Fire & Water

by Alexis Hall

  As we got closer to the scary metal death fortress, I began to feel myself getting twitchy and irritable. It wasn’t a great feeling, but I’d take it over the skeevy sex palace any day of the week. We pushed our way through a throng of what I guessed were either demons or the damned. Hell was pretty crowded—there was probably a pithy quote about it in some poem I hadn’t read. My right hand went to my wrist, where I was still keeping a sanctified steel dagger. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice said that I could just knife Gethsemane and fight my way to the fortress. Another, saner voice said that would be a completely pointless thing to do.

  We passed underneath a huge arch with winged demon chicks perched all over it, and I noticed the crowd beginning to thin out. That nagging sense of really wanting to hurt something really kind of right now got a whole lot more naggy. Things also got a lot louder. To one side I saw a tall, lithe creature with barbed talons rip into something that looked upsettingly human. All around me people were screaming, swearing, spitting curses. We hurried the fuck up. I couldn’t help but notice that Gethsemane looked genuinely nervous—I suppose where they came from the tormented souls weren’t going to shank you in a corridor. As for me, I was feeling disturbingly good about the situation. Maybe it was my mother’s influence, maybe it was because I had a dangerous job and was used to watching out for people who might go for me. Mostly, though, I think the Palace of Wrath freaked me out less than the Palace of Lust because as far as I was concerned violence was supposed to be horrible.

  The palace gates were open. I say open, they were off their hinges. It looked like they’d been guarded at one point, but the guards were dead—or as close to dead as you could be in a place like this. Neither of them were moving, their bodies lying in pools of blood, or something like it. We stepped over them and pressed inside. Where the path leading up to the fortress had been this godawful cacophony, inside was eerily quiet, like you were expecting an ambush at any moment. Blood caked the floors and spattered the walls. Gethsemane was definitely hurrying now. Through empty corridors, down a gore-slicked spiral staircase to a dank stone chamber. Something moved in the darkness, something hunched and wretched, but with a quickness about it that I thought was very likely to be dangerous.

  I was right. It moved with a grace and speed that it shouldn’t really have been capable of but then, hey, demon. It pounced on Gethsemane, bearing them to the ground and pinning them with its hands around their throat.

  “You should not be here,” it whispered. Its voice was rough and ragged. “Should not have come. Should have stayed in the other tower.”

  Without thinking I lunged forwards, wrenched the creature up, the sanctified blade at its throat. It wasn’t a rescue attempt. I was just angry. The thing struggled, and the part of me that this place was filling with hatred liked that it struggled.

  “Kate, this is Mooncalf. Mooncalf, this is Kate.” Gethsemane took a shaky breath—they were out of their element here and the longer we stayed the more it was showing. “I suggest that everybody puts their knives down.”

  I didn’t want to. I wanted to gut them both. For what they were. For where we were. For the sheer fun of it.

  I put my knife down. The creature called Mooncalf backed away. It seemed to be looking at me. Now my eyes were more used to the darkness, I could see that he looked broadly human. Hunched, scarred and beaten-down, but more like me than most of the things I’d seen since I got here.

  “Kate wants something belonging to Vera King,” continued Gethsemane. “I think you have it.”

  Mooncalf flinched. “Maybe. What?”

  “The soul of a child.” She’d changed again. This time into a young woman, with auburn hair and a timeless, innocent quality. “You won’t have sent her to the blood pits. Not yet.”

  “The mistress commands,” he replied. “And I obey.”

  Gethsemane came forwards and took his head in her hands. “She is not your mistress. She is a mortal sorcerer, and you are a demon of the pit. She may have bound you as she once bound me, but she will die for that. This woman will make certain of it.”

  I felt another flash of anger, and I think it was the regular sort. “Hey, wait a moment, what?”

  Mooncalf turned towards me, gazing up at me with cruel, unbelieving eyes. “Kill her, will you?” He didn’t look happy. Happiness didn’t really seem to exist here.

  “I’m not going around murdering grannies.”

  Gethsemane’s hand came to rest on my shoulder. “You want the girl back? This is how you get it.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted anything that badly. Nana King wasn’t exactly an innocent, but she was somebody’s nan, for fuck’s sake. Okay, the somebody in question was a bloodthirsty gangster who could shoot fire out his eyeballs, and I knew for a fact she had a legion of demons at her beck and call, but it still felt wrong.

  Mooncalf put his hands together, then moved them apart to reveal a tiny swirling ball of light. That was Phoebe. In the hands of one of Vera King’s minions, in a dark damp chamber, in the Palace of Wrath. In Hell. There were no two ways about it, I had to get her out of there.

  “Fine,” I said. “Just...it won’t be straight away. It’ll be... I don’t know. But I’ll get it done.”

  “Promise me.” He sounded desperate. Everything here sounded desperate. “Promise me that she will die. That she will die soon. That you will take this—” He reached out, twisted a shard of rusted metal from the wall, and held it towards me. “That you will take this and thrust it into her heart.”

  Hey Kate! What did you do this evening? Oh you know, the usual. Let a shapeshifting sexual predator take me to the most miserable place in the cosmos and promised a bloodthirsty hellbeast that I’d brutally stab a little old lady. “Whatever,” I said. “Just give me the girl.”

  “Promise me. I have to hear the words.”

  I’d say this was getting creepy. But we’d passed creepy about six stations ago. This was getting sick. “Okay. All right. If that’s what it takes.” I grabbed the spike. “I promise that the next time I meet Vera King I will stab—”

  “Thrust.” There was a malicious glee in his voice.

  “That I will thrust this spike through her heart.” The moment I’d said it, I felt something. A tearing, catching feeling in what I really hoped wasn’t my soul.

  Mooncalf handed me the little ball of light. “It will be sweet,” he said, with a faraway look on his face, “to be free.”

  “You do realise that you have a gigantic pit full of armour-plated monsters down here?” I tucked the spike into my inside pocket. “Is it really so hard for you to take care of one octogenarian?”

  “You think we’d stay down here if we could come and go as we liked?” Gethsemane looked genuinely pissed off. “You think I’d spend my evenings picking up losers in fast food outlets if I could just live?” She took my hand again, none too gently. “Come on. We’re done here.”

  We turned and left. I heard Mooncalf whispering kill her over and over again as we went, and I carried on hearing it long after I should have stopped. I held Phoebe’s soul cupped between my hands—something told me that I wanted to make really, really sure nobody got sight of it while we were making our way out. The path between the palaces was still chaos, but I kept my head up, walked straight ahead and tried not to think of all the hideous, visceral things that people were doing to one another either side of me. Unfortunately, walking straight ahead turned out to mean walking straight into this full-on spiky lizard monster with crocodile teeth and bat wings. It stared down at me and growled.

  I made apologetic noises and tried to step around, but it grabbed me with one massive claw and lowered its muzzle to sniff at me.

  “Let go. Now.” I tried to sound menacing. Which was tough when you were dealing with a creature about twice your size while holding something you couldn’t risk damaging.

  It reached up with it
s other talon and tried to pry my hands open. I guess this was the infernal equivalent of the big kids taking your lunch money, only with an eternity of torment at the end of it. And from the looks of things, I was about six seconds away from getting the world’s least precise acupuncture treatment. If my mother’s power couldn’t reach me here, I was totally fucked. Pressing Phoebe’s soul to my chest with one hand, I grabbed the demon’s wrist with the other, and twisted. At the same time I reached out to the Deepwild with whatever bits of my mind weren’t already busy dealing with this totally fucked-up situation. The power came over me in a rush, wild and vicious and different somehow, tangled up with the sick and strangling hatred that filled the air.

  Taken off guard, the demon stumbled forward. I pressed on its arm with my elbow and forced it painfully to its knees. It slashed up wildly with its one free claw and drew blood. Between the Palace of Wrath and the dark of the wood, it just pissed me off. I hooked my leg over its shoulder and twisted with my whole body. There was a wet popping tear and the limb came away in my grip. The beast howled and rose up to savage me. I tossed the arm, wrapped my hand around its throat and squeezed. The muscles in its neck were strong, but faerie and the violent, vindictive power of this Hell were stronger. My fingers broke skin and crushed tissue, forcing its head back and ripping through tendon and gristle. It fell at my feet and I almost laughed. I licked its blood from my fingertips and immediately regretted it. It tasted of bile and acid, spite and fury. Gethsemane was pulling at my sleeve, and a dozen voices at the back of my mind said to pluck out her eyes and eat them.

  I looked down at the little orb of light that swirled in my left hand. It was important. I remembered that. There was something calming about it. Something that didn’t belong to this place or to the wilds or to anything but itself.

  I glanced at Gethsemane. She looked fucking terrified. I really needed to get out of here.

  We didn’t run. This was the kind of situation where running got you chased. But we walked pretty damned quickly, and the nice thing about ripping a monster’s throat out with your bare hands is that it made people give you your space. We passed beneath the iron arch and hurried back to the Palace of Lust. I was feeling more myself, but the demon-blood in my mouth and the constant, gnawing pressure of, y’know, Hell was really getting to me.

  Gethsemane led me through the corridors of the Palace and back to the staircase. I started climbing, and found it harder than I’d imagined. I might not be the fittest person in the world, but I’ve done the steps at Covent Garden tube when the lifts were down, and this was something else entirely. It was like something was trying to drag me down. By the time I reached the top I was crawling, my heart racing, my breath catching. When we reached the door, I collapsed, turned back to face down the stairwell, and vomited. The mingled scent of piss and puke and the lingering traces of sulphur was the least pleasant thing I’d smelled in a good long while. Including the times I’d been sewer-diving.

  I slumped on the top step with my head between my knees, holding the little soul-orb in front of my eyes and telling myself it had all been worth it. Gethsemane sat beside me. They’d reverted to their neutral form—which I was beginning to take as a perverse sign of trust.

  “That,” I said. “Was fucking horrible.” I kind of wanted to throw up again, but I wasn’t sure there was anything left in my stomach.

  “It’s Hell. What did you expect?”

  I just waited there a while, breathing heavily. Then I looked up and stared at Gethsemane. Even in this shape, the one that wasn’t completely designed to push all of my buttons, there was something enticing about them. But that wasn’t what was bugging me right now. “How do you do it?” I asked. “You send people there. Forever. You must have sent hundreds. Thousands.”

  “You were in that place for an hour, and look at you.” They turned away. “I’m not going to try and justify myself. I’m not going to say it’s right. But we can’t all be like Ashriel. Most of us, most of us who’ve been there for so long, for six thousand years some of us, we’d do anything to get out.”

  “Then how did Ash escape?”

  Gethsemane laughed. It wasn’t the laugh I expected from a succubus, or incubus, or whatever type of ’cubus they were in this shape. There was nothing seductive about it. “He didn’t.” They looked at me, and I must have had a really vacant expression on my face because they continued: “Oh come on, you must have heard the line. This is Hell...”

  “Nor am I out of it?” I finished. Ash had said that to me when we’d first met.

  “I’ll admit, coming up here and walking around is a perk a lot of us don’t get. But Hell isn’t really a place; it’s a state of being. The way you felt while you were down there, we feel that way all the time unless we” —they looked away again—“unless we do what we do.”

  Next time I saw Ash I was buying him a drink. Okay, not true, next time I saw Ash I was probably going to ask him to help me out with something really important and life threatening because that was how most of my relationships worked. But the next time I saw Ash socially and outside the context of a giant mystical clusterfuck, I was buying him a drink. “What is it even for? I mean, what’s the point?”

  Gethsemane shrugged. “It wasn’t my idea. It’s a punishment for...something. Go around expecting things to be fair or make sense, and you’re going to be really disappointed.”

  At last I went back to the carriage and Gethsemane went off to... I don’t know, damn another person to eternal torment, I guess. Fuck, this reality was fucked up. At the flat, I found Nim still asleep and Phoebe still unconscious. The little ball of light seemed to brighten somehow as it got closer to her body. A tiny, suspicious part of me had the sudden paranoid thought that this wasn’t her soul at all but some kind of monstrous hell-parasite that I was about to unleash on the world. But if that was the case, there was nothing I could do about it.

  I held the light over Phoebe’s chest. It sank slowly into her body, and her eyes flickered open. She sat up, glanced frantically around her with a look that I can only describe as mortally fucking terrified, and then burst into tears. All the commotion must have disturbed Nim, because she stirred as well. I was selfishly glad about that, because I suck with kids and Nim’s quite good with them. Is quite good with everybody, really. Without stopping to ask what was happening, or how things had got the way they’d got, she put her arm around Phoebe’s shoulders and told her everything was all right. That it was going to be all right. She said it in that way she had of saying things so you couldn’t not believe her.

  I left the room. Phoebe didn’t really know me and having a stranger around was just going to make things worse, so I sat on my sofa and waited for everything to be done.

  I must have nodded off, because the next thing I knew light was filtering through the curtains and Nim was sitting next to me. I peeled my face off the armrest and swivelled myself into something that looked a bit like a sitting position. My head was killing me and my mouth felt like—oh yeah—like I’d swallowed demon blood, vomited heavily, and then passed out without brushing my teeth. There was blood on the sofa as well, from where my arm had been ripped open. I took such terrible care of my stuff.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  “Fine.” Nim shut her eyes and thought for a moment. “As fine as she could be. Kate, what did you do?”

  “Fixed it.”

  She glared at me. It was her serious, I run this city and you don’t pull that crap with me face. “Kate,” she repeated, “what did you do?”

  So I explained. That I’d gone to see Ashriel, then Gethsemane. That I’d asked a devil for help and that I’d got it after a fashion. That I’d literally been to Hell and back. That I was honestly feeling really pretty messed up right now what with everything that had happened in the last few days and that I wasn’t in any fit state to have my choices raked over no matter how stupid or reckless they were.


  It wound up being quite a long explanation.

  When I was done, Nimue stood up. Then she crouched, and kissed me gently on the forehead. “You shouldn’t have done it,” she said. “But I’m glad you did. Phoebe will be safe, I’ll make sure of it. So will everybody else who can’t protect themselves. We’ll win this. I promise.”

  I stared blearily at her. “You still need the Tears, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “You know that means messing with the wolves and the Merchant of Dreams?”

  “The wolves are your problem. The Merchant is mine. Get the Tears for your client. I’ll make whatever bargains I have to from there.”

  I tried to stand and failed. “Nim, you don’t have to. Never make deals with faeries is, like, page four of the Big Book of Not Getting Totally Fucked Over. I’ll square things. Don’t worry.”

  “No,” she told me. “You won’t.” It wasn’t a statement, it was a pronouncement. This was the way things were going to be. I felt bad that I was glad about it.

  “Fine.” I sighed. “Look, you and Phoebe can stay here as long as you like. I’d ask if you need anything but, honestly, I think I’m going to want to lie here and be unconscious for a bit.”

  Nim might have said something back to me, but I didn’t catch it. Because, y’know, unconscious.

  Chapter Twelve

  Statues & Wolves

  I woke up—okay, came to—a couple of hours later. I could barely move. I really had to cut down on the amount of running around, getting the crap kicked out of me, being set on fire and literally visiting Hell that I did. That and saturated fats. At first, I just sort of lay there for a bit, staring at the ceiling, and trying to comfort myself with the thought that I’d done a straightforwardly good thing last night. Unless I hadn’t.

  Nim had vanished sometime in the night, and taken Phoebe with her. Which was fine. I hadn’t expected them to stick around. Mages were paranoid and elusive at the best of times, even when they weren’t trying to stop their friend’s kids getting caught in the crossfire of a massive magical war. Besides, I had shit of my own to deal with, what with the Tears and the werewolves and the Merchant.