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  “What’s that?” Kelly replied.

  “Batting average,” Jason said.

  “What’s that?” Kelly asked. Samantha snorted.

  “It isn’t important,” she said, standing. “I need you to go with them today.”

  “I don’t leave your side,” Kelly answered.

  “What are your responsibilities?” she asked.

  “See to the safety of my kindred.”

  “And if I told you that the right way for that to happen was by going with Sam and Jason?”

  Kelly blinked, wide-eyed.

  “I wouldn’t believe you?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  He blinked again.

  “Mahkail entrusted them to me. He knew that I was the most capable ally you had for protecting them. Do you believe that I would send you away when it was in their best interest for you to stay?”

  Kelly looked from Samantha to Jason.

  “No.”

  Sam stood.

  “He can stay for the first half,” he said. Samantha glared, but he ignored her. “Cut him a break. He’s just trying to do his job.”

  “Fine,” Samantha said. “For that, you get to dial Argo.”

  He pulled out his phone and she told him the number from memory, then took the phone into the closet to use it.

  “If it makes you feel any better, kid, I’m as in the dark as you are,” Jason said. “They keep secrets.”

  “I don’t believe in secrets,” Kelly said.

  “Sure you do,” Jason told him.

  “No I don’t. Truth is always best.”

  “A demon walks up to you, asks where Sam is, because he wants to steal her bag of angel dust,” Jason said, then looked at Sam. “We’ve got to come up with a good drug reference for that. Or is that too on the nose?”

  Sam touched his index finger to his nose, and Jason shrugged.

  “Anyway, a demon asks you where Sam is. What do you tell him?”

  Kelly looked torn.

  “I don’t tell him where she is?”

  “Right answer,” Jason said. “We, Sam and I, we’d lie. Sam over there on the phone, she’d say something complicated and confusing, but ultimately true, because she generally avoids lying, but you aren’t really up for that, so I if I were you, I’d go with the lie.”

  Kelly looked appalled.

  “I don’t lie.”

  “Learn. Fast,” Jason said.

  “He doesn’t have to lie,” Sam said. “You guys need to cut him a break.”

  “Why?” Jason asked. “Dude, you should have seen this angel from last night. Muscles like that,” he said, cupping his hand around his arm, “tall, like maybe taller than you, swarthy. Manly.” He grunted. “And he sends this twerp to look out for us. For us.”

  “Not his fault,” Sam said.

  “We’re going to end up having to bail him out, just watch,” Jason said. “We’ll be out of the building and Sam’ll go, like, where’s Kelly?, and one of us will have to go back in for him.”

  “You don’t have to go back in for me,” Kelly said, glitching across the room to prove the point.

  “Whatever,” Jason said. “You get what I’m saying.”

  Sam thought Kelly looked vaguely like Trigger, the messenger demon Sam tended to trust when she needed someone who could glitch from place to place. Well, she trusted him well enough to employ him. He wondered why Kelly came off so badly by comparison.

  “Maybe he’ll be useful,” Sam said. “You never know.”

  “I don’t sleep,” Kelly said. “They say humans are weakest when they’re asleep.”

  “There you go,” Sam said. “He can do the all-night driving.”

  “No way he’s driving Gwen.”

  “I don’t know how to drive.”

  Sam chewed the inside of his cheek.

  “There’s a difference between lying and not blurting out the truth just because it’s true,” he told Kelly. “It isn’t dishonest to sit on a fact like that unless it’s relevant.”

  “Was it not relevant?”

  “It absolutely was,” Jason said. “Sam just doesn’t like being wrong.”

  “How was he wrong? He didn’t say I knew how to drive.”

  “No. He said maybe you’d be useful,” Jason said. “I’m just hoping for entertaining.”

  Sam picked up the dishes and carried them to the kitchen. He put his elbows on the counter, mentally listening to Samantha fighting with Argo as Jason held up his hand and shook it back and forth. He mimed a throw.

  “Get the ball, Kelly.”

  Kelly turned his head, looking around for the ball that he was holding in his own hand. Sam dropped his head between his hands, running his fingers through his hair, then looked up as Kelly started looking behind furniture. Jason was fighting laughter. It was going to be a long day.

  <><><>

  Samantha stood in Carter’s back yard with Carter and Kelly.

  “I’m serious,” she said to the angel. “This is as far as you go. I need you gone, now.”

  He was grumpy about it, but she had gotten him to agree. He could stay until the last minute, and after that, he had to join Sam and Jason. They’d driven all night and through the next morning, and the strain on Samantha’s bond was painful. Had been for hours, growing continually worse. She was short-tempered and if Kelly didn’t live up to his agreement, he was going to get the brunt of it. Carter had known her long enough to tell, and it looked like he was hoping the standoff would happen. Kelly disappointed him by disappearing with a final huff.

  “You going to tell me what’s going on now?” Carter asked.

  “Nope.”

  “I assume you’re here to open the gate,” he said. She nodded, tugging at Sam. They’d been wandering for an hour now, and there was still no confirmation that they were ready. He tugged back, as impatient as she was. They hadn’t been this far apart since before they met.

  “Not that I’m complaining about your two mongrels not being here, but I do have more important things to do than stand here and hold a gate closed.”

  Samantha ignored him, dropping across the boundary into the hell plane. Swordmaker was waiting for her.

  “You open that gate, every demon on this side is going to know you did it and that you’re planning on coming through it,” he said. “They aren’t dumb.”

  “I made the contract, I’ll live up to it.”

  He looked at the spot on her waist where the angeldust was hidden under her clothes.

  “That was an interesting little complication.”

  “Couldn’t be helped,” she said.

  “The reasonable risk rider just dropped off,” he said. “We come across anything you can’t handle on your own, I’m out of here.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, then sighed. He wasn’t being unreasonable. She was planning on bringing angeldust physically onto the hellplane. It may very well have been unprecedented.

  “Agreed,” she said. “Let’s get moving.”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  She dropped back across the boundary and went to the shed to get the stakes that formed the ring of the hellsgate. Carter watched as she cleared the ground where she would draw the gate, and then topped the stakes and put them into their post holes.

  “You could help,” she grunted.

  “And upset your concentration?” he answered.

  She got out the charcoal and drew the pattern on the ground that Swordmaker would be replicating hellside.

  “What have you got for armor?” Carter asked as she worked.

  “Real concerned about my concentration are you?”

  “You haven’t got any, have you?”

  She gritted her teeth, trying to keep focused. If she and Swordmaker lost alignment while she worked, the entire gate would explode with a force capable of leveling Carter’s building, if it weren’t already reinforced for such a possibility.

  “Whatever the big secret is, I’d rather you not walk a b
ag full of angel’s ashes into Hell without at least a plan,” Carter said. She looked over at him, pausing at a corner.

  “Who are you talking to?”

  He gave her a crooked smile.

  “Like you’ve got any credibility left after your last year.”

  She started up again, ignoring him. He let her work in peace. She drew the final circle inside the gate, then stood, looking through it at Swordmaker.

  “I need to get my stuff together, then we’ll go.”

  He nodded. She went through the gap between the prime angel and the final demon to pick up her backpack.

  “Samantha,” Carter said, using her full name to indicate that he was serious. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “I’ve made up my mind, Aspen. I’m asking for your help. Please.”

  He nodded.

  “You’ve never been across through a gate.”

  “Just for a minute last time, with Jason.”

  “You can’t do it without armor. I’m sorry. Not even you.”

  She took a deep breath and forced all of the air out of her lungs.

  “I know,” she whispered, drawing deep on her power. Her body braced hard against the force of it and her back pressed up as her head dropped. She felt the concentrations of power ripple and emerge along her skin, and she shuddered, gritting her teeth.

  As her lungs started to burn and her body started to shake, the last of them stabilized and she opened her eyes, then turned her hands palm-up. Carter looked at the black marks, angeltongue symbols, on her skin.

  “If you’re hoping I’ll gratify you by being impressed, you’re going to be disappointed.”

  “I’m impressed,” Swordmaker called from the gate. “Can we go?”

  “Hold it closed,” Samantha said to Carter. The ring around the central circle was, in her application, a fence. Demons could cross it when no one held it closed on the earth plane, but when someone who could access the power of the fence held it, they couldn’t cross. Swordmaker stepped away as Samantha walked back into the circle - between the prime angel and the first angel - and Carter took hold of the same two posts.

  “Good luck,” he said and she thanked him with a silent smile. She tugged on Sam again, and he gave her a weak hope. It would have to do. She wanted to get this done fast. She walked through the gate.

  The heat on the other side was staggering. The air was foul and heavy with carbon dioxide and sulfur, not to mention larger grit that sanded at her lungs. She forced herself to breathe it, anyway, only giving herself a moment’s pause before walking through Carter’s image and onto the hellplane. She was only as defended as her physical body could make her. No redos, no escape plans. Now, no safety fence. She knew she should have stopped to consider whether it was worth it, but she was operating on sheer momentum now. She started the long walk across the hellplane to Sam.

  Swordmaker was quiet for the first portion of the trip as Samantha acclimated to being on the hellplane. She had marks up and down her arms, on her chest and her stomach, and a large one on her back that represented her own identifying mark in angeltongue. They were strong enough to keep the worst of the heat and corrosion off of her, but it didn’t stop her from sweating herself slick. She couldn’t carry water in her backpack, because it would melt in plastic and explode out of metal or glass like an overheated radiator. She just had to keep her pace reasonable and keep moving.

  “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” Swordmaker asked.

  “Houston,” Samantha answered.

  “What’s…? Oh. Aren’t you a clever girl? That’s where they held him, isn’t it?”

  “Two birds,” she answered.

  “And why this elaborate stunt to jailbreak a demon?”

  “Still not telling,” Samantha said, the hot air scorching her lungs. How had Carter and Jason not complained about this? The ground pushed heat up through her feet, and the rocks were hot enough when she had to climb that she was hesitant to use her hands to do it. She’d checked Lahn to be sure she could use the blade if she had to, and the angel blade was still cool to her skin, but the metal of the zipper on her boots was sending up a scorching smell.

  The distance from the range to Hellcity was about a four-hour hike. The distance from any point on the range to any other point was variable, approaching a limit of eight hours, if she had to go all the way along the 23-degree path off of her own radius that she had chosen. She hoped it didn’t come to that, but the geometry predicting the distance between any two points on the plane was hopelessly complex, and sixty percent guesswork, anyway. The demons who were the most capable navigating the range operated as much on instinct as they did math.

  She kept an eye on Sam’s image on the range as she walked, willing it closer. She had to wait until he was exactly radial to turn and work her way back out from Hellcity, or else she’d end up wasting the entire trip out and have to go back to the 23-degree tack she was on now to work her way closer again. It wandered closer and further as she walked, interchanging position with various other mountains. Jason went by him a couple of times, but she didn’t end up on Jason’s radius, either. That would have been too easy. She could still feel Sam out at the end of the bond, hopelessly far away through the gate that Carter was holding closed and all the way to Houston. The sense of hope was growing, so they were at least getting closer to the gate.

  The mountains on the range, normally frozen by the time differential, were active and mobile in normal activity. She could see Sam and Jason talking to each other from their respective spots on the range, occasionally arguing. She could feel the heat of the argument through Sam as he struggled to contain his temper. A few times both of them looked over their shoulders and Sam hit her with a wave of exasperation. She smiled, knowing the source of that exasperation.

  Finally she found Sam’s radius and turned. Swordmaker followed, looking over his shoulder toward Hellcity, down in its bowl. Samantha did the same, periodically, concerned that the demons who knew about the hellsgate might figure out her ploy and intercept them. Physically present on the hellplane, she was as powerful as she ever was, but she was also very fragile and very human. There was a shock of victory, very far away, as Sam and Jason located the gate, and Samantha picked up her pace.

  “Still can’t imagine what is worth this effort,” Swordmaker said.

  “Neither can I,” Samantha muttered. She covered the last thirty minutes of the hike in a surge of exhaustion, reaching an area of strange geography, even for the hellplane. Sniffer was waiting on the edge.

  “Renouch!” she called with relief. “They’ve gone in and I can’t follow.”

  She paused when she saw Swordmaker, eyes flicking from Samantha to Swordmaker with the urgency of a cornered animal.

  “This is the third party,” Samantha said. Swordmaker was looking at the hellsgate.

  “If it’s all the same to you,” he said, “I’d put her through there, rather than across the boundary. It’s cheaper.”

  Samantha walked over to where he stood and started tracing out the massive curve of the gate, trying to plot it out in full form in her head. It was a mental exercise that needed practice, because the hellsgate looked different on the hellplane than it did earthside - radii became starpoints, most notably - but she eventually got it. She put her hand to her mouth, and Swordmaker eyed her sideways.

  “I’d like to get this done and go back to my day job.”

  She shook her head.

  “Of course. Power then blood.”

  He put his hand out toward Sniffer, and the girl skittered away.

  “He’s going to give you the power you need to go across the gate,” Samantha said. “He’s bound from doing anything else.”

  The girl whimpered, but edged closer, holding out her hand. She screwed her eyes shut and looked away as Swordmaker touched her hand, then looked at Samantha again. Samantha pointed.

  “Go wait for me over there.”

  Swordmaker wat
ched as the girl darted away.

  “She’s very obedient, that one.”

  “Uncharacteristic, isn’t it?”

  “She’s brand new. One of your escapees?”

  “There’s no more information coming,” Samantha said, reaching into her backpack - the zippers were too hot to touch without using her shirt - and pulling out a stone bowl and a balance. The balance was treated wood, and she had bags of sand marked in weights. She balanced out the bowl, then handed a one ounce bag to Swordmaker.

  “Agreed?”

  He borrowed the balance to weigh it against a measure he took out of his pocket, then gave it back to her.

  “Agreed.”

  She squatted over the bowl and drew Lahn, finding her pulse on her wrist and stabbing the point of the blade into the spot, not wanting to sit and wait for a slower wound to produce blood. She let the blood roll down her thumb and into the bowl and waited for the balance to level out. As it did, she wrapped a bandage around her wrist, just holding it with her other hand, and turned to Swordmaker.

  “As contracted?”

  “As contracted.”

  They nodded to each other and he took the bowl and put it somewhere less visible. He would have to be careful getting back to Hellcity, but he would have a plan for that. Samantha walked into the range of the gate and waved Sniffer over.

  “Are you ready?”

  The girl nodded enthusiastically.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Remember what I told you. You kill anyone, and I will send you back here. You may think I wouldn’t find out, but I find out a lot of things people think I never would. You should assume I’ll know.”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

  They walked across the gate.

  <><><>

  The buildings were deserted.

  Jason had recognized the loading docks as the point where he had gotten out, and they had skirted the shopping mall, finding a construction entrance that hadn’t been energetically locked and breaking in. Sam was supposed to call Argo to tell him where they were as soon as they were sure they had found the hellsgate. Samantha had been hellside for three hours.

  All four of them were on edge. He and Samantha were stressed at being pushed further and further apart - his brain argued with his instincts at every step, and he was close to turning around and walking to New York - and Jason was jumpy enough that he had nearly hit Sam with Anadidd’na when Sam sent a stray nail clicking across the floor with his foot. Kelly was angry and feeling the impotence that came standard with working with Samantha when she had a high-level problem to solve. She was more like Carter than she realized, when it came to her work methods.