by SM Reine
Still, whether via juncture or family portal, it had often taken weeks to reach junctures hidden inside mountains, in the sky, or even underneath the ocean.
Now there was nothing for Fritz to do but go to Helltown.
He stood on the precipice only briefly, waiting for the smoke to clear so he could see where he would land when he jumped. Ba’al’s corpse sprawled underneath him. Little could get Fritz’s hair standing on end like the sight of Ba’al.
Then he jumped.
Fritz fell, boots-first, arms spread for balance, his heart in his throat.
When he landed, it was in the House of Belial.
Call it luck, call it practice, call it fate’s sick sense of humor—he struck right on the pelvis, and he rolled toward the cradle below.
He caught himself by wrapping his arms around a bony spur. The line of bone scraped along his chest, hands, and face as he clung to it, slowing his decline. He hit the rotten ground ankle-deep in yellow curds.
The House rose above him. It had been different every time he visited due to the biological nature of Malebolge. The buildings would spread like cancer one year, then decay the next. They always came back. They always died again.
Today, the House looked stranger than Fritz had seen it before. It looked like it was in a rotting phase with no following growth. The buildings carved graceful arcs through the air as they tumbled, splattering across the spongy earth.
The wards were down. Proserpine was already here.
He didn’t breathe until he found her.
She towered over the slave quarters, infinitely huge. It wasn’t an illusion here. Malebolge was home to nightmares, the place from which they were all born. Earth’s limitations didn’t apply in this space. She had enough power that she could have filled the space in the cavern like a storm raining ichor.
At the moment, her storm was much more localized. Proserpine faced away from him. She was looking at something else—someone else.
Fritz scrambled up the wall of the pelvis again, traversing it to approach his demon cousin. The bones were slick under his hands. “Pros!”
She didn’t hear him the first time, and he had to call again.
“Proserpine!”
When she turned, her body darkened until opaque, forming an impenetrable wall. If Isobel and Suzy were behind her, there was no way to know. He couldn’t tell if they were alive.
“Darling baby Friederling,” Proserpine purred, slithering toward Fritz. She billowed and grew and filled the air with the stench of perforated intestine.
He reached the top of the spur. “Where are they?”
Proserpine’s mouth split into a wide grin. She had a thousand broken teeth. The jags were yellow with brown tips. She’d been biting flesh, and she was bloody.
A beam of light from Earth momentarily slashed through the billowing black smoke of the nightmare’s form, splitting her tail into tufts, before smoke again obscured the hint of sun.
“Who are you looking for?” she asked.
“You know who,” Fritz said. “If you’ve killed my wife, I swear that I will make you suffer for decades before I let you die. Believe me. I have the money for the most incredible torture devices.”
“What do you think you will you do to me in my house?” Her yards-long fingers unfolded from within the depths of her foggy cloak to stroke his cheek. “You surrendered it to me.”
“Then I’ll win against you in combat.” Fritz jerked a knife from his belt, flipped out the blade.
“With that? Oh honey.” Proserpine’s darkness flowed into the night, surrounding Fritz. He stood among black with the white fingers of a demon scratching his jaw. “Have you forgotten what I am? Have you forgotten where we are?”
Nightmare power slammed into him.
On Earth, close to Cèsar, Fritz would have been invulnerable.
There was little he could do in Malebolge. Proserpine suffused his mind like blood into a sponge. He was engulfed in total darkness, disconnected from the surrounding dimension. He could no longer see the bones he stood upon.
The only thing he could see was Proserpine.
Fritz tracked the movement of her clownishly exaggerated face without moving his head. She looked close enough to stab, but he knew that it was an illusion created by distorted light. He wouldn’t get more than one opportunity to strike. He needed to wait until she was in arm’s reach.
Sounds crept through the darkness.
Whispers.
“Where are you?” Proserpine whispered, twisting around Fritz to peer over his shoulder.
The chime of a massive bell rang through Fritz’s bones. It shook his teeth in his jaw, shivered over the topography of his skin, made his lungs seize against his heart.
Before the first chime could fade away, a second followed, and a third. It was so loud. The mallet striking those bells must have been as big as Fritz.
His leg hurt. Fritz staggered at the sudden pinch on his ankle.
His prosthetic ankle.
He looked down. Now he wasn’t straddling bone spurs, but standing on a wooden platform looking down the bell tower of a church.
The bell tolled again.
Somehow, he could hear Proserpine’s whisper even though the sound deafened him. “What does this memory mean to you?” she asked.
Fritz realized which church he was in. Black walls, black chains, its windows angled away from the trajectory of the sun. It was a church in Helltown.
He turned to see Naamah behind him. The fallen angel looked too frail to pose a threat, but she had nonetheless disabled Fritz with a blow to the head. He’d had no chance to fight back. She’d surprised him in the parking lot outside the OPA offices, and he hadn’t heard her coming.
While he was unconscious, she’d dragged Fritz to her cathedral and lashed a chain around his ankle. She’d hung a weight from him. He had been the clapper in the bell.
And he was here again. Naamah shoved him and he swung into space, suspended by the ropes wrapped around his chest and arms. Fritz was stretched tight on the rope by his ankle weight. He’d almost thought his entire leg would tear off.
It wasn’t a memory.
It was reality.
He was living this again. Swinging under the bell, suffocated by rope, with a chain pinching off any sensation in his foot. His toes burned. That burning was the last sensation he’d ever feel in his foot.
“I’ll see you later, darling,” Naamah had said. She’d believed him to be her husband. Her brain had been addled by the fall from Heaven.
Proserpine floated behind Naamah this time, the shadow of the angel. “A fond memory, I see,” Proserpine said.
Fritz could barely hear her. The fear was choking.
Hanging inside that bell had been the first time Fritz had thought he genuinely might die.
It wasn’t the death that shamed him, but his fear of it. He had expected to face his imminent death with more grace. Kopides died young—that was the rule. As the frontline soldiers in a battle against evil, they seldom saw thirty years of age. There were no officers in this fight, no men kept out of the trenches.
But Fritz wasn’t most kopides. He’d been raised by a loving nanny—he had to believe Dejana truly loved him—and she had sheltered him from his heritage as a kopis until he was a teenager. She had let him believe he had a future. That he could choose what kind of man he wanted to become.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Dejana had said one night when she’d tended to him in a fever. The stroke of a damp washcloth over his fevered forehead had been as comforting as the clapper in the bell had been painful. “You can be anyone.”
And then he’d turned fourteen.
Werner had sought him out.
His father had told him that kopides were born to die.
Of course, Werner had promptly added that the rule didn’t apply to Friederlings. Between his nanny and his father, Fritz had truly believed he was different. He’d faced his kopis duties with a certain sense
of immortality.
Was that not the legacy of a Friederling? The rules did not apply to them. The rules existed to keep lesser men in line.
Fritz was not born to die.
He’d realized he was wrong when he was hanging in that bell tower, losing sensation in his foot that he would never regain. He had watched the fallen angel limping away from him, her back an exaggerated hunch from the shriveled wings underneath her robes, and he’d known that if she came back, it would not be to release him.
Werner had walked away from him too. Many times. Every time Fritz had seen him, brief as the visits had been, it had ended in Werner walking away.
Going back to his life as the head of the House of Belial.
Leaving the son he hadn’t intended to create.
Werner hadn’t limped, hadn’t had a hunch. He had been straight-backed and strong, with hair half-blond, half-gray, and fists that looked like they’d never once been curled around the hilt of a blade.
Naamah walked away, Werner walked away.
Fritz was alone in the bell tower about to die.
I didn’t die.
Cèsar had appeared, spiraling up the stairs to cut Fritz down. He’d let the kopis fall over his shoulder and carried him to safety on the roof outside. Then and there, Cèsar had slashed their wrists, combined their blood, chosen to be the shield to Fritz’s sword.
He had believed Fritz was worth saving. He’d looked so admiring when Fritz left the house earlier, too.
There was hope.
Fritz gathered that hope around himself like a cloak, pauldrons and gauntlets and armor. He shoved against Proserpine. “Stay out of my mind!”
The visions exploded and reality rushed back in. It wasn’t much of an improvement. Malebolge was worse than the bell tower in most ways. But at least this fearscape, filled with oversized rotten bones, was reality. At least he could glimpse Earth above him through the slit—the promise of a life with his aspis where they could, again, be together, work together, save people together.
Fritz mentally shoved his bond down Proserpine’s throat.
She choked on it.
The nightmare reared away from him, her billowing form constricted as if by an invisible serpent. Proserpine’s fingers clawed at her face. “No—how—?”
Fritz lunged with the knife, and he buried it inside of her.
There wasn’t enough of a physical body for him to cut, but he didn’t need to fight with physical power. He connected with her, shoved himself into her. Buried the knife so deep.
Her hands clutched his wrist. She shivered just inches away, her face twisting.
“I will banish you,” Fritz whispered. “You will be driven into oblivion.”
“Do it, and I’ll make you regret it,” she hissed. “I come back. I always come back. And I’ve seen your aspis, so I know who matters to you most. I will get revenge.”
“You’re welcome to try.”
He summoned his full strength. Not just what he had when combined with Cèsar—a bond strong enough to traverse the planes—but what the Friederling family had given him. He reached out to the wards that Proserpine had taken away from him and he took them back.
The House of Belial’s power rubbed against him with serpentine calm.
Begone.
With that one command, he snapped the wards shut around Proserpine.
And she was gone.
In a blink, she dissipated, and Fritz stood alone on the arch of Ba’al’s hipbone. His eyes traveled over the place where she’d been standing. There was no sign of the Purple Heart. Not that he’d expected she would actually shit it out and prolapse her anus the way Cèsar said, but he’d hoped it might fall if she unsubstantiated.
Isobel and Suzy were lying on the other side, just outside the doors to the slave quarters.
“Belle!”
Fritz leaped off the bones and trudged through the rot to reach them. Malebolge had already begun to claim their bodies. The curds creeping over their legs, their faces. Both women were bleeding, but he couldn’t see the injuries.
He sank knee-deep trying to get to Isobel’s side. He was afraid that when he’d touch her, there’d be no warmth, no response—a zombie no longer animated. But when his hand ran over the smooth flesh of her arm, Isobel’s eyes opened.
“Fritz.” There was that same admiration that he’d seen in Cèsar’s eyes, brighter than the sun radiating down from Earth. Then she stiffened, and she fought to sit up. “Suzy!”
“Five more minutes, Mom,” Suzy grumbled from the other side. She sat up and looked down at herself. “Ugh. I smell like cheese. Where’s that big stupid Pennywhistle thing? Did you kill her?”
“I drove her away for now.” Fritz wrapped his hands around the women’s arms and yanked them free. They had to return the favor to help get him out. It was like quicksand, this pile of spongy fat and fetid flesh. “We can’t rely on the wards to keep her from reappearing. We need to climb back to Earth, and fast.”
“Climbing,” Suzy said flatly. “Yay.”
Isobel threw her arms around him once they were both upright. She smelled like cheese, too. He didn’t care. He buried his face in her hair and inhaled the stench just so that he could get a hint of his wife underneath.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I am too,” he said.
“Gross,” Suzy said. “Where’s Cèsar? I’m surprised the big puppy isn’t jumping on me right now.”
Fritz began climbing to the house, his hand clasped on Isobel’s. “He’s safely on Earth. He warned me where you two went, and he stayed to take care of the Genesis Convention.”
“Take care of it how, exactly?” Suzy asked.
“We won’t know until we get there,” Fritz said. Whatever Cèsar had chosen, he was certain the choice would be correct.
The certainty lasted only a moment.
Isobel was trying to wring some of the grease out of her clothes, and she found a piece of folded paper in her waistband. She stopped walking when she unfolded it. The color drained from her face.
“What’s that?” Fritz asked.
“It’s from Cèsar. He must have stuck it on me when we were hugging.” Her hands started shaking. The paper trembled in her hands. “Look at this.” Isobel shoved the note in Fritz’s face.
The paper was creased, making it even harder to read the chicken scratch that Cèsar tried to pass off as handwriting. Fritz had been getting reports in this handwriting for years and it was still a struggle to piece those words together to find a meaning.
Izzy,
I’ve always liked you. I don’t think I ever told you enough how much I like you.
I have to ask a big favor that I don’t deserve. I want you to say goodbye for me. You know who matters.
-Cèsar
“Goodbye?” Fritz’s eyes lifted from the letter, barely legible as it was. “Where would he be going?”
Suzy’s hand crept to her mouth as horror spread through her eyes. “Zettel’s bomb. The Genesis Convention.”
She’d barely gotten out the last syllable before Fritz was dropping the paper, turning, racing up the slope of the pelvic bones.
Back to Earth. Back to save Cèsar.
Assuming it wasn’t already too late.
Fritz took the stairs up the exterior slope of Malebolge three at a time. He didn’t stop to make sure the shorter women could keep up, nor did he look back even once at the remnants of what had once been the House of Belial.
He arrived at Helltown and didn’t stop there, either. Kopides were faster than most humans. Fast enough that the few remaining Silver Needles didn’t seem to regard it as worthwhile to fight him.
Despite flying over the pavement, Fritz got to Isobel’s RV around the same time they did. He was not the only one who was driven by fear. He had never seen Isobel so pale, or heard such little attitude from Suzy.
He wasn’t sure how long it took to drive back to Beverly Hills. Five minutes would have been too long.
Isobel slammed through Fritz’s gated entrance before it was open all the way. She skidded to a stop outside Fritz’s dojo. There was a helicopter on the roof, its rotors still spinning. There were lights inside the building, so Fritz could see that the catering company had set up the tables, and that Lady Tresor was standing at one end to speak to a handful of people.
There was no sign of the angel Makael yet. An angel would have been impossible to miss.
The fact that there was no angel was a good sign. Quietude meant the bomb had yet to be detonated.
“Out of my way,” Suzy said when Fritz paused in the doorway of the RV. She pushed him aside, jumped through the beaded doorway, and strode across the lawn toward the dojo.
“You’re too late.” These words came from the nearby bushes—or, more specifically, a very disgruntled Gary Zettel who sat behind them with an impressive black eye. “You’re way too late.”
At another time, Fritz would have relished the opportunity to kick the shit out of the former secretary. He didn’t even pause now.
“I gave him the bomb!” Zettel shouted when the three of them passed by with barely a glance. “He’s going to blow the place to kingdom come!”
Indeed, through the windows, Fritz could see that Cèsar was now in the dojo. He wouldn’t have known it was Cèsar if not for the bond. At this angle, he could only see part of his sleeve, the angle of his shoulder. He appeared to be standing near Lady Tresor, and he was doing something with his hands.
“Wait out here,” Fritz told Isobel and Suzy, and he stepped into the dojo.
“Wait!” Isobel said. “The bomb—”
He entered the dojo and shut the door behind him.
His workout room had been transformed in the space of a few hours by household staff. Most staff had left when the Breaking stretched through Los Angeles, and Fritz had been happy to let them go, but he’d been happier still to have the help of that handful who remained. They’d worked tirelessly to convert the large space to a luxurious meeting room.
There was no sign of the barbells, the weapons’ racks, the foam pads. The wooden floors had been polished. A single table was surrounded by candelabras with dancing firelight. A buffet table held ripe fruit, fresh-baked bread—many delectations that Fritz would find himself missing in months to come.
