Author's Note:

While I had been limiting each of the previous chapters to one character's point of view per chapter, I decided I need all three character's POV in this one to make it work. But since it was rightfully Trish's turn, she got POV twice. Why do I think about things like this? Because I'm a nerd. Anyway, there's actually some action in this one.

Strip and Go Naked

Trish was speeding down the highway at nearly twenty miles over the limit, but she swore she could still smell the rank scent of blood and gore on her clothes.

Her job had taken longer than expected. Normally she stuck to strictly demon prey—she tried to avoid creatures that belonged only in an episode of the X-Files if at all possible—but this job had paid well and she hadn't known for certain when she took it that the target was not actually a demon. Most freaky supernatural creatures could be explained as demons, after all. But to her dismay, she had actually been hired to hunt an escaped test subject from some sort of sick genetic experiment.

The creature was not clever, but it was resourceful. Whenever she had managed to get close, it had promptly split itself in two, spilling nasty smelling primordial juices everywhere along the way. She must have killed the damn thing twenty times by the time she finally caught it before it had the chance to multiply again. As far as she could tell it was completely dead now, and she had insisted on a higher reward when she brought the disgusting carcass of the experiment-gone-wrong to her client. Seeing her condition, he had either agreed because of her obvious effort or because he wanted to be away from her stench as quickly as possible.

She probably should have grabbed a hotel room for the night and cleaned herself up before heading back, but she was so sick of that dismal village after spending three miserable days exploring every nook and cranny of it that she couldn't stand to be there another minute.

Slowing down when she hit the outskirts of the city, Trish considered finding a way to delay the inevitable just a little bit longer, but she had lived with the ambiguity of her situation with Dante hanging over her head for long enough.

Though she didn't exactly regret pushing Dante away, she did wish that she could have left on better terms. She had to admit that Lady's theory had turned out to be fairly accurate, but part of her was still a bit suspicious of his sincerity. He had been awfully eager to "get in her pants," as he had so genteelly put it, and she couldn't help wondering if he was merely interested in crossing one more woman off his list. She had no desire to be on that list. The only way he was going to get her into his bed was if he threw his list away entirely. She honestly didn't know whether that was even possible for him. But she was willing to find out.

Rush hour traffic slowed her down the closer she got to the middle of town and she pulled out her cell phone when her stomach started growling. Thinking dinner might be a nice way to start patching things up between them, she dialed his number.

The phone rang. And rang. And just when she was about to hang up someone answered, but it was not Dante. "Lady?" Trish asked in surprise.

"Trish!" Lady said quickly, her voice coated in worry. "Are you back in town?"

"Yeah," Trish answered with a hint of trepidation. "Is something up? Where's Dante?"

"That's the problem…I'm not sure." Lady groaned. "I think I did something really stupid."

"What happened?"

Lady hesitated. "Where are you?"

Trish glanced up at the sign hanging over the intersection she was passing through. "3rd and Grand. I'm only a few blocks away, but traffic is murder."

"Take a right on Cherry. It should be the next street. You can take a shortcut through the new park there."

"Got it. I'll see you in a few minutes." Trish hung up and shoved the phone back in her pocket, cutting past the car ahead of her to take a sharp right on Cherry. Very little actual thought went through her head as she made her way through the park and down the street to Devil May Cry; she was too busy trying to navigate traffic and trying not to think of explanations for Lady's panic.

Parking her bike out front and hurrying up the steps, she shoved the door open and stepped inside without preamble, momentarily forgetting her own stench. Lady, who was pacing back and forth between the pool table and the jukebox, stopped in her circuit immediately and turned to Trish in horror, her nose wrinkling.

"Sorry," Trish apologized quickly. "I didn't take the time to clean up. What's going on?"

Holding her fingers up to her nose while trying not to appear as if she was bothered by the smell, Lady replied, "I'm afraid Dante might have gotten himself in over his head this time. And it's all my fault. I told him about this demon who was in town, and…" Blinking slowly, she paused. "You know, you could go ahead and take a shower upstairs first, if you want. We can figure out what to do about Dante when you're done."

Trish raised an eyebrow, but she had to admit that she was smelling pretty awful even to herself. "Okay. But only if you order us some dinner in the meantime. I'm starving." She started heading for the stairs.

"What do you want? Should I order pizza?"

Pausing halfway up the stairs, Trish peered down at her from between the railing and the ceiling. "Absolutely not."

"We could put it on Dante's tab that way."

Trish shook her head. "No, I'm against pizza on principle. Order Chinese or something. With extra crab rangoon."

She didn't take the time to find out if Lady had any other questions, taking the rest of the stairs two at a time and flinging open the door to her old room. Pausing on the threshold despite her hurry, she noticed that someone had been in the room recently; the dust on the floor had been disturbed and there was a faint imprint of a body on the covers. The footprints had been made by rather large feet and she felt a dull ache in her chest at the possibility that Dante had been the one to make them.

Shaking the thought away, Trish opened the closet and frowned at the small assortment of clothing she had left behind. Dante's comment echoed in her head and she considered walking down the hall and stealing something from his closet, but she knew that would be impractical. Not only would anything she found there be likely to fit her poorly, but she also had no interest in dealing with the gloating expression he would have on his face when he saw her wearing his clothes.

Deciding to make do with what she had, she grabbed a tight blue drawstring shirt that was a little impractical for demon hunting and a pair of brown cargo pants that had always been too loose on her.

Hurrying across the hall to the bathroom, she held her breath and flipped on the light.

The bathroom was surprisingly clean and tidy. It wasn't as clean as she had kept it when she lived in the house, but it wasn't bad, all things considered. She wondered briefly if Lady had cleaned it because she couldn't stand the filth, but then she decided that Lady probably wouldn't come near a mess Dante had made. She would simply yell at him until he finally cleaned it up himself to stop her haranguing.

The shower felt amazingly good, the layers of grit and grime washing away down the drain and leaving her feeling refreshed. When she was certain that her skin was scrubbed clean, Trish stepped out of the shower and dried off quickly, wrapping a towel around her hair. She paused halfway through the process, burrowing her face in the towel for one weak moment when she recognized the scent of the fabric softener and thought of the way it had smelled on Dante's clothes when she had been held captive in his arms.

Once she was dressed, Trish tried to wring as much water out of her hair as she could before she hurried downstairs, pulling on a pair of socks as she went. Lady was at the door talking to a deliveryman by the time she entered the room and the aroma of fried rice and soy sauce wafted through the room.

Lady spread the food out over Dante's desk, and after a reluctant glance at his empty chair they both decided to sit on the edge of the desk rather than take his chair.

Lady started explaining as soon as they were situated. Listening while she eagerly inhaled a bowl of hot and sour soup, Trish wondered why Lady felt like any of this was her fault. Dante clearly had chosen to pursue the succubus on his own, and it wasn't as if he wouldn't have found out about the demon sooner or later anyway—it was hunting in his territory, after all.

"And then I found out that this succubus isn't just any old demon," Lady lamented, picking at a container of fried rice with her chopsticks. "She's like the mother of all succubae and came to this city specifically to find the son of Sparda. She was targeting him from the beginning and it seems that all her other victims were only a light snack before the main course. I guess she has some kind of grudge against his father."

"Who doesn't?" Trish said with a frown, finishing off the last bite of a crab rangoon. "But Dante's no pushover. Surely he could hold his own against her."

Lady glanced at her, doubt filling her eyes. "She came here looking for him so she's probably done her research. She intends to make him her slave or something and keep him around as long as she can keep feeding off of him. I came here to warn him as soon as I found out, but he was already gone."

Trish pushed her container of General Tso's chicken aside with a sigh, her appetite unexpectedly waning. "Any ideas where she is now?"

"I tracked her to some abandoned storage caves outside of town. There was an accident a few years ago and some of the chambers collapsed, but most of the structure is still standing. It sounds like the perfect hiding place for a demon, doesn't it?"

Nodding grimly, Trish agreed. Deciding there was no point in delaying the inevitable any more than necessary. "Shall we go?" she asked, brushing off her hands.

A small smile curved Lady's lips as she began gathering up their leftovers. "I'll put this away if you'll take out the trash."

They were at the caves fifteen minutes later, parking their bikes next to Dante's beat up car.

"Well, I guess that settles it," Trish said with a sour smile, dragging a finger along the side of the red car. "Even if the demon isn't here, he's around here somewhere, at least."

The entrance to the caves was partially collapsed and they had to crawl over a cascade of cement rubble just to get inside. Lady turned on a flashlight as she dropped down to the cracked pavement that sloped downhill to the network of caves deep beneath the hillside. The light danced along the long, crumbling corridor, bouncing off of crevices, thick pillars of rock painted over in industrial white paint and the hollowed remnants of what had once been shops and storage units. Their footsteps echoed eerily in the crumbling corridor, but the caves were silent otherwise—aside from the occasional drip of water or buzz of a fluorescent light that hadn't quite given up yet.

"There's a lot of ground to cover," Trish sighed, turning in a slow circle when they reached a pair of branching corridors. "Do you think we should split up?"

"Probably," Lady agreed. "Do you want a flashlight?"

Trish smiled. "No need. My eyes are pretty sensitive. Should we meet back here in a half an hour?"

"Sure." Lady adjusted Kalina Ann on her shoulder; Trish had never understood how Lady managed to carry around a weapon that was nearly as big as her and possibly weighed more than she did, but judging by the skill with which Lady used the bazooka, it was no burden for her. "Good hunting," Lady said with a wave as she turned down the right path.

Trish wondered whether this was really the wisest thing to be doing. According to Lady, the succubus had next to no interest in women, so they didn't really have a lot to worry about where their own wellbeing was concerned, but anyone would fight back when threatened. She imagined the succubus wouldn't roll over and say uncle just because they were women if they were rushing in to rescue her prize.

Still, Trish had a lot of faith in her excellent hearing, and she imagined that if Lady were to run into the succubus first, she would hear it easily enough to come to her aid before things got too ugly. It wasn't that she doubted Lady's ability to take care of herself so much as she questioned the demon's strength if Dante hadn't finished her off by now. It might take a team effort to bring this one down.

---------

Dante was feeling pretty lousy. He had gone after the succubus mostly out of an unfounded grudge against Lady for saying he shouldn't, and it was proving to be a really bad idea. Not only was the demon stronger than he had expected, but she fought dirty. Her saliva seemed to be severely poisonous, and every time she managed to get the better of him and snag a soul-sucking kiss, he was left temporarily stunned and practically paralyzed.

He had brought Nevan along with him because she was always whining about how he never took her out anymore, and he figured it would be useful to fight fire with fire. Surely one succubus would be good defense against another, after all. But she had been less than worthless. The moment they found the demon she had up and refused to fight for him, claiming the succubus was her mother or something and it was against her principles to fight her. Dante hadn't even known the bat bitch had principles.

While his guns had been useful, he had made the most progress with Alastor. The succubus had an army of spider familiars and they were difficult targets to hit with a bullet. Unfortunately, Alastor was buried somewhere on the other side of the chamber and Dante was wrapped in a suffocating cocoon of spider silk suspended from the ceiling.

His head pounded painfully as he watched the ground sway back and forth across his vision, forgetting for a moment that the ground wasn't moving at all and he was the one who was swaying. Closing his eyes with a groan, Dante listened to the tiny scrabbling sounds of hundreds of skeletal legs against the crumbling cement floor and willed himself to recover enough to risk a devil trigger. He had triggered half a dozen times already in this fight for what little good it had done him, but he had barely managed to do any damage to her without ending up at her mercy immediately afterward.

He had fallen victim to her poison one too many times during their last scuffle and she had taken full advantage of his weakness. Healing herself by drawing vitality from him, she had sated herself temporarily and slinked away into some dark corner to bask in the afterglow while he was left tangled in her web. He should have been using the opportunity to regain his strength and plan a sneak attack, but it seemed that regaining his strength was taking his full attention and still progressing rather slowly.

Cursing himself for his stupidity, Dante considered his limited options. At the moment his only real choice was to play the victim and pretend to be helpless--though he truly was not far from it at the moment. If she let her guard down, he might be able to make his move and deliver a fatal blow before she could stop him.

Dante was just drifting back into unconsciousness when he felt himself being lowered from the ceiling, spiny legs catching him before he touched the ground and righting him on his feet. Shaking himself awake, he tried to focus on the succubus as she stepped out of the shadows with a wicked grin, jagged teeth flashing whitely against crimson lips. "I see you're awake. That's good," she growled, gesturing to the large spider behind him. "I'm getting hungry again."

The spider maneuvered him closer to the succubus with uncaring jabs of razor-sharp legs and Dante winced, but tried to appear submissive and not struggle against the silk still woven tightly around his body. Judging by the satisfied expression on her angular face, the succubus was falling for his act.

"Mmm," she purred, caressing his face with long, thin fingers. "That's more like it. You should get used to this, my pet." Her sharp fingernails sliced through his silk restraints and Dante breathed a sigh of relief as the choking pressure around his torso eased. "Your father was destined to be my mate, you know," she purred, nipping at his jaw.

Dante didn't know, nor did he care to know. His mind was completely occupied with where Alastor was at the moment and when he could devil trigger.

"But he refused me," she snarled, her nails digging deep enough to cut a thin line through the ragged remnants of his shirt and into the skin beneath. When the web was thin enough to collapse under its own weight, she tore the remainder of his shirt apart, skating spidery fingers over his skin possessively. "And he took a lowly human as his mate instead. Can you imagine my disgrace?"

"Guess he just wasn't into the kinky sex," Dante muttered absently, finally locating the silver glimmer of Alastor's blade in the corner of the room.

"But you are," she whispered, pulling him flush against her curvaceous body and Dante shuddered. Her skin exuded some kind of fragrance loaded with pheromones and he couldn't fight the arousal it immediately inspired. The reaction was unnatural and vaguely painful, especially because being intimate with a succubus meant having your life drained away one drop at a time. "You are mine now," she breathed, "and you will love me any way I ask you to."

Dante finally felt the potential of his full demon powers hovering just at the edge of his perception like catching a glimpse of something in his peripheral vision. It glowed and glimmered within his mind but would disappear the moment he shifted his attention toward it. He was close now. He needed to distract her just a little longer.

"I could please you a lot better if you gave me a chance to recover," he murmured in his sexiest throaty growl. "You're only cheating yourself by keeping me weak."

"A clever attempt to trick me, but a futile one," she breathed against his lips.

"We'll see." Triggering with an explosion of energy, Dante shoved her away roughly and flew across the room to his weapon, spinning back to face her just as she managed to catch up to him, her spider minions scurrying along in her wake. Power tingling through his fingertips, he swung his sword at her, dodging her attacks with liquid grace and finally burying his blade in her abdomen, driving it through until the hilt was flush with her skin.

She gasped in pain, but her lips curved back into that inevitable smile. "Every bit as valiant as he was," she whispered with a dry, rasping laugh, dragging long fingers through his tangled mane of hair as his devil trigger faded and the rush of strength left his body with shocking abruptness.

He tried to pull Alastor out of her body so that he could finish the job, but his arms felt weak. Blood flowed from her wound, trailing down over his arms and burning where it touched his bare skin. His muscles shuddered and his knees gave out as the blood seemed to slither over his skin, simultaneously scorching him and spreading numbness throughout his body. He should have known that her blood would be at least as poisonous as her saliva. He should have been more careful.

His knees landed hard on the cracked cement and breath rattled out of his chest with a painful gasp, his back arching as she forced his head back and drank his life eagerly from his lips.

----------

Her flashlight illuminated a patchwork of silvery web slung across the entrance to another chamber. Squinting into the dark space, Lady pushed a lacy curtain of web aside and ducked beneath a slab of concrete. Water splashed beneath her boots, pouring in a steady stream from a pipe jutting out of one of the walls and pooling in jagged puddles across the broken floor.

Holding a gun aloft in one hand and her flashlight in the other as she scanned the ragged recesses of the chamber draped in spidery silk, Lady turned in a slow circle. She was expecting an attack at any moment, but it seemed that this room was no different than the dozen other rooms she had already explored. Sighing, she turned back toward the entrance, but gasped when her flashlight caught a strange shape suspended from the ceiling a few yards away from her. It looked vaguely man-sized, wrapped in a bundle of spider's silk and swaying slowly back and forth. Silver hair—almost indistinguishable from the silver silk—obscured the figure's features as it stirred in an unfelt breeze.

"Dante," she whispered with a mixture of relief and worry, approaching him cautiously.

He was hanging several feet above her head and just out of reach, but she could see his face clearly when she got closer, his pale brows drawn together even in sleep and his eyelashes twitching against his cheeks. She didn't know if he was poisoned or just unconscious, but she did know that she would have to get him down in order to find out either way. Taking a step back and raising her gun, she squinted up at the mass of silk connecting his cocoon with web stretched across the ceiling. The silk was sturdy stuff and it took three bullets to break it, but when it did snap he plummeted to the floor in short order.

Holstering her gun with one last wary look around the chamber, Lady knelt down beside him as he groaned in pain. He looked disoriented as he blinked fitfully into the light, his expression strangely uncertain as he tried to scramble away from her despite the silk wrapped tightly about his torso. Finding a place to prop up the flashlight, Lady reached for the knife at her waist and placed her other hand reassuringly against his chest.

"It's me. Jut stay still and I'll have you free in a second."

He looked up at her with wide eyes, his expression at once frightened and desperately confused. She had never seen an expression like that on his face before and it scared the shit out of her. Now that she was closer, she could see that blood was still leaking from a cut on his shoulder and several gashes across his cheekbone, and she realized he must have been weak enough that he wasn't able to heal himself properly anymore.

"Who are you?" he whispered in a voice that hardly even sounded like his, hoarse and deeper than it usually was.

Lady's hand trembled as she began to hack at the silk cocoon. "Nice joke, Dante," she said lightly, trying not to take his question seriously. "The sympathy card won't work on me for long, you know."

"Dante?" he murmured, leaning toward her with an intent expression in his eyes. "Is that…my name?"

Fear stabbed through her because there was no mistaking the gravity in his eyes, but she forced herself to keep working as she heard the structure rumble ominously around them. It had shuddered a few times in her journey through the caves, but this was the biggest quake she had felt yet. She didn't count on its stability to last much longer with the frequency of the tremors. "Don't worry," she said, as much to reassure herself as for him. "That succubus must have poisoned you or something and that's why you can't remember. You'll be fine if we can just get you out of here."

Watching her earnestly, he stayed remarkably still as she finished freeing him from the web and awkwardly managed to crawl out of the remaining cocoon as she pried it away. He stumbled to his feet and leaned against an outcropping of broken concrete, reaching back to offer her a hand up. She was startled by the cool temperature of his skin as he weakly helped her to her feet, frowning as she brushed some of the dirty strands of hair away from his face so she could get a better look at his eyes.

"You really don't remember, do you?" she whispered. "Do you even remember where you are, or how you got here?"

He glanced around the chamber anxiously and there was something about his manner that seemed jarringly wrong. "I feel like I've been here a long time. I remember waking up here before, but nothing before that."

The ground rumbled again beneath their feet. "We need to get out of here," Lady said, clinging to practicality at the moment. "This place could collapse at any moment. Can you walk?"

He nodded, and again she was struck by a sense of wrongness. His expression was too serious—his eyes too attentive of her every move.

Shoving her disquiet to a back corner of her mind, Lady gestured to the exit. "This way." She drew her gun again and raised her flashlight as she led him out of the chamber, listening carefully to his slow footsteps behind her and half expecting an attack from him as much as from any other source. Though she was fairly certain he was actually Dante, she couldn't be sure that the succubus wasn't controlling him somehow. She had no idea why the demon would do such a thing, but she couldn't think of another explanation for the wrongness she was sensing from him. Unless the succubus had stripped away more than just his memories and his personality had been stolen as well.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Lady shook the thought away.

"Were you trapped here as well?" he asked quietly as he followed her up the pile of rock leading to the main tunnel.

"No. I came to find you."

"You came here just to rescue me?" He seemed startled by the idea.

Lady glanced back at him as she waited for him to make his way back down to the ground. "Yes…I guess I did."

"You must be a good friend," he said solemnly, his gaze unnerving in its intensity.

She would have expected him to make a statement like that with a lot more attitude, but she tried not to dwell on his unusually straightforward phrasing and utter lack of innuendo. Besides, she should have been pleased by his change in demeanor and lack of crude jokes. It was rather refreshing. "You know, I think I like you better without your memories," she said softly, sweeping her flashlight across the corridor ahead as she began walking again. "You're a lot nicer than usual."

----------

Pushing a large slab of concrete aside with a grunt, Trish grimaced at the wet webbing that clung to her skin as she squeezed through the opening into a larger chamber. Brushing spider silk off from her face, she scanned the chamber for signs of life, fully expecting to find herself in a den full of hungry demonic spiders. In truth, it wasn't far from that, though all the spiders she could see seemed to be focused on the eerie tableau taking place at the center of the room.

Back arched and arms hanging limply at his sides, Dante was bent back beneath a staggeringly beautiful woman, his mouth covered by her crimson lips and his body quaking as the muscles in her pale throat swallowed again and again. He was either half-unconscious or physically drained to the point that he could no longer retaliate, but either way Trish didn't exactly relish the sight of him being ravished by such a voluptuous female.

Disgusted, Trish finally pulled her gaze away enough to notice that Alastor was buried inside the demon's midsection, dark blood flowing from her wound and pooling at her feet. Approaching slowly, Trish skirted the circle of spiders until she found a decent opening. She summoned lightning to her fingertips and leapt up onto a shelf of rock, striking down a few spiders to clear the way before she landed on the ground next to the succubus.

"Dinner time's over," she snapped as she ripped the succubus away from Dante, sending energy sparking through the demon's body the moment she was no longer touching him.

The demon let loose an ear piercing wail and threw Trish off of her with surprising strength. Sparing only a glance at Dante's immobile body sprawled over the ground, Trish dodged a second attack and kicked at Alastor's hilt—which was still absurdly buried halfway through the demon—and brought a fresh surge of dark blood to the surface.

Snarling, the succubus pulled the sword from her abdomen and flung it across the chamber toward Trish. "How dare you interrupt my meal?" she howled.

Rolling agilely out of the way, Trish pulled out her guns and started taking aim at the spiders quickly surrounding her. She had only picked off a few before she felt spiny legs slash at her from behind, poisonous fangs simultaneously sinking into her shoulder. Electrocuting the spider with an explosion of energy before it could get away, Trish sent other bursts of lightning cutting through the air toward the closest arachnids. The sooner they were out of the way, the sooner she could focus on the real target.

The succubus was already turning her attention back toward Dante, but Trish wasn't about to let her get there first, dispatching the spiders still in her way as she raced back toward the demon. Despite her injury, the succubus moved with blinding speed—at least as quickly as Trish—and it was only Trish's freshness to the fight that allowed her to keep up. Firing her guns at the demon and forcing her away from Dante, Trish charged the bullets with magical energy, giving them extra punch as they sailed through the air.

"No! You can't have him," the succubus snarled, flinging a handful of her own blood at Trish as she narrowly avoided the bullets. "He belongs to me now."

Gasping when the blood burned into her skin like acid, Trish hesitated just long enough for the succubus to pin her back against the slab of concrete behind her and twist her guns out of her grasp. Yanking at her hair, the succubus pulled Trish's head back cruelly and a hint of fear raced along Trish's spine. "I thought you preferred men," she hissed.

"What I prefer is demon blood," the succubus retorted, crushing her mouth over Trish's before she could retaliate.

The sensation was difficult to describe, simultaneously agonizing and exhilarating. Trish found she couldn't even try to pull away as her body went limp, her strength draining away with every thrust of the demon's tongue, but the part that bothered her the most was that she didn't really seem to mind. Her reaction was illogical and against her very being, but the demon seemed to have some sort of glamour that impaired judgment.

A wordless cry from Dante brought her back to reality and she twisted out of reach the moment she saw Dante's demonic aspect tearing the succubus away. Dante was struggling fiercely with the demon, but he would only be able to keep up his strength so long in his weakened state. Leaping into the air, she noted a displaced chunk of rock looming high over their heads and focused her attention on dislodging it. Pounding at the weak spot in the ceiling and hoping she wouldn't end up burying them all alive in the process, Trish watched cracks begin to spread across the rock.

Screaming Dante's name in warning, she skidded to a stop on the rubble-strewn ground as the large chunk of rock finally gave way. The succubus wailed in pain as the rock crushed her beneath its weight and her cry cut off abruptly in the middle; if the blow hadn't actually killed her, it had at least put her out of commission for the moment.

Cement continued to crumble and rocks and debris came raining down from the ceiling, choking the air with dust. Coughing as she stumbled away from the dust cloud, Trish searched among the fallen remains for Dante's silver head. She found him struggling to his feet on the opposite side of the chamber, leaning heavily on Alastor for support. Luckily, he had heard her cry and anticipated her action, rolling to the side the moment the ceiling began to collapse. While she knew his reaction was simply due to good instincts, part of her felt a bit of pleasure at the thought that they still knew each other well enough to practically reach each other's minds in the heat of a battle.

Small rocks continued to tumble from the weakened ceiling and the groaning of the walls around them made her increasingly uneasy. "The rest of it probably won't last much longer," she told him, looking up the cracks spreading slowly across the broken ceiling as she pulled one of his arms over her shoulders.

"Nostalgic, isn't it?" Dante asked with a strained smile, his skin smeared with blood and his hair hanging in dirty clumps around his face.

Trish raised an eyebrow at him as she pulled him toward the exit, trying not to notice how much of his weight she was having to support.

"Escaping a place that's falling down on top of us, you know?" he continued weakly. "We've done this a few times."

Shaking her head and tightening her grip on his waist, she retorted, "You get sentimental about the strangest things."

Author's Note: I know…it's kind of a weird place to leave them. Sorry about that. Especially with the two Dantes running around. I'll try to get the next chapter up fairly soon so you won't have to be left hanging too long.