"—And over here we have the entrance hall! I really love the new stained glass—card suits, see? Husk suggested it. The hearts are my favourite, but I think you'd probably like the spades… or maybe you'd hate all of it; it's my dad's work, after all..."

Hazbin Hotel—second of its kind, alter of redemption, centre of self-improvement, and birthplace of second chances—positively glistened under the Pentagram's blood bright, noonday light. It was a glorious, crimson peacock of a building, with stained glass plumage and gilded eyes of cut crystal that stared proudly out over the Pentagram as though it were an Overlord in its own right. It looked too good a building to belong to Hell and yet, as it rose from the grim maroon of the heat-cracked, blood-soaked, eyeball-studded earth, it was impossible to imagine it anywhere else.

At long last, the labour of rebuilding was complete, and Charlie was giving her very first tour of the premises to an old tapped-together cathedral radio cradled in her arms.

A very silent radio, all things considered. It had been quite some time since she'd been confronted by one that was completely quiet—six months and three weeks, to be precise. They were Alastor's allies. They sang to him, hissing static secrets in languages only he could understand, never fully silent even when he'd left their immediate vicinity; everyone at the hotel had grown accustomed to the constant susurration of the airwaves, that low, droning hum. It was almost comforting, almost comfortable, a low murmuring reminder that the Radio Demon, their most dangerous ally, was nearby and active. The lack of it was like a stopped clock, an empty house.

Silence was anathema and yet it was everywhere; her voice wasn't enough to fill it. Eventually, inevitably, she had to draw breath and, in those seconds, quiet converged, gaining ground in increments until that fateful moment when she realised she had come all the way around to the front of the building where she had started and had nothing left to say. Charlie stared at the radio and, without eyes, it couldn't stare back but it did something similar and she felt lonelier for it.

"Come on, Al," she whispered, dropping her voice to something cajoling. "It's not the same without you here. We built you a new radio tower, all ready to go for when you want to get your show back on air. We've rebuilt the whole hotel from the ground up—even that stupidly unlucky wall! The hard part is over... you can come home now. I know you've got your whole 'mysterious and untouchable' act to keep up but... we miss you. I miss your dumb jokes, and dancing, and advice that's sometimes kinda good if you ignore the violent parts."

"You still talking to shadows Charlie?"

There was no way to know how long Husk had been stood there watching; he hadn't been on the steps when she had first rounded the building, she was certain of that. Or maybe he had been and she simply hadn't noticed. Regardless, he was there now, slumped against the front column in a way which belied the attentiveness in his sullen face. Wine-dulled eyes the colour of burned oranges followed her, and there was too much distance, close to wariness, in that gaze for it to be neutral. Feeling caught and a little ridiculous, Charlie laughed like she had been told a joke, a stilted series of ha!'s' she had to stretch her smile around.

"You said he'd still be tuned into his wavelength, right?" She asked, her own weak humour frangible in her ears. "If he can use these to chatter away at us whenever he likes then maybe it can go both ways." In her arms the radio seemed to grow heavier, somehow more inanimate. "I'm pretending he's out there listening to me."

Husk raised a feathered eyebrow and said nothing. The radio, it's insides disarrayed, it's casing cracked and stained, said nothing; it's weight was that of a dead thing and suddenly she didn't want to be holding it.

Carefully, acting as though it were a particularly temperamental piece of glassware, Charlie set her burden down on the steps before siting down beside it to keep it company. The perfect angles she had painstakingly carved into the stone cut into the curve of her back like the disapproving finger of some stern, old governess demanding she sit up straight. This was too grand a building to slouch in front of.

It was hers and she was miserable; Charlie slouched harder in rebuke.

It was a brisk sort of day, one where the wind had teeth and the sunlight flickered knifingly into eyes. Were times slightly different, had history taken a few steps to the left as it wove its path, it was the sort of day which would have seen Charlie planning a picnic whose ultimate disaster would have little effect on her treasuring of it.

As things stood, Charlie was only outside because the alternative was staying in, and she couldn't bear that. Her newly built hotel was too large. It's emptiness echoed, her footsteps drips of water in the vast grandeur of a some cavern whose hollowness she could feel opening up around her. Their old home had groaned and clucked its tongue under the weight of seven lives, but this place was sturdy, an immaculate construction of marble, dark wood, and stained glass, and the six people inside it meant nothing; its silence was a closed-fist of crushed velvet. For all that they had built it together, it didn't quite fit them right, a familiar pattern pulled out of place by a few errant stitches she couldn't find to set right. Not for want of looking; the search had been extensive.

There was a puzzle piece missing and she could feel it. There was no way to stop feeling it.

"How's Niffty?" Charlie tried anyway, all strained faux-nonchalance, invested in a hopeful sort of world where she could feign normalcy a little longer. Husk grunted.

"Mad that there aren't any bugs in the new walls. Haven't seen her in an hour."

So that diversion would be going nowhere. "And Angel?"

"Got called into work." The darkness clinging to the word was palpable and Charlie felt her bones cool; after her first, disastrous intervention, she had made a conscious effort to stay out of Angel's way on the matter, but she couldn't remain oblivious to everything. "He said he won't be done until late, so we'll probably see him again tomorrow."

'Don't ask about it,' frowned the fierce, liquor-coloured eyes, and Charlie obliged, though her list of 'normal' questions was fast running out. Worrying could be done silently.

"And how are you today, Husk?"

He did not thank her for abstaining by letting her scurry of with her dignity superficially intact. Of course he didn't. Charlie poked experimentally at the softly peeling edges of her smile and wondered how best to make it stay on an unhappy face.

"Me? I'm wondering why you're sat outside talking to a radio that won't talk back."

In the immediate aftermath of it all, the beginning of Alastor's absence, she had been terrified, first by the grim potential, then again by the forbidding ambiguity, the hollowness in the heart of a question mark. But both Husk and Niffty agreed that their master lived and, willing to be mollified, she had believed him absolutely. Worry had been swept up by a hundred other practicalities, tidied away on the top shelf in a box labelled 'he's fine, stop asking.' It had not seemed unreasonable to trust that she could focus on the tasks at hand until, one by one, they were completed and she was left with nothing to hold.

But now it was the end of the week, the seventh day, time to rest, and Alastor still wasn't back; all those festering fears were bubbling back to the surface with frantic urgency, old concerns, deeply buried, following close behind, tied to their ragged edges to form a conglomerate anxiety which didn't fit anywhere. She no longer truly believed her friend could be okay by himself, but that was not the sum of it anymore. She had never fully trusted the foot closest to the door, the suitcase unpacked but never put away.

Much like the radio, Charlie didn't answer him, though she was petulantly aware she could have said Husk knew that wasn't what she meant, and she would have been perfectly correct. She tied the words around her tongue in fretful thought and stared at the darkness the sun threw in her wake. It was darkness only.

There was a rough, worn-through sigh and a succession of bony crackle-pops as Husk carefully lowered himself down to sit beside her. He left a person's width of space between them, a holdover from giving the same sage advice at the bar where his ill-temper presented as frankness and slight inebriation was expected, even welcomed. At little piece of normalcy in a pristine yet disordered world.

(He wished there was a bar between them now—his old bar, not the new, clean-cut thing they'd made. The company of his bottles and the weird familiarity of Alastor's hunting lodge decor would have been a reluctant comfort. Something about sitting side-by-side felt unusually personal; listening to Charlie like this—sat outside in sober sunlight—instead of her being draped over a bar and crying... there was an element to it more avuncular than professional and Husk wasn't entirely sure he liked it.

He sat down despite this, muttering complaints about the creaking of his joints and the lack of booze, and when Charlie offered him a smile that said many fond things very quietly, Husk resolved to just ignore the knot of warmth under his sternum until he found an appropriate time to drown it.)

"Princess, listen," he started, unsure of how to make anything regarding Alastor sound positive, let alone reassuring. "I've had the misfortune of knowing Alastor a real long time. I've stuck around through all sorts of shit—and believe me, there's been a lot of it. Alastor's walked away from scraps with far better men than Adam and been just fine."

Just like that, the fragile smile died.

"You've seen him fight other sinners," she agreed quietly. "But... you know this was different. I get that, out of all of us, he was the best equipped for a battle, but we both know he wouldn't have told you everything about the worst fights he's been in before. Especially not the really bad bits."

"No need to tell me—I was there for a lot of them." Sighing, Husk dragged a hand down his face and winced when his whiskers caught on his nails; his memory lit up neon with static shrieking, neon blood, and Vox... he would save that story for another day. "Some lucky fucker cut his head off once; he turned up in Zestial's place the next day to tell the story... not that anyone asked. He'll drag his bony ass back here when he's good and ready, Princess, you don't need to—"

And the patient claws hovering around her heart sliced.

"But what if he doesn't?" Charlie cried, the desperation she had been so meticulous in holding back sluicing through her in a tidal wave. Her voice jumped a nerve-wincing number of octaves. "We have no idea what Adam did to him... I knew I should have insisted he take an angelic weapon—anything! Niffty did amazing with just a dagger—a dagger would have been enough!"

"Idiot didn't want it," Husk argued with appalling rationality that was helpful but did not help.

"I could have ordered him!"

"Since when has you ordering Alastor about achieved anything?"

"I could have tried!" Charlie wailed, knotting her hands through her hair where her fingers tangled like sprats in a net in the mats she hadn't the patience to brush out. She had not slept well. The urge to pace was desperate enough to be painful, the placid stillness of her hotel intolerable where it sat behind her and under her skin. In that stillness, she could still smell the fresh paint, smell the blood. "I should have done something else... now he's not coming back, he's not talking to us, and I still have no idea what's happened to him."

'What if he's not coming home? What if he's okay, absolutely fine, and he's still not coming home? What if he doesn't want us anymore?'

"Princess, relax, ok?" Husk's taciturn frown was soft with compassion but very real in its frustration. "I would have felt it if he started dying."

Of course he wasn't dying. Immediately after the battle that had loomed as a possibility but it hardly seemed real or relevant now. In daylight where the violence was abstract, a bloody phantasm like a nightmare she hadn't quite shaken off, she could easily recall all the reasons a mortal sinner had been their first line of defence. Dying was human. And Alastor might be more vulnerable than he liked to admit, might be lying wounded somewhere, but he wasn't like Sir Pentious. He wouldn't just die.

"What if he needs help?" Because there had to be a reason he wasn't coming home.

"It's Alastor. He doesn't want help."

The answer was a closed door she could rest her forehead against knowing there was no one behind it.

Alastor couldn't die. But he could get sick of them. He could decide they weren't worth bleeding for, that a joke wasn't worth dying for, and as the days of his absence dragged out, it seemed increasingly possible she would never see him again.

At a towering six foot seven, it was impossible for Charlie to look small but, with her arms tucked into her core and her knees drawn to her chest, head bowed, she was managing an approximation close enough to be pitiable. She grappled for a way to explain her feelings about Alastor to Husk, who would be kind but did not care.

"I can't just sit here and wait for him to want to talk to us again," she whispered, small, raw, helpless.

Husk could. Husk had done that very gladly for seven years, and had wasted no time in telling Alastor that they had been the best seven years of their acquaintance when he finally got back. With some difficulty born from lack of practice, he schooled his features into something approachable.

"What do you want me to say Charlie?"

He phrased it like a question, but it wasn't one, not really; when one asks a question, it is taken as a given that one does not have the answer (and if one is in the practice of commonly asking questions they already know the answer to, then they are quite simply impolite.) Husk didn't know what Charlie wanted, couldn't predict the precise shape of the words, but he could feel her intent clear as the indentations on a die face.

"... I know you know where he's hiding."

It was what he expected. It was what she was always going to say. Still, he didn't like hearing it; the fur on the back of his neck stood upright to form a hostile ruff he couldn't quite persuade to flatten.

"I'm not asking you to go check on him yourself—I wouldn't put you in that situation," Charlie continued carefully. "Just... just tell me where he is so I can go? Please. I promise I'll shut up about it afterwards, and I'll totally calm down about the whole thing, I just..." She shuddered through a sigh, all her well meaning bluster deflating. "I need to see him."

For a moment like a pull on a cigarette, Husk didn't answer.

"What the hell for?" He growled, when the matter didn't resolve itself. "You don't even like the guy."

"I don't not like him," Charlie protested, and there was a note of hurt in her voice at the insinuation which proved even more damning than her earnestness and lack of guile. "Sure he's... difficult... and annoying... and evil... but he keeps his word, and he makes me smile, and sometimes that's enough of a reason to care about someone. And even if I did dislike him—even if I hated him—Alastor's still one of my people. He got hurt trying to help me. He fought Adam to save my hotel." With endearing if insane sincerity, she pressed her palm against her chest, above the only heart in creation big enough to fit everyone in Hell inside. "He's my responsibility. He's part of my family."

There was a soft sort of breeze going about its business today. It cut through the layers of Husk's fur, right through to the skin, and it wasn't cold enough to chill him or convince his stubborn flesh to shiver but he was aware of it. It was a chaser, of sorts, sour and green, to Charlie's murmurings, whispered to the bartender with no damn bar.

"There are a lot of people I can't help any more," Charlie continued, confessional quiet. "I led them to their deaths before I ever had a chance to even know them. Sir Pentious is dead, and we are never going to see him again. I still know how to make the type of tea he likes and how he organises his tools... I found his top hat when we were cleaning the old hotel up and I don't know what to do with it.

"And I'm learning to be okay with that, I am. I can accept it. As long as there are other things for me to do with the life I have because of them, I can live with not being able to do anything for the people I failed anymore." She held her own hand in her lap, thumb stroking tenderly over her knuckles. She wished Vaggie wasn't stuck doing Alastor's job, could be there to hold her instead. "Alastor's still out there, somewhere."

'I can do this. A loose thread I can worry to stop me picking scabs. There's a hole in my home. This is something I can do. This is something I can fix. Let me fix it, let me try, let me make everything better or let me drive myself mad trying. Please—it's what I'm good at. It's my best quality.'

There it was, the slow-strobing red heart of the matter, all cosseting of fright and ambiguity peeled away in neat chunks like orange flesh. It wasn't about Alastor, not really; it was about helplessness. He could understand that at least.

Husk heaved a rough sigh and wished he could feel annoyed. The persistence of Charlie's hope was scratchy, a fingernail worrying the desiccated casing of a nascent flower bud, peeling away the scant protection; illogical as it was, she made him want to be hopeful too. Damn her. Damn her open-handed earnestness. Damn the pretty black eyes and the way they held on to him, hand-in-hand, full of the dew-drop belief that he would do the things she asked. That he would help the way she asked.

And damn him too.

"You're really not gonna let this go, are you kid?"

She nodded slowly, like his acquiescence was a flighty creature she were leery of startling.

Once, Husk had enjoyed the security of knowing his own mind well, confident in its contours in a way that made up for the palpable and ever-present awareness that he wasn't anything to be proud of. Every channel winding its way through his honeycombed heart, the ones spelling out selfish, cheat, fraud in tar-black letters, was much traced and intimately familiar to him. More than that, they were deep, deficiencies in his spirit too intrinsic to be covered up or accounted for. Husk was not a good man nor was he a good friend; he was aware of these things and any shame experienced over the matter was incidental, inconsequential, and, ultimately, easily ignored.

Somewhere along the way, without him really noticing, that had changed. In the place of apathy, that all-consuming swamp, there were hard kernels of something that was not quite honour but had much the same effect. In a process almost without him, these misfits had worked their way into places they shouldn't be, places he thought he had sealed off and let die long ago, and suddenly things were different. Suddenly—a six-month process of suddenlys—it might still be true that Husk was not the best of men, but he could distinctly feel the possibility within himself to be a decent friend.

Stretching out from the depths of his absent soul were chains—unlike the ones he and Alastor used, intangible, and binding, and inexplicably wanted—as fine and delicate as the links in a necklace, and the others hung on the length like pendants. It was a pleasant weight. They trusted him to carry their affection and he trusted them in turn. It was daunting and yet terribly, tremulously precious to be beholden to someone else in a fashion that was wanted—how rare that was in Hell! And he had discovered it four times over in this den of madmen and fools. Wasn't that just something? Reforging human hearts in Hell. Water to wine was a paltry parlour trick in comparison.

So he was annoyed, and pleased, and daunted, and amused all at once not simply because he was going to give someone more powerful than him what they wanted when they asked, but because he was doing it willingly.

Damn her for changing him. Damn him for changing. Damn them both.

(Alastor, incapable of change, certainly would.)

"Here." From the depths of his pocket, a realm beyond fabric that bristled and scratched, Husk withdrew a crackle of paper. It was crumpled to oblivion, it's edges frayed, stained and scorched, but the writing on it remained legible—always legible. Husk had spent seven years trying to scrape it off. "This is where the old broadcasts used to transmit from. Those old broadcasts."

Charlie's body, smarter than her mind, stilled, leaving her thoughts to race enthusiastically ahead of it for a few seconds before their leads snapped short and they too took a pause. The old broadcasts; the ones the Radio Demon was famous for.

The proffered note was splotched with a deep scarlet.

She had been only young when the Alastor arrived in Hell and started his bloody campaigns. Stuffed into the attic of her mind were vague, underwater memories of his rise to power, of a theatrical voice floating from the speakers and cheerfully—always cheerfully—instructing his unseen audience to listen and attend; 'Let's begin!' Whenever her mother caught her listening she made sure to turn it off, but Charlie had the station memorised and always managed to find it again. Most of the time it was talking—quotidian matters, the weather, some news, ghoulish accounts of recent deaths. Oftentimes there was music—fast-paced, gleeful songs; slower, more intimate ballads; tunes built for parties. There was a very distinct memory lodged in the back of Charlie's mind of stumbling along the long corridor to her father's workshop, a radio full of excitable jazz half-falling out of her arms, determined to make him dance with her; somehow she knew she had done that at least a dozen times.

And then there was That Time. The time she tried to find his channel after dark and discovered the screaming. The hideous, wretched, incomprehensible noise.

She had broken the radio trying to turn it off; she had sat on her bed, hidden under the duvet, a rubber duck clasped to her chest, sobbing and scrabbling at her ears and fighting the urge to vomit best as her child's body could manage. That had been the last time she tuned into Alastor's broadcast. By the time he turned up again she had heard enough of his mythos for those sunny memories to be reduced to ghosts floating around other people's tombstones; headstones inscribed with the names of over fifty Overlords and several thousand nameless sinners.

"His old radio tower?" Gingerly, she took the scrap of paper; the florid stains were wine, only wine. Grimly severe as the officiant of a will, Husk nodded.

"If the bastard's holed up anywhere, it'll be there." Amber eyes bore into her, protective and caring in a brusque, rough fashion like a cuff from a callused palm, and despite her two and a half centuries of life Charlie felt very young. "Just be careful. He keeps himself on a tight leash day to day, but all bets are off when something like this happens."

Alastor's handwriting was a tangle of neat swirls. It was almost too pretty to be his.

"I trust him," Charlie told the note. She didn't want to look at Husk, the frustrated warmth of someone wiser, the almost-regret of giving her the calling card already setting in. She much didn't enjoy feeling young and small with a kingdom on her back.

"You shouldn't," the bartender warned, disapproving as much as cautionary. "Hell, even Rosie and that bitch Mimsy know to back off once he's taken a bad hit, and they're as close to Alastor as anyone can get. He'll hurt you, Charlie. He won't even have to mean for it to happen. Mad dogs bite."

"I'm not stupid, Husk. I know everyone thinks I'm just the dumbest person in Hell, but I'm not; trusting everyone the way I do is a choice."

"A dumb choice."

"Look around you—Hell was built off the backs of a million stupid choices." And this, of course, was as indelibly true as ever but, when Husk did as requested, all he could see was the red, white, and gold of their hotel. "Maybe I am senselessly kind, but it's working better than everyone else being senselessly cruel. Surely that counts for something?"

(It counted for everything, but that wasn't the point. Sometimes it wasn't a matter of who fundamentally deserved kindness but who you wanted to waste your last act on. Some people died for stupid, soft-hearted reasons and it was worth it in the end. That wouldn't be the case if Charlie lost a bout with whatever feral thing Alastor turned into when doors were closed.)

"To beat Heaven? Sure." Husk said it so easily, as though her capability had never been a question. "To beat Alastor? Gonna need a lot more than an open hand to keep him off your neck."

"I don't want to beat him." Tenderly, Charlie smoothed a finger over the too-pretty writing, smoothing the crinkles flat. "I want him to be safe."

For a long stretch of a moment, Husk stared at the girl who was his princess but didn't feel like it and, dutifully, she stared back with wide black eyes. They fought that silent war without malice or comment, and when Husk at last sighed and heaved himself to his feet, he left it without victor; both of them had made their point.

"... Don't get yourself killed, got it?" He barked in the sort of voice that insists to secure a safe return through insistence alone. Taken aback by the strength of it, Charlie jumped, but felt a broad smile stretching her mouth at the implicit permission. "You're the best of us kid—not that you'll hear me saying it twice. Tell the bastard I said not to hurry back."

Like the bobbing flame of a fresh lit candle, Charlie bounced to her feet, full of vigour, eyes full of stars.

"You hoping for another seven years?" She asked, her grin no longer pretend. Husk scoffed and waved her off.

"I'm hoping for double but betting on nothing. Like I said—" the cat's black lips turned up in a sharp smile full of feline teeth that made the resultant expression rather hard. "Mean, old stag will be back in no time."

But he watched her leave with worried eyes and fiddled with the invisible chain around his neck, the length stretching intangibly off into the infinite distance and leading far, far away.

𖤐

She was knocking on the hatch door before the bulbs had cooled, their red light still imprinted on the world when she blinked.

"Ahhh, Charlie! Such perfect timing—I was just finishing up my evening broadcast. You missed some of my better musings, if I do say so myself, but no matter. What brings you to my humble radio station?"

"Hey Al." Charlie hauled herself up the ladder and deliberately neglected to mention that she had been stood waiting for the 'ON AIR' sign to shut off; he either knew and was graciously ignoring the fact, or he would laugh at her when he found out. She cut to the chase, in so much as Charlie was ever able to cut to the chase. "Do you mind if I sit with you for a while? I just... I can't sleep but Vaggie can and I would feel bad if I woke her up, but I really need somebody to talk to because everything's a disaster right now and—"

"Charlie, Charlie!" Alastor was laughing, sound fuzzed with static, an indulgent if frustrated smile on his lips. "My word, you'd have a fine career as an auctioneer if it ever struck your fancy. Not even I am so lively at this time of night, certainly not after so long an evening. Now—" With a neat click of his fingers, he transformed the armchair before his transmissions desk into a sofa and settled back down, his cane laid across the seat between them. "Sit. Can I offer you some tea?"

Sighing, Charlie sunk down into the suede cushioning. The fabricated construct was perfect as expected, it's embrace purely professional but infinitely welcome after the strife of a seemingly interminable day.

"Tea would be incredible, thank you so much."

"It's no trouble, dear," he replied in a sing-song lilt. "Put a record on—if we're staying up here, I'll not have silence... though with you around I suppose that's a given!"

Some minds are easily distracted, their nervous boil diffused, by the confident offering of a simple task, and Charlie was fortunate enough to be in possession of one of them. She set about the task of selecting a vinyl with such fervent seriousness it might have been the most important thing in the world and, gradually, the impatience and haste drained from her thoughts. On the table nearby, Alastor went about the cosy mundanity of preparing a teapot which would, beyond reason, pour two separate concoctions into their respective cups—bitter black tea for himself, raspberry and cherry for his guest. These were homely tasks, frivolities, and enacting them was to invite the sort of placidity people reserved for their homes, hidden in the cabinet with the good china and brought out for friends and family. All was well in the radio tower; Alastor allowed it to be no other way.

None of the records in the radio host's collection were bad—a quality made more impressive by how extensive a collection it was—but Charlie still made a point of conducting a considered search. Evaluation was soothing; she wasn't expected to be quick about it. After picking through a myriad of artists and genres, she had a small shortlist tucked neatly to one side, and she fiddled through those at the same mincing pace: ballad, orchestral, lament, ballad, orchestral, lament, sad songs, soft songs. Eventually, carefully, she set a new record from a demon artist she listened to whenever she felt particularly sorry for herself on the turntable. Low, lyrical notes warbled out from under the needle and waltzed dreamily through the air and, satisfied, Charlie took her place at the transmission desk where a cup of pink liquid steamed in invitation.

Beside her, Alastor hummed, ear flickering just enough to convince her it could move. Another few bars of the song played as he seemed to consider something, and then the music began to warp and melt, the record stuttering on its needle, and the tune picked up its pace like a frightened heart. Something reached into the vinyl, murdered the band, and did something irreparable to their instruments, and that went on until, quite abruptly, it was a different song altogether. Horns blared to life in the background, the shriek and squeal of jazz, and the singer started up again, different lyrics, different voice, not at all what Charlie had picked. The heavy layer of static was the only thing preventing the mad music from being right in the room with them, transporting them to a smoky speakeasy that smelled of whiskey and ice.

"You've not played this one for me before," Charlie observed, unperturbed by the change in tune.

For the limited (and yet not insignificant) number of times Charlie visited Alastor's radio tower, that was their little ritual; him pretending to allow her a choice in a song, only to magically shift it to something he found more appealing. She had stopped being annoyed after the first few times but had yet to stop thinking about the choice she made. It wasn't quite defiance, but was maybe a close cousin, a benign stubbornness that said she wouldn't step on his toes but such was a choice she was making.

"I haven't! It's still rather fresh, but too much polishing ruins good jazz." In that faux-harmless affectation he wore so well, Alastor leant against the desk, fist pressing into one cheek. "So! What's got you in such a state?"

The red eyes drilling into her felt like ruby knives pinning her to velvet, and that should have been discomforting but it wasn't. It was grounding. This was Hell's most terrifying sinner and she had his full attention; it should have been frightening but, despite his grandiose posturing and threats, Alastor had never quite crossed that line. Not to her.

Alastor was a knife. He was vicious, sharp, and quick. He was a show runner and that meant he'd help her get things done. He was often exactly what she needed and right now… well, no; right now she would infinitely prefer Vaggie, but he would have to do.

"I've just... had the longest day." If she had been sat with her girlfriend, Charlie would have flopped against his arm at this point, but Alastor very much wasn't Vaggie and that was an important part of the exercise. "Angel doesn't want to listen to me or do any of the personal work I set him and I know it's because his job's been really tough on him at the minute—God, I would kill Valentino if it weren't hypocritical of me—"

("Some men deserve to die!" Alastor interjected cheerfully, to the enthusiastic approval of his invisible audience.)

"—And I can't stand the fact that Angel's being hurt," Charlie continued, ignoring him. "But I know he doesn't want me interfering. And I am trying so hard to be understanding about that, but it doesn't leave me with many options for helping him. I want to respect his boundaries but if this work is the only way I can save him and he doesn't want to do it... What am I supposed to do? He doesn't want me getting involved. Do I just sit here while he gets hurt? That's terrible! I know I need to keep him safe, but I just don't know how to do that if he doesn't help me first."

It was an uncomfortably mercenary sentiment, Charlie found, the idea of quid pro quo in aiding her sinners. 'Help me help you' was all well and good until someone didn't want to be helped; then it felt more like 'let me help you so I don't have to feel bad.'

"Ahh, the complex navigation of a wounded dog's heart... not really my area of expertise, Charlie," Alastor said in a shrug of a voice. "I find chasing helpless prey distasteful, and while dear Angel is far from a blushing damsel I'm never going to advise you to beg to be useful. Give him time."

Time. How many times had she looked up at the clock in the centre of town and counted how many days left there should have been? Thirty, said the countdown, in tones of lead. Two and a half hours to midnight, snickered the watch burnt into her wrist; soon—far too soon—there would be twenty nine days, only twenty nine.

"We might not have time," Charlie whispered in a voice which, if she were with Vaggie, would have seen a comforting arm draped around her shoulders. But she was not with her girlfriend and Alastor did no such thing.

"Then I'm afraid you must trust him to take care of himself like the grown adult gangster he is." If anything, his comfortless half-moon grin was wider. His eyebrows were raised, incredulous as though her problems were small and easily solved and he was wondering why they bothered her so. As though he were struggling not to laugh at her. "Angel Dust will come to you if and when he decides he needs to use your skills. He knows you're at his service—you've belaboured that point quite enough."

"You think so? I'd never abandon any of you..."

"So you've said many, many times." Alastor stretched lazily, the music muffling briefly with static as his spine popped. "In any case, wasn't Sir Pentious your model patient for your redemption nonsense?"

Charlie felt her face twist as disillusionment took her pretty hopes in its fist and squeezed them into sourness. She was well acquainted with the phrase which assured the addressee 'I'm not mad; just disappointed' and she was almost ashamed to find such sentiments impossible to offer; she had come too far to not be a little angry with him.

"Oh, don't even talk to me about Pentious..." Frustrated by her own frustration, Charlie scrubbed her hands over her face, sunk her cheeks into her palms. "He's been building a... particle, laser gun, death ray, zapper thingy in my basement!"

(She could still see his expression, plastered across her mind's eye, half swallowed in the artificial gloam of the ancient lights; defensive, apologetic, but resolute as he told her "I'm sssorry, Miss Morningstar, but I think this issss the right thing to do." It hurt her heart that he could look so earnest, speak with such appeal, even as he demonstrated how little her plans were working. Dear, dependable Pen, with his slightly worried smile and ineffectual pomposity, his Egg Boys clamouring around his heels with wrenches and screwdrivers. She wondered at the fact that he could chatter to her amiably at breakfast every morning before coming down here, to work in the dark on a device meant to carve a stark swathe of emptiness in the world she was trying to save.)

"Has he now?" Alastor asked keenly, and it wasn't the reception she had wanted but beggars couldn't be choosers and everyone else was in bed.

"Yes! It's terrible, isn't it?" Alastor's grin said he didn't agree, so she ignored him. "I really thought we'd got past this with him, but apparently not! Apparently I still have to be worried about what he does when he sneaks off to the boiler room. I knew I shouldn't have let him keep that Carmine catalogue, it was just asking for trouble, and—"

"Does it work?"

"What?" Charlie blinked at him, heart twisting again. "No, not yet, but that's not the point. Come on Alastor—you bitch about everyone's dumb schemes all the time, be mad with me!"

"I would never slander the good name of a fellow Overlord," Alastor lied with aplomb. "In this particular situation, I in fact think Mr Pentious might be on to a winner."

The fabric of her blazer pulled tight over her hunched spine and, feeling ineffectual and alone, Charlie took ahold of her lapels and pulled it tighter; her forehead rested on the cool lip of the transmissions desk, the line of metal cutting coldly into her forehead. She wished she could be like the metal—objective, unaffected, a still, steady line—and she envied Alastor his unchanging smile. Nothing'ON AIR ever seemed bout of hand with him... with every tick of the clock, her dream slipped a little further out of her hand, a ribbon, slick with sweat, one she was holding too tightly to steal away but unraveled between her fingers anyway...

If she went down to the basement now, back down those treacherous stairs which creaked an announcement no matter her delicacy, she knew she would find him working there still. Perhaps he would have managed to secure the tarpaulin over it this time. Perhaps he would succeed in schooling his features into something unworried. It had been chance—a careless Egg Boy tripping on the edge of the dust sheet and pulling it off the cannon—and not Pentious himself who revealed his treachery, and that couldn't be reconciled with.

("I trusted you!"

"I know! And I knew you would be upssset, ssso that's why I hid it down here! Ssso you didn't have to sssee!"

"That's worse, Pentious!"

"Miss M—Charlie. Please underssstand; I'm not... I wouldn't—thisss wasn't something I did to hurt you. I'm doing this to help. We are exposssed here. We have no weapons, we—"

"That's the point of the hotel! It's not an armoury!")

Screaming wouldn't help. Screaming wouldn't help. Inhale... Exhale... Screaming wouldn't help. Screaming wouldn't—

"No!" Her voice was shrill; she could hear it but she couldn't stop it. If anything, hearing her own panic made her more frantic—it made it physical, real. "We have just over a month left to redeem sinners, and he's still trying to kill people! You—"

"Charlie," Alastor interrupted with the deftness of a knife. "Regardless of your frankly insipid hopes and dreams, the fact remains that we exist in a realm full of people who very much deserve to be killed and we will soon be under attack."

"But—"

A hand slipped around her jaw and forced it closed quick enough to make her teeth click. Tenderness was not something the hand knew very well, and that was evident in the sting of its too-sharp nails; still, it was trying. She had seen the things those hands could do when they weren't offering their approximation of gentle.

It went deservedly unappreciated.

"Now now," Alastor admonished as she yanked her head from his unresisting grip; he looked remarkably unconcerned for someone under the scarlet glare of Hell's princess, but Charlie didn't think anything had ever actually frightened Alastor. "No need to raise your voice—you're the only other person in this place with any sense of dignity, I would hate to see you lose it because you couldn't listen. I'm not against you. In this particular instance, I simply don't think you're looking at things with quite the right perspective."

Had she not been exhausted, Charlie might have tried harder to correct the demon's behaviour; she was not above telling Alastor he had gone too far. But she was tired and, momentum interrupted, her mind whirled to a halt, and she watched her rambling miseries run away without her like a rat tail down a hole. Free from pursuit, she could still feel them, writhing in the walls of her mind, unaddressed.

A lot had been beyond her control recently. Alastor might as well add himself to the list.

"You sound like my dad," Charlie muttered sullenly. "He always says I don't really see things clearly..."

A laugh, free from its static shroud, rare enough to be startling.

"That's not your problem—quite the opposite, actually! You do a magnificent job of seeing the world clear as the finest crystal. Everything in black and white! All neat and tidy, either/or with nothing in the middle! You have perfected the art of dividing up the Pentagram and parcelling its troubles up for consumption. It's admirable."

Slowly, the tense little knot of irascibility in Charlie's chest loosened.

"Oh... thank you!"

"And it's completely incorrect," Alastor concluded, having left just enough of a pause to let her assume it a compliment and cheer up. "My dear, this world isn't a clear place. It's cloudy as blood. If you're seeing things clearly, you're doing something very wrong indeed. It's a mess, and being so divisive about it is getting you nowhere. I might recommend adopting a shade of grey, if such a thing wouldn't crush your sensibilities."

There was no silence to fall in the radio tower; notes drummed their fingers thoughtfully against Charlie's brain, a mimicry of Alastor's fingers on the desk. She could hear the studio audience moving around behind her but knew better than to turn around.

Maddeningly unhelpful as he could be, this was precisely why she had needed him, the thing he offered that no one else did: Vaggie was wonderful, impossible to live without, but she was supportive to a fault and Charlie knew it, could feel the cosy net of good opinion keeping her from harm; her mother's answer phone would accept her every concern without judgment or complaint no matter its subject or source, but it never offered anything; and her father... it had been a long time since her father had helped. It had been a long time since he had done anything at all.

Alastor had no compunctions about telling her, with perfect cheer, all the ways in which she was wrong. And she didn't have to believe him, but it did give her something to push back against. Black and white, sat side by side, a million iterations of grey strung out between them.

"What do you think of it all, then?" Alastor made a show of pretending to be flattered she had asked, as though he hadn't expected it, as though he wouldn't have been grievously offended behind a grit-toothed smile if she hadn't.

"Well, as someone cleverly pointed out, the time we have before our woefully premature extermination day is fast running out... Perhaps a deadly particle accelerator wouldn't be the worst thing to have close to hand, hm?" She looked no happier and the demon sighed. Briefly, he touched two fingers to the underside of her chin and tilted her head upwards so that he might meet her otherwise downcast gaze. His face could not be kind, but it was making a fair stab at being understanding. "A weapon in and of itself is not an evil thing. What one does with these things matters. Work with what you have, not what you wish you had. You cannot stop him, so direct him instead. Idle hands are the devil's tools—the man needs a project. Goodness knows I understand what that's like."

It shouldn't have softened her heart, but boredom was such a humanising affliction for a demon like Alastor to contend with, a thorn in a lion's paw. A perfectly surmountable squabble with eternity. It was a brief flicker of something stupid and ordinary, a brief hint of a petty world where there wasn't a doomsday device in the cellar or an exorcist army on the horizon and they could afford to be bored. An implausible sort of place where her plans to fix people worked perfectly on the very first try.

... Actually, it was a perfectly possible sort of world; she already had the Radio Demon playing her records and pouring her tea like they were old friends. What could be stranger than that?

(He seemed so relaxed, so content, sat here beside her. A part of her, the hopeful part which had fallen for the feint of a predator, wanted to ask him to stay: 'isn't this nicer than all the blood? Isn't this so much better than the killing? Or at least equally as good? Sit with me a little longer. You look so different when you smile without teeth.')

"I still don't like the idea of Pen creating weapons, but..." Biting her lip, Charlie poked at a few ideas, testing her weight against them with slowly growing confidence; Sir Pentious was indisputable a mechanical genius—surely offence wasn't the limit of that? "Maybe a shield? For all of us? Ooh, like some sort of giant bubble we could put around the whole hotel! We could be a refuge from all the fighting, no violence necessary! He gets to make something, and I don't have to have a terrifying laser cannon in the basement."

From every corner of the room roused a rapture of applause, so dense in its enthusiasm it sounded for all the world like a rainstorm in a jungle, scrunched up and crammed in that little room. Charlie whirled around and found the walls wallpapered with black cutout faces, all scribbled with neon smiles. As the shadow audience cheered for her, Charlie reflected, with a little wistfulness amid the shocked thrill of adulation, that this was precisely the reception she had wanted from that long-ago interview with Katie Killjoy.

"And there we have it!" Alastor crowed in the jubilant, theatrical voice he used for commentating on the hell horse races. He gestured to her with his microphone, a movement like the gallant tipping of a gentleman's hat. "We'll make a dazzlingly effective leader of you yet, Miss Morningstar."

In a fashion almost physical, Charlie could feel the strands of whatever black-widow web he weaved brushing up against her skin in a thousand threads of gossamer, an enterprise as vast and ambitious as her own, but it was hard to care. Oh, she knew he was malevolent, murderous, unrepentant, but he smiled at her like he was proud of her, and she had been an imaginative child once; she loved to play pretend.

And maybe it wasn't all a lie; he wouldn't have sat and listened to her worries at the beginning of their partnership. Maybe their attempts at corrupting each other would equal out, or maybe she would win him over. Maybe Vaggie was right, and she would always need to keep a knife hidden behind her back in one hand, but with the other—

"Can I give you a hug?"

At the end of the day—and it was the end of a very long day—what was Alastor but another sinner to pull to her chest?

"Hmmm." Alastor squinted at her, head tilted to one side, caught off guard though he would never admit it. "Reason?"

"You make me happy." That was the short answer, so paired down and free of clarifying amendment it was almost incorrect, but the reality wasn't something she could easily parse. "I'm glad you decided to stick around even though I shut the door in your face. Twice."

"In impressively quick succession!" He looked at her, expression inscrutable but sharp. Searching. Assessing. Whatever test she was undergoing in those narrow eyes, she didn't pass; a hand stretched out over the divide anyway. "How about a friendly handshake instead? No deal—on my honour as a gracious host!"

Charlie took what she could get, though she wasn't quite hopeful enough to risk actually taking the proffered hand. She took him by the arm instead. Through the supple leather of his glove, Alastor's hand was bony where it clamped down on her wrist, the claws digging lightly into her jacket. There was no knife hidden up the sleeve, only a lean forearm. If she hadn't been interrupted by layers of fabric, her palm would have been pressed above his pulse point but she couldn't feel his heartbeat.

Unblinking, Alastor held her gaze, his broad grin fixed to his face like a crescent moon he had stolen and forgotten about. There was another expression tucked just behind it, one she couldn't parse.

"There." Briefly, he brushed a finger over Charlie's cheek, over the curve of her smile. "Now you're properly dressed."

('Isn't this better than streets of people cowering? Let's work something out. We could do it, you and me. We could find the middle ground and it doesn't have to hurt.')

After that their conversation turned to easier topics, safe waters: the conditions of the hotel and its upkeep; news and gossip from Alastor's many sources; Charlie enthusiastically told stories about what was happening in the other rings and Alastor listened with rapt attention. The evening wore on without them noticing. Hell, garish and immortal, sprawled out into the distant dark behind the glass, it's ragged towers and glittering lights far below them, all around them, and when she was up so high it felt like something she could manage. They kept talking long into the night, even as the music stopped and voices over the radio grew garbled, distorted, and the limelights behind Alastor's eyes started to dim...

At some point Charlie must have fallen asleep, lulled by the warmth and the low red light, because the next thing she remembered was waking up, thoughts gluey and disjointed as an abandoned art project, her mouth half-open and mashed against someone's arm.

'Vaggie,' she thought with muzzy happiness, and that was enough to keep her content for a few minutes more, until it registered to her that her sleeping partner wasn't soft. Vaggie should not be so bony.

Alastor was not a comfortable person to fall asleep on. Beneath the padding of his jacket, the bones of his shoulder rose and fell in uneven contours that pressed into Charlie's cheek without any apparent interference of flesh. At such close quarters, it was more apparent than ever that Alastor was a living corpse in an old-fashioned suit. He was over-warm, skeletally thin, and narrowly built, a truly awful pillow; Charlie could feel the hard point of an elbow digging into her ribs and, judging by the ache, it had been there for quite some time. Nothing about the arrangement was restful now that she was awake.

Despite this, Charlie didn't move immediately. He was asleep—actually asleep, not pretending so he could bite someone. The air was thick with static like a hive of drowsy bees, occasionally blurred with distant voices from other broadcasts as he tuned into other stations as easy and aimless as a person rolling over in their sleep.

Alastor never almost slept. Nobody ever saw him like this. Certainly no one ever sat next to him, close enough to drool on the lapel of his once-well-made suit jacket.

It was enough to make a girl feel special. Sincerely uncomfortable—the crick in her neck was murder—but special.

Careful not to disturb him, Charlie eased herself upright and then to her feet, her stiff body a collection of bony clicking sounds stuffed into a bag of pins and needles. For a long time she stood still before the transmission desk simply because doing anything else would invite gravity to topple her. Behind her, the sounds of static continued, the rise and fall of it as gentle and regular as sea swells.

Hazy and half-awake, Charlie studied her friend. Alastor's omnipresent smile was gone, reduced to the faintest upward turn of his lips more a result of perception than anything else, barely an expression at all; he looked younger without it, softer. Without her there to prop him up, he was slumping over, looking small and crumpled in his wrinkled suit. Gently—hesitantly—Charlie took him by the shoulders and eased his unresisting body the rest of the way down and arranged him so that he lay on his back, his unwieldy long legs flung over the sofa's arm. There. That was better. Still half-asleep herself, she leaned over him.

He had always seemed vast, untouchable, an imposing, venomous, whirlwind of a demon—an Overlord, one of the most physically powerful sinners to ever step foot in Hell... It was strange to see him lying there like that. She could almost imagine a human man, without long, deer ears, antlers, glowing eyes, or cherry red hair, asleep in a radio station in New Orleans; it was the same vague sort of conjuring with which she could picture the worlds in storybooks.

Feeling impotently protective and helplessly fond, Charlie leaned over and pressed a chaste kiss to Alastor's forehead, barely a brush of lips to skin, and it was only the rush of relief that flowed through her when he didn't even stir that told her it had been a reckless thing to do. Cold washed through her nerves, a frigid wave of wakefulness that shook her and hissed to pull herself together; this was a monster, nothing more. Even so, she lingered for a second longer.

Because people were never so simple and, monster though he might be, he was her friend too. Black and white and shades of grey.

Still, she didn't regret leaving him to his writhing shadows when she did slip out; Vaggie was a much better sleep partner and the comforts of her own bed stole the evening's events away. When she woke in the morning, the memory of Alastor's sleeping face was barely more than mist, which faded further in the presence of the sinner himself, wide awake and already busy helping Niffty in the kitchen.

The smile he flashed her when she walked in, full of renewed plans to make hopes and dreams a reality, was as bright as always; full of ever-ready mockery, a wolfish enthusiasm, and something that might have been his version of warmth.

(She never could never find the ladder into his radio tower after that.)

𖤐

The first thing Charlie did was send a text to Vaggie. The second thing she did was drive herself insane for five very hectic minutes.

Feeling a little like a bubble of soap—bright, shiny with hope, and nervous all at once, aware of her own fragility—Charlie made her way to the new kitchen. It was an industrial affair of brass, and chrome, and ceramic, scintillatingly clean, a surgical suite that smelled of lemons and fresh croissants. They had used it very little, as Lucifer had taken over providing food and he had a preference for simply magicking meals into existence, conjured perfection every time. It was a kind gesture—indeed it was what she had been used to for the greater part of her immortal life—but Charlie had still felt relief when she found Niffty making bug biscuits in the kitchen one evening; at least someone was using it.

(It made it feel like a home, she had realised, stood in the doorway in silence and listening as the maid sang her squashed bug song. Anyone could, with the right materials and time, call together a building and it was human nature to seek out spaces to sleep and shelter, but it took something else to make a place one belonged. Cooking meant comfort, meant people were comfortable, and an industrial tray of cookies baked by one person more often than not meant sharing. It meant family, but perhaps not in that precise word. Close enough, but not quite,

Before she could sneak away, Niffty noticed her, and Charlie found herself roped in to chopping weevils for the biscuits. She ended the night with flour dusting her favourite blazer and icing swiped across her nose, belly sore from laughing. For the first time since the place was complete, she was reassured that the kitchen wouldn't always look so perfect and might one day seem like somewhere people did more than walk the halls.)

With more enthusiasm than plan, Charlie rifled through the cupboards, ransacking them for anything that might prove useful to Alastor in his hideaway. This amounted to a haphazard pile amassed in the middle of the kitchen table, one that only forwent the kitchen sink because the article in question was industrial quality and bolted in place and she was almost certain Alastor wouldn't require a wall.

Where was this old hideaway? The note cited the wetlands that lay far beyond city borders, avoided even by those hardy pockets of civilisation that eked a survival outside the Pentagram's overcrowded bounds. Charlie had been there precisely once and had stayed long enough to see the ruins of boats floundering half-submerged in the slimy waters of the river and the rotting corpses of unfortunate sinners wandering aimlessly amount under the command of mushrooms. Nothing remotely human survived there. The purpose of the marsh, it's very reason for being, was self-absorption, it's poisoned beauty eating up its every admirer and interloper, indiscriminate and unrelenting.

How long could any building remain remotely habitable in those conditions? What was the likelihood Alastor's hideaway was still standing? She considered the sink and the wall to which it was attached with new appraisal...

... Her dad could always make another one.

In the end, she decided against destroying her own hotel, if only because her absent hotelier would likely laugh himself sick if she turned up with anything it was evident had once been mortared down. That sort of logic also ruled out the fridge-freezer and oven... which were, Charlie realised as her fervour calmed, insane things to consider. With fresh eyes, she regarded the tumbledown pile in the middle of the vast kitchen table and tried not to feel too ridiculous.

There was no way to know what she was walking in to. She had no idea what to expect. The note, being an inanimate object, didn't elaborate beyond those forbidding coordinates.

Swampland... how very inconvenient—how very Alastor. Vaggie had told her what his room looked like, about the section of wall which cracked away like peeling paint poorly pasted over another section of reality; she wished he had let her see it, but Vaggie had only snuck in that once.

'He likes swamps and wetlands, that's where he grew up and what he's used to. Sure; Hell's a very different kind of place, but I'm sure he accounted for that. Maybe he didn't have a plan when he ran away at first, but he'll have come up with something since.'

It was unthinkable that she might go to this place and not find him there at all.

Much as she wouldn't have dared admit it, Alastor had been the pillow for her mind for months, the only one of her motley family who felt capable of keeping things running. She was under no illusions that she and Vaggie hadn't been managing as well as she had wanted to believe at the time, and he had fixed that with a snap of well-gloved fingers. He was less important than her, far weaker than her father, but he was, God rot him, stable. And wasn't that a concise depiction of her sorry state of affairs? The serial killing cannibal deer with delusions of grandeur was the one of the reliable forces in her life. Vaggie supported her, Alastor managed the minutia and snapped playfully at her heels to keep her going; that was how things worked.

Her grand project stood above her, one resident down, echoing with its emptiness, and she didn't know what to do about it. She had all the support in the world, people who could tear down mountains and turn them into palaces for her, but there was an empty spot in those ranks and the rest the gears were spinning without traction. She had a house but not a home.

But that was okay, that was fixable—it's not like he was dead. There was still time to make everything better, put everything and everybody back in their proper place. Alastor was fine. Absolutely fine. She was going to fix this.

Charlie paired down her reactionary provision heap to raw meat wrapped in cellophane, dishcloths, the first aid kit from under the sink, and the sewing kit Vaggie kept in her handbag, and sheepishly put everything else away. In its place on the kitchen table, she left a note; it was three pages long and, materially, didn't say very much. When she went out to the waiting limousine, she wasn't quite sneaking out, but she moved like she hoped no one would see her and she was happy to be unobserved.

Almost unobserved.

"So who are we hiding from? Came a voice from behind her. Charlie would have jumped if it had been anyone else; as it was, she still startled a little but recovered quickly. Things always seemed better, more manageable, when Vaggie was around.

"Hi!"

"Hey sweetie." Amusement danced in the angel's feline eyes. "Why are we sneaking around with a backpack that smells like raw meat? Your text... was not clear."

To demonstrate, she turned her phone around to display: 'VAGGIE! COME QUICK! I KNOW YOURE BUSY BUT HUSK IS BEING HELPFUL!' Now that she was calmer, Charlie could see how that wasn't particularly helpful. Accurate maybe, enthusiastic certainly, but not much else.

"Right, sorry!" She pulled the scrap of paper in question from her pocket and presented it; its grubby, wine-stained letters stared baldly at them, underwhelming and nondescript. Veggie looked appropriately underwhelmed. "Husk just told me where Alastor might be hiding and I'm going there now to check. I was hoping you would come along because I know he's hurt but I don't know how badly, and I don't know if I can deal with that by my—"

"Sweetie, it's okay. Of course I'm coming."

Surprised for a second time, Charlie paused. She had been anticipating that Vaggie would have a great many very sensible concerns she was not looking forwards to countering. To skip that entirely was not unpleasant, but it did throw her off considerably.

"Wait, really?" The sun seemed brighter, more of a kindness than it had been. Charlie wondered if she should have packed a picnic after all.

"Yeah, of course." Speculatively, Vaggie tested the blade of her angelic spear against the pad of her thumb. "You know he's not gonna be happy to see you, right?"

Gently, Charlie eased the weapon from her girlfriend's hand and slipped it carefully into the limo.

"Ugh, I know. I'm ignoring everything I know about boundaries... but I think these qualify as exceptional circumstances." The bag went next to the spear, equally careful. "We won't stay if he doesn't want us to."

"Do the others know what we're doing?" Vaggie asked as she got into the car. "You know, just in case we go missing?"

"Husk does. And I left a note!"

Which would have to do. She wasn't going to tell Niffty because the maid would want to come along and she hadn't the patience to be corralling her. Husk knew and wouldn't want to come. Angel was out. Her dad was up in his tower and would remain there for some time. The note would suffice for anyone who happened upon her absence.

Body full of flutters, Charlie cracked open the screen to the front of the car and relayed the destination to the invisible, intangible chauffeur, then faced pointedly away from the mirrored windows until she was certain her hotel had receded far into the rearview.

Hopefully, they would return to find it right where she had left it unread. Hopefully, by the time they returned, they would have Alastor in tow and everyone would be too busy celebrating to notice she'd gone without them.

𖤐

Something watched her leave. Eyes that were not those of her bartender followed the car as it drifted out of the employee car park and on to the streets of Hell. This gaze was not impeded by walls, buildings, or the twists and turns of the long winding roads; it pursued her with relentless attention through the city roads, those clogged arteries, and quietly made record of her progress as she abandoned them for the wider, less traveled highways stretching far away towards whatever lay beyond the flat, red horizon.

Charlie didn't notice. It wouldn't have ever occurred to her to even think of it.