“Sorry, I - I know you told me, where are we going again?” Pit was trailing Dahlia and Will, fussing with the hems of her sleeves. She was wearing a shirt that bore a cannibalism joke, which Will ground his teeth about but said nothing. Even she seemed to be uncomfortable about it, he noted, feeling vindicated. He gave a sharp look to a woman who nearly walked into him, taking no small pleasure in the way her breath caught in her throat when she saw the sword on his back.

“Charneltown!” Dahlia called back, tipping up the brim of her honest-to-God witch’s hat. She led the three of them through busy streets with a confidence befitting any creature in its natural habitat. She nodded at the food carts, rounded corners without looking, even moved out in front of cars when she knew she had the right of way. Will hated this in particular - more than once he had to hurry across an intersection in a half-crouch just in case she needed to be tackled out of the way of some enraged cabbie, and more than once Will had to flag Dahlia down after Pit had gotten caught on the other side of a crosswalk, too nervous to interrupt the flow of traffic.

“Right, right, but - who are we meeting? Whose - shop?”

“Friend of mine! Animus reader!”

“No, their name -”

“Dandelion Dixie!”

“Dandelion?”

“Just cross already, Christ!”

The city brought some half dozen images crawling up in Will’s mind, like worms after a rainstorm: Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel, Babylon the Great - and he did not invoke Revelations lightly. Towers of glass and steel, silhouetted titans when he arrived in the night, now stood all around him, blotting out the sky. He had seen pictures of ancient Pagan things, henges and obelisks, and the resemblance made his blood run sour. Even the crowds began to look more and more blasphemous to his eye - where there had once been only the occasional servitor there were now dozens, each carrying coffee or a briefcase or dry cleaning and marching down the sidewalk like windup toys or drunken sailors, as they were able. Dahlia finger-gunned at a passing man whose lower jaw split down and out when he laughed, like the skull of a snake. A baroque quadrupedal thing loped along behind him on four hands, carrying brown paper bags full of groceries on its flat back. A fifth hand flashed out from its underbelly to steady a loose cantaloupe.

“That was Mohammed, he’s a sous-chef for this Neo-Americana place in Midtown,” Dahlia said, “He commissioned that little servitor from me... Last April? I think?”

Pit made a kind of lost, affirmative sound.

They dropped out of the crush of mid-morning traffic to get breakfast at a donut stand nestled in the midst of a number of other small, clean shops - artisanal popsicles and the like. Will watched the inhuman shapes moving through the crowd while Pit downed cruller after cruller and thanked Dahlia profusely. For her part, Dahlia drank coffee with the same kind of attitude most people reserve for taking out the recycling. Over her shoulder, a group of men in black suits loped down the street with a smug, predatory gait. Will looked through and past them, counting the ones with handguns hidden in their waistbands, his fingers dancing over the grip of a hidden box cutter.

“What’s up, Will?” Pit nudged his boot, jumping when he snapped to attention at the touch. They had been talking about - something. He had missed it. He shook his head.

“Timmy stuck in a well?” Pit gave Dahlia a reproachful look, undermined by a little smile she tried to hide.

“A cage of every unclean and hateful bird,” He gestured at the tide of passers-by. The group of suits were gone. Dahlia laughed.

“Just you wait. Charneltown is gonna turn you inside out.”

“So, you said, um, this person is an animus reader?”

“Yeah, like a palm reader. They can look at animus, see where it’s been, what it’s doing. Figured they could maybe get some hooks in whatever this thing is moving between us,” Dahlia gestured to the two of them with all four arms.

“You haven’t met them?”

“No, Dixie’s a friend. Well? Kind of. We’ve known each other for a while. Why?”

“‘They, them’.”

“Oh, no, Dixie just doesn’t really go in for, y’know,” she waved her hand, “Genders. You’ll see.” Will grunted. Dahlia turned to him, achingly slow.

“Are you sure you don’t want to eat, Will?” Pit asked, chafing at the silence.

“No need to break fast,” Will waved her off.

“You’re gonna walk a couple miles today,” Dahlia said over the rim of her mug, “When did you eat last, anyway?” He couldn’t remember. Two days, maybe three. Not the longest he’d ever gone, but hunger’s dull teeth worked the lining of his stomach like a buzzsaw in slow motion. Pit popped a chunk of cruller into her mouth, careful to keep her wrists facing down whenever she could.

“Keeps a body sharp,” He countered. He cringed inwardly, watching the piece of donut pass behind Pit’s teeth, forever lost.

“No wonder you’re so cranky,” Dahlia quipped. Pit pushed a small paper bag towards him until it ran aground against his elbow.

“Will. You need to eat,” He looked up to protest, but as they locked eyes, he felt the presence of something bright and far away looking through her, backing her sentiment. He took the bagel from the bag, bowing his head, and Pit settled back, satisfied. As he said grace, Dahlia swore.

The city moved around them with an elemental authority, as if the whole world had become an unstable centrifuge full of people - the crowds were as much an atmospheric element as the sharp breeze that tumbled around the towers overhead. It was the busiest place Will had ever seen, a far cry from the dust-haunted streets of Prophet. The landscape itself had a diminished corpselike quality to it in the daylight, a great deep-sea fish whose bioluminescence turned flat and lifeless once brought to the surface.

“Had the weirdest dream last night,” Pit ventured. This caught Will’s attention - his own dreams had been confusing, to say the least. Constantly shifting vignettes of food that he denied himself, of women and then men acting strangely, trying to touch him, memories of singing in choir. All of it culminated in a more coherent sequence of himself cutting down devils and fouler spirits, his burning blade crashing into and through them, their black blood washing over him like sunlight at dawn. Until that moment, killing had only ever felt Necessary - this was the first time it had felt Good. The shift was subtle, but it meant everything.

Dahlia was there but she was also Gabriel, and Pit was there but she was also Mary Magdalene, and they were both so small compared to the charging foe, the singing blade, the boiling blood, that they were quickly forgotten at his flank.

Altogether, the whole thing seemed vaguely mastrubatory - he pushed it out of his mind with a stern immediacy upon waking. Dahlia straightened in her chair and adjusted her sunglasses.

“First half was all creature comforts, second half was some Hieronymus Bosch shit. Right?” Dahlia stirred her coffee with a pinky finger.

“Um?”

“Garden of Earthly Delights, the hell paintings.”

“Oh. Oh! Yes?”

“Something comfortable, then something uncomfortable. You too, right, Will?” He made a noncommittal gesture, breathing out, savoring the memory of ichor striking his face - it didn’t seem so uncomfortable to him. It felt like home.

“A vision, then, not a dream. Blessed be.” Pit went pale.

“Yeah. It’s a reward and an order, I think,” Dahlia mused. One flash of an expression passed over her face - disgust, Will thought.

“His bidding or a prophecy?”

“Bidding, I hope.”

“In my dream, um, you killed me,” Pit mumbled, looking down at the table. Will straightened - he hadn’t been watching behind him in the dream. Some paternal subroutine in his brain collided with his stomach, sending it into a controlled spin. Dahlia nodded, as if the accusation was common knowledge.

“Same here. That’s why I wanted to go see Dixie this morning - try and get a better read on what it really wants us to do.”

“What - What do we do if that is what it wants?”

“Killed Her?” Will found himself standing, fists clenched. Dahlia’s eyes went wide.

“Sit. Down.“

“Thou woulds’t slay a lamb of God?” He could feel the far-away thing brush against the back of his mind, poised to restrain him. Pit shrank into her chair, emitting a low whine.

“Apparently,” Dahlia snapped, matching his gaze but not his volume, “That was my main concern vis a vis prophecy. Sit down.” Her usual grin was gone, replaced by a steely non-expression that neatly framed the anger in her eyes. Conversations at nearby tables withered and died.

“No weapon formed against one blessed shall prosper.”

“Nobody’s - doing - that, you crazy asshole.”

“Signs and portents, Judas!”

“If you pull a knife on me because somebody else had a bad dream, you’ll be in the fuckin’ pokey in twenty minutes flat. Swear to God.”

“Use not His name in vain, bruja!”

“His-Will-Be-Done,” Pit whispered, “Please sit.” Her voice was a shuddering squeak, but the voice beneath it and behind it and above it was like many waters. He bowed his head and sat, recognizing the sound instantly. Dahlia threw up her arms in disbelief.

“Um. Okay. This thing wants us together for a reason. So. Whether it’s God, or, or, some other - thing, until we know what it wants us to do, you guys can’t kill each other. Or me. So we’re gonna go over to this Dandelion person and they’re going to tell us that, the, uh, what it wants us to do. And then we’ll do it. Okay?” Dahlia only scowled across the table at Will, who kept his head down. Pit looked back and forth between them, still shaking.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” Will said, trying to slot the word into his vocabulary. Across the table, Dahlia was in the middle of a kind of full-body eye roll.

“Man! I knew I should have smoked before I left the house -”

“Just say ‘okay’,” Pit snapped. The interjection surprised her as much as it did Dahlia, so she added, “Please.”

“Okay,” Dahlia grinned.

Next Chapter: X - Dahlia