Chapter 81: Say Hello to My Little Friend
The angel didn't answer right away.
He looked at Azazel the way you look at something you used to know well and have spent a long time trying to stop thinking about — not with hatred, exactly, but with the specific exhaustion of someone who has been grieving a loss for so long that the grief has become structural.
"Old friends," he said finally. His voice was even, unhurried, carrying the particular weight of something that had been speaking since before recorded language and had learned patience the hard way. "I don't remember it that way."
Azazel held his gaze. "Heaven. Before the fall. You remember."
"I remember everything." Amanna's eyes flared gold — not warm gold, the cold gold of something ancient and certain. "That's the problem."
The wind came up around the church with the specific violence of weather that isn't weather — leaves tearing off the trees in spiraling columns, the temperature dropping ten degrees in four seconds, the sound of it carrying the frequency that old churches were built thick to suppress. It was the atmosphere that Midnight Mass understood and most horror got wrong: the oldest supernatural things don't arrive with fire and spectacle, they arrive with the sudden removal of ordinary comfort, the feeling that the air itself has changed allegiance.
"If you considered me a friend," Amanna said, "you would not have gone down with Lucifer."
Something crossed Azazel's face — not guilt, not quite, but the shadow of something that had been guilt once and had cured into something harder over the centuries. "Heaven," he said, and his voice carried a contempt that was old enough to have calcified, "is a silent, empty place where God hasn't been seen in longer than either of us wants to admit.
You know that. You left it too — you found yourself a church on Earth to inhabit. Don't lecture me about choosing the place that felt real."
Amanna was quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, with the tone of someone closing a door: "My purpose is not yours to judge. And what you've done here—" his eyes moved briefly toward the tree line, toward something Azazel hadn't shown yet — "what you've been doing for decades — there's no framework in which that's defensible. Not even the one you've built for yourself."
He turned away.
"The church doesn't welcome what you are," he said. "Go."
He was nearly at the door when Azazel's voice stopped him.
"One question." Flat. Direct. The voice of something that had been carrying a specific problem for a very long time. "Where is Lucifer. I've covered every level of Hell — the sealed territories, the legions, everywhere. He's not there. A hundred years of looking and there's nothing."
Amanna stopped.
Stood with his back to Azazel for a moment that stretched.
Then he turned his head, just slightly, and the expression on his face was the specific one that appears when someone who is very intelligent looks at someone who has been very wrong for a very long time and feels something that is simultaneously pity and irritation and an old, old sadness.
"You were deceived by him," Amanna said. "From the beginning. You followed him down and he was never what he told you he was." He shook his head once. "You deserve that particular wound."
Then, because something in him — the part that remembered what they were before all of this, the part that Supernatural Season 4 understood when it introduced Castiel, the angel who had been in the darkness between stars since before human civilization and still chose to feel something — that part won out over the rest.
"Los Angeles," he said quietly. "What you're looking for is in Los Angeles."
The church door closed behind him.
Azazel stood in the night with that information and felt, for the first time in months, something that resembled forward motion.
Then he felt something else.
He turned toward the water.
The bay was dark, the far lights of Staten Island's industrial edge reflecting broken on the surface. Somewhere out there, moving fast, a boat was cutting across the water toward him. He couldn't see it yet. He didn't need to. He could feel the specific weight of it — the accumulated supernatural density of whatever was on board, pressing against his awareness like a front moving in.
A cold smile crossed his face.
"Winchesters," he said, to the dark.
Behind him, from the tree line, Amanna's voice carried one last time — fainter now, already departing:
"Your attitude was never this relaxed when Anderson was alive. Or Pete."
The smile didn't waver. But something behind his eyes shifted.
He raised his right hand.
And the forest moved.
Out on the water, things were not going according to plan.
The boat Dom had sourced — a rigid-hull inflatable, technically rated for eight people, currently carrying significantly more than eight people plus a Minigun in a wooden crate — was expressing its structural objections in several ways simultaneously.
"FASTER—"
"THIS IS FASTER—" Dom, at the wheel, was having what appeared to be the worst evening of his recent life. "And this boat is OVERLOADED, do you understand what overloaded means—"
"I understand what it means, I'm the one who loaded it—"
"THEN WHY DID YOU LOAD IT LIKE THAT—"
Rango looked around the boat, running a headcount. Sam. Dean. Ted on his shoulder. Megan. Kevin. Clare, who was going to draw the binding formation. Amanda, who handled probability manipulation. Pierce — the Vomiting Man — currently gripping the rail with both hands and the expression of a man losing a significant internal argument. Big Eater, taking up approximately the space of two people. Andrew, the one whose ability to reverse supernatural projectiles Rango had been quietly relieved to have available. The four turtles, weapons across their laps, looking stoic.
Something was missing.
"Who's not accounted for?" he said.
Clare raised her hand with the apologetic expression of someone identifying a problem they feel responsible for. "Did we remember the Invisible Man?"
The space beside her said nothing.
"...He's been here the whole time," Ted said, after a moment.
"Right," Rango said.
"He's right next to Clare."
"I know, Ted."
He turned to the four turtles. "Leo. You four are taking up significant boat capacity. Head for the island ahead of us, scout the perimeter, confirm Yellow Eyes's position."
Leonardo looked at his brothers.
His brothers looked at Leonardo.
"We're," Raphael started. Stopped. "We're actually freshwater—"
"You're turtles."
"We're mutant turtles. The mutation went in a specific direction. We're better on land than in water. Significantly."
Rango stared at him.
"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," he said slowly, "who can't swim."
"The mutation prioritized other attributes," Donatello said, with the slightly defensive tone of someone explaining a known limitation in their spec sheet.
"I cannot believe," Rango said, "that this is information I'm receiving right now."
"To be fair," Michelangelo said, "nobody asked before tonight."
Dom, at the wheel, looked at Rango with the specific expression of a man who had agreed to drive a boat full of people to fight demons and was now learning that some of those people were turtles who couldn't swim. "I'm not even going to ask," Dom said. "I'm just going to keep driving."
Then: "WHY IS THE BOAT LEAKING—"
Everyone looked at Pierce, who had the expression of a man whose body had made decisions independently of his preferences.
"Seasick," he said. "The acid reflux — I can't always control the direction—"
"The BOTTOM of the boat—"
"I said I'm sorry—"
"Alright." Dean cut through it the way Dean cut through things — forward and decisive, the field experience of a man who had learned that momentum was more valuable than perfect conditions. "We're two minutes out. Battle plan, go."
Rango took a breath.
"Clare — binding formation, northeast corner of the churchyard. That's your priority and your only priority. Leonardo, your team forms a perimeter around her. Nobody gets through to her while she's drawing."
"Invisible Man — close cover on Clare. If anything gets past the turtles."
The air beside Clare confirmed this in whatever way the Invisible Man confirmed things.
"Amanda — probability support for Dean and Sam. They're the primary strike on Azazel directly. Anything you can do to tilt the variables, do it."
He looked at Pierce and Big Eater. "You two have the puppet army. Azazel's been seeding people for decades — there are going to be a lot of them and they're going to have abilities. Your job is to keep them off everyone else."
"Pierce." He fixed him with a specific look. "I need you functional when we land. Hold it together until the tree line."
Pierce nodded with the expression of a man making a promise his body might override.
"Andrew." Rango looked at the quiet one in the back. "You wait. You find your angle on Azazel directly. One shot, maximum force, when he's committed to engagement and not expecting a ranged counter. Don't rush it."
"And you?" Sam asked.
Rango reached down and lifted the lid of the wooden crate beside him.
Inside: the Minigun. Six barrels. The ammunition — several hundred rounds, each one now gleaming faintly with the specific sheen of metal that had been submerged in undiluted century-old holy water blessed by a Vatican archivist whose name had not been recorded because recording it would have made him a target.
He'd sourced the holy water from the same Boston church Amos had used in 1987. It had been aging in a sealed stone vessel in the crypt for thirty-eight years. Concentrated, unreduced, the real thing.
Every round soaking in it for the last four hours.
He picked up the Minigun with both hands.
Ted, on his shoulder, squared up.
"I have a very bad feeling about the next twenty minutes," Ted said. "And I want it on record that I said that."
"Noted," Rango said.
The island was coming up fast.
They hit the shore running.
The forest was dark in the specific way of a place that had been dark for a while before they arrived — not just the absence of light but the presence of something that preferred it, the atmosphere that The Ritual (2017) got exactly right: the sense that the woods are not neutral territory, that they remember what's moved through them, that the thing waiting inside has been waiting longer than you've been looking.
They were maybe forty feet into the tree line when the mist came up from the ground.
Not fog. Not weather. The specific black mist of things that had been planted in human bodies years before their hosts understood what they were carrying — Azazel's puppet army, the seed-bearers, dozens of them materializing out of the dark with the blank-eyed unity of people whose internal volume had been turned all the way down.
Everyone stopped.
There was a brief moment — the specific pause of a group of people who have just seen the size of the problem and are recalibrating simultaneously — and then Clare said, from somewhere in the middle:
"What was the plan? We draw the formation while you clear, or you draw while we clear—"
"We clear while you draw," Leonardo said.
"That's what I said," Raphael said. "Didn't I say that?"
"You said they clear while we protect," Donatello said.
"Same thing—"
"Not the same—"
"Can we—" Michelangelo started.
The puppet army was thirty feet away.
Twenty.
Big Eater made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a war cry, picked up a fallen tree with both hands, and walked forward.
Pierce made a different sound — the specific sound of a man whose body had just resolved its four-hour internal conflict — and what followed was the single most effective opening move in the engagement, which nobody had planned and which Rango would later describe to Amos only as we had a chemical advantage in the first thirty seconds.
The formation fell apart completely.
Everyone charged.
Clare, who had been designated to hang back, found herself three rows deep into the puppet line, firing with both hands, shouting something that wasn't a battle cry so much as a continuous expression of surprise at herself. Amanda was beside her, probability rippling off her in visible waves that kept deflecting incoming attacks with the specific randomness of very good luck operating at speed.
Back at the boat, Rango took in the scene.
The tactical plan — the one he'd outlined in specific, sequential detail on the water — had lasted approximately eleven seconds.
This, he thought, is why the Expendables have a third act.
Dom was still at the boat. Still. Watching.
"Sure you don't want help?" Dom said.
"I'm sure." Rango shouldered the Minigun. He looked at Dom with the genuine warmth of someone who had arrived at a real respect for a person over the course of several improbable evenings. "You've done your part. Go back. Tomorrow morning you'll hear how it went."
Dom looked at him for a long moment — the specific look of a man who understood respect when it was offered and knew the difference between being sent away as an insult and sent away as a gift.
He nodded once.
Started the engine.
The boat pulled away.
Made it approximately forty yards before sitting noticeably lower in the water.
Rango and Ted watched from the shore as Dom, who had walked into Murder House two hours ago with the casual authority of a man who had never once been in a situation he couldn't handle, stood in a slowly sinking rigid-hull inflatable holding a life jacket and waving.
Ted said nothing for a moment.
"We're not going back for him," Rango said.
"No," Ted agreed.
"He'll be fine. He survived worse."
"He'll be fine," Ted confirmed. "He's Dom."
They turned and walked into the forest.
Inside the tree line, Azazel had stopped watching the chaos with amusement and started watching it with something else.
The puppet army — dozens of seed-bearers, every one of them carrying abilities that should have made this a contained engagement — was not being contained. The large man with the tree was functionally unstoppable. The one who'd been sick on the boat was producing something from his body that was dissolving his puppets at a cellular level, which was not in any threat assessment Azazel had run. The probability manipulator was turning every directed attack sideways.
He raised his hand.
A fireball the diameter of a Buick condensed above the tree line and dropped.
It exploded thirty feet above the canopy.
In the tree line below, Andrew lowered his fist slowly, his expression the focused calm of someone who had been waiting for exactly this and had delivered exactly this.
Azazel looked at the point where the fireball had detonated.
Then he dropped from where he'd been hovering and hit the ground in the center of the engagement, the puppet surge multiplying around him, and the temperature of the entire forest floor dropped eight degrees in two seconds.
The battle shifted register.
And through the tree line, from the direction of the shore, a sound arrived that was not the sound of the forest or the puppets or anything that had been part of the night so far.
Six barrels. Six thousand rounds per minute. The Minigun, which Jesse Ventura had carried through a Central American jungle in 1987 as the visual grammar of a man who had brought the wrong amount of force to a fight and intended to correct that assessment, which Rango had now loaded with ammunition soaked for four hours in thirty-eight-year-old Vatican holy water.
The muzzle flash lit the tree line gold.
The sound was the sound of rain, if rain moved at that velocity and burned on contact.
Rango's voice came through it, underneath the roar, carrying the specific energy of a man who had been moving toward this moment for longer than tonight:
"Say hello to my little friend!"
The forest, for a moment, went entirely gold.
[Reader Support Milestones]
500 Power Stones → +1 Chapter
10 Reviews → +1 Chapter
Enjoyed the read? Leave a review.
20+advanced chapters on P1treon Soulforger