Chapter Text
This was not a story about a brave maiden venturing into the lion's den.
It was not the climax of a domestic drama, where all the tragic dysfunction of a relationship that failed long ago finally comes to the point of no return. It was not the culmination of an action movie, in which the hero confronted the kingpin for one last romp of brazen ultraviolence.
What it was, was the dramatic irony of watching a man let a violent maniac into his house.
The tension in the elevator was palpable. The thing was hideous, its interior walls clad in sumptuous red shag, with gold-plated fixtures and zebra-print tile underfoot, all of it lit in fluorescent pink. Angel was staring directly ahead into the panel of heart-shaped buttons as they ascended, hugging himself with two sets of arms and rocking minutely from toe to heel. Valentino had a hand on his waist, another resting in the smooth hollow where his neck met his shoulder. After a few floors he squeezed, tight, and Angel stopped rocking.
Valentino was back to scrolling rapidly through his phone, still held over Angel's head, for the accessibility settings had been cranked so high that Angel would not even have to try to read the text if he caught a glance. The moth's entire face was contorted, whether by what he was reading or the physical effort of doing so, and on the pate of his bald head the saturated lighting revealed a glossy sheen of sweat.
His presentation was holding with the same brittleness it had done when he realized his stash in the limo was ruined - one single, petty frustration away from critical mass, and the heat of it choked the enclosed space as much as the cloying haze of his cigarette.
Whatever its smoke was supposed to do when inhaled second-hand, Angel's first proper dose of cocaine in weeks was hitting him hard enough that the effects seemed unable to stick. Focused. A dynamo of impulsive rage and suicidal confidence just asking for a sideways look to set it off. The rocking had stopped, but now he was compulsively twirling a strand of his fluff around one finger, static softly popping as the chromatophores rubbed against each other. Grinding his teeth. Grinding, faster.
He was coming unhinged. And Valentino was too distracted to notice.
He was transfixed by his phone, and whatever he was seeing there was far more fearful to him than a moody whor* overdue for an attitude adjustment. His healthy antenna was rippling like an external lung, dragging behind it the withered stalk of its ruined mate, and the static charge crawling up each point of contact with Angel's body made the ruff of his coat stand on end.
The fist gripping Angel's elbow fell away as the phone did, and Valentino's primary hand moved from the spider's neck to press the palm flat in the center of his back. The blinking hearts indicated they were two floors from the penthouse. Valentino's bicep flexed.
Then the elevator dinged, and the doors slid open.
"Ugh, FINALLY!" Angel exclaimed, pushing smoothly out of Valentino's grip to stride ahead of him into the apartment, four arms extended in a full-body stretch. "You shoulda shot that driver, I thought that sh*t was nevah gonna end."
The spider's entire persona had shifted in the space of a blink. No longer tottering and traumatized, but sleek and self-assured, he stripped off his blazer and gloves as he went, like a duch*ess shedding the constriction of her bodice after a long night of hob-nobbing.
Valentino still hadn't left the elevator. His palm was awkwardly half-raised where Angel had left it, cigarette drooping from his lipless mouth, and the way he was looking at his contractee was so blankly neutral as to be inhuman. Like the face of a mirror that no longer knew which reality to reflect.
"What sh*t?" The moth demanded, stepping into the suite on a plume of scarlet smoke.
"-That whole scene in the limo. You know." Angel turned around with a scoff, puffing his bangs out of his face as he cast his garments aside on the heart-shaped back of a velvet chair. He rolled his eyes at Valentino as though they were both in on some kind of exasperating joke. "'cause Vox has cameras everywhere you hang out? You did real f*ckin' good, Daddy. Didn't know you could still act like that."
Angel winked, wrinkling his snout over the coy flicker of his gold tooth, and it was as though the freakish configuration of bruises twined around his every arm were not even there. The thing he had been restrained by could not be humanoid, an unnatural amalgamation of limbs whose length implied something much bigger, and manifold more strange.
As far as Valentino knew, his contractee had been nearly drawn and quartered by this abomination, and suddenly Angel was carrying it off like he didn't even notice. As though Valentino were the only one imagining what it would be like for those loathsome coils to s q u e e z e until bones unspooled in a spiral of compound fractures and popped through the skin like spines on the back of a pulverized echidna.
Angel's flirty expression was fading into something uneasy.
"C'mon, we can drop the telenovela crap now, can't we?" He prompted, looking anxiously over his shoulder. "Didn't you say this place was Vox-proof? I feel like I've been on-set fa two f*ckin' weeks, I just wanna kick back an' take a bath in peace."
Valentino couldn't afford not to know what to do. And if he didn't, he could not afford for his prize thrall to realize that was the case.
"Relax, Angel-Cakes," the moth cooed, sashaying into the suite in a whirl of feathery coattails, as though he himself were perfectly at ease. "Voxy couldn't get inside a Filipino rent boy without my help."
The penthouse was sealed, then.
Like a tomb.
Valentino's swishing pace had put Angel at his back, and so he did not see the way Angel's shadow turned its head where it lounged on the wallpaper, occupying the blind spots between the leopard print. He didn't notice the delay before Angel's head caught up. He did notice the click of Angel's heels on red-checkered tile as he followed in his master's wake, and that seemed enough to please him.
Then Valentino squeaked, and he strode ahead out of the foyer to snatch a remote off the wall. He fumbled it once, then set the massive floor-to-ceiling windows that accommodated both the main floor and the mezzanine to opaque, cutting off their view of whatever it was about the cityscape that so displeased him.
The moth whirled around with a broad, bright-eyed smile, then strode back across the main room to take Angel lovingly by the shoulders and turn him away from the antechamber leading to the guest suite, where a sectional aquarium had been shattered, leaving behind a carpet that still looked slightly soggy. The fish were nowhere to be seen, and Angel was not permitted to keep looking, ushered instead into a plush heart-shaped conversation pit arranged around a gold dais and pole.
Dripping with perfect smarm, Valentino said, "I told you, didn't I, baby? Tonight is all about you. And. M e ."
"Thank f*ck," Angel sighed, pushing his fingers through his bangs as he slumped into Valentino's guiding hands. "I ain't gonna lie, Val, that was a rough one. We better've made bank on my ass this time."
Valentino's mounting fury had been arrested by another of those indecisive little pauses, caught between the eagerness to punish and the urge to...what? To what?
"We always do," the moth replied, and perhaps there was a world in which that tone was harboring hidden resentments. Perhaps that world was this one.
"Right," Angel murmured, staring moodily at one of the garish leopard statuettes framing the U of the conversation pit. "So you guys're fightin' again, huh? You 'n Vox, I mean. How long d'you figure before he gets ovah himself and comes crawlin' back this time?"
Valentino's lip twitched, flashing his partial grill as though he had been pegged with a paintball gun. "Crawling back like you, amorcito?"
"Ah, I was ready t'do that weeks ago." Angel waved Valentino off with an eyeroll and a flap of the hand. "You know how I am. Couldn't get away from Miss Princess aftah she gave me all that dough, though - esa pinche presumida, just like you said. I was pretty much waitin' fer you t'get sick'a my sh*t and come get my ass so I'd have an excuse ta split. 'cept then I guess you figured out how to get one over on the Radio Demon first. I dunno how you did it, but damn, you got him hooked up good."
Valentino ought to be positively preening at all this affirmation of his excellence. Angel was telling him everything he wanted to hear, everything he needed to be true, but with his body still half-turned toward the masked cityscape, his eyes were darting sharply. Toward the top of Angel's head, the blank face of glass behind which the smoking wreckage of VNN would still be visible across town, back again.
If Angel assumed he was already in on some clever scheme, Valentino could not admit otherwise. Not without revealing that he'd had no plan at all beyond his compulsive greed, and sacrificing the illusion of control to which he was desperately clinging. Desperate - for if he were not, he would not be indulging this conversation in the first place.
The moth had clearly been completely convinced that Angel's performance in the limo was genuine - and was now realizing that his whor* was capable of deceiving him. Having to bury the alarm of figuring out how to respond to this hidden Angel who had slipped from his molted shell with such grace. For which one was real? Which had been real all along?
Valentino gave up his looming position at Angel's side to sweep to the far end of the lounge area, where a permanent dip in the sectional sofa revealed his usual spot. There were more indices of his recent confinement here, the crafts station he had made of the glass coffee table not least of all. The surface rested on the back of a statuette of a crouching panther, and atop it were outspread the accoutrement with which Valentino had been aggressively bedazzling a wide selection of guns.
Valentino either felt he did not owe Angel a response, or he had yet to think of one. Behind him, Angel's eyes were chillingly hollow, boring out of a slackened face with the doll-like shine of an idling shark - thoughtless, without feeling. A primal thing that would not have the higher moral function to reconsider when an errant twitch triggered the reflex to kill.
"C'mon, Big V, I ain't mad for real. You don't gotta be scared," Angel soothed him with a voice like silk and lace. Then, with just a dash of denim: "-You coulda hit me harder to sell it, though. You know I can take more than a puss* shot like that."
"Scared? Of you? Baby." The moth whipped back around, smiling so wide it flashed his receding, cocaine-bleached gumline. He cupped Angel's cheek with one bejeweled hand, and encircled a slender elbow with another. "You should be grateful for my little love taps. I could break you if I didn't care so much."
"Aw, Daddy," Angel mewed, swaying near to catch Valentino's other secondary hand with his own and interlace their fingers. He had twice as many left to spare, and he covered the one on his cheek as though he never wanted it to leave. "You always look out fa me. 'cause what we got is forever, yeah? I promise I didn't mean that sh*t in the limo, I just wanted Vox t'think I was bein' a bitch. Like I wasn't gonna spill the real tea the f*ckin' second I got you up here alone."
I got you. Not the other way around. After so many you know's and like you said's, Angel's flip to active voice seemed to strike Valentino with as much unease as his affectionate mood. The man was petty enough to grasp why that irked him. It was doubtful that he was emotionally intelligent enough to understand why it made him nervous.
"There's more?" Though Valentino's voice swung smoothly into a quippy tenor, it had started in a sharper, more genuine place. He made an effort to unnarrow his eyes. "Busy boy. Daddy's impressed."
"Yeah," Angel said, his accent as kittenish and sugar-thick as it had been since he slithered into the limo. "Like we said back there - you're bettah than him. I'm gonna do whatevah you want. I'm gonna stay. I meant all that stuff."
"Ooh~ He's a good boy, too," Valentino growled, bowing possessively over this simpering bimbo who claimed to know all the things he so dreadfully wanted to learn, and could not afford to remain ignorant of for long. "Keep talking, baby. Daddy's gonna spoil you so good. Going to give you everything you deserve."
"Sick," Angel declared agreeably, and then he leveraged his hold on Valentino to jump into his arms, where he proceeded to recline in a bridal carry like a princess who expected to be carried to her fainting couch. Examining his nails, he said, "So what's the plan? Like, for real? I know this sh*t just got real f*ckin' serious. Voodoo Daddy ain't gonna like it when he finds out you took me back b'fore he got all the time he paid ya for."
Valentino blinked, all four arms now occupied supporting his presumptuous passenger rather than pawing or squeezing him. Pressured at last into some kind of answer, he said, "Don't tease me, Angie~ You want to sit at the table with the grown-ups? You've got to show me what you're bringing to it, first."
"I'm gonna, I'm gonna," Angel griped, "Yer just scarin' me is all. I know you always know what yer doin', but f*ck, you clam up like this and I start feelin' like maybe you don't an' you just don't want me to-"
Valentino dropped Angel onto the spot beside his own throne from a greater height than was entirely necessary, and Angel rewarded him with a yelp, curling up to remove pressure from the bandages Valentino had no doubt been able to feel again through his clothes.
"Christ, that hurts," Angel hissed, rubbing ruefully at his behind. If Valentino had been testing the limits of aggression he could get away with, Angel did not seem to have noticed. "No f*ckin' manners, these guys, I swear. Gimme some space fer a sec, will ya? I gotta show you this sh*t. Let's just say you ain't gonna be happy with what he did ta the merchandise. Gonna take months fer the scars t'go away."
Valentino had parried the first diversion from his promised intel easily enough, but he did not seem to have been prepared for the second, and he impotently did as he was told, folding slowly into his own seat as Angel hooked two thumbs under the waistband of his leggings and stretched it.
Angel peered up at him. The moth nodded, and said, "Strip."
Angel rolled over to flatten his primary palms on the back of the sofa, knees braced on its edge as he rolled the elastic band down from the snatched inlet of his waist over the swell of his hips, buttocks, thighs. Sensuality thinly veiling the advent of horror, as the gauze and medical tape Valentino's roughhousing had caused to peel exposed the first fringes of split flesh, the blue lips of which had pursed in the early stages of granulation - then ruptured, then started to ooze.
It was clear that the wounds had reopened in several places sometime in the last few hours, blushing through the bandages in fresh, bruisy clouds. Angel was wearing a pair of black boyshorts over them, holding the arrangement in place firmly enough to keep the full extent of his injuries in the realm of imagination, but there was no denying that he had been brutalized in ways too depraved for a stable man to ask for.
Valentino leaned forward in his seat.
"This is the sh*t he did aftah I tried callin' you," Angel told him, wincing darkly over his shoulder. "Had his shadow hold me down while he made me shove my co*ck down his throat. Sliced me up like roast beef so I wouldn't enjoy it too much."
"Your co*ck down his?" Valentino scoffed, and leaned away from the display to stub the butt of his cigarette in a crowded tray amid the armory on the coffee table. He parted the wings of his coat as he sat back and kicked one leg over the opposite knee, the picture of poise in beglittered scarlet bell-bottoms. "You made it sound like he's had you doing dismemberment p*rn, and he paid money to blow you? Angie..."
"Jesus Christ, Val, he's a f*ckin' Cannibal," Angel snapped, shoving his leggings the rest of the way down to his ankles and kicking them sharply away. His boots landed on the carpet with a thud. "You evah get deep-throated by a cannibal before? He's got TEETH in there, these rings of 'em all the way down like-like some kinda meat-grinder. I could feel 'em tickling my dick like he was gonna-"
Angel was opening and clenching his fists to mime the closing of these foul apertures around a captive penis. Valentino recrossed his legs.
"He had me give him my whole knot like a f*ckin' maniac, so I wasn't gettin' out unless I could cum, but the whole time I'm thinkin' if I move even a little bit-" Angel raved on, gesticulating as only an Italian could to illustrate the sheer extent of this horror. "And, and his tongue's got hooks on it! It's like two feet long, I swear to God I thought he was gonna scrape the skin off the inside'a my asshole and slurp my guts out like a f*ckin' ANTEATER-"
"Alright!" Valentino cut him off, seizing Angel by the hip and squeezing until he cried out and clenched the back of the sofa with his fists, silenced by the teeth he had embedded in his lip.
Back still turned, grinning around them as he let the blood run. There were slits in the velvety back of the sofa under his hands where ripped upholstery now showed through. Angel's claws would have lined up perfectly were his hands half the size.
Valentino seemed perilously close to vomiting down the satin front of his shirt. "You're getting pissy about the sh*t he didn't do? Don't be a baby, mi amor - you said you could take more than a puss* shot, didn't you?"
"Yeah," Angel conceded meekly, and unmeekly rolled his primary eyes while he mouthed a mocking wah-wah-wah.
The man had ordered Angel to strip. He had put him under no obligation to make it a pleasant experience.
"So stop bitching, sit that nasty ass down, and tell me what else you found out."
"f*cking look at me - I need more drugs first, gimme anothah dip from that bag," Angel replied, brusquely rolling into place at Valentino's side and slipping his hand into the moth's coat to retrieve the desired intoxicants himself. "Satan's ballsack, if you love me you'd give me the whole damn thing."
Seemingly stunned by the spider's audacity, Valentino grabbed his intruding wrist and held it fast. But then he retrieved what Angel had been after - and he let him have what he wanted.
Angel licked his finger and stuffed it aggressively into the baggie, then jammed it under his upper lip and started to scrub, as though he could scour it in so deep he'd never have to come down.
"Angelcakes..." Valentino purred dangerously, tipping Angel's chin with the points of his golden claws. "You clam up like this and Daddy starts thinking you're lying."
"C'mon, would I? When sh*t's gettin' this intense? I'm a dummy, but I ain't stupid," Angel replied dismissively, smacking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "There's just a lot. I'm tryin' to figure out where to start with all this crap."
"You start with the sob story you fed me in the limo," Valentino prompted him. "How much of that was horsesh*t?"
"What, like, the part about Al f*ckin' with you 'til you chased Vox back to him? That was for real," Angel responded innocently, pitching into the wide-eyed cadence of a man sharing a shocking piece of gossip. "He did everything on purpose, it's total psychopath sh*t. Makin' you think that place had a list you weren't on, the thing with the table bein' too small, the little sheep chick playin' chicken with you. The place ain't even non-smoking - that rat waiter was puffing Unluckies like a chimney when I was there. Al told him to let you light up b'fore he pulled it on you, he's the pettiest bitch, you don't even know."
Angel had tilted his head to let the drip run down the back of his throat, eyes pinched shut, and in the moments of courteous blindness he offered Valentino was left to stare into the middle distance and comprehend the full extent to which he had been made a fool. He did not blink. All facial activity had drained back into the swiveling antennae that were his only unpremeditated form of expression - one sleek strand fanning so wide that the fibers separated and seemed to crawl, shackled to the slack-mouthed horror of its braindead Siamese twin.
Perhaps he was reliving himself jumping like a dog for the check Alastor had waggled in front of him. Perhaps he was recognizing that Angel knew. And yet he was here, purring and mewling like a loyal underling who was unbothered by the WEAKNESS his boss had shown.
The moth was checking his text messages when Angel opened his eyes. Blue light illuminating the hollow of his brows from beneath, exaggerating the angles of his face like a fixed, pallid mask. Above the scroll of text the time ticked over another minute.
"Val, seriously?" Angel huffed, stretching out his legs as he lounged back into the sofa. "The phone? I just went through twenty kinds'a hell fa you, think you could make me a priority for one night? You promised."
"Shut up." Valentino had begun to sweat profusely. "I promised I'd give you what you deserve. If you're going to waste my time talking about how that tacky freak eats dinner, I'm going to deal with my other business."
"The Studio ain't actually gonna get bombed, Val. You can chill out."
Valentino went very, very, s t i l l .
"How did you know."
Angel had spread his upper arms across the back of the couch, relaxed and seeming slightly less interested in this news than he was in the carpet he was picking at with his toe. He had noticed the long waves of auburn hair scattered on the shag, sticking now to his sock-clad feet.
It might normally have indicated the manic defacement of a very expensive wig - but Angel was touching the places white stuffing was poking out of those conspicuous gouges in the upholstery, and his eyes had grown suddenly stormy.
"C'mon, like Cherri could get together a payload that big and rig it all up without anybody catching wise. After doin' VNN too? Get real," Angel scoffed, flicking his bangs back out of his face. "Only reason she could do that is 'cause Vox is a cheap bastard who hasn't updated a building code since the f*ckin' 70's."
It was sublime, the stretch of suspended animation that occurred in the moment Angel achieved total control.
Valentino was having a physical reaction to the change, clenching his phone so tightly in his hand that the casing strained. He was swallowing repeatedly, like he was salivating too fast to leave his mouth open.
"You didn't seriously believe that sh*t, did you?" Angel teased him, snout scrunched over a mean-spirited little smirk.
Valentino inhaled sharply through his teeth. Perhaps he hadn't, but when had he been given a moment to think about the matter critically? When before right now?
And he needed to know what Angel knew. Everything depended on it now.
"Where did you hear about this?" Valentino demanded, and though he did not raise his voice, the sound left him like bile bubbling out of the unseen chambers of a churning gut. The better question would have been when, and moreover, how much, but the man had already decided where his priorities lay.
Angel glanced up from under his eyelashes, smooth as the indifferent face of God.
"Just makes sense. What'd you think was gonna happen?"
Valentino's face seized in an awkward palsy as he jammed his glasses further up his face, growling, "But how do you KNOW? Who told you?"
"Same way I know Al's gonna kill Vox," Angel drawled, picking casually at his teeth. "We got like a day and a half max, and it's goin' down. This whole thing was a honeypot."
"W h a t."
"That's what I said," Angel snickered. "Seriously, though, just think about it. Vox's had that big swingin' hate boner for him for what, like seventy years? Since before he met you, for sure, and he still can't let it go. So if the Radio Demon wants ta split up the Vees, how's he gonna do it? The f*ck else woulda got Vox to do all this?"
"I F U C K I N G TOLD HIM!" Valentino exploded, chucking his phone across the suite and slamming all four fists onto his shuddering thighs. Angel's toes curled sharply into the carpet, but his face did not so much as twitch. "¡Hijo malparido de la grandísima puta-!"
Every other damning detail seemed momentarily forgotten in the face of this one reality that offered Valentino some kind of positive emotion. It did not matter that the pain he was celebrating in another would also cause irreparable harm to himself. That was the type of thought that arrived in the afterward, if it ever arrived at all.
"He's playin' nice fer now so he can finally bear witness to the undoing of his fatal foe, yeah," Angel agreed. "He's waitin' 'til Vox is done screwing himself over to pull the plug. Probably wanted t'see if the little bitchass was really gonna kill you like he said he would."
Valentino was forced to catch the first dribble of hot pink saliva with his sleeve, and in the entire torture session so far nothing had seemed to humiliate him so profoundly as the undignified slurping noise he had to make to keep his furious drooling at bay. His body was trying to defend itself the only way it knew how, but in this moment his secret weapon was doing nothing but forcing him to give up on long sentences.
"He's the one."
"Oh yeah. What'd you think I meant by him wanting you outta the way?" Angel egged him on. "He wants to make Vox do it for him instead'a squashin' you like a bug, just because he can. He says screwing up your whole empire ain't good enough - Voxy's gotta prove he wants it b'fore Al really puts out. And he wants it bad."
The mood in the room finally snapped, like some maggot-ridden ligament of the mind that had been fraying strand by strand, and when it gave with a gummy smack Valentino was subjected to the same experience that befell the bear who died on Sarnath Row. Being borne down upon by a specter of unspeakable carnage, the instinct that took hold of him was not to fight or to flee, but to FREEZE. Suddenly the leopards and dobermans flanking the conversation pit all seemed to be staring at him. The panther crouched resentfully under its burden, peering through the disaster zone of guns and drug paraphernalia on the table as though waiting for an ankle to come in striking range.
Animal prints and golden statuettes and that garish coffee table. Surrounding himself with the imagery of predators in poses of service as he strove to style himself a chief among them, though he collected replicas and patterns instead of trophies and skins. Perhaps he couldn't tolerate the presence of the real thing.
Perhaps it made him uneasy.
"Good thing I got out in time to tell ya all about it, huh?" Valentino's sleep paralysis demon offered him the shining smile of a contented devotee. "They really f*cked up now. No way those shmucks are gettin' to Valentino once he's seen 'em coming."
The penthouse was sealed. Vox's entire focus was fixated on his multi-million dollar loss Downtown. Velvet would not prioritize Valentino's fate over her own, and he was cut off from social media, watching his reputation unravel before his eyes. Valentino was totally isolated from every avenue of support on which his grandiosity relied for substance - for without those things all he really had was unresolved trauma and a bad attitude. The shadow of the Radio Demon had already been smuggled through the wards of his safe haven, and Angel could call upon his immaterial attack dog with a snap.
But he was taking his time. Sleek and confident, twice as old as this would-be predator squirming in its own ill-fashioned web, and so powerful that he could afford to play with his food.
Valentino reached across the space between them and touched Angel's bare neck. Angel's jaw firmed, and he looked up at his victim with impassive calculation when claw-capped fingers closed in a loose collar around his throat. Silence for a moment, the two of them locked eye-to-eye, each waiting to see who would blink first.
Valentino was at the end of his rope, and when the reaction he wanted did not come fast enough, the trump card he thought to pull was, "Where's your choker, baby?"
The beat that followed was as fraught as the half-century of history that still prowled in the dark mental crawlspace where Angel had learned how to live.
"This is about trust, Angelcakes. You haven't been breaking mine, have you?"
The article had vanished from Angel's off-the-clock wardrobe nearly a month ago.
"Al took it," Angel lied. "Asked me why I always had it on - guess he didn't like the answer."
"You know Daddy told you never to take it off," Valentino murmured darkly. The insectile rasp that buzzed under all his speech had become a pronounced vibrato. "No matter who you're with. You promised."
"What was I s'posed t'do, huh?" Angel shot back. "I let him talk me inta takin' off my socks 'cause he likes my feet, how was I gonna tell the Radio Demon he can't bite all up on my neck?"
"I thought it was Al now," Valentino simpered venomously. "You don't sound traumatized to me, flaquito. Not if you're talking about him like that."
"Pfffft. It's 'cause I got that freaky little dork wrapped around my finger," Angel replied. "Seriously, don't sweat. He's not gonna be a problem fa me."
The logic break clicked into place and stuck like a bent key. Opposing gears in Valentino's mind had locked their teeth, and at long last he could no longer suspend disbelief.
"You said you ran away because he was going to tongue-f*ck you to death and pin you up on his wall."
"I said you got him hooked up good, remember? The guy's f*ckin' gone on me. Total simp. He'd literally kill somebody if I'd let him kiss my toe beans for it," Angel corrected him, gold tooth poking over his lip as he plumped his fluff and let it drop with a salacious bounce. "Like you didn't know he'd be that type. Ain't that what Vox was fa you? Bigshot sugar daddy who wants a dommy mommy to step on his junk an' tell him he's scum? I got this. Learned it from the best."
Valentino looked like a man who had been abruptly stricken blind, crouching bug-eyed in the middle of a busy intersection. None of it made sense. The evidence of his senses did not make sense. Any decision he made could be the wrong one if he only thought he knew what he knew, and for some reason he was still being sheltered under the auspices of this friendly mood he had not earned, watching with unease as Angel calmly overlooked his attempts at dragging it down. Just sitting there, reclining like a snow-white jaguar in the pink, arboreal glow.
One of the little horned poppets that had peered at Valentino in the limo finished rotating the last leopard statue to face his seat. Valentino's head turned sharply, and for a long moment he squinted at the brazen cat like he hadn't looked at it in twenty years.
"You okay, Daddy?" Angel inquired perkily. "Startin' t'see the ghosts, huh? Me too - been weeks since I really got well, this sh*t's sendin' me to the moon."
Only after Valentino's eyes had snapped away again did the tiny homunculus poke its head back around the statue's rump. The dozens of glowing eyes clustered in the blackness under the sectional bobbed and weaved as its compatriots silently cheered it on.
Valentino was visibly struggling to maintain the narrative they had spun together. It was a comfort, perhaps, this scene that cast him as the kingpin plotting with his gangster moll, but the harder he doubled down on it, the greater the cognitive dissonance became - clashing with the knowledge that this slender, lovely beast had just become magnitudes more powerful than he, and must be appeased so that it would not find out.
Then the Angel who had promised he wasn't mad for real was suddenly nowhere to be found.
"Will you f*ckin' say something?" The spider barked abruptly. "What are you just sitting there looking like an idiot for? WAKE UP!"
Angel was ripping through costume changes like a maniac, and as the meek and shaken whor* had given way to a figure of calm confidence, Angel emerged now like the birth of thunder. His near-nakedness had allowed his chest and mantle to rise unhindered, and it made him look suddenly larger, his smooth, unthreatening outline carved up into a ragged burst of bristling spikes.
"You wanna talk about TRUST?" Angel escalated immediately to a shout, his voice like a physical whipcrack against the easygoing charm he'd been treating Valentino with so far. "You wanna pick that fight with ME right now? Like I don't know f*ckin' everything about what you just tried to pull with Cherri?"
Valentino's own fluffy collar poofed, so dramatic that there could no longer be any doubt that it was a living part of his body. His coat bristled likewise with short, silky fibers, a sudden jump that released a subtle layer of glimmering dust.
"This is seriously what you've been wasting your time on? THIS?" Angel continued, gesturing incredulously at the mess of bedazzled guns and glue desecrating the coffee table. All the aquarium fish had been lined up in a neurotic row and speared on co*cktail umbrellas like macabre miniature beachgoers. "Your whole life in ON f*ckING FIRE and you've been in here jamming your thumb up your ass and figuring out how to torture me some more instead'a MAKING A GODDAMN PLAN? What kind of Overlord are you?!"
Valentino had leaned back from the assault, openly gawping. Now the hand that had flinched back from Angel's neck wound into a knuckle-popping fist and beat down against the back of the couch, and the moth was immediately on the defensive. "What the f*ck are you talking about, you crazy bitch? I am so sick of you cooking up bullsh*t in your head every time I leave you alone-"
Angel shot to his feet, and Valentino instinctively jumped up likewise.
"You coulda got me killed too, all because you can't take somebody showin' you what a pathetic piece of sh*t you are, and for what? A hundred thou?" Angel was pointing aggressively up at Valentino's looming face, shoulders back and chin jutting high. "My sweet ass makes that sh*t on ad revenue in a MONTH. You are so stupid, you are such a goddamn MORON-"
Valentino's coat stirred and started to part like a dressing gown, revealing the first curves of rosy eyemarks on the inner side. Then Angel seized the overfull heart-shaped ashtray off the coffee table, spilling an arc of ash and butts before he heaved it at the ground between Valentino's feet. The moth jumped back, and where his toes had been the stone paperweight thudded into the carpet and crunched a dent into the hardwood beneath.
Angel pursued at once, pushing up into Valentino's space, and one of the moth's stilettos caught in the shag, forcing another hop-skip before he caught himself on the curve of the conversation pit. Then it seemed wise to step out of the pit to avoid knocking his thighs on that obstacle, and some paralyzed part of Valentino's brain seemed to be overlooking the fact that this constituted a retreat.
"I don't know what kind of lies that sleazy brujo has been feeding you in whatever hole you crawled out of, but he's got you so turned around that it's funny," Valentino insisted with his arms outspread, somehow finding himself in the unlikely position of trying to deescalate the situation. "You're brainwashed, babycakes. You don't know what you're talking about."
He was still backing away. He was shoulder-checking a spiral staircase that lead to the mezzanine, meeting the rim of a bathtub styled like a martini glass that overlooked the main living space and displayed the bathers for those mingling below. The strip of hardwood from it to the balcony doors situated them between the lounge and the "sleeping" area, and centered on that strip was a white tiger-print rug that hosted an enormous scarlet chaise longue, whose occupant would survey all that went on inside the suite.
Only here was there any sign of the moth iconography that was omnipresent in Valentino's public holdings. Elevated alone at the center of all this savage imagery, it somehow seemed like a vulnerable place to be.
"Don't f*ckin' talk down to me!" Angel shrieked, advancing after Valentino on limbs that suddenly seemed far too long. "You're always treatin' me like you think I'm the dumb bimbo here! Like you aren't a mediocre pick-me bitch takin' credit for-"
"Daddy's treating you like what you are, sweetheart," Valentino crooned over him, then audibly sucked back another mouthful of sticky-sweet drool. "You don't even know what 'mediocre' means. Nobody's impressed when you pull fancy words out of your trash poetry books because you think it makes you sound smart. When you're having one of your little baby tantrums it's just pathetic."
"I was born in 1915, you sh*t-eating cuck," Angel snarled viperously. "I coulda been your daddy, but a dog beat me over the fence."
They appeared to have arrived at the point of no return.
"E x c u s e me?"
"Last time I checked yer blind, not deaf," Angel sneered. "I said I'm 109 years old, and your Mama shoulda got an abortion."
Valentino's eyelids flared. "YOU signed the Contract. YOU knew what you were getting into, and THIS is how you talk to me? After everything I've done for you?"
"I was f*cked outta my mind on drugs and I LOVED YOU!" Angel bellowed. His tertiary eyes looked larger, faceted like insectoid diamonds studded in flesh. His proportions were...wrong. "I wasn't payin' attention to the fine print and YOU f*ckING KNEW THAT!"
The hour Cherri had prescribed was over minutes ago, and there had been no boom. Here was proof that she had been bluffing. Here was proof that Angel was not.
"You know the deal," Valentino insisted, and when he grabbed Angel's throat this time he was not in the least bit gentle. "Fame, safety, e v e r y little thing you want - and the only thing you've got to do for all that is exactly what I say. I don't get how you think that's so H A R D."
"Yeah?" Angel wheezed, squeezing Valentino's wrist so hard that the tendons in his hands popped like piano wire. "Just that easy, huh?"
"It could have been so easy, amorcito," Valentino said. "I've got everything you want. Everything you'll ever need. How many times are we going to have to do this before you figure that out? How long are you going to keep hurting yourself before you just stop struggling and stay where you belong?"
"Too bad you can't hold up your end of the Deal anymore," Angel replied.
Valentino's lips pulled back over his filed teeth. "Baby, I can do all kinds of things for an ungrateful slu*t like you."
"You got every f*ckin' thing in Hell to give me except the stuff I want," Angel told him. "You ain't got it in you to give me that. And here I am still honoring the Contract like a good goddamn Sicilian while you sh*t all over it. I oughta bust your knees backwards for that."
Valentino seized Angel's secondary shoulders with his lower hands and shouted, "I got you where you are, you wouldn't have ANY of this if I hadn't taken you in-"
"Yeah? Well now I'm gonna stay rich and famous no mattah what you do, 'cause I'm the one they wanna see," Angel shot back. "Gimme six months and I won't even need the drugs. You got nothin' I want. You sure as Hell ain't got anything I 'need'. And I ain't f*ckin' safe. So what're we doin' here?"
"WHAT makes you think you can T A L K to me like that?"
"Oh no~ What're you gonna do about it, Mistah V?" Angel swooned into Valentino's grip with consummate drama. The glaze of realism he had given his performance so far was peeling away, and the grinning thing that crawled out was practically Vaudevillian. "You gonna kill off your cash cow 'cause you got your feefees hurt?"
"Don't t e m p t me." Valentino shook him once, hard. "Daddy also keeps you safe from himself, Angelcakes. But maybe you forgo-"
"Like Hell you do."
"¡Puta madre!" Valentino lifted Angel by his arms and barreled them back toward the chaise, which he slammed Angel down on and pinned him to by the neck. "¡Me cago en tu PUTA madre!"
"I'm only scared'a you 'cause I can't fight back." Angel coughed, still crushing Valentino's wrist with two hands as he scrabbled to get his legs between their bodies. "'cause I know you can do whatevah you want t'me."
"That's right, baby," Valentino growled down into his face, so close that the frame of his glasses bit into Angel's cheek. "I thought I taught you better, Angel, but nobody ever accused you of being smart - so let me say it real slow so you can get it through your ditzy little head-" He was spraying spit like a rotary sprinkler now, pushed so far beyond caring that he let it drip onto Angel's defiant face. "-I've been a goddamn s a i n t, letting you crash and burn out there on your own because Lucifer's little LAUGHING-STOCK got it in your head that you're worth something. But I guess you need a little reminder that I O W N YOU."
Angel was giggling around a swelling tongue, and likewise grunted, "Too bad none'a that's true anymore."
"What. Did you just say?" Valentino squeaked, crushing Angel's jaw in his other primary hand. "I don't think I heard you..."
Angel turned his head into Valentino's bruising grip, until his breath ghosted along the side of the moth's face.
Low and husky through clean arcs of little, deadly teeth, he murmured, "Al offered me a deal, Big V."
Valentino laughed, a savage, scornful bark that made up for in bravado what that little widening of the eyes had cost him. "You don't have a soul to barter anymore, sweetcheeks. That crackpot is playing you like a fiddle and you're too dumb to realize it." He slid Angel's body up against the arm of the chaise by the ridge of his adam's apple and started to crush. "But don't worry, Daddy knows what you need. Just a little tough lo-"
"Guess it's a good thing it wasn't mine he wanted to trade," Angel gasped.
Valentino loosened his grip.
Angel extended one of his tertiary arms to one side with a check-this-out wink, palm upturned as though to cup a flame, then poised his fingers in perfect imitation of Alastor's signature move. His shadow's head split open in a visible slice of a smile.
Angel snapped his fingers, and the creature sewn into the lining of that shadow skittered up the curve of his spine, out along that slender arm to spark black distortion into the air at Angel's fingertips. Space warped around them, neon-pink polygons oscillating at the fringes of a vantablack hole that rested in the palm of Angel's hand.
Behind his rosy spectacles, Valentino paled.
"I own the Radio Demon, you s t u p i d motherf*cker," Angel stage-whispered. He showed no fear, and the perfect drama with which he crushed that little singularity in his fist, scattering fragments of discombobulated space with a queer pop - oh, it was art. "I'm the one who came up with the plan. Al did his lil dinner date 'cause he had a crush on me, and everything aftah that was M E."
"You dumb BITCH," Valentino boomed, wrenching Angel off the chaise to toss him roughly on the floor. "You think you can LIE to me? You think you can f*ck with ME?"
"There's my Val," Angel murmured, rolling onto his elbows, then his hip. For the very first time since their reunion began, Angel was looking into Valentino's eyes like he saw a person inside. One he had been waiting for. Pushing himself up to kneel at Valentino's feet, he said, "Hit me, I dare ya."
A tense hesitation stretched in the moment before that flicker of fear turned back into rage, and Valentino struck Angel across the face in a resounding backhand slap.
"Do it again," Angel demanded at once. His head and torso had twisted to one side from the impact, but he had not gone down, his core muscles wound as tight as iron. He snapped back around to confront Valentino with a blistering Kubrick stare and snarled, "Hit me!"
This time Valentino lunged into a full-bodied punch, and when Angel ducked to guard his jaw it caught him square in the cheek instead, splitting skin along the arch below his eye. Angel reeled, catching himself with one arm on the seat of the chaise, then threw himself to his feet and back into Valentino's space.
"I said HIT ME!" He roared, spit flying, blue in the face with bloodshot eyes. "Get yer balls outta your purse and f*ckin' H I T ME!"
Valentino was terrified.
He reeked of it, watching his most reliable tool fail to produce the compliance he had learned to expect. It had been too easy for too long, and Valentino had let himself forget that he was kicking a dog who was muzzled, not toothless. He had forgotten how to handle an Angel who had not given up. Or perhaps he had never learned.
Angel's body was changing. His proportions were becoming less humanoid - limbs longer, spindlier, the jackknife Z of his legs more dramatic - and his eyes, T E E T H.
"Should've stayed down, c*nt," Valentino warned him, his wings slowly spreading to dominate Angel's field of view. "You won't have any teeth left in that pretty face when I'm done with you."
"Y'know what?" Angel scoffed, spitting a wad of blood on the white carpet and wiping his mouth on his hand. "I think I'm pretty sick'a listening to the sh*t comin' outta your mouth. I'm thinkin' maybe you don't get to h a v e one anymore. How 'bout that, Mistah Valentino? How's that sou-"
"SHUT your LITTLE whor* MOUTH," Valentino boomed, grabbing Angel's neck with two hands and l i f t i n g until the spider was wobbling on tiptoe. Their size difference had never felt so vast. "-en tu madre, en tus muertes, en TODO-"
Angel's feet were scrabbling as they left the ground, fighting to support his body by bracing against Valentino's legs while the moth was occupied with his extra arms.
The poppets were everywhere. Squat or scrawny or gangly or stubby - some with sunken eyes and others none at all - each fashioned with a smiling, overbitten row of human teeth. Dozens of them, pouring across the ceiling like sackcloth tarantulas and dangling in a lengthening chain from the chandelier overhead.
Something was w r i t h i n g behind the pattern on the wallpaper, a vast shadow diffused among the rosy spotlights until it seemed so large it filled the room. A shadow, just the shadow cast by something so titanic that three dimensions were not enough for it to fit inside. But it was TRYING, just an atom's-breadth from seething out of the angles of space to turn Valentino's last stand into a nightmare so bleak it defied imagining.
But it could not act. It was restrained by no magic bond, all those acres of teeth muzzled by no more than a simple promise as it watched the fragile little firefly it loved more than anything in the world being crushed by an uncaring hand.
The pareidolic stag still lay upon the cliffside eyrie, guarding its co-opted young, and it was by the grace of those golden creepers twisting around its barren ribs that it managed not to rise and descend upon the Greed Sector in all its oscillating glory. This too was a choice, for the beast was not tied down; it was rooted, and did not want to pull them up. They were growing, budding, flourishing, wrapping the Radio Demon in a metaphysical hug to substitute the one that "Alastor" was in no condition to accept.
They reminded him this was a radical act of love. For the only thing more immense than the power of the looming abomination was that of the man who was choosing not to call upon it. Whose only reason not to pull the trigger on this poor fool was because he wasn't done with him yet.
The legs of a jumping spider were clever tools indeed. Lacking extensor muscles entirely, the flexors had room to grow double in size, run through by pressurized channels of hemolymph. When Angel contracted those sinuses his knees drew up tight, wound like the hammer of a co*cked pistol, and only by keeping his thighs clenched did he prevent that gun from going off.
This became problematic for Valentino when Angel started losing consciousness. The spider's primary eyes were bulging, blue-lipped and black-tongued as his own weight hung in the crook of Valentino's hand. He was trying to hoist himself with four shuddering arms, but the tertiary set was clawing wildly at Valentino's face, smacking away the moth's bent glasses to be immediately trod underfoot.
Angel did not choose to black out. When it happened, what came next was nothing but a fact of his biology. He couldn't have stopped it if he wanted to.
Angel's eyes rolled back, and the hydraulic pressure in his thighs released automatically, hemolymph flooding the empty sinuses in his shins with such force that the resulting kick fired like a cannon.
Valentino's left ankle was smashed at a speed of over one hundred meters per second, imploding inside a thigh-high boot that became more or less a sausage casing filled with pulled pork and broken bones.
Angel dropped to the floor in a heap, coughing and sucking air, and was immediately in a blind scramble to put distance, any distance, between himself and the fallout of the line he had just crossed.
The leg crumpled like an empty soda can the moment Valentino shifted his weight on it. This wasn't necessarily a disaster on its own, but it was Valentino who had decided to wear eight-inch heels to a fight for his life, and he went down. And he had very far to fall.
Valentino was crawling toward the chaise. There was now an eight-inch difference between his left leg and his right, and he needed that. one. OFF because he couldn't balance on it until he DID but the f*cking boot had to be a THIGH-HIGH and he couldn't M O V E and he needed a f*cking GUN.
Angel was stripping his socks off, revealing his large pink feet and raptorial claws. There was nothing titillating in his nudity now. The lack of clothing served only to strip away the visual cue that said he had once been human. What remained was a truly alien thing, spindly and pale and bristling with arms, its proportions so distorted that its vague resemblance to mankind evoked primal fear.
Here was a spider that had to duck to get through most doorways, and it had opposable thumbs. This city, this realm was so unrelentingly bizarre that one could forget how blood-curdling that notion really was. He was a monster, and the genre shift was complete.
Valentino was out of his boot and had given up looking for his glasses. His natural vision had been enough to hobble back into the conversation pit, but he was at the overburdened coffee table now, and he was screaming with frustration as he tried to check the caliber of the bullets he was mashing into his pistol.
The thing was an atrocity, a massive revolver with a hot pink, monogrammed barrel, gold heart-shaped trigger-guard and zebra-print frame. Its very existence was an insult, but at least it was easy to spot. It was the ammunition that failed to stand out - and this day, this one day, Valentino had been responsible enough not to play with a loaded gun.
When the moth heaved himself over the back of the couch and squinted down the barrel, Angel was right in front of him, and he said, "STRAWBERRY!"
Valentino blinked.
"Straw-?"
Angel had extended his arm like Adam reaching for the hand of God, knowing full well he intended to pull that deity down from on high. His own shadow no longer cast itself on the wall, but merged across the gap between dimensions and inhabited the body to which it was tied. Bioelectricity surged under Angel's skin, illuminating every chromatophore in his radiant body, and that energy wanted O U T.
Pink lightning cracked across the space from the tip of Angel's finger to his Overlord's golden grill, and Valentino's mouth exploded in a spray of sparkling gore.
Something smacked into the carpet, an arc of wet bone and unspun flesh with fragments of teeth still embedded in its blackened gums. The tongue had not come off with it, only partially-torn at the root, dangling now to lick the hollow of Valentino's gulping throat.
For a moment everything was perfectly still. Crystalized in time, marked only by the reek of fresh ozone and a faint ringing in the ears.
Valentino looked down, and he realized that his jaw had fallen off. He understandably did not take this well.
The moth made a noise that sounded like a plaintive burp, blinking around a twist of shrapnel from his detonated fillings. A dribble of blood oozed down his cheek like the tears of stigmata, and he looked at Angel with upturned brows, seeming almost confused - like he was asking him to explain how this could possibly have happened.
Then Valentino exploded into violence with a scream so guttural that it punched up into the hindbrain and started to chew.
His wings blasted wide, buffetting the suite with a thick cloud of glimmering dust, and the shockiness in Angel's slackened eyes vanished when the air blast knocked him off his feet.
Valentino had bought himself distance to shoot, but he had also worsened his already dismal visibility, and the moment he took aim Angel jumped straight upward, gone before the bullet had even left the chamber. The poppets had already been swinging the chandelier like poltergeists overhead, and they fell over one another to grab Angel's hands when they closed on the steel frame, holding them fast while the spider swung his legs to flip himself up and take hold of the chain.
Valentino was howling like a bedlamite when he fired at the chandelier, raining down shards of scarlet glass, but Angel had scaled the chain already, and as soon as the pads on his bare feet stuck to the ceiling he was a skittering, hexapedal nightmare. The bullet struck the roof, and the way the fragments sang when the kinetic energy dispersed revealed that in spite of its drab casing, it had a core of Angelic steel.
But what would have been a trump card for any other was all but useless here, in the hands of a wounded man who could barely see. Just as Valentino could have opted for sensible shoes or contact lenses, no one had forced him to snub the advantages of a semi-automatic pistol. He had decided the aesthetic of a revolver was worth the limitations - but there was no worse time to devolve into panic than when one had only six rounds in a cylinder.
The human mind was hard-coded to perceive spidery movements with alarm, and the leopard print broke up the outline of that skittering shape until it became a dread-inducing visual smear. Angel's natural glow merged seamlessly into the rosy light palette, and the translucence of his fur made him all but disappear. Valentino was quite literally firing at shadows - for he had nothing else on which to go.
The thing on the ceiling was making an insectile chittering noise as it evaded him, vibrating the thin layer of chitin that reinforced the space between its skeleton and flesh, and it needed to DIE he needed to MAKE IT DIE so it would stop making that f*cking s o u n d but he couldn't make. it. DIE and now he didn't know if that was five shots or six oh god five please let it be five
Then Valentino remembered that Angel was literally bound to him - that at any time he could choose to summon the eighteen feet of ultrapink chain it took to link his dominant hand to the manacle that appeared around Angel's neck. And, because he possessed the power to yank his contractee down from a height of two storeys, he decided that meant he ought to exercise it.
Pulling an enraged animal down on top of him turned out to be no wiser a decision than it had been when Valentino's patsy tried it, and it cost him just as dear. Angel dropped, and because he had positioned himself directly above Valentino, he had no choice but to land on him with all his weight.
Angel's primary hands slapped onto the pate of Valentino's head, and when the force of the drop pummeled them into the ground the moth's skull bounced on the hardwood with a bassy SMACK. That chitinous layer of air around Angel's bones bounced back with a cheerful spring, completely unaffected. Only one of them had been made to do this.
When Valentino stirred Angel was no longer on top of him, but the moment he sat up there was a hissing set of chelicerae unfolding in his face - slick, segmented mouthparts holding up the corners of Angel's mouth in a grotesque mockery of laughter. Valentino made a wet barking sound and recoiled, had to get it get it AWAY get it the f*ck AWAY DON'T TOUCH ME DON'T LET IT T O U C H ME-
And then, because the man's shirt had been unbuttoned to the navel, Angel reached a hand inside. Like his heels, his glasses, his gun, it had been Valentino's decision to wear a nipple chain today.
Angel wrapped his fist once to gather the slack, then he shot to his feet with a mighty wrench of his dominant bicep, and the departure of Valentino's right nipple was announced by a blunt, fleshy rrRIP.
Valentino shrieked out of the ruination of his mouth like he had just beheld the Second Coming of Christ. His back arched to breaking-point in one visceral lunge, knees shooting up like a bug curling on its back to die, and then his foot was flopping on his decimated ankle as he tried to use it to kick Angel away. He caught the spider in the stomach, he SCREAMED at the pain, and then the thing that was hurting him simply let him get away.
This was for a given definition of the term, of course. An escape was never particularly fast when it was done on hands and knees, dragging one's severed nipple on the ground between one's legs while the other held on by half its heart-shaped areola. Valentino was leaving a clotty smear of blood on the hardwood as it dumped out of his mouth, and the only thing that seemed to be keeping him from lapsing into shock was that bright pop of pink-zebra-gold that showed him where his revolver had landed - and the promise it provided of hurting this monster BACK.
He needed his silver bullet; his wolfsbane; his hammer and stake. Once he had it he could pull this creature he had chained himself to in close and blow its f*ckING head off, he could make it PAY, he
He was almost there.
Then something stomped down on Valentino's wing like the train of a gown, and a clawed foot kicked the pistol back out of reach, skittering across the median to tumble down the short set of stairs leading to the sleeping area. Valentino lunged for it with a screech of dismay, and the two massive claws pinning his wing punched through against the pressure, ripping the limb open like a downy sail. So very delicate.
"Go get it, Daddy," Angel said, ice cold as he stepped off and began winding a loop of the soul chain with his lower hands. "You still got a bullet left in there. I counted."
The "bedroom," like the bathtub, had been set up to provide the mezzanine a generous view of whatever activities took place within, the furniture centered around an enormous heart-shaped bed in bridal white - or perhaps something more practical and vulgar. Mirrors on the walls, mirrors on the ceiling, diffused spotlights that were sure to catch and illuminate the glass cases containing countless posters of Valentino himself in salacious pin-up poses.
Valentino tried. There was a gold-plated rail adjoining the stairs, and because he still thought he was too precious to simply crawl down the flight, he used it to heave himself onto the only functioning foot he still had, aiming to brace the hop he would have to take to safely reach his only hope of survival.
The c*nt should have stayed down. If he had, he might still have a leg to stand on.
What happened instead was practically slapstick. Angel twirled the loop of chain he had wound, then cast it like a fly fisherman, hooked Valentino's good ankle, and ripped it out from under him, sending the moth toppling head-first into the room. Valentino had tried instinctively to save his damaged leg from further harm, but the angle was too severe, his own height too great. He struck the ground, and though the cherry-red shag shielded him from a second concussion, the high ceiling echoed back the muffled CRUMP when his collarbone buckled and broke.
"I've been rehearsing this for fifty f*ckin' years," Angel said as he descended the stairs to tower over his prey while it squirmed, coiling in more of the chain with every step. "Over and over again in my head, every time you were raping me," KICK, "or draggin' me around by my hair," KICK, "or not callin' me when you said you would!" He was getting down on his knees to straddle Valentino's back, dropping low into a nasty, grinning snarl, and when he was settled he dropped a length of chain over Valentino's head and under his shattered jaw, so that he could yank it up and demand the attention he was due. "You got no idea how long I've been w a i t i n ', Daddy. I know every f*ckin' thing about you, and you just let me in like you thought I was too stupid to read you. What'd you think I was doin' this whole time, hangin' around and seein' how you do business?"
Snared up in chains like spider silk, which Valentino himself had materialized, but did not seem to remember he could banish if he just released the deathgrip he had on them. The chains that bind, evidence of a commitment, for to tame a wild animal was a lifelong responsibility - and Valentino had failed to honor the covenant. The consequences would be neither fair nor unfair: this was a matter of nature, and she did not deal in restorative justice. Only blood.
"I've been bored outta my MIND, acting like the six things you know how ta talk about didn't stop bein' interesting before I'd known you a year. I could run a studio myself after everything I learned off you," Angel had come perilously close to raving like a maniac - and then he thrust himself right over the edge like he'd been ready all his life. "In fact, maybe I f*ckin' will! I'd make a better executive producer than you! You fell off in the 2000's, and keepin' you relevant-" Angel seized Valentino by the antennae, "-has been on me 'n Vox evah since. You ain't had another break-out star who lasted ten years! And YOU! Can't take the HEAT!"
He emphasized each point by beating Valentino's head into the floor, seemingly intent on pulverizing what little remained of his face. There was little recognizable in it now - and perhaps that was why Angel was able to look him in the eye with such joy when he wrenched his neck back as far as it would go, so they could see each other in the reflection of a poster frame.
The poster depicted a bust shot of Valentino in his full regalia, holding a sawed-off shotgun in his lower hands and two crossed pistols in the upper set - the vulgar revolver, and a gold-plated semi-automatic he ought to have chosen tonight instead. The moth was grinning out of his forest of guns, eyelids dropped low under perfect penciled brows, seeming to tempt the viewer nearer with his gaze. The poster was autographed - Love, Valentino.
The postscript read, To my biggest fan. - Me
The man in that poster no longer existed. A new reality had been superimposed on the layer of glass that protected that glamorous ideal, and it seemed to take Valentino a very long time to register what he was looking at.
The scene was graphic, to say the least. Angel's glowing eyes were recognizable first, six wicked points of light clustered around the foremost set, so large and alien and bright. His smile was next, glinting gold over the shoulder of something so horrible it almost defied description. A Hole. A cavern of raw meat studded with shards of metal and bone, terminating in a stripe of open sinus cavities below two wet, weeping bulbs that purported to be eyes. And finally, out of all this mess, the first thing that was identifiably personal: the blasted hinges of a humanoid jaw, slack and hanging low.
Valentino realized that he was looking at his own face, and an immediate denial shunted out of him with a gut-wrenching nnnnn-uuuuuh!
"Not so pretty now, are ya, hotlips?" Angel purred. There were mirrors all around to provide an alternate angle, and in every one of them he was a white spider crouched low over a lump of wriggling meat, blue blood streaked down his thighs like warpaint where all but the last strips of gauze had peeled away. He was still holding the soul chain under Valentino's cratered chin with two hands, petting the moth's bald head as he murmured, "You know no one'll love ya if you ain't pretty."
Valentino gagged when he noticed the way his tongue was flopping when he tried to speak - then gagged at the way it dangled when he stopped. Blood and saliva ran freely from the blasted channel of flesh where his mouth used to be, and then he wretched and there was bile too, because he had eaten nothing in the last few days that he had not brought back up, and he had nothing better to add.
"Now we're gonna talk about what I wanna talk about, D a d d y," Angel murmured in his ear. "And I wanna talk about contracts. See, my boyfriend's a real legal eagle, and I bet you dollars to donuts he's already got a nice, tight lil document all ready fa me..."
He was not left waiting long. The moment his expectant palm upturned it had been occupied, and Angel curled his fingers around the roll of fresh vellum with a self-satisfied smirk.
Angel took one look at the unfolded paper and busted up laughing.
"sh*t, Val, I gotta break scene fer a sec, you need to f*ckin' see this. He wrote it in glitter pen," the spider gushed, leaning over to hold the document in front of Valentino's face. "Pink glitter pen, can you believe this guy? You nevah made a fool'a yerself on notarized legal docs just t'make me laugh. You take yerself real goddamn serious for a guy dressed like a Bond villain's bedspread, I tell ya."
Valentino's voice had broken too, those guttural howls cracking into sharp, distressed squeaks when his vocal cords ruptured from overuse. He was making a guttering whistle now, sharp shrieks of it as he breathed, and the fixity of his staring eyes in the mirror was all he had left to indicate that every ounce of his attention was right where it should be.
Angel draped himself across Valentino's back, reclining as he snapped the paper open like a playbill to read aloud: "'I, the undersigned, hereby declare null and void all contracts spiritual, financial, or otherwise binding between myself and the undersigned claimant, pursuant upon terms of exchange to be verbally negotiated on-site.' Alright, not bad." He reached around and patted Valentino's breast pocket for a pen, then tweaked the man's half-severed nipple with it and asked, "D'you mind?"
Valentino's body jumped violently, and he barked like a drowning dog when Angel used the dangling piercing to bully him onto his back. His snapped collarbone briefly resisted the shift, then slid out of the skin like a tentpole through drenched canvas. The man didn't seem to have any screaming left in him. He was looking down at himself from the mirrors mounted on the ceiling, laid out in a broken sprawl at the center of a mushy mat of blood-soaked shag.
Angel sat up and ripped a drawer out of the nearest vanity table, then dumped it out and flipped it upside down to use the underside as a clipboard. The pen was an extravagant fineliner in pink leopard print, and it hovered, its golden nib an inch from the line that read Claimant Signature Here.
Angel blinked. His jaw was locked so tight that the tension popped at his temples, and for a moment he seemed like a man flat on his belly looking over the edge of a cliff - knowing a stray wind was not going to make him fall, but experiencing every bodily emotion as though he already had.
Angel signed his name Anthony, and styled it with a little heart.
It was Valentino's turn. He was still staring at his reflection overhead, surrounded by the fragments of his own self-image, and all the posters seemed to be staring back, their perfect faces taking on a look of subtle disdain. When Angel held up their new Contract on the drawer for his perusal and tapped it loudly with the pen, Valentino sucked in a bubbly breath.
"What's up, Big V? You wanna go? I could let ya go, if you want," Angel offered with doe-eyed sincerity. When Valentino glanced sideways he added, "No, really! If that's what'll get you t'sign the divorce papers, I could let ya go down that elevator and get some help right now!"
There was a beat, sly and cruel, in which Angel cast a contemplative glance over his shoulder, toward the heart-shaped entrance to the lift. Something made him snicker.
"'course, that means you're gonna hafta wiggle yourself inta that lobby and let aaaaaall those people see what I did t'you..." the spider mused. "And then it's day one of bein' a mealy-mouthed freak with half a face who got crippled by his own bitch." Angel settled back, half on his side with his blood-slick flank upturned. He was still tapping out a rhythm with the pen when he said, "You think they're gonna help you? Think any'a those punks are loyal to you? Or are they just gonna laugh?"
Valentino considered his argument, and lapsed at last into despair. If he agreed to the spider's terms, Angel would be magically barred from hurting him any further. Angel would be free, but he would have to let Valentino go. Nothing that had been done to him so far would Erase him. Most of it might even regenerate. Someday.
But he would have to be taken care of. He'd have to depend on people to be kind; to admit that he had weaknesses; to accept that he could fail - or his needs would not be met. He could give everything, he could be so perfectly convenient and lovable that he hardly seemed to be there at all, and his needs still might not be met. Because he couldn't choose not to be dependent, but the people around him could always choose not to let him depend.
He had been losing his eyesight for decades already. This was well-trodden ground, but he could no longer make the decision to step back from the ledge. It was coming. The mortifying ordeal of being known.
Humiliation. Every minute of every day, for the rest of his afterlife.
"What's waitin' out there for you, huh? Don't'cha think you oughta stay up here with yer Angelcakes and take it like a man?" Angel suggested gently, twirling Valentino's dead antenna around his finger like a telephone cord. He was lying on his stomach beside Valentino now, pushed up on his elbows to look down at this man the way he had when he thought they were in love. "Who needs all that sh*t? Without me, all yer gonna be now is an ugly-ass, washed-up old queen, and you're such a bastard that nobody's gonna miss you. On to the next skinny young thing, like that." The spider snapped his fingers. Nothing happened, but the body under him still flinched. "Remember? But hey, that's showbiz, y'know? What can ya do?"
Valentino made a visceral noise, a blood-spewing roar that peaked into something keener and more desperate, like the shriek of a dying rabbit. Because the fact that he knew he needed to die did not mean that he wanted to. Didn't mean he was Ready.
"Aw, Daddy, don't cry! Hard part's over with!" Angel cooed. "All the stuff you actually give a sh*t about is already done for! All you gotta do is call it a wrap, see?"
The foul revolver looked massive in Angel's hand. The opening of the barrel was styled in the shape of a heart, and this he crammed so hard into the side of Valentino's head that it birthed a bruise which would not have time to rise.
"I can't kill ya if you don't sign it, buster," Angel said quietly. "Put your John Hand-co*ck right there, or I'm gonna hafta just keep f*ckin' you up worse 'til ya do. By the time I'm done you ain't gonna be able to end it yerself. But you'll want to." Angel flashed a nasty smile that wrinkled the skin above his snout. "You sign that and I'll make it quick, just fa you. For all the fun times we had."
There was nothing left in Valentino's eyes but a bleak and boundless hatred.
"Now babe, you really gonna give me that face?" Angel started to sing - loose and whimsical, like they both ought to know the tune. "Right now, I'm your one and only saving grace..."
He shoved the pen into one of Valentino's lower hands and wrapped his own around it as a knuckle-popping guide.
"But this ain't charity work, there's standards you gotta meet," Angel snarled, suddenly up against Valentino's temple so that they were looking cheek-to-cheek down the length of his arm. "Don't make me make you regret the ones that you didn't keep."
He was holding the drawer up under their joined hands, hovering the tip just above the dotted line. It would need to be Valentino's choice to let the pen touch paper.
Valentino looked at their hands. At the pen, which he knew was the tool that would really end his life before the gun could even try. And he was the one who had to pull the trigger. Angel was not going to murder him; he was going to make him commit suicide.
Did that mean this was still technically his own choice? Did it matter if it was the only one that he could make, so long as it would be the last?
"Going once..." Angel sang. "Going twice~...Go-"
The Overlord of Lust closed his long, bloody fingers around the barrel of the pen, and then he signed his name.
Valentino.
The effect was immediate. The soul chain shattered first on Valentino's end, then one link at a time, firing down the length of Angel's leash until it reached the manacle around the spider's neck. The sudden glow spotlighted the outlines of Valentino's fingers already blackening where they had caught Angel's throat and squeezed - then the pink collar broke, and vanished like mist in the wind.
The Contract was annulled. It was over.
...It was over.
The sound was just a giggle at first.
A chuckle, really. Rather wheezy, and not too loud. But once it started, it just kept going - and then Angel was laughing outright. Disbelieving, then incredulous, then hysterical, and by then he had realized that he could not make himself stop, dragging two hands down his face and gripping the frazzled hair on the sides of his head.
He was whooping, cackling, he was deranged - he was crawling back on top of Valentino and jamming the barrel of the gun into his ruined mouth.
"Now tell me you want it, you son of a bitch," Angel rasped, a sound so essentially arachnoid that it was clear he had never been anything less - not even on Earth. "Beg me to give it to you."
Valentino gurgled, then produced another fleshy burp. His tongue flopped once like an exhausted fish. He had been stripped of everything, everything, everything he had except for his last shred of dignity, and this he handed over too when he shut his eyes so that he would not see it coming.
"Holy hell, I love this," Angel breathed. Then, escalating rapidly: "I thought I was still gonna be afraid'a you, but this is better than the drugs! f*ck! f*ck you! f*ck! YOU!"
And he did make it quick. He had staked his name on it.
Angel fired the revolver on the final f*ck, and kept clicking the cylinder around even after the mealy contents of Valentino's head had been blasted out the top of his skull and splattered halfway up the wall. Across the posters, the mirrors, lobbying one last insult at the irredeemable carpet. Everywhere.
Somewhere impossibly far away, a curtain fell, and there was quiet in the Great Theater where the King in Yellow held court, as a key actor left the stage for the very last time. Then, as though through a layer of water between one reality and the next, the Spectators on the balconies began to cheer. The Audience had been watching, whispering, waiting for so long, and it was all any performer could hope for, to experience the proof that theirs was a story worth telling.
The play had begun two weeks ago, and two-and-a-half years ago, and always ago - and this, here, was the core crescendo toward which all threads had been leading. There were others in this story with blood sacrifices still to make, but Anthony "Angel Dust" Ragnatelli had fulfilled his to thunderous applause.
The fact that he was out of ammo had finally pinged Angel's brain, and he was now beating Valentino with the butt of the gun, mashing it into the cavity again and again and AGAIN as more and more of the moth's head caved in. From the neck up, it was now impossible to tell that this wad of pulverized gore had ever been a man.
"Hel-LO! Somebody promised me a Louisville S-LUGGER~!" Angel demanded in operatic sing-song when he got tired of tenderizing hamburger, snapping his fingers impatiently over his head. "C'mon, c'mon! I'm not talkin' for my health here, let's GO!"
The thoughtform had been drafted over a week ago, obviously. And it had had time to grow rich with detail.
It was no ordinary baseball bat. The thing had begun its life in the bayou, and though it made no sense for a mangrove to yield wood with the properties of ash, it would spring back just as neat and take punishment like the real thing. The secret was this: inside, at the core, a crooked branch of black antler, still rich with blood vessels on which the transmogrified wood fed, and would live. The grip was wrapped in roan deerhide that was still warm to the touch, so freshly-parted from the hart it might well have a pulse.
Angel had stood when it appeared in his hands, dropping the brain-caked handgun on the carpet and letting the arm holding it fall slack. He was in awe, watching as flourishes were added before his eyes: a spiderweb pattern burning into the polished surface; short, savage prongs growing out of the barrel like black carpenter's nails.
When Angel had concocted this plan, he had told Alastor that I'm gonna be your gun - but it was the Radio Demon who was the weapon now, and the trigger had always been Angel's to pull.
"f*ck, baby, yer gonna make me c-ryyy..."
Angel bowed his head. Shaking, gripping the choke in one hand and petting the living buckskin with the other. His shoulders trembled so violently when he sucked in a breath that his ribs jumped out against the flesh in a swelling cage. Bloated and ready to pop.
The spider whipped around and wound up, face frozen in a skull-faced rictus of sharp, conical teeth. The tears brimmed over, and he chose to do his weeping while brutalizing a corpse beyond all reason or sense. Neither vengeance nor justice, neither anger nor fear could explain it. It was a level of overkill that could be justified by nothing but the sheer, rapturous pleasure of the act.
Angel's entire body was heaving with fatigue by the time it even occurred to him to slow down. His desecration had been so decadent that the bat was audibly bouncing off the ground through the body with every strike. Crumpled wings and drenched fluff that was no longer white. Not pink, not green, not aquamarine, / We're painting the roses red!
And Angel, too. A slasher villain in glorious technicolor, smeared red and blue and purple where the twain did meet. He was panting rapidly, shoulders hunched over the aggressive axis of his jackknifed knees, and from the back it seemed as though his mantle had doubled in size. He was glowing so aggressively that his image overexposed. There was nothing left at his feet worth beating, but he was not done with this anger yet.
"I'm goin' back down," Angel announced, twirling the bat around his hand, and an arc of cast-off striped the wall as he walked by. "Everybody in that f*ckin' lobby's gotta die. Gonna cut my way out like Tony Montana."
He was a stunning figure as he crossed the foyer toward the elevator, striding like a god in all his excellence, long-confined but free at last to walk the earth and bestow his judgment upon it. He was freakish, monstrous, a very profanity on the record of a Creator who claimed to be the author of neither cruelty nor pain.
B e a u t i f u l. He was more beautiful than any being had ever been, living or dead. The great stag tipped its head back and mourned what might have been while Alastor's doppelganger wrapped around Angel from behind to waylay him.
No form, just disembodied force. A sheet of electrons against the skin, enveloping every last atom in a momentary embrace - but afraid to linger too long. It wasn't sure. It wasn't sure of the right thing to do, but it was going to try.
There was no part of Alastor that would not have been delighted to see Angel unleashed upon those rubes downstairs. They were day actors, extras in the play of life, who if they came onscreen at all would do so purely to provide bodies for Angel to wreak ultraviolence upon.
But Charlie wouldn't like it, and Angel would regret it later.
Angel had frozen at the shadow's immaterial touch, trembling with exertion, and his eyes looked shocky and vague when it materialized before him. It clasped two of his hands in its crooked, spindly claws, and around its head summoned the silhouettes of a crown, a spear, and the arc of a monochrome rainbow.
Angel already knew. His expression was crumbling in on itself, his eyes wide and devastatingly hunted. Slim was hunching to rub its face against those captured hands like a worshipful cat, and it could feel the bioelectricity thudding under the delicate skin on the inside of Angel's wrists. The spider sounded as if he was beginning to hyperventilate.
He needed to keep moving, and he needed to stop. He couldn't hold on much longer, but he was terrified to let go.
HE WAS NOT DONE WITH THIS ANGER YET.
Something shattered on the hardwood behind him.
Angel whirled around to look at the shards scattered across the floor. Then up, toward the revelation that one of Alastor's homunculi had dropped a glass object off the mezzanine.
That one was still holding a highball glass triumphantly over its head, and beside it another was hoisting a large black bottle of what looked like very expensive gin. Others were seething up to the railing to show off assorted pieces of Three-Vees memorabilia - standees, tchotchkes, a SeXXXi Award for Best Cinematography depicting a bent figure spreading their ass - and all of them were watching. Awaiting Angel's word.
Something else broke, even louder, and Angel's eyes snapped back to the first level. Slim had looped a tentacle around a nearby leopard statue, then hucked it across the foyer to crash through the casing protecting one of Valentino's posters.
It grinned silently beside its handiwork now, wagging its tail like a self-satisfied dog, and the spark was visible when it dawned on Angel what the shadow was suggesting they do.
Angel pointed with his bat to the golem who was holding the gold trophy and shouted, "PULL!"
The statuette sailed over the edge of the mezzanine, and the arc of Angel's bat caught it with a clean snap of raw velocity, bashing the figure off its plinth.
"PULL!"
The gin bottle next, black glass and juniper and the satisfying liquid S M A S H when it burst. When he hit the crystal highball glass it sang, and now Slim was gathering up clay pigeons for him too, pitching a Valentino bobblehead to its violent demise.
The glass from the shattered poster casing crunched under Angel's bare foot, and he hissed. But when he stepped back he was looking at the gouge that had been ripped out of Valentino's matte-gloss double behind the frame, and he no longer seemed to care what hurt and what didn't.
Valentino wasn't destroyed yet. His image was all around, smiling that oily smile that said he knew he was gorgeous, he knew he was reprehensible - and he knew that because he was gorgeous, he would get away with it.
The next poster down depicted Valentino in black G-string lingerie and a voluminous scarlet boa, curling a commanding finger at the viewer while he smacked a riding crop into his lower palm. Angel whipped off an absolute punisher of a swing, and the rich, satisfying shatter it earned him seemed reason enough to do it again. He reached into the case and ripped the poster right down the middle, then moved on to the next one.
Valentino in a glittering silver leisure suit, salaciously reclined on the hood of a flashy sportscar. Valentino with a half-foot of tongue curling through the upturned V of his fingers. TESORO by VALENTINO - GET HOOKED; VALENTINO, LIVE IN PENTAGRAM CITY; VALENTINO, VEEPLE MAGAZINE'S SEXIEST slu*t OF THE YEAR; VALENTINO, HIS UNTOLD STORY; V A L E N
It could only go on so long.
The insulating mental buzz of the cocaine was already starting to recede, and between one swing and the next Angel seemed to realize it. That what he had told himself would be his last ride was almost over, and every dirty, wretched, aching mile from here on out would have to take place on his own two feet.
He was going to come down. And he was going to have to trust himself enough to believe he could get back up.
Angel was abruptly shuddering with fear. He was hunching his shoulders and shoving a fist into his mouth to bite it until blood rolled down his wrist. Dropping his bat with a thwock and grabbing a hank of hair at the base of his skull.
He squatted down with his knees to his chest, covered his head, and screamed, "I WANNA GO H O M E!"
Oh yes. Yes, yes they would, they could.
Angel could come Home.
He didn't need to struggle anymore. He had stood on his own for long enough, and now it was okay for him to need something to lean on that did not come in a baggie. Slim was knit to Angel's dormant doppelganger like a second skin, and when that doubled shadow moved Angel would feel the pull. A psychic suggestion urging him to match its step.
The horned poppets were standing around the spider in a circle, and now several of them scampered forward to tug at the long fur on his calves like little children seeking an apron-string to hold. When Angel looked up at them, he had clearly elected to put off nuclear meltdown by dissociating from his feelings entirely. Vague-eyed and distant, he allowed himself to be lead. Relaxed into it like he never wanted to make a decision again.
Angel would need to exit the psychic blackbox before Slim could safely whisk him away, and getting to the roof would be the simplest means. If the elevator could not be ridden, then it could be pried, and the shaft climbed the rest of the way to the helipad. The staff in the lobby would know that the lift was ascending, and might notice when it did not come back down. It might hasten the discovery of Valentino's death - but Angel would already be safe inside the Hotel by then. Any further complications could be dealt with.
Something jingled in the antechamber behind them.
It was the one recessed behind the broken aquarium. The door was open now, and there was a woman standing there with her hand on the knob.
She was a cat demon with tawny fur, wearing a large gold bell around her neck where her left hand fluttered like a nervous bird. She was clutching shut a trailing cream bathrobe, ears pinned close to her skull, and the V-shaped slice that made one of them fold over at the tip said that whoever had done the chop-job on her auburn hair had not taken it from her without a fight. Angel stiffened and went perfectly still.
"Is he dead?"
She had been beaten very terribly. It was impossible to tell what color her eyes were beneath the swelling, and she sounded like she was talking around a mouthful of wet tissues. A shocking amount of fur had been ripped out of her long, fluffy tail, but what remained was puffed out like a bottle brush.
After a very long pause, Angel exhaled and told her, "Yeah. He's dead."
Both of them were touching their throats with absent-minded fingers. Rubbing at them like a hand patting down a pocket for a wallet that wasn't there.
"How long you been here, babe?" Angel rasped when the silence grew fraught.
"The whole time."
"No, I mean with him."
She flinched. "All week."
"I'm so f*ckin' sorry," Angel breathed, biting down on his lip and reaching up to squeeze one of his elbows with the opposite hand. His eyes darted anxiously aside. "I-I didn't know who it was gonna be, but I knew...y'know, I knew if I went through with this it'd be somebody, and I- You gotta believe me, Summer, I am sorry."
"Yeah, well," Summer murmured, aborting a half-finished attempt to flick hair over her shoulder that she no longer had. She seemed to have decided Angel wasn't going to hurt her. Presumably, she had not been certain when she made the decision to open the door. "It's not like I've never seen you like this and thought 'better him than me.' Maybe I deserved a turn. You caught me on a day when I'm not in love with him."
"You didn't deserve sh*t," Angel replied immediately. "Don't let him put garbage like that in your mouth."
"Whatever. It's over. He's..." Summer looked down at Angel's body, then uneasily away, and did not finish her sentence. "Maybe Velvet will take over and I can keep my job."
Summer hesitated, staring down at her bare feet - then she reached up and unclasped the collar her bell was hung on.
"It's chipped. I can only get around the penthouse floors if I keep it on," she said, and threw it across the space between them rather than push it into Angel's bloody hands. "You stole it from me while I was knocked out on quaaludes, and when I woke up I couldn't get down to warn anybody."
Angel looked numbly down at the collar and murmured, "...thanks. You gonna be okay up here 'til Kitty lets security in? I-...I kinda trashed, everything."
Summer knew, of course. She had been listening, and she cut a queasy glance across the foyer before she said, "I'm not coming out of my suite. I've got a lot of really good drugs, and I'm going to do a f*ck-ton of them."
It was the go-to tool of eldritch scholars everywhere.
"Only the lobby and the valet are staffed right now. He fired half the people who didn't leave," she continued in hushed tones. "If you take the service elevator no one will even know."
Angel's face pinched when he realized that Summer was looking at him like that because she was afraid of him.
And she had every reason to be. Angel was a vision, but one only the maniac who loved him could look upon without a leap of primal horror, and the fact that she didn't think this gore-splattered lunatic was going to kill her did not mean she wanted him to get any closer. She was beginning to seem as eager to get rid of him as she was to help.
Angel's bristling mantle sank like the deflating defenses of a manticore, and he decided what manner of man he was going to be - one who had become a monster rather than remain a victim, in far better fashion than Valentino had ever done. Not monster as in fiend, but a grand creature, powerful yet not necessarily evil. Even benevolent, if one was courteous and knew the right offerings to make.
Angel closed his fist around the bell and said, "You're so f*cking real for this, babe. I owe you."
"Sure," Summer responded, easing toward the open door to the guest suite. "Send me a Christmas card."
"Summer, wait."
She stopped, fur rising on the back of her neck, and she looked at him with one paw on the doorframe, existing in a flighty zone somewhere between curiosity and alarm.
"...Hotel's prob'ly gonna be lookin' for waitresses soon. I'll give you and Dia references. Scottie 'n Memo, too."
"Angie..." Summer paused, then trailed off, tapping her claws on the door. "Look, it's a cute idea, but Vel is definitely going to take over the Studio, and she'll probably just promote Travis. He'll f*cking suck at it, but it won't be that bad."
"Just-" Angel hesitated. And then he told her, "...just think about it. It gets bettah than this. I promise."
**********
The Pentagram could be rightfully called a city that never slept, but there was a thin arc of urban sprawl extending from the southern border of the Doomsday District to outer Wrathside that never quite seemed to wake up.
The neighborhood appeared to have dozed off sometime in the early 20th century, for the close-packed tenements and vacant factory warehouses were an estuary of early modern and industrial architecture, dilapidated with age but not terribly ill-used. At some point in the last hundred years, and for no readily apparent reason, every single person that lived here had packed up and left - and in a city strained to bursting by overpopulation, nobody had ever moved back in. Even transient activity was completely nonexistent, benches unslept-on and barrel fires unlit.
Even the desperate did not go here. In their place, the city's wildlife had reclaimed the streets, red sulfur rats and swarms of quieves flourishing unmolested by whatever had driven the Sinners so thoroughly away.
There was a singular quieve buzzing around the entrance to a stormdrain, flicking its huge, hairless ears as it dipped its proboscis through the grate in search of some treat washed down from the occupied districts. It was still reaching when the funnel of the drain began to carry up the sound of muffled conversation, and it co*cked its head, staring down into the grate with wet, bulging eyes.
An orange glow began to filter up out of the dark, and the bug-dog buzzed over to stand on a manhole through which the light was being funneled into thin, slanting spears. The quieve watched, transfixed, and then took a wide stance as it stuck its mouthparts down one of the pick holes to take a sniff.
There was a dull, concussive THUD from below, and the manhole cover blasted off like a cork from the neck of a champagne bottle, hurling the little creature squealing into the night.
A puff of smoke wafted out of the stormdrain, and then there was the sound of something cool and smooth sliding on rough metal, followed by the pings of teeny tiny feet on the rungs of a ladder.
"Are we goin' the right way this time?" / "I hope we don't end up in that part of the sewer again..." / "How come #4 always gets to walk in front?"
A massive serpent slithered up out of the manhole, barely wide enough through which to fit its bulk. Then it rose as though to meet a charmer's flute and flared its yellow hood like a flash of monstrous eyeballs on the unlit street, revealing that it was wearing a very dirty but very snappy pinstriped jacket.
"SHUT up, you IDIOTSss!" Sir Pentious hissed down into the tunnel. "We are entering into unknown territory, we must be VIGILANT!"
"Sorry, Boss..."
The cobra turned, and his tophat's eye cast a broad beam like a miner's headlamp, becoming the only source of artificial light for blocks in all directions.
"Gee, Boss, it's kinda spooky here," Frank stage-whispered behind his hand while #2 and #5 helped #6 out of the manhole. "How come nobody's around?"
With the wildlife driven off by the blast, the street's isolation really did become quite uncanny. It had been uninhabited for so long that there wasn't even trash on the sidewalk. Nothing audible but the scrape of scales on asphalt and the echoes of their own voices.
It made those things seem very loud.
"JUSSST as I planned, my ignorant omelette-in-waiting!" Sir Pentious declared while prodding at the battlefield dressing with which he had covered his ruined eye. "All the better to travel by ssSTEALTH!"
"Are we really bein' sneaky if you're yelling at us?"
The cobra reared back, aghast, then sputtered sotto voce: "I-I have no time for your bothersome quessstions! Resume formation at once, First Mate, and leave me to-"
"Excuse me."
She spoke so quietly that she was almost inaudible over Pentious' posturing, but all bickering ceased at once the moment she did.
The little sheep demon must have been too short to be caught in the beam of the serpent's hat the first time around, because she was standing right there, hooves clasped in front of her like she had been awhile, politely waiting to enter the conversation.
"Who goes there?!" Sir Pentious screeched, turning on the ewe with his ray-gun drawn.
She was wearing slacks and a cozy turtleneck, flicking her soft gray ears under the poof of her wooly bouffant, and butter wouldn't melt for all the innocence in those enormous black eyes. Unperturbed, she glanced over her shoulder before asking, "Do you need any help? You kind of look like you could use it..."
Sir Pentious flicked his tongue. He slowly lowered his weapon.
"Not a bit, Little Miss!" He replied, seeming to recompose himself into an air of gentlemanly good manners. He straightened his hat, fixed his tie, then said, "My asssociates and I are sssimply passing through!"
"This really isn't a place you should be just passing through," the ewe remarked, rocking back on her hooves with an ingenuous blink. "It's dangerous out here."
The Eggbois had bumbled out to peek at her from around Sir Pentious' tail, and one of them cried, "You better shoot her, Boss! She could be a sleeper agent for the shadow government!"
"What, you egg! Did I not tell you to BE SILENT?" Pentious reprimanded it, then turned back to the sheep with his hand on his breast, bowing a few inches toward her level. "Ahem, do excuse me, Miss...?"
"My name is Imogen."
A moment of awkward silence fell. The ewe seemed to be waiting for something.
The cobra cleared his throat.
"Please excuse my minion's rudeness, Miss Imogen," he bid her gallantly, and seemed to realize at the very last second that sweeping his hat off his head would keep him from seeing her. "MY name is ssSir PENTIOU-"
It somehow felt very important that he be able to see her. Not a man used to thinking twice, it appeared to strike him only at the last moment that it might not be wise to offer his name to just anyone.
"Hi, Sir Pentio," Imogen replied softly, stepping toward him. "You're hurt. I think you should come with me."
"Oh, truly, 'tis but a flesh wound-"
"Come on, we can't just stand around talking in the open like this," she cut him off gently, taking Pentious' hand in her small hoof. "Follow me, I know a safe place where somebody can help you with your eye. You don't want to get found by one of Them, do you?"
Sir Pentious looked down at her, thoroughly nonplussed. "Them, did you say?"
Imogen pointed up and over Pentious' shoulder, and when he turned the beam of his hatlamp illuminated the side of a brick building. It was as old as everything in this unlikely ghost town, but some intrepid soul had returned here just long enough to tag up the surface with glaring red paint.
DANGER. TURN BACK. Crudely-drawn stick figures with black eyes and needle-faced grins. A half-dozen arrows arrayed in a semi-circle around the words STAY OUT!!! And then, underlined three times:
CANNIBALS!
"Do you not know where you are?"
Pentious cringed with his entire face. "Wrathside...ssSouth?"
He was now letting her lead him by the hand, watching the wool on her head flounce as she walked, telling him that, "This is No Man's Land. Nobody lives here because it's right next door to the Colony, and anybody the Cannibals catch this far in is fair game. There are hunting parties out all the time."
The snake seemed to have recognized just enough of his situation to be anxious. If he had noticed what his rescuer's shadow looked like on the alley wall, he would have been far more than that.
"This way. And try not to talk too much."
One of the Eggbois was tugging at his coattails and trying frantically to point at something. Sir Pentious shushed it, taking a cautious glance back over his shoulder to check the mouth of the alley instead.
Empty, yet he still felt like he had something on his tail.
And then something important finally seemed to occur to him.
"What are YOU doing out here, my dear?"
"Hm?"
The sheep looked back over her shoulder absently, as though she hadn't quite heard him. Sir Pentious persisted.
"Miss Imogen, if thisss place is so dangerous, why are you here?"
Imogen's nose twitched.
"You should come with me," she repeated, smiling reassuringly. "We can talk when it's safe. It's just a little more this way..."
It was a little more - and a little more, and just a tiny bit further than that. Every time he hesitated there were soft words and little close-lipped smiles and those big red eyes looking up at
Except they hadn't been red. They'd been black. Hadn't they? Black like the button eye of a stuffie, just as charming as could be.
"My dear, I beg your pardon, but why are we traveling eassst?"
Imogen raised her eyebrows. "We aren't going east."
"We most certainly are," Pentious put his figurative foot down. "You've gotten turned around, Missy! Would continuing this way not take us further in...to..."
They were red. Red as hellfire with white ungulate pupils, oblong and strange.
"I guess you caught me." Imogen linked her hooves behind her back and shrugged, wrinkling the heart-shaped pad on her nose.
"What on EARTH do you mean by-"
Imogen was standing in front of something VERY large.
The shape emerged into the beam of the hatlamp, and an eight-foot mass of bristling brown fur was suddenly taking up half the width of the narrow side street. The rat demon was vigorously fat, with a handsome waistcoat tailored over his belly, and a flatcap shading his small, beady eyes.
Imogen smiled with teeth for the first time, and her lips had been hiding the dentition of a dog.
"I told you, we have hunting parties out all the time."
"Hullo!" The big rat greeted them with a toothsome grin, sweeping in to wrap his meaty paws around Sir Pentious' shoulders and give him a hearty shake. "Who's that you've got there, Genny? Did we find our man?"
Sir Pentious made a valiant attempt to flee, but whipping around in a circle only revealed the fact that he and his minions were completely surrounded. The street was occupied on either side by a gaggle of ghouls dressed for a foxhunt, hollow-eyed over their cheerful, fearful teeth. The mouth of the alley Pentious was aiming for was full of mean-spirited children with very sharp knives.
"He was right where she said he would be," Imogen answered, and jerked her thumb digit toward the newest member of their little 'party'. "That was the easiest pull I've made since I got here."
"Oh, but look at him, he's so lovely!" One of the ghouls gushed, hugging her pitchfork to her bosom. "Look at that skin! So smooth!"
Sir Pentious pressed a hand to his chest and looked down at himself, preening a little. "Why, thank you, Madam. I do try to take care of mysel-"
"You would look just fabulous as a handbag!" She concurred, pressing a hand to her cheek and swooning toward her closest companion. "And a set of shoes - oh, Herbert, I've been just dying for a new pair of dancing shoes..."
"Now now, Buttercup," the fellow in tweed and breeches chided her fondly, twisting a magnificent mustache with his shotgun in the crook of one arm. "Surely you'd like a nice ball python better. You've such a fondness for spots."
"Will you two lovebirds stop joshing?" The rat demon chided in turn. "You know what we're here to do."
Sir Pentious had finally remembered where he knew the name Imogen from. His hood deflated under a wash of immediate dread.
The ewe craned her neck at him. Her pupils looked like inverted crosses drawn with ritual chalk.
"You know why I'm here," she murmured, and the fact that she still sounded just as sweet as pie had become actively alarming. "You tried to take my dream from me. You didn't even know me, but you looked at the thing I loved enough to want to sell my soul for it, and you decided you were going to just blow it up."
"Ressst assured, I-I have already been shown the error of my ways!" Sir Pentious stammered, holding up his hands with an ingratiating smile. "Miss Cherri Bomb herssself has accepted my apology!"
"That's her prerogative," Imogen responded coldly. "If I believed in letting other people tell me who should be forgiven, I'd still be paying tithe."
Her voice was changing. It had taken on a strange doubling effect, like there was another voice speaking just a split second before the first one, but with all the wrong inflections. She wasn't not a sheep. Or else she was a very disciplined mimic.
Something under the collar of Imogen's turtleneck was glowing witchy green, and when she closed her fist she was holding a ceramic carving knife the length of her forearm. She raised it, with her index digit neatly poised on the blunt side of the blade to guide a sawing cut.
Pentious started slithering backwards to maintain distance when she advanced, but his back almost immediately made contact with the broad belly of the rat, who gripped his shoulders much more tightly this time.
"You're gonna wanna stand still there, chief," the fellow said beside the opening of Pentious' ear. His front teeth were the size of railroad spikes.
The serpent's voice cracked up an octave: "Surely we can handle thisss like gentlemen? And ladies! I shall make reparations for emotional damages!"
The Eggbois were being gagged and restrained by the saw-toothed children, who held onto them by the limbs like ill-treated dolls. Herbert and Buttercup were leaning around either of the big rat's shoulders to favor Pentious with smiles that had been purchased as a set. And the tip of Imogen's knife made contact with the cobra's scaly belly.
It hovered there, just puckering the skin. Dead center, where one clean slip would spill his reptilian guts in a steaming pile at her feet. Pentious sucked in his stomach and screwed his eye shut.
The blade withdrew.
"You're lucky. Mistress Rosie wants to meet you. Maybe if you do exactly what she says she won't let me eat you from the tail up." There was nothing sweet about this little lamb now. "I weigh less than seventy pounds. It's going to take me a long time to finish."
Sir Pentious gulped.
"And if you ever call me Little Miss again, I'm going to slit your throat."
A man was dying on his bedroom floor two districts over, and smoke was still rising over the distant rooftops of the inner city. A pair of terrorists had stumbled to safety thirty minutes ago, a serpent had found his way, and Baba Yaga had prophesied all upon her great iron stove. It was possible that she had added that last little omen to the portents herself - but if she had, then Fate must have decided she was too ungodly old to argue with.
The threads converged, and a pack of Cannibals turned home from the hunt to present their catch to the Widow-Wight, like bees to the bramble of the silvery roses that had bewitched their senses and held them all dear.
