Free Plague of Angels by John Patrick Kennedy Page A

so, their light penetrated the thin skin of her eyelids and singed her pupils. The sigils coiled around her body, just as she’d coiled around the cross in cobra form.
    Time stopped. And then Tribunal’s voice came to her as clear as if He was still standing beside her.
    “Have you done it, my beloved?” Tribunal asked.
    “Done what?” said Nyx, even as she basked in the sound of his voice. “Killed God’s Angels? Yes. Spoken the word? Yes. Is there more you wish of me?”
    “Much, much more,” said Tribunal. “God lied to me. He did not listen to my judgment, but chose to pass His own. He let these humans live!” The venom in Tribunal’s voice filled in her head, and for a moment her vision swam with the force of it. “He betrayed me! He sent me down to be tortured and killed, and then, when He was finished with me, He would not even listen to me!”
    Tribunal’s voice was anguished, and while she understood His pain, it was all Nyx could do not to say, “You were only scourged and crucified.” She’d been hurled from Heaven into the Lake of Fire. Memories of that and the thousand years of pain that followed it filled her mind. A moment later ,they were all overwhelmed by her love for Tribunal. What He wanted, she wanted. “What will You do, then?”
    “Not just I,” said Tribunal. “We. We will take these humans He has saved and abandoned, and turn them against Him. And when our followers outnumber His, we will set them against each other, and they will fight until there is none left alive.”
    “Why wait?” asked Nyx. “There’s so few of them. I can kill them all tonight and be done with it.”
    “No, you can’t,” said Tribunal. “Angels cannot interfere anymore. Not directly.”
    “What do you mean?” Nyx was thoroughly confused. “I have been interfering. I just spent three days torturing Judas. Before that, I rewrote Mary’s memory.”
    “Judas is no longer of concern. He played his part, and when it was done he was discarded.”
    “And Mary?”
    “Did rewriting Mary’s memory weaken Christianity?”
    “Well….” Nyx thought about it. “No. Shit.” Nyx stewed for a time. “So let me get this straight. God is not allowing any interference with the development of His new little religion.”
    “No divine interference,” said Tribunal. “The humans may do as they wish.”
    “Then why were His Angels here?”
    “To observe,” said Tribunal. “To report back to God at the end of a thousand years and tell Him what the mortals have done.”
    “And then what? God judges them again?”
    “No.”
    “Oh, for fuck’s sake!”
    “He has said that this time, Mankind will pursue its own course,” said Tribunal. “And they will be judged each as individuals, not as a race, based on their own choices, not the choices made for them by Angels and false Gods.”
    “Fuck, fuck, fuck, and FUCK!” screamed Nyx. She kicked a rock, hard enough to shatter it, then another one, and then a third. “This is horseshit! I can’t do anything? I just get to sit here and…. ”
    Nyx stopped. Then she sat down. This is stupid, Nyx decided. I am the Queen of Hell and I’ll be fucked by Lucifer’s pet Incubus before I give up. For a long time she brooded, glaring at the desert rocks as if their very nature was an affront to her.
    Then she stood up again. “What, exactly, did God decree?”
    Tribunal was silent a moment, and when He spoke His tones echoed God’s exactly. “They shall go unfettered by Angels. They shall have free will and free choice, and they will choose for themselves which actions to take. No Angel shall order, compel, or lay hands on those who build my church.”
    Nyx thought about this for a time, then smiled wide. “Right. I will build myself a church, as you asked, and it will rival Christianity very easily, because I am going to wipe Christianity out!”
    “You cannot,” Tribunal reminded her. “You cannot interfere with the growth of His church.”
    “No,”