She followed Mikhail Tolstoy as he turned away, heading for the door.
"Oh, won't you introduce us?" I called after them, in English. "An exchange of names and honorifics? I am Pericles, my dear, and I look forward to your acquaintance."
Mikhail turned on one heel, and he would have drawn then, and perhaps sent a bullet through my head. The silver on it would sting, but it wouldn't kill me. I didn't want to show too much of myself, and my restraint was rewarded.
Because she turned, too, and that mismatched gaze met mine with a pleasurable shiver. "Jill," she said flatly, the word cutting through a thick silence as the singers onstage finished their last, tremulous harmony. "Jill Kismet, hellbreed. Remember it."
I let them go that night. Then I went upstairs to the white-draped room I used as my sanctum and opened a flat rosewood case.
The knives inside were loaded with silver, and I could have another iron frame made to cradle me. The game was not over yet. Sending my dear almost-father back to our home was merely the prelude. The simulacrum of breathing, of flesh itself, was not enough. I wanted power, too. All of his, to add to my own. She was the one who would deliver it to me, if I was patient enough.
I was already planning where I would kiss her.
THE NAUGHTIEST CHERUB
KEVIN HEARNE
In the Iron Druid series, supernatural creatures such as witches, vampires, and werewolves--in addition to the various gods and goddesses of various mythologies--fill the world. The series is typically told from the vantage of Atticus O'Sullivan, a Druid who owns and runs an occult bookshop, and who gets embroiled in the day-to-day happenings of supernatural creatures. This story, narrated by Loki, takes place after Staked, book eight of the series.
The road to hell is not, as they say, paved with good intentions. Mostly it's crumbling stone, some rank weeds, and the occasional pile of dog shit. At least the one I am following is; there are many roads to perdition, but this one is in Kansas, for some reason. And I will note for the record that there is a significant difference between going to Hel and going to hell.
My daughter's realm, for all that it is cold and dim and cheerless with a constant cover of damp clouds, is at least somewhat consistent in its conception and manifestation.
The hell of monotheists, by contrast, is a hot, shifting, poisonous plane with air so foul that it feels as bad on my skin as it smells--that is, polluted with all manner of evils. As soon as I step through a portal created by an obliging demon, my armpits begin to sweat goat cheese and my balls feel like they're marinating in pepper sauce. Blasted by hot dry winds and chapped by sulfurous fumes one moment, in the next I'm buffeted by a moist effluvium shat from some manky demon's ass upwind.
Or perhaps the source of the miasma is not that far away at all, but rather my hellspawn escort, guiding me to a meeting with Lucifer.
"What am I looking at, here?" I ask it--and I use it because I cannot be sure that it has a gender, or even a functioning set of reproductive organs. It's a four-legged doglike thing, except that its legs are designed like those of an insect, originating underneath the beast and splayed out to the sides. It's colored like an insect, too, all green and teal. "Is this the hell of Milton, Dante, or Hieronymus Bosch, perhaps? Scenes out of a Dore etching?"
"You've done your research. It is all those and more," it replies, in a voice that sounds like it's chewing on rock salt yet somehow finds it sour. "There are circles of hell. There are realms of darkness. There is a lake of fire. There are dukes of hell, and imps, and hellhounds, and most anything collectively imagined by humans."
"And the being I will be visiting shortly? How does he appear?" I ask my escort, who is decidedly from the Bosch lineup of hellions.
"However he wishes. I have seen him take many forms."
"Interesting."
"Do you not take many forms? I have heard you have the power to do so."
"I do. I do, indeed. But they are forms that I imagine, rather than forms that have been imagined by others. They are not my natural manifestation, merely suits of clothes, so to speak, that I wear for short periods of time."
The landscape--or hellscape--wobbles in front of me as if I have drunk too much mead before snapping back together with an audible pop, looking as sharp and threatening as the tip of Odin's spear.
"What just happened?" I ask the thing.
"Hell constantly readjusts itself according to the fevered imaginations of mortals."
"Does this happen in heaven, too?"
"I'm sure I wouldn't know. Maybe the clouds move around or something. I suspect it is not so richly imagined as hell."
When I am finally brought before Lucifer as arranged, he does not appear in any form close to popular conception. No horns on his head, with a pointy mustache and soul patch. No forked tail or trident or any weapon at all. No goat hooves or ram's head. (Damn it--I was rather hoping to see that one.) No suave good looks, and certainly no leathery bat wings. There are wings, however--four massive ones, which take turns flapping and hiding his spherical body from view, keeping most of his bulk shielded from sight as he slowly rotates in place only five feet above the ground. What's he hiding under there? Tiny dinosaur arms? An embarrassing angelic erection? A series of mouths and other orifices? Mostly all I see are eyes. Many eyes, black and winking at me with jeweled eyelids, always three or more trained on me as he spins and flaps and waits.
As I watch them, the wings are not merely attractive, they are glorious. Shiny, shimmering, and rippling with a spectrum of colors, prismatic coyness that defies simple description. It is, no doubt, why humans took to describing him as having more beast-like qualities. Cherubs are beautiful and difficult to imagine as agents of evil. And Lucifer was--and remains--the most powerful and beautiful of the cherubim.
Such sublime magnificence is far more intimidating than any bestial appearance he could have taken, and as soon as I think it, I know that is why he chose to appear this way to me.
"Lucifer, I bring Loki of the AEsir, who seeks audience," the demon says. I am surprised and pleased that he keeps the introductions so short. We do not need a long list of titles and ego fluffing. We know who we are.