“Ossick,” my best friend the bone-monster began, “the depth of the bond forged between you and I during our decades together exceeds even my unquenchable thirst to wreak vengeance upon Rivulon. It causes me the greatest sadness to learn that you have ever believed otherwise, even if for a fleeting moment only.”

Oh I’d really gone and dicked the dog this time. Straight up melted an Old God and a soul mimic, which was basically an evil unicorn.

But Alex instantly forgave me. I didn’t deserve him.

And I’d known that to be a fact ever since the very first time I met Handsome Alex, way back in 1971. He was still a man in those days, with the tan and physique of an olympic beach volleyball player and hair like that Fabio fuck. He was sitting alone at a table under an umbrella outside a cafe in Casablanca, wearing a perfect pale linen suit while he waited for his lover to arrive; the supermodel, Angelique. He’d slipped an engagement ring to the maitre de and asked for it to be sunk at the bottom of his date’s champagne flute.

I was working at that time inside the bartender. I think his name was Aziz. Skinny and shifty as a snake on crack. But that’s not important.

What is important is that using the Aziz vessel I put the ring in her glass just like Alex asked, along with half a gram of cyanide which he had not requested. On the house and whatnot.

Then I watched while Angelique got super sick. A lot of really ugly shit happened. She fainted and hit her head, that was the first sign of major trouble. Handsome Alex ruined his beautiful suit cradling her there on the crowded patio. She turned cherry red and puked everywhere. The other customers started to holler and panic.

But not Handsome Alex. I watched him remain perfectly calm the entire time, right up and through the seizures and the eventual cardiac arrest. It happened fast; humans being so deliciously fragile.

Her body wasn’t even cold when he laid his coat over her face and walked off toward the ocean. I’d seen a lot of shit in a millennia and a half of being an instrument of pure evil but that was something else. He had me captivated, Handsome Fucker.

Later, I started possessing airline pilots. Every time Alex tried to fly back across the Mediterranean I’d crash his plane. Kept him trapped in Casablanca for seven years. Rivulon never told me why I was doing any of this; why he wanted me doing any of this.

The weird part was that Alex still didn’t really seem to mind. Not like most humans would have, anyway. That first plane crash, all his flesh and organs burned off in the wreckage. That glorious mop of hair, too — but he wouldn’t die. Rivulon wouldn’t let him, I figured. The plan must have been to drive him mad in the most obvious way imaginable: forced immortality.

Yeah, you probably just picked up on the fact I used to work for the Unraveler. Look, don’t judge me. You don’t know what it’s like looking for a job when you’re an immortal seed of evil. Pretty much limits your prospects to politics or the insurance industry, if you’re not willing to do the unholy bidding of an Old God.

Anyway, eventually Handsome Alex got me out of my bondage. He stole me from Rivulon.

And how did I repay him?

“I fucked everything up.”

“Caw!”

“While it is true that you have further complicated a situation which was already infested with obstacles, to say that you have fucked up everything would be most premature.”

Hearing Handsome Alex say the F word was about the most shocking moment of my long undeath. All I could do was gape open-mouthed; first at him—an expression he returned as usual with his yet-to-be-reattached jaw—and then at Lady Gates, who was still perched atop his head, and then finally at the mess I’d made of Rivulon and Mina Diamond’s soul cocoon.

Things hadn’t gone exactly how I’d planned when I ‘d made the snap-decision to start pumping pure putridity into their conjoined souls. In fact I hadn’t planned anything at all, I’d reacted out of pure self-preservation before giving any thought to how my actions might affect the others. Yeah yeah, I know — so unlike me.

Here’s the rub: Putrefaction wasn’t the sort of attack that could injure a soul. Would it would do, was fuck up living flesh. And decomposition doesn’t just happen all on its own; decay isn’t inevitable, it ain’t entropy.

On Earth, it’s the work of hungry little microbes. So when I’m on Earth, that’s the underlying mechanism with my Putrefaction spell. I actually conjure thousands or fuck I don’t know maybe millions of flesh-eating little microbe-motherfuckers.

And they had eaten the un-living shit out of Fake Mina Diamond’s flesh-vessel, alright. But not before the soul mimic had already absorbed Rivulon. And then this legit swarm of the fattened microbes—it looked like a living shadow or maybe a mean-ass tumbleweed made from curly little pubes—it fled right through the crack under our cabin door. The Mina mimic had possessed the entire swarm or some shit.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“The situation as I see it,” Alex began, “is most dire.”

“Cawcawcaw!” Lady Gates crowed, and Handsome Alex shooed her off his skull with one swipe of his bony hand.

“Please allow me to finish before you perform your profane mockery of speech, Lady Gates.” She flapped over to the far bench seat and pouted. She was a bird but the pout was undeniable; a full-bird-body pout. “The situation as I see it is most dire, this is true, but we may still turn this to our advantage.”

The evil sonofabitch had a backup plan. I felt the Kirby vessel’s heart thump inside my fat body.

“By absorbing Rivulon, the soul mimic has gained power which it likely struggles to comprehend. It is entirely possible the being we knew as Mina Diamond will rapidly become insane and the microbes which she currently inhabits might simply scatter harmlessly, if that comes to pass.”

“What would happen to Rivulon?” I asked. “He’s not dead, right? He can’t be killed.”

“I have little doubt he has returned already to the voidscape. While the mimic may have been able to reproduce his soul, it was only because Rivulon had been fed a narrative in which he believed he had a soul to begin with, and thereby manifested one through artificial means.”

“He conjured himself up a fake soul because you told him he was a soulbound entity instead of an Old God, which is actually something closer to a concept. That the gist of it?”

“Yes, that is close enough.”

“So then I gotta believe the narrative started going to shit once the Mina mimic-thing tried to absorb his made-up soul, right?”

“Correct again. At that point, I believe he would have simply returned to his home realm, where I am certain he is already plotting his next move against us.”

“And meanwhile, we have a swarm of microbes that just learned how to become a being of unimaginable power, but they might go nuts before they can like, unlock that power. So what do we do about it?”

“Well frankly, Kirby, I was all set to diagram what I believe is our best course of action but then you determined for some unknown reason that it would be even better if you paraphrased my more than adequate explanation of the Mina Situation, which served only to interrupt my flow.” His eyes flared like a couple of pissed off lemons. “Now, if you please.”

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

“We do nothing. We wait and we see. I believe it extremely unlikely the mimic will return and attempt to harm us, even if it does manage to unlock Rivulon’s power without going insane. Our own power has already been proven to it; it knows the danger we present.”

“So we just sit around and wait to see what happens?” I couldn’t believe he wanted to be so passive.

“You just did it again.” His eyes were a pair of those bright-ass headlights that they must hand out free at the Dickhead Store. Where you buy dickheads. “You just said back to me exactly what I said a moment earlier.”

“Fuck! My bad. I’m just very surprised, my friend. I can’t believe you just want to do nothing.”

“You have interpreted my meaning incorrectly, for there is much to be done.” His eyes returned to a more comfortable, evil amber glow. “The train will arrive in Zanzo Khan tomorrow afternoon. We must both procure a workable vessel for the Lady Gates as well as recruit an entirely new lead guitarist. And it would be best if we accomplish these goals well in advance of soundcheck, so that we might rehearse for the next skew-off, which will involve a one-on-one battle, a fact which will be true for the remainder of the contest, making the development of some tactics and counter-strategies vital for our continued advancement upon Emperor Hawijimi’s Sonic Gauntlet for the Reward of Great Fortune and the Infinite Adoration of the Glorious People of Hawijimi and Her Colonies.”

“Hey, what the fuck? I thought you’d come to grips with ‘the Cacophony?’ Like man, that’s what Hawijimi him-fucking-self prefers, remember?”

Handsome Alex chuckled, thick with mirth and cold-blooded evil.

“Oh you dick. You’re just screwing with me. What has gotten into you, dude? Full of fucking jokes all of a sudden.”

“You caught me.” He held up his four bony hands at either side like some kind of demonic Walter White meme. The fire danced in his eyes. “I am enjoying myself, Ossick. I mean Kirby.”

I shook my head and laughed. “Alright man, I know we were really looking good with Rivulon in our skew but I promise: I’m gonna make this up to you. I’m gonna get Lady Bird-tits here a new body so she can slappa-da-bass and I’ll hunt us up a new guitarist while I’m at it. And I’ll do it all before the sun sets.”

“Ambitious.”

“CAW! Bird-tits?!? How dare you! CAW!”

I laughed some more and as I was about to slip out the door Handsome Alex stopped me.

“Kirby,” he said. “Stay out of the bar. Please.”

*****

The bar was full of rich weirdo vampires. Most of them had already seen the plastic surgeon and had their shit put back together, but more than a few were still super fucked. Anyway, they couldn’t get drunk so instead they were taking turns bleeding the servants. I walked in on like eight of them in the shitter, all sucking at the wrists and throat and even the feet of some poor cocktail waitress. Nasty scene. Hawijimi was going to be pissed if that was one of his people.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to find a body for Lady Gates or a non-vampire guitarist here in the bar so after a couple drinks I decided to bounce. But before I could, a couple in the corner caught my eye. They were giving me that look like, “Hey, my partner and I spotted you from across the bar and we’re horny rich weirdoes who want to do weird sex shit to you before we feed you to our pigs or some shit.”

But she was kind of hot from the side and then she turned to look at me dead-on and it was Mina fucking Diamond. But I’m not talking about the soul mimic Mina Diamond; this was the real deal, the one Alex had intended to recruit in the first place.

How was she here? The mimic had been impersonating her — didn’t that mean it had eaten her soul or whatever?

I started casually walking over in that direction to get a closer look and then her date turned and I stopped undead in my tracks. A hot squirt of piss fired out of Kirby Dufresne’s stubby little weiner before I could pinch it back.

Her date was tan and built like some kind of professional surfer, wearing a perfectly tailored, pale linen suit. And that fucking HAIR.

“Handsome Alex?” I asked, voice shaking and even more piss trickling. “Aw dammit!”