~~Day 46~~

  ~~David~~

  He sat up. Caera didn’t like that. She pulled him back down, and he again disappeared in a sea of boobage.

  On his right was Caera, snuggling into his side. On his left, Jeskura. Both pressed their breasts into his shoulders and chest. And behind him sat Daoka, her legs spread around him, back to the cave wall, his head on her stomach. It was Heaven, and he very much didn’t want to leave. Leaving meant going on a hike, and he hated hiking; the girls hated it even more. And if they stayed here, they could have more sex, some more sex, maybe some more sex, and after that, some more sex.

  “We have to get moving,” he said. The words tasted bitter. “Twilight’s almost over. The sun’s up.”

  “No sun down here in Hell,” Caera said, and she leaned in so she could run her long tongue along his neck. Daoka’s huge breasts sat on his shoulders, though, so the tiger had to half bury her face against one to reach David. From the clicking sounds, Daoka didn’t mind at all.

  “I agree with Caera,” Jes said. “We’ve been walking for so damn long. My feet hurt.”

  Daoka clicked some more, and Acelina chuckled.

  “Hooves are indeed the best,” the spire mother said. With a rather haughty ugh, she pulled a wing in front of her and ran her cws along its fingers, looking for dirt to discard.

  She sat on the other side of the small cave, eyeless gaze aimed at them. But for all her desire to be left alone, she didn’t stop the four little bundles of chaos from snuggling up against her thighs, pying with her tail, or her enormous thin wings, or with Lasca, her breasts. Bravest of the Las indeed, the little critter sat sideways on Acelina’s p, one cheek resting between the demon’s breasts, and judging from her tail and limp wings, she was asleep. And for some strange reason, Acelina combed the sleeping little demon’s dreadlocks with her cws.

  The spire mother almost looked happy. Not that David could really tell, with the ck of any facial features, but normally Acelina’s body nguage seemed a little stand-off-ish; not that David could really read body nguage, either. Still, she seemed happier, and the Las weren’t terrified of her anymore. And if st night was any indication, they were also addicted to her breast milk.

  It did taste oddly amazing, so he couldn’t bme them.

  “We have no idea when the world will end,” he said. “We need to get moving.”

  “I know,” Caera said. “Just… five more minutes.”

  “Five more minutes,” Jes said, nodding as she leaned in, copied Caera, and licked his cheek. Unlike Caera, she didn’t pull away, content to lean her cheek against Daoka’s tit and leave it there as she smiled at him. “You know, the stranger could have been lying. I vote we just give up the whole pn, go back to the temple, set up a defense there, and recruit all the imps and grems to work for us.” She walked her cws up his naked abs and chest. “I bet we could have a dozen impas and grems on your dick every night, and apparently you’d still have energy left over to fuck the rest of us. Think that’d be a nice arrangement.”

  “Very nice!” Latia said. The tiniest of the Las joined them, sat on David’s shins facing him, and put her hooves on his stomach. “Big orgy! Impins and gremlins have big cocks, too! Not big like David, but still, big. Lots of sex for all of us. At the same time!” She fpped her wings, and David scrunched up his eyes at the impact of air. “Big pile of sex!”

  “I wouldn’t mind that,” Caera said, grinning at David. “Five or six of those little guys trying to get their dicks in me all at the same time? I’d be so stuffed.”

  He frowned at her, earned some ughs from her, and a kiss, but he would not be swayed. Groaning, he pushed himself back to sitting, picked Latia up, earned some ughs from her, too, and set her aside. Back on his feet, he got his leather skirt on, his heavy-ass half breastpte, and pointed at the rest of the zy demons.

  “We’re trying to save the world. Come on!”

  They all groaned, but after some clicking, stretching, and hoof tapping, they got dressed in their armor, even Acelina. Caera still hadn’t mentioned that the spire mother was wearing the tregeera’s old friend’s armor, but it also didn’t seem to bother her. Demon etiquette.

  Daoka got on the tiger’s back, and the group once again began the excursion. This time they’d slept in a hole not too deep in the ground, with only barely enough twist and turns they could hide in it. Not a great pce to hide and sleep, but it was all they’d found.

  “No hellbeasts, again,” he said. “That normal?”

  “No,” Jes said, “it’s not. Something weird is going on. Remnants walking free was already weird, but now hellbeasts aren’t hunting at twilight?”

  “They’re hunting,” Caera said, sniffing the air. “I can smell them. They’re just not hunting when they usually do.”

  “Question,” David said, raising a finger. “If every hellbeast in an area fought every demon, what would happen?”

  The Las all gasped and shared scared looks. Jes and Caera shook their heads, and Daoka clicked a few times as she gestured out at the opening mountain terrain ahead of them.

  “We’d probably lose,” Caera said. “Some hellbeasts are pretty nuts. You saw that dragon creature the rider had.”

  “Oh, right.” Fucking christ that thing had been huge. “You’re sure it’s still alive?”

  Daoka clicked and pointed behind them, back toward the canyon, but stopped mid click. Her arm lowered, and with dropped jaw, she clicked once more.

  Everyone turned, and everyone froze.

  The path to the Grave Valley was some pretty rough mountain range, but behind them, back toward Death’s Grip, a break had opened in the mountains over Domice’s valley so they could see all the way back to the spire. From here, it was just a tiny bck vertical line, and beyond it, fire. The sky swirled on itself and joined a tornado of fire and va. Too far to tell exactly how big, but it had to be almost as big as the spire itself.

  “What the fuck,” Jes said. “I haven’t seen a tornado that big in ages.”

  “That’s a thing?” David asked.

  “Yeah, but that thing is huge.”

  “Too huge,” Caera said. “No way that just happened randomly.”

  David held up a hand, and everyone grew quiet. He hadn’t meant to shush them with a gesture, but apparently he had. Much as he would have turned around and apologized for it, he needed the silence.

  “I can… hear it,” he said.

  Daoka clicked once.

  “Hear… the song.” He leaned toward the distant firestorm and aimed his ear at it. No change. It wasn’t something he heard with his ears, but his insides, like a vibration that was so deep and low, it had to be felt, not heard. “It sounds like… frustration, and rage, and… a dance?”

  Caera joined him, Dao still on her back, and the satyr nudged his shoulder as she clicked at him.

  “You didn’t dream about Mia, right?” the tiger asked.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “If you really keep dreaming about other unmarked when they die, then Mia’s still alive.”

  “Yeah, but—wait, you think she did that?”

  “It’s on the other side of the canyon, and you said yourself you can hear it. I hear nothing.” Caera looked back at the others.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing,” they all said.

  He gulped. Spinning up some bckstone spikes and walls, and cracking a cave like pstic, had been a weird, difficult, and had left him hungry. Hell, he was still hungry, and he’d eaten twice since the incident. Humans could go months without eating, but not him. If Mia had created that tornado, she was probably starving.

  “David’s sister did that?” Lasca asked. “Strong! David do hellfire, too?”

  He looked back at the crowd. “That’s… Is that hellfire?”

  “Hard to tell from here,” Jes said. “Hellfire kinda looks like fire, until you get close and you see the amber in it. The va.”

  Hellfire was, as far as the runes in his mind could figure, some sort of destructive force created by essence and resonance ripping into each other and creating a cycle, almost like a fission reaction. The runes showed him it was Hell’s form of annihition, as if it embodied it, represented it. As if it was existentially important, and the runes showed it side by side with the flowing waters of Heaven.

  Water for healing, and fire for destruction. It was very… traditional.

  “You want to go back?” Caera asked. “Maybe see if there’s a way across the canyon?”

  “Nah. You know that’ll never work. Huge waste of time, we might not find a way across, we might never catch up to her, and even if we did us just being near each other causes problems. No, let’s just… keep going.” He turned, checked back to see if the insane dispy was real and not his imagination, and continued on the journey.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  ~~Day 51~~

  They walked. They walked. They walked some more. His feet were iron by this point, but the demons weren’t so lucky. Daoka felt fine enough to walk on her own again, and Caera was thankful to be free of the extra weight, but demons were strong and she hadn’t really been weighed down. No, it was just the distance that was the problem, kilometers upon kilometers, miles upon miles.

  They went slow, but there was no avoiding how worn down they were all getting. Even Acelina, Laria, and Latia grew tired, their hooves unable to withstand the rock and stone for so long.

  “I’m telling you,” David said, falling back a bit so he could chat with the two little grems, “you should get horseshoes.”

  “Do not be ridiculous,” Acelina said, walking in the back.

  “It might help?”

  Latia whined up at him and tugged on his arm.

  “Carry me.”

  “Uh, aren’t you the demon? Super strong? You should be carrying me.”

  “Latia is tiny!” After a few more whines, she threw herself at his back.

  He almost toppled, but sure enough, Latia was a tiny thing, and once she was on his back, it wasn’t much trouble to hold her thighs. He’d held her horizontally and fucked her like a toy just a week ago, that’s how light she was. They’d all had sex a few times since then, but never with the same energy since everyone was exhausted all the time.

  The little devil critter fpped her wings a few times, snuggled to his back, and buried her chin over his shoulder. Okay, yeap, still light, but she had chunks of meera metal for armor, and his ego quickly proved his downfall as he tried to walk the next kilometer. Her armor was probably as heavy as all of her.

  “You’re killing him,” Caera said, one very painful half hour ter.

  “David is strong!”

  “David is a small human man who can barely lift a pebble.”

  He winced, but the sweat beading down his forehead didn’t lie.

  “Fiiiine.” Latia hopped off and immediately began whining again. Literally, whining noises, like a dog or annoyed cat, and it wasn’t long before the other little critters mirrored her. Four little dies teetered side to side as they walked, knocking shoulders, unable to stay upright.

  “You four,” Acelina said with a hiss, “weigh almost nothing. I weigh more than ten of you. Stop compining.”

  “Butt too big,” Lasca said.

  “Thighs too big,” Laara said.

  “Boobs too big,” Laria said, which made David ugh. The little grem was a busty creature.

  With a heavy snort, Acelina stomped forward, and the four Las scattered, chirping and clicking and squealing. She didn’t chase them, satisfied, and hit David in the back with one of her long wings.

  “Annoying as the little creatures are, they have a point. It would be easier to run than to walk this distance.”

  “Really?” David asked.

  “No, but regardless, if this trek does not end sometime soon, we may have to stop for several days.”

  “Agreed,” Caera said. “I know you wanna just go go go, David, but if this keeps up, we’ll break.”

  He raised an eyebrow down at the tiger prowling beside him.

  “Really?”

  She ughed. “No, but it’s definitely harder on us than you. We might need a few days to sit and hunt.”

  Daoka clicked and gestured around at the mountains.

  “Right,” Jes said. “Demons want to hunt! We want to sneak around, track down some souls, and eat them. And then ze about doing nothing for hours. Days.”

  Demons were predators, and the more he learned about them, the more they seemed like cssic surface big cat predators. They didn’t go on journeys. They set up a territory, marked it, patrolled it, hunted in it, and didn’t get along with potential competitors.

  “We need a car,” he said, looking down as he went into think mode. “We’re almost at the Grave Valley, right? Then we cross the Scar, the Red Pits, and the Navameere Fields. We’re crossing over half of Hell.”

  All the demons, save Acelina, groaned.

  “Don’t remind us,” Jes said. “We agreed to help ‘cause we’d prefer the world didn’t end, you know? Doesn’t mean we have to like the trip.”

  “Maybe… Maybe we can recruit some hellbeasts? You said demons sometimes ride goorts, right?”

  “I did,” Caera said. “But it’d have to be a damn big goort to handle me or Acelina. And you can’t tame a wild goort, not easily. You have to raise it from an egg, and even then they can be dangerous.”

  Jes came up beside him. “I wonder how the rider tamed that dragon. I’ve never seen a hellbeast like that, so it has to be rare. Probably something from Angel’s Spine. Think you can tame that?”

  “I don’t know how to tame a hellbeast! What makes you think I can?”

  “The rider. You both got some crazy auras. So… maybe you can, too?”

  “They’re not the same,” Caera said. “The rider’s aura isn’t like a demon’s, or David’s.”

  Mysteries on top of mysteries.

  “I mean, find me a hellbeast and I’ll try?” David said. “I think—”

  The group grew silent as they crested a hill, and the Grave Valley y before them.

  It had no mountains. A long, long valley, hundreds of kilometers long, with gentle hills along both edges of the Hell donut. At least the valley didn’t seem to sink deep, so it wouldn’t take any effort at all to walk down into it. And hey, no mountains! No more scaling deadly cliffs. No more climbing rocks, rocks, and more rocks. The valley looked, for the most part, ft.

  Ft, and dotted with lots of tiny white things poking up from the fog, or at least at a distance they looked like tiny white things. The closer ones had just enough shape to look like something familiar.

  “Tombstones,” he said.

  “Tombstones,” Caera said, sitting beside him. The other demons did the same, everyone taking the hill’s top as a moment to rest.

  “Are there… people in them? In the graves, I mean.”

  “They’re not really graves,” she said. “You think anyone in Hell buries their dead?”

  “I suppose not. But, then, why tombstones?”

  Caera gestured back to the dozens of giant mountains behind them.

  “The same reason you found lots of statues. Hell grew them.”

  Daoka clicked a few times, came in behind David, and hugged him to her chest so her eyeless gaze went over him. With another weak click, she set her chin on his skull and shook her head.

  Jes ughed. “What do you mean, creepy?”

  “I am getting Halloween vibes,” David said. “I see a lot of shadow, lot of fog, and a lot of tombstones, and uh… some buildings in the distance. White?”

  “Stone,” Caera said. “You’ll see.”

  “Right. Uh, anything we should know before we just… start walking down there?”

  She shrugged and began a slow walk down the gentle slope. David gnced back at the rest of them, but they all shrugged, too, and followed her. The ck of pnning was going to give him an aneurysm, but that was what demons did, even ones like Caera. He scampered after them.

  “Seriously, what’re we gonna run into?” He raised a hand and counted fingers. “You told me there’s four areas. The Border Stones right in front of us, then there’s the Bck Mausoleum and the Dead Lands, and past them there’s the Amisius Forest. Assuming those names are descriptive, Dao is right, and this is going to be creepy.” After a long sigh, he threw up his hands. “And who thought up these names!? Who’s Amisius?”

  “Demons aren’t imaginative,” Caera said. “Far as I know, we either name things the most obvious thing, or name them after some big demon or battle or whatnot, millions of years ago.” She flicked her tail back the way they came. “Geeraz Tombs, Gorzen Mountains, Gazra Crag? I found one record that mentioned Geeraz, Gorzen, and Gazra, a trio of angels who died fighting demons. It could be wrong, of course.”

  He was betting on wrong. Much as the girls were all awesome, and Caera had an eye for history, she was definitely an exception. Demons didn’t give a shit about the past, didn’t care to record it, didn’t care to know it, and after a million years, it made perfect sense for names to evolve.

  The runes in his head didn’t say anything about the names of pces inside the provinces of Hell, and most of the provinces still had their real name. The Grave Valley was really the Grave Valley, which meant whoever created the rune knew what graves were.

  He stopped and stared at the ground as the gears in his brain went into overdrive. If God was the one who made the runes that named a bunch of things, did God know about the concept of graves millions of years before they’d exist? It fit the whole omnipotent, omniscient thing, but that made no sense, either. Nothing was omnipotent, or omniscient. They were paradoxical and fwed ideas. Maybe the rune word for grave also meant any pce where dead things were? Maybe the runes evolved as the surface evolved? Maybe—

  Daoka looked back, clicked up at him, and held out her hand. Analysis paralysis was a bitch. He took her hand, and everyone walked into a completely new section of Hell.

  The environment didn’t transition smoothly like it would on the surface. Over a course of maybe a quarter kilometer, the ground went from brown, with specs of red and bck, to just bck. The dirt grew softer, and compared to the hundreds of kilometers he’d walked barefoot on rock and pebbles, the softer dirt felt like grass. The air grew darker, too, with a thick fog that blocked out some of the light, just enough for evening darkness to settle on them.

  There were metal gates.

  “What the fuck?” With a shaking hand, he touched the first metal gate, and yanked his hand back. Not actually metal, but bckstone, except it was in the perfect shape of a short fence that only reached his waist and went kilometers in both directions toward the inner and outer edges of Hell. It had spiked tips, too.

  “What?” Jes asked, and she hopped over it like it was no big deal.

  “This is… a metal fence.” He pushed the gate open. It squeaked, slid open, and he stepped through. “This is the exact sort of fence and gate you’d find outside a graveyard on the surface.”

  “You’ve seen a lot of the stuff Hell has grown,” Caera said, and she followed him in. “This surprises you?”

  “Yes! The other stuff looked crazy and surreal. The skull braziers, giant bck spikes, the statues, all that shit looked… not normal, and perfect for Hell. This looks normal.”

  “You would prefer it look unnatural?” Acelina asked. Tall as she was, she stepped over the fence like it wasn’t even there.

  “Kinda, yeah. At least when shit looks weird, it fits. When shit looks normal, and then you start seeing the creepy shit that—” There was creepy shit.

  A giant tombstone sat before them, white stone stained with bck dirt and worn with time. It was twelve feet tall, nearly as wide, and thick enough if it fell on him it’d have squashed him like a tomato. It had no adornments, no letters, but the shape was a cssic tombstone, complete with the curved top.

  “This!” He gestured to it. “This is what I’m talking about!”

  “You saw the tombstones,” Caera said, “back on the hill.”

  “I thought they’d be normal size!” His brain had tagged them at a certain height, and it hadn’t even dawned on him to reevaluate until he’d gotten close enough. Mental whipsh.

  “This is normal size.”

  “No, it’s not! Normal size is as tall as the fence!”

  The demons looked between each other, shrugged like he was crazy, and moved on. Jes climbed up one tombstone, perched, and Daoka jumped up after her, clearing the twelve-foot jump and nding in a squat.

  “If you fall and spill your guts,” Jes said, “I’m not helping you.”

  Daoka chirped at her lover, stood up tall, and scanned ahead like a meerkat. After a few seconds, she shrugged and clicked down at the rest of them. She didn’t see anything.

  David couldn’t see shit, either, now that he was in the valley. The hint of fog around them didn’t stop their vision of things nearby, but they couldn’t see anymore than half a kilometer out before it grew too dark. Even the burning sky above looked darker. And with the huge tombstones everywhere, vision was definitely going to be a problem, especially with them so exposed.

  Never in his life did he think he would, but damn, he missed the tunnels. Walking through the dark, avoiding bloodgrip vines, hellbeast spiders, possible remnant patches or Cainite ambushes, all of that was horrible, but better than being out in the open, with no roof or walls to hide under or behind. If another group of angels found them now, the fuck were they supposed to do?

  “We stay low,” Caera said, and she thumped Dao and Jes’s tombstone with her huge tail. “Dumbasses.”

  Dao and Jes groaned, but hopped down and fell in line. Like a well-oiled machine, they slipped into their usual positions, Caera at the front with Jes and Dao behind her, David in the middle with the Las around him, and Acelina in the rear. Except the Las lingered on the fence and tombstones, big eyes wide and looking the structures up and down with wonder, at least until Acelina gave them a whip crack with her thin tail.

  “Never seen,” Lasca said, gesturing around at the faux graveyard.

  “Never seen,” the other three said in tandem.

  “Neither have I,” the giant demoness said, and she ushered the little dies forward with her hands and wings. “But I’m not foolish enough to stop and admire. We must reach Timaeus, and he will escort us to Azailia. Then we part ways.”

  “Nooo,” Laria said, and she tugged on Acelina’s hand. “Stay.”

  “I will not stay. I am a zotiva and belong in a spire.”

  “Nooo,” the other Las said, in tandem.

  “Silence. You miscreants will get no more milk from me.”

  David peeked back at the spire mother, but looked away once she realized. Much as Acelina constantly compined about her circumstances, a lot, he knew he’d miss it. Maybe it was because he was so used to being alone, and for the first time in his life — second life — he had people around him, talking to him, penetrating his anti-social bubble he’d been so attached to. He’d gotten kinda used to them, even the spire mother. The sex helped, definitely, but he also kinda liked Acelina, too. Something about her being an annoying, grumpy bitch tickled his brain.

  Daoka clicked a few times, gncing back, too.

  Acelina shook her head. “Do not be ridiculous. You will not miss me.”

  “I won’t,” Jes said, raising a hand, only for Daoka to sp it down.

  Clicking up a storm, Daoka turned around and walked backward long enough to gesture at Acelina and then out at Death’s Grip behind them.

  “I did what I had to do in order to survive,” Acelina said. “Do not read more into than that.”

  Dao didn’t look convinced. Shrugging, she hopped back up to join Jes, and chirped a few whispers in her ear, earning some groans from the gargoyle.

  “I’ll miss you,” David said back to the spire mother. Never in a million years would old David actually say something like that, and he knew it. It sounded alien being honest like that, and forthcoming, and emotionally vulnerable, and every reflex he had told him to not say it. But he did.

  The group went silent.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  ~~Mia~~

  A week of walking across Death’s Grip sucked. She spent most of it on Vin’s back, but holding onto his spikes and making sure her egg stayed in its sling proved tiring after twelve hours. And twelve hours it was, an extreme amount of walking to do in a single day, every day. The demons hated it, but Romakus insisted. They had to get away from Death’s Grip before the bailiff Tacitus found them, and more importantly, before a thousand angels found them.

  Whatever Mia had done to py her inner strings so loudly, it wasn’t working anymore. She could still feel the strings, but pying them was difficult, like someone trying a guitar for the first time. Sore fingers. She tried to py them, but even crafting a simple aura was too hard, and hurt. A tiny sex aura, or a little peace aura, or a minuscule cheerful aura, she couldn’t craft any of them, and every time she tried, hunger shot through her.

  She was starving.

  “Here,” Adron said, and he handed her another heart. “Eat.” He walked beside her and Vin, the group working their way up and around the st mountain between them and the Bck Valley. Vin ignored him.

  “I don’t want another heart,” she said. “I’ve eaten ten in the past week! That’s not normal, right?”

  “It is not,” Kasimiro said, walking on Vin’s other side. Vin ignored him.

  “I don’t want any more bad memories.” What few demons who’d died but hadn’t burned to ash in the firestorm, the demons had fed on, but had also made sure Mia got to eat. Romakus had ensured she’d had her fill. Problem: she couldn’t get full, and the hunger wasn’t going away.

  They’d found no angel corpses, or at least not in good enough condition for a heart to eat. The ones that had been intact had either been barely alive enough to escape, or their bodies had been grabbed by their fleeing kin. Angels didn’t leave a man, or woman, behind.

  “I don’t know what’s up with your appetite,” Adron said, “but I do know you’re still hungry. Eat.”

  Groaning, she scooped up the heart, and gred at the warm, wet thing in her hand. The fact she knew it wasn’t a demon heart, but a human heart, with just a gnce, was seriously fucked up.

  “You found a human nearby?”

  “Hiding in a little cave, yeah.”

  “What was their number?”

  “What?”

  She gred down at the vratorin.

  “What was their number?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention? I think I remember seeing a four?”

  Sighing, she buried her forehead against Vin’s back, and watched the dead flesh sit in her palm. The higher the number, the less guilty she felt about Adron killing the soul, but the worst the new memories would be. The lower the number, the memories might not be so bad, but then she’d feel horrible that someone who was only maybe a 3 or 4 had to die like prey to a predator.

  She bit into the heart. A murderer. A woman who’d poisoned her husband, and judging from the memory, the man did not deserve it. A cssic story, something so cliché it was hard to believe it’d actually happened. But it had.

  Of all the new memories she’d gained, a man going to sleep peacefully and never waking up ranked pretty low on the fucked-up list. Worst of all, the fucked up shit some demons did, the ones who enjoyed torture and rape, their memories weren’t the worst, and the only reason Mia’s brain wasn’t ripped to mulch by the human memories was its strange ability to file the new memories away like books in a library. She only had to see them once, and once she had, they were locked up, and she was happy to leave them locked up.

  “We’re almost there,” Livian said. The four-armed ten-foot demon slowed until she stood near Adron, and she looked at Mia as she gestured forward. “The Bck Valley will be rough going.”

  Groaning, Mia stepped off Vin’s back spikes and walked beside him instead; her weight didn’t mean much to Vin, but still. She patted her egg, checked it for any scratches or dents, and looked back up at the Zel look-alike. That wasn’t really a fair comparison. Livian and Zel were both bolstara tetrads, so they both had four arms, hooves, no tail, a quartet of righteous horns, and the only obvious difference was Livian had short dreadlocks and no piercings. There were more, subtle differences in the shape of their faces just likes humans would have, but they were hard to notice when red eyes, bck horns, and dark red skin were still so novel.

  She definitely like Livian more than Zel, though, for sure.

  “Rough?” Mia asked. “Rougher than Death’s Grip?”

  “It’s ftter,” Adron said. “There’s that.”

  “That vision of another unmarked dying showed a bit of the pce. It looked… gross. It looked like a swamp, and there were trenches with guts in them, and everything looked super dark, and…” Her voice trailed off as they stepped around the base of the st mountain of Death’s Grip.

  Bck Valley. Yeah, it was definitely a bck valley, a dip in the ground that raised only just slightly on the inner and outer edges of Hell; it was so damn ft she could see all the way to both sides. It didn’t look like it’d be hard to get into, just a casual walk down a gentle slope, but the bck fog was so thick, it looked disturbingly close to one of those pictures of underwater kes, brine pools.

  “Your bother is crossing the Grave Valley, right?” Livian asked. “The fog isn’t so bad, there.”

  “You’ve been there?” Mia asked.

  “I have.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Azailia and Zel shared a lot of ideas and views, including letting demons make their own little tribes to fight among themselves. It’s a decent way to weed out the weak. But in the Grave Valley, the groups are rger, maybe a few for each bailiff.”

  “I uh… meant what it looks like.”

  Laughing, she leaned down to her side and grinned at Mia.

  “A lot better than the Bck Valley.”

  Mia frowned back up at her, which just made the huge demoness ugh more. Okay, yes, she was better than Zel, and Julisa too, but she was still a bitch.

  “The Grave Valley,” she said, “is filled with Hell’s monuments to the surface world’s graveyard. Tombstones, mausoleums, dark forests, small churches, and a lingering fog that permeates.”

  “Sounds like… Halloween.”

  “Kinda,” Adron said.

  “David loves Halloween.” Who the fuck was she kidding. She loved Halloween and spooky shit. And candy. And pumpkin spice ttes, but she’d never admit that out loud. “The Bck Valley isn’t like that?”

  Livian shook her head. “Not in the slightest. It is an endless swamp of rotten blood, with remnants churning in the crevices of mud, ripped apart by the shifting mounds so their insides decorate the ndscape. An infinite supply of gore, supplied by your precious humans above.”

  Fuck. Mia hung her head and stroked her egg.

  “I wish we could trade pces with David, then. I’d prefer spooky Halloween stuff.”

  “The Grave Valley has its own dangers,” Livian said. “But at least you have a dry pce to put your feet, there. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to walk endless mud and blood up to your ankles, with hooves?” She stomped a hoof, and the impact sound of the hard rocky earth of Death’s Grip was satisfying. “And unlike you, I do not have a gorgeous ragarin to carry me.”

  Vin snorted, but didn’t so much as gnce Livian’s way. In fact, he hadn’t said much since the incident with the angels, no words to Mia or to Romakus or even to Adron or Kasimiro. He did look Mia’s way whenever she got off his back to walk around, but that was it. Something was on his mind, and of course he wouldn’t talk about it, no point in even asking. And when they all parked for the night, exhausted from walking all day and all twilight hours, no one had the energy to even talk or fuck.

  So far, this journey sucked.

  Sighing, Mia jogged ahead, passed the tiger, some gargoyles, some vrats, a few brutes, Faust and his three incubus buddies, Yulia the bat girl, and Julisa, until she reached Romakus. Before Mia could say anything, her eyes nded on the angel, and the words caught in her throat.

  Yosepha walked beside the huge gorujin tetrad, wearing her white toga potram clothes, no longer stained by copious amounts of blood. Her wings hadn’t regrown yet, and according to her, wouldn’t for some time, small fleshy stubs with ruined tips, like someone hadn’t cut them off so much as ripped them off. Maybe that was what happened, but Yosepha refused to talk about it.

  And the angel still had on the pouch around her neck, like a neckce. Or an anchor, judging from the way the angel frequently fidgeted with it. Someone had given it to her, but of course, she refused to talk about that, too.

  “Romakus,” Mia said.

  Yosepha looked back to her, face stern and hard. The angel always had a stern look, but ever since the incident, Mia had snuck a few peeks of her looking sad, vulnerable, and even scared. No matter how much Mia tried to connect with her the past few days, Yosepha avoided her, refused to make eye contact, refused to talk to her. And for some reason Mia couldn’t even begin to understand, the angel seemed more comfortable being open with Romakus. Every night when the group found a hole to sleep in, Yosepha sat with Romakus, and the demon held her with his wing.

  He protected her.

  “What? Cold feet?” Romakus asked, and he turned enough to look back at her as he walked toward the swamp below. “Bit te now.”

  “No.” She caught up to him and looked past his wing to the enormous valley ahead of them. “I mean, uh… not enough to stop me. But I wanted to say you should slow down.”

  “Slow down? Did you not see the thousand demons behind us?”

  “I did, but we’ve outrun them. They didn’t even spot us.”

  “Tregeeras are skilled trackers,” Yosepha said. “They might still find us. Romakus was right to push the group.”

  Angels were apparently comfortable walking long distances, like humans, but demons definitely weren’t. Even the light ones like Yulia looked worn out, and she spent a lot of her time on her brute friend’s back, like Mia did Vin.

  “I understand that, but if we go into the Bck Valley broken and tired, it could get bad. Right? And it’s a swamp. Anyone with hooves is going to have a hard time.”

  Romakus snorted. “What do you suggest? Snowshoes?”

  “I’ll have you know I’ve worn snowshoes before!”

  “Typical Canadian.”

  “That… is not fair.” Wait. Did she ever tell Romakus she was Canadian? “I didn’t live in Northern Canada, anyway. But my point is, we’re going to have to change gears, and like this, you’re gonna wear everyone out.” If Romakus knew what a snowshoe was, he knew what changing gears meant.

  “She has a point,” Yosepha said. “Tacitus is not likely to follow us into the Bck Valley. Once we’re in the valley, we should slow down.”

  Romakus growled down at Yosepha, and of course she just stared up at him like he was a pushover she could break with one good punch. Maybe she could. Her wings would take a long time to regrow, maybe months, but she’d eaten Galon’s heart. Maybe she could kick Romakus’s ass now?

  “We still pnning to avoid Alessio?” Mia asked.

  “Of course,” Romakus said. “She’ll want to kill you.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  After an annoyed, drawn-out, practically theatrical sigh, Romakus fpped a wing at her.

  “Imagine you hated someone. You really, really wanted to get revenge on them. You wanted to grind them under your heel. You wanted to see their eyes as you break them. And then you found out they’d had an aneurism and died in their sleep, and—”

  This was about Mia taking Alessio’s chance for revenge. Bleh.

  Mia held up a hand. “I’m not capable of that kind of hate.”

  The demon looked down at her, eyebrow braised.

  “Everyone’s capable of hate like that.”

  “Says you.”

  Romakus turned, and the group stopped on a dime. Snarling, pyful demeanor gone, he squatted down in front of Mia and set his gaze on hers from only six inches away.

  “Demons understand hate, Mia. We understand it well. We understand rage and lust, and we understand hate. We’re born understanding it, written into our blood by Lucifer themself. But the hate a human is capable of, the insidious, seething, infectious hate that devours you and destroys you from the inside out? Hate that spreads through your veins and turns your insides into nothing but bile? The quiet, patient hate, willing to wait years before finally getting perfect revenge? That is a level of hate a demon cannot reach, but humans reach all the time.”

  Mia did her best to maintain eye contact, but her mind jumped back to the memory of the hateful wife who poisoned her husband. How long had she pnned that kill? How much had she hated her husband every night for who knows how many months or years before finally settling on murder?

  “I… didn’t say all humans,” she said, “just me. Others, I’m sure, too.”

  “You don’t think if I found your brother and killed him in front of you, in a way so heinous that poets would write pys about me, would make you hate me that much?”

  That was enough to grab her eyes again, and she stared death into him as hard as she could.

  “No. I wish it would. I wish I could hate that much. But I know myself well enough to know that no, I couldn’t hate as much as you think I could.”

  Romakus met her gaze, and the two of them stared at each other for uncomfortably long, until Mia felt Vin’s presence behind her. Not that Vin scared Romakus, but her bodyguard at least gave the Damall leader a reason to not be too mean.

  “At any rate,” Romakus said, getting back up and resuming the march, “Alessio hated Zel, a lot, enough to rival human hate. They’d been at each other’s throats for centuries.”

  “So, you think if Alessio finds out I killed Zel, she won’t be thankful? She’ll be angry?”

  “Of course. You took what she wanted.”

  “Maybe,” Yosepha said. “She could be thankful for the strategic opportunity.”

  Laughing, Romakus patted the angel on the head, earning a snarl from her and a sp to his wrist.

  “Demons don’t fight each other for strategic reasons,” he said. “They fight each other because they want to.”

  “I thought demons wanted to rule Hell?” Mia asked.

  “They do, but because they think it’s the best way to get the best wars. They want to fight. They want conquest. They don’t want peace.”

  “That makes no sense! If a demon eventually takes over all of Hell, they’d…”

  “Be very, very bored.” Romakus ughed, and it almost sounded merry, as he took the first step into the bck fog.

  “Stay back,” Yosepha said, and she shrugged her wing stump in Mia’s direction. They both froze.

  “Yosepha, you’re—”

  “Do not worry for me, Mia. I will be fine.” Shrugging her shoulder as if she hadn’t just tried to push Mia back with her missing wing, Yosepha summoned her armor in a gentle fsh of gold light, and marched ahead. The two holes in the armor’s back where wings should have emerged held only fleshy, ruined nubs.

  Sighing, Mia slowed down until most of the group passed her, and she again walked with Kas, Vin, and Adron. And Livian, apparently.

  “I can see you trying to soothe all who will listen,” Livian said. “Stop.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we are demons, and angels. We are not humans. We aren’t molded by circumstances like humans are. We simply deal with them.”

  “What? That can’t be right. Everyone’s molded by the things that happen to them in their life. Romakus just told me Alessio hated Zel. That has to be because of stuff that happened between them, right?”

  “It’s not the same. Humans are… You evolve and adapt. With demons, and probably angels, we…” She frowned as she looked down and held her chin in one of her four hands. “It’s different. It’s why your gorgeous bodyguard can stay locked in a spire dungeon for centuries and not lose his mind, where a human would. It’s why angels can do their duty for millennia without pause.”

  Mia looked back to Adron, and the vrat nodded. She looked to Kas, and he nodded. She looked up at Vin, and he didn’t nod, but he did his usual quiet rumble that was his yes sound.

  “I guess I’m just not seeing it,” Mia said. “But I’ve only been in Hell a bit over a month, so it’s not like I’m some kinda demon angel expert.” Not that she wouldn’t mind being that, if she had to stay here. Maybe she could continue her career choice as a psychologist, except with demons as patients, or maybe even angels? Assuming she saved the world. Assuming Heaven wouldn’t do everything in its power to kill her, considering what she’d done.

  Livian shrugged. “Either way, I suggest you stop trying to settle problems and make people happy. It will backfire.” With a wicked little grin, she winked at Mia and hopped ahead until she disappeared in the shadow.

  Mia sucked in a breath, and followed, and her bodyguards stuck close.

  The mist was thick enough she hesitated to breathe once it enveloped her, but Hell was Hell, she was a ghost, and it wasn’t actually oxygen she was breathing. Sure enough, she could still breathe, and even see a little further than she figured; not that fifty meters was a far distance, but better than the five feet she’d expected. As, as much as her mind had been worried about the bck fog, it quickly turned into an afterthought.

  The ground turned from dirt to swamp in minutes, and Mia whined and groaned as her gdiator sandals failed to protect her toes from the moisture. Wet. Everything was warm and wet.

  “Vin,” she said, “can I… um…”

  Vin hadn’t been talking to her much tely, but her whiny begging voice — perfectly crafted, of course — was enough to convince him to help her out. With an annoyed rumbled, he grabbed her, set her on his back again, and she groaned some more as she shook one foot out at a time. Her feet were soaked, and she knew it was blood from the texture; super gross she knew that. But what made it a thousand times worse was how bck it was, like it was rotten, and tainted.

  It didn’t smell rotten? Or at least, only a bit, and her nose adjusted quickly.

  “I’d gotten used to fire and va, and rocks,” she said. “A swamp in Hell is just weird.”

  “Wait until you see Angel’s Spine,” Adron said.

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Just the edge, and I couldn’t see much from the fog, but… it was a pretty messed up sight. A giant mountain, except not a mountain. It looked… unnatural.”

  “Focus on what’s in front of us,” Kas said, “not what’s beyond. Alessio controls the Bck Valley with a very… loose grip. The nd is harsh, and the hellbeasts here are deadly. Demons struggle to survive as much as the humans. Be on your guard.”

  Vin grunted agreement. Much as the child of Belial didn’t like Adron, he’d get along with Kas if he gave him a chance. They were both quiet, cranky assholes, just for different reasons.

  A small part of her drifted off into La-La Land as she rested her cheek against Vin’s shoulder, and fantasies crept up into her thoughts. Kas, Adron, and Vin, all fighting for a piece of her, until eventually they agreed to share, and passed her around like a toy. And then they’d get jealous waiting, and all three would get on her at once, each desperate to get their cocks into her all at the same time.

  As much as she wanted to hold on to that fantasy, that small part of her disappeared under the wet bnket smothering her. Everything sucked. Having Kas and Adron back was awesome, and having a group to work with instead of just Vin was great, too. But despite that, everything sucked. Yosepha wouldn’t talk to her, probably because Mia killed hundreds of her kind. Demons had died by the droves, too, and not all demons deserved that fate.

  Even if this journey didn’t suck, it was hard to think about sex right now. She couldn’t even get the faintest hint of the aura going, and that felt… weird. She’d been creating a small aura around her since arriving in Hell, usually barely anything more than a buzz that did nothing, and now she wasn’t emitting even that. Her inner fingers just ached too much, just like her stupid heart.

  She hated poetry, but right now, she could probably write something.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  The Bck Valley only got worse. The fog remained consistent, fifty meters, but worse was they were walking, borderline swimming, in guts. Actual guts. It didn’t seem to get deeper than a few inches, maybe half a foot in certain pces, but that was enough that their walk slowed even more. Not just guts, either, but other organs, too. More than a few times, an eyeball sat in the bck mess, along with other organs she couldn’t identify at a gnce. And in the mess ran streaks of red, like little red rivers on bck sand. Except it wasn’t bck sand, but more flesh, tainted by… by the nd?

  There were mounds. Gross, bloody, gory mounds, things that stuck up out of the ground twenty or thirty feet, were ft on top, and were covered in rge, sharp bones that stuck out of them. And because that wasn’t bad enough, the mounds twisted, some sections turning left and others turning right, so the white bone spikes sticking out of the fleshy mess ripped up the hundreds of remnants growing from its surface. A meat grinder.

  Some bone spikes met each other where they rotated around, and a remnant between them was crushed and ripped apart. For a small second, the surface of the mound beneath all the twisting remnants was visible, exposing alien bone, white but dripping with fresh red blood, only to mix with bck blood that oozed from the crack’s between the bones.

  The only reason she could even see the gross dispy of alien, fleshy destruction, was drifting blue fires. The burning sky was all but invisible behind the bck fog, only enough light to show the silhouettes of distant mounds in the swamp, but every so often, a blue light danced in the distance. From so far and in the fog, it looked like giant blue fireflies that moved little, and blinked out of existence ten or twenty seconds ter.

  Those were gas pockets, bursting up from the gore they walked on, and something lit them. Why they burned blue, no idea, and she doubted the demons knew, either. But randomly, a blue fire erupted from the gore, burned a few feet high, sted long enough they could see around the endless swamp, and disappeared. Thankfully, it was a recurring thing, blue fmes lighting the way. Not so thankfully, they were random, and Kas snarled as one erupted under his tail.

  This pce was a thousand times worse than Death’s Grip.

  “You okay, Kas?” Mia asked.

  He snarled and clicked once, and kept his eyeless gaze pointed down from then on.

  “How does anyone know where the fuck to go around here?” She swung her free arm out at the endless bck. “Where are we even going?”

  With a slow arm, Vin pointed down at a trench nearby, the biggest one.

  “Romakus is following the main trench. It will take us to the rgest trench in the valley. We orient from there.”

  Getting information from Vin was always difficult, but every so often, he dared to grace them with his infinite wisdom. Vinicius had been all around Hell, and probably knew it even better than Romakus. And of course, because demons were assholes, they hadn’t bothered to grace Mia with much information before arriving. That was how they did things, on the fly, no preparing, no pnning.

  Zel had been unique in that regard. And Romakus was unique. What would Alessio be like? Better to not find out.

  “Last I made it through this damn pce,” Adron said, “Vicente was in charge of the Trench.” The way he said ‘Trench’ sealed it as a pce, the pce the little trench led to. “A major asshole of a korgejin.”

  Korgejin. A tetrad, ten feet tall, big horns, hooves, no tail, and two giant wings. And the two Mia had met, Zel’s right hands, had been mean. Big, big meanies.

  “I’ve met him,” Kas said. “If he still runs the Trench, he will be a problem.”

  “Maybe Romakus pns to go around?” Mia asked.

  “We can’t,” Adron said. “The Trench is how we navigate the Bck Valley. The biggest part is mostly in the center, with four branches that run to each edge, with connecting veins like the one we’re following. Romakus will keep the trench in view and follow it as best he can.”

  “Where’s the spire?”

  “Closer to the inner edge. We should be able to avoid it, as long as we, you know, don’t get caught crossing the Trench.”

  She frowned. “Let me guess. There are other trenches, ones we could follow that lead nowhere and could get us all turned around.”

  “Yeap.”

  “So… if we lose sight of the trench… Trench’s trench… we can get lost? We can’t see anything out here! Can the tregeera even smell anything?”

  “Doubtful,” Kas said. “Too wet. So, let’s not get lost.”

  “Don’t get lost… Right, okay. Sure. We can do that, right? How’d you get through this pce when you came through, Vin?”

  “I followed the trench.” And from the calm, deep way he said it, the ‘and killed everyone in my way’ was implied.

  Groaning, Mia rested her forehead against Vin’s shoulder, squeezed one of his back spikes, and stroked her egg with her other hand. It shifted gently in her grip, and she smiled down at it in the gentle fshes of blue firelight. It was still alive and well, and she stroked it like she would a dog’s back. Maybe if she treated the egg nicely, the cannam it’d hatch would be a nice puppers? Probably not, but still, she wasn’t going to abandon the egg just because all other cannam were mean. Hell had birthed it specifically for her, or it’d seemed like it, and that was reason enough to keep it.

  Hell. Was it Hell that’d listened to her, danced for her, mirrored her song, and pyed it a thousand times louder than she could have? Was it Hell who still pyed the song Mia had started, and maintained that firestorm she’d left behind? Was it Hell who… who made Mia feel like she’d come home when she reached out to it?

  Mia looked down at the bck gore underneath Vin’s feet, and reached out with her mind. What the fuck ‘reaching out with her mind’ even meant, she didn’t know, but she could, like someone had given her a new sense she just spontaneously knew how to use. She had special hidden fingers inside her that could py invisible strings, so a new sixth sense seemed pretty reasonable.

  She could feel the Bck Valley, feel its churning bones and millions of remnants, feel its… its… something. Death’s Grip had felt barren and dead by comparison. Or maybe she was just getting better at using her special abilities, whatever the fuck they were. Whatever the reason, the Bck Valley felt more alive, and not in a good way. The deeper they moved into it, the more the creepy image of maggots festering in a wound filled her mind, as if that was what the Bck Valley actually was. A maggot-infested wound, filled with rotting flesh and pus.

  “Any other pces I should know about?” she asked.

  Vin said nothing. Asshole. At least Adron was willing to talk.

  “There’s also the Mound and the Maze,” Adron said. “The Mound is… like this.” He gestured to one of the thirty-foot mounds sticking out of the swamp, yet another mass covered in remnants, with white spiky bones sticking out of twisting, rotating yers underneath that churned through the damned like making hamburger. She would have puked for the mental image, if she could. “Except much bigger, and demons frequent it constantly since the portal drops souls off their all the time.”

  “And the Maze?”

  “A maze,” Kas said.

  Mia almost ughed. Was that a joke? She scanned Kas’s face, but found no smile.

  “Think hedge maze,” Adron said, “except the walls are made of more of this.” He again gestured to the mound as they walked past.

  “This pce sucks.”

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  The demons took off and disappeared into the bck fog, leaving Mia behind with Vin, Kas, Adron, and Julisa; she’d insisted, taking Livian’s pce. Some blue fire had shown movement in the distance, probably humans, and the demons were hungry. Time to hunt, but they didn’t trust Mia’s group yet. Getting people to trust strangers was hard enough, but demons? There was a reason you didn’t throw house cats together quickly. It’d be awhile before the Damall gave Mia, Vin, Kas, or Adron any trust.

  “Where are we gonna sleep?” Mia asked.

  “Trench,” Vinicius said.

  “But the trench is full of… guts.”

  “We’ll find a hole,” Adron said. “There are gaps in the mess. You just have to know where to look.”

  “And… you know?”

  “Nope. I’ve only been through the Bck Valley once, and every night was a giant pain. I spent a lot of nights with no sleep, or sleeping in the swamp. I only found a sleeping hole once.”

  “There are holes in the trench,” Vin said. “We’ll find one.”

  Julisa chuckled as she came up to Vin, and gently poked his side with her tail.

  “Of course the child of Belial knows every province well.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Oh don’t be so humble, ragarin. You’ve been around all of Hell several times in your long life, haven’t you?”

  Vin snorted, but didn’t push Julisa away. With a slow rumble, he took some steps toward one of the mounds, folded his four arms across his chest, and just… watched the turning bdes rip apart remnants. His way of passing the time.

  Mia took a single peek, and that was more than she should have. From this close, she got to see how the remnants were half torn apart, half cut apart, and their guts literally fell from their soft bodies. More than a few remnants didn’t die instantly.

  “Vin,” Mia said, “can you not—”

  Her big, bad, dumb bodyguard snorted, and did not move. Something had officially crawled up his ass and died.

  Gagging, Mia hopped off Vin’s back and moved over to Kas.

  “For the love of god, let me up let me up let me up!”

  Kas snorted at her, the same sort of big, demony noise Vin made, but he lowered his head enough she climbed up onto his back. Kas may not have been a twelve-foot child of the Old Ones, but he was still a giant nine-foot demon, easily big enough to carry her. And even better, he liked walking on all fours, or super slouched forward when he went on two. Riding him was like riding a big horse or something, covered in big spikes.

  She kicked out her feet, and outright squealed as a bit of something juicy got stuck between her toes. She kicked harder.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Julisa said.

  “You’ve been across the Bck Valley, too?”

  “Not across it, but in it. I’ve helped Alessio in the past, when we both wanted Zel dead.” Before Mia could ask, she shrugged and gestured back the way they came. “I fought Vin in the Grave Valley, where I’m from.” And again, before Mia could ask, Julisa grinned down at Kas and Adron. “It was centuries ago, little soul. I do not remember the details, just the feel of your bodyguard’s delicious hands wrapped around my throat.”

  Adron raised a brow as he looked between the two huge demons. But with infinite wisdom, he didn’t ask.

  “I don’t know you two,” Julisa said, upper arms still on her armored chest, two lower pointing out at Kas and Adron. “Expin yourselves to me.”

  “Really?” Mia asked. “We’ve all sat down and introduced ourselves already.”

  “Introductions are hardly enough for me to trust them. There’s a reason I’m here, and not out hunting with Romakus and the others.”

  Adron shrugged. “Just a vrat who tries to keep himself alive. I worked for Zel for many years.” Conveniently, he didn’t say ‘spy’, which, as far as Mia could tell, was what he’d been, a spy for Zel pretending to work for Diogo. Because of course Zel hadn’t trusted her bailiffs enough to not plot her downfall, even though Diogo seemed devoted. Paranoia, or prudence?

  Kas clicked once. “One of Zel’s enforcers.”

  “Two who worked for Zel, and two who befriended the unmarked.” Julisa raised a brow as she looked between the two of them. “And two who have fucked her. Am I right?”

  Adron, the past Adron, would have grinned, or chuckled. But Adron hadn’t been behaving the same way he did when Mia met him, and Mia was struggling to put a fine point on it. This new Adron just shrugged again.

  “Why do you care?”

  “Oh, no reason.” With an insidious little smirk, Julisa eyed Mia for a half second before she turned and joined Vin.

  Ugh, was this some sort of cat fight thing? Fighting each other for a man? Yeah, fuck that.

  Mia leaned down over Kas and set her cheek on the top of his head, beside some of his spikes. A big, ft shark head with no eyes, with two big horns sticking out of its side and pointing forward. Kinda comfy.

  “Let’s look around,” Adron said. “We got the mound for a marker. Just keep it in sight and let’s scout the area. We might find some hiding food.”

  Kas clicked, nodded, and the three of them headed off. Mia gnced back, and sure enough, Vin stayed with Julisa, the two of them watching the big mound grind up fresh remnants like it was a campfire and they were roasting marshmallows.

  Vin wasn’t behaving like himself either, but he had zero interest in talking to Mia about anything, so fuck him. Adron, and even Kas, were more talkative.

  “Now that we’ve got a little distance… You actually fucked Vin?” Adron asked, voice low, brow raised. He looked positively… incredulous.

  “That’s… not fair. You know there’s something weird about me!” Yelling without yelling was difficult, but she managed. “I had all the Damall fucking each other, with this aura.”

  Adron’s smile, his old smile returned. For a minute, anyway.

  “I’m not judging. Just surprised he could even do it. Tetrads have be to gentle with humans or they’ll kill them just from the size difference.”

  “I’m… not human.” She sat up straight and stroked her egg. “No point denying that, now. Auras, reading the ancient nguage, angel runes, controlling Hell, and, uh… a body that can… handle quite a bit.”

  Adron held up a hand. “And an endless appetite. You’re quite the pig.”

  She gred death straight into the vrat’s soul. Or, sin. Whatever. But as, for all her crazy powers, she couldn’t incinerate the damn man on the spot like he deserved.

  “I don’t know why any of that is happening. All I know is, my body isn’t normal, and Vin and I, our retionship got a little… physical.” She almost said ‘just physical’, as if to defend herself. She didn’t need to defend herself, not to this slut!

  “And Romakus,” Adron said, “we trust him?”

  It was their first time actually getting to talk about the Damall since they’d gotten together. A perfect time to actually do a little updating.

  “Romakus is strange,” Kas said, “and deadly.”

  “How do you know him?” Mia asked.

  “Zel had me scouting nearby mountains because she thought the Damall were around. They were. Romakus and I fought.”

  Mia threw up her hands.

  “Is that how every demon gets to know each other? Violence? Never mind. Romakus seems kinda crazy and weird, but I trust Yosepha, and Yosepha trusts Romakus.”

  Adron and Kas shared a look.

  “You trust the angel that much?” Adron asked.

  “Of course. You don’t trust angels?”

  “I mean, I’ve never really had to deal with one. Angels don’t exactly make a habit of coming down to Hell, and when they do, it’s usually to kill a bunch of us. Any smart demon avoids them.”

  “Do not trust angels,” Kas said. “Or did you not see them strike down their own?”

  “Demons kill each other every day! For a snack!”

  “Yeah,” Adron said, “but angels are angels. They don’t kill each other, Mia. Not ever.”

  “I’ve talked to Yosepha, a lot, and—”

  “Lately?”

  “Not… tely.”

  Silence fell on them, and Mia stared down at the top of Kas’s head. Yosepha lying, or betraying, or deceiving or maniputing or anything, just seemed impossible. Completely impossible.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mia said. “I need to get to False Gate, and the Damall seem like the best bet. Them, and keeping Vin as a bodyguard. They—”

  Kas and Adron both snapped their heads to the side, nearly throwing Mia off the big sarkarin’s back, but she held on and looked where they were looking. Nothing. She opened her mouth but shut it before she made any noise. A month in Hell had given her the reflex to learn when to be silent.

  Noise. Squish?

  The Bck Valley was mostly quiet, each remnant that spawned dying almost immediately to the churning bone spikes, or drowning in the swamp before they could make much noise. And the ones that didn’t die instantly, their noises blended into the background; getting used to Hell’s endless sounds of torture was fucked up, but it was happening, even if Mia didn’t want it to. The small bursts of blue fmes were almost silent, too.

  But there was noise. Squish. Squish. Something walked in the bck swamp, something slow, something heavy. It came closer, and the three of them stared into the fog, looking for any signs of movement. Nothing.

  Something. A shift in the bck gore of the swamp, the tainted entrails spreading around impact. A footprint?

  Another footprint, and another, each getting closer. But, nothing was making them. Literally, nothing. Mia, Kas, and Adron all stared, but no one made a sound as yet another footprint sunk into the muck. Massive footprints, bigger than Kas’s, Romakus’s, or even Vin’s. Much bigger than Vin’s.

  Kas turned and sprinted for the tetrad and ragarin, and Mia squeaked, one hand clutching her egg, the other grabbing one of his back spikes. Adron followed without a sound, save for the churning guts under his talons. They weren’t as fast as they should have been, each step sinking them deep into the gore like horrible mud, and the thing following them wasn’t slowed by the swamp at all.

  Something was following them. Something was following them, and each step it took shook the ground. The bck gore underneath its feet rippled ahead of it, each thundering step of the invisible creature growing heavier and heavier until the ground rumbled. An earthquake? The gore bubbled with each impact, until it almost boiled.

  “What’s going on!?” Julisa yelled.

  “I don’t know! Vin!?”

  “I don’t know,” the biggest, oldest, strongest demon alive said.

  The footsteps followed, and the demons ran, straight back toward Death’s Grip.

  “Back to the trench!” Adron yelled. “Go!”

  On a dime, the group turned and ran to the trench. If they fell in, a five-foot drop awaited them into a ten-foot-wide trench flooded with guts. Literally flooded, guts constantly flowing into it. There was probably a one, two, maybe three foot deep yer of bck gore at the bottom of the trench. Maybe more. Mia didn’t want to find out.

  But it was their only guide in the Bck Valley, and if they didn’t follow it, they’d be lost.

  “What do we do!?” Mia screamed. “What—”

  “I don’t know!” Adron yelled back. “Something hidden is chasing us!”

  “Hidden!? It’s invisible!” Mia and Julisa said, at the same time. A moment worthy of notice, if not for the sheer panic in their voices.

  “There is no invisible… anything, in Hell,” Vin said, leading the pack. “Run!”

  Run. The child of Belial said run. Ice ran down Mia’s spine, and she looked behind her as she clutched Kas’s back spikes. Or at least, she had been clutching his spikes. With a seamless scooping motion, Vin grabbed her and set her on his back. She didn’t protest, and neither did Kas. She grabbed his spikes and stood on them, her chest to his back and head peeking over his shoulder. The egg? Thank god, still in the sling.

  She looked back, and her heart sank into her stomach. It was chasing them, each step shaking the ground more and more. Without consistent light, it was hard to see the shape of the footsteps, but every so often a blue fme illuminated everything nearby, and the footprints came into view. The shapes were never the same. One looked like a T-Rex, with three long toes and cws. The next had two toes. The next had four. They ran in darkness for a while longer, and the next burst of light showed a footprint with no toes at all.

  Something shimmered, a flicker of shape in the fog. An invisible body pushing the fog aside, like a gust of wind in mist. But the longer she stared, the more a shape came into view. On the edge of the bckness, she could see it.

  It had skin. It had limbs. A blurry mess of shapes coalesced into something gargantuan, but that was all her brain could wrap around. The color was dark, but shifted from navy to gray to dark green, and the colors ran slowly around the limbs like dripping wet paint that defied gravity. Maybe it was a chameleon, changing its color to blend in?

  No. Chameleons didn’t grow and lose limbs, but whatever this thing was, it was doing exactly that. Enormous arms, each the size of Vinicius, erupted from something that must have been a torso, before they fell off, breaking away and dispersing into the bck fog, never hitting the ground. Pieces of it appeared before disappearing again, legs broke away and reformed, shaped differently every time.

  It had to be forty feet tall, and proportional, like some sort of mini Godzil chasing them. At some points it even looked kinda like Godzil, tail included, but then the tail broke away, and the creature stood more upright.

  The next footprint looked way too human, and so did the next one, and the next one. Mia’s eyes drifted higher up the creature’s shape, more and more of it coming into view as it chased them, and she screamed. It looked human. Almost. It didn’t run at them so much as lean forward and jog after them, as if its upper half was too heavy, but it was proportionally human. Thick arms, thick legs, thick torso, a blocky body with arms hanging underneath its leaning-forward chest, but human.

  It had eyes. Two eyes stared down at her from the bck fog above, right where two human eyes would have been, but they shined with the universe, endless obsidian sparkling with stars hidden in their depths. She stared up at them and tried to scream again, but her throat refused to work. Thoughts melted away, repced with only cold nothingness. Her grip on Vin’s spikes loosened, and only some vestigial wisp of instinct allowed her to keep holding on.

  There was no song in those eyes. No music. No vibration. No life. No existence.

  It was the same thing she’d seen at the bottom of that canyon that’d ripped open under the Death’s Grip spire. Endless bck. A swirling, infinite whirlpool of endless bck, moving, alive but not alive. And it was looking directly at her. Not Julisa, or Vinicius, or Kasimiro or Adron. It was looking directly at her.

  It had tentacles hanging from where a jaw and mouth should have been.

  Adron looked back, and sucked in another breath between his pants.

  “What is that!?” His voice and panic shot through Mia’s brain, and awareness snapped through her limbs hard enough she almost fell.

  “You can see it, too?”

  “Yes, I can see it! What the fuck happened? What is that and why does it look like that!?”

  “I don’t fucking know!”

  Pieces of the monster continued to fade in and out of existence, and the shape still wasn’t completely solid, but new mutations grew less and less extreme. It grew cws, and its human-like feet grew cws, too, but the basic shape remained. The long tentacles of its mouth reached halfway down its torso, and they wriggled, like an octopus. Features on the skin, like spikes, were all a blur and ever shifting. But the eyes remained completely consistent, as if the monster had found the perfect match for whatever it was trying… to become.

  It matched their speed, but each swing of its massive legs was slow, and thunderous. The swamp vibrated with each step, and the bck gore around Vin’s feet spshed up to his knees as the strange monster shook the nd.

  It reached down from high above, and Mia ducked her head close to Vin’s shoulder as the thing’s fingers came for her.

  Adron jumped high, and mid-air brought out his sword and swung it down. It went through the monster’s huge fingers, straight through, and the alien creature yanked its hand back. It stared at its fingers, and three of them fell from its hand. Except they didn’t. The three fingers remained, but also fell. They hit the swamp with a spsh, but disappeared a moment ter, leaving empty impact holes in the bck gore. The fingers were still on the creature’s hand, but they flickered in and out of existence.

  It swung its other hand down, and instead of going for Mia, brought its palm down onto Adron. Adron dodged half of it, but his right side got caught under the fingers, and he spun out of control. Sword still in hand, he nded on his back, and scampered to get to his feet, but the monster caught up with him.

  Kas spun around and jumped on the creature’s leg. He sunk his cws into it, and the creature’s leg turned invisible a moment ter, leaving Kas to hang on nothing but empty air for a split moment before falling. The leg reformed, but flickered in and out, and the giant monster fell to a knee, only to swing his hand out and sm it into Kas’s body, sending the shark demon flying. He spttered in the bck mud, got up, but fell to a knee the moment he took a step forward. Hurt.

  “Vin, help them!”

  Vin said nothing, charging ahead away from Adron, Kas, and the semi-invisible semi-corporeal monster out of Mia’s nightmares.

  “Vin!”

  Still nothing. Not even Julisa said anything.

  “Vin, if you do not go back and help them, I will turn this leash on and leave it on! Go!”

  Vin growled, but sure enough he turned around, sinking his talons deep into the muck and spinning around so momentum nearly threw Mia off. He did that on purpose, the asshole.

  “Vinicius!” Julisa yelled. Well, fuck her, she could go run off and die for all Mia cared, right now.

  Once Vinicius got close to the monster, Mia hopped off. Spt, knees and hands in the bck gore, and nearly her face, too. Free of his passenger, Vinicius leapt over Adron, onto the giant creature’s arm, and got all four sets of cws into it, teeth included.

  His spikes glowed, lines of amber lighting up along the base of each tail, back, spine, and head spike, until they almost looked like they were on fire.

  “Vin!” Mia yelled. “Be careful!”

  Vin roared into the creature’s arm, and with his teeth still sunk into its alien flesh, he unleashed hellfire. Fmes poured from his mouth straight onto the creature, flowing over it in that special way only fire with a purpose could. It came out with such force, none of it singed Vin, gushing over the creature and into the bck fog beyond.

  The creature screamed. It aimed its alien face upward, and screamed, mouth tentacles filing. The scream made no sound, but it ripped through Mia’s bones. Her ears didn’t notice it at all, but her stomach boiled. It was not a sound, but a ck of sound in a way that didn’t fit. It was like getting her brains sucked out through her ears by the vacuum of space, times a thousand.

  Mia screamed, but no one heard her. She might as well have screamed into a bck hole. It was nothing. It was less than nothing. And the vibrating strings that flowed through the world didn’t just stop, they disappeared. For one single second, the strings were gone, and only a void was left behind.

  The strings sprang back into existence, and a new roar filled the dead air. Vin’s roar, still ripping into the alien creature. It swung its arm out, but Vin held on, unleashing more fme until it lit up the fog, repcing the fire sky that couldn’t penetrate the Bck Valley. More and more fme, until the fire tched onto the monster. The creature caught the fme, and Vin finally let go.

  The sound of his nding in the muck was almost comical, but again it disappeared under the void shriek of the monster as hellfire took its body. It raised its arms as the fmes mixed with flecks of va, spread along its body, and drowned it. It backed away, arms filing in that slow way giant creatures moved, and chunks of heavy fme fell into the muck. Its limbs changed shape and lost color, mutating as much as losing physicality to the point the hellfire fell through the creature and burned on the bck gore underneath it.

  It went poof. Hellfire burned on nothing but air and fell onto the swamp, heavier than it should have been. Maybe burning on the creature’s blood? Mia had seen no blood, but in the bck fog and amber explosion of hellfire, the whole scene looked like a World War II movie at night. She hadn’t seen shit.

  She ran to them, ignoring the squish of her sandals in the muck. Okay, not completely ignoring, but enough she got some speed and ran to Adron.

  “Adron!”

  “I’m fine.” He sat up, groaning and shaking his shoulder. “Nearly broke my arm.”

  “Kas!” She shoved off Adron’s good shoulder and ran in Kas’s direction. He was standing again, in his usual leaning-forward kinda-squatting way, and she reached up and grabbed his jaw. “You okay?”

  He clicked once. Good enough. She ran back, toward Vin this time, waving her arms.

  “You did it! You killed it!”

  “I killed nothing,” Vin said, snarling as he got up. He’d nded hard, and the spsh of muck had soaked him. Something bck, long, and rope-like rolled off his arm.

  “Are… you sure? Because, I mean, it’s gone.” She gestured around to the hellfire that still burned. Normal fire would have been put out instantly by the wet mess of the swamp, but hellfire was special. It burned in a way nothing else did. It’d die eventually, but for now, it provided enough light for everyone to stand around and see… nothing. Absolutely nothing. The creature was gone. Only its footprints remained.

  “It’s gone,” he said. “But I know death. I didn’t kill it.”

  “It?” Julisa asked, finally joining them, four bck swords in her hands. “What even was it? It was invisible at first, and then it gained a shape.”

  “I’d hoped that was a trick of the fog,” Adron said, finally getting up. Groaning, he shook his hurt shoulder, used his good arm to get his sword back on its hook behind him, and wiped off as much gook off as he could. “It was sort of… coming in and out of existence, wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” Kas said. “And its flesh was… smooth.”

  Mia raised a brow. “Smooth?” Julisa said it too, in tandem. Annoying.

  “Smooth,” Vinicius said. “Like…”

  “Like it was too simple,” Kas said. “Creatures have… texture, and flesh, and blood and bone. It didn’t feel like it had anything like that.”

  “A pstic monster?”

  Vin and Kas both shook their heads. They weren’t saying no, they just didn’t know what pstic felt like.

  Sighing, Mia walked beside Kas and checked out his leg. It didn’t look broken, but even if it was sprained, it wasn’t like Kas would say so.

  “What was with that scream it made?” Julisa asked. “I didn’t hear it. I felt it.”

  “You felt it, too?” The crazy stuff wasn’t just happening to Mia, this time. “I felt it, too, but really… really felt it. The scream, it… cut me off from the strings.”

  All four demons went silent. They weren’t aware of the strings, didn’t feel them, and couldn’t py them. Demons and their sins were more like someone wielding a literal weapon at a music concert, while wearing earplugs. But they knew about Mia’s strings, and knew she’d pyed them to stop the angels.

  “I feel fine now,” Mia said, “but for a second there, it was… it was so weird. It…” Stepping closer to the strands of burning fire sitting on the bck swamp, she held up a hand and scanned for any signs of the monster. Not a single one. “When I looked into its eyes, it… it looked right back at me, and… and it was like…” Just like st time, ice ran down her spine, and she hugged herself. “It was like when that canyon opened up underneath the spire. I looked down into it, and… and… the thing down there, in the bck? It looked back up at me, and… and just now, it felt the same way.”

  More silence. The demons looked between each other, but Julisa looked confused, while the others looked heavy with realization, even eyeless Kas.

  “So this has to do with whatever caused the canyon to tear open?” Julisa asked. “I have not seen the canyon from close, but I have heard other demons speak of the living bckness underneath Hell. You’re telling me that monster”—she gestured to where the giant creature had been—“came from there?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe?” Mia spun around and looked in all directions. “I don’t see another unmarked. I don’t feel any of those earthqu—hellquakes that tore everything up when David and I were close. This thing just showed up, no announcement, nothing.”

  “And it began to change,” Julisa said, snarling as she hooked her swords along her back. “It adopted a form?”

  “I guess. I—Can we get moving? If Vin’s right and that thing’s not actually dead, I don’t want to be here.”

  The tetrad shrugged. “He coated it in hellfire. Nothing survives hellfire. Not demon. Not angel.”

  They went silent again and looked to Vinicius, but in predictable fashion, the child of Belial said nothing. He walked close and low enough for Mia to grab some of his spikes, and she settled on his back again as the group returned to trekking across the swamp.

  “I know you’ll hate me for this, Vin,” Mia said, putting her chin on his shoulder. “But thank you.”

  “You threatened me.”

  “And you know that I know that you’d rather just take the pain than do what I want.” She thumped his shoulder. “This leash can stop you in your tracks, but it can’t make you do anything you don’t want to. Stubborn asshole.” And of course, calling him a stubborn asshole was the perfect compliment, something he’d appreciate more than saying thank you. But it was important she thank him, anyway.

  “The shape,” Adron said, walking beside them. “I’ve seen that shape before. I mean, kinda? In the scrying pool.”

  “I have, too,” Mia said. “It’s… I mean, it’s the sort of shape you see on the surface all the time. In real stuff, you see it on ocean creatures. Squids, octopuses, things like that, just… not on humanoid bodies. But, in fiction… you see it… on…”

  There was no way. Sure, angels and demons seemed to have affected the surface world and their representation of stuff, or maybe it was vice versa, and Hell and Heaven were evolving to reflect the surface’s impressions of them. Maybe both. But that thing had changed into such a specific shape, there was no way it wasn’t connected to the surface, and how the surface viewed things. Or maybe to how Mia did?

  A shrill, silent scream hit them all, and they froze. Slowly, they turned and looked into the bck fog behind them.

  “Is it back?” Adron asked. Silent, alien noises erupted from the depth of bckness beyond, and it drowned Adron’s voice underneath a bnket of suffocation.

  No one moved. No one breathed. Everyone stared down at the muck, waiting for another footprint to appear.

  A hundred footprints appeared. Small things, no bigger than Adron’s, but a hundred of them tore up the muck, and came for them like a pack of running dogs.

  In the single moment it took the group to realize what was happening, the creatures chasing them gained bodies. More colors shifted across their skin, dark navy, dark green, shimmering onyx. Limbs came into view, each creature running on all fours, bulky bodies with thick arms and legs. No tail. Two bck, deep, eternal eyes.

  Each of the creatures looked as rge as a vrat, with a human-ish shape, but just like the first creature, nothing looked solid. And unlike the first creature, they ran on all fours, bodies warped to make their human forms fit into the unnatural position. The size of their limbs changed. Their cws changed. The amount of fingers on their hands changed. Their bones changed.

  And they screamed, each unleashing a muted death shriek that drowned everything.