you’re now stuck in Hell, in a human body that you shouldn’t even be in now that we’re supposed to be dead.”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
“Because I’m dead.”
“Nope. You’re only a little bit dead. Doesn’t count.”
“Okay, because I used the blade?”
“Very good! That is the correct answer.”
Donna sighed, but she slowed her pace and picked her way across the stony banks of a trickling stream. The water looked like it could easily be blood, and it smelled like a dead pigeon (she knew what those smelled like because she and Navin had found one in his attic, once upon a time).
“Why would you even offer to help me? Not that I believe, for one minute, that you’ll actually do anything useful.”
“I’m insulted! I am mortally wounded. Offended. Upset.”
“Oh, please … ” Donna muttered.
“Hurt.”
Donna stopped walking and swung around. She grabbed the front of Newton-Navin’s T-shirt and pulled him toward her.
“Quit. Screwing. Around. Or, so help me, I will do everything in my power to make you regret it.”
Newton tried to twist out of her grip, but Donna just shook him until he stopped squirming.
“Oooh, you’re so strong!” he said. “You’re so masterful. Take me now! I already know you’re a good kisser.”
She glared at him some more.
“I am here to help you, you know. Consider me your own personal psychopomp. I can guide you through the domains of the Otherworld.”
Donna released him and spun away, pissed beyond all measure. She pressed the heel of her hand above her right eye and took a deep breath. She could feel a headache starting.
Please don’t tell me I’m going to be stuck with Newton for all eternity, she thought.
Now that really was her idea of Hell. And she wanted her friend back. Like, right now.
She tried to take in some of her surroundings as they walked. All around them, colors shifted and breathed into new forms; the air heated and cooled and then burned again. She walked through an ornate, gothic-styled doorway that had appeared out of nowhere—with nothing but wide open space, like a multicolored desert, on either side of it—and touched the gargoyle sitting on its crumbling post as she went by. The gargoyle’s stone head turned to watch her and blinked its eyes.
Donna gulped and kept walking.
Everything changed and yet stayed the same, but the sun in the sky was constant. Burning silver-bright, casting that strange half-light over the Otherworld. Until they came to a point in the alien landscape where her companion suddenly stopped.
“I can’t go any further with you,” Newton said.
“What? I thought you were my own personal psycho?”
“Psychopomp,” he said, looking offended.
Donna didn’t exactly want him around, but she wasn’t enthusiastic about being left alone either. At least with Newton in Navin’s body, she got to see Nav’s face—no matter how twisted the whole situation was. She was also worried that if she let the body-snatching demon out of her sight, she would lose Navin for good.
Newton grimaced. “I’ll show you why I can’t go any further, shall I?”
“Go ahead, then. Astound me,” Donna said.
Newton reached out with both hands. His palms app-eared to press against some kind of invisible barrier, like he was standing behind a pane of glass.
“You’re trapped?”
Newton nodded, downcast. “The Demon King knows I’m here. Damn it all to Hell!” He made the sign of the cross, then winked at her.
He continued to search the air in front of him with his hands, doing a good impression of one of the old-fashioned mimes that Donna sometimes saw outside Ironbridge’s Central Mall. It was surreal.
Newton punched the barrier. Hard. “You’d best go on. Demian will be waiting for you.”
He hit it again.
Donna swallowed against the sudden dryness in her throat. “Don’t keep doing that. Remember whose body you’re using.”
Newton examined his knuckles. “Good point. Oooh …
pretty bruise, wanna see?”
“No,” she snapped. She took a deep breath, scared to leave Navin behind but not really having a whole lot of choice. What was that famous Winston Churchill quote that Robert liked? “If you’re going through Hell … keep going.”
Donna figured that she’d better keep going.
She trudged up the side of the hill, trying not to think about what would happen at the top.
The higher Donna climbed, the darker it became, as though somebody with a giant eraser was rubbing out the sun. It was a strange sun, with that jaundiced light, but at least it had provided some kind of illumination on the earlier part of her journey. She stopped for a moment and rested against