According to reports on my latest new phone, the world had supposedly descended into chaos in the time it had taken me to bang my head against spreadsheets. I was inclined to think it had gotten the better deal.

Once I was out of reality slice range and Odin’s memorial to himself, I began to slide back into a better mood. Admittedly, it wasn’t looking great out there. The world economy was still in shambles after the sun incident as organisations the world over rushed to reconfigure their working hours. Earthquakes were in the process of ravaging Japan with no one arriving in time to stop them. A plane had run into a mysterious giant wall in the middle of a Bolivian salt flat – well, these were other people’s problems. Other people meaning Vishnu and, to a lesser extent, Tez.

My phone rang, and I tore my eyes away from the smoke still hanging over Rome, casting a dull orange haze over the rooftops across the new night sky. “Odin,” I answered, though I looked absolutely nothing like him at the moment. Rather, I was passing myself off as a nun, weathered and kindly, with three crucifixes for extra piousness.

Shops were still open, or at least some were. The Italian government hadn’t yet reached a consensus on which new restrictions they were going to apply to national opening hours, and the country was experiencing unprecedented 24-hour activity as a result. In fairness, some of that activity could be put down to people panic-buying supplies, but there were equally as many people out enjoying a meal as I was.

Enki’s voice groaned down the other end of the phone. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.”

“Do go on,” I said pleasantly, taking a sip from my cup of espresso.

“I need to transfer two hundred of your Helpdesk staff into Operations. I know how it looks, but we need to adapt. It doesn’t matter who they are –”

“Sure,” I interrupted. “Go ahead.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. I could hear the wheels turning. “About what happened earlier,” he began.

“Oh, I know you hate me,” I said through another sip. “I just don’t care. If it makes you feel better, you’re welcome to remove your signature from Vishnu’s warrant in return for my general lack of opposition to you carving up my portfolio. I’m sure those two hundred employees will be very happy with their promotions.”

Silence.

“No?” I sighed. “Well, if you have nothing else to add, let me get back to my job of saving us all from the next internal disaster. I’m very busy.”

I punctuated the end of the sentence with a bite of carpaccio. It was almost the truth. I’d stopped by to check the local effects on the ground before meeting with the pope. Getting an idea of the general context of a situation didn’t hurt, and if it did, chances were good I’d do it anyway.

Ending the call, I stowed the phone back in my habit and turned to the five year old next to me. “Work,” I said in Portuguese with a shrug. “How are you liking your gelato?”

Clara looked up at me around a mouthful of the aforementioned delicacy. My adopted daughter as of four days ago neatly licked her lips and wiped them on the back of her free hand. “It’s good,” she said politely, but squirmed a little in the café seat as she said it.

“Out with it,” I said, resting an elbow on the tablecloth. “What’s the matter? Is it the smoke? I can make it go away, if that’s all.”

Clara tucked her chin into her chest as she took another mouthful of gelato. “No,” she spoke around a mouthful of food. “Mum will be angry with me. She told me I should never speak to strangers again, and that you were a bad woman who should go to jail forever.”

“She doesn’t really mean that,” I reassured her. “Forever is a long time. And jail isn’t somewhere people should have to stay for long. I should know; I was in one for two hundred years. And also on Tuesday. So you can tell your mum that.”

The girl stared at me over the top of her mouthful of raspberry. “You’re lying,” she accused me.

“Normally,” I admitted, keeping an ear out as a group of bystanders erupted into loud disagreement a few dozen metres away, “you might be right. But I’m your dad now, and I don’t lie to my children. Instead, I take them on fun adventures when their other parents think they’re safely tucked up asleep.”

And would continue to do so. I’d left a very convincing facsimile behind in Clara’s bed, which she’d ‘oohed’ at and poked with a finger, then sat on and poked some more until I’d informed her she could desecrate herself again later.

“For example,” I continued to my diminutive audience, “you’re about to meet the pope. Not bad for a second outing, if I do say so. If your mum complains, tell her it’s a valuable practical introduction to the contemporary Roman Catholic establishment.”

Clara blinked back at me.

As if I’d planned it, a burst of green filled my head as the naudhiz rune sitting in the back of it suddenly sprang to life.

I know you’re close by, said Pope Grace I. And we need to talk. I’ve got your fellow lackeys breathing down my neck and cutting off access to Lorenzo. That boy has no idea how to handle the media and he’s going to make an absolute fool of himself. And the Church with him.

What an excellent idea, I responded, grinning. What’s your schedule like in the immediate future?

More vacant than I’d –

Plate and fork in one hand, I reached out and poked Clara with the other and transported us both to the pope’s location. Startling at the unexpected transition, the girl’s cone wobbled out of her hand and splattered dark pink goo all over the carpet.

– prefer, finished the pope, staring in my direction.

“Oops,” said Clara. She gazed up at the pope, then stepped away from the impact radius and backed slowly behind me as if I could protect her from the wrath of the frozen dessert police.

This wasn’t Grace’s hotel. None I recognised, at least. Instead, we stood in a spacious office with an oversized wood desk and sumptuous furnishings now covered in bits of gelato. Embassy, if I had to guess. It had that kind of look about it. The murmur of many distant voices reached my ears from outside, and the unassuming laptop sitting closed on the desk gave me a mild pang of unease.

Grace recovered quickly, his gaze shifting from the site of the wreckage to the small girl in pyjamas. He smiled. “Nothing to worry about, little one. How would you like a new one?”

From behind his back the demon lord pulled out a highly improbable cone of raspberry gelato and offered it to my daughter, who immediately forgot her guilt and hurried forward to claim it. He grinned at me.

“That’s new,” I observed, finishing off the remnants of the carpaccio. “How does that work, exactly?”

“I see what people want and pull it into existence,” replied Grace. He’d been standing in front of the desk, tensely wound as though his nerves hadn’t been letting him rest. “I’ve been practicing. In the last two days I’ve learnt more disturbing things about members of my clergy than I did over the entirety of my past career. The blackmail material alone is worth the risk of obliteration, if you ask me.”

“Huh,” I mused, and bumped the plate back to the restaurant it came from. “I don’t suppose you could take, say, my overwhelming desire to stamp Providence into tiny pieces and make that happen?”

“Funny,” he said. “It’s almost like you think I haven’t already tried to abuse it. I’m sorry to say physical objects appear to be the extent of its exploitability.”

Not especially abstract, then. Pity; a ‘get whatever you want instantly’ ability would have saved us all a lot of time. “There’s still a lot you can do with that,” I pointed out.

“I’m still figuring this out,” said the pope. “Turns out it doesn’t work so well with living things.”

“I’m going to assume I don’t want to know the specifics.”

“You’d be lying,” he retorted. “You do want to know the details. I can see it.”

I gave him a look.

“Fine,” he said, retreating behind the desk. “We need to talk about Lorenzo. Alone, preferably. Maybe I could have the Guard mind...” his eyes swept over Clara again, who had gone over to one of the long, narrow windows and was trying to peer out of it.

“Clara,” I finished for him. “My daughter.”

Grace eyed her with significantly more caution than he had earlier. “I… see.”

“She doesn’t speak Italian,” I explained. “And even if she did, she’s five. I don’t think she’s going to be rivalling Machiavelli for a while.”

“Hmm,” said the pope, rightly unconvinced. “Let me show you something.” Compared to our last encounter, he seemed more virile again. Not quite physically younger, but the octogenarian’s body stood straighter, his movements resembling those of someone half his age. It was noticeable, and, depending on how we used it, could either be a boon or a hindrance.

Striding across to the windows, he unhooked a latch and beckoned me out onto a wide, high balcony. The distant voices I’d been hearing rose in volume the moment it cracked open, their murmuring becoming a quiet roar. Not waiting for further instruction, Clara skipped out and let out an excited ‘ooh’ of appreciation.

A crowd had gathered below. It wasn’t small.

Even with half the population still in bed in the cold pre-dawn, people carpeted the full length of the vast piazza below. Some had pitched tents in the street, the glow of phones and camping lights swinging from within. Others had come with picnic blankets or prayer rugs. I saw groups of nuns and ministers in different denominational habits, as well as a surprising number of people wearing symbols of other faiths. More than a few seemed to be locals or tourists who had been passing by, assumed people were lining up for some kind of special event, and been absorbed into the general anticipatory atmosphere.

It was catching, like crowds often were. The sounds, smells and dancing lights set my heart pounding akin to chants before battle. It smacked of the same signature mix of excitement and desperate uncertainty heralding change - or at least the fear of it.

Even so, these weren’t unusual numbers for a figure who regularly spoke to audiences in the tens of thousands. “What’s the occasion?” I asked, with a sideways glance at the figure in question.

“You mean, aside from doomsday?”

“I suppose that means your press releases are working,” I said, folding my hands piously in front of me. “It’s a little premature for the hedonistic fatalism phase, but you know your audience best.”

As people below caught wind the pope had emerged, the noise of the crowd rose in pitch and volume. Heads turned and arms waved towards the balcony. Clara’s eyes threatened to bug out of her head as she waved back madly, encouraging a large number of people in the crowd to engage her further. I was fairly sure I’d just cured her of any further qualms about parental disapproval.

“If we stay out here any longer, they’ll expect a speech,” Grace murmured. He rested his bandage-swathed hand on the window latch.

Swayed by heady expectation, I toyed with pushing Grace to do one better. Hundreds of wishes granted, all at once; fountains of omens falling from the sky into unready hands. It would have been glorious, if we could have gotten away with it.

Instead, I turned my back on temptation and followed the pope back into the embassy, with only a brief pause to pry Clara from the balcony rail.

“Looks like it’s all going according to plan, then,” I commented, closing the door behind us.

Shoulders deflating, the pope let out an exasperated groan. “To plan? To plan? When I announced the end of the world, I didn’t think it would actually happen.” He waved an arm around the room at nothing in particular. “I’ve seen the numbers. Every available flight is booked out to every city in the country. Traffic to the border is backed up through half of Switzerland.” He stabbed a finger towards the window. “What’s out there is just the beginning, and I’m losing control of it to a wet-behind-the-ears youngling who doesn’t know the first thing about public appearances, and your lot.”

“Hold up. No one’s destroying the world just yet. Although depending on the almighty sheep herder up there in his praise cave, it might start getting spicy. We’re just after its leadership.” I was gratified to see I could say it – confirmation we weren’t being watched.

“So what do we do?” Grace asked, seating himself back behind the desk. “They’re keeping the boy under armed guard. And not my guard. They’re dressed the same, but they look at people like bugs under a microscope, and all their desires are the same.”

“Unflinching adoration of the Petulant One?”

“You know, I could start to get used to your naming conventions.”

“Angels.” I pulled a face as I watched Clara return to plastering her nose against the glass. “Figures. I wouldn’t try any tricks on them. Play along for now and see if you can work your way back into their plans. They’ll be preparing something.” I filled him in on the outcome of the executive meeting. “And if I were Legba,” I concluded, having a minor epiphany, “I’d act when my audience hit peak capacity. That’s when the most eyes will be on it.”

Understanding showered across Grace’s features. “You think that will be the best time to strike. For the plan.”

Lucy had evidently been keeping him up to date. “I do. And it would be useful to have you around for an extra push when we do, Lust.”

He stared at me for a moment, brow furrowing at the use of his demon name, then nodded. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “More of the Guard are being replaced by angels every hour. I’m not sure what’s happening to the men they’re displacing, but I’m of a mind to send the rest of them home while I can.”

Replaced? I let my form dissolve, leaving him staring awkwardly at Clara – who by now had seen me conduct enough miracles for it to be less interesting than gelato – and pushed my way out through the door cracks, repeating the process until I filled the whole wing of the building.

The difference was obvious. The true guards – what few remained – stood tense and restless; some in small, huddled pairs. Adrenaline pulsed through the veins I brushed on their wrists and necks. Born from fear. The angels, meanwhile, stood near-motionless at their posts or trod the halls with perfect, inhuman precision.

While we’d been standing around chatting, the embassy had quietly been playing out scenes from a horror movie in the background.

Try leading with that next time, I chastised the pope, as I picked up the remaining Swiss Guards and dumped them on Mayari’s island, some familiar faces among them. No good practicing heroics on witnesses who’d just turn around and gossip about unsanctioned divine activity. They could marinate their puffy sleeves in the tropics for a while.

“Taken care of,” I followed up, re-materialising in the original suite. “You realise you’re undefended now.”

“Would it really have helped?” Grace asked. I recognised the subtle stress I’d overlooked before; the tension of someone with a good camera face trying to find the best in a bad situation.

I shook my head.

“I’ve long been surrounded by wolves,” he acknowledged with a shrug. “These are just stronger and more numerous.”

“Well,” I remarked, motioning for Clara to skip her way back towards me from her spot at the window, “try not to get eaten. Find out what you can and keep an eye on the crowds.”

I know how to contact you, he agreed, and then my daughter and I were back at her bedroom with the fake Clara in it.

The real one squealed excitedly and poked it with a finger.