by James Hunter
“Okay, so let me see if I have this straight. You helped ol’ Goo-blood McGee”—I glanced at Levi—“to track me down for three months, all so you could give me a one-way ticket out of Hell? No strings attached?”
“Mostly,” she replied with a curt nod. “Though it was actually the MudMan who sought me out. It’s your Guild that sent him down here to find you, or rather what remains of the Guild. As to strings … as I’m sure you’re aware, there are always strings attached. I intend to see you gone”—she paused, weighing me through narrowed eyes—“but I would see you kill Asmodeus on the way out.”
“Whoa now,” I replied, shooting my hands into the air. “I’m gonna stop you right there. Me?” I cocked an eyebrow and thumped my chest. “I’m not a gun for hire—not anymore and definitely not for you. I don’t like being someone else’s goon, not even when the target is an asshole demon.”
“Understandable,” she said, tracing her nails over the tabletop in elaborate swirls. “But you’ll help me because, once again, it’s in our mutual interest. You see, getting into Hell is easy enough, but getting out is a tricky bit of business. Traversing the nine levels is manageable through the Purgatory Gates, but there’s only one way to get from Hell into Outworld. A giant nexus with but a single door. I’m sure you’ve seen it—the blinding beam of light situated at the heart of our quaint city.
“And here, then, is the complication: The nexus point for Pandæmonium lies at the center of the Flesh Palace, and only Asmodeus has the key to unlock the way. So, if you want to leave this place, you must infiltrate the Flesh Palace Arena, murder the king, and steal the talisman he wears about his neck. If you do that, I get a well-deserved promotion, and you get to go home. Win-win for everyone save Asmodeus.” She fell silent, her words lingering heavy in the air like a storm cloud ready and waiting to vomit lightning to the ground.
“Okay,” I finally said, sitting back in my seat, running my palms through stringy, sweat-stained hair. “Let’s say I agree to this—and I haven’t agreed yet—how exactly do I go about killing a demon, anyway? Might be I’m a little behind the learning curve, but I was under the impression that immortals can’t die. Hence the name.”
“Most true,” Hecate replied with a wicked half smile, “yet despite that, Azazel has managed to kill seventeen members of Asmodeus’ Court, all by using the power of the Fourth Seal, Death. If Azazel was exiled to the Second Seal because of his unchecked ambition, then Buné, the Fourth Horseman, was banished and sealed away because he was too dangerous to leave loose. Armed with his scythe, Buné has the ultimate power over life and death. The ability to utterly annihilate any soul—even an angelic or demonic one. And Azazel has exploited that loophole with devastating effectiveness.”
She snapped her fingers, and the pinched-face woman pulled a glossy picture from a dossier on the seat next to her. She set the picture out for all to see. The photo showcased a short hand-held weapon, not much bigger than a hatchet, with a handle made from yellowed bone and a wicked half-moon crescent for a blade etched with runes of power. The sickle was smaller than I’d been expecting, but it looked like a weapon fit for the Reaper all right.
“So,” I said, folding my arms across my impressive new chest, “all I have to do is stroll into the Flesh Palace, kill Asmodeus with Buné’s Death scythe there”—I waved a hand at the picture—“then hop onto the interdimensional elevator to Outworld?”
“Yes,” she replied, steepling her fingers once more, a crafty, cunning look flashing across her features. “There are a few complications to overcome—the first being, you need to find the scythe.” She tapped the photo with one long fingernail. “Unfortunately, you didn’t have it on you when the MudMan apprehended you, which means it’s no doubt squirreled away in whatever underground bunker Azazel’s been using as his operations base. And that operations base is the best-kept secret in Hell—every demon, Lost Soul, and Flesh Eater in Pandæmonium’s been searching high and low for it.”
“Well, why don’t I just ask him where it is?” I hedged. “I mean he’s locked up in my head, but I have ways to reach him.”
“No,” the MudMan intoned solemnly. “He’s far more dangerous than you can think. Perhaps you would survive the encounter, but the risk of losing yourself is too great—especially after the trouble we went through to get you in the first place. Needless to say, Azazel didn’t come willingly the first time, and he won’t be foolish enough to let his guard down a second time. Better to risk death than talk with that monster.”
“Sadly, the MudMan is right. You’ll just have to do this the old-fashion way—by running down leads.” She paused, gaze hazy and distant. “And as it happens, I have just such a lead. I strongly suspect you were working with an accomplice while possessed by Azazel. What he managed to accomplish would be impossible without one. And there’s only one demon I can think of that fits the bill: Tezrian, former goddess of war, and undisputed queen bee over the Roller Nation. Once upon a time, she was Azazel’s disciple, closest follower, and lover.”
“If anyone helped Azazel, it was her,” Hecate continued after a time. “She is quite ...” She faltered, lips slightly parted as she searched for the word. “Unstable. But in Hell, who isn’t a little unhinged, eh? If anyone will know where the scythe is, it will be her. Likely, she has the damned thing somewhere inside her fortress.
“Fortunately for you, finding her won’t be difficult. Surviving her is a different matter entirely, however. Still, between you and the MudMan, I have the utmost confidence in your success. And if you should fail?” She smiled, a cold, cutthroat grin. “Well, it’s no skin off my back, even if it means the skin off yours.” The words seemed to imply something, but what I couldn’t say.
My brow creased in worry as I listened. “You said there were a couple of complications—what else should I be worried about?”
She rolled her eyes and waved away my question as a triviality she couldn’t be bothered to explain. “One thing at a time, my greedy little rat. There will be time for all that if you survive dear Tez and get the scythe back. Until then, keep focused on the task at hand. Paper,” she said, glancing at the pinch-faced woman beside her. In a blink, the woman pulled out a slip of creamy white parchment, seemingly from thin air, and placed it on the table before Hecate, adjusting it just so, then giving it a little pat.
The Succubus Queen extended a single claw-tipped digit and scribbled an address onto the paper, a gentle curl of gray smoke wafting up as she wrote. She lifted the paper and blew on it, scattering a fine layer of sooty ash, then extended it toward Levi, who was suddenly at my side. “This, then, is where you will find Tez’s crew, the Cobalt Lily Rollers. Don’t let the name fool you. Tez rules over the entirety of the Roller Nation, and the Lilies are her personal enforcers. No one tussles with those girls—they’ll gut you, hang you from the rafters, and use your bodies as fleshy piñatas.”
Levi accepted the sheet of paper with a nod and a slight smile—almost as if he were legitimately looking forward to the prospect of tracking down Tezrian and her insane gang.
Come to think of it, he probably was.
“One additional word of warning,” Hecate said, sticking a slim finger into the air. “If dear, sweet, bloodthirsty Tez is working with Azazel, she’ll no doubt seek to capture you, Mr. Lazarus. And if she manages that, she’ll perform a reverse-exorcism to put Azazel back in the driver’s seat, as you mortals are wont to say.” She tapped her nose conspiratorially. “Such a fate would be most unpleasant for you, I think.” She offered me a toothy shark’s grin of a smile. “Now scurry along, children—Asmodeus isn’t going to kill himself. Unfortunately.”
ELEVEN:
The Cobalt Lily Rollers
It took Levi and me an hour to navigate the crowded and deadly streets of Pandæmonium, avoiding random packs of roving Flesh Eaters and the other unnatural denizens, all looking for an easy mark. Eventually, though, we made it to the address Hecate had so kindly provided: a sleek, towering sp
ire with a set of black stone steps drilling down into the earth. The steps dead-ended at a crimson door presided over by a hulking sentry who looked like the lovechild of a rhino and a dump truck. The guy was all bulky muscles, beady eyes, blue pebbled skin, and fat fingers as big as plantains.
A shit-kicking brawler if I’d ever seen one.
A neon sign hung above the entry, depicting a lounging pinup girl with giant breasts sporting a pair of roller skates. Above the neon woman was the name of the joint: Hell on Wheels. A club. And a popping one too, judging by the line snaking away from the door, up the stairs, and off into the distance for another half block.
A firm, callused hand fell on my shoulder, stopping me before I descended the stairs. I turned, glancing back at Levi—the breath caught in my chest, despite the fact that I’d already seen his disguise. He looked like me. Not kinda like me, but identical in every detail, all the way from my missing eye and new bulging muscles, down to my dusty black boots. Levi’s shapeshifting ability wasn’t confined to clay-faced killing machine or mustached creeper. Nope, he could resemble just about anyone with a little time and effort—which meant he purposely chose to look like a middle-aged man who worked at Home Depot.
I could only begin to scratch the surface of what that said about him as a person.
Absently, I ran a hand over my weather-beaten face—a gentle reminder that for the time being, I wasn’t Yancy Lazarus. For now, I was just some washed-up old Hellion, bent and beaten by a hard, hard life in the gutters of Pandæmonium. The disguise, though not nearly as impressive as Levi’s, was still pretty amazing, mostly because I hadn’t done a damned thing to accomplish it. No Vis. No Nox. No constructs. Queen Hecate had kindly loaned me the services of a Flesh Tailor—a specialist who’d used all kinds of weird lotions and awful smelling concoctions to alter my appearance.
At least for a few hours.
“You ready for this?” Levi asked, his voice a perfect imitation of my own.
“It’s my plan,” I replied, shrugging free from his mitt. “The better question is can you pull off your end? I mean sure, you look like me, but even with my face and voice I find it hard to believe you’ll be able to capture my quick wit and roguish charm, muck-face.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he grunted tersely, shooting me a slick grin and resting one hand on his hip. “I’m a good actor. I’ve watched you. Studied you. I know the way you move. The way you talk. No one will see through the ruse. Just don’t get caught. We only have one chance to get this right.”
He wheeled around, weaving through the crowd of Hellions milling in front of the club, shouldering past those too slow to make way. I stayed a step behind him, following in his wake as we descended the steps and cut to the front of the line, earning an avalanche of disgruntled glowers and angry mutters. Those all died away the second Levi pulled a sleek ebony stone from his pocket.
The rock was the size of a silver dollar and inscribed with a glowing red rune—a strange labyrinthine wheel flanked by a pair of crescent moons. Hecate’s seal.
That little rock would bump us right to the front of any line and see us into any establishment loyal to the Rebel Succubus Queen. Tezrian wasn’t loyal to anyone—except maybe to Azazel, if the rumors were true—but she sure as shit had no love for Asmodeus. The meat-slab sentry’s beady black eyes widened a hair, and he quickly shuffled aside, yanking the door open, and averting his gaze as we slipped into the club.
With that stone, we were damn near royalty. At least in some circles.
Thunderous techno music—all sharp, electronic squeals and driving bass, accompanied by the drone of voices—slammed into my ears like a sledgehammer and reverberated inside my chest. Strobing lights in a multitude of hues jabbed at my eye, disorienting and painful. Hell on Wheels was as big as an industrial warehouse, with rusty, corrugated metal-sided walls and exposed metal beams running overhead, festooned with light strips. Huge cement struts were scattered throughout the room, covered in smoldering Hellion brands and demonic sigils pulsing with infernal light.
Bodies filled the floor, dancing, grinding, writhing in ecstasy.
A friggin’ rave.
I’ve been to a rave or two in my days—always for work, understand—and I wasn’t happy to find myself in another. I couldn’t stand the press of sweaty bodies, groping hands, or reek of stale beer and bad BO, and even worse? The music sucked more than a black hole.
At the far end of the room, elevated on a raised platform, was the DJ. He wore a pin-striped suit, a gray fraying noose as a necktie, and a raven-headed mask. At least I hoped it was a mask. It was absolutely horrifying either way. But even as bizarre as the DJ was, and he was weird to the max with a capital W, he couldn’t even hold a candle to the gals occupying a hollowed-out pit in the center of the club. It reminded me vaguely of the fighting ring in the Southside Blood Pit, but there was no sand and no Lovecraftian Cthulhu fiend.
Instead, this was a skating rink, sunken into the floor so all the spectators could get an eyeful of the action. Seeing through the crowd was tricky, but an overhead Jumbotron broadcast everything in high-def clarity.
The rink was an oval of smooth gray concrete spray-painted with swirls of illegible graffiti, flaming skulls, topless cartoon pinup girls, and, of course, roller skates. So many roller skates: flaming roller skates, winged roller skates, bladed roller skates. And in the rink, women were zipping, zooming, and zagging around at breakneck speeds, slamming into one another with bone-breaking force. Levi shot me one more hard look, then hooked left, shoving his way through the crowd, opening up a small pocket around him as he angled for the roller girls.
I cut right, shuffling my feet along like an old man with arthritis in the knees, keeping my head down so as not to cause any untimely trouble. My job wasn’t to pick a fight; it was to be a fly on the wall and the next best thing to invisible. I skittered along the edge of the dancers covered in colorful faux furs and strings of rainbow beads, but little else. Most of the club-goers had the hazy-eyed look of addicts rolling deep and lost to the world. I inched forward, slipping past a pair of all but naked Hellion women with twisting neon glyphs carved into their flesh, shining like glow sticks in the dark.
After fighting my way against the crowd like a salmon battling against the current, I emerged into a new crowd of hard-faced men and women surrounding the rink itself, their gazes glued on the burly women jockeying for position on the track below.
I stared too. I didn’t want to, not really, but damned if I could help myself.
Like so many other things in the Inferno, I’d never seen anything like this.
The women below were bigger than most men—two or three hundred pounds of lean muscle, sinew, and bright tattoos—and cobbled together like Frankenstein monsters. Many had limbs which clearly came from different bodies, all crudely stitched into place with black catgut sutures. Patchwork girls, one and all. They were decked out in striped knee-high socks, skimpy midriffs, and shoulder pads studded with wicked spikes and gleaming razor blades.
I’m not a huge roller derby fan, but even at a glance I could tell those spikes weren’t regulation, and neither were the weapons they clutched in white-knuckled grips: gnarled wooden clubs, lengths of rusty steel chain, fat lead sewer pipes, an assortment of unwieldy monkey wrenches. One even had a machete.
Two teams streaked around the track, but the Cobalt Lily Rollers were easy enough to pick out. Their toxic-green tops, marked with blue, blood-drenched flowers were as good as road signs. There were only five Cobalt Lily Rollers on the track, though more watched on from the sidelines, and each woman had a number on her back, positioned beneath a name. But not normal, sensible names like Judy or Samantha. Not even close.
#16 Mama Murderwheels. #8 Rapunchel. #13 Lady Bones Sally. #2 The Deep South Riot. #7 Machoman Candy Savage.
And their opponents, the Badass Betties—wearing bright pink wifebeaters—had names just as varied and just as weird.
I watched in mute fascina
tion as a blue-skinned Betty, sporting fishnets and a spike-studded helmet with a gold star plastered on the side, shot forward from the rear of the pack. She moved like wildfire, this lady, weaving her way past the other skaters, dodging wild elbows and pipes whistling through the air. A monkey wrench shot out low, but she narrowly diverted the crippling strike with a round steel buckler strapped to one forearm. And all the while, she crept forward, driving toward some unseen goal.
She very nearly broke free from the pack when one of the Lilies—an M1A1 tank of a woman with a thin Mohawk and a doughy face—swerved, lashing out with a massive sledgehammer. The Betty veered right, but half a beat too slow. In a blink the hammer landed, sideswiping the Betty across the jaw. The weapon landed like a rockslide; the Betty’s jaw cracked, and teeth and blue blood sprayed out as the woman went down in a tangle of limbs and skates. The crowd, pressing in against the retaining wall around the rink, shrieked their approval, fists pumping, while handfuls of coins switched hands.
“Ouch,” boomed a ringside announcer with a deep baritone voice and a shock of wavy black hair. “That’s gotta hurt. I’ll bet Tragedy Ann is gonna be feeling that for a few days to come. And since she’s lead Jammer, that’ll end this Jam …” He paused, voice fading as the crowd let out a dejected mutter.
“And signal the beginning of the bonus Buzz Saw Round!” he finished with a roar. The crowd’s mutters turned into a thundercrack of cheers and hoots. “All points are doubled!” the announcer declared. As he spoke, thin splits opened on the floor, and swirling buzz saw blades emerged—spinning discs of shrieking metal two or three feet in diameter.
Sweet, holy mother of God.
More money changed hands as ravers and gamblers watched the women below go into berserker mode. They kept skating, sure, but mostly, they just attacked each other:
