Chapter Text
Anathema, mine descendant, an hour will cometh when ye must turne towards a union moste unusual for thy salvation. But prepare, for thy favour must be repaid even unto the deepest pits of Hellfire and choruses of Heaven.
Anathema Device (and it was still very solidly Device) was a woman who liked to believe she knew the way her life was supposed to work. Of course, for most of said life that had been thanks to Agnes Nutter. The witch with all the answers who decided to share them in the form of vague riddles that didn’t so much guide as wave a hand in what may or may not be the right direction.
Despite, and in some part because of this, Anathema took pride in her ability to decipher these codes and followed her given destiny without undue complaint.
Her destiny. Her reason for being on this Earth. She’d hurtled towards it since the moment she’d been born, just a piece of Agnes’s predestined scheme.
From a young age her mother had made it obvious that, thinking practically, little else mattered. She couldn’t afford to act beyond Agnes’s master plan and anything that could help her along that journey. Besides, if Anathema didn’t do her job right there wouldn’t be anything beyond what Agnes had written in her book.
So Anathema failed to make a plan for this hypothetical after and tried not to worry about it. Her future didn’t matter in the face of the End of the World.
But the last day came and went and there was an after.
It was very lucky then that, just as Agnes and her prophecies came to their conclusion, along came Newt. Agnes’s last gift. Anathema was set on appreciating him. After all, according to the book they were supposed to live happily ever after.
Or so she presumed.
While her life changed very abruptly on the Day the World Didn’t End, when she thought about it on long lonely nights she knew her role didn’t. Even after they burned the Further Prophecies. (Newt’s idea and the first of many she followed hesitantly.) There was always another voice to guide her. To make decisions and decide what was right for her so she didn’t have to.
She tried to love Newt. That was what she was meant to do, after all. It shouldn’t have been hard. He was kind. He meant well. He loved her.
But, in the end, all she felt for him was a sense of obligation. She was obligated to love him. To stand by him and hold him close. All because of Agnes and a few words on a three hundred year old page. It never felt right. They weren’t similar enough. Or different enough. Or compatible enough. What they had, she didn’t quite know what to call it, just drained her.
In the end she felt the only thing they had tying them together was Agnes.
She spent far too many hours of far too many nights alone. Having crawled out of their cold shared bed to sit in the garden under the stars. Here she was closer, spatially, to Agnes than ever before. In the same country her long lost ancestor had lived and exploded. But, night after night, she felt like Agnes was slipping away. Like somewhere she’d failed to interpret Agnes right and that Agnes was punishing her for it.
She couldn’t keep pretending. Keep convincing herself that this was the right way of things. Even though she’d been so sure this is what Agnes intended. She had to admit her failure.
So they’d called it a break. Just a break. But Anathema wasn’t ignorant. She knew full well that so called breaks trended towards permanency more often than not.
Which left her alone. Really and truly alone for the first time in her life. Without her mother. Without Newt. Without Agnes.
But she couldn’t just wallow in her own loneliness and uncertainty. That wasn’t productive and it certainly wasn’t what she was raised to do. So she buried the thoughts and tried to live all on her own. To focus her energy and wit on more productive things.
Like protesting climate change and hunger and the rampant corruption that exacerbated every single one of those issues. These causes gave her some purpose. And some like-minded company. She’d managed this balancing of action and anxiety well enough for a few increasingly sleepless weeks.
But Agnes lingered. The plan, the very thing that had been drilled into her since childhood, never left the back of her mind and it percolated from there into every thought, stirring up unease and unrest.
She just couldn’t understand where’d she’d gone wrong.
Talking to her mom about it got her nowhere. As much as her mom loved her and believed in her she just couldn’t understand. She wasn’t the one led to save the world by Agnes. And then did. And then was abandoned. She had her own life. Her part in the plan that defined their family had gone right, after all.
Besides, she kept insisting to get back with Newt, since it’s what Agnes intended. And Agnes is never wrong.
The line had long since grown old, so she stopped trying to explain herself.
She thought about trying out a therapist, but half of the things she needed to talk about most she couldn’t. Not with most people. And, nice as the Them were, they were just kids. After what happened with Adam she tried to curate what ideas and opinions she gave out. And while Madam Tracy was very sweet, Shadwell, for all the times Newt had tried to convince her otherwise, made her skin crawl. And she definitely wasn’t going to go to Newt, who she’d barely exchanged more than a few words with since their break began.
Of course, that left the odd couple.
She’d been hesitant to reach out at first. After all, they weren’t even human. And while their stand against the forces of Heaven and Hell had pretty firmly placed them on humanity’s side, their sheer existence was, to put it lightly, mildly off putting.
And it wasn’t like she’d forgotten how the demon had hit her with his car and stole Agnes’s prophecies.
Still, she had nothing left to lose. Things couldn’t possibly get worse.
It was the angel she’d decided would be the one less likely to turn her to stone if she caught him on a bad day. And enough people talked online about the many and various odd happenings in his bookstore that it wasn’t all that hard to find out where he lived.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t exactly made the best entrance for herself.
It had been a hard day (more like three, since had been nearly that long since she’d gotten any more than a few hours of sleep) that had pushed her to his doorstep, wholly unannounced and in the middle of a breakdown that had begun over her ordering the wrong kind of Chinese takeout and in her blubbering at his doorstep about the wave of wrongness that had rolled over her. Everything she’d ever done wrong, magnified.
It hadn’t been the second impression she’d been searching for.
Much to her relief the angel hadn’t kicked her to the curb. Instead he had, at first rather uncertainly, led her inside and guided her gently to a worn couch with quiet, nervous reassurances about her well being and that nobody was all wrong, that it just wasn’t possible and she shouldn’t say such things.
Then he’d evaporated into the store, emerging minutes later with the demon Crowley on his heels. Who, after a critical eye and a remark in the angel’s ear, pulled his own vanishing act. His return was accompanied by a warm mug that passed hands to her, which she quickly discovered was only half the coffee it appeared to be.
It had been enough to pull her back into coherency.
After she’d composed herself, the pair had been surprisingly sympathetic to her plight. That first night they’d just listened, with wildly differing levels of curiosity.
It had been the first step. One meeting led to another. And then another. And they just never stopped.
She usually came to the bookshop during bad weeks. Hard weeks. Sometimes all she needed was the company and a place by a rainy window with a good book. Aziraphale always had a good recommendations and his gushing over them was a reward all in itself. So sometimes she just read and it was enough to take her mind off what it didn’t understand.
But often she needed more than that. She needed to speak before the thoughts bouncing around her head consumed her. On days like that she’d sit down with Aziraphale and she would speak. And he would listen. Oftentimes Crowley lurked nearby, though rarely participated, since he was usually sprawled out across Aziraphale’s lap in some advanced stage of a nap.
When she had spent herself, wrung every persistent, nagging thought from her head, it became Aziraphale’s turn. He usually asked questions. “Well, what would you do?” He never took any answer that had Agnes, or Newt, or her mother within it. A popular one was the frightening: “What makes you happy?”
Other times he would talk about Heaven, about expectations and breaking rules you’ve known all your life. About moving on after you do. He talked a lot about moving on, though sometimes he let slip his own anxiety, as he began to stutter and wring his hands together as if asking for some bizarre forgiveness.
It was at times like that that made Anathema believe Crowley must be listening, since, whenever Aziraphale began to stumble, one of Crowley’s hands always found its way into Aziraphale’s and laced their fingers tight until the angel found the strength to compose himself.
After they’d exhausted themselves talking they’d usually go out for a “night cap” as Aziraphale called it. (Crowley just called it what it was. A chance to get well and truly sloshed.) They’d stumble back to the bookshop and Aziraphale would insist she crash on a couch and she’d weakly resist before inevitably caving in. And he’d bring her a pillow and a blanket and tell her to have good dreams. Which she did.
Befriending an angel had its perks.
Their meetings progressed to a weekly event. Sometimes it was just to catch up, since she simply wasn’t ready to leap the hurdle of calling up an angel or a demon on the phone to talk to them about the weather or their week yet. She’d thought, very briefly, about setting up a Facebook for Aziraphale to help promote his business and keep in touch. But after realizing the damage Crowley could wreak and that Aziraphale didn’t exactly want for business, she’d given up on the idea.
It was that visit that convinced her to brave the London Underground on this rainy Friday afternoon.
Anathema had brought a present with her, a Napa Valley chardonnay that her mom had recommended, since the last time she’d talked about Californian wine Aziraphale had all but turned his nose up and she was convinced to get him to try the stuff. For now she clutched the bottle close, fearful the damp paper bag might give way. By the time she made it to Soho the rain had turned into a fine mist that fogged her glasses and made it feel like she was walking through a particularly sticky pond.
She ducked into the covered patio of the coffee shop opposite Aziraphale’s bookstore to wipe the water from her glasses and attempt to wring her hair at the window. Gracious as the angel was he wouldn’t stand for her to waltz into his bookstore sopping wet and she knew it.
It was in the reflection of the window that she noticed Crowley’s big black car parked on the curb beside Aziraphale’s bookstore. And the tow truck readying it to be towed away.
That she’d even taken notice of Crowley’s Bentley was already out of the ordinary. She often forgot about it entirely, despite the fact that she always saw it there, parked illegally on the curb outside of Aziraphale’s shop. Despite that, whenever she pictured the bookshop it slipped from her mind like water off a duck’s back.
The culprit was the innate magic of both Aziraphale and Crowley. Magic was, for people like herself, occultists and witches, something to be harness in subtle ways. It was more about observing and understanding the world differently than the movies made it seem. Sure, there was the odd summoning, but the skill never got much practical use.
Not so much for Crowley and Aziraphale, who’s very existence demanded the world shift itself to fit their mold. Anathema would have been lying if she’d said she wasn’t jealous.
One day, back when she was still with Newt, they’d spent an afternoon deciding what they’d do if they were bestowed with divine or hellish powers the way the odd couple was. She’d help replant the rain-forests. He’d finally go to college for computer engineering.
But whatever it was that made her and the population at large forget about the Bentley clearly wasn’t working at the moment. And it was about to be loaded onto a truck and hauled away.
Abandoning the task of wringing out her coat, Anathema bolted across the street, narrowly avoiding a speeding cab in the process. “Wait!” She stopped the balding man who was bending down to hook his truck to the Bentley’s front bumper. She eyed the car briefly. It looked no different than usual, save for a number of brightly colored parking tickets wilting on its windshield. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The man turned to her. “An American?” His breath smelled of cigarette smoke. “What does it look like, miss?” He gave her a once over. And then a twice over that made the back of her neck prickle. “This your car? You come to pay?”
“No. It’s not mine.” She said in lieu of something far less charitable.
“Okay. Great, then get outta my way.” The man returned to work dutifully, paying her little more than a last look before setting to his task.
She watched him hook the car before she could find her voice. “You can’t do that.”
Wiping clean his hands, the man gave her a not so friendly smile. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
Because you’ll be turned to jelly by a very unhappy demon. No, she couldn’t say that. “Because I’m here to pay the fine.”
The man’s gnarled eyebrows shot up. Suddenly he looked much more interested. Funny, how money will do that. “Little good Samaritan, are you? It won’t help unless you can actually get the thing to move before someone puts another ticket on it. The thing hasn’t moved for days and no one’s come to pay up yet.”
“Days? Really?” Ignoring the spike of ice that had just been driven through her guts, Anathema dug through her purse for the checkbook her mom had made her bring. She’d have to bill it to her mom, who would hopefully understand the urgency of her situation once she had the time to explain it. There was something terribly wrong, Crowley maintained that he’d never once been fined or given any ticket of any kind and she believed him simply because it was obvious he wouldn’t let that happen.
Her next glance at the looming bookstore only twisted a knot of apprehension within her.
“Yeah. Oh. Uh. You don’t pay me.”
“Could I, though? What if I add a little extra? Then you could… look the other way.” She really didn’t have time to figure out the intricacies of the London judicial system. She did briefly imagine a sour man in a powdered wig, though.
The man considered her proposition while he chewed on his bottom lip. He eventually shrugged. “Sure. Ah. Don’t skimp me though.” He leered a bit at his own cleverness.
The total on the tickets made her wince, but she cut the check anyway. “Wouldn’t dream of it. And thank you.”
He took the check from her and whistled. “No, miss. Thank you.” He lingered over long, looking expectantly at her.
She gave him an automatic, courteous smile. It was enough to get him to go away so she didn’t have to resort to brandishing the bread knife she kept tucked away in her belt. And so, while he cleared off the tickets from the Bentley’s window, she sped on to the bookstore.
It’s windows were shuttered, though little lights shone through the slats. The place looked thoroughly closed. But the door gave at the smallest push. Another bad sign. She always had to knock and usually had to do so twice before one of them showed up to unlock the door for her.
Inside was worse still. There were books scattered across the floor, overturned and at spine splitting angles. The sight would have dismayed Aziraphale. The odd downy feathers that littered the scene likely originated from the overturned wreck of the angel’s favorite armchair, its cushions solidly sliced open. There was a sickeningly large chunk cut from one of the wooden columns that she guessed came from the downwards strike of a sword.
Stepping past scattered books, she tried to be practical. That’s what Agnes had trained her for. Quick thinking. Practicality under stress. Ignore the fear boiling in her. She had a job to do. Assess. Decipher. Solve.
She set aside the wine on an undisturbed coffee table. It would have to wait.
They’d been attacked, that much was obvious.
Heaven and Hell were the most likely. There weren’t exactly hordes of sword wielding maniacs going around breaking into old bookstores. Aziraphale had, after she’d expressed worry about the consequences of betraying Agnes’s legacy, retailed in some length the story of their clever escape from the cruel punishment of Heaven and Hell. He’d made it sound as if they’d be safe for some time. But Crowley, from his spot curled up on Aziraphale’s lap, had muttered a slightly more cautious prediction.
They might be safe. For a while. But obviously not forever.
Maybe that while had come to its end more quickly than they would have liked.
While she was walking, pacing, she knew she wasn’t getting anywhere. She knew too little. If she could just know where they’d gone. If she could have any clue, any hint at all. She was used to hints, mysteries weren’t fair without hints.
Not for the first time she desperately wished that she hadn’t burned the Further Prophecies. Agnes would have known what to expect. What to do. How to get her friends back.
But Agnes wasn’t here to guide her. And that was her (and Newt’s) fault.
Then again, she wasn’t just a descendant. She couldn’t let herself be. Newt had been right about that. And Aziraphale had latched onto that idea as well, pushing her to move beyond. Do something right that was all her own. She doubted an attack on his life was what he’d anticipated would get her to try something new. “Alright. Okay, you’ve got this.” With a deep breath, she tried at surveying the scene again.
Another look revealed little more beyond the wreckage. It certainly didn’t get any better. But there was a mess, after all. Which meant there had been a struggle. Which meant there had been time to fight off their attackers. And, maybe, time to leave something telling behind.
That seemed like the kind of thing they might do. At least, she held out some hope.
But where would a secret message go? Would it be addressed to her? Or was she flattering herself? Surely they must have assumed she wanted to help. Because she did. Odd as they were they’d become very dear to her. Like the two well meaning, eccentric uncles she’d never had.
There was only one place she would look first. Who she’d always turned to. She could only hope that either of them had the same thought.
Finding her was the hard part.
After Crowley had tossed the burned remains of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies to her on the Day the World Didn’t End she’d kept the old book carefully locked away in Jasmine cottage and she tried not to think about it. To immerse herself in living life without it and just live with Newt and be happy. But when that plan fell through she found herself returning to the book.
Not because it would offer her advice, though she naively wished it would. Sometimes, she’d even flip to pages, as if there’d be a new message there, as if she hadn’t long since devoted herself to memorizing its passages. The familiarity was a comfort, even if it came with the lingering scent of burnt leather.
But she couldn’t keep it in the house with her. Too many nights Agnes was her only company. Too many nights she’d skip from page to page, hoping for some guidance she might have missed before. Guidance that was never there.
After she started meeting with Aziraphale she’d asked if he could hold the book under the promise that it would be kept safe.
Aziraphale had leapt excitedly to the occasion and had taken the book with all the reverence of an entity who understood just how much sentimental and historical value the book held to her and to the world. And she’d been put at ease that there were no better hands it could be in.
So, she went searching for Agnes. She flipped over every scattered book, stacking them in neat piles to relieve the chaos, but to no avail. When she scoured the shelves and found nothing she moved on to the trail of wreckage that extended back into Aziraphale’s back room, picking over and tidying it as best she could given the circumstances.
Carefully stepping her way over an overturned armoire, Anathema got her first look at what had become of Aziraphale’s usually cozy office. Here there were even more books scattered across the floor here and some of them, she recognized with a wince, were in no condition to be tossed with impunity. One of Aziraphale’s ornate old lamps had been knocked over. It’s shattered bulb added the extra peril of broken glass to the already half disassembled room.
It looked like someone had torn apart the office in search of something.
These books were a harder task to sort, since many of them were so old they threatened to crumble away in her hand. It was under the wreckage of the lamp that she finally found her quarry.
Agnes, looking as charred and singed as ever.
The wave of relief that Anathema felt as she laid eyes on her rolled over her like the sight of an old friend she thought was lost forever, come to save the day. Except this old friend was a know-it-all witch who’d been blown up centuries before she was ever born.
When she flipped to the first page her mouth went dry. Burned into the already charred page and doodled on page was a strange sigil and the words “bring a water gun” written in what looked like Crowley’s hurried cursive.
That surprised her. She’d fully expected it to be Aziraphale who would have thought to leave her a note here. Perhaps Crowley had been paying more attention to her all those late nights than she’d anticipated.
She imagined, only briefly because the act of imagining it only made her sick with worry, the pair facing off against this unknown foe only to realize they were going to lose. In the awful panic Crowley must have slipped back here in search of some way to communicate to her where they’d gone. He’d torn the room apart looking for Agnes’s book. Why Aziraphale, who surely would have known where the book was without tearing apart the room, didn’t get it. Well, she really didn’t want to entertain that thought.
She read over the message again. “Bring a water gun?” Saying it out loud granted her no more insight. “Really? Are you six or six thousand?” The demon often attempted to intentionally frustrate her for a laugh. But under the circumstances it didn’t seem appropriate.
Setting aside the message for the time being, she inspected the charred sigil with a critical eye. Crowley was very lucky she was an occultist who took her studies seriously. It looked very much like a typical banishment. Except for the symbol in the middle, the object of the banishment. And suddenly she understood.
Crowley hadn’t given her a banishing spell.
He gave her a front door to Hell. The summoning symbol in the middle wasn’t for the demonically inclined, it was for Earthly entities, like herself. In a stroke of genius he’d flipped the script. But just because he wrote it didn’t it would work. She’d never heard of anything like it before.
“Oh. You’ve got to be joking.” But the book gave her nothing in return. She resisted the urge to flip to a different page. Agnes couldn’t help her, not with these old prophecies. She was on her own.
And Crowley wanted her to storm Hell. No big deal. As if this were something she’d ever done before or could even do at all. She’d only ever seen a grand total of two demons in her time on Earth and the one of them that was actually evil had been far more interested in an eleven year old boy than herself.
He wanted her to storm Hell and all he’d given her was the front door and a suggestion on what toys to bring.
She sat opposite the book on one of Aziraphale’s still intact couches and put her head in her hands, hoping to ward off a forming headache.
Days. That’s what the man had said. It’s been at least a week since she’d seen them. She had to wonder if they’d been counting them, waiting for her to get the message. Or maybe they weren’t. Maybe time worked differently down there and they’d been trapped for years. Or maybe they were already dead.
That fear curdled in her stomach. She didn’t want to lose the entities that had quickly become her lifeline. And she’d be damned if she were going to just abandoned them. It wasn’t in her nature.
All things considered, she’d be damned either way.
The rest of the day she spent in a mad dash around London. She visited a number of convenience stores before finding what she needed, a very confused priest who nevertheless did as she requested, an occult store whose owner’s questions she tried to dodge as best she could, and, finally, a sandwich shop. The food helped relieve the headache, and besides, she wasn’t going to die storming Hell on an empty stomach.
She thought briefly of opening her bottle of chardonnay only to decide that, if. Not if, she firmly reminded herself, but when. When they got through this, they’d be able to celebrate with it.
The symbol was drawn, painstakingly traced against the wooden floors of the bookshop with red paint dark enough to trick the eye into thinking it was blood. Candles were lit. Before her sat a small, empty stone bowl, waiting to be filled.
She double checked the symbol. It’d do no one any good if she sent herself to Greenland on the back of a misdrawn symbol. Or blew herself up. Which was not exactly a part of Agnes’s legacy she was looking to duplicate.
Everything looked as it should. She would have to trust Crowley. Crowley the demon, Crowley the Serpent. Crowley the man who had hit her with his car and still not apologized for it.
“Okay, Crowley. Let’s do this.” And, with a final steeling look across the wrecked bookshop, she stepped up to bat with Hell.
She held out her pendulum over the cursed circle, where it dangled from her hand. “Darkest night,” she spoke quietly, though the words echoed beyond her, amplified by some unknowable power. “Bring to me the fallen. The corrupted. The cursed and forsaken.” Here was where the ritual differed. “Open a passage. Let me pay for my entry.”
Using the bread knife in her belt (and sterilized under a flame to assure she didn’t catch some two hundred year old plague from the dust in Aziraphale’s shop), she sucked in a breath and pressed the knife into the tip of her finger. A thin line of blood ran down it and splattered into the pestle she’d set out. (Like the misconceptions of witches working naked, years of popular culture had far exaggerated the amount of blood needed for such rituals, even ones as taboo as this.)
Then the circle began to glow a sickly red and she stepped back, stemming the blood running from her finger with a handkerchief she was sure Aziraphale had never once used as anything more than decor. She’d apologize later. Or maybe she wouldn’t. It would really depend on whether or not she died in the next three minutes.
The red glow began to overwhelm the room and from the circle burst a dark aura that solidified into a mass like a solid black obelisk. It let off a low, droning hum. “Okay… Very Kubrick.”
One hand on the small toy pistol she’d shoved into the band of her skirt, Anathema stepped towards the obelisk. Part of her expected to bounce right off it. Instead her hand passed through its reflective surface, which rippled like water. Had she been able to, she would’ve liked to stop and observe the phenomenon. Briefly, she considered whether or not if, like some kind of modern Orpheus, she would be among the first humans to enter Hell before her allotted date with Death. Though she could only hope her venture would be a tad more successful.
The obelisk made a strange sucking, almost slurping sound as she passed beyond it. The space that stretched out before her was the same dark consistency as the obelisk itself. It seemed out of space and time, a rest stop between worlds with an occupancy of one: her.
Walk on. Warned a woman’s voice in her head that wasn’t her own.
So she took another step.