Last God Standing (7 page)

The Carthaginian’s blade froze in midswing. Everything stopped as Gabriel appeared in front of me and the temporal anomaly that accompanied every angelic visitation dragged local spacetime to a halt.

“Yes, Mighty One?”

Everything would remain Stopped only for as long as Gabriel remained at my side. But the momentum of reality is so powerful that any substantive disruption of the spacetime continuum creates new problems: babies born before they were conceived; eggs hatched centuries after their descendants fertilized them... But how could I defeat Hannibal when I couldn’t access my own divinity?

As I was considering the extremely limited list of responses, Hannibal’s sword… moved.

“He’s resisting.”

“Resisting
thy unassailable will, Lord?”
Gabriel chuckled.
“You’re testing me again, aren’t you? Or perhaps you’re assaying the infidelity of the big Mexican with the meat cleaver.”

“He’s not Mexican. He’s Carthaginian.”

I could sense Hannibal marshalling energies destructive enough to undermine temporal forces he couldn’t possibly have mastered. He was immobilized in time, but time was running out.

“I need Pluto.”

“The planet?”

“No, you idiot. Pluto, the Roman God of the Dead.”

“But,
Lord, no pagan Death God has been active since–”

“Since they all agreed not to intervene in human affairs, yes I know. You have to go get him. Burbank. California. Check the Deadly Delights Horrorshop. He owns the place.”

At least I hoped he still did. Pluto was notoriously anti-social. For all I knew he might have sold his specialty bookshop and relocated to Miami Beach. But his absence from Hades had allowed Hannibal to escape. I needed his power.

“You’ll have to look for him under a different name. Greek, maybe Italian. I… Wait…”

There was a tremor in the fabric of spacetime, like the fibrillating heartbeat of a rogue quasar. The disruption was coming from Hannibal. He was glaring at me.

“You,” he growled. “I… see… you!”

His eyes were alight, focused, his muscles straining with the effort of fighting through Gabriel’s disruption.

“I… serve… I… serve… no god… but…”

I grasped for the dimension where my divinity reserves prowled… and felt the stirrings of power.

“Yes!”

I opened the interface, hoping for a glorious flood of force, and was rewarded with a halfhearted blurt of divinity. Not nearly enough.

Better call in a contractor.

Occasionally I could “farm out” certain incursion events to friendly deities with whom I maintained good working relations. The biggest challenge in choosing a contractor was choosing the right god for the job. Unfortunately, in Hannibal’s case, I knew exactly who to call.

I cast my consciousness into the infinite, seeking the energies of the one I hoped could help. Hannibal was moving his other arm by then; twisting his right leg, driving the ball of his sandaled foot into the dirt, shifting his weight, turning toward me, his black-rimmed eyes glinting in Phoenician fury.

“I… serve… no god… but… but…!”

“What do you want,
O
tormentor of lonely hausfraus?”

The voice, so familiar from our meeting several summers earlier, was as luscious as I remembered.

“What’s happening inside your pants?”
Gabriel said.

I couldn’t hide the prominent bulge that puffed out the front of my khakis. And the part of me that the newcomer was stimulating didn’t want to. No. I wanted to find the first woman within spitting distance, throw her down on the ground and…

“Is that a shillelagh in your pants or are you just happy to see me?”

Even Hannibal seemed to sense the change: the air had just been electrified by a massive dose of predatory Female pheromones.

“I… need a favor. A contact…”

“Oh my.”

“I mean a contract…”

Any woman would do. Old, ugly, too fat or skeleton thin…

“A contract… rebuking…”

The sultry female voice chuckled. My contractor was pouring it on a little thick, even for her.

“And are you willing to pay the price for my services?”

“I’ll pay, M. Wait… what do… you want?”

“We both know what I want, God of ancient deserts.”

I’d barely escaped from the clutches of this particular goddess at last year’s convention. Shango of the West African Pantheon was still limping after their bathroom encounter. But I’d worry about the consequences later.

“Alright, just hurry!”

“
Men
,” she sighed.
“You’re all alike. Silly fookers.”

Lightning flickered in the west. Thunder rumbled overhead. My contractor was notoriously stingy when it came to her divinity, choosing to spend her most recent incarnation as a disembodied wraith lodged in the co-opted consciousness of a schizophrenic Boston-Irish romance writer. This allowed her some leeway when she chose to use her powers: maintaining a seeming required a continuous outpouring of divinity; it was expensive even for the most powerful gods. Riding along in the mind of a socially awkward manic-depressive allowed my colleague to save up for special occasions. And when it came to her dealings with men, the Morrigan was always up for a challenge.

“The covenant is made.”

There was a flash of light, a crackle of electric sex.

“Hello, Yahweh.”

For this “occasion” she’d chosen the seeming of a statuesque redhead with sparkling emerald eyes and enormous breasts. The Irish sex goddess had sheathed herself in a form-fitting green shift made from living lianas. A hazy emerald halo encircled her head, finding its verdant echo in her catlike eyes. Her skin was radiant and smooth, tanned without freckle or blemish. Her hair, a deep red that alternated between the last flare of sunlight and the flash of autumn leaves, writhed of its own accord, as if she hovered within a plane without gravity. I crossed my legs. No man, regardless of his sexual orientation, could behold the Morrigan in her finest rags and not be instantly enflamed.

The Irish goddess of Love, Sex and War floated across the smoking plain and hovered a few feet over my head, just high enough, I noted, for me to catch a tantalizing peek under her vines.

“You’ve been working out, Lando Cooper.”

“Hello, M,” I said, fighting the urge to reach out and touch her flawless white foot. “You’re looking…”

“Yes?”
she said, eyelashes batting, speedshuttering her emerald eyes.
“Go on.”

“You’re looking… really well.”

“Sure and you’re a master of understatement,”
she said, her voice lightly accented by her Celtic brogue
.
“I can spy, by the twinkle in your eye, that I’m lookin’ way past ‘well’.”

The Morrigan laughed in that richly erotic way that drove mortals wild. She wasn’t smirking at the twinkle in my eye. She wasn’t even looking at my “eye”.

“What is’t you’ve called me to do, Yahweh?”
She floated a few feet closer and reached down to draw one jade fingernail along the line of my jaw.
“I believe we have unfinished business between us. The matter o’ your seduction, as I recall.”

The Morrigan smiled: a devastating conflation of lust and mad Gaelic humor.

“Your education in the ways of love are long overdue, my friend. I would remedy your ignorance with fiery kisses and the darkest erotic magicks.”

She drifted downward and pressed her palms against my chest, her hands sliding lower… lower…

“Tonight, Yahweh, while the mummer’s moon rides high above the world… your lessons will begin.”

“Hamanahamanahama…” The Morrigan was really layin’ it down. “Hannibal. I need you to…”

“Ochmagloch er mockenstoch,”
she whispered.
“He’s smokin’ hot.”

Hannibal flexed, and the sheath of stilltime within which he strained shattered and fell to the ground in glowing tatters.

“I serve no god but me!”

He gripped his sabre and strode forward, the tip of his weapon pointed at Gabriel.

“For the glory of Carthage!”

“Gabriel! Get Pluto! Go!”

Hannibal swung his saber. The energies humming through it were powerful enough to maim an archangel.

“Gabriel! Move!”

The Angel of the Morning vanished a nanosecond before the screaming blade whistled through the space his head had occupied. Hannibal’s momentum whirled him around to face me.

“Your attempts at camouflage are undone, desert god. My percipience has pierced that pathetic shell within which you’ve chosen to squat.”

Around us, time resumed its normal march. The screaming human bystanders staggered away into the chaos. The gathered media moved in closer, cameras hissing.

“I’m going to enjoy murdering you, Yahweh,” Hannibal said. “I’m going to butcher you with such extravagant brutality that the others won’t even think of standing in my way.”

Others?

“Who empowered you, Hannibal? You’re no god; you were dead.”

Hannibal swung his sword in lazy circles, maintaining his distance, for the moment.

“Oh, I’ll be a god soon enough. And when I am I’ll make you watch while I feed your balls to the Midgard Serpent. Although in that body you appear to be sadly deficient in your allotment of manmeat.”

“And what about you, Hannibal Barca,”
the Morrigan said.
“What’s holdin’ up your codpiece?”

The emerald goddess dropped into the space between us. She’d obviously rearranged the space around her to maximize the effect of her divine charms. She floated, buoyed upon a wave of primaeval sexy, her red tresses streaming in the wind generated by her own hotness. Hannibal’s scimitar dipped ever so slightly, an ugly sneer twisting his wolfish grin into a frown.

“Is this how you battle, desert god? Sending your concubines into the field to distract me?”

“Concubine?”
the Morrigan rasped. “
Concubine?
”

Hannibal laughed, although his eyes roved hungrily up the Morrigan’s body. And when he spun back to face me, his stance was a little less wide.

“You won’t find me such easy pickings, God of the West. I, Hannibal, the Lion of Carthage, invoke the right of Celestial Challenge.”

I was drawing a blank. “Celestial what?”

“Celestial Challenge,”
the Morrigan snarled.
“It compels a god to fight the challenger or face instant dematerialization. Only true gods even know about Celestial Challenge. Nothing short of a demigod can invoke it.”

“Aye,” Hannibal growled. “I’m hip to it.”

The Morrigan’s beauty devolved into the ugliest of scowls. She floated there, her arms folded across her murderous breasts. I could almost hear the black-Irish rage thrashing around inside the eroticized snake pit that was her mind.

“Did you hear me, desert god?” Hannibal roared. “Fight!”

Usually, at this point I would assume an Aspect and put my enemy to rout. The Great Burning Face in the Sky is perfect for this particular scenario, although Whirling Pillar of Flame always wows ’em at the Conventions. In the seven years since I’d learned the truth of my incarnation I’d fought and won fifteen duels. Recently, not counting Zeus, I’d defeated four other major gods in open combat: Set of the Egyptians; Pele of Polynesia; Loki, Halfgiant/All Bastard of the Norse Pantheon; and Triton, the son of Poseidon. Now Set works as a nightwatchman at Cairo’s Ripley’s Believe It Or Not: Mummy Madness! Pele tends bar at a lesbian brothel located in the shadows of Mount Kilauea. Loki teaches a “comedy traffic school” driver’s education course in Salt Lake City, and Triton lives in the Spongebob Squarepants Bubble Blaster at the bottom of my fishtank. Don’t get it twisted: at the height of my popularity I was a God among gods. Thanks to two thousand years of Holy War, Crusades, witch burnings, slavery, religious genocide, nation building, nation stealing and a pagan-pulping global media campaign that staggers on even into the twenty-first century, I was at the top of the divinity game. But now Hannibal was gunning for me with dismemberment in his eye, and I’d been cut off.

“Man to man then, Hannibal!” I cried. “But look!” I raised my hands, my fingers spread wide. “I’m unarmed.”

Hannibal scowled. “Why not simply draw a weapon from the very air? A simple feat for a true deity.”

A broadsword big enough to abort a baby stegosaurus thudded into the dirt at my feet. It was nearly as long as I was tall. Just looking at it gave me a hernia.

“Fight!”

Hannibal whirled his blade and charged. I gripped the Nubian blade’s hilt and pulled. That was a laugh: I might as well have tried drinking Yankee Stadium; the blade remained firmly buried in the dirt. Hannibal swept in, swinging his sword in a casual beheading motion. I ducked. Seven years spent fighting errant divinities had given me a passing familiarity with defensive tactics. As he swung the blade around and behind his head I dived to my left, hit the ground in a diveroll and sprang to my feet. Hannibal lunged forward, his blade humming with stolen divinity. I danced backward and the sword’s point just missed my right nipple. I dodged left, then feinted right, avoiding Hannibal’s next thrust by a hair.

“Fight, boygod. Come to your doom!”

“
Aye
.
Fight him, my sexy prince.”

The Morrigan offered a mischievous wink, divinity playing about her head like emerald St Elmo’s Fire.

“You have my blessing.”

Sudden strength filled my limbs. The Morrigan’s power surged into my body like a balm in Gilead, and I felt my muscles expanding, my perceptions quickening. I felt as if I could tear into the dirt beneath my feet and uproot the foundations of the Earth. I was invincible again, immortal, the vassal and the vessel of something far greater.

“Fight, my champion. Defend my honor.”

I turned back just in time to see Hannibal’s sword whistling toward my head. I reached up with both hands and stopped the blade between my palms.

Wow. She’s good.

“You can thank me later, Lando Cooper,”
the Morrigan replied.
“Kick his Carthaginian ass!”

The Goddess had just inducted me into the ranks of the Filail, the superhuman warrior clan that fought alongside the Irish pantheon in that country’s antiquity. They were strong, fast, supremely skilled, and utterly merciless. I shrugged, and ghostly armor, sky blue and gold, coalesced around me.