Page 18 of Run Like the Devil

I spun at the voice, finding Hubis standing behind me. He looked different, but I wasn’t sure why. He wore the same clothing, hadn’t changed anything physically that I knew about, but something had changed.

“Why am I here?”

He shrugged, and that was when I figured out what was different. He didn’t have that same disinterest. Was it because we didn’t have an audience? Was this the real man?

The fact there was a real man freaked me out. Hubis was God. No matter that I understood how it had happened, that I knew he wasn’t the only one, none of that changed that he had formed my entire world. Him having a personality and acting like an actual individual made me feel oddly unsafe. It was like seeing a surgeon out drinking at night—I didn’t like to see weakness in the people I had to trust.

“You are here to learn your lesson.”

“Are you going to give me a lecture or something? Because I have to warn you—I’ve always been a shitty student. There are a few classes I only passed because my teacher didn’t mind giving me some extra credit.” I lifted my eyebrow even as I screamed that making sex jokes now was a horrible idea.

Not that Hubis reacted at all. “No. I am going to show you the chaos of the last world, to help you understand why my order is so important.”

“And we’re talking first why?”

“Because I can do so now without worrying about the others. I rarely find people worth talking to anymore, so I could hardly pass up this opportunity.”

“Didn’t figure you had much you wanted to talk about.”

Hubis approached me, and while I tried to back away, it didn’t seem as if I could move the way he could. He circled around me, walking with ease where it felt like the ground stuck to my feet, making me slower. I sure as hell didn’t like him behind me, but all I could do was twist my head to try to keep him in my sight.

Not that it mattered. Looking at him wasn’t going to protect me at all.

“A lot of people have fought against the order I have created, but few had done so quite as fervently as you. Few have also done it from a position where they could actually oppose me. By the time they achieved any level of power, they had long given up fighting the order—people at the top no longer care about changing things if it risks their place.”

“I’ve always been one of a kind,” I muttered.

When Hubis came in front of me again, he leaned in so close that we probably looked like lovers.

And we were sure as fuck not lovers. Even I had my limits.

“Order is essential to the universe. Without it, people suffer.”

“People suffer anyways—that’s life.”

Hubis let out a quick, annoyed breath. “It isn’t—or rather, it doesn’t have to be. Before I took over, before I imposed my will, the old world was full of pain and suffering and madness.”

“This world is still full of those things!”

“You understand nothing.” The anger in that word took me by surprise.

Hubis hadn’t seemed to care about anything, yet here he was, showing a glimpse of true feeling. Leave it to me to pull out an actual emotion from him and have it be anger.

Still, he pressed on, each word full of more fury than the last. “You believe you know anything of pain? Of what chaos can exist when order is abandoned? Then you truly need the lesson you are about to receive. You can experience what I erased, what I destroyed and replaced with my own order. Perhaps, at the end of it, you will better understand why I am unflinching in the face of protecting that order.”

He reached out and set a hand on my forehead, and yet again the world lurched around me.

When I opened my eyes, the brightness of the sun made me squint. I found myself alone, with Hubis nowhere in sight. Instead, I was in a wide-open field, surrounded with the same strange grass I’d seen in the Forgotten Caves.

This was his world, right? It didn’t feel the same as it had in the Caves, though. There, it had been dimmed, like the difference of looking out a window and looking at a television.

This felt real. The cool grass wet my bare feet and the sun warmed my skin. I reached out to touch a plant that grew, the orange of its leaves so foreign I couldn’t stop myself. Except…

The hand wasn’t my own. At least, it wasn’t unless I’d turned blue and grown a long fucking arm in the time since I’d last seen myself. I peered down, trying to get an idea of what the rest of myself looked like.

All of it was strange, and it took a long moment for me to sort it out.

I’m the same sort of being as Hubis.

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