OK. Trying not to panic. Almost succeeding. First time using magic and it's sent me straight to hell. The temptation is there to just sit down and give up, but I can hear voices in the distance. Whoever it is, they know where we've been hiding at the hotel and they're coming for us. Which means I've got to get out of here, for Raven. Magic got me in here. Maybe it can get me out as well. I don't have a museum archive to work with. Just what's in my own head. I have to destroy something and a happy memory should do the job. I think back to when I was eighteen, getting my A-level results. One of the few times I can remember my parents being proud of me. I draw a ward around myself in the black sand, and scratch a doorway with Huldra's spear. I hold the memory in my mind and...nothing.
It didn't work. I failed, and I'm stuck here in hell. I'm on the point of giving up when it dawns on me that something's wrong. It seemed hot because I expected it to be hot. But it's not, and the light has a blue quality to it that I've seen before. My own flat in my dreams, my sanctuary. This isn't hell. It's a dream, or Limbo, as the new knowledge in my head is now telling me. That's why it didn't work. I was trying to open the wrong door. Try again. There's a sudden agonising pain as the memory is ripped out of my head, but the corridor is gone. I'm out. Back in my own flat in Camden.
I'm not alone. There's a little girl sitting at the table, drawing in a book. When she looks up at me, I recognise her face. It's me, when I was only eight years old. She asks me who I am. I ignore that. She's the one who's not meant to be here. Not that that's stopping her talking. And she knows everything about me. Every detail of my fucked up life, always running away, always failing.
I can't do this right now. The bed's right there, and all I want to do is curl up on it and wait for the pain to stop, but she's not going to let me. She wants to show me the picture she's drawn, and I know I don't want to see it, whatever it is, but I look anyway and it's Lily. Of course it's Lily, with her throat cut and symbols carved into her flesh.
Who the hell is she? She doesn't answer that, but talks about Lily. How they took her away to be killed and I did nothing. How I must have known, given what that place was like, and I did nothing. I would have been next, if Nathan hadn't tipped me off to get out of there. Was I really so fucking naive back then? I left her to die, and now I've found her and I've still done nothing.
I can feel myself starting to break, as I scrabble for tissues to scrub away the tears that are blurring my vision. She keeps going. How I've failed my friends. Raven dragged to hell and tortured to near madness. Beatrice now sharing her mind with a bloodthirsty killer. Would that ever have happened if they hadn't known me? No. Everything they've been through is my fault. Pathetic little me with my excuses about my parents never loving me, hiding away in a cult and then in this bedsit asking for help from people I don't even know.
She's looking for a response, but all she's telling me is the same things I've been telling myself since this whole mess started. It is all my fault. So she tells me what I have to do now. Give up. Take the spear, and make it all stop. Without me, my friends will be safe, and I'll be free.
Free. She reminds me of the spider demon on that rooftop, asking me what I wanted most, and I told him I wanted to be free, but that was my stupid naive answer and I know now there's something I want far more than that. And I am done with people wearing faces that don't belong to them.
She changes then, melting away into some kind of dripping slime until she no longer resembles a child. I pick up Huldra's spear and drive it into what's left of the creature, and with that it's gone and I'm ready to keep going. Just like Abaddon said, I'm fragile, but I'm determined.
Which is no help at all when I open my front door and two of the plastic soldiers are outside, lowering their sub machine guns towards me.
Slam the door. Hit the floor to avoid the hail of lead that immediately bursts through the cheap wooden door. Reach under the bed for my handgun. Still there, thank fuck. There's enough of the door gone that I can see to aim. Weak spot in the neck. I know that from last time when Mary ripped one's head right off. Shame everywhere else is covered in kevlar. The shots land but it's not enough. One of them closes the distance and I drop the gun in favour of the spear. I drive it up into his neck, and he's down.
The other steps over his fallen companion and turns his weapon on me, and I try to throw myself to safety but a spray of bullets rips into me. The pain is extraordinary, but I make one last desperate attempt to fight back before losing my grip on the spear as everything fades to black.
Waking up. Seems to be a hospital. That's good. Better than dead, anyway. Not much pain. Bandages covering my many injuries. Also good. Handcuffs chaining my wrist to the bed. That's less good.
I smell the man before I see him. A mix of brylcream and rotting meat heralds a man who looks like he walked straight out of some old TV crime drama. He introduces himself as DCI Hunt. As I try to think what on earth I can tell him that won't get me either jailed or sectioned, the light catches him for a moment and I get a glimpse of a vast pair of wings. An angel. He's an angel. I guess it makes sense that if demons exist, so do angels, although given my current predicament I'm pretty certain he's no more on my side than they were. And it seems I'm not the first of our little group to run into him, assuming the 'big man' refers to Nathan.
He's got an offer for me. All the trouble goes away if I just give him what he wants. Service, absolute obedience. See, there's the thing. I've historically not been very good at that. A complete failure, in fact. That doesn't please him, but at least he leaves me along to think about it.
And what I'm thinking is that something about this doesn't quite feel real. He's not a real police officer. Maybe these aren't real handcuffs. I just have to make myself see past it, but how am I going to do that without Raven's bottle of LSD? Then I realise Raven's still given me the answer. It's in his book. A string of words and symbols that will open my eyes. I whisper the words while picturing the symbols, and then I'm somewhere else. A cell, open on one side, looking out at a city of vast skyscrapers. And only two ways out. Over the edge, to plummit to my death, or through the door. The door that DCI Hunt just walked back through.
I'm completely unarmed, and he's an angel carrying a huge spear, and for a moment I'm actually considering that drop until Huldra's memories start to guide me. He knows spear fighting. He knows a spear that big is unwieldy. So gets low and get close and you take away their advantage. There's a lot more to it than that, but that was enough to give me the chance to get past him and out of the door.
Time to get out of here. Time to call on the magic again and pray I don't mess it up this time, even as I'm sprinting through yet another alternate dimension being hunted by a fucking angel. Another happy memory, and I'm going to have to find a new way to do this because twenty years of depression haven't exactly given me a lot to work with here, but I remember getting paid for my first ever PI job and the realisation that I'd been successful at something, and I pick a doorway in the smooth black marble corridor I'm running down and as the memory is ripped out of my mind I throw myself through.
I'm back at the British Museum. I sent myself back here because an injured Beatrice got herself into trouble to get me in there and I might have to get her back out of it again. But first, there's a room full of security guards staring at me as I've suddenly run through their doorway covered in bandages and wearing a hospital gown.
"Sorry! Wrong door! Erm...temporal police. Try not to think about it."
I leave the stunned looking security guards and go looking for some clothes. A janitor's closet gets me a set of overalls. They're made for someone several inches taller than me and I have to fold over the cuffs a few times, but at least they hide most of the bandages. Now to find Beatrice. Assuming she's only had to deal with mundane challenges she'll most likely be in the closest security post to where she kicked the door open. So I should start at that door.
When I get there, there's just the one security guard, deep in conversation with Raven, who has somehow convinced the poor man to come to one of his poetry recitals. Raven introduces me as his friend and the guard is curious why I'm wearing the overalls, so I tell him I'm temping. He nod, the staff turnover is terrible. I agree, pointing out they couldn't even get me a uniform in my size. Wait...did I just come up with a convincing cover story?
As we leave him behind, promising to see him at the coffee shop for poetry, Raven tells me the bad news. He came here with Mary, who was apparently somewhat changed after a visit to Maiden, Mother and Crone, but one of the four demons had shown up and taken her away for a meeting with the big guy. Which meant it's time for the three of us to conduct a daring rescue attempt.
Beatrice is in an office looking bored, and it's so good to see her looking like herself instead of the monstrosity I had to fight. But there's no time for emotional reunifications. Mary's in trouble, and even if I didn't owe her for pulling me out of hell, or Inferno as I find myself wanting to call it now, there's no way I can take out all four demons by myself. Especially not since DCI Hunt implied Nathan might no longer be in a position to help. But no time to think about that. Or explain to Raven why I suddenly know magic. I ask if he can manage any of that healing magic he was talking about using on Beatrice, but it's going to take time, and I don't have time. I just need a happy memory. He offers one of his. I wish I didn't have to take it, but the longer this takes, the more risk of losing Mary.
He hands me a photo of the three of us on a night out at the Dev. I hold it in my hands, and try to ignore Raven's scream of pain as the memory is torn out of his mind. The portal opens, and I realise I've fucked up yet again. I'm there in that vast cathedral, but I'm alone. Alone, that is except for Saklas standing over a dais, carving symbols into a young woman's flesh.
My first thought is to rush him and knock the knife out of his hands, but that's just going to be a fast way to get both of us killed. I need backup. And I know where to find it. Twenty years of depression hasn't given me much to work with, but twenty years of nightmares is another matter entirely. I've brought things back from Limbo before. Weapons, blood, maggots. And if I can bring back maggots, why not spiders?
I use my own blood to call them and give them form, using my fingers to trace out the symbols that pull them out of Limbo. And then a swarm of monstrous spiders rips its way into Inferno, spindly black limbs clacking and venom hissing as it drips from their fangs onto the stone floor.
Saklas doesn't seem too impressed, but I don't need him to be impressed. I need him to be distracted, and right now his attention is on me. The knife goes flying from his hand, but I can see the woman on the dais isn't moving. He's holding her there. I can feel the spiders, each one linked to my own mind, and I drive them to attack. Not enough to kill him, but enough to release his grip on the woman even as the spiders swarm across her body. He has tricks of his own, calling for his servants, and those dreadful flayed corpses rise up to join the fight. My spiders can't hold out against them, and I can feel the pain of each one being snuffed out in the grip of those creatures. But they don't have to win. They just have to hold their attention long enough for the woman to get to me.
"You'd better be Mary," I tell her as we step back into the museum office and the portal closes behind us. The old 'tell us something only you would know' routine is a bit of a cliche, but this blonde woman with blood red nails doesn't look much like the Mary I know. I ask her what we ate after that last trip to Paradise Gardens. Chinese food and terrible wine. It's really her. Beatrice is looking stunned. I just feel like if I'm still alive at the end of all this, I'm going to want to get myself a robe. And maybe a pointy hat.
Where now? After the conversation I heard, I don't think the hotel room is safe any more, and Mary agrees. She has an alternative though. A limo pulls up outside and takes us to some fancy hotel, and as we're taken up to the penthouse suite I'm reminded it's not only the kind of sleazy places I'm familiar with that don't ask questions.
As Beatrice and Raven investigate the room service menu, Mary pulls me aside. There's something Raven hasn't told me, and I immediately know that means bad news. He told her that while Mildred was torturing him, she forced him to sign a contract. That's no surprise, given what Abaddon did to me, but there's more. The pact has bound him to her, and if she dies, so does he. The same applies to Abaddon, of course, but that barely even registers. I can't let Raven die. We have to break the pact - both pacts - before we can kill them.
The thread of hope in all this is that I know how to break the pacts. We need Saklas's book, and Mary knows how to get it. But summoning it has a price, and the price is murder. We have to sacrifice an unwilling servant, and it's one thing to kill monsters and plastic soldiers but the idea of cold blooded murder still revolts me.
But then I remember the word Saklas used in the cathedral. Servants. It's not just the flayed corpses. The four demons are his servants, and I'm sure they'll be very unwilling indeed. I don't know if I'm capable of murdering an innocent, but killing one of those four to get the book? That I would enjoy.
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