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Unfortunately, His Minions tend to like the water, too. A quick scan of the surface reveals nothing. No enemies. No structures where they might be hiding. They’re probably all submerged.
No biggie. I have a spell for that, too. I trace a few complicated sigils in the air on either side of my neck, and the skin moves and splits, forming gills. My lungs grow new pathways, muscle and sinew moving and shifting to accommodate the new airways, and the endodermis thins to create natural filters beneath the slits of my gills.
There. Now to take care of my mobility underwater. I step out of my boots and slip my rings into my pockets. With my feet and hands bare, I cast the necessary spells to give me webbing between my fingers and toes.
This is as close as I’ll ever be to becoming a mermaid. I don’t give myself a full tail, though, because I’m in jeans, and I’d rather not have the spell wear off and leave me half-naked and surrounded by envy demons who are just itching to get their greasy hands on a human chick to mate with. Ew.
With my transformation complete, I wade into the thick waves and open my senses to the currents. Another infernal trick, one that I’ve yet to put into practice, but theoretically I should be able to track even weak, low-level envy demons through the trails of energy they leave in their wake. Every living thing, whether mortal or immortal, has a traceable life force. Envy demons, by their nature, leave waves of jealousy wherever they go. Little green trails in the ether, crisscrossing through the murky waters. I zero in on the weakest energy trails first, hoping I don’t bump into an upper-level demon by accident.
Minutes stretch by, warped by the weird physics of Hell, before I find one close enough to hunt.
The whole thing reeks of a trap. This guy is puny, barely half my size, and for some odd reason it’s all by itself out here in the waters. Demons in general aren’t the most caring and nurturing of individuals, but even they tend to keep the weaker of their kind protected when possible. This dude is probably bait.
And I’m about to bite the hook.
I swim slow circles around the diminutive envy demon, testing to see if it senses me. So far, so good; it’s just tooling along, poking a damned soul with a pitchfork in the most annoyingly stereotypical torture scene I could’ve imagined. The thing is just toying with the soul, not really even doing any astral damage to the poor damned being.
Well, I guess at the very least I’m ending a damned soul’s torture early. Score one for the good guys? I don’t really know how that works out. The deceased must have done some terrible, envious things to get damned to this corner of Hell, but does that mean they’ve gotta endure this bullshit foralleternity? I guess it’s not my call … but I’m on a mission, so if the Almighty has indeed determined this person gets eternal punishment down here, He’s gotta find another envy demon to dole it out. This one’s mine.
Time to get busy. Inch by inch I swim towards the hopefully unsuspecting demon, prepping my first offensive spell. It freezes mid-poke a nanosecond before I release the magic, yellow eyes widening in horror as the charged energy makes a beeline for its tiny body.
Flaying something that small doesn’t take long. Green blood muddies the waters even more, and the damned soul swims off, probably thinking it’s free. Dumbass.
I realize then that I don’t have any way of bringing proof of my kills back to Az on the surface. I conjure a rope and a large sack, tying the rope around my waist and gagging as I stuff the flayed demon skin into the sack before securing the other end of the rope to the bag.
A voice cuts through the water, and I almost flay my damn self as I nearly jump out of my skin.
“See what I told you guys? She came right to us!”
Slowly, carefully, I turn around, charging my hands with the next spell in my roster. Behind me float a dozen envy demons, each one larger than the last.
The good news is there’s enough of them there for me to practice the other eight methods I need.
The bad news is that at least three of them have auras the size of Buicks.
Upper-level envy demons.
I’m royally screwed.
Chapter 16
Asmodeus
Callie’s taking too long down there. I lost all sense of her when she cast the spells necessary to hide from demonic detection.
Have I sent her to her doom?
Off in the distance, the greasy water churns. Flashes of light pierce the surface, and a whirlpool of activity clues me in to Callie’s location. There’s no way a damned human soul is fighting its torture that hard. That has to be my Calliope.
I rush to shed my human glamour, taking demon form and preparing to dive in. With that much turbulence in the water, she has to be under attack by multiple demons.
Before I can leap, though, the air around me crackles with familiar energy as reality warps nearby. I whip around towards the new arrival, ready to fight, and my jaw drops when I see who just shifted behind me.
There, water-logged and gasping for air, stands Callie … with a burlap sack tied to her waist, dripping greenish blood.
She sheds the rope and gestures, casting the necessary spells to return to her natural form. The heaving gills resorb into her neck, and the webs fade from between her fingers and toes. She grabs the sack and tosses it at me before bending to pick up her discarded boots.
“There. Should be enough pieces in there to equal nine demons.” She pauses with one foot halfway in a boot, then conjures a towel to dry her feet before putting the boots on. “I sure as Hell hope you can tell that I used nine different techniques, because I’m not doing that again any time soon unless it’s life or death.”
