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  Maybe she had gotten captured. The jab of panicked guilt she felt at that surprised her. She wasn’t supposed to feel this way about a demon. Not a proper one. Gray demons were different, she had been lead to believe. It was okay to care about a gray demon, because they were humanized by their restraint. Real demons, though… She wondered what the ethics were to bringing a demon across intentionally.

  She made her way towards Hellcity for lack of a better direction to go, picking through the argument. The Rangers killed demons. All of them, any time, for no reason. It was never wrong to kill a demon, but it didn’t mean it was always right. Even a purist like Samantha knew that there were things in the world that were neither right nor wrong, when she’d seen as much as she had. Some things were just decisions. She had actually refused to kill a proper demon in Florida, once, who had learned to live on artistic energy. Part of the reason was that she just found him so novel. Part of it was that he woke her up from a dark frenzy that had put Sam and Jason at risk and distracted her from better pursuits. But a lot of it was that he didn’t deserve for her to kill him. Eternal judgement wasn’t her thing. Not my problem, and I’m grateful, she often said when she got into arguments with Carter. But the decision to take a life, even if it wasn’t a living life was important to her, and she had decided that the demon in Florida, among others, hadn’t deserved it.

  Bringing a demon across, on the other hand, was a different thing again. Most demons killed people. If they couldn’t manage people, they killed other things. Things with blood and life. In the hierarchy of importance, living things were all more important than demons. In the decision between a person and a demon, she would pick the person without blinking. In the decision between a cow and a demon, unless the demon was really interesting, or they paid for the blood, or raised the cow themselves… It got tangled, but the cow would generally win. Between an earthworm and a demon… She knew the idealist answer was that the earthworm was more important, but she was a Shaman. Knowing things was important to her, and if she had to choose between a non-violent demon and an earthworm, she’d probably go with the demon because he knew things. Even if they did lie through their teeth more than not.

  To bring a demon across, risk letting the creature out into the earth plane, out of a sense of loyalty to the demon because she had made a good-faith effort to fulfill her half of a contract… Intuitively, it felt like the right thing to do, but she shied away from closer inspection of the ethics of it. Just because someone was her friend didn’t mean that it was okay to risk innocent life.

  Even Jason.

  She’d been willing to bring Jason back across, and Sniffer in the same trip, just to have him back. She’d never even stopped to think about it.

  “Renouch?” someone called. It was the name the demons gave her. It meant ‘the one who came back’, though Sniffer had mis-translated it as ‘the one who comes back’, and still seemed to believe her own translation. Samantha turned. The skinny demon hung back, out of range, ready to run. Samantha didn’t recognize her, but it wasn’t a surprise. She’d been gone a long time.

  “You’re still here waiting for me?” she asked. The demon shrugged.

  “I don’t have anything better to do. There aren’t many rogues any more. They rounded most of us up again.”

  Polite conversation dictated that Samantha say ‘I’m sorry’ in response to that, but it wasn’t appropriate, here.

  “I understand.”

  “You came back. Did you find your friend?”

  “I did.”

  The expression that crossed the demon’s face might have been disappointment. She hadn’t yet learned how to form her features to match her character, and she was simply desiccated to black tissue and bone. Facial expressions were difficult to read at this stage. She’d finished her first cycle and was starting her second.

  “I’m glad,” she finally said. Samantha smiled.

  “Thank you.”

  “Why have you come back?”

  The reaction came as an instinctive one.

  “What do you want, Sniffer?”

  “To not be here.” The answer was equally un-guiled.

  “Have you drunk blood while you’ve been here?”

  Disdain.

  “No.”

  “You understand that you’ll want to kill if you cross. You won’t be alive, and you’ll know it. You’ll want to take life, as a result.”

  She looked away.

  “If you say so.”

  “And if you kill a person - any person - I will hunt you down and send you back here.”

  She looked at Samantha wide-eyed.

  “I didn’t fulfill the contract.”

  “I’m human,” Samantha said. “Freewill is an amazing thing.”

  The demon’s mouth fell open.

  “You would do that?”

  “It’s going to take me some time to get things set up.” She pointed at the image of Sam, some way around the horizon now. “You know him?”

  “Of course.”

  “I want you to stay close to him. I’ll come for you.”

  The demon hopped on her toes and ran forward to grab Samantha’s hands.

  “Oh, thank you. I won’t disappoint you.”

  “You were my ally at a time that I didn’t have many,” Samantha said. “But that won’t go forever.”

  “I understand. Oh, thank you.”

  Samantha could see that if the demon were capable of producing tears, she would have. She waved her away.

  “Go on. I have work to do.”

  She nodded and ran out along Samantha’s radius, guessing correctly that in local-earth geography that Sam would be nearby. Samantha continued on into Hellcity, the plan already there underneath her vacillating. She had known exactly what she would do, if she’d managed to find Sniffer.

  She’d left a mark on Hellcity in the periodic rampages of wanton fury while Jason was missing. The geography recovered and moved on, but the demons remembered her. A scout on the edge of the bowl that held Hellcity went screaming away, and for a moment she wished she had her rifle with her. That had been good, clean fun. She took Lahn out again, tossing and catching the blade through increasingly complex patterns of flips and twists as she walked. The blade had been a gift from Carter, something of a coming-of-age acknowledgment a few months after she had died. She was bonded to the epic blade, and was one of the few who could routinely find her. Lahn liked to hide.

  When she hit the edge of Hellcity, the greater portion of the populace had fled indoors. They had never understood what had triggered her anger, and would not know that it was over, now. She didn’t mind. It almost made her feel like whistling, walking through the empty streets of the red-limestone-and-iron city. The salmon-colored sky looked as if something very red and very dusty had recently exploded, and that the sun would break through at any moment, but it never did. There was no day and no night, here. Just that ever-present red light. It was oppressive.

  She made her way to the sect house she had in mind and knocked on the door. The guard opened it and looked down at her with great curling red lips and deeply-recessed eyes, torn between his express role of being intimidating and his desire to slam the door in her face and hope that the dragon mark there would keep her from kicking it in.

  “I need to talk to him,” she said. “If you ask, he’ll see me.”

  The guard squinted at her, then closed the door in her face. She waited. Kicking in the door actually wasn’t on the list of things she could do, right now, but she could explode it if she wanted to. Angletongue was even more powerful here than on the earth plane, and there weren’t any innocent bystanders to worry about.

  She waited a few minutes and the guard returned with Mha’Shing, the Swordmaker. The demon winked at her.

  “He wouldn’t bring you in by himself,” he said. The guard glared, and Swordmaker grinned.

  “She won’t give me any trouble.”

  Samantha looked up at the tall blood demon as s
he passed through the door, then followed Swordmaker through the ever-changing maze of hallways down to his lair. It smelled of sulfur and smokes she couldn’t identify; burning things in Hell to melt metal was a different chemical process than on the earth plane. The walls of his lair were lined with weapons. There were a dozen or more notable blacksmiths in Hellcity, but Samantha had the most history with Swordmaker, and while it would be unwise to say that she trusted the demon, she did understand the mutually-beneficial economic nature of their relationship, and she understood how they had managed to build a certain amount of trust-like leeway on that foundation.

  “I’ve heard you found the man you were looking for. Or that he found you,” Swordmaker said. “And that my blade performed as designed.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, torn between fury and amusement. He had known things he hadn’t told her, but he had been on Jason’s side. Demons were complex political animals, especially as connected a power demon as Swordmaker. He watched her for a moment, then went to sit at the slate-gray workbench where they always did their deals.

  “What do they want from him?” Samantha asked, joining him.

  “I don’t know. Just that they want him.”

  Every word out of the demon’s mouth was suspect, without a contract, but he’d proven reliable in the past. He had a fondness for warriors, and had taken an odd shine to Jason as soon as he had figured out who he was.

  “Who wants him?”

  “If I gave you a name it would be a lie,” he said.

  “Why did you help him?”

  Swordmaker grinned again, dark red flesh curling around ivory teeth.

  “Because they fear me. My blades cut them down here and there.”

  “Charming.”

  He grinned wider.

  “I’m actually not here about him,” Samantha said. Swordmaker shifted, settling for the negotiation. “I want to trade blood for power.”

  “How much?”

  “One ounce, and enough for a very low class one to cross.”

  “Who?”

  “You won’t know until you do the transfer.”

  He watched her for a moment.

  “You know contracts aren’t valid without cost to both parties,” he said. “What is this about?”

  “This is a valid contract. I give you blood for power to a third party. The rest of it does not concern you.”

  There was a sparkle of amusement in his black eyes. She suspected he liked her because she was unexpected. She’d wondered before if demons had the capacity for boredom.

  “Very well. What are the terms of the exchange?”

  “I’ll cross at the hellsgate in Carter’s back yard, and you’ll come with me to the site of the exchange - not here. The third party will be at the exchange, and you are not to interfere with that party once it is identified to you. By interfere, I mean have any interaction with beyond that which is expressly necessary to transfer power. You will identify the quantity of power necessary, agreeing to the contract on my assurance that the third party is a low level class one. If you decide that the quantity of power is too high because I have misrepresented the nature of the third party, we will not renegotiate. You are free to decline the exchange of blood for power, but the prohibition of interference remains.”

  “What do you expect for protection hellside?”

  She would have to cross physically to meet her side of the contract, and it was incredibly risky. Any demon who got a shot at her would not hesitate to try to bleed her dry, unless she were protected or capable of protecting herself. Even the fear she inspired would be an insufficient guarantee of her safety.

  “None but your agreement to participate in the protection of my person, and that you refrain from trying to capitalize on my exposure.”

  “We’re going cross-country, aren’t we?”

  “Irrelevant to the contract.”

  “I would allow you to die in the interest of preserving my well-being,” he said.

  “Reasonable risk rider, of course,” she said. He nodded, eyes sharp.

  “Did he die? Have I been fed lies?”

  She smiled before she could contain it.

  “The identity of the third party is absolutely not part of this conversation, but you don’t spend enough time outside of your workshop if you don’t know the answer to that.”

  The images of all of the humans living on earth were visible from Hellcity. They formed a range of mountains around the city, sized proportionate to some measure of combined power. Carter was inarguable the most powerful man who had ever lived, by the empirical measurement of height as seen from the center of Hellcity. Jason, Samantha had noted on her way into the city, was distressingly tall, even from a sitting position on the floor in the apartment. Carter was going to want to measure him; either way, he was un-missable from Hellcity. For Swordmaker to have not seen him - for a demon who had never met the human, the human’s physical features were obscured to the point of looking like red stone, but if the demon would recognize the human in person, he would recognize him in the range - meant he had been holed up the entire time Jason had been out of the hellsgate.

  Swordmaker steepled his fingers in front of his face.

  “Did she really intervene on his behalf?”

  “That’s what I’ve been told,” Samantha answered. Swordmaker nodded. She went back over the terms of the contract, ready to close it.

  “The terms and execution of this contract, including the identity of the third party are absolutely confidential. You would be bound from communicating them to anyone.”

  “What are you hiding, child?” Swordmaker asked.

  “Those are my terms. Your option.”

  “So contracted,” he said. She dipped her head.

  “So contracted.”

  “You’ve changed from the last time you were here,” he said.

  “I have.”

  “There was a dark weight on you before. It grew worse during the boy’s disappearance. I’m surprised you would come back here so soon.”

  “I won’t tip my hand, Swordmaker. Don’t try,” Samantha said. He smiled.

  “You are very young. Amusing, but young.”

  “I have blood in my veins and freewill that powers your universe,” Samantha answered, standing. “I will take a little bit of time to arrange things, but it won’t be long. Be ready.”

  He shrugged.

  “Of course. It’s a wealth of blood to pass up for something so simple.”

  He’d have done it for free, just to have the knowledge, Samantha realized. She shrugged it off as unimportant.

  “Would you let me leave on my own? I like everyone running away from me.”

  He grinned.

  “I will see you soon, Renouch.”

  She left, keeping Lahn in her sheath as she left the sect house - only three wrong turns - and ended up on the street in Hellcity again. There were a few demons out, watching to see when she would re-emerge, and they scattered as she walked down the stairs to the street. She walked out of Hellcity as though a ghost town, and started the long trek back to the range to jump back across to the earth plane.

  <><><>

  She opened her eyes on the earth plane and reached for her drink, downing half of it before Sam tugged at her mentally.

  “So?” he asked.

  “I’ve got a plan,” she answered. “I can’t tell you here, though.”

  Sam nodded. Jason cocked an eyebrow.

  “It’s a surprise,” she said.

  “So how are we supposed to do our part, and what if I don’t like it?”

  She slid her eyes to one side, going through items in her head.

  “I think it accomplishes everything you’d want,” she said.

  “It gets me laid?”

  “Oh, come on. Kara just left.”

  He shrugged. She had been ready to pull him across to the Paradise plane and explain it to him, but that was more than she was willing to tolerate. He could work blind, for
that. She looked at Sam.

  “I’ll tell you tonight.”

  He nodded again, chewing.

  “Everything go okay?”

  She thought through the events on the hellplane, one at a time, letting him listen to her reactions to them, and he nodded.

  “I’m glad.”

  “You two are even freakier than you were before,” Jason complained.

  “You have no idea,” Samantha said without looking up from her next forkful of food.

  <><><>

  She slept on Jason’s chest again. It seemed most natural, for the possible bed arrangements, and it made all three of them sleep better. Jason for not being alone, and Sam and Samantha for knowing that Jason was there. It gave Samantha a stiff neck, but it was worth it.

  She’d explained what she needed Sam to do in a dream early in the evening, and they had wandered off into their own dreams afterward that faded in and out of normal, blank sleep. It was from this that Samantha woke, feeling like something abnormal had happened. She sat up and looked around. They kept the apartment lit from the kitchen and above the doorway all night, now, because none of them were willing to ask if Jason was ready to sleep in the dark again yet. Jason snorted and blinked his eyes awake as Samantha focused on the man standing inside the doorway.

  Jason grabbed Anadidd’na from her sheath and was ready to jump out of the bed when Samantha put her hand on his chest.

  “Easy,” she murmured, then gave the man a wide smile, vaulting over Jason lightly onto the floor and skipped over to him.

  “Mahkail,” she said, kneeling on the floor in front of him. “Anadidd’na anan’ae.”