His tone concerned me, but I wasn’t sure how bad it could be. Riley had been strong enough to resist the summoning. He was still here, with me. He had forgiven me. Nothing could be so bad anymore.

“She’s certainly a determined woman,” Neil observed. “I’ll bet someone pissed her off real good. Hell hath no fury and all that.”

“You sound as if you admire this insignificant insect,” Riley accused.

Neil shrugged. “It takes chutzpah to give Cthulhu the finger and call out Azathoth. Crazy, crazy chutzpah. She reminds me of this Egyptian queen I once—”

“Who’s Az… Aza…?” I asked.

“God.” Neil reached under the counter and pulled out a pair of tweezers, which he used to pluck at the herbs in the bowl of his pipe. “If God were a sleeping, blathering idiot and all of you four-dimensional critters were just figments of his dreams.” He took a drag. “Also, my dad.”

“You’re Jesus?” I shifted my weight uncomfortably. So much talk of priests and God and stuff—I didn’t like to think about it. It was all too meta for me.

Neil choked. “Riley,” he said through his coughs as he waved the smoke from his face. “This one’s a keeper.”

“We cannot allow her to summon Azathoth on the day of Alignment,” Riley said, bringing us back to business with a deadly serious tone. “If Azathoth awakens, his dream will end.”

He looked at me, and I felt myself drowning in the sea of his eyes. Drowning in a good way, that made me shiver from my head to my toes.

“And if his dream ends,” Riley said, “so will you.”

Chapter Nineteen: Crushed

Riley remained silent and morose for a long time as the sun set through the shop windows. Neil prattled on about “the last time” something like this had happened, something about an ox-head and a squirming primordial mass called Brr’tth’ythya. I hardly listened to him, my attention fixed on Riley’s perfect face. He seemed cut out of stone, distracted, upset even. I was worried too, worried about Vik in the clutches of that succubus, but Riley didn’t need to know that. Why was he still so upset, anyway? We had defeated the monster, the monster inside him. The major crisis had been averted.

Hadn’t it?

Neil took a long drag on his tie-dyed blue pipe. “I gotta tell you, I never get these cultists,” he said. “It seems like whenever something pops up that they don’t understand or can’t explain, their first impulse is to worship it. What is that? I will never understand you mortals.” His eyes shone golden like the Egyptian desert. “Gotta admire that girl’s tenacity, though, I’ll tell you that.”

“Indeed,” said Riley. It was the first word he’d spoken in almost an hour.