Hell's Pawn (26 page)

“All you need to do is hop in this seat and you’ll be reunited with your ancestors.” The woman’s eyes widened. S he took a tentative step backwards, but R immon matched her by stepping forward. He placed a hand on each arm, muscles flexing as he lifted her. “Allow me to help you,” he said politely, even as the woman began struggling and kicking. O nce in the driver’s seat, chains extended from the steam coach to hold her in place.

“Nice seatbelt,” J ohn murmured as they took their seats inside the cabin. “I s it just me or is she not looking forward to going home again?”

“We’ll soon find out why.”

The coach lurched forward, accompanied by the usual indignant shouting as the denizens of Hell were knocked over in the street. B olo hung his head out the window and observed, barking in response to the loud insults.

“W ill Dante remember any of this when we restore him?” J ohn asked. “For that matter, does she remember being Dante?”

“I t’s hard to say. This sort of past life regression is almost unheard of. We don’t know what purpose the R egression R egalia was invented for or its origin. O ne story claims that a demon lord invented them for his own entertainment; another is your standard romantic tale of lovers chasing each other across time. The R egalia is truly unique. That Asmoday allowed us to borrow it is a strong sign of his desperation.” John nodded. They weren’t travelling to recruit other gods this time. They were after an army, one made of terraco a in fact. J ohn remembered seeing a documentary about it once. Q in S hi Huang, the First E mperor of C hina, had been buried with an army of more than eight thousand soldiers and a good number of chariots and horses, all made from clay. The idea was to give Q in his own army in the afterlife. P resumably it had worked because Asmoday was sending them to hire this army.

O f course, now they were off track, guided by the J apanese religion of S hinto rather than Chinese Taoism.

“We should be able to reach our intended destination,” R immon said, predicting John’s question. “At the very least this will get us nearer to where we need to be.” B olo moved away from the window to lay his head in J ohn’s lap. J ohn could see why the dog was bored with the view. Nothing was visible outside except darkness. He looked at Rimmon for answers, but the demon appeared just as perplexed.

The coach stopped. W ith no reference point, they sensed this rather than felt it.

R immon left the coach first, stepping down onto ground that could not be seen. J ohn followed, feeling vertigo from being suspended in a void.

“Home,” the woman in the driver’s seat moaned. “Why did you bring me home?”

“Fumiko!”

The voices came from all around, booming in unison.

“Fumiko, you have returned but you have not changed!”

“They don’t sound happy,” J ohn whispered. “M aybe you be er get her unchained and turned back into Dante.”

B ut the coach had already released the li le old woman, who hopped down and began to run.

“You cannot escape from your ancestral home.”

I n the darkness, shapes began to form. C abinets, couches, paper lanterns, and tidy wooden floors. These were monochrome at first, but colors soon flourished as reality solidified.

“You were to reincarnate, F umiko, to learn from your mistakes. You are still a liar,
a thief, instilling the confidence of strangers before taking from them!”

“S o what?” Fumiko shook her fists at the air. “I ’m not ashamed of what I am! The people I stole from were too stupid to deserve their money. I f I hadn’t taken it, someone else would have!”

“That’s Dante, all right,” John muttered.

Faces began to form all around them. People of all ages were there, young and old, so many now that it was impossible to count.

“You will return to E arth. You will live many lives until you are worthy of joining
the family spirit.”

“Amaterasu!” Fumiko cried. “Amaterasu! G oddess of the sun, I beseech you. Take me into hiding, take me away from these spirits that trouble me so. Hide me from my family as you once hid from yours!”

“You will reincarnate!”

The faces descended, moving for Fumiko, but a beam of sunlight cut through the room, surrounding the old woman in its glow. S he cackled victoriously as the light intensified, becoming so bright J ohn had to close his eyes. W hen the light disappeared, Fumiko was gone.

“No,” J ohn breathed. “Wait! Wait you idiots, that was Dante! I t wasn’t Fumiko at all!” He ran forward, waving his arms for a ention, but the faces, the house, everything faded until nothing was left but the black void. They had lost Dante.

Chapter Twelve

The darkness was unforgiving and impenetrable. How vision was still possible was, like most of the afterlife, beyond reasoning. J ohn gripped one of the coach’s brass lanterns stubbornly and scowled.

“We can’t leave. If we do we’ll never see him again.”

“S taying here serves no purpose,” R immon said. “We will find Dante, perhaps with the assistance of another god, but staying in place won’t bring him back. He’s Fumiko now, a woman who has no warmth for us and won’t willingly return to this place.”

“There has to be something we can do!”

“We can move on.” R immon snapped his fingers and the wheels of the coach began to turn, following the demon as he walked away.

J ohn released the lamp and decided to protest by staying in place, B olo waiting loyally at his side. B ut as the coach began shrinking into the distance, they ran to catch up. Rimmon was decent enough not to act smug.

“We’ll get him back,” he reassured John once more.

As they walked, J ohn promised himself a hundred times that he would set things right with Dante. He would enlist the entire army he had raised if need be.

“Neat trick,” he said eventually, nodding at the self-propelled coach wheels. “W hy didn’t you do that before?”

“I was busy possessing Dante.”

“Will it cause trouble here, you being out in plain sight?” R immon shook his head. “I ’m just another
kami
here, a spiritual being like any other. Ironic that the denizens of Hell are welcome here when there’s so little to see.”

“It’s creepy. I could see a sort of house back there before it faded.” That wasn’t all. O bjects faded into existence before disappearing again, like icebergs in a fog-drenched sea. No rhyme or reason seemed to govern what would appear. An old stone well, a wooden cart, once even an acre of farmland appeared suddenly below their feet before vanishing again.

“I ’m beginning to suspect existence here is more private than what we are used to,” R immon said. “As we saw with Fumiko, the souls here cluster together into an ancestral spirit. Not being a part of these families might mean we cannot see their homes, but I wonder if they can see us.”

L ike ghosts, passing through the walls of their homes,
J ohn thought as he watched B olo bounding along ahead of them. The dog had an amazing knack for knowing the direction they were headed in, which was more than J ohn could say for himself.

W ithout any visible landmarks, at least any that stayed in place for long, he couldn’t tell if they were walking in a straight line or going in circles.

“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked. “We were aiming for Taoism, but this is Shintoism, right? Can we walk from one afterlife to another?” R immon nodded. “Here we can. R eligion isn’t divided here as it is in the Western world. S hintoism, Taoism, B uddhism, each is different and yet complimentary. The people take what they need from each. R eincarnation, for instance, isn’t part of the S hinto faith. S hinto has very li le to say about the afterlife. There’s a saying in Japan,

‘L ive S hinto, die B uddhist.’ The philosophy of S hinto guides them through life, but the more gentle traditions of Buddha are what they turn to when a loved one departs.

“B elieve it or not, the Western world wasn’t so different once. J ust look at how much the different religions have in common. Flood myths aren’t limited to just Noah.

During R agnarok, the Norse version of Armageddon, the world is flooded and everyone dies except for two people, a man and a woman. E nd of the world scenarios, both past and future, are found in most mythologies, a time of peace and repopulation often following destruction. W ho’s to say that Noah and his wife weren’t the survivors of Ragnarok? Am I losing you?”

“No, I think I follow,” J ohn said. “You’re saying that most religions tell the same story or at least borrow heavily from each other.”

“E xactly. There are countless examples of this. The Norse have the Haminjur, and the G reeks have E rotes, both of which are remarkably similar to guardian angels. The G reek gods fought the Titans just as the Norse fought ice giants, and we’ve already established that the original concept of Hell was G reek by design. The G reeks were influential in the concept of Heaven as well, if you consider the sky home of the gods on Mount Olympus.

“As for the deities themselves, the Hindu gods B rahma, S hiva, and V ishnu form a triad that represents creation, preservation, and destruction. I s that so different from the Holy Trinity? Then there’s the son of G od, champion of E arth, and born of mortal blood, but that could refer to both Hercules and J esus. R eligions often deny these comparisons, unwilling to acknowledge that their beliefs are rooted in many different cultures, but I’ve always felt these similarities to be complementary.

“There was a time, in this world at least, when these connections were celebrated.

B ut now all is separated, the similarities forgo en in favor of differences. S uspicion and mistrust have deteriorated the pathways between realms, and soon they will be destroyed altogether. We are confined to our rooms, forbidden to go outside and play, and why?”

R immon turned to J ohn, who shook his head, surprised it wasn’t a rhetorical question. Perhaps R immon didn’t know the answer himself because he remained silent, lost in his own thoughts.

The void around them became oppressive, objects no longer appearing as often as they once had. Aside from a comment that they were between realms, R immon didn’t speak. J ohn had never been much for idle chitchat himself, but the void didn’t provide his mind with any entertainment. His thoughts turned to R immon, as they seemed too keen to do lately, and of R immon’s estranged boyfriend. J ohn knew very li le of the man. There had been the breathtakingly handsome bust in R immon’s dining room and the story of how they met, but nothing more.

“Tell me more about your ex-boyfriend,” John said.

“Hm?”

“I’m curious about him. Is he a demon like you?”

Rimmon smiled. “It’s complicated.”

“So? We have time.”

“You know that I miss him, and that he isn’t happy with who I am. The rest is unimportant.”

J ohn pictured the bust in his mind again, except this time it was smirking.
Nice try,
chump,
he imagined it saying,
but I beat you to the punch. B esides, what makes you think
you’re good enough for him? What are you to an incubus?

J ohn’s subconscious wasn’t normally so self-depreciative, but he supposed it did have a point. I n life J ohn did just fine for himself, but here, surrounded by gods, demons, and other strange creatures, what was he? J ohn was still a fledgling, learning the ropes. R immon possibly perceived him as being ridiculously young. His frequent questions were probably nothing more than baby talk to a being who may have existed for centuries.

Then again, J ohn was moving gods with his words. L owly human he may be, but the afterlife was dancing to his tune as of late. He was playing ambassador for Hell, a role that R immon shared, and their mutual success could only bring them together.

They were partners in crime, so to speak. G entlemen of equal standing, sharing the same footing, two peas in a pod, and a bunch of other silly metaphors.

“We have company,” Rimmon murmured.

J ohn’s thoughts evaporated as he saw his mother. The yearning in his heart drowned out even thoughts of R immon, but the emotions soon spu ered and died.

This woman was thin, tan, and had short blond hair, just like his mother, but her eyes were vacant. S he had the same easy smile she always wore, but this wasn’t her. His mother was still alive in California. S he couldn’t be here with them now. J ohn didn’t want her to be, not until it was her time.

“What do we do?”

Rimmon spread his arms and closed his eyes. “We make her welcome.” A world sprang into creation, filling the emptiness around them with color and light. Trees heavy with ripened fruit appeared first, forming a grove where they stood.

An azure sky bled through the dark above, white co on ball clouds coming next.

G reen grass unrolled like a carpet, stretching out to the stranger and halting just in front of her feet.

J ohn had felt accomplished when creating B olo’s leash, but this demonstration of skill was pure mastery. R immon only needed seconds to create a miniature world.

R olling hills covered in tiny white and purple flowers now stretched as far as the eye could see. B olo was already racing across these hills, barking gleefully. This is what J acobi had spoken of, the ability to craft a new world in the dark and empty spaces between realms. If one person were capable of such a feat, he could only imagine what an entire community could do.

Their guest hardly reacted, having eyes only for J ohn as she came nearer. He wondered for a moment if this wasn’t his mother after all. W hy else would the woman not be looking at R immon, whose beauty was greater? Her vacant eyes never left his, even when Rimmon greeted her.

“J ohn,” she said, and he was certain this wasn’t his mother. S he had called him J ohnny since the day he was born. “J ohn, I have such important news for you. S uch wonderful news!”

“Who are you?” he asked but she shook her head, eager to continue.

“I’ve been sent to find you, to tell you what they don’t what you to know. You’re—” R immon snarled, thunder exploding and drowning out her words. J ohn flinched, still trying to read her lips, to decipher their movement, but R immon’s back obscured his vision as he leapt upon the woman and punched at her face. The woman’s mouth stretched wide, her features lost to a gaping orifice that enveloped Rimmon’s fist.