Chapter 12
12
“W elcome to hell, we appreciate you waiting while we get your itinerary together. Please take a number.”
The melodic, almost sweet voice felt like a gong inside my head. My fingers flexed and the blade I was still holding shivered under my fingers. “This is bullshit,” I heard the demon complain. “I jumped into the blade to avoid this!”
I winced and sat up carefully. The room we were in had a black-and-white checkered tile floor and deep gray walls with sketches drawn on them. I blinked. The sketches were moving, stick figures doing all sorts of…
“Oh my,” I whispered. “It’s a shock those stick figures don’t light on fire rubbing up against each other like that.”
I twisted around. There was a single door across from me. The door had been white. But the white paint had faded, handprints all over it, blurring what had once been bright and clean. Dirty handprints.
Next to me lay a woman who looked exactly like Kinkly, right down to her wings, only she was my size. I mean, not chubby but an average height for a human. I reached over and touched her shoulder. She’d died as she’d fallen on me, that had to be why she was here too. “Kinkly?”
She groaned and flapped a wing at me. “Go away, I’m tired and feel like I’ve been on a drinking binge for a week straight on ogre beer.”
I bit the inside of my cheek and looked on the other side of me. Corb lay there, seemingly smaller than I remembered him. And less muscular, his limbs gangly and sickly looking. I frowned and touched a hand to his back, feeling his individual bones. He cringed.
“Corb?”
“Don’t look at me.” He shook his head. “Please.”
“What the hell’s happening?” I managed to spin around on my knees and wobble to my feet. My body felt strange. Light.
“Well,” that melodic voice rang through the air, and a desk materialized in front of me. Covered in bright red leather, it was pin cushioned with tiny skulls all over. A petite woman sat on the other side, her fingers flashing over a typewriter. She wore a dress suit made of red leather that was incredibly tight and pushed her ample bosom up so it could have comfortably held a dinner plate loaded with a turkey dinner. Her hair was as bright red as the suit and pulled into a tight French roll.
She tapped her long, equally red nails on her desk. “You died, and someone put a spell around you all that sent you here. It happens sometimes. Usually, it’s someone who doesn’t like you.”
Someone.
Bramble. It had to be my cousin. I mean, she and Louis wanted me to come and get Crash out of hell, I knew that. But…
The look in her eyes as she had finished the spell had suggested she wasn’t happy with what was happening, but that didn’t make sense. She wanted me here. Didn’t she?
Unless she was playing both sides of the table like Crash had been? Was that possible? A tiny bit of hope sprang into my heart. “Okay, so that doesn’t explain why my friends don’t look like…themselves.”
“Oh, that’s easy. You cannot hide who you really are in heaven or hell. Your friend there, the fairy? Heart and soul of a creature a hundred times her size. You? A true beauty, despite your beliefs about yourself.” She held up a mirror and I gasped. I was me…but…refined in every sense of the word, high cheekbones, full lips, laughter in my eyes.
“That’s not possible,” I breathed out, touching my face and then looking down at my body, my leathers clinging to every curve. I was not by any means skinny, but I had a shapely figure.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that jazz,” the secretary of hell said. “Now, you see yourself as the ones who love you see you.”
“But Corb—”
“Is suffering,” she shrugged. “Some of you idiots make choices that you regret once you see how it has made you less than you should be underneath the skin and bones that others see.”
Corb stayed on the floor, curled around himself. “But he was killed trying to save me. That has to count for something.” I looked back to the secretary. “Doesn’t it?”
“It will depend on him.” She tapped her nails again. “It says you’re supposed to be a party of four?”
I looked around. “Robert?”
He stepped out of the shadows, fully human, no skeleton showing. “Bree. We really must stop meeting like this. It’s terrible form.”
I laughed and the sound bounced oddly in the strange space.
“None of that,” the secretary said. “Now. State the nature of your visit?”
“Oh.” This was very…proper. “I mean, we’re here to rescue someone.”
“Hmm. Someone. That fae king I suppose? He’s a pain in our ass anyway. He won’t die fully, he’s no fun to torture. Truly, it would be in our best interest, but…there is a cost if you want to take a soul from hell.”
Robert stepped up beside me and Kinkly, who was quietly freaking out, her eyes wide as she stared at me in the face.
“What kind of cost?” I asked. “Like a challenge or something?”
“There are levels of hell,” Robert murmured. “We will have to work through them to get to Crash.”
“What your friend said. And when you get there, the warden will demand something from you.”
The blade trembled in my hand. “Terrible fucking idea,” the demon told me. “To be clear.”
“Ah yes, and Toltza’s shadow.” The secretary pulled up a clipboard and ran a long red fingernail down the page. “He’ll need to stay here, unless he actually belongs to any of you?”
“I belong to the Sentinel,” he yelled. “I belong to her now.”
“I didn’t agree to that!” I yelled back.
“I’ll stay in the weapon. I’ve heard of other demon-possessed items. A flail of all fucking things,” he muttered. “Better than staying in this shithole.”
“Jaysu—”
“No.” The word boomed through the space, dropping us to our knees.
“Bree, it would be best if you didn’t use that word here,” Robert whispered. “Just to be on the safe side.”
I swallowed hard. “Got it. Okay, so we have our party, where do we go? How do we get to Crash?”
“Through that door over there on the right,” the woman said. “Go to the top of the stairs to reach your entry point.”
Kinkly cleared her throat. “Do you have a map or anything?”
“You have a demon with you,” the secretary drawled. “If he can’t help you, I surely cannot. Here is your timepiece. You have until the sand runs out. When the time has run out, you will all belong to hell. Forever.”
She tossed me something on a long chain. I caught it mid-air and brought it to my face. An old school timer with sand sliding through it. Only…I peered closer. The sand was moving, writhing. Hands reaching up out of the sand.
“Don’t mind the souls. They deserve to be there,” the secretary never looked up from her typing.
Souls. Souls were trapped in this thing? With a grimace, I slipped it over my neck.
I took a step toward the once-white door all covered with handprints. “Corb, you have to come with us.”
“I don’t want you to see me like this,” he whispered.
I sighed. “We don’t have time for your pity party. You’ve done bad shit, Corb, and we all know it. So, get your ass off the floor and let’s go.” I didn’t look at him but strode toward the door.
“Hard ass,” the blade in my hand muttered. “I like it.”
“Shut up you…what am I going to call you anyway?” I didn’t put the blade away. I was too afraid I’d need it. I mean…I was assuming we were going to face some very awful things in here.
“Well, you can’t call me Toltza, that name belongs to the better half of me. The nice half of me. You come up with a name for me. That’s the general rule.” The shadow’s voice was whiny now, irritated.
“What are you mad about?”
“I had to claim you as my boss!” he snapped. “In order not to get stuck here. I leapt out of your body as you were fighting because I could see the writing on the wall! You shouldn’t have been able to take an actual weapon with you.”
“And yet here you are,” I said.
“Here I am.” The blade shivered. “Name me and get it over with.”
I glanced at Kinkly and shook my head. “Now I have to name a demon.”
“You could call him Nancy,” she suggested with a sly smile, a definite twinkle to her eyes. “Bet he’d like that. Seeing as he ran from a fight, that would make him a real Nancy pants.”
“Fuck you both!” the blade yelled. Which only sealed his fate as far as I was concerned.
I grinned. “Hell yeah, Nancy. Nice to have you on board with us.”
Robert guffawed on the other side of me. “Only you two could find a way to crack a joke when you’re trapped in hell.”
“That’s what we do,” I said as I put my hand to the door, gripping the blade, aka Nancy, in the other. “We laugh, and we keep going.”
Soft footsteps behind us told me that Corb had caught up, but I didn’t look over my shoulder. I suspected he’d bolt if I did. “Here we go.”
I pushed the door open, saw my hand leave its own imprint on the white edge where I touched it, and stepped through.
My own version of hell reared up in front of me, perhaps even more monstrous than the galloos we’d fought.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I breathed out, and took an involuntary step back.
Kinkly let out an ‘eep.’ “That’s not fun.” But of course, she could fly, so it was nothing to her, not really.
Robert took me by the hand. “One step at a time, Bree.”
The stairs in front of me went straight up. Straight up, without any visible end in sight. Like I literally could not see the door at the top. “There must be ten miles of stairs!” I yelped. “That will take hours!”
“Possibly,” Robert said. “We’ll rest where we must. Let’s go.”
It wasn’t that I wasn’t going to go up the stairs. I took the first step and locked my eyes only on the step in front of me. If I tried to look too far ahead, I would lose my mind.
“Okay, so we have a long walk,” I muttered. “Let’s talk about what’s ahead of us. Robert, you said you’ve…have you been here before?”
“In a sense,” he said softly. “My wife was dragged into hell. I had to retrieve her. Mind you, she wasn’t my wife at the time.”
I looked over at him. “You’ve never talked about a wife.”
He glanced at me, then looked back at the stairs. “It is difficult to talk about your heart when your vocabulary consists of only five or six words. When I’ve had more speech capabilities, we’ve always been in the middle of some fight or another.” He smiled, softening his words. “You remind me of her, a great deal. But…I lost her to a magic that I could not fight.”
“Oh, that’s so sad,” Kinkly whispered. She flew to my right, keeping pace with us. It seemed like the stairs should not have been wide enough for us all to fit on the same step, but whatever warped magic was here in hell, it seemed to allow for impossibilities.
“Is that why you help her? Bree, I mean,” Corb asked from behind us.
I dared a quick glance back. He looked like a very slim version of himself, almost like a teenager, all gangly and lacking muscle. But otherwise, he was more himself than he had been even a few minutes ago.
“It was, in the beginning,” Robert said. “Then I realized that she was a sentinel, not so much unlike myself. And you—” He squeezed my hand. “—are not as much like my wife as I first thought. Not really.”
“Is that a compliment or a shot at me?” I was doing my best not to think about the muscles burning in my thighs and ass. The conversation helped…a little.
“No shots. You are your own person, Bree. You are beautiful inside and out. My wife was too, just different.”
His hand flexed over mine again, and I flexed my fingers back. “Thank you, Robert.”
Kinkly flew upward easily. “Are we really dead, do you think?”
That was a question I’d been avoiding. I could still feel the claws of the galloo sink through me, cutting vital pieces of my organs in half. Could still see Kinkly falling from the sky. Could still feel how still Corb had been behind me.
My throat tightened. “Yes. I think we are.”
“Then what are we going to do?” she whispered. “What happens when we find Crash? How do we get him out, if we are dead?”
I paused on the steps. “We get him out first, however we must. Because that saves everyone else. Eric, Eammon, Feish, Sarge, Winnifred, Jinx, all our friends will be safe.”
“But only for a little while,” Corb said, without any venom. “The Dark Council is still fighting to have their way with the world, they won’t stop with you gone.”
I looked back at him. “I know. But our friends will keep up the fight. You know it. I know it. Even if I’m not there, Crash will fight them. He is free of all his bonds, so he won’t be held back by any rules once he is back.”
“That’s not true.” Corb lifted his head, his eyes full of uncertainty. “He will still have bonds on him. He won’t be free unless all the Dark Council members are dead.”
I stared back at Corb. “You sound pretty certain for a guy who doesn’t know anything about the Dark Council.”
He didn’t drop his eyes; I’d give him credit for that. “I got pulled into the Council too. I’m dead. But I can still feel their chains on me. They have no power here, but I suspect if I were to go back, I’d have to do what they wish.”
Robert let out a string of curses and Kinkly hissed. “You were always working with them?”
Corb held his ground. “Like Crash, I was brought in when I was too young to know any better. Once the bonds are placed on you, there is no way out. I played double agent for both sides. Like Crash, I did what I could, when I could to slow them, but it's not easy.”
I started back up the stairs, anger fueling my feet. “Look, right now we have to get to Crash, and we go from there. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” my two friends and Corb said in tandem.
Which left the stairs.
I glanced at the time piece. We’d lost maybe five percent of the souls, we had to hurry. “We have to pick up the pace.” Which is how I ended up jogging up the stairs, sometimes taking two at a time. That I could even think of doing two at a time was a miracle on par with anything the bible could have come up with.
“Bree?” Kinkly was beside me still. “You want to take a break?”
“No.” I bit the word out between gasps of air. “Just. Keep. Going.”
I don’t know how long it was before my legs finally buckled. I went to my knees but didn’t dare look up to see how much we had left. Because, let’s be honest, it didn’t matter. I had to make it to the top, one way or another.
Robert sat beside me, and we looked down the way we’d come.
“Tell me what we might face.” My lungs burned. My muscles were on fire. But my head was busy trying to figure out how to get all the way to Crash. Because no matter how bad the stairs were, they weren’t really trying to stop us. They wouldn’t drag us down and…well, I’d say kill, but that was no longer a factor. Eat our souls maybe?
“There are five realms, one for each of the elements,” Robert said. “Earth, air, fire, water, and spirit. The last of which is where the souls are kept.”
I glanced at his profile. What would have happened if he’d been training me properly from the beginning? Maybe we’d have stopped the Dark Council from getting this far. “Okay, so do we know which element we have to deal with first?”
He shook his head. “No. My wife, Evangeline, told me about it after I rescued her. She traveled through all five realms, though she was dragged by a demon so it was more from a passenger’s view point.”
Kinkly gasped. “She was like Crash, trapped in limbo?”
“No,” he shook his head quickly. “No, she was physically pulled through hell by a demon. So, it was different.”
Different. But was it? I put a hand to my left knee. I had a scar there from when I was a kid. I could still feel it through the buttery thin leathers. Did the scars on your soul mimic the marks of your body?
“Kinkly, show me your wings.” I motioned for her to turn around and she obliged.
There was the line where her wings had been torn and then mended. I ran a finger along the edge. “Still scarred.”
“I don’t have any of my scars,” Corb said.
I frowned. “I don’t understand. Maybe it’s random?”
Corb and Robert shared a quick look that I caught, even though the two men quickly acted as though nothing had passed between them. “It is likely nothing,” Robert said. “Nothing to worry about right now.”
I pushed to my feet and turned to the stairs again. “Let’s go.” I really wasn’t ready to keep climbing, but the push to get to the top was strong.
Even if my stamina was not. So much for not feeling my aches and pains after I was dead.
I couldn’t see past the sweat that dripped into my eyes which meant that I started stumbling up the steps, fighting to stay sort-of upright, even as I climbed on my hands and knees.
Yes, hell had my number. Score one for Lucifer, or Hades, or whoever was in charge here.
Kinkly flew up ahead of us. “I can see the door! You’re almost there.”
“About. Ducking. Time,” I gasped as I lifted my head. Indeed, the door was right there, just ahead of me. Another dozen steps and I’d able to touch the handle.
Digging deep, I forced my legs to keep moving, up and up, as that one thought circled around in my head. Why did it hurt this badly if I were here in spirit only?
Unless…unless that wasn’t the case. Could we be here like Robert’s wife had been here, fully in the flesh? Was that what Bramble had done with the spell?
On the last step to the door, I fell forward and crashed against the frame. Again, I didn’t care. I just sat there, slumped, and gasping for air as my legs all but hummed. “How am I going to walk after this?”
Nancy snickered. “You’ll fecking run if you have to, girly. Run from the monsters. Run from your own demons.”
I looked down at the blade. “Anyone ever tell you what an ass you are? I know we’ll run if we have to.”
Robert and Corb thumped down next to me. Robert was sweating and gasping like me. Corb was not. There wasn’t a glimmer of sweat on his brow. No trembling in his muscles—the few that he had looked fine.
I tipped the time piece up. Not quite a tenth gone. “We have to hurry, time is wasting.” I lurched to my feet.
“But if we go through in this state,” Robert said, “we’ll get taken if we have to run. Nancy is right about that. We need to run from the monsters.”
The door in front of me was painted a faded blue, with far fewer handprints than the first doorway we’d gone through. Blue.
I held up Nancy. “What are we facing when we go through a blue door?”
“Oh, now you want my help?”
“I could just throw you through the door, see what happens,” I shrugged as if it was no matter to me. “I can always get another blade.”
“Water, you sassy girly. Water is blue. The colors of the doors line up to the elements they hold behind them.”
That made sense then. A water realm of some sort lay beyond the door. I wrinkled up my nose.
“Corb, you need to go through first.” I beckoned for him to join me in front of the door, doing my best to ignore the tremors in my legs. I locked my knees to stay upright and drew a shaky breath.
“Why?” he asked, so quietly that I wasn’t sure that he even meant for me to hear.
“Nancy here says it’s a water realm. Blue door, water is blue? It makes sense.” And yes, I offered it up as a question. I mean…I was really just playing guessing games here, even with Nancy helping, I wasn’t sure how far I could trust him. “Why don’t you poke your head through first. You would sense water, wouldn’t you?”
Corb looked at me, and for just a heartbeat, I saw the man who’d first reminded me that I was a woman worth fighting for. Sure, he’d been an absolute shit, a betrayer of the worst kind…but…I saw in his eyes what he could have been.
“I would sense it, yes,” he looked down. “It might open us into the bottom of an ocean for all we know.”
“Also bad,” Kinkly said, “For the record.”
I pressed my hand to the door and gave it an experimental push. It creaked and the whoosh of waves was immediate, the surf roaring as a wild wind pummeled the salt water, spraying it up and through the door. Corb stuck his head through. “Well, you found an ocean.”
“Stellar observations.” Kinkly hovered behind me, her hand on my shoulder for balance. “Is there land anywhere? How do we traverse this water realm?”
I pushed the door again, felt it sticking against something, and then it was as if a giant hand shoved us all from behind, throwing us through the doorway and across a small sandy beach, tumbling us over and over. I landed on my belly, black sand spraying up around me, in my nose and mouth. I managed to get my eyes shut but only just in time to keep the sand out of them.
Spluttering, I rolled onto my knees and dusted off my face to take in the first level of hell.
“Any ideas, Nancy? What do we do to get out of here and to the next realm?” I wiggled my right hand, the one holding the black blade.
“You’ll want to look for another door,” Nancy said, his voice seriously irritated. “And fast.”
I didn’t dare look at the timepiece hanging from my neck. I knew we were on a time crunch.
“Okay, so everyone sticks together. We’ll see if we can find a door–”
Robert grabbed me and spun me around to face the other direction as the ground beneath us shook. “No time. The island is being chewed up by…something.”
The island, which wasn’t more than a sandspit in the middle of a crazy, thrashing ocean, was indeed being torn apart by something in the water with a damn big mouth and teeth that hooked backward, like a snake’s. If a snake were the size of a blue whale.
“Motherducker,” I whispered.
“Nope, that’s a maw mouth. Big one too. You might want to move,” Nancy grumbled.
“New plan, we need to get out of here!” I yelped and sprinted down the sand spit. Black sand, a few scraggly bushes and two rafts sat on the far side of the sandy beach.
“Too good to be true,” Robert breathed out. “It’ll be a trick of some sort.”
“Of course it is!” Nancy yelled. “They want to get you out onto the water where the real demons are, but you don’t have a choice. You need to get in the water and find the next damn door! So get on a raft!”
I didn’t argue, because I knew Nancy didn’t want to be here, and the only way for him to get out of hell was to get us out.
“Do as he says,” I yelped as I got behind one of the boats and started pushing. “Robert, you and Kinkly on the other. Corb, you’re with me.”
He seemed startled that I wanted him with me. But it wasn’t for the pleasure of his company. I figured he was less likely to abandon us if he was on my boat. The four of us pushed the pitiful rafts—there was actually duct tape on ours, used to hold the joints together—out into the surf. The waves fought to push us back with each gulp and swell.
“Hang off the edge and kick!” Corb yelled, sounding more like himself. Bossy, irritated.
We’d barely gotten the rafts into the water, doing what Corb had said, when the maw mouth—if that was even what it was called—lunged over the sandspit and made a grab for us.
Kinkly and I screamed as it landed between the two rafts, shoving us apart, its body creating its own set of waves. “No! Kink! Robert!”
“Keep kicking!” Corb hollered. “No matter what, keep moving!”
I did as he said, kicking as hard as I could, helping him drive the raft forward. But I couldn’t help but look for Robert and Kinkly. They were nowhere to be seen. “We lost them!”
This was not what I wanted, not at all.
“Keep going,” Corb snapped. “You can’t save anyone if you don’t focus on getting yourself out of here!”
The Hollows trainer in him seemed to show up as he directed the raft to the right. “That direction, go. Push hard!”
He might have said more, but something grabbed me around the ankle and jerked me free from the raft. I didn’t even have a chance to get a good gulp of air before I was being yanked downward. I kicked as hard as I could to free myself but quickly realized that wasn’t going to do me any good.
I twisted around and tried to dive after the thing that had me, immediately wishing I hadn’t turned around to look. The tendrils were long like seaweed, thin and numbering in the hundreds.
The body was human—or had been human—and its arms stretched toward me, thinning out into long strands that had once been fingers. The nail tips wrapped around and around my legs because I couldn’t look away from the disfigured head, the eye sockets empty except for the seaweed tendrils shooting toward me. The mouth was the same, seaweed that wasn’t seaweed.
It was viscera .
“Idiot! Use me!” Nancy screamed, his voice clear as day even under the water.
I slashed at the tendril closest to me, cutting through it, a bloom of red erupting in the water. Over and over I cut at the bits holding me, doing all I could not to freak out. I was running out of air, I had to get to the surface.
I’d cut the last of the snaggers when something else grabbed me by the hair and dragged me upward. I knew it was Corb by the way his magic sung across my skin.
I helped, kicking and using my arm that wasn’t holding my knife to help us get to the top.
We broke the surface, spluttering and struggling to stay above the waves that were coming harder and faster than before.
“I lost the raft!” Corb yelled.
I twisted around to see the raft being lifted into the air on a tentacle that was as big as a bus so we could see the underside of it. With nothing short of a massive bulls-eye etched into it. “It was a mark—literally,” I coughed. “Everything in here is looking for those ducking rafts.”
My heart clenched. Robert and Kinkly. They had a bulls-eye marked on them too.
“You can’t save them, not like this.” Corb tugged on me. “We need to keep swimming. Come on.”
Come on. Like swimming through these waves would be easy. Even without the threat of something below us, the water alone would be enough to kill us. A second time.
Just how in the hell—pun intended—were we supposed to get out of here?
“Corb, we have to find a better way!” I yelled to be heard over the water. “Something faster.”
He spun around in the water, his face serious. “Okay. But you’ll have to trust me.”
Jaysus on a donkey, why did it always come back to trust with this one?