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“Come on, then, demon-child, show me what you’ve got,” Gideon said.
“My parents were death-cultists, not demons, Griddle, for fucks’ sake,” Harrow sighed, but she also dropped into a crouch to survey the massive swirl of protection ward on the floor, so Gideon felt like she’d basically won that round. Plus, Harrow cursed, which was always hilarious.
She offered up her arm, sleeve already rolled up, before Harrow could ask, and barely flinched as the remarkably sharp blade of Harrow’s weird sacrificial demon knife (“It’s a standard obsidian blade, Griddle, just because it’s black doesn’t mean it’s demonic!”) sliced across the delicate skin of her wrist. It was a shallow cut, and hardly hurt at all as she tilted her arm to let a steady drip of blood fall into the bowl Harrow held up.
Harrow didn’t need much this time, which was lucky, because just as the blood in the bowl reached the first etched mark on the side, the drips slowed, and then stopped. They both watched as the cut on her wrist sealed up into a neat pink line, and then disappeared entirely, the scar gone almost as fast as it could form.
“That’s stranger than any of my cult stuff, you know that, Griddle,” Harrow said, as she always did, and Gideon grinned.
“You’re just jealous that I’m more awesome than you,” Gideon said.
“I am not, I’m just concerned that your complete lack of interest in your own abilities is going to get both of us killed one of these days.”
“Awww, you think I could kill both of us? You say the sweetest things,” and Harrow turned away from whatever she was doing with the blood and the ward to give Gideon a death glare. Gideon smiled back, and surreptitiously leaned both hands on the rotting table behind her just enough that her biceps flexed impressively— half flaunt, half threat. Harrow immediately busied herself with her bloody paintbrush, and Gideon discovered that leaning on a rotting table meant that her hands were now full of splinters.
While Harrow finished working, Gideon amused herself watching the splinters work their way out of her hands of their own volition. Truthfully, she spent a lot of time wondering what exactly was up with her body. She’d never gotten sick as a child, or even injured enough to make it clear that she was healing particularly quickly. Then again, the only person she’d had to compare herself to as a child was Harrow, who had constantly been dripping blood from various orifices, so they’d both assumed that the difference was that Harrow, with all of her occulty nonsense, was weaker, not that Gideon herself was anything special.
It was seven months after they’d left the compound— salted and burned and pissed on the ashes, Gideon usually put it, but Harrow liked to be polite about things— that they’d realized something genuinely weird was going on. Gideon had taken a machete straight through the arm protecting Harrow from some jumped up baby hunters who couldn’t tell a goth death-cult witch (“Osseous thaumaturge, Griddle, honestly, what do you think a witch does?”) from a vampire if it drew bone wards on the floor in front of them, and after Harrow’d done something truly awful to the hunters that seemed to have made their insides become their outsides, and they’d both freaked out quite a bit, they realized that even before Harrow had pulled the machete away, the skin around the wound was already trying to close.
It was an odd feeling, healing from an injury like that. It had only happened a few times, but she’d spent a lot of time cataloging the sensation, if only to appease Harrow’s gruesome sense of curiosity. The delicate cuts that Harrow made to bleed her were so expertly done and so quick to mend that it was more like a shiver than anything, and she hardly felt the splinters at all, but a gaping hole in her arm or abdomen took longer to close, and the healing was uncomfortable. It rarely hurt so much as it felt like a bone-deep itch that she simply had to scratch, and Harrow often ended up slapping away her hand where it drifted over to scratch at the inside of the wound as her muscle fibers knit back together before their eyes.
As far as they could tell, Gideon was the only person who could do something like that. Harrow certainly couldn’t, though she could patch herself up well enough if it came to it, but it always took a concerted effort that left her shaking and so tired she was liable to collapse into Gideon’s waiting arms at a moment’s notice. They hadn’t exactly asked around either, because it didn’t seem like something that they should advertise, but Harrow had tentatively brought it up as a hypothetical thought exercise to Palamedes during one of their long distance research binges. He’d gotten very excited about it and promptly hung up on her and disappeared off the grid for six days before emerging with a truly horrifying number of ancient and deadly creatures, beings, and gods with accelerated healing.
They’d ruled them all out, though, one way or another, and as the months wore on Gideon found herself more and more willing to just accept that sometimes, weird shit happened, and when you were the best not-friend of a slightly demented goth death-cult osseous thaumaturge currently making a name for yourself by traveling around the country and chopping the heads off of monsters with your kick-ass maybe-holy sword, weird shit happened more often than average.
Harrow was unconvinced, but Harrow would pick a lump of clay to death if she could, and she was still with Gideon after all of the dead-ends, so Gideon figured it was probably alright, whatever she might be.
The last of the splinters wriggled their way out just as Harrow finished. Gideon brushed them off of her palms as she went to stand by her, looking across the bloody pattern on the floor.
Harrow sat back on her heels to check her work. The huge, sprawling protection ward was still in place, but the added flourishes and breaks done in— among other things— Gideon’s blood changed the meaning of it entirely. It was a summoning circle, now, with an iron-clad trap at its heart. Harrow had reversed the original purpose of the ward, and in doing so warped the original intent to strengthen her own work. It was impressive stuff, Gideon had to admit, even if she could only follow about half of it.
Harrow stood up abruptly, and rested her hands on her hips. There were two pale circles of dust on her jeans where she had been kneeling, and her fingers left pink and grey smears on the black of her shirt that she was pointedly ignoring. She’d look a lot less grimy if she’d only wear something other than black, Gideon reflected, but on the other hand wearing a color might actually kill her, so they would just have to go to the laundromat again after they were done here.
“Ready?” Harrow asked, glancing up at her.
Gideon shifted slightly in front of Harrow, and tugged her sword from its scabbard on her back. The weight of it was comfortable in her hands, and the tip rested just above the dusty floor, not raised, not yet, but waiting.
“Ready,” she said.
Harrow raised both of her hands up. It was not a particularly awe-inspiring sight, a tiny figure dressed in dusty black pressing her hands against nothing, but then the air around the circle began to shiver. It smelled of sulfur and ozone, the hair rose on Gideon’s arms, and very suddenly wind whipped through the room so fiercely that she had to fight to keep her eyes open.
When it died down, a woman stood in the middle of the circle.
She turned to them immediately. The face she was wearing might have been lovely once, but now its features were twisted into a furious scowl, and her eyes, staring through the mask of another woman’s body, were all one color, a grotesque rotting peach that always made Gideon want to gag. She snarled at them both.
“Babies! I’ve been summoned by babies!” Mercymorn shrieked, and Gideon rolled her eyes.
“Hello, Mercymorn,” Harrow said calmly.
“Infants,” Mercy howled, “Infants terrible.”
“It’s enfant terrible, actually,” Gideon said helpfully, completely butchering the French pronunciation. She hoped that somewhere in Louisiana Jeannemary was regretting ever meeting her.
“Where did you even get the summon for this?” Mercy demanded, pacing around the circle and glaring at the lines.
“Ianthe owed me a favor,” Harrow said, cheerfully giving up her confidential source under absolutely no pressure. “That’s not the important part, though, Mercymorn. You know what I want.”
“I’m going to skin her alive,” Mercy said, paying Harrow absolutely no mind. “I’m going to make her wear her own flesh like a fucking tutu.”
“Gross,” Gideon said, secure in the knowledge that if Mercy was ignoring Harrow, she definitely didn’t rank high enough to get attention. It was rude, but fair. Gideon was much more effective against things that couldn’t bounce out of their physical bodies on a moment’s notice.
Sure enough, Mercy didn’t seem to hear her at all. Instead she stalked to the very edges of the circle, poking a toe critically at the line on the floor. She was barefoot, and the thick, dark line sparked and sputtered where her skin touched it. She leapt backwards, and turned to Harrow with a snarl. “That is not blood,” she said accusingly.
“Bone ash,” Harrow agreed. “Consecrated bone ash, from my own personal supply. I remember how much you liked the blood last time, and I made adjustments.” She crossed her arms behind her back, and straightened her spine up to her adorably tiny full height, like a soldier standing to attention. “Now then: Mercymorn the First, Knight of Hell and Lady of the Damned, I have caught you fairly and honestly, and trapped you with blood and ash and holy bone. I am owed a payment, and I demand you make it, in the name of my father’s grave and my mother’s tomb.”
It was an impressive speech, though it would have been more impressive if Mercy hadn’t decided to sit on the floor and mouth it along with her halfway through, looking utterly disgusted with the whole proceeding.
“Yes, yes, I know the laws, no need for all the pomp and circumstance,” she snapped, almost before Harrow had gotten the last syllable out. “You get one request, you horrible little toddler. One. And then I get to kill you.”
Gideon tensed minutely, grip tightening on the hilt of her sword, before one thin, bony finger surreptitiously jabbed at her elbow. She forced herself to relax, glancing over her shoulder at where Harrow stood at ease, looking completely unsurprised by this declaration. “You can try,” Harrow said graciously. “But on to the more important matters.”
At this, Mercy sat up, eyes fixed firmly on Harrow.
“I want a name,” Harrow said. “A summon for a summons.”
“That’s it?” Mercy actually sounded faintly surprised. She had a right to be, in all fairness. Names were commonplace these days. Even the more potent summons could be found in some book or ancient graffiti somewhere. There were few real secret names left off-Earth, and fewer still that would be equivalent in exchange for the capture and release of one of the last living Knights of Hell. There really were only two, actually, and no ordinary human would be so arrogant as to walk up and ask for either of them.
“I want the name of the king undying. I want the true name of God.”
Then again, Gideon reflected as Mercymorn let out a predictable— and utterly earsplitting— howl of rage, Harrow had never struck her as particularly human.
Once Mercy had finished wailing, and cursing, and threatening them with the nastiest things in Hell and on Earth that she could think up to throw at them, Harrow remained unshakeable, and the laws remained clear. A summon for a summons. A name for a name. It was fair, even if it was entirely unprecedented.
Harrow drew a single line through a smaller circle that overlapped with the substantially larger arc of the trap, and the smaller circle began, very slowly, to decompose. It would eventually reach the rest of the wards, and they would collapse like dominoes, releasing the demon inside, but by then Harrow and Gideon would be long gone. Mercy knew it, too, for all her threats, and when she’d finally worked out her anger in screams, she gave them both a cold glare that followed them to the door.
“I can’t believe God’s name is John,” Gideon said, feeling oddly light despite the ten pounds of steel on her back, and Harrow’s ridiculously heavy duffle bag full of tools slung over her shoulder. There really was nothing better than a job well done.
“It is a bit anticlimactic,” Harrow said, “but what’s important is what’s attached to this particular name, not the sound it makes by itself.”
Gideon thought about asking what the fuck that meant, and then decided that she was really better off not knowing at all. “What’re we going to do with it, then?”
Harrow paused as they arrived at the car. Gideon shoved the bag into the back seat, as carefully as she could so as not to crush anything Harrow might prefer uncrushed, and then leaned back against the door, waiting patiently. Harrow’s hands opened and closed at her side, and she looked odd. Unsure, almost, but Gideon had never seen Harrow unsure once in her entire life. She’d had plans on plans even when they’d both been in diapers.
“I think,” Harrow said, and then hesitated. Gideon was officially freaked. “I think… we’re going to take it to Pent.”
“To Abigail?” Gideon asked, startled. “But you hate Abigail! You said that her entire house wanted to eat you, and that psychics were all just sociopaths with better storylines! You thought her husband was trying to kill you!”
“I know, Griddle,” Harrow snapped, with some of her usual fire coming back into her eyes. “I’m aware. But I’ve been having a feeling lately.”
Gideon waited, tense. Harrow rarely had feelings, and when she did, they usually weren’t good ones. Last time she’d had a feeling, they’d discovered that Gideon was a little bit immortal. The time before that, their home had burned down.
Well. They’d burned their home down, but that was just semantics.
“We’ve bitten off a lot, here, Gri— Gideon,” Harrow said, way more solemnly than was necessary, because the minute she’d said Gideon Gideon was prepared to perform an on-the-spot exorcism, or perhaps start doomsday prepping for the end of the world. Again. “We’re very good— the best, perhaps—” and Gideon pretended that that praise was meant for her as well, and felt warm and mushy even as she also started counting back from the last time she saw Harrow handle salt or holy water “— but this is very big, and I feel like it might not… end well, if we keep trying to do this on our own.”
She looked up at Gideon, then, very fiercely. “We are good, on our own,” she said, and Gideon nodded in agreement. They were, and she was just as proud of that as Harrow was. “But what we’re dealing with here is huge. It’s not even end-of-the-world huge, we’ve dealt with that before, it’s end-of-all-worlds huge, potentially.” She took a deep breath, and glanced back at the ruined church behind them, just once. “I get the feeling that if we do this on our own, we might not come back from it. I’d— I’d like to come back, I think.” She sounded almost surprised by that admission.
“So we take it to Pent,” Gideon said simply, and Harrow’s shoulders slumped, ever so slightly.
“Yes. We take it to Pent.”
Gideon pushed off of the car, and gestured grandly at the passenger’s side. “After you, my penumbral mistress.”
Harrow blatantly ignored the name, which was excellent, because it meant Gideon could keep using it until she got so annoyed she started throwing things. “I’m driving.”
“Like hell are you driving,” Gideon said, jangling the keys a foot above Harrow’s head. “You just pulled an exorcism for a knight of hell out of your ass, it’s a miracle you’re still standing.”
In fact, Harrow was swaying very slightly, in extremely small circles, but Gideon didn’t feel like having that particular argument again. “I did not pull it out of my ass,” she said with dignity, “It was a carefully calculated ritual designed and reviewed by Palamedes and Ianthe, who knows her stuff even if she is a nightmare. I only improvised slightly, and even that was tried and tested, Griddle, honestly.” Harrow glowered in her general direction, but she didn’t put up any more of a fight about driving as she made her slightly unsteady way over to the door, which suggested that she was actually feeling the effects far more than Gideon realized.
Gideon shut the door behind her as she slumped onto the seat with a barely audible sigh, and circled the car slowly, counting off the seconds. She took a moment to tuck her sword into the hidden compartment of their trunk, and replace it with two daggers— one silver, one iron— that she could keep strapped inconspicuously to her arms without getting in the way of a long drive. Sure enough, by the time she’d made it to thirty and slid into the driver’s seat, Harrow was asleep. Her head lolled against the seatbelt that she’d managed to fumble her way into before passing out, and she was exhaling in soft, breathy little snores. Her mouth was half open, and she would definitely wake up with drool on her shirt and a weird red crease running across her face from the belt. She was still utterly covered in dust and other less savory things from spending so long crouched in a church basement rewriting the word of God. Gideon loved her impossibly.
She would have taken more time to look at her— Harrow never liked to be looked at when she was awake, and she slept about half of the amount of time that a normal person was meant to, so she was hardly ever asleep at the same time as Gideon— but there was a psychotic demon in the church behind them who’d like nothing better than to sink her teeth into their necks and shake, so instead she stepped on the gas and left the ghostly little hamlet behind as quickly as she dared. She pointed them towards Boston, and Abigail and Magnus, and the most comfortable house either of them had ever spent more than a single night in, no matter what Harrow thought about psychics. Hopefully, for the first time in their miserable lives, they were moving towards more answers, instead of more questions. Hopefully, they were moving towards something that Gideon could stab with her sword. Hopefully, they were moving towards somewhere that they would both get to come back from.
For now, she turned the radio on low, and settled in for a long night, with Harrow next to her, sleeping as peacefully as if they’d already made it to somewhere like home.