Free bedeviled & beyond 06 - bedeviled & befouled by sam cheever Page B

She already loves you because of me. You don’t have to kiss her ass.
    I grinned. Now who needs the swear jar, Glynus?
    It’s not my fault. The prophet told you not to swear in front of me when I was a baby.
    Yeah, but she didn’t tell me why.
    Well, now you know.

CHAPTER SIX
    Oh, Hell no!
    Into Hell young miss must go, to save the man she loves,
    But stranger things than she could know, may bitch-slap her from above.
    We entered the Hell dimension through a rift we’d discovered in the mountains that had once spilled green dragons into Olympus in huge numbers. The dragons had been trying to escape a steady buildup of sulfur in the air of Hell that was killing their young.
    The result was that Olympus now had several new colonies of green dragons and Hell had lost most of its transport animals.
    It sucketh to be them.
    Slayer flew behind Glynus and me on a huge red dragon, compliments of Queen Persuis, the red queen. He’d been her dragon slayer for a couple of years and, as Glynus had informed me at the time, he had the queen wrapped. Apparently she’d still do anything for him because we currently had ten of her finest warriors flying with us.
    Darma rode beside me on Spence and Emo rode an enormous red on Glynus’ other side.
    Myra and my father would meet us inside the castle. They needed to speak to Hades Corporate before they could enter the Big Red Guy’s toasty environs, even on a rescue mission. The new regs had something to do with recent infighting between Heaven and Hell about porous borders.
    Politics sucked.
    I firmly shoved the niggle of guilt about the porous borders thing to the back of my mind. I might have had something to do with that.
    Glynus headed toward the massive castle Dialle’s father had built on top of a craggy black mountain in the center of Hell. The castle seemed much the way it had when I’d been there before. I looked down and immediately regretted it. The ground beneath us boiled and smoked, like the inside of a volcano. The fiery liquid surface flowed around the wide, black mountains dotting its surface, which was where the wealthiest and most powerful inhabitants of Hell built their charred, soaring castles. Those who had come to Hell without power lived in caves, which were more like pockmarks on the sides of the mountains than actual caverns, and did their best not to go mad from the heat and the stench.
    Glynus’ wide, black body swayed and dipped as she flew steadily forward. I felt the tingle of her protective magics as a constant force against my skin. Without it, I’d have burned to a pile of ashes within seconds of entering the place. Even with Glynus’ protective bubble of magic, the heat throbbed against me like a living thing, pulling moisture from my body like a succubus and leaving behind a shaky, husk-like feeling.
    We couldn’t get to the castle fast enough for my comfort.
    A distant shout brought my head snapping around and Glynus’ big body tightened with tension. We have company, mother halfling .
    I sighed. Arrayed in an arrow formation, a small army of enormous, winged creatures flew toward us in the distance. They looked like some kind of dragon-gargoyle hybrid, with massive, brown bodies, wings that looked too small to be effective, and huge heads sporting oversized, tusk-like teeth. Each monster had a warrior devil riding its back. The red-and-orange flash of the fire below glinted off the long, deadly looking blades they held. Oh yummy, gargoyle surprise. Let’s head them off. We aren’t going to be able to outrun them.
    I glanced back at Slayer and he nodded, pulling his dragon up and turning it as Glynus veered off. Emo shouted back to Gerch, Brina slipped into place beside Spence, and our small rescue party turned in lumbering formation to meet what to all appearances was a hostile force.
    I fought back concern for Dialle. Every minute in that place was another moment closer to madness. I only briefly considered ducking out the back and letting