“I am, actually,” Apollo replied. “That thing was the epitome of bad taste, and for someone whose job it is to represent spiritual purity, you really ought to have known better. You weren’t doing the church any favours. Now, if no one has any objections, we should sign this thing and be done with it.”

“There are still a few more points to cover,” said Tez. While the rest of us were distracted by Vince’s eccentricities, he’d made his way over to the altar and plopped the heart on top of it, where it twitched disconcertingly on top of the goat carcass. “But he’s right – we’ve got about ten minutes to sign before we have problems incoming.”

“What’s the scenario where we reach the greatest consensus?” Lucy asked.

“What kind of problems?” Mayari asked simultaneously. Her shoulders tensed.

Tez and Apollo glanced at each other and nodded. “Give us a moment,” said the former, holding up a hand. He went still, while Apollo went into interrogation mode. About twenty seconds later Shitface snapped out of it.

“We’re fine as is,” he said. “No changes.”

Tez nodded. “And I can verify. Lucifer can draft a solid agreement.”

Which meant Lucy, Durga and I had all kept our mouths shut in the short-term. For someone who was used to doing everything above-board, Durga was impressing me at how easily she was adapting to taking a few liberties on the sly.

“What kind of problems?” Mayari reiterated, pressing her earlier question.

“Yahweh-checking-up-on-the-pope problems,” Apollo answered. “Some non-situation in Africa with a few heads of state, and he wants Grace to stir up enough trouble to make it into one.” He sighed and shook his head. “I’ve got to let this one go. But for now, all you need to worry about is signing a certain document.”

With a flourish, Lucy signed his name on the phone screen with a stylus and passed it to the pope, who squinted at it for a few moments, then shrugged and added his signature. Apollo was next, barely holding the tablet before passing it on, followed by Tez and Durga in quick succession. The warrior goddess handed me the tablet next, and I found myself peering down at the collection of squiggles representing the divine commitments of four major gods from distinct pantheons; a bizarre collection I wouldn’t have pictured teaming up out of the blue. Mine would make five; Mayari’s six; and the pope was in a category all his own, representing the link between mortals and divinity while failing to be an adequate role model for either.

This was a major undertaking, and I hadn’t been expecting something so… formal. I would have preferred something that hadn’t committed me quite this much; something I could duck out of if I changed my mind or it went south, but there wasn’t time to mull it over.

Shitface had just a trace of a smirk on his lips as I paused with the stylus hovering over the screen. He was enjoying this. He could have let on earlier that we wouldn’t have much time to read the contract, but hadn’t, biding his time until we were all rushed into signing something that hadn’t even been fully explained. We hadn’t asked all the right questions earlier. He hadn’t misrepresented or twisted any detail, yet had managed to rush us into his plan unprepared, controlling the course of the meeting. At this point I was mostly convinced we were on the same side; he was just doing it to prove he was still in control.

I signed the pact without taking my eyes off his face, letting him know I knew what he was doing, and his smile deepened. No matter. If it ended up being a problem, there would be a way out. There was always a way. And Apollo, for all his strengths, was not known for his wisdom.

Mayari also hesitated on her turn, gripping the stylus between the tips of three fingers like a hotcake. She opened her mouth, closed it again, then opened it again. “This wasn’t how I pictured this,” she said. “But things rarely are. You,” she directed at Apollo, “should be careful where you tread. And as for you two,” she added, looking between Lucy and myself, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

So much for the ‘dream team’.

As the tip of the stylus broke contact with the screen on the last signature, I felt something settle over me like a string of ethereal cobwebs, so light as to be almost not there at all. Also like a cobweb, however, it nevertheless managed to be irritating. The part of me which controlled my powers acted on instinct to try and brush it off. It didn’t budge, of course. Would have been a terrible pact if it had.

“And now the sacrifice,” said Lucy.

Tez was already on it. Handle grasped in both hands, he drove his stone blade into the heart, which gave up on life immediately with a slight whoosh of air and fluid. Not to be denied, he kept going past this point and, when he ran out of heart to puncture, gave a slight shrug and stabbed the goat for good measure.

I sniggered a bit into the silence that followed. Only a bit, though, because a second later the web the pact had woven came to life around me in a roar of energy. Energy bearing a notable resemblance to the variety which had rampaged its way out of my arm the day before, and almost as painful, although it seemed we’d be spared the infernal wails this time. If there had been any doubt Lucy was behind this bargain, it was now gone.

Web-like tendrils of power burned through my soul, slicing through like razor wire and burying themselves in deep. Amongst the pain, Lucifer was speaking, though whether it was aloud or in my head I couldn’t tell:

“In the names of the Traitor, the Heretic, the Foe, the Shadow, the Warlord, the Liar, and the Inciter, the pact is sealed; to remain unbroken until the tyrant topples.”

And then it was over. I found myself opening my eyes, though I had no memory of closing them. It was dark and smelt of smoke – all the candles had been snuffed out in one fell swoop. I adjusted my vision to account for it, but the effort was made redundant when Apollo reignited them all with a snap of his fingers. His hands were shaking somewhat.

A cluster of rattled faces peered out at each other over the flickering flames. Grace had slumped over unconscious on his throne but was still alive, a fact I somehow knew without needing to go over and check. The rest of us had made it through awake, although I suspected the pope had gotten the better end of the deal.

“Damn,” gasped Mayari, next to me. “This had better not become a habit.”

“Adversity brings people together, I hear,” I mimicked her in response.

“If you like being a parrot so much, fly away and be one somewhere else,” she retorted, but there wasn’t any real animosity behind it. “Damn,” she said again, brushing the silver hair out of her face.

I could still feel the threads of the pact hiding under my skin, no longer irritating or painful. There was something familiar about them in this state, and it bothered me that I couldn’t place it. When you spent time around gods, unresolved déjà vu could be a warning sign of various forms of mental tampering. It was probably nothing, but it would be a good idea to get that checked at some point.

It was a problem future me could deal with, however. Right now there were more pressing concerns.

“It’s done,” Lucy announced, letting out a breath as he jumped down from the edge of the stage. He caught the phone Mayari tossed his way, tapped the screen a few times and tucked it away in a pocket. Everyone else had come out of the ritual looking like they’d stared into the eye of madness and listened to its attempts to give them style advice. Lucy, of course, didn’t have a hair out of place.

“Why does all of your magic have to hurt?” I grumbled, rubbing my arms even though it had no impact whatsoever. The pain might have dissipated, but it felt like I was still lingering in the afterimage.

“Let’s reconvene tomorrow, same time,” said Apollo. He laid a hand on Grace’s arm and the pope stirred, rousing from his sleep with the bleary expression of someone who had avoided death and wasn’t sure why. “Tezcatlipoca or I will be in touch with the details. The rest of us should go before top office looks in.” Except you, he added privately, meeting my eyes.

As people left, the threads inside me moved in response, readjusting and realigning like muscles being assigned to a new purpose. Much like I had instinctively known the pope’s condition, the pact was giving me a vague sense of the other members of our agreement. Not quite a wayfinding device, and not quite an empathic read. But there was something there, enough for me to suspect that if one of us became compromised, the others would know about it. Knowing Lucy, it was no doubt an additional piece of insurance. Although it was only good as long as the pact held.

Recognition flared, and I realised why it seemed familiar. Tug of war. Although instead of the two-player match between Lucy and Yahweh, this was between seven; and instead of a single rope, this was laced with as many as there were connections between participants. More like a metaphorical web – no wonder it had felt like one. But the effects, I imagined, would be similar. Pick up the net from the centre, and we’d all fall down dangling from the corners, and what affected one would affect all. Apollo had started to get into that with his speech about power drain, but I had a feeling that was just skirting the edge of it.

Lucy was the common factor here, and it revealed something about how his powers operated, a subject I knew less about than I should despite our amicable relationship. Part of that would probably have come down to him ‘distracting’ me if I came too close to figuring it out. And I would have. Maybe even multiple times.

Everyone knew Lucifer was powerful – the tyrant considered him a threat, after all. Most people knew his powers included some form of limited mind control, which alone was a compelling justification to keep him depowered on Helpdesk. He was also one of that rare breed who could gift abilities to others, like he was doing with the latest batch of demon lords. But I was starting to see another pattern here, and it involved connections between people. Us with our little Vatican Concord; Lucy and Yahweh; even whatever was going on with Tru and the demon rune. It was like he took metaphorical links between people, picked the aspects he wanted and warped them to suit his needs. Which was useful, yes, but more importantly abstract. And if there was one overriding rule of thumb when it came to magic, it was that things got more powerful the more abstract they became.

I didn’t think I’d seen the last of the things he was hiding. And I needed to get my memory checked for suspicious gaps.

Lucy also stayed behind. When it was just him, me, Shitface and the pope, he addressed the seer expectantly. “Cutting it a bit fine, aren’t we?”

“You have a ritual to complete,” Apollo mentioned, nodding towards the summoning circle. “And not much time.”

This seemed to mean something to Lucy, because he shrugged. “Prophecy has spoken, apparently.” He turned to me. “You might want to change back beforehand.”

I blinked, shifting back to Sorine’s more feminine side in the space of a heartbeat. Moments later, it occurred to me why we were all still here, and I cracked a grin. Even Shitface being present and everything that implied couldn’t dampen my mood.

“I can’t be here,” the selfsame god said, vanishing without another word. A brief and very muffled commotion sounded from outside the entrance, before that too was cut off. And then it was back to the original meeting quota - just me, the devil and the Holy Father, who was busy dry-heaving over the side of the throne. A single drop of blood trickled down the side of his neck from his ear. The ritual had not been kind to him.

How long did we have? A couple of minutes? Seconds? Shitface, in his infinite wisdom, hadn’t bothered to warn us.

I hurried to Grace’s side and clapped my hand on his arm, thin and bony through the folds of his regalia. “Ready for round two?”

He gripped back with the surprising strength of someone who had been through an adverse experience and had strong feelings about it. “You’re out of your mind,” he wheezed.

“Come, now,” Lucy said, in a reassuring voice. He pointed towards the centre of the ritual circle. “Over there, please. We might have a pact, but some extra assurance never hurts.”

We’d need it. Only a couple of minutes in, and Lucy’s pact was going to have to withstand the scrutiny brought on by a high-ranking member of Yahweh’s staff becoming a demon lord.

“I beg to differ,” argued Grace. “It hurts like the -” he broke off, made a pained noise as it occurred to him what he was saying, then resumed saying it anyway, “- like the devil.”

There was no way he was going to make it over there on his own. I warped us both into the centre of the pentagram, resting the octogenarian on the floor so he had less distance to fall.

Lucy didn’t waste any time, gesturing towards the circle. All five rings lit up in glowing symbols. Four of them remained dark to my senses, but the Futhark ring flared to life in my mind, imparting messages of concealment, misdirection and what appeared to be gibberish amid a plethora of blatant grammatical errors. Not that I was much better, it had to be said.

I shot Lucy an amused look, and he winced. “That bad?”

“It should still work,” I admitted. “Probably.” The runes had been Odin’s original brainchild, and he was more given to efficiency than accuracy. Caring less about how something was done as long as it was done. As such, a trait of his creations was that they tended to work despite people’s attempts to botch them up. Still. It might be a good idea to fix it up a bit in case we exploded the pope by accident.

Conscious of time, I did my best, figuring out how to fix the worst of the mistakes, and sent the resulting derivative through to the devil. He made the changes, symbols shifting around in front of my eyes, and some of the gibberish melted away into reinforcement.

“Close enough,” I decreed, examining the results from where I was squatting. “You’ve got a lot of different alphabets there; I’m sure at least one of them will pick up the slack.”

“You’re on your own from here,” he remarked. “It’s too risky for me to stay. There’s no binding on the circle – so just conduct the transfer, destroy the evidence, and get out of there.”

“Be honest,” said Grace, in the voice of the doomed. “Is this going to kill me?”

Lucy shook his head. “Bit of a waste of all this preparation if it was. You’ll thank us later.” He walked over to the bloody mess on the altar, picked up the remains of the heart in one hand and the goat in the other, and hesitated, raking his eyes over the two of us in the circle. “See you in the office,” he said to me eventually, and left.

With gods departing left and right, I couldn’t help but feel as if I was being set up for some kind of trap.

“Your guards were right,” I said to Grace. “Let a woman in here, and next thing you know there are dark pacts and sacrificial goats everywhere. Handshake?”

For a brief moment I wondered what would happen if Grace wasn’t a suitable demon lord candidate, but the consideration was short-lived. If you couldn’t become a suitable candidate clawing and backstabbing your way into one of the world’s top offices, something was wrong with this picture.

I was prepared for the pain this time and managed to avoid the physical side entirely. The moment it hit, Grace made a brief, distorted sound not dissimilar to a dying balloon and crumpled over onto the floor. I suffered through the soul-pain, which was still about as much fun as being tortured with pliers in several places at once, and was dimly aware of the unholy wailing reverberating around the echoey chamber accompanied by a green light show I was in far too much agony to appreciate.

When it ended, I examined Grace’s palm. Naudhiz this time, the rune bearing a striking resemblance to the cross of the pope’s own institution, but with fewer right angles. Need. Desire. Well, that would no doubt translate to Lust in demonic vernacular. It fit – the pope had a lust for power that seemed difficult to sate. And perhaps for other things, but I wasn’t going to ask.

If Yahweh was paying a visit, I couldn’t leave the rune on display. A few internal adjustments later, I held out my index finger and excreted a sticky black resin dark enough to muffle the light, coating the palm and the back of the rune hand alike, then shoved the hand back into his robes.

That just left the summoning circle.

“He’s coming,” Grace whispered from the floor, before I had a chance to think of a plan. I hadn’t noticed he’d been coming round. “He’s coming. He’s -” he broke off into silence, but from the way the candles burst and flared, the message was clear.

The tyrant was here.