We had returned from Fae to find that it was almost noon the following day, cutting it very close. Talon and Carl had been silent, merely watching me as I told them what to do. They didn’t question, comment, or even speak unless I asked them to. Which was good enough for me.

Death was waiting for us in front of the Arch. Talon and Carl wore deep hoods to conceal their appearance from the dozen or so humans walking, eating on a blanket, or tossing Frisbees around the area. With it being broad daylight, all it would take was one close inspection under those hoods to start a panic. Luckily, no one paid us any attention.

Death opened his mouth to say something, but then hesitated, studying me. “You seem… well. Alive. Full.”

I grinned. “Ah, irony. Bringing life to the Underworld. I had an energy drink.”

He continued to watch me in silence, then finally glanced at my companions. “It is time to depart. Not that it matters at this point, but are you ready?”

I nodded smugly. “I’ve taken any precautions I could think of. Even printed out copies of the Mappa dell’Inferno by Botticelli. A map to Hell based on Dante’s Divine Comedy.” We had spent days studying the famous painting, staring at the inverted funnel shape until we had nightmares. Well, I had nightmares. Carl had seemed eerily peaceful and well rested afterwards.

Death chuckled, but it slowly grew into a great booming laugh. “You think that will save you? As if we would let humans publish an accurate map!”

I squinted at him, my confidence wavering. “Well, it can’t hurt,” I argued stubbornly.

“Just don’t use it. That map is so much toilet paper.”

I kicked a boot into the grass angrily. “You couldn’t have told me that earlier? I spent a lot of time reading this kind of stuff. Hours…” I muttered, suppressing a shudder at the nightmares.

“Well, unless you’d rather give up your soul, we best get moving. Hopefully you brought some good walking shoes.” He turned and began walking to the center of the Arch.

I nodded as I followed him. I glanced at the dozen or so people around us, but it was almost as if they didn’t see us at all. I waved at one, curious. He was only ten feet away. He smiled, but his eyes let me know he was looking past me. I glanced the other way to see he was staring at a friend who was getting ready to toss a Frisbee. I held out my hands, flipping both off simultaneously. They didn’t react at all, and I shivered.

I hurried after Death, not wanting to know how he had managed to conceal us from the humans. “Now that we are here, can you finally tell me who’s in charge down there? There are so many options, but I really doubt it’s Lucifer. That’s kind of discriminating against everyone else if he’s in charge.”

Death turned to face me. “One lesson you should already know…” he said in a tight, frustrated voice. “Is to not say certain names out loud. And that’s a long list of names. It’s not like earth, Nate. You say the wrong fucking name down there, and you have no idea what kind of shit storm will rain down upon you.” He stepped backwards, and the world flashed black for a moment, revealing the Grim Reaper, the Horseman of the Apocalypse, holding his wickedly lethal scythe, taller than his own body. His mask – a human skull, but slightly elongated – flashed into place, and I again considered the impact craters visible on its surface, wondering what sort of a caliber bullet would have left a mark on his Mask.

Then he was Hemingway again, a man in a sharp suit.

Flicker.

Death.

Flicker. Hemingway.

Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. Back and forth, faster and faster…

Then we were suddenly standing in a dead landscape. Condensed clouds of drifting, shifting, black fog roiled and crashed over each other with such mass that as one crested and struck another, the weaker of the two dispersed like a wet water balloon hitting pavement, evaporating in an instant. The land was dead. Ash covered the earth in knobby, distorted pale pillars like precariously balanced stacks of totaled cars, and as I took a step, the pale earth beneath my boots puffed up into the air as if it weighed almost nothing. Such fine immolation that it could make the dust practically float like feathers. The sky crackled with black lightning in the distance, seeming to somehow throb with pulses of darkness rather than flashes of brightness – like a sudden shade thrown over the moon.

Speaking of… I looked up at the sky, staring at those shifting, charcoal clouds. They were limned with red and orange fire, like staring up at a bed of coals.

No sun or moon could be seen through the infinite darkness of pregnant, hostile clouds.

Death pointed a skeletal claw off to his right and a pillar of white simply evaporated, collapsing like a demolished building. I blinked.

“Death is all around you, now. You sought this. You asked for this. But this is only the beginning of the decay, the heartache, the woe.” He said it like a neighbor pointing out patches of petunias in the front yard while bragging about the garden out back. “This is all you can conceive at the moment, but as you descend, your horizons will be… broadened,” he said with a mirthless, rasping chuckle.

“Tone down the crazy, Death. You know me. No need to impress.”

Whip quick, his scythe was swinging at my face with the sound of a thousand dying screams rather than the whistling of air. Both Talon and Carl were suddenly before me, but the scythe turned to vapor, whisking right through them before solidifying on the other side of them –right before my face.

The blade appeared at my neck. I was caught so off guard by both its sheer speed and by its delivery – harmlessly passing through my friends – that I didn’t even have time to flinch. White fire danced in the black sockets of Death’s Mask. The scythe’s razor edge barely touched my skin and I suddenly felt as if my whole body was submerged into the Arctic Ocean…

“Drop the blade, Rider, or we all die here. We’ve all come to dance, and it looks like you’re the only one in a dress,” Talon snarled, glancing at the Horseman’s death-shroud robe.

Carl just hissed, holding two swords in a reverse grip as he crouched, readied to leap. His fanned hood rattled, and I knew he was ready to spit that odd venom of his.

But I could only stare at Death’s skeletal claw holding the edge of his scythe a dozen feet away from me, and the blade itself resting against my throat. But between, where the staff should have been, was only vapor. His scythe shouldn’t have been able to reach me.

So his scythe was able to reach impossible distances, and grant no harm to those he didn’t intend to die. Which made sense, being Death, and all. Otherwise he might have received a lot of written complaints. My hand was creeping up to my necklace, inch by inch, the only hope left to me. The moment before my fingertip touched the metal coin – my Horseman’s Mask – Death’s scythe evaporated.

I collapsed to my knees, shivering violently, feeling on fire as the icy sensation left my skin.

Death grunted. “There are no friends in this place. I warned you. That I could not aid you here. That this was foolish. That…” he waved a hand, turning his back on us. As his robes swirled near the ground, more puffs of the white ash floated up into the air, and I tensed as I saw his feet. Skeleton, not feet. Just bone.

I stared at his robes, remembering the cobwebbed fabric, like a death shroud, but somehow thick enough to prevent seeing through it. As I stared now, I noticed a faint purple glow beneath the shroud, like light. None of it shone near his hands or feet.

I climbed to my feet, rubbing my arms briskly. I didn’t retaliate. He was right. I should have known better than to press him. This wasn’t Hemmingway. Not any longer. This was Death in his official capacity. And I was banging on his front door in the middle of the night.

“My apologies, Pale Rider,” I said, eyes downcast.

His shoulders tensed, but he didn’t turn. After a time, he waved a hand before him.

The sound of cracking ice in a silent pond at dawn rocked the world, and the ashes on the ground began floating up a foot off the ground. The vibration of something underneath us began banging as if we actually were standing on thin ice, and a sea dragon was trying to break through to get to us. As the thumping increased, the ash continued to bounce and lift into the air, clearing the space around us to reveal polished black stone.

The air hummed. The heat began to increase as if we were standing before an open oven door.

Suddenly, everything stopped and we stood in complete silence.

Death was perched in a squatting position on the inches long wooden handle protruding from the haft of his weapon, about halfway up the blade. The arced blade rested on the ground, impossibly keeping the weapon upright, but rocking back and forth like a rocking chair along the back of the blade, making Death sway like a spinster on the porch as he stared at us, that white fire in his eye sockets flickering brightly.

“Don’t use the Mask. I cannot take it from thee, but beware the Horn of Servitude. You’ve heard it twice. Perhaps the third time’s the charm,” he said in a wheezing chuckle, unlike any voice I had ever heard him use. “If you call upon the Mask down there, and it is the final stroke… let’s just say that I wouldn’t recommend announcing a Rider – a Fifth Rider – of the Apocalypse in the depths of Hell, without his Brothers. Some of the… residents have long memories, and were present when the scriptures were written. It might attract unwanted attention.”

I opened my mouth but gasped as he suddenly leapt thirty feet into the air, directly above us, wielding the scythe overhead like an axe. Black lightning struck the blade, tinged with the red and orange hellfire of the clouds…

And then he was falling like a comet. Like a Fallen Angel. Straight at us.

We dove to the side and Death’s scythe slammed into the black stone where we had been standing. Orange and red fire spider-webbed the polished black stone with a sound like the earth had just cracked in half, and the ground shattered beneath us.

We fell, obviously.

I stared up at the Hellish world above us, remembering all the decay and destruction, and saw the robed Horseman floating as he stared down at us. He held a black feather in his skeletal claw, and I noticed a red orb at the tip. Then the black glass began repairing itself like crystals growing in fast forward until Death and the hole were gone, leaving only a smoky glass window.

As I thought about the feather – which had looked just like one of Grimm’s feathers – I managed to wonder what could be worse than what we had already seen.

I didn’t have to wait long to find out.