by SM Reine
“You could have fucking told me that!”
“I was getting around to asking.” Isobel flung out a hand, reaching for Suzy’s. “Come on!”
“Fritz is letting you go to Malebolge?”
“Fritz doesn’t let me do anything! Come on!”
Suzy glanced over her shoulder. Zettel was standing in the street a hundred yards back. Why wasn’t he chasing her to the Fissure?
Then she realized what that expression on his face was.
Fear.
He was too scared of Malebolge to go after Suzy, and that fear won out against his anger. That was how Suzy would always remember Gary Zettel. Not as a domineering Union commander, or as the first Secretary of the Office of Preternatural Affairs, or even her compatriot in the Apple. She would remember him as a frightened man staring into the heart of Malebolge, incapable of moving.
“Come on, Suzy!” Isobel shouted again. “Helltown can wait! Let’s go save the victims of the House of Belial!”
“Fuck, you’re a convincing asshole,” Suzy said.
She grabbed Isobel’s hand.
Together, they leapt into Malebolge.
Chapter 17
Suzy had never been to Hell before. The instant she set foot in Malebolge, she decided that she didn’t care for it.
For one thing, the climate was the worst. Her hair was normally dry and coarse, so stepping into the extra-dry heat of Hell made her hair turn into tumbleweed.
For another, they had landed on the edge of a cliff overlooking a city inside a giant corpse, all of which was contained in a very dark and very miserable cavern. It was hot, sticky, and smelled like rotten eggs.
Another thing Suzy didn’t like about Malebolge was the sound. She tried to squint through the smoke. “Is that shrieking sound wind or wailing or…?”
“Wailing,” Isobel said, getting down onto all fours so she could slide down the side of the cliff. “Definitely wailing of damned souls.”
Suzy pressed her back against the ledge. She only had three feet of black rock to brace herself on, maybe, and it was sheer above and below.
She got dizzy every time she looked up. The dark fog made it hard to tell where the wailing came from, but the path between Hell and Earth was clear through the Fissure. It looked like a slitted eye from here.
It probably wasn’t safe to stand so close to the Fissure. The wind between dimensions threatened to suck Suzy off her feet, and it was one heck of a drop to the yellow wasteland below. But it also didn’t look safe to climb down.
Suzy really didn’t want to climb down.
“Remind me why I’m here?” she asked.
“We’re saving people that my husband’s family enslaved,” Isobel said.
Suzy groaned. “Right.” She jammed the Focus into her back pocket and slid down over the edge feet-first. She gripped the rocks tighter with both hands than she’d ever gripped anything before. “Oh holy fuck!”
How did the drop look even longer when she was dangling over it? It looked like it was about a million miles long and she was definitely going to splatter on the desert below.
Isobel was climbing without looking down. She kept her gaze on the wall, seeking the next hand- and footholds. If Isobel was brave enough to do it, then damn it all, so was Suzy.
She focused on the wall and climbed down.
The shrieking, wailing sounds intensified as they got lower. Suzy couldn’t help but look over her shoulder.
The rotten cadaver in Malebolge had a too-long spine twisted across the yellow plains. The spine bowed backward near the shoulders, plunging into the ground, so Suzy couldn’t see a skull from her position high on the wall.
She could see the bow-like curves of the collarbones, each of which was sturdy enough to support skyscrapers. Holes had been dug into the ribs to permit ramps to be propped inside them, giving access from the wasteland to the chest cavity.
There was smoke gushing out of the Malebolge cadaver’s heart, and that smoke seemed to be…wiggling. Because it wasn’t smoke at all. Demons were being born out of that giant Hell-corpse. That was the wailing sound Suzy heard.
“Cool,” she said faintly. “Very cool.” She didn’t mean it.
She focused on climbing again.
Suzy focused so hard on climbing, in fact, that she didn’t realize she’d gotten to the bottom until she put a foot down and hit solid ground. Suzy released the cavern wall and stumbled.
“Not so bad, huh?” Isobel asked, tying her hair up as she faced the wasteland.
“Is that how people seriously get down whenever they’re visiting Malebolge? Cliff climbing?”
“Oh, there are stairs over there.” Isobel nodded toward the cavern wall further up the wasteland.
Suzy almost went supersonic. “Stairs? There are stairs and we climbed down at threat of imminent death?”
“It’s shorter,” Isobel said.
“And you wonder why I don’t want to be friends with you.”
“Still?”
“Just because we’ve now gone to Hell together does not mean that I’m going to start making us best-friend lanyards,” Suzy said. “By the way, you better know where you’re going. And if it involves more climbing, I want to take the stairs.”
The House of Belial was nearby, nestled within the pelvis on the cadaver. Isobel’s shortcut meant they had indeed dropped to the ground close to the house.
The property was even bigger than Fritz’s manor in Beverly Hills—no small feat, since Casa Friederling was similar to the Winchester Mystery House in its sprawl. But the House of Belial didn’t just sprawl. It sprawled.
“That’s a house?” Suzy stared up at the black towers, the squat buildings of obsidian brick, the fence topped with cruel barbs. “It’s inside the giant rotten skeleton.”
“Ba’al,” Isobel said. “Not a rotten skeleton, but Ba’al.” She climbed a spur of bone adjacent to the right hip, sliding over it so that she could reach the webbed gates of the house.
“Looks like a rotten skeleton to me,” Suzy said, following Isobel. “Oh God, what the fuck am I doing? Climbing around the inside of an enormous rotten skeleton? What the fuck is Fritz doing with a house in a rotten skeleton?”
“He didn’t put it here.” Isobel pressed her hands to the iron gate and peered through the bars.
They were only a short walkway from the first building, which looked like it was probably the originator of that rotten-egg smell. Its walls were crumbly and half-collapsed.
“I can open the wards to the House of Belial because I’m married to Fritz,” Isobel said. “But I’m going to have to hold them open while you break the Oculus in the main building. It’ll be in the back, overlooking the slave quarters. You must break it before Proserpine does. It will prevent her from seizing any magical inheritance during the House’s fall.”
Suzy struggled to distinguish a second building at the back of the property. It was hidden underneath piles of fetid adipose tissue bigger than Isobel’s RV.
She had to climb all those fatty clumps to destroy the Oculus.
Couldn’t be much harder than restoring the Focus alone.
“Wait,” Suzy said, finally realizing what Isobel had said. “You’re going to stand out here while I go in there? No way. No fucking way.”
“If I don’t hold the wards open, the Oculus will kill you when you try to smash it,” Isobel said.
“I’m not smashing anything! You’re already dead—you go do it!”
“The explosion could hurt or kill any slaves that are in that property.” Isobel drew a knife and slashed her palm. “This is the safest way to do it. Just watch out for Proserpine.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Suzy said. “I’m not going out there.”
Blood welled on Isobel’s cut palm, a little bit too slow, a little bit too sludgy-thick. “Please?”
Suzy glared at her. And then she glared at the nasty pile of shit that the Friederling family seemed to think passed as a noble House of Malebolge.
There were human beings in there. People who had been held captive in this wasteland, this hellish nightmare, for most of their lives. Some had never known anything but this smell, and the wailing, and the rancid fat drip-drip-dripping from a pelvic bone spur.
“Fuck,” Suzy said, trying to swipe a drop of fat off of her frizzed-up hair. It stained her fingers yellow. “Okay. I’ll do it. Fuck. Open the wards.”
“Remember, when you get inside the front building, head straight to the back. It’s on the third floor. You’ll have about five minutes to get back there and smash it, but it shouldn’t take you more than sixty seconds to get there.”
“Why a five-minute limit?” Suzy asked.
“I’m a zombie,” Isobel said. “I only have so much blood.” She pressed her hand to the gates. They swung open.
Suzy felt the wards falling like she’d just changed elevation. Her ears popped.
She bolted.
It was hard to run on the yellow ground in Malebolge. It was a little bit squishy, kinda sunken. Worse than trying to jog on the beach, and Suzy hated jogging on the beach. The stench of the rotten house surrounded her as she dived through the front doors.
It was barely nicer on the inside. Instead of constructing the interior with Ba’al’s adipose tissue, the House of Belial had bone wainscoting. The windows were held open by ridges that looked like teeth. The doorways appeared to be oversized ribs.
Straight to the back. Five minutes.
“I am not staying in here for five minutes,” Suzy muttered. She’d spent much more than five minutes climbing down into this Ba’al guy and was already so fucking done with the entire dimension.
She climbed stairs that looked suspiciously like giant molars. There were no railings, nothing to hold as she climbed. By the time she got to the third floor—still without any walls to hold on to—the stairs were wobbling under her feet, as though the roots sunk into the walls were beginning to rot just like the fat outside.
At the top, Suzy found herself in an office. Its furniture was not made from bone. It was a different kind of disturbing to see human heirloom furniture when it was in the middle of a room made out of fucking demon bone.
“Oculus, Oculus, where is the Oculus?” she muttered, gaze sweeping over the room.
The desk was a functional space with paperwork on its surface and a filing cabinet at its side. The bookshelves were buried under knickknacks, most of which looked to have come from demon craftsmen. Nothing screamed out with magic.
Suzy walked to the back window, peering through to the slave quarters beyond. It was a really depressing building.
There was a glass sphere on the windowsill.
“Hey, you look like an Oculus,” Suzy said.
She put her hand on it.
And then she sneezed.
She sneezed hard.
Suzy hit the ground on all fours, coughing and sneezing and hacking and wheezing. Her throat closed up. Suddenly she couldn’t even smell the filthy stench of Malebolge.
The magic in the Oculus was not human. It was infernal.
She should have guessed that would be a problem. Suzy had encountered infernal magic once before and had had a similar reaction, similar to Cèsar’s allergy to typical human magic.
Damn it, she should have seen this coming.
The slaves needed her help.
She fumbled for the windowsill, fingers seeking out the shape of the glass ball even though tears blinded her.
“Oh look,” said a voice, “a visitor.”
Suzy tried to blink her eyes clear.
A woman descended upon her.
At least, Suzy thought it was a woman. She caught a glimpse of a clownish face, exaggerated in its proportions. She was grinning. It exposed a whole lot of teeth.
“Proserpine, I take it,” Suzy gasped.
That was the only thing she got out before the nightmare demon’s hand settled onto her forehead. Suzy’s mind exploded. The room vanished, swallowed by darkness.
She opened her mouth to scream. There was no air. She couldn’t inhale, couldn’t exhale, couldn’t make a sound.
Sounds assaulted her ears.
Screaming.
The screams were different than the wailing in Malebolge. They echoed against concrete walls with anger, despair, damnation. She’d heard these screams when she’d been locked inside a Union detention center years earlier. Suzy had never forgotten what it sounded like when men realized they would never see sunlight again.
Proserpine is a nightmare. This isn’t real, and I’m not really back in the detention center.
Suzy tried to cling to this idea, pushing away the terror that threatened to drive her into insanity.
It’s not real.
She hit the concrete floor of a cell, pushed by a man wearing a black uniform. He had no face. It didn’t matter which Union kopis had detained her; he was following the orders of a soulless organization that didn’t care about its detainees. Anyone would have done it.
“Don’t get comfortable,” the faceless agent had said.
Don’t get comfortable.
There had been nightmare demons in the Union detention center too. They tossed all kinds of criminals down there without any consideration for who their neighbors might be.
Suzy’s cell, which had been roughly the size of a broom closet, had been wedged between the cells of two nightmares.
She was falling. It was dark.
None of this was real.
Suzy must have still been flapping around the office in the House of Belial, because her hand brushed something cold and round and she started sneezing. It wasn’t in her imagination. She’d touched the Oculus again.
Suzy closed her hand, praying that she was holding on to the Oculus.
Proserpine’s face loomed in hers.
Don’t get comfortable.
Suzy hurled the Oculus.
It shattered.
She snapped out of Proserpine’s thrall in time to see the nightmare contorted with pain. The House of Belial’s wards had come down. Proserpine was the nearest heir, so she bore the brunt of the collapse.
Proserpine’s grinning clown-face had twisted into a scowl. “I don’t know what you think you’ll get out of that, but you just made the biggest mistake of your life!”
Infernal energy lashed at Suzy.
She was going to get sucked into nightmares again. She was going to be sent back to that Union detention center.
“Fuck that noise,” Suzy said.
She hurled herself out the office window.
The same quality that made the yellow ground difficult to run upon made it a painless landing pad. Suzy bounced when she struck.
She rolled onto her back and gasped for breath. She hadn’t realized how quickly the proximity to a nightmare demon—and one as huge as Proserpine—had made her begin to suffocate. Even the sour taste of Malebolge’s air was refreshing in comparison.
Isobel raced over and wrenched Suzy to her feet.
“We have to run,” she said.
Suzy didn’t even want to bother arguing with Isobel, which was a sure sign of exactly how miserable she felt.
They ran.
It didn’t take long for them to cross the House of Belial’s property. Good thing too, because the wind blasting through the pelvis started to tear at the House of Belial’s walls. Sodden fat sprinkled over Suzy, slicking her skin, and she would have freaked out if it hadn’t been just one more awful thing in the most awful place she’d ever experienced.
Proserpine was right behind them. She billowed out of the window like oil squirted across the surface of the ocean. And she looked pissed.
“Run,” Isobel gasped again, as if there was anything else they could do.
Tendrils of shadow crawled over Suzy’s shoulders.
You’ve made a huge mistake.
Don’t get comfortable.
Suzy was lying on a hard concrete floor, trapped in darkness, surrounded by nightmares. She was locked a
way. Never going to see daylight again.
“Don’t look back!” Isobel’s face loomed in the shadows of the detention center. She wasn’t supposed to be there. She hadn’t been trapped with Suzy.
Isobel wrapped her arms around Suzy’s waist and yanked.
They tumbled through the door to the slave quarters together.
The slave quarters were essentially a stable peppered with mining equipment. The ground was covered in straw—normal, mundane straw—and there were stalls rather than bedrooms. There were no people inside those stalls.
She pushed up onto her knees, got the hair out of her face. The building had enough space for a dozen slaves, maybe more. And it was empty.
“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” Suzy asked.
Isobel was staring around the room, blood draining from her face. “Oh my God. I’m so stupid.” She started laughing hysterically.
The wall behind them crumbled. The door shook. Fat sprayed over them in a fine mist again, and Suzy was too busy staring at Isobel in horror to care.
“Why are you so stupid?” Suzy asked.
“I didn’t tell Fritz I planned to come down here. I thought I’d just sneak down and destroy the house, you know, without needing to involve him, so he wouldn’t feel guilty, and—“
“And what?” Suzy asked.
“It looks like Fritz let the slaves out of Hell ages ago. The troughs are dry. There’s no personal property. It’s empty.” Isobel’s laughter had turned to tears. “I’m going to die because I didn’t trust Fritz.”
Chapter 18
On Earth, a couple of hours earlier, Fritz had been watching Cèsar from his bedroom balcony. He leaned on his good leg, bare-fleshed but for his briefs. The outfit he would wear to the Genesis Convention was laid out on the bed behind him.
Achieving the aesthetic standards of a billionaire head-of-agency was a time-consuming process that should have begun much earlier. He’d mastered the art of getting ready for board meetings as a boy, and he knew how long it took.