cigarette fell from her fingertips, and he cast his away into destruction. As his hand slid over her, his voice whispered, low and urgent in her ear. "Than let us forget business for a time, Lady."
Her only response was a rising purr of pure delight, as she moved to embrace him.
Shadows pass through darker shadows. In the back alleys of Khazan, if you had eyes, they would be of no use to you.
Sam walks alone in the night, and sees perfectly. He has been walking for some time by now, with Phil's broken, blooded body slung over his shoulder. Every so often, the dead weight groans and shifts in a way that would be reassuring to anyone who could not tell the difference between life and death.
Sam does not need to be reassured. He has seen too much of both.
In that place, at that time, the only noise is the even tap-tap-tapping of Scythe-haft upon broken pavement. Sam's feet make no sound.
With any luck, the party has made the GrimSpire by now. The bike is not the one he rode for centuries, but it rested for a time in the hostel of the Shallow Guild of Bleak Sunrise, and has taken some power from that place. It is intelligent. It will guide them, and protect them.
Of course, Stella (as she calls herself now) can take care of herself. Sam worries that, if this becomes necessary, she will cease to be Stella. It has taken her eons to build up an illusion of humanity around the core of her soul. If she used her power fully, that would do as well for her as a dyke made of green twigs against a tidal wave.
A few meters in front of him, a pack of Imps crouch, staring at him, and at Phil, with hungry eyes. They advance slowly, like tigers, eyes curious and hungry. One of them licks its lips.
Sam raises his head, and the stars of his eyes gleam out of the empty eyesockets of a grinning skull.
The Imps turn to run, but a blue-white blade, finer than love, manifests at the top of the Scythe, and Sam brings it around in a wide, gleaming arc. There is a momentary flash of discontinuity, and the Imps disappear, their souls torn asunder and scattered into the cold darkness.
For a brief moment, there is a contest. The Scythe tugs at Sam, urging him to move onward, to destroy again, and again, to lay waste to this world, and to the world beyond. He could stride the universe, screaming his motorcycle through the vastness of space and aethyr, and bring an end to the failed experiment of existence...
He returns the Scythe to his side. The blade winks once, reflecting an unseen light, and vanishes.
Sam walks on, in that place of darkness, and there is no sound but the tap-tap-tapping of Scythe-haft on broken pavement.
"You'll have to do... better than that..." Sam Justice faced the Demon Lord, drawing in deep gasps of breath through tightly-clenched teeth, in the splinter-and-shard ruins of Mrs. Withers' boarding house. It rose over him, magnificent in its black chasis, hanging with flesh-ripping hooks, its head like that of a newborn child, with eyes red as the death of worlds. Far below the segmented exoskeleton, a long, scorpion-like tail lashed at the debris. Mrs. Withers' surprised head rested, cleaved neatly in two, at his feet. All around him, the Imps and dark-shadow servitors clustered, fangs reaching hungrily for him, only held back by the presence of the Lord's will.
It spoke in the voice of his first love, and its words were soft. "Justice. Look around you. Your life, brief as it was, is over. Join us, and live for all time."
Justice's clothes hung limply from his tough form, trench-coat and dark shirt and pants rent into ribbons by the first explosion of glass, when they had come through the wall, and the floor, and the ceiling, all at once, all hungry. His cattle prod lay upon the floor far behind him, shattered by the Lord's spined, whiplash tail, a small pile of dead Imps and servitors slumped next to it.
He had fought nobly, he had fought well, he had fought viciously, and in the end, he had fought dirty, but in the end there had been too many of them. He had amassed quite a pile, but then the Lord had come, its eyes burning, unforgiving, and unrelenting. His chest and legs were covered with scratches and stripes from the whip-tail, and the back of his left fist burned with the acid of demon blood. Still, somehow, he was able to stare straight into the Lord's face and say with a level, earnest voice, "Fuck you."
"Come now, Justice. Where has you life in the mortal world taken you? Your woman left you for another. You had your day of strength in the arena, but in the days since then, what has happened? Who would know your face now, if I were to show it to them?"
"Fuck you."
The Demon Lord edged itself forward on needle-sharp legs, rising to its full fourteen-foot height against the burning flame of the sky. The hairless head of a child stared down at him, and its lips twisted into a sharp-toothed grin as it spoke. "You could come to us, Justice. I could show you the world, show you power, show you what it means to be a being of true might. You would COME again, and your power would be greater than anything Khazan could imagine."
"Fuck you."
"Justice, Justice. Do you have any idea how it pains me to talk to someone who will not respond... civilly?" The tail twitched around and traced a long, wicked scar across his back. He barely winced. The pain was distant streak across his soul. "You are nothing. You are less than nothing. You are mortal: limited, conceited, pathetic. You live on your own, you watch cartoons incessantly, you try and be noble, and look where it has gotten you. Why didn't you ever grow up, Justice? Take the step now, and live in the glorious flame. Leave behind your pathetic, juvenile mortal life, and come with us. Walk down the ages, and tread upon the heavens. You've failed. I offer you a once-in-an-eternity chance, Justice. You can rule, or you can burn."
"Fuck you." Rage stirred deep inside Sam Justice, rising from the depths of his stomach to the crown of his head. It tingled in his palms, pressed behind his eyes, oozed out the wounds which crisscrossed his back, chest, and legs. His eyes burned, although whether from rage or sorrow, he couldn't tell.
The Lord swelled closer, interested. "What will you do now then, Justice? Stand and wait for the end? Try some last action of defiance? What can you do against us, mortal man?"
Sam Justice did not speak, as the rage continued to rise, and rise again, towering through his soul, burning in his eyes, and with the rage came power. It poured through his nerves, ran like molten gold through his veins, and his soul swelled in time with it.
The Lord laughed, but before it could speak again, Sam Justice dropped into a fighter's crouch and brought his hands out before him, wrists linked, palms blooming outward to face the great, insectile thing. His voice was low, and echoed from the rubble and glass piled high around him, resonated from every dead and dying body, reverberated off of every pool of blood. "KAME..."
The Lord smiled, and leaned forward, licking its lips in blissful anticipation.
"HAME..."
It laughed, like nails scraping over a chalkboard. "How pathetic. He actually believes..."
But belief is a powerful thing. The world began to shake, small rocks bouncing off the piles of rubble, rising a few inches into the air before sheer pressure reduced them to a fine powder.
"HA!!!!!" Light burst from Sam Justice's fingertips, brilliant and blinding, tearing through space far faster than normal energy. It slammed into the Lord, moving so fast that it seemed slow, and a scream echoed over the cackling of the watching demons.
When the light cleared, there was nothing left of the former Lord but a memory and a scream that held the air far longer than normal sound could have done. The Imps rushed forward to destroy Sam Justice, but they found only a burned, blackened skeleton, wrists fused together, palms outstretched, eye sockets staring vacantly upon a burned and ruined world.
Sam Justice had moved on.
Darkness, and silence.
The last thing Phil remembered was the pain, burning, biting, crushing, from everywhere and nowhere at once. Then, nothing, and now, darkness, and silence.
Was he dead? If so, this was a piss-poor excuse for an afterlife. He would have expected the devils to start in on him by now. Of course, even the afterlife could be having problems, these days.
But he still hurt, in his mind, like there was a body a long way away, one that he would have to return to. Not dead, then.
Not dead. Then what?
Then. Starlight and rain on blood-slick faces, grizzled, young, old, all staring vacantly, looking for some excuse. They had been used, destroyed, pissed on, and needed satisfaction, before they went down to the grave. As he lowered his guard, a voice echoed through his mind, calling him in words that transcended words.
Now. Blue-white light bloomed in the dark place outside, and yet within, Phil's mind. He shrunk away, shielding his unprepared eyes from the brilliance, but it shone through an arm transparent as a plastic bottle. For some reason, he did not find this particularly remarkable. After all, he had left his body behind.
The light drew closer, and he noticed something odd about it. The brilliance did not fade. There was light, and where the light was not, there was darkness, the interface a stark line, not intervening shades of gray. In the core of the light, something moved, a trick of shadow and light that played itself out much like a woman's face.
The voice, when it came, was that of a woman as well, old, wise, beautiful, and infinitely patient. "Phil."
He cleared his throat, tugging nervously at the collar of the carbon-black JLA jumpsuit as if trying to rearrange an uncomfortable tie. "Um. Excuse me. You wouldn't happen to know if this was the afterlife by any chance? 'Cause I've got a sizable bet going about the temperature down here..."
Laughter echoed through the void.
"Oh, so I'm funny, is that it? A whole month's salary is riding on this, it is."
The laughter gradually drew to a close, and Phil stared off into the light, arms crossed jauntily over his broad chest. "This is not the afterlife. You are not dead, yet. If your... companion... gets you to suitable help in time, and he will, you will survive with nothing worse than minor scars."
"Give me something to show at parties, then."
"If there are any parties left."
Phil nodded solemnly, business taking over. "Yes."
The voice changed tone to match him, but lost none of its age, or patience. It simply became careful and calculating as well. "Phil. I have brought you here to make a proposition."
He laughed, his eyes flashing gallantly in the reflected light. "So you are a demon after all, eh? The old 'sell your soul and get your heart's desire' trick, eh? You'll get nothing from me."
"No, Phil. I am not a demon." It was shocked, almost hurt, if he could go so far as to say that a disembodied, omnipresent voice could sound hurt.
"What are you, then?"
Discontinuity. The darkness stops, and a city begins around them, buildings appearing as if they had always been there, spires scraping through the sky to the stars themselves, cars and repulsorcraft screaming through the air, billboards and hovering, animatronic signs pulsing light into the eyes of millions of passing beings of all sizes and races. Billions of lights shone from the skyscrapers, from the houses, from the suburbs, and behind every one of those brightly-lit windows, there lived a story, people, life. He knew this city. Its towers were his friends, his homes, his fiefdom. There, in Central Park, was the statue of Whisper erected by the JLA long years ago. Under a mile away, the Arena flowered like a deadly, reversed daffodil, huge and domed, blimps, dirigibles, and hoverplatforms jockeying for the most valuable piece of aerospace in the entire city. He knew the place long before its name was spoken out loud.
"I am Khazan."
One eyebrow arched up inquisitively. "You mean, like an artificial intelligence?"
"No." The word was almost on the verge of laughter, but did not quite cross the line. "You have heard that cities have souls? That this is the reason Moscow is not London, London not Vienna, Vienna not San Francisco, because their souls are as different as those of two people?"
"I've heard it now."
"Then know that sometimes cities wake up, when they are in pain, or when they are about to die. The vengance of a city, the death of a city, is a great and terrible thing."
"I haven't found many things in this life that are great without being terrible."
Ignoring the comment, it pressed on. "I am awake. This present trouble has awakened me, and I find myself in great pain. It is not yet my time to die."
"Everyone believes that, before the end."
"But I know it. The days of all cities are numbered, by their own kind if by no one else, and the end is preceeded by a long period of pain, and diminishment. Never before has a city ended so abruptly, at the height of its power. You understand."
It was not a question, but Phil responded anyway, crossing his two well-muscled arms across a broad chest, transparent as glass. "Yes."
"I must live. In order to do so, I need an agent, an avatar, someone to channel my consciousness and preserve my life."
"And you chose me."
"There will be... compensations."
Phil turned away from the light, and his dark eyes fell upon the gleaming, metallic mass of Khazan arrayed beneath him. He spoke without turning, lips barely moving. "I'm sorry. You've got the wrong man."
"Phil..." The name was more urgent this time, almost pleading, but it trailed off as he whirled to face the light once again.
"Christ! You saw what I did out there! If you really are Khazan, you know what your people just did to me. I could have torn through them. You saw them, you know. Little people, ragged, torn clothes, torn bodies, and me, leader of the Just-Us League, one of the best fighters anywhere. And I let them tear me apart. I didn't even fight back. Do you know how that felt? Do you have any idea what that meant?" He drew himself up to his full, two-meter height, muscles swelling against the suddenly tight black jumpsuit, eyes burning with an inward fire. Far beneath him, the city watched impassively, and life continued on. The light glowed without pause.
"Yes."
A smile slowly broke Phil's hard face, and a tired twinkle dawned in his eye. "Good. I thought you might."
Deep within the light, a woman's face smiled inscrutably, and raised its eyebrow, but no sound issued forth. From below, perhaps, for a moment, the sounds of the city congealed into something quite like laughter.
He sagged, his eyes rolled back into his head and closed, and his transparent body hovered in midair for a moment before it vanished.
The lobby of the SLJ Towers had been the project of hundreds of artists, drawn from all over the multiverse by the promise of riches, a name chiseled in granite on the wall, and the eternal memory reserved for the works of great men and women, even when they themselves are forgotten. It shone with black marble and silver highlights and ran with rivers of light, the great wishing well in the center of its floor perennially serene and calm. Its water itself was a work of art, sculpted by molecular artists from realms beyond the shortest wavelengths of the human eye, flawless and silver, designed to comfort, to envelop, to please.
Now the black marble was splintered, the silver molten, the light scattered across the spectrum. The wishing well ran with blood in all its variety, silver, rainbow, red. Dead forms of angels, demons, and humans lay on top of one another, mixed with the shattered exoskeletons of the SLJ's security bots. Outside the front gate, the battle still waged on, the few surviving angels, lead by a figure of radiance and command, tearing into a legion of spiders and bats and Imps and a great, thorned form sliding from victim to victim in an arc of blood and sweat, leaving tears in his wake.
DragonFang pulled back and turned to Pockets, who hugged her pillow expectantly and looked up at him with bright children's eyes. He shook his head, lips pressed together, eyes gleaming red. His left hand clenched into a fist, tight enough that even he could feel the nails biting into his palm.
He remembered when the lobby had been built, years ago. He had helped oversee the construction, seen the pool when it had filled itself. Seeing the place like this was difficult. Once, a long time ago, he had watched a dragon die. Now, he felt that pain again.
"DF?"
Her voice, small and piping as it was, pulled him back to the present. He shook his head. "No. Not out that way. There's still fighting going on, and I don't trust these sons of bitches to stay dead." She shook her head, and he licked his lips. "If I Turned in here, I'd be crushed. Even a Dragon isn't strong enough to shoulder off an entire skyscraper when the foundations are removed, and there's no way I can get you out with the fighting outside as thick as it is." While his last words edged out of his mouth, there was a scream, and something that had once been the top half of a human blurred through the air in a mist of red and white, and splattered against the wall. DragonFang continued as if he had not heard, or seen. "So, the front is out."
"We're stuck here, then?" She sounded like a scared child, true, but there was steel in that voice, below everything else. Her fingers tightened white on the pillow.
"No. There's one other way out." Pockets raised a questioning eyebrow. He explained quietly, hoping none of the combatants outside were close enough to hear. Dragons had particularly acute senses of hearing, but he didn't know anything about these demons. They couldn't fight very well, but how well could they hear? Or smell? "Through the roof. Once we get up there, I transform, and you get to ride dragonback to safety."
"Sounds fun."
He laughed, low and barking. "You should feel lucky. The last three people who stepped on my back didn't live to step off again."
"I guess I should be flattered, then."
He sighed. "Cute." A slight pause in the fighting outside, the roar of battle dying down to little more than a whisper. "Let's move."
Seryph nodded to himself, slowly resheathing his katana. "Grimspire. Yes."
Lester blinked, his eyes wide and wild. "You know this thing?"
Bryn stared openly at the model building, immense even by Khazan's standards. "Who..." He paused, shook his head, and tried again. "What is Grimspire?"
I am myself.
Stell turned to Seryph, the same question shining in her eyes. Seryph grinned wryly, and produced words out of thin air as only an English teacher can. "Think of it as the Flying Dutchman of buildings. I don't know where it came from, but it's a law of its own. It owes allegiance to no creature but itself. I can't even guess how your skeletal friend got it to agree to take us in." He turned the question back on the miniature monolith, lacking anywhere else to put it, but the building did not seem offended.
He got me something, once. There are many things a gigantic, nearly omnipotent weapons factory can do for itself, but going into a supermarket is not one of them. Stell was about to ask what a building would ever need from the supermarket, before it continued. I speak, of course, metaphorically. I owe our mutual acquaintance a favor. That, and I dislike this new change in the order of things. I am... accustomed... to Khazan as a city, and I should dislike seeing that change. It would bring me displeasure. The finality of that tone suggested that "displeasure" in fact meant something incredibly violent, incredibly painful, and incredibly prolonged.
Lester laughed. Now that they were back inside surroundings that approached his opinion of civilization, he had changed dramatically. The half-crazed fear of the last few hours was gone entirely, and his stance grew more forward, almost arrogant, with each passing moment. "Do you have communications systems?"
Of course.
Lester's smile widened. Before he could speak again, Stell stood in front of him, staring deep into his arrogant, cold blue eyes with her own deep green. "Don't."
His left eyebrow rose a fraction of an inch. "Why shouldn't I? One word from me, and the Outer Regions would descend on Khazan like a pack of vultures."
"And be slaughtered." She shook her head. "Right now, the only reason your people haven't fallen is because the Eyes haven't turned in their direction. The only thing you're doing is holding things together, keeping the outer probabilities from destroying themselves as Khazan is thrown into turmoil."
Bryn stepped forward, placing himself directly in between the two forms. "She's right. Have you seen the size of those armies out there? We've gotten lucky so far. The only reason we're even still alive is that the big people haven't been able to find us."
"And that just went out the window." Three pairs of eyes turned to stare at Seryph, leaning nonchalantly against the scale model of the Spire. His eyes remained fixed upon Stella as his fingers traced the swells and outlines of gun emplacements, windows, and elevator shafts upon the dull metal surface. "Didn't it?"
It took a force of will to prevent Stell's heart from jumping up into her chest. Instead, she turned to face Seryph, and mutely nodded.
Behind her, Lester and Bryn both spoke at once. "What?!"
She shoved her hands nervously into the pockets of her jeans, and stared at the floor. The room resounded with the silence of people awaiting an explanation. Finally, she sighed, and raised her head to Seryph. Exhaustion crouched in the lines of her face. "There was a Cherubim in the party of angels that was hunting us. They aren't called Sleepless Eyes for nothing. Everything it saw, everything it sensed, through the moment of its destruction, was passed on to the Archae. They'll be here soon, and if they're here, then the demons will know, and they'll be here." She swallowed, licked her lips, and stared back at Seryph. "In another few hours, this whole place will be a war zone. The Spire should protect us for a little while, but-"
I will protect for quite some time. It will be... fun... to see aetherial creatures pounding on my walls. A good laugh, for the first time in centuries.
Stell shook her head, eyes darting from wall to potted plant, then back to the miniature spire, as she tried to trace the origin of the voice. "You don't know what you're getting yourself into. We can't stay here."
My dear, of course I do, and of course you can. This is the safest place for you, now. If you leave, you'll be hunted, and there's no place for you to run to, this time. I am the only freehold operating in this city. The others left hours ago. And, whether you leave or not, they will still try and destroy me for helping you. The voice sounded more smug than fatalistic. As I said, it will be amusing.
Stell opened her mouth to protest, but before she could speak, Lester had taken a step forward, and was speaking. "Of course, we accept your offer of hospitality. Thank you."
The spire did not reply.
Lester nodded, and turned back to Stell, his voice a low whisper. "What are you, crazy?"
She glared at him, and he flinched away from her eyes. "I was trying to save the life of a freehold. His kind, no matter how twisted and evil, are rare. If we survive this..."
"Which we won't unless we get some protection, and soon." He placed a hand on her shoulder and bent forward to stare into her eyes. "Listen..."
Stella brought her hand around in a tight arc and brushed off Lester's arm with enough force to cause him to take a step back. "You are the last person I would ask for advice here, LaCroix. We've carried you this far partly because they wanted you, and we can't allow them to have anything they want that badly, and partly out of simple human decency, which I'm running really short on at the moment. Just..." With a frustrated sigh, she turned away from him, one arm remaining behind to brush off his furtive attempt to catch hold of her shoulder again. Green eyes fixed upon a piece of lithographed modern art on the lobby wall: A rotted orange, sitting upon the edge of a swimming pool tinted with the toxic glitter of an oil slick.
Behind her, Seryph straightened in a barely audible rustle of black cloth. "We're all tired here. Maybe the best thing right now would be to catch some sleep..."
At the mention of sleep, Stell felt her legs shake beneath her. It had been hours since she had allowed herself to feel just how tired she was. Even before the late-night run from demonic and angelic hordes, she had been exhausted. Now, Grimspire's cold marble floor looked very comfortable. Repressing a yawn, she turned back to Seryph, pointedly avoiding Lester's thin, bedraggled form. "Yeah. Sleep sounds good about now."
Then sleep you shall have. Bedrooms have been created for your use, and you may sleep unobstructed. You are probably the only beings in this realm to have the pleasure.
"Thank you." Stell thought it had been herself that spoke, but it could just as easily have been Bryn, Seryph, even Lester... or all at once. She needed to get some sleep. She wasn't as young as she used to be.
One of the exit archways flickered and began to glow a faintly noticeable blood-red, and when the Spire spoke again, the voice came distinctly from that direction. Right this way, please.
Fortieth floor. DragonFang shook his head, and wiped a strand of dark, blood-black hair out of his eyes. Couldn't they have made the SLJ towers just a bit shorter? Surely ten stories would have been enough for a super-team, if they packed it in a bit... But noooo, they just needed to have the third-tallest building in Khazan, next to the JLA HQ and the KOMBG Center. He turned back to Pockets. "Are you all right?"
The girl nodded, one arm clamped firmly on the white metal railing of the clinically polished staircase. She was breathing hard, her pajamas dark with sweat and demon blood, but her eyes were still hard and focused, the grip on the pillow as strong as ever. DF smiled in approval, the grin widening into an expression of genuine amusement as she looked away from his long, needle-pointed teeth.
"I'm fine."
"Good." DF turned his attention back to the stairs, booted feet taking them two, three, sometimes four at a time. "We've got another fifty stories to go. At least."
The girl made no reply, and for a moment he continued up the stairwell, before her voice called him back. "Wait!"
He turned all the way around this time, looming to his full eight feet over her slight form. "What?"
She put one finger to her lips, and motioned down the stairs behind them, towards the ruined lobby and the still-raging battle. DF nodded iratably. "Yes, I can hear them."
"No. Not them." She shook her head. "Others."
DF's eyes narrowed as he focused his attention outwards, through his ears and into the world. The battle raged on below, of course. More warriors had arrived on both sides, and the entire thing was rapidly degenerating into a bloodbath. If they were lucky, he and Pockets would make the top before one of the contestants decided to get trigger-happy and start taking out the foundations of nearby buildings. But that wasn't what Pockets was worried about... Closer. Further up... only a few floors below them... Pounding noises, light clicking sounds, the faint screech of hooves and talons digging into a pseudomarble floor...
Demons. Hunting. His eyes shot open.
"Shit." Below, the click-thumping quickened in pace, drawing closer and closer... "Kid, it's time to find out how fast you can run."
Sam walked down East Ninty-Seventh Street, with Phil supine on his shoulder. Blood dripped upon the pavement, trickling off in scarlet rivulets to join the thick flow of waste that clogged the gutter. The Scythe tapped rhythmically upon the pavement, and deep beneath flowing night-black robes, things that might have once resembled feet scratched over the rough road.
Far above, he heard angels pass over, their song faster and more urgent than usual, soaring against the stars in waves of flame. The song spoke of things - the death of kindred, a place, a time. Images wove through the chords. Deep within vacant eyesockets, the twin sparks of his pupils flared as he recognized Stella, Seryph, Bryn, Lester. They had failed to get to the Spire before being discovered. This changed things.
They had not recognized Stella yet. This was good.
They had recognized Grimspire. This was not good. Both sides would rally to destroy a freehold, especially if there was something they wanted within.
Within the dark cowl, he tilted his skull to the side for a moment. Night air coiled around him. In the distance, something dying screamed like a cat in the night. He straightened then, and slid to the left, standing to the far side of the gutter. The shadows of a red brick building embraced him.
The sound started as a low rumble, felt through the concrete more than heard, then built, crescendoing until one could make out the sound of thousands of feet pattering against the road. A light in the distance swelled and approached, dark shapes appearing in its core, little more than blurs at first, becoming distinct as they passed over stone, rubble, and broken bodies. They were the Kh'rakh'hai, slender, man-shaped and little taller than a man, black, spiny limbs a blur as they covered the ground. Electricity crackled through air ionized by their passage, striking the walls and floor of the alleyway, causing the world to shine with a ferocious, Kirlian-esque aura. Their claws raked the ground, their eyes writhed with the maggots that fed upon their insides, and their teeth raked and tore at the air, like horses champing at a bit. They were the pack, the bringers of destruction, and they were coming for the Grimspire.
A blade flashed blue-white in the shadows of a red-brick building. The maggots in their eyes rose up to look...
It was the last thing they ever saw.
Sam stepped out from the shadows, and walked faster. They would be looking for him, too, now. Things were happening more swiftly than anticipated.
Soon, his brethren would come.
In a brush of dark robes over smoking, ruined pavement, he was gone.
Seryph stood alone in the large room, a black silhouette in the night, his face and hands tiny pools of gray-white light. The silence was broken by the massive discharge of Grimspire's gun in the distance, like a bomb detonating over a small city. As if on cue, he moved then, the katana blossoming from its sheath to cut the air, hands spreading out like the wings of a crane, sword tucked beneath one arm like a beak. Hips twisted and he spun, blade unfolding to describe a half-arc in the air, then reversing and striking behind him. In a spin of hair, flesh, and flapping clothing, he spun again, like a top, like a whirlwind, dropping into a crouch to strike at an imaginary opponent's hamstring, then cutting up across another's chest. He painted with his sword, he danced with his mind, with the silence, with the darkness.
Images rose within his head : flames, the face of a dying angel, eyes open and innocent like a child's, sword burning in its hand. The crack of a Tartarean's neck as Sam snapped it. The piles of bodies surrounding Bryn's cell. Lester's impeccable black shoes treading through puddles of blood... The girl, his date to the Grand Ball, whose name he didn't even know...
As he moved, tears left burning tracks down cheeks of stone.
After some time, he stopped, sheathing the sword with a spinning flair, and, not turning to face the door, spoke. "Well?"
Leaning against the doorjamb, clad in a silver-gray silk robe which she must have dredged up from somewhere within the Spire's wardrobe, hair swept back from her high forehead, Stella smiled. "Couldn't sleep. I decided to go for a walk."
Seryph laughed, turned, and walked towards her. "I know what you mean. It was just too much."
She straightened and stepped inside the dark room, the fabric of the robe sliding audibly over her skin. "That... what you just did with the sword. It was beautiful."
In a whisper of steel, the katana was out, separating the distance between them, Seryph's hand firmly closed around the handle. She didn't flinch at the sword, or at Seryph's piercing blue eyes within his simple, no-nonsense face. "I kill people with this. I learn how to kill people. I practice killing. That's the first rule of the sword: you kill people with it." He shook his head, and the steel flashed as he slammed it back into its sheath. Something distant shone in his eye. "And out there, right now, people are dying." His laugh was barking and harsh, but there was no hilarity in his face as he turned away from her and walked away, into the darkness. His voice echoed off the walls of the chamber. "And you know what the worst part of it all is? I don't know what I'm fighting for any more. Evil... Fighting evil is one thing, but now the angels aren't on our side... There isn't anything left any more, anything good." His voice cracked, and they stood there for a time, in the darkness.
Stella walked forward, her bare feet soft upon the gray-black carpet, and laid one hand upon his shoulder, feeling the firm muscles of neck and back through the rigid, blood-stained fabric. Her stomach tightened, and her eyes glistened wetly as she spoke, voice barely trembling. "Seryph... You can't believe that. I heard a wise man say: Just because the appearance of beauty may conceal evil, does not mean that beauty itself is evil. Maybe the watchers have failed us. Maybe it is time to choose again, to build a better place. But don't think, because the angels are no better than their opposites, that there is no good in the world. We have to build goodness inside ourselves. We can't look for it in the outside world."
He raised his head and looked back at her, over his shoulder, looking into her soft green eyes. An unfelt wind from a nearby ventilation duct ruffled through his dark hair. "You sound like you speak from experience."
She smiled sadly, her eyes falling to the floor. When she raised them again to stare into Seryph's own, he saw something in them he had never seen before: age far beyond her apparent twenty-some years, and pain, too. "I've been hurt before, Seryph. It took me a long time to recover. And a longer time to get over the feeling of rejection, loss that came with the hurt. I've learned something, in all this time: it never gets any better. But you live with it, and you learn that there are things which go beyond pain... Feelings that transcend fact..."
He had turned to face her, staring down into her eyes, millimeters from touching the softly glowing grey-silver robe. He reached for her, and her arms slid, haltingly, to encircle him.
Ahem.
"Jesus!" They recoiled away from each other as Grimspire's omnipresent voice riveted through the room. Seryph tugged nervously on his collar, and Stell nervously tugged at the cinch of her robe.
I believe he may be along in a moment, the migrant arms factory deadpanned. In the meantime, there is someone at the door I believe you should meet.
It was Sam. They raced down the stairs to enter the immense front hall for the second time that night, Lester and Bryn fresh from their slumber, Stella and Seryph still looking a bit startled and unsure. The lobby, unlit in their absence to conserve power, blossomed into full brilliance around them as they passed through the archway, light kindling itself inside lanterns, desklamps, fluorescents, and the great chandelier. The Grimspire miniature glistened in a decidedly unmetallic way as their feet clattered across the tile.
Seryph was the first to reach the front door, with Stella and Bryn only a short pace behind him, and Lester trailing up the herd, wincing with every step as his aching muscles, unused to hard labor, exacted their penalty for the night's exercise. They stood and waited expectantly as the front double-door first trembled, then smashed inward with the force of a rampaging elephant and slammed into the walls on either side of it with a sound loud enough to leave a ringing aftershock echoing through their ears.
Beyond the doors, of course, was the alleyway, suspiciously clean for a place that was supposed to be the focus of Hell's assault effort. To Stella's knowing eye, the telltales announced quite clearly what had happened. Blood and ichor splattered upon the walls, claw marks in the concrete, segments of which were simply missing, as if someone had come in with a chisel sharper than a molecule and began to gouge away chunks of reality itself. There had been demons here, in great number. Not even their bodies remained to mark their passing. She doubted seriously that a large portion of their souls had survived in any meaningful sense.
Sam stood reverse-silhouetted in the doorway, casting out a long, spectral shadow into the alleyway, scorching whatever it touched with the glistening fury of darkness. His hood was pulled up to conceal the grim, grinning features of his skull, but light still gleamed out from within, burning and insistent, so fierce that Stell herself nearly took a step back in shock. Sam gripped the Scythe in one bony fist, but the Scythe itself looked changed, somehow, hungrier, glittering with an uncommon sharpness even for that great blade. Things beyond darkness swam within the confines of the handle, and she thought for a moment that something was written upon it, black upon black, in script she had not seen in half an eternity. The Horseman's other arm rested upon his shoulder, where he balanced something so broken and battered that it could hardly be called a body.
"Sam!" Her first cry of recognition was cut short by the soft, dreadful tap-tapping of the Scythe upon pavement, then upon ceramic tile, as he stepped across the threshold, brushing past them in a cold wave. The doors slammed closed behind him. "Sam, are you all right?"
A low, sawing sound filled the room, like talons grating over gravestones. Lester shivered, Bryn blinked in confusion, and even Seryph looked vaguely startled. She understood. They were not familiar with Sam's laughter.
ALL RIGHT? A long pause. PERHAPS. BUT HE IS NOT. With that, he knelt upon the tiles, and gently laid his terrible burden on Grimspire's floor. For the first time their eyes fell to the form, to its ruined face, to the JLA insignia still barely intact on its left breast.
Bryn was the first to speak. "Is that-"
"Oh my God." Seryph stepped forward, bending over the pronated form, and checked its pulse under the jaw, with two outstretched fingers. His hand came away bloody. "It's Phil, and he's alive."
Stell blinked. "We need to get him to a hospital!"
Sam nodded once, within the confines of his dark hood. YES. THERE IS MUCH TO BE DONE.
Stell shivered at his tone.
DragonFang's legs burned, and his arms ached as he cradled Pockets to his chest, her breathing fast against his own. The demons were closing. He could hear their claws, their hooves on the stairs, sometimes leaping whole flights at a time, still often struggling to place their feet one at a time on the steps. One fortunate thing about demons, he reflected - designed for combat on level ground, constructed by themselves and by eons of evolution for terror and battlefield carnage, they were lousy at climbing stairs. Only five floors left, now. Turning around a landing, he glanced down at Pockets, trying her level best to remain still in his grip, despite looking slightly insulted at having to be carried like a baby. "Are you all right?"
She nodded, and he quickened his pace. Below, the demons moved faster as well. Damn. They were starting to learn about turns, about landings. Four floors left, now. The wind of their passage swiped away droplets of sweat from his proud forehead, sliding over the veins that stood out in stark relief against the skin. His breath raced, hot and rapid, over pointed teeth, and stairs blurred by below his feet. Three and a half. Three.
The demons were no more than four floors behind, moving faster every moment. This was going to be close. DF's legs pumped like pistons, weighed like lead, propelled him upwards like a cannonball. Two floors. One. The demons three floors behind, now two... And the door to the roof was before him, and he hit it with his curled shoulder, letting Pockets slide to the ground so he could transform without shredding her once they hit the roof, and the door crumpled like tissue paper, and gravel crunched beneath their feet, Pockets pulled ahead of him, her young legs moving her forward onto the gray concrete of the heleport...
Seven figures stood around them, lit from within with the light of heaven, like Egyptian alabaster, their wings raised to the sky, every feather pronounced and real, like razor blades, like a child's cry, the light of their swords draining away the five A.M. darkness as if a floodgate had been opened. DF's eyes widened, and Pockets struggled to stop, turned back to DragonFang as if to look for advice.
The flaming sword described an arc from the depths of a geometer's ecstatic dreams in the night air.
Pockets' mouth fell open in a silent 'O' of surprise, and a tear leaked out of the right corner of her left eye. Flame sparkled in it as rolled down her cheek.
Blood spread across the front of her blue pajamas, staining them a dark, black-purple. She slumped to one side and fell. DragonFang caught her in his arms a moment before she hit the ground, his red eyes staring into the child's blue as the light within them faded. He raised his fingers to her face, and gently closed her eyes in sleep for the last time.
He laid her to the ground, and there were things quite like tears in his eyes.
The flaming sword slit through the air like falling silk.
Before it reached its target, DragonFang turned and caught the angel's hand in his own powerful fist. Veins surged down the length of his arm, and the angel's arm cracked and caved in, rainbow blood and splinters of bone bursting out of the softly glowing skin. It looked down and caught DragonFang's eyes, and for a moment they contained pain, and for a moment they contained rage, and then, at last, there was nothing human left in them at all.
Those eyes were the last thing the angel ever saw.
A dragon flowered over the SLJ Tower, its great, leathery wings beating against the scorched air, and fire claimed the night. It roared a roar to tear the heavens asunder, and to the far reached of Khazan, men and women who harbored within them the old blood felt sadness grip them, and knew not why.
As the dragon flew away, a tear of diamond glistened in the corner of its great, ruby-faceted eye.