Andy vibrated with rage, and it fueled her.
“Gahhh!” Her battlecry. She screamed as she ran through the ash fields of hell and drove the purring blade of her chainsaw into the rocky flesh of the dead thing in front of her. It cut through the chest and slipped out the back, a metal tongue lapping black and red blood into the air off a chain whose teeth were gunked up with bits of flesh. Andy perched her shotgun on the shoulder of the demon, spun around—heel in the ash—and fired a blast from her boomstick at the foe closing in behind her. The blast took off its head. Dozens and dozens of bodies were already scattered among the fire trees around her, but more closed in, more rushed toward the woman who ventured into hell to find her wife, merely flesh waiting to be cut down.
She fought for an hour, fought hard until every muscle screamed and every bone threatened to snap under the pressure of her rage. The violence was cyclical and endless, or so it seemed. Infinity found a sudden end when Andy’s roaring and overworked blade cut through the thick neck of a demon—severing the head—and the body fell only to be followed by silence. A hundred stony corpses were scattered around her. Ash drifted down from a gray sky and coated them like snow. Andy panted, catching her breath, and she waited. It wouldn’t be long now. The fastest way to gain an audience with Shaitan the Taker of Souls, queen of her own slice of hell, was to make a sacrifice. The hundred or so corpses littered around her were enough, apparently. Matted hair coated in blood obscured Andy’s vision, but it wasn’t enough to hide the Queen’s entrance.
Thorns reached up out of the ashy hellscape, stretching up toward the hidden sun of the sky like fingers. They twisted together, knotting and netting and taking shape until they were more than just a simple thicket of thorns, until they were a throne. Andy stepped forward and the ash fell heavier. The ash piled on the throne—falling from above—and the pile soon took shape too, until it wasn’t a pile of ash at all but a mirror reflection of Andy sitting there. Shaitan, the Taker of Souls, once went by another name, and she once went by another body, Andy’s body. Once she was Mia Allen. Now she was more.
Shaitan’s hair was darker and her eyes were fire orange, but the rest was a copy of the woman standing before her. The largest exception to this was the fact that Shaitan’s right hand was missing and a festering nub was left resting on the arm of her thorn throne. Shaitan stared at Andy. Andy stared at Shaitan. That’s how it remained for a while as the silence lingered. The Taker of Souls didn’t speak until she elected to.
“There are easier ways to contact me,” Shaitan said, her voice carrying like thirty voices speaking through one pair of lips.
“Nothing is this direct.” Andy was still out of breath. “I couldn’t wait for you to answer when you felt like it so I figured I’d come to you.”
“It’s dangerous, you know,” Shaitan said. “Hell is not a place one should tread lightly.”
Andy looked left and right. She was surrounded by corpses, corpses she worked hard to turn into corpses, and she shrugged. “I think I’m treading okay.”
“Why are you here?”
“My wife,” Andy said. “She was taken from me, killed, and Avery, my daughter—the strongest witch I know—wasn’t able to bring her back. I came to find her soul. I came for you to show me the way.”
“That’s who you’re here for, not why,” Shaitan said, the voice slipping into something more relaxed. There was more Mia in her than demon. “There is always a deeper why. I suggest you figure that out before you get where you need to be. It will be easier that way.”
“That mean you’re going to point me in the right direction?”
“You’re already heading in the right direction,” Shaitan said. Andy blinked and the demon queen was gone, the throne was gone, the ash fields were gone. She turned around, chainsaw blade dragging across soft dirt, and she found that she was in a dark forest now. It was colder here, a colder layer of hell, cold enough for Andy to see her breath. The trees were closer together here, thicker, darker, and hooded figures stood in the shadows of their branches.
There were over a dozen of them, tall figures with pointed hoods and faces hidden by darkness. They faced Andy but didn’t flinch when the blood soaked girl approached with a chainsaw in one hand and her shotgun in the other.
“These are the pathfinders,” Mia’s voice echoed in Andy’s head even if Shaitan was gone. “Guardians of the various soul prisons. Defeat the one standing in the way of you reaching your wife and you will be reunited with her soul.”
“Defeat as in kill?”Andy asked, but nothing responded. She was walking toward them now but they weren’t moving. She didn’t know which one was the pathfinder she was meant to defeat, she didn’t even know where Claire’s soul was being held. This whole thing was a living nightmare. One moment all was normal, the next Claire was killed by an enemy she was meant to have peace with—Inetkaes, the Red Queen, ruler of the vampires—heart ripped clean from her chest. Andy always said she would go to hell and back for Claire and now she had the chance to prove it. She didn’t care what challenges waited ahead of her. She was bringing her wife home to their daughters, she was going to set things right, and once they were back home, they could prepare for the war that was to come.
Andy stopped a few paces away from the pathfinders and the cloaked figures turned around. All but one faced away, and the once still facing Andy stepped forward. Andy asked, “You’re the one?” and the pathfinder nodded. She shrugged and pulled the cord on her chainsaw to give it life. The engine hummed but when she tilted her head back up, the pathfinder was gone, they were all gone, and so was the forest.
Everything around Andy was different. Hell was funny that way, always shifting. Andy stood in the middle of a dance club—an empty and abandoned club. This was her club, Inetkaes’ club, she knew it even if she had never been there. It was a distraction and it worked. Andy didn’t notice that she was no longer coated in blood or that her chainsaw was no longer purring. She didn’t hear the footsteps behind her either.
“She was thinking about you, you know… in her last moments she was thinking of you.”
Andy spun on her heels, that fiery rage burning up again when she heard the voice. She aimed her shotgun at the pale woman with the red hair walking over to her, a grin on her face. “This is a trick,” Andy said, after thinking about it for a second. “You’re… you’re not her, you’re not Inetkaes. You’re the pathfinder. This is my test.”
The Pathfinder disguising themselves as the Red Queen smirked and squinted. “Aren’t you clever, aren’t you—”
BOOM! Andy pulled the trigger and fired a buckshot at the woman. At that range it splintered her skull and blew off half her head. The Pathfinder flopped back, dead, but nothing changed. More footsteps came behind Andy. Another Inetkaes walked out, carefully holding onto the railing as she navigated the stairs in heels. Andy started the engine of her chainsaw again.
“You are a feisty spirit,” the fake Inetkaes said. “I see why she married you. I see why she died for you. I should thank you. Claire’s suffering is… well, it’s easier to manipulate because she has such powerful connections to those who are still vulnerable. Once we grow bored with the reruns of past trauma, once we make her spirit numb to those she already lost, we will do the same to you. The Andy-shaped hole in Claire’s heart is a torturer’s wet dream.”
“Keep her name out of your f***ing mouth,” Andy said, spitting through gritted teeth. Her eyes were red and tearing up, and she still had the shotgun aimed at the pathfinder’s head. The demonic spirit wearing Inetkaes’ face smiled.
“You can’t get to her, Andy,” the pathfinder said. “She’s dead. She’s here. She’s ours… finally ours. Not even the angels can reach her this time. Do you know what was going through her mind when she ripped her heart out? The Red Queen’s mind, not Claire’s… do you want to know what she was feeling?”
“GAHHH!” Andy charged forward and brought the purring blade of the chainsaw down into the pathfinder’s face, splitting the skull in two and spraying blood left and right and up and down. Andy’s rage fueled her. She cut through the head until the body went still and she cut some more. Footsteps moved behind her again and another came out.
“There it is, the great undoing,” the pathfinder said from the lips of her third Inetkaes duplicate. “What do you think you’re going to achieve?”
BOOM! This time the shotgun blast cleared through the chest. The body fell, another came out. Another blast from her boomstick—after a quick reload—took that one down too, but only for another to appear.
“Rage drives you,” it said. “Drives you to death, to despair, to war…”
“Stop!” Andy charged, her shotgun empty. She dropped the boomstick and used two hands to hold the chainsaw high over her head and took off Inetkaes’ head with a clean sweep. The head popped off and blood spurted like a fountain.
“What will be left of you if you get her back,” the pathfinder asked, stepping out again in another body. “Another chance will just be wasted on the rage.”
It was too late now. The rage took over, and Andy saw stars. She rushed toward the newest body, stepping over one that had already been slayed, and she gutted it. Another came and another fell, and another, and another, and another, until there were so many dead and dismembered corpses that Andy couldn’t find the ground anymore. The room drowned in blood. She screamed and flung her chainsaw through the air at the next Inetkaes that walked into the room and it caved her head in. Falling to her knees, panting, Andy was surrounded by corpses, the result of her rage, and the emptiness followed.
Andy fell to her knees and the bodies surrounding her morphed and shifted into something new. The faces changed. No longer was she surrounded by the blank dead gazes of Inetkaes staring back at her, but the faces were more familiar. Claire, Mollie, the twins, Mia, Avery, Dani… she was surrounded by her family, her friends, her everything; she was surrounded by death. Shuffling back in a panic, Andy’s face trembled with fear and regret and pain. “No, no, no no no no no,” She crawled back until she couldn’t crawl back any farther.
This was what the rage led to. This was the war she carried in her heart, the future carved into her by her pain and suffering, and immediately she knew it was wrong. She couldn’t bring Claire back and carry the rage at the same time. She couldn’t keep the cycle of violence going. And once she let it go, once she allowed her heart to beat without the steady percussion of hate and rage the bodies disappeared, the blood vanished, the weapons melted away. Andy climbed to her feet, standing on shaky legs, and she found a door that appeared. It opened and a blinding light shined through. The glow filled her with love; the glow of Claire’s soul. She smiled. She went to it. She brought her wife home, and she left the rage in hell.
