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.Her hand waves over his face.Then she moves her face closer.Her eyes, like pools of water.Green, blue, shimmering.He can see himself in that gaze.He’s beautiful.It’s returned to him.The scars are gone.His heart dances.He blinks.He blinks.He can blink!“Goodbye, Frank,” she says.Then she closes her eyes.His skin splits, like a sausage casing too long on the grill.Like window blinds retracted.Everything is hot.All is pain.He feels like a boiled lobster.Frank Polcyn dies.THE SKINLESS MAN writhes once, yelps like a kicked puppy, then expires.Psyche finds it all rather grotesque.Her mother-in-law is cruel.She knows that.And her last kindness to him somehow makes it all the crueler.But he deserved it.She takes no joy in what happened, but she finds no grief for him, either.What she did find, however, was in his mind.In his last hour.She sees what happened to Tundu.Sees the Devil.Sees the boy.She knows where they’re going.She tells this all to Aphrodite.“I want to fix things,” Psyche says.“I want to go and help.”“We should just go home.”“The Devil is free.Doesn’t that concern you?”“Yes, and that’s why I want to stay out of his way.I’ll call the others.We’ll make a plan.We have time.”Psyche sees what harm the Devil can do.She knows why he’s going.It was in Frank’s mind and now it’s in hers.The Throne of Heaven is empty.Open to be claimed.Which means there’s no time at all.But she dare not tell Aphrodite.A world with her as the One True Goddess.It would be a beautiful world, and so wretched.“Please.Let me fix this.I’ll come home with you then.”Aphrodite seems to ponder, then nods.“Go.”Psyche lets her wings unfurl.She takes flight, catches a heat vector, and moves fast as the wind.THE MINISTER STAMMERS: “Please, don’t hurt me.”He says that because, of course, he’s scared.Lucifer can see the fear in the fat man’s eyes.Big black dude, gut-shot.Comatose child.But really, it’s his own presence.The presence of the Devil.God’s zealots can smell it on him.They know when they’re in the midst of God’s Own Scourge.Their stomachs curdle.Their pubes curl.They know.This poor idiot thought he was going to consult on a marriage.That’s what Frank told him.And here he is, swayed by the stupidest of lies so as to meet the shirtless Infernal Lord face-to-face.“I have to,” Lucifer says, shrugging.Then: Lightbringer’s flickering glass blade is in his hand and he beheads the poor fool.The head bounces away like a soccer ball.The Devil drags the body, one-handed, up onto the dais of this little church.Then he tells Tundu what to do.The big bastard lays the child down on one of the empty pews, then walks over to the headless, twitching corpse and stomps on it, again and again.Blood pumping.Squirting, even.Pooling.It’s enough.The Devil goes and picks up the boy.He steps into the pool of blood, does a little tapdance and says a little evil prayer—Babelian tongue, a string of heretical glossolalia.Then both he and the child sink into the blood and are gone.Heavenbound, they go.MICHAEL AND CASON stand on a mirrored black floor, like hematite pounded flat.All around lie the carcasses of angels.Hundreds, thousands of them.Desiccated, shriveled.Mouths stretched wide, eyes like raisins placed delicately in puckered sockets.Hands still clutching sword hilts without blades.“My brothers,” Michael says.“This way.”He points ahead—the gleaming floor drops off into nothing, down into the infinity of clouds and storms.Ahead, the throne floats.It’s a throne of glass.Like in his dreams, but in the glass he sees no skulls—it’s just smooth, no sharp edges, all curves.It shifts.Like it’s liquid, almost.Maybe not glass at all.The throne rests on a golden disc, and beneath that golden disc are draped thousands upon thousands of wires—golden, gleaming, some red like copper, others burnished like bronze, some thick, others thin, but all some shade of gold.The filaments go as far as the eye can see and then some.They bundle here but then splay out, separating and sinking through a layer of clouds far, far below.Cason sees no way to reach the throne.Michael senses his confusion.The angel waves a lazy hand—And a walkway forms out of smaller golden discs.One after the other.“Go ahead,” Michael says.“It’s yours.You merely need to sit upon it.”“I don’t want it.”“Why?”“Because I don’t want that kind of power.Or that responsibility.”“But you would become God.”“I don’t want that.”Michael looks disappointed.And confused.“Oh.”“I’m.sorry.”“It appears as if I won’t have a new M—”He is split in twain by a glass blade, cutting his sentence short.The two halves of the Archangel Michael flop to each side.The angel’s innards are dry, like burned paper; bits of him flutter up in a non-existent wind.“I always hated him,” the Devil says.“So pompous.So righteous.He’s the prick who threw me down, down, down.When there wasn’t yet a Hell path to walk.”Cason gapes.Staggers backward [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Her hand waves over his face.Then she moves her face closer.Her eyes, like pools of water.Green, blue, shimmering.He can see himself in that gaze.He’s beautiful.It’s returned to him.The scars are gone.His heart dances.He blinks.He blinks.He can blink!“Goodbye, Frank,” she says.Then she closes her eyes.His skin splits, like a sausage casing too long on the grill.Like window blinds retracted.Everything is hot.All is pain.He feels like a boiled lobster.Frank Polcyn dies.THE SKINLESS MAN writhes once, yelps like a kicked puppy, then expires.Psyche finds it all rather grotesque.Her mother-in-law is cruel.She knows that.And her last kindness to him somehow makes it all the crueler.But he deserved it.She takes no joy in what happened, but she finds no grief for him, either.What she did find, however, was in his mind.In his last hour.She sees what happened to Tundu.Sees the Devil.Sees the boy.She knows where they’re going.She tells this all to Aphrodite.“I want to fix things,” Psyche says.“I want to go and help.”“We should just go home.”“The Devil is free.Doesn’t that concern you?”“Yes, and that’s why I want to stay out of his way.I’ll call the others.We’ll make a plan.We have time.”Psyche sees what harm the Devil can do.She knows why he’s going.It was in Frank’s mind and now it’s in hers.The Throne of Heaven is empty.Open to be claimed.Which means there’s no time at all.But she dare not tell Aphrodite.A world with her as the One True Goddess.It would be a beautiful world, and so wretched.“Please.Let me fix this.I’ll come home with you then.”Aphrodite seems to ponder, then nods.“Go.”Psyche lets her wings unfurl.She takes flight, catches a heat vector, and moves fast as the wind.THE MINISTER STAMMERS: “Please, don’t hurt me.”He says that because, of course, he’s scared.Lucifer can see the fear in the fat man’s eyes.Big black dude, gut-shot.Comatose child.But really, it’s his own presence.The presence of the Devil.God’s zealots can smell it on him.They know when they’re in the midst of God’s Own Scourge.Their stomachs curdle.Their pubes curl.They know.This poor idiot thought he was going to consult on a marriage.That’s what Frank told him.And here he is, swayed by the stupidest of lies so as to meet the shirtless Infernal Lord face-to-face.“I have to,” Lucifer says, shrugging.Then: Lightbringer’s flickering glass blade is in his hand and he beheads the poor fool.The head bounces away like a soccer ball.The Devil drags the body, one-handed, up onto the dais of this little church.Then he tells Tundu what to do.The big bastard lays the child down on one of the empty pews, then walks over to the headless, twitching corpse and stomps on it, again and again.Blood pumping.Squirting, even.Pooling.It’s enough.The Devil goes and picks up the boy.He steps into the pool of blood, does a little tapdance and says a little evil prayer—Babelian tongue, a string of heretical glossolalia.Then both he and the child sink into the blood and are gone.Heavenbound, they go.MICHAEL AND CASON stand on a mirrored black floor, like hematite pounded flat.All around lie the carcasses of angels.Hundreds, thousands of them.Desiccated, shriveled.Mouths stretched wide, eyes like raisins placed delicately in puckered sockets.Hands still clutching sword hilts without blades.“My brothers,” Michael says.“This way.”He points ahead—the gleaming floor drops off into nothing, down into the infinity of clouds and storms.Ahead, the throne floats.It’s a throne of glass.Like in his dreams, but in the glass he sees no skulls—it’s just smooth, no sharp edges, all curves.It shifts.Like it’s liquid, almost.Maybe not glass at all.The throne rests on a golden disc, and beneath that golden disc are draped thousands upon thousands of wires—golden, gleaming, some red like copper, others burnished like bronze, some thick, others thin, but all some shade of gold.The filaments go as far as the eye can see and then some.They bundle here but then splay out, separating and sinking through a layer of clouds far, far below.Cason sees no way to reach the throne.Michael senses his confusion.The angel waves a lazy hand—And a walkway forms out of smaller golden discs.One after the other.“Go ahead,” Michael says.“It’s yours.You merely need to sit upon it.”“I don’t want it.”“Why?”“Because I don’t want that kind of power.Or that responsibility.”“But you would become God.”“I don’t want that.”Michael looks disappointed.And confused.“Oh.”“I’m.sorry.”“It appears as if I won’t have a new M—”He is split in twain by a glass blade, cutting his sentence short.The two halves of the Archangel Michael flop to each side.The angel’s innards are dry, like burned paper; bits of him flutter up in a non-existent wind.“I always hated him,” the Devil says.“So pompous.So righteous.He’s the prick who threw me down, down, down.When there wasn’t yet a Hell path to walk.”Cason gapes.Staggers backward [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]