Raquel, who had been as still as a mannequin during their encounter with the security guard, gasped and backed away as blood trickled from his skull down the stone steps.

“I was handling it,” Rodrigo said.

“Yes, poorly. Honestly. Agreeing to hand over your blade to that lout as if he had you at a disadvantage. Pathetic.”

“Thanks,” Leila said as she walked over to the body. She snatched the shotgun from the ground and searched the pouches of the man’s vest, pulling out extra ammunition. For once, Rodrigo was glad he wasn’t in control because her response caught him completely off guard. It was as if the man’s death hadn’t fazed her at all.

“Maybe this one isn’t such a waste of space after all,” Resent said.

“You didn’t have to,” Carlito muttered.

“Sorry? I don’t comprehend whimpering, brat. Speak up if you have anything worth saying.” The gruffness of Resent’s voice made Leila flinch, seeming to just realize how dramatically Rodrigo had changed.

“I said you didn’t have to do it,” Carlito repeated. “Kill him like that. I could have talked him down. No one had to die.”

Resent stared at him, as if genuinely contemplating his words, then burst into a fit of raucous laughter. When he settled down, he wiped away welled up tears. “Oh, how I so look forward to seeing the naivete melt off you.”

“Are we switching back?” Rodrigo asked.

“Considering you were nearly killed by a human, no, not anytime soon. I’ll actually neutralize threats instead of kowtowing to them.”

“The demons are bad enough,” Raquel said. “I can’t believe there’s guys screwed up enough to be perving out during all this.”

“Sweetie, the biggest creeps will only take this as an incentive to get creepier,” Leila said. She had tied her curls into a low ponytail and removed her earrings in what seemed an effort to avoid inviting any more unwanted attention. She was peering through the glass panes of the door and into the apartment building’s lobby. “Should we go inside? See if he kept anything useful behind the security desk, like more guns or ammo?”

“But...what if his family lives in there?” Carlito asked.

“What does it matter? If they’re hostile, they can join their degenerate patriarch,” Resent said, prodding the man’s corpse with his foot. He was reaching for the gilded door handle when something faint that resembled a howl became audible to them.

“W-what was that?” Raquel asked.

“Never mind the spoils. Onward.” Resent hurried across the street with the others behind him. He vaulted over the chest-high slanted stone wall that wrapped around the park’s perimeter, not breaking his stride while the others clambered over it.

“Sounds like wolves,” Rodrigo said.

“Hell’s hounds are superior in every aspect to such lower life forms. As a pack, they can easily bring down ogres.”

All of them were on edge as they kept to the park’s paved roads, careful not to pass underneath any bridges where they would be totally blind. In their umpteenth stroke of bad luck, most of the cast iron lamp posts were off. The lights from the surrounding buildings shining through the spaces between the tree branches, many denuded by winter, provided little illumination.

Hardly another person was in sight, which made sense. The park was near closing time. Attractions like the zoo or carousel had shut down hours earlier. Most joggers, tourists, and even the homeless had probably gone indoors when this all began, hunkering down for the night. The few people they did come across, saw a belligerent boy crusted in blood from head to toe and with hair spiky enough it could have been the weapon responsible, and found any other direction to go in.

As Rodrigo watched Resent step foot onto the wooden walkway of the curving Bow Bridge, he found the sight of the lake glimmering beneath it in the moonlight vaguely threatening, as if demonic acid-spitting mermaids would pop out any second. They paused in front of a green sign posted by one of the few working lamps that informed them they were entering the Ramble, a famous bird-watching spot. A red marker on the map indicating their location showed they’d been going the wrong way, having veered off to the left.

A flashlight flicked on behind Resent as he continued forward, the wobbling beam of light cutting through the darkness ahead, and sending restless squirrels scampering away.

“Shut that off,” he hissed, without turning to see who was responsible.

“You don’t know where you’re going because none of us can see anything,” Raquel said.

“I can. And so can other demons. Off.”

The same warped howling filled their ears, louder this time. It was high-pitched and warbling, the haunting noise echoing from every direction. Resent came to a halt.

Raquel’s face slammed into the back of his shoulder as she was putting her flashlight keychain away. She stumbled backward. “Ow! What’s wrong with you? Why’d you stop?”

“All of you, conceal yourselves in the shrubbery. Keep a fair distance from one another. Do it now,” Resent ordered.

Carlito and Leila did so right away. Raquel stuck around. “Why? And where’s my bro—”

Resent clamped Raquel’s lips shut between his thumb and index finger. “Listen here, you little ingrate. In case you failed to notice, your brother just proved inept at keeping you lot safe. One useless human would be burden enough. Three of you are an affliction. So if you fancy serving yourself up for the hounds to feast upon and lightening the load, be my guest. Otherwise, if you have any interest in staying alive, you will follow my every command.”

Raquel glared at Resent, eyes burning with defiance, but then multiple howls tore through the air in rapid succession, and she ran off.

“You’re not leaving my sister to them,” Rodrigo said with an edge to his voice.

“Yes, yes, of course not. Because what a terrible loss that would be.” Resent tightly wrapped his hands in the black and purple nebulae like he was wearing a second pair of gloves. As he approached one of the tallest oak trees in the vicinity, spikes formed on the knuckle of every finger except his thumbs. He punched into the trunk with his left hand. Then did the same with his right and pulled out his left. He climbed it with impressive speed, reaching a thick branch and squatting on his haunches, as he looked below.

Minutes passed, and the howling died down. Rodrigo began to think Resent was overreacting. Then they crept into sight. He counted six of them, but there might have been more. Their pitch-black fur made them meld into the shadows. He could only spot them because their entirely silver eyes were glowing. They padded along the narrow winding path, sniffing their surroundings.

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“Won’t they smell the others?” Rodrigo asked.

“Possibly. However, there are humans everywhere, and they don’t have our specific scent, so if fortune favors us, they’ll pass us by.”

When one wandered toward a working lamp, Rodrigo got a better look. It was huge. Closer to a horse than a wolf and with brawny hind legs twice as large as its forelegs. Its long, pointed ears, covered in fur, jut out of the upper part of its head, which was skeletal.

“Perfect, Dreadhounds,” Resent said.

“What?”

“As in, of Dreadmus, Hell’s capital. The hounds are titled by what cities they were born and trained in. Only hounds aligned with Dreadmus don masks crafted from the bones of their first kills.”

One of the bushes rustled. Every hound locked onto it at once, converging on the bush and growling as they drew nearer.

“Dammit! Surrounded by incompetence,” Resent said as he got to his feet.

Before he could dive from the refuge of the tree, screams came from farther down the path. The pack spun and darted after a man and woman who had broken into an all-out run.

The tension left Resent’s limbs. “Excellent. As long as they have those two to play with, they should forget about whichever one of our brigade of halfwits went spastic.”

The hounds were so obscenely fast, they would pounce on the couple in seconds. Unlike the horde of suffering people from earlier, Rodrigo might make a difference here. “We should help them. Maybe you could scare that pack off just by showing up.”

“Let me understand this. You expect the Prince of Hell to fight against his fellow demons, more so, his own subjects, for the sake of some insignificant humans?”

“All right, let me just—”

“Be killed in seconds? Because that’s what would occur without my intervention. Now, I know your sense of self-preservation is tenuous at best, but why risk the lives of your kith and kin over complete strangers?”

Though Rodrigo hated to admit it, Resent was right. He wanted to help, and allowing these people to essentially be used as sacrifices, even to lure the hounds away from his family, was flat-out the worst thing he’d ever done. But what good would he be to Raquel and Carlito if he ended up dead? As long as they were vulnerable, he couldn’t act impulsively.

It was minutes later when Resent regrouped with the others down on the ground. The couple had run far enough to be out of sight by the end. Their screams had lasted mere seconds before dying with them. If there was the thinnest silver lining, it was that the hounds didn’t play with their prey. Their howling faded as they got farther away.

Rodrigo half-expected someone to call Resent out on letting those two die, or at least talk about how horrible it was. But other than the trembling that had become a natural state for them since the hotel, no one seemed to have much of a reaction. Maybe it was because with all they’d seen, two more deaths paled in comparison. Or maybe it was because the cries of people being butchered already surrounded them, and had become like white noise.

“What were those things?” Carlito asked as they reached the park’s exit. “I couldn’t see anything.”

“Hounds,” Resent said.

“L-like Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog of the underworld?”

“Never heard of it. Sounds like more rampant human imagination. Though demons having multiple heads isn’t unprecedented.”

“Kay,” Leila said. “So there’s the goth knights, the douchey little winged ones, the not-so-gentle giant, and now...hounds. What else do we have to look forward to?” She started off trying to sound blithe, but by the end, her cracking voice was pleading, as if hoping Resent would say they’d already seen the worst Hell had to offer.

“Far too many races to delve into.”

When they finally arrived across the street from the museum, the others all seemed on their last legs. Carlito was especially exhausted, wiping beads of sweat from his forehead and fighting to catch his breath. Resent took one look at him and shook his head, repulsed.

On the broad staircase of the Met, flanked by a pair of square granite fountains, each spouting dozens of jets of water arcing into the air, a brutal battle between diavoliks and a SWAT team was in progress. Armed with assault rifles, you would think the officers would at least be on equal footing with the demons, brandishing swords and spears. But with bullets that were barely denting the armor of the diavoliks, the police were struggling to keep them at bay.

“Uh, what’s that?” Carlito asked, pointing up into the distance. They followed his finger and saw a gray, flying figure carrying a screaming person. At first there was one, then several others appeared, each of them holding at least one captive.

“The malformed,” Resent said.

“Why do they call themselves that? Low self-confidence?” Rodrigo asked.

“They didn’t choose the name. It was given to them when a diavolik and imp first procreated and wound up dissatisfied with the result. Of course, now there are so many malformed that they can mate with each other.”

Rodrigo gagged. “Thanks for that lovely mental image.”

“What are they doing with those people?” Raquel asked.

“Transporting prisoners to Hell, where they will use them as slaves, meat, or for a brief bit of amusement. No matter, they seem to be leaving.” Resent took out Rodrigo’s vibrating cellphone and stared at it. It was unclear whether he was at a loss or just didn’t want to bother, but he returned control.

Adena spoke as soon as Rodrigo answered the phone. “I see you made it.”

Maybe it was because everyone around him was in such an uproar that he was starting to find the sound of her calm, even-tempered voice a salve for his frayed nerves. “Yeah. We’re on East 82nd Street, across from the museum. Now, where—”

Raquel shrieked.

Rodrigo spun and saw a malformed lifting her into the sky. Like the imps, it had a tail and pointed ears, though like diavoliks still had some white in its eyes. Where its mouth should have been, there were folds of torn flesh that looked like lips had been materializing, but gave up halfway. Up close, it wasn’t as big as he thought. Being about the size of a tall man with an athletic build, it was its proportional wingspan that made it come across as far larger.

Leila was already shooting with her shotgun, in a picture-perfect stance, firing again and again at the demon’s back to avoid hitting Raquel. Each ear-ringing blast hit the demon, but failed to pierce its skin, or even stun it.

Rodrigo tossed a backpedaling Carlito the phone. The malformed was airborne with Raquel flailing in its arms, when Rodrigo slammed the nebulae into the ground and gripped its right wing. He was hoping to weigh it down, but the demon didn’t seem to notice him. He put his left palm inches from the malformed’s head and formed the sphere. Four spikes protruded from it and...bounced harmlessly off its skull?

If nothing else, he now had the malformed’s undivided attention as it dropped Raquel. Before he could let go of its wing, the malformed shot into the sky. It flew in a frenzy, trying to shake him off, but Rodrigo was holding on for dear life as they were now hundreds of feet in the air and rising. The more their altitude increased, the further his vision deteriorated as the frigid wind stung his eyes.

Unlike every other demon so far, the malformed was silent. Nothing but the sound of beating wings. And that was only more frightening. Rodrigo drew his sword, stabbing at the demon’s other wing, but again, he might as well have been striking a boulder.

“Do you not yet grasp that a malformed’s skin is thicker and their bones denser than the majority of demons?" Resent asked. "If your plan is to let this mute bastard drag us into deep space, then let me know now.”

Rodrigo sheathed the blade. So if stabbing this thing wasn’t bothering it, he only had one other option before he completely succumbed to his rising sense of vertigo. With his free hand, he stretched the nebulae into a chain and wrapped it around the malformed’s throat. He was hoping to somehow steer its flight, but all it accomplished was alarming the demon. It began plunging toward the earth.

“Oh, crap.” If Rodrigo kept clinging to the malformed, within seconds, he’d end up a stain on the pavement. He dissipated the nebulae and released the wing. The malformed grabbed for him without stopping, but it was descending faster than he was. Once the view stopped looking like it did from the Spiral’s summit, Rodrigo brought out the nebulae so that he could parachute down. But the demon was already launching itself back up at him.

As Rodrigo looked at the oncoming malformed, in wide-eyed horror, a column of blistering flame erupted from the ground. With the silence its lack of a mouth cursed it to, the demon didn’t make a peep as the flesh melted off its bones, leaving a charred skeleton behind. Rodrigo landed without difficulty, and the others hurried over to him.

“What was that fire just now?” Leila asked.

Rodrigo glanced around until he spotted her. The white-haired girl dressed in black was standing on the sidewalk, unfazed by the pandemonium that surrounded her. “Adena.”