I wanted to move, but I couldn’t, not even for Vivian. I was no weakling, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I could tell that Cernunnos had destroyed me, that my injuries were killing me slowly.

  “No!” Vivian screamed. “Nick! Noooooo…!”

  But Cernunnos grabbed her up like a rag doll and tossed her weightlessly over his shoulder. Then he disappeared into the woods like before, like lightning, like he was never there at all.

  I groaned and the fingers on my left hand scratched at the bloodied grass, all the motion I could muster. I spied the first light of morning cresting over the nearest ridge and pouring over the destroyed remnants of my body. I gave it my best, I gave it my all, but my body just lay there, broken and bleeding. Morning was here, a bright, fresh start to a new day. But I was already finished.

  “Nick.”

  Humph.

  “Nick,” came the voice, “wake up. Time to wake up.”

  No. Don’t wanna.

  “Nick. Open your eyes.”

  No. I want to go back to sleep. Go away.

  “You’re dying, Nick. Open your goddamn eyes, son.”

  The pesky little voice needled me, made me groan and shake my head like a flea in my ear I couldn’t rid myself of.

  “Nicholas Nevaeh Englebrecht, this is your father speaking, open your fucking eyes. Now.”

  I slowly blinked open my eyes. I was still lying on the ground by the altar, but now I could see a tall pair of legs in front of me clad in cream-colored, linen trousers and a pair of buffed brown oxford shoes. I could see as high as the knees; no higher. I couldn’t lift my head anymore than that. But my dad obliged me by squatting down in front of me. I could see he wore a fine black dress shirt and a suit jacket that matched the trousers perfectly. Gucci-made, of course. He smoked one of his long, thin cigarettes, and the sight of it made me hungry.

  “Look at me, Nick,” he said in a voice so deep and commanding that the ground faintly vibrated with it. I looked. His face was beautiful and loveless and remote, as always. “Nick, you’re dying.”

  Yes. Probably.

  I grunted a response. It was all I could muster at the moment.

  “That was very brave what you did, taking Cernunnos on that way, and you’ve paid the ultimate price, but now it’s time.”

  Time? Time for what?

  “What do you think, Nick?”

  No, please. Not that. I shook my head. “Can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. You must.”

  My body felt like broken stone, and there was absolutely no feeling below my waist. My mouth felt like it was full of bloody marbles. My skin felt two sizes too small for my body. Still, I grunted out my defiance. “No, Dad. Please.” I’d beg if I had to.

  “Nick, I’m your father, and I’m telling you it’s time. You must be reborn. The Ophanim is coming.”

  His words drove a new spike of fear though me, and I thought about my vulnerable position, lying here on the ground while the angel crept up on me, but I just couldn’t find the strength to do anything about it. The idea of losing my body and soul was bad, but what my dad was proposing seemed infinitely more horrible… a more terrible prison. “Told you. Not ready.”

  “You are,” my dad said, sounding angry now. “You’ve been ready a long, long time, son. You’ve already begun the Ascension. There’s no stopping it now, no matter how many times your enemies cut your wings from you. I told you, long ago, that you were created especially for this purpose. You’re my heir. You’re my son. You’re the star of the morning, the bringer of light…”

  I heard the dull, shushing noise of tall grass crunching underfoot not very far off. Maybe a thousand yards. Maybe less. The shush-shush-shush of slow, zombie footsteps growing ever nearer. I grunted and made a valiant effort to apply leverage to the ground under my nose, but my body didn’t budge an inch.

  “Nick, it’s time. There’s no escaping this.”

  Shush-shush. Shush-shush.

  I shook my head. “Can’t. Don’t know how.”

  “Use the power inside you. Use the light, little Lucifer.”

  Shush-shush. Shush-shush. Shush-shush-shush…

  I sought the light within myself. I saw only darkness, only pain. A whine gathered in my throat.

  Shush-shush-shush-shush-shush-shush…

  “Lucifer… you’ve risen and fallen a thousand times. Michael drove you down into the pit, but you rose again, great dragon,” my father’s voice thundered over me. “Gabriel sent you into the mountains, but you returned stronger than ever.”

  I didn’t feel strong. I felt… shattered. Defeated.

  “You think you have lost? What is light without dark? What are they without you? You are a part of them all. You can never be defeated. You will rise yet again. Rise now!”

  “I can’t!” I screamed, inside my mind and out.

  The Devil stood up, stood over me. He looked down at me, his face darkened with outrage and concern, his form shining and godlike and so terrible it made my entire broken body shirk at the sight. “My son,” he said in a new voice, a softer voice, “do you want me to tell you a story like fathers do? Shall I tell you the truth about your mother? I loved her the moment I laid my eyes upon her. I knew she was the one, that she was mine and mine alone. She was a strong woman, the strongest I’d ever met. Almost her entire family had died out, except for her. But she didn’t give up. She never gave up on anything.” He paused as he considered his next words. “She loved me more than anything… except, possibly, for you. So when she ran away from me, hid from me, it ripped my world apart, Nick. I had never known such rage in all my life. That’s how I knew how much I loved her. And that’s why I came for her. That’s why I took her to be with me in Hell.”

  I knew his words were calculated for maximum impact. I knew what he was doing, but it didn’t matter that I knew. I squeezed my eyes shut and fisted my hands against the tidal wave of wild, childlike rage building inside me.

  “She lives in Hell, in a paradise of my own design. She still belongs to me, Nick. But do you want to know a secret? Do you want to know something I’ve never told you before?” He leaned down to whisper in my ear, his voice a sibilant, snakelike hiss. “She doesn’t know your name. She doesn’t know you anymore. I wiped her memories of ever having a child or a life beyond the one I’ve given her. She’s mine, body and soul.” I could hear the smugness in his voice, the power bleeding over me, the gloating, because in the end he had won. He had taken her and I would never see her again, not in this world, at least.

  I swallowed against the bitter knot forming in my throat. I felt my blood pounding in my ears like a dull roar. I lifted my left fist up and slammed it down hard on the ground.

  “Even if I brought her back, even if I introduced you two, she wouldn’t recognize you at all. She wouldn’t care.”

  Again, I brought my first up and slammed it into the earth, this time much harder.

  “As far as she’s concerned, I’m her entire world, and you don’t exist at all.”

  I could no longer hear the angel making its rambling way toward me through the long grass. All I could hear was my own heart beating thickly in my chest, sending surges of blood up into my ears, clouding my eyes with a deep red rage.

  “Do you understand me, Nicky? Your mother doesn’t fucking care about you. She doesn’t even know you exist.” He stood over me, barking his words down upon me like a coach over a fallen prize fighter. “Are you surprised, my son? Everything you touch goes away. Everyone you love dies. Your mother. Peter. Elsie Knapp. Isaac. Even Vivian will abandon you in time, when she finds out what you’re really made of. That is your lot in life, Nick, to be alone, a Prince among devils. But, right now, all I see is a motherless, friendless punk from New York who thinks he’s a tough guy. You want to know the truth, Nick? The truth is, it’s lonely at the top. And you’ll be alone for the rest of your fucking life.”

  I brought both fists up and slammed them down. The surge of power, magick, whatever you wanted to call it, hissed through my body like unspent electricity. It filled me until I thought my skin would split apart. I pushed against the earth and it gave. I didn’t even remember climbing to my feet, but suddenly I was standing toe-to-toe with my father. He smiled at me, reached out, and seized my cheeks in the palms of his hands.

  “My son,” he said with a satisfied smile. “There you are.”

  His power surged through me like a hundred burning swords. I stiffened, my back bowing as it filled me with agony and with ecstasy. “It’s rage,” I gasped out between gritted teeth. “My sin… it’s rage, isn’t it?”

  “Wrong,” my father said. He smiled his serpentine smile. “It’s love, Nick. Love… and lust.” He laughed, a full, throaty sound of pure, unbridled bliss. “And you, my son, will make the world burn with it.”

  The pain of his touch drove me screaming to my knees at his feet. I had never felt such pain, even when Cernunnos had been breaking my back like kindling. I felt it and I howled at the sky in my agony. I resisted the power that crackled along my skin like a million cat claws ripping my flesh to pieces, revealing the darkness beneath. I fought tooth and nail against the four sets of wings ripping their savage way through the tender skin of my spine. I raged at my father’s power, and how it was reconstructing me.

  But that didn’t stop me from Ascending.

  had a fantasy that I was fourteen years old again. My foster father had called me from my bedroom into the living room. It was Friday night, and he was drunk and doubling up his belt. “Nicky, get your fucking ass in here!” he was bellowing with red-eyed rage. I was scared and sore from his last beating the night before, but I still went. For one thing, I’d stolen money from him, so we both knew I was damned guilty of my sins. For another, I knew that if I didn’t go, he would beat one of my foster sisters instead. He’d probably do worse to them.

  He struck me first thing across the face and I went down hard on my knees on the worn, evil green living room carpet in that stinking flat in east Harlem. But that’s where the real memory diverted and became something else. Because instead of standing up and taking my licks, defiant idiot that I was, I stayed down. My body hurt too much to move.

  I looked down at my hands and realized they were the large, bony hands of a man. I was a man. But I was something else, too. My blond hair was no longer cut in a shaggy 1980’s mess. Instead, it slithered, long and luxuriously platinum, down over my bunched shoulders. Likewise, the ragged shirt and jeans I’d been wearing, sweat-stained and covered in urine and tattered from running through the woods, were gone, replaced by silver and gold armor. Greaves covered my arms and legs, and my robes beneath it were scarlet red and untarnished. I wore a thick, heavy gold sash with the sign of my father’s house on it—my real father. My back ached and my bones writhed as eight great, black wings burst from my flesh there, all of them armored in shining, tempered steel.

  When finally I stood up, I realized I carried a long, slender staff in burnished gold, with a jagged, two-prong fork, similar to a pair of monstrous crab claws, at the end of it. I recognized the weapon immediately: it was my father’s bident—my grandfather’s weapon in his war against the lesser gods. The Morning Star.

  My foster father dropped his belt and said, “Nick, what have you done?”

  And I answered in a low, vibrating hiss, “Dear Father, I have become.” And drove the bident through my foster father’s flesh, the weapon judging and condemning him to an eternity of pain and punishment in hell.

  That cruel, balding old man vanished, and I realized I was looking at my true father again. I was standing in the vale where the remnants of that cursed altar lay, and I was looking my father in the eye, though nothing else had changed. I was still that armored, winged man, transformed. He looked at me and smiled, and I smiled back as we shared a secret moment of total father-son understanding between us. “Father,” I said in wonder as my hands vibrated with the energy of the Morning Star, the power of God Himself on earth, “such power…”

  I felt a presence closing in on me.

  I turned. The Ophanim was closer than I’d anticipated, maybe ten yards away, close enough that the long, early morning shadow of the angel almost touched me. I caught a single glance of the angel: tall, bent, almost skeletal, weak-looking, its skin like white parchment stretched over birdlike bones, its arms and wings spread in benediction. I saw all its eyes, its hundreds of eyes, and I felt its power wash over me. I felt it as it began to judge me, to calcify around me. But I, too, was powerful. In fact, I had never felt such power, like summer lightning and deadly winter cold all wrapped up and surging through my body and brain. The electricity of unbridled God-ness filled my belly, my bones, my eyes, and my mouth. It filled me to capacity, making me what I was, and flowed over onto the ground. And as the Ophanim’s power reached me and tried to judge the greatest judge of humankind, so also did my power touch it.

  I had never felt so good, so well, and so strong. Invincible. Indomitable. It was like every shadow had vanished from my mind. Every worry, every misery, was gone. All my guilt and many regrets had vanished. I thought how I could do anything, be anything I wanted—a priest, a dictator, a god—and, interestingly enough, the idea didn’t seem at all absurd. I was powerful. I was like God Himself, and it wasn’t a sin to think that way, because He had made me like this. He had favored me, made me powerful. I was His magnum opus, His little beauty, his Morning Star, His gift to the world, and that made me proud to be my father’s son.

  I lifted my arms, and my power blew down the bowl-like vale in a shockwave. It ripped the remaining leaves off the trees. It scalped the skeletal branches off the bushes. It burned the grass down to mud. It blew over Cernunnos’ altar with such force it turned the marble to soft ash that immediately began to blow away. The angel was caught in the backwash. I saw it raise its hands and open its mouth in a soundless scream. I saw that even the inside of its mouth had cursed eyes. Then I saw the thing disintegrate, blown to shining, white ash in a matter of seconds.

  I lowered my arms and looked around in satisfaction. In less than a few heartbeats, I had demolished everything in my path, leveled over five hundred feet of the clearing, and stripped it down to red bedrock and shining white rock. I stood on what looked like steaming deadpan in the middle of the Mohave Desert. Even the topsoil had burned away, and I doubted that anything would grow here for years, if ever it would.

  That insidious laughter again…

  I looked up and saw my dad standing upon a distant precipice overlooking the vale. He was grinning madly from ear to ear as he watched what he had set in motion.

  “Good job, son,” he told me. “You’re a natural.”

  The wind whistled over the mountains and through the naked trees. Dust blew over naked rocks and deadpan. A long way off, I heard the panicked cry of a crow taking flight, a lonely, mournful noise.

  Isaac’s body still lay about twenty feet from the altar, but something about it had changed. It had looked so sad and crushed when I had last looked on it. But now I realized how inconsequential it really was. Standing beside Isaac’s body, I saw his soul. Not some pale, sad, diaphanous shade like in a horror movie, but one painted in all shining Technicolor and powerful youth, solid and beautiful and beaming a smile like he never had in life. He was wearing English clothes and waving to me. Beside him materialized a second soul I instantly recognized as Caleb. Like Isaac, he, too, was dressed in street clothes, but he was healthy and beautiful, no longer ravaged by the syphilis that had stolen his life. The two young men clasped hands and nodded at me. Then they were both gone, melting away so quickly I wondered if I had imagined it all.

  I felt a surge of goodness, of righteousness. I turned to face the grove separating me from the colony, from Abraham. “I’m still alive, Abraham,” I whispered, knowing he could feel me, that he feared me.

  Abraham. Cernunnos.

  The trees bent under my anger and the mountains moaned. “I’m still alive, and I’m coming for you. I’m coming for your god. I’m coming for both of you.”

  The wind soughed mournfully, but my dad laughed and laughed. “Go get ‘em, son!”

  I started back toward the colony.

  I stepped out of the trees and into a small circle of Swartzcopf men. I stood in my robes and armor, bident in hand, and all eight wings fully extended. The men, Abraham and his supporters—one holding Vivian down on the ground on her knees, his hands snarled in her hair—all looked on me with their bleach-white faces, their grimaces of horror, their haunted eyes. Vivian herself managed to lift her head slightly but I had never seen such fear in her eyes.

  Behind them, several members of the community—the women, the young men, and children who had gathered to see what was happening in the grove—clenched their eyes in prayer before racing off for their homes. The men who remained, all the colony leaders, began murmuring prayers of deliverance and exorcism even as I approached, though I could have told them to save their breath. God was dead, or on vacation, or whatever, and he wasn’t taking their calls. No one was. For all intents and purposes, I was in charge now, which was bad news for them.

  They had let the genie out of the bottle; now they had to deal with it.

  Abraham, a brave man if a stupid one, got in front of his men. He was wielding a pitchfork clumsily in his burned, bandaged hands, and though I’m sure it gave him some small measure of comfort, I thought it was comical, like a sad spoof of American Gothic. “Stop!” he said, lifting the pitchfork threateningly in one hand and reaching for the simple wooden cross he wore around his neck with the other. “I know who you are and I command thee to stop, Ha-Satan! You will not enter this colony!”

 

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