Griffin and Zeke both were carrying guns as well. They wouldn’t do any more good than Leo’s own shotgun, but it was hard to go into a fight without some sort of weapon—natural or manufactured. “This is it.” I scuffed the dirt under the black sneakers we’d stopped and bought on the way. Neither boots or bare feet were going to make it a mile over the Nevada desert, and Leo hadn’t happened to also purchase me footwear for that early birthday present. “Where we make our stand.” It wasn’t especially auspicious that the word “stand” was almost always accompanied by “last.”
Zeke shrugged. “Here or at the am/pm. Doesn’t matter, except at least I could get candy bars at the am/ pm.”
“I only wish someone were here to write down those poetic words for posterity,” Leo said. “They are epic in breadth and scope. Homer would be green with jealousy.”
Zeke pumped a round in his shotgun. “There’s not a whole lot poetic about dying,” he said matter-of-factly.
He was right. I took a deep breath, feeling my mortality acutely. I’d always been mortal, but I hadn’t been so vulnerably mortal. I hadn’t been human, hadn’t given them credit for staring into the face of death with nothing more to keep them going than hope, optimism, or ruthlessly channeled resignation to their fate. If we survived, I’d be tempted to give them a little slack in the future. “Griffin?”
As Leo and Zeke flanked him, Griffin showed his wings and spread them wide. Zeke had been right. They were the wings of a dragon, flown out of the heart of the sun to land impossibly on Earth. They were the same beautiful gold I’d seen before, untarnished and wholly undemonlike. Hopefully, Cronus wouldn’t know that. As I stepped in front of Griffin, my back to him and the sword down and behind my leg, the Titan proved he didn’t. He appeared twenty feet in front of me. Subtly this time, with no moving of the world, only a small ripple in the shadow of it. It was all the worse for that.
The emptiness inside him, the dark clots of nothing-ness that swallowed everything and anything, was pouring out. From his eyes and his mouth, it ran down the unnaturally smooth face... down the inside-out shirt and cardboard cutout of jeans, down the offensively careless costume of a human being, and began to eat away at the ground beneath his feet. The earth was being unmade beneath him, unraveling in tiny pockets as you could for the first time see what reality was formed from. It was glorious to see and then horrible to watch it die. Cronus took a step and the world cringed beneath it. His blackly bleeding eyes fixed on Griffin and the word passed out of his mouth through the shadows. “Finally.”
“Finally is right,” I said. “Finally your days are no more. You took my one home, you bastard, but you’re not taking the other.” He wasn’t taking Griffin either. Griffin had risked his life for my plan and Zeke had risked that much more. I wasn’t going to let Cronus pass through me to Griffin and his wings. Pure and simple. It wasn’t going to happen.
Cronus thought differently, proving it as he took another step toward us. He was at the end, so close to the culmination of what he’d started nine hundred and ninety-nine demons ago. He was within reach of tipping that first domino that would bring all the others down. He needed only one more wing to get the map to find Lucifer, to navigate Hell. But he didn’t have to worry about finding his way around Hell—Hell found him just fine.
Out of the canyon mouth came a flashflood of demons. They ran on all fours. They had no choice. Their wings had already been cut off. Eligos and Lucifer, they took no chances. Eligos himself hadn’t risked that his might be taken. His demons were without a general, but that didn’t mean they were any less determined to bring down Cronus. Between the devil they knew and the devil they didn’t want to, they’d take the first. They had a home to save, the same as I did. I’d asked Eligos for Hell itself, and he had given it to me.
The demons swarmed the Titan more quickly than I could blink, Komodo dragons with bleeding backs. He didn’t try to get away. What did he have to fear from these Fallen when he’d already killed a hair shy of a thousand of them? When he touched them, they screamed and unraveled the same as the ground had. Or he ripped them apart, pieces of them turning to a dark rain in the air.
Yet behind them came the angels.
Fighting with the brothers they’d long cast down, some were as they’d been created, glass with daggered wings, blinding under the sun, with swords of fire. Some were in human form with feathered wings. Azrael, all glass and the farthest thing from human you could be except for Cronus himself, led from behind. Far behind, hovering over the canyon. I wasn’t surprised. It was easy to kill when it wasn’t your own existence you were risking. When you could be cut out of reality like a paper doll, wadded up, and thrown away, it was amazing how quickly an asshole like him learned caution, restraint, and to shut his annoyingly arrogant mouth.
For every demon who fell, an angel took his place. When that angel exploded, a stained glass window burst that filled the air; yet another demon was there to attack again. Cronus had multiple jaws fastened around each arm and leg. He had fiery swords plunged into him again and again until I could swear I could smell the stench of burned plastic. When the smallest area opened up, a shotgun blast came from behind me to put a slug into it. I heard Leo and Zeke both cursing behind me as the shotguns turned out to be as useless as everything else. Demons, angels, and man-made death, but the fake man who would be GodKingfuckingEmperor of All didn’t go down. He tossed more demons away, some with a mouthful of whatever cheap fabric of reality made him. Angels—archangels some—were broken like Christmas ornaments rather than the fiercely lethal fighters they were. I ducked as one demon was thrown over me and heard Zeke curse again as he was hit and fell under his weight.
“Don’t kill him, Kit,” I said without turning. “He’s on our side for the moment.”
As I watched, they kept coming, pouring out of the canyon with a single purpose. There was something almost glorious in that, two opposite sides in what should’ve been an unstoppable whole. Cronus, however, was stopping them left and right. How many angels could dance on the head of a pin? It didn’t matter. There might not be any left in Heaven to do the dancing when this was over, and if wings didn’t grow back, demons were going to be much less awe worthy in paintings and sculptures. It could make you wonder why Cronus was putting up with it. Why didn’t he simply move the world again—until he was virtually on top of Griffin to take that wing?
I didn’t wonder. He was having fun. Killing was boring to a Titan, but this wasn’t simple killing. This was a non-païen Heaven and Hell at his fingertips to obliterate. Even to Cronus, that was a change of pace. What he’d planned for after consuming Lucifer and Hell, he had a taste of now, and he liked it. With every slow step he took toward me and the wings that were behind me, he was having a goddamn ball. With every step his attackers, soldiers through and through, died in droves.
Then one could’ve wondered, where was the reason behind it? If every angel and demon fell and it did nothing but give Cronus a jolt of Irish in his coffee, why do it at all? What was the point? Where was the reason? I didn’t wonder. I knew.
I was the point.
This world was the reason.
Anna—the Rose—had been the means.
If you can save someone, do it. If you can save someone and in turn have them save everyone and everything, do that too.