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  I spun, slashing blindly, desperation clawing at my mind, magick pulsing in my stomach. The Knife of Abraham cut across a waiter’s stomach, parting the white shirt and the skin beneath like water. Black ink spurted, coating me in a slimy sheet of icy liquid. Tentacles burst out, more tentacles than should have fit inside the waiter. They spilled onto the floor, thigh-thick and python-long, lying limp for a moment before they rose into the air, tips swinging to and fro, hounds scenting for prey.

  The waiter giggled as his clone stepped close to him, giggling in perfect unity.

  The clone’s mouth split at the corners, ink running from the rips. His wide throat convulsed once, then again, and a fat-tipped slug of alien flesh came up and out of his mouth. It slithered out, rolling and undulating down his chest. Two smaller tendrils pushed his baby-seal eyes from their sockets, twisting and curling down his cheeks as they waved beside his moon face, the eyeballs unblinking on the ends of their stalks.

  I stepped back, swallowing hard against the sickness that wanted to happen.

  Cthulhu sloshed in his tank.

  Free me.

  My Mark burned as the words pulsed in my mind.

  Daniel fell, wrapped in the grip of the two waiters he fought. They knelt over him as he struggled, holding him down, masking his face with a pile of writhing tentacles.

  My eyes found the Man in Black.

  He crouched on the ground, pressed down by a cage of green magick. I could hear his coat screaming as it smoldered where the corruption of magick touched it. The Sushi Priest stood on the altar, holding the Eye of Omens high, face pulled in a wide smile as he cast his spell over the chaos god.

  I looked for a way out, an escape, a way to go.

  A wave of tentacles crashed into me, slapping around my body, dragging me to the ground. They squeezed, tightening, cutting off my air. Black spots swam across my vision, and my head throbbed.

  The knife fell from my numb fingers.

  FREE ME.

  The waiters loomed over me, one smiling like a lunatic, the other’s face a flaccid sack around the three tentacles waving from the stump of its neck.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  FREE ME AND I WILL SAVE YOU.

  My chest collapsed, crushed by the weight of the tentacles constricting around me. I gasped, trying to pull air into crushed lungs.

  Daniel, I’m sorry. I failed.

  The world began to go black.

  Cthulhu moved in his tank.

  Everything grew dark, so very dark.

  Before I went under, I made a wish.

  51

  THUNDER FELL IN the middle of the cavern as Cthulhu crashed to the floor, freed by my magick.

  He crouched, massive, enormous, gigantic; filling the space with his size, his presence. Syrupy fluid sluiced off him, splashing to the cavern floor and racing to fill uneven divots and crevasses in an amniotic rush. Out of his tank, he pressed against the walls of my mind with the weight of a titan.

  “No!” the Sushi Priest shouted, magick crackling off his skin, rolling down the folds of his robe, fed by his anger. He still held the Eye of Omens, streaming magick from it to keep the Man in Black pinned to the ground.

  The Great One shifted, turning at the sound of his captor’s voice. He spoke, words crashing through my mindspace, turning me into a butterfly in a hurricane.

  THE TIDES TURN, LITTLE MAN. NOW YOU SHALL PAY.

  The Sushi Priest screamed out a spell and flung his free arm in an arc of sorcery that cut across the space, striking the sea god in the face. The magick sizzled against inhuman flesh, smoke billowing as Cthulhu screamed inside my mind.

  The tentacles around me loosened, slipping away. Air, sweet air, rushed into my lungs, painful and cold. The waiters pulled away, moving to help their master. Gibbering, they shambled toward Cthulhu. They were joined by their brothers, who’d let go of Daniel. Rolling on my side, I pushed up, looking for him.

  I found him lying on the cavern floor.

  He looked dead.

  Oh God, no.

  I scrambled toward him.

  An explosion rocked the cavern with a BOOM! that shook the ground, throwing me down. My face hit the limestone, and a line of pain shot across my cheekbone. Chunks of rock rained down from the ceiling, stalactites falling in spears of crushing stone. I looked and found the source.

  Cthulhu had slammed his gigantic fist down on the gill-throated waiters.

  He shifted, lifting massive, barnacled knuckles from the ground. Pulp stained black with ink stretched from cavern floor to sea-god fist in a torn net of gore. The waiters had been crushed, reduced to paste and amputated tentacles that wriggled and twitched in the stain.

  Cthulhu turned toward the Sushi Priest as he flung more magick at him.

  I hurried to Daniel, pushing aside the thought that there were gods and a sorcerer Sushi Priest fighting behind me. I couldn’t do anything but get to Daniel; the rest of it was too much to deal with.

  Propped on one elbow, he rubbed his forehead with the fingers of his other hand. Relief flooded over me to see him alive.

  He was filthy, slime and blood mixed with rock dust and ink to form a layer of grime from the top of his head to the bottoms of his feet. I touched his chest and saw that my hand was coated in a layer of the same grime.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Are you?”

  “As I can be.” His eyes looked over my head. “Oh, damn, that can’t be good.”

  I glanced behind me. Daniel stared at Cthulhu advancing, moving step by step toward the Sushi Priest, batting aside spells as he did with webbed hands the size of treetops. I turned to Daniel. “I think he’s on our side.”

  “None of them are on our side.”

  He was right. “On our side more than most,” I said.

  “Go, go, Godzilla then.” He shivered. “How did he get out of the fishbowl?”

  “I did it. I didn’t see another way out.”

  He nodded. “No wonder I feel so crappy.”

  I’d used magick. Dammit.

  He grabbed my arm. “Hey.” He shook me, not hard, just enough to get me to look at him. “Get that look off your face. You only did what you had to. I’ll be okay.”

  “No more magick.” I meant it.

  “No more magick tomorrow.” He let go of my arm. “Today we have stuff to get done, and magick is required.”

  I didn’t agree, but I didn’t argue.

  “Here’s your knife. You’ll need that too.” He held out the Aqedah, handle first. I took it, and he tried to stand.

  I grabbed him before he collapsed.

  He sat on the ground, face twisted in pain. “Maybe I’ll sit here for a minute.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “A little.”

  Sweat cut trails through the dirt and grime on his face, skin showing waxy underneath. His breathing sounded ragged, and his hands shook, twittering and trembling as he held his legs, curled around himself. He was hurting. A lot. I let my eyes shift, sliding my focus like I had before, calling my magick up to See through.

  In my vision, Daniel became a clear vessel. The golden energy had been drained to almost half. It lay inside him, sloshing through his body with a lot of room to spare. Turning, I blinked the magick away.

  “As soon as you can stand, I’m getting you out of here.”

  He shook his head. “No. We’ve got to finish this.”

  “Screw this. Let the world burn. All I want is you to be safe, to stop being hurt.” I moved closer, my hand on his face. “The rest of the world can go to hell.”

  He grinned. It was weak, but it was there, dimples and all. “We have to save the world. I need it to be here tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, and all the days after those.” His trembling hands pulled me closer. “I need them, because I want to spend all of them with you.”

  My heart swelled in my chest. It was hard to breathe.

  His voice was soft, his mouth close to mine. “So we fi
ght. Till the bitter end.”

  “Till the bitter end,” I echoed.

  A wave of magick knocked us sideways before we could kiss.

  52

  DANIEL’S ARMS WRAPPED around me, keeping me from tumbling across the floor. Pinned against him, I felt us slide nearly a foot across the gravel-strewn floor. The magick washed off us with a crackling snap like a fire whip. Daniel groaned, his arms falling away from me.

  I moved, scrambling to take my weight off him. He sat up, and blood spotted his hoodie where the gravel on the floor had torn through it and the skin beneath. My hands touched his arms and chest, avoiding his injuries. “Are you okay?”

  “It hurts, but I will be.” He shook his head, making his shaggy bangs fall over his eyes. “What was that?”

  I pointed.

  The Sushi Priest now stood on the limestone altar. A tendril of vile sorcery from the talisman in his hand still pinned the Man in Black to the ground, but the priest was surrounded by a crackling orb of chartreuse magick. Cthulhu’s tremendous hand cupped over it, squeezing, sea-god flesh sizzling as the etheric energy scorched and sparked between webbed fingers the size of the Sushi Priest himself. I could feel the pain in Cthulhu’s hand; it echoed down the connection between us, making the Mark on my own hand grow hot, the lines burning across my palm. I looked down. The swirled and whorled scars glowed a dull red-orange. Rubbing it on my pants made little wisps of gray smoke. I looked back at the fight between elder gods and sorcerer.

  The Sushi Priest’s spell cast Cthulhu in lime-green highlights, flashing and popping like a strobe, making the elder god look like a special effect in a movie as he loomed in the darkness. His back brushed the ceiling of the cavern, crushing stalactites into a rain of dust.

  Cthulhu leaned on the sphere, pressing harder. The limestone slab under the Sushi Priest’s feet broke in half with a CRACK! that resounded across the stone-littered floor. The Sushi Priest screamed and swung the Eye of Omens up, adding its magick to his own. The sphere around him doubled in size, intensifying, pushing Cthulhu back. The energy flared so bright I had to squint just to look, the sparks and crackles shooting little pains across my retinas. Inside my mind Cthulhu howled his agony, but he pressed on.

  The Man in Black, free from his prison, rose off the ground in a fury, his coat flaring dragon-wing wide around him. The black-bladed sword gleamed in his red right hand, naked and wicked and iniquity-sharp. His hand pulsed with crimson energy like the still-beating heart of some cursed creature. It dripped gobbets of magick, spilling scarlet-black down the blade. His dark face twisted with raw anger and naked wrath, his black, glittering eyes slit-staring at the Sushi Priest.

  He lashed out, slamming the sword through the sphere of energy. It struck the Sushi Priest at the knees, shearing through flesh and bone like black-bladed lightning.

  The Sushi Priest screamed once as his protective spell crumbled. The scream still echoed as Cthulhu’s hand snapped shut around him, plucking him upward and leaving his legs from the knees down to stand on the broken limestone altar.

  53

  THE TWO ELDER gods stood facing each other across the severed stumps perched on the limestone altar. Blood soaked the white-green stone, turning it dark as they glared at each other. Cthulhu loomed from floor to ceiling, hunched over gigantic knees, his colossal, stone-crushing knuckles cracking the rock underneath him. He breathed through gills the size of ship sails under a tangled nest of wriggling tentacles where a mouth should have been, and it moved the air inside the entire chamber in dank, lagoon-moist drafts.

  The Man in Black looked like a wisp in comparison, a tiny slip of a figure next to the massive sea god. He stood in his fluttering coat, thin blade in his red right hand.

  Then he shifted, and everything changed.

  The Man in Black looked the same, but suddenly he was different. His presence expanded between one eye blink and the next, growing into something that pressed against the magick under my skin. He was the Heart of Darkness, the Lord of Nightmares, the original Suicide King.

  He was the Crawling Chaos in all his terrible glory.

  Daniel scurried next to me. His voice was still thready with pain. “What do we do?”

  “Be very, very quiet,” I whispered.

  “’Cause we’re hunting wabbits?”

  I shook my head. “We are the rabbits.”

  “Good point.”

  Cthulhu shifted, and more of the ceiling crumbled against his winged back, dust falling across shoulders like mountains, sticking to damp, sea-god skin. His voice was the sounding of cloister bells inside my head, loud but hollow, warning of danger.

  NEPHEW.

  “Uncle.” The Man in Black gave a small nod, lips pulled into a grin.

  WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

  “You are free from your prison, Lord of R’lyeh.”

  BECAUSE OF YOUR ACOLYTE.

  The Man in Black tilted his head. “You are welcome. Indebted, but welcome.”

  Cthulhu shifted.

  IT WAS NOT AT YOUR HAND.

  “She is my hand. She bears my Mark.”

  The symbol in my palm flared hotter as he said it. I bristled inside but stayed quiet.

  Cthulhu shook his head, and the cavern vibrated.

  HER POWER IS HER OWN. NO DEBT IS OWED TO YOU.

  His massive head turned slightly, red orb of an eye looking directly at me. Under his gaze, my magick began to bubble and boil. My skin flushed fever-hot, and it took every ounce of control to not squirm, to not turn away and hide from the weight of that awful, crimson eye.

  The Man in Black lunged forward, coat flaring around him with a snap, his saturnine face pulled into a snarl exposing long, jagged shark teeth. “She is my Acolyte. What is hers is mine by right of possession.”

  The implication of that struck me like a fist. My hand reached back, falling on Daniel’s leg. He was mine. No one else’s.

  Mine and mine alone.

  Cthulhu turned toward the Man in Black.

  SHE ONLY FOLLOWS YOU BECAUSE SHE DOES NOT KNOW THE TRUTH.

  “My truth is her truth, Deep Dweller,” he spat.

  NOT FOR LONG, PRINCE OF LIES.

  Cthulhu didn’t move as his mind crashed into mine like a tsunami, sweeping me under and washing me away into a riptide of darkness.

  54

  I WAS BACK.

  Back in the vision of a blood-black future where the moon hung low and red in a tattered and falling sky, and the world burned and bled, and the stench of torn gut and violent death threatened to choke the air from my lungs. It all closed around me like a fist.

  Squeezing.

  Constricting.

  Oppressing.

  I blinked rapidly, trying to clear the tears that welled in my eyes, burning from the soot that hung in the air. Movement in front of me caught my eye.

  I stood behind a monster, the monster I’d seen earlier, the one that held my little brother, Jacks. The one eating my little brother, Jacks, with jagged, gnashing teeth. I could just see my brother’s tiny socked foot around slowly flapping wings of stretched membrane.

  My stomach clenched.

  “Don’t move, Charlie. You can’t save him. That’s not why I brought you here.”

  The voice came from behind me. It carried over my shoulder, a pleasant tenor with a muted accent that was vaguely Bostonian. I turned.

  A man stood just a few feet away.

  He was dressed in dark jeans with folded cuffs, a brown leather jacket over a skin-tight black T-shirt, and motorcycle boots, and his dark hair was greased into a pseudo-pompadour; he looked like a seventies version of someone from the fifties.

  He had kind brown eyes and a large nose.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Really?”

  “You know me, Charlie.”

  “I don’t.”

  He opened his mouth and spoke something in a language I could not understand, one made of feelings and urges instead of language and sound.

  The moment h
e said the word, knowledge poured on me like boiling oil. He pushed against the magick inside me, sweeping back and forth like the tides. He felt immense, bottomless, near infinite.

  I breathed his name.

  “Cthulhu.”

  He nodded, warm eyes twinkling.

  “What are we doing?” This made no sense.

  “We are having a conversation in a possible apocalypse.”

  “Wait, why aren’t we in the cave?”

  “We are.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t understand.

  “We are both avatars of ourselves. You are still beneath the Temple of Ba’althune next to your paramour. I am still in the golden city of R’yleh, and I still fight your master in the same temple where you are. All of these things are true. I splintered us and took a portion of each to the moment you chose your path, the moment you chose this future.”

  “I didn’t want any of this.”

  “You chose to help Nyarlathotep achieve his goals.”

  “To stop this.”

  He shook his head sadly, then lifted his chin, indicating the scene in front of us. “Watch closely.”

  I turned to look. We’d shifted, now looking at the event from the side. I saw myself.

  I looked terrible. Other Charlie looked like a child compared to the squatting monstrosity she faced. I watched myself scream in rage, face purple and knotted. The creature leaned to the left and broke wind, my brother’s body sliding on its bloated stomach.

  “Watch,” Cthulhu said. Other Charlie took a step, her hands clenched in fists of rage, and then the night swirled behind her and coalesced into the form of a man.

  The Man in Black.

  He looked different now, his coat flaring off him in spikes and blades of inky black energy, his skull swollen and malformed around a shark’s maw of triple-rowed teeth. His eyes glowed crimson, pulsing in syncopated rhythm with his red right claw. He reached out, razor talons clamping on Other Charlie’s shoulder, spinning her around. He grabbed her, snatching her off her feet and lifting her into the air. Blood burst where his talons pierced her body, tearing a scream from her throat that cut into my bones, going on and on and on in an undulating wave of agony that stole her words away.