“What’s that? Do we all get one of those? Where’s mine?”
“It’s complicated.”
She shrugged. “Whatever, dude. Talk later.” She extended her hand and summoned – wow, this kid was something else – she summoned a golden baseball bat.
“Time to smash some faces,” she said, launching herself into battle, bringing her weapon whistling into an arc against the very first demon she encountered. The bat took half his teeth out. Lina cheered herself on, bashing him in the head a second time.
Artemis nudged me in the ribs. “You gotta give props to the little runt. She’s got moxie. And a head start on you.”
I glared at her, remembering myself. “What? Who’s even keeping score?”
“I am.” She tapped the side of her head, nocking an arrow in her bow. “It’s all in here. By the way, I’ve already got fourteen points.”
“Forget this,” I said, raising my shield and sword, uttering a battle cry as I rushed in to join the fray.
From somewhere behind me, Artemis called out. “Fifteen. Keep up, loser.”
I slashed with my sword, smashed with my shield, letting my anger and Artemis’s cute little competition fuel my fighting spirit. It didn’t matter, ultimately, how many each of us killed. All we had to focus on was beating back Gluttony’s forces. I ran my sword through a demon’s belly, grunting. That made four. I bashed my shield against another, knocking the wind out of him, using the window of opportunity to thrust my blade into his heart. Five. But really, who was counting? We were reapers cutting through Beelzebub’s field of minions, threshing away the demon chaff.
Between the colossal fly traps and pitchers, other bizarre plants had pushed their way out of the ground. Here and there were enormous leaves with moist surfaces, catching Beelzebub’s forces like great sheets of natural flypaper. Strange vines wavered like tentacles in the air, studded all around with dewy probes that attracted and caught what was left of the flies.
My heart leapt, confidence burning bright in my chest, pushing more power into my strikes. We were winning. In the air or on the ground, Beelzebub’s army was toast.
I struck down another demon, lopping off her head before she had a chance to get up. Her corpse, like those of her peers, began to decay almost instantly, a feature of the physical vessels demons used on the surface, the sludge returning to its prime hell to be recycled for future use. It filled the air with a disgusting smell of rot, fortunately slightly masked by the presence of so many of Dionysus and Florian’s strange creations. The park was starting to look like an alien landscape. Any tourist who wandered in would either stay to take a million pictures or run away screaming.
Oh. Oh no. Tourists. I’d forgotten all about them. I stuck my sword in the ground, touching two fingers to my temple the way I’d seen Asher and Royce do when they needed to talk to someone using their minds. I thought of Royce and his gruff voice, his cigarette-and-whiskey trademark scent. I thought especially hard of his shabby clothes.
“I heard that, you little asshole,” his voice thundered in my head. Wow, was it really that easy to get his attention?
“Royce?” I said in my head. “Yikes, this feels weird. Look, we’re in Nicaragua, place called Masaya Volcano. You need to send some people over to watch the perimeter, keep out the tourists.”
I flinched when his telepathic voice went blasting in my head even louder, like someone had turned the volume all the way up. “What fucking tourists?”
“It’s a national park. Tourist destination. Volcano’s a mouth to hell. No time to explain.”
“You really are a little asshole, Albrecht, telling us about this last minute and – ”
“I’m hanging up now,” I thought. “Beep.”
My brain caught the tail end of Royce cussing me out and sharing some very choice words about what he was planning to do with his hands and my neck the next time he saw me. I shook my head, surprised that it had worked. I couldn’t hear him anymore. What I did hear, though, was a distant, persistent series of popping noises. Teleportation magic. It was the Lorica, arriving to help. Good old terrible Royce.
I picked up my sword again, gripping the hilt tight, my jaw set. Fuck, yes. We had this in the bag. Artemis was picking off demons left and right, Raziel skewering them on the end of his vicious spear. Rays of burning sunlight scorched the battlefield, blasting from the tips of Apollo’s fingers. And Lina had augmented her bat mid-fight, enchanting it so that it was studded with crooked nails and wrapped in barbed wire. I was growing to like her more and more.
Emboldened, I marched forward, the way to the volcano clear. Its mouth was nothing short of breathtaking, a core of fire and lava that truly looked like it could have led into the heart of the prime hells. And it did, of course, as I was so cruelly reminded by the sight of Beelzebub himself rising out of the molten rock.
The prince’s mouth was set into a furious line as he tossed his hair free of flecks of magma, his form completely unharmed by the volcano’s heat. He screamed, his rage carrying across the battlefield.
“Idiots. How were so many of you killed by plants? Fucking plants.” He whipped his hand at me, pointing in my face with a single gloved finger. “You. This is all because of you. I should have murdered you the very day I met you, taken your meat by force.”
I raised my sword and pointed it right back. “I’d love to see you try. It’ll be a nice change for you. Don’t your people literally eat shit?”
Beelzebub grinned, his fangs burning like fire in the blasting heat of the volcano. “I ate your mother, too, nephilim.”
26
I staggered back, my breath gone, like I’d been punched in the gut. “You – you what? That
