Hellfire – Princess of Hell

The light had changed.

I first noticed it through the stillness in Valerian’s chest, which was the sign that the room was accepting its morning. The music had dropped to a low, ambient level. Half of the people in the booth were asleep: their eyes were closed and they were breathing slowly with no intention of moving. The other half were just horizontal.

Rose’s arm had gone slack across my stomach.

I lay there for exactly three seconds, cataloguing the ceiling, and then it hit me.

The body.

I’d come here to find my body, and I realised that I had spent the better part of eight hours having sex.

To be fair to myself, the sex had been instrumental. The social access, the cover—

No, it had been good. That was the honest answer. This body found it easy and pleasurable, and I’d stopped fighting that fact weeks ago, so there was no point manufacturing outrage about it now. The taxi driver hadn’t been instrumental either, if I was counting. Some things were just what they were.

But I had an objective. I had walked into this building with a specific, concrete objective, and I had accomplished none of it.

I sat up.

Rose stirred, made a small sound of protest, and went still again. Valerian's eyes opened—vampires, apparently, didn't so much sleep as pause—and he watched me stand up without comment.

“Refreshing myself.” I smoothed the hem of my dress. “Back in a moment.”

He accepted this with a slight inclination of his head.

The corridor to the restrooms was quiet, just the distant pulse of the sound system and someone’s muffled conversation behind a closed door. I pushed into the same room I’d used before, turned the lock, and stood over the basin.

In the mirror: dishevelled hair, cosmetics that had survived better than they had any right to, and the look of someone assembling a plan from inadequate materials.

Right.

I drew the geometry from memory, smaller this time. The mana cost was negligible. The spell activated in seconds—I felt the familiar pull of it orienting, reaching, and—

Same result. All around me. Inside the building, or near enough that the resolution couldn’t distinguish.

The spell wasn’t imprecise. I’d run it three times now and it kept returning the same answer with the same confidence. Which meant either the body was genuinely somewhere in this building that I hadn’t accessed, or—

I let the geometry dissolve and stared at the condensation running down the glass.

Something was interfering.

If I had it right. This was something closer to deflection. The spell was finding a target and reporting it, but the target wasn’t behaving the way a freely moving person should. It was staying put. It had been staying put all night.

A shielded room. A warded container. Some kind of dampening field that kept the signature geographically anchored but prevented meaningful triangulation.

I turned the tap on and off without using it.

Somewhere behind walls I hadn’t been shown, in a building whose floor plan I still only knew from one walk-through six hours ago, in a city I’d grown up in but was navigating as an entirely different species—my body was sitting still and waiting.

Or it wasn’t waiting at all, and that was the worse possibility.

I unlocked the door.

* * *

Valerian’s eyes tracked me the moment I cleared the corridor entrance.

I slid back into the booth, finding the gap Rose had vacated—she’d migrated toward Julian at some point, the pair of them a tangle of limbs at the far end. Harper had her head on Silas’s shoulder. Eleanor was gone entirely.

“Hope I wasn’t long.”

“You were.” Valerian refilled his glass from a bottle that hadn’t been there before. “But I kept myself occupied.”

He offered me the bottle. I held out a glass and he poured without being asked.

“Your friend.” He settled back, watching me over the rim of his own drink. “Still on your mind?”

“Still on my mind.”

“And no closer to finding him.”

I turned the glass in my fingers. The liquid was dark and warm-smelling, something fortified and very old. “I’ll circle back. The night’s been good regardless.”

That earned a small, satisfied sound from him—not quite agreement, but acknowledgment.

“Can I ask you something?” I set the glass down. “About the venue.”

“Anything.”

“Is there anything here? Structurally, I mean. Magically.” I kept my tone incidental, the kind of question you ask while looking at something else. “Something that might interfere with spellwork.”

He paused. A considered pause, not a suspicious one. “What prompts that?”

“I may have tried a locating spell or two.”

“May have.”

“In the restroom. Yes.”

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. He found that funny, or found me funny, which wasn’t entirely different. “And it behaved strangely.”

“It gave me an answer I couldn’t use.”

He set his glass down on the low table, lacing his fingers together. “There isn’t anything within the building itself that I’m aware of. No deliberate dampening. No active wards beyond the standard privacy measures.” He paused again, and this time it was the pause of a man retrieving something from a long way back. “Though.”

I waited.

“There are leylines beneath us.” He said it the way someone mentions a well-known landmark—useful information, not a revelation. “Converging, if I recall correctly. Somewhere under this block.”

I’d read about them. The library had three texts that touched on the phenomenon: ambient mana running in concentrated channels through the earth, vast and slow, the way deep water moves beneath still surface. Almost absent in Hell, which was part of why ritual magic in Gehenna required more elaborate sacrificial scaffolding. Here, in the mortal realms, they apparently ran everywhere if you knew how to find them.

Powerful. Disruptive to precision work if you didn’t account for them. And I hadn’t—because I’d copied the locating geometry out of a reference text and trusted that following the recipe correctly would produce a reliable result, which was, in retrospect, exactly the kind of assumption that separated someone who understood a spell from someone who could merely execute it.

The circle had found something real. I was nearly certain of that. Whether it had found what I was looking for, or whether it had latched onto the leyline convergence beneath the building and returned that as a target—I didn’t have the theoretical grounding to say.

I picked up my glass and drank.

“That would do it,” I said. “Or might do it. I’m still working out which.”

“Frustrated?”

“Thinking.”

He smiled at that, properly this time. “You think the way other people hold their breath.”

I didn’t answer, because there wasn’t anything useful to say to it and because he wasn’t entirely wrong. I finished what was in the glass and set it down with a small, definitive click.

“I should go.” I reached for my coat from wherever it had ended up—under Harper’s knee, as it turned out. She shifted without waking. “It’s very late.”

“Or very early.”

“Those are the same thing at this point.” I stood, shook out the coat, and draped it over my arm. The room looked exactly as I’d found it hours ago, minus the people and plus the pleasant wreckage of a long night. Rose stirred at the movement, opened one eye, and closed it again.

Valerian rose with me, because he was that kind of person. “If your friend surfaces.”

“You have the number.”

He did. I’d given it to him around the third hour, when I’d decided he was more useful as a contact than a distraction. He inclined his head and didn’t push for more, which confirmed the judgement.

I crossed the floor toward the exit, heels quiet on the floor, and didn’t look back.

* * *

The fire door swung shut behind me with a sound like a full stop.

Cold morning air. The sky above the rooftops had gone that particular shade of grey that comes just before colour returns to things—not dawn yet, but the threat of it. The street was empty except for a fox picking its way along the opposite kerb, unbothered.

I stood there for a moment and took stock.

The whole night, and she hadn’t surfaced. The locating spell had given me something real—I still believed that—but the leylines had muddied it enough that I couldn’t trust the result. I had a vampire’s contact information, a collection of experiences I wasn’t going to catalogue in detail, and the same problem I’d walked in with.

Not entirely wasted. The night had fed me, in more than one sense, and Valerian was a useful thread to keep. But I was going back to Gehenna tomorrow, and the honest assessment was that I’d achieved nothing with respect to the one task that actually mattered.

I started walking.

The fox watched me pass and went back to the bin it was investigating. Sensible creature.

I turned the problem over as I walked. Faith was the obvious move—she had resources, she had access, and she already knew something was wrong. But the AOR would have her lines monitored, probably had since she started asking questions, and walking into that conversation without a plan was a way to convert a small problem into a large one. If she didn’t believe me—and the range of outcomes there ran from mild to catastrophic—I’d have an angry ex on my head that thought I was a demon from hell trying to trick her.

Daniel, though.

He already knew something had happened to me, had been looking on his own, and he’d come into whatever was developing between him and the supernatural with open eyes and a fairly steady head. More than that: he knew me. The real shape of how I thought, not the surface version people got. If anyone was going to hear I woke up in a succubus body and I’ve been in Hell for a month and not immediately call someone, it was him.

And he was close. Thirty minutes on foot, maybe less.

Not the phone, though. If not Faith’s line then Daniel’s was probably next on someone’s list, and even if it wasn’t, I didn’t want this conversation going through a device at six in the morning with uncertain ears.

I checked my coat pocket out of habit. The phone was there, the ring was on my finger, and I felt—

Fine. That was the word. The pavement was damp under my heels and I was walking through a city that smelled of rain and diesel and something frying somewhere distant, and I felt fine. Good, even, in the dense, settled way that followed a long night rather than a restless one. The cold wasn’t bothering me. My feet weren’t sore.

I’d stopped noticing, somewhere in the past few weeks, how cleanly this body moved through the world. Tonight should have left traces—hours of exertion in a hot, crowded room, and then whatever else had occupied the small hours—but there was nothing. No grit behind the eyes, no stiffness, no residue from anything I’d touched or anyone who’d touched me. The skin stayed clean regardless. Clothes were a different situation, but I’d already solved that through the ring.

It was useful, I thought. Objectively, practically useful. Nothing more complicated than that.

Ahead, the sky between the rooftops had started to go pink at the very edge.

I turned north toward Daniel’s street.

* * *

Daniel’s street was quiet enough that my heels were the only sound on it.

Victorian terracing on both sides, wheelie bins out for collection, a light on in one upstairs window two houses down. His place was dark. I stopped at the gate and stood there with my hand on the latch and let myself look at the front door for a moment.

Part of me wanted the lights to stay off. Wanted him to be at Faith’s still, or asleep with his phone off, or anywhere that would give me another twelve hours before I had to sit across from him and say it. The night had been long and the problem was still the problem and doing this now, in yesterday’s clothes with the sky going pink behind me, was not how I’d planned it.

The other part had been carrying this for a month and was tired of the weight.

I opened the gate.

The bell produced a sound somewhere inside—one of those old mechanical ones, not a buzzer. I waited. The street stayed quiet. I was already composing the retreat: gone for a walk, thought I’d try, I’ll ring later—

Footsteps on stairs.

The lock turned, and then the door opened, and Daniel stood there in a grey t-shirt and track bottoms with his hair doing something chaotic on the left side, and for a second he just looked at me the way people look when their brain is still catching up.

“Lily.” He straightened. “What—has something happened? Did you find anything about Liam?”

His voice had gone careful, the way it did when he was trying not to alarm someone. I recognised the register. I’d heard it aimed at other people, never at me.

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

He pulled the door wider without asking anything else and stepped back to let me through.

The sitting room was exactly as it always was—throw blanket over the sofa arm, a mug on the side table that had probably gone cold hours ago, the lamp in the corner throwing everything amber. He’d left a book open on the cushion nearest the window. He moved it and gestured at the sofa and I sat, and he dropped into the armchair across from me and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

“So.” His eyes moved over my face. “Did you find him?”

I’d had the whole walk to figure out how to start this. Every approach I’d constructed had a flaw—too much preamble, too little, the wrong sequence of information. There wasn’t a clean entry point. There was only the thing itself.

“Daniel.”

He waited.

The lamp hummed. Somewhere outside a car moved through the street and its headlights swept across the ceiling and were gone.

I’d hospitalised three people for him once, at sixteen, and hadn’t hesitated for a second. I’d thought about that on the walk over. The body had been different, the stakes had been simpler, but the calculus was the same: some things you do because the alternative is worse.

“I’m Liam,” I said.

* * *

Daniel’s face did something complicated. He sat back an inch.

“Sorry?”

“I’m Liam.”

A beat. Then the corner of his mouth pulled, uncertain, like he was waiting for the rest of the sentence to arrive and explain itself.

“Lily.” He shook his head. “What’s actually going on? Did you find him or not?”

“Daniel—”

“Don’t.” The warmth in his voice dropped a register. “Don’t mess me around. If something’s happened to him just tell me straight.”

I looked at my hands in my lap. The ring caught the lamplight. I turned it once around my finger and thought about the sixteen different ways I’d rehearsed this on the walk over, and how none of them had survived contact with his face.

“You remember Mrs. Delilah’s office,” I said. “Year three. The jar.”

The muscle at the side of his jaw moved.

“The spider jar,” I said. “I had it. My idea, my jar, I put it in her desk drawer. You walked in at the wrong moment and she caught you holding it and you just—took it. Stood there and took the whole thing. I tried to say it was me and you talked over me, kept talking until I couldn’t get a word in, and you got two weeks of lunch detention and I got nothing.”

His mouth had stopped doing anything at all.

“I was furious at you for a week,” I said. “You thought it was because I felt guilty. It wasn’t. It was because you didn’t even ask.”

The mug on the side table. The lamp. The book he’d set face-down on the cushion beside him, spine creasing, which three years ago I would have leaned over and corrected without thinking.

“And then in secondary school,” I said, “year ten, those three from Mackenzie’s form who kept finding you at lunch. I followed them one afternoon. I didn’t plan past that, I just—I couldn’t watch it anymore.” I paused. “Hospital. Two of them. The third one could walk fine, he just couldn’t eat solid food for a bit.”

Daniel had gone very still.

“You never asked how they stopped,” I said. “I think you didn’t want to know.”

He stood up. Sat back down. His hand went to the back of his neck.

“Liam.” The name came out stripped of everything except the shape of it.

“Yeah.”

“You’re—” He gestured at me, at all of it, the white hair and the dress and everything that came with the body, and the gesture sort of ran out of steam halfway through. “You’re a woman.”

“Apparently.”

“How.”

“Long story.”

He looked at me for another second, then stood again, and this time he went to the window and stood with his back to me, one hand braced on the frame, looking out at the street going grey with early morning.

“How long?” He didn’t turn around.

“At least few hours,” I said.

He turned then, and his expression had settled into something I recognised—not calm, but the thing underneath panic, the part of him that kept moving when the obvious responses failed.

“Okay,” he said. “Then sit there and tell me everything.”

I pulled one knee up onto the sofa cushion and looked at him.

“Brace yourself,” I said. “Because honestly? What I look like right now is the easiest part of the whole story to believe.”

His eyes tracked the shift in the air as I let the glamour go—dark hair bleeding back to white, the horns rising clean from the sides of my forehead—and I watched his face do something it had never done in twenty-six years of knowing him.

“About six weeks ago,” I said, “I woke up in Hell.”

* * *

Daniel’s laugh came out small and tired, more breath than sound.

“And here I thought I was the strange one. Waking up with a thousand years of dead men in my head.”

“This isn’t a competition.”

“No.” He rubbed his face. “No, it really isn’t.”

He dropped back into the armchair across from me and sat for a moment with his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor between us. My tail moved against the sofa cushion without asking permission. I pressed it flat.

“Do you think she went somewhere?” he said. “The real Lily. With your body.”

“What else would explain it? Bodies don’t just vanish. I ended up in hers, it follows she ended up in mine.” I turned the ring around my finger once. “The question is whether she’s using it or whether someone’s using her.”

Daniel nodded slowly. He’d been processing the whole conversation the same way he always processed things that didn’t fit—quietly, steadily, building from what he knew outward. It was one of the things I’d always counted on.

“That den,” he said. “The warehouse. I’ll keep an eye on it. If he’s in there—if she’s in there—I’ll notice.” A beat. “Shouldn’t be an issue. Apparently I’m one of them now.”

“Please.” I meant it more plainly than I usually let myself mean anything. “My spell—I’m still not certain whether it pointed correctly or whether it was the leylines scrambling the output. I learned how to cast it, not what makes it work. And I won’t be able to stay long enough to run it again.”

“Why not?” He caught his own question. “Right. The Academy.”

“Yeah.” I shifted on the sofa. “I have to go back, otherwise my—” The word snagged. “Lily’s parents will come and collect me personally, and that conversation would be significantly worse than this one.”

Daniel looked at me for a moment.

“Are you going to tell Faith?”

“Are you serious?”

“Generally, yes.”

I stood up, which wasn’t entirely intentional, and went to the window. The street outside was Saturday-morning empty, the pavement still dark from overnight rain.

“First,” I said, “she might not believe me. Second, whatever was between us is finished now. That’s just the shape of things.”

“You don’t believe that second part.”

I didn’t answer.

“She told me why she ended it,” Daniel said. “After you disappeared. She said you almost died once and you didn’t even know it. Something from her work, came too close. She was scared it would happen again.” He paused. “She only told me because she thought it might help find you.”

I turned around.

“She blames herself,” he said. “Thinks that if she’d explained at the time you might have been more careful. Might still be here.”

The lamp on his side table threw a warm circle across the floorboards. Outside, a car passed without slowing.

“I’ll tell her,” I said. “At some point.”

“Make sure that point exists.”

“Daniel.”

“I’m just saying.”

I crossed back to the sofa and sat down, and for a moment neither of us said anything. The house was very quiet. Somewhere upstairs a pipe ticked once and went still.

He leaned back in the armchair and looked at me—really looked, the way he always had, like whatever he found would just be information.

“You know what gets me,” he said, and his voice had shed most of the weight it had been carrying since I arrived. “You. Of all people. Making friends. In Hell.”

“Don’t.”

“Genuinely. Liam Dawnstar, who I once watched go three weeks at university without learning anyone’s surname on purpose—”

“It just happened.” I could hear how flat I sounded and that only made it worse. “I wasn’t trying to.”

“That’s the funniest part.”

My tail flicked before I could stop it. I looked at the ceiling.

Daniel smiled. Not the polite version he kept ready for people he didn’t know. The real one, that had always meant he was genuinely, helplessly amused.

“Shut up,” I said.

He held his hands up.

* * *

The console loaded and Daniel handed me a controller without ceremony, the way he always had—not asking whether I wanted to play, just assuming the answer.

I took it.

We didn’t talk much for the first hour. The game was one I knew, an older fighting title with roster balance problems and hit detection I’d always found satisfying to exploit, and Daniel had clearly been putting in time since I’d last seen him because he wasn’t feeding me free openings anymore. I had to actually look for them.

“You’re better,” I said, after he landed a combination I hadn’t seen coming.

“Little bit.” He was already queueing the next round. “You’re a lot better.”

“I’ve been awake for the better part of six weeks. Constant.”

“That’s not what I mean.” He glanced sideways. “Your reactions. Last time we played you were good. Now you’re reading me a full second ahead.”

I didn’t have a clean answer for that. Whether it was the body’s architecture or five weeks of operating in an environment that would kill me for a lapse in attention, the result was the same. I watched his thumb on the joystick and knew his next input before it registered.

We played another three rounds. He started adapting his patterns, trying to introduce variables, and I caught myself leaning into it—the genuine interest of it, the back-and-forth—until I stopped tracking the screen and started tracking him instead.

He had his jaw set, eyes on the television, the loose-shouldered posture he always dropped into when something had his full attention. Brown eyes sharp and still. The kind of face that looked better in concentration than in repose, the architecture only landing properly when it had something to work against.

I looked back at the screen.

I did not pursue that line of thought. Daniel was my friend. He had been my friend since we were twelve years old in a children’s home that smelled of institutional carpet cleaner, and that was the complete context.

Except—

Aria was my friend. Isabella was my friend. I had been sleeping with both of them with the frequency and enthusiasm of someone who had entirely stopped pretending it was incidental.

The distinction I was trying to draw had developed some significant structural problems.

“Liam?”

I looked down.

My tail had wrapped around Daniel’s ankle.

It sat there, perfectly comfortable, doing absolutely nothing I had asked it to do.

“Sorry.” I pulled it back. “It does that. I can’t always—it doesn’t always check in first.”

Daniel stared at where it had been for a moment. Then he picked his controller back up.

“Focus,” I said.

“Right.”

He picked up the controller again. I caught the shift of fabric in my peripheral vision—something I wasn’t supposed to have noticed, something he was hoping I hadn’t noticed, and the problem crystallized with full clarity.

I had completely forgotten. I’ve been in this body for long enough to stop running the constant background check of what it was broadcasting. The angle of my legs. The way I’d been leaning toward him during the close rounds. The slight parting of my lips that this body defaulted to when I was focused on something I found interesting.

Whatever promises this body made just by existing in a room, it had been making them for the last four hours, and I’d been too comfortable to notice.

I set the controller on the cushion beside me.

“I should probably go.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t argue. Points to him. “Yeah, probably.”

He stood up and moved toward the hallway with the careful posture of someone concentrating on walking normally, and I pulled the glamour back into place.

“Don’t forget about summoning,” I said, at the door.

“I won’t forget.”

“And watch the warehouse.”

“I know.”

I stepped into the hallway and stopped. The decent thing to do was say it directly.

“I’m sorry. For that. I forgot to manage it—the way I move, the way I sit. It just runs in the background now. I should have been paying attention.”

Daniel leaned against the doorframe. His expression had settled back into something comfortable and recognizable, which I was grateful for.

“I know,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

I looked at him a moment longer. He looked back.

“Good to know you’re not dead,” he said.

“That’s a low bar.”

“Take what I can get.”

I turned and went down the stairs, and the door clicked shut behind me, and the morning was cold and damp and smelled of car exhaust and wet concrete, and I walked south toward the Underground with my hands in my pockets and my tail glamoured, very carefully not thinking about anything at all.