“You step into my realm and I will peel the skin off your melting bones,” he said. “I will show you what waits for all your little friends. I will make you beg to die.”
“You been threatenin’ me for years,” I said. “I am done listenin’.”
I knelt in the basin. The water soaked my jeans, climbed up my stomach. I lay back until it covered my chest. My head tipped under. The ceiling of the shop vanished. The candlelight blurred.
I held onto Grace’s fingers and Seraphine’s grip and started the descent. I spoke the last set of words in my head. The ones I’d learned years ago from the priest. The ones that gave permission and demanded passage.
Heat wrapped around me and the water became weight.
The world flipped and I let myself fall.
The first breath I pulled in scorched my throat. The ground under my boots was hard and rough, and the sky above was not a sky. There was no air. There was pressure. There was only the sound of distant screams. Pain emanated through the ground. And the taste of ash filled my mouth.
Hell.
I felt Bael here in a way I could not on the surface. He was not a shadow in a girl’s skull. He was large, an old, heavy presence pressing on my bones.
“Peter,” he spoke. His voice boomed from everywhere and nowhere. “You came. Brave little exorcist.”
I walked. I did not run. I did not look around much. Every sight in that place was a trap, a hook, a door. I kept my mind on one thing. The thread of Grace’s soul. It was a thin thread of aura, pulled tight, but still attached to him.
I followed it. Shapes moved at the edge of my vision. Lost things. Torn things. Souls that had not passed on and never would. They reached, but they did not touch. I did not belong to them. I belonged to the woman seated in that chair.
Walking through hell was not something one could endure for long. I had minutes, possibly seconds before Lucifer would find out a human soul was wandering his territory. And then I’d be fucked. Bael may be a Lord of hell, but Lucifer…He was another type of demon entirely.
Bael appeared ahead. He did not wear Grace’s face anymore. His form shifted. Horns, teeth, fire and shadow. I did not catalog every piece. I focused on the center. The core. The knot that held him together.
“You have hunted my lesser,” he said. “You have bound scraps of shit that we send to you. You step to a throne now.”
“I see a coward who hides in young girls and old grudges,” I said. “You touched my woman. You broke my friend. You signed your own death warrant.”
He surged forward. Pain sliced through my chest. Claws that were not claws raked at my soul. He tried to drag me down, to scatter me into the screaming mass under our feet.
I braced.
Every prayer I had ever spoken, every curse, every promise, every day I had chosen to keep fighting when I wanted to put a gun in my own mouth, it all rose up at once. I grabbed the force of it and shoved it straight into him.
For the first time, he staggered and I didn’t hesitate to move in.
I did not have guns here. I did not have knives. I had my will. I had the authority I carried in my cross, and I had the memory of Grace’s whisper in my ear, raw and small.
Hellsing, I’m scared.
Saying the Lord’s prayer, I reached for him, wrapping my hands around the center of him and yanked him down to the ground. I flung Virgil’s rosary around his neck, and I pulled on his legs. He hit the ground with a roaring scream. His form buckled as flame flared around us. The souls below howled and the whole place shook.
“You do not get to keep her,” I said again. “Not in my world. Not in yours.”
“If I go down then I will keep you with me,” it dragged its claws across my chest, and I screamed but kept dragging him.
“Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” I began to pray.
I dragged him. Step by step, I hauled him through his own realm. He clawed at the ground. He slammed raw fear into my head. He threw images at me, Grace dead, Bullet gutted, Hoax hanging, Josh torn apart, the club burning, Seraphine broken.
I did not let go. I pulled him to the edge of a pit that opened under everything else. A place where souls swirled without form. The ones who had gone too far to remember their own names. The ones who had chosen monsters and lost even that.
He fought harder. “I will climb out,” he roared. “You chain me here and I will climb. I will wait. I have time. I will find you. I will take her again! You cannot hold me!”
I summoned every binding I knew. I wrapped him in words, in will, in the promise of judgment that outranked both him and me. I tied him in knots of power and hate and devotion. Then I kicked his feet out from under him and dragged him over the edge, he grabbed at me, pulling me down with him.
