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Loren

I didn’t know where I was anymore.

In Hell, externally, but my turmoil was internal, spanning the last few days I’d spent bouncing between joy and grief.

Loss and gain. Loving Indy had always been a cycle, but now it felt more like a cyclone sucking me up and stealing me from everything that had ever been home.

I’d sent him away, then he’d done the same to me.

Each separation stripped off a piece of my soul.

The latest shard went with him into Nero’s chambers.

Into a fight to the death that I could neither attend nor prevent.

My hound wailed. He was loudest in moments when I was most quiet.

Like he wanted me to cry out, too.

But I didn’t. I didn’t argue when Indy told me to go.

I didn’t tell him goodbye.

And I didn’t hurry away from the place where my phoenix would draw his last breath.

I practically crawled.

It took everything in me to move my feet one slogging step at a time down the hall with my back turned in what could only feel like abandonment.

We’d been fortunate not to encounter any opposition on the way here, and I hoped that trend would continue.

I had no explanation for my return to Hell, and we hounds weren’t often left to wander these halls.

It was suspicious, and while I struggled to care what might happen to me now that Indy was gone, I needed to.

I had a new mission: find Whitney.

My job of retrieving contracted souls began and ended there.

I found the damned and reaped them, sending them along for Moira to deal with.

It was unfortunate work, but I was grateful not to involve myself in the aftermath or pay many visits to the catacombs where Hell stored its human occupants.

I knew how to get there, though, and gradually, my feet moved freely enough to make swift progress.

To get to Whitney, yes, but also to get back.

Even if there was no chance Indy would survive, I wouldn’t leave him here.

I would take his ashes and scatter them off the Hoover Dam.

Let him fly one more time.

Hell existed in the belly of the universe, but it had lower layers of its own.

I descended, taking untraveled corridors and empty stairways down and down and down until my ears popped from the change in pressure.

As I traveled, the textures and terrains seemed to degrade.

From the modern finery of the upper floors to the archaic passages below.

By the time I reached Hell’s deepest depths, I was walking through a tunnel made of stone and lit by wall-mounted torches.

It felt less like a prison and more like a tomb—uninhabited and pervasively quiet.

My feet scuffled and soft breaths puffed, reminding me I was the most alive of all the dead things down here.

And there were so many dead things.

The tunnel opened into a vast cavern.

The walls stretched up into an abyss overhead while forming a labyrinth below.

Slabs of stone rose from the floor, cut with short, deep shelves enclosed by metal grates.

Every shelf held a body.

A soul withering away in a space even more cramped than the kennels I loathed.

All a person could do here was lie prostrate with their arms pinned to their sides; there was barely space to turn their heads, hardly room to breathe.

My chest constricted, and I turned my gaze away, relying on my nose to find Whitney’s scent.

Indy’s phoenix aroma was warm and honey-sweet, but Whitney smelled spicier.

Like black pepper with a hit of mint that chilled my nostrils.

It had been tainted, of course, by the stink of Moira’s corruption.

But that would be gone now.

His soul was unbound, and his body was no longer a shared property.

It seemed to be a blessing until I looked at the dark, caged cavities all around me.

Moira had advised us to be grateful for the life we’d been given.

She said she spared us.

I hadn’t believed it before now.

As I advanced into the room, I whiffed at the air.

I closed my eyes and breathed deeper, seeking frosty mint.

It was a big ask. A long shot.

I was certain the souls here were arranged in some orderly fashion, but with bodies stacked high overhead and walling me in on both sides, I couldn’t make sense of it.

I couldn’t even see them all, and I didn’t dare call out.

Better they stayed asleep and unaware of their own misery.

The farther I got from the entry, the more I wanted to turn back.

Every beat of my heart felt like poking a bruise, my nose was too full of smells to sort one from a billion others, and my eyes wouldn’t stop watering.

I wiped my sleeve across them, scowling while striding forward.

I walked so far I worried I would get lost down here.

And maybe I could accept that, going mad from confusion and stumbling in circles and eventually forgetting what brought me here in the first place.

But I remembered. I always did.

So, I carried on, caring less about the slap of my shoes on the floor or my aggravated huffing.

Caring so little that a growl rumbled out of me, quiet at first but echoing until it became a shout.

“Whitney!”

I panted and glanced side to side at the crevasses packed with motionless bodies, waiting for one of them to respond.

“Whitney!”

“Here!”

A voice far smaller and hoarser than mine called back, and I stopped short.

“Over here,” he repeated, accented in the way I expected, broken in the way I did not.

Rushing forward, I sniffed deeply, inhaling till my lungs felt apt to burst. But the chill of mint was there.

The tingle of pepper.

The smell of Whitney without our mistress grew stronger as I barreled past rows and towers of stirring bodies.

Groans and abject cries from those I’d woken assaulted my ears.

Like in the kennels, the noises weren’t quite human.

But they weren’t animal, either.

They sounded like ghosts, wailing incoherently, threatening to drown Whitney’s cries, but I had him now.

I smelled him, then I saw him, caged like a corpse in a coffin, his fingers wrapped white-knuckled around the metal grate that kept him prisoner.

I arrived beside the wall where Whitney was stored on a shelf at waist level.

He turned his head toward me, blond hair a mess and his green eyes sunken.

Haunted. For all the effort it had taken to arrive, I suddenly wanted to retreat, like touching him would draw me to him and not the other way around.

“This feels familiar,” Whitney rasped.

“Except this time I’m the one looking out.”

I crouched to inspect the bars between us, looking for a door or lock but finding none.

Tentatively, I grabbed the grate, and Whitney caught my fingers before I began to pull.

I met his gaze, noting the differences in his visage.

His skin was speckled with blood.

Red, not the black that leaked from wounded demons.

Besides being tangled and frizzed, his hair was pulled back and tied at the nape of his neck in an old-fashioned style.

About as old-fashioned as his clothes, I surmised.

Not a suit like the ones Moira put on him.

Neither was it the kind of casual outfit he’d donned during his time on Earth.

It was a uniform made with a faded red coat and tan pants tucked into a pair of boots.

It must have been what he was wearing when he died.

“Loren, I can’t…” His fingers quivered against mine as he forced a laugh.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see you.”

Rather than answer, I grasped the bars with both hands and heaved backward with every bit of my preternatural strength.

I shouldn’t have expected it to move.

I’d kicked and clawed and even gnawed at the doors in the kennels enough to know they didn’t easily give.

But those were made to contain hellish beasts and, presumably, these were not, which gave me an advantage.

Pulling free of Whitney, I stepped back.

The terror that flashed across his face could only be explained one way: he thought I was leaving him.

Eager to quell that fear, I shook my head and explained the only way I knew how: “Indy sent me.”

His expression relaxed as I reached into the nearest shadow and drew my glaive from it.

Palming over the metal shaft, I situated my grip, then turned the blade end toward where Whitney lay.

“Don’t move,” I told him.

He nodded and pulled his hand back, pinning it to his side in a pose so stiff and straight it must have ached.

I swung the glaive around, tensed for resistance I never met.

The grate split, then fell away with a clatter.

Whitney wasn’t as quick as he used to be, but he wasted no time rolling out of the cavity to land on the floor.

He scrambled to standing, and I got a better look at the blood that splotched his uniform from shoulders to shins.

A sheath was secured to his belt, but his saber was notably absent.

I flung my glaive away, then faced Whitney, who opened his mouth once, twice, then shook his head.

“I’ll assume you’re as eager to leave this place as I am,” he said.

I nodded, and he broke into motion, a bit unsteady but rapidly gaining his footing as he headed toward the nearest wall.

He couldn’t get out that way, and I wouldn’t.

I had to go back. For Indy, or whatever remained of him.

“He’s still here,” the words wrenched out of me and drew Whitney to a halt.

“Who is?” he asked.

“Indy.”

His pale brows dipped.

“Here? Why? You said he was going to Heaven.”

I swallowed.

“He was. He did. But now he’s here, and I…” My hands fisted, and I wished I had something better to hold than emptiness.

“I can’t leave him.”

Whitney swayed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and seeming to debate until he announced, “I’m right behind you.”

Reversing my journey through the catacombs was another sort of slog.

I was glad to have Whitney at my back and anxious to return to Indy, but any relief I might have felt was robbed by my imagination plaguing me with images of my phoenix in flames or in pieces.

I’d rushed to get here, but I raced to get out.

I ran, and Whitney struggled to keep up, but I didn’t slow until someone called my name.

“Lorenzo? It can’t be.”

My head whipped around while my ears pricked to the familiar sound.

I knew that voice; I used to dream about it.

But I hadn’t heard it aloud in over a century.

Whitney stumbled to a stop behind me, but before he could ask the cause for our delay, it made itself apparent.

Jonathan had aged. Twenty years had peppered his hair and flecked his full beard with gray.

I’d only ever seen him shaven clean, perhaps with a bit of stubble, but his clear blue eyes were unmistakable as they peered out through the grate that caged him.

My heart stuttered.

He was still handsome.

Somehow distinguished, even trapped as he was.

He lay in one of the stone recesses, placed at head level so we could face each other directly.

Or we could have if I hadn’t immediately shied from his gaze.

“Where have you been?” he asked, squirming in the confined space.

“And how…?”

He’d been here all along.

Under my feet for a century, well within reach.

I could have come to him.

I could have freed him the way I’d just freed Whitney, and Moira knew it.

But she kept us apart because she wanted me for herself.

The thought made my blood burn.

All Hell had ever done was take from me.

My life, my lover, and now Indy, who was both of those things and more.

Reply lodged in my throat while I gawked at Jonathan.

I studied the crow’s feet creasing his temples and the laugh lines around his lips and considered all the life I’d given him.

All the life I’d missed.

“Are you some sort of devil now?” Jonathan asked through a suspicious squint.

“You don’t have the look of a dead man.”

He reached through the bars like Whitney had done, but I didn’t react.

I simply stared at his fingers stretching toward me and remembered what Moira had called him.

A despicable man.

A philandering narcissist.

Both were true, yet I’d stayed with him.

Loved him. Because I was loyal.

What would a loyal man do now?

The answer was obvious: a loyal man would summon his glaive, slice through the bars, and free Jonathan.

In doing so, he would take back one of the many things Hell had stolen from him.

But I didn’t.

I stood, and I scrutinized because I couldn’t walk away from this long-awaited reunion.

This moment I’d hoped and even prayed for.

I needed to go, but first I needed to know .

“Did you mourn me?”

The question felt out of place, plucked from where it had lived in my brain for decades.

I’d wondered so many things after I died.

Lamented all I’d left behind.

I was lamenting now, mourning a fresh loss, and maybe that was why it mattered.

Maybe that was why I wondered if he felt the same way I did.

If he hurt like this when he lost me.

Jonathan frowned. “What?”

“Did you mourn me?” I repeated.

His fingers curled to grip the metal bars as he asked, “When you left?”

Bodies around us shifted and moaned.

Grates rattled. I’d unsettled this place, and if it was as much a prison as it appeared, guards might soon arrive.

Jonathan’s cerulean eyes flicked over me, assessing without the anticipated fondness.

When he made a scoffing sound in the back of his throat, I flinched.

“Why would I mourn you?” he asked.

“I didn’t even know you were dead. You vanished. Left no trace. No trail to follow.”

That put me on my heels.

Of course, I hadn’t explained my departure.

There had been no opportunity.

“But did you try?” I asked.

“Did you look for me?” My voice came out hoarse as I rambled on.

“Because I would have turned over the world for you. I would’ve forged a path. I would have found a way?—”

“You left me on my deathbed,” Jonathan snapped.

“In my greatest moment of need.”

My jaw hung slack.

Was that what he thought of me?

After all this time?

I lacked the presence of mind to protest before he continued.

“You saw the end of what I could provide for you, so you left. Found yourself another benefactor, I imagine. Became another man’s whore.”

I hissed a breath.

“Don’t call me that?—”

“I asked one thing of you, Lorenzo.” The grit in his voice chafed me.

“My final wish was to see my family cared for. I entrusted that task to you, but you refused it. And then you abandoned us all.”

I remembered the sanatorium ward bustling with nurses, the arrival of his wife and daughters, and the way I’d been dismissed as an unwelcome interloper.

A shameful thing. I would never have been enough for them.

Jonathan would have left a void I couldn’t fill.

I knew that now as well as I had then.

But I thought I’d done better.

I had sacrificed myself for him.

For all of them.

It took a moment for my mouth to work, for my tongue to do more than lay limp between my teeth.

Finally, I stammered, “I didn’t abandon… She took me away, I… I sold my soul for you.”

Jonathan gave a huff, then shook the bars between us.

“A lot of good it did,” he said.

“You see where I am. You didn’t spare me this.”

He was right, and it made me feel as foolish as I had when Moira made plain that my efforts had been in vain.

“But you’re walking free.” Jonathan’s voice drew my attention.

“Perhaps you can do some good yet. Free me from this place and consider all forgiven.”

I barely managed to squeak out, “ Forgiven ?”

Whitney had been silent till now, observing the way he had the day he watched the demoness barter for my soul.

Now though, he cleared his voice and spoke.

“Loren, we need to go.”

Looking at Jonathan, I found his expression fixed, unyielding as I knew he could be.

Cruel as he’d been in life.

For years, I’d survived on the scraps of his kindness.

I had lived in his shadow, convinced it was preferable to my darkness.

But I’d had better since then.

I’d been loved.

“No.” I shook my head.

“I deserve more than your forgiveness. I always deserved more.”

“There you are.” Jonathan flicked his eyes skyward.

“Ever the ingrate. But this isn’t the time for another self-indulgent tirade?—”

Stepping forward brought my foot down hard on the stone floor.

The knocking sound stopped Jonathan midstream.

“I stood back and let you have your wife. Your family,” I began, practically seething.

“I waited in that lonely flat for weeks at a time, desperate for your company. My death gave me more than you ever did.” The truths piled up, bitter at first then growing sweet until I found myself smiling through tears.

“It gave me a better life. So many lives with a man who adores me. He fights for me, and he would… he might…”

It was hard to say.

Impossible to accept.

I could relive the horrors of the past, fueled by righteous indignation, but the present was too painful to face.

Tears dripped from my lashes as I met Jonathan’s gaze.

“He believes what I used to think of you,” I said.

“That I’m worth dying for.”

A loyal man would have freed him, and I was loyal, but not to Jonathan.

Not anymore.

So, I didn’t summon my glaive, I didn’t cut through the bars, and I didn’t waste another word trying to convince him of what I knew.

He was a despicable man, and Hell could have him.