“Oh, I don’t know…maybe because Lucifer might have done some remodeling in two fucking millennia?”
Jesus, their yelling was splitting my skull. I wanted to tell them to tone it down, but my mouth was full of cotton, my tongue swollen to twice its usual size. Not even mental communication worked—my mind felt like sticky goo and I couldn’t for the life of me get a precise thought together and push it to Azazel.
What the fuck happened to me?
Again, I tried to pry my eyes open, and this time I succeeded. The light stabbed at me like a dagger straight through my eyeballs and into my brain. Ouch. After blinking a couple of times, my surroundings came into focus and stopped spinning.
I was sitting propped against the wall of a gloomy corridor, Azazel and Azmodea standing several yards away, still arguing.
“For all we know,” Azmodea said, “you could lead us straight into Lucifer’s personal chambers.”
“Not if we go down!”
“But at some point we have to go up again! And then what?”
My mouth still wouldn’t cooperate, my brain on the frizz, and waving my arm—almost hitting myself in the face in the process—to get their attention didn’t work. They were too absorbed in their yelling match. Were siblings always so argumentative? I wouldn’t know.
The images of the two girls I’d seen in my dad’s new home flashed through my mind, and my chest ached. I could have had that, though. Sisters. If things had gone differently, if the festering wound inside me could have healed years earlier, maybe I could have gotten to know my two half-sisters. I might have even liked them. Now I’d never know.
And with that, my sluggish thoughts swung toward the very reason we were even here. My dad!
I sat up straighter, wincing at the pain pounding my skull. Did Azazel get him? Had he already gone down into the Pit and gotten his soul? They were talking about getting out of the palace, so either we were now trying to head home after a successful mission…or we were cutting our losses and abandoning the cause in favor of getting the fuck out.
I had no idea what had happened between us entering the throne room and now. When I tried to sift through my memories to figure it out, the pain in my head intensified from the effort. What the fuck? I couldn’t have just blacked out.
As for my father’s soul, there was no way to tell if Azazel had it on him—it wouldn’t show if he did. As he’d explained to me before we embarked on our heist, he’d use a small container made for carrying souls from Earth to Hell. Souls were spirit only, their ghostly forms but memories of their human body. They didn’t necessarily need to be in their full form and could easily be compressed into a smaller shape to be stored or transported. Demons did it all the time when catching and bringing sinners to Hell. Apparently, lugging full-form souls around was too much of a hassle.
When I’d asked, with no small amount of dismay, “You’re going to Ghostbuster my dad?” Azazel assured me it wouldn’t hurt my father’s soul to be squeezed into a box. I was still skeptical about that.
I needed to ask Azazel about my dad, but first I had to get my body to obey simple commands, like speak words, stand up, or stop drooling. Grimacing, I flailed and wiggled in slow motion until my muscles did their thing and I was able to stagger to my feet, using the wall behind me as a crutch.
So far, so good.
I caught my breath for a moment, listening to Azazel and Azmodea’s continued arguing. Something about insurgents blocking the way, Lucifer’s guards, fighting, and someone’s lack of orientation, which seemed to be an established point of contention between the two siblings.
“I’m not the one who got lost in the dungeons,” Azmodea snapped.
“I was five!” Azazel bared his teeth. “And I distinctly remember you couldn’t find your way out of the Dragon’s Tail Garden either!”
“Because it’s a maze! It’s meant to be confusing!”
“Keep telling yourself that, maybe it’ll become true.”
Azmodea looked like she was one second away from strangling him. Oh, no. If they went at each other’s throats, we’d never get out of here.
I opened my mouth to test again if I could finally speak when pain flared up from my ankle. I screamed. Something yanked my leg out from under me,