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  And this was how, several years later, deep in a prison in the third circle of Hell, I played the opening bars to ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’.

  The music blasted from the organ, making the world around us shake. Looming dangerously close was Cerberus. The mastodonic demon glared at me with all six eyes.

  Slowly he swayed, lulled into a magical slumber. I played some more, making several mistakes, but thankfully that didn’t seem to affect the magic it was having on the giant dog.

  However, the music had zero effect on the other demons who wanted to kill me.

  Kulshedra swept me up with her human arms, and threw me behind her.

  “Don’t get ussssed to thisss,” she said, as we slithered along at breakneck speed.

  Berphomet grinned behind me. “So many hidden talents. Now I am doubly grateful.”

  “Buy me a pint sometime when we get outta here.”

  “I meant grateful to myself for not killing you.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “Less talking, more distracting,” Paimon said. “We are close to the cliffs.”

  The same cliffs we had descended from.

  Berphomet and I fired at the pursuing demons but they were like an infinite zombie wave.

  Suddenly, Kulshedra buckled and threw herself at the cliff. She clung to it sideways, scaling vertically upwards. Paimon was doing the same thing, galloping vertically. Only Lhorax scaled it up like a monkey.

  The other demons had found a zigzagging staircase, cut directly into the cliff’s face.

  Berphomet waited until the first wave reached a corner and dropped a grenade. The explosive kind this time. Both demons and staircase blew up. The rock crunched, already reforming the missing steps.

  More demons followed.

  Suddenly, the oppressive cold let up, replaced by a blast of scorching desert heat.

  Stygian guards and inmates screamed but let up, refusing to cross beyond their icy home.

  A second later all five of us were tumbling, galloping, and slithering over coarse sands.

  I panted heavily as I descended from Kulshedra’s back.

  “Lhorax,” I said. “Welcome to the second circle.”

  In response, Lhorax sniffed the air. A grain of sand entered his nose and he sneezed on me.

  Chapter 26

  Every good invasion needs two essential things: first, a plan of action. Luckily, Paimon was the equivalent of a sleazy lawyer and a used-car salesman all rolled up in one.

  Within minutes of returning to the second circle, he told us that we had a way out of there. That’s it—nothing else.

  Guess demons love their theatrics.

  The second thing you need is a shit-ton of weapons, and for that you turn to the assassin of the group. True professional that he was, Berphomet had several stash houses around Hell, and this particular bunker could have outfitted a whole battalion (a number which Paimon was happy to summon) and was stocked with every imaginable weapon in existence.

  “Now that’s more like it,” I said, staring at a wall of munitions and firearms.

  Kulshedra and Lhorax wandered inside the bunker and looked completely lost. Paimon sneered at the weapons, while Berphomet went about reloading his weapons and restocking cartridges. He picked out a silver rifle from a stockpile of a dozen near-identical weapons and polished its already-gleaming surface.

  “Take whatever you need,” he said. “Mortal weapons are easy to come by.”

  He chambered a round and paused only to hear the sound of the rifle’s internal mechanism work.

  “Not so much anti-magic rounds, right?” I added.

  “Indeed,” he said. “The sygaldry alone costs enough to purchase a new car.” He cocked his goat head. “Then again, I am rather expensive.”

  “Oh yeah? How much?”

  He told me.

  I gaped. “That’s a lot of zeroes.”

  “I am the best out there, Erik Ashendale,” he said. “And unlike my kin, I have a penchant for mortal pleasures.”

  “Pleasssuresss that will get you killed sssome day,” Kulshedra interjected.

  I saw her run her hands over a pile of mini-guns, and suddenly had the image of a giant snake demon with machine-guns strapped to her person.

  Lhorax just picked up a splitting maul, a massive war hammer almost as tall as he was. Simple, effective, brutal—precisely what Lhorax himself was.

  “Are you quite done playing with your toys?” Paimon demanded. “Our emissaries on the other side await, and I am quite eager to get the invasion going.”

  “Yeah, about that,” I said. “How exactly are you planning on getting us out of here?”

  He cocked his head. “Why, the same way all demons are summoned, human,” he said. “We trick mortals into giving us a ride.”

  I’ve only ever been on the summoner side of Summoning spells, never the summoned, and now I understood why. Getting called over to cross planes is disconcerting to say the least. It reminded me of when my sister cast her Soul Snares to yank me out of Limbo.

  But summoning a soul was one thing—calling over something with flesh and bone and a living body was a completely different story.

  Paimon had us hike for about a mile outside of Kulshedra’s territory, where a decrepit forest loomed into view. I hadn’t seen it before but like I said, travel in Hell was more of a mental thing as opposed to geographical.

  The forest was fundamentally wrong, too. There was no green, only grey and blue, and tints of sickly violet and dripping crimson. Vines and leaves spooled out of control. Thorns grew sporadically in all directions. I saw several trees spearing into each other, as if merging in the most violent way possible.

  In the middle of the forest stood a ring of hooded demons. Their faces were completely hidden, but there was no disguising the bumps and horns that poked out from beneath the dark fabrics. They were positioned at intervals from each other, standing at uniform points around a sizable ring of fire.

  Paimon went up to one of them. The hooded demon raised a hand, palm up. Paimon dropped a handful of gold coins and the demon tossed them in a cauldron that sputtered into green flames.

  “Get in,” Paimon told us.

  The five of us: myself, Paimon, Berphomet, Kulshedra, and Lhorax, huddled inside the circle and waited.

  The demons began chanting. The flames turned blue, then black.

  And then the flesh rending started.

  Yep, that was correct. Our flesh tore itself apart, dissolving into tiny chunks that became smaller and smaller, reaching what I assumed to be molecular and then atomic level.

  Meanwhile the demons’ chanting became a drone that thumped against my core, the sound compelling it to sink further into reality.

  And beyond.

  Black fire roared and raged. It tore at our flesh, a sensation that was not painful in a regular sense, but disturbing and uncomfortable, like a thousand stitches pulling at your skin. Fear washed over me, the same sort of primordial fear of death that all living creatures had.

  And in turn, that fear fed the spell, making it stronger, and holding our shapes together for when we emerged on the other side.

  Darkness consumed us.

  We emerged in blood.

  I recognized the forest as human. We were summoned in a similar circle on Earth, this one populated by my kind, as opposed to hooded demons.

  And they were all dead, or in the process of dying.

  Amidst the bodies littering the camp, I spotted one of the survivors. He had taken off his burgundy hood, revealing a freckled face belonging to a scared-out-of-his-mind thirty-year-old guy with ginger hair.

  His eyes flitted on each of us before settling on me—the only familiar shape in the crowd.

  His mouth tried forming words but none came, and when the first of his whispers was formed, something viscous and black leapt on him and dug into his mouth, tearing open his jaws and throat until it burrowed its way to his stomach.

  “The fuck is that?
” I said.

  “Our mode of transportation,” Paimon answered from next to me.

  I glanced at the other bodies. They too were being consumed by gelatinous dark blobs that grew larger the more flesh they ate.

  “Who are these people?” I asked.

  “Practitioners of an art better left unpracticed,” Berphomet answered. “Usually they can only summon one of us at a time, thinking we are the embodiment of evil and granters of their desires.”

  I nodded. Yeah, I’ve met my fair share of idiots, practitioners who thought summoning something from the great beyond meant that creature would be indebted to you, or somehow bound to obey your commands.

  I also knew the risks of summoning more than you could handle. No wonder they all died. Your average Wicca, druid, whatever-bullshit-you-call-yourselves group can handle one, maybe two, low-class demons.

  But none of us were low class (and don’t get me started on which category I fell under).

  The effort would have killed them on the spot, and the spell should have failed. Guess having a hand from the other side, what with all those demonic summoners, made sure the spell succeeded.

  But this was the cost of hubris.

  Paimon waved his hand and a thousand blobs of black jelly smacked into each other. The big blob grew more viscous, then more solid, then became a pile of living writhing flesh. A hand grew out, then a head. Paimon raised one of his horse legs and slammed a hoof down on it, crushing the head. He kept stomping the blob into paste every time it formed something resembling a body.

  “No, no, you know what I want,” he told the creature, almost teasingly.

  The flesh blob swelled and grew. Smiling, Paimon softly blew his trumpet into the blob.

  It grew even more and within minutes I was staring at a blimp made out of dripping wet meat and black ooze.

  “An airship?” I asked.

  The blimp groaned and shuddered. A maw on its side tore open. Inside, stacked neatly like porcelain figurines were a few hundred Asmodaii, still and unmoving.

  The blimp closed up and Paimon snapped his fingers. The front part of it deflated enough for us to climb aboard. I took a wobbly step onto the ground made of living flesh and found myself on a deck of sorts. Another command by Paimon inflated the blimp around us, and moments later we were in the air, soaring over the forest, then the clouds and then in the starry sky.

  I felt the wind on my face and closed my eyes. My senses told me that magic was all around me. I kept my eyes screwed shut, daring only to sneak the smallest of peaks every couple of seconds.

  Whatever this airship-demon was, it flew using the same space distortion principle as when traveling in Hell. Think of it as teleportation but with pit stops. I saw the world fly by, occasionally recognizing a blip of a city, perhaps a famous landmark as we zoomed through middle America and flew past several states. Minutes passed, then an hour. A clear sheen of dark blue now filled the horizon: the Atlantic Ocean. More minutes, then a second hour, followed by a third.

  It says something that even a demonic teleporting blimp needs a few hours to traverse our planet. Maybe it was the moment of reprieve I was having from being chased by my former allies, or the fact I was still reeling from the shock of finding out I had been the Knightmare all along and had a Sin infesting me from within.

  Instead I focused on the pretty stars and the blurry ocean below, and left my thoughts lingering behind.

  Chapter 27

  The flesh-airship demon soared over a mountainous region, the space around us dashing past, distorted and twisted. I stood on the prow of the creature. Cold winds blew around me but I remained steady, the only movement being my coat flapping in the wind.

  I extended my senses, feeling something in the back of my mind telling me we had arrived.

  The edges of a rift appeared just above the highest peak of the largest mountain.

  Paimon’s hooves clomped softy behind me. “We are here,” he said. The crown of thorns dug into the dead skin of his forehead as the airship bounced with turbulence. “But I do not see the portal.”

  “It’s here,” I said, never taking my eyes off the rift.

  The turbulence grew more violent as the airship slowed down. Now Berphomet and Kulshedra joined us. Lhorax apparently was lounging in the back, snacking on something I didn't want to spend too much thought on.

  “Can you open it?” I asked.

  “The airship can,” Paimon answered. “But it will take time.”

  “Time which we don’t have,” Berphomet said. “Any pocket universe will have an alarm system and I believe we may have triggered a few already. If it were me, I would have this whole region wired like a grid. That way the citizens of Castello del Relampago will have time to fortify and arm themselves. As the wizard will tell you, the most effective magic is that which takes time to prepare, and the longer we struggle with opening the rift, the more of it they will have.”

  I nodded and tried to hide my discomfort around the demonic assassin. While demons and other supernatural creatures were made of magic, they merely lived in it. They breathed it like humans do oxygen, but very rarely could they manipulate it like humans could. To humans magic was a series of formulae, or a complex machine. On the surface, it’s just a series of buttons and switches: the right combination gave you the desired effect. Then, add to it human emotion and you had yourself a few powerhouses.

  Point is, it unsettled me that Berphomet, a demon, could calmly analyze magic in such a cold, calm, human manner. That told me he had no trouble taking down wizards, or even Specialists, with relative ease by using the very foundation of our system against us.

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “How?” Paimon demanded.

  I didn’t answer him, mostly because I did not have an answer. I just knew I could. Then again, this was Greede’s origin point, and something told me that at one point all the Seven Deadly Sins had made a pit stop here. That’s what a Nexus is, a vortex of pure unbridled power, like a nerve centre in the Earth’s magical system.

  And the Sin inside me, subtly whispering from the darkest corners of my mind, remembered this place.

  I reached out, feeling living darkness emerge from my body. Tendrils of darkness merged into the spatial distortion that was the rift and hooked themselves in. I raked my curled fingers apart and with it the rift tore open, becoming wider.

  The airship prow slid inside the hole but stopped. The rift was too small.

  I planted my feet wide and solid, and strained in effort. It was like doing that last rep at the gym, where your mind knew that the weight is too much, but a part of you, a louder part of you, told you to push anyway. You could find strength in conviction and I knew that there was no turning back now.

  I had to pull that rift open.

  Had to.

  The airship slid further in, more than halfway through. Black spots started appearing in my vision. I felt something stir inside me, subtle at first but when I shone a light on it, it didn’t back down. The image of a spider-like insect of chitinous black rising from my consciousness, giving me power. The curse within me, Dark Erik, merged with it, and I pulled. The rift tore open easily, now becoming a permanent damaged hole in the middle of two realities superimposed on one another.

  I looked down, breathing heavily and willing the power back down to a manageable level. We were still flying over a night sky, but the landscape was vastly different.

  Gone were the tarmac roads, the neon signs, the uniformity of industry. Instead, I thought we had stepped back through time. The Renaissance-style buildings were modest in their own right, with stone roads winding between them like rivulets.

  Castello del Relampago, like any other city, had several districts, some for housing, others for entertainment. Even from up here I could spot signs for bars and pubs and teahouses. At the centre of it all was a large plaza, round and majestic, with lights all around it gathered like fireflies.

  Up ahead, on the northernmost part, wa
s a long serpentine road, dark and foreboding, winding up to a hill that led to a long cactus-like Medieval castle. Its crenellations were alight with soft braziers, and storm clouds gathered over it, despite the midsummer night sky over the rest of the city. Lightning snaked over the castle.

  Storms were a powerful source of magic. It was as primal as nature could get, and the power in a single bolt of lightning had more juice in it than any magic from any creature I’d encountered so far.

  Which begged the question: what had come first, Greede or the lightning?

  Had he managed to create a perpetual storm, a never-ending battery for his pocket universe and all the magic it housed, or had he gotten lucky and stumbled on a pre-existing Nexus?

  I wouldn’t know which one to bet money on, honestly. Greede was powerful and he always kept a whole deck of aces up both sleeves—the guy had a deus ex machina for every occasion.

  But he was also freakishly lucky. Although, going by recent events, that luck was slowly running out, from getting screwed over by Azazel, to battling me and not finishing the job, not once now, but three times.

  I shook my head. No point in arguing over luck or skill—I was here to raise Hell and let slip the dogs of war.

  As we floated over the plaza, I stood on the edge of the airship’s prow and looked down. People scurried about, running in a panic as they began noticing the airship soaring over them. The atmosphere became charged with fear.

  I inhaled and stepped over.

  Cold winds hit my skin and I felt the chill in parts of my body that immediately protested. I willed my magic and the wing charm to activate. Instead of the opalescent ethereal wings of violet and blue, my wings were now merged with shadows and I soared over the castle town like an oversized bat.

  I grinned.

  “I am vengeance, I am the night,” I yelled. My voice was lost in the rush of the wind.

  “I am Batman!”