by Alcy Leyva
“Funny.” Hel walked over to her brother, the hound called Fen. Giving the audience her back, she whispered something to the beast that made him stand and bare his teeth.
“Funny, funny,” Hel repeated as the hound prowled to one side of the stage.
To my left, Palls’ fingers were a blur. He snapped his fingers five times and wove the tiny tongues of flame into a single ball of black fire in less time than it took to suck in a breath. He kept it low, between his knees, biding his time for someone to make a move. I thought about snapping my fingers, but I knew my little light show wouldn’t compare to his and I didn’t want to make us look bad.
The veins and nerves throughout Hel’s body began wriggling as she climbed the steps on my right. The hound was mirroring her up the left. Behind them both, trolls and rats and even Hel’s Followers were spreading out in case anyone tried to run.
“I guess it’s fitting,” she said, still speaking to the audience. “Here I am talking about the no-talent Wardens, the useless Shade Wraiths of the underworld, and we’re in luck. That’s right. We have guests in the audience tonight.”
The two were only a row from our seats when Palls stood up. He tossed the fireball at the hound’s head and pulled me to my feet.
“Anyone you prefer?” he asked.
I slipped by him, yelling, “Fido.”
Palls ran toward Hel and I watched as the hound huffed up its chest and blew out Palls’ black fireball in midair like a child playing with a dandelion.
With Palls and Hel mixing it up, all six of Fen’s red eyes locked on to me.
I stopped short and started running back toward Palls. “No fair! Switch back! Switch back!”
Hel reached into her mouth with both her living and dead hands and pulled out two swords—one gold, one bronze. She brought both blades down on Palls who blocked both of them with an arm encased in fire.
Through his gritted teeth, he yelled, “Kinda busy here.”
I turned back and Fen the hellhound was sizing me up. The audience was already running for their lives, but the hound either swatted them aside with its paw or ignored them. I was its prey—lucky me.
“I killed the Warden of this floor,” Hel shouted as she put more pressure on her dual swords. “That’s right. I hung her limbs to decorate my foyer. And I can’t wait to add two more prizes to my collection.”
Struggling, Palls fell to a knee. His fire began sparking as if about to go out.
Hel was ecstatic. “Wardens or not, you can’t kill an Old God.”
“Palls!” I was caught between a hound and a hard place. I didn’t know what to do.
And then Gaffrey Palls said three magical little words:
“Light them up!”
As I turned back, Fen had already leapt high into the air.
I raised my hand and snapped my fingers just as the beast was close enough that I could feel its hot breath on me.
I only got one shot off.
The largest ball of fire I’d seen Palls produce was roughly the size of a basketball.
The only way I can describe what leapt from my fingers was that it was definitely round, but only in the way a gaseous planet the size of a small woodland cottage is.
Even with the beast’s enormous size, Fen hit the ball of fire and was immediately engulfed by its flames. It let out one pitiful yelp and vanished. The hound’s flaming corpse didn’t even come out of the other side. Instead, the sphere continued on its trajectory, broke into the edge of the stage, and exploded, raining black jets of flame down on everyone’s heads.
Hearing two swords clatter to the ground behind me, I spun around to see Hel and Palls gawking at the destruction I had caused.
Shaking, the Old God dropped to her knees and screamed her brother’s name. She began raking at her face and hair, cursing in a language I was pretty sure hadn’t been spoken in eons, and Palls picked himself up as we both dove through the massive hole my little light show had produced.
Making it outside, I was immediately stung by cold. The building we had escaped from was nothing but a square void planted into the dirt—a windowless, thoughtless black cube. But the real oddity was where this place was located.
Outside, a moon and a vast night sky hung above our heads. For a moment we just stood there, staring up at the twinkling stars and the moonlight. In the distance, we saw mountains and endless desert rolling in every direction. I couldn’t tell if I was still in Hell or not. The rest of the humans made their way out behind us.
A peal of tires broke everyone’s malaise. Folks scattered. As Palls and I watched, a beat up, dusty green car with awful wood paneling right out of the 70s squealed to a stop in front of us.
Cain popped the passenger door open.
“That was easy,” she grinned. “Get in.”
CHAPTER 17
We drove for a long time without speaking: Palls in the backseat laid out, me in the passenger side staring out the window. Only Cain, still wearing her black uniform from another failed job placement, looked even remotely pleased with herself.
I didn’t know what was on everyone else’s minds, but in my head I kept replaying the image of my hand nuking a giant dog. Part of me wanted to test snapping my fingers again, but I was afraid of the whole “blasting a hole in reality” thing.
The road seemed to run on for ages. I wasn’t sure about the gas situation, but I thought this was the least of our problems. The shitty car kept thumping and stuttering as if it were going to fall apart at any minute. Still, Cain kept her foot on the gas and never dropped below ninety.
We drove until the night spun over. I watched as the sunrise changed the blue sands to a blazing orange color I’d never seen before. The cold of the night seemed like an afterthought after driving for minutes in the strangling morning heat.
The desert was vast in every direction. I rolled down the windows to get some air, but the sand flying in felt like glass shards on my skin. There were no plants or animals, no signs of life in any way. In the distance, five steep mountain ranges could be seen, but other than that brief bit of punctuation there was nothing else to be seen for ages.
After a long while, I decided to break the ice.
“Hey, Cain.”
“What’s up, love?”
“Just for my peace of mind. What was your plan back there?”
“You mean my rescue plan?”
I nodded slowly. “Sure.”
Cain seemed extra pleased with herself as she leaned into me. “I planned to infiltrate their ranks. You know, get on Hel’s good side?”
“Wait,” I cut in, a sudden thought forming in my mind. “How is it that you get all of these jobs down here?”
“Two words: Fallen. Angel,” she said, pointing back at her wings. “Hell loves its Fallen Angels. I didn’t even have to interview for the last gig. But anyway, after sneaking into the establishment, I planned to get you reunited with Palls, make sure you were in the audience in front of Hel, and then boom!” She slammed both of her hands on the steering wheel and then offered me one of her palms. “I will accept praise in the form of high fives.”
I tapped my forehead instead. “Where does the ‘boom’ come in, Cain? Can we unpack the ‘boom’ for a second?”
“Old Gods are ancient beings of pure evil,” Palls told her as he sat up. “Generals of the Dark Lord himself. Plagues of humanity. We could have been torn to pieces.”
The ex-angel clucked her tongue and peeked at him through the rear view. “And here you are bitching about it, Palls. C’mon! Both of you kicked her ass and got out of there. Bet Hel and her demon dog will think twice about coming up against two Wardens next time.”
Palls and I didn’t respond.
After a minute of the open road and the thumping from the car, I asked, “Do you even know where we’re headed, Cain? Is it that way, toward tho
se mountains?”
“Those aren’t mountains, Grey. And we’re headed to the Fifth Circle: the River Styx.”
I looked around at the rolling dunes and blowing sands.
“Where’s this river?”
“No idea,” she said, and then seemed to remember something. She slammed on the brakes, skidded to a stop on the side of the road, and hopped out. That’s when I realized that the banging sound wasn’t coming from the car.
It was coming from its trunk.
****
So, a naked blue man, an ex-angel of death, a guy with the powers of a demon inside of him, and I were riding in a car…
There was a joke in there somewhere, but I didn’t exactly feel like sticking around for the punch line.
The blue man sat in the front with me. While he had absolutely no problem with his nakedness, I made sure to keep my knee from rubbing against his. Bony and wispy, his skin was as thin as paper, so much so that the wind blowing in from the windows and hitting his flesh made it sound like the dude was a kite caught in a high-powered fan.
“Where did you get yourself a liar?” Palls asked.
“Don’t look at me,” Cain deflected. “That’s the one we crashed into back at the Maw.”
Peeking over at him, I had to ask, “So, you’re really a liar?”
The blue man shrugged. “Yes.”
I narrowed my eyes, not sure if that was a lie or not. “What’s your name?”
He thought about it for five long seconds and then responded with a shrug and a name that clearly ended in a question mark. “Mark?”
“Thanks. I regret asking.” I grabbed “Mark” by the shoulders and forced him into the backseat. “Now, can someone please tell me what this guy has to do with where we’re going?”
Palls pushed the little guy to the other side of the backseat. “Liars have their own place in Hell, Grey. They’re tortured in the Eighth Circle, which means—”
“Which means if he was able to come up, he can show us the way back down,” Cain finished, way too happy with herself. “Now speak up, little man. Are we headed the right way?”
Not-Mark leaned forward, squinted, and sat back with his arms crossed. “Yes?”
I raised my hand as if in class. “Okay, can I point out something that may or may not be a horrible problem—one I feel we may be overlooking and which might lead to our eventual doom? This guy—the guy we’re basing this entire ride on—is a liar.”
“Whoa,” Not-Mark shouted. “Ouch.”
I was beside myself, having left any last bit of my limited supply of patience back in Hel’s bizarre studio. “I didn’t make that up. That’s literally what you call yourself!”
“Just drop it for now, Grey.”
I turned back in my seat to shout at Palls, but stopped as we locked eyes. His stare told me everything I needed to know: he was far less concerned about the paper man beside him as he was about me annihilating a supposed eternal deity of the underworld with a simple, totally unpracticed gesture. I sat back down and faced forward. “How far until we get to this river?”
Not-Mark decided this was a good time to be cryptic. “Distance isn’t real. This car isn’t real. This desert isn’t real. What you’re looking for will appear or it won’t appear. It might take minutes or never. We drive until the end.”
It’s difficult for me to explain, but somehow, the liar was telling the truth. We rode on and on and on. The days changed, from night to day and back again. But the five shadowy mountains in the distance never moved. Neither did the road or the car or sand. It was all just empty flatland in front of us for ages.
After what felt like days in the car without anyone saying a single word to anyone else, I turned to riddle Cain with another bevy of questions, but I stopped short when I saw the lifelessness in her eyes. The angel’s face was pale and she seemed to be dozing at the wheel.
“Hey Cain, you feeling okay?
Startling her caused her to spread her wings. One smacked me right across the face and the other shattered the driver-side window. Cain slammed the wheel so hard to the right I thought we were about to flip and tumble. But she turned back, swerved to get back into position, and continued the course.
“My bad,” she protested, but immediately started to fall asleep again.
I grabbed the wheel as she slouched over into my lap.
That’s when I saw it. Around her collarbone was the wound I had spotted back in her apartment, only now it was the size of a fist. Even worse, around it the skin was cracked and gray. Whatever the wound was seemed to be spreading under her armpit and behind her neck, crawling over her body like an infection.
The car veered again and started to fishtail wildly as we hopped off the road and into the sand. We were completely out of control now as Palls and I tried our best to wrestle the wheel into the right position.
“Her foot’s on the gas pedal!” Palls yelled as he dove into the front seat. With all of Cain’s weight on me and my mouth full of her feathers, all I could do was stare out at the land in front of us.
Something caught my eye. Even in the brightness of the daylight, I could see an object streak across the blueness like a comet. At first, I thought the yellow beam was a star rising high into space, but it became painfully obvious as it got larger and larger—swelling from the size of a penny, to that of a bowling ball, to a house with white boards and large windows—that whatever it was coming toward us.
The star-turned-building landed with a large, earth-shattering crash in the dirt about fifty yards ahead of us and we were still speeding toward it going a hundred miles per hour.
“Balls!” I shouted.
Palls shouted back. “Almost got it!”
“I didn’t call you but yeah, hurry the f—”
“Done!”
Palls struck the brake, sending us into a sudden wild skid. With the small house coming up on us fast, I held on for dear life—or, whatever—as the car sent us into so many spins that I lost count.
Finally, the car came to a stop and everyone let out a collective groan.
All except Cain, who popped up immediately.
“Cool. We’re here,” she said and climbed through the broken window like this was no big deal at all. As she walked away, I pushed open my door and tumbled out onto the sand with much less tact.
After a minute or two, my legs and arms were working so I decided to use them. With my hands firmly affixed on my waist, I followed the skid marks we had made in the sand. It was quite a long walk, but as soon as I stepped back onto the black tar road we had been driving on, I glanced both ways and screamed my frustrations at the open air. It was the same in both directions: a dark, dead vein running across a brown, cracked land.
I had expected to get through the Circles of Hell one-by-one, busting down one door after another and taking on any and all types of weird that came my way. What I wasn’t expecting was entire worlds to trek across, Old Gods, and miles and miles of nothingness.
My hands started to shake so badly that even the sky itself seemed to be throbbing. This wasn’t like any panic attack I ever remembered having when I was alive. I just kept pacing and breathing until Palls approached.
“How are you feeling Grey?’
“Me?” I replied. “Look at me, Palls. I’m fucking fantastic! Just leave me alone for a bit.”
Palls didn’t budge.
Still pacing, I asked him, “What was Hel trying to do back there?”
Palls shook his head. “She was building a legion of trolls and what she called Followers—an entire army for herself. Looks like she’s planning to invade the other Circles of Hell.”
I threw my hands up. “And that’s totally normal? You’re completely fine with that?”
The older man crossed his arms. “I’m not, but I’ve also been down here longer than you, which means
I’m used to things literally going to hell on a minute-by-minute basis. If you really need to know, it’s worse than I thought, okay? Hel was able to kill the Warden of this Circle. That’s not something that should happen. The Old Gods created Hell; they travel in and around it. They stir up trouble from time to time, but nothing like this—and I’ve never heard of one killing a Warden. So, yeah, something’s really wrong down here, but I also know it’s not going to get any easier.” Seeing the pain on my face, his voice took on a softer tone, “Roll with the emotions, Grey. It’ll pass. Don’t fight it.”
“I’m sorry,” I wheezed. “Tell me again when was the last time you blew up an Old God?”
“Um. Never. Actually, that’s not supposed to be possible.”
“Great.”
I tried to walk away, but Palls maneuvered in front of me. “Just take it easy. I’m just asking for you to listen.”
I wanted to lash out at him again, to remind him to keep to himself, but instead I took a deep breath. It felt like my brain was on fire, like my insides were drying out. Even if I wasn’t in a real body, I constantly felt like I was being shoved through a meat grinder.
“I know you’re not looking for any advice, especially from me, so take this however you want. Leaving all of that mess inside of you isn’t going to make you saner. You need to get those emotional knots out of your system.”
Palls crossed his arms and straightened his back, just like I had seen him do a hundred times before. I understood what I needed to do. Slapping my hands on my knees, I bent over and stared into the black road. The two of us must have looked like two of the most amazing idiots in Hell: Palls the dumb statue and me in my doped-up ostrich pose, but I truly gave no shits about it.
In a rush of hot air and even hotter fluid, whatever anxiety had been pooling up in my joints was suddenly flushed out. It felt freaking wonderful.
“Does that help at all?” Palls asked.
“It will if you shut up for five seconds,” I replied. After those beautiful moments ticked out, I stood back up and let my hands slide up my thighs and back to my waist. The world was calmer; my nerves were not firing off like fireworks. I didn’t feel like the entire world was trying to swallow me up. For the moment, I seemed to be back to my new normal. “Okay. Let’s get back in the car.”
