Chloe stared at her string-covered murder board. She could feel her eyes glazing over, her coffee tank miles beyond zero, her hands spasming against the cool air of the precinct. Four murders in just as many days. Too many in too few. And so far, all of her work? All of her time and energy and effort and those lives? For nothing.

The killer left evidence. It was overwhelming Ella and all of the other techs—there were mounds of it. Hell, there wasn't even too much evidence. The issue was that none of the evidence meant anything.

Chloe shook herself, forcing herself to look at her board, eyes twitching and hard to still. They had unknown saliva, unknown fingerprints, unknown blood, and even an unmatched bite mark on victim three. They could have destroyed over half the evidence and still have had enough to sentence the perp without question. All the samples matched each other, meaning that the primary link between the murders (other than the deceased) was their murderer. Hence Chloe's murder board. The main question to the upper left was how someone managed to avoid being documented in this day and age, in any form, before killing a string of people. The secondary question was what the dead had in common. That one seemed to have more of an answer than the previous.

All the victims were in their thirties and were anti-summoning religious. So, possible targets included approximately 300,000 people within LA. That did, admittedly, eliminate most of the population of the city, but functionally that data was useless. Chloe was drawing blanks at pinpointing the pattern. She knew Dan was, too, and so was Ella, and so was everyone else who'd glanced at her murder board on their way by. Even the interviews with family members had revealed nothing: no relative had contact with the victims within the past seven months. Chloe leant deeper into her chair and sighed.

It was barely afternoon and the day was already a massive train wreck of open questions with no end in sight. To make matters ever more frustrating, she hadn't been able to properly close the summoning-gone-wrong from five days previous. A talented summoner who didn't mind murder was still running around the city going entirely unpunished, while, if Lucifer had been telling the truth and accurate (and wasn't that just a tad oxymoronic given that he was the Devil?), there was some poor confused soul from the lower levels of hell stumbling around trying not to get run over by a car. Yeah, these past few days had been a mess.

Chloe had tried to get in contact with Lucifer after he'd left. He was the infernal consultant for that case after all, his actual name be literally damned, and she'd fully intended to capitalize on that even if summoning, banishing, and the rest of that lot were normally Dan's pot, not hers. She still knew the protocol. But Dan hadn't been able to reach Lucifer. Hell, he hadn't been able to contact either Mazikeen or Vassago. The former he speculated he couldn't reach because she was simply too high up on the food chain for him. The latter was a different matter: for all intents and purposes, he'd received a busy dial tone. When he tried again, he'd basically seen a sock on the doorknob. Chloe learned that day that Dan, most of the precinct, and a number of the demons on the upper floors of Hell had a betting pool going on as to when Paimon and Vassago would finally get together. Money changed hands far too quickly for Chloe's approval when Dan announced that Vassago wasn't taking visitors.

A blur of red and black marred Chloe's vision, and she blinked. Her cross-eyed gaze had pulled the board too far out of focus for her to distinguish between anything. That's where the case was, right now: too far out of focus. Too blurry to be meaningful, even with mounds of evidence. Chloe would love even a smidge of clarity to help wrangle the meaningless puddles of thoughts drawn out before her. She had to be missing something. Some connection—something so obvious that she managed to lose it, like a pair of glasses on someone's head.

"Hey." Dan set a paper cup of coffee on Chloe's desk. It was afternoon. It was too late for coffee. Chloe drank it anyway. "Anything?" Dan asked, staring at Chloe's board.

She shook her head. "You?"

"No. I'm actually about to bring a demon up here, mainly to see if they can tell me something about human summoning, but I was going to ask if they knew anything about the murders, too." He took a swig of his coffee. "Hey, are we gonna talk about the other day?" Right.

"Oh, God, sorry. I-" She sighed. Because she hadn't actually had time to properly explain why Lucifer was on Earth, or why he was the consultant for the summoning-gone-wrong, or anything; she hadn't even had time to explain to Ella that she'd hugged the Devil and smiled while doing so. Hell, she hadn't had time to fix the holes in the wall where Mazikeen had taught Trixie how to throw a knife. Explaining Lucifer to Dan and Ella was not the highest item on her list of priorities. "Can I explain after? It's nothing bad. Just, I—I can't think right now."

Dan frowned, brow furrowing. "Yeah, okay. Are you okay?" Was she okay? "Did you sleep last night?"

"No." Maybe Dan had a point. Maybe that was why her brain was all sorts of clouded, her caffeine dependency had skyrocketed, and she couldn't find the pair of figurative glasses on her head or the farmhouse at the optometrist's. "But I can't go home. I'm chasing a summoner-murderer and a serial killer and I can't figure out how to identify either of them!" Chloe sank into her chair, chin tilted towards the drop ceiling and eyes closed. It did feel nice, closing her eyes. "Sorry. Just, go ahead. Summon someone."

Dan shuffled, his brown jacket rustling against his jeans. "Chlo, you have to take a break sometime. You can't win all of them." He gently tugged her cup of coffee from her hands, and Chloe let him take it. It thudded mutely on her desk. "Go home. Take a personal day with Trixie."

"No, I can't." Chloe shook her head and forced herself to sit upright. "I made a promise to the families. I can't go back on that." She refused to fail them. Her eyes shot open. What if that's it? "The—the victims. They hadn't talked with their families for over half a year. Why were they estranged?" She swiveled her chair, banging her shin into her desk with a resounding clang, but she ignored it to tear through her interview notes. Dan moved her coffee.

The first victim, Marjorie Potts, had died when her wrists were slashed and both her hands cut off. Sweet, charming, and a delight were the primary adjectives friends had used to describe; her family had said nothing of the sort. Her father had not said a single word, her mother hardly more articulate. Her brother gave the most information. 'She betrayed us,' he'd said. Chloe found the exact sentence in her notes. 'She betrayed us, and the Lord, and we can't forgive her.' Chloe had initially taken that to mean that she'd either sinned or decided to turn away from her family's religion. But what if… Chloe glanced at Dan. What if she'd summoned someone?

Erik Coulson was next. Chloe flipped to the next page in her notes, accidently ripping it slightly in the process. His cousin, the family member who'd been closest with him before they forewent contact, had clutched the cross he wore around his neck which matched the one Ella found that strangled Erik, but he hadn't elaborated on why Erik had been excommunicated.

Third was Soaad DuFrain. Hers was the first family Chloe had interviewed, and hers was the only family who had wept for their daughter's death. They hadn't wanted to push her away. But she had summoned, and she refused to stop, and she refused to apologize even as she prayed daily, and they hadn't been able to forgive her.

The last victim was Peter Gould. The murderer had ripped a door in Peter's throat and bound his dismembered feet into a steeple of prayer. Chloe had found a pocket planner in his coat and determined that he regularly attended church and other worship services. The church he attended was halfway across LA from his family's church, which is actually where Chloe had located Mrs. Sarah Gould, Peter's mother and last surviving relative, and informed her of Peter's death. She'd frowned, stared at the ground, scowled, and said, 'he might've brought up a demon, but he's going to Hell with the rest of his ilk.' She then spat on the ground and walked away.

"The perp's killing summoners," Chloe said, finally closing her notes and reaching for her coffee which Dan had set on the other side of her desk. "He's killing summoners who were still practicing their religion."

"Huh." Dan turned to face her murder board, obviously trying to follow the lines of red string anew. "We should've seen that earlier." Yeah, they should've. Chloe even had the reason for the victims' familial exile on the board. "But how's he finding out about them? I mean, that's not something I'd go around saying in public." So much for finding the glasses on top of her head.

"Maybe he's a… a priest… or he's listening to their confessions?" That sounded weak even to herself. "But DuFrain was Muslim." Furthermore, each victim attended different places of worship, all across town, and all at different times; some of their schedules were almost exactly opposite. Chloe's eyes drifted back to her board, towards a picture of Gould's planner. Chloe stared at it. "What if they all went to the same support group?"

"What," Dan said, "like a Summoners Anonymous?"

Chloe nodded. "They're still practicing, still attending worship." She pulled a dry-erase marker off of her desk and scribbled SA on her board and circled it. "Is there a support group for anti-summoning religious summoners?"

"Probably." Dan shrugged. "I'll take a look, ask around. Maybe Ella found a calendar or something on one of the victim's computers." Yeah. That'd be good. Chloe sipped her coffee, more alert now than she had been all day. "Anyway," Dan continued, "I need to go bring up a demon."

"Mm." Chloe tucked away her files. "Could you bring Lu…" Chloe cut herself off. She couldn't say his name. It kept getting caught in her throat; she used to be able to say it just fine before she met the owner, but now, not so much. "Uh, could you bring him back up here, too?"

"Chlo." That was Dan's dad voice again. "He's—he's him. I mean, he's probably manipulating you, or trying to steal your soul, or something." Yeah, like she hadn't already thought of that. But if she could make it a half-hour in the car with him in the passenger seat without him trying anything except to get into her pants, then he probably wasn't intending to damn her anytime soon. Chloe just had to convince herself of that logic, too.

"I know. But he's the infernal consultant for the one murder neither of us have a direction for right now. I need to talk to him." Dan shook his head. "I'll come with you," Chloe continued, "and I'll ask him to leave as soon as we're done. But I have to talk to him, and you do, too, about the spirit summoning thing." He was still hesitating. Chloe stood, grabbed Dan by the wrist, and tugged him towards the summoning room at the far end of the precinct. He gave in after a moment.

"You know I can't summon him," Dan said, following her around the desks and other officers. "I'm not sure he can be summoned. How good of a person do you have to be to summon the Devil?" He stepped ahead of her, pulling some chalk out of a holder placed just outside the summoning room, and shut the door to the room behind them.

"I know." Chloe stepped back to the observer's section of the oval room, safely inside some basic protective sigil that someone had taped to the floor the other year. If the lighting were even slightly poorer in there she would've lost Dan in his leather jacket to the shadows. "But you can get Paimon, or Vassago, or someone else who might be able to reach him." Dan squatted and began drawing lines and swirls weaving around the pre-painted and slightly scuffed pentagram in his stick of chalk. They only kept the most basic of supplies in the precinct's summoning room: chalk, tape, and a two small tins of paint. Everything else for the more complicated summons had been removed to a storage closet across the way after one too many incidents with suspects breaking free, running into the room, and summoning an angel (and occasionally a demon). Everyone in the precinct had learned the visual way that most angels were not forgiving beings.

Dan stopped chalking in his lines to appraise his work. Chloe had never had any skill with summoning, but she did know some of the more common pentagrams and symbols by heart, mainly from being married to Dan. However, she didn't recognize this one.

"It's for Vassago," Dan explained. He stepped backwards into the middle part of the oval, equidistant between both the summoning pentagram and the protection sigil. "Uh, pro tip: most of the higher demons can be summoned with chalk. Same goes for some of the higher angels, too." Dan shifted awkwardly. "That's how Charlotte Richards got stuck with Amenadiel. Well, that, and 'cause, you know, she's not going up when she dies. Ready?"

Chloe nodded. "Ready."

Dan set his foot on the outside line of the pentagram. He stared at the center of his drawing, tucked his hands into his pockets, and blinked.

The screams made it into the room before the demon. They bounced on the walls, echoing up and down and around through the oval, up through the drop-tile ceiling, but not out. Soundproofed walls came standard in every police station's summoning room.

The demon appeared in the time it took for Chloe to blink. It was a crawling beast, tripedal and alligator like, with a human face oozing blood from its shoulders. As far as demons went, Chloe was honestly rather unimpressed. It didn't even feel imposing like most powerful demons did. Dan removed his foot from the circle as the creature tried to snap at his ankle. Its snout hit the barrier created by the outside lines of the pentagram.

"That's Vassago?" Chloe shouted. The creature's human face caterwauled.

"No!" Dan covered his ears. "Don't know who that is!"

"Can you send it back?" It was circling the pentagram, snapping madly at the air. The human eyes on its back oozed yellow tears.

Dan stuck his toe on the outmost side of the pentagram's paint. The demon's incisors (human incisors, Chloe noted) grazed the air less than an inch from his shoe. Dan blinked. The blink turned into a second, then a third, then his eyes remained closed. The demon threw itself against the barrier.

"Dan?"

Dan stumbled back into Chloe. "Dan! Hey!" What? She caught him before he could hit the wall. "Hey, come on."

"Got it!" That wasn't Dan. The screams broke, their silence filled by sheer presence. Dan used Chloe as support and rubbed his neck. It was almost like what Lucifer had demonstrated at the crime scene. Almost, just less stifling.

Standing over the bloody corpse of the first demon was a second who, at first glance, Chloe mistook for an angel. But angels didn't have blood on their hands, or bones braided into their hair, or rotting wings raining broken feathers.

"Hi, Mr. Dan," the demon said. He shoved the primary feather he'd been holding in his hand like a sword into one of his wings. "And Ms. Not-Mr.-Dan." Not-Mr.-Dan? The not-angel stomped on the human face on the alligator's back, crunching its nose with a sharp snap. "I don't know who this demon was, either. Probably one of Vine's, although could be from lower down, too. There's some anarchy down there, right now." Bit of anarchy? The demon, whom Chloe assumed was Vassago, grinned, revealing that he had perfectly straight teeth. "I had to bring in my lovely Usagoo, and even Paimon's fighting, and you haven't seen Hell and beauty until you've seen Paimon fight."

"I've never been to Hell," Dan said, "no matter what you all think." He cleared his throat. "Also, uh, Chloe, Vassago, Vassago, Chloe." Chloe forced herself to smile at Vassago. She could feel how tight lipped and false it was, but Vassago didn't seem to care.

"Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Not-Mr.-Dan." He bowed slightly, yellow bones weaved into his hair bouncing against each other. Chloe simply held her stretched smile for lack of anything better to do.

"Yeah." Dan hooked his thumbs into his jacket pockets, and Vassago straightened from his bow. "Uh, what did you say was going on in Hell?"

Vassago pursed his lips. "You need to clean your ears, Mr. Dan. I said that Hell's in anarchy. There're three demons trying to claim the throne right now, and so far, they're doing a bang-up job of it."

"Wait," Chloe ordered. Anarchy in Hell, sure, but the throne? "Is Luc…" Oh, God, it was stuck in the back of her throat. "Luci… Lucifer. Is he okay?" Both Dan and Vassago held equal amounts of incredulity on their faces, but Chloe held her ground. Damn it, Lucifer was her consultant for one of her cases, and, well, she was probably going to end up downstairs for this, but he didn't seem like a bad guy. Scary, and intimidating, and one hell of a flirt, but not bad. "Is he okay?" she repeated.

"I… I would imagine he is." Vassago fiddled with a silver ring he wore on what remained of a missing finger. "We would know if he were not." That was not as reassuring as Chloe would've liked. "Still, he hasn't done anything to stop the fighting, so there is an extraordinarily slim possibility that he's not." He tucked his rotting wings closer to his body. "The Prince enjoys watching Hell burn every few centuries, primarily to suss out the traitors and power hungry, but also because he likes the show." Vassago shrugged. "But no one's stupid enough to try to assassinate him. Not when Mazikeen's around, anyway. She'd skewer them." That was actually surprisingly comforting. Chloe crossed her arms and nodded. "Anyway, Mr. Dan," Vassago said, "what did you bring me and this lump up here for?" He kicked the dead demon. It squelched.

"Yeah." Dan said that more for himself than Vassago. "Someone got out a few days ago. Human, but ritualistic. Our… infernal consultant—" he couldn't bring himself to say Lucifer's name either, Chloe noted with a self-appeasing smile—"said that someone had summoned a human soul?"

Vassago blinked. A few more rotting feathers drifted to the ground. They were burning the floor, Chloe realized, and they were turning the burn spots into black sludge. "The body wouldn't have happened to have died around 11:24 Sunday morning, would it?" That's what Ella had said when they'd returned to the precinct: death occurred between 11 AM and noon, although she couldn't narrow it down further. Chloe nodded in sync with Dan. "Ah." The demon bit his lip. "The body—was it nice and still and quietly dead, or was it more like a Pollock?" They had modern art in Hell? Actually, Chloe wasn't surprised by that.

"Exsanguinated and exploded," Dan confirmed.

"Well, fuck." Ah, crap. It was never good when a demon swore. The last time that had happened around Chloe, she'd been working with Dan, and a vacuum tube to Hell opened up in the middle of the precinct. "See, Mr. Dan and Ms. Not-Mr.-Dan, I allow souls to return to Earth from my floor, and Paimon does the same; we are the uppermost layers of Hell and our residents had simply been poorly sorted or had no place to go. We are the only lords to whom Lucifer allows this sort of escapist behavior." Vassago waved his hand and a rough schematic of Hell appeared before him. Chloe grit her teeth and forced herself to ignore the magic. "Beneath us are the true defenses of Hell, beginning with the second wall and the four floors of personal hells." The layers beyond the top glowed green. "From those, while it is possible for a human soul to continue downwards, it's not possible for a soul to return up. That's why Dante and Virgil had to climb all the way down to Treachery before they could escape out the backdoor at the top of the first traitor." Treachery, the lowest portion of the magic schematic, lit up in blue. "We sealed the backdoor, of course, once Virgil returned and mentioned it to me over tea, but Treachery is Treachery." The schematic disappeared. "Someone up here summoned a soul from down there." Vassago shifted. "Someone down there excavated the back door. And now the soul from down there is up here, which means you have a soul who warranted some of Hell's oldest tried-and-true torture methods now running around and there's chaos downstairs." He scratched the corner of his mouth. "Good luck with that."

Vassago fell silent, and neither Dan nor Chloe did anything to break it. So, Chloe summarized for herself, a soul had escaped from Treachery and was now up here. Breathe in, breathe out. Treachery sounded like it was Hell's basement where no one wanted to go. What did someone have to do to get sent to the basement in Hell? Whatever it was (wouldn't being a traitor be too simple?), she was sure she would find out once they found the rampant soul. Probably after it caused unimaginable chaos. Breathe.

Yeah, Chloe would call that worthy of a demon's, 'well, fuck.'

AN

As always, comments and concrit are wonderful (and if you spot a bit of incoherency let me know- I don't have a beta).