To my utter surprise, I made it to the upper levels of hell and over the Styx without any problem. Kharon, the ferryman, did give me a bit of a weird look. I think. I’m not entirely sure he actually has eyes behind that hood of his and I’ve never gotten up the courage to ask. Kharon doesn’t have a temper so much as he doesn’t like questions… and being half-mortal, I really don’t want to end up in the Styx.

I’ve seen souls that he’s thrown overboard for not having the right payment. Just glimpses of them beneath the surface of the black water, but their expressions? I’m a demon, the stuff of nightmares, and the look in their dead eyes gives even me the willies.

Eyes or not, the hood had been turned my way a lot on the journey across to the shores of the living. I have no clue how powerful he is (or even if Kharon is a he) but he didn’t give any indication he could see through my disguise.

I’d picked a reaper this time, all in your face black leather, shiny blades and attitude because they’re one of the few creatures that move easily between the lands of the living and the dead. No one stops a reaper. Angels ignore their existence and demons give them a wide berth. I’m not entirely sure they can kill either, but it seems no one wants to take the chance.

After a while, s/he’d gone back to looking ahead and paid me no mind. But when I’d gotten up to leave the boat, making way for incoming passengers, I’d found a coin on my seat. I’d palmed it before anyone else could see it, but I’m sure it wasn’t there when I sat down. He must have seen through my disguise and decided to let me pass. Otherwise why give me a way to return?

Not asking questions, I beat feet and headed for one of the gateways to the mortal world. Anticipation and, yes, nerves mounted as I neared the closest one. I’d never been “up top” but I watched a lot of cable. Would it be the same as I’d seen on screen, or worse? I’d seen plenty of mortals and they were all shits… made me think that the shows I watched weren’t exactly indicative of reality, you know? But then, we got the worst of the worst, so I was only seeing half the picture.

I had wanted to take a little time and savor my first steps in the mortal world, but as I approached the gate, the skin between my shoulder blades itched and the hairs on the back of my neck rose. I was being followed. Whistling a soft tune to myself, I hid a curse to dispel shadows within the tune, dropping to tie my perfectly secure shoelace at the same time. My breathing rasped in my ear, almost deafening me.

Using the movement for cover, I both looked around me and called hellfire in my closed fist at the same time.

But… nothing. Zip, zilch, nada. I was alone in the stone corridor.

Blowing my bangs out of my face, I got to my feet and sprinted toward the gate. Whoever was following me was stealthy and very good at concealing themselves, which ruled out minor demons and left either a higher demon or a fallen. Which meant I wouldn’t know who and what until they decided to reveal themselves. Since I didn’t want to get into it with either while still in the reach of hell, I needed to get gone and bloody fast.

My dash for the gate must have taken my lurker by surprise. As my booted feet crunched small pebbles and dirt underfoot, there was a sense of movement behind me, a swirl of darkness and claws… But then I hit the azure, shimmering surface of the gate, arms spread wide, and fell into the human world.

“Oh, you mother…trucker!” I hissed as mortality hit me like a ton of freaking bricks. I gasped as every cell in my body contracted, feeling heavier than it ever had in my life. My vision greyed out as I hit the ground on my knees and sucked air like it was going out of fashion.

I was dying, seriously freaking dying, I decided, as my body fought to get used to… what? Mortality? Fucking hell, no wonder the dead were so freaking depressed if this is what they came from. The crushing weight of gravity was intense.

Cogs turned and clicked within my mind, and the weight eased. It wasn’t gravity, but time. I was mortal, and, contrary to what eighties fashion would have you believe, big hair and shoulder pads big enough to launch jets from were not my enemy. Time was.

I blinked and managed to focus. I could feel myself aging. Could feel the grip of time and the fates who would eventually cut the cord that decided my lifespan. Bitches. If I ever got ahold of one, they’d regret getting out of bed that morning now that I’d had a taste of what mortality felt like. I didn’t like it. In fact, I liked it less than pop music. I’m a rock-chick through and through.

There was a puddle in front of me and I focused on my reflection. Did I have new wrinkles? Was my skin sagging? It felt like it. I turned my head this way and that, studying my face, but no, my skin was as smooth and taut as it always had been. No new crow’s feet had erupted in the few seconds since I’d crossed the barrier from hell.

Then I realized my knees were wet. I was kneeling in the freaking puddle. Great, just my sodding luck.

My lungs ached and I took in a shuddering breath. And moaned. The air was so sweet. Pure and even a little moist, with absolutely no hint of sulfur or brimstone. I breathed out and dragged another lungful in, managing to restrain my whimper as I looked up and around. Grandfather knew where I was, but it looked like every busted up back alley in every film I’d ever seen. With added dirt. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m from hell, but that’s a kind of dried-on, baked dirt. This was… wet dirt. Ewwww. Gross.

Wrinkling my nose as I clambered to my feet, I got a half-second warning before the portal opened behind me and spat something out of hell.

“Eat fire, mother-trucker!” I hissed as I leapt and let rip with hellfire at the same time. Whoever or whatever had been in the corridor with me must have managed to get a fix on where I landed and followed me.

The fire-bolt left my fingers and sizzled through the air. There was a hiss, a yowl and something big and furry skittered sideways faster than anything that big had a right to. My eyes widened as the bolt hit a dumpster and sent it skittering sideways to crash into a wall.

I couldn’t spare it more than a quick glance and a wince as it embedded itself halfway up the brick wall, wheels spinning madly. Instead, my attention was all on the hulking form stalking toward me. Wreathed in shadows, it had glowing red eyes and lethal looking claws that shone through the blackness it had wrapped around itself.

A hellcat.

Shit. I was so, so screwed.

Let me tell you about hellcats. They’re like hellhounds, but much worse. My uncle, in his infinite wisdom (and a large amount of alcohol) had decided that hounds were too… tame. So he made hellcats. (Hell-penguins never took off. Apparently they were too friendly and gave the higher level demons nightmares. Go figure.) All that destruction and chaos wrapped in a body with permanent anger management issues and disdain for everything? Yeah, Uncle Luce is a genius at times.

Now I was on the wrong side of the hell-gate, facing down a hellcat with zero backup and no freaking plan.

Then I blinked, studying the creature in front of me. Something about the way the shadows curled around him was familiar.

“E-dub?” I asked, suddenly straightening.

“Oh, for g-g-hewhoshallnotbementioned’s sake,” the cat yowled, the sounds forming into words in my head, and dropped the shadows. Before me was a cat the size of a small Shetland pony, covered in bright orange, fluffy fur. Violently orange. Like an orange had had an orgy with another orange and had psychedelic orangey babies. “How did you know it was me?”

I shrugged, standing upright and banishing my hellfire. “Your shadows curl in the same way your fur does.” I motioned toward the fluffy ruff on the top of his head. “It’s cute.”

I hid my grin at his furious look. Let me tell you about E-dub. It stands for E.W. but in the way of things, the W had been shortened to “dub.” Really, it’s short for Evil Wanker because he is. If there’s any trouble with the hellcats, guaranteed he’s at the bottom of it. He likes to stir up trouble and scare the shit out of the lower demons. Even some of the higher ones will give him a wide berth. He seems to like me, though, arriving in my rooms one day and leaving his luminous orange fur all over my stuff. Asshole. Furry asshole.

“Whatcha’ doing here, E-dub?” I asked, looking around to take in more details of our surroundings. The dirty alley hadn’t gotten any better while I’d been hurling fire-bolts, more was the pity.

“Mpppphhh,” E-dub gave a little huff of annoyance and I shot him a grin. He preferred to be called by his full (self-appointed) title of Lord Skullcrusher the third. No way was I adding to his ego and calling the fluffball that. He was a cat, a hellcat all the same, but add a laser pointer or catnip into the mix and the feline DNA shone through.

“This!” He gave another yowl and started to hack like he had a hairball stuck. With a grimace I backed the hell up, getting the toes of my boots out of the blast zone. Hellcat vomit? Let’s just say it takes more than a bit of bleach and industrial scrubbing to get rid of.

“Hhhnnnuracccckk!”

A manila file landed with a wet splat on the broken and cracked asphalt at my feet. I wrinkled my nose as he looked up at me expectantly.

“Oh no, I am not touching that. Not if you freaking paid me.” I shook my head, folding my arms over my chest. “I am not touching anything that came from any of your bodily orifices. Ever.”

He grumbled, his eyes flashing with hellfire for a moment before settling back to a bright green. In hell his eyes were always red. The change was cute.

“I am not a witch’s familiar!” he exclaimed, disgruntled.

Smoke rose from his fur, bringing the stench of home for a second. My arms relaxed and a hint of a smile played with the corners of my lips. E-dub was cute when he was mad, if a psychopathic monster from hell could ever be considered cute, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.

“Bully for you.” A little confusion colored my voice. Was it state random facts day today or something? I was in a back alley in what appeared to be the middle of the night, with Lucifer the size of a doll in my back pocket having a conversation with a talking cat. Currently… nothing would surprise me. “Why are you telling me?”

E-dub sat down and began washing a paw. “Read it.”

“Uh, no… orifices rule, remember?” I edged forward and frowned. Jynx Savannah Morningstar was printed in bold letters on the front. “Errr, why does it have my name on it?”

“Read it,” E-dub ordered, shifting his position, and his furry head disappeared between his legs. Slurping sounds informed me he was washing his nads. Right here in public. “It says I’m your familiar.”

“What?” I couldn’t help it. I laughed out loud. “Don’t be stupid. I’m a demon. We don’t have familiars… will you knock it off? It’s polite to look at someone when you’re talking to them.”

E-dub grunted and moved, plonking his furry ass down and spreading his back legs. Green eyes regarded me over an area of his anatomy I was trying hard not to think about, let alone look at.

“Not any better.” I twitched my fingers, hellfire caressing the tips. “Move it or lose it, bud.”

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” E-dub huffed and rolled to his feet. “And you’re not just a demon. You’re half mortal, remember? Your father was a warlock…” He paused, as if for dramatic effect. “A healer warlock.”

“What? Don’t be daft.”

It took me a few minutes of blinking and replaying those words through my head to make them stick. I didn’t know much about my father. Asking the mom… well, let’s just say you could ask the question and you’d get an answer, but whether it was the answer to the question you’d asked or a complete fabrication was another matter.

Pushing her doesn’t help either. She’s like a two-year-old most of the time—all cute and crap. Piss her off? She’s like a two-year-old whose blankey is in the washer… one with all the power of hell at her fingertips. Last time she got pissed off… remember the world wars? Yeah. That’s what I’m talking about.

On the subject of my father? Zilch. It’s like the guy doesn’t exist. Every time I ask, I get a blank look, like I’m suddenly not speaking any intelligible language anymore.

So to find out even that little snippet about my father was… mind blowing.

I snorted. “You don’t know shit. How do you know that?”

I rolled my shoulders, settling my jacket more comfortably across them. My gaze fell to the file, its edges lifting slightly in the breeze wafting down the alley. It looked battered and dog-eared, like someone had looked at it a lot.

“Is it in there? Does it say anything else about him?”

I made a grab for the file, my no orifices rule completely forgotten in the face of finding something out about my father. If he was a healer, he could help me with Uncle Luce and save hell from Nabzon’s tyranny. But the instant my fingers closed around the cardstock, the damn thing disappeared in a poof and a shower of warning red sparks.

“Huh?” I blinked, looking at my hand and then around my feet. “Where’d it go?”

There was a musical tinkle and the file appeared beside E-dub, now sitting with all his paws together, doing cute and fluffy as well as a slavering beast from the pits of hell could.

I looked at him. “Are you making yourself smaller and cuter?”

He was. He’d shrunk down to the size of a big housecat.

E-dub sniffed. “I am Lord Skullcrusher the third. I am not cute.”

I lifted an eyebrow, silently looking over the new little tufts on his ears, the floofy ruff and tail and the big, green eyes that even had anime style sparkles in them. He wouldn’t look out of place on some tween’s social media feed.

“Yeah, yeah… whatever you say, my lord. Now,” I nodded toward the file. “What else does it say?”

E-dub sniffed and flicked the file open with an extended claw and sniffed. “Apparently you’re not allowed to read it. And I’m not allowed to tell you what’s in it.”

Asshole cat. I gritted my teeth and counted to ten. Ten? Ha! I needed about a thousand when dealing with a hellcat.

“What are you allowed to say?” I edged a little closer, trying to read over his shoulder.

He grumbled under his breath, inching around, his ass between me and the file all the time. Flicking a glance over his shoulder, he gave a feline grin and his tail shot up, giving me an excellent view of his asshole.

“Wanker,” I hissed as his shoulders shook in silent, feline laughter. “Okay, you read. Find out if there’s anything we can use to track my dad down. Like, maybe a last known address?” I added hopefully.

E-dub grunted, flipping pages quickly, and shook his head. “Whole load of sweet feck all,” he declared. “Your dad was a warlock… Let’s see… called Rafe Amatore.”

I let the name roll over and over in my mind. Certain I’d never heard it before, I searched my memories but came up with nothing. Call it a blessing of my bloodlines, mixed as they were, but I’ve always had excellent recall. So I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, I’d never heard the name Rafe Amatore. But, it sounded right, felt right, as though something deep inside me recognized the truth.

“Any information on where he is?”

E-dub held up a paw, his ear flicking as he read. His lips were actually moving, but my lip reading, especially from cat lips, was still shite and I couldn’t make anything out. Finally, he shook his head.

“Nope. He seems to have gone into hiding after…” He trailed off, giving me a little look that quickly slid away. He didn’t need to finish the sentence. My dad had gone into hiding after my mom. Mind you, finding out that he’d slept with the mother of all darkness, Lilith herself, would freak anyone out, never mind a warlock.

Did he know about me?

The thought slipped out before I could stop it. The tiny voice was that of seven-year-old me, the girl who’d grown up with the Prince of Darkness as a father figure, the girl who’d been given two sub-levels of hell and a demon army one Christmas when all she’d wanted a was a pony. I squashed it and the memory of the year I had asked for a pony (Seriously… Not a mistake I ever made again), stuffed those thoughts right back down in their box in the bottom of my mind, and frowned.

“Okay, magical location it is then.”

Dusting my hands on my thighs, I stood up. Standing with my feet shoulder-width apart, I made sure I had my balance before opening one palm. Extending a nail, I sliced into my palm. Scarlet drew a line across my skin, beading and welling as I tilted my palm. Time slowed as the drop formed into a perfect red ball, like a holly berry. It grew bigger and fatter until it started to break away. As it fell, I called hellfire to wrap around it.

“Show me Rafe Am—”

The world exploded around me. Heat and fire turned the world into a cascade of orange and black. I was slammed backward, hurtling through the air in a somersault, and slammed into the wall next to the dumpster. I slid down the wall with a groan, headfirst, into a bin full of cardboard.

“Fuck…ing HOME!” I muttered, fighting my way free of the soggy cardboard with vicious punches and elbow jabs. It put up a fight, but eventually I managed to roll out and stood up.

The alley was a scene of devastation. Bins were scattered, their contents strewn over the ground and splattered up the opposite wall to where I stood. Scorch marks drew patterns over every surface.

“Shiiiiiiit…” A lump of wet cardboard slid down the side of my face to land on the ground by my foot. What the hell had I done?

“MADAFREAKINGMADATRUCKER!”

The muffled cursing came from behind me. Whirling around I spotted E-dub’s feet sticking up in the air behind a piled of scorched garbage. Stomping over, I reached down, grabbed ahold of his back paws and yanked him clear.

We rolled together, landing in the puddle in the middle of the alley with a wet splash. I groaned again. Hellcats were heavier than they looked.

“Any idea why my hellfire doesn’t work?” I asked as I shoved E-dub off me and rolled to my feet with far less grace than I’d started the day with. Then I got a look at him and winced.

His fur was gone all down his left side, the bloody and torn edges revealing a swirling mass of utter darkness streaked with the red of eternal fire and darker, fleshy things I didn’t want to think about. One ear was torn almost clean off, dangling from the side of his head like a grisly earring, and the wet mass of what remained of his eyeball oozed down his cheek. Fire blazed in the empty socket.

“Grandfather,” I muttered. “You look freaking rough. What the blazes happened?”

E-dub sniffed and shook his head. The ear flew off to splat against the nearby wall. Wrinkling his nose, he took a deep breath and sneezed. There was a pop and a flash. When my vision cleared, he sat there, fully furred with his ear in place and two bright green eyes twinkling at me.

“If I had to guess,” he commented, licking his paw and starting to wash his newly reattached ear. “I’d say it’s because we’re in the mortal realm and you’re part witch. Downstairs, you got blood magic. Up here, you have to use your mortal magic.”

I looked at him like he was speaking Swahili. “Mortal magic? How the hell am I going to do that? I’ve never used it before!”

He shrugged. “Better try, girlie, or we’re never going to find your dad and heal your uncle. As far as I read in that file, your magic is innate. You should already know how to use it. Like inside, like a magical tapeworm or something.”

“Ewww.” I wrinkled my nose. “Thanks so much for that image.”

“You’re welcome. Now make with the Abracadabra, would you? I’m getting peckish.”

I sighed but refrained from comment. If I was alone up here in the mortal world without my hellfire, I could do much worse than a hellcat for a companion. He’d healed himself, so I assumed whatever was screwing up my fire hadn’t interfered with his magic. Thankfully.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Innate. Right. I could do this. I would do this because the fate of hell, and possibly everything, rested on it.

“Wait!”

I cracked open an eyelid to look at E-dub. He sat in front of me, his tail wrapped around his paws and a lascivious look in his big green eyes.

“What?”

“If you’re doing mortal magic, you need to be skyclad.”

“Is that so?” My expression set. E-dub might be a hellcat, but he was also male and demon-kin. Which meant that not only was he an asshole times two, but he was also a pervert by nature.

The cat nodded. “Says so right in the file.”

Pursing my lips, I pretended to think about it and then reached for the zip on my jacket. He edged forward, an eager little look on his face. Calling the tiniest bit of hellfire, not enough to trigger all hell breaking loose like before (no pun intended), I zapped him.

Shrieking, he disappeared behind a bin, his tail puffed out like he’d stuck a claw in an electrical socket.

“The instant I have to get skyclad, sunshine, is the point I relocate your eyeballs to your asshole,” I called after him. “See how you like watching your own business for eternity.”

There was the rustle of paper from behind the bin. “Oh, would you look at this? There’s an exception for those of demon nature.”

I chuckled and reached deep within myself, searching for the part of my soul I’d always ignored. The little mass was buried so far down it had always been easy to ignore. Over the years it had gotten smaller and smaller, until I wasn’t even sure it was there anymore. But I found it, the tiniest little kernel. As soon as I touched it, though, it flared to life, surging up from the pit of my soul to fill me like hellfire, but not.

“Maps and compass I need not,

To find an unknown dad

Guide me on the path I need,

Before this place makes me sad.”