A powerful force, like a kick, hit Kinzer’s stomach.
He felt like he was flying. For a moment, he thought they were still travelling, but as he fell against a bumpy surface, he knew they’d reached their destination.
His vision blurred as his eyes struggled to adjust to their new location. As the forms of the blurred images took shape, he checked either side of him. Suits and dresses, drenched in blood, scattered across a tile floor, covered in dismembered heads and appendages.
He was even lying across a few bodies.
A horrible sound, the crying of a baby, filled the room.
Janka stepped before him, gazing down at his former lover as the Christ—tucked in his arm—threw a fit, its arms and legs jerking about to either side. Janka raised the sword in his free hand, the gleam in his eyes seeming to question why Kinzer would have been so stupid to have followed him here unarmed. The Teleporter stood just behind him.
“Well, well,” a voice came from the other side of the room.
Veylo stepped over several corpses. He was dressed as finely as ever, though streaks of blood stretched across his suit and face. He held a suitcase, and as he stepped beside Janka, he set it on the floor. He looked like he was at a station waiting for a train.
“So pleased to see you again, Kinzer,” he said. “We would stay, but we have somewhere to be.”
He removed a sword from a sheath that hung from his belt and approached Kinzer.
“I’m surprised you haven’t finished him already.”
“He’s been fairly troublesome,” Janka said in a way Kinzer once would have heard him say in an amused tone—the way lovers joke about one another.
“Don’t you get it, Kinzer?” Veylo asked. A splatter of blood running from the corner of his lip to his chin stretched as he smiled as he had when he’d staged Janka’s death. Looking back, Kinzer couldn’t help but wonder if he’d smiled that way because he’d felt so clever with how he’d duped him. “It’s over. We’ve won. Look around you. Fallens and higherlings… We have travelled across the realms, finding those who would align themselves with our cause… to restore the Almighty to His rightful throne over all that is. Goodbye, troubles. This is the dawn of the new war. Only war would be such a silly thing to call it because it isn’t so grand. We have all the weapons. It’d be like a hawk referring to its hunt of a mouse as a war. You’ll have to excuse the mortal reference. It seems I’ve been here a tad too long. But I won’t leave you in suspense, as this should have been handled long before now.”
Veylo raised his sword when—
SLICE!
His eyes grew wide and he dropped it, his arms falling to his sides. He stood there, wide-eyed. His smile had vanished. A blade stuck through his chest.
He turned to his assailant, Janka, behind him, who still held the Christ in his arms.
Kinzer didn’t understand. They had been on the same side.
As Veylo fell to his knees, Janka leaned forward and whispered into his ear. “I suppose now is the time to reveal, Veylo, that we have no use for you.”
He jerked his sword from Veylo’s back and let the devious immortal, who began trembling severely, collapse onto the corpse-covered floor.
It seemed fitting to Kinzer, as the streaks of blood across him already matched the bodies around him.
Kinzer waited for the Teleporter to interfere, but he stayed back, watching the spectacle as if he’d known it was coming.
This had clearly been planned.
“What? Why?” Kinzer asked, bewildered by Janka’s disregard for his own comrade.
Janka marveled at the blood across Kinzer’s blade.
“Veylo was so limited. He always wanted to please the Almighty. He wanted to make Him enjoy his work. If the Almighty desired it, he would bring it to life in His name. He didn’t have the vision I had. A vision of peace… of hope. I needed him for the Morarkes, but now, all is in place, and you are far too late to do anything about it.”
“So the Almighty just needed him for the Morarkes, and now He’s done with him?”
Janka chuckled, the sound drown out slightly by the Christ’s amplifying cry.
“No, no. I said I needed them.”
“You?”
