Chapter Seven

I would stay here forever if I could, but I have a mess to clean up.

Where there once was a dust covered painting—a pastoral scene, with an illegible signature—the canvas has burned away, leaving a charred frame that I would think held a mirror, if I didn't know better.

"Is that?"

"Yes." Julia looks at it and her eyes flicker with firelight that isn't there.

She floats away from me and helps me sit upright, the heat from the open portal washes against my skin, so I don't even look at my jacket as I get my pants and shoes back on.

"Are you ready?" Julia asks, brushing my hair from my face.

"No, but… we've got to go either way and the longer we put it off… the more likely it will all be for nothing."

Julia goes to the frame first, peeking her head through and then climbing through the frame, not floating through the wall like she would normally and turns back to me, holding out her hand.

"The frame will be too hot to touch," she warns. "I might burn you."

"Okay…" I look around the room and snatch the sheet off the settee, folding it three times to give myself enough padding to help get me through the portal and across to her.

When my boots hit the floor, an unsettled feeling washes over my skin, like hundreds of ants racing across my flesh.

We're in the same house… but nothing's broken.

The floorboards are pristine. The lamp glass isn't shattered. But everything is leached of its color.

Julia fits here.

I shove that thought away. She doesn't belong in hell. She belongs with me.

"Is this what it looked like… before?" I ask as Julia wanders to the opposite wall.

"Yes." She touches a crystal dangling from a table-side lamp. "We can linger here. It's safe inside these walls, but outside… If a demon finds us, they'll shove you back through."

The way she says it makes me think, "Just me?"

"You don't belong here."

It isn't hard to guess that every moment she spends here puts her at risk.

I take her hand. "We'll hurry."

I walk down the stairs and skip the last one out of habit… even though I didn't need to.

Julia follows me without a word.

I go to the drawing room first. The floor is clear of the sand circle. There are no remnants of the gathering I had tonight… And there are no bodies.

"I had hoped…"

"They left." Julia says, and when I look back at her, her eyes are on the floor. "I can see their footprints."

"I can't."

She looks at me with an apologetic smile. "There will be many things here that I can see which you cannot."

I don't belong here.

"Where did they go?"

"To find the entrance to their specific hells…" she looks from me to the front door and then back again. "This house is a haven for us… but not for them. They would have been compelled to leave."

And I have to go find them.

Julia doesn't touch the doorknob and I hesitate. "The frame was too hot, will this be too?"

"No." She smiles at me and I see… fear in the cant of her lips. "It's been a very long time since I left this house… I just needed to take a moment."

I understand, but, "I don't think we have time."

"I know." She takes a deep breath and nods. "Let's find them so we can get back."

The doorknob is warm, but doesn't burn me when I take it and when I open the front door, heat washes over me as the taste of ash fills my mouth and brimstone assaults my nose.

There is nothing but silence beyond that door and when I blink past the brightness…

"Welcome to hell," Julia says quietly, staring out at it. Her voice is more solid than it was before. "But be careful, your magic won't work here."

"Well, that sucks."

The house sits in the middle of a cloud of unmoving red dust. It extends up into the sky and I am not sure where it ends.

A strange and stagnant calm hangs over this place that is a near mirror of the world above. Red sky, red dirt, black bark and spindly trees with gray leaves and shriveled apples.

The fruit is rotten.

The ones that have fallen to the gray green grass crawl with insects, split open and twitching as though they're alive beneath the carapaces that move them.

Dark shadows shift among the trees.

"Those are the demons we must avoid. They will take you back to the living world. Or worse, they could mistake you for an errant soul and try to place you in your particular hell."

"Okay." I take a deep breath and the air tastes foul, but, "I'm not complaining, but… I expected hell to be a little more… hellish?"

"It is," she says, descending the stairs and looking back at me again. Her eyes glow red like embers now. "Once your part of it finds you, hell makes itself known."

I follow her down and squeeze her hand tighter. I don't know how this place works and the last thing I want to do is get separated from her.

"How do we find Dylan and Jonas?"

"Where would they have gone if this was the living world?"

"Maybe to the cars?" I look toward the lot, but what I can see of it is empty.

"Where are those?" She asks, and I remember that my grandmothers only bought their farm seventy years ago. It feels like they've been here forever.

"If they exist here," I say, "they'll be on the other side of the cornfield."

"Then we'll go there first."

The grass crunches like it's made of glass as we walk through the orchard, past the rotting apples.

Enormous scarab beetles and carpenter bees buzz around us, getting too close for comfort, but once we're out of the trees, they go back to the shade of those boughs.

In the long gray grass of the field between Julia's home and my grandmothers' farm, I pause, feeling smaller than I ever have in my life. The high walls of dust and dirt seem infinitely higher.

If that dust was moving, I'd think we were at the center of an impossibly large cyclone.

"You said once my part of hell finds me… does everyone have an individual hell?"

"No. Like is tortured with like, that sort of thing."

Right… "My grandmothers said Dante almost had it right."

"He was obsessed with circles." She shakes her head and her hair turns transparent when it gets too far away from her face. "But he told a lot of the story right."

"So this is limbo?"

"Essentially," she says looking around us in ways that make me wonder what else she sees. "They will pass the sins that do not call to them until they find the one that does. Gluttony and Avarice didn't call to me… I saw them and felt no tug."

"What did call to you?"

She glances at me sidelong. "Wrath." The "of course" goes unsaid.

"How much time have you spent here?" I grip her hand tighter.

"The entirety of the four months before he burned my body." She grimaces. "I managed not to fall for any of hell's traps… because I knew they were lies."

"What kind of traps are they?"

She stops, turning to me and caressing my cheek. "There shouldn't be any for you here. Hell punishes the deserving. Your balance sheet hasn't been tallied yet."

I lean into her palm. Even here, her newly physical presence is soothing. But movement catches my attention and I turn away from her, searching for what my periphery had shown me.

Whoever it is, it's the right size and shape… human, definitely not a demon or something worse.

I hold her hand tighter. "Come on, I think we found one."