Aleister left me alone for a while, and after a few hours of quality time with my cuddly worm friends, I started to notice my vision was going in and out, turning the flickering orange firelight from the Lake black and white as I turned my head, like my eyes were an old television set with the color going out.

My vision was changing because those demon worms had magic in them, and my soul was absorbing it, just a trickle, as they burrowed inside me, just enough to bump my vision into astral space. I guess I didn’t need my body to be a wizard, and some things still worked, even in Hell.

I craned my neck during one particularly violent spasm and noticed I had several vivid lines of color sticking out my back - a variety of magic tethers connecting me to people and objects I had bonded with.

I recognized the thick golden tether that bound me to Lydia, and a robust red cable that seemed to be pulsing much stronger than the others.

I gave a mental tug on the golden tether, desperately reaching out to Lydia for help. But Lydia was too far away, and there were no convenient mirrors or portals here to boost my signal back to Earth.

But then, as I examined the manacles that were suspending me from the ceiling, I noticed a tiny amber line coming from my right hand. It wasn’t much compared to the others, just a thread, but it seemed to reach all the way up through the ceiling, maybe even beyond the confines of Hell itself.

I gave a mental tug on that amber thread and felt the knife, Cecilia’s Knife, the faerie blade Denise had hexed to me months ago, when I came into the potion shop and begged for her help.

That knife had been a Hardy family heirloom for centuries, and was intimately bound to Denise and her mother, connected by faerie magic that even demons did not completely understand.

That gift had saved my life countless times in combat, appearing in my hand like it had a mind of its own, perfectly placed to be my weapon of last resort, after all my magic failed.

Was this tiny thread strong enough to reach all the way back home? Was that knife bound to my body, or my soul?

I grabbed that thread as hard as I could and focused my will on it, using every drop of fear, pain, and longing in my soul to try and summon the blade, or get some kind of message back to Denise.

* * *

Lydia and Denise were side by side watching over my body, which was resting completely inert on a cot in Berkley Street HQ, just one in a room full of suffering people.

The screams of the patients had died down to a series of overlapping moans by now, now that everyone had been treated with magical first aid. The majority of cases had been healed and released to the basement shelter, leaving only the ones who still needed help from conventional medicine.

I had never seen my own body like this before, naked under a disposable hospital gown, lying so still I might as well have been dead.

Simon had stripped off my ruined clothes and thrown all my personal effects onto a tiny table beside the cot. I didn’t have much. My Datacore, the case that held my optics and my ear filaments, the clear plastic rectangle that served as my digital Bluestar badge, lip balm, a box of wet wipes, and the archaic set of metal keys I still had to use to get into my apartment.

And there was one more item on that table, the curved black handle with golden runes on it, the container for a faerie blade that could pop out in a fraction of a second, if a member of the Hardy family, or one of their champions, was holding it in their hand.

Azael was alternating the view from his mirror so I could watch the interplay of events between Earth and Hell, and I had to laugh a little as I saw Denise and Lydia sitting together beside me, desperately trying not to speak to or even look at each other.

Then Lydia said, “Can you hear that?”

She was competing with a bit of background noise as the room was filled with hospital sounds - moaning and clinking and clattering, set against the soft whispering of students working with patients, as Simon ordered them around like nurses.

Denise couldn’t hear anything, but as soon as Lydia said it, she felt something. Denise sprang to her feet and zeroed in on the knife at my bedside, slowly moving by itself as she watched.

“He’s calling for it,” Denise said, as the knife started to rattle and jump around on the table, desperate to get to me, but still too far away.

Denise grabbed it and started pumping power in, sending a jolt of her own magic back through the tiny tether to answer my call.

Denise put her hand on that knife handle back on Earth, and a manifestation of it popped into my hand. Not the physical knife, but a conjured version, as if the physical blade was just an anchor point for something more.

However it worked, I was suddenly holding a version of that tiny faerie blade, made solid somehow, in defiance of Hell. I could feel Denise pouring power into it and struggled to take that power into me.

Back on Earth, Denise shouted, “I can feel him!” and continued pouring power in as fast as she could.

I cannot possibly explain how this worked, and the stunt was apparently rare enough that it made Azael lean forward like he was taking notes.

However it happened, my soul drank every bit of power Denise could give me, outlining me in a warm amber glow, like I had just flipped a switch and turned on a light in Aleister’s torture chamber.

I had been swapping power with Denise for months before I joined Bluestar 7. Feeling it again made me realize how much I missed her and made me remember how good this was, the amazing sense of peace and clarity I felt, when I had Hardy family magic pulsing in my chest.

Would a healing spell work on a naked soul? I cast the purification part of Tobias’s spell and felt the magic trying to purge the worms from my body. But I had not really thought this through, and I didn’t realize how efficient the spell would be at performing its primary function.

This portion of the spell was made specifically to force out parasites, but most parasites in the human body are quite small, whereas many of these worms were longer and thicker than my fingers.

The spell was made to help people who had a bunch of tiny parasites, or maybe one big tapeworm, but I had just cast it on a metaphorical body that was hosting twenty or thirty big ones.

At first it just started ejecting them, forcing me to gag and thrash around, as the worms that had crawled inside various holes were now rushing to find the quickest way out.

Then the spell decided the worms weren’t evacuating quickly enough and started to set them on fire. The spell was healing the damage as fast as it burned me, but I still hadn’t learned anything for deadening pain.

The only thing more fun than spitting out thirty worms is spitting out thirty worms that are also on fire. They blazed and shriveled into husks on the floor, as they tried to frantically crawl away from me.

I had to twist my hand around and cut myself a few times, but I was finally able to cut through the first manacle and reach around to saw off the second, interrupted every few seconds as I paused to spit out a flaming worm.

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The manacles fell with an audible clanging noise as I landed a bit too hard and ended up standing on a pile of dead worms. Still naked and mostly helpless, but now I had a knife in my hand.

I spat out the last worm as I landed, left with nothing but a thick charcoal taste in my mouth, and a single wisp of smoke curling out my nose.

I had made too much noise, so the Enforcer demon who had brought the box of worms stepped into the chamber to see what was going on.

Enforcers are like the bouncers of Hell, absurdly tall and wide, muscled like 1980s bodybuilders, roughly human-shaped, usually naked with no genitalia, equipped with corresponding horns, teeth, and claws. This one was jet black with gold horns and gold claws, following some kind of uniform coloration that Mammon used for all his troops. The Enforcer was approximately eight feet tall.

A demon this big might have scared me last year, but I had just spent months as a working superhero sidekicking a goddess, tangling with an endless stream of Hunters and river monsters.

I was in agonizing pain after being tortured for three hours, and worst of all, I had just been forced to speak to my father.

I may have just been a naked guy with a knife at this point, but I was armed, I was desperate, and I was pissed. Looking back, all I can remember is being delighted that I had something to stab.

I started with his feet, stabbing and slicing anything I could reach while I crawled under his legs. I quickly learned that while the knife was solid enough to cut him, the rest of my body still passed right through.

But there’s a bit of a tactical advantage there, when you can walk right through your opponent and get behind him while he’s flailing around.

I couldn’t climb on top of him with an intangible body, so I just had to keep ducking and diving around him, stabbing whatever I could reach as fast as my arm could move.

It’s always a bit disconcerting, to see how well I fight when I just stop giving a fuck. There was no dignity to this performance, I just kept dodging and stabbing, dodging and stabbing, over and over again.

He hit me hard enough to knock me back a few times, but I didn’t need magic to roll and spring back up. He even knocked the knife away once, but the hex still worked, allowing me to summon it back into my hand.

I finally did enough damage to his legs to get him on his knees and started stabbing the back of his neck and head. Dark gold blood splashed everywhere, passing through my body, creating slick spots on the floor.

The demon finally collapsed, and I watched in the gray as his soul left his body, turning it into a useless pile of flesh.

Azael made me watch as I continued stabbing, wasting precious time as I took my anger out on something that was already dead. And then I may have mutilated the corpse a little.

Finally, I broke off and tugged again on my connection with Denise.

“He killed something,” she said, still standing by my bedside with the knife in her hand. “He’s still in Hell, but he killed something. Come on, Tim. Just one more miracle.”

Denise was still pouring power in, but I was only able to get a fraction of it through the tiny conduit she had used to hex the knife, and there’s no way it would be enough to get me home.

That left me with one option, a big fat tether that was bound to something right here in Hell. I was still bound to Taltorak, the priceless magic tome Xavier Kovach sold his soul for, presumably locked in some kind of infernal vault still in Baalphezar’s palace.

I might just be trading one prison for another, but surely anything was better than a torture chamber.

I wrapped my metaphorical hand around the big red tether and tried to connect, just as Aleister came through the door and realized I was free.

I had just enough time to flip him off before the tether got a grip and yanked me up through three layers of Hell. I was moving too fast to see much detail, but holy shit, guys - whatever temptations you’re facing on Earth, I promise, you do not want to end up down there.

I landed in a weird circular chamber, just big enough for a pedestal containing the book. Taltorak looked just like it always had, a jet-black tome with a red rune on the cover, with the cover and the paper made literally from demon skin.

This wasn’t a cursed demon book; this book started its life as an angel trophy and was used to teach magic to the first generation of men, struggling to survive after being kicked out of the Garden.

There is some debate over whether it was given to Cain or Abel, but Azael got really pissy when I asked about it.

The original tome was filled with benevolent magic, teaching early men how to purify food and water, encourage the growth of healthy crops, and even transmute one form of matter to another, as they slowly learned to build shelters for themselves.

I wasn’t exactly sure when demons stole it and dragged it down to Hell, but now it was a prison, containing the spirits of a thousand dead mages who had touched this book and been condemned for it, after writing their secrets inside.

I had never seen the actual book before, the permanent version that lived in Hell, as it projected a copy of itself into physical space on Earth.

The biggest difference between the Earth version and the Hell version? The Hell version was wrapped in chains - giant chains of red-hot iron, supposedly enchanted by the Devil himself.

That’s why they hadn’t torn Baalphezar’s fortress down. The whole thing had been built around this pedestal, built to contain the most valuable book in our universe.

Baalphezar may have been dead, but the other lords couldn’t just pick this thing up and take it down to their own layers. Taltorak was stuck here for eternity, until the Devil came back and took these chains away.

I put my metaphorical hand on the book, and the spirits inside screamed at me, a thousand overlapping screams, half of them screaming “Let us out!” and the other half asking, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Guys, I just escaped from Mammon and I’m making a break for it! I can cast, but I need magic! Does anybody know how I can get a power source down here?”

There was plenty of magic in the Lake of Fire, but you had to be channeling through a lord to get to it, leaving me right where I started.

The wizards in this book had a thousand crazy ideas for channeling magic in Hell, but they all required shit I didn’t have, like a physical body. And there was definitely no magic inside the book itself, none that any of us could access, since any lingering magic might be used to liberate the spirits inside.

I mumbled “Sorry!” to my imprisoned brothers and ran out the suspiciously open door to the rest of Baalphezar’s palace. Best guess? Somebody had tried to steal the book while they were fleeing and had left the door open behind them.

I looked down and realized I was wearing clothes again, a projection of clothes, I guess - dressed in my “good jeans” and a clean white shirt, my favorite white shirt, that Dad let me pick out from the discount rack at the HDI distro.

It had been a little too big for me then and was still a little too big for me now, but it was made from better material than anything else on the rack. I remember thinking this would hopefully be harder to rip, even if white would be harder to clean. I looked down and saw a matching pair of clean white sneakers, like I had just come from distro and picked out a new pair.

Your soul is a projection of how you see yourself; not your best self, not your worst self, but wearing the clothes that make you feel the most like who you are inside.

I was wearing the same outfit here in Purgatory, not wearing my good suit, not wearing my Bluestar jacket, stuck with this vision of myself that I had formed when I was sixteen years old.

I stumbled through the corridors trying to find my way back to something I recognized until I finally found the harem, looking very sad and empty now, with pillows scattered across the black marble floor.

The waterfall was still cutting through the smooth black rock that made up the back wall, but there was no magic here. Just an endless stream of water from the river Lethe, that would briefly allow you to forget the horrible things you’d done and stop worrying about the things you were about to do.

I emerged in Baalphezar’s throne room, to the site of my big victory. There was still a stain on the floor where I bashed his head open, but the torches that used to be lit up with angry purple magic were dark, confirming that this whole palace was now a magic dead zone, until one of Psongor’s lieutenants took over the job.

Whoever it was, he was gonna need a new throne, as I had smashed the elaborate chunk of black marble Baalphezar had been sitting on.

Had this whole escape been pointless?

* * *

Aleister was really hoping to handle this on his own, before Titus found out, but the big demon walked in and found him alone in the chair room.

“Where’s Kovak?” he asked.

Aleister sighed. “Timothy Kovak has briefly escaped, using some kind of faerie magic that absolutely should not work down here. And when I get him back, I am going to study that faerie tether until I figure it out, before I’m forced to believe in true love!”

“Aleister, where the fuck is he?”

“He escaped to the Taltorak chamber in Baalphezar’s palace, which means this will be a simple matter of sending some Enforcers to drag him back.”

Aleister tried to distract him, but Titus noticed his nervous glance and wandered into the worm room.

“Aleister, there is a dead Enforcer in here with approximately two hundred stab wounds. And you left Kovak alone so long, he had time to gouge its eyes out and carve a smiley face on its forehead!” Titus took an angry breath and said, “I’m recalling some troops.”

“Ridiculous overkill!” Aleister shouted, sounding shrill and panicky, even to himself. “We can handle this ourselves.”

Titus stalked back into the chair room and got in Aleister’s face. Then he gestured to the stairs. “You wanna go up there and tell our Master we’ve got a Kovach loose in Hell again?”

“We can handle this with two Enforcers,” Aleister insisted.

“This kid eats Enforcers for lunch.”

“On Earth perhaps, but he’s alone in an empty palace, powerless, with no body and no magic. Will you please relax? Timothy Kovak is not going to conquer Hell with a two-inch faerie blade, I don’t care what his last name is!”