Goetic Justice 2

"What did you tell me about your time in the demon realm, of your thousands of years drifting aimlessly in a soup of immaterial thought and emotion?" Ryan countered, Nahash looking on with tears welling in her ovine eyes. "You told me that an infinite existence in that state paled in comparison to a single second of life in the tangible world. You told me to savor every second of it, to value every gust of wind and every blade of grass, to appreciate every smell and sight and flavor while there was still time. Well, that's the way I feel about you, Nahash. I know that our time is limited, the lifespan of a human is but a brief candle from your perspective, yet the fact that it's so finite is what makes it infinitely valuable. That is why I'm going to fight tooth and nail, why I'm going to put everything at risk for one more second with you, because I won't get another chance."

"You have become wise," she said as a solitary tear rolled down her cheek to wet her woolly ruff, her angry outburst now over. She sounded defeated, perhaps sensing that his mind was set and that he could not be swayed. "You understand the value of life, you are making your own decisions without my council, and you have become an experienced summoner. Yet I would have a living husband who is meek and ignorant over a wise one who is dead."

"Then help me stay that way," he said, "I know that we can succeed. Together."

She wiped her eyes with her fluffy forearm, then nodded. Ryan turned back to Gaap, awaiting the demon's decision.

"I accept your wager," it croaked. "Prepare yourself for travel, Ryan Cutter."

"Can I bring anything with me?" he asked.

"Within reason," the creature replied.

"I'm bringing this weapon," Ryan said as he pulled the handgun from his belt, "and this ring."

Gaap recoiled like a vampire that had been exposed to sunlight as Ryan brandished the onyx wedding band, shrinking back as its crooked smile was replaced with a grimace.

"This, I cannot do," it hissed.

"What? Why not?" he asked as he shared a concerned glance with Nahash.

"This artifact has been forged with magick that far exceeds my own. I cannot transport it, I cannot touch it. Please, put it away."

He did as the demon requested, covering his hand with his sleeve, then he turned to Nahash. He wanted to say something to comfort her, but no words came to him.

"Ryan, the plan won't work," she said. She looked dejected, her sheep-like ears drooping. "I cannot go with you, without that ring I will have no way of knowing where you are! We have to try something else, come up with another plan!"

"The contract is sealed," Gaap reminded them, "I will have my payment one way or another..."

Ryan gestured for the demon to be calm, leaving his protective triangle and walking over to Nahash. He plunged his face into her downy wool, and she closed her arms around him, pulling him tight against her bosom as if afraid that he would vanish once she let go of him. They shared a few moments of silence, and then he had to pull himself away from her. He considered that this might be the last time that he would smell her earthy scent, the last time that he would feel her warmth, but breaking down now wouldn't do anyone any good. He steeled himself, putting on a confident front even as he choked back the tears that were threatening to overwhelm him. She probably sensed his emotions regardless.

"I can do this," he insisted, trying to reassure himself as much as Nahash. "Just a quick in and out, I'll be back before you've even noticed that I'm gone." He removed the black ring from his finger and placed it in her palm, closing her hand over it. "Keep this safe for me, I'll need it when I get back."

"Be careful Ryan," she whispered, "don't take any unnecessary risks."

He turned back to Gaap, cocking his weapon with a mechanical click.

"Let's get this done."

The demon grinned again, exposing its yellowed teeth, watching him intently with unseen eyes.

"You may experience some...discomfort..."

Ryan winced, gripping his chest with his hand. His heart was beating erratically, aching, a numbness moving down his left arm. Nahash sensed his distress and moved towards him, but the demon put himself between them. Her eyes were wild, and she looked about ready to kick the creature across the room, but it raised a bony hand to stay her.

"This body must die," it explained in its raspy voice, "only then can the soul be transported elsewhere. He is quite safe, I have not violated the terms of our agreement..."

"It's f-fine Nahash," Ryan stammered, coughing as the pain spread through him. "We have to t-trust Gaap."

Darkness began to eat at the corners of his vision, primal panic overtaking him. Was this a heart attack? Oh God, he was really dying. What would that entail? What would it feel like? He dropped to his knees, then fell to his side, every muscle in his body burning. It felt like an elephant was standing on his chest. His heart stopped, and an odd euphoria came over him, his brain becoming starved of oxygen. He felt cold, so cold...

***

A kaleidoscope of vibrant colors swirled around Ryan, like some kind of trippy album cover from the sixties. All the hues of the rainbow seemed to flow into one another like running paints, mingling and swirling, creating new colors that he didn't even have a name for. He wasn't seeing it, however. He had no eyes, no senses of any kind. It was like a dream was being projected into his mind by some outside force.

There was no Ryan in fact, the boundaries of his body were absent, and the boundaries of his mind were becoming blurred and uncertain. He couldn't wiggle his fingers or toes, he had no sense of himself. It was like someone had unplugged him from the physical world. There was just an odd sense of floating, tumbling, of being lost.

They hit him like a wall, all at once, hundreds of thousands of them. There were voices in his head that were not his own, like he had somehow developed a violent case of schizophrenia. He tried to cover his ears with his hands to block out the intolerable noise, but he had neither. There was no way to stop it, no volume control. He tried to scream, to beg the voices to stop, but he had no voice.

It wasn't just voices, it was thoughts too, the memories and emotions of outsiders flooding his brain. He felt their sadness, their despair, he experienced their joy and their happiness as if it were his own. There was so much of it coming so fast, impossible to parse, and in a second he had experienced a lifetime's worth of emotional highs and lows.

Their thoughts intruded into his mind, he could experience their memories, there was no boundary between him and them. Such terminology had lost all meaning, there was only us. His ego had ceased to exist, and he no longer saw himself as an individual. It was wonderful and horrifying, enlightening and crushing. A thousand lives flashed before his eyes, millions of accumulated years in a fraction of a moment, impossible to make any sense of. He was being overloaded, tortured.

Was this what Nahash had lived through for all those millennia? Was this the immaterium, where thoughts and emotions were as real and as tangible as a rock or a tree?

***

Ryan awoke on a cold floor, taking in a lungful of air. He opened his eyes and looked around, his panic slowly subsiding as he realized that he was no longer being assailed by thoughts made manifest. He was in some kind of confined space, a storage closet? There were boxes stacked against the wall behind him, and there was a mop and bucket to his right.

He slowly rose to his feet, his legs shaky and his body oddly awkward. His chest now felt fine, but he was uncoordinated, like he was wearing shoes that were the wrong size or something. He turned to examine his surroundings and then nearly had a second heart attack as he noticed Gaap. The demon was uncomfortably close in the small closet, there was barely enough room for the both of them.

"It is done," Gaap hissed, "you have reached your destination."

The demon then reached out with a bony, discolored finger, too long and with too many joints. It looked more like a spider's leg than a human appendage. He recoiled from it, but there was nowhere to go, and he balled his fists as he felt the tip of that ghastly digit brush his forehead.

A vision flashed before his eyes like a waking dream. His perspective shifted, shooting out of the door and down the corridor, as if footage from a drone was being played back at great speed. He wound through snaking tunnels, past guards armed with rifles, over the heads of robed men carrying books and tablet computers. He entered a room and came to a stop, hovering before an older man with a salt and pepper beard. He was hunched over a table, reading from ancient manuscripts.

Ryan recognized his face from Gamori's sand sculpture, it was Carlisle.

He snapped back to the present, gasping as the sudden change in perspective dizzied him, and he had to lean against the wall for a moment while he got his bearings. He knew where the man was, he knew how to get to him, like a roadmap of the facility had been burned into his brain.

"You have all that you need, Ryan Cutter," Gaap croaked. "Now go, and if you should accomplish your task, I will return you to the company of your Nephilim companions. I would wish you good luck in your venture, but that would not be in my best interests..."

The creature began to laugh, hacking and coarse, the sound slowly fading as the demon vanished into a fuzzy haze. Ryan drew his weapon and checked the magazine, moving to the door and preparing to open it.

There had been eight armed guards between him and Carlisle, along with a dozen other Masons who weren't armed but who may still try to stop him or attempt to raise the alarm. There was no way that he could reach Carlisle's chamber in secret, there was no cover, only bare corridors lit with fluorescent lamps. There wasn't so much as a shadow that might help to conceal his presence. He would have to fight his way through. At least he had the element of surprise, they would not be expecting an attack here, they probably thought themselves untouchable.

He had to move quickly, or his mental map of where the threats were located wouldn't count for much. He opened the door to the closet and stepped out into the whitewashed hallway. There didn't seem to be any security cameras, and the guards were patrolling on routes rather than protecting specific locations. He missed Nahash, he had counted on having her here to watch his back, but he would have to make do.

He set off down the corridor, already knowing where he was supposed to go, every fork and turn that he should take was already planned out. As he rounded a corner in the oddly organic corridor, he came across a man wearing ornate robes who was engrossed in the readout of a tablet computer. The stranger looked up from his task, then froze, the blood draining from his face as he saw the gun.

Ryan moved past him, knowing that he wasn't going to try to stop him. Two more robed men parted to let him pass, looking on in surprise and confusion as Ryan's shoes squeaked on the stone floor. He increased his pace to a jog, his heart pounding in his chest, and not because he was exerting himself. He had done this before, he knew to let his reflexes do the work, but the adrenaline that was flooding his veins was impossible to ignore.

He arrived at a junction and then took a left. Everything looked the same here, all of the corridors were white and featureless save for the occasional locked door. He would have been completely lost if he had neglected to ask for Gaap's help in locating Carlisle. He should be coming up on the first pair of guards soon, and so he readied his weapon, willing his hands to stop shaking.

It all happened so quickly. He turned another corner and there they were, two men walking side by side with automatic rifles draped across their chests on slings. They wore long-sleeved shirts with pants that were tucked into their boots, dressed like policeman or security guards, but in regal purple instead of black or blue. They had Masonic insignias on their upper arms and on the baseball caps that they wore, and they had belts from which zip ties, walkie-talkies, and sidearms were hanging. They had been chatting, but as Ryan came into view and raised his weapon, he saw their smiles falter.

Ryan fired twice, the noise making his ears ring in the confines of the corridor, and both men dropped. He moved forward, keeping his handgun trained on them, and put another round into the one who was still moving. Dark blood pooled beneath their prone bodies on the pristine floor, staining their purple shirts, reflecting the fluorescent lights that shone from above. They hadn't been wearing body armor or bulletproof vests.

He stooped and recovered one of their rifles, struggling to pull the sling over the limp body's head, then checked the magazine and the safety. It was a Galil MAR chambered in 5.56mm, a shortened version of the Israeli assault rifle platform. It made sense to use a rifle with a short barrel in these tight corridors. Might as well go loud, everyone in the base would have heard those gunshots.

He set the fire selector to full-auto and stowed a second magazine in his belt, wishing that he had recovered one of the chest rigs from the dead soldiers back in the forest. He set his Glock to safe and then shoved it down the back of his pants, continuing on his way.

The lead weight feeling in his gut had returned again. These men hadn't been trying to kill him, they hadn't burst into his apartment with their weapons drawn and they hadn't been shooting at his friends. They would certainly have done the same to him, but he couldn't do mental gymnastics this time. He was solely responsible for their deaths. He felt nauseous, but he had to press on.

After running for another minute or so he heard shouting coming from around the next bend, emerging to see a frightened scribe dart into a side door and close it behind him. Ryan leapt back into cover just as a hail of bullets whizzed past. There were more guards down at the end of the hall, perhaps thirty meters away.

He poked his rifle around the corner and blind-fired it, letting the recoil bounce it around. He loosed a couple more short bursts, waiting for the return fire, then leaned his upper body out from behind the wall. One of the men was down and the second was dragging him away, aiming his weapon in Ryan's direction with his free hand.

Ryan should have hesitated, he should have felt remorse when he saw that guard trying desperately to pull his counterpart out of the line of fire, but the killer instincts that Vapula had bestowed upon him only saw an opening. He cut the guard down with a three-round burst to the chest, and the man slumped against the wall like a rag doll, leaving a smear of dark blood as he slid to the ground to lie motionless beside his friend.

They knew that he was coming now, things were about to get hairy. He passed by the bodies and emerged from the corridor into a larger chamber, the white paneling giving way to polished stone. It looked like a cave that had been hollowed out of the solid bedrock, and it was full of large crates that were stacked on tiered shelves, like a warehouse. More and more he was starting to think that the strange and illogical layout of this place was not by design. Had these tunnels and caves existed before the Masons had set up shop here? He could think of no other reason that they would place a storage area in such an odd place.

He heard a sizzling sound, and then something that sounded like liquid hitting the floor. He looked around him, and then saw a thick strand of what resembled molten rock drop from the air a few meters in front of him. He aimed his weapon at the ceiling, and then had to cover his eyes with his forearm. There was something up there, as bright as a cutting torch, the blazing circle that it was carving in the roof of the cave burned into his retinas. He tried to blink it away, but the ghostly afterimage remained.

Was it Haures? His heart racing, he dove into cover behind one of the shelves, keeping his weapon trained on the ceiling even if he couldn't look directly at it. Molten rock poured from the roof like magma, its consistency thick and gooey. It looked almost like flaming peanut butter. It impacted the ground below the hole, slowly spreading outwards into a pancake shape, the crates that it came into contact with bursting into flames. Ryan could feel the heat of it on his face even from a distance.

A dark shape dropped down into the mass, shaking the floor as it landed, its feet splashing in the burning material like it was no more than a rain puddle. It was massive, twelve feet tall or more, and it shook its furry body like a wet dog as it flexed a pair of bat-like wings.

"A-Azazel?!" Ryan stammered.

The beast turned its horned head to look back at him with its trio of burning eyes, the flaming halberd that it held in its hands glowing white-hot. A few more droplets of molten rock fell on its back, rolling off its coat like raindrops.

"Ryan Cutter," Azazel rumbled, its tombstone teeth exposed in a malicious grin. "Our paths converge once again. I have something that belongs to thee."

The Watcher tossed something in Ryan's direction, and he dropped his rifle, letting it hang from its sling as he snatched the object from the air. He opened his fingers to see the onyx ring resting in his palm, the arcane runes that were inscribed on its inner surface glowing a fiery orange.

"But...why?" Ryan asked. "Why are you helping me? You said that you considered the favor that you owed me repaid."

"I am not helping thee," Azazel laughed, his booming voice echoing through the cave. "Thou art helping me, if thou art aware of it or not."

"What do you mean?"

"All will become clear to you before this day is through, but there are more pressing matters that require thy immediate attention. Seek out Carlisle, rid yourself of Haures, and if the fates align we shall meet again soon. Do try to stay alive, Ryan Cutter. Shouldst thou perish it would upset my daughters terribly, and I might not see an end to their bleating for another hundred years."

At that, the beast sped off down another corridor, somehow able to fit inside the narrow spaces despite his immense size. It looked almost comical, like a ferret disappearing down a length of PVC pipe.

Ryan returned the ring to his finger, then felt the hairs on his arms stand on end. The dark shadows in the poorly lit chamber began to shift, running across the walls and floor as if cast by an unseen light, coalescing into a single point. They became a solid mass, and that solid mass then took a familiar, hourglass shape.

Nahash emerged from the darkness, a smile on her pink lips and a spring in her step.

"I suspect that my father is starting to like you," she said, "not that he would ever admit it."

He rushed forward and took her in his arms, the two sharing a brief moment together before she eased him away from her.

"Stand back," she said as she extended her arm, Ryan watching as a flickering flame sprang to life in her hand. It grew and spread, becoming a shaft of molten metal, glowing like it had just been pulled from a furnace. It did not singe her wool, nor do it seem to hurt her, the metal slowly taking shape and cooling. When the flames died down they left a curved sword in their wake, the blade shaped like a crescent, Nahash swinging the weapon experimentally.

"It's called a khopesh," she explained, noticing his expression. "A gift from my father. It's a little dated perhaps, but I know how to use it. I haven't wielded a sword like this since the day that my mother died..."