Ransom For Hire - Appointment In Hell (5 page)

Romock was whimpering in Satan’s grip. “Did my Imp here have anything to do with that?” Satan asked, his voice no longer bored and his words taking on an edge.

Ransom nodded.

Romock’s whimpering turned into blubbering.

Until the Imp caught fire, blue oily flame leaking out of Satan’s hand and streaking across the Imp, burning hot and fierce, turning the blue flesh to black soot so quickly that the Imp barely had time to scream before it was simply gone.

Satan looked at his hand, with the blackened, sooty remains of Romock on it, and screwed up his face with disgust. Ransom offered him the handkerchief he had been wearing.

“Thank you,” Satan said to him, taking the offered cloth and wiping his hand clean with it. “Very kind.”

Smudges stained the pristine sleeve of Satan’s suitcoat. He scrubbed at them with the handkerchief but only managed to smudge the black remains into the fabric. Finally he frowned and gave up.

When he was done, Satan threw the handkerchief onto the clean white tabletop and sighed heavily. “There are too many in my own realm who think they can overthrow me. Me! I mean, seriously. You would think by now that my supremacy would be unchallenged. It’s bad enough I have God’s Angels still thinking they’re better than me. I will not have my own Angels plotting against me, too.”

People tended to forget that Satan was an Angel himself. Ransom was aware of it, aware of the power that sat casually in a chair across from him behind a mask of civility, aware of how dead he could be in the blink of an eye.

“Are you afraid of me?” Satan asked.

Ransom snorted out a laugh. “Afraid? Of you? The Prince of Darkness? Of course I’m afraid of you. My mother didn’t raise me to be stupid.”

Satan nodded knowingly. “Everyone is afraid of me. I have a serious P.R. problem. I’m not really a bad guy, you know? I just have my own way of doing things.”

He waited as if he was expecting Ransom to say something in response to that. Ransom wisely kept his mouth shut. Another thing his mother had taught him.

If you can’t say something nice to someone bigger than you are, best to keep your mouth shut.

“Okay. Yes, well,” Satan seemed to come back to himself. “The matter here is your wife. She’s there, behind those bars, right?”

Ransom nodded.

“The way I see it is this. You are trespassing. I have every right to kill you. Or hold you here. What a boon that would be for me, to have the great Jack Ransom trapped in Hell!” Satan rubbed his hands together in obvious glee, and Ransom felt his chest tighten around his heart. He prepared himself to fight, because there was no way in Hell he was running. Not with his wife right there behind him.

“But on the other hand,” Satan continued, “there is the matter of you doing me a solid, as they say, and not agreeing to kill me when Lan Protegux tried to persuade you. Not that you could have anyway, Ransom, but I’m sure it was no easy thing to say no to Lan. And that’s not to mention that for a few years you were my major supplier. You were sending me souls of humans and monsters and demons alike faster than I could handle them, for a while.”

Satan stood up and went to the white glass bars. He looked in on Julia for a while before seeming to make his decision. “Fine. Take her. But after this, we’re even, Ransom. If you come into Hell again, you’re fair game for me.”

And then Satan was gone.

So were the glass bars.

Ransom ran to his wife. She stirred as he picked her up off the floor and held her to his chest. Her deep hazel eyes fluttered open. She came awake, and the first thing she saw, was Ransom’s face.

“Jack?” she spoke his name, weakly. “Where am I?”

“Someplace bad, baby. Someplace you should never have been. But it’s all right. I’m here now. And we’re getting you out.”

Ransom stood his wife up but had to hold an arm under her to keep her steady. She was still groggy, still not fully aware of her surroundings. Whatever power had been keeping her unconscious still hadn’t worn off. Ransom considered it a minor blessing. She might never have to know exactly what had been done to her.

He was nowhere near his exit point now. In truth, he didn’t have a clue where he was, relatively speaking, in the landscape of Hell. He could try to walk out with her, across who knew how much of Hell, past how many evil and hungry and vile things that would take her naked flesh as an invitation, in more ways than one. He’d be risking her and him both getting killed in the process, if he tried it that way.

Or he could cheat.

Cheating sounded like the better plan.

Holding Julia against him in the circle of his right arm, he reached into the front pocket of his coat with his left hand and pulled out the Orb.

The Orb was ancient. No one knew who had made it. No one really knew everything it could do. But Al’Gamesh kept it around because there were two very specific things that they knew it could do.

One, was create a reverse path.

Ransom looked intently at the dull surface of the Orb until it started to shine with the same ethereal silver light it had down in the lower chamber of Al’Gamesh’s dwelling. He stared through the light, into the milky interior of the Orb itself, and whispered one word: “Home.”

The Orb pulsed. It throbbed in his hand, and the light lifted up from the Orb and spread in a misty cloud around Ransom’s hand before stretching out in one particular direction. It became a path of light leading from the Orb to one wall of this eerie room. Ransom knew it was passing through the wall, stretching out further into the realm of Hell, back the way Ransom had come.

This was the reverse path being created. The Orb was linking the spot where Ransom stood, to the point in Hell closest to what Ransom thought of as “home.” In this case, back to the point where he had come through the Veil and into Hell. Back to the field of those stinking, bloated flowers.

And once the link was completed between the two points there would be a tugging pull like this that swept him and Julia across Hell and back—

—to where the Veil would be standing open, waiting for him to return to Earth.

Ransom sucked in breath after the swift tension that had dragged him across the landscape of Hell dissipated. He felt like he had just surfaced after being underwater for an hour. His wife breathed just as heavily. She looked around them, wide-eyed and unable to focus.

The Orb was not a fun way to travel. Just quick.

He opened his eyes again and looked around him, trying to find the exact location of the Veil.

“Oh, Hell,” he whispered.

The spot where he stood was surrounded. Humans, demons, vampires, monsters of other descriptions and things that had no description. They all stood around him in countless numbers. And they were between him and his point of exit to the Veil.

They had been waiting for him. Most likely, they had been drawn to the power the Veil emanated, the radiating pulse of energy that was created by the opening between this realm and the next. They might not be able to use it themselves, but they would know something had come through.

Of course it was also possible they were here to settle scores with him personally.

He recognized a lot of them. People or things that he had dispatched back on Earth who had gone straight to Hell. He was the reason they were here. They didn’t look like they were happy about it.

“Julia,” he whispered to his wife, “Julia, I’m sorry.”

She was still only half aware of herself and what was going on. He would have liked to lay her down to face this horde, but the black, hungry flowers were everywhere and they would eat her alive if he did. As it was they were already nipping at her feet. So he held her still, and addressed the crowd.

“I killed you all once!” His voice carried through the ash and darkness of Hell, like an echo with a life of its own. “Today I have killed Lan Protegux, four of his friends, and two Trolls! I will kill all of you next, if you don’t leave us alone. NOW!”

The crowd rumbled, growled, laughed, hissed. Something that looked like a snake on steroids pounded heavy fists against the ground, pulping black flowers and cracking the dry earth. He had killed that thing more than two years ago. It hadn’t died easily.

He looked around at all of them. Trying to scare them off obviously wasn’t going to work.

“Fine,” Ransom said. “Be that way.”

He held the Orb up over his head in his left hand. He called forth its inner light with a stroke of his fingers, and hid his wife’s face against his chest.

There was no way this would work.

Was there?

The Orb burned his skin. He could feel the heat from it radiating into his bones, down his arm, across his chest, as the Orb called up his own life force to power what it would do next.

The horde of creatures advanced on him, all at once.

And then the darkness of Hell was pushed aside by the blinding, blazing red light of the Orb as it created the equivalent discharge of an exploding nuclear bomb.

The world around him disappeared. He lost all sense of time, of self, of life. There was nothing but the red light, and blinding pain.

And then it was gone.

Ransom dared to open his eyes after a few moments. He looked down at Julia. She was safe in his arms still, breathing slowly, but breathing still. She was unconscious again. The force of the Orb’s magic had been too much for her in her state.

He remembered then to check himself over too and found that he was also still breathing, choking on Hell’s ash. Count that as something, he thought. Breathing meant he wasn’t dead.

And then he looked around. The landscape of Hell was…gone. In every direction there was nothing but blackened earth from horizon to horizon. Nothing stood as far as he could see. Nothing, except the Veil.

Every denizen of Hell that had came looking for a pound of his flesh was gone. Every single one.

“Yes!” Ransom yelled in triumph, raising the Orb in his fist. He had done it, he had gone into Hell and saved his wife and was going to live to tell the tale.

His eyes bugged as he caught sight of his hand around the Orb. It was blackened to the bone, the flesh gone, charred away, leaving skeletal fingers clenched around the Orb. The sleeve of his coat was burned and tattered, and under it he could see the raw red remains of what had been his left forearm.

He whimpered. It should hurt. There should be intolerable pain with an injury like that. The fact that he didn’t feel anything meant the nerves there were gone. He had lost the arm completely.

The fires the Orb called up had been so intense that the bones were melted together and fused so that the Orb was trapped in his hand.

Ransom thought he would throw up. But he felt Julia move in his other arm and realized the price he had paid was worth her life.

Al’Gamesh would want the Orb back. His arm would have to be cut off to go with it. Not that he thought that would be a problem for the Veil keeper.

Not something to worry about now. Now, they needed to get out before anything else he had put here in Hell found them.

Ransom stepped forward and took them both through the Veil, and back to Earth.

Al’Gamesh was waiting to close the doorway behind them. And then, finally, Ransom sagged to the floor and let Julia rest in his lap.

“You made it,” Al’Gamesh’s spoke, the force of its voice harsh against his ears and mind, especially after navigating the landscape of Hell.

“Yeah,” Ransom answered. “Don’t sound so surprised. You should know better than to bet against me.”

“I am aware of that. I would not have bargained with you otherwise.”

Ransom figured it was as much of a compliment as he was likely to get from Al’Gamesh.

The thing inside its dark cloak hissed. “I’ll take the Orb back now.”

“Yeah. Well. Might be a problem with that.” He held up his dead arm, the Orb caught in the bones of what had once been his hand.

Al’Gamesh floated over to Ransom and wrapped the sleeves of its cloak around Ransom’s severed limb. And with a hard crack, it broke the bones off just below the wrist to retrieve the Orb.

Ransom gagged but didn’t say anything. He just didn’t have the strength left.

His arm. His arm was gone. He should care more.

Hard to care about himself when the woman he loved was huddled in his arms, safe again from the horrors of Hell, where she’d been put because of his past.

“You should go home, now, Ransom.” Death had more emotion in its voice than Al’Gamesh had. “And do not bother me again. Until I call upon you. I will give you time with your wife and time to recover from your wounds before I start exacting your payment for our deal.”

Orb in hand, Al’Gamesh made for the stairway, leaving Ransom and his wife behind to find their own way out.

Three years of service to Al’Gamesh. Ransom nodded. That was the deal he had made for Julia’s life. He hugged her naked body closer and allowed himself to relax. There wouldn’t be much time for relaxing and being with her once the Veil keeper started calling on him again.

Veil keeper.

Keeper of the entrance to Hell.

Ransom had been so intent earlier on getting to his wife, that he hadn’t had time to consider how his wife could have been stolen and brought to Hell in the first place. But now his analytical mind turned the problem over to observe it from every angle. She had been taken to Hell. There were only so many ways…

“You know, Al’Gamesh, there’s only so many entryways to Hell from Earth.” He laid his wife gently on the stone floor and stood up. His missing hand suddenly itched. He ignored it. Tried to, anyway.

The creature that was Al’Gamesh stopped partway up the spiraling stairs and turned back to Ransom. “You have a point?”

“I’ve been thinking on how my wife got taken into Hell. Had to be through one of the established doorways. The only other way is to die and have your soul get sent there. I know her. There’s no way she would ever end up in Hell. Plus, she’s still alive, so.”

Al’Gamesh said nothing.

“You bastard,” Ransom said, quietly. Now he was sure of it.

The thing turned away and continued up the stairs, talking as it went. “You have no proof it was me, Ransom. If you ever do, feel free to come discuss it. Until then, you know your way out.”