Cat dropped to the ground, crawling toward her bleeding friends. The four wolves surrounded the group, growling at the approaching soldiers. She didn’t notice the rifles trained on them.
Shinji coughed and spat blood. He started to chant and gesticulate, “Divine Bulwark!” He cast a spell that created a golden bubble that grew from his hand and extended to cover all of them before vanishing. “Don’t attack. We’re safe for now.”
“Alice!” Cat whimpered.
“She’s alive,” Shinji sputtered. “She has an ability that lets her share damage with her wolves.”
“And you?”
“I have a passive that shields me from ambushes and a steel helmet,” he said as he rubbed the dent on his brain bucket. “We’re larger-than-life heroes,” the Japanese joked, grinning with bloody teeth. “No, seriously. So long we aren’t maimed or dead, we’ll bounce back faster than you did.”
“Civilians, cease all hostilities!” The colonel on the loudspeaker shouted at them. “You are under arrest for treason!”
“Colonel, what are you doing?” Jack asked.
“Stand down, lieutenant! You are colluding with the enemy?”
Angered, Jack pointed at the demonspawn still slaughtering soldiers, “Are you insane? The enemy is over there, killing our men! Taking American lives!”
“They are a necessary sacrifice,” the colonel droned. “We need weapons to fight against the threat of the occult. Thank you for exposing it for us and giving us leverage to settle a most profitable deal, one that will catapult our military into the unquestionable major power of the world.”
A deal with whom? She asked for a moment before they heard a slow clap of hands approaching from the main building. Catherine's shrieking was all Cat needed to know who was coming.
“He’s under control, Jack,” she said. “The enemy has corrupted the colonel.” Cat kept her head down to avoid looking at the man but the sound of his shoes over the pavement reached her ears even over the whimpers of dying soldiers.
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Roger Marthan laughed and cackled. “Splendid! Splendid! Despair! Death! Betrayal! Corruption! Greed! And most delicious of all, HUBRIS! The cherry on the cake is a filthy [Paladin] and a [Priestess] whore bleeding on the ground! What a marvelous day to be a demon walking on Earth!” The demon disguised as a man threw an arm over the shoulders of two soldiers, “How do you like my new converts? Theirs is the powers of Hell! My new Theoretical Satanists, a leap of overconfidence away from damnation. Oh, how sweet it is!”
“Never,” Cat roared, imbued by some unknown fervor. “You won’t win, demon.”
“Pfffff. Ha, ha!” The disguised demon spluttered and chortled. “You have no idea, do you, my little stray lamb? Hell always has its due! Even if your stupid plan of killing me with a silver bullet worked and I was sent back to hell, because I’m truly immortal, they would just send someone else up here to get you. And since you had hypothetically defeated me, they would be able to send someone slightly more powerful. And then the game starts all over again. Imagine you defeat this second demon. What would happen? BOOM. Demon prince. Loose on earth for the first time since the Babylonians because one stubborn girl refused her due punishment.”
Roger Marthan grinned like a Sunday TV prize game show host. “Do resist. Do slay me. What about we do a little game? Get the [Paladin] sword and stab me in the heart. Make it all go away. Kill me and see what happens! I promise you’ll be free of me!”
She looked at the katana strapped to Shinji’s belt. The [Paladin], still lying on the floor, met her gaze and shook his head. “Do not deal with the devil. Your head is no milk mug.”
“SILENCE, MAGGOT!” Roger Marthan tried to kick Shinji on the ground but his shoe bounced on the golden dome which came visible for an instant and flew away, leaving his foot burning. The stench of brimstone and rotten flesh made even the entranced soldiers retch.
“My deals are a hundred percent innocuous, my dear,” fluttering his eyelashes, he shifted his visage to mocking of a pleasant face and cooed. “If you do not offer your own soul, I do not take a soul. Differently from what common pop culture would say, you can’t even offer someone else’s soul by proxy, as the colonel here learned the hard way. Of course, dealing with me is a sin in itself, but this is Cap-I-Tal-Ist America! Every single person out there in Manhattan carries a bunch of sins! Wash it away with Holy water and a dozen rosaries in Sunday church and it will all be A-Okay.”
With the demon’s voice grating on her ears along with Catherine who was panicking the whole time, it was hard to say if he was lying or not. If she could sense lies in the first place.
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“But I grew bored of this cornered prey act, little girl,” he hardened his visage. “I’ll propose you a little game. Here’s the deal.”
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Once the demon said that last sentence, something locked in place. The sounds of gunfire stopped the soldiers aiming rifles at them no longer breathing. Cat once gain felt stuck in the eternity between moments, just like when they died almost a year ago.
“Is this where you make your deals?” She asked.
“Hum, you seem oddly familiar with this effect. People freak out all the time when I bring them to this space. What secrets do you hold, Catherine? Why can’t I repossess your soul as is Hell’s rightful property? Questions, questions, questions,” the demon spoke to himself.
Cat glanced at him and saw Rorgramathan’s true form. The 3-D model was only sixty percent accurate. It lacked the oozing mucus, the stench, the pulsating blob of fat. He was disgusting but in this time-stopped reality, neither she nor Catherine felt any fear.
“Now it’s the real deal, right?” She asked as she got back on her feet.
“Correct. Let’s make a Deal, a real Deal, capital D,” the demon muttered. “Here’s the thing. I’ll let you go out of the fort. The military will do nothing to stop you. Then you’ll have a fifteen-minute headstart, and I’ll sic my little mutant over there on you. He’s almost done with his meal anyway.”
Cat glanced at the Walker and got horrified as she saw the soldiers’ souls frozen in time, screaming as they were pulled out of their dying bodies and dragged as if by invisible hands into the demonspawn.
“If you survive half an hour, I’ll let your human and wolf friends leave without any further harm. Should you die, well, you won’t care about their fate anyway. You’ll be too busy getting cozy IN HELL.”
“And what if I don’t accept your deal?” She challenged him. Easy to do in this place where she couldn’t feel strong emotions.
“Then I’ll sic the pet on you anyway and let the dice roll. This is a Deal you have nothing to lose by accepting. And I can’t lie in this space.”
“What is your true name?”
“Rorgramathan,” the demon answered. “And don’t even try, nobody on this planet can wield power over it. Your Abrahamic God locked magic out of the world, much to the dismay of all the other pantheons, ours included.”
She knew that to be true. Just like William was enraptured by the angel’s descent and understood he had to relinquish his afterlife for Catherine’s sake, so she could sense the rules of this frozen world. It was something greater than the demon, a power he could merely borrow. She didn’t know the full rules but those she understood were absolute truths. It was a knowledge that transcended what a mortal brain could grasp.
Cat glanced at the downed but already stable forms of her returner friends.
“They only keep whatever they bring with them. Scraps compared to the true heights these two failures could reach if they stayed in their adoptive worlds. Really a shame...”
She replayed the demon’s last statements, “Wait, is God real?”
Rorgramathan laughed. “Of course that asshole is real. But your Holy Books were so twisted and changed by mortal powers over the centuries they barely contain any sliver of Truth.”
“Is there a way to free me from your pursuit?” She asked, trying to hide the budding hope. “Make you relinquish the claim on my soul?”
“Short of divine intervention? Don’t count on it, though. The Man won’t come around, Mr. Cash,” he sighed, “Oh, well, this honesty thing is tiresome. I could do it as I hold, let’s call it the ‘deed’ or ‘hell’s claim’ to your soul. However, why would I do that? What’s in it for me? I would only trade a soul for another soul and you only hold the one.”
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Cat was about to accept the demon’s deal, but she paused to think. It was a skill William trained for years since he started working with investment banking. A moment to consider when the position was stable was the best thing one could do before committing to a transaction. Remove the emotion and study the situation as an impassive outsider. And she couldn’t hope for more “stable” than this frozen world where even the grief of dying vanished.
A plan started to form but she didn’t think she could pull it off. Just like the colonel said, the demon made better Deals with leverage and the ball was on the wrong court right now. She had to play on the defensive. But she filed every single morsel of information for later.
“This Deal is not favorable to me,” she said.
“Laudable, but too late. I already have another Deal in place, to let that guy over there kill and fuck you in whichever order he pleases. That’s why he surrendered himself to become a hellspawn. This is the best I can offer. Fifteen minutes of a head start then fifteen minutes of pursuit. The guy is on his last legs, your choice of friends was really a poor match for him. Who knows, you might even kill him.”
She knew she had no choice but to take the Deal. The demon would give her a way out in exchange for entertainment. She noticed the demon was… innocent was not the right word. Childishly naive in the way he conducted his Deals. To him, the military, the cult, the rapist, even her mother were just toys to be used then discarded when he grew bored. Maybe she could use that to her advantage.
The Wall Street banker knew the relationship between risk and reward. Her position was already bad and the prospect of a loss was great. Taking an additional risk when she was already in an “all-in” position wasn’t that bad. It was like taunting your opponents at a poker table right after declaring you were betting it all. Assuming they didn’t shoot you in the face right away, you had no more money to lose. Well, in this case, she was about to die, her friends were critically wounded and both Jack and Martinez had no supernatural powers.
“Let’s make an even more interesting Deal,” she finally summoned the courage to challenge him. “I’ll try to kill your pet in thirty minutes. Not just run away but kill him.”
The demon grinned, “OH! That’s the SPIRIT of it!” He exulted. “What do you want in return?”
“Leave my mother and her Foundation alone. Whatever help you or any entity under your influence pledged to her foundation shall remain, but you and your puppets and cohorts should leave her alone.”
Here in this world only absolute truths remained. Just as William knew he had to save Catherine, the girl he became knew she loved her mother. Absolutely, unconditionally.
Rorgramathan cackled. “SPLENDID! A sacrifice for love! Too bad it won’t save you. Nothing will. You are in my hands, Catherine, but I will love to see you squirm. Do fight my pet. However, if you just run away I’ll corrupt your mother into my next demonspawn. I don’t care if you die or live, your mommy will be safe, though she’ll never love you. That’s not because of me, though. I can see human hearts and hers is shriveled by the grief of losing the man she loved.”
He extended his hand. “Do. We. Have. A. Deal?”
Cat grabbed the slimy appendage. “Deal.”