Chapter 22 Hellsing
HELLSING
Grace’s body arched. Her mouth opened on a sound that split every hair on my arms. Smoke rolled off the sigil on her skin and the black in her eyes broke, peeling away at the edges.
“You ain’t keepin’ her, Bael. You ain’t wearin’ her skin, you ain’t touchin’ what’s mine.
I watched you kill her daddy right in front o’ me.
You really think I’m lettin’ that slide?
Naw. I’m comin’ for you now, demon. Not in this room.
Not through her. I’m comin’ to your pit, to your throne.
You wanted me alone? Fine. You got me. Just you… and me.”
He snarled. “You cannot reach me,” he said.
“You dip your fingers in shallow waters, but you have never walked the depth. You’re too scared to meet my maker. Too weak.”
“Watch me,” I said.
I turned to the bowl. Most of the water had spilled, but enough remained to work.
Seraphine understood before I had to tell her.
She moved, fast and shaking. She pulled a larger copper basin from behind the counter and filled it with water, spilling the rest of the holy water I carried in the flask in my bag.
She hauled the basin into the circle adding fresh herbs, salt, and ash.
Ashes to ashes.
“You step in there, you may not come back,” she said. “You know that.”
“He just killed the only person who believed in me, right in front of me, I said. “He is sitting in the body of the woman I love. I am not letting that stand. You hold this circle. You hold her. You anchor me. You pull when you feel the tug.”
Seraphine swallowed hard and nodded. “How do you get there?” she asked.
I stripped off my coat and shirt. The air hit my bare chest. My skin burned where the sigil sat. I climbed into the basin and stood barefoot in the cold water. It rose past my ankles, past my calves.
“Through his mark,” I said. “Through mine. Through the path we already opened when I invited him in the first time. I am tired of waitin’ on him to show. I am going to get him.”
I held out my hand. Seraphine took Grace’s hand and wrapped it around mine, then laid her own over both.
“Three points,” she said. “Witch. Exorcist. Witch. It will hold.”
Bael hissed through Grace’s lips.
“You step into my realm and I will peel the skin off your melting bones,” he said. “I will show you what waits for all your little friends. I will make you beg to die.”
“You been threatenin’ me for years,” I said. “I am done listenin’.”
I knelt in the basin. The water soaked my jeans, climbed up my stomach. I lay back until it covered my chest. My head tipped under. The ceiling of the shop vanished. The candlelight blurred.
I held onto Grace’s fingers and Seraphine’s grip and started the descent. I spoke the last set of words in my head. The ones I’d learned years ago from the priest. The ones that gave permission and demanded passage.
Heat wrapped around me and the water became weight.
The world flipped and I let myself fall.
The first breath I pulled in scorched my throat. The ground under my boots was hard and rough, and the sky above was not a sky. There was no air. There was pressure. There was only the sound of distant screams. Pain emanated through the ground. And the taste of ash filled my mouth.
Hell.
I felt Bael here in a way I could not on the surface. He was not a shadow in a girl’s skull. He was large, an old, heavy presence pressing on my bones.
“Peter,” he spoke. His voice boomed from everywhere and nowhere. “You came. Brave little exorcist.”
I walked. I did not run. I did not look around much. Every sight in that place was a trap, a hook, a door. I kept my mind on one thing. The thread of Grace’s soul. It was a thin thread of aura, pulled tight, but still attached to him.
I followed it. Shapes moved at the edge of my vision. Lost things. Torn things. Souls that had not passed on and never would. They reached, but they did not touch. I did not belong to them. I belonged to the woman seated in that chair.
Walking through hell was not something one could endure for long. I had minutes, possibly seconds before Lucifer would find out a human soul was wandering his territory. And then I’d be fucked. Bael may be a Lord of hell, but Lucifer…He was another type of demon entirely.
Bael appeared ahead. He did not wear Grace’s face anymore. His form shifted. Horns, teeth, fire and shadow. I did not catalog every piece. I focused on the center. The core. The knot that held him together.
“You have hunted my lesser,” he said. “You have bound scraps of shit that we send to you. You step to a throne now.”
“I see a coward who hides in young girls and old grudges,” I said. “You touched my woman. You broke my friend. You signed your own death warrant.”
He surged forward. Pain sliced through my chest. Claws that were not claws raked at my soul. He tried to drag me down, to scatter me into the screaming mass under our feet.
I braced.
Every prayer I had ever spoken, every curse, every promise, every day I had chosen to keep fighting when I wanted to put a gun in my own mouth, it all rose up at once. I grabbed the force of it and shoved it straight into him.
For the first time, he staggered and I didn’t hesitate to move in.
I did not have guns here. I did not have knives. I had my will. I had the authority I carried in my cross, and I had the memory of Grace’s whisper in my ear, raw and small.
Hellsing, I’m scared.
Saying the Lord’s prayer, I reached for him, wrapping my hands around the center of him and yanked him down to the ground.
I flung Virgil’s rosary around his neck, and I pulled on his legs.
He hit the ground with a roaring scream.
His form buckled as flame flared around us.
The souls below howled and the whole place shook.
“You do not get to keep her,” I said again. “Not in my world. Not in yours.”
“If I go down then I will keep you with me,” it dragged its claws across my chest, and I screamed but kept dragging him.
“Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” I began to pray.
I dragged him. Step by step, I hauled him through his own realm. He clawed at the ground. He slammed raw fear into my head. He threw images at me, Grace dead, Bullet gutted, Hoax hanging, Josh torn apart, the club burning, Seraphine broken.
I did not let go. I pulled him to the edge of a pit that opened under everything else. A place where souls swirled without form. The ones who had gone too far to remember their own names. The ones who had chosen monsters and lost even that.
He fought harder. “I will climb out,” he roared. “You chain me here and I will climb. I will wait. I have time. I will find you. I will take her again! You cannot hold me!”
I summoned every binding I knew. I wrapped him in words, in will, in the promise of judgment that outranked both him and me. I tied him in knots of power and hate and devotion. Then I kicked his feet out from under him and dragged him over the edge, he grabbed at me, pulling me down with him.
I slipped, falling over the edge with him, and then my hand caught onto something.
Virgil’s rosary dangled from the edge. I held on long enough to watch him tumble into the mass below, chains of light and shadow wrapping around him.
The souls there rose up, grabbing and clinging to him.
His scream rolled through me, through the pit, through Hell itself.
He would claw. He would tear. He would sink his teeth into anything he could reach. But he would be busy while we continued to live.
“You crawl back to my world,” I said, voice raw, “and I will be there. I will hunt you every time. I will make it my only purpose.”
The last of him disappeared under the surface of the pit. I watched as the thread tied to Grace’s soul went slack, then snapped free.
Pain ripped through me. My knees buckled. The heat crushed in close as I dragged myself back up onto solid ground.
Far away, through the roar and the weight and the stench, I heard another sound.
My name.
“Peter,” Grace said. Her voice was thin, distant. “Come back. Please. Come back to me.”
Hands grabbed my shoulders. Not Bael’s. Seraphine’s.
She reached through the path I had opened, through the water, through the wards. Her power hooked into mine. Her will yanked.
Grace added hers. New and raw and trembling. She had just crawled out of a prison, and she was already reaching back in.
“Let him go,” Seraphine said. “You had your fight. He is bound. Peter, let go.”
I exhaled. For a second, I wanted to stay. Hell made a certain sense. There were no questions there. Only punishment.
Then I thought of Virgil’s body on the floor of the shop. I thought of Grace’s cheek against my hand.
I let go.
The pit and the screams dropped away. Cold water splashed over my face and I jerked upward.
My chest spasmed causing me to cough, choking as water poured out of my nose and mouth. My back slammed against the inside of the basin.
“Peter,” Grace said. “God, Peter.”
She was over me.
Her eyes were that gentle brown again. Wide. Ringed with red from crying. The mark on her skin still sat there, but it was dull, quiet, no longer pulsing.
Her hands framed my face, and I sighed feeling the warmth in her palms. Her body leaned over the basin, hair falling around us, her top clung to her from the sweat and stray splashes of water.
Seraphine knelt behind her, one hand on my shoulder, the other braced on the rim of the basin. She looked drained. Dark smudges sat under her eyes and dried blood marked her upper lip.
“You with us?” Seraphine asked. Her voice shook but held.
I nodded then blinked up at Grace. Her mouth trembled. Tears slid down her cheeks, dripping onto my chest.
“Your father…” I started.
She closed her eyes for a second. Her shoulders shook.
“I know,” she said. Her voice broke. “I know.”
She lowered her cheek into my hand. I had not realized I had lifted it, but my palm cupped her face, fingers spread along her jaw. She pressed into it as if she needed that touch to stay upright.
Tears trickled over my skin. “Ah, Gracie,” I said.
The words scraped out of my raw throat. “I am sorry. I am so damn sorry.”
She shook her head. “He must have known,” she said. “Dad always knew this would happen. Mom’s dreams… He knew. He used to talk about a night that smelled like smoke and iron. He told me he might not walk away from it. He must have said goodbye in his head before he walked through that door.”
Her lips pressed against my palm and my heart twisted.
“Grace, I…” I started.
I wanted to tell her everything. That I had dragged Bael down for her. That I would do it again. That the sight of Virgil hanging in the air would never leave me. That I loved her so much it scared me more than Hell.
She opened her eyes and met mine.
“I know, Peter,” she said. “I love you too.”
The words settled in the space between us. Simple and true. No rituals or spells between us, just a fact laid bare in a room that still held the ghost of her father’s last breath.
I let out a long, shaking breath. Her thumb stroked my cheek. My other hand rose to her waist, fingers curling into the fabric of her shirt, needing to feel that she was real and warm and here.
Behind her, Seraphine bowed her head over Virgil’s body on the floor. For that small stretch of time, I stayed in the basin with Grace’s face above mine, her cheek in my palm, her words in my chest.
Hell could keep its screams. I was exactly where I needed to be.