Cold: Chapter Seventeen
In which you have decided not to give up, which might lead to consequences.
Chapter 17
Clyve backed away from the bartender’s slashed grin and stood there, blinking. I watched as his cybernetic implants kicked in and flooded him with calming chemicals. I prodded my adrenal implant to do the same, and I felt my heartbeat and my breath return to normal.
“So what are we looking at?” Clyve asked.
“Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos,” I said. “Creature with the power to…well, to do that,” I said, pointing at the puddle that had recently been Angela Martin. “And that,” I said, pointing to the puppeted bartender.
“This is another Lovecraft thing, isn’t it?” Clyve asked.
“I think so,” I said.
“The author you speak of could only conceive of a tiny portion of my true nature,” the slashed bartender said in a voice that flew through the air like bees, stinging my mind. “So what’ll it be, my bionic friends?”
“Well, you’ve got all the cards,” Clyve said. “I don’t know what you plan to do with them even if we give up, so I’m not sure where we stand.”
“I told you. If you give up, I’ll restore your two friends here.”
“Ok, but here’s the thing, you’re so all-powerful, right? Why’d you need all this theater here, when you could just turn us all into goo and go on about your day?” Clyve asked.
“And if we do ‘give up,’ then what’s the end game? Chances are it doesn’t end up good for us in the long run, right?” I added. “So these two would very likely die anyway.”
“What’s your real game?” Clyve asked.
The bartender fell to the ground in a heap. Rising in her place, a man in a black suit, face obscured by shadow, golden eyes glowing out of the darkness, a flat-brimmed hat on his head.
“All of it,” the man said in a voice made of distant screams, placing gloved hands on the surface of the bar. “My game is all of it.”
“Well that’s just gibberish,” Clyve said.
“To you, maybe,” the man said. “But the subtleties of Shakespeare are gibberish to an ant.”
At that moment, I heard the distinct sound of giant claws landing on the roof. The bar reverberated with the sound, the hanging lights over the pool tables wobbling.
“The fuck is—” That was Edwin, storming out of his office. He stopped and stared at the horrible pile of what had once been Angela Martin.
“What…” he breathed. “Who the fuck are you?” This he directed at the man in black.
“Edwin, you might want to stay out of this,” I said.
“Yeah,” Clyve said. “Trust me, you don’t want a piece.”
“I wanna know what the hell’s on my roof,” Edwin said, storming out the front door.
“Nodens,” the man in black said. “You brought Nodens here?”
“I didn’t bring anyone here,” I said.
But then I felt something in my pocket, something that hadn’t been there a second ago. I pulled it out, immediately recognizing the medallion I’d been given in the Dreamlands, the medallion that made me a knight of Nodens. I flashed it at the man in black, who recoiled at it.
“That motherfucker,” the man in black said.
Edwin ran back inside. “The absolute fuck is that thing on my roof??”
“Night-gaunt,” I said, realizing exactly what was happening. “It’s ok, I think it’s the good guys.”
The creature then began to tear a hole in the bar’s roof, and debris rained down inside. I dove under a table, and Clyve joined me there. I didn’t see where Edwin went.
A massive creature with black, leathery wings and a humanoid body with skin the hue of an oil slick, crashed down into the bar and stalked toward Nyarlathotep.
“Back, you foul thing,” the man in black said, bracing himself against the bar back.
“Don’t call my friends foul,” said another voice. Dismounting from the night-gaunt was another figure, this one tall, his face writhing with a beard of tentacles, carrying a trident.
“P-Poseidon??” Clyve yelped.
“Nodens, if you please,” said Nodens.
“Ok who the fuck is this now?” Edwin asked from his position crouched behind one of the pool tables.
“The cavalry,” I said. I held my medallion aloft for Nodens’ inspection. “I serve at your pleasure, my lord.” I knelt, not really knowing why, but knowing I needed to.
“Rise, my knight,” Nodens said, and I did. “Your supplication is appreciated but unnecessary.”
“Ok I’m about to wolf out on these motherfuckers for breaking my bar,” Edwin said, standing and assuming a more confrontational affect.
“Don’t,” Clyve said. “Just trust me.”
Nodens walked over to the man in black and plucked him out from behind the bar, raising him up by his collar.
“Get out of here, crawling one,” Nodens said. “These tiny creatures are not your concern.”
The man in black began to transform, huge tentacles growing from his arms, his legs extending into massive claws, a third leg forming a tripod. His face extended upward into the writhing form of a massive worm with a vertical slit for a mouth. He freed himself from Nodens’ grip and roared, shattering all of the windows in the bar.
But in that moment, Nodens struck, grabbing that writhing neck and squeezing, choking, black fluid oozing out from Nodens’ fingers. And then Nodens put out his other hand, and smoke billowed outward, forming a swirling portal.
Nodens whipped Nyarlathotep around and threw him through the portal.
“Monsters always need to stop and scream at heroes before attacking,” Nodens said. “I’ve never understood why. Leaves them vulnerable to attack for no reason.”
“So is he gone?” I asked.
“Relocated to a pocket dimension. It won’t hold him long,” Nodens explained.
“What now?” Clyve said.
“Can you restore our friends?” I asked.
Nodens looked at the puddle of Angela Martin’s viscera. “No,” he said. “That one is beyond saving. However, I think this one will be just fine.” He helped the bartender to her feet. The gashes in her cheeks had already started to heal, and she stood, shakily, a hand on the bar top to support her.
“Been alive way too long to let a little thing like being possessed by an eldritch horror do me in,” she said.
“Glad you’re ok, sister,” Edwin said. “As for you, uh, thanks for the assist, but did your leathery friend here really have to wreck my roof?”
“My apologies. I will restore your roof as I depart.”
Nodens mounted his night-gaunt and flew up through the hole in the ceiling, which then restored itself as if it had never been destroyed.
“That’s going to make some news,” Edwin said. “Not ideal.”
“Well, we’ll just have to do what we always do – deny, deflect, distract,” the bartender said.
Edwin sat in a chair next to the remains of Angela Martin.
“Sorry it had to go down like this, sister. I don’t know what kind of power that guy had, but you deserved better. After all the work you did, you deserved better.”
Clyve, the bartender, and I gathered around and gave the dead hunter turned werewolf a respectful moment of silence.
“Ok, so the next step is to check out that bookstore, right?” I asked after it seemed the moment had reached a place of catharsis.
“Yeah, Lovecraft’s place,” Clyve said.
In that moment, my vision clouded, filled with static, swirling in a vortex, and in that vortex I saw that figure from the bathroom sink, onyx skin and body covered in eyes, staring at me, and I heard a voice.
“Kill Clyve.”
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