Page 58 of A Serpent in the Garden

The grass gave up one of its secrets soon enough, a thick rope of thrashing scales that sent my heart pounding, my feet stumbling backward. The snake looked carved of metal, silver and shimmering and damp. It flicked out its tongue, tasting the air, two glossy beads eyeing me with interest. I nearly tripped trying to back away, but it carved a curvaceous path through the grass and over the pebbles, smoothly sliding on its belly toward me, head raised and swaying.

It was unperturbed at the snake’s pursuit. It senses the Fang in you.

In you, I corrected. ady

Whichever. It won’t hurt you.

The snake looked as if it wanted me to wear it like a bracelet and seemed to anticipate where I’d like to plant my feet, moving with haste to follow.

An irritable huff, as though I were deliberately wasting time. Just keep looking for the stone, stop dancing around. It’s here somewhere.

I’m going to step on him, I said, skirting the snake. How could I look for anything with it tracking me so prodigiously?

I kept walking when some of the snake’s initial excitement seemed to ebb away, kicking aside tussocks, passing over the faded gleam of pebbles. I felt its beady eyes upon me as I searched, though it at least seemed content to remain a passive witness. And when I knelt to push aside a dense thicket of grass, my hand found something large and sturdy hidden beneath it. I ripped out stalks and clawed through a thin layer of wet earth, my nails scraping stone. Brushing it clean as best I could, I found a smooth rock, a gouge packed with earth slashed into it.

He hadn’t dug deep to bury it; my fingers found the hilt moments later. I could scarcely see what it looked like when it was caked with mud, but it was long and curved and curiously warm, with a reassuring heft as I held it.

Wash it off in the stream back in the wood. Say goodbye to your new friend. We need to move.

I clambered to my feet. The snake’s head tilted back to watch me, its forked tongue flicking. When I turned to give the river one last look, I froze. Cleaving a path through still water was a boat, a cloaked figure rowing downriver. At the inside bottom, a dull glitter of coins. Laid out almost tenderly were bodies that didn’t look entirely solid, shimmering at their edges, gray-tinged and flickering in and out of existence, like stars on cloudy nights. As I stood there transfixed, the ferryman turned his gaze toward me, feet above him on the cliff bank. He was ghoulish even from this distance, shadows leaking under eyes that stared without expression. Skeletal beneath the rippling cloak, white skin clinging to ribs and wasted muscle, deformed in his grotesque proportions. Spindly arms and overlong, bowed legs. And he was looking right at me.

It’s all right, It said, at the thrumming of my heart. He can’t see you.

So I backed away from the ferryman and ran, slipping into the wood once again.

I found a moonstone hilt and a wicked blade when I rinsed the weapon in the stream. Even after being buried for years, it hadn’t rusted, the metal a dark and lethal silver, curved like a harvest sickle. I’d never seen its like.

It was my father’s. Its voice was oddly flattened. I never thought I’d see it again but over my dead body would I have let them take it from me.

Will you find him, I asked tentatively, once you’re back in Hell? I know he’s gone, but…wouldn’t he wind up there, in the end? Not because he’s evil, but because of what he was?

I will never see him again. We don’t have souls. There is no afterlife for demons. When we die, we’re gone for good.

Then I’ll be very careful with this. I dried the blade off on the cleanest section of my pants that I could find. And I’ll make sure to give it back to you.

It had nothing to say to that. I felt him rustling around, as if shaking off a bad memory. You’ll have to dump your bag somewhere, I don’t want you weighed down by it. I’ll need to take control soon if you’re going to make it inside the gates.

Are you even strong enough yet?

I’ll have to be. You won’t make it in without me. The river butts up against the left side of Hell and the wood surrounds it from every other side. There’s a meadow just outside the gates that the children play in. We’re not going through that set of gates; we’re going through the gates for the In Between off to the side, along the river. The cliff bank peters off and turns into a stone wall. If you were to lose your footing, you’d be dead if you fell in the water, but I can use the gaps between stones as footholds and climb sideways along it so the guards at the Hell gates won’t see. The ferryman can’t see a blessed thing so it won’t matter if he’s there. We can slip past him as he’s unloading his haul of souls and sneak inside Hell proper somehow. Maybe you can pretend to be just another damned soul in the antechamber.

But the bodies in the boat, I said, glancing helplessly around the ghostly half-light of the wood, trying not to imagine myself plunging ten feet into a calm river of death, I don’t look dead the way they did—

The body will solidify once it’s out of an earthly realm. Every damned soul in Hell looks just like you.

If he’d meant it to be comforting, he’d failed. My throat had gone drier and drier with each word he spoke. Frantic, perilously close to sudden, surprising tears. A noise in my ears like a jeering crowd, loud and roaring.

You have my blade, It said. You’ll have surprise and me at the reins. No demon manning the antechamber is going to expect to be attacked by a damned soul with a Hell-forged blade. Not to mention the ones stuck on guard duty aren’t very impressive, so far as demons go. None of the good ones will lower themselves to running the fucking check-in desk when there are souls that need torturing.

I felt punch-drunk, unfocused, like some essential part of me had flown away from this mess and gone back to Monde’s End, where it wasn’t precisely safe but neither was it certain death.

This is what you wanted, Des. A chill ran down my back, like something with cold fingers was stroking my spine. You were prepared to face the wood to make it. Well, now we’re here. Are you ready?

I wasn’t, but I said I was. I’m sure It knew I was lying, but he didn’t call me on it.

Fuck your bloodrose, he said, before I could conjure so much as a petal of it in my mind’s eye. Your bloodrose can rot. Let’s go.

Another round of crashing through the wood. I expected at any moment to meet something menacing, to feel a hand on my shoulder and a voice asking who I was and what I was doing here. Nothing of the sort happened, but I had the sense I was being stalked by shadows once again.