The Road to Helltown

by SM Reine

That was not an answer at all.

  I’d have pressed him for more, except that was when my condo’s window shattered inward. Because while I’d spent months in hiding, Proserpine had spent months searching so she could use me to get revenge against Fritz.

  And now she’d arrived.

  Proserpine was an ugly bitch, which means a lot coming from me. I’ve never met a woman I couldn’t find a little bit attractive. Even Agent Bryce, embattled gods let her blocky soul rest in peace, had been pretty in the way girl-skinned Minecraft characters were pretty.

  Without boobs, butt, flesh, an actual skeleton, or most other human features, Proserpine was just plain ugly.

  Her leer had gotten leerier since the last time I’d glimpsed her by the Fissure. Each corner of her mouth reached to her temples. Her eyes sagged, exposing the dusty eye socket underneath. Her round nose and sharp teeth were tipped with blood.

  It looked like she had just eaten a person.

  She probably hadn’t. Nightmares didn’t eat flesh. They ate brains. The stuff that got generated in brains, anyway.

  The fear.

  That was why I’d set up super-powerful wards in order to protect my brains from her.

  I’d learned fast that I could no longer rely on the bond with Fritz to protect me from nightmares. I wasn’t as vulnerable as when I’d faced David Nicholas, but I wasn’t exactly ready to face Proserpine either. Fuck me, I wasn’t even capable of handling her wisps.

  She hadn’t brought along any wisps to this fight. I was guessing she’d reabsorbed them. The creature piling through the window was a single, massive entity.

  First her face pressed to the window, and her fingers curled around the edges of the sill. Then more fingers curled around the edges. And more.

  A hundred hands slithered in.

  Proserpine could only see me from the angle she was at, but I wasn’t certain I could even see the core of her yet. One face pressed to the window, leering and saggy, but it slid away to be replaced by another.

  Aspis…

  I tripped over my own feet running for the generator.

  I’ve been looking for you, aspis, Proserpine whispered. Her voice was nails sinking into my balls. I felt it in the twist of my guts. I think you’ve been looking for me, too.

  An eye blinked open in the center of the black, looking through my window between knuckle ridges. The generator was about two feet to the left of it. I got close enough to see the glistening outer curve of the eye, and the inner dome of the pupil, and the vast tangled intestines that formed the fibers of the iris. There were more hands and more screaming faces in a single iris.

  That was her actual face. It was fucking huge.

  The eye bulged as she pressed herself to the window, beginning to squeeze through.

  Aspis…

  A hand seized my shirt. It was rotting. Flesh plopped off the wrist, splattering on my shoe.

  “Oh fuck!” I jerked away, slapped my hand on the generator. The light flashed yellow. It was warming up.

  Proserpine’s eye popped through the window with a jelly-like bounce. She slopped to the floor. Once one part of her was through, the rest began growing from it, connecting ceiling and floor in slimy nightmare ropes.

  “Cèsar!” Fritz hissed. He’d stepped back into the recession beside my fridge, momentarily unseen. He gestured to me. He wanted to run.

  I wasn’t going to run.

  This was everything I’d prepared for.

  I turned to find Proserpine rearing up above me. Her eyes were as tall as me, and her face was tenfold, bowing over me so that I had to crane my neck to see the horns jutting from her forehead. It was impossible for something that big to fit in my condo. Even this swanky-ass condo.

  She was inside of me.

  What scares you the most, aspis? Proserpine asked. Her voice came right into my head, but I heard it inside my brain, where she’d injected herself.

  The room vanished.

  The grumbling of the generator turned to the sigh of waves crashing against the beach.

  I was ankle-deep in soggy loam.

  The sky was gray, and a hurricane was moving in. The beach houses up on stilts might survive. They swayed slightly with the wind, shingles flapping. I was trudging underneath one, running alongside the waves, chasing a shape with sleek black hair.

  I caught him, pinned him down.

  It was an incubus.

  I hadn’t known much about demons at the time. I hadn’t known that all of them had that eerie white skin with sleek hair dripping from their scalp.

  All I knew was that this guy had held my sister captive, and he’d spent days torturing her with silver needles.

  What happened? Proserpine asked.

  I fisted his shirt to lift his chest from the sand and slammed my fist into his face. His head whipped back. His nose broke. The blood gushed out like a geyser, a crimson-tinted oil slick, and I kept punching him to watch it spray.

  “You’re gonna pay,” I grunted, a syllable for every blow. “You’re gonna pay for what you did to Ofelia!”

  This had really happened. It was happening again. The hurricane was pounding my back, telling me to stop, think about what I was doing. It was loud and dark and I kept punching the incubus.

  Sirens wailed. Black SUVs pulled up on the beach, just on the other side of the pylons. It was my first glimpse of the Office of Preternatural Affairs. They’d come to seize the incubus.

  Years earlier, they’d stopped me from beating him to death. It was easy to beat incubi to death. Puncture a hole in ‘em and they kept bleeding. But they’d stopped me. I didn’t have his death on my hands.

  In Proserpine’s vision, I didn’t stop.

  I kept punching again, and again, and again, and…

  No. This isn’t reality. This isn’t real.

  The voice I heard in my head now was not mine, nor was it Proserpine’s. It sounded like it belonged to a dry-humored billionaire who’d lost all of his chill.

  I twisted without letting go of the incubus. Fritz stood in the water. He wasn’t wearing a suit and sunglasses, like the day I’d met him on the beach. He was in a cable-knit sweater. Standing next to my refrigerator.

  My brain hurt to perceive both realities at once.

  “The lights,” Fritz said.

  Yes. The lights.

  But first…

  I plunged a hand into my pocket, found a twist of ribbon, and activated it.

  The circle of power downstairs activated. It formed a fresh globe of power that engulfed the three floors surrounding it, including mine. I sneezed so hard it felt like my face was gonna blow off.

  My face stayed attached, but Proserpine didn’t. It felt like I’d sneezed her out of my head.

  I came to my senses on my knees in front of the window. Proserpine was beside me, huge, but not as huge as I’d first seen her. Maybe twice my height.

  The light on the generator had turned green.

  “What have you done?” Proserpine asked, slamming her body against the wall. She was trying to break out of my circle. She couldn’t. As soon as she hit, she erupted into a thousand pieces and reformed across the room. “Powerful wards, aspis!”

  “The name’s Cèsar,” I said.

  I flipped a switch behind the couch.

  The lights came on.

  I hadn’t wanted to risk the fuel to check their positioning, so I hadn’t had them all on yet. Now they blazed to life like a thousand miniature suns. They burned away every single shadow in the room.

  Including most of Proserpine.

  She screamed as her pieces fragmented away, exposing the fragile structure underneath. Her tangible demon form barely passed as humanoid. Couple of shriveled arms near her chest, couple of shriveled legs propping her up. She had the spine of a giraffe and her human-ish face propped at the end of it.

  The lights didn’t allow her smoke to reform. She was nothing except brittle stick-bug.

  “Well, that’s a lot less impressive,” I said,
getting to my feet.

  “I am of the House of Belial,” she snarled. “You can’t do this to me!”

  “I once put Fritz’s hand in a bowl of warm water while he was sleeping,” I said. “I don’t give a fuck what House you’re from.”

  Proserpine screamed and flung herself against the wards.

  I felt it like a knife in the brain. Pain shot all the way down my neck to my tailbone.

  “Tied to you, are they?” Proserpine asked.

  She lunged at me.

  That stick-bug body smacked into mine, and we rolled, all bony edges and jagged teeth. I kicked her off but she just jumped on me again, rolling both of us into the bubble made by the circle of power.

  The wards jolted again. Pain washed over me.

  “Cèsar!” Fritz was pounding his fist on the outside of the magical wall. I’d made it strong enough to keep Proserpine in, and that meant I’d also made it strong enough to keep everything out. “Open the circle!”

  “No! I’ve got this!”

  That was a lie.

  I’d actually thought that getting all those lights blazing would kill Proserpine. Everyone said lights killed nightmares. The circle of power had only been meant to contain her long enough for the lights to burn her away.

  Either rumors were untrue or Proserpine was too powerful.

  Panic was the mother of invention, or something like that. I took the Coke bottle of fuel out of my pocket. I also had the Focus.

  Hmm.

  I thought about how to use these things to save my ass for a moment too long. Proserpine’s fingers closed around my skull, and I felt a hard pinch in my right ear, followed by screams inside of my skull.

  “Cèsar! Open the wards, damn you!”

  Aspis…

  I was falling into nightmares, sinking down into dark places I hadn’t been for years.

  Finding Ofelia crumpled on the floor of the beach house, her neck an indistinguishable mess of skin-flaps slicked with blood.

  Getting that call from my mom saying she’d gone into jail again. And they’re holding me a long time this time, baby, she’d said. I don’t know when I’m gonna be out.

  And then when I was fifteen, and I found out my mom had been out of jail for years, and she hadn’t come looking for my siblings and me. My brother Domingo had never been the same after that. Stopped talking to me. Stopped loving me.

  “Making me think about that is low, Proserpine,” I said. “Really fucking low.”

  Is it? she asked. She was crawling through the valleys of my brain, searching for worse things to tease out.

  Like a woman’s body in my bathtub. She had been a half-succubus trying to kill me. I’d been so drunk that I didn’t remember killing her to defend myself. I had no recollection of strangling her, my meaty hands locked around the throat of a woman too small to fight back with physical strength.

  Was it self-defense? Or did you enjoy getting to kill her?

  I remembered killing her now.

  How it felt to have her pulse beating like a sparrow’s against my palm.

  The gurgles in the back of her mouth as she struggled to breathe.

  Her knees locked against my ribcage, almost like we were fucking, when she was really trying to squeeze me to death as I squeezed her to death.

  “I didn’t want to kill her,” I said. “I don’t hurt women.”

  Demonstrably, you do, Proserpine said.

  Her name was Erin Karwell.

  She used to sign her name dotted with a heart.

  When she’d tried to kill me, I’d killed her first, and it was self-defense. I hadn’t had a choice.

  Did you have a choice when you helped kill Naamah?

  The fallen angel. An old woman addled by a curse handed down from Adam. She hadn’t known she was hurting people, and up until the last moment, she’d believed her husband was still alive.

  We’d cut her heart out.

  “It’s different,” I said.

  You’ve hurt others.

  Isobel’s face swam through my mind. She’d looked so sad on the yacht, like she was afraid she’d never see me again. And Jesus, I didn’t want it to be like that. I loved Izzy. Felt like a betrayal to think those words, even though I hadn’t been with Suzy in ages. But it was true. I loved Izzy.

  My hands were locked around her throat. She was gurgling in the back of her mouth as she struggled to take a last breath.

  You killed her.

  Isobel’s eyes rolled into the back of her head.

  A laugh broke through the nightmare.

  My hands were still choking Isobel, and I couldn’t stop them. But I had enough control to turn my head. When I looked to the left, Fritz was still standing on the beach in the hurricane with me, wearing that baggy white sweater, and laughing his ass off.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked. “I’m killing your wife.”

  Oh my God. I was killing Isobel.

  “Please, Cèsar,” Fritz said. “Proserpine is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Isobel’s as likely to be licked to death by amorous kittens as she is to be strangled by you.”

  I looked back down at Isobel, smashed against the edge of the bathtub where her body would land when she finally died.

  It wasn’t Isobel anymore. It was Fritz. We were locked in a battle to the death, his knees digging into my ribs, the heels of my palms threatening to collapse his throat. He didn’t look afraid.

  Instead of fighting back, he took my wrists and gently pulled. My hands opened. He straightened and took my shoulders, forcing me to look at him. Fritz’s face filled my vision the way Proserpine’s had.

  “You are not dangerous,” Fritz said. “None of this is real. And you need to open the wards so that I can save you from my ugly cousin.” Which was a really nice statement, except that he punctuated it by ripping my ear off.

  I leaped away from him, screaming and slapping at the bleeding wound on my head.

  In reality, there was no wound. Fritz was still outside the circle.

  Proserpine had stuck a finger in my ear. I had just ripped it out. And ripped it off of her hand in the process.

  “Oh my fucking God, she had a finger in my ear!” I flung the nightmare appendage to the floor, and it squirmed back toward Proserpine like a worm.

  “The wards!” Fritz yelled, pounding his fist against the outside of the circle again.

  If I let him in, we’d both be stuck with Proserpine.

  I needed to finish this.

  Proserpine reconnected her finger and rounded on me again. I leaped behind the couch, ducking so that she’d have to take a few extra steps to get another finger in my goddamn ear. What the fuck was up with that?

  “Let’s hope this works,” I said.

  I dumped the gasoline on the Focus and flicked my lighter. The fuel caught. I pushed the power of the fire inside of it, along with every drop of magic I had left in my body.

  Every ounce of strength. Every bit of my righteous anger.

  The Focus burned.

  And when Proserpine rounded the couch, I was the one who jumped on her first.

  My shoulder smashed into her chest.

  She was so bony, it seemed like she should have collapsed into a pile of dust. Yet I hit her and felt something give. Like I was hitting a trampoline and getting sucked in instead of bouncing off.

  The Focus blazed within Proserpine’s nightmare darkness.

  Distant memories swirled around me—visions of killing people I’d never wanted to kill, handling homicides I never wanted to investigate, and joining a cult that was, in retrospect, a really terrible idea.

  “Go the fuck away,” I said, breathing on the Focus.

  It ignited and erupted.

  Proserpine splattered into a million pieces, and she took my wards with them.

  I finally hit the ground in the penthouse. Nightmare ichor showered around me, slimy and cold. The lights were dead. The buzz of magic was gone, along with the pressure it inflicted on my sinuses.
/>   And the Focus was a whole lot of useless diamond shards in the middle of it all.

  My eyes struggled to adjust to the sudden absence of light. Fritz was a white blur striding through the apartment to drag me to my feet and away from Proserpine’s guts.

  “What is wrong with you?” he demanded, shaking me. “What did you think you were doing?”

  “Killing Proserpine,” I said.

  “But why? Why do it alone?”

  I couldn’t give him the answer right now. My skin was burning where Proserpine’s ichor splattered me, and my shaking, clenched fists were starting to boil. “I need to get this off,” I said hoarsely.

  “Do you have a working shower here?” Fritz asked.

  I laughed. “Fuck no.” And then I realized that the black splatters all over my floor were moving, sliding toward each other. “Fuck no!”

  Proserpine was forming again.

  I’d used Helltown’s most powerful magic against her, and she still wasn’t dead.

  “Run,” Fritz said.

  He grabbed my arm, thundered down the stairs, and bolted into the rainy San Francisco night.

  Chapter 23

  On the bright side, the rain washed the ichor off of me. It sluiced from my body into the streets and left behind angry red patterns on my skin. I had shadow burns, just like Isobel. We were matchy-matchy now. So cute.

  Fritz and I only managed to race a block away before Proserpine’s screams echoed off the surrounding street. If she was screaming, that meant she had at least one mouth, and she had enough form to feel pain. She knew I’d killed her. She was pissed off. Her next attack would be even worse.

  “Jesus,” I panted, putting on a burst of speed. “What does it take to kill that thing?”

  “She’s from the House of Belial! It’s complicated!” Fritz tore down the hill, pulling ahead of me. He was limping a little. His gait askew.

  His ankle rolled.

  Fritz stumbled, hitting his knees. I hoped he was right—that members of the House of Belial, like Fritz, would be very hard to kill.

  There was a time I could have run all the way to Canada with Fritz in my arms. Two hundred pounds of kopis wasn’t much when I took strength-augmenting poultices. But the world was different these days. I was different.