Chapter 4

My descent into Hell was brief and bumpy. I slammed against solid rock walls way too rough to be man-made, like some long-ago underground aqueduct that had somehow avoided becoming part of Pennsauken's infrastructure. Then again, I suspected very few of Hell's entryways showed up on city planning maps, not even in New Jersey.

"Incoming!" I shouted down to Sariah. She yelped, sounding less alarmed than irritated as she scrambled out of the way in time before I crashed down beside her. I rolled up to my feet again, my head spinning.

"Where are we?" I demanded. "Is this Hell? Can you tell?"

"Oh, yeah. It's Hell all right." She groaned, drawing her knees up as she leaned against a rock wall. "I fucking hate this place."

"Where did Barry go?" I'd spread-eagled my arms in defense against my own lack of impulse control, my stance wide. There was light, oddly enough, an ambient glow that emanated from the walls with a nice cheery red.

"Not far, believe me." Sariah stood as well, leaning down to dust off her jeans. "And don't ask me how you made it in here, because Kreios is right, you shouldn't be able to enter Hell. Armaeus made you immortal. Either that, or his magic sucks balls. As for Barry, give it a second. You'll hear him."

Her voice was so soft as to be barely audible, and it had changed in pitch as well. It was lower, harder. I thought back to when I had first met Sariah in Hell, this almost perfect mirror image of myself who was yet so different. She hadn't been particularly sisterly from the get-go, but we'd crossed a lot of fires since then.

She turned and peered intently down one of the corridors, grimacing a little. "This way," she muttered, almost more to herself than to me. I followed her halfway up a corridor until it split off. She leaned close to me, putting her mouth next to my ear.

"The old saying that the walls have ears came from down here, you know. There are pockets of Hell that are basically wired for sound. This is one of them."

I glanced around. "Wired for who?"

"The black beast, the prince of darkness—the devil, in the flesh. And not that pretty boy we just left either."

That sharp edge was back in her voice. "What is with you two?" I asked, but she waved me off, the glint of one of her blades catching the dim light. She moved forward with long, quick strides, her steps sure and certain in the half gloom.

"We can get to that later. Right now, you should focus. The dude I'm talking about is an ancient creature, pretty much spit out of the bowels of Earth during creation. He's not all horns and devil eyes and cloven hooves, but he's no cover model either. His glamour is designed strictly to freak you out, and given that Barry is the food he's playing with, you can expect a pretty textbook devil incarnation." She shook her head. "I've never even heard of Byzantium pitch, and I've been down here a really long time."

In another twenty paces, we finally heard a sound that was detectable to my ears. Something that made Sariah stop. Sobbing. Specifically, a woman sobbing.

"That ain't Barry—or Maria, in case you're wondering," Sariah said coldly, and she headed on, but I held up a hand.

"Yeah, but…" I began.

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 DD 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 she 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."