by Edward Lee
Via flipped idly through the Gideon’s Luciferic Bible on the nightstand. “Lay low here for a little while, till the heat’s down. Then we get you back to your own world, where you won’t be in danger anymore.”
“But I don’t want to go back,” Cassie insisted, “not yet. I need to find my sister!”
Hush looked at her forlornly, then so did Via. “That’s out of the question now. We’ve got to get you out, and you can never come back.”
“I’m not leaving this screwed up city until I see my sister!” Cassie was quite adamant. “I didn’t come all this way, through all this—” she glanced fiercely about the malodorous room—“crap just to go back without seeing her.”
“We’ll argue about that later,” Via said. “But now let me ask you something. What the hell happened to the Troll back at the club? When Hush and I ran out of there, he was dead. It looked like someone redecorated the place with his brains.”
That’s right. The Troll, and that vendor.
All this commotion had pushed it to the back of her mind. “I did it,” she confessed. “At least I think I did. But I’m not sure what actually happened.”
“Were you mad?”
“Well, yes. He was trying to kill me.”
“Did the room fill with weird light?”
“Yes.”
Via and Hush were nodding, smiling. “It’s just more of the Etheress Myth that’s turning out to be true,” Via went on. “An outburst of emotions will amplify your aura. You can project violence with your thoughts, and that’s good because we’re gonna need it, considering what’s happened.”
Cassie didn’t want to project violence; she just wanted to find her sister. But she also considered this: With every Constab in the district looking for me, I’m probably going to have to project A LOT of violence....
“You have a tremendous amount of power, Cassie, and once you learn how to use it, that’ll greatly increase your chances of getting out of here in one piece. But there’s a bad side. Your aura itself.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When you walk in Hell as a living human being, your whole lifeforce glows off of you. That’s why we told you to bring an onyx stone; it’ll keep your aura hidden most of the time, except when you get really mad or frightened—like with that Troll. But there’s an exchange of energy. Show me your onyx.”
Cassie dug the stone out of her pocket, examined it between her forefinger and thumb. “It’s tiny!” she exclaimed. “It’s only half the size it’s supposed to be.”
“That’s because your aura’s using it up. It won’t be long before it’s all burned off, then you’ll be walking around here lit up like a Christmas tree. Shit.”
“Then we need to get another onyx,” Cassie deduced.
“Yeah. Too bad there aren’t any in Hell. We have our own stones for certain kinds of protection—Blood—phire, Totenstone, Nektaphyte—but they don’t work on someone who’s alive.”
“Then we’ll go back to my house—the Deadpass. I’ll get more onyx there, and more bones and anything else we need.” Then Cassie decided to stand her ground. “And you can’t tell me I can’t come back. I know where the trail is, I know how to get here. You can’t stop me—I can do anything I want. I’m an Etheress.”
“Great,” Via said to Hush. “Now she’s getting a big head. But you’re right; we can’t stop you. You can come back here and search every block in the Mephistopolis for your sister if that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want,” Cassie asserted.
“We have to rest for a little while,” Via said, droopyeyed. Hush was nodding off too, in front of the bizarre TV. “To us, we’ve been on the move all night, but to you, only one second of your life has gone by.”
Cassie didn’t fully understand, but that was a given by now. Via and Hush both curled up atop the atrocious bed and were sleeping within seconds.
Cassie felt the opposite: energized, raring to go. She dawdled about the room, ignoring the bloodstains and other signs of remnant horror. What else could I expect in a whorehouse in Hell? She looked out the window. Below, prostitutes of many species pranced up and down the street, looking for clients. The black moon crept along, inching between the monolithic skyscrapers in the endless distance. A Gargoyle sat hunched on an opposing building ledge. Thousands of years of devolution had apparently left their wings useless; they spent their lives crawling about on buildings. The Gargoyle snarled at her, baring fangs, but when Cassie focused her thoughts, the feeble mental projection went nowhere.
The Gargoyle cackled.
I did it before. How come I can’t do it now?
Then a furor rose from below: high-pitched subhuman shrieks bursting into the night. Cassie looked down and saw a devilish pimp stomping on a young prostitute that seemed part-Troll and part-Imp. “Stop that!” she shouted down, but the pimp just looked up, extended a taloned middle finger, and kept stomping.
Cassie shouted again, her aura flashed and the pimp’s homed head exploded with a grisly pop!
Still works, she thought, satisfied.
The prostitute waved up to her. “Thanks!”
Cassie just smiled and nodded.
She tried to occupy herself with television but it was difficult. A Ghoul in a white apron hosted what appeared to be a cooking show. “Render the fat at precisely 375 degrees,” the hideous woman instructed. “We’ll want to fry the baby Nether-Swine brains in quadrants, to ensure even cooking, but before dredging them in the flour, we’ll need to marinate them briefly in milk. Milk from freshly pressed Cacodemon moles is preferable, but if you don’t have that—be resourceful!”
Now the woman was deftly kneading one of her own leathery breasts, letting the dark milk drip into the bowl of greenish brains. Emeril would dump in his pants if he could see this! Cassie thought and switched channels.
Next came a show called SELL YOURSELF FOR ZAP! White-cloaked Neptomancers stood perfectly still as lowly Zap addicts severed parts of themselves for divination. One man sawed his foot off and placed it into a censer full of hot coals, while the cloaked diviners took notes, reading the smoke. Applause rose from the studio audience. The contestant was rewarded with a single syringe full of the drug, which he immediately inserted up his nostril and injected. Next, a woman was rewarded with six syringes after she willingly lay naked upon a red-hot iron grate. Her flesh sizzled, producing a large billow of smoke. More applause. Then the woman got off the grate to take her reward, the entire back of her body charred black.
Cassie was about to turn the set off, but a sudden beeping sound ensued and letters began to roll across the screen. ALERT! ALERT! ALERT!
Then: DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR TELEVISION! STAY TUNED FOR AN URGENT BULLETIN FROM THE LUCIFERIC EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM....
An anchorwoman whose face looked segmented like a turtle shell sat stolid behind a news desk. Pointed ears protruded from the sides of her neatly flipped brunet hair. “The most shocking news to ever be reported has rocked the Mephistopolis tonight. The Agency of the Constabulary has just told us that a genuine Etheress has entered Hell—”
Cassie leaned closer, eyes wide.
“—and is now hiding out somewhere in the vicinity of Boniface Square. All citizens of the Mephistopolis are ordered to keep a look-out for this woman....”
Now the screen flashed something akin to a police composite—of Cassie’s face.
“Oh, Christ!” she exclaimed. Then she turned and was harshly jostling her friends on the bed. “Via! Hush! Look!”
When they awoke, they groggily stared at the TV, but they didn’t remain groggy for long.
“Holy shit,” Via muttered. “Word sure got out fast. Now we’re really screwed.”
“The offender’s name is Cassie Heydon,” the saurian anchorwoman continued, “and she is in Hell as I report this. Spokesdemons from the Constabulary recently learned of Ms. Heydon’s infiltration of the Mephistopolis after the fluke capture of this lowly XR—”
; Next, the screen flashed the wanted poster they’d seen earlier, sporting Xeke’s face.
“I knew it!” Via hissed. “I knew that back-stabbing son of a bitch ratted us out!”
“This dire information was extracted out of him after routine interrogation at the Commission of Judicial Torture....”
Now the screen showed the dismal torture chamber where Xeke lay strapped to a rack of iron spikes. Two uniformed Golems were placing heavy, flat stones on his chest. Xeke was bellowing in pain as the points of the spikes surfaced through his chest. The camera zoomed to Xeke’s agony-twisted face; he looked frantic-eyed to the lens and hacked out: “Cassie! I’m sorry! I tried not to squeal but I just couldn’t stand the pain! Please forgive me!”
It crushed Cassie to witness the torture. Xeke didn’t willingly go to the Constabs, she realized. They tortured him for the information.... She would do anything to make the torture stop.
But then, on the screen, the Golems began to remove the rocks, and Xeke groaned in relief. Suddenly a vaguely recognizable face appeared, a narrow face with a monocle in one eye. “Cassie Heydon,” the figure said in a sharp nasally voice. “I am Commissioner of Torture Himmler. I’ll have you know that there is a lofty bounty out on your head. My Constables are hunting you this very moment; they are on every street comer, in every alleyway, and in every subway station. It is impossible for you to escape the city, so let me appeal to your better judgment. As you can see, I have stopped all torture procedures against your friend. If you turn yourself in, I will guarantee your safety as well as the safety of your confederates. You will all be rewarded handsomely—”
“Don’t listen to him, Cassie,” Via said.
The Commissioner continued: “I have also ordered all torture to cease upon this person too. It’s someone I believe you know....”
Cassie gasped. The station cut to another studio—another torture chamber. In the dark stone room, a woman hung suspended from shackles.
Lissa.
Cassie’s stomach clenched. Oh my God, no....
The scene cut back to the Commissioner’s narrow face. “Your sister will also remain safe—if you cooperate.”
Xeke’s voice boomed in the background: “Don’t do it, Cassie! Don’t believe him! Get out of the city as fast as—”
A sudden whack! and then Xeke’s outburst was silenced.
“Please comply quickly,” the Commissioner suggested. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
A final cut back to Lissa, whose face looked terrified through tresses of black hair. The camera panned down to show what Lissa had been suspended over: a vat full of squirming Razor-Leeches.
“You sick BASTARDS!” Cassie yelled in outrage, and then her aura flashed brighter than ever and—
“Damn!” Via shrieked.
—the television exploded.
Pieces rained down on them. When the cloud of smoke cleared, Cassie stared around in the silence. “Sorry,” she peeped.
“Try to control yourself,” Via said, coughing in the smoke.
“How can I? If I don’t do what they say, they’re going to torture my sister—for eternity. And you saw what they were doing to Xeke.”
Via and Hush exchanged more suspicious glances. “I’m still not too confident about Xeke,” Via revealed. “It’s all too convenient. I still think he’s in on it.”
The notion seemed absurd to Cassie. “How can you say that? They were torturing him, for God’s sake! We can’t blame him for telling the police about us! He was suffering incredible pain!”
“That’s not even what I’m talking about. They want you to think exactly what you’re thinking now—that he’s still on our side. And when you refuse to turn yourself in, what do you want to bet that we’ll run into Xeke somewhere along the line? And he’ll have some jive about how he escaped.”
“That’s crazy,” Cassie objected. “And who said I was refusing to turn myself in?”
Via and Hush grinned at each other, Hush laughing silently, Via aloud.
“What’s so funny?”
“Jesus, Cassie. You’re the most naive person I ever met,” Via went on. “You believe that guy?”
“Why not? I’ll turn myself in, then we’ll all be safe. He even said we’d be rewarded.”
More laughter. “Cassie, you’d buy tea from Lucrezia Borgia. If you turned yourself in, Lucifer’s Warlocks would put you in an Auric Press in two seconds. They’d squeeze all your Ethereal energy out and transfer it right into a Power Dolmen. That’s why they want you, to use you like a supernatural battery so that Satan and his most powerful demons can be fully incarnated into the Living World. And your sister? They’d drop her into that vat of Razor-Leeches and leave her there for a thousand years, and me and Hush too.”
“Well ...” Cassie had to think. “All right, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll act like I’m turning myself in, but then we’ll rescue Lissa and Xeke.”
Another round of laughter. “Right. We’re gonna rescue Lissa and Xeke from the Commission of Judicial Torture, the Constabulary’s biggest stronghold. You’d have an easier time busting someone out of a supermax prison. It’s impossible.”
“No it’s not,” Cassie insisted. “I’ll just use my—my—” She pointed to the exploded television. “My projection powers. Anyone who gets in our way, I’ll-I’ ll ... blow up their heads.”
Via and Hush couldn’t stop laughing, which was really beginning to piss Cassie off. “Against Bio-Wizards and Warlocks? They’d eat you for breakfast, Cassie,” Via told her. “And the security troops all wear incantated armor. If you projected against them, it would be like shooting paperclips with rubber bands at a cinder-block wall. Believe me, it won’t work.”
Cassie flared, “Then what the hell good are my Etheress powers!”
“You’re an untrained Etheress. You don’t even know how to use what you’ve got. You’d have to practice for years before you could take on the Constabulary. It’s an intricate psychic art; you’ve got to train your mind and your spirit. You don’t just walk into Hell one day and start blowing up heads.”
Cassie’s enthusiasm deflated at once. But then Hush got up quickly, whipped out her pencil, and began writing on the wall:
What about an inversion hex?
“That’d be great, Hush,” Via said. “But we’d need a Power Relic, and we don’t have any way to—”
Her sentence stopped as if guillotined. Then her face beamed. “You’re right! With Cassie, we could do it!”
“Do what!” Cassie demanded.
Via got up. “We have to go back to your house right away.”
“But how?” Cassie asked the logical question. “The guy on TV said that every Constab in the district is hunting me. They’re even staking out the subway stations. How can we get back to Blackwell Hall without being caught first?”
This time, the glances that Via and Hush exchanged were downright grim. “How do we do this, Hush?” Via asked.
Hush wrote:
draw straws, I guess
“No, I’ll do it,” Via decided.
“You’ll do what?” Cassie insisted. Once again she felt like everyone knew what was going on but her.
But before an answer could be made—tap tap tap
The three of them all looked fretfully to the door. Someone was knocking.
“Hold tight,” Via whispered. “If it was Constabs, they wouldn’t bother knocking.” Then she went to the door, looked out the peephole. “What do you want?”
A gruff male voice replied. “It’s the manager. You breakin’ stuff in here? Open up.”
Via rolled her eyes at the broken television. “Ah, just a little accident. We’ll pay for the damage.”
“Open up,” and then a key could be heard in the lock.
“Damn it!” Via muttered and stepped back. “Everybody be cool, he’s coming into the room.”
The door opened and in walked a fairly normal looking bald man in a suit. He didn’t look happy to begin with, and when he n
oticed the shattered TV, he looked even less happy.
“What the hell are you silly bitches doin’ in here!” he complained rather loudly. “What’s this look like? A pig sty?”
“Uh, no, not a pig sty,” Via said. “A whorehouse in Hell.”
“Don’t get smart, missy,” he pointed a finger at her. “You wrecked a perfectly good TV! You know how much those things cost? You think we put ’em here just for you to bust up? Huh? You think televisions grow on trees? Judas J. Priest, that was a brand new set.”
“It was a piece of shit. The reception sucked.”
“Oh, so that means you silly bitches can just trash it? You pay up right now—two Brutus Notes—or I call the Constabs. They won’t fuck around with the likes of you—they’ll throw all three of your asses right in the lezzie tank. Then you can spend a couple hundred years being some butch demon’s bitch and munching Troll carpet. See how you silly bitches like that.”
Via looked duped, and Cassie quickly realized the predicament. A fingernail would easily pay for the damage, but if she bit one off in front of him—
He’ll know I’m an Etheress, Cassie thought.
“Look,” Via faltered, “we don’t have any cash right now but we’ll have some soon. I promise we’ll pay you back. I’ll write you an I.O.U.”
The manager gawped at her. “What am I, an asshole? You silly bitches come in here and trash my motel and I’m supposed to take an I.O.U?” Now he was stalking around the room, his hands up, ranting. “Judas J. Priest! I am just so fuckin’ sick of bein’ taken advantage of by every pimp, hooker, and hustler to walk down the street! I try to be a nice guy, and look what happens. Try to give you whores a decent place where you can make some money, and look what I get for my effort. There ain’t no way I’m gettin’ ripped off by a bunch of silly bitches like you!”
Guess he’s having a bad day, Cassic thought.
But when the man turned around—his back to them—Hush jerked on Via’s sleeve and then scribbled on the wall:
Bi-facer!
Via stared at the man’s back, and then Cassie noticed something too. There seemed to be some strange fold of skin around his neck, showing within the back of his collar.