resistance than the occasional twitch. This was the same creature who had chased me merrily through his house a few days before, shucking clothes and trading kisses until neither one of us could quite see straight. And I realized I loved them both equal y.
I said, “Take what you need.”
He drank again, deeply, like a desert hiker who’s just realized he doesn’t need to ration his water anymore. And then he snapped the demon’s neck like a chicken bone.
Raoul was already pul ing a garbage bag out of one of his jacket pockets. “Here,” he said, “put the body in this. We may need it later.”
I cleared my throat as Vayl fol owed his suggestion and he closed the top of the bag with a cheerful red-and-white-striped twist tie. “Do you always carry garbage bags for this reason?” I asked Raoul.
“Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “Almost everything here feeds on flesh. It’s nice to have extra around so your skin isn’t the first target the monsters go for.”
“Oh.”
Vayl flung the sack over his back and set his cane to the path, and I tried hard not to think about horror-movie Santa Claus similarities as we headed onward, Raoul leading him while Lotus fol owed and I pul ed rear guard.
Now that I’d gotten over the first shock of brawling with a demon my training kicked in. Despite the fact that my eyes wanted to jump from horror to horror, never resting until they found a friendly face to ease the pain, I saw that the trail was built on a bed of human bones mired in salted earth and red clay. The appendage fields ran as far as I could see in either direction. And each body part imprisoned a diamond-shaped, multi-hued soul that was straining, and failing, to fly free. Without a complete physical form to make it whole again, the soul battered against the body part, flailing helplessly like a tethered eagle. And above them al , just like I’d remembered, a sky so ful of fire I couldn’t look at it long without imagining that the whole thing was going to drop down and incinerate us al .
“If we had a map, what would this particular region be cal ed?” I asked Raoul.
“You have probably heard it referred to as Limbo,” he said. “It is, in fact, right outside of hel ’s easternmost gate, of which there are thirteen. It is a place where souls are stored until they decide what they want out of the afterlife.”
“That sounds a little crazy,” I said. “I mean, to hear you talk before it sounded like souls could be kidnapped into hel , and that you and the other Eldhayr regularly tried to rescue them. Or that they came here because this was where they belonged.”
“Yes,” said Raoul. “But some are here because they want it. They’ve done something hideous in life that they were never punished for, and they feel they deserve to be here. Those are the ones Satan admits personal y.”
“Oh. And uh.” I hesitated. Did I real y want to know? Yes. Because we’d been to hel together before. And to have shared this horror once meant we had more of a stake in getting it right the second time. “What are you seeing?” I asked.
He glanced around, his face more pale under his natural tan than I’d seen it in months. At first he stared at me, like he couldn’t believe I’d asked. But then I could tel he understood. And he said, “It’s a great clearing in the jungle. Fires have been set everywhere around it, and on them are big boiling cauldrons.”
I almost asked him to stop there, but I could tel he had to finish now. So I clenched my teeth together as he said, “Inside the cauldrons are the bobbing heads of those who can’t decide what to do. Their eyes are rol ing, Jaz. They’re stil , somehow, alive. It may be the worst thing I’ve ever seen.
And I have seen so very much.”
I reached my hand forward past Lotus and Vayl and squeezed Raoul’s hand, tightly, for just a second. And then let go.
I glanced at Lotus. She’d gotten the shakes sometime during our march. After Raoul’s description I didn’t want to know what she saw. But I could tel , even if she’d started out in deep denial, she’d been unable to keep it up. She was seeing her future and it scared the shit out of her.
We walked on.
As we traveled among the undecided dead, Raoul, Vayl, Lotus, and I watched their souls fight.
Some of them, I thought, real y must have wanted to be free. But they couldn’t get past whatever they’d done in life. They knew time must be served. Maybe even forever. But others reminded me of moths battering themselves against a porch light. It seemed to me, after a while, that al they wanted was to cause themselves pain. And I imagined that even here, outside one of the most remote of his gates, I could hear the Great Taker laughing.
Only once did Lotus turn to me. Her eyes, wide with horror, begged me to make it stop. I said,
“This is hel ’s suburb, kid. Think of what it’s like inside.” She whispered, “I always knew I had to be punished. I just figured—” I said, “When you were sixteen and Vayl’s son, you got your brother kil ed. That was over two hundred years ago. How have things been since then?”
She fel silent, a single tear rol ing down her cheek as she turned back to the path.
Final y, after forty-five minutes of watching and walking, we came to the end of the fields and the edge of the great river that surrounded Satan’s domain. It had gone by lots of names over time, the most recent of which was the Moat. Sure I’d read about it. How you get across. Ways to pay the Ferryman. How the Ferryman, who also had lots of names, was one of Satan’s bosom buddies, which was why he’d landed such a swank job in the first place. Fight beside a guy long enough and, yeah, you’re going to get rewarded. Even in a shithole like hel .
This being sort of the back way in, we didn’t see him. Which meant we’d have to find our own way across water that, in some places, was rumored to be deeper than the Mariana Trench, containing whirlpools, undertows, and creatures so terrifying even catching sight of a fin or claw had been known to drive the dead mad.
I said, “Looks like it’s gonna be self-serve.”
Raoul nodded his agreement. “Just keep in mind what happens when we get to the other side.” To this point I hadn’t let my eyes or my conscious thought go to that spot, looming like a haunted house on the opposite bank. A
