And Then There Were Dragons

by Alcy Leyva

  “Don’t remember asking for help,” I snapped, though I secretly enjoyed the thought of having the psychopath in my corner for once. This was a numbers game.

  The two groups stared at each other for a few seconds.

  With lightning-fast hands, the cloaked figure reached out and grabbed me by the neck. Before I could break the hold, it shoved me down and swung the massive hammer past my head. Its momentum swung into an upturn, and with a deadly radial spin, crashed against the masked men at its back. Their bodies burst like water balloons on contact, and in one slick movement the hooded figure jackknifed the hammer at Mason’s head, hooked both Palls and me by the arms, and dashed down the hall with us in tow like a bolt of lightning carrying a couple of wayward comets.

  The hallway was a blur as we moved at such a speed that our legs dangled in the wind like kite tails. Suddenly, we stopped and I heard the ding and rusted metal slide of an elevator door. The figure tossed us inside, and quickly joined us, shutting the gate behind it.

  Looking through the gate, I watched as the hallway started to warp and buckle. The lights exploded, the walls crumbled, and screams spilled from every room and corner. With his suit torn, his white man-bun blowing in the wind, and a fancy new pair of black wings sprouting from his back, Mason Scarborough was flying towards us with pure madness in his eyes.

  With perfect timing, the elevator cleared the floor before he arrived, ending the sound of my name being screamed from his lips with a nice muting pop.

  Palls and I, having both managed to scramble to our feet, drew backward to the walls of the elevator as the hooded figure turned and lowered its hood. Blonde hair spilled out and the figure leaned back so that her head thumped against the wall.

  “Why is it so hard to keep a job?” she asked, and I assumed it was rhetorical. The woman was out of breath and sweating. Rolling her face to the side so she could see us clearly, she shook her head and winked at me. “Take it easy there, gorgeous. I won’t bite.”

  It took a blink, but then I recognized her. It was a little bit of a delayed reaction, but the low lighting (not to mention the crazed maniac we had just escaped) had rattled my memory loose. The moment her face finally registered on my timeline, I couldn’t help but yell at her.

  “Cain! What are you doing here?”

  “You know each other?” Palls asked.

  “Hi, Grey.” Cain—the woman I knew as a former angel of death—slid to the ground in a deep, full body exhale. “Small afterlife, eh?”

  Suddenly, the consequence of our escape hit me. “Wait! Petty! We left Petty down there.” I looked for a switch to stop the doors, but there wasn’t one. “We need to go back down.” I swiveled to Palls. He bowed his head as if to ward off the shout that was coming next, but I delivered it anyway. It was deafening in the small space. “I am not leaving without my sister! You said she was down there and I am not leaving her behind!”

  “Your cute sister isn’t down there,” Cain butted in. She had wrestled her way out of the dark robe and slammed it into the ground with disgust. Without the hooded ensemble, she looked more or less like she had when I last seen her: dressed simply in a black t-shirt and black jeans that were ripped at the knees. “She was, but she’s not anymore.”

  “Where did she go?” Palls stole my line.

  “Summoned up to Limbo.”

  “Who called?”

  “Dunno,” Cain finished, letting the rest of her hair down and combing it through with her fingers. “Of course, Mason was pissssssed,” she said, turning the last word up several thousand octaves with its own crescendo. She smiled triumphantly, as if this little performance brought her some sliver of joy.

  “All right! That’s it!” I had had enough. I stood there seething. Gaffrey Palls and Cain the ex-god of death/ex-torturer in hell both seemed shocked I’d bulldozed my way back into the conversation, which had originally been mine. “I’m tired of people talking around me. I’m tired of not knowing what the fuck is going on. I’m tired of people making plans about me as if this isn’t impacting my life or afterlife or whatever. I want to know what’s going on and I want to know now!”

  All I got back was silence. The elevator was rising slowly, but there was no humming mechanism or dull engine to narrate our movement. We were just quietly skimming upward through a dark shaft blanketed in shadows. It dawned on me that the space between the floors of the hotel seemed ages apart. What elevator takes this long just to go up one level?

  “It’s not easy to explain,” Palls offered, but I quickly shut that shit down.

  “Try me.”

  Cain laughed. “You’re still so adorable, Grey. Can’t say I approve of the company you’re currently keeping, but who am I to judge?” She rolled onto her knees and stood to her feet, but instead of answering me, she looked straight up. “All right. I’m down to talk and tell you everything I know—just not now. We’re almost at the Second Circle. I’d think twice about yapping too loud when we get there.”

  The elevator took a bump and shook. It seemed we were arriving at our destination.

  Palls sighed. He crossed his arms over his thick chest and closed his eyes as if in meditation. “Can she borrow that robe?” he asked, referring to Cain’s old employee uniform.

  Cain shrugged and handed it to me.

  I took the garb from her, mouthed a thank you since it was probably the nice thing to do, and promptly threw the thing in Palls’ face. “Why do I have to put this on?”

  Palls tapped each of his fat fingers on his arm as the robe slipped off his face and returned to its former position on the floor. “You said you want answers, but you also heard your…friend. We need to stay out of people’s eyeballs, especially on this next level. Plus, this bit can be a lot to take in when it’s your first time.”

  I clapped my hands together and shouted. “O-kay. Let’s get something straight. Before I got down here, I was doing just fine. Sure, things got a little hairy, but I went up against a deranged angel and five demons. Five! And, let’s not forget, I saved the world.”

  “Weren’t you the reason it was ending in the first place?” Cain interjected.

  I nodded slowly. “All right. Okay. If you want to be a Negative Nancy about it, sure. I’m personally more of a ‘world half-saved’ person, but whatever. Big picture: I went up against the forces of evil and I won.”

  “You died,” Palls chimed in.

  “A technicality. Look, my point is: this isn’t my first fiery rodeo. I’ve vanquished evil—several, in fact. I’ve stared right into the face of adversity and burped into it. You can keep your robes. You can keep your advice and coddling. I’m pretty sure I can handle a crazy hotel full of cannibals. In my sleep. On laundry day!”

  The elevator stopped suddenly and Cain pulled back the gate without adding anything to my speech. She walked through and Palls gestured I should step out before him. I walked out of the lift, not out into another hallway, but into a street.

  A street that ran for miles into a valley of buildings.

  Buildings harvested together and dotted by shadowed skyscrapers.

  Skyscrapers so high they seemed to rake the very sky itself.

  I had walked out onto a city a layman might mistake for the New York I left behind. There were hundreds of people around us: hot dog vendors, knock-off purse dealers, crosswalk cops. They were walking along the sidewalk or waiting to cross at streetlights; they honked their car horns with disgust in what looked like the thick of rush hour traffic. I even spotted some people running for a rattling elevated train that was snaking its way in and out of the city skyline.

  But this wasn’t New York—this wasn’t the city I grew up in and learned to love and to hate. The big freaking red flag for this truth was the people walking by us—these people heading to their cubicles and retail spaces and antique umbrella stores—were not people. In fact, they weren’t human at all.


  They had purple and red skins, and scales. They had spaded tails and large forking horns. Some breathed fire, some were on fire. They wore suits and loincloths and held their coffee cups with talons or black lobster claws. There were non-humans the size of trucks that shook the pavement when they walked, and others fluttered about on wings that flapped so quickly they blurred as they hovered in place. The only thing even remotely human about them was their phone use. Most of these creatures were on their phones. Scratch that—everyone was on their phones.

  Palls walked a few feet ahead, stopped, and silently offered me the robe again.

  Without an ounce of protest, I took the garment and pulled my head through the hood.

  As I peered out at this vast metropolis filled to the brim with every demon and monster imaginable, I heard Palls say, “Welcome to New Necropolis, Amanda Grey.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Ahhhhh. Feels fucking great to let the girls out after a long day’s work!” Cain yelled.

  Totally expecting something else, I watched two black-feathered wings shoot out of her shoulder blades and spread out in one glorious arc. She stretched and preened them for a few seconds before folding them neatly behind her back.

  Palls and Cain made me walk between them as we made our way through the city of Necropolis. And, keeping to their word, our journey was more or less “weird free.” Or, at the very least, it was “weird lite” considering I was trekking through Hell with an angel and a dead murderer. Staying off of the main streets, we moved through the city quickly.

  The hood over my face made it hard to see much. Cain told me hiding my face was for my own protection, but something told me there were things they didn’t want me to see, too. I’ll admit, part of me was grateful for this.

  From the bits and pieces I did see on my short jog, New Necropolis was just like my hometown: folks arguing about rent swells, air that sometimes smelled like food and sometimes like bodily fluids, fistfights about parking spaces. Sure, these were demons carrying out these New York staples, but it still managed to remind me of Home Sweet Home.

  Not to play into the whole ambience thing, but the devil was truly in the details in New Necro. The little touches—the creepy details that coated everything with a sinister sheen of rotting paint—that were, by far, the toughest to block out. Whether it be the advertisements on certain buildings promoting tools for skin carvings, or the bizarre street names (a notable standout being when we had to wait on the corner of Adolf and Inquisition Boulevard), this city was truly a hellscape. But, while the ads themselves had their own problems, my biggest gripe was not with the violent content (because what else would you expect down here), but the font they were written in. All of the massive, printed advertisements in Hell were written in the biggest, fattest, and most annoying font imaginable: Lobster.

  I don’t know about you, but I firmly believe Lobster font is attack on common decency and typefaces everywhere. Back when I was alive, sans-semi-Apocalypse, I could stand by Times New Roman. I could adapt to Arial. I might’ve even thrown down a Wingding or two on a quiet Friday night. But typing every single advertisement in Hell in Lobster font was an affront to the living and the dead alike—it was worse than Comic Sans. If this was the kind of minute torture I had to look forward to for the rest of my afterlife, Hell was truly going to be a place of pure misery.

  We moved with purpose, a brisk ten-minute pace that was at times hard to keep up with. At one point, Cain slapped a hand on my shoulder and pulled me back a few paces behind Palls, who either didn’t seem to notice or didn’t need to care.

  “Look, about what happened back in the human world. I screwed up, okay?” Cain told me. “Barnem was a tool and I kind of just jumped on the bandwagon. If you don’t trust me—”

  “We’re good, Cain. It’s fine.” My reply stopped the ex-angel short.

  “It’s … fine? Darlin’, I almost massacred your entire race.”

  “Let’s chalk it up to poor career choices and move on.” But I wasn’t looking at her when I said this. “What do you know about him?”

  Cain glanced over to Palls and shook her head. “Just that he’s bad business. I always knew never to trust a Shade—no offense—but he’s one I would be really careful with, especially in this city. There’s a reason you have to walk around all covered up and he gets to strut around without anything hiding what he is. Let’s just leave it at that.” The angel then winked at me. “No worries, gorgeous. If he tries something, I’ll slice his head off.”

  I could only see the bottom of her face as she brought her finger to her lips to keep that last bit between us.

  Palls sighed and stopped short. “We’re here.”

  Cain and I made the same tortured sound when, in unison, we spotted the place Palls had chosen for our private meeting.

  “Out of all the places in Hell, you’re making us go in there?” I asked. “I would rather be tortured to death by Mason while hearing him lecture me about rudely bleeding on him.”

  “It’s the only place where folks will be too caught up in their own misery to pay us any mind,” Palls explained. “If you have a better spot, then by all means.”

  Watching my two unlikely companions make off toward the establishment, I tugged the hood closer to my face and yelled after them. “Just so both of you know, so far, Hell really sucks.”

  ****

  “No, wait. Stop!” I pleaded, throwing my hands up. “There’s way too much for me to understand. I don’t get it. I don’t get any of this.”

  Cain didn’t pay me any mind. She had amassed four cups of water around her and was chugging each one down like it was her first gulp of liquid in centuries. Palls, on the other hand, crossed his arms and closed his eyes, as if his happy place was anywhere that didn’t involve me. It probably was.

  “Sure, Grey. What do you need me to explain?”

  I flipped the menu over so he could see what I was looking at. “There are, like, twelve different names for pasta and all of them sound like venereal diseases. Not to mention it’s all written in freakin’ Lobster font. It’s aggravating. I just want noodles with sauce. Someone point to noodles and sauce!”

  The Olive Garden was packed, not an empty seat to be found. That’s not saying much since even in my non-dead days I had yet to bear witness to an empty Olive Garden. My parents had taken me there once, more as an experience than as tried-and-true fans of what my mom dubbed “fast food served on a plate,” and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why the place was so packed serving food that tasted like a soulless being from another planet had looked up the word “pasta” and started molesting noodles in an experiment to try and understand our species. All that aside, even in Hell there was a fifteen-minute wait for a booth.

  There were, however, three things that informed me this Olive Garden was not, let’s say, like the ones in my previous plane of existence.

  The first thing, of course, was the other patrons. Besides Palls and me, there wasn’t another human in sight. Cain looked human, but her death angel wings were a dead giveaway. Surrounding us in the other booths were giant insects with wings that rocked the low hanging lights when they buzzed, slugs with horned shells and eyes sprouting from every orifice, and multi-armed skeletons getting stuck in an endless loop of bro high fives and selfies.

  The second unsettling thing about this restaurant was the cats, which were here in even higher numbers than the hotel. Hairballs and loose fur were everywhere, while the cats themselves sat in the light fixtures and lounged under seats. Some of the brave ones had no problem climbing right onto the tables to stare at patrons too busy conversing about how bitter the salad dressing was to care about a little extra cat dander in their food.

  But the most unsettling thing about this place stopped just as Palls flagged him down at our table. The waiters in this Olive Garden not only sported the same uniform (white shirts, black
vests, and pants) as they did in their undead counterpart, but they had tar-black skin and gray eyes. I had seen this look before. Petty had been turned into an undead puppet like this the first time she had died—not a zombie exactly, but pretty damn close. Looking at these husks walking around swelled a sizable knot in my throat.

  So I’ll admit it: the combination of the ghouls, the zombie waiters, and the slew of cats hanging around provided the perfect cocktail of a truly horrifying and rightfully adorable dining experience.

  As if bored by it all, Palls let out a sound I could only describe as a toilet bowl trying to swallow two pounds of paper clips. In the new lighting, I could really see this man as I hadn’t before. Sitting a few feet from him still made me sick to my stomach, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of knowing this. Aside from the black pinstripe suit and the white wingtip shoes, not to mention the trench coat and fedora, he looked just as he had on the night he tried to kill me—still a broad human with square shoulders and hands the size of waffle irons. Every time he rattled his thick fingers against the table, my entire body shook.

  Of course, the last time we met, his eyeball was missing and his teeth were all broken. This Palls looked younger and his skin was flawless. The punch I had recently gifted him back in the hotel hadn’t even left a mark.

  “Don’t talk all at once, you two,” I mumbled.

  Cain set down her last cup of water and stretched her arms. “There’s quite a bit to parse through, Grey.”

  “Fine, then,” I replied. “Let’s start with why there’s an Olive Garden in Hell.”

  “People gotta make a living,” Palls replied as the waiter leaned over and served us three more cups of ice water. Behind him, I spotted two cats biting and gnawing at the waiter’s exposed ankle. The sound of tearing meat was nauseating.

  As he walked away (his hungry fans literally nipping at his heels), a cat—a rather fat tabby—leapt up onto our table and began pawing at my saltshaker. After a few light taps, it knocked the whole thing over while no one said anything or moved to stop it. Its mission now complete, the cat jumped down to join its brethren snacking on our waiter.