Hellfire – Princess of Hell

Faith’s building had a buzzer panel with half the labels missing. I found her number from memory, pressed it, and waited with my hands in my jacket pockets.

The intercom clicked. No greeting, just the door release. I pushed through.

Third floor. The lift was out of service, a handwritten note taped at eye height. I took the stairs, which gave me enough time to arrange my face into something that wasn’t thinking about the cold still sitting behind my sternum, and to confirm my glamour was holding correctly. Hair dark, horns reduced, wings gone. Just a woman visiting a friend.

Faith opened the door before I reached it.

“Come in.” She stepped back to make room, already moving toward the kitchen.

I crossed the threshold and did a slow circuit of the space with my eyes while she filled the kettle. The furniture was right, the layout was the same, but something about the arrangement had simplified. The bookshelves were two-thirds empty. There was a box in the corner that hadn’t been unpacked, or hadn’t been repacked, hard to say which. The side table that used to hold three or four things held one: her keys.

“Nice place,” I said.

“Please.” She set the kettle on its base without looking up. “I haven’t really been here for a month.”

That tracked. The flat had the particular stillness of rooms visited rather than lived in, surfaces clean in a way that meant nothing had been set down and moved and set down again.

“Sit wherever,” she said.

I turned toward the sofa and stopped.

Daniel was already there. Sitting at the near end with a mug balanced on his knee, wearing the brown jacket he’d had since university, looking exactly like himself in the unhelpful way that people do when you’re not expecting them.

He looked up.

“Hi.” He shifted his mug to his other hand and half-rose from the cushion in that reflex he’d always had, the one that made him stand when women entered rooms without ever seeming to think about it. “Daniel Rowe. You must be Lily?”

My eyes went to Faith.

She was leaning against the kitchen doorframe, watching me with the careful neutrality of someone who had made a decision and was waiting to see how it landed.

“He was Liam’s closest friend,” she said. “I thought he might know something useful. He’s been trying to find him too.”

Daniel was still half-standing, waiting for me to respond. He had the same open expression he’d always had, the one that made people immediately comfortable, the one I knew the mechanism of the way I knew how my own ribcage worked.

I knew exactly what he’d do if I told him. He’d believe me faster than Faith had. He’d probably cry. He’d want to talk about it for six hours.

I also knew what this body was doing with the information that a warm, kind, genuinely good-looking man was three feet away and looking at me with that much uncomplicated attention.

Absolutely not, I told it.

It didn’t respond, which was worse than if it had.

“Lily,” I said, and shook his hand. “Sorry, you caught me off guard. She didn’t mention you’d be here.”

Faith’s expression didn’t change. “Last-minute decision.”

That told me nothing, which was probably the point.

I pulled off my jacket, took the armchair across from the sofa rather than the cushion beside him, and settled into it with the deliberate geometry of someone choosing a chess position.

Daniel sat back down. He was already leaning slightly forward, elbows on his knees, ready to be helpful.

I looked at the ceiling for half a second.

Thirty-five days in Hell, and this was the thing that had me wanting to simply walk back out the door.

* * *

The kettle finished boiling. Faith brought three mugs over and distributed them with the efficiency of someone who’d run enough briefings to know that warm hands helped people talk. Daniel wrapped both palms around his immediately. I held mine by the rim.

“So you knew Liam from before the disappearance,” Daniel said. Not a question exactly, more the opening move of someone trying to build a map.

“We ran into each other a few times. Mutual interests.” I turned the mug slowly. “You grew up with him.”

“Foster system, yeah. Since we were about nine.” He glanced at his tea. “He used to follow me around pretending he wasn’t following me. Thought he was being subtle.”

I knew. I’d been there. The memory of Daniel’s patient, slightly exasperated face as I trailed him through the home’s corridors sat in me with the specific weight of something that had actually happened, not a story someone had told me.

“Sounds like him,” I said.

Faith had taken the other end of the sofa. She watched the exchange for a moment, then set her mug on the table.

“Lily, you mentioned on the phone you had a spell worth trying.”

I looked at Daniel. Then at her.

“He’s fine,” she said. “He’s part of our world.”

Daniel’s laugh came out slightly too short. “I mean. New to it. Very new. Still figuring out the vocabulary.”

“What does that mean?”

He turned the mug in his hands. “About three months ago I started remembering things that didn’t happen to me. Places I’d never been, people I’d never met. Took a few weeks before anyone could explain it.” A pause. “Apparently I’m a Vampire Ancestor. Which is apparently a thing that exists.”

I looked at him. He had the slightly sheepish expression of someone who’d said something absurd and knew it.

“What’s a Vampire Ancestor?”

“I can walk you through it later,” Faith said. “It’s a whole conversation. Right now—” she gestured between us, “—the spell.”

I considered pressing, then let it go. The honest answer was that I’d known Daniel for most of my life and he’d never done a single thing worth worrying about. Whatever he was becoming, that hadn’t changed yet, and it wasn’t relevant to the next twenty minutes.

I thought about how I had apparently been the only normal person in my own life without knowing it. The orphan, the engineer, the man who’d chosen his own surname because no one had given him one worth keeping. Apparently that man had a vampire for a best friend and a VCD agent for a girlfriend. Past tense on that last one.

“It’s straightforward,” I said. “I already have what I need. There’s a ritual variant, which is what I’m doing, but in principle—” I stopped myself before I explained why I was using the ritual instead of the direct cast. Mentioning that I wasn’t confident in my own abilities required explaining why, and that conversation ended somewhere I wasn’t going. “The ritual version is just more reliable.”

It was also more accurate to describe it as a locator than a divination. The mechanics were closer to necromancy, working from the soul outward to find the body tethered to it. But I’d used the word divination seemed safer than admitting it was necromancy, so divination it remained.

“The floor,” Faith said. “How much space?”

“A metre, maybe a bit more. Clear surface.”

She nodded once and gestured toward the open space between the coffee table and the far wall. “Plenty.”

I crouched down and pulled the chalk from my ring, palming it so the retrieval looked like a jacket pocket. The floorboards were bare wood, smooth enough. I found the centre point by eye and pressed the chalk down.

“While I do this, you may as well tell me what you’ve already got. Drawing the whole thing will take a few minutes.”

Faith settled back against the sofa cushions. A small line appeared between her brows.

“There was magical residue at his flat,” she said. “After he went missing. Faint. The AOR filed it as ambient fluctuation, but—”

* * *

“—ambient fluctuation,” Faith said. “Which is what they say when they don’t want to file the paperwork.”

I kept drawing. The first ring came out clean, chalk pulling steady across the wood grain.

“There’s also been an uptick in vampire activity in the borough since he went missing.” She glanced sideways. “No offence.”

“None taken.” Daniel turned his mug again. He’d been doing that since he sat down, slow quarter-rotations, something to occupy his hands.

“Three nests that weren’t there six weeks ago,” Faith continued. “Could be coincidence. Could be something came through and disturbed the local hierarchy. I can’t prove the connection, but.” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“Liam wouldn’t just leave.” Daniel set the mug down finally. “That’s the thing. He doesn’t usually make impulsive decisions. He doesn’t go anywhere without a reason, and if he had a reason, he would’ve told me.” A pause. “He tells me things. Not everything, but. If he was planning something, I’d have known.”

Both of them were right, and neither of them knew how right they were, and I kept my eyes on the floor and drew the second ring inside the first.

They were looking for me. Both of them. Sitting in the same room as me, drinking tea, and they had no idea, and I thought about what it would take to just say it. I opened my mouth.

“Listen—”

They both looked up.

The chalk was still in my hand. My reflection caught faintly in the dark window across the room and I looked nothing like the person they were looking for. I looked at the circle on the floor instead.

“I’ve finished the circle,” I said.

I stood and stepped back to see the whole of it. The geometry held. Five points, equidistant, the inner rings properly nested, the dividing lines carrying the load-bearing angles at the junctions. I’d placed the components while I drew, a candle at each point, the chalk notation between them running in the older notation I’d pulled from the library text rather than the Academy shorthand. It looked, in the plain light of Faith’s living room, exactly like what it was.

A pentagram. On her floor. In chalk.

“Right.” I looked at them both. “I’ll start now. It may take a minute to produce anything.”

Daniel leaned forward on his knees to look at it. “And this tells us where he is?”

“If he’s locatable. Yes.”

I knelt at the designated anchor point, the topmost node, and pressed both palms flat against the chalk lines. The wood was cool. I pulled on the mana sitting in the room’s ambient field, thin and sluggish compared to Hell’s atmosphere, and fed it through the geometry in a slow, deliberate sequence, node to node, tracing the internal logic of the circle the way you’d trace a circuit to check for breaks.

No breaks.

The candles caught without flame touching them.

I pushed the activation through the final line, and the circle took the working.

The room went black.

* * *

The darkness wasn’t empty.

Something caught me by the sternum and pulled.

Not physically. My hands were still flat on the chalk lines, the wood still cool under my palms. But the part of me that had fed the working into the circle went somewhere else, very suddenly, the way sleep takes you mid-thought.

London opened beneath me.

I saw the river first, a grey ribbon catching the last of the evening light, and then the grid of streets spreading out from it in every direction, headlights moving through them like slow sparks. I knew the shape of it. I’d walked most of it, worked in it, spent eight years learning its logic. It looked smaller from here. Quieter.

Then something shifted. A tug, lateral and insistent, pulling my attention northwest, toward a point I couldn’t name but could feel with the same certainty I felt the floor under my knees. Not a direction. More like a recognition. The way you know a voice before you’ve parsed the words.

Whatever the circle had anchored to was there.

The candle nearest me guttered. The working began unravelling at the edges, the geometry losing pressure the way a held breath loses pressure, and I felt the pull attenuate, thin, snap.

The room came back in pieces. The floor. The chalk. The particular smell of Faith’s flat, something faintly floral over old carpet. The candles sat dim and ordinary in the electric light.

Neither of them spoke.

I sat back on my heels and looked at the circle. The notation was intact. The candles had burned maybe two centimetres each, which meant I’d been under for longer than it felt.

Daniel was watching me with his elbows on his knees. Faith had moved to the edge of the sofa, her posture very straight.

“Well?” Faith asked.

I needed to find it myself first. Confirm what I’d felt was what I thought it was, not an artefact of the working, not ambient resonance pulling the circle sideways. Take it apart properly before I handed it to Faith and whatever machinery came attached to her.

I picked up the chalk from the floor.

“The circle registered something.” I turned it over in my fingers. “Northwest. I need to run the calculation before I can give you an exact location.”

* * *

The conversation had gone in three full circles before anyone admitted it wasn’t going anywhere new.

Faith walked us to the door. She had that look she got when she’d run out of angles to push from—jaw set, hands loose at her sides, professionally at rest. Daniel lingered by the coat rack, hands in his pockets.

“Call us,” Faith said. “When you have the location pinned down. Don’t sit on it.”

“Tomorrow, probably.” I pulled on my jacket. “I want to verify the reading before I hand you a postcode.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

She held the door. The hallway light caught the planes of her face at the same angle it always had when I stood in this doorway, and I turned away before that particular observation went anywhere useful.

Daniel offered his hand. I shook it.

“Under better circumstances next time,” he said.

“Hopefully there won’t be worse ones.”

He smiled at that. Genuine, easy, the exact smile I remembered from fifteen years of it being directed at me from the other side of the expression.

I walked down the hallway.

Behind me, a flat palm connected with the back of someone’s skull. The sound of it was distinct.

“Ow—what was—”

“You were staring.”

A pause.

“She’s got a very—”

“Daniel.”

I kept walking.

The stairwell door swung shut behind me and cut off whatever defence he’d been building. I took the steps down at an easy pace, one hand trailing the banister, and found myself working through the geometry of it with the same clinical detachment I applied to most things lately.

My best friend was checking me out.

Which was, objectively, a strange sentence to sit with. And also, if I was being honest with myself in the privacy of a concrete stairwell, a completely understandable response to the current arrangement. I’d seen this body in a mirror. I understood the physics.

If the situation were reversed—if Daniel had somehow ended up walking away from me in that particular silhouette—I would have looked too.

* * *

The ground floor door opened onto cold air and the particular smell of London at night, damp concrete and exhaust and something faintly sweet from a takeaway somewhere up the street.

I pulled out my phone and called Felix.

He picked up on the second ring.

“Vera.” The way he said it already had a smile in it.

“I need a pickup. Not where you dropped me, somewhere different.” I gave him a cross street two blocks east. “Can you manage fifteen minutes?”

“For you? Ten.”

“Fifteen is fine, Felix. Don’t get a ticket on my account.”

He laughed. “You know, most fares don’t worry about my driving.”

“Most fares haven’t been in your cab.”

Another laugh, warmer this time. “Fair enough. Fifteen minutes.”

“Good boy,” I said, and hung up.

I pocketed the phone and started walking.

He was going to be disappointed, arriving all eager energy only to find himself ferrying a passenger to a postcode. But he’d already collected a fairly generous tip for his trouble, and that particular transaction had closed two hours ago, so I didn’t spend long on the guilt.

The evening air was damp against my face. I walked at an easy pace, heels quiet on the pavement, and let my mind work the problem now that there was nobody to read my face while I did it.

The spell had given me a direction. Northwest. Specific enough to matter, vague enough to keep Faith at arm’s length for another day while I looked first.

The obvious answer: The real Lilithiel was walking around in it.

A comatose body didn’t go missing under its own power, which meant she’d woken up in mine at roughly the same moment I’d woken up in hers, and had promptly… gone somewhere. Done something. Chosen, for whatever reason, not to announce herself.

Which raised its own questions.

I turned the corner and found a sheltered doorway to wait in, arms folded against the chill.

The less comfortable possibility sat further back in my thoughts and I kept it there, at a distance, behind the working parts of the problem. A body in a dumpster was still a location. It still resolved. It didn’t mean anything yet that the spell had found something, only that it had found.

Headlights swept around the far end of the street.

* * *

Felix pulled up two minutes early, which meant he’d probably run an amber light somewhere.

I climbed in. The cab smelled faintly of air freshener and takeaway, same as last time.

“There’s one more stop.” I gave him the general area, northwest, and watched his face in the mirror do a quick calculation before settling.

“Right.” He pulled out. “Course there is.”

He drove for a minute without speaking, which for Felix was unusual enough that I noticed it. Then, with the careful casualness of someone who’d been preparing the question since he’d picked up the phone, “So what do you actually get up to? When you’re not, y’know. Having a night of it.”

“Research, mostly.”

“Yeah?” He glanced in the mirror. “What kind?”

“The kind that takes you places you didn’t expect.” I watched the streetlights slide past. “Finding things that went missing. Putting them back where they belong.”

“Like a detective.”

“Similar.”

“Huh.” He seemed to turn this over. “Pays well, does it?”

“Some nights better than others.”

That got a short laugh out of him. The tension in his shoulders dropped a fraction and he drove the rest of the way with his elbow on the door, comfortable again, which was where I needed him.

He pulled to the kerb.

“Here we are, then.”

“Thank you, Felix.” I leaned between the seats, close enough that he went very still, and pressed my lips to the corner of his jaw. My fingers found the seam of his jacket pocket, lifted the tracker out in the same motion, smooth and finished before he’d fully processed the first part.

I settled back.

“You’ve been genuinely helpful.”

He swallowed. Actually swallowed.

“I don’t know how long this takes,” I said, pulling the door handle. “Get some rest.”

“I… yeah.” His voice had gone slightly unfocused. “Yeah, alright.”

I stepped out and closed the door.

His cab idled at the kerb for a moment longer than necessary before the indicator clicked on and he pulled away.

I turned the tracker between my fingers once, then closed my fist around it and faced the building ahead.

Around the back of it, according to a spell that had already dissolved, was an answer I’d been looking for.

* * *

The warehouse sat behind the office block like an afterthought, squat and dark where everything around it carried at least a lit window or a functioning sign. I’d clocked it from the street before I’d consciously registered I was looking for it. The pull wasn’t directional exactly, more like the ambient pressure of Ardorkeep condensed into a single point, that low hum beneath everything in the city that I’d stopped noticing the way you stop noticing traffic.

Something was running here. Something sustained.

I walked the perimeter, hands loose at my sides, reading the building the way I’d read any unfamiliar system. Roller shutters down. A side door with a new padlock on old fittings. Three windows on the ground floor, dark. The ones on the upper floor were a different matter: two of them carrying a faint amber wash that didn’t match the cold LEDs of the streetlights. Warm. Internal. Someone had draped something over the glass rather than fitting blinds, and wherever the fabric didn’t quite meet the frame, light bled through in thin lines.

I could go up. The drain pipe on the east corner looked load-bearing enough, and the ledge below the second floor windows was wide. It was the obvious move. Efficient, low contact.

Then I rounded the back corner and stopped.

The man was leaning against the wall beside a fire door, arms folded, not quite blocking it. Big through the shoulders, ink up both forearms, skin pale enough to look grey in the amber spill from a security light overhead. He had the stillness of someone who’d stood in that exact spot many times before.

His eyes moved down, then up, slow and without apology.

“You lost?”

“No.” I let a small pause sit there. “I was hoping to come in.”

I’d already half-turned, calculating the drain pipe route, when the fire door swung open behind him.

He’d stepped aside.

I looked at the open door. Then at him. He’d gone back to his folded-arms posture, gaze ahead, as if he’d already forgotten making the decision.

That was quick.

I ran the geometry of it. A lone woman at the back of an unlisted warehouse on a Friday night, approaching a door she had no apparent reason to know existed, and the man just… steps aside. Which meant either the threshold had a very liberal admissions policy, or this body’s face had done the work before I’d opened my mouth.

Neither answer was particularly comforting.

The hum was stronger near the door. Warmer. Still not identifiable in any way I could pin down, just presence, density, the same quality the market districts of Ardorkeep had at peak hour when every stall was running and the ambient energy sat thick enough to taste. I’d never thought to question what generated it there. Here I had no frame for it yet.

I looked at the open door again.

She was in there. Had to be. The spell had dissolved but the coordinates were still behind my eyes, precise enough to put her in this building, on this block.

If she was running a ritual to go back, I needed to know. If someone was running one for her, I needed to know that more.

The man hadn’t moved. Wasn’t watching me. Just waiting, with the patience of someone paid to stand in one place.

I stepped through the door.

* * *

The corridor ran straight and dim, industrial strip lighting doing very little except confirming the floor was concrete and the walls were original brick. Someone had hung dark fabric along both sides, heavy velvet in deep red that absorbed the light rather than reflecting it. Underfoot, a runner that had no business being in a warehouse, thick pile, the kind that cost money. The hum was stronger here. Not louder. Denser.

Then I heard the first sound.

Low. Extended. Not pain.

I stopped, sorted the ambient noise the way I’d sort a signal from interference, and counted three separate sources before I’d taken another step. A closed door to my left. Somewhere above me, through the ceiling. Further down the corridor where the fabric parted around a corner I hadn’t reached yet.

The smell hit next. Warm skin, perfume worn down to its base notes, something copper underneath everything. I catalogued it without deciding to.

The corridor opened.

I’d expected equipment. Racking, maybe. Pallet spaces. Whatever a working warehouse held when it was actually being used for storage.

What I got was low furniture and candlelight and bodies arranged across it in various configurations, some clothed, most not entirely. Booths along the far wall with heavy curtains half-drawn. A bar along the right side, proper bottles, a server moving with practiced quiet. The ceiling had been dressed somehow, dark draping that ate the height and made the space feel contained. Intimate. A dozen conversations happening at once, none of them loud.

I stood at the entrance and understood why the outside of this building had felt like Ardorkeep.

Not because Lilithiel was running a ritual. Not because anything hellish was happening here. The market districts back home ran on that pressure because desire aggregated there, dozens of succubi and their prey in continuous proximity, the ambient energy of hunger and satisfaction cycling through the air until it was just the texture of the place. I’d breathed it so long I’d stopped identifying it as anything except how Hell felt.

This was the same mechanism. Different people. Same principle.

Which meant she was here because of course she was. Whatever soul had woken up in my old body, it had been a succubus before it had been anything else. A place like this would register as home unlike most of the London.

I moved further in, keeping to the edges, running a slow scan. The patrons broke into two categories. Most looked human—flushed, relaxed, that particular quality of attention given freely and completely to whoever sat beside them. The kind of focus that didn’t usually come without assistance. But scattered through the room, a different type. Colder. Deliberate. A man in a dark jacket turning a chalice slowly in both hands, the liquid inside too deep a red to be anything from a bottle behind that bar. A woman in the corner booth, hair fallen back from her neck, and the person beside her hadn’t lifted their face yet but wasn’t drinking from a glass.

So Faith’s increased vampire activity wasn’t a patrol problem. Someone had opened a dining room.

The question was which direction the causality ran. Did this place draw Lilithiel, or had Lilithiel drawn this place to her?

Or, the third option, neither my body nor her were here for a reason I hadn’t worked out yet.

“You look like you’re trying to decide something.”

The man was already beside me. I hadn’t tracked his approach, which was information. He was maybe forty, good suit, the particular ease of someone who hosted rather than attended. His smile was the practiced kind, wide enough to welcome, careful enough not to presume.

“First time can feel that way.” He tilted his head toward the room. “There’s no obligation. Some people just like the atmosphere.”

I looked at him, then at the room, then back.

“Who runs this?”

A small adjustment in the smile. Not offended. Re-evaluating.

“That depends on what you’re looking for.”