There was a time when Jonathan Ragnie could only sit and sweat, as things were moving despite him. Despite being the firstborn son of Henry Ragnie, he was always the spare, the unwanted alternative. And considering their provenance amongst the many families of Sicilian Mafia as one of the ones most 'tainted' by English ancestry, enemies were many, friends few, and options limited. And yet they managed to carve out part of a city for themselves, before a great fall befell them.

But that was a lifetime ago, both literally and figuratively. Jonathan was Arackniss now. And Ragnie had become Veloce. But still, despite all the changes, for most of his time down here – time well earned considering the shit he'd done while he was alive, he held no illusions of that – he was still the spare and the unwanted alternative. But then a pimp set him on fire in an alleyway, and everything changed. As the star of Arackniss dawned, the moon of Henroin was setting, and setting faster and faster with each passing day. He was running out of time. He could sense there was a change in the wind, smell violence percolating up like the smell of rain on parched soil. And goddamnit, he wasn't fucking ready.

"You look tense, baby," Imelda said, lounging in the chair that, if he were a more calm person he would be sitting in right now, as he glared at the map of the Veloce Family's holdings, and the recent encroachments of Magianno to one side, and the everpresent catastrophe which was Capone on the other. The sharks were circling. The water was bloody.

"Tense? Babe, I passed 'tense' four fuckin' months ago," Arackniss said. Had it been a year, now, since he decided on his lunatic plan to push out his own father? Maybe it'd even been more. But the calendar mocked him with the year 2025. Time was running off on him. And every day that passed saw his goal grow more and more brittle. "If I don't do something fast, might be that me takin' over would just be the second-to-last step of Capone reachin' in and takin' everything we've got."

"Don't you be down on yourself like that, sugar," Imelda said. "Focus on what you've got. And what you've got is a better brain than that old fossil ever had."

"Yer just sain' that 'cause he married you off to Cipriani without your say-so," Arackniss said.

"He shoulda' known that wouldn't've lasted," Imelda tensed her fingers, and had the claws extend from them, wicked and sharp and in the case of her index and middle fingers outright replaced with razor-sharp steel. She had apparently tried to plate those with Angel Steel, but the plating kept cracking and falling off, and as a rule Angel Steel could not be implanted into the body of a Sinner the way that ordinary Steel could, so she made do with what she could have.

"Yeah. That was a funny fuckin' thing to read over coffee," Arackniss allowed himself a laugh. The 'divorce' between Imelda and Joseph Cipriani had been… messy. Involving numerous, mutual assassination attempts, and only abruptly terminated when Cipriani had the 'extreme misfortune' of being stuck out of cover during a Purge Day. Arackniss had earned no small favor from the Princess of N'Orleans by putting that into motion.

It might absolutely be the case that Arackniss was not mighty until recently, but that didn't mean he was useless his entire time down here in Hell. Farthest thing from it. It was just that now, it didn't matter if you could see what Arackniss was doing or not; it was still gonna end badly for you.

"So why don't you tell me what's go you all coiled up and hard?" Imelda asked, approaching from behind and kneading his shoulders. She was quite a bit taller than him, a bit over a foot, but he wasn't vain about that. Arackniss was what he was – a spider. And she was what she was – a lioness.

"I've got almost half 'a the old faces on my side now, whether they even realize it or not," Arackniss said. "But I don't think I've got time to get the other half before Henroin does somethin' fucking stupid again. The Family is bleeding more an' more with every dumb-fuck move he pulls. And if I try pullin' the Old Man's punches any more, he'll flip his shit at me, and then I won't be able to to do anything at all anymore."

Imelda sighed, but continued applying gentle, kneading pressure to the muscles of his back and neck. It was likely she was the only reason that he didn't have a splitting tension-headache right now. He looked at the room around him, to the conspiracy-boards that now adorned every wall and table-top. The connections between the people he could trust and the people that nobody reasonable would. The connections between those still loyal to Henroin, and those that might be able to pull them to Arackniss' side.

The last board, dominating the entire wall behind Arackniss and Imelda, was the board of people who Arackniss was pretty sure were going to jump ship the moment anything kicked off. And they were legion. He traced too damned many names as they would leave for Magianno, or Salamanca, or Medveyvev, or worst of all Capone. That there was more than zero of the faces who had a line connecting their escape-hatch to Capone boiled Arackniss' blood. It's one thing to not be loyal to your side. It's another to betray that side to the enemy that you've been fighting for the last fifty fucking years.

The room had windows, but they were all blacked-out and trash-bagged besides, meaning that the only light within came from the lanterns that were set about, casting the place with long and moody shadows, and the two mafiosos lit up from beneath by their glow giving them a horror-movie visage. Heh, if only. The truth was, the only horror wasn't from the two of them. It was from everybody else. They were just trying to survive.

"If Capone moves, Henroin won't be able to stop him," Arackniss muttered.

"If," Imelda said, releasing his tense muscles and rounding the table. She leaned forward with her hands on the tabletop, letting her claws pop once more, plucking into the paper on the tabletop without actually ripping it. "Sugar, you're gonna give yourself an ulcer if you keep thinkin' about the 'might have beens'. Just focus on what you've got, first," she said.

Arackniss nodded, hooking the chair behind him with his foot and pulling it into place behind him, and dropping himself down into it. He actually had a war-chest, money which he'd been able to squirrel from untold different places, via 'coopting' the people whom he 'eliminated'. Most of it was coming from Saul, who despite being visibly on Henroin's side, was quietly in perfect agreement that the Old Man's time was done. And with that money, he could afford to do things like bribe the Muscle, to pull Soldiers from places that Henroin wanted them…

Or he could do something audacious with it, and just formally hire Old Tom.

Which is what Arackniss did.

Because he was running out of time for non-audacious moves.

The old Vory had transformed the moment the first million fell into his palm. No longer the easy-going and lazy tiger who would only passively add his intimidation to any discussions that Arackniss was involved in, now Old Tom was a one person stampede of criminality and action, slinking through the lines of Henroin's increasingly ragged defenses and opening them up even wider, shaking the faith of those who still put stock in what the Spider King tried to portray.

Half of the reason why the list of people whom Arackniss was reasonably certain would stand by Henroin was so pitifully small was down to Old Tom doing Old Tom things. It was shocking to see the man whom, by Arackniss' recollection, had faded into laziness and indolence, instantly return to his most vibrant, violent, and terrifying self. He hadn't faded with time, Arackniss had come to realize. No, Old Tom had simply stopped bothering to try, for what Henroin was paying him.

And as soon as somebody else paid his fee, somebody who didn't have rot for brains, the classic Old Tom, the Old Tom from the time when even Capone walked carefully around Veloce, well, that old tiger was back, and woe betide any poor fuck who didn't recognize it.

Arackniss looked at all that he'd quietly done to corner and sideline Henroin, all of those tiny, subtle things that Henroin was too brazen to see, too proud to admit. And he still, even now, didn't know if he'd done enough.

He didn't know if he'd ever do enough.

"Mel… do you still got a line on Sally Serpent?" Arackniss asked. Imelda's head tilted the way curious cats would at hearing that.

"Why d'you wanna bring that silly thing into this?" Imelda asked.

"I need eyes on his inner circle. I got a hunch there's something I'm not seeing. Something important," Arackniss admitted. There were no false fronts with Imelda. Even without getting a supernatural boost by the guy who turned out to be the Demiurge, Imelda could still almost keep up with him. And Arackniss had had the chauvinism beaten out of him by decades in Hell.

"What? Do you think she's cracking?" Imelda asked.

"I just…" Arackniss said. He stared at the listing of the still-loyal inner circle of Henroin. "Just call Sally. See what she's seeing."

Imelda didn't seem happy with being bluntly ordered, but what else could he say? All he had was his gut feeling and a lingering dread. And if he didn't do something about either, then he had that sinking sensation that Veloce wouldn't survive the month, let alone the year.

"I'll do it, sugar," Imelda said, forcefully turning him to look at her. "But don't you ever snap at me like the Old Man."

He hadn't snapped. Or at least he hadn't thought he had. But he just gave a tired nod, one that she took with the sincerity it had. And then, somehow despite the heels she was wearing, she silently padded out of the room.

And the boy who would be king sat down, waiting for the axe to fall, and unsure of whose neck it was going to cut.


Chapter 45

Power Moves


Summer again pushed aside the rain and cold of spring and winter of Hell offering heat and sun. If Angel Dust weren't surrounded by so many shitty people he might have actually tolerated it. If he could have been sure Molly was safe, he would have even enjoyed it. The weather did little to soothe Angel's nerves. He was on edge. The last time he made a run for Heaven, he had launched entirely too fucking early after preparing for weeks instead of months, and it got Cherri Bomb killed. Now he was preparing for literal years. And he still didn't know if he'd done enough, and been patient enough.

"Can Sinners even have heart-attacks, now that you're dead?" Truly asked, sitting on the bench beside him with a cold beer replete with condensation in one hand. Her jacket was shrugged open a bit, meaning that she was showing more skin than usual, which was of no interest to Angel Dust whatsoever. May be the case she weren't human, but she was still a woman, and that had The Ick for him.

"I ain't ever heard of it," Angel Dust said.

"Then you're probably fast on track to be a pioneer of poor health after death," Truly said.

"Oh, fuckin' spare me…" Angel Dust said.

"I'm serious. I've seen chattel slaves less stressed than you," Truly said.

"What's today's date?" Angel Dust asked. Truly frowned at him. "Yeah. Twenty twenty fuckin' five, an' about half way through that at that! I've been runnin' at this wall for two fuckin' years now!"

"Yikes," Truly said flatly. She gave a glance to the gun-range which had been put up in a parking lot behind the back of the hotel. "I take it that's why you're essentially black with gunpowder right now?"

"New guns don't use gunpowder, they use nitro," Angel Dust groused. "And nitro don't leave you black."

"I was being half-serious to highlight a serious point; that you're still training for this," Truly said. "I get it. The wait hurts. If I had a sibling I actually cared about that didn't treat me like a pity-case, I imagine that having to wait this long would fucking suck."

"You've got no idea, Tru," Angel Dust said, leaning forward and resting his face on one of his hands. She really would understand. Apparently she had a hard time enjoying anything at all, and that was at the heart of her eating problem. The way she described it, her life seemed an awful, bleak slog without anything to keep her optimistic. He honestly didn't know how she kept it going. The back end of the Hotel was now pretty definitively taken over by the Second Legion of the Damned, with only the conservatory and the graveyard directly beside it not being used by soldiers for something. Hell continued to evolve. And Angel Dust stayed exactly the same.

There weren't enough distractions in Hell to pull Angel Dust's attention away from the fact that he was leaving Molly up there, hungry and in danger, while he fucked around down here, shot his guns, made his lasagnas, and felt like a fairly hopeless shitter.

"I've gotta do something," Angel Dust admitted. "But I don't know what. And it's fuckin' killing me."

"Well, maybe you should ask your brother," Truly prompted.

"I ain't even been inside a mile of the guy for months. He won't take my calls, won't do shit. How would I even contact him at this point?" Angel Dust asked.

"Stand up and turn left," Truly said. Angel blinked at her, then turned to his left. And lo and behold, there was Arackniss, dressed in his suit, a dour and grim look on his face. Oh, this wasn't likely to be good, by the look of things.

"What's goin', bro?" Angel Dust asked, standing up and towering over his elder brother.

"We gotta talk," Arackniss cut through the preamble, a dead-serious look hammering the point into place. "And we gotta do it somewhere private."

"Well, shit. Fine, come with me, then," Angel Dust said. He turned to Truly. "I'll be back down in a bit."

"You'd better. If you do something stupid and make a run for the Palace of Iron, know that I can outrun you, and I will tackle you to the ground before you do something stupid," Truly said, gesturing at him with her can.

Angel Dust rolled his eyes, and went into the Hotel. Rather than head up the guts of the building to the lobby, he ducked (literally) into one of the passages that were meant for the cleaners to quickly and surreptitiously get around the building without having to be seen by the patrons and clients. These back-ways only really existed on the first, second, and third floors, seeming to have been abandoned as a concept only part way up the building, but their cramped quarters enabled the two brothers to bypass any prying eyes, and head to other places that the staff of a hotel would be expected to quietly go.

Like the kitchen.

The kitchen of the Happy Hotel was a broad affair, one that ought to be staffed by dozens, but usually only stood the ministrations of two, or on a rush day, three. Or it had, until more hands offered to help. Now there were various under-chefs, and line cooks, and the like making sure the boring and easy shit was always available, and leaving the high-end and complicated stuff to that pair of Babylonian inn-masters and to a fuckup of a mafia pornstar.

The noise of the kitchen also made it a good place to have a conversation sub-rosa, one that was almost impossible for somebody to listen in on or worse to record. So the two brothers, having emerged from the very low door (requiring another dip from Angel Dust so as not to bang his face on the lintel), he immediately sidestepped, then leaned on an as-yet unneeded dishwasher.

"Okay, we can talk here. Those mooks are too busy to even care what we're gumming," Angel Dust said, with one of his many hands waved toward the other goons in the kitchen.

"I don't know about this," Arackniss said, paranoia clear on his face, his many red eyes flitting between the help as though trying to search the backs of their heads for signs of treachery.

"Well I do. So spill it. What's got you all hot-and-bothered?" Angel Dust said.

"I have to oust Henroin," Arackniss admitted, and seemed to deflate at having it no longer pent up inside of him. "And I need to do it soon."

"Well… okay? Why do I need to know about this?" Angel Dust said. Arackniss turned a hot and angry look at him. "Hey, when was the last time I had anything good to say on that hairy old fossil? You know hows I feel about him!"

"I mean," Arackniss said, "that I'm going to have to go to war against my Pa. Against our Pa," he gestured between the two of them. "Don't pretend like that don't mean nothing to you."

"Maybe once. Now he's just some asshole I got half 'a my genes from," Angel Dust said. He looked at his smaller, older brother. "So what's the big deal? If you gotta off him, off him. Easy as."

Arackniss offered a deeply unhappy laugh, head hanging for a moment. "If only it was that simple, bro," Arackniss said. He looked up to stare Angel Dust in the eye. "When I do this… I'm not gonna throw away all you built and hand it over to fuckin' Capone."

"What's Capone gotta do with this?" Angel Dust asked.

"Do you want that Chicago cuck to eat up what you done and erase yer mark on Hell?" Arackniss asked.

"Look, I get that you hates Capone more than most. He's just some fuckin' guy to me," Angel Dust said. He'd gotten out of the Mob business long before Capone landed in Hell, so he had little connection to the guy. "So what's the big idea?"

Arackniss stared at his cleft hand, bearing only two fingers and a thumb, then turned to Angel Dust again. "This isn't Arackniss askin' Angel Dust," Arackniss said. "This is Jonathan askin' Anthony. Will you get Molly outta Heaven and down here where we can keep her safe?"

The solemnity even managed to settle onto Angel Dust at that. Both of them were most of a century out from acknowledging their deadnames. To bring them up now… Arackniss was serious serious.

"I have to," Angel Dust said.

"...then yer gonna have to do it without me," Arackniss admitted, his head hanging in shame. But only for a moment, before his face took on a stubborn set, and he faced Angel Dust again. "So you go get Molls. And when you come back, I'll make sure she's got something what's worthy of her to live in. Capiche?"

Angel Dust could only nod. It was bad for the mission to lose somebody as strong as Arackniss… but the spider-brother was talking too goddamned much sense. Angel Dust didn't have the kind of nest-egg that Molly deserved to dig into. But if his brother could take over Henroin's shit-show and right the ship of it, then he certainly would.

"Do what you gotta do," Angel Dust said. "I'll handle the rest."

"Thank you," Arackniss said. Angel Dust watched as he left, slinking away quietly as, well, a spider, and vanishing from the kitchen. Great. Now Angel Dust needed to find replacement muscle to replace his brother. And he couldn't even be mad about the reasons for having to do it.

There were times when life in Hell truly sucked.


He didn't need his brother's blessing to do what he was doing, but it still felt better to have it than to not. Arackniss could feel the clocks on this ticking perilously close to midnight, but frustratingly, they didn't all tick at the same rate. And he had to have everything line up perfectly if he wanted this to go off without a massacre that would be on his conscience until the next millennium, and leave Veloce too weak to withstand Capone besides.

The scene before him was a convoy of passenger vans and up-armored kill-trucks, the kind usually used in the Road Wars that took place in Northwest PC. Hadene wasn't exactly expensive, considering it was an essentially infinite resource capped only by refinement bottlenecks, but those bottlenecks were enough of a ball-ache that a whole array of gangs had sprung up to steal refined Hadene and resell it. And it was by the careful execution of one of those gangs that this convoy of vehicles had been assembled.

These rigs weren't the quickest off of the line, nor had they the highest top-end speed. But what they had, was a lot of mass. That made them the perfect weapons of sheer inertia; once they were rolling at speed, there was very little that the traffic of Pentagram City could do to stop them. Only a traffic jam would have been sufficient to bleed off their lethal momentum and bring them to a halt. And Arackniss had chosen the hour specifically because it was in the middle of the work day, and the streets would be, while still heavily driven, actively moving instead of large swathes of gridlock.

Like the push of a glacier, they had to make it from outside of PC all the way to the Veloce family's territory in Inner True North. And once they were there, the next step would fire.

"You crazy fucks all know yer parts," Arackniss said to those he'd gathered. Not just the people he had 'eliminated' and dragged to their life-incognito, but also a heady arrangement of hired guns, both those which he had brought in by a dole from embezzled Dust King money and those who he was able to call to his side based purely on the currency of reputation. The notion that Old Tom the Tiger of the Caucasus was active again had pulled in a number of 'groupies', who though inexpert with weapons, were warm bodies willing to kill at Arackniss' demand. And shocking to the Grey Spider of the Spider Mafia, there were some groupies that had come for him.

That was something he was going to have to get used to. That he'd garnered a reputation.

Besides that, there were a surprising number of Hellhounds, all of them operating under their own military leadership, a grey-muzzled schnauzer-fellow named Shrapnel. They were apparently good and sneaky besides. And the price for hiring the lot of them could be nice and cheap… so long as most of them made it out alive. He didn't know Shrapnel's angle, but he could take a guess, and that guess was that the old Hound wanted some live, bloody, and deadly training for his people.

Well, fine. If you're offering bodies to hold guns, and willing to charge inversely proportional to how many Hounds are standing at the end, then Arackniss would use them, and even not-as-cannon-fodder. He had groupies and imps to do that. And oh god, the quality of the imps. It was pathetic, but they were cheap, and any bullets they soaked up would be bullets that didn't reach people Arackniss actually gave a shit about.

The ones that surprised him, really, were the tetrad of fuckin' Betrayed who were willing to do something drastic, for drastic pay. Arackniss had had to talk with Saul to learn that those people were slipping out of Heaven by dribs and drabs, and a lot of them took up and started living in Hell as though it was made for them. These four had been part of that whole massive-invasion of the lower Rings thing that had gone on, and had only just made it back up to Pride Ring, stealing their way upward by hook or by crook. It showed they had chutzpah, if nothing else. They wanted cash to buy some nice shit before they went back to Heaven, Arackniss reckoned. Well, whatever. If they were willing to fight like lunatics and couldn't meaningfully die, then Arackniss could use them.

Beyond that there were the standards. Sinners and fiends, armored up for war, climbing into the vehicles. Arackniss didn't take the lead vehicle, because that would have been stupid. He was two rigs back, pulling himself into the back-seat along side Imelda and a Chinese Mafia princess called Fa Chin Xi, who, like Imelda, had a feline Aspect to her, taking on the look of a snow-leopard.

"It's about time," Xi said, continuing to strap her body-armor into place as the heavy rig they were in began to accelerate. She was lithe, like Imelda as opposed to Old Tom's sheer feline bulk. "I was thinking we would be moving from hovel to hovel until the peach-tree withers."

"It's gotta be now," Arackniss said. And that wasn't even strictly true. There were far more ideal days to do this, days in the future. But the problem with all of those potential future dates was that they increasingly left Veloce open to the attacks which Arackniss was very sure that Capone was putting into motion. Hell, there was every chance that, as they spoke, Veloce was being attacked by Magianno. And that was shit Arackniss would not abide.

He pulled his own body-armor on, not bothering to try to be dapper and debonair in the tornado of violence which was about to be unleashed on central Pentagram City. He wasn't doing any of this for his ego, or for the sake of his reputation. He needed to not have holes in places that would slow him down, long enough to wrest control of Veloce from the death-grip of the cadaver currently running it. All else was secondary.

"Just remember your part," he told the leopard-Sinner, staring through the window as the landscape streaked by, and at the corner of the window's revelation the sheer scope of Pentagram City began to mount over the landscape and rake jealous claws toward the sky.

His phone was bitching at him, so he gave it a glance. A text from Little Tony. His eyes narrowed. According to him, Big Tony had spent the whole morning grumbling about Henroin. Looking downright treasonous, even.

"Who'sit?" Imelda asked.

"Little Tony, one 'a my guys on the inside," Arackniss said. Sally had paid off big time, revealing a lot of other sets of eyes that he could use. He had a lot more of those than he feared he'd have, but not as many as he'd prefer. Still, it was more than sufficient to give him eyes on what was going to be a very, very messy situation when everything kicked off. "He says that Big Tony might be on the verge of flipping."

"Doesn't Big Tony answer to the Consigliere?" Xi asked.

"That he does. And Medium Tony listens to Big Tony," Arackniss mused. He gave a glance at the approaching mountains of concrete and steel that would soon swallow their convoy and lock them on their deadly purpose. "Imma make him an offer he can't refuse."

"He might even be smart enough to take it," Imelda said with a chuckle.

The amount of legwork he put into this was stunning, to the point where he often only got minutes of sleep each day, usually while being driven somewhere to hoodwink, gaslight, browbeat, bludgeon or bribe somebody into doing what was clearly for the best of Veloce entirely. And he knew that he was missing pieces. Pieces that could bite him in the ass. But it was too late to stop now. He was committed. It was victory or death.

Another text came, just as the convoy banked off of the bypass road and descended to the ground level of Pentagram City. Visibility fell to almost nothing as they plunged into smog so thick that Arackniss wagered that his driver could only just barely see the vehicle in front of him, and only barely see the headlights of the one behind him. He knew by the way that the convoy suddenly slowed that the lead truck had plowed into and shoved aside traffic. Rather than create an accordion of moderate-velocity steel all the way out to the badlands, it was slow down or be stopped violently. Arackniss looked at the text.

Finally, a smile came to his face. Imelda scooted a bit closer, now cocooned in her body armor and looking only a fraction as elegant as she naturally was. "What's got that grin on your face, sugar?" she asked.

"I just got some good fuckin' news for a change," he said, as the convoy plowed through the smog. There was a rattle as a few stray bullets smacked into the door beside Arackniss, but he paid them no mind. The door was armored just shy of what could be expected on a tank, and though the clear part of it looked like glass, it was actually a form of metal that went transparent when there was a current through it. He didn't know the specifics, only that it kept idiots from shooting him. And they were probably just stray sprays; they ended quickly, so they couldn't have been an attack of intention. "Remember Moyle?"

"Wish I could say I didn't," Imelda said.

"He's just driven off to the races. He and his won't be there when we land, and won't get back before we're done, one way or th'other," Arackniss said. Pietrie Moyle was a weird one, a Sinner that nobody had the first clue who he was before he died, but he certainly took to organized crime in the afterlife like a duck to water. And he was zealously loyal to Henroin. One of the few names that Arackniss could not shake for any price or any leverage. And if he was just gonna not-fucking-be-there when the convoy landed, then that was a bonus that Arackniss would gladly, gladly take.

"Fog-wall in thirty," the driver's voice came back. And true to his estimation, thirty seconds later the smog abruptly ended, leaving the vehicles moving at stern and uncompromising speed through the streets of the Capital of All Hell. Occasionally idiots would try to dart across the street, only to get pancaked by the vehicles in front of Arackniss. He felt no pity for them. When a player in the game they played was making moves, you waited your turn, or you got flattened.

There were no more conversations, and Imelda had taken to humming lightly, extending and retracting her claws. She didn't look especially pleased, having to wear body-armor that did nothing to flatter her figure, but this was not a day to look good while doing half of a job. This was a day to go to war, and be the one standing at the end of it. And Arackniss wasn't about to let his most important supporters for the coup die just because somebody on the other side had Angel Steel in bullets and Arackniss' guys thought that Spellweave would be enough. Not today, at least.

Contingencies and contingencies, work of months and months of labor and sleepless nights and waking nightmares. And still all Arackniss could see as the plan barreled past its point of no return was the vast gaps that he couldn't plug before the timing worked against him.

Damn you, Henroin, Arackniss thought! Why did you have to push me to this? Why did you have to push all of us to this?

There were no answers for the rebelling son of Veloce. None but assumptions.

If Arackniss didn't know better, he would have sworn that Henroin was purposeful in breaking Veloce apart. But Arackniss did know better. And Henroin was about as subtle as an artillery barrage. He didn't think deeply. He expected his personal strength, or the strength of his word, to carry the day, every single day. The old fool's son bonked his forehead on the window. There had been a time when Henroin had to actually be smart. But that time was when he was still called Henry, and before he pissed off the whole Genovese clan and inculcated the murder of his entire family at the Genovese's hands.

Another change in the air, even in this atmospherically sealed passenger-tank. They were passing briefly along Low Central, just dipping in and touching its outermost skin before turning back outward, and heading for True North. Arackniss wondered if anybody out there even noticed that there was a mafia war going down today. Or if anybody even cared. This being Hell, he somewhat doubted it.

"Our spot's just ahead. Nobody's waiting for us," the driver said, which interrupted Imelda's humming and Xi's foot-tapping. Xi didn't like to show that she was nervous, but her body gave her away. Ah, well, it wasn't like Arackniss was immune to this all. And when he looked through the window, he beheld that indeed, the first of Henroin's properties, right at the edge of where Low Central became True North, there were cars parked in the expected places, but no muscle, no thugs, no ambushes. Dare he? Fuck it, he needed to dare today.

He pulled his phone and dialed, as his car passed its entrance, and he still saw no fortification in place. "Have a back-car sweep the mattress store; if they nod and bow you just get back in and catch up, capiche?"

"Got it," came the answer. And when Arackniss turned to look through the plate at the back of the vehicle, he saw a large, passenger van veer into the parking lot, but then lost sight of things as they made a corner.

He quickly turned and looked ahead. Vincent and Vincent's was next, a little restaurant directly on their path. And they, unlike the mattress store, had cars stacked up, and people waiting. The convoy slowed, and one of the well-dressed mobsters who was at the moment too far for Arackniss to identify went up to the lead car and shouted something at it. The whole convoy came to a very brief halt, as the stranger was told something, and then nodded, moving down the line of the convoy as it slowly started to pick up speed again.

And when Arackniss spotted the man, he couldn't have been more surprised.

"Hector?" he asked, mostly to himself. The lizard-sinner was small, rather like Saul, but woe to any who thought Hector weak because of it. He was dressed in his usual, which clashed somewhat with the more Sicilian norms by being a crisp white shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows, an undershirt, and khaki colored slacks. Hector hadn't been Italian Mafia before he died. He'd been Mexican Cartel, and it showed.

The moment that Hector spotted Arackniss through the glass of his slow moving truck, he reached into the holster that hung in one of his armpits, extracting his piece, and clapping it to his heart with a hard stare in his eyes.

"Oh you sneaky fuckin' lizard," Arackniss said, as Hector raised his gun and fired off a few rounds into the air. Hector had been silently waiting all this time for somebody to make a grab. And now he was instantly aligning himself with literally anybody who would.

The calculus of the whole coup took on new numbers, as the force that he had been putting stalwartly on Henroin's side suddenly flipped to being on his with nothing more than a gesture and a few gunshots to the sky.

Henroin's estate had been made the way most mafia holdings had; by bulldozing anybody who stood in the way of what he wanted. Therefore, the mansion that stood at the border between True North and Low Central stuck out like a hammer-struck thumb, a weird anomaly in the carefully tended poverty around it. The edge of Low Central was, by design, supposed to be poor and an eyesore, so that those who lived within the heart of Low Central, and especially those permitted to dwell in High Central, could see always that they were the shining jewels that had risen above the constant threat of want and hunger. Some may complain about the aesthetics, but it served to be an object lesson from Lucifer himself. You might be up here today, but tomorrow your dumb ass could be down there with them.

There was no chance that the gates were going to open for an entire convoy of trucks and vans, so the lead just drove through it; it had been fortified and given that armor that tanks have to stop missiles on its front bumper. When the vehicle hit, the shaped charges on that bumper detonated, tearing the fence off of its footing and hurling it into the rose-gardens at the heart of the great sweeping oval that the drive in front of the mansion created. The car in front of Arackniss split left, while his own split right, the lead car parking in the flower-beds and unfurling an autocannon from the truck's roof.

"It's showtime, baby!" Imelda said eagerly, as she pulled on the helmet which had been an argument and a half to put there. She had a pretty face. It'd be a damned shame if she messed it up while winning this. Arackniss' car swept to a halt essentially front-bumper-to-front-bumper with the car that had split off in the other direction, and with a kick, its door swung open and the three of them were standing on the steps to Henroin's mansion.

Enzo was standing at the top of them, an SMG in his hands but not pointed at Arackniss, his oddly simian face a portrait of confusion. "Arackniss, what the fuck? Did'ja forget how to press the call button?" Enzo demanded.

Enzo was a decent sort. Dumb as rocks, but decent.

Thus, when Arackniss reached into his coat, he selected from the two Tommy's he had, and picked the one which didn't have Seraphic Steel bullets, and used that one to hose Enzo in good old-fashioned lead. The apish Sinner dropped, his body riddled with holes. But he'd stand back up eventually. Not until after it was all done.

"You got yer names. Go get 'em," Arackniss said, as Xi gave a curt acknowledgement, then ran to one of the marble pillars holding up sort of baldachin over one of the entrances, clambering it up like it were a tree-trunk, and smashing her way into a second-story window. Imelda, though, stayed with Arackniss. Behind them, other vans and trucks screeched to a halt, bumper to bumper, and disgorged their hired guns.

"Long live the don," Imelda said with sultry tone.

"God save us all," Arackniss muttered, then began up the stairs to the biggest gamble of his afterlife.


Despite his many, many, many years in combat, Shrapnel knew that it was a typically a foolish leader who led from the front. And Arackniss was at this moment manning the very tip of the forelorn-hope, that front of the front of the vanguard that was, by all military doctrine, expected to flail gloriously and die quickly. But despite taking a place that prideful idiots clamored for, Arackniss did dozens of other things which painted him as something other than a prideful idiot. Like wearing sufficient body armor.

"Move like your tails are on fire, boys!" Shrapnel shouted to his commandos. Well, they would be his commandos in time. For now, they were mere pups, only one of the lot of them having seen organized combat before. While it was true that each and every one of them was a killer, for Hellhounds, violence was a random and savage thing. To become expert at it required a commitment and resources that most Hellhounds simply had no access to.

So it was that Shrapnel built the army that would outlive him; starting at the very bottom. Oh, Loona would probably recoil violently at the notion of an army being raised in her name, or more broadly in the name of the Free Hounds of Dennys, but she, for all her world-shaking ways, she seemed trapped in tentative thinking. Not nearly so bad as Vortex, who had been rendered nearly neutered by his inner fear, but still she would tell him to stop, as though that would end the thought of Hellhounds mobilizing for the good of their race.

It was inevitable, now. Mordecai Shrapnel was only a swimmer on the tide of Hellhounds' Fortunes, barely able to paddle it into directions he found more acceptable. One way or another, sooner or later – perhaps even in what remained of his lifetime – there would be another Great Hellhound Revolt. Every other one that he knew of had been a slap-dash affair that came to a sad and grinding finale. This time, Shrapnel was here. There would be nothing slap-dash about how it started.

And that meant that he had to blood his commandos while the circumstances permitted it, before the horrible engine of attrition truly picked up momentum.

The building was familiar enough to Shrapnel, having been dragged on spiked leash through its grounds before. He knew the outside well enough that there were no surprises as he rounded the side of the building and his Hounds ghosted through the decorative topiary, all shrubs cut into the forms of powerful beasts of the Human World. The lot of his boys were able to reach the back end without likely a single of them being glanced by any of the many windows that looked down on to this garden, with its pool beginning near its back end and nestling into the corner of the lot. Their current destination was the back. It was where the loading docks were.

For all Henroin Veloce's manor was a place of privilege and a show of force against Hell, it had mundane uses; such as sitting atop a subterranean warehouse for a truly stunning amount of narcotics. If anybody tried to flee, they'd do it out the back, jumping into a van full of heroin and cocaine, and driving out into the wild streets of Pentagram City.

Shrapnel wasn't a fan of intoxicants, himself. He very much valued self control. But though he held those who lost themselves to such vices in a reasonable disdain, he recognized that those same vices represented a vast sum of money in exchangeable medium. Which meant that there were going to be runners. And his boys would get their training.

"Pick your spots!" Shrapnel hissed out, and his commandos clumped into groups of three, just as Shrapnel himself did, joining a bitch and a young pup not even out of his teens, and together darting across the open side of the yard until they reached the closest piece of cover, which was a small equipment shed facing the pool's shallow end. The other groups moved for further and harder-to-reach spots, likely giving him pity for his metal leg and foot. Much as he'd like to say that he didn't need their pity, it was a good thing that he didn't need to run nearly so far. The squeaking might have alerted someone who had somehow missed two dozen Hellhounds and more running between shrubs.

Shrapnel pulled his bayonet from its place locked down the side of his metal leg, and with its tip he pushed against the window, then thumped its hilt until the window shattered with minimal noise. Inside the shack was the stink of chlorine and the dull hum of a motor running. This was the pool's machinery, then. Well, it gave him just enough space to set up two of his guys. The bitch laid out on the floor, staring directly at a wall through a rifle with no scope. The pup moved to the actual door of the thing, unlocking it and cracking it, while holding his own submachine gun in his hands. He'd figured this was the safest way to make his fire teams. A spotter, to call targets, a marksman to fire at those targets, and a lookout to shoot any bastard who got lucky enough to close distance on them. Ordinarily, that last would have been unnecessary, but the dimensions of the current combat required a shift in strategy.

Never let it be said that Shrapnel allowed himself to become stale.

He pulled out the disc of glass and handed it down to the bitch, while lifting his sighting scope to his eye, peeking through the other window at the back of the building. That disc of glass was… something like… a sighting system; it was a 'magic mirror' that was connected to the sighting scope that Shrapnel now peered through; through it, the bitch could see what he saw, and her body subconsciously shifted her stance so that even with the six feet of separation between them, she was now pointing exactly where he was.

It might have been impolite to simply call her 'the bitch', but Shrapnel was an old soldier in a profession where Hounds died very, very young. And though it hardened his heart, it was the only tether for his sanity to not get attached to the new recruits before he had a measure of them. Too often he had become friends with unblooded Pups, only to have them shredded in The Forever War. Never again.

Whosoever survived their fight, Shrapnel would learn the names of. That was his policy then, and it was his policy now.

So the order of the moment was wait. But they didn't need to wait long.

Gunfire went from sporadic-yet-sharp to cataclysmic-yet-muted, as the mafiosos plunged into the building and began to gun down those whom weren't going to do the smart thing and throw down arms. But then again, being as these were organized criminals, Shrapnel considered that they wouldn't have accepted surrenders anyway.

"Door opening," came a call through the radio Shrapnel wore. His angle was almost flush with the back of the building. While that meant he wouldn't see those who started moving, his position would be able to chase anybody who managed to reach the back gate out into the streets. But true to the call-out, a van bearing the markings of a moving company began to accelerate down the tarmac toward the gates, which even now were starting to open.

"Make a blockade," Shrapnel said. He didn't give an order to the sniper at his feet; this wasn't her shot to take. No, the muffled crack came from somewhere far to Shrapnel's right, the van suddenly veering and crashing into the gate as it opened, bending it and halting the car more or less blocking all but a sliver of egress from the yard. That was more luck than skill, but he'd take luck today.

Idly, Shrapnel imagined the shouting the mobsters were probably sending into that lead van, excoriating him for crashing into the gate that they needed open in order to flee, heedless of how they were likely venting air to what was, for a while, a dead man.

Another van came out, but pulled aside, allowing a large truck to bypass it. It paused half way down the drive, as though making one last try to shout some sense into the van-driver. Nobody could see that he'd been shot. Nobody knew that they were under fire.

"I've got a driver," the bitch at Shrapnel's feet said.

"Lock on them and hold," Shrapnel whispered to her. If they opened fire too early, the others would turtle in the loading area, and they would turn this from a shooting-gallery into a siege. And Shrapnel was not going to spend Hellhound lives in another man's siege. Another van pulled up, abreast with the first behind the truck, and another emerged, only its nose peeking out.

There was a belch of black smoke from the truck, as its driver put his pedal to the floor, and he picked up just a bit of speed, but given his mass, that translated into a lot of momentum, which he smashed into the van and hurled it out of the grasp of the broken gate and into the street beyond. The truck had one driver and no cargo. If it made it out, no bother to Shrapnel.

Then at last Shrapnel got what he wanted. He saw mobsters jogging out of the loading area, guns in their hands, as they moved to help clear the road. After all, one lane of traffic would still slow down the exodus of vans.

Shrapnel was only vexed that fewer foot soldiers were jogging than he would have preferred. When they passed the vans, Shrapnel gave just a moment of consideration. Hold or attack? And thankfully for him, his experience and his gut both spoke together in answer.

"Fire at selected," Shrapnel ordered.

The blast of hot gas venting from the rifle the bitch was firing blasted along Shrapnel's ankles as she fired straight through the corrugated metal wall of the shack, and caused the chest of one of the mobsters to suddenly find itself both external to the person possessing it and leaving at some significant velocity. It wasn't flashy, aiming center of mass, but even against Sinners it put them on the ground and kept them there. Unless they had the frankly freakish levels of Regeneration touted by The Radio Demon, he'd be on the ground for hours.

This fight wasn't going to take hours.

Shrapnel turned and picked out another, who was stunned at the sudden ballistic evisceration of his comrade. He could tell that the bitch was taking just a moment to shift her aim, not bothering for anything fancy. Just putting her sights on the largest part of the wide-shouldered former-human's body, and pulling the trigger. There was another loud crack, another blast of hot gas, and another hole punched into the wall beside the first. This time, the bullet caught the mobster in the gut, and the bitch wasted no time sending another bullet at him even as he fell; it caught him in the groin, and because of his orientation at that moment, the bullet ripped upward through his entire abdomen and chest, likely exiting explosively near the mobster's shoulder.

"Hold," he whispered harshly, dipping his sight and calling the bitch to stop firing. The Hound at the door was rock solid with tension, staring through the crack in the door. Two shots was risky, but three was practically suicidal. Four, before the mobsters were distracted, would sign their death warrant. The same corrugated metal that allowed her bullets to go out would do nothing to stop the mobster's bullets from coming in.

But Shrapnel's deathly worries were answered when one of the only mobsters looking vaguely in the old Hound's direction with is gun up was hit from a very different angle, this bullet entering the side of one of the mobster's shoulders and exploding away his other arm, dropping him to the ground as blood shot out of both sides of him to the pounding of his undead heart.

Shrapnel lifted his sight, and nearly snarled at the fact that a mobster had somehow gotten close to one of his fire-teams. That was the most frustrating thing about fighting former-humans. Every single one of them had some sort of trick or trap that they could pull, simply by virtue of their provenance. The mobster was running toward the gazebo that three of Shrapnel's boys and bitches would be in, but he didn't get close at all before the decorative flowers woven through the trellis that formed a half-wall in the garden structure began to explode outward, and a hail of bullets were offered by that fire-group. The one who got uncomfortably close ended up doing a bullet-dance and dropping with a perforated face and chest.

The vans were starting to floor it now. "Stop those vans!" Shrapnel snapped. He could almost feel the shift in everybody aiming, ignoring the approaching mobsters with machine guns, ducking and hitting the dirt – or submerging, as the case of the trio who were actually firing from within the pool may be – before there were a series of loud cracks in the air. One van rumbled forward until it smashed into the back of the truck. The other veered hard onto the far grass, cutting a wide arc through the turf, before it finally hit a wrought-iron bench and was launched upward, high-centering it and leaving its drive wheels spinning.

The mobsters were starting to firm up. They knew they were wedged, and had to fight for the right to flee. Shrapnel would have argued it was safer to let those who were cowards run, rather than back them into a corner where even cowards could fight like lions, but his current employer had let it be known on no uncertain terms. If they run, gun them down. The Pride Wall will sort them out.

Shrapnel had held positions with as many men against far, far, far more opponents before, opponents better trained and better armed. But today, he had something of a handicap that he had lacked in his many battles during The Forever War; he wanted to make sure that every single one of his pups walked out alive. It may have been utopian thinking to even demand that of himself, but still he had. He would learn every single one of their names at the end of today, so help him Dog.

"Fire at will," Shrapnel finally said. Though there were bullets pounding into the places that his other fire teams were settled in, the lack of fire from Shrapnel's direction had pulled the mobster's attention away, made them forget that they'd been attacked from this direction at all. So when the Hound pushed the door open, leaned out laying on his side with his legs over the bitch's back he started to lay down fire, and the bitch fired again and again.

Shrapnel no longer started holding them to the standard of 'perfection', now that this was an honest gun-battle. The mobsters, now finding themselves pincered, did one of two things. They either ran toward their enemies, thinking to rush them while the mobsters had them suppressed. Or they ran away.

"Snipe the cowards," Shrapnel said, then he pulled his pistol from its holster and stepped out over the prone Hound at the door. "Show them the red of their own blood!"

The sound of gunfire and screams of anger, pain and death were a cradle-song to Shrapnel. And he grimly but willingly added to it, to the bass thuds of his massive pistol meting out death to those who had been complicit in his torture at Fat Dino's hands.

Hellhounds seldom truly got a chance to be a source of comeuppance. That being the case, Shrapnel found himself grinning as he brought a righteous vengeance onto those who had wronged him, and doubtless countless others of his brethren. Today, red in tooth and claw, was a good day to be a Hellhound.


Old Tom was old.

It was almost a foolishly simple thing to say. But the truth of it rang through with every action and deed he ever achieved. He died an old man in an occupation where men died young. He served as a Hellish mercenary for near a century where most Sinners seldom last a decade. And freed from the bondage of a withering and age-frail body, he would only become more dangerous, more fearsome with age. Where once he was but a fifth-son of a farmer at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, he had shed those paltry beginnings and become first a Thief In Law even amongst Thieves In Law, and then to become one of the finest mercenaries that Hell could claim to have.

Where once Tom had no shoes in the wintertime, having to dart across fields so cold that the burned his soles with every stride to milk and feed the cows in the hours where the sun hadn't even dared peek above the horizon, now Tom had experienced nearly all comforts that first Earth and then Hell had to offer. And to the man who provided those comforts, for a time, Tom could offer loyalty.

Such it was for Arackniss. The Young Spider was a good leader to have, given a paucity of options. He thought things through. He made plans, and plans for when those plans failed. Tom had had the grave misfortune of having to fight against people like The Young Spider, both in Russia's seedy underbelly and in the pits of Hell itself. Such men were nightmares to try to move against, for every means of advance played host to pitfall, landmine, or vile curse. Which was why he so appreciated working for one for a change. It was deeply edifying to the old tiger to see others fall into the traps that, were circumstances different, would be his problem to surmount.

The estate of Henroin Veloce was quickly gaining a different sort of look to it. Arackniss was striding forward, his pace steady, and though not quick, had a certain inevitability to it that seemed to give heart to his followers, who ran around behind him, sweeping rooms, clearing out hiding places, and gunning down anybody who so much as breathed defiance against him. The look that Tom referred to was 'red, and streaky', for many were the mobsters who had either raised guns against Tom and Arackniss and those who moved with them, and more still were those who simply froze, and Arackniss had elected to fill them with lead as a safety precaution. Nearly all of the people here were Sinners, and they would recover from some bullets. And the imps, who did the little jobs? They were sensible. When people with guns rampaged through rooms containing them, they retreated to the corners, made sure their hands were visible and empty of anything approaching a weapon, and waited for the pandemonium to pass over them.

Tom liked imps. They were sensible. If Tom were not human, he would like to think that he would be best served to have been an imp. There was a streak of stubborn pride in him that an imp would either do terribly or terrifically with, and it galled Tom that he would never get to experience which it was. Much as Tom's artistic repertoire was mostly peopled with creators from the powerful class, his own history taught him the value and perspective of being an underdog, of being the least of a great host.

Many thought Old Tom was too shallow of a man to hold such thoughts as these. Well, fuck your mother, whoever said that of him; let fools underestimate him, so that he could defeat them with surprise in their hearts and not a sweat broken.

The room shook with every step Tom took, not just because he was gifted here in Hell with the body of a tiger and the might to match, but because he had wrapped that tiger in something even more deadly. Arackniss had outright demanded to know where he'd gotten ahold of this device which he now bore on himself like a second skin. But Tom just laughed at him and snarled that old men are allowed to have secrets.

It was no business of Arackniss that Old Tom had friends in Glowtown, friends who were willing, for the right bribes, to allow a Blasphemer Powered Armor System to 'fail quality inspection' and vanish from the ledgers. The bitch of the thing had been arranging for one of appropriate size to be so 'lost'. Old Tom was not a small man.

Strictly, the machine could have been better. In order to smuggle it out, it had to be 'demilitarized', which was to say, have its integral weaponry removed. But that still left it as a half tonne of synthetic-myomer driven heavy armor and protective features that rendered Old Tom essentially invulnerable to even the largest guns that these little mobsters could bear against him.

Within his armored helm, Old Tom was grinning, having the time of his afterlife. While Arackniss advanced slowly, Old Tom had no reason to. He could run, as fast as the machine allowed him to – it did hamper him very slightly from his fastest sprint, but given the perks of it, it was an infliction he could endure – and smashed headlong into a group of three who had upended a granite table and were trying to kill anybody who passed by the door that they overwatched. Tom had had this thing for a while, but only now did he have an opportunity to meaningfully use it. And since Old Tom wasn't about to let them shoot Arackniss from enfillade (even if the Young Spider was wearing some amount of armor) now was as good a time to shock his foes as any. So Tom kicked the table, splitting it and the movement of the vast weight catching one of the gunmen and hurling him aside, while leaving the other two unloading .45 caliber bullets at him from truly point blank range; they didn't even set off the armor's ablation warning, so toothless were they.

"What the fuck is this?" The Other Jimmy demanded. For just a moment, as Old Tom let a malevolent laugh exit his armor, he wondered if circumstances had made Other Jimmy into just 'Jimmy' now? Henroin had thrown Original Jimmy bodily through the Pride Wall. Ah well, such peccadillos of nomenclature were not for Old Tom to decide. As the mobster's guns clicked empty, only then, with terror in their hearts at having launched a hundred bullets at their foe for nothing, did Tom race forward, grabbing both of them by their throats, and then with a mighty heave and a triumphant laugh, he slammed them down on the broken edge of the table, so that the jagged stone would decapitate them. Sinners both, they would recover.

There was a third, though.

Tom turned to the other, who had his gun in front of him, and was now cowering, pulling his derby hat as though hoping that he could hide himself inside of it. Pathetic in its entirety. Old Tom didn't even bother giving him a temporary death. He just stooped down, grabbed the gun that the fear-paralyzed man had abandoned, and turned back to the hallway. And just as Arackniss crossed the door, his pace slow but steady as the coming of winter.

Tom strode out, checking that the gun he'd stolen was functional – it was – and falling in beside The Young Spider. "Is fun time," Old Tom said.

"Yeah. I'm havin' a gas," Arackniss said, displaying tremendous deadpan. Old Tom barked out a belly laugh, but let the usurper of Veloce continue walking. The Cat of the Bayou was seemly more of Tom's mentality; he could see her through the glass double doors of the sitting room yonder, tearing mobsters apart with her claws, as they tried to exit a 'hidden path' that Old Tom was entirely aware of, and thus so was The Young Spider. The last, she slashed his throat almost elegantly, before hurling his body through the doors, shattering the glass and splintering the wood that contained the panes. With a spriteliness that Tom in his Blasphemer couldn't match, she joined Arackniss just as he reached the foot of the great staircase, that head up, ornately, through two stories, before terminating at a door.

"Hey, Baby, you've got some blood on you," the Bayou Cat painted red by her violence teased with her lilting tone.

"You got more," Arackniss answered back. He paused at last, tilting his head as though hearing something. He raised his hand that wasn't holding a Thompson and snapped his fingers. Old Tom didn't need more than the basest of context to know that he was up. He ascended a few more steps, at the head of the pack.

No sooner had he passed the third step than bullets began to ping against the back of his head. There was a warning of microfractures as an antipersonnel rifle bullet managed to by sheer luck hit the edge of a plate. Well, that was not going to do. Old Tom turned, and began retreating up the stairs, and with his stolen gun, he began opening skulls.

It was a good defensive position with the way that the Grand Stairway was constructed. Each of the floors it reached opened into a balcony of sorts that enabled people to form murder holes. Ordinarily, a wonderfully valid tactic, enabling them to shoot with impunity those below. But Old Tom was immune to their valid tactic, and suddenly the whole thing was cast to the wind. By their panicked voices, they were expecting a great many things with regards to a sudden attack on the estate, but Old Tom in powered armor was not one such possibility. Sadly for Tom, his gun clicked empty before he'd successfully turned all of his opponents into a problem to deal with tomorrow, so he had to weather a bit of fire without response. But then he saw something arcing over the very impromptu barricade that they set up. A hand grenade. How creative.

Flipping his gun in his hands so he held it by the barrel, he almost contemptuously swatted the grenade with the gun's butt and sent it back whence it came. It detonated directly above the barricade, likely taking out at least one fool. Old Tom smiled in his armored helmet. Today was a fine day.

Not willing to make the same mistake twice, Tom snapped his armored fingers toward Imelda. Though she made a face of annoyance at him, she did unloop the trench-gun she had on a belt at her back and threw it to him. Hers was about the only gun that Tom, in his current armor, could fit his finger non-destructively into the trigger of (the previous machine-gun having to be mangled so he could fire it). Tom then walked backward up the next flight, so when the next barricade showed itself, he was already facing it. As soon as his head and shoulders appeared to their perspective, they opened fire, and Tom could hear soft rain on his armor.

He laughed, continuing his backward advance until his hips were now visible to them, at which point they ran out of ammo in their current magazines. Tom rooted his feet for a moment, then hurled himself up and forward. He landed with a calamitous crash atop and thus through the mostly-wooden barricade that these ones had set up, outright crushing one of the hold-outs under his massive weight. He swung the trenchgun to his side, a portion of his vision still slaved to the motion of that arm even without the cannon on it so he could no-peek-fire at the one at one side of him and rip his throat out with buckshot. Of the other two, one, in an act more of madness than of heroism, tried to stab the superlatively armored Tom, only to have the knife harmlessly skip off of the armored plates. The other ran, diving headlong through a door and into another room.

Drat. He would be a problem. But not a problem for Tom.

"Wait wait wait!" the little rat in front of him said.

Tom waited exactly long enough to swing Imelda's trenchgun so that it was pointed at the rat Sinner's face.

"You don't need to…"

Tom was instantly bored by the mobster's attempt to sway him, so shot the front of his face through the back of his skull.

"One runner in trophy room, Young Spider," Tom announced, hopping over the rail to shatter several steps that he landed on, which was inconvenient and would cost the Young Spider money, but it would cost nothing to Tom, so he didn't care. Arackniss was walking again, his red eyes locked on the door at the top landing. Just beyond the top landing was Henroin's office. Defensively, not a good place to put it, although it did have two stairwell ambushes to get there. Old Tom would have put it somewhere else, were he designing the building. But his opinions had been ignored when this place went up. So Henroin put himself in an indefensible position.

"Stand back. I'm goin' foyst," Arackniss announced as he reached the top of the stairs, facing the heavy, ornate teak door that led into Henroin's offices.

"He will try to shoot you," Old Tom pointed out, as he lobbed the trenchgun back to the Bayou Cat.

"Yeah. He'll try," Arackniss said. Well, if the young man wanted to play such a game, who was Old Tom to stop him?

Arackniss entered exactly how Tom would have, by bull-rushing the door near its hinges with his shoulder, ripping it from its mooring and hurling it forward into the room. And then, well, Tom saw something that surprised him. He knew that some fighters who specialized in speed could move so quickly as to appear a blur, and those were terrifying opponents indeed. Tom had nothing bad to say about any who achieved such an acme of speed, and idly wished that he could have as well, but Tom, it seemed, had neither the talent nor the stubborn will to achieve despite lack of talent, so he would choose to be strong instead. To be a blur in combat was to be the final arbiter of who lives and dies.

The Young Spider did not blur.

The Young Spider outright disappeared.

A very strange gunshot sound hit the air, one that Tom only later understood to be the result of seven distinct gunshots all overlapping each other in a fraction of a second. And in the broad room, with its ballistic glass window overlooking the hovels of True North, with its black columns leafed with gold, with its broad table with a distinct line of guns for Henroin to use one after another, there were seven other mobsters.

The past tense being the imperative, there.

In the instant that strange, bloated gunshot sounded, each of the seven of them all died, their heads blossoming into bloody sprays, all coming from vastly different directions; two of those bloody sprays, of the two standing on the 'rug' made of the tanned skin of one of Henroin's former enemies, had been rather pointedly directed toward the face of Henroin. So when the instant of violent death ended, and the Young Spider reappeared standing at the very heart of the room, it was just in time for Henroin's eyes to be fouled by blood, brains and chips of skull.

Henroin flinched back despite his likely intention, putting more than an arm's reach between him and the guns. He swiped at his face, as Arackniss put his American pistol away. It was a decent weapon, the M1911A1. A bit lacking in capacity. If Old Tom ever had use for a pistol, he preferred the Glock 21, as it had almost twice the bullets in each magazine, and was otherwise a perfectly normal and serviceable piece.

When Henroin had finally cleared his eyes, and saw that the one invading his residence was not Capone or Magianno or anybody else, but his own son, he let out a snarl of supreme fury. "What the fuck are doin' you fuckin' retard! We're getting hit by Magianno right fuckin' now! There ain't time for this stupid bullshit you brain-dead little piss-bucket!"

"Yeah, I figured he'd be hitting you by now," Arackniss said, his tone more sad than anything. Like a disappointed father staring down a tantruming son. "You gave him all the weakness he'd need to attack."

"I am gonna make you with you'd never been b–" Henroin began.

He was cut off when Arackniss quick-drew his other pistol, which was a Bodeo 1889, an old Italian piece. A revolver, and one not often seen in hell. In fact, by Tom's eye, he would probably guess that it was hand-made by the Veloce as some sort of sigil piece. Before Henroin could react, Arackniss had fanned the hammer four times, to another bloated single gunshot sound, and a stitch of four bullet-holes ran across Henroin's broad head.

Henroin collapsed forward, bleeding piteously, onto the table amidst the guns that he never got a chance to use.

Arackniss turned to Old Tom. "Tom, grab the dog downstairs and mount the convoy. Hit Magianno's headquarters with everything you got. If I know that greasy fuck, he's goin' all in on hitting us, which means…"

"That his house is undefended," Tom said. The plan was sound. Kill the leaders, and then give the attackers an ultimatum of either dying for nothing and no profit, or accept defeat and get to live and try again in the ever evolving landscape of Pentagram City's criminal underbelly. "I will kill these men."

"You'd bettah, for the price I pay you," Arackniss said with a laugh, then moved up and began to drag Henroin off of the table and dump him onto the 'rug' which was the skin of a heavily tattooed former-human. Tom needed no further instruction. He'd survived enough fights to know that Arackniss had his own next step to pursue, one that Old Tom would not be involved with and thus the tiger would need no input into. Tom moved to the next room over, one that would have traditional glass instead of the transparent metal that paranoid mobsters favored, and simply launched himself at the wall.

The wall splintered, the window shattering as windows ought.

It was a long fall, but Tom was, at his core, a cat. And cats always land on their feet. With a mighty bang, he landed on the now shattered flagstones of the walkway. He could hear occasional gunshots from his left, and sure enough, there was the tail end of a gun-fight going on between the Old Dog's Hounds and the cowards of Veloce who had thought to run. That worked to Tom's advantage. He loped easily toward the killing field, and raised his voice to call out for the dog in charge. A few more seconds of gunfire later, there was a shout. "Hold fire, regroup!" that the old man of the dogs announced.

Shrapnel was like Tom, in his way. An old man in an occupation where men died young. So Tom afforded him more respect than he did to most. The greying Hellhound exited that swimming pool's maintenance shack, and the other hounds began to quickly jog toward him, some of their number still holding arms toward the massacre they'd undertaken, which was prudent. "Young Spider say we move now against Magianno while Magianno is weak. Take him while he has a shit," Old Tom said.

"With how many?" Shrapnel asked, not bothering to question the swerve in his mission.

Old Tom turned to the massacre again. "How many can you fit in vans?" Old Tom asked.

It turned out, that when you hurled a bunch of drugs and guns out of the back of the vans, there was more than enough room for Old Tom, all of Shrapnel's Hellhounds, and a few other of the Young Spider's people who had been close enough for Old Tom to roar at and get them wedged in as well. It was an audacious move, but today was an audacious day, it seemed. The shift in battle only took about ten minutes, with the last to squeeze into the truck being Xi, whose armor was looking moderately shredded, as though she'd gotten into a swordfight at some point. Good for her. Swordfights build character.

"Do you think we're overextending?" Xi asked, as the vans began to thunder through the streets, which, now being aware that there was A Big Mafia Thing going on were empty of all but those who would be killed if they weren't on the roads. And those same drivers, when caught-up to by a convoy of bullet-riddled vans, did the prudent thing and just pulled aside to let them pass. Smart boys.

"Young Spider has many arms. Reach is long," Old Tom mused. Realistically, a prudent notion would have been to lock down the Veloce estate for a few days and consolidate. But hitting that pest Magianno while his forces were squatting over privy was a once-in-a-decade opportunity that Old Tom agreed whole-heartedly with the now-current Don of the Veloce Crime Family. Cleaning up the family's borders and putting them adjacent to two groups who were long neutral rather than hostile to Veloce would be a coup, and might reap dividends in the inevitable war against Alphonse Capone.

"You could simply say he's being naive," Xi failed to grasp Tom's meaning. Well, so be it. He didn't know her, despite fucking her a time or two. And she, despite the same, didn't know him. It suited Old Tom to allow people to think his mind more inert than it actually was. It made it all the simpler to take advantage of people underestimating him.

The trip didn't even feel a tenth as long as the one from the badlands into Pentagram City, flying by as Old Tom considered what he'd find here. Magianno was an aggressive pest. May be that he still had defenses left around his seat of power in the Hotel Etna, which the vans were careening toward. It might be that he only had a skeleton crew manning his operations while his 'best men' went out to strike at where Henroin's operation had been weak.

"I see the snow falling, and it is red. What grim weather has come to our nation," Tom intoned, forcefully ignoring his brain's new instinct to render it into After and instead deliberately letting them slip his lips as Georgian. Xi turned a confused look to him, her own brain having the double-trick of hearing it in one language and understanding it in another. He simply grinned, as the van came to a halt near the front doors of the Hotel Etna. And then with a booming laugh, he didn't even bother with the back door; he ripped his way through the side of the van, landing on a shocked mobster-doorman who hadn't even gotten a chance to pull his piece before a tonne of angry landed on him. The other doorman let out a surprised yell, reaching for a radio to alert the building. In the time Old Tom took stomp a hole through the chest of the Sinner under his foot, Xi bolted, claws first, out of the hole he'd ripped, slashing the other doorman's face and neck to shreds and silencing him.

"Let us kill the pig and his piglets!" Old Tom roared, out loud through the speakers of his armor, so all of the little mobsters and their Hellhound Mercenaries could hear him. And then, with a mighty crash, he stormed through the front door and into enemy territory.

It was a good and glorious thing, to be paid so well to do what he was so good at.


"Wait, you're just going to send a handful? What about…" Imelda began, but Arackniss silenced her with a gesture.

"A handful is all Magianno's worth right now. And it's Old Tom leadin' them. They'll either bring me back a big fuckin' rash of mob-bacon, or they'll have wrecked a bunch'a his shit and knocked him outta the game for a while while we dig in. Now grab Pa's feet. We ain't done here."

"Wait what do you mean?" Imelda asked.

"His feet?" Arackniss pointed. Imelda clearly didn't like being ordered around, but grasped that time was of the essence and explanations took time that he didn't have to spare. Once she had his feet, Arackniss took Henroin by his shoulders and lifted him up, walking toward the panel of a 'window' that the old man used to stare through. Arackniss knew his kick wouldn't shatter it; it wasn't glass. But it did tear it out from its mooring, and send it crashing down onto an outdoor dining set, which was crushed flat under the panel's weight. Arackniss phoned the driver of one of the vehicles which was near the middle of the convoy that brung them here. "Bring the rig to the back, pronto."

"Baby, I don't know what's goin' on here, and if I have to get any more orders barked at me I'm gonna start clawin' people," Imelda promised.

"I'm headin' off one problem with Old Tom. And with him," he, gestured to the temporary carcass that he was helping to hold up with one of his spare hands, "I'm gonna go head off another."

"What problems could a corpse 'head off'?" Imelda was clearly running low on patience.

"Ismael Salamanca," was all Arackniss said, but Imelda was cogent enough to be aware of the many, many, grievous insults that Henroin had done and said to the Salamanca clan, all the way back from when Angel Dust first pushed Ismael's brother, Jesus (what the fuck was up with Mexicans and naming themselves Jesus, by the way?) into obscurity and exile, and Ismael had to spend a decade regaining the family's honor in a new location and with a mostly new crew, while Veloce built itself on the bones of Jesus Salamanca's better days.

The van pulled around, and Arackniss motioned to swing Henroin's carcass. Imelda humored him, and the two of them just chucked the corpse out the window, landing it face-first on the marble flagstones, further damaging Arackniss' father and lengthening how long it'd be until he Regenerated himself back to life. Imelda was staring at him, catching him before he jumped down (a drop of four stories, given the rapid dip toward the back-yard on this side of the house opposite the pool). "He'll still kill you for what you've done to him," Imelda tried to point out.

"And what have I done to him?" he asked. Imelda opened her mouth to start listing examples, but he continued. "What can he prove?"

And that was the trick of this. For all Arackniss had indeed been his father's Hatchetman in fucking with the Salamancas quite a few times over the years, whereas all of Henroin's insults had been blatant, overt, loud, and obvious, everything that Arackniss had done had been quiet, subtle, covert, and most importantly of all, deniable.

While there was no end to the proof of enmity toward Henroin Veloce, Salamanca likely had no proof whatsoever that Arackniss had ever done a single thing to so much as inconvenience him.

And that would make what he was about to do marginally more possible.

Heartless, but possible.

He jumped down, and Imelda, pussycat she was, jumped down after him. He landed to a cracking of stone, because he was too tough to be meaningfully hurt by such a small drop. Imelda landed with a soft plap and not so much as a shiver, because, of course, she was a cat, now. While Arackniss could easily have hoisted his father and chucked him into the back of the van idling nearby, he allowed Imelda to help him. It probably was for the best that she thought she was helping.

She joined him, as well as a few of Arackniss' other hired guns. He could see that the overwhelming majority of them were actually still alive. Even the imps. Either he had desperately overestimated Henroin's endurance or drastically underestimate the strength of his own position. Whichever was the case, now was the part of the plan that he had shared with only three others. Old Tom knew, because Old Tom as a bodyguard was too valuable to ignore. Scutello knew, so that he could get money into the right places. And the other was Rick Tucci, who cuffed the driver in the side of the head and shouted at him to move to shotgun, and took over driving. Ricardo Tucci had once been a golden boy of Henroin's institution. His fall from grace had soured him strongly toward the Old Man, so it was easiest to buy Tucci's loyalty which saw vengeance as part of its unfolding.

So Tucci started driving, while the former driver watched from the front passenger, Imelda and Arackniss lounged in the middle seat, and the mangled corpse of Henroin was rudely shoved into the back.

It was almost unacceptably brash, doing this the way that he did. Arackniss recognized that taking a swing at Magianno's headquarters instead of just driving away the vultures was a gamble that required rolling a twelve on a pair of old and badly-formed dice. But he'd called the audible, because fate, or something like it, had broken his way. Instead of having a meatgrinder through Hector's group to even reach Henroin's compound, they were let through without so much as a frown. Instead of a siege that might take days to run to its course, the fight was over in minutes.

And out of the entire force that was now consolidating in Arackniss's compound, and digging in the strength of Veloce while the digging still mattered, a handful of Arackniss's people went down. Two imps, neither one dead. Two Sinners, only dead temporarily. Another Sinner wounded but still able to do work. And out of the Hellhound mercs, only one of them had caught a bullet and needed to get moved out of the battleground. Even then, it seemed that the Hound would likely survive the wound.

A half dozen casualties in a war against a nearly Centennial Power here in Pentragram City. Either that was an act of nearly divine providence or it was proof of just how frail the organization of Veloce had become. And in either case, it was up to Arackniss to right the ship before the tidal-wave that was Alphonse Fucking Capone sank them entirely.

True north faded quickly in the rear-view, as Arackniss glared at the road which radiated directly north out of Low Central. The Radiator Roads weren't straight, per se, because they bent with the fabric of reality of the city, but they came closer to being straight than any other road in this weird fucking city, and they took what was mathematically the shortest path from the heart of the warp at Low Central to the nearest point of Pentagram City which was no longer urban. In this case, Northreach. Strictly, passing through the nominally-neutral but de facto hostile territory of the Tomitori Zaibotsu was a dangerous move, especially today, but Kei maintained his power through careful non-rule, rather than crackdowns and shows of force. And since Tomitori played so nice with Peacekeeper Sallos, to the extent that one of the Ars Goetia's Great Garrisons was a proud landmark of the land of Kei Tomitori, to incite violence upon the soft-handed cartel from the Orient was to bring down the fury of a fallen angel. Holstering guns was only prudent, when arrayed against such powers.

Because of Tomitori's association with Sallos, his territory was vast, but necessarily could not expand. To be aligned with Sallos was to align with at least nominative pacifism. It served as neutral ground for many factions. Including the one which Arackniss was placing a phone-call to right now.

"Fuck you and your pizza-eating cronies," came the answer immediately upon pick-up by the other party, shouting into Arackniss's ear. "I should have my nephews come over there and pull your tongue out through your slit-open, hairy throat!"

"Keep talkin' like that and I may give you exactly that oppahtoonity," Arackniss said.

There was a pause, as the one who'd picked up no doubt checked the caller-id of who made this call, and confirmed that it was indeed called from Henroin's personal Hellphone – which it was.

"What the fuck are you doing with your father's phone, little vermin?" a different voice, more snarling and lizardlike came onto the line.

"Making an offer, effective immediately. Send who you've gotta send; I'll be waiting just inside Kei's turf outsida 'a yer borders," Arackniss said.

"Are you doin' what I think you're doin'?" Imelda asked.

"Watch and you'll see," Arackniss said, while hanging up and sending a new call to Kei Tomitori, which one of his underlings picked up. There wasn't much fronting or chest-beating to do. Just informing him that he was on his turf for purposes of brokerage, not war. As though anybody but Henroin would be dumb enough to declare war on Kei.

Even Capone wouldn't have been bold enough to do that.

The van pulled off of the Radiator Road and down through some streets of Inner Northeast, leaving behind hovels and homeless camps for a public park, put up and maintained by the owners of this land. It was lined with trees, which, though tall, all had a dreadful aura to them. As the van pulled off of the street and moved into the park, Arackniss could see the wood-petrified forms of victims who had been nailed to those trees, and then had the tree grow through them. The fortunate ones were fiends or imps; they were clearly dead, rotten or merely bones-held-in-bark. The Sinners, who could not die from this treatment, ended up entombed in living wood, only the barest twist of their body pressing out against the bark evidence that they were there at all.

Kei Tomitori may have been a shockingly peaceful yakuza boss. That didn't make him a merciful one.

They parked the van, and Arackniss got out, looking at the park, and its trees of agonized fools who tried their luck against Tomitori and failed. He could very much imagine a history where he and his father were both entombed in living wood, as he followed exactly the wrong order given by exactly the wrong fool, left to linger without food until their minds broke. But not now. Now, Arackniss knew better. And he had a righteous purpose, one that would likely take him years go see to its end. Tomitori had, through good alliances, secured his power and comfort by the grace of a fallen angel. Arackniss would have to secure, through strength and audacity, their own place against the depredations of Capone, or whatever worse thing would come after him.

There would be a worse thing, of course. This was Hell.

He had to wait for quite a time. Not an hour, but some portion of it. Even now, Old Tom and the other mercenaries would be attacking Magianno and crushing their power base, catching them with their pants down. Everything had to go perfectly, but things were aligning toward perfection at a shocking rate. May even be the case that they aligned enough to make all of this work.

Finally, after an anxiety inducing wait, the massive, gold-plated car of Ismael Salamanca appeared, approaching from one of the other roads that led to the Garden Most Beautiful (a weird name, that must have been a joke in Japanese that Arackniss didn't understand) and rolled to a halt a good distance away. The back doors of the car opened, and three massive Sinners, two reptile Sinners and one having the Aspect of a monster Arackniss wasn't familiar with, stepped out, forming something of a wall between the car and Arackniss' people and his van. The passenger door opened, and Padre Pio, the Hellpreacher, exited on that side, wearing his episcopal robes and his red horn-punctured skull-cap marked with silver skulls and a jewel encrusted crucifix which seared the flesh of the lamb-Sinner who wore it any time it touched skin. Padre refused to react to his own faith causing the symbol of that faith to injure and hurt him. Few of that piety remained in Hell. Arackniss didn't see the point of it, but that was between Pio and God.

Last out of the car was Ismael Salamanca himself.

Salamanca was a dragon of a man, but one whose wings had been clipped not long after his arrival in Hell by his brother Jesus. The irony that Jesus essentially vanished and the brother Jesus suborned remained had to be something for the history books. Still, Salamanca's skin was all scales, deep bedded by the look of them, and his eyes slit like those of a serpent. He was tall, eight feet tall, and top heavy, with the scales on his arms so much smaller than those on his face. Fitting, because those scales were individually colored, forming mosaics which resembled tattooes he no doubt had when he was alive.

"Alright," Ismael's voice sounded exactly like what it should have been for such a horrifying figure, deep and imposing and dangerous. "We are here on neutral ground. You speak for your old man, little spider?"

Arackniss shook his head.

"I speak for the whole Veloce family."

Salamanca gave a derisive snort. "No you don't," he said. "Only the Old Spider can speak for your family. And he's not here. You speak for him. Don't lie to me thinking yourself safe in Kei's backyard."

"Incorrect," Arackniss said. Ismael began to snarl and smoke curled from his lips.

"What is incorrect?" Pio asked, interrupting the Grounded Dragon.

"That the Old Man isn't here. Imelda, if you would?" Arackniss asked.

In his mind, he had imagined a thousand show-downs with his father, a thousand arguments that he could have with the man. But in the end, reality was what it was. And as Imelda dragged the Regenerating corpse of Henroin out of the van, the Salamancas all stopped their sniggering and posturing, and became much more focused and concerned.

There was no mistaking Henroin for anybody but himself, after all.

Salamanca turned a glance back to the Padre, but Pio was stoic, staring with sharp eyes at the slowly regenerating corpse of Henroin.

"So," Salamanca said, crossing his arms before his barrel of a chest "Why are you standing there like your have an opinion that matters?"

Arackniss answered that question by extracting a single bullet, which gleamed in the sunlight with the unmistakable sheen of Seraphic Steel. The three toughs all shifted, getting ready to tackle either attacker or target if he did something stupid. But instead, Arackniss very slowly and deliberately pulled out one of his pistols that was chambered in the same caliber, dumping the mag and racking out the bullet that was ready to fire. It left him with a gun with slide locked back, one that he, with no flourish but very clear telegraphing, slid the bullet into battery and let the slide clack forward.

He had imagined a thousand last shouting matches with Henroin, and in that thousand arguments, there was never a way out but bloody. So he obeyed reality. And he let his final argument come from the barrel of a gun.

The gunshot made only one of the toughs react, because he had aimed it nowhere near any of the Salamanca contingent and instead drilled the bullet directly through the head of Henroin Veloce. An instant later, all of Henroin's wounds began to clog up with Demon Bone Ash, his Regeneration ended by one of the few things capable of it. There was a hollow feeling in Arackniss' heart, to pull the trigger and end his own father.

But in all the ways that mattered, Henroin Veloce was already dead. Not just dead in body, but dead in spirit and dead in will. If it hadn't been Arackniss's hand that pulled this trigger, somebody else's would have, and the rut that Henroin cut with his heedless rampaging would have been a lot longer and bloodier by the time it happened.

Arackniss threw the gun away, not willing to keep touching the weapon he used to to murder his own father. This was not an act to be proud of. It was something which needed to happen. He faced Salamanca, whose eyes regarded him as though he'd never seen Arackniss before in all their shared durance in Hell.

"Ten thousand insults to Salamanca from Henroin, and from Henroin alone. Veloce holds no claim on them," Arackniss said, his voice severe. "The old day is done. I think it's time we start to build a new one."

"That's a big show for a 'new start'," Salamanca said. "People don't make big shows unless they want something big in return. Henroin has done insult to my family, yes. And I would have preferred to fire that bullet myself. So why are you standing here, in The Daimyo's back yard, when we ought-to-be fighting each other?"

"Capone," was all Arackniss said.

Salamanca leaned aside and spat. "He's a lot closer to you than he is to me," the grounded Dragon said.

"But he'll reach you, even if he has to go around Tomitori to do it. Do you want your people bending knee to a goddamned Italian?" Arackniss asked.

"You ask as a 'goddamned Italian'," Salamanca pointed out with a bass grunt that puffed out smoke.

"Bullshit, I was American. And that don't matter now that I'm dead," Arackniss said. "What I want is peace. Between your guys and mine. So that when Capone comes, we can finally pitch that sonuvabitch through the Pride Wall like he deserves."

Salamanca turned to Padre Pio. "What do you think, Padre?" the Grounded Dragon asked. And the Hellpreacher clutched the jeweled crucifix, ignoring how it burned his palms and sent smoke curling up around his face.

"It is a rare thing," Pio said, and despite his more than a century in Hell, it still sounded distinctly Portugese, as the man himself was purportedly Brazilian.

"What is?" Salamanca asked.

"To see even so much as a spark of God's Righteousness in this fallen and despoiled meat that we live amongst, is a desperately rare thing," Padre Pio said. He held out a hand, one that was raw from the burns that his own faith imbued into the crucifix such that its holiness could harm him, and with it, he made a motion of benediction, his fingertips outright catching fire as he did. Faith was a rare thing in Hell. And Padre Pio had been a faithless preacher in life, only to have that faith born and multiplied to approach infinity by his time in Hell. "With him, we can do God's work."

Salamanca gave a raised brow. "You don't even say that about me," he pointed out.

"Many are God's projects, and we cannot expect God to do all the work," Pio did not answer Salamanca's charge at all. He turned and went back to the car, obviously having said everything he'd wished to. That just left Imelda, a couple of Arackniss's new mafiosos, and the Young Spider of Veloce himself, standing above the corpse of the Old Spider of Veloce which very gradually began to rot.

Salamanca took it all in. Arackniss was not the kind to think him a brute because he had the physique and face of one. Dragons were rare Sinners, because they represented all of the best of the worst aspects of humanity. Ambition, greed, power, and more than most things cunning. It was fortunate for Hell that there were not many Dragons. Slowly, a smile of sharp, flesh-ripping teeth opened on Ismael Salamanca's face.

"Peace," he said with a small nod. "In the name of indignities repaid. And may be there is a day where we fight together against Capone."

"May be," Arackniss said.

He turned his back first, letting Salamanca 'win' the stare down because Arackniss had already gotten everything he wanted. A secure border so that he could only be pushed from one direction was incredibly valuable, especially with a new Great Turf War brewing on the horizon. There were still years of work to be done and only months to do it in. So it was either going to be sleeping during car-rides or heavy amphetamine use for the next little while.

Suddenly, Angel Dust's rapidly spiraling drug habit came to a sort of sense about it.

"That was… did you plan all of that?" Imelda only asked when they were both back in the van, so as not to offer any loss of face in front of Salamanca.

"Enough of it to be proud, not enough to be confident," he admitted, and he let out a sigh, his back loosing and he sank into the seat. Oh, but he wanted to sleep for a year. A year he couldn't afford to lose. He looked to his phone. Updates by the Hellhound commander; Magianno was on the way to falling, but there were some hold outs that would take about an hour to clear. Still more than soon enough.

It was done.

Magianno's territory and resources would soon be Arackniss's. Salamanca and Veloce were now at peace, and wouldn't constantly be sniping and swiping at each other. Now all he had to do was rebuild what Henroin broke, and form a wall for Capone to break his teeth against.

Actually strike that last thought; A Don's work was never done.


"Oh, it was wild in the days before The Pentagram Way got set up. The Wild West, where gangs would be constantly gunning each other down over a street-corner or a strip of pavement. And back in Lucifer's day, that kind of warfare was more sustainable. There would always be more Sinners, and it wasn't like they had to contend with the Fiendish Mafias further down the stack of Hell. But Hell isn't a stagnant body anymore. And to keep up, us Sinners up here had to adapt. Change the way our family business worked.

No more Great Turf Wars. If you've got beef with a family that you can't hash out any other way but red, you stage a battle for it, defender gets to state the terms of it. It kept things civilized. Kept things calm. And more than anything else, it kept our casualties down, so that when the Pride Wall stopped being the end of the line and instead became another imaginary line in the dirt that we could cross as we pleased, suddenly we had people from up here going down there. And Greed Ring has no shortage of Mafia Families waiting.

The Mob Wars of the early 2030s were bad. But it could'a been worse. We were already all bunched up after that years-long crusade to finally axe Capone. So when the fiends from the Lower Rings started to push us, we were still organized enough to push back. And back then, we were still a bunch of Families that fuckin' hated each other. So you understand just how bad it had to get that we started to hate the Fiendish Mafia even more than each other, up to and until The Pentagram Way was established and we dug our trenches.

In the end, our unity was born out of mutual hatred, and somehow, the Dons turned that into actual, genuine fucking respect. I still wonder what would have happened if the Pride Wall fell while Henroin was still in charge of Veloce, if the Families were still at war. Hell, I wonder what Capone would have done during the Mob Wars. But that kind of thinking doesn't do much good for me. Just the idle fancies of an old man. I've got more important things to look after now, like the fact that somehow I've got a living grandkid down here. Listen; pushing drugs pays the bills well enough, until you're starting to worry about paying for a brat's college tuition. Then things get messy."

-Saul Rott, Consigliere of the Veloce Crime Family