Free Aftermath by Tim Marquitz

She’s, uh, less than pleased with me right now.” This strange urge to tell the truth was really getting on my nerves.
    “And why is that?”
    “Oh, I don’t know… Maybe because I felt obligated to tell her that I held her BFF Veronica against the wall by her throat and unloaded my gun into her head.”
    “Frank! You didn’t—?” Rachelle started but swallowed back her question as she starred at me. She could see I was being honest. “Oh, Frank.”
    Rahim sighed. “I wondered why we hadn’t seen her in Hell recently but I hadn’t expected you to…”
    “Murder her?” I asked. “Not everyone deserves a happy ending, Rahim. Not her and definitely not me, but at the end of the day I’m okay with my daughter being alive in exchange for Veronica being dead. That was the price of Veronica’s life: her betrayal of my child.”
    Rahim dragged his hands across his scalp, his palms scritching across the stubble. “When was this?”
    “Right before I put the screws to Trinity and buried Judas alive under twenty tons of concrete.”
    Rachelle just stared, unable to speak over the litany of my recent crimes. Disappointment gleamed in her eyes yet there was a hint of understanding. It was more than I expected.
    “If it’s any consolation I’m sure I’ll wind up in Hell.”
    Both Rahim and Rachelle were realists and they completely understood that DRAC wasn’t some offshoot of the Girl Scouts. People died in our business. We killed people; all of us have and we would again, likely many times before it happened to us. We had plenty of blood on our hands. I didn’t imagine Rahim or Rachelle were overly distraught that I’d taken Trinity or Judas out. Both were thorns in our sides that had caused a ton of deaths, Karra’s included, but the fact that I’d murdered my ex-wife was something different. It was a confirmation of all their fears. I was exactly who they had always worried I’d become, Satan’s baby boy come home to roost, the Devil inherent.
    “I get it,” I told them. “It’s why I left town, why I surrendered Hell to DRAC. Why I’ve spent the last five months shoving needles in my veins and drinking Louisiana dry of anything resembling alcohol.” I exhaled loudly. It tasted bitter. “I’m not proud of what I did, and it’s gonna haunt me no matter how much she deserved it, but I would do it again without question, Abigail in exchange for Veronica. It isn’t a question. Not ever.”
    “Frank—” That was as far as Rahim got before Michael cut through the tension, screaming in our heads.
    “Poe is reporting incoming at the North Dakota site. They need you there now!”
    Rachelle scrambled to her feet without hesitation and I felt her power welling up. Not two seconds later a gate split the dimensions in half.
    “We can discuss this later,” I said, if there was a later, and hurled myself through the portal. There’d be no quick and easy resolution to their dilemma of what to do with me after everything was said and done but none of that mattered right then. My daughter was still in the middle of something I’d helped to create and I’d be damned if I let Shaw or the Covenant anywhere near my kid.
    On the other side with Rahim and Rachelle at my heels we appeared right alongside Shaw and her DSI goons.
    “What are we looking at?” I asked.
    Shaw’s eyes were unfocused but she pointed to an area just south of us. “Someone’s breaking through the wards right there.”
    I didn’t bother to say anything in response, bolting off to where she’d indicated. Rahim followed after, Rachelle keeping her distance as befitted the nature of her power, and the army of DSI folks ran after us. We reached the place just as the wards broke down and three people popped in out of nowhere. I didn’t recognize a single one of them.
    “Who the fuck are you guys?”
    They might as well have been triplets as much as they looked like each other. Nephilim by the feel of their essences, each had an