31

HELL TO PAY

The torturous journey that had taken Decimus the Accursed agonizing days to complete now flew by beneath Hellbringer’s tires at breakneck speeds. The sleek black demon car sliced across a wasteland the color of dried blood, blasting up a dark cloud of dust that hung suspended in the foul air behind, marking their long passage across a dead realm where few mortals had ever dared to tread—and fewer still had ever returned alive.

For the most part, Tartarus was as flat and dark as an old cast-iron skillet, and it felt about as searing hot. The only light came from jagged gulches that cut across the ground here and there, freely flowing with hot lava. The molten rock spurted crimson and gold, and every shade in between, wavering under ripples of superheated air. Clouds of incandescent gas blasted skyward, spraying red-hot droplets of lava in all directions.

The bloodred sky pressed down low overhead, full of endless swirls of smoke. They appeared to coalesce into vast agonized faces the size of cities, twisted into wordless screams that melted away as quickly as they formed. In the distance, smaller specks moved with lazy deliberation, resembling flocks of birds. But Dru knew they weren’t birds, not here in the deepest realms of the abyss.

She held the unnaturally cold scroll tight against her chest, but it gave her no relief from the fear that clutched her. Everything around her—the sky, the light, the air itself—felt so incredibly wrong. It made her feel delirious, itchy, and uncomfortable inside her own skin. Deep down inside, every instinct told her that she should never have come here, that she needed to turn around and flee, and never look back.

But she had no choice. They had to keep going.

As Hellbringer altered course to avoid a lava-filled ravine, Dru broke out in a clammy sweat, as much from the oppressive heat as from fear. She bent closer to the dashboard, scrutinizing the rows of chrome-ringed analog gauges and silver rocker switches. “It’s so hot in here. How do you turn on the air conditioning in this thing?”

“Air conditioning?” Despite the danger pressing in on all sides, Greyson’s red eyes crinkled at the corners with amusement. “This is a muscle car.”

“And? So?” Dru tugged at her low collar, desperately trying to flap some air through it. It didn’t work. “I’m pretty sure muscle cars are allowed to have air conditioning.”

“Not back in 1969.”

“Oh. Great. Because sweating is more macho. That’s an interesting design philosophy.”

“Hey, let me show you a trick. See these?” Greyson reached forward and turned the chrome window crank, rolling down his window to let in a blast of oven-hot air. “See? So much better.” He smiled, but the tension behind it was obvious. She could tell from the way he gripped the steering wheel tight, the way he glanced in all directions, alert for danger. His great-looking smile was just meant to try to lessen her fear.

It didn’t work, but she decided to play along anyway. “Oh, very funny.” Dru had to raise her voice to be heard above the high-speed wind howling into the car. She rolled her window open too, gagging on the foul air of Tartarus. She could barely breathe it. It stripped every last drop of moisture out of her throat, replacing it with soot and ash.

She struggled to open the little triangular vent window in front of the main window, but when she finally got it, she was pleasantly surprised that it directed a slightly faster stream of air right across her lap. It didn’t cool her off much.

Hellbringer changed directions again, giving a wide berth to a churning pool of lava the size of a baseball stadium. Dru had to turn her face away from the scorching heat. Ahead of them, the ground rose toward a lone mountain peak, truncated at the top, and Dru immediately recognized it from her vision of Decimus’s journey.

She pointed. “That’s it! That’s where we need to bring the scroll.” A surge of optimism rose up inside her. At last, after all this struggle, their objective was finally in sight. Dru allowed herself to dare to believe they actually had a chance to survive this.

Greyson nodded with satisfaction. “Good. We need to get Hellbringer out of this place. The sooner we can, the—whoa!” He swung the wheel as a helicopter-sized presence burst up from the lava pool and flapped directly into their path on blazing leathery wings, trailing droplets of molten fire. Its newly formed skeletal body burned with white heat, convulsing as it struggled to fly.

Dru braced herself against the dashboard as Greyson whipped them around the burning creature. Hellbringer’s tires howled in protest, and they lurched into a diagonal skid. The beating wings swept over them, inches above Hellbringer’s long hood, and the thing turned a skull-like face to snap hungrily at Dru with lava-dripping jaws. The heat radiating from its knife-like teeth scorched her face.

Then it was gone from the open window as Hellbringer streaked past. With a jolt, Greyson pulled them out of the skid and downshifted, sending them hurtling away from the creature and toward the mountain.

“Dru!” He reached for her.

“I’m okay.” She gave his hand a brief squeeze and let him return it to the gearshift. Her heart hammered in her chest as she checked to make sure all of her body parts were still attached. Reassured, she turned around and leaned her head out of the car, into the wind-stream. Behind them, the flapping creature struggled to lift itself into the twisted sky. It watched them go with a creepy intelligence.

Dru shivered. “Congratulations. It’s a bouncing baby demon. How charming.”

Greyson’s forehead wrinkled deeply with worry. And maybe a little confusion.

“Tartarus is where demons are spawned,” Dru explained. “Apparently, they’re born hungry. And they love to feed on the mortal souls of people like you and me. So, they’re looking at us like Hellbringer’s delivering them a pizza.”

His troubled gaze dropped to the dashboard, and Dru could practically read his thoughts.

“Yeah . . .” she said slowly. “On the inside, Hellbringer is one of those things. Sorry.”

Greyson’s jaw set in a hard line. “That explains why he seems so…conflicted.”

“About taking us to the mountain?”

“About being here at all.”

Despite her raging fear of burning to death in the fires of Tartarus and having her soul devoured by bloodthirsty demons, a small part of Dru lit up with scientific curiosity. “When you say that Hellbringer is conflicted, do you mean that you’re picking up on those sensations? Or that Hell-bringer is actually behaving strangely? And, follow-up question, are you yourself experiencing any strange conflicting feelings?”

Greyson shook his head, but Dru couldn’t tell whether he really wasn’t sure, or whether he just didn’t want to talk about it. He steered them up over a gentle rise edged by a steep cliff. The tires grumbled on the uneven rock. “Now is not a good time for follow-up questions.”

Dru was about to firmly disagree, but the words died in her throat as a congregation of demons soared over the ridgeline, blotting out the tortured sky with fiery wings and sinuous tails. She had never seen so much pure evil in one place.

She shrank down into the seat, trying to make herself invisible. “Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a good solid galena crystal right about now.” She mentally kicked herself for not bringing any, though she had to wonder if it could even exist in this realm of such intense demonic power. The moment she tried to power it up, it might explode in her hand. It might even act as a beacon, drawing the attention of every demon for miles.

Greyson peered upward as the demons winged overhead and passed by, heading for the far horizon. “I think Hellbringer is keeping us safe. At least for the moment.”

Dru nodded to herself, although she wasn’t entirely sure she bought into Greyson’s explanation. In a strange way, this was a homecoming for the speed demon. This forsaken place was the hellish abyss where Hellbringer had been spawned in the first place. It probably knew some of the other demons around here. That was a chilling thought, despite the volcanic heat pressing in on them.

Hellbringer climbed steadily up the black rock mountainside. Soon, the way became too steep to head directly toward the summit, and Greyson steered them on a long ever-rising spiral toward the top. Aside from occasional ridges and crevices where the rock had expanded or broken over time, the surface was unnaturally smooth. It looked less like the snowcapped peaks of the Rocky Mountains she was familiar with, and more like some kind of vast black iron plate that had been pounded up from below to form a towering cone.

As the rise became steeper, Hellbringer’s huge engine strained, and the tires scrabbled for purchase on the smooth slope. The car tilted farther and farther to the right, until Dru was leaning over toward Greyson just to remain upright. She glanced hopefully past him toward the top of the mountain, but it was still so far away.

Out the open window on her right, the volcanic plain stretched out far below, crisscrossed with lava flows and dotted with flaring pools of light. Thickening smoke obscured it in the distance, but it didn’t stave off the vertigo that threatened to steal Dru’s breath away.

With a pitiful wail, the back tires slipped. Dru’s stomach lurched as they slid sideways. They dropped only a few feet, but it was enough to send a spike of pure animal terror shooting through Dru’s veins. She clutched at Greyson’s arm, suddenly filled with terrifying visions of falling out the open passenger-side window and plummeting to her death.

She struggled to catch her breath. “Stop. Stop the car. We have to walk from here. Or climb.”

Grimly, he nodded, clearly not liking the idea. “I think you’re right.” He parked Hellbringer on the steeply tilted slope and shut off the engine. The ghost of its rumble kept on reverberating in her ears, even though now the loudest sound was the hot wind sweeping down the mountainside, clawing at her hair and pulling at her dry skin.

She tried to figure out how she was going to get out of the car without falling, and found herself clutching at Greyson’s arm again. She swallowed.

“Hang on,” he said. “We’ll get out my side.”

To her surprise, he didn’t even open the door. With a grunt, he heaved himself up onto the seat and climbed out the window. Then he reached back in for her. “Come on.”

Clutching the apocalypse scroll tightly, she took his outstretched hand. With considerably more difficulty, she climbed out beside him and stood unsteadily on the slope. The wind picked up again, snatching at her clothes and hair, and especially at the scroll, as if it was trying to pluck the artifact from her grasp.

She tried not to think about how dangerous the scroll was, and instead focus on getting to the top. She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and also made sure her glasses were firmly in place. Because the last thing she wanted to do was drop them and end up stumbling around blindly on top of a fiery mountain in Hell.

“Ready?” Greyson said.

Dru nodded and started up the steep slope. The rock wasn’t quite as slick as she had feared, but it definitely didn’t offer an overabundance of grip to her non-hiking shoes.

She had made it only a dozen steps when a high-pitched scream rose up from somewhere far below. It hit the very top edge of Dru’s hearing and climbed beyond it, from a whistle to a wail, and as sharp and piercing as shattering glass. She looked out over the vast volcanic plain, searching out the source of the sound.

Far below, in the shadows at the base of the mountain, a deeper darkness gathered. Shadowy forms, shrunken to tiny black dots by distance, massed in a canyon between two tall ridges. Dru rubbed her glasses on her shirt to clean them and looked again, squinting into the distance. Tiny pinpoints of light burned in the darkness, and Dru had to squint to make out what they were.

When she finally saw, she wished she hadn’t. Those dots were glowing eyes. A horde of demons gathered at the base of the mountain.

The shrill call came again. Greyson grimaced, as if the sound were a hundred times louder. “No,” he muttered, shaking his head as if trying to clear it. “Don’t do it.”

She wanted to ask him what he meant, but he wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to Hellbringer.

The call came a third time, and Dru realized what was happening only when Hellbringer’s engine thundered to life. The speed demon’s kin were calling him home.

Greyson’s eyes flared even brighter red. He strode downhill toward Hellbringer with his palm outstretched in a universal gesture. “STOP!” he commanded, in a voice with so much force behind it that Dru felt it as much as she heard it.

She had seen him command Hellbringer and other speed demons before, compelling them to obey his orders by the sheer force of his will. But this time, things were different. Either the tortured landscape of Tartarus somehow negated his power, or the call of the other demons was too strong for Hellbringer to resist. Its back tires suddenly spun out peals of white smoke, and the speed demon launched into motion.

Greyson charged after the car, arms pumping. At the last moment, he leaped, barely catching the chrome door handle.

Dru watched, hand clasped over her mouth in horror, as the speed demon hurtled headlong down the mountain slope, dragging Greyson alongside. Just when she feared he would be crushed, he managed to pull himself up, and he climbed headfirst in through the open window.

But Hellbringer didn’t so much as slow down. It streaked down the mountainside toward its demon brethren, until it plunged into shadow and vanished, taking Greyson with it. All that was left behind was the fading roar of its engine, and soon even that dwindled away to nothing.

Dru stood alone on the mountainside, gripping the apocalypse scroll tight. She couldn’t fight off the overwhelming pain of betrayal that cut her to the core. This wasn’t the first time Hellbringer had taken Greyson away from her. But the awful realization dawned on her that this might finally be the last time she ever saw either of them.

It was her own fault, she realized. She had trusted Hellbringer, even here in the abyss, when she should have realized the danger. Hellbringer wasn’t human. It wasn’t even really a car. At its heart, it was a diabolical demon. She had tried everything she could to bring it over to the side of good, to earn its respect and gain its help in saving the world. But in the end, Hellbringer had to choose its own path, no matter how much trust she placed in the speed demon.

Salem’s words came back to haunt her: Sooner or later, darling, that’s going to get you killed.

And the worst part was that she wasn’t the only one. What about Salem and Rane? What about Greyson? How could any of them survive this awful place, with Hellbringer now turned against them?

Rather than let those dark thoughts crush her, she focused on the present. She had exactly one job to do. Bring the apocalypse scroll to the top, throw it back into the pit where it belonged, and save the world. In the end, her own life wasn’t the most important thing. Everyone and everything else depended on her right now. She wouldn’t stop until she had made sure that doomsday was over, once and for all.

She turned and climbed up the steep slope. It wasn’t far in terms of absolute distance, but the going was rough. Here at the top, the mountain was buckled and cracked by Decimus’s magic. She had to wedge her feet in footholds, one at a time, and clamber over the broken rocks. Athletic pursuits were not her strong point, and never was this more painfully clear than right here.

If it weren’t for the scroll, at least she would have had two hands to work with, but she didn’t dare loosen up her grip. She wasn’t about to come this far and accidentally drop the scroll, sending it bouncing down the mountainside to lodge in some anonymous crevice between rocks.

She kept climbing. Legs burning, lungs on fire, arms shaking, Dru finally squeezed between the rocks that ringed the top of the dead volcano. As the wind tugged at her hair, she stepped out into the open, feet crunching on broken fragments of black stone. The wide, jagged rim of the crater yawned open before her, big enough to swallow a city block. Inside, all was dead and cold and dark.

But between her and the edge of the crater loomed a dark apparition. Seeing it, Dru backed up a step, but there was nowhere she could go. There was no way to escape the wraith.

In one fluid motion, it swung around to face her and stretched out a cadaverous arm toward the scroll. For the first time, it spoke.

“Give it to me.”