“Sure, I totally will. But before I do, just let me say that I love you, and if I don’t come back from Hell, just tell Cassie I did something much less foolish and less liable to make her do something about it. Like I died peacefully in my sleep.”
And by the time Popcorn pounced, she was across the porch.
Down the steps and to the truck, with him barking frantically in her wake. It was heartbreaking, really. Gut-wrenching. To know he’d wanted to do that for her, and that she was now doing this to him. But it had to be done. He was just a dog.
She couldn’t let him go to Hell.
It had to be her. It had to be this.
And apparently the truck knew it. She got in, and it immediately started playing “I’d Do Anything for Love.” It revved its engine, so hard the front end lifted. Then it lunged forward, and that was that.
She was on her way to get Jack back.
And let the devil dare to tell her no.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
She really didn’t know what to expect to happen after she had crashed a truck into Hell. It felt sort of like immediate death was in the cards, most likely courtesy of a giant hand smashing her to smithereens. Or a thousand pincers automatically pulling her to pieces. Or maybe something more surreal and weird like… experiencing a million years of nothingness in five seconds and then dying of insanity.
Though she had to say it was honestly more unsettling when nothing did.
She took ten minutes of terrified psyching herself up, with the truck playing a series of encouraging anthems in the background, and then she opened the door to find herself in a hallway. And not even a horrifying hallway, with melted faces for walls and a floor made of teeth and the sound of someone constantly laughing maniacally in the background.
Instead, it was almostdull.
Like the kind of thing you’d find in a run-down town hall from the fifties. Everything was painted varying shades of green. Dust hung in the air, as if it had never quite been cleaned properly. Or nobody ever came to this floor because there was so little on it of interest. And the lighting was so tired. Fluorescent strips on the beige ceiling, one of which was constantly crackling just a little.
She didn’t like it at all.
It was too quiet, too just ever so slightly off.
But she forced herself to start walking. Pen clutched in her hand, spare pen in her pocket, eyes on as much as she could manage at once. She passed closed doors with glass tops—some of them with words stenciled across them. Though none of them were anything she could read.
They looked like Jack trying to say his name.
Some of them made her teeth buzz. They made her hand prickle around her pen. She had to write something on her skin, just to get it to abate. Though the second she did she knew she shouldn’t have. The lights dimmed once the spell was cast. Like this place hadn’t heard her when she’d crashed through.
But it heard her when she used magic.
And it decided the punishment for magic use was everything suddenly turning upside down, so violently she wasn’t sure what was happening at first. She spun; her legs wound up over her head. For a moment she thought she was being hurled to her doom. Then, suddenly, she was standing on the ceiling.
Or on the floor, only the other way around.
She didn’t know. She couldn’t describe it. All she understood was that she was alive, and she hadn’t dropped fifty feet, and there was a staircase suddenly not far from where she was. And if she could just get to it, she could maybe get back down.
But as soon as she put a foot on it, the whole thingswung.
It turned, it spun. She wound up sprawled on the steps, clinging on for dear life. Even though she felt pretty sure she didn’t have to.There’s no such thing as up or down or gravity here, she tried to tell herself. But it wouldn’t go in.
It couldn’t, until she saw someone else navigate it.
She glimpsed him through a blur of walls moving and floors shifting and everything somehow hanging in space. He simplywalked from underneath a staircase, and went all the way around to the other side. No breaking stride, no compensation for the one-eighty-degree spin.
Like it was all one thing.
All one level, even when it looked like it wasn’t.
Amazing, really. But nowhere near as much as when he stood over her, looking just as he had when he left. Plaid shirt, jeans, boots.Aren’t you supposed to wear big cloaks in Hell, she wanted to say to him. But before she could do anything as mad as that, or maybe just burst into tears, he shot her the most furious look.
