by Jenn Stark
Sariah snapped a sharp gaze back at me, hard and unforgiving. “Sara, Barry’s no prince, but the way he looked at Maria when he thought no one could see him, which I happen to know firsthand now…that was real. So him, we save. But otherwise, if somebody’s down here, chances are they should be. It’s not your job to save everyone. It’s definitely not mine. Let’s go.”
She turned back and tugged me on, leaving me to mull over that little chestnut. Technically, as Justice of the Arcana Council, it wasn’t my job to save anyone. But it was my job to get justice for those who’d been wronged. Had this woman been wronged? Stuck in Hell through choices not her own? Where did my duty stop anyway?
I didn’t have any more time to think about it as more commotion caught our attention. Muffled shouts, like someone speaking through heavy blankets. Sariah grinned, her entire body seeming to go electric.
“Okay, then.” She looked back at me. “We’ve got druids to start—not real ones, but they dress the part. You’ll like these guys. The chubby bastard they’re performing for certainly does. They’re his number one enforcers.”
She picked up the pace and in about fifty more steps, we reached another doorway, this one opening onto a room with more light. Barry stood in the center, wrapped up like a tamale in what looked to be burlap with a suspiciously oily sheen. Only his head stuck out the top.
Three figures stood around him. Tall, thin, and—Sariah was right—druidic looking in heavy cowled robes, they could have been any D&D clerics in any basement anywhere. One of them lifted a hand, and a whoosh of air went up. The guy now brandished a flaming torch. My eyes snapped wide.
Barry started screaming like a madman as the cleric waved the flame toward him. Perfectly reasonable response, as far as I was concerned.
Apparently unimpressed by the uproar, Sariah leaned close and hissed in my ear. “It’s illusion magic, the best of the best. There’s a reason for the fire-and-brimstone legends, the eternal flame that never dies and all that bullshit. It’s because it works. Fire is a big trigger for a lot of people.”
An unreasonable chill swept through me. It should have been a trigger for Sariah as well, but then she had run into the fire, while I had raced away.
“I did everything you asked, everything. I killed them all,” Barry pleaded, as the druid guy leaned forward and set the fringe of the burlap sack ablaze. Barry’s voice climbed several octaves. “I killed them all!”
“You killed three.” A voice flowed out from the shadows at the back of the room, dark and ragged. It leached into my bones and circled like a fist around my spine, making me stiffen.
“Sariah,” I muttered.
Barry’s screams grew more frantic. “I killed them, all of them. Even George finally drank, I’m sure of it—”
“George remains among the living,” the slithering voice countered, and I blinked, thinking of the man that Kreios had impersonated in the pizzeria. “I would have received his shriveled body on a pallet if he didn’t. His soul is mortgaged over to me a dozen times, yet he’s not here. So I’ll take you instead.”
“No,” Barry screeched, and whether it was illusion or not, his pain appeared very real as he flopped around inside his cocoon, trying to roll the fire out. The druid guys stepped off to the side, their faces unseeable beneath their heavy cowls. Beside me, Sariah squared her shoulders. Metal flashed in her right hand.
“Not yet, not yet,” she muttered. “Might as well make this worth it.”
“My children are hungry,” the voice taunted, thick with satisfaction. “They haven’t had fresh meat for some time. You broke your bargain with me and wasted my pitch.”
“I didn’t,” Barry wailed, but the fire had moved farther up the bundled blankets, and I could smell something other than oil and fabric. Roasting flesh.
I nearly burst forward then, but Sariah’s left hand lashed out and gripped my forearm. “The field has to be set,” she said tightly.
A second later, a rush of movement burst into the room from all sides, making my eyes peel wide. Demon spawn of every description crowded close. Traditional horned mini devils, clacking lizards, hissing snakes, deformed monkeys, even rodents scuttled forward as the fire surrounding Barry flamed higher, then abruptly guttered out.
“I’d say he’s just about done.” Sariah grinned at me, whipping out a second metal bracelet of Justice that she had fashioned into a long, jagged knife, the weapon of choice for the Night Witch. “Let’s go.”
She leapt into the fray, scattering the creatures as Barry’s scream choked off. I followed right behind. My hands electrified with a fireball of my own, but one born of magic, not true flame. I wasted no time choosing targets. I picked the easiest ones, the tall, thin, robed druids who turned and raised their torches of flame against me. Two-thirds of the horde were focused on Sariah and her whirling blades, while the final third were shredding the blankets around Barry.
The mix of fire blazing from the brands and my own brilliant fireballs threw everything into full light. For the first time, I caught a glimpse of the creature hovering at the back of the room.
Sariah had been right. The beast was…beastly. The enormous creature sported the head of a goat, horns sticking out on either side, surmounting a body that was fat and hairy. Its belly spilled out over squat legs with cloven feet. It had small, man-sized arms all out of proportion to its enormous body, and it held a bottle in one long-fingered fist, a glass of dark liquid in the other. Its eyes went wide with surprise as my fireballs sent the druids exploding in all directions, taking out a good portion of the creatures ripping into Barry’s charred blankets.
“You bitch!” the devil roared, but not at me, as the bright lights also served to illuminate Sariah gutting its spawn army with a speed that went well beyond human. The Night Witch’s knives screamed their fury.
I leapt forward, grateful that the beast was distracted. I swept the remaining demons off Barry, ripping through his wrappings until I exposed what was left of him. He was still alive, but he’d lost a good quarter of his girth, his body shrunken and bright pink, and definitely singed on the edges.
“Can you run?” I asked. He only stared at me, nodding mutely, his eyes glassy with shock. I reached out a hand and winced as he grabbed it, his own hand burning hot. I didn’t have time to try to heal him. We had to go.
“Sariah!” I shouted, and she laughed with hard, feral glee.
“Right behind you. Just cleaning up the trash.”
I pulled Barry clear as Sariah turned toward the creature in the back of the room. She went after it and, with one arcing slash, gutted it from neck to belly, then she reached in and pulled out its heart and threw it across the room, sending another knife soaring out immediately after it. The knife was faster and skewered the heart before it reached the far wall.
The devil creature crumpled to the ground, and Sariah used her free hand to grab the bottle it was holding before anything more spilled out of it.
“That was for Barnabas,” she spat. Leaning down, she picked up a strip of cloth and stuffed it in the mouth of the bottle. Then she turned toward me.
“The others will come to feast on this shitshow. We’ve gotta get out of here.”
“You think?” I muttered.
She strode across the room and recovered her knives, wiping them on her jeans before slapping them back against her wrists, where they returned to their original bracelet forms. I let her take some of Barry’s weight as she came up on his other side.
Together, we led the stumbling, muttering, pizza-slinging necromancer out of the room, back into the gloom-shrouded corridors of Hell.
“Which way do we go from here?” I asked.
Sariah glanced around, evidently used to the dim lighting. “What I know about the Arcana Council, they like things easy,” she said. “It doesn’t so much matter where we poke up, it’ll be where they want us to be.”
“You sound strangely confident about that.”
She grinned at me, then dropped her voice when sh
e spoke again, reminding me of the need for discretion. “I’m kind of curious to see what’s going to happen to you now that you broke the seal of Hell and all, not gonna lie. You seriously shouldn’t have done that. Do you feel any different or anything?”
“Nope.” I shook my head. But that didn’t mean I felt good. I was pretty sure Armaeus and Kreios had the right of it. Immortals couldn’t enter Hell, no matter how powerful they were. And I was immortal by virtue of the fact that I was an Arcana Council member. So how had I managed it?
The only answer wasn’t a good one.
“I think Armaeus doesn’t know as much about me as he thought he did,” I muttered as Barry moaned between us.
Sariah sighed. “Pretty much.”
5
Barry started crying quietly, so we kept our conversation to a minimum, gradually working our way through the corridors. Eventually, we crouched our way through a low opening in the rock. The rumble of engines and heavy equipment reached us from far overhead, and I lifted my brows at Sariah over Barry’s head. “Are we out?”
“In Between, I’m thinking. Which means we can talk, at least.” Sariah grunted, shifting her hold on Barry and glaring at him hard. “I’m not sure what Maria sees in you beyond your moony-eyed stares, buddy, but you are one lucky bastard.”
He stiffened and managed to pull himself together a bit more. “What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s the only reason we went in after you. She believes in you, even though you’re a sack of shit.”
“Maria?” he asked, still sounding dazed. “She knows nothing—she’s safe. I’ve kept her safe.”
“Yeah, yeah, you can tell her all about it—here we go,” Sariah said.
She was right. As we came around the corner, a doorway stood open, cut into the solid rock. We drew even with it and stopped, peering into the shadows beyond.
“What’s this?” Barry asked, his voice tremulous. Not even a trace of his former swagger remained, and he shivered uncontrollably as the thick shadows flowed away from the door, eventually revealing a woman lit by a pool of light. She knelt in front of a small table covered with a heavy dark purple fabric.
Maria clasped her hands in prayer, and the candlelight flickered higher, making the religious icons lined up next to the crystals and candles stand out in sharp relief. “He’s a good man, a powerful man. He just needs a second chance,” she pleaded.
Beside me, Barry sucked in a quick breath.
I glanced to Sariah. She rolled her eyes, then gave Barry a push toward the door. “You fuck this up, we’re not saving you again,” she informed him tersely.
He stumbled into the mists, and a second later, we heard Maria’s cry of exultation.
We slowly closed the door behind them.
“There,” I grinned at Sariah. “You feel better now?”
“I…do,” she said, surprising me. She kept her gaze on the door a long minute. “That—yeah. It wasn’t exactly all the truth, what I just told him, but it was true enough, I guess. There’s a whole lot of people who are assholes and don’t deserve to be saved. But some of them have people who love them anyway. I guess it kind of makes you want to see how things turn out, with the right kind of second chance.”
I bit my lip, but kept my face carefully neutral as she turned back to me. Once again, how well did I really know Sariah, this reflection of me who’d taken a decidedly crooked path to get to where she was today? Not well enough, clearly.
“So where to?” I finally managed.
She squinted up the corridor. “If Kreios is topside, you can bet he’ll have transpo home. You probably don’t need it, but considering you caught him off guard by disappearing down the rabbit hole, it might be interesting to find out if he’s learned anything. If the magic house of Tarot cards is about to take a tumble, we should probably know that sooner rather than later. Plus, I’m thinking he’s going to be in a chatty mood.”
“Oh?” I narrowed my eyes at her as we started walking again. “Any particular reason why you might think that?”
She shrugged. “He was close enough to touch at Demonico’s, at least for a little while. I don’t need that long to soak up a Connected’s skills. My ability to use said skills doesn’t last very long, but it’s fun while I can access them—especially when they’re at his level.”
“You’ve gotten stronger.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “The Night Witch gig has some fringe benefits that weren’t included in the job description, namely that my ability to sponge the magic off others has amped up like whoa. I can’t draw blood from a stone, so the person I’m tapping needs to be pretty strong for the skill to be super beneficial, but everyone has something to offer. Maria was a low-level hedge witch. I couldn’t do too much with that, because when I draw someone down, I deplete them, and that’s no good for most humans. But Kreios? I don’t think he even noticed. And I got a full-on view into his head—and into Maria’s, for that matter…and into Barry’s while I was up. It was…useful.”
I considered that. Sariah was probably wrong. I quite seriously doubted that Kreios was unaware that his skills were being siphoned off. Far more likely he’d wanted it to happen just because he found the idea curious. He was a curious kind of guy.
“So that’s why you guys aren’t getting along?” I asked. “Because you hijacked his ability of discernment and didn’t like what you saw?” Even as I asked the question, I shook my head. “That can’t be right, though. You were pissed at him long before he reached our table.”
“Yeah, well. I was kind of messed up after this last gig, and let’s just say I got some visitors while I was laid up. With each new one that showed up, I tried soaking up some of their abilities.”
“Uh oh,” I said. “Visitors like who? The Magician?”
“One more tick down the Tarot food chain,” Sariah grinned. “Eshe.”
I blinked. “Eshe came to see you? Seriously?” The High Priestess of the Arcana Council wasn’t exactly chummy with anyone, and I’d never thought she’d considered Sariah as anything more than a nuisance.
Apparently, Sariah’s siphoned mind-reading skills had faded somewhat. She gave no reaction to my internal musings. “Yup. And once she was done, she left behind a parting gift I know for a fact she hadn’t intended. I had some wicked dreams. In addition to tipping me off to check out your incoming caseload at Justice Hall, and cluing me in to the value of a doughboy army, those dreams basically made our buddy Kreios out to be, well, kind of an asshole. Sort of like his predecessor, if I’m getting my history right.”
I squinted at her. “Kind of an asshole, how?”
“For starters, I think he’s looking to try to kill the Magician.”
“What? There’s no way. They’re friends. They’ve always been friends.”
“Uh-huh.” She glared right back. “Am I the only one who’s noticed that he’s taken over the Magician’s jobs, and here we are in the middle of a basic, boring opportunity to get some Justice done, and he shows up out of nowhere, sticking his nose in things?”
“But that can’t be right,” I protested, though in reality, Sariah could absolutely be right. I’d always liked Kreios, we’d gotten along, but how well did I really know the demigod?
The answer, of course, was not very well—especially since I didn’t have the Devil’s mad skills of being able to see into others’ most intimate thoughts.
I scowled at Sariah, though we kept moving briskly along the corridor. “How did you keep him from knowing your suspicions?”
She laughed. “That part’s easy. I didn’t. He knows I’m not currently a fan, and he knows why. He may not know the specific details of it because I hang around with you enough to be able to keep my mental barriers shipshape, but he knows that I’ve gotten some bad feels about him—and I think he’s surprised. I think it makes him curious about me, which could be good, could be bad.”
“It could be very bad,” I agreed. “I’ve never seen Kreios actually interested enoug
h to go after someone for any reason. He usually just…”
“Gets them,” Sariah said with a nod. “As in, they fall into his lap. Yeah, I noticed that too. But I don’t think he’s gonna show up on my doorstep carrying flowers, if that’s your concern. He’s got the hots for Nikki.”
I snorted. “Everyone’s got the hots for Nikki if they’re smart, while she’s got the hots for at least a half dozen people right this second. The Devil knows that better than anyone, and supports it. But since we’re on the subject of relationships…”
Before I could finish the question, Sariah raised her hand. “Don’t even start with me and Brody,” she said, her words conjuring up images of the rumpled, square-jawed Las Vegas detective who was one of our few friends left over from childhood. “I’m never going to see him as anything other than the knight in shining armor that he still is, and he’s never going to see me as anything but the little sister of his ex. We may keep knocking the idea around a few times because he is hella hot, despite his Boy Scout act, but that’s not going anywhere. And I don’t need any more friends.”
Something in her voice caught me up short. Between my work and, well, my work, I didn’t have a lot of friends either, but I did have some—who I valued more than I did my own skin. What had Sariah’s life been like in Hell? Had she always been this alone?
The name came to me immediately.
“Who is Barnabas?”
She chuckled a little ruefully. “I figured you maybe heard that. He was a ghoul, I guess you’d call him, but a good guy, as ghouls went. A low-ranking lieutenant of the fat-bodied fucker we just took out. After that asshole and his buddies used him as fodder for one of their black dark-magic parties, they killed him. I mean, sure, I guess he was already dead. But after the spawn got done with him, he was dead, dead. First time I realized that could happen down in Hell. I didn’t take it well.”
I nodded, my heart twisting a little. If your best friend was a ghoul, what did that say about your social group? “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, you win or you learn. One of the joys of walking through Hell, you figure out how not to get too attached.” She squinted ahead, slowing her stride at last. “This looks promising.”