12

The domain of Dave was very hard to find - but deliberately so. It was a prison after all, or at least it started off that way; what it was now was anyone’s guess.

It had some of the trappings you’d expect from a hell dimension - rivers of seething lava, broken up only by crumbling islands made of equal parts volcanic rock and carbonized flesh and bones - but that was for the tourists. Dave didn’t actually live there.

He lived in a fairy tale style castle in the clouds. There was a blanket of coal black clouds, then, above it, a layer of puffy white ones like cotton candy. On top of that layer was a mile long castle made of marble and glass, gilt and gemstones. It was more garish than anything Disney could have come up with; it made Cinderella’s castle look sober and tasteful. There were over two dozen towers and minarets, all layered with gold, reflecting the lava light that seeped through the clouds below, and Bob just knew if the “Queer Eye” guys saw this, they’d storm the castle and demand that Dave be less goddamn gay. There was no excuse for a bejeweled leviathan of a castle like this, even if you‘d had your taste surgically removed. And precisely who was Dave trying to impress? There was never anyone here to see it.

Well, okay, he was. But he was here to kick his ass, and there was nothing he could do to impress him except give the fuck up.

There was no obvious entrance to the castle, so Bob simply walked up to it and burnt his way through a jewel encrusted wall, hoping that it really pissed Dave off. The halls were plated gold, the floor made of crushed diamonds, all of it so ostentatious he bet even Donald Trump would pause. Some gods just didn’t know when to stop. He tested the acoustics in the hall. “We get our clues from the ones who thought they would conquer us, are we too fucked to say the end is here …” Yeah, shitty acoustics, just like he thought. Soft metal just didn’t have a good echo.

He heard a rumble, and looked behind him in time to see a metal gate slam down, trapping him in this corridor. He wasn't surprised to turn back and find a river of lava streaming towards him.

It stopped short, and suddenly rose up into a pillar, still liquid and yet not losing cohesion or dripping like it should have - only in the special universes of other gods did the rules of physics change on a dime. The pillar of lava became a humanoid shape, a growing bubble of lava becoming something like a head, cheekbones suggested in the hard clefts of liquid rock, a mouth like a hole, and two motes of bright yellow fire becoming what passed for eyes. They fixed on him, hot and remorseless. "You are a fool," Dave said, in a voice that sounded like a clogged drain.

"I've heard that a lot," Bob admitted.

Dave wasn't amused. "You're just a patsy. Always have been."

"I'm givin' you one last chance. Stop the incursion into my plane."

He made a bubbling roil, like a pan of soup boiling, and it took Bob a moment to realize it was a laugh. "Your plane? You mean your prison. I'm freeing you. See, you're able to move between planes already."

"Hate to break it to ya, Dave-o, but Earth hasn't been my prison for a long time. I got my powers back, and I can go anywhere I want."

"Really? So why did they give you your powers back? Did you kiss their asses enough? Grovel like a good Human?"

"I got them back on my own. They weren't real happy with it, but it wasn't like I was actually gonna go anywhere permanently. I like Earth. I have all my stuff there."

Dave's burning yellow eyes narrowed, the lava of his face shifting in swirling in almost hypnotic patterns. "You're not getting it at all, are you Bob? You think you've outsmarted them, but you don't outsmart a group mind. You know why they encased you in flesh? Because you've always been a sensualist, Bob, and a sentimentalist - they knew it'd keep you entertained and fascinated for an eon or two. They could keep you where they wanted you by feeding a yen, and they've succeeded. They wanted you to get your powers back so you could fight their battles for them, but they knew you'd never trust it unless you seemingly got them on your own, behind their backs. So they set everything up. They used you like they used me. I'm the dumping point for their rage, and you're the dumping point for their lust. Higher beings have to be above such frailties of the mind."

Bob nodded. "Sounds about right."

His eyes widened, the spots of flame growing and licking up his face. "What?"

Bob scoffed and shook his head. "Mate, they encased me in a Belial. I know the ins and out of all bullshit, no matter who it comes from. Did they manipulate you and me? Yeah, of course, like they manipulate Humans and demons alike when it serves them. That's what they - what we - do. I don't like it - I don't like them - but I love my family, and I love my Earth. It is mine in all its wonderfully fucked up glory, and I'm not letting anyone take it away from me. That includes the Powers, if it comes to that."

"A war on heaven, Bob? Again? It didn't work for you last time."

"Times change, people change. Oddly enough, gods never do. That's their fatal flaw."

He took a step towards him, although it was more of a liquid glide. He was giving off tremendous heat, but that wasn't really what it was - it was rage and madness given physicality, something that would reduce a mortal to cinders within twenty feet. "Oh really? Is that my fatal flaw, you arrogant little prick?"

He didn't even see him move - lava simply hit him on the side of his face, throwing him back against the bars sealing off the hall, and burning away the left half of his face in its entirety, from his jaw to the crown of his head. It didn't hurt for more than a millisecond, as the temperature - the power - was too incandescent. Bob tried to shake it off, the lingering sting of a god with far more power than him, and let his own energy fill in the missing contours of his face. He had to remake his left eye in nothing but energy, and it gave everything on that side a weird blue cast, as obviously he hadn't perfected making retinas. Bit of a bugger.

Dave continued glaring at him with his molten hate. "You can't beat me Bob. They hated more than they ever loved."

"Oh, I know. That's why I didn't come alone."

He cocked his head to the side curiously, an amusingly human gesture, and then he made that bubbling noise again. "And what pathetic lie is that? I can sense incursions into my realm, and you're it."

"Sure about that?"

As if on cue, the lava in Dave's torso began to roil, and he looked down in time to see a cobra burst through his liquid skin and dropped unharmed to the floor. It was but the first of a dozen - mambas, rattlers, green snakes and copperheads, all bursting through the lava as if was a mere fog, unscathed and unharmed - and Dave grabbed a handful of them as they came out. "What is -" When he squeezed the snakes hard, trying to burn them, he was so instantly repelled by their own energy his hand dissolved into liquid clots of lava, and the snakes fell with it to the floor, slithering away.

"Even you can't kill the avatar snakes of a death god," Bob pointed out. "Although, you wanna keep trying? I'm kinda curious how much it'll take to get Degei pissed off. He doesn't get angry a lot, but I hear it's quite a show when he does."

Dave looked at him sharply. "Degei?" Yep, even psychopathic gods were afraid of something, and while most gods treated death gods like garbage men, death gods were a fundamental force in the universe, a true elemental, something that couldn't be destroyed. Piss off a death god and you would know no end of torment.

When Dave looked up at him, it was with as much contempt as a man with a lava face could muster. "They can't hurt me, I'm not physical enough."

That's when a thud seemed to echo through the castle, rippling and resonating off the gold walls like his singing never could. Dave looked up, as if he could stare through the ceiling. "What ..."

"Ah, Ganny's arrived. You remember Ganesha, right? The only god who would talk to me for a long time. Great guy. We need more gods like him."

Dave's eyes narrowed so much the fire almost disappeared. "He can't hurt me - he can't hurt anything. Unless he overpowers them with his smell."

Bob wagged a finger at him. "Rudeness won't get you anywhere, Dave. Now admittedly he's a lover not a fighter, but you do remember the effect he has on entropy, don't you? And what is a dimensional tear but entropy speeded up to the power of a googolplex?"

Dave’s skin was now bubbling, but it wasn’t just the snakes trying to get out of him. The fury was now coming off in an almost palpable way; it stung, smelled of burning lye, and tasted like ammonia. “All you’re doing is slowing me down. Nothing you and your lame ass friends can do can stop me. I guess I lucked out that your friends are so pathetic, huh?”

“Luck has nothing to do with it,” a female voice said. Dave turned, and Bob could see, over his roiling molten shoulder, a slim, reasonably attractive women with sensibly cut brunette hair, a natty tailored skirt suit in the darkest red, and eyes that were as black as a starless sky. She could have been a lawyer straight from any floor of Wolfram and Hart, except no mortal could have survived even this far. “Bob is the god of misfits, the outcasts, the forgotten and discarded, the freaks and the exiles. I mean, you should see the used up fuck towel that’s his avatar.” She rolled her eyes, but since she had no pupils or irises, it was more of an implied gesture. “These misfits all band together, you know. Bob, Ganesha, Degei - even the mortals pulled to them are only of the oddball variety.”

“Not Ganny,” Bob replied. “He’s still got name recognition.”

“Fine. He’s as close to mainstream as this breed ever gets. Sad really.” She started walking up the corridor, her heels clicking on the diamond floor. Just from the cant of Dave’s head, he knew he was puzzled.

“Wait a second - aren’t you a … what the hell do you call yourselves nowadays?”

“Senior Partners,” Bob offered.

Dave didn’t acknowledge him in any way, presumably because he recognized that he wasn’t the threat. “You hate his kind,” Dave pointed out, just in case the Partner didn’t know that.

She stepped over the slithering snakes delicately, a moue of distaste warping her lips. “Yes, well, we hate you more. And when it comes down to it, the Powers will mostly be destroyed by a weapon of their own design. So either Bob will destroy them someday, or they will destroy him. Either way, it’s a good outcome for us.”

“He’ll do nothing,” Dave burbled. “You’re just hoping.”

The woman just shrugged. “Perhaps, perhaps not. Time will tell.”

Dave burned a trough in his own floor, keeping the Partner separated from him. “You’re a better shot, Partner, but you’re still not enough. You can’t stop me.”

Since Dave’s coruscating back was to him, Bob let his physical self become something in between, something a bit more ephemeral and semi-corporeal, and reached inside himself, burying his own right arm into his “stomach”. He’d hidden something in himself, exactly where Dave wouldn’t be able to sense it, where it would be lost in his own energy and impossible to read.

The Partner had been right. He was a misfit, an outcast, a weirdo, and most of his friends were too. His friends … and his ex-wives or lovers, depending on what laws you adhered to. Bastet was an “avenger goddess”, a daughter of the sun, extremely powerful, although her legend had been eroded until she was just remembered as the “cat headed god” (and that wasn‘t even true - it was a lion, not a cat), and often taken simply as a fertility goddess, as most female goddesses were reduced to for no reason other than lingering sexism.

But he knew how powerful she was, and he hadn’t forgotten - she was his ex-wife (or ex -lover, again depending on what you believed and practiced) - and she’d given him a weapon that could kill anything evil: a blessed knife. But killing evil wouldn’t be enough here; Dave was a god, and beyond such a distinction. So Bastet gave him something that could hurt a god, kill them even, and she did have that power - avenger god, daughter of the sun. But people had forgotten; not only people, but gods who never knew her, or didn’t know her that well.

It was funny, but sometimes when he saw her it all came flooding back. The reason they split up had nothing to do with how they felt about each other, but where they wanted to live. Bas was done with the Earth plane, she couldn’t abide it anymore, but of course he loved it and had family there. They tried a long distance commute sort of relationship, but it just became unworkable, and they realized they just had to end it. But sometimes when they got together, they could both feel the spark - they still loved each other. It was hard not to. She’d asked him if he really needed to do this, and when he assured her he had to, she gave him one of her more lethal weapons.

It was called the “eye of Horus”, although it wasn’t his eye and really had nothing to do with him. It was a small snow globe sized object that could have been glass, but wasn’t. It looked like it contained something liquid reddish black, but it was no more liquid than the container was glass.

It was the last residual energy of Seth, god of chaos and destruction, killed in mythology by Osiris, but really killed by Ammit. Residual traces of his energy - nonsentient, toxic, nearly impossible to contain or control - was captured by Bastet, who imprisoned it behind her own energy made solid. Seth was more or less an embodiment of destruction, of darkness unleashed, and his energy was as corrosive as acid would be to a being made of flesh. You couldn’t absorb it, like you could absorb the energies of other gods, because it was not meant to be. Seth could barely handle himself - no one else would have any luck. Bastet had kept it all this time for the simple reason that this was the god equivalent of the “final solution”, with the added problem that it was inherently unstable. Yes, it could kill a god, but there was no telling when it would stop killing, how many it would take out before it lost its toxicity. It didn’t seem to effect Bas, but then little did.

She said she could bring it, use it, but he insisted it was his fight and he had to do this. Dave was almost a brother after all - everyone thought Bob was the first Power kicked out, but that wasn’t necessarily true. He was just the first full Power kicked out; Dave was an ill advised hybrid. That was part of what fed his voluminous rage.

As he pulled it out of him, he tried to keep it cloaked behind his own energy, so Dave couldn’t sense it - if Dave had sensed it when he first showed, he’d probably have killed him without bothering to talk. No one with the eye of Horus could mean anything but your death.

The solidified power seemed to start melting on instant contact with Bob’s pseudoflesh, her energy even in this non-sentient form recognizing and responding to him. There was no doubt about it - pseudoflesh or not, this was going to hurt. Oh well, no help for it.

Dave stiffened, his lava almost hardening, but he didn’t turn to look at Bob, as his focus was on the one he assumed to be the bigger threat to him, the Senior Partner. And to her credit, she saw Bob reach inside himself, but she never looked directly at him, and even though she must have guessed what it was, she kept her eyes on Dave.

“What the hell did you just do to my gateway?” Dave burbled angrily.

She shook her head, her expression mostly blank and yet strangely contemptuous. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. But then again, Bob never told me what his plan was, but I’ve figured it out. I’m just a distraction, the big boogie man that keeps you from noticing he’s about to kill you.”

Well, she’d committed him to it, so it was now or never. There was simply no way to brace for it, so he simply plunged his arm through Dave’s back, and he gritted his teeth against the sudden, sharp feeling of all his psuedoflesh burning away as he pushed his arm in deep, only energy holding him together.

And then, when he was certain he could wait no longer, he sunk his fingers through the semi-liquid membrane of Bastet’s energy, and let the tainted remnant of Seth join him in Dave’s body.

It would almost be interesting to see if he lived through this.

13

Bren supposed he expected something straight out of an old time black and white horror film, or maybe even the set of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, but that wasn’t what Rosewood looked like. It could have been a bland office park behind a ten foot high security fence topped with razor wire, its lawn not so much mowed as scalped. There were a few security spots lighting up parts of the building on this historically gloomy day, but all it did was show how thin the white paint was on what were essentially cinderblocks. They had small islands of flowers on the grounds, roses and azaleas mostly, some California poppies, but they looked sad somehow, like the one daisy that managed to survive at a nuclear ground zero.

Before pressing ahead, Giles cast a spell that put everyone on the grounds asleep. A simple spell, but it was so broad it left him winded, so he had to rest a moment before they continued. But Giles got more time to bank up his reserves, as everything from then on was all Naomi: the fence, the alarm system, all the locks were controlled by electricity. With simple manipulation, she made the gate spring open for them, all doors unlock, and the alarms remain dormant. It was nice to finally have something high tech to confront; sometimes all this mystical shit got so complicated his head hurt.

Although the “waiting room” had many windows and pastel painted walls with hotel quality art hanging on them, the feeling of “prisoner area” didn’t go away - and having visited his mother in prison a couple of times, he knew that feeling well. The glass doors were locked with a coded security system, but since they ran on electricity, Naomi was the pass key that got them through it and into the heart of the building.

Although Giles made sure they wouldn’t run into any of patients thanks to his spell, there was an undeniably eerie feeling as they walked down the empty corridors, with their cheap white tiles and walls painted a very pale shade of robin’s egg blue - a calming color, a pacifying one. Giles had something with him called a “homing stone”, a small teardrop shaped crystal on a necklace that you could have picked up at a drug store … well, if the stone wasn’t more special than it looked. Bren barely saw any color variations in it, maybe a mild pink glow, but Giles seemed able to stare at it and interpret what it meant.

They were down a third corridor, where the metal doors that lined both sides of the hall seemed to get thicker, and the windows in them smaller and covered with thicker wire mesh, when Kier stopped and suddenly hissed, “Shh!”

They quieted, but after a moment Bren leaned in and whispered, “Wha-” Kier put a hand over his mouth, and just in time, because that’s when they all heard it.

Farther down the hall, up ahead of them, there was a small scuff of footsteps. They paused in the sudden silence.

Naomi looked at Giles, alarmed. “Isn’t everyone supposed to be asleep?”

“Yes,” he replied almost defensively. “But … the gateway may have some kind of protection against minor spells.”

“You couldn’t have thought of that before?” Kier asked accusingly.

Giles glared at him, his hatred almost palpable. “We do have to find him. If he’s asleep like everyone else, it would have made it more difficult. At least this makes our job easier.”

“Does it really?” Naomi wondered, and touched a wall. It looked like she was leaning on it, or judging its solidity, but if you looked closely you could see the small sparks of electricity between her fingertips and the wall; she was charging up. “They know we’re coming now.”

Giles shrugged impatiently. “They probably knew already, as soon as I threw the spell.”

Bren shook his head, hating this plan more and more, and let his demon side come out. He knew it wouldn’t have been better if he went back to Sun Plaza, but just being in a place like this, quiet and reeking of antiseptics, he felt like he was going to jump out of his skin. He wondered how things were going for the others, and if they were having as much fun as the first visit. “You’ve got a plan, yeah?”

“Of course.” Giles almost sounded offended by the question.

But before he could inform them what it was, a nurse appeared at the head of the corridor, a well built, statuesque blonde in a white pantsuit type of uniform. But she wasn’t your usual kind of nurse, even though her figure brought to mind the sexy nurses you might see in a Playboy fantasy.

For one thing, she had a type of triangular shape painted on her forehead in what could have very well been blood. For the second, her eyes glowed with pinprick reddish-orange light buried deep within her otherwise black pupils. The third thing was her jaw unhinged as they watched, becoming not only inhuman but grotesquely large, maybe a foot across and equally wide as it drooped down, and then, without warning, she vomited a long, scorching stream of fire at them.

A fire breathing nurse? Now it seemed perfectly appropriate that they were in an insane asylum.