Matters of Time and Fishes
Holding Clarisse aloft on her wrist, Nighna guided them through the hushed sterility of the cubicle maze. Time
seemed to have slipped as they passed by row after endless row of identical cubes. Even Oz, who was positively
made of patience, began to feel a little anxious. The tension manifested as a nagging itch beneath his
breastbone that slowly spread into his arms the further along they went.
The twinge itself didn’t bother him. It was the familiarity of twinge, too like the beginning prickles of his wolf
rage that had his hackles up. So to speak. Oz knew how to control it. He had dedicated solid months of his life
to meditation, in which he traveled to the deepest jungles and remotest mountain temples to find teachers who
could show him how to channel his wolfy energy, to balance his chakras, to locate an inner pool of tranquility
that made the rage in him subside.
With that deep well of inner cool, he had nothing to worry about. He was reasonably sure that should he lapse in
all of his training, there was no moon in Hell. So… everything was covered.
But that twinge…
“So,” Anjelica said, as they hairpinned another turn in the labyrinth. They’d been going on like this for hours.
Hours and hours. Maybe even a whole day… “Where is everyone?”
Nighna continued without looking back, as though navigating and talking at the same time was a mild annoyance
to her.
She said, “Oh, they’re here. They move at a pace much slower than human eyes can detect…”
“Slower?” Oz chimed in.
“Yes,” Nighna went on. “It is not good for either of you to be here. The longer you stay, the slower you become
until at last…”
“You’re in limbo, too,” Oz finished.
Nighna nodded. “Yes.” she said. “Here we are.”
And there they were. In one step, they moved from the sedate row of cubicles and into bustling atrium packed
with thousands of people. Oz and Anjelica felt assaulted by the sudden jump in the decibel level around them.
The expansive room resembled a featureless airport terminal packed with droves of people, all of whom had
missed their flights, had bad meals on the planes and had lost their luggage.
Nighna’s amber colored eyes flicked over the milling crowd. She made a perturbed little clicking noise with her
tongue before turning to them. Clarisse, who seemed to fancy the noise even less than Nighna, puffed out her
feathers and dug her head under her wing.
“Here,” she said, pointing to a bank of escalators. “This way. Stick close.”
“Not gonna be a problem,” Oz said. He linked arms with Anjelica and followed Nighna’s edict with dogged
tenacity.
As they bulldozed their way through the throng, Oz noticed the nettling stab beneath his ribcage again. This
time, he attributed it to the sudden flux of chaos pressing in on them. Some of the people had made signs with
people names scrawled on them. Some of them were bloody. Some were naked. And the smell… Oh God. It was
ripe and rotten yellow smell, like pumpkins left too long on the vine to molder and putrify.
Some aspect of the wolf stirred in him. It felt and heard and tasted the stench of all that wretched humanity.
“I am the man,” he whispered under his breath, drawing upon the considerable reserves he knew he possessed.
“I am the man. Not the wolf.”
Though the crowd persisted, the burning sensation did not. Oz had things in check, and that was good.
Because he felt they might need to keep it that way.
After a good deal of salmon-like struggling, they broke free from the bulk of the crowd. Nighna led them to a
descending escalator, which Oz appreciated because it forced everyone to glide down in single file.
Once they had mounted the steps, Nighna turned to them. “This is an unusually high volume of dead,” she said
tightly. “Could be problematic.”
“The vampires,” Anjelica said, with a sudden flash of understanding.
“Yes,” Nighna said. “The earth cannot recover quickly from such a tremendous loss. Neither can Hell easily
accommodate it.”
The escalator delivered them briskly to the lower level of the terminal, where it seemed even more recently
deceased had gathered. A dissonant tension seemed to swell in the cavernous breadth, like the fetid gasses in a
decomposing corpse. It was darker here, and more fish analogies came to mind. Tuna. Sardines. Salmon again.
Crabs in a bucket, climbing all over each other in a crazed attempt at escape.
“Helli,” Oz said, quickly taking her hand. They forced their way through, at times losing sight of Nighna, and
what an awful prospect Oz thought that would be…
Somewhere close by a fight broke out. People shoved and shouted. A handful of coins like mackerel scales
danced and scattered across the hard tile floor, right at Oz and Anjelica’s feet.
All three froze, face to face with the swarm that fell still and seemed to notice all at once that they were not as
them. They were not dead. Not yet.
“Um?” Anjelica said.
“Yeah,” Oz answered.
The three watched in horror as the mob devolved into a single writhing creature with a hundred sets of teeth
and a thousand greedy grasping fingers.
“Come,” Nighna said, somehow remaining calm. “I know a short cut.”
She gripped them both by the wrists and they fell back toward what Oz had been sure was a plain white brick
wall. The crowd advanced, the din growing in crescendo as they gained momentum, their faces contorted into
masks of unfettered frenzy.
Oz felt the primal hunger like a hot coals in the back of his throat. Clawing its way to the surface. Ready to
mutilate and mangle and shred…
…a vacant parking lot.
Oz looked about, panting. Anjelica, equally shocked, raked her hands through her hair and laughed. The building
sat squarely behind them. No door. No portal. They had simply passed right through the wall.
“Did you… I mean, did we just?” Anjelica burbled.
Nighna settled Clarisse on her shoulder with an impatient flourish, then reached into her shoulder bag. She
withdrew two folded squares of brown cloth.
“Put these on,” she said curtly. “Follow me.”
Nighna turned on her delicate heel and stalked off in the opposite direction, toward a gradually sloping rise on
the other side of the parking lot.
Oz unfolded the scrap of cloth. It was a robe: hooded, unadorned and scratchy like a burlap sack. Anjelica
slipped hers over her shoulders.
“Where did she get these?” Anjelica whispered.
Oz inclined his head in a kind of mini-shrug. “Probably best not ask those kinds of questions,” he said.
Nighna had already crested the hill by the time Oz and Anjelica donned their Friar Tuck’s Reject Robes. She
sighed dramatically and swore a nasty sounding demon curse under her breath. They trotted up the rise to join
her. The land fell away beneath them in a series of rolling gray foothills. Across this wasteland looped a thick line
of people zigging and zagging all the way to the far and distant horizon. A wide sign nearby announced:
Approximate waiting time from this point – 1,423,602 hours.
“Wow, that’s like,” Oz said. He looked up, doing the calculation in his head, “Fifty-nine thousand three hundred
and sixteen days.”
Anjelica’s brows peaked on her forehead.
“And eighteen hours,” he finished, aware that he had just geeked.
Nighna turned to them. “Time is a human construct,” she explained. “It’s meaningless. A psychological trick
meant to make them –” she gestured over the cliff “ – feel as though they are making progress.”
“That’s… unexpectedly considerate,” Oz said.
“We’re demons. We’re not without refinement. But, we don’t have time for this,” Nighna said. She looked out
toward the horizon, eyes scanning back and forth as she plotted their next move.
Anjelica stared out over the crowd. The air above them shimmered like a heat mirage. There were millions…
“They’re not moving. They’re just… stuck.,” Anjelica said quietly. Her heart ached at the sight of so many
miserable souls. Or not souls, actually. Souls they lacked. They were soul-free.
“This way,” Nighna said impatiently. “And don’t think of them. You can’t save them. You are all you need to
worry about.”
Nighna struck off along a worn path that ran along the brow of the hill.
Anjelica lingered, transfixed.
“Helli,” Oz said. She turned, found him and followed.
After trekking for another mind-and-foot-numbingly long time down steep, slick, rocky trails, they reached a
lowland littered with misshapen boulders. Clarisse awoke briefly; Nighna let her fly off and away high above
them. Her raucous, honking cries bounced off of the rocks and put Oz and Anjelica further on edge.
Fortunately, Oz hadn’t felt any of the wolfy creepiness since the Holding Area of the Damned.
Oz slipped up beside Anjelica. “You had a hip-hop theory worth sharing,” he said.
“The Madonna principle,” she said.
“You really think she’s to blame?”
“Totally,” Anjelica said, some of her tenseness melting. “It all started with Express Yourself. Actually, before
that. But once Express Yourself came out, female artists could be as bad as they wanted to be, while still being
womanly. It was all about empowerment. For women. And they put the hip in hip hop…”
Clarisse returned, chittering happily in one of her demon tongues. Nighna held out her arm in a graceful arc and
Clarisse swept down to her, landing with effortless finesse. Nighna and Clarisse shared an intimate moment of
intense staring.
“Ah,” Nighna said, bringing the hip hop discussion to a close. “Very good. Right around this ridge.”
The bird settled back down upon Nighna’s shoulder, still as a statue.
“Do you think…?” Anjelica began.
“This way,” Nighna said in a commanding yet regal tone that left no room for questions. They followed her in
silence around the ridge, under an overhang of rock and back out into the bottomlands. The press of people
meandered closer here. They could hear them, screaming, groaning, mordantly venting their agonized
frustrations. At least they couldn’t smell them…
To their left, a flat plane of green-black water spread out into the thickening twilight. The waves that swelled
on its surface undulated like ripples of coagulated tar. The slow-motion effect of it felt hypnotic.
Sensing this, Nighna called a warning back to them. “Don’t watch the river,” she shouted. “Quickly now.”
They passed between a bluff and the riverbank with still enough room to give the water wide berth. The people
waiting in their endless line disappeared from view. From this vantage, they could see a broad black dash
approaching from across the river. It moved with a swift sureness, edging easily forward over the viscous
black.
As they neared, Oz could make out a shape atop the dash, which was, in fact, a flat-bottomed barge. And the
figure, it turned out, was a man with the face of a bullfrog. Not a bullfrog in the Dickensian personification
sense, either. He was full-on bullfrog. A pair of protuberant yellow eyes sat on either side of his flat head. He
wore a broad grimace on his splotchy green face. As he approached, he filled the bellow beneath his chin and
yelled, “Stand abacks you rabble! Or you’ll be sent to the end o’ the line.”
This was met with much protest, but they all begrudgingly stepped back from the velvet ropes and waited until
he had docked and tethered the barge.
Nighna, Anjelica and Oz arrived at the boat dock just as Bullfrog Guy laid one webbed hand on the velvet rope
to let his passengers aboard.
“Looks like you’ve been busy,” Nighna said, her voice now chocolate-y smooth and sultry.
The webbed fingers tightened on the rope briefly, before the man turned to face them.
“Nig’han’het!” He shouted, his spacious chin blushing pink. “It’s been an age! An epoch! Eons, even.”
He clasped the velvet rope closed. This sent up fresh spikes of rage, with people shouting, ‘Hey, no fair!’ and
‘What’s the deal? No cuts allowed!’ But all of these went unheeded.
“Charon,” Nighna said, inclining her head to him. He bowed, all courtly and formal, then snapped his head back
up, grinning maniacally.
“This your work?” he asked.
“Not this time,” Nighna said. She stepped aside with Charon and they began to speak in a demon tongue Oz
didn’t understand. It was then Oz noticed that her appearance had changed.
“Nice tusks,” he whispered, nudging Anjelica.
“And brow-ridge,” she concurred, giggling lightly.
“I’m beginning to understand Andrew’s attraction…” he said, which earned him a quick but good-natured jab to
his ribs.
The crowd grew more restless as Nighna and Charon conversed. After a moment, when the volume rose too high
for them to hear one another, Charon filled his bellows again and shouted, “If you haven’t learnt patience yet,
learn it now! Trust me on this one.”
This did little to settle the multitude, so Nighna went on, getting quickly to business.
“You know what I’m after,” she said, reverting to her human visage and speaking again in English.
“Oh, aye,” Charon answered. “Seen him, I have.”
“How long?”
“Days.” He shrugged. “Weeks. Who knows?”
“He was alone?”
Charon laughed. “Alone and runnin’, Nig’han. Now I sees why. He bought passage wit dis.”
He opened the front of his striped doublet and pulled out a nicely preserved severed hand.
Anjelica covered her mouth. “Oh God,” she muttered.
Nighna’s eyes flashed, but she continued. “We need to cross, Charon,” she said.
“You can, no prob,” Charon said with a shrug. “These two: lot of live weight to deal with.”
“I’ll buy their passage. They’re my servants,” Nighna said.
Charon’s wide lips pursed as he eyed them appraisingly. Oz shifted uncomfortably. He wasn’t sure he liked being
called a demon’s servant, even if it was for pretend.
“You mean to tell me you gots a werewolf and a –” Charon’s tongue shot out like a whip and tasted Anjelica’s
forearm. His eyes widened, “– Slayer? As servants?”
Nighna reverted to her human visage. “I do, Charon,” she said levelly.
He spread his sticky fingers. “Won’t be cheap,” he said. “You can kill ’em now and cut the price.”
Oz and Anjelica exchanged wary glances.
“No,” Nighna said. “I need them alive. Name your price. You know how I dislike bargaining.”
Charon cocked an eyelid.
“And I’ll want the boy’s hand as well,” Nighna said. Oz watched her, quietly marveling over her bored-yet-
elegant bearing. Her eyes gave nothing away. If seeing her lover’s severed hand used as currency by her rival
bothered her in the slightest, she wasn’t giving anything away.
“It’s mummified,” Charon said, sneering.
Nighna yawned. The crowd behind them writhed and pitched, and another scuffle ruptured along the lines. Two
men toppled from behind the ropes, rolling and punching like a pair of cartoon dogs fighting over a string of link
sausages. They tumbled, screaming, into the black water. Oz and Anjelica witnessed in horror as the two men
flash-fried down to their skeletons, then slowly began to sink beneath the surface. But the thing was, they
weren’t dead. And they still fought; their blackened bones tore at wisps of frazzled hair on their heads even as
they disappeared.
“Okay. Surreal,” Oz said, once he’d mentally jarred himself back to reality. Skewed though it was.
“Oh fine,” Charon said. “I want free passage in Eregnor and a century’s mems to Triumvirate. Plus, a key to
the executive washroom at Wolfram & Hart.” He leaned to Anjelica and added with a wink, “Those guys can
launder anything.”
“Fifty years membership to Triumvirate,” Nighna said. “That’s all I can currently guarantee. You know how
things are.”
“Seventy-five,” Charon said, his frown deepening stubbornly.
“Sixty, and I’ll have a word with the Big Guys downstairs about sending you some help until this influx of dead
lets up,” she said.
Now Charon’s smile did seem to split his face in two. “Aw, Nig’han. It ain’t gonna let up. You should know it well
as I. End of Days is here. And not just Here. All the worlds come crashin’ down,” he said.
Nighna sighed. “Do we have a deal or not?”
“It’s a deal,” Charon said. Still grinning, he offered Andrew’s hand. “Here, let’s shake on it,” he said, laughing
robustly at his own joke. “Shake on it!”
Nighna took the hand and put it unceremoniously into her shoulder bag. Charon was still chortling once he
ushered them onto the barge and set sail, much to the chagrin of the roiling mob they left behind on shore.
Anjelica sat down in the center of the boat and stared fixedly at her feet. Oz took a place beside her and
waited for her to speak.
When she didn’t, he bumped her shoulder with his own. Even while his mind ran over the facts that Luxe and
Thellian had parted company, and that the others were not in Hell but somewhere that was not here, he decided
to distract them both by returning to their standby conversation already on hold.
“Hey,” he said softly. “We had a topic going, and I gotta say I’m gonna disagree. Madonna as the spearhead of
modern hip hop…”
“This is a horrible, terrible place,” Anjelica said.
“It’s not so bad,” Oz said.
Anjelica balked at him.
He gave a non-committal shrug. “I wouldn’t want to charter a yacht or anything,” he said. “But the people are
nice.”
“What people?” Anjelica groaned. “All those poor dead ones…”
“You,” Oz said.
Anjelica blinked. She looked at him as though he had grown a pair of mouths on either side of his face and was
singing Ode to Joy in three part harmony. But he wasn’t. Thankfully. He simply sat and stared in that off-
putting way he had that made her feel both terrified and eerily calm. He meant her. Meant that she was worth a
visit to Hell. He thought she was nice. And she thought… well, her mind had gone completely blank.
“So,” Oz said. “Madonna…”
They debated for the countless hours it took for Charon’s barge to reach the far bank of the River Styx. Nighna
listened to them, glad for their incessant chatter. It helped her focus. She kept her shoulder bag cradled in her
lap while she plotted their course in her mind.
Luxe. Clarisse told her he was very near. It was only a matter of time.
Holding Clarisse aloft on her wrist, Nighna guided them through the hushed sterility of the cubicle maze. Time
seemed to have slipped as they passed by row after endless row of identical cubes. Even Oz, who was positively
made of patience, began to feel a little anxious. The tension manifested as a nagging itch beneath his
breastbone that slowly spread into his arms the further along they went.
The twinge itself didn’t bother him. It was the familiarity of twinge, too like the beginning prickles of his wolf
rage that had his hackles up. So to speak. Oz knew how to control it. He had dedicated solid months of his life
to meditation, in which he traveled to the deepest jungles and remotest mountain temples to find teachers who
could show him how to channel his wolfy energy, to balance his chakras, to locate an inner pool of tranquility
that made the rage in him subside.
With that deep well of inner cool, he had nothing to worry about. He was reasonably sure that should he lapse in
all of his training, there was no moon in Hell. So… everything was covered.
But that twinge…
“So,” Anjelica said, as they hairpinned another turn in the labyrinth. They’d been going on like this for hours.
Hours and hours. Maybe even a whole day… “Where is everyone?”
Nighna continued without looking back, as though navigating and talking at the same time was a mild annoyance
to her.
She said, “Oh, they’re here. They move at a pace much slower than human eyes can detect…”
“Slower?” Oz chimed in.
“Yes,” Nighna went on. “It is not good for either of you to be here. The longer you stay, the slower you become
until at last…”
“You’re in limbo, too,” Oz finished.
Nighna nodded. “Yes.” she said. “Here we are.”
And there they were. In one step, they moved from the sedate row of cubicles and into bustling atrium packed
with thousands of people. Oz and Anjelica felt assaulted by the sudden jump in the decibel level around them.
The expansive room resembled a featureless airport terminal packed with droves of people, all of whom had
missed their flights, had bad meals on the planes and had lost their luggage.
Nighna’s amber colored eyes flicked over the milling crowd. She made a perturbed little clicking noise with her
tongue before turning to them. Clarisse, who seemed to fancy the noise even less than Nighna, puffed out her
feathers and dug her head under her wing.
“Here,” she said, pointing to a bank of escalators. “This way. Stick close.”
“Not gonna be a problem,” Oz said. He linked arms with Anjelica and followed Nighna’s edict with dogged
tenacity.
As they bulldozed their way through the throng, Oz noticed the nettling stab beneath his ribcage again. This
time, he attributed it to the sudden flux of chaos pressing in on them. Some of the people had made signs with
people names scrawled on them. Some of them were bloody. Some were naked. And the smell… Oh God. It was
ripe and rotten yellow smell, like pumpkins left too long on the vine to molder and putrify.
Some aspect of the wolf stirred in him. It felt and heard and tasted the stench of all that wretched humanity.
“I am the man,” he whispered under his breath, drawing upon the considerable reserves he knew he possessed.
“I am the man. Not the wolf.”
Though the crowd persisted, the burning sensation did not. Oz had things in check, and that was good.
Because he felt they might need to keep it that way.
After a good deal of salmon-like struggling, they broke free from the bulk of the crowd. Nighna led them to a
descending escalator, which Oz appreciated because it forced everyone to glide down in single file.
Once they had mounted the steps, Nighna turned to them. “This is an unusually high volume of dead,” she said
tightly. “Could be problematic.”
“The vampires,” Anjelica said, with a sudden flash of understanding.
“Yes,” Nighna said. “The earth cannot recover quickly from such a tremendous loss. Neither can Hell easily
accommodate it.”
The escalator delivered them briskly to the lower level of the terminal, where it seemed even more recently
deceased had gathered. A dissonant tension seemed to swell in the cavernous breadth, like the fetid gasses in a
decomposing corpse. It was darker here, and more fish analogies came to mind. Tuna. Sardines. Salmon again.
Crabs in a bucket, climbing all over each other in a crazed attempt at escape.
“Helli,” Oz said, quickly taking her hand. They forced their way through, at times losing sight of Nighna, and
what an awful prospect Oz thought that would be…
Somewhere close by a fight broke out. People shoved and shouted. A handful of coins like mackerel scales
danced and scattered across the hard tile floor, right at Oz and Anjelica’s feet.
All three froze, face to face with the swarm that fell still and seemed to notice all at once that they were not as
them. They were not dead. Not yet.
“Um?” Anjelica said.
“Yeah,” Oz answered.
The three watched in horror as the mob devolved into a single writhing creature with a hundred sets of teeth
and a thousand greedy grasping fingers.
“Come,” Nighna said, somehow remaining calm. “I know a short cut.”
She gripped them both by the wrists and they fell back toward what Oz had been sure was a plain white brick
wall. The crowd advanced, the din growing in crescendo as they gained momentum, their faces contorted into
masks of unfettered frenzy.
Oz felt the primal hunger like a hot coals in the back of his throat. Clawing its way to the surface. Ready to
mutilate and mangle and shred…
…a vacant parking lot.
Oz looked about, panting. Anjelica, equally shocked, raked her hands through her hair and laughed. The building
sat squarely behind them. No door. No portal. They had simply passed right through the wall.
“Did you… I mean, did we just?” Anjelica burbled.
Nighna settled Clarisse on her shoulder with an impatient flourish, then reached into her shoulder bag. She
withdrew two folded squares of brown cloth.
“Put these on,” she said curtly. “Follow me.”
Nighna turned on her delicate heel and stalked off in the opposite direction, toward a gradually sloping rise on
the other side of the parking lot.
Oz unfolded the scrap of cloth. It was a robe: hooded, unadorned and scratchy like a burlap sack. Anjelica
slipped hers over her shoulders.
“Where did she get these?” Anjelica whispered.
Oz inclined his head in a kind of mini-shrug. “Probably best not ask those kinds of questions,” he said.
Nighna had already crested the hill by the time Oz and Anjelica donned their Friar Tuck’s Reject Robes. She
sighed dramatically and swore a nasty sounding demon curse under her breath. They trotted up the rise to join
her. The land fell away beneath them in a series of rolling gray foothills. Across this wasteland looped a thick line
of people zigging and zagging all the way to the far and distant horizon. A wide sign nearby announced:
Approximate waiting time from this point – 1,423,602 hours.
“Wow, that’s like,” Oz said. He looked up, doing the calculation in his head, “Fifty-nine thousand three hundred
and sixteen days.”
Anjelica’s brows peaked on her forehead.
“And eighteen hours,” he finished, aware that he had just geeked.
Nighna turned to them. “Time is a human construct,” she explained. “It’s meaningless. A psychological trick
meant to make them –” she gestured over the cliff “ – feel as though they are making progress.”
“That’s… unexpectedly considerate,” Oz said.
“We’re demons. We’re not without refinement. But, we don’t have time for this,” Nighna said. She looked out
toward the horizon, eyes scanning back and forth as she plotted their next move.
Anjelica stared out over the crowd. The air above them shimmered like a heat mirage. There were millions…
“They’re not moving. They’re just… stuck.,” Anjelica said quietly. Her heart ached at the sight of so many
miserable souls. Or not souls, actually. Souls they lacked. They were soul-free.
“This way,” Nighna said impatiently. “And don’t think of them. You can’t save them. You are all you need to
worry about.”
Nighna struck off along a worn path that ran along the brow of the hill.
Anjelica lingered, transfixed.
“Helli,” Oz said. She turned, found him and followed.
After trekking for another mind-and-foot-numbingly long time down steep, slick, rocky trails, they reached a
lowland littered with misshapen boulders. Clarisse awoke briefly; Nighna let her fly off and away high above
them. Her raucous, honking cries bounced off of the rocks and put Oz and Anjelica further on edge.
Fortunately, Oz hadn’t felt any of the wolfy creepiness since the Holding Area of the Damned.
Oz slipped up beside Anjelica. “You had a hip-hop theory worth sharing,” he said.
“The Madonna principle,” she said.
“You really think she’s to blame?”
“Totally,” Anjelica said, some of her tenseness melting. “It all started with Express Yourself. Actually, before
that. But once Express Yourself came out, female artists could be as bad as they wanted to be, while still being
womanly. It was all about empowerment. For women. And they put the hip in hip hop…”
Clarisse returned, chittering happily in one of her demon tongues. Nighna held out her arm in a graceful arc and
Clarisse swept down to her, landing with effortless finesse. Nighna and Clarisse shared an intimate moment of
intense staring.
“Ah,” Nighna said, bringing the hip hop discussion to a close. “Very good. Right around this ridge.”
The bird settled back down upon Nighna’s shoulder, still as a statue.
“Do you think…?” Anjelica began.
“This way,” Nighna said in a commanding yet regal tone that left no room for questions. They followed her in
silence around the ridge, under an overhang of rock and back out into the bottomlands. The press of people
meandered closer here. They could hear them, screaming, groaning, mordantly venting their agonized
frustrations. At least they couldn’t smell them…
To their left, a flat plane of green-black water spread out into the thickening twilight. The waves that swelled
on its surface undulated like ripples of coagulated tar. The slow-motion effect of it felt hypnotic.
Sensing this, Nighna called a warning back to them. “Don’t watch the river,” she shouted. “Quickly now.”
They passed between a bluff and the riverbank with still enough room to give the water wide berth. The people
waiting in their endless line disappeared from view. From this vantage, they could see a broad black dash
approaching from across the river. It moved with a swift sureness, edging easily forward over the viscous
black.
As they neared, Oz could make out a shape atop the dash, which was, in fact, a flat-bottomed barge. And the
figure, it turned out, was a man with the face of a bullfrog. Not a bullfrog in the Dickensian personification
sense, either. He was full-on bullfrog. A pair of protuberant yellow eyes sat on either side of his flat head. He
wore a broad grimace on his splotchy green face. As he approached, he filled the bellow beneath his chin and
yelled, “Stand abacks you rabble! Or you’ll be sent to the end o’ the line.”
This was met with much protest, but they all begrudgingly stepped back from the velvet ropes and waited until
he had docked and tethered the barge.
Nighna, Anjelica and Oz arrived at the boat dock just as Bullfrog Guy laid one webbed hand on the velvet rope
to let his passengers aboard.
“Looks like you’ve been busy,” Nighna said, her voice now chocolate-y smooth and sultry.
The webbed fingers tightened on the rope briefly, before the man turned to face them.
“Nig’han’het!” He shouted, his spacious chin blushing pink. “It’s been an age! An epoch! Eons, even.”
He clasped the velvet rope closed. This sent up fresh spikes of rage, with people shouting, ‘Hey, no fair!’ and
‘What’s the deal? No cuts allowed!’ But all of these went unheeded.
“Charon,” Nighna said, inclining her head to him. He bowed, all courtly and formal, then snapped his head back
up, grinning maniacally.
“This your work?” he asked.
“Not this time,” Nighna said. She stepped aside with Charon and they began to speak in a demon tongue Oz
didn’t understand. It was then Oz noticed that her appearance had changed.
“Nice tusks,” he whispered, nudging Anjelica.
“And brow-ridge,” she concurred, giggling lightly.
“I’m beginning to understand Andrew’s attraction…” he said, which earned him a quick but good-natured jab to
his ribs.
The crowd grew more restless as Nighna and Charon conversed. After a moment, when the volume rose too high
for them to hear one another, Charon filled his bellows again and shouted, “If you haven’t learnt patience yet,
learn it now! Trust me on this one.”
This did little to settle the multitude, so Nighna went on, getting quickly to business.
“You know what I’m after,” she said, reverting to her human visage and speaking again in English.
“Oh, aye,” Charon answered. “Seen him, I have.”
“How long?”
“Days.” He shrugged. “Weeks. Who knows?”
“He was alone?”
Charon laughed. “Alone and runnin’, Nig’han. Now I sees why. He bought passage wit dis.”
He opened the front of his striped doublet and pulled out a nicely preserved severed hand.
Anjelica covered her mouth. “Oh God,” she muttered.
Nighna’s eyes flashed, but she continued. “We need to cross, Charon,” she said.
“You can, no prob,” Charon said with a shrug. “These two: lot of live weight to deal with.”
“I’ll buy their passage. They’re my servants,” Nighna said.
Charon’s wide lips pursed as he eyed them appraisingly. Oz shifted uncomfortably. He wasn’t sure he liked being
called a demon’s servant, even if it was for pretend.
“You mean to tell me you gots a werewolf and a –” Charon’s tongue shot out like a whip and tasted Anjelica’s
forearm. His eyes widened, “– Slayer? As servants?”
Nighna reverted to her human visage. “I do, Charon,” she said levelly.
He spread his sticky fingers. “Won’t be cheap,” he said. “You can kill ’em now and cut the price.”
Oz and Anjelica exchanged wary glances.
“No,” Nighna said. “I need them alive. Name your price. You know how I dislike bargaining.”
Charon cocked an eyelid.
“And I’ll want the boy’s hand as well,” Nighna said. Oz watched her, quietly marveling over her bored-yet-
elegant bearing. Her eyes gave nothing away. If seeing her lover’s severed hand used as currency by her rival
bothered her in the slightest, she wasn’t giving anything away.
“It’s mummified,” Charon said, sneering.
Nighna yawned. The crowd behind them writhed and pitched, and another scuffle ruptured along the lines. Two
men toppled from behind the ropes, rolling and punching like a pair of cartoon dogs fighting over a string of link
sausages. They tumbled, screaming, into the black water. Oz and Anjelica witnessed in horror as the two men
flash-fried down to their skeletons, then slowly began to sink beneath the surface. But the thing was, they
weren’t dead. And they still fought; their blackened bones tore at wisps of frazzled hair on their heads even as
they disappeared.
“Okay. Surreal,” Oz said, once he’d mentally jarred himself back to reality. Skewed though it was.
“Oh fine,” Charon said. “I want free passage in Eregnor and a century’s mems to Triumvirate. Plus, a key to
the executive washroom at Wolfram & Hart.” He leaned to Anjelica and added with a wink, “Those guys can
launder anything.”
“Fifty years membership to Triumvirate,” Nighna said. “That’s all I can currently guarantee. You know how
things are.”
“Seventy-five,” Charon said, his frown deepening stubbornly.
“Sixty, and I’ll have a word with the Big Guys downstairs about sending you some help until this influx of dead
lets up,” she said.
Now Charon’s smile did seem to split his face in two. “Aw, Nig’han. It ain’t gonna let up. You should know it well
as I. End of Days is here. And not just Here. All the worlds come crashin’ down,” he said.
Nighna sighed. “Do we have a deal or not?”
“It’s a deal,” Charon said. Still grinning, he offered Andrew’s hand. “Here, let’s shake on it,” he said, laughing
robustly at his own joke. “Shake on it!”
Nighna took the hand and put it unceremoniously into her shoulder bag. Charon was still chortling once he
ushered them onto the barge and set sail, much to the chagrin of the roiling mob they left behind on shore.
Anjelica sat down in the center of the boat and stared fixedly at her feet. Oz took a place beside her and
waited for her to speak.
When she didn’t, he bumped her shoulder with his own. Even while his mind ran over the facts that Luxe and
Thellian had parted company, and that the others were not in Hell but somewhere that was not here, he decided
to distract them both by returning to their standby conversation already on hold.
“Hey,” he said softly. “We had a topic going, and I gotta say I’m gonna disagree. Madonna as the spearhead of
modern hip hop…”
“This is a horrible, terrible place,” Anjelica said.
“It’s not so bad,” Oz said.
Anjelica balked at him.
He gave a non-committal shrug. “I wouldn’t want to charter a yacht or anything,” he said. “But the people are
nice.”
“What people?” Anjelica groaned. “All those poor dead ones…”
“You,” Oz said.
Anjelica blinked. She looked at him as though he had grown a pair of mouths on either side of his face and was
singing Ode to Joy in three part harmony. But he wasn’t. Thankfully. He simply sat and stared in that off-
putting way he had that made her feel both terrified and eerily calm. He meant her. Meant that she was worth a
visit to Hell. He thought she was nice. And she thought… well, her mind had gone completely blank.
“So,” Oz said. “Madonna…”
They debated for the countless hours it took for Charon’s barge to reach the far bank of the River Styx. Nighna
listened to them, glad for their incessant chatter. It helped her focus. She kept her shoulder bag cradled in her
lap while she plotted their course in her mind.
Luxe. Clarisse told her he was very near. It was only a matter of time.
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.Chapter Index.
Anywhere Out
of This World
Blood, Pressure
The Drawing Board
All's Well
Anywhere Out of
This World
Mourning Sickness
Welcome to Hell
Relative
Matters of Time
& Fishes
International Calls
Empty as Houses
Lusty Wrong Feelings
Enthralled
Thanksgiving
Seduced
Innocents Lost
Burn
Flashback
Not A Chance In Hell
Empty Rooms
Two Roads Diverged
Starfall
Blindsided
Not Her Own
Outta Here
The Valley of the
Shadow of Death
Comes the Rain
Smoke and Mirrors
Drawn to You
Team Angel
By Fire Reborn
Salvage
Ashes to Ashes
Life Is...
With A Little Help
Appearances Deceiving
Familiarity
Sweetness
Not All Who Wander
That Old Black Magic
For Lorne
Drawn Together
Lost to Sand
Fall of Triumvirate
Parallel Lives
The Lovers
Avenger
Double Cross
Pursuit
Ripper's Girl
Pandemonium
Negative Space
Raveled Threads
Asunder
Human Hands
Singular
Fragmented
Symmetry
Plans
Rogue Squadron
Legends
Anywhere Out
of This World
Blood, Pressure
The Drawing Board
All's Well
Anywhere Out of
This World
Mourning Sickness
Welcome to Hell
Relative
Matters of Time
& Fishes
International Calls
Empty as Houses
Lusty Wrong Feelings
Enthralled
Thanksgiving
Seduced
Innocents Lost
Burn
Flashback
Not A Chance In Hell
Empty Rooms
Two Roads Diverged
Starfall
Blindsided
Not Her Own
Outta Here
The Valley of the
Shadow of Death
Comes the Rain
Smoke and Mirrors
Drawn to You
Team Angel
By Fire Reborn
Salvage
Ashes to Ashes
Life Is...
With A Little Help
Appearances Deceiving
Familiarity
Sweetness
Not All Who Wander
That Old Black Magic
For Lorne
Drawn Together
Lost to Sand
Fall of Triumvirate
Parallel Lives
The Lovers
Avenger
Double Cross
Pursuit
Ripper's Girl
Pandemonium
Negative Space
Raveled Threads
Asunder
Human Hands
Singular
Fragmented
Symmetry
Plans
Rogue Squadron
Legends