The Song of Ruin

by James Golen

The Demiurge has revealed himself, and declared a vendetta against God. Hell is in turmoil as Lucifer - now with a mere imp as his Proxy - is surely planning a new war against Heaven, to reclaim the throne he calls his own. And those who are stuck on the battlefield have to find a way to survive. This is a story of how good men die. Book 2 of The Silent God Duology.

24. The Cruelty Is The Point

Frankly, the apartment that Blitz was living in was much more in line with Barb's expectations of him compared to what the rumor mill spat out. It was a squat, dingy looking building built for the laborers and lackwits of Imp City to crash, sleep, and ingest frankly unsafe amounts of recreational drugs while waiting for the night to pass over and their work shift to begin anew. It was a far cry from the stately manor of the Proxy of Lucifer, which according to Millie he'd earned outright.

So much had passed her by, it turned out.

"And this is Loona's floor," Millie said as she continued up the stairs to where Barb's brother hung his metaphorical hat. "She's his Hellhound. He adopted her 'bout five years back or so."

"Adopted? Not bought?" Barb asked.

"My son has some issues with intimacy," Mom said, shaking her head lightly at the hallway that they passed on their passage up. "So when he saw a deeply damaged, violent Hellhound shrinking into a corner of a kennel, well... he did what he did."

"Yup. She's got her own stuff goin' on now," Millie said. "Selling human drugs down here. Medicines and the like."

"Why would Hell want that?"

"Because they work, and she's willing to sell to people who actually need them rather than stockpiling them until they can be sold for a king's ransom," Tilla said. "She's a bit untempered, but she's smarter than those people at the kennel gave her credit."

"I still can't believe you're here," Barb said. She'd gotten all of her confused-if-joyous weeping out of her, but now she was fairly certain that she was drifting along in a degree of shock. "I mean... I saw you die. Me and Blitz, we both saw you die! HE FUCKING KILLED YOU."

"Barb," Tilla snapped, and Barb found herself silenced under her withering glare. There was still decades of resentment there, and though Tilla's shocking return curbed some of it, the imp's heart was by its nature a petty thing. "Since when does that stop Ruut Nuckelavee?" Tilla asked, her tone very cold, and bleak as a Monday morning in the bad half of Sloth. But Tilla's lips pulled up into a smirk after a moment. "But even getting brought back to continue playing brood mare wasn't all bad. I got to have the rest of my kids. And we should be meeting one right abooooout..."

The one that Mom had been expecting was already out in the hall, arms crossed before her chest as though standing in judgement. A step behind her and at her right side was another imp, about this teenaged girl's age, but bearing the wings of an Envy Clade. He didn't look nearly so imperious as the girl did.

"So this is the much reputed Barb Wire Nuckelavee?" the girl asked, her creole accent not as thick as Barb would have imagined. She stared at Barb for a second, then leaned slightly forward. "And I am to trust that one of such a name as that isn't here to spirit my mother and my siblings away from this place in the night?"

"What? No! Why would I do that?" Barb asked, genuinely confused.

"It's the name," Tilla said. "Krieg has a certain dislike of Clan Cruac."

"Was it because of the forced breeding?" Barb asked.

"Yes, it was because of the forced breeding," Krieg was less than happy to answer. "I would much prefer to be virginal at this age than what transpired. And you bear the name of those who inflicted that upon me."

"Well, I can't exactly help that, now can I? I'm from where I'm from," Barb refused to be bullrushed by a teenager. Krieg, though, nodded toward their shared mother.

"She did. What is your name now, Mother?"

"Tilla Miller," she said as though this was something that the two of them had repeated many, many times, in the effort of one to convince the other.

"What kind of an imp name is Miller?" Barb asked.

"A better one than Nuckelavee, I assure you," Krieg said. She then turned her gaze to their mother again. "You weren't speaking in jest; her blood is practically dead of thaumaturgy. I'm even surprised she can live with blood that dull."

"I've got better things than magic to play with," Barb pointed out.

"Oh? Such as?" Krieg asked, standing her ground.

"I'm a famous actress!" Barb pointed out.

"I've never seen you in anything," Krieg said. Behind her, the envy imp gave an 'um' and raised a finger, but Krieg pointedly ignored his intrusion.

"That's impossible. I was Kokabiel in My Worst Angels!" Barb pointed out, gesturing broadly to what she visualized as the past.

"Should that impress me?" Krieg asked.

"Ohh! That's where I saw you before!" Millie sounded delighted.

"See? She gets it," Barb said, pointing at the pregnant she-imp at her side.

"Twee-cherry, as much as I'm charmed by your eagerness to defend your mother from leeches and parasites," Tilla said, breaking out her Mom-Voice in full, "to do so against my other daughter is a bit in excess. And besides that, I don't know about my girl, but Millie's been on her feet running after my little escape-artist of a son for the last few hours. Don't make her keep standing in a hallway when there's perfectly good couches in the apartment."

The boy himself was awake again, gnawing on that stolen silver spoon with all the vigor that his lack of teeth allowed him. At least he wasn't darting around the building on his hands and knees. Krieg sighed and hung her head for a moment, knowing that there was no possible victory against Mom at this point. To Barb, it was shocking, seeing the mother Tilla had become. All of Barb's memories were... complicated, of the woman treating her own children more like fellow siblings than offspring, and made all the harsher by Blitz's dumbfuckery that snatched her out of Barb's life when Barb was no older than this Krieg was now. But considering that Cash Buckzo had impregnated Tilla – his own daughter – when she was all of thirteen years old, complicated was probably the best that could be expected out of that deeply messed up family vine.

The room off of the hallway was a bit packed, reminding Barb of those few times that Cash had splashed a bit of money so they could sleep in a motel instead of on inflatable mattresses under a tent. But it had been claimed pretty definitively by its inhabitants. Within were two more imps, younger than Krieg and likely little older than Barb's own Lyve. The girl of the pair instantly grabbed a kitchen knife when barb entered first, standing in front of her slightly smaller brother with an 'Imma shank a bitch' look on her face. Tilla, though, leaned around the doorframe and pointed at her, causing the girl to flinch back, and lose much of her fire.

"Um, who dis?" the boy asked.

"Victoria, August, this is my eldest daughter, Barb," Tilla said.

"Barb?" August asked. "Why do she look so familiar?"

"Wait a second. Aren't you from that show Mom watches? From like... years and years ago?" Victoria asked, lobbing the knife in an arc which landed tip first into a cutting board.

"It wasn't that long ago," Barb said with a defensive edge to her voice she couldn't suppress. The fact was, it was in fact that long ago. Kokabiel had been the previous Main, and by now they were eight seasons (which made four years) into Armaros' run, and his story had at least a season left before they could punt him for the new runner.

Well, about that...

"Yeah I didn't even recognize her. They do really good makeup on that show," Millie noted. The two children offered enthusiastic 'Hi Mills!' at her entrance and rushed over to give her hugs. It was just so homey that it almost made Barb envious. But she had other things to worry about. Bigger and more important things.

"Well, are you just going to stand there and leave your aunt/half-sister looking sad and bitter?" Tilla asked, gesturing to Barb. So that was the dynamic in play? It actually kinda fit, the age differences being what they were. And August gave a shrug and then hugged Barb, too. Vicky seemed a bit standoffish. That would probably serve her well in life, Barb figured.

Introductions out of the way, Barb sat down on a chair, having the Envy Imp who'd still not named himself sit opposite her, while the kids asked what their mother was doing home this early. Tilla gave the typical mom-answers. Frankly, if Barb hadn't intruded on all-of-their-mother's 'vacation' time, she'd probably still be out there doing whatever it was she did to unwind.

"I've got a question for you," the Envy imp said, seeming more comfortable on the outskirts of these gatherings.

"I might even have an answer," Barb answered. "And you are...who, again?"

"Uller Cruikshank," Uller answered. "Krieg is teaching me magic."

"Oh. Didn't know Envy imps could learn magic," Barb said. But then again, what Barb didn't know about magic could probably fill Purson's library. Uller looked like he was about to launch into a diatribe, but he coached himself to calm, then cleared his throat.

"Be that as it may," he said, very deliberately, before turning and watching the interplay between the pregnant imp, Barb's mother, and Barb's half-siblings which by family custom were to be treated as nieces and nephews. "What brought you back now, of all times? I'm given to understand you cut yourself from the family years ago."

"No, I cut myself from BLITZ years ago," she snapped harshly. But then the rest of it came back, remembering scrubbing the black off of her hands until her fingers cracked and started to bleed. "I had to go to rehab."

"I saw that," Uller said, gesturing to the necklace that had a pendant with the number 180 on it. She'd gotten it months ago, making it more than half a year without any alcohol whatsoever. By rights the number should have been 400, but she managed to fuck that up while still in rehab. "But that doesn't explain the distance. From what I know about Blitz Miller, he would have been there for you even in that..."

"My brother and I don't have the best relationship," Barb said, with venom still in her tone, cutting off that line of conversation before it led somewhere neither of these two outsiders wanted it going. That Tilla was alive, somehow, killed the hatred. But the anger remained.

Uller sighed. "He does have a vindictive streak if he thinks you've betrayed him. So what did you do?"

"Nothing, compared to what he did to me; I just took his acting career," Barb said, finding herself involuntarily shuddering at the mere thought of her father/grandfather's hand on her skin that such a thought brought up. And that, in turn, made her hands twitch, thinking again of scrubbing away black until her own blood replaced it. "And until he sent me that phone call... I just thought he'd disowned me. We both did and said some pretty horrible shit to each other after mom… well… died. Turns out his heart's got some room for forgiveness after all."

"And that's why you came back. Because you need him for something," Uller said, nodding distantly. She snapped her gaze over to him. How could he possibly...? "You're desperate. And you keep looking at Wayland with hungry eyes. You have a young child of your own, I guess? And you think Blitz can get them back for you?"

"...yes," she admitted. Lyve was in the system, and until and unless she got enough money to bullrush that system, she would need external help to get it to hand over her flesh and blood to her. Lyve was her final defiance against Cash. Another man's child in the womb that he'd wanted.

"He'll help you," Uller said with a nod.

"After what I did..." she began, but Uller let out a chuckle.

"This is Blitz, and you're part of his family. He'd punch Lucifer in the dick for his family, if you let him. And he is the Proxy, after all."

And it had to be enough. Lyve would disappear into a system that would see him as addicted and derelict as she was when it spat him out. She had to believe, even in this impossible Hail-Mary, that something would shake him loose and give him back. She did what was asked of her. And she needed something to go right with her life right now.

"So, uh... mind explaining something?" Uller asked.

"I don't know if I can, but shoot," Barb said.

"Why hasn't MWA been on the air? It's pretty much the only thing Krieg watches on TV these days, and..."

"But she just said..." Barb motioned to the hallway where Krieg had claimed otherwise.

"You should know this about Krieg. She lies to get the advantage over people," Uller shrugged.

Clever kid. "Oh. Well, that's because the Masters got destroyed when an Exorcist fucked up the building and killed Frid Zhivage," Barb said.

"Wait... The guy playing Armaros is dead?" Uller asked.

"Yup. And they don't know what to fucking do right now," Barb said. The studio heads didn't at least. There were other murmurings from the writers, though. Murmurings of insurrection. But they were outside of her reach right now. She needed her kid back.

"Are you certain you're calling short your vacation over... this one?" Krieg asked, gesturing to Barb.

"I guess until Wayland's grown up, I'm a full time mother," Tilla said, not sounding entirely disappointed. "Maybe next time."

"If you keep saying that, the maybes will become nevers. I insist that you abandon us and pamper yourself!" Krieg said.

"Ordinarily, I'd say you just want to throw a party and do drugs, but I know you too well for that," Tilla said, pinching her middle-daughter's cheek. Krieg was not amused. "Fine. Once Barb is settled, and when Moxxie isn't on a job in the human world, I'll leave Wayland with both of them, and then hide in a spot where none of you little sprats can find me."

"That's all I could ask," Krieg said primly. She then pointed to Barb. "Now as for you; has our mother shared with you any secrets of magic that she has not with me?"

"What? No. I'm dull-blooded," Barb said.

"Then you are beneath my notice," Krieg said, but with a lot less rancor than most of the others had made in that announcement. The rest of them just swirled around Barb as conversations went onto other topics, and the family that had sprung up here and embraced the Wrathling continued. Just let Blitz help me, Barb begged. I need this.

---

Chapter 24

The Cruelty Is the Point

---

That job turned out to be about five times the pain in the ass that it'd needed to be. As it'd just been Blitz and Moxx, they'd had a certain facility in stealth that bringing along a Hellhound like Loona or Maelstrom would lack, and a precision that even Millie might have thrown out. Blitz knew that he was going to be getting a fuckload more jobs from the North American continent in the next few years, if the utter shitshow he saw up there was any indication. They were massacring each other up there!

Loona was waiting in the office with her feet up on the desk when the portal flared open, and Blitz threw his literal bag-of-dicks through. It landed with a sickening plop on the floor, leaking red onto the carpet. Loona's face pulled up with disgust at that. "Was that really necessary?"

"She wanted the dicks of eight specific old fucks, so she's getting the dicks of eight specific old fucks," Blitz said to his daughter. Moxxie came through and immediately went for the fridge, pulling an ice bag and holding it to his head. Not because he'd gotten hit there, but because he was desperately overheated. So was Blitz, frankly. He was so hot that he'd stopped sweating, which was a really bad sign. Still, after swigging back some water from the cooler, then abandoning the cup and just hefting the tank and guzzling a gallon of that shit, he started to feel the hydration spread through his body. Fuck that part of that country. The next time somebody mentions 'Death Valley' in any context, Blitz was adding a fucking zero to the price.

"I thought this was a party-crash murder. Why are you so fucking dehydrated?" Loona asked, brow raised.

"That's how it started," Moxx said, from where he had taken Blitz's lead and now guzzled water straight out of the tank. "Then there were the cultists, one of our targets ran to a compound, we had to kill... frankly an embarrassing amount of fundamentalists... and then we had to chase down the last one who fled into the desert."

"Until he ran outta fucking gas," Blitz said.

"I remember when America was merely awful. Now it's almost Hellish," Moxxie noted.

"Yeah, well, you did kill, like, half of the angriest old fucks you could find, and then left the other half to get even angrier," Loona said, continuing to type away at her computer with one hand while doom-scrolling with the other. It couldn't possibly be that simple, could it? Nations weren't that easy to kill.

Then again, unbeknownst to Blitz, Hell had a tremendous amount of inertia behind it. Between four Regency Periods spanning billions, then hundreds of millions, then tens of thousands of years, unaging Deadly Sins, and the forceful personality of Lucifer way at the top, things down here in Hell only broke if people wanted them to break. Human weakness alone was not enough.

Freed from such high-minded thinking, Blitz began to eat refrigerator pizza to further get his body temperature under control. It was a bitch of a thing that fire didn't do shit to Imps, but sunlight could bake them. What was up with that? There was a yelping sound coming from his pocket, and he pulled out his Hellphone. Why was Tills texting him?

He opened it, and saw a pic of Barb standing next to their shared mother.

Blitz must have been standing there shocked for a while, because he was only jolted to coherence when Loona beaned a paper-ball off of his head. "Hey, you alive over there?" she asked, still at her desk.

"Yeah just one fucking minute when did..." Blitz began, his confusion starting to spark before his brain caught up with him and reminded of him what he'd done while drunk off of his balls. "Ohhh. Oh this is 'cause I blubbered like a drunken bitch."

There was a portal in the room with them that Blitz hadn't heard Moxxie open, and the smaller imp was coming back through with a note. "Um, sir? It says that everybody's gone to your apartment. Should I?"

"Yeah, fuckin' do it, man!" Blitz said. He wasn't sure what he was feeling right now. And that was fucking uncomfortable. Blitz was a man of blessedly few deep thoughts, and could canoe down his stream of consciousness for days without getting wet. He didn't like mulling on those sticky, stanky feelings that his life tried to pile onto him. Better to just feel them and then let 'em go. But for all his desire to be more 'in the moment' than some monks, he still had a pretty good idea what each of those feeling was when it came at him. Now, he was in the lurch because his current plate was heaped with shit that he didn't recognize. And that he didn't like how it made him feel. "Hey Loonie? You mind locking up once that 'Africa' thing is done?"

"Yeah sure, whatever," she said, not looking up at him. The next portal opened to the hallway outside his apartment. And he quickly threw open the door to see Barb, that bitch who stabbed him in the back and took his spot on that show. Well, that was what he thought to himself. The truth was more complicated, and thus harder to hold a grudge about. The bad blood had been mutual, and spilled by both of them. And Blitz's part in it had been, frankly, pretty heartbreaking. But for all Blitz wanted very much to still be angry at Barb, the way she turned to him, and the way her face fell instead of curling up in smugness or snarling with rage kinda killed that desire in the crib.

"Oh... hey bro," Barb said.

"The fuck did you finally show up here for?" Blitz demanded as he entered his apartment which was, as he very much preferred it, packed with imps that shared genes with him.

"I wanted to apologize," Barb said.

"You wanted to what?" he asked, his pique now on the verge of getting smothered just like his indignance had.

"There was only one spot, and we both knew it. They needed one imp. Didn't care who... but I shouldn't have sabotaged you and took your chance to actually fight for it," she said.

"Yeah. I could'a been the big TV star while you got mocked off'a the stage of that shitty Sit-Com," Blitz said.

"But that isn't how it turned out. Still. I regret doing it. I regret... fucking everything that he told me to do, honestly," she looked positively haunted at that admission. Well, fuck. There went his anger. So what was left? Well, rather than doing the dumb-bitch thing and try to sort through them all and figure out which one was which, he just picked one of his impulses at random and acted on it.

That impulse being to give his long estranged sister a hug.

Barb gave a squawk of alarm at suddenly having Blitz's arms squeezing her. But Blitz squeezed her anyway. "Don't... just don't fuckin' do it again, okay?" he asked, his voice quivering.

She gave a surprised laugh. "Of course not. I don't even want your job right now. I'm not exactly paid killer these days," she said.

"Yeah, you're not. Best remember that," Blitz said, and then put her back to arms'-length. "Why did you even listen to that kiddie-fucker? All he ever gave this family was fear and pain!"

"I know! I know, Blitz!" she said, shame clear on her face. Considering how much her face resembled his, it was easy for him to recognize. "I don't even have a good answer for it myself. I knew every fucking thing that he did to Mom, that he did to you, that he did to m... and I just went along with it anyway. I think that there's just something cracked in me whenever he was involved."

"Look, Sis," Blitz said, giving her shoulders a squeeze. "You're probably one of the last people that saw him alive. Just say the word and I'll hunt him down and put his head on a spike."

"You don't need to to that," Barb said.

"Maybe I don't, but I really fuckin' wanna!" Blitz said, crossing his arms.

"And besides... look, I'm not just here to ask forgiveness for my half of that bullshit. Although that was important, just for, well... reasons," she reached into her dress and pulled out a medallion with a numbered coin, which meant nothing to Blitz. He just glanced to it, then back to her, and let her keep talking. "I'm here because I need help, and I think you might be the only one who can help me."

Well if that didn't just pickle Blitz's optimism. "So you just show up on my doorstep after thirty fucking years because you neeeeed something?" Blitz demanded, as though he weren't every bit as in-the-wrong about how the family had gotten split up for this long to begin with.

"You give me that attitude after getting Momma killed?" Barb snapped at him. And that instantly was under Blitz's skin.

"FUCK YOU! I'm the only reason she's safe up here in Pride Ring, and not bein' used as fuckin' breeding stock for our witch of a Gramma-ma right now!" he snapped back. "It's not like you haven't been holding that in my face for the last thirty fuckin' years!"

"Thirty?" Barb asked, suddenly confused. "It's been, like, fifteen."

"SEVENTEEN! And you'd know what I meant by that if you actually gave a shit about bein' a good sister!" Blitz shouted.

"ENOUGH," Tilla raised her voice and all of her gathered children flinched at the hearing of it. Since that fraternity composed most of the people currently in the room, that made a heady silence rear its ugly head. Tilla pointed at her eldest children. "She is apologizing. Accept it, Blitz. He is apologizing. Accept it, Barb. I am alive. He is absolved. I will not have you fighting this fight over again in front of me," Tilla said with the sternest voice Blitz had ever heard out of her. Both Blitz and Barb quickly had expressions of suitable chagrin, so Tilla dusted off her dress, then gestured more gently toward Barb. "She has a son. That son was taken from her. And you could help get him back."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because I want you to," Tilla said. Oh. Oh that. She puffed out a breath. "I know, Blitz, you're not ready to forgive her part yet. But she is still your blood, and Lyve Wire is still my grandson. I will not have a grandson of mine adrift in Hell's foster care system."

"Or an orphanage," Millie added.

"Or an... oh Satan that would be worse," Tilla muttered. She then faced Blitz. "So don't do this for your sister who is desperate and afraid. Do this for your mother so your family can get bigger."

Blitz glanced between the sister he wanted to be angry at, and had one massively glaring good-fucking-reason to be volcanically pissed at him, and then to the mother to whom he couldn't say no. He hung his head for a moment. "Fuckin... Fine. Fine! I'll go kill his foster parents and get him b–"

"No!" everybody in the room above the age of 15 shouted. Moxxie was the one to continue past that point. "If you do that not only are you damaging an already teetering social service you're probably going to get Sallos after you. And he won't care if you're Proxy or not."

"So what? I'll just ice that shit stain too," Blitz said.

"Lucifer favors Sallos. Sallos keeps the riots to a minimum and the peace – such as it is – in effect," Moxxie said tried to explain. "If you kill Sallos, Lucifer would probably take out a lot of anger on you. And you know how angry Lucifer can be."

"Well shit. If I can't kill this problem away, how in the fuck am I supposed to deal with it?"

"Um... why don't you just ask?" Millie asked from the arm of the couch, which she was perched on her knees looking over the back of. "I mean, 'till you piss the Big Hoss off, you are the Proxy of Lucifer. Maybe that's worth somethin'?"

"Exactly," Barbie said. "I'm an actress who hasn't had a role in two years, with as much money as that kind of gap allows. I can't do anything, can't shake any trees, to get Lyve back. But you can flatten the forest with a word. Please, Blitz. I'm begging you."

And she was, her hands clasped before and her eyes doing their very best Hellhound puppy impression, which ordinarily would have been laughable to somebody with the degree and depth of schadenfreude as Blitz, but he could tell that she was being utterly honest. And fuck it all, she was in fact family. Shitty family, but by that metric in a lot of ways so was Blitz.

"GodDAMNit why'd ya got to go and give me the puppy eyes. Fine! I'll go 'be nice' and 'talk' to people to 'get your son back' 'legally'."

"Should I be concerned by the amount of air-quotes he was using there?" the winged shit asked of Krieg.

"So you are developing a working sense of prudence. Bravo," Krieg said, clapping the one whom Blitz still hadn't memorized the name of right in his wing spur which looked like it hurt like a bastard. He started toward the door. "Uncle? Where are you going?"

"Well I'm not gonna just sit around with my fist up my ass; I'm gonna go do it now!" Blitz said as he went for the doors.

"Oh. Well. Yay?" Barb said with a questioning look behind Blitz's back to their mother. And just as Blitz missed that, he also missed the begrudging nod that Tilla gave to Barb. Some things just went the way that they went when Blitz was involved, after all.

---

The change had been intense.

She hadn't felt it that night, when she got utterly shit-faced and showcased Sam's singing voice to the rest of the Hotel. Not only did that fucker have a set of pipes on him like a church-organ, but the blatantly magical scenario that unfolded as he did his piece in retrospect prepared her for the meeting that she'd had with him on Cloud Four. It was obvious that he was going to end up up here, one way or the other. Just not the way he did. Not in the state that he did.

No, the change had come to her as she settled into her chair, facing the rain, and felt hope, real, tangible, physical hope. And she grabbed onto it, clenching her fingers into it so tight that it fused into her skin so she could never let it go. Then, a moment of pain, and a flash of light. Then she was standing in some Cherub's back yard, and she felt... more...

Actually, that was the best way of summarizing what she felt when she woke up with that only slight hangover in the middle of Heaven. She felt more. More than she had ever been. More than she thought possible. And most shockingly of all, it still felt entirely her. She wasn't just Wendy Wasted anymore. She'd changed too much for that. The name Gloria Mundi was just a recognition of such. But here, in her own mind, or with those few who had known her path... she still had the luxury of being Wendy again. All that had come to her was not a foreign bequest of hitherto unseen power. This was hers. It had always been hers. And she just needed to find the right perspective, drive, ambition, and strength of will to claim it. And if all of this, her sight through the greenery, her power of growth and regrowth, her selective intangibility, and all of the other things that she hadn't even had a chance to explore yet; if all of that was inside Gloria Gwendalyn Monday, botanist damned by suicide... what power did everybody else have?

She didn't know. But she had a feeling that she'd learn before too long. If one could Redeem themself, then many others could. She wasn't so vain as to think she was unique. She was just the first of many across a finish line people didn't even know to run toward.

With her new power, finding people became a snap. As long as the place they were living wasn't utterly barren or so toxic as to be inhospitable to life as modern chemistry knew it, she could sense the presence and location of people pretty much at will. It made it very easy for her to avoid people. If she felt them coming, poof, she was a cloud of smoke drifting invulnerably away long before they reached line of effect to her. She never let Gabriel's thugs actually get close. While she might be able to avoid harm through intangibility, she wasn't sure of the limits of her physical resilience, and had little desire to test them. Testing them promised pain to little benefit.

Here on Five, it was a wholly different Heaven than what one saw in the lower Clouds. She was blind on Four, essentially, because nothing could grow there. Here, though, flower-beds and hobby farms abounded, glorious in their beauty and utterly worthless for their culinary value. A beacon of blossoming vanity and blindness, turpitude-on-the-vine. It was fairly well populated with the Cherubs, who had taken over the elegant towers that had once belonged to the humans before they were expelled to the lower Clouds. Now that she was looking at them, she could see a sort of inspiration to the Rat Towers in these seemingly impossibly tall structures. But these, with clean lines and immaculate facades, now were made filthy in her mind's eye by the association even by proxy to such human misery.

She flew faster than the wind, faster than sound, not quite as fast as light, crossing away from these prototype towers that now Humans could only dully mimic rather than adopt. The Cloud shrieked past swiftly, passing glorious manor-houses for the Grigori who had done such works as to earn some trifle of redemption in the eyes of their fellows, or the many other Secondborn who had little truck with their lust-waylaid kin. The Firstborn tended to stay in Seven, Eight and Nine, as they were able. There were a few places that stood out, though. Penemue's home, for example, had been ransacked, then burned to the ground. It stood a shattered hull of a glorious manse, testament to the pettiness of Gabriel and his goons. And there was another, a place stuffed in a curl of reality that was hard to even perceive. Overlooking a bend on the River Respite that no map could ever display there was another home, this one overgrown such with ivy and its gardens so out of control that it was only visible for what it was – a manor – by a tower that shone with gold so smooth that even vines could not cling to it.

There, she felt Rage Incarnate.

He had said that they weren't going to talk again. Well, fuck all of that. Wendy was the final arbiter on who Wendy did or did not speak to. And since she was feeling at least a little bit spiteful, she let that decide her itinerary, pulling herself together and essentially assembling her body out of the magical equivalent to subatomic particles over the course of about two strides. Her view narrowed, but sharpened. It was still strange how normal it had become to see out of three eyes. At least she stopped poking herself when she rubbed her forehead. That had taken some getting used to.

The Manse did not belong, according to any records that she'd been able to snoop, to any Angel in Heaven. But having dug a bit deeper, she knew why. This whole structure was mirrored, a few bends in the river away, by another structure whose towers glowed with silver. That copy-palace belonged to Abel. Ten thousand years had not been kind to Cain's intended heavenly abode, abandoned when it became obvious he could never dwell in it. Shame and disappointment was a scent in the air, almost as strong as the smell of dank earth that squashed under her shoes. It was spongy, here, at the docks-area that she'd manifested herself. Occasional great floods seemed to have deposited layer upon layer of silt here, which only spurred more furious plant growth. She gave her head a shake. As much as this was a fascinating site to explore from a botanical perspective, she wasn't here for that. She was here for the faint white glow that leaked through a vine-choked window.

She rose up on grass-smothered steps and tiles and ducked into the room, which was musty and stank of neglect. The glow was just in front of her, and she picked up her pace, about to burst into the room with a 'surprise motherfucker!' in her most mocking of tones, but the words died in her throat when she entered and saw not Samuel Scailes, but one of Gabriel's most notorious goons.

Malik turned to her, and she readied herself to discorporate. But when he turned, it wasn't with anger and violence. It was... tired. Run down. He wasn't wearing his armor, instead draped in robes of white and purple. She blinked at him. What the sweet hell was he doing here?

"Well," Malik said. "This is unexpected."

"You took the words out of my mouth. What are you doing here, Malik?" she asked.

"Introspecting," he said. She turned him an askance glance at that. "I trust you're here for the actually important people in this building?"

"Which you don't count yourself?" she said.

And Malik offered a quiet laugh. "Indeed not. The last few months have been remarkably informative for me. Humbling, you might say."

"Humbling enough that you didn't immediately draw a knife on me. That had to be mind-shattering," Wendy said very, very flatly.

"You're more right than you know," Malik said, turning his eyes toward the next room. "They're in there. I don't know if they're waiting for you, but knowing them, they probably are."

"Thanks," she said with obvious sarcasm, and walked past the Angel who slowly returned the spot in front of the long crumbled fresco where she'd discovered him. The path ahead lead deeper into the manse and thus deeper into darkness. Unlike other Angelic mansions that she'd snuck into or just remotely viewed – being intangible had its benefits – this one had never been retrofitted for electricity, and all of its torches had long rotted away. Even the brackets that held them had succumbed to rust and erosion of ten thousand neglected years.

But the dark didn't last for long. Just like night, where there was always a sunrise in the offing, the dark that she plunged through gave way to a new pool of warm, white light, beyond even that which she purposefully failed to illuminate with her own halo. And she could hear talking there, a voice deep yet hesitant, hitching and stammering.

"...alike to anything... really. I..." the words came to her, in that foreign voice.

"And yet you allowed it," the new voice was Sam's.

"No. To allow, I would need will. I had no will. Only the orders of the Father," the first said.

"And yet here you are again, your voice returned," Sam said, as though proving a point that she hadn't been privy to the setup of. There was a long silence, which she used to finally pass through the vacant threshold into the sitting room that was in a much lesser state of ruin than the rest of what should have been Cain's Heavenly Manor. Sam was standing, wearing most of his armor as he always did these days. What was shocking, truly surprising, was the one he was talking to.

Metatron.

Metatron was seated in an oversized rocking chair, his eyes not able to focus on Samael and instead fixated on the floor. His halo was ornate in a way that no other Angel she'd seen was, not merely a band of cold white light but instead a mandala intricate as jade-sculpture that hovered above the short brown hair of his crown. Despite the fact that he was nine feet tall, taller than either the Redemptor who had entered the room or the Son of Chaos, he had a seeming smallness to him, as though no matter his physical dimensions he would always fade into the background and be a minor part of any goings on.

In Metatron, she saw herself at her very most despairing. But not by pain and fear. Metatron was withdrawn as though he had never in his existence had a chance to stand, and was now expected to run. Finally, his eyes shifted toward her, an unnaturally bright pair flicking see the point that her feet touched the floor, before flicking them back to his usual resting place.

"We aren't alone," Metatron said. Sam tensed, his back straightening, and smoke began to well around his shoulders, before he turned a glance over his shoulder to Wendy. The moment he spotted her, that smoke dissipated, and his vigilant melancholy transformed into outright confusion.

So shocked was she by the presence of Metatron that she essentially glossed over the fact that red-bearded Thor was sitting on a desk, eating an entire bucket of fried chicken without saying a word. She could deal with dead Norse Gods later, when things weren't as precarious.

"How are you here?" Sam asked.

"Nice to see you too," Wendy said.

"No, I said that we would not speak again. And..." Sam said, facing her and pointing at the floor dramatically.

"And because you say a thing that thing has to happen?" She asked, cocking a fist on her hip.

"...Yes, actually," Sam said. But the surprise began to fade, and a wistful smile came to his face, finally erupting with a single laugh. "Of course you can circumvent it. You always were walking paradox, Wendy. Nice to see that's enshrined now in celestial law."

"What is this?" she nodded toward Metatron and Thor.

"I'm why Thor is Thor. Accordingly, he's helping me with something long term. And Metatron? He's been helping me since I got here," Sam said of the Seraphim. Metatron didn't answer that statement, continuing to stare at the floor. "When I got into Heaven, he was basically alike to a loyal-yet-abandoned dog. Anything I asked him to do, he did as though it were the word of God. Which, now that I think about it, is probably closer to the truth than I'm comfortable with," Sam said, giving his head a shake. Thor uttered a chuckle, and then spat a bone into a pile that was growing in a corner of the room.

"So he's what Heaven has been running around trying to find," she said. "I was wondering that myself."

"It's only been in the last few months that Metatron's regained his voice. The last few weeks in particular have been very enlightening," Sam noted.

"I can only imagine," she said.

"I know you didn't come here to discuss the whereabouts of the Voice of God," Sam said, sitting down and having a chair appear beneath him as he did. When Wendy glanced down at her side, she noted that another chair had been produced for her, sitting just behind her. Probably, the only piece of furniture that the actually belonged in the room was likely the desk that Thor was sitting on. May as well. "So why did you defy Edict and hunt me down again? Was it to slap me again? Because I'm a firm believer that equal rights means equal lefts."

"Please. You've never hit a woman," she said. He just stared at her. "Oh shit you've actually belted a chick. Why? Did she have a knife on your or something?"

"She was about to drive the car I was passenger in into a culvert. Didn't want to die, so I slugged her and THIS ISN'T IMPORTANT!" Sam snapped. Thor laughed at him. "Don't you start." He sighed and rubbed his brow. "I swear to that shithead up on Nine that the moment you people hunt me down you try to make me into who you remember from the Hotel. I can't just shoot the shit forever, Wendy. I have a job to do."

"And so do I," she said. He glanced up at her. "As much as I'm furious at what you've done to the Sam I know and like, I know that there's at least a bit of him still in there that's got a finger on the steering wheel. So I'm going to do what nobody up here's ever done to you before. I'm going to ask a favor, in the sake of old times."

"Old times," he repeated flatly.

"Don't get lippy with me, mister 'I wanna kill God and got mopey because of it'," She pointed out. Thor's brow rose almost to his hairline, and it was clear he was only not laughing because he was mid swallow. "Win or lose on your side I'm still gonna have a job to do."

Sam again had a laugh escape him. "Alright then. What is it that you need?"

"I need the Gift of Rage," she said.

Sam stared at her for a moment, his brow drawing down slightly. "Did... you not understand? The Gift of Rage doesn't exist. It's something my mother..." he began.

"No, the Gift of Rage didn't used-to exist," she clarified. "But it sure as shit exists now. I'm pretty sure if you were to look inside yourself and actually check, you'd find it in there."

Sam paused, tilting his head down and staring as though at – or perhaps through – his own chest. And after a few seconds, he looked back up at her. "Okay. Didn't expect that. And it still doesn't explain why you need the Gift of Rage. Don't you have your own Gift? No, of course you don't," he answered before she could, "the Redemptor don't have Gifts, because those are Angelic in nature, and you're a hyperhuman. So boilerplate why you need an Angel's Gift."

"Something you said got me thinking," she said. Then she gave a shrug, "Okay, a couple of things did. And they're all working together to make me think something I presumed to be impossible really isn't. What was it you called me when I walked up here?"

"A walking paradox?" Sam said.

"Exactly," she said. "Sam, I am currently five years old on Earth. An Earth that hasn't run screaming off the cliff of climate apocalypse quite yet. And..."

"I'd say don't break the Arrow, but I don't think anybody cares at this point," Sam noted.

"Yup," she said. "I have a plan to save the Earth from itself. And for that, I need the Gift of Rage."

"Who are you going to give it to?" Sam asked.

"Myself," she said.

Sam stared at her, tilting his head. He could probably strip-mine her reasoning out of her, but he let her speak.

"Or rather, the version of me that won't grow up and die to become Gloria Mundi," Wendy said. "A version of me that never moved to the US. A version of me that didn't pick a job cataloguing extinction, and instead did something about that extinction."

"One, investiture is usually done in an embryo," Sam said.

"It doesn't have to be, and it's better in my case that it isn't. I want her to understand how bad things get, so she'll be driven to change them," she said.

"...and two, there's a chance that you'd just overwrite a child's psyche," Sam said.

"I won't," she said.

"How can you be sure?" Sam asked. "How can you be sure that anything that you're planning will work the way you presume? How can you be certain any of your presumptions and fundamental axioms aren't broken? What makes you think this is possible at all?"

"Asked the pot of the kettle," Metatron cut in, and Thor gave a long 'Ooooooof!'. Both former Hotel-guests turned to the pair of them, Sam in open shock, and Wendy in smugness.

"Thank you, Metatron," she said, of the Seraphim who continued to stare at the floor near his feet. "Every question you just asked me applies, in full, to you. So you have no moral high ground to presume that I'm going to fuck this up."

"For somebody who didn't have your own agency until a few months ago, you've got a hitherto undiscovered wellspring of sass, Metatron," Sam noted. Metatron didn't react to the charge. He then turned to Wendy. "And I guess you're right. My own plans are on the face of them no less insane and impossible than what you've just said. The fact that I know that they not only can work, but must work, is not something which I can easily convince others of, a feature your plan shares. Fine. In the name of old times, and shared insanity, I give you the Gift of Rage. Still... this will be messier than you think."

"Pot, kettle," Wendy said.

"Wendy," he said with an impatience in his words, "If I had wanted to simply bum-rush god and stab him in the eye, I could have done that six times over by now. I'm trying to mitigate the harm that said eye-stabbing will cause. And I'm starting to pick things out that can destroy him without destroying everything else."

"Really. You learn that destroying God might destroy the cosmos and you still work at doing it?" she asked, leaning against the doorframe that she hadn't yet left.

"Humans detonated the first nukes despite the belief there was a chance doing so could ignite the entire atmosphere," Sam shrugged.

"What is it with you and nukes?" she asked.

"Sometimes the weapon of mass destruction is a kindness," he said. He stared at Metatron for a moment. "Do you know what the meaning of Demiurge is?"

"Is this relevant?" she asked.

"False god. Petty god. One demanding obedience and praise," he said. He then shook his head. "Tell me honestly, Wendy... was that me? Was that me even at my worst?"

"No, you were a mopey sad-sack who didn't trust himself not to hurt people he cared about and thought that death was a pleasant alternative to slavery," she said. Her brow furrowed. "Why?"

"I'm starting to wonder why people keep calling me Demiurge," Sam said. He then slammed his fist into his chest, pounding straight through armor and rupturing skin and bone, before ripping out his own heart as easily as most people would shoo a fly. Dripping with blazing golden blood was the organ that continued to beat as he held it toward her. His own wound burned and seared, and when the flames abated, the armor was repaired, his injury under it likely also mended. "I trust you know how to extract it?"

"Wh... why are you giving me your heart?" she asked, aghast.

Sam stared at it for a second. "Oh. Right. That's where the Gift of Rage is," he said. He shook his head lightly. "I keep forgetting that Alastor probably doesn't share the things that he learns." Well, Wendy thought, when in Rome.

"Am I the first lady you gave your heart to?" she asked with a smirk as she collected his still beating organ.

"Don't you start with that. I wasn't a monk when I was alive," Sam said.

"You were pretty monkish in the Hotel," she said.

"Something was stifling my sex drive," Sam said. "Just as well. I might have been the only Sinner not firing blanks."

"Was? So not anymore?" she asked, uncomfortable with how his heart squirmed against her hands.

"Eh. I'm a bit too much of a public enemy to do anything about it now, and hybristophiles freak me the hell out," Sam said.

"You know, for just a minute there, you sounded like the Sam I used to know," she said.

"I still am. I've just got a job to do," he said. He actually believed it, too. It was a pity that he couldn't see Sam as she could, see how so much of him was that alien force and alien drive. Maybe, though, there was enough Sam still left. "But so you know, history will try to snap you back. Unless you take extraordinary measures, fate will fight you to a stop."

"Define extraordinary measures," she said, as she tucked the throbbing heart into a spot where it wouldn't slather her hands in golden blood anymore.

"It wouldn't require a Shard of Ruin," Sam said. "But it's a close thing. Luckily, Hell's been making 'close things' for the last few eons."

"Wait... to change the future I need to go back to Hell?" she asked.

"Just a visit; as you are now, you can leave pretty much any time you like. Just..." he paused, pointing for a moment. As though trying to find the right way to say something. "Promise me this one thing. When you go back, do not under any circumstances go to the Ring of Sloth."

"Why? Do you have something down there you don't want me to see?"

"I haven't been to Hell since I punched Lucifer's teeth in," Sam said. "I'm asking you not to for the sake of your own safety and sanity. Don't go to Sloth. You would be worse than naked to what is down there, worse than vulnerable."

"Okay. No Sloth. Why would I wanna go there anyway?" she gave a shrug.

"I hear the spas are nice," Sam said off handed. His lips tugged into a slight smile for just a moment, then he returned his attention to the matter at hand. "What you need is a Paradox Engine. Use one if it exists. Make one and use it if one doesn't. Purson should be of use to you in that, either way."

"It was good to talk to you," Wendy said. "Just..."

"Be safe?" Sam asked. "Can't promise that. But I can promise that I'll make a better present for your better future to grow into. Since I can't claim we won't meet again, I'll instead say I hope if we meet again, it's under less... dingy... circumstances."

"We can only hope," she said. And with that, she allowed herself to waft away.

As she discorporated from the house that ought-have-been Cain's, she heard Thor spit another bone, and speak. "I like her. She reminds me of my daughter. She'll do well."

"I hope so," Sam said, with a distant, unhappy tone. A tone which was pure Sam. Sometimes, a finger on the wheel was all you needed. Maybe, for Sam, that'd be enough.

---

The building was a three storey, squat little pustule of concrete and glass that sat on the outskirts of True South in Pentagram City, one which was always a little too hot and a little too stuffy no matter what time of year it was. The air conditioning here was chugging and loud, rattling and buzzing no matter where you were in the building as it did its hellish damndest to keep the air within the building breathable against the vile stench of the Poisoned Lake that would snake its way up here from hundreds of miles away, dropping like venom with the rain. True South was the only part of Pentagram City which didn't have a homeless population. It was far to toxic and deadly for that.

Barb was well aware of this building. She had been here often enough that she could possibly navigate it blindfolded. It was a wart of bureaucracy on the face of a faltering city that had never in the modern Regency Period been intended to be functional. This was where she had come, again and again, as the date on her medallion grew less representative of how long she'd actually been sober, trying to get her son given back to her. And they deflected her again and again as a mirror does to a laser.

The lines were neverending. Some services had longer lines, such as the Motor Vehicle Licensing Department. While the slight majority of people in Hell drove without licenses, without a license one could not get vehicle insurance, so they were at the mercy of other peoples' bad driving. The more prudent, the more moneyed, and the more paranoid made it so that there was always a line practically to the door. It typically only advanced half its entire length each day, leaving a lot of late-arrivals shit out of luck. Tax Avoidance was even longer, often spilling out into the street. But what Barb only had eyes for was Family Severance.

The Department of Family Severance existed wholly to tear apart families and cast them to the four winds. It unashamedly acted on bad information, in bad faith, and on bribes, to be as cruel as possible to those with as little power as possible. Barb was fairly certain that it had been crafted from the ground up by The Devil Himself during a period of extreme schadenfreude to see just how badly he could make a system function. Swiftly were families broken by the DFS, and with glacial lethargy could they be put back together.

The line wasn't long, but even having eight people in front of you when the doors to the building opened was usually enough to ensure you weren't even getting seen. And if the office closed while you were in the middle of a session, fuck you, you suck, go away and try later. The bigger buildings had more people, but weren't to any degree faster. And what few successes she did have over this Kafka-esque fucking nightmare of a system were the ones which pointed her to this building in particular instead of just the department as a whole. That had taken her fifty hours of waiting-and-bitching time, tallied up.

"This place is awful," Tilla said. Her hands flexed as though preparing to hold a little one close, but since she'd left her children in the care of the Rough's, it was just the Millers and Barb to come here.

"That's putting the kindest possible name on what this building is," she said. The fifty hours it'd taken to get here added another fifty just trying to get a family that they'd dropped her kid with. "The noise will drive you to despair in an hour, trust me."

"You can hear something?" Blitz asked. He tapped on the controls to his augmetic ears, then shrugged. Apparently he'd blown out his own ears so that he could fight the previous Proxy of Lucifer on even footing. What he meant by 'Even footing' was somewhat lost on Barb.

"Consider yourself lucky," she said, and guided them clear of the queues that lead to places they didn't want to be – that nobody wanted to be, in an ideal Hell – and toward the DFS. And there were three people, all of them fiends, in the line ahead of her. Ordinarily, that, too, was a death-notice. Fiends got infinitely more attention given to them than imps did, and even still the service that a fiend got was on the bad side of atrocious.

Blitz, though, didn't seem to care. He just stormed up, shoving the larger fiend women out of the way and making for the desk. The first one to complain got a pistol pointed at her head. Well, that solved one issue in a way that Barb hadn't been able to equal before. "Okay, which one of you bitch-bag's is in charge of kids gettin' pulled from their mamas?"

"That would be the entire department, sir," the fiend behind the desk ought to have been practically angelic in beauty and purity, its hair aglow and eyes shining. But here, the Virgoan Consumer looked as used up as some of the women that Barb's misadventures had put her in the same strata as. He was tired, with dark eye-bags stark against the alabaster skin of his face, which was broken out in stress acne. His hair was ragged and unkempt, and he had an expression that declared he was just so done with everything that he would welcome a gun toting maniac like Blitz as even simply a change from the monotony of his job. "I would ask if you had an appointment, but imps are not eligible for our reservation service. Also, appointments are booked until the year 2034."

"I don't care. I'm here to get my sister her kid back," Blitz barged in.

"There is a procedure for civil reunion," the worker said flatly. She couldn't even bring up the old anger she had against Kritch, because this wasn't Kritch. This one had a nameplate reading Borik.

"Well get on it double time," Blitz pressured.

"We don't do double time," Borik said, staring through Blitz's head. Blitz pulled his pistol and pointed it at the civil servant.

"Well how's about you start doing double time, you leaky urethra?" Blitz demanded, his Luger poised to punch a hole between the Consumer's eyes.

"Sir... I've been working for the last six hours without a break and have another eight ahead of me. And I'm not allowed to sit down in the chair that's in this booth, because of a regulation so long-winded if you were to wind it up and try to eat it you'd choke," Borik said. "I have been working for the last thirty-six days in a row without a day off. I've had every vacation I've tried to schedule denied for the last three years. If you shoot me, you'll either kill me and I'll never have to come back here, or you'll wound me and I'll get to see the inside of a hospital for a while. Either way is okay by me."

That put a crack into Blitz's bravado. He hadn't come here expecting what she knew of this place. It wasn't bulletproof out of cruelty. The machine of Hell's great iniquity didn't need to be actively cruel to cause the pain that it did. It propelled itself off of sheer apathy, towards not just Barb in particular but to everybody – including the people who worked for it.

"Blitz... Blitz, put the gun down," Tilla counselled. Blitz, though, had his hand shudder and shake, as though the mere recommendation for him to be sensible was driving him in the opposite direction. That was a family trait, as it turned out. Barb knew the instinct all too terribly well. "Tell them who you are."

The entire reason he'd come here.

Blitz pulled his pistol down and angrily shoved it away, then stormed over to the 'waiting area' that had a few fairly ratty chairs sitting in it. He dumped the sleeping old fiend out of it, and started to drag it toward the booth. Barb gave a glance to the old fiend. Was he actually dead? Maybe. Wait times here were indeed that long. Now having a platform to stand on and not needing to stare up at the Consumer in the booth, Blitz puffed himself up with all of the self-importance that he could summon.

"Look here, fuck-head. My name is Blitz Miller. I'm that Proxy of Lucifer thing that people seem to give an actual shit about. And I say that you're gonna get my sister her kid back. Do you hear me? Do I need to speak louder for you, shitstain?"

"Please verify that you hold royal office," he said, putting a form in front of Blitz. Blitz stabbed it with a weird looking knife that he pulled out of his coat and ripped the forms off of the table, scoring a rent in the wood as he did. The Consumer turned sunken eyes to him and sighed. "Sir, if I cannot verify your identity and station, I will have to call in the Peacekeepers."

"Fuckin' do it! I relish the cha – fuck what now?" Blitz was cut off when Barb grabbed his tail and gave it a yank. She glared at him to not throw her best chance away for his own pettiness. That Mama was also glaring at him probably gave her anger an actual bit of standing in Blitz's eyes. He turned. "Fine. What'd'ya need to prove it?

"Your signature," the Consumer put another form in front of Blitz, but before Blitz could sign it, Mama darted over and snatched it from the booth and quickly read through it.

"...Blitz, even if you sign this, he's not going to do anything," Tilla said.

"So what the fuck was the point of that?" Blitz demanded of the peon in front of him.

"I work as a demonic face to the workings of Naked Law. If you are verified as a fellow servant of Naked Law, your request can continue to the next level within four to six business months."

"The fuck is a business month?" Blitz asked. A valid question, because a business month presumed that the office was open no more than fifteen days, it meant that four to six of them could be anywhere from early next year to some time after Lyve's sixth birthday. Blitz slammed his hands on the desk. "Just gimme a name of who has her kid, or I swear I will burn this entire building to the FUCKING ground!"

"Son, sign this first," Tilla said. Blitz didn't even turn his glare from the Consumer standing in front of a dusty and cob-web covered chair as he scribbled his name onto the form.

"In the correct spot, sir," the Consumer stolidly refused to be intimidated, tapping a point on the form which Blitz had to write his name again. The Consumer picked it up, and a few seconds later the form erupted into flame, vanishing in an instant. "Your request for special forbearance is being processed. Please allow..."

"Yeah, four to six fucking forevers. When does she get her kid back?"

"The usual time-frame for Civil Reunion varies between three and twenty seven years," the Consumer said, which made Barb's heart sink in her chest.

"TWENTY SEVEN FUCKIN' YEARS?" Blitz roared at him.

"It could also be longer. There's a war on, you know?" The Consumer noted.

"I'M THE PROXY OF THE DEVIL HIS FUCKING SELF!"

"As his servant, if verified, you will have access to the T-201-7-F form, which will ensure that your matter is personally seen to by a representative of the Bureau of Naked Law, likely some time in the next two calendar years," the Consumer said. He shrugged. "There is no faster that you could get this to happen with anything less than one of the Royal Family showing up. This is what it is."

And just like that, the nail of despair was driven into her heart. Three years. Lyve's entire lifetime again, before she'd have a chance to see him again, at the absolute earliest. And if she wasn't so spectacularly lucky, the number increased all the way to 'never'.

"That is all. Thank you for barging in front of the line. A formal complaint to your conduct has automatically been sent to Naked Law. Good day," Borik finally said.

"You just wait one fuckin' minute! I ain't nearly done with you!" Blitz demanded. But then the shutter fell with a guillotine clang, cutting off the people outside of the bureaucracy from the people who served it.

"I'm sorry, Pokey," Tilla said, pulling Barb into a hug, but Blitz, whom Barb had expected to explode into rage, instead seethed quietly. He turned around and sat down in the chair, his legs dangling from it, as his hateful intensity grew cold and savage. "Blitz? Blitz are you alright?"

"Gimme a minute," Blitz snapped. Even as Barb's eyes started to well in desperate, fearful frustration, the anger just grew colder and colder on Blitz's face, until it was as cold as the long-lost fields of Betrayal.

"There's still got to be something we can do. Blitz? Blitz!"

"I need to take a walk," Blitz muttered, and he stormed out of the building, practically crackling with malevolence so strong that there wasn't enough imp to contain it all. But Barb could do nothing but cling to her mother and cry. This had been her last shot.

It was over. Her son was gone.

---

It was weird that Dad didn't want to go on the mission. Loona and Maelstrom had gone up alone, in that sweltering city of the Human World, far from their usual haunts. The people here much more closely resembled Maelstrom's disguise than they did Loona's. In fact, she was by far and away the palest human-seeming individual that she'd seen in the last few minutes. Must have been a regional thing for humans, she figured.

"And another city which reminds me entirely too much of Hell," Maelstrom said, as they left the high-rises and well-tended infrastructure and entered into a shanty-town slum which hemmed the city in all directions. Maelstrom released a chuckle. "I'm starting to think that either Hell isn't as bad as people claim, or the Human World is a lot worse."

"It's full of humans. What do you expect?" she asked, trying to ignore all the suspicious glances that people were giving her as she navigated the increasingly dilapidated roads. The money for this one wasn't particularly good, but it was an easy job, according to the client. Just go into the biggest hovel of a particular slum and kill a middle aged guy who stole from the client before he died. No dealing with human governments, or crimes against reality. Just killing the living at the behest of the dead. "Tell me something, Mal; did Blitz seem a bit off to you?"

"I have no actual basis for what's normal when he's involved," Maelstrom noted.

"Don't be cute, Mal. Gimme an answer," she pressured as she glanced between a couple of 'biggest hovel's, trying to figure out which one was bigger, and thus the target.

"First of all, why am I 'Mal', now?" Maelstrom asked.

"Shorter. Easier to shout when fighting," Loona ticked off her fingers as she walked. "And it's a lot less suspicious when we're surrounded by humans to have a mostly human name getting yelled."

"Okay. Fair," Maelstrom said. "As for Blitz... yeah, he's upset about something."

"I figured that much," Loona said. Blitz didn't even need to say anything for her to see that his little trip to Pentagram City had been a bust in the worst way. And she knew full well how clannish and hyper-inclusive he was when it came to family members – even estranged ones. To have the system slam the door in his face must have been shocking. "I was hoping that maybe being the Proxy would shake some shit loose. Guess that just doesn't work that easily."

"Wait, he told you what he was doing?" Maelstrom asked.

Strictly, he didn't need to; Loona was quickly becoming able to suss out people's intentions without a word needing saying. She knew that a power like that existed, and belonged to at least one dude that she'd met; that Sam guy who helped make her like she was now. And while she was frankly sure that her new senses were a pale shade of what he had going on, it still let her read entire books off of empty pages. How much more shit did that guy have to see, with his better version of her own bullshit, she wondered? Well, no matter. He was off tear-assing wherever-the-fuck he was. "Did you hear that Blitz's sister got out of rehab?"

"Oh. Not a good reunion, then," Maelstrom said. That had to be the building, that one over there. Now that she was closer, she could see that it wasn't any taller than the other, but was a lot thicker.

"Nah, he forgave her pretty much as soon as she apologized and meant it," she said. That she hadn't gleaned from her instincts; Millie had sent that text to her by accident while trying to send something to Fatty. She started navigating toward that more kingly hovel, but was stopped by a pair of hulking, dark skinned humans. One of them was festooned with bullet scars, even on his face. How a human had survived that was a mystery. "Come on, they're waiting for me," she said to the goons, with a forced 'airhead' tone.

"Who's waiting on an American? Maybe you should go back to the city before somebody likes the look of you too much," the scarred guard said upon a gesture back whence the Hounds had come with a shocking degree of sincerity. Huh. Maybe not all hulking humans were bastards.

"Why do you think I'm here? Somebody already has!" she said, her body playing up a degree of sluttiness that she was pretty sure that she'd never be able to pull off honestly. The scarred one turned to the other, who just stared at her as though she were a side of beef and he was a vegetarian.

"Is this wise?" Maelstrom asked at a whisper.

"This your pimp?" the scarred one asked.

"More like a bodyguard!" she offered with forced brightness. Come on, pincushion, let us pass.

The scarred guard looked from Maelstrom, who was still in his usual, high-strung state, then to Loona, who appeared at least to be a slender pale goth girl with ashen hair and bitching makeup.

"One second," he said, and reached for a wand. Oh damn it, Loona thought. She surreptitiously pulled her pistol from the back of her shorts near where her tail was, and slid it atop the book which hovered invisibly there. He wanded her pretty quickly, not questioning the few beeps he did get. When he wanded Maelstrom, he quickly found the spiked knuckles he had in a pocket. "You walk around here without a gun? You're braver than most."

"Guns are loud. I have sensitive ears," Maelstrom managed to say something tough, almost certainly by accident. The scarred human gave a laugh and tucked the spiked knuckles back into the pocket he'd found them.

"You're crazy. I like that kind of crazy. Go on in. Make sure she stays away from Michel. He's the fucking bad kind of crazy," the human said with a swat to Maelstrom's shoulder.

"Noted," Maelstrom said. Then the two of them entered the hovel... which was actually rather nice on the inside. While the walls without were corrugated metal, the walls within were smooth plaster, and while the floors obviously weren't level, they were fairly clean. And the toys these people had laying about; game systems and big screen TVs – two of them at opposite sides of the same room – mismatched sofas and exercise equipment. Humans using any and all of the above didn't so much as give the pair of them a glance. They were engaged in their bread and circus. Better they not get riled. The beaded drape into the hallway revealed a properly built toilet, and then a stairway up to the higher floors. "So. This thing with Blitz..."

"Look, take what I say next with a grain of salt, but I think Blitz ran into a problem he couldn't kill his way out of," Loona said, voice pitched low.

"There aren't many of those in Hell," Maelstrom noted.

"Bureaucracy," she said.

"What kind of bureaucracy?" Maelstrom asked as they ascended.

"Something about a kid in the system," she said, trying and failing to not have at least a pang of sympathy for somebody in the same stretch she'd been subjected to.

"What'd the mother do to lose the child?" Maelstrom asked.

"You're really presuming I know everything going on in their lives based on looking at my Dad, you know that?" she pointed out.

"Right. Sorry," Maelstrom flinched.

"But in this case you're right to, 'cause I'm awesome," she rallied, as they passed a room that had a wild-eyed, long haired beast of a human in it. He stared with bloodshot eyes as he menacingly sharpened a knife against a chunk of stone. Fuckin' weirdo. That was probably Michel. She put him behind them and continued to the 'nicer' rooms, where the target was likely to be hiding. "I'm guessing that Dad's sister fucked up, then tried to unfuck herself and get her kid back. But the system said 'lol no' to her."

"And being the Proxy wasn't enough to set it straight?" Maelstrom asked. There were actual doors up here, so she started testing them. Twice, back to back, she opened into humans fornicating. Weirdos. Then she saw an apartment with nobody in it. Finally, an apartment that had two humans, sitting across from each other at a table. One of them was middle aged and had the misshaped eye that they'd been warned about. He wasn't kidding, this was easy.

She opened the door and stepped in, and the moment she crossed the threshold, she heard an odd grinding sound. The younger of the two men straightened his back, glancing to the new arrivals, then pulled something from his suit. "A moment, please?" he asked them, which arrested Loona. He wasn't afraid. Or angry. He was curious. He held the device which looked like an extra thick Hellphone in front of him, toward the target, then swung it toward Loona and Maelstrom. When he did so, the grinding, clicking noise became louder and faster. Then he pulled it back to himself. It slowed and quieted. Then, to confirm, he pushed it out toward the pair of them again, to speed and noise.

"Loona, what...?" Maelstrom asked.

"I presume these are disguises to hide your true forms, then?" the young man asked, tucking the device away.

"What the fuck are you talking about, Jean?" the target demanded, pushing from the table and standing, reaching to his waistband. The younger man, Jean, pulled a taser from the underside of the table and knocked his punk-ass down. He fell, convulsing, without offering a scream.

"I apologize for Daniel. He is not polite. And I don't like the notion of being shot in the presence of hellspawn. I'm not sure what would result," Jean said.

"Wait... you know?" Maelstrom asked.

"Until today, I presumed this," Jean pulled the device from his pocket once more, "was just an odd toy I earned selling hard-to-find metals. Could you bind him so he doesn't try to shoot me again? He is due a bad day."

"Oh, we're here to kill him," Maelstrom offered. Jean's brow lofted and he gave a smile that showed a cleft between his two front teeth.

"Then don't let me stop you," he said. He stood from the table and backed away, so that Maelstrom could step over the still recovering target, and with very little effort rotate his head so that it was facing an anatomically impossible direction. "Well, that's his bad day. It cannot get any worse than this. Has he angered the demons as much as he has the living?"

"No, we're just assassins, we don't work for those elite assholes at the top," Loona said. He tilted his head.

"Then, for whom do you work?" the remarkably calm human asked.

"Well, for the guy this guy stiffed then offed fifteen years ago, for one," Loona said. Maelstrom, though, returned to her side and leaned in.

"Are we going to need to kill him, for seeing us?" he asked.

"I certainly hope not," Jean said with a gesture of innocence that clearly this guy didn't deserve to make with honesty.

"Yeah. He doesn't even know what kind of hellspawn we are. He's harmless. Just don't talk to a blonde bitch with a black suit and meatball eyes, and you and me are golden."

"I... Agree to your terms," Jean said.

"Damned right you do," Loona said. "Come on. Let's get back home."

This guy wasn't going to blab. She knew that at a glance. No, he was practically euphoric, as though a part of his life he didn't know had been missing had been given to him. She didn't question it. And she didn't even bother going to a remote location to pull out Dad's book and open a portal back to Hell.

"Why do I feel like he's going to bite us in the tail?" Maelstrom asked.

"You feel that way about most things," Loona said. Blitz was staring at a poster of a Hell Horse with a distant and sad look on his face. "Hey, Dad... I heard about your sister and her kid. That's rough."

"Fuckin... what's my job even fuckin' worth if I can't lever that shit to help my family?" he asked, not nearly as explosively as he usually did.

"You'll figure something out. Call Fatty, he's got a good brain on him," Loona pointed out. Maelstrom's brow drew down for a moment, as something occurred to him. "Something you want to share, Mal?"

"I just had an idea... Blitz, sir... did your sister actually complete her rehabilitation?"

"Yeah. Got a medallion and everything," he said.

"And your word wasn't enough to get the child out of the machine?" he asked.

"I oughta mail a shit into every one 'a their inboxes!" Blitz answered by way of not answering.

"What if... we use somebody whose word the bureaucracy can't ignore?" Maelstrom asked.

"And who would that be?" Loona asked. Above the Proxy was pretty much the Devil Himself.

"I'll let you know when I make a phone call. It might be nothing, I might just be blathering... but if this works..." he trailed off, then walked into the hall, dialing a number that he had installed into his memory rather than into the phone. Well, even Maelstrom was surprising her today. This made today a rare one. He paced for a second, then frowned. "That's weird. She told me she'd pick up."

"Who are you even calling?"

"Charlie," Maelstrom said over his shoulder. She frowned, and Blitz outright scowled.

"What's this Charlie guy got that I don't?" Blitz demanded.

"It's not a guy," Maelstrom said, putting his phone away as it hadn't been answered. "And as to what they have that you don't? Well... you're not Heir to the Low Throne."

All still in the office stared at him.

"Charlie as in Princess Charlotte?" Blitz confirmed.

"How in the fuck do you have Princess Charlotte's phone number?" Loona demanded.

"She gave me a place to stay just after you killed Birch," he said. "She said I could call any time I needed help."

"Help getting housing, I'm guessing, not help circumventing her father's living legal system," Loona pointed out.

"She did not specify," Maelstrom said.

"Well shit, if that works I'll take it," Blitz said, taking the Grimoire from Loona's hand and flipping it open. "Let's go visit a princess."

"Actually..." Maelstrom said with a wince, "it... might... be better if I go alone."

"And why the fuck is that?" Blitz asked.

"She knows me, and she doesn't know you," Maelstrom pointed out the reasonable.

"I hope you're sure about what you're doing, Mal. It won't be good if you piss off somebody that high on the ladder," Loona coached.

"I don't think that's likely," Maelstrom said, offering her a nervous shrug. "She seems like a nice person."

---

That certainly hit the spot, as the saying went.

The last few weeks in this corner of Hell had been akin to pounding more and more pressure into a water vessel. And water as a rule didn't like to be compressed when magic wasn't involved. So when the pressure began to cause the vessel to creak, Charlie took it upon herself to release some of the pressure before that vessel exploded.

The vessel was Vaggie.

The release was kinky naughtiness.

Charlie wiped most of the red lipstick off of her black lips, letting them return to their natural shade, and quickly brushed at her hair, getting some of it to obey her. Truth be told, Vaggie wasn't the only one in need of that particular release. Things had gotten so busy that Charlie had gone near a month without intimacy, which for her was a lifetime. And before that, there was another month of celibacy imposed on her by the fact that the one she'd presumed was Vaggie was actually the fucking GLIMPSE! When she found out about that she practically marched to Ozzie's to burn a good portion of Lust Ring to the ground. But calmer heads prevailed. She still didn't forgive the Glimpse for what she did. But she could abide it. For now. She puffed out a breath, forcing herself not to get angry again at an old thoughts. It wouldn't do her any good.

Vaggie had been reduced to wordless murmuring some time ago, and was likely still hours from regaining higher brain function, but the happy noises she made pulled a smile from Charlie as she finished her post-coital primping and tied her robe closed a little tighter. Today was looking like it was going to be a good, quiet day, that she could spend fucking her lover into a puddle, like she used to before she started the whole Happy Hotel idea years ago.

But her peaceful day of good-natured debauchery was upended by a tearing, burning sound that erupted from the bedroom, and the sound of somebody heavy stepping onto the floor.

Then, a strangled yelp, and a voice declaring, "Dog-damn it I didn't tell you to put me here!"

Charlie leaned out of her bathroom as the portal that had opened in her bedroom pulled itself closed, leaving a flinching black-and-tan hellhound who was trying pointedly not to look at the very exposed Vaggie who was shackled ankle and wrist to the bedframe. Charlie wanted to demand what he was doing, but her brain caught up to her and reminded her that obviously he didn't want to be here exactly, either. With a grumble under her breath, she grabbed a blanket and threw it over her girlfriend to afford her at least a bit of decency – as though either of the two women had any left after what they'd been up to for the last four hours – and approached the Hound. "Maelstrom? Why are you in my bedroom?"

"I'm really sorry! I didn't tell them to put me here, just wherever you were!" he said, eyes pressed closed and turned away as though afeared of looking upon the Ark of The Covenant.

"Well, here I am," she pointed out.

"Can we... go somewhere there aren't naked humans?" he asked, looking like he wanted to melt into a puddle and seep through the floor.

It was hard to be mad at him. He was trying so hard to be polite. He'd just been less than specific when magic was involved. "Fine," she said, forcing an even tone. "Let's go to the sitting room."

The Master Bedroom for the Hotel was actually an apartment suite on the second floor. Installed before elevators were even a thing, the Second Floor was considered the penthouse of floors, playing host to no rooms but a pair of boutiques and four sprawling suites. One of them Charlie took for herself. Another now belonged to Cain, who had settled in as though he had no intention of ever leaving. And a third was given over to once-Colonel, now Brigadier Roth to be his personal war-room, now that her Legion was staring to see actual, honest to Dad volunteers. The last sat empty. Maybe another big name would take it, one day.

It was increasingly hard to think of a name that could compare to the First Of The Damned, though.

She sat down in the small, and somewhat neglected sitting room where she kept a few pieces of magical bric-a-brac that while nice, were hardly needed by somebody like her, including a few Stones of Power, a Caul of Embrace, and that Grimoire she was going to really have to get around to memorizing someday. Maelstrom the Hound looked at the naked wealth of magical artifacts around him and practically recoiled from it. Good to see he hadn't become a thief in the months since she last saw him. That'd have been sad.

"Despite the way that you decided to visit," Charlie said, pouring some cold tea onto ice, "it's good to see that you're doing alright. You're not nearly as bony as when I saw you last. And your clothes look nice; is your brother's place as good our rooms?"

"Oh, Reggie's apartment is a shoe-box you could fit twice over in this room alone," Maelstrom said, letting out a nervous laugh. His smile was all nerves. "I'm... I'm really sorry about that. I should have told him to put me in the same building as you instead of..."

"That looked like a Goetic portal. Have you gotten work with one of the Goetia?" she asked.

"No. No, I'm doing something else," he said. But then he gave his head a shake. "Look, while I'd actually love to catch up, I'm not just here for reminiscence. I need your help with something."

She sat up a bit straighter at that. "What kind of something? Maelstrom, are you in trouble? Are there Slave Hunters after you?"

"No. They wouldn't dare," he actually lost his nerves for that laugh, as though recalling something that made him feel mightier than usual. "No, no no, my problem isn't me. It's a f... yeah I guess you could call him a friend."

He seemed surprised at the realization of that. Well, good for him, making unexpected friends.

"My boss, he's got a sister, and his sister has a son," Malestrom said, indicating each with a unique hand gesture. "And she went through some rough times a few years back. Picked up a bad drinking habit, to the point where they took her kid away from her," he pulled the gesture indicating the child away from the one indicating the sister.

"Well, that's unfortunate, but if she was that enslaved by her vice, maybe it's safer that..." Charlie began, but Maelstrom raised a finger. "Oh, right. Sorry, you weren't done."

"'Preciated. Now the sister went through rehab. All the way through. Came out the other side sober with the medallion and everything. But the system won't give her her child back," Maelstrom finished the scenario that he was dealing with.

"Well that doesn't seem fair," Charlie noted.

"Hell isn't fair to imps, just like it isn't fair to Hellhounds," Maelstrom nodded. Oh, so the friend, the sister, and the child were all imps? Well that explained why the Bureau was being so dismissive. It wasn't a commonly related fact that most of the time people just didn't bother filing or working cases involving imps. They were seen as too short-lived, too weak, and too useless to bother with. Instead of even having the dignity of being put into limbo of storage cabinets never cracked open, she was sure – because she had personally witnessed – that they cared so little as to hurl an entire bundle of imp-related files from a window and directly into a dumpster. It hit her on the way down. She'd been there looking for the whereabouts of Vaggie's stolen power at the time. Shut up, brain, stop judging me she told herself.

"So what did you come here for?" she asked.

"Look... I know after the way I just showed up here, I have no grounds to ask any kind of favors from you. You're a Princess, and I'm a former slave, so..."

"Don't be like that, you're a former guest," she stressed. "And you're a guest that seems to be doing well for himself now that he's passed on through! What is it you do for a living again?"

"Oh I kill people now," Maelstrom said.

Charlie blinked at him.

"Mostly the living. Occasionally and honestly preferably monsters from outside Creation. Were you aware how many infestations the Aristocrats have in their 'summer homes'? It's fucking terrifying the things they try to sweep under their rugs."

"I'm sorry, you kill people now?" Charlie repeated.

"I try to stay out of aristocratic assassinations. They're so entangling," he gave a shudder, as though the notion set him ill-at-ease. He looked at her. "You don't approve, do you? Charlie... I'm a slave-soldier. I've only got a very narrow skill set. And this way, I can make sure I kill the ethically unacceptable instead of just anybody whom somebody's got a grudge against."

"There has to be better work for you out there," she said gently.

"There is. I'm helping smuggle human drugs into Hell, too," he said. Her expression must have been pretty mortified, because he gave his head a shake. "Medicinal drugs, Charlie! The kind that Hell doesn't bother making!"

"Oh. That actually sounds a lot better. You should do more of that," she said. This was altogether very strange. He'd certainly hit the ground running, this ex-slave-soldier. He nodded, agreeing with her at least in principle. But as he'd said, Hell was not often kind to Hellhounds. He'd do what he had to. "Maelstrom... are you asking me to directly intervene with a broken system to extract one child from it return it to its underprivileged mother?"

"I... guess, yeah, that's what I'm asking," he said, his already floppy ears dropping back as though he were bracing himself for a blow.

"Why didn't you just say that? I can have that done in no time," Charlie said with a laugh. He blinked at her in confusion. "Come with me, I don't want the first thing that Vaggie sees when she sobers up to be somebody she's not really familiar with.

"She's drunk? Is it safe to leave somebody drunk tied up like that?" Maelstrom asked. Charlie then realized that he simply did not understand her fully.

"She's a... particular kind of drunk," Charlie said. "But that's not the point. Let's get a meal into you and I'll go get the child. What is the name again?"

"Um... wait, I have it written down," he pulled out his phone and swiped a few times through it. "Lyve Wire Nuckelavee."

"That name's familiar," Charlie said as she started to bundle Maelstrom out of the room. "Is he related to Barbie Wire Nuckelavee?"

"Yeah, that's his mother," Maelstrom said as the door closed to the tiny hallway with only one attendant elevator – not the main one which led to the higher floors, just a tiny thing that could only reasonably hold two people – and the ornate stairs which lead down toward the corner of the lobby that the second floor calved from.

"No kidding!" Charlie said. "I loved her work on Black Tyde. Frankly I think they wasted her on My Worst Angels. She's got a lot more range than that!"

"I'll let her know you're a fan of her other work," Maelstrom said.

Behind them, abandoned by the woman who'd inflicted befuddlement upon her or the hapless Hellhound who accidentally saw her naked, Vaggie just let out a long, happy sigh, as months of tension finally worked their way out in the way that Charlie was so good at that capitalism would have demanded she charge a fee for it. Still, swimming in happy chemicals, Vaggie was in no position to point that out, nor desired to. Because as long as either Charlie or Vaggie had a say in it, that shit wasn't for sale.

---

The call of the bottle was almost inescapable. She'd thought she'd wanted booze badly when they bundled her into that rehab clinic. But that was a shadow of a ghost to how bad she wanted it now. The call of numbness, of not caring, of annihilation-of-self that a particular molecule could cause. She was sitting in Blitz's living room again, a blanket wrapped 'round her shoulders, as she stared through the television set and off into infinity. She was never going to see Lyve again.

The despair was crushing and foul, suffocating like the house fire. Only it didn't wrack her lungs with coughing and her eyes with dry, but instead with hitching sobs and tears. Barb had tried. She'd tried as hard as she could. And Hell, as Hell always did, slapped her in the face for the audacity of demanding that turnabout be fair play.

There was a shifting of the sofa as somebody dropped themself opposite Barb. She didn't bother looking over. Because that would have required effort that she didn't have in her.

"Fight it," Millie's husband said. And that was just strange enough to penetrate her cocoon of misery. Of all the things that somebody could have said to her, either commiserating or encouraging, they all washed off of her like piss off of porcelain. But this? She felt her head turning, and a bloodshot eye turning to the assassin who now sat across from her.

"Excuse me?" she croaked.

"The despair. Fight it," Millie said. He usually had a sort of bookish air about him, something too fancy for the gutter where imps belonged. Now, though, his face was stern, any apparent youth lost behind furious intensity. "Hell wants you to despair, to give up, and to start drinking again. And you're going to fight it."

"What?" she asked.

"You're going to fight it, because that's what you are. You're Blitz Miller's sister. Sister to a man who killed the unkillable. And if Hell wants you to become the worst version of yourself so it can throw its head back and laugh, fight back. Fight back out of naked spite if you have to," Moxxie said.

"Since when do you talk like that?" Millie asked, leaning around the sofa, looking a bit concerned.

"Just suddenly understanding something that got preached to me a lot as a kid," Moxxie said, not taking his eyes off of Barb. "That's what Hell is in the Luciferean Age. A constant and ruinous call to become the worst version of yourself. Hell was better than this once. And you were better than this. And both can be better again. Fight. And if you need to get your son back by burning down a hundred office buildings, do it. Anything that kills the misery enflames the soul."

"Look at you, soundin' all preacherly," Blitz said, before throwing himself face-first over the back of the sofa; having not taken momentum into account, he then landed face-first on the floor before popping back up and planting ass on cushion. "Look, Moxx ain't wrong. Us imps stick together, 'cause we've got to. We ain't all Wrathlings like M&M here, who have a Deadly Sin willing to go to bat for 'em," wait what? "so just say the world, and I'll start killin' my way through some bureaucrats."

"We might be a bit premature to do that," Loona said from the door, eyes on her Hellphone.

"Well, we can kill 'em just because, too. If that'll make you feel better," Blitz gave Barb a nudge with his elbow.

"No, I mean that Maelstrom just sent me a text. His crazy plan actually is working. The Princess is out doing shit."

"Wait what?" Barb straightened at that. "You're doing what?"

Loona glanced over at her. "Oh, yeah. Thought I told you; Maelstrom's an almost-friend of Princess Charlotte of the Morning Star. And it turns out he's really good at doing the puppy eyes because he managed to wrangle a favor out of her."

"Just... just like that?" Barb turned a glance to her brother, then to her mother, then to the Hellhound. "How is it possible you just have an in with the FUCKING PRINCESS OF ALL HELL?"

"Language," Mother said.

"Fuckin'!" August repeated loudly. Mother growled and palmed her face.

"These are things that happen," Loona offered no explanation and shrugged. There was a guitar playing a power-chord on her Hellphone, and she glanced to it again. "Man, she works fast. Just got texted from Mal that she's goin' to the group home."

Barb was now numb for an entirely new reason. This seemed like an impossible dream, after her despair coming so close to swallowing her whole. She stood up, barely feeling her legs as she moved to the sink. She turned on the tap, then put her head under it, and sucked water into her nose.

And fucking hell did it ever hurt.

"You're s'pposed to use your mouth, Barb!" Millie said from the arm of the couch near Moxxie.

"Naw, she's just doing the thing to make sure she's not asleep," Blitz said, which was in fact exactly what she had been doing. She coughed and sputtered and snorted, spraying a bit of fairly rank, unfiltered city water onto the floor and finally wiping it and the snot it had dislodged off of her face as she tried with all her might to not start crying again. She was awake. "I did the same thing when I woke up after killin' Birch. Shit seemed too good to be true."

"Oh. So that's why," Moxxie said.

"I'm going to do it," Barb realized.

"You're going to do what?" Mom said when she came to help Barb back to her feet.

"I know you watch my old show. And it hasn't been on the last little while," Barb said. "Well, the writers apparently are sick of having all of their good shit chopped because it isn't 'marketable'. They asked me and a bunch of the guys who aren't dead to do something... bold."

"How bold are we talking about?" she asked. My Worst Angels may have been one of Hell's longest serialized drama-comedies (emphasis of late on the comedy), but Barb had known even from her own time on the show, there was actual talent involved there, and a capacity to make it something... bigger. Funnier, but more dramatic at the same time. To make the show what it had been back in the Second Series, if not grander.

"Well, it involves filming a double- if not triple-length episode in secret without Bellersly finding out, hijacking the broadcasting system, and firing that onto the air before we all get arrested or shot," Barb said.

"And if you succeed?"

Barb thought for a moment. "Then we'll have told an actual story instead of pandering to the corn."

"Hey, what's wrong with corn?" Blitz asked.

"You know exactly what's wrong with the corn. The average of the corn is a fucking idiot, and by definition half of them are even dumber than that!" Barb pointed out.

"Why are they talking about the intelligence of a plant?" Millie asked.

"The Corn is what carnies call the people they 'reap' as they move through an area," Moxxie set her straight.

"Wow. Do they really think we're that dumb?" Millie seemed a bit upset by that.

"I doubt she was talking about us," Moxxie said. He then faced her. "You want to make some actual art, don't you?"

"There's got to be a better kind of story that we can tell," Barb said. "Something that means something."

Moxxie glanced at the floor, then to her. "You want to talk about this war. Lucifer won't allow that."

"He will when he sees what Jackson Byros has planned," Barb said. "I think Lucifer will be very, very happy... to see Heaven's view of the war he started."

Moxxie tilted his head to a side. "Do you have a source in Heaven?"

"Not in. From," Barb said.

And what madness had come to her show and the plans it was making when there was another tearing sound in the apartment, just in front of its exit. And through it came the tall, mighty form of the Princess of All Hell, wearing none of the finery that Barb had honestly expected such a high personage to be wearing. She was wearing a fuzzy bathrobe and was barefoot, her hair slightly mussed and her makeup smudged as though she'd been interrupted in the middle of sex for this. But she came through talking over her shoulder to a taller, more powerfully built Hellhound and holding a confused looking three year old imp in her arms.

"Seriously, though, I'd try to stay out of that other stuff. It's poison for the soul," the Princess said.

"It's poison that pays so well I can afford the antidote and then some. You know what I am, Charlie. We don't have a lot of choice in the matter," the Hellhound said. Who was this Hellhound that he could be so chummy with the third most politically powerful person in Hell? "Still; thank you. I couldn't think of any other way to..."

"Just one second, Maelstrom," Charlotte said, turning her attention to the people in the room, pausing a glance first on Tilla, which was understandable because Tilla was only a foot shorter than Charlie, which made her freakishly tall for an imp, and then with a look of mild distaste to Blitz. Not enmity or scorn, or even the typical racial disgust most had toward imps, just as though she was slightly unhappy with him. When it finally panned over to where Krieg and Barb were standing, her gaze darted between the two of them for a second before deciding on Barb. "You're the mother of this little boy?"

"Lyve?" she asked, and the boy perked up, no doubt having his ears remind him what a third of his life without images of her denied him. "It's me, sweetie!"

"Just a second. Let me see it," the Princess said, pointing at Barb's neck with one hand while the other cradled a young imp. What? Oh the medallion maybe? She pulled it out and held it forward. Charlotte took it between her index finger and thumb and gave it a stern rub. And as Barb watched, the 180 on its face became a 232. "That's exactly what I was hoping to see."

And then Charlotte handed Lyve over to her, the little imp clinging to her and sucking his thumb, clearly befuddled and unsure what to do or what to feel. Barb wasn't so poleaxed. She just started to well up and dribble. How was this miracle possible?

"Oh, and in about a month or so, there's gonna be some paperwork that comes to this apartment. Make sure you fill it out and send it back immediately," Charlotte said. She then puffed out a breath. "Well, Maelstrom, some of these seem like good people. It's good to see you're doing alright. And if you ever..."

"I know, I know," Maelstrom said, waving her unspoken offer away. "But I don't want to use up any more of your time. And don't you think Vaggie might be a little annoyed by now that you haven't come back?"

The Princess's back straightened as a look of sudden realization came to her face. "I left her tied to the bed," she said. She glanced to the others. "It's nice to meet you all, but I've got to gooooooo."

And with that, she snatched the dusty Grimoire from Maelstrom's grasp, using to to close the first portal and then open a second.

"Byeeeeee!" she said, waving over her shoulder before entering what appeared to be a dark bedroom.

"Sweetie, where have you been? Why are you using a portal? And why can I hear sobbing?" another woman's voice came from that bedroom, before the portal snapped shut.

"Blitz?" Tilla asked as Barb plunked herself onto the chair beside the fridge and held her little boy tight to her chest.

"Yeah?" Blitz answered.

"Why doesn't the Princess of All Hell seem to like you?" Mother asked.

"It's because he kills people for a living," Maelstrom supplied. "For the record, she doesn't like that I do it either."

"...she is so fucking weird," Uller summarized the Heir to the Low Throne in a single sentence.

---

Agrippa's consciousness snapped back into him with a shock, and he found himself sitting up in the dirt and scree of this wasteland. He had no idea where he was. Or how he'd got here. And since he was not in any sense a man of the sort to intoxicate himself, he had no explanation for the hole in his mind where his recent past should be.

He just sat there, in the dirt, taking stock. His right arm hurt desperately. He rotated it, eventually laying flat against a rock and carefully reseating it into its socket, a crunch followed by some relief and utility in his extremity. He started to quest his fingers along his head, looking for a head-wound that might explain his befuddlement. He found none. While his Regeneration was more robust than average, it still would have awakened him before erasing the signs of the injury which had waylaid him.

With that possible explanation benched as not the case, he started to look around him. The air was hot, hotter than the spring time season would have allowed. When he turned around, he managed not to flinch only by the centuries of his Stoic resolve. The Pride Wall was only feet away from his back.

What had happened?

And why could sober Ambrosius not remember it?

He got to his feet, clenching his fist, trying to summon his panoply to himself. And he couldn't. His brow furrowed, corners of his beak pulling into a baffled frown. Then he looked up across the Pride Wall. And there he saw, scattered on its far side, his scutum, his hasta, his spatha and strewn about the pieces of his armor.

This was altogether very strange. They were right there. He could see them. And while Agrippa only had the most workman's knowledge of magic, he knew it well enough at least to be able to perform that basic summoning wyrd. He tried again, clenching his fist, while staring at his scattered panoply, some of it bearing the marks of his long distinguished House. It didn't so much as twitch toward him, let alone teleport as it should.

The air held a somewhat metal stink to it. A stink he recognized as the Poisoned Lake of the South Pride Wilds. And it was blowing directly through the wall at him. He tilted his head at that. That shouldn't be possible. It was a straight line from Pentagram City to the Poisoned Lake and then to the Pride Wall. There was no course of meteorology he was aware of that could have blown that stink into Greed and then back out again.

Then, with a sinking sensation in his stomach, he slowly turned and looked up and slightly to the east. The sun beat down him, as was to be expected. But he held out a hand to full extension, and used his thumb to blot out the sun.

And there was a second, fainter one near it.

This wasn't Pride.

This was Greed. The acceptance of that also slotted in that the sky was indeed a different color, which denial had shielded his awareness of. Now he was savagely, nakedly aware.

He glanced down at himself, notably not on fire and not dead. Then to the Pride Wall. What was this madness? Was he asleep? No. No his dreams had more blatant falsities of logic, not these subtle ones. He walked to the Pride wall, and screwing his courage to the sticking place, extended a hand. He expected that it – and the rest of him, would catch fire when he touched that resisting membrane that kept the Damned in Pride Ring. But his hand passed through the Pride Wall as though it weren't there, a mirage that only fooled his eyes. He held his breath, and took a step forward.

The second sun vanished, and the angle of it shifted drastically, the color returning to familiar hues and the temperature dropping quite a bit as Agrippa stepped onto the otherwise identical wasteland. He clenched his fist. And all of his Panoply appeared exactly where and how it was meant to.

Something impossible had happened.

And with the resolution to tell absolutely nobody about it, he started to jog north, toward the nearest town where he could arrange transport back to the Palace of Flowers. Only misery and ruin would come from speaking of what had just transpired, especially given how little Agrippa understood about what had come to pass.

---

"Demographics are an often misunderstood layer of statistics. The old saying that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics is in full force when people try to look at the aggregates of things and try to infer truths about those wholes. Consider that imps take up four times as much bed-space in orphanages and group homes than fiends or Hellhounds in every Ring of Hell except Wrath. What could you infer about that? Most would say that imps must therefore be spectacularly unfit parents. That they are singularly incapable of being anything but a burden on the social system in which they're raised.

Or maybe it's because the system is built on a fundamental prejudice that sees imps as an acceptable victim. I'm not even speaking from anecdotes. There were actual, on-paper training manuals informing members of the bureaucracy to grant imps and Hellhounds a different and obviously inferior treatment compared to fiends, if all other factors involved were equal. Actually, a moment... I forgot; for Family Severance, for an imp to be treated as an equal to a Fiend, they would need to be seven economic brackets higher, have a position of authority in a Fiendish Five Hundred company, and have be vouched for by an Ars Goetia. Which you can probably attest are unlikely features for an imp to be granted. It's in writing, Killjoy. Go ahead and put it up.

Not so funny now, is it?

The system was designed to be cruel, so it was very good at being cruel. Once Sinners started to have children and the Cambion became a thing, they were in the same boat as imps and Hellhounds. Sinners who had to, at great personal expense, had to enact dangerous magic on themselves to negate their infertility, and now had to deal with the same unfair system that the Least Hellborn had to contend because the letter of the law excluded them from the protected races, were understandably outraged. They would have likely mobilized as a group to burn down every office of Family Severance, had not Lucifer's successor done it for them."

- Rachel Scailes, First of the Betrayed.