“You look like shit,” Raum said.
“Thanks.” She felt like shit too. There were flecks of demon-blood overspray all over her from Meph’s feeding frenzy, and she was filthy from her time as Val’s prisoner and hiding out later in the cave.
“What happened?”
“Valefor has Meph. He made him shift and—” This time her voice hitched a little, so she stopped and swallowed hard.
“Fuck,” Bel said, and she realized she didn’t need to explain more.
“How?” was Raum’s next question.
Where to begin? There was so much to tell, but it was too difficult to speak with her throat closing up. She didn’t want to give a damn play-by-play. She wanted to crawl into Meph’s bed and make the world go away for a little while. Forever, maybe.
But the two demons were staring at her expectantly, and she had to say something.
“Valefor found us. On Earth. Murmur sold us out and told him how to find us.”
“That motherfucker,” Belial growled. “I’ll show that pale bastard what it means to be dead.”
“And then Val came and took Meph and me, and he used me to make Meph shift, and—”
“What about the binding tattoo?” Raum asked.
“He cut it off him.”
“Shit.”
“And after Meph shifted, I thought—He saved me from Valefor, and I thought maybe I’d gotten through to him, but—”
They all felt it at the same time. The unmistakable skin-crawling tingle of Sheolic magic, coming from the hellgate beside her.
Iris fell silent and stared into the empty sigil with a pounding heart. She didn’t dare to hope, yet she couldn’t help it at the same time—
Two figures appeared in the center of the gate.
One was tall and slender and garbed in a cloak of shadows. His face was like a skull, with sunken eyes and a long slash for a mouth.
And the second figure was...
A desiccated husk. A husk with the head of a horse-donkey-goat and the body of a lion-man. There wasn’t much else recognizable about him. His fur had turned white, and all his healthy body tissue had withered away like a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy. The only reason he was upright was because he was being held that way.
Everyone stared at the picture for a moment in silence.
And then Belial brushed his hands together and said, “Well, that was easy.”
Raum snorted.
Meph unceremoniously dropped Valefor’s husk, and it landed with a muted thump.
Iris crouched and finally smudged the line of the sigil.So that’s what it feels like to have intuition, she realized, thinking about the times Lily had explained it to her and she’d hadn’t had a clue. Now, she did. If she hadn’t listened to herself, Meph might not have been able to come back.
She stood and approached him, careful to avoid the withered body on the ground. “Hi.”
He stared down at her. She craned her head back to meet his empty eyes.
When he lifted a hand, she lifted hers too, and their palms pressed together. “I’m so glad you came back.”
“Isss,” he said.
