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.

30. The Unthinkable

Rachel just laid on the floor for a while.

The room she found herself suddenly in was utterly black, and stank of old dust, thinned cleaning products, and a small amount of human urine. Simply, wherever the hell she was, it smelled uncomfortably alike to Heaven.

She just lay there, and tried to get this all through her head. The imps had done some sort of magic ritual on the corpse she kept. Then she got dizzy. And then next moment, she felt something cut into her back and then she fell in the darkness onto the floor.

"If I get my hands on those imps, I swear…" she finally said, but her voice had an odd croak to it. She coughed, and spat out something thick, that felt like mucous, that she had to wipe away from her face and onto the floor. She then felt another cough, welling deep in the seat of her lungs. She flopped over onto her belly, and then coughed long and hard, disgorging more of that viscous whatever from her lungs, until she finally pulled in a breath that felt ragged and crisp, like peppermint on hard-brushed and bleeding gums. She finally reached back, and was a bit confused, because she didn't feel her blouse. And her knees were being bit into by short carpet.

Was she naked, for some reason?

"Did that kill me?" she asked, her voice sounding still somewhat raw. She looked around, her eyes still trying to adjust to the dark. "Where even am I?"

She wasn't on the Recovery Couch, that was for certain. The little chaise-lounge in the lobby of Charlie's Hotel was certainly more comfortable than this. And notably, the Hotel didn't have any carpet in any of the areas of high-traffic, such as the lobby, dining area, or the like. She felt something wet and slick under her fingers, one that stung mightily. She hissed through her breath, then brought her hand around. She could smell blood. But why? What happened to her back?

The instant she put her hand down, she recoiled with another hiss, because this time she'd planted it onto a shard of broken ceramic, which sliced onto the heel of her palm like a knife. She flicked the shard out and popped the wound into her mouth to at least keep it away from the dirt. Now, only now, did she realize that this was way too dark. She looked up, glancing up under her brows, but saw none of the light that her Gapped Halo ought to have shed. And it didn't even feel like she was suppressing it. Strange.

She pushed herself to her feet, as finally she began to pick out contours in the darkness. A chair here, a sofa there. And most oddly, what seemed to be a hospital bed. Empty, its lines and jellyfish of bags clipped shut and left to languish. She felt a gurgling in her guts, and she started to hobble her way to the little hallway leading away from this 'living' area. She quickly gave a pleased noise when she located a bathroom, and planted herself in time to not make a mess of the floor.

Rachel was half way through her movement, which she otherwise spent wrapping her hand in a wash-cloth, when she realized that this was the first time she'd pooped in years.

"That impish magic killed me so hard it started my intestines back up," Rachel said with a distant laugh. She was definitely naked; she knew the feel of bare skin against toilet well enough to understand that. But when she finally cleared herself out of something that smelled worse than the foulest leavings she ever recalled depositing when she was alive, she rose and finally groped at the wall until she flipped the light-switch on.

The lights instantly seared into her eyes, nearly blinding her anew. It took her about half as long as it had to acclimatize to the light as it had the dark, but she saw a great deal more for it. For one, there was a one single large towel, an unappealing shade of brown but more than large enough for Rachel to gird herself in. Which she quickly did. The other racks stood empty. Then she tried to look at the pain on her back.

She didn't get that far, though. When she looked at herself, she saw the same face that she always did, but there was something… different, about it. For one thing, as noted, she didn't have a visible halo. Her hair was in its least frizzy of modes, laying lank against her head in anemic curls, the way it only got if she went for months without washing it (a feat she had not done once in her adult life, thank you very much). Her skin, though, was almost radiant, the freckles standing out even more starkly than they had the last time she gave any attention to a mirror.

Idly, she reached up and prodded at the skin of her face, feeling the flesh there as tender as the skin of a newborn babe. She opened her mouth, leaning back so that the light could illuminate her lower teeth. No fillings.

"...where am I?" she repeated, this time not as an idle question but as an important one.

She left the bathroom, and by the reflected light through the hall she found other light switches, and illuminated the whole as she had the part. There was a bedroom, but the bed was packed into a corner and on its side, with another medical bed taking its pride of place. This one was much fancier than the one in the living room, and lacked the dangling bags of fluids. She looked at the dresser, pulling it open to find very large clothing, cut for a man who had let himself go to seed.

She then glanced to the bedside table. There were a small cluster of pictures in frames there. One of them showed a bloated, bald old man with red and empty eyes staring past the camera while a few medical helpers with uneasy expressions tried to make it seem like all of them were having a good time and failing. Another picture, of a younger version of him with his family. And finally a picture of a young woman, the picture fading for age.

The last two made Rachel's stomach drop. She moved to the family picture, snatching it up and holding it so the glare didn't interrupt it. Those children were Phillip Junior, Jessica, and Samuel. All of the children seemed unhappy, but managing to varying degrees to hide it. The man, Phillip, just looked sick of life. And the last picture was one of her, when she was still a teenager, that Phillip had snapped of her when she wasn't paying attention.

"This is Phillip's room," she made the point clear to herself. Her gaze flicked over to the closet, then to the picture in her hand. The picture of her family after it lost her. Would he? She reopened that closet, and found stuffed into the very edge of it a bunch of old dresses, sized for a woman of diminutive proportions. Rachel let a chuckle out, shaking her head. Phillip really never got over her, did he?

She pulled out a dress and pulled it on, because it was a damned sight more convenient than a towel. But all of this just raised new questions. She distinctly recalled being made into road-kill. She could not hope to forget the unforgivable state that Heaven had fallen into. She could even still with crystal clarity remember the relative comfort of Hell. She remembered Charlie. She remembered Husk.

So why was she here on Earth right now?

She went back out to the living room, and found no answer to that question, but one to a question she hitherto hadn't had a chance to ask. If this was Phillip's room, where was Phillip? And by the bits that belonged inside a medical bag, left piled on the floor, it was obvious somebody had an episode of some sort here, one that the paramedics may or may not have been able to stem, but obviously resulted in them moving him out.

Rachel felt a sting of shame having not pegged immediately what this 'apartment' was, with its room and bathroom and sleeping area and no kitchen whatsoever: This was a supported living unit, for somebody in palliative care. Phillip, by the ruthless advance of ages, had grown old, grown sickly, and by the look of the picture, didn't establish any kind of connection with his children so they'd want to look after him. Then, maybe another stroke, or heart attack, or something like it. The date on the bag in the rack was from about a week ago.

No, he wouldn't be dead, she realized. If Phillip were dead, they'd have have cleaned this place out and put another dying patient here in his spot. She finally went to the window and pulled the blinds back. Having spent some time getting used to the light, she only flinched a little when she looked out and saw an incredibly familiar skyline poking its way above the trees.

"Fredericton," she said.

Then there was a moment of silence.

"Those little bastards actually brought me back to life," she finally said.

---

Chapter 30

The Unthinkable

---

Charlie perked up visibly when the modestly dressed Incubus finally returned to her little corner of Hell. She'd gotten the message that he was returning second hand, but given that he'd spent more than a week out of contact, she had feared perhaps that either something had happened to him, or else that the whole first meeting was some sort of elaborate joke on her to raise her hopes before a long wait slowly ground them into dust.

Of course, when Byron showed up, he was walking slowly, hitchingly, and looked extremely unwell. His nose and ears were almost vibrant in color, while the skin farther away from them nearly became white, and his hair seemed to have thinned somewhat. He was breathing deeply just walking into the 'gates' of the cafe which a family of enterprising imps had set up to both take advantage of Charlie's protective armed forces, and to sell stuff to them. Considering that stuff was restricted to food and fancy coffee, she saw no reason to interfere with the curiously named Pascal's Mugging.

"You're finally back!" Charlie said brightly, moving to offer him her chair, because it was the closest to the gate and taking the seat opposite it. Byron gave a grateful nod of his head, then carefully made his way to the chair, dropping himself into it and breathing heavy. "You don't look so well; are you alright?"

"If you'd asked me two days ago, I would have begged for death," Byron said, offering a mild chuckle. "Doradric Fever. I think I caught it coming up the first time. The timing works out."

Charlie winced a bit. "That is really bad for Concubi. Shouldn't you be in a hospital?"

"As though an independent journalist in Hell gets health-care benefits," Byron rolled his eyes.

"Well, if I'd known, I would have paid for it myself," she said. Byron ceased in his eye roll, and turned his gaze at her, as though in naked disbelief. But he didn't voice that doubt. "I was beginning to worry that the whole event had been canceled without telling me."

"No. No the fault is all mine," Byron said, continuing to breathe deep. He looked tired just walking here. Considering that likely the only walking he'd done was from the perimeter to the gate of Pascal's Mugging, that spoke to his willpower that he could get up even in the state he was in. He pulled a pair of lapel-mics from a pocket, glancing at the clip of one before handing it to her, while pinning the second one to himself. "Alright, please say something to test the microphone."

"Say what, exactly?" she asked. The Incubus checked a Hellphone for a moment, then nodded.

"Yes, it's working," he said. He tried to take a drink of the glass of water which had been set out waiting for him, but managed to get it down the wrong pipe and reduce him to a coughing fit.

"We can reschedule this if you're still…" Charlie began.

"No we're doing this now before I keel over and die," Byron said, warding her off with a raised finger. After a bit more coughing, he seemed to settle himself, and managed to successfully pull down a second sip. "Alright. Please state your name, and what it is you're doing here in Pride Ring."

"Right," she dusted her lap and straightened her back, trying to make herself at least feel as imperial as she by rights ought to always be. "My name is Charlotte Magne, of the House of Morningstar, daughter of Archangel Lucifer, Heir to the Low Throne, and declared inheritor to the position of King of All Hell."

Byron muttered something, and when she paused, he looked at her and then gave a start. "What?" he asked.

"What was that you just said?" she asked.

"I was just… You are also the daughter of the Firstling Lilith, Damned-By-God, correct?" Byron said.

She wasn't sure why he worded it like that, but she answered to the affirmative, then started throwing up air-quotes. "Yes. Which I know, technically makes me a 'Nephilim', and makes me 'half human', and 'at best half devil'. But as you can plainly see, this is the kind of work that doesn't require a truck-load of demonic power. Anybody could have done this. I'm just the one who decided to do it first."

"I suppose that's true," Byron said. "So what exactly inspired you to try to build this sort of… ersatz-Purgatory here in the city that your father uses to rule over all of Hell?"

"That's a bit of a personal story, actually," she admitted. "It has a lot to do with my girlfriend."

"That would be…" the Incubus wracked his brain for a moment, then snapped the plastic fingers of his prosthetic hand. "Vagatha, the one who glared at us from the door last time."

"She can be a bit… protective," Charlie said. She sighed. "Do you know what happens to Sinners when they first land in Hell?"

"I don't come to Pride very often, and frankly, I've never had a reason to look into it," Byron said, daubing his fingers in the water and spreading it across his brow.

"They land here, confused, naked, and sometimes angry. And they're immediately grabbed up by whoever's got the strength and the cruelty to grab them. They get sold into slavery, or raped, or cannibalized, or sometimes all three in various order. They're dragged into the very worst part of Hell's ecosystem the instant that they arrive, before they even know which way is down," Charlie shook her head slowly. "Is it any wonder why so many of them are so violent, so mistrusting, and so cruel? For the entire time they've been in my homeland, it's all they've ever known."

Byron tilted his head a bit. "I can't quite grasp where this sentiment of yours is coming from. Everybody knows Sinners are monsters who are kept up here for the good of everybody else," he said.

"You don't mean that. And if you do mean that, it's because you don't know any better," Charlie said, her jaw tensing. Byron seemed to grasp that he'd stepped on a bear-trap, and recoiled before planting his other foot in one, too.

"It's just," he said, measuredly, with a calming gesture with his flesh-and-blood hand, "it's very well known that Sinners are what they are because they couldn't live according to their own moral rules on their own world. There's a lot of distrust to be had toward a people who have, by their very existence here, proven that they can't function in a society."

"Wendy was a good person," Charlie said, trying not to let her anger surge. He didn't know what he was talking about. And speaking from ignorance was something that she had long ago consigned herself to just having to deal with. She was not the kind of person who would force another's opinion to be one that suited her. That was the easy path, and the wrong one. "She lived a life trying to help people, and came to Hell because at the end of that life she killed herself rather than suffer needlessly for decades. And for the sin of self-slaughter, she went through every single thing that I've said that new Sinners suffer, and more that was even worse."

Byron opened his mouth, but closed it, likely rethinking what he was about to say as either offensive, ignorant, or both, and deciding better.

"And it seems like more and more people are being sent here for less and less sin," Charlie pointed out. It had been something of a shock for her to actually read through the manifest of reasons why Sinners were in Hell, as provided during their entry into the Happy Hotel. The oldest ones, the multi-centennial Sinners who had been trying to use the Stone of Farewell but didn't fall into the Abyss when it did, they all had registers of rape and mass-murder and torture, things that they were trying to better themselves from. She had five of them now, a little clique that didn't talk much with the other, younger Sinners, a group that had lost themselves for three centuries in despair, believing that absolution was now impossible.

And then she had people from the turn of the previous century, where people who killed a single person, either through intent or neglect, would find themselves in the Hell, and then, at the Hotel.

And by the middle of the previous century, even petty theft was enough to damn them.

From the turn of this century, many people didn't even know what they'd done to warrant damnation. The landed confused, and were brought low by those who prey on such things. People who had committed no great offense, no ruin of another. Adulterers, maybe, or thieves, or con-artists, or prostitutes. If the trend continued as it seemed to be heading, with Rozarin Ahmadi as an example, there were now people who led good if difficult lives, without noticeable sin, landing in Hell without recourse.

It was almost enough to drive her to despair. But she had to believe that helping was the right path. Because to do nothing, that was unthinkable. The incubus nodded, as though trying to get her to continue, because she'd been thoughtful and quiet for a longer time than she'd realized.

"Which means I have a moral imperative to help anybody who asks of me. Even if I know they're not going to succeed. As long as they honestly, with whole-heart try," Charlie said. The incubus nodded, fidgetting with his mechanical fingers as though deeply unsure of what to say.

"Alright," Byron finally said. "I know this is going to sound like a bit of an aside, but… what became of this 'Wendy'? You seem to only talk about her in the past-tense, so…"

"Oh, she was our first success story, like I mentioned last time," Charlie said. "The first Sinner who was Redeemed and went to Heaven."

"And forgive me if this seems incredibly insensitive, but what actual proof do you have that she 'succeeded' and was Redeemed, as opposed to just disappeared into the night?" Byron asked, looking at least contrite in having to ask the question. And though she didn't like that the question was raised, given the base cynicism of Hell, it was one that most would ask.

"Because I have these," she said, pulling the small, but incredibly heavy bag from one of her pockets and setting it onto the table. She leaned down and rolled the bag a bit, so that the crystal dust within was able to catch the light the way that it was becoming known, splitting white light into melancholy hues. "Now, I know it's not much to look at, but these are proof positive that she and Fiona are both in Heaven right now!"

She finally looked up, having finally gotten the anti-rainbow to form, as it would when arranged just so, and saw that Byron was leaning away with an alarmed look on his face. "Wh-what is that?" he asked.

"Wages!" she said brightly, he stared at her as though she'd laid out a plate of baby-entrails instead of a bag of scintillating dust. Which was the kind of thing you'd only find in Gluttony, to be frank. He turned a concerned look from her to the bag and then back to her. "Wages of Sin."

"Wages of Sin," he repeated. Tentatively, he reached toward the bag, flinching back upon touching the plastic for the first time, before switching hands and lifting it with his augmetic instead of the one made of flesh. As though he were afraid it would infect him. He had to try twice to get the bag, which looked to contain a few grams but actually massed quite a few kilograms, and held them in his palm. "Do… you know what these are?" he asked, looking thoroughly baffled.

"You'd need to ask Alastor about the nitty-gritty, but I think that it's the cast-off sin of the person who redeemed themselves," she said. Byron gave a deeply uncomfortable noise in the back of his throat and inelegantly dropped the bag back onto the table between them. "Are you alright? You seem afraid of it. It's just dust in a bag."

"It's the physical crystalization of sin itself," he said. He gave his head a brief shake. "I know God doesn't exactly give us a lot of attention down here, but if the Angels saw this stuff… Actually, I can't even guess what they'd do. This is… this is wild."

"So you believe that Sinners can be Redeemed, then?" she asked. This guy knew more about magical stuff than she would have guessed.

"It's a bit hard to ignore the evidence of my own eyes," Byron said, somewhat distantly. He glanced away from the table for a moment, as though he heard something, but returned his attention to her. "Does this happen… often?" he asked, now leaning a bit back in his seat but not shying away from the Wages nearly as much as he had.

"Redemption? Admittedly, no. Not yet at least," Charlie said. "We've only had two Redemptions. But but that's two more in this year than there've been in three centuries, or so!"

"That is a marked uptick, yes," Byron said.

"And while Wendy Went Up at night when we were, admittedly, all drunk, I was standing right in front of Fiona – dead sober! – when she did likewise! These Wages," she pulled a second baggie from her pocket, which contained a small amount more dust and when she set it on the table made the thing creak in protest, "are from her!"

"No kidding," Byron said. "Were there any other witnesses?"

"Yes! Angel Dust, who is our first client, was right there with me when she went. And Vaggie was with me, of course. Oh, and Alastor!" she said.

"The… Radio Demon," he said, slowly.

"Yes, Alastor is currently helping my project in… well, he's…" Charlie tried to find a way to end that sentence both honestly and in a way that reflected well on both her and the demon in question. And she was having a hard time finding a way to split that hair. "I'm sure he's finding some way to be helpful up there in the penthouse. But yes, Alastor saw it, too. Do you want to talk to him? He seemed to know the most about the whole thing."

"That's not necessary," Byron said rather abruptly, and with a nervous expression. He turned a glance to the doors to the Hotel, across the street, and visibly swallowed. Oh, right. People were terrified of the Radio Demon. "But perhaps you could have this 'Angel Dust'… why does that name sound familiar?"

"Oh, he's a porn-star. I'm sure your kind would be aware of him," she said.

"My kind?" Byron asked flatly.

"Yes, your kind the iiiinnnc-I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply…" she cut herself off as she realized what exactly she was saying to the shockingly modestly-dressed incubus sitting across from her.

"No, you didn't imply, you outright stated," Byron said. He gave a short chuckle. "Not all of us are that way, you know."

"Sexually attracted to men?" She hazarded.

"...involved in the production and distribution of pornography," Byron said flatly. He narrowed his eyes at her. "How much do you actually know about Concubian Culture?"

"I know you spend a lot of time in the Human World," she said with a shrug.

"So practically nothing then. Even I – no, we're not going to get into that," Byron said, as though preventing himself from going on a screed much the way that sometimes Charlie had to do likewise. "But this is beside the point; I'm supposed to be interviewing you about this project, which is shockingly successful, all things considered, not your woeful lack of knowledge of the cultures of Hell."

That stung at Charlie in a way that she hadn't expected. And now that he brought it up, she realized just how right he was. Despite having spent both centuries of her life here in Hell, she knew almost nothing about the cultures of the populace who peopled it. Beyond the aristocracy, which was by-and-large rooted in Pride Ring, she had to admit she knew almost nothing about the way that the different Fiend Clades arranged themselves, socially, or even why Hellhounds were still kept as slaves when they were clearly just fuzzy people.

"So what else would you like to ask about?" Charlie asked. She gave a shrug. "Since I'm mostly just pumping money into things ever since Rachel got here, I've got all day to spend talking about things."

"Actually, Rachel is a good place to start," Byron said, pulling out a paper notepad that already had some scribblings on it, but clear even upside-down and across the table was 'find out about Rachel Scailes' which was circled and underlined. "How about we discuss your programming director?"

Fredericton was not much like how Rachel remembered it. As though at some point in the last thirty years the capital of New Brunswick had gotten into its head that it needed to be significantly busier than it actually was. It wasn't like this was goddamned Halifax. Stay in your lane, Fredericton. You're the lazy capital.

Of course, wandering the streets in the warmth of summer was edifying in a way that Hell couldn't match. For one thing, all of the people around her looked like people, and not animals, living flames, or even weirder things. For another, despite the trumped-up business of the expanded Fredericton of 2023, things felt refreshingly mundane. She had left the care-home that Phillip was languishing in without being questioned by anybody, with all of the things of worth that she'd pilfered from her other-half's room. It was a strange thing to think about. The vow was 'until death do us part', and she had rather definitively died. That she was now alive again still put into question whether Phillip was an ex-husband, or a current husband. And that was all without the fact that he was likely in medical freefall, so if she waited long enough, she would be able to cut the Gordian Knot with a sword called 'late-husband'.

In a way, she wished that Husk were here. Only not, because Husk was a Sinner, and he'd burst into flame upon entering the mortal world. Still, he had shown her in every regard what an actual lover was meant to be. And considering what she knew now, it probably wouldn't take long to find a way to communicate with Hell and get a Hellphone up here. That, too, was another shock to her; everybody seemed to have their eyes locked on their phones as they went around. From a world with bricks for cellular phones, to a heaven with little communications infrastructure whatsoever, it seemed Fredericton was taking cues from Hell, rather than the other place.

She had some small amount of money, now. Not just in the bills that had been stuffed in a drawer (Who decided it was a good idea to make money out of plastic? That just felt wrong), but also an additional injection that she got by pawning off the jewelry of hers that Phillip had kept after her death. For once, his lack of wit and intense sentimentality was working to her favor.

The public library that she'd used to go to had expanded vastly from her recollections of it. Once it had been a musty, dark collection of books and periodicals. Now it seemed to be an information nexus that would have sparked an honest flame of delight in her dead, dead soul. Still, she definitely appreciated having a place where she could go, and use computers that didn't sprawl over an entire cabinet, to track down a hideous amount of information on pretty much everybody in North America.

If she had thought Titter and Sinstagram had been Hellish inventions, a few hours on the internet had educated her.

She had stayed there in that building for most of the morning, only leaving when it became clear that there were people stacked up and waiting for the computer she was on to clear. It seemed that the homeless population of Fredericton had only expanded since her death. Now, technically, she was one of them.

Unless this worked out.

She had not been idly frittering away three hours in the library imbibing celebrity gossip about people she didn't know nor care about, nor ogling the lifestyles of people who didn't matter. She had spent it tracking down two people.

Phillip Scailes Junior.

Jessica Aylen Scailes.

She had also in a moment of masturbatory morbidity looked up herself. Rachel Scailes warranted a tiny notice in the bottom corner of an obituaries page. Which wasn't paid for by Phillip, but Davan Dijkstra, which was a name she had to subsequently look up, but was the older, Polish man who essentially lieutenanted the mental health clinic she was working at when she died.

And she also found by searching for him that Dijkstra vanished without a trace a few days after her death.

But the glut of her time was spent tracking down her still-living children. She knew not to look for Samuel, because Sam by many accounts had died in the interim. But there'd been no mention of Junior's or Jess' current whereabouts at care-home. And because the internet utterly ran roughshod over the very notion of privacy, she found out a lot on her kids.

Such as the apartment where Junior lived.

Rachel knew that there was no way she could just ring his bell and try to explain this through the intercom, so she did what she always did when she was put into an awkward situation. She assumed a role. The role of the hour was somebody young, flabbergasted, and at the end of her rope, downcast and distraught. To make herself seem the most harmless sort of pathetic that she could, so that anybody living in the building would feel compelled to let her in 'to go to her apartment'.

She only had to try it on one person, an older woman who walked with her back straight even though she used a cane. The woman seemed to fold instantly before Rachel's persona, and allowed her in. While it was somewhat embarrassing to have to apologize and thank and force herself to stumble over her words (such failures of erudiction were only possible by conscious effort, to Rachel), it did get her past the most annoying of the gates between her and where she needed to go.

The building was fairly rough in its construction, with one of the walls having a patch that was painted with a color that didn't quite match the rest of the hallway. Likely covering up a big piece of graffiti. And all of the walls here on the ground floor were naked to the concrete. This was a place of people living at the bottom of their income bracket, just over the hump of homelessness. If she'd dared to hope to find better, she'd have been disappointed. She continued acting the young and scatterbrained fool during the elevator ride up, because the woman had joined her in the lift. The moment that the doors closed behind the stranger and left Rachel alone, she let the entire mask drop and fell silent.

It was plain to her that despite all of the research she'd done, she might have been at least a bit better served to have put thought into what she was going to say to her children. She knew what she looked like, now. Her body wasn't just resurrected at the age she died; it had actually subtracted a few years. Why, she barely even seemed to be thirty at all. That meant that she was going to look like somebody younger than her own children, which was not an easy thing to explain away.

But there wasn't much else to do. She had no documentation. There was no allowance by the Canadian government to resurrect a SIN due to 'being brought back from the dead'. If she didn't start gathering allies soon, she'd be homeless again, and she had sworn in her youth that she would never be so without means ever again.

Well, the door was right over there. Nut up, or shut up.

Rachel chose to nut up. She knocked on the door. Through that door, she could hear voices inside. Loud voices. Screaming. Not angry screaming, though. It sounded like excited adolescents at play. That pulled an oddly warm smile onto her otherwise porcelain-doll face. And the thought about it kept her musing until the door swung open, and Rachel had to look up into the face of a tall, curvy blonde.

Rachel almost didn't recognize her.

"Um… can I help you?" Jessica Scailes asked. Jess had been fat as a child, then beset by anorexia during her adolescence to the point of near-emaciation. It was edifying to see her now finally in a body which no longer swung to the extremes but found a happy place somewhere in the middle.

"This is going to sound a little strange," Rachel said, "but I need you to remember '91."

"Excuse me?" Jess asked. She'd certainly bloomed into a lovely woman, sharing Rachel's shotgunning of freckles but having golden hair like her father, and a pair of blue eyes made her quite a stunning portrait. In a way, she looked somewhat like a shorter, less evil version of Charlie's mother.

"Christmas of '91. The turkey. The brick," she said.

Jess leaned back, alarm coming to her face as no doubt the memories came back to her. Rachel had been on her back for the entire month due to pneumonia, so the kids (and they were merely kids at the time) tried to cook the traditional Christmas Dinner. And it went about as well as one could expect when the oldest of them hadn't reached puberty yet. Though they didn't start a fire, when the bird finally was removed from the oven, it had all of the edibility of a cinderblock, and likely had the same structural features as well.

Even in her weakened state, Rachel found the thing delightfully ridiculous. Sure, they'd wasted a bit of what little money they had, but it was a memory that the family could cherish. They had shamefully buried the turkey and the roaster it was stuck to in the bottom of a dumpster a few buildings over, and swore to never speak of it again.

"Wait a minute," Jess said. Good, she was cluing in. Not that Rachel doubted her; while Jessica took about 80% of her looks from her father, she had all of her mother's brain, which was a damned good thing all considered. "We never told anybody…"

"What's going on out there?" A male voice asked. It didn't sound like Phillip's, which was a relief. The next person to come around the corner was a gaunt looking, bean-pole of a man, his skin faintly yellowed with jaundice, and despite his skeletal look, his belly still stuck out a bit. His thinning and receded hair was red, not giving way to grey. He had Phillip's eyes, but more than enough of Rachel to counterbalance them. That would only be Junior. Junior recoiled back at seeing Rachel, instantly recognizing her, but instantly also disbelieving himself. Which he was right to, because she had died nearly twenty years ago.

"Do I need to offer a password to you, too? Or are you going to let me into your apartment?" Rachel asked.

"Wh… how?" Junior asked, coming to the door and trying to shoulder Jess out of the way (he failed, because Jess had more weight, which was dedicated to more useful things than liver-damage and beer-gut).

"No. This is impossible. People don't just come back from the dead," Jess said, giving her head a shake and causing her waves of hair to toss.

"The world, it turns out, is a bit more complicated than even I expected. So go ahead. Ask a question only your mother would know," Rachel prompted.

"The Metroid…" Junior began.

"Engage Ridley Mother Fucker, all capitals," Rachel said. That really stuck with her kids, didn't it? Well, it was a damned strange glitch to behold.

"What really happened to Foxy?" Jess asked.

"You tried to make a cat play with a hamster, and reality ensued," Rachel said. She turned to Junior. "Sorry about your hamster, by the way."

"But…" Junior stammered.

"Where did you meet Dad?" Jess asked.

"Do you want the story I told you, or the truth?" she asked. Jess blinked. "I told you I met him when he helped fix my broken-down car off of the TransCanada. But the fact is, I've never owned a car in my own name. I hunted for somebody lonely and desperate enough to shack up with a random woman, and found him drinking in a dive bar in Miramichi two doors down from a strip-club."

Junior leaned back, a look of alarm and some small measure of disgust on his face. Jess, though, slackened, as though hearing what she never thought she would.

"I take it that Phillip finally told a truer version of things than the one we gave to you," Rachel said.

"...How?"

"May I come in? I've been walking all day, and I'd like to sit down," Rachel said. Her two surviving children pulled back into the room (which despite this building looking as it did actually was decently spacious) and motioned to a sofa which had a bunch of pillows and blankets snarled up at one end. Somebody was sleeping here. Likely Jess, since this wasn't her home. The two children, both of them right at the cusp of adolescence, quieted when she entered, turning confused and querulous looks at Jess and Junior. Rather than take the sofa, she pulled her legs up under her on the easy-chair and leaned into the comfortable, broken-in faux-leather of it.

"Mom? Who is this?" the older and blonder of the two children asked.

"That's a very good question," Jess said. She shot a look at the chairs next to the table, and both boys cleared out into the kitchen/dining area to let the adults talk. "What exactly are you?"

"I'm exactly what you're trying to deny to yourself. I'm your mother," she said. Jess was tentative, but Junior's face twitched at her saying the words aloud. "And as it turns out, not only are Heaven and Hell both real, but so is magic."

"Bullshit," Jess said. Phillip Junior sighed, though, and reached under the sofa with a hand, up into its springs, and pulled out a bottle of something that was a faintly metallic shade of blue-green, about half-filling a vodka bottle. Upon seeing the bottle, Jess scowled. "Goddamn it, PeeJay…"

Junior didn't answer her, reaching down his sweatpants and pulling out a revolver.

"WHAT THE FUCK, PEEJAY!" Jess shouted at him.

He ignored her, dumping the bullets out of the revolver, and then dribbling a bit of the liquid onto one of them. The copper remained the same. But the lead stopped looking dull and grey, and turned to shining gold.

"You wanna know why I'm so sick? I'm not actually an alcoholic. I hardly ever drink. I'm an alchemist," Junior said to his sister. He turned to his mother. "Which, believe me, can't bring back the dead no matter what I tried. So what exactly happened to you?"

"I offered a favor to some imps," she said, relieved that she wouldn't have to convince both of her children about the far-stranger state of reality that they actually lived in. Jess was just staring, baffled, at the golden bullet that Junior abandoned as he reloaded the rest and tucked his gun away. Junior frowned.

"...imps are real?" he asked. Well, now they had a good jumping off point. So spending the rest of the day catching up in both directions with her family sounded like exactly the kind of break that Rachel needed.

Birah was sweating bullets, and glad that the automata he was piloting wasn't doing likewise.

There had been no way he would have been able to secret away the Type 26's that were being arduously reconstructed by Yael and his people. So if he wanted to actually learn something worth knowing about the Nephilim in Hell, he determined that he'd have to make some sort of proxy-Exorcist himself to do the job.

And what he produced in that desperate, ceaseless week was so pathetic that Sahaquiel would have scoffed in disgust at it. It had none of an Exorcist's battle protocols, was about as resilient as a popsicle-stick bridge with bad glue, and most dangerously, had no Essence Shunt. It was only by grace of the Essence Shunts in the Type 26's that Strigoi and her people were Sent Vigil rather than turned into carcasses. It was a tool that (usually) prevented any meaningful magical or physical harm from filtering back to do damage to its pilot. And necessarily, by Birah's lack of craft, he had to leave it on the cutting room floor. So he was vulnerable in a way that no other Piloting Angel could be vulnerable.

But for all its failings, its faulty design, its lack and its ignominy, it had a practical and feasible aperture through which he could feed his magic out and do such things as create and maintain glamours, or do such things as were needful to survive with a fragile body in a place like Hell.

Of course, that a Secondborn had been able to create something which was even somewhat comparable, even to a laughably pathetic measure, to the works of the Ingenuity of God was probably a legendary achievement in its own right.

"So how exactly did you meet this 'Rachel Scailes'?" Birah asked. Charlie brightened at the conversation turning away from things which seemed to make her viscerally sad.

"She fell into our back yard!" Charlie said. She gave a shrug. "Angel Dust was the one that brought her in; I was busy saying goodbye to Maelstrom at the time. But when she came in, she sat down, ate a meal fit for five, and then… well… I'm not sure if I should talk about what she told me."

"May I ask why?"

"She… has certain opinions about Heaven," Charlie said, making it clear through her tone alone that she didn't necessarily agree with those opinions. She shook her head. "I don't want to say I don't believe her now, but… well… I didn't then. But since then, all the news I hear is lining up with her version of events."

"Which was?" Birah asked.

"That Heaven has gotten bad. Really, really bad," Charlie said quietly. "That something's gone wrong up there. That the machines are broken and nobody with the power to fix them is even trying."

How right she was. Few were the Angels who tried to staunch the bleeding of a crumbling Heaven. Even Birah couldn't say for certain that he was doing all he possibly could. He had dedicated a week of effort and the difficult-to-source materials of a stagnant and devolving Heaven to pursue a lark and have a conversation with one of the Great Enemies of God. That didn't speak well as to his pragmatism.

"I've been hearing similar things, but haven't corroborated them," Birah said, not showing his proverbial cards.

"Neither have I, actually. And it's not like I can't just pop up to Fort Abandon and look for myself… but every time I think about it, I just shudder," Charlie said. Her eyes were cast down at her hands, which were slowly rotating her cup of coffee pensively. She didn't want to look the truth in its eye and have her world-view break completely.

In that, she was more like an Angel than most would care to admit.

Charlie gave her head a shake and continued. "So after Rachel finished eating, she asked some questions about how Hell works, and then offered to work here."

"I feel as though there are some steps that you're leaving out," Birah said, but forcing himself to keep his tone extremely flat. That he was pointing out an obvious lack, rather than making an accusation.

"No, that is pretty much exactly how it happened. I explained The Chain of Being and a few bits about Naked Law to Rachel, and then she demanded that she work at the Hotel because it was clear she was needed there," Charlie contended, looking a sort of wistfully annoyed at it. Charlie looked to Birah once more. "After that, that's when she started to take the lead on, well, a lot of things."

"I had heard mention of a 'Fiona O'Daire'," Birah prompted.

"Yes, Rachel's the reason why the Dragon of Connacht is awake, and sane, and in a very roundabout way why she's currently Redeemed and up in Heaven," Charlie said with a stern nod. "It turns out, that there's an assassin one city over who's very good at brain surgery!"

"Is that so?" Birah asked. It behooved Hell to have one of such eclectic skills embodied in a single, strange person.

"And then she… actually, why not just ask her yourself? Rachel! Rachel, that interviewer is back!" Charlie said, waving across the traffic-less street to the approaching, petite form of Rachel Scailes. She had the sphinx-Sinner with her, as often she did. As far as bodyguards go, she could have done worse. Birah had looked into this 'Husk' through what channels he could open while still in Heaven. While he had been born in an Appalachian backwater, and died a sad, lonely drunk in the desert, in Hell he had slowly, subtly, and quietly become a person of some significant influence.

"Where is Dresden?" Rachel immediately asked upon entering the open-air cafe section of Pascal's Mugging.

"What?" she asked.

"Where did you put him?" Rachel wasn't letting that go. Charlie sighed, and pointed to another building nearby; it was fire-damaged and had a crumbled hole in its facing as though somebody'd piloted a bus into it. Rachel narrowed her eyes, as though scrutinizing Charlie for a lie, then when she was satisfied she didn't see one.

"Good," Rachel said. She turned to Birah next, looking at him with concern and leaning back from his visage which was visibly unwell. Easier to not get people to attack a man if they feared they might become ill through the attacking. And a week-long, paralytic illness was a good excuse for why he had been so out-of-the-loop until his eventual reappearance. "I hope he's no longer infectious."

"Only to other Concubi, and even then, I'm probably out of the worst," Birah said. A lot of time and mental effort had gone into him crafting a 'backstory' for Byron Pael, the Incubus independent journalist who attached to eccentric characters to do their legwork for them. But it turned out that much of that had been utterly moot, as most of the questions that he had arduously developed air-tight answers for were utterly ignored by Charlie.

She knew almost nothing about the peccadilloes of her own people. Which was a foreign thought to Birah, at least at first. But then, he was also clever enough to realize that Hell was much more balkanized and much more heterogeneous than Heaven even on its most simplistic Rings. Heaven merely had Angels, Archangels, and Cherubs, along with its Innocent. Hell had a cavalcade of different clades of Fiends, the imps, the Elder Devils, the Leviathan-blooded abominations, Sinners up here, and even stranger things the further from God you went.

"Byron's finally back to do his piece on the Hotel!" Charlie said, trying to force some enthusiasm back into her voice.

"I am not blind, Charlie," Rachel said. "Puff piece, or hit-piece?"

"You do realize I wouldn't actually admit to preparing to do a hatchet-job," Birah pointed out.

Rachel nodded and turned to Charlie. "He's probably more honest than most," Rachel said. Husk, seeming to predict her next move before she said a word or twitched a brow, picked up a chair from a nearby table and plunked it down for her beside Charlie, so that Birah now faced both of them. Husk sat at the otherwise abandoned table, keeping an eye on not just Birah but everything around him. "If you're actually going to accurately report on the Hotel, then you should probably get the obvious problems out of the way first."

"The obvious problems?" Birah asked.

"That very few Sinners actually care enough to try to move toward Redemption, considering the majority of them still down here in Hell landed after Stonefall and thus just decided to be the worst versions of themselves," Rachel said. "That any attempts at changing people necessarily is fraught with difficulties on the verge of utter impossibility. That there are a number of people currently under Charlie's roof that are exploiting her for free housing and protection from their enemies."

"They're doing what?" Charlie asked, seemingly caught off guard by Rachel's points.

"And that necessarily any successes that the Hotel produces will be a gross negative for Hell, as the only people good enough to actually make something of themselves necessarily leave Hell behind and go to a place which is, in my opinion, somewhat worse," Rachel continued.

"But that doesn't negate the good that they've done in the time that they're here!" Charlie gamefully interjected. And Rachel, for all her apparent pessimism, could only give a begrudging nod.

"If you'd like my opinion on the matter, on the record, I think Charlie should have a firmer hand with the people who are here," Rachel said.

"Rachel!" Charlie said.

"If nothing else, to prevent people from parasitizing the Hotel Project if they don't actually intend to either be of benefit to themselves, or to the greater New Purgatory Endeavor," Rachel clarified.

"I can't turn people away. I refuse to," Charlie said.

"And the longer you hold that opinion, the more people will take you for a ride, and the worse it will be when you finally come to your senses and have to do what I've been telling you to do for months, now," Rachel concluded. Charlie was rallying to launch a new counterpoint, but there was a crash and a billow of oily black smoke that came from the building with a hole in it, and both women reacted with either a flinch and a start in Charlie's case, or a hanging of the head and a groan from Rachel.

"Dresden," Rachel muttered. She turned to Charlie. "Aren't you glad he's not in the Hotel itself anymore?"

Charlie had a rock-stubborn look on her face, and refused Rachel the satisfaction of agreeing. She stood up, and for just a moment, plastered a kindly smile onto her face. "Please excuse me. I've got a situation that I need to go and deal with. Order some coffee and a scone; don't worry, I'll cover any costs. Rachel?"

"If I go with you, you know what I'm going to tell you," Rachel said. She reached up and rubbed at the knife-scored medallion that hung around her neck, and concentrated for a moment as she stood before reaching for something.

"Just… come," Charlie's magnanimity was cracking, but held long enough for the two women to rise and head toward the building, which the emitted another crash, and had one of the walls bow outward slightly as something slammed into its inner surface with incredible force.

"...where's my phone?" Rachel asked. But then she shook her head and glanced over to Husk. Husk shrugged and followed. As Rachel went, so went Husk's nation. There was a connection there, one that was now growing stronger and harder to break. And even Birah could see that, bit by bit, the old swindler was being changed by it.

The sincerity of this whole affair was what shocked Birah the most. He had little doubt as to Charlie believing in herself from the last meeting, but this one was proving that her assurance was not born in a place of delusion. Now, he had been shown the metaphorical receipts. He saw the costs of things, and the worth of things. They weren't laboring in ignorant bliss toward an impossible ends. They had an achievable goal, if one that seemed utterly impossible to Birah. But then, airplanes had seemed impossible not just to man but to Angel as well, until a pair of brothers and a few other people forgotten by history just pulled up their socks in North Carolina and did it.

Who was to say what Birah thought to be impossible was an inevitability just waiting for its appropriate pioneer?

Birah cleared his throat loudly to the waitress nearby. The sign on the outer wall of the building proudly declared that they offered coffee made with 'smuggled bean', and since it was hard to find a worse strain of coffee than the infernica bean, he was willing to entertain anything that wasn't naturally grown in Hell. Infernica, for all it was rich in caffeine and could be produced literally anywhere and in any climate save for permafrost, had the most foul and acrid aftertaste, like you had just gargled brimstone and vomit. "What kind of bean do you actually smuggle down here?" Birah asked. It was somewhat foolish, as he knew that this device didn't have a lot of 'stomach' room, but he could still taste, and anything to keep up appearances was a godsend.

"We have the finest round-bean from the Human Woaaaht the fuck!" the cat-like Sinner broke off with a scream of alarm, recoiling away from Birah, who turned, and found that Charlie and Rachel's place now sat another form. One who grinned broadly with glowing red eyes and a blood-red suit.

"They only have Robusta, but I agree, it's a vast improvement over local strains. I always tell them that steeping raw native beans for two days would remove most of the foulness, but impatience and greed don't always heed good advice," The Radio Demon said. "I'll have a cup myself as well. Do be a dear and fetch them for us."

The Sinner tried to turn and run, but Alastor's hand zipped out and caught the orange furred tail of the Sinner and prevented her exodus. Alastor turned to her, all of the cruelty of a demon in the height of his madness present in that twist of a grin.

"Two cups of coffee. Robusta. Please," Alastor repeated himself. "Don't make me order third time."

The Sinner darted into the building. There was a faint scent of urine in the air. Alastor chuckled, clapping the fur off of his hands.

"It's ever so hard to find good help these days. I trust you know who I am?"

"Alastor, whose aliases include The Radio Demon, The Beast That Grins, The Pridebreaker, The Crone Killer, and a host of other grisly accomplishments? Yes. Yes I know who you are," Birah said. Glad again that this machine could not sweat.

"That's for the best, certainly," Alastor said. He the leaned forward in his seat. "But that doesn't deprive you of your need to introduce yourself to me."

"Right. I am Byron Pael. Independent journalist and researcher," Birah said, pointedly not extending a hand for a shake. There were few Sinners truly of note in Hell. Cain was one such. In Birah's opinion, it was a travesty the way that he was treated by the Firstborn. If a man achieves all of the prerequisites for ascension by the Stone of Farewell, let him arise! But instead God firmly said no, that Cain would suffer eternally. Or the widow Carmilla and her human daughters, women personally damned by God merely for the entanglement of Zagan. Alastor was the opposite of those. He was somebody whom, upon Birah's learning of him, he was glad that there existed a maelstrom of torment for him to be cast into, and wished there was some way for it to be made worse.

"That is a blatant lie," Alastor said.

"I'm sorry?" Birah asked.

"You're going to be if you aren't honest with me, certainly," Alastor said. Birah blinked, then set his hand to push himself out of his seat. "You will stay exactly where you are. Because I'm not done talking to you, and we can either do this here, in the urbane environs of this cafe on the upper end of mediocrity, or we can do this in the penthouse of the Hazbin Hotel. And I assure you, I have no concessions up there as to the comfort of other souls."

"I didn't come here to be threatened by some random Sinner…" Birah began.

"I am not 'some random' Sinner. I am the Radio Demon," Alastor said.

"...and I doubt that Charlie or Rachel would much appreciate if they come back from their little problem to find you torturing their interviewer," Birah continued.

"Do I look like the kind of person who cares?" Alastor asked, grin growing wider. "Rachel has already tried to defy me before. Her attempts at resisting my designs were laughably adorable. And Charlotte? I'm certain I can arrange for her to heed my word over yours. She's a delightfully naive one, our Heir to the Throne. So easy to mould into a shape that pleases me."

Birah felt a weight in his stomach. If there was one thing which was known without any contention about the Radio Demon, it was that as strong as he was physically, his magic was even stronger. And Birah's piss-poor proxy for an Exorcist had no Essence Shunt. If the Radio Demon wanted to strike Birah dead, he could kill Birah in Heaven dead without leaving his seat at Pascal's Mugging. Birah settled himself into his seat again.

"So let's try this again, 'Birah The Spellbinder',"Alastor said. "By all means… introduce yourself."

---

Jess looked like she was questioning everything she had ever learned and every decision she had ever made in her entire life, watching as her only surviving brother talked about using chemicals to perform magic. Rachel couldn't say that she blamed the poor woman. Magic was not a thing which Rachel had exactly indoctrinated them to believe in. Better they have a ruthlessly pragmatic mindset, that the world was what it was, and the only way to succeed at it was to banish magical thinking and take physical, tangible actions. That those tangible actions could apparently yield magical results was a wrinkle that Rachel could not have foretold.

It was evening now, and though she was dead tired, she stayed awake, trying to catch up on everything that she had missed while being dead. Though neither Junior nor Jessica were married (at forty and forty one, no less) both of them had 'good enough' families, if ones that weren't the sort that Rachel was deeply familiar with. It seemed that the modern age didn't value rigidity the way that Rachel's had. Relationships could be begun on a whim and last for decades, but without actually demanding the traditional waymarks of engagement, marriage, and children.

She should have been alive in the modern age, Rachel pondered. And then she recalled that she was, in fact, alive in the modern age. And now she was technically younger than her children, so she had even more claim to it than they did.

"Are you going to fall out of your chair, Jeej?" Junior asked, finally breaking off recounting of his attempts at using alchemy to perform a resurrection ritual – a feat for which it turned out alchemy was simply the wrong tool for the job. He wasn't bitter that he'd spent decades barking up the wrong tree, though. He supported his family through 'chemical engineering', which was a convoluted way of saying that he turned fake jewelry into actual gold and silver which he resold to metals-investors. He'd pointed out that there was actually some utility in stripping gold off of shitty jewelry, though it often required dozens of garbage rings, chains, and necklaces to give so much as a few grams of gold. Junior, not beholden to merely using the gold which was actually there, could reap a lot more from the same process without raising any real questions.

Jessica, conversely, had a fantastically mundane job, being co-president of something to do with technology and the internet. Jessica had been somewhat stunned in relating how she earned her living, and Rachel admittedly was somewhat in the dark as to the nature and historiography of the timeline of the internet-age, let alone where a woman like Jessica who came up with nothing could be made so comfortably wealthy by it.

And that brought the topic to the children. And there were more than just Edgar and Simon. The elder of Jess's pair was already in university. The next three were Junior's, whose web of relations and affairs were so complicated that they required a graph to visualize; suffice it to say it was fortunate she hadn't villainized the gays when her children grew up, because Phillip Junior was half-way into that camp himself. No, to be fair, he was about as gay as Husk was, in that he was only interested in people, and not so off-put by the arrangement of their gonads. Junior actually had three children, had between them amidst a network of five people, including one other bisexual man and three women. They were too young to live here with him, according to Junior, and had taken after their mothers.

His youngest, born just earlier this year, had been named Samuel Scailes the Second. The pompous little rat actually put 'the second' on a birth certificate of somebody descended from Rachel. She almost rolled her eyes clear out of her head when she heard that one.

"I can't believe any of this is happening," Jessica said. "Any of this!"

"Sometimes, you have to simply accept the victories that life hands you," Junior said, a moment before Rachel was going to say it herself. He turned to Rachel. "Now I know you've been waiting to hear about us for a long time, but I can't really contain my curiosity any longer my self: Did you talk to Sam in Heaven?"

"Sam didn't go to Heaven," Rachel said. That had been stunning news to her as well, and the slap of it seem to hit both of her children across their faces. "And not through any great fault of his own. He wasn't a murderer or a rapist or a blasphemer. He just didn't do enough good to impress the Archangel who was standing at the gate that day."

"Since when do Archangels take part in the judging of souls?" Jess asked, leaning forward.

"Since day one, apparently," Rachel said. "Sam got sent down because he wasn't what Glorious Michael wanted him to be. And then…"

"But you also said that you got sent to Hell, too," Junior pointed out.

"That is true. I missed Sam by a few days," Rachel said. She shrugged. "Husk didn't go into great detail regarding my baby boy, but apparently, he was – is – something unusual. And when he finally embraced the gift of rage, like I taught you all, he decided to attack Heaven."

"One man against Heaven isn't even a fight," Jess said.

"If Sam were still a man, I'd agree. Husk says that in the last moments, he became something… else," Rachel said. It was a sliver in her heart that she hadn't had the chance to speak to her most vulnerable boy. Even as she lay dying back in the '90s, her thoughts hadn't gone to Jessica, whom Rachel was certain would be alright, nor Junior, for whom Rachel was reasonably sure, but to Sam, who was still so young, and needed so much from her that she didn't have a chance to give him.

"That doesn't surprise me, all things considered," Junior said. He turned a look to Jess, and the blonde gave a begrudging but admitted nod. "I talked to some of the many, many, many people who came to Sam's memorial. I'm talking people from San di-fucking-ego, from Florida, from Detroit, from Vancouver; pretty much everywhere Sam went, he found people who would drop everything to go to a pauper's funeral."

"Language," Rachel said, at the end of that.

"Right. Sorry, Mom," he said. And then he was struck for a moment at the words coming from his mouth. As though never believing that he'd ever utter them again and being blindsided when he had. Rachel turned a look to Jess, who nodded. She had been there, too, then.

"There's a whole online community that's grown up around his memory," Jess said. "People only realizing what he was once he was gone. I have a feeling that's a running theme of his life."

"More than you'd realize. If I could only get that Hellphone Husk gave me, I could show you," she said. While it had taken her a long time under Husk's tutelage, she had in fact managed to learn at least one little spell, that of extradimensional storage. Which she could only use with magical aid because apparently she was about as magical as your average pile of gravel. "Only I don't have a battery that I can tap into."

"What kind of battery?" Junior asked.

"Well, the one that Husk gave me was a gold coin, about this big," she made a size with her fingers, "etched with a particular set of runes on both sides."

"Runes are just tourist trinkets," Junior pointed out.

"Then empowered by blood. Human blood is a powerful thing, even in my admittedly paltry case."

"...Let me see," Phillip Junior said, moving to a section of the wall-moulding and pulling it aside, revealing a stack of un-pressed bullion, rendered into blank circular slugs. Junior had to have a quarter of a million there stashed in his wall. Why the sweet hell was he living in this building with that kind of money just on hand?

Well, the answer was 'because he was spending a lot of it toward a fruitless and impossible goal, being the resurrection of the now-resurrected Rachel Scailes', apparently. Which meant that with that money-sink gone, he would probably be moving up and out soon enough.

"I was always envious of Husk and his invisible pockets all over the place. He used to go around naked, you understand," Rachel said, accepting the coin and setting it onto the table. Both of her children gave her an askance look at that. "Sinners don't have a lot of 'humanity' left in them down in Hell. I was actually fairly easily recognized because when I landed down there, I still looked like this."

"Still, naked though?" Jess clarified.

"His Aspect took the form of an Androsphinx. He had nothing to hide and nothing to prove," Rachel said. "So to do as Husk did, and to ensure that I wouldn't be tethered to purse-makers in Hell as I was in the world of the living, I slowly, step-by-step, and with glacial pace created one for myself. And accessing it requires a charge of magic which, frankly, I don't possess at any given time, which probably speaks volumes how little magic is left in me since Raguel pulled my heart out."

"Whyyyyy?" Junior asked.

"Oh, I was supposed to have become an Angel after I died. For reasons I'm unaware of, the process failed," Rachel said. She waved the issue away, and began to carefully carve lines into the gold with a kitchen knife. A gouge would have been more ideal, but she used what she had on hand. "Whatever he wanted so badly in my heart must have been all of my magic, since, well… I have to do this."

"Is that a Hermetic Seal?" Junior asked, leaning closer to her slow, careful work.

"Indeed it is," Rachel said. When one side had the lines scratched into place, she flipped it and started on the other. "I trust you know what these things mean, because my personal knowledge of the iconography of magic is a bit lacking. I'm told that Sam took to it like a fish to water, though."

"Well, son of a to-be-Angel, I would hope," Junior said. He muttered something under his breath, and at Rachel's prompting repeated himself louder. "That one looks like you're creating a rune used to extract things. What exactly is it extracting?"

"This is a Blood Engine, and a fairly crude one," Rachel said. "It takes human blood and refines out the magic inherent in it, condensing it and storing it inside the metal of the Engine itself. The gold slowly starts to glow with a faintly red light as it approaches saturation."

"So it's a magic vampire coin," Jess said, trying to keep her disbelief couched.

"There's a reason that Vampires – which I've been told do exist here on Earth – need our blood to survive," Rachel said.

"Vampires aren't real," Jess scoffed.

Junior tapped the vodka bottle again. "One of the twenty seven ingredients of this is Thick Coldblood, which has to be imported from Greece, where a bunch of them live."

"Oh for Christ's sake, PeeJay, don't humor her!" Jess implored.

"What? The ones in Chicago refuse to sell!" Junior said, then cast a thumb over his shoulder. "Do you wanna see my bloodstone?"

"Oh, if Husk knew you had a bloodstone, he'd be offering you cash on the barrel-head for it," Rachel gave a chuckle. Vampire blood was an almost impossible-to-acquire resource in Hell. Apparently the sanguivores of the world made very sure they trusted who they sold their excess blood to. Which probably implied a lengthy and convoluted story as to how Phillip Scailes Junior managed to get his hands on one of their incredibly valuable bloodstones.

"I'm having a schizoid break, aren't I?" Jess asked, wilting in her chair. "The entire world stopped making sense. My drunk brother is an alchemist, my mother came back from the dead, and Vampires are real."

"I'm not a drunk, for the last time," Junior said.

"If you're not a drunk, why is your skin yellow and your gut big?" Jess asked.

"The skin is because I breathed in something I shouldn't have, and the gut is because I have shitty eating habits," Junior said blithely. Rachel then jabbed at the already-lacerated heel of her hand, letting some more blood well up in the wound, before she smeared it on both sides of the coin. Jess looked dismayed for a moment. But just a moment, because as she watched, the blood was pulled into the gold, which somebody who was as well educated as Jessica Scailes knew wasn't a thing which gold tended to do with any sort of liquid.

"Now, I just need to let it trickle-charge for a few hours before I try opening my pocket," Rachel said.

"How do you even know your pocket is still there?" Junior asked.

"That gold just ate your blood," Jess was stuck a few beats back in the conversation.

"Because I'm here, and it was connected to me when I was dead. I just need to have the magical charge to open it. When I show you my Hellphone and all of the things on it, maybe then, Jessica, you'll believe me about Hell."

There was silence, as the ticking of an old clock sounded on the wall. Ten in the evening. They'd been up for a while, and the sun was long down. Jessica just stared at them, then moved to the couch. She picked up the blanket and the pillows, dropped herself under them, and held her pillow around her head and face.

"I'm going to try to face all this tomorrow when I wake up and things aren't crazy anymore," she muttered, muffled, through the pillow. Tellingly, Rachel was starting to feel her own eyelids begin to grow heavy, in a way that she certainly hadn't since her time in Hell, if not her time before it in the hell that was Heaven. Maybe it was indeed time to turn in.

"I, ah… don't exactly have a lot of bedding left over," Junior said with apologetic tone. Rachel, though, found the lever on the side of the easy-chair, and launched the leg-rest forward. She'd still be sitting up, but it was a damned sight more comfortable than picking a spot on the floor. Junior chuckled, then went over to his linen closet, picking out the last pillow he had and a bright yellow blanket that was starting to come unraveled – a blanket the sentimental child had brought with him for thirty goddamned years, from the looks of it, and flicked it open over her. Summer being what it was, she wouldn't need much warmth, but the comfort was a good thing.

"I guess we'll talk again in the morning," Junior said. He stared at her for a moment. "I… I need you to know that…"

"That you never stopped trying to bring me back? That's obsession, not love," Rachel pointed out.

"This world needed you," Junior said quietly. "We needed you."

"And frankly, Hell needs me, too, but considering I'm up here and no longer down there, Charlie will have to figure things out on her own," she said.

"Charlie?"

"Princess of Hell. She's a lovely girl. I think you'd like her. Now I'm exhausted. There'll be time enough for everything later," Rachel said.

Junior still pulled her up out of the chair and gave her a crushing hug. And a small, warm smile slipped onto Rachel's face at being so manhandled.

---

"I'm sorry… what?" Birah asked.

"Introduce yourself," Alastor prompted again. "A name doesn't mean much, considering there are untoldmillions of your kind up there. And I do prefer to have a measure of the people I am dealing with."

"Maybe I wouldn't prefer to deal with you at all," Birah said.

"Rejected," Alastor said off-handedly. "Sadly for you, that's not an option I'm giving you."

"And what's to stop me from just calling Charlie in and ending the interview? Walking away?" Birah asked.

"Try," Alastor said, his grin ratcheting wide. "I dare you. I implore you. Try."

And if there was one thing that Birah's cursory research into the current state of Hell had taught him, it was one bullet point being reinforced again and again and again, circled and underlined and stroked with a highlighter in yellow, it was a very simple sentence. Don't Fuck With The Radio Demon.

"You already know my name, and what I do," Birah said. "What more is there for me to tell you? And for that matter, why aren't you just ripping me to shreds right now? Are you afraid of what this body has hidden away?"

"That thing? No," Alastor said, leaning forward in his seat and making a bipod with his elbows, stabilizing his chin on his knuckles. "I have some experience with angelic manufacture, and this thing? It would have been laughed out of the room in the 1940's. But for what it's worth, you are right in that knowing your name and your place in that static, stagnant hierarchy up there does illuminate a great many things. It didn't reveal that you are considered one of the highest mages of the Secondborn of God, but I have other sources. Still, it does little to explain why such an august personage has lied and stolen his way into this lark of social-conditioning like a gutter-thief and likely thinking you can somehow use that ridiculous toy on your shirt to keep me from speaking as I please. That's not in your power."

Birah glanced to his lapel mic, that was still recording. "Are you sure about…"

"That is a wireless device, using radio transmission to connect recorder to storage," the Radio Demon said. "And what am I again?" So much for that being an out, then. So Birah thought fast.

"So is this what you do for Charlie? You provide her security from mages?" Birah asked, trying to keep the subject as much off of him as he could.

"When I feel like it, and to the extent that I feel like it. But as to why I'm here, right now, across from you? That comes down to simple curiosity. A wondering as to why this unusual specimen is so far away from its nesting grounds. Ordinarily, when Angels come to Hell, they do so in panoply and arms, their beings blasting away shadow with unseemly light and throwing their weight around with not even the first consideration to the fine art of subtlety," Alastor said, leaning back from his looming and now laying his hands flat on the tabletop. "So it stands to reason that you are here for reasons that are not best suited to the overt and the obvious. Kudos, little Angel. You've managed to already exceed expectations in not succumbing immediately to boorishness."

Birah furrowed his brow. "Wait… if you aren't here for magical protection, then why are you here?" he asked.

"That is between myself and Charlotte," Alastor said, gently rubbing his fingertips along his thumb as though whetting a sword against stone. "And frankly, I would be surprised if our sweet host even understands it. But that's not a problem for me. You have a certain knack for ignoring questions I pose to you and attempting to direct the conversation away from you. For the sake of decent discussion, please stop. And note that this will be the final time I ask you anything. From now on, I start dictating."

"She doesn't know… you're exploiting her ignorance, then," Birah said. "I never thought I would be defending the naivete of Lucifer's daughter, but it's obvious that you're using her. But why?"

"Aha!" Alastor said, clapping his hands together loudly. "This is about Charlotte's status as a Nephilim, isn't it? Well, she certainly broke the mould, didn't she?" Alastor gave a distorted laugh. "There's never been one like her, and I'm fair sure there won't be one again. Such a shame. All that power and she refuses to use it."

"You want to take her Nephilim powers for yourself," Birah charged.

"I would be lying if I said that the thought hadn't crossed my mind," Alastor said, leaning now back in his chair, summoning his microphone cane with one hand and spiking its foot into the tile to the sound of a tile cracking apart. "After all, to ask questions requires permission. And Power is the ultimate permission."

"If you take so much as a whisper of her powers, Gabriel will find you," Birah said. That was a line he wasn't ready to cross under most circumstances, and certainly not to the enmity of Charlie. Birah daren't say a word about her to Gabriel, so he would not pursue her. Gabriel would find Alastor, though, because Birah had absolutely no compunctions against sending Gabriel against somebody like him.

"And that would be a bad day for everybody involved," Alastor said. He gave a slow chuckle. "I'm going to level with you, little angel; if you had asked me two years ago, I would have said that I am at the limits of my power, and those limits fall short of such things as the Archangels of God. But now? Now things are shifting. I find myself learning about new opportunities that hitherto I had considered not just impossible, but unthinkable. Last year, I cowered in fear of Michael. Next year, I may spit into the eye of God."

Alastor then leaned forward, looming across the table and planting Birah deep into his chair.

"And there is nothing any of you will be able to do to stop me. Not even the Might of God," Alastor swore.

Birah, though, merely swallowed his nerves and sat up again, refusing to be cowed by this demon.

"And yet here you sit," Birah said.

"Excuse me?" Alastor asked.

"You, human, are still sitting here, talking a big game and doing very little to actually back it up. You talk about taking the birthright of a Nephilim, but I don't even think that's possible. And if it were possible, it would likely require sacrifices I'm fairly certain from my research of you that you wouldn't be willing to make."

"If you think there are costs beyond my willingness to pay, then your research has been woefully incomplete," Alastor pointed out.

"They'd be costs you have to pay yourself. Pay using your power, your potential. Pay by sacrificing knowledge and information itself," Birah said, and the tightening of the eye of the Radio Demon that his monocle rode told him that it was the latter that concerned Alastor the most. He could abide any infirmity or disability. But he could not countenance any increase of his personal ignorance. "And more than that, Charlie has protection."

"From who?" Alastor laughed. He gestured to the grey woman who was entering the hotel with a pallet-jack full of food for the dining hall. "The neutered ex-whore who cannot light a match using her own personal magic?" he then gestured toward the hole that Charlie had departed into. "The broken-willed gambler who I can bend into any shape I will? The brick-headed social worker who is even less puissant than Miss Vialpando? Who, I ask, would actually be able to protect her? Who would even be willing?"

Birah didn't speak for a moment, letting the derisive laughter wash over him. Alastor didn't understand, did he? He didn't grasp for an instant that there were a number of people who watched Charlie go about her business not as an employer, but as a savior. That there were many who were doing things that by their own thinking would have been impossible before, made possible by her audacity and nature.

"If all of Hell turns against her, and stands at your side," Birah promised, "then I will protect her."

Alastor slapped his knee, laughing with explosive force. "Oh, this is delightful! Mere minutes out from the coattails of the Archangels in the presence of a Nephilim and you are all but throwing yourself at her feet! You angels truly were designed to be the last word in slavery."

Birah glared at him. Not softening his decree to ask what he meant by that; if he did he would give up ground he might never get back.

"Far be it for me to gainsay somebody declaring themselves someone's unseen protector. It's a classical literary trope for a reason, from the Scarlet Pimpernel to Zorro and all swashbucklers in between," Alastor finally calmed his laughter. "But what makes you think you're even useful as a her unseen knight? After all, a real Angel would have had to gall and temerity to come down to Hell in the flesh. Which means that you lack some particular capabilities. Not that great a fighter, are you?"

Again, Birah refused to show that Alastor's stabs in the dark were hitting without mercy and without miss.

"Trying to draw me to a halt with a withering glare?" Alastor chided. "Better than you have tried, and failed."

"Raguel succeeded," Birah said.

"You are not Raguel," Alastor said with a slow shake of his head, grin still wide and unkind. Then he leaned back and tutted. "But that's somewhat beside the point. You are correct in that letting certain forces amongst your kind know about Charlotte would spoil a useful opportunity for me. And for that reason alone I trust that neither one of us at this table will reveal what we know about her, either present or future."

Blackmail, then. Silence for silence.

"You are a despicable creature," Birah said, his voice shepherded to not be a disgusted scream. "A vile leech feasting on the only vital thing in this entire fetid pit of misery. Had I the strength, I would kill you where you sit."

"That's the thing. You don't," Alastor said. He leaned forward again. "Whereas I could easily send a spike of corrupted power straight through that little toy you're puppeteering, and without those vital pieces, I could do exactly that to you with no ramifications to me whatsoever. Don't threaten me, little Angel. You are not in control here. I am."

"You can't kill me, because then you'll reveal yourself – what you actually are – to Charlie," Birah said. "And you can't bear to lose that opportunity, now can you?"

"Finally the boy discovers the nature of our bind, our stalemate," Alastor said with a chuckle.

"I'm several thousand years older than you," Birah said, peevishly.

"And yet in all things that matter, you remain a boy," Alastor said. "With a boy's perspective and a boy's thinking. Whereas I've been an explorer, a sorceror, an entertainer, an academic, and an inventor; in all the ways that you have not, I have been a man. And you, with your stagnant existence, will always be a boy. And frankly, I don't feel much like continuing to talk to boys today. We'll meet again soon, little boy-angel. I'm sure of it."

And with that, and a chuckle that grew into a deep and shuddering laugh, Alastor seemed to smear out against the world, growing fuzzier at his edges, translucent then transparent through is planes, until there was a strange, visual 'blip', and Alastor vanished from Pascal's Mugging with all of the gaudiness that he had arrived.

"No, I'm tellin' ya it's fucking weird," Pride's Swindler Incarnate said, as he walked beside Charlie and Rachel. He was staring at his Hellphone. "Yer phone wasn't a piece of shit. It should be ringing right now."

"Well, what does it say?" Rachel asked.

"Out of service area. Mother fucker the 'service area' is all of goddamned Hell!" Husk said. He turned a surly eye to the Betrayed beside him. "Did you get picked by a Succubus when I wasn't looking?"

"Why a succubus?" Rachel asked, pausing by the gate of Pascal's Mugging, while Charlie made apologies for being pulled away which Birah only gave half of his attention to. He motioned for the Nephilim to return to her seat, while keeping an ear out on the other conversation he was party to.

"Because they go Topside more often than anybody else. Except some of the Consumers, at least," Husk said.

"I'm pretty sure that didn't happen," Rachel said. "Look, it'll turn up, one way or another. And it's not like I can't afford another one."

"Don't make a habit of dismissing your shit, or soon you'll find you ain't got any of it left," Husk warned, then began to stomp toward the hotel itself. Birah finally turned to give his attention to Charlie fully.

"Alright. So, tell me this," Birah said, trying to get back into his gears. "How exactly are you financing this entire thing? I can't imagine that Lucifer is willing to open his purse for the likes of… that!"

"That's a bit of a strange story. And it starts with the Goat of the Apocalypse," Charlie began, while Rachel sat down beside her. There was still so much left to learn about this. If it was really possible to Redeem the Sinner without the Stone of Farewell, what other fundamental truths had the likes of Birah been lied to about? The only way to find out, was to dig through the muck. And Birah, as it turned out, was very handy with the muck-rake.

---

"No, we honestly thought that they were getting ready to go to war.

Understand things from our perspective; you get a bunch of slaves together, agitate them with promises of emancipation, make them beholden to you in particular as a savior-figure, and then begin to radicalize them against the system they were just extracted from, while injecting them as a body into the machinery of hell to earn money and influence. Those things that she did, that is a fact. From those facts, certain inferences can be made.

Why target the slaves? Because slaves are mouldable; my brother always said that a clever hand can craft a young slave into literally anything, from a bed-warmer to a major-general. Why emancipate them? To unshackle them from Naked Law and all of the protections that Naked Law puts into place preventing slave-rebellion. Why start all those businesses, using ex-slaves as labor-force? Because the sinews of war are infinite money, and slaves are very adept at making money for other people.

It was the sneaky manumission of Mordecai Shrapnel that put my contemporaries most on edge, though; he's long dead now, as Hellhounds don't live forever, but in his age, he was the foremost and preeminent expert on asymmetrical warfare that Hell had in its entire muster. If there was a single soldier who could gather irregulars and array them against a force comprising of Legions, and still find a way to win, it was Shrapnel.

His sudden freedom alarmed slaveholders. That he suddenly appeared in the orbit of Loona Miller seemed to put writing clearly on the wall, in block letters six feet high. That the Hellhounds are going to throw another Great Uprising, right in the middle of an existential war against Heaven, and leave all of Hell in the lurch for it. Every delay that we perceived in the opening moves of that uprising just made us more afraid, as we saw inaction and lack of attack as yet more subterfuge and inconspicuous action sapping us where we weren't watching.

We, in our foolishness and paranoia, were the ones to launch the first blows in the Blood Emancipation. That whole internal conflict spiraled out of something so simple; we presumed incorrect fundamental axioms were sacrosanct, and flew into the wild without footing because of it.

The loss of Hellhounds as the low-link in the Chain of Being lays not with the Hounds themselves, but with the Ars Goetia who fucked things up so incredibly badly in handling them… and them getting exactly the right kind of ally on their side."

– Raum, the Young Crow, Hexbreaker and Ars Goetia