I'd been a while since Millie had killed somebody.

She'd just taken it for granted that her life was going to be punctuated like a lurid novel with all of the carcasses she left behind in her wake. And though once in her life she had been ashamed of her temper, her violence, and her propensity to tear those who had angered her to shreds, the mere presence of Moxxie turned what had been an embarrassing failure of her character into something she could be beamingly proud of.

She was lucky to have him. So goddamned lucky.

Of course, getting around was starting to get a bit annoying. Imp children were active little blighters, even before they were born, and the spawn inside of her seemed to delight in punching and kicking her in the guts whenever it damned well felt like it. Still, she could accept the internal beating with aplomb, because it was proof-in-being that she was going to be a mom soon.

That had always seemed like something of a distant, perhaps even impossible dream. Not getting pregnant, any imp could do that; no, she was referring to being able to raise her spawn with a loving husband in a big, spacious house. In Pride it had seemed a pipe-dream. Then they killed the Proxy of Lucifer and stole his house.

Simply put, things were about as close to ideal as Millie could imagine.

Wayland had been left with her, Tilla saying that after having spent most of her life parenting her children she finally needed a vacation from them. Her eldest children, Blitz and Barb, were adults, and her younger were yet old enough to be mostly self-sufficient. Only Wayland, born late last year, was still essentially the helpless meat-potato that spawn were for the first year of their lives. Not wishing to saddle Krieg with motherly duties, she actually did something rare for her and reached to somebody outside her family.

Millie didn't mind at all. While more days than not had just she and Moxxie tooling around the house, making the nursery extra ready and driving off nosy bastards who wanted to talk to Blitz – who didn't even live in this city – there were enough times where she'd been left alone that were starting to bother her. She was torn. On one hand, she was fairly certain that even if she got shot in the belly by a twelve-gauge the spawn would be fine. On the other, she didn't want to put herself in a position where she had to put that theory to the test. This was her first kid. She didn't want to ruin its life, or even kill it, by being rash and stupid when she had the option not to.

"Mnem," Wayland said, as he once again pulled his arms out of the swaddling and started to writhe away from her.

"Oh, settle down, little one. It should be warm and comfortable. Just you rest and wait..." she tried to coo, but Wayland turned a look of infantile defiance at her, and rebuked.

"Bleg!" Wayland declared.

"If you keep trying to get loose, I'm just gonna wrap you up tighter," she said, booping his nose to a look of mild consternation from the infant, while winding the baby up again. Wayland did not look amused in the least. And within seconds after she stopped, he threw up his hands, having once again gotten them out of the swaddling.

"Gaglbl," Wayland said, then promptly rolled over, and started dragging himself along the sofa. Millie sighed, then grabbed the back of his swaddling and held it still so he could crawl his way out. He was pretty precocious when it came to his mobility. Most spawn were pretty much stationary for five months if not six. Wayland couldn't be stopped even now in his late fourth month. Well, that just meant he'd be even more of a handful. She couldn't quite grasp why he was so eager to just go. It wasn't like a baby imp could get very far.

She had a thought, and pulled out her Hellphone, only pausing from speeddialing her husband because she had to shift over and put Wayland on the floor so he wouldn't fall three feet off the couch and hurt himself. The instant he was on the floor, his face got a sort of stubborn look on it, and he started dragging himself forward. What a weird little spawn. "Moxxie?" she asked, as her phone call got picked up before the first ring terminated.

"speak quietly," her husband whispered.

"Oh, are we in trouble? Should I get my axe and..." Millie said, getting to her feet, only to have her own unborn-get punt her in the spine for the audacity of changing her physical orientation.

"no need. Just avoiding gun-toting militia," Moxxie whispered. "What did you call for?"

"Is that your missus? Hey Mills!" Blitz cut in.

"SIR! STEALTH!" he hissed.

"You're sure you don't need me there? I could kill a militia for ya," she promised.

There was a long silence, then a sigh of what sounded like relief from Moxxie. "I'm not getting you involved in this in the state you're in. This is for the good of our child, Millie. Trust me to take care of you for a while."

"Oh, fine," she said. "Are y'all safe now?"

"Safe enough to speak," Mox said. "This country is a madhouse. Was it this bad the last time we were here?"

"Don't think so," Blitz' voice barely reached the phone and thus Millie.

Then Moxxie sighed. "But then the last time we were here we killed a lot of their governmental leaders and the people who pay them."

"D'ya figure we just broke a country over our knee that easily, Mox?" Blitz asked. There was a pause, then 'huh'. "Y'know what? I'm prouder of that than I'd thought I'd be."

"So what did you want to talk about, Sweetie?" she could practically envision Mox rolling his eyes and turning away from Blitz to speak with some level of candor.

"I thought of another name," she said.

"Boy or girl?" Moxxie asked. He was pretty set on Casher for a boy. He'd told her how after his Mother's 'mysterious demise' that a thug called 'Casher' had been about the only friend he had for the rest of his childhood. Having met Crimson, and pointedly not Saffron, she could see how he would cling to any male role model he could get. Also, the 'er' was important. Every imp she'd ever met or heard about just named Cash – Blitz's father included – was some kind of asshole.

"Girl," she said. "How about 'Beatrice'?"

"Beatrice Rough. I like it. We can definitely add it to the list," he said.

"Are you two still talkin' baby names? 'Cause were kinda busy trying not to get FUCKED IN OUR A'S!" Blitz pointed out.

"It's our first child. We're probably going to be too exhausted and sick of life to care this deeply about our second, third, fourth and fifth," Moxxie said. And that was why she loved him so much. He understood exactly the kind of family she wanted. But at this point she'd be happy if some of those came in clutches, because being out of the action like this was going to drive her insane.

"Oh shit, d'ya think they saw us?" Blitz asked.

"I've gotta go," Moxxie began, then the phone picked up the distinct crack of a bullet passing very close at supersonic speeds. "Love ya' honey!"

The call ended, and Millie couldn't help but smile. Even being shot at, her beloved husband made sure to say 'I love you', before hanging up. She was the luckiest imp in Hell to have a fella like him.

As she tucked her Hellphone away, she leaned well aside and grabbed the remote. It was supposed to be My Worst Angels time, but the screen just showed dead air. Well, that probably wasn't good, but considering the way Millie's schedule was of late, she had little else to do.

She looked to where Wayland had been crawling. And couldn't find him. Her brow furrowed, and she hopped down from the couch. She picked up the hem of cloth and looked under the couch. Nothing but a few dust bunnies. She then trotted quickly over to the hallway, which pressed warmly on her, as she looked first one way, toward the door – closed, thank Satan – and then deep into the manse where a corner had been intentionally left damaged. That had been the point that Blitz's shotgun blast tore off a chunk of that nasty Nathan Birch's face. Such events needed to be immortalized, even to somebody as aesthetically dead as Millie.

She started up the hall. "Wayland? Wayland where did you get off to?"

Silence answered her.

"Wayland?" she asked again.

And as she stood in the silence of the building, she could only barely hear a distantly muffled 'Bleeegh'.

That. How. Where? What?

"C'mon Wayland, no need to hide from yer sitter," Millie said, feeling a sense of nerves and trepidation start to work up her spine. She hadn't been on the phone for very long at all. And a baby crawling at Wayland's speed could only have gotten to about... here, she thought, standing next to where a bloodstain had been cut from the wall, framed, and mounted. And despite her expectation, there was still no sign of Wayland. Had he learned to sprint-crawl so quickly?

But then she had a weird notion. She flattened her head against a wall.

And heard babbling laughter through the walls.

"Wayland? Where in tarnation did you go?" Millie demanded, and started her pursuit.

Chapter 23

Where The Fuck Is Wayland Miller?

This was starting to get a little ridiculous, Millie thought to herself as she rechecked the back door which lead to the garage. It was still locked. And since the lock was four feet above the floor, so high that Millie needed to reach above her head to unlock it, it was entirely safely out of the way of a baby imp's questing little hands. Still, she hesitated. The babbling sound that she heard from time to time always sounded one room away, the pleased noises of a young imp defiant that it'd escaped its temporary caretaker mocking her from out-of-reach.

She pressed her head to the door, and on the other side, heard a 'glug' sound. Well that was odd. She quickly unlatched the door and opened it, flicking on the lights to reveal the fleet of old, luxury cars that Blitz was neglecting and that Moxxie and Millie had no need for. There was another glug, and a growing pool of golden, viscous fluid, where a can of motor oil had been upset on a shelf and was now spilling onto the floor. Millie muttered under her breath, turning off the lights and closing the door. She didn't have the time to clean up oil right now. And frankly, she could live with one oil stain in a room she never went into.

"I'm gettin' flustered, I gotta calm down," Millie said, pacing up and down the hallway for a moment, ignoring her own unborn child stretching languorously inside her. She had a tendency to see red when she was deeply upset. And while she wasn't at that point yet, it wasn't as far away as she would have ordinarily hoped. So she took a couple of deep breaths. And then she opened her eyes and started back toward where she'd begun. Wayland was a crawling infant. He couldn't have gotten far. And he certainly couldn't have gotten into a locked garage.

She had almost reached the parlor where this event took place when she saw a toy drop down from the offset overhang to the second floor. She blinked, then looked up, just in time to see a naked imp-butt with a little tail disappearing past the railings of the second floor in its recessed place parallel to the run of the hall. He'd gone up the stairs? "You just stay right there, Wayland; I'm a-comin'!"

Millie quickly darted to the base of the stairs, taking them three at a time and reaching the second floor in no time flat. She turned, and almost punched a hole in the wall next to her when she couldn't see Wayland. But she heard an infant's giggle, so she pushed that instinct down and went after. And her stomach settled into place when she finally came to see Wayland, who was gently bashing his barely formed horns against the ventilation duct that let warm air up near the floor. She tutted and grabbed the naked infant, who immediately let out a dismayed 'pnegh!' and flailed with his little limbs.

"You can't be runnin' off like that. Baby like you would end up getting hurt," she said. The infant had an almost comical look of outrage on his little face, lips pulled into a deep scowl, until he began to babble aggressively and shift in her grasp. He did so for the entire time she carried him down stairs. Where was his diaper? She'd pinned that on extra tight. Maybe, escape artist that he was, he'd abandoned it somewhere to stink up a room when it lay undiscovered for hours. Well, she had the source of the hypothetical stink in her arms, so she went back toward the kitchen. "So fussy. Are you hungry little man?"

Wayland didn't stop his aggression and his scowling. So she grabbed a bottle that had been warming and quickly tucked it up against his mouth. The instant that milk was on offer, his scowl melted and he looked more content with the status of things in Hell. Still, he looked around with unusual intensity as he sucked from the bottle.

All told, Millie was thankful for this 'dry run' of taking care of a baby imp. For all she felt her 'biological imperative', pretty strongly even, she was first and foremost a destroyer of lives, not a nurturer of them. So she needed a bit of a primer on how to be gentle and caring to the spawn. He must have just been hungry, she realized, now that he'd stopped being so actively rebellious as she grabbed a new diaper. He didn't seem like he'd messed himself. Babies tended to have 'residue' from movements. He just jettisoned his diaper somewhere. Weird, but babies were weird.

"Alright. You got all that wanderlust out of you?" Millie asked, delicately booping Wayland on his nose as he continued to devour formula. His legs kicked vigorously as she re-diapered him, probably saying 'not in this lifetime' in his adorable baby way. "Well fine, then. If you want to rummage around, I'll just make a pen for ya."

So back to the parlor they went, only this time, she closed and locked all the doors when she did. She pulled the cushions from the sofa, setting them on the floor so that there wouldn't be a long fall for the baby, and she just let him have at it. The instant that he lost interest in his bottle, he was off crawling again with a speed that impressed Millie. Look at the little guy go, with his widdle legs!

Millie turned on the TV again. My Worst Angels remained dead air. Disappointing. So she started flipping channels, eventually settling on Its Dahm Good and watching Jeffrey go through his newest recipes for human flesh. Oh look at that. Dahmer was cutting up one of his audience members. Well that was neat.

While Millie'd intended to keep an eye on Wayland, the hypnotic quality of the cooking show, the warmth of the blanket over her, and the moment of relative calm of her own baby started to drag at her eyelids. "Have you got it outta yourself?" Millie asked. Wayland continued crawling around, careening around like a living Roomba, only pausing briefly as he passed by Millie to grab and tug at her mouth for a moment, before offering a 'g'heh' and continuing to putter around. Had she remembered to burp him? Babies needed to be burped after feeding, right?

Well, if they did, it seemed that Wayland wasn't needing that kind of service. He just wanted to zip around and burn some energy. He certainly had no shortage of it. Spawn always had more energy than their elders. She almost wondered if the father of Wayland was a Sloth imp, the way Wayland was carrying on. She was out-of-the-loop on things, how Tilla's long-time lover Bartholomayo was a Betrayal imp. Such things didn't really matter, she figured, drowsily. Dahmer then put the food into the oven, and started doing unspeakable things to the rest of the carcass, which was revolting and horrifying and pretty much standard for Its Dahm Good. It also helped finish pulling Millie into a dozing state.

It only felt like she'd closed her eyes for a moment, but she opened her eyes and Dahmer was extracting his meal from the oven. Since Its Dahm Good worked in real time unlike most cooking shows, she'd had to have been down for a half hour at least. She still felt groggy. Life was unfair.

She glanced around, knuckling the bleariness from her eyes, only paying half a mind as Dahmer forced the 'guest' who'd been seated next to the show's victim to eat that victim's braised buttock. She couldn't see Wayland.

She pushed herself to her feet, again lifting the hem under the couch. Again, just dust bunnies. And all the doors were still closed.

"But... what?" she asked.

The worry started to settle into her heart again. How? How had he gotten out? She jogged a circuit around the room, and in a remote corner, found a heating vent that had been knocked aside. Oh no. That lead straight to the furnace. The fire wouldn't hurt Wayland, because even if he was an infant, he was still an imp, but it was a long drop. He might hurt himself from the fall.

"I'm comin' Wayland," she said, throwing open the door to the hall, but even as her door opened there came the loud ding-dong of somebody at the entrance. She really didn't have time for this right now. She still made for that door, because the closest basement access was near it. The ding dong sounded again. And she grumbled to herself, before throwing open the door and snapping. "Go away! I ain't got time for you!"

The interloper outside was a tall imp, easily overtopping Blitz but not quite meeting Tilla Miller's mutant height. Though a woman, her head was shaven, and she had numerous scars visible on her body that were entirely too regular to be accidental. "Wait a fuckin' minute; you're not Blitzø!" the she-imp said.

"Correct!" Millie said. Then she slammed the front door and put the intruder out of mind. The basement access was a door sized for imps, as it was intended to be used exclusively by 'the help'. And the way down was all worn, very unforgiving steps that lead into the undercroft of the Manse. There was another way down where people the size of Sinners could go, but this was closer, so she used it, and just made sure be careful not to slip and fall. There were three lives at stake if she did. Well, two; she unbroke her own neck during a fight, once. A fall like this wouldn't kill her. But the one inside her might not be so lucky, and the delay might spell doom for another.

The path opened into a hallway that lead to a scullion-door to the sex dungeon that Moxxie was transforming from serial-killer fodder into just some honest fun, and past that was the hidden panel that opened into the lower passage. She outright kicked it off of its rails and pulled herself into the ill-lit basement. There was only one light switch and it was near the 'polite staircase', which she didn't have time to run to. She immediately took a left, following her ear and the feel of hot dry air, until she reached a much more utilitarian door, one that was uncomfortably hot to the touch. She threw it open, and then coughed a bit as she was socked in the face by heat and a stench of burnt fuel-ichor.

The furnace was an old brute of a thing, ugly and shaped rather uncomfortably like a fiend's anatomical heart. And like that heart, it shifted every few seconds, as though slowly beating. She didn't understand its intricacies, and she neither cared to or needed to. She just had to go to the output vent.

It was damned uncomfortable, clambering up that iron-and-brass bastard to the aorta-like pipe that departed upward from it. She didn't have the tools to unfasten it, so she just maneuvered so that her belly wasn't in her way, planted her hooves against the machine's body, and then wrenched the pipe off of its spot. The heat in the room went from uncomfortable to broiling as the heat that had been being piped through the house now pooled in the room with her. "Wayland! Wayland are you okay?" she screamed. She then thrust her upper body down into the burn chamber, as her belly prevented her from crawling all the way in. It was desperately uncomfortable, but she saw nothing but burning oil and the plate that separated the top burner from the bottom. The gap was perhaps an inch between the plate and the wall. No infant imp could fit through that.

Wayland hadn't fallen into the furnace. Thank Satan for that.

Millie pulled herself out of the furnace, idly swatting at her shoulders where her dress was smouldering and catching fire. If he wasn't here... He must have pushed out another vent. She had a thought, and stuck her head up the pipe she'd wrenched loose. "Wayland! Wayland can you hear me?" she shouted up that pipe.

And after a moment, spent in desperate concentration, she was sure she heart an infant's giggle.

With a smile less joyous and more unhinged, she inelegantly wrenched that pipe more-or-less back into position and made a note to tell Moxxie to fix it. Wayland was somewhere upstairs, near a vent but outside of the pipe. If he'd been in the pipe, the giggle wouldn't have sounded quite like that.

She hustled back to the Polite Staircase, ignoring the other lower floor rooms, because Wayland sure as shit wasn't in them. It was a well crafted and maintained affair, with random stones set carefully in mortar to resemble a garden path, only as stairs. She didn't bother to wonder why whoever put them there made them by that aesthetic. She was in this moment numb to such concerns. The Polite Staircase emerged near the back of the house, near the garage but a room and a hallway away. And it put her next to the first potential room; a library.

She threw open the door to the library, jogging around the bookshelves to the points where the heat came in. No sign of him. There were, however, signs of Moxxie here. The room was roughly split into thirds, in terms of Moxxie's influence. The first third were a neatly sorted selection of books, put into their shelves according to his very particular desires and delights. The next was an only slightly orderly pile, those books that Moxxie was in the process of reading, categorizing, and reallocating. The third was the utterly slapdash arrangement that Nathan Birch had shoved tomes into slots as the fancy struck him. This room had been a bugbear for Mox for a while now. And he only tackled it when he wasn't busy with work, with magical research, or with keeping his wife happy.

He was seldom in this library of late.

"Wayland?" she asked. No sign of him here.

With a growl that sounded nearly feral to Millie, she stomped a hoof against the floor, cracking one of the black marble tiles that formed a checker-board pattern, and left the room. Immediately upon exiting, that she-imp was in her face. And she had a gun in one hand. "Now listen here, I–" the she-imp said, looming over Millie with her superior height. Millie, though, was having none of that. She swept the now-intruder hard into the wall, snatching the gun from the woman's hand and biting it in half. The intruder looked stunned by that display, which was appropriate.

"I ain't. Got time. For you," Millie declared, after spitting out half of a gun onto the floor. "Now get out!"

"Not until I talk to Blitzø Nuckelavee!" the intruder declared.

"Ain't no such person no more," Millie said. "Get out, or I throw you out."

"What do you mean, Blitzø doesn't exist? He lives here! Everybody says so!" the intruder pointed at the floor, likely indicating the house.

"Alright, out you go," Millie said. She grabbed the larger woman by the back of her collar and by the stem of her tail and hefted, easily picking the bigger imp off of the floor and carrying her through the coat room into the garage. She hip-barged the door open – shattering it in the process – then heaved the intruder into the mud of a now-dead flowerbed. "And stay out!"

These distractions were gonna be the death of her.

Ignoring the sputtering, muddy woman outside, she turned her attention to the rest of the house. Wayland had to be on the first floor, but could be pretty much anywhere. As long as he didn't fall down that riser pipe – which she knew that he hadn't – that gave him the run of this storey. So she just had to be quick and to see if any vent covers were shoved out. Or listen at them for a giggling baby.

What the fuck was her life right now? She only gave herself a moment to grapple with that errant and unwanted thought, before starting to duck into and out of rooms, looking at their vents and when feasible squatting down to listen at them.

A guest bedroom which was still mostly cobwebs starting five feet up from the floor held her in place for a moment, because the vent cover was askew. He hadn't come out into this room that they hadn't bothered cleaning above an arm's reach, the cover made that clear. But maybe he pushed on it before moving on? It had to be possible. The next room was the nursery, and she pelted over to it at double-time. Vent untouched. But even as she was about to close the door, she spotted a stuffed mastadon that was face down on the floor. She paused, moving over to it and putting it back on its feet as it belonged. There was drool on one of its legs.

"Wayland?" she asked, quickly darting around the room as much as her condition would allow her. There was no answer to her calls. It didn't even occur to her that there was no way he could have futzed with the stuffed animal, seeings as he hadn't moved the vent to get in here. But the fact was, she was edging closer to panic with every passing minute. She had to find that child.

"Alright, now wait just one fuckin' minute. Who do you think you are to throw me into a flowerbed!" the she-imp demanded, having barged into the nursery behind Millie. Millie answered by taking a baby-book and hurling it so hard that it embedded into the wall next to the she-imp's face like a throwing star.

"Next time won't be a warning; get outta my way," Millie demanded, and stormed toward the door. The woman didn't move fast enough so Millie picked her up and set her aside, heading into the hall. She hadn't heard Wayland in a while now. She was definitely worried. She crossed the hallway and opened the door which lead to a little hall which ended at the kitchen. The baby-gate was still there, still closed. She just jumped over it, checking that Wayland hadn't crawled into possibly the most dangerous room that wasn't a swimming pool for a baby imp. And the expanse that had once been manned by enslaved chefs was empty, cold, and clean.

"What are you even doing?" the she-imp asked at the end of the little hall.

"I gotta find Wayland. You can either help or get the fuck outta my home!" Millie decided that if this woman was going to stick her neck in like this, she was getting deputized.

"Great. What's a Wayland?" the other woman asked.

Millie just glared at her.

"Oh. Ohhh!" it seemed to dawn on her at long last. "Wow. Okay, I know exactly what you're going through."

Millie threw open the door to the dining room, a chamber long unused by just Moxxie and Millie. They'd had a fancy dinner once, just to say that they had, but otherwise used a study near the parlor as their main eating area. And with the table swept clean and no cloth to hide anything from view, it was clear that the increasingly evasive spawn was not here, either.

"Wayland!" Millie shouted.

"Shut up, I'm trying to listen!" the other woman said, her eyes pressed shut as she wandered with one hand keeping her tethered to a wall. Well, let her wander blind all she wanted. Millie was about to tell her to actually do something useful when those eyes snapped open and she pointed at the ceiling. "I heard a door opening upstairs."

"You what?"

"Us Nuckelavee's have good hearing," she said. And that was a Nuckelavee brand on her forehead. It'd just been X'ed out with scar-tissue. She then started toward the back of the building before pausing. "Where's the staircase up?"

Millie didn't answer, showing instead of telling. The stately staircase was off-set in a little cubby so that it didn't break up the lines of the entry hall, and only had a minor overlook. It was a minor miracle she'd spotted Wayland up there the first time. When she got to the top, she saw a door that was gently creaking closed. That wasn't a room that either she or Moxxie used, so they just left it be until they needed it. She quickly pulled the door open to a metal's protest. And looking down, she could see little handprints and knee-drags cutting through the dust.

"Wayland!" she said, quickly trying to turn on the lights, and failing because the bulbs in this dusty, underused room were all burnt out. The darkness here wasn't absolute, but it was enough that she quickly lost the trail, her fists clenching in frustration, until there was a flick sound behind her and a small flame of yellow light came from the intruder woman's cigarette lighter.

"This is... different," the woman opined.

"Come here, I need your light," Millie said, grabbing her other arm and dragging her along.

"Hey, watch it! I just had these nails redone," the woman complained.

"I don't care!" Millie said. The dragging marks made a clear path, one that skirted around the old, dry-rotting cardboard boxes that were stacked precariously, past the bureaus grey with dust, past the crates of water-damaged wood set into the corners. And then they went straight into a section of the wall, and ended.

"Whu... how?" Millie asked. The woman, though, turned her head, then quickly flattened the side of it against the wall. Millie did likewise. She heard the sound that came at the end of a toilet-flush, as the tank refilled with water. And then, muffled for what it passed through, she could swear she heard a 'fgneggh'.

An ordinary and less stressed Millie would ask how a baby imp could have made it up here again without her noticing, then crawled straight through a wall, but Millie was exactly upset enough for that not to register to her. She was out of the room with a snap, the wind of her passage dragging up all of the dust in that room into a suffocating haze that saw the other imp woman start coughing and wheezing as Millie tried to get to the next room. But the next room couldn't be reached by this hallway. She kept walking. What was up here again? Her pregnancy-addled thinking only clued in when she reached the ornate door against the wall that this was once Birch's Guest Bedroom, which he used to prostitute his draconic bodyguard for favors or even for just his own sadistic amusement. It had an en suite bathroom. The door was open. She quickly ran in, and saw that there were dusty handprints that went out to the carpet of the adjoining room, before vanishing again.

Millie stewed for a moment as the other imp caught up with her, then with a frustrated growl kicked the wall. She expected a chunk of it to be thrown into the next room over. Instead, there was a 'weeeq' sound and the panel she'd kicked rotated on a hidden axle.

"Secret passage. Nice," the other woman said. Millie, though glanced from the door to the bathroom to the spot she'd kicked. It was very short, and by prodding the panel with her foot she saw that it took almost no effort to shift this panel. Without saying a word she dipped down and got into the gap, finding a dusty, dry stairway heading upward. When the other woman joined her, cigarette lighter casting light with her, Millie saw little hand prints on the steps, and long smudges as the imp babe pulled himself arduously upward with a fortitude that bordered on madness.

Millie didn't question it. She just took the steps, three at a time. At the top, she opened a door.

And for a moment she was assailed on all sides by wildfire, heat pressing at her as though she'd just stepped into a furnace burner. And then when she blinked, it was just a hidden storage area in one of the nooks of the roof. In most ordinary circumstances, she might have considered that an event worthy of consideration. But right now, her eyes were only on the floor, seeking desperately for the babe that she'd promised to care for. Wayland had to be alright. If he wasn't, then she would have failed as a mother before even becoming one.

"Hey, did you smell Hadene up here?" the other woman asked, as Millie moved into the structure, past fiend-sized manikins that showed various debilitations, as though waiting for a sadistic artist to arrange them for painting reference. Through them, she pushed, not caring if she knocked them over. "Hey! Careful you might tip one over onto..."

"You're only here 'cause you got a source of light!" Millie snapped, turning to point an accusing finger at the other imp with her. She was quite beyond noticing that the door that the two women had used to come into this room no longer seemed to exist.

"I'm here because I know what it's like to lose a kid, and I don't want you to feel that," she said, eyes setting into a very familiar frame of defiance. "If you keep rampaging around and he's under one of these things, don't you think he'll be hurt when one lands on him?"

She growled, snarled even, but even in her frazzled state she was not able to lie to herself and say that the other woman was wrong. So she slowed down, and started to push through the forest of reference figures with a bit more deliberation and care. There were a lot of these bastards. Like, a lot a lot. But the streaks on the floor, when she saw them, lead in this direction, this direction she went.

"Um... lady? Are you seeing this?" the other imp asked.

"I don't have time to..." she snapped, but the other imp grabbed her arm and pulled. Ordinarily, it would have been a futile gesture, but since Millie was already turning to offer her rejoinder, it instead pointed her past where the other imp, who was Millie's light-source, and to the other manikins that they'd passed.

They were all facing them.

Every single one.

She hadn't been paying very close attention as she'd waded this far into the room... which come to think of it shouldn't she have reached the far wall three times over by now? But now that she thought about it, they had been facing every which way before. Not this battery of inward, blank faces, with stylisticly wounded bodies imposing on the pair of imps in their midst.

The air became very, very cold, both women's breath fogging the air in front of them. There was a fwoosh, and one manikin's head caught flame. Then another's. The darkness of the room was pressed outward, until Millie guessed from the distance from the ceiling they were standing in a room that had to be the size of a warehouse, rather than the cubby that their home would allow physically. And with a drone of infrasound that caused all of the wooden figures to shudder and jiggle slightly, dark red began to press out as though oozing out of the wood, forming words.

Die, Sinner

Millie blinked at that, then looked to the imp beside her.

"Do you think that's meant for us?" Millie asked. Another loud creak, and another message appeared directly overhead, dripping fetid, rotten blood down on them as it manifested.

Your cruelty has consequences

"Holy shit, what did you do?" the other imp asked, turning a nervous glance at Millie.

"I didn't do nothin'! We just moved in here a few months ago! This would..." and then, Millie finally twigged, and looked at the new message, which was starting to form what she guessed was going to be 'Your mind will be our toy', when she cleared her throat and then said loudly. "Excuse me! Are you tryin' to talk to Nathan Birch?"

The drone ended, and the shuddering of the wood paused. The message directly overhead slid off, landing in clots on the floor near the imps. Another quickly flared into its place.

Fuck. Did we get the wrong guy again?

"Yeah," Millie said. "Sorry to tell you guys, but Birch is like really, really fuckin' dead right now."

Another pause, and then the first message just past the horizon of manikin heads reshaped itself into: Really?

"Yup. We killed the shit outta him last year!" Millie said. There was a long silence. Then, on the chest of one of the manikins, blood oozed out saying: ...oh.

Then various messages manifested themselves, most in blood but some in wood-burning. I told you we should have done this sooner. It wasn't my fault. Son of a bitch! Wait, if he's dead why are we still here? And a bunch of other messages.

"Holy shit, this house is really, really haunted," the other woman said. One message glowed faintly golden, overpowering the others which continued to 'chatter' behind it.

Wait a second. Are you why the house isn't so fucking bleak all of the sudden?

"Oh, that was muh husband," Millie said. "He wanted the place to feel homey."

Well it's certainly an improvement.

"He'll be happy to hear you think that," Millie said. Then she shook her head. "Look, dead guys; have you seen a baby imp around here? He's about this big," she held her hands a loaf-of-bread apart, "and got grey hair and can't seem to stop moving..."

"Grey hair? Are you sure it's a boy?" the other imp asked.

"Wayland's weird in a lotta ways," Millie pointed out.

Oh yeah. That little thing. We didn't want to take out our wrath on a baby so we locked him in the china cabinet.

"You what?" Millie asked of the immaterial dead people. The manikins, now that she looked at them again, were all pointedly not looking at her, as though deeply embarrassed.

He's slippery!

"No kidding," Millie said. An arrow burned into being along the roof, leading to a corner of the now suddenly much smaller room, and to the china cabinet in question.

And she couldn't see Wayland.

"No. You said he was in there!" she said, throwing open the doors to reveal long disused china and pointedly no imp spawn. But as Millie edged on the precipice of a true panic, she felt a hand on her shoulder, and was gently walked to the side of the thing.

Where Wayland, naked again, was nomming eagerly on a silver spoon on the floor next to the china cabinet. He looked up at the imps who had approached him, then held out the spoon in his little fist with a victorious 'pneeigh!'

Millie swept him up into her arms and hugged him tight. "Don't you do that to me! You scared me half to death!"

The infant just babbled at her, now sedated as he was by his claim over a silver spoon. Well, if he wanted a spoon to keep him calm, she'd give him a drawer-full. Holy hell, she thought to herself. Is this what being a mom is like all the time?

"Look at that. He's got a dick and everything. Color me shocked," the other woman said. Then she paused, canting a fist against her hip. "Wait a second. He might be a Hermie. Is that a Prideling?"

"No, he ain't," Millie said. She turned, and even as she felt her panic abate and her annoyance return to its place as chief amongst her emotions, she had finally calmed down enough that she could recognize this she imp. She'd seen her before. Every day at work, plastered on a poster across from her boss.

It was fortunate that Millie didn't stack her self-worth on her own intellect. Because right now she felt kinda dumb for overlooking it for the entire time she was panicking.

"We should probably give that little guy a bath. He's filthy," Barbie Wire Nuckelavee said.

"I think I can handle that. So what do you want with Blitz? He don't live here," she said, pulling Wayland close. Blitz's long estranged twin sister gave a flinch of expression, somewhere between frustration and anger, but she quickly stomped it down with a puff of breath.

"Okay. That wasn't just trying to get me to leave. I accept that now," she said, with a really weird tone. "Fuck I need a dri – no, no! None of that. Look... what's your name again?"

"Millie," she answered. "Millie Rough."

"Fuck me, name like that you must be straight outta Wrath," Barb laughed. Now that the ghosts of the building were chastened and the manikins had parted, it was Barb who opened the door which led back down into the manse proper. "I'm guessing that's your first one, if you're getting this worked up over babysitting."

"I wanna do this right. And if I can't keep ahold of one little babe every time I nod off..." Millie began, now heading down the creaky stairs and exiting into the room where the worst of Birch's depravities were unleashed.

"Don't even start with that. I've never seen a kid that slippery in my life," Barb said. "My own certainly wasn't that mobile when he was... let's say five months?"

"Four," Millie said.

"Fuck me, four? Mine wasn't even sitting up on his own at four months," Barb said.

"I didn't know you had a son," Millie said.

"Yeah. Lyve," Barbie said. "You look in your Second Half. I'm guessing... July due date?"

"That's what they tell me. How do you know all this?" Millie asked as the retreated back into the more ordinary parts of the manor. She just gave Millie a wry shake of the head. Right. She'd been through this. "Y'know, I don't actually know much of anythin' 'bout you. Blitz don't talk about you or his Daddy too much."

"Yeah. The fucker knows why," a dark and seething anger festered in Barb's eyes at the mention of Cash Buckzo Nuckelavee. Or possibly of Blitz. Then she seemed to reclaim herself physically, not slapping herself but doing something which seemed about the same to her, and puffed out another breath. "Look, can I get a cup of coffee or something? I really wanna drink and I can't afford to have it be liquor."

Right. Riiiight. Barb had been in Rehab back in 2021, and who even knows how long she'd been in there when Mayday used her prestige to open the exit for herself. Millie nodded, leading down to the smaller kitchenette that Moxx used to make dinners, since the bigger, practically industrial kitchen was just too much room for something the size of an imp. There, she plunked the now thoroughly amused Wayland in the sink and began pouring in hot water on him, while idly turning on the coffee maker.

Then Millie saw the champagne bottle beside the fridge. Millie quickly grabbed it and dropped it into a garbage can where it'd be out of sight at least.

"So!" Millie said, planting her back to the pail which she gently shoved around the side of the fridge with her tail. "What brings you lookin' for Blitz at a time like this? You ain't lookin' for money, I hope. He gets real ornery when people try to take him for a ride."

"Yeah, like he's got the fuckin' right after what he did," Barb muttered darkly, leaning back against the table and watching as coffee began to percolate down into the carafe. "I don't even know if I should tell a stranger this, but... fuck it. I don't have many friends left. A couple months back, I got a call from my brother. He was drunk as shit, but... he said he was sorry. For the messed up shit he said to me, when I got the break on My Worst Angels and he didn't. For getting… For taking something important from me. And he sounded like he meant it."

Millie nodded. "Blitz made a buncha them calls. He even made a call to Verosika Mayday. You know her?"

"The pop star?" Barb asked.

"Yup. They went through a bad breakup, and..."

"I'm sorry, just hold on a second. At what point in what Hell did my dipthong of a brother bang Verosika Mayday?"

Millie, as in the dark as to what a dipthong was as Barb was, didn't correct her on her word usage, "This one, 'parently. It got bad. She had a tattoo of him and everything. My hand to Satan!"

"Wow. Turns out my brother is actually good at something after all, even if that something is fucking above his weight class."

"Oh, you got no idea how right that is, sister," Millie said.

"What does that mean? Also, don't drown the kid after all the trouble you put into saving him," Barb pointed out.

Millie gave out a peep and quickly turned to the sink, where Wayland was already up to his neck in scalding water. He didn't the slightest bit perturbed, though. He just continued to swish and tap his spoon against things, delighted thoroughly, while Millie shut off the water, and started to give the baby a basic bath for all the dust and schmutz he'd crawled through. "What I mean, is that he's got a boyfriend in the Ars Goetia now!"

"Bullshit," said Barb.

"Language! Not in front'a the baby!" Millie said, covering Wayland's little ears.

"He's still a year out from learning how to speak. Let him hear. How in the fuck," Millie frowned a little deeper, and Barb did another centering gesture before trying again, "how in the Hell did Blitz manage that one?"

"Wow. You're really outta the loop, aren't ya?" Millie asked.

And so she started talking. Not just about how Blitz got himself a thirteen foot tall fallen angel for a boyfriend, but for all the other stuff he'd done in the last couple years. Birch entered into that pretty heavily, and Millie felt no desire to censor the most destructive fight she'd ever been a part of. She even had to start over when her brain-fog made her realize that she'd omitted something really important, until she finally took a big drink of coffee and tried from the very, very beginning.

When she'd gotten recruited along with her then very-soon-to-be-husband to IMP.

No longer needing to ask very necessary clarifying questions, Barb sat back and listened as Millie yammered about the asshole kid Blitz shot in the board room, the cannibal family, the ill-fated 'investigation' at that summer camp which thoroughly discouraged her husband since the target drowned on his own by the time they figured out it was him they were after, about the Pain Games and being bodyguard to Stolas for a theme-park trip, of that uncomfortable and embarrassing trip to a place called Ell Ay which seemed built from the ground up to trap her husband in an endless cycle of buying new and shitty human-made art. With the now finally sleeping Wayland in her arms, she talked about the Florida massacre, and about the old rich fuck who they almost talked into offing himself. She talked about that whole fracas between a pair of Overlords who both wanted credit for killing the man who killed them both when they were alive, that stupid bullshit with Crimson in Greed, and the Assault On The Lumberjacks.

Then, eternal buzzkill that he was even from beyond the grave, the mood darkened when she had to bring up Nathan Birch.

She hadn't gotten far with that, barely to the point where they'd met that Sam guy and they split up and killed a guy twice, when her grumbling stomach finally pulled her out of what was clearly a monologue she couldn't stop and look to the clock. And she saw there that it was almost supper time. Which meant that Moxxie must have... yup, he'd sent her a text saying that they'd had to take over a human militia and thus wouldn't be back until morning. So who was that who was knocking on the door?

"Why would your husband knock?" Barb also noticed the incongruity, and was at Millie's side as she went for the front door. Millie hopped up the little stairs that Moxx had built into the door so that she could actually look through the peep hole. And she saw through it the tops of a pair of black horns; for most imps, she would have seen nothing at all.

"Just a second, this'll be quick," Millie said. She hopped down and opened the door a bit. "What're ya doin' here so soon? I thought you were on vacation?"

"I still am," Tilla said, pulling a bunch of baby formula from her bag. "But I didn't give you enough food."

"Oh, that's nothin'. I got tonnes stocked up for when this little 'un shows itself," Millie said, giving her belly a loving rub.

"Still, I shouldn't dig into your sup-ow"

The ow was because the other of the pair of front doors was swung open by Barb and hit Tilla in the shoulder. Barb stood there with her eyes wide, her lips trembling. Millie looked from the child to the mother, and then back. And then reckoned that whatever Blitz had told Barb in his apology, it obviously didn't include that Tilla had been brought back from the dead.

"Mama?" Barb asked, her eyes welling. And when the shock of finding her eldest daughter in a place she didn't expect fled, Tilla wasted no time sweeping the shorter imp into a rib creaking hug "How? How are you alive?" Barb asked.

"Ruut Nuckelavee thought she could keep me locked up forever," she said. "Away from you. Away from your brother. Under her power. Well, fuck her."

"Yeah, fuck that bitch," Barb said, but her voice was fully weepy, and damn it all, seeing the mother and daughter reunited so unexpectedly was pulling tears out of Millie, too. "I tried, Mama. I really tried to do what you told me."

"I know you did, Pokey," Tilla said. "I know you did."

Tilla looked over to Wayland, who was sleeping with his mouth wrapped 'round the silver spoon he'd fixated on, and with her tail she pulled Millie into the embrace. Oh damn it, now Millie was really crying. But she didn't mind. Old saying went that what ends well was all well. And today was an all well kinda day.

"Actually, I'm of the opinion that on the aggregate, Heaven didn't have a culture during the New War for Heaven, and that only got worse when the Second Heresiarchy took its place. True, there was the laughably self-righteous and self-indulgent works produced by the Angels, but that's hollow pap. The humans weren't allowed the resources to make lasting art. And while I don't doubt their stage plays and music would even now bear consideration, there was no distribution of them. There was no shared sense of nation in heaven, no common works of art. Just the hyperpolarized mess that we've spent the last decades trying to sort out.

I've always held the opinion that any nation that cannot produce art, culture, and identity is nothing but an army with a catering-service attached to it. And Heaven, particularly during the Interbellum period and even into the Second Heresiarchy, was just a bunch of Angels serving as commissars and champions over a horde of broken-minded conscripts. Not even a catered-army, they were just a couple of faulty nukes sitting atop a smouldering crate filled with dynamite. They were fighting a propaganda war that they'd lost by the time they even realized it was happening, against their own 'people', which they'd lost because they refused or failed to create common identity with the humans that they'd been tasked to look over. Herzog himself couldn't fight that tide. And the man did try.

Consider the explosion of culture, both up and down, which sprang up from Fort Abandon on Cloud One, once we put up wi-fi. The primary trade-goods from Hell were water, food, and television shows. I'm not joking when I say that having all sixty seasons of My Worst Angels probably did more to turn heaven's media-starved populace away from the higher clouds than any insanity that Gabriel got up to in the late Second. And I'm not just saying that because of 'Metronome' and what my mother – rest her soul – made that show into. When people are hungry, they will eat anything and consider it a feast. When they are thirsty, they will drink from a muddy puddle and smile. And when their souls need nourishing, when they need stories to give them hope and inspire emotions that privation has denied them, even the vulgar, crass art of Hell is the finest ambrosia in Creation."

-Sir Lyve Wire Miller, PhD, Actor and Doctor of Philosophy