Pushing myself up, I’d just straightened when the elevator doors parted softly. My mouth dropped open as I got my first glimpse of...Hell?
Not at all.
What lay beyond the open elevator doors was white walls—a white floor, a white ceiling. Shiny white. Pristine. My feet carried me out of the elevator, into a wide and vast circular lobby with hundreds if not thousands of hallways. There was music playing. Horrible, jaunty lobby music; the kind that would drive you crazy if you had to listen to it for longer than five minutes. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Hell had a lobby.
Nothing was guarding the lobby. No demons waited to pounce on me, and that surprised me. Then again, Cayman had warned me that nothing in Hell was what it seemed. Maybe I just couldn’t see the demons. As I wheeled around, searching for hidden dangers, I realized there were gold placards on the walls near each hallway, displaying the names of...
“Holy crap,” I whispered.
Names of all the demons were clearly etched into the gold placards. Some I didn’t recognize. Others made my stomach twist and then drop. ABADDON. VINE. MOLOCH. BAEL. The names went on and on. Straight across from the elevator was the hallway labeled THE BOSS and beside it was one that caught my breath.
ASTAROTH.
I almost started toward it, because something inside of me wanted to see how Roth really lived when he was down here, but I stopped myself. I didn’t have time for this.
Across from those names was THE PITS. And there, three down from that, was the name I’d been looking for: GRIM.
Taking a deep, fortifying breath, I walked briskly toward the hall bearing Grim’s name and then down the long, brightly lit, relatively cool tunnel. There were no windows. No scents to speak of. The air was stagnant but clean, and still, the hairs all over my body began to rise.
I reached a double set of windowless doors and before I could do anything, they opened silently, revealing a world I’d never seen before as a blast of oppressive heat smacked into me.
Stopping an inch from the exit, I bit down on my lip. This...this was what I’d expected. In a way. The sky beyond the hall was a burnt red. There were no clouds. No sun or moon. Just a deep, orangey red that seemed to have no source. The scent of sulfur and something I couldn’t quite make out turned my stomach.
A road made of some kind of stone separated tall, ash-colored buildings. They rose like skyscrapers, reaching into that strange sky, their windows dark with no sign of life inside them. My gaze tracked over the formidable, intimidating buildings to the massive structure at the end of the road, several city blocks away. It was the largest of all the buildings, but designed like something straight out of the Middle Ages. Twin steeples rose from either side of the pitch roof, and it gave the impression that it was more of a fortress than a home. Sort of like the compound I’d grown up in.
I swallowed hard, knowing that was where I was going to have to go, because of course, it wasn’t like Grim could live in a cute house with a picket fence or something. Oh no, it had to be the Lord of the Rings-type castle all the way down there.
Knowing I didn’t have a lot of time and that time in general worked vastly different down here, I pulled up my big-girl undies and stepped out of the hallway.
It happened immediately.
Without any warning, a shiver rippled across my skin and I felt Bambi and Robin leave my body. Panicked, I tried to stop them, because I wasn’t sure if Robin was ready for that, but there was no calling them back.
Two shadows drifted out from underneath my shirt, forming two irregular shaped circles. They trembled, and then dropped to the stone roadway, spilling into a million tiny balls that shot together. The inky black balls rose into the air, but they didn’t drop to the ground like they normally would.
The dots spun and spun until a thick shadow formed. Before me, as my mouth hung open, legs formed, along with torsos and arms and heads. For a second, they were two people-shaped pools of black oil, and then, within a heartbeat, the murkiness gave way to detail.
A boy and a girl stood in front of me.
My jaw was starting to ache from how long I was gaping, but I couldn’t snap my mouth shut. They weren’t little boys and girls. Actually, they looked slightly older than me, but they were definitely of the male and female humanoid variety.
The guy was tall and slender, with auburn hair that fell into crimson-colored eyes. Shirtless, he was all wiry grace. A fine dusting of reddish hair covered his bare skin. Standing next to him was a woman with hair a deep red, nearly matching her eyes. Dressed in a black tank top and jeans, she almost looked normal. Almost. Patches of her skin weren’t exactly...skin. More like tiny scales breaking through, all so very...snake-like.
Oh my God.
The woman grinned brightly. “Hey, girl, hey.”
“Hey,” I said slowly, glancing between the two. “Um...”
Raising his chin in a greeting, the guy’s nose twitched and then...then his ears did the same. “Hi.”
Oh my God.
“I so knew you were up to shenanigans, and I was right!” Turning to the guy, the girl raised her hand, flipping him off. “Told you so. Told you that she was going to come here. So you should be glad I’m here, so you don’t get eaten by dragons. And yes, there are dragons here. And not as nice as Thumper, either.”
“You’re just so smart,” he replied drily.
“Damn tootin’.” She spun toward me. “He’s not very helpful right now, since he’s like new to all of this. I needed to come along.”
“You... You are...” I almost couldn’t bring myself to say it. “You’re Bambi.”
Hopping, she clapped her hands together. “And you’re Layla. And he’s Dumbass.”
Dumbass sighed. “I’m Robin. You know, your real familiar. Not the parasite who needs to go back to Daddy.”
Bambi snorted. “How about you go back to yourself. Huh? How about that?”
That didn’t even make sense, but the fact that I was staring at Bambi and Robin and they looked like humans didn’t make sense, either. “So you two... This is what you really look like?”
She nodded. “Yep. When we can, which tragically isn’t very often. But we can talk to one another even in our animal forms. Sort of telepathically.” She pouted. “Robin here is a bore. He’s really just slept this whole time.”
He scowled in her direction. “Because I needed to get charged up.”
“Whatever,” she quipped. “I miss my boys. Nitro and Fury and Thor. They’re fun. Thumper is like you. Another bore who just sleeps all the time, and when he doesn’t, he’s a grumpy tool.”
I blinked slowly as Bambi raised her arms above her head, stretching. Her top rose, flashing a taut stomach, and it suddenly hit me that Roth had a chick on him. Roth seriously had a chick all over him, all the time! On lots of parts of his body. And I had a dude on my stomach!
Roth and Cayman had failed to mention this little detail to me.
An ugly, insidious feeling crept into me and I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “You are on Roth.”
“Um, yeah. And sometimes I’m on you. Duh.” She frowned. “Did you hurt your head or something?”
Okay. I squeezed my eyes shut briefly. The jealousy was ridiculous. I couldn’t be jealous over Bambi, who might be a hot girl but also was a snake most of the time—a legit, giant snake that ate gross things.
Besides, I had a dude on me— “Oh my God,” I groaned, looking at Robin. “You were on me last night. You were on me—”
“The moment you all started losing clothes, I totally checked out.” He raised his hands, wrinkling his nose. “Did not want to see any of that. Didn’t feel any of that.”
“I...” There were no words.
“Look,” Bambi said, “for most of the time we’re on you, we aren’t paying attention to what you’re doing. Well, not true. When you were with Zayne, I was so paying attention.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “So the kittens? They...”
“They are hot. Oh my golly God, they’re triplets,” Bambi said, smacking my arm with enough force to stagger me. “Triplets, Layla. There are actually three of them.”
“I got that.” I rubbed my stinging arm. “Thanks.”
Robin folded his arms as he cast his gaze to the orangey sky. “I have a feeling we should not be here.”
“This is unspeakably weird,” I muttered, trying to grasp the fact that I was talking to the familiars.
Bambi flipped that crimson hair over her shoulder. “I think it’s fantastically delightful.” Prancing forward, she stuck out her tongue in Robin’s direction. Even in her human form, the tongue was still forked. “But you know what’s not delightful? Your taste in men. I was really hoping you’d hook up with Zayne. He looked yummy.”
“You’ve already eaten one Warden—”
“Honey, that’s not the kind of eating I’m thinking of when I clap eyes on that big, blond ball of sweet, sweet loving.”
My eyes widened as Robin rolled his. “I’m...uh, sorry to disappoint you?”
Bambi continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “I liked it when he would pet me and I think you liked it, too,” she said, and my face went up in flames, because I knew exactly the moment she was referring to. “But I wonder how he’d feel if he knew what part of me he was actually feeling up. It wasn’t my neck.”