To Hell & Back

A loud grinding sound woke me some time later. I looked up to see a young woman getting dragged into the room. She kicked and clawed, fighting as hard as she could, while they dragged her into a cage like mine. She looked only a few years older than me. Once inside her cage, she glared defiantly but stayed silent.

A robed figure walked into the center of the room. He made a few gestures to a pair of big, hulking guys that followed him. They began setting the place up for something. There is essentially no ceremony necessary for any magic, it just looks fancier and more mysterious if you have some special setup. Not many people know that, so witches tend to showoff when they cast in front of non-witches. The hulking brutes set up candles, then drew a multi-layered circle in chalk, and if that wasn’t asinine enough, they lined the circle with blood dripped slowly from a chalice.

Who does that? I wondered, rolling my eyes.

The robed figure pulled back his hood, revealing his face in a particularly dramatic fashion. I tried to feel surprised; it was Craven, a warlock I’d met while apprenticing under Ted. I had been just starting my apprenticeship when his was ending. He had been addicted to the dark arts and the raw power it gave: blood and sacrificial magic, demonic summoning, and the like.

Ted kicked him out because he wouldn’t quit dabbling in it. Of course, Ted then went on to teach me how to do it, just in case I might need it.

When Craven looked at me, I glared at him as hard as I could. I felt my lip curl as I poured my anger into him with my eyes. His eyes widened for a moment before he looked away and went back to his work. He didn’t meet my gaze again.

Another man walked up and tapped on my cage. When he had my attention, he indicated the girl that had just been dragged in and said, “Consider this the beginning of our negotiations. This girl has run out of chances. You’ve still got one left.”

Once they had finished setting the place up, they dragged the young woman out of her cage and tied her limbs to poles that I didn’t remember being there, just inside the smallest circle of blood. Craven cut the clothes from her body, then he made long but shallow cuts to her palms, arms, legs, and feet to get her blood flowing out without killing her.

Powering something… but what? I wondered. Summoning something, most likely… Has he really become a warlock?

I closed my eyes when Craven’s eyes started to glow, indicating he was channeling a great deal of power. I followed the steps of the spell: a hole ripped in the fabric of our realm, a line cast out through the ether to Hell, creating a tunnel along with it. Once it located its target, a second and much more powerful line traveled through the newly opened tunnel to smash through the barriers to Hell.

From there, it targeted the particular monster he wanted and wrapped tightly around it. Hell, like any realm, would impulsively push out any foreign material, so the demon would be spat out through the most convenient opening available: the newly formed tunnel.

I wish I could have been there when the first warlock was figuring this stuff out. Then again, the first warlock, per the historical texts I read, died horribly after his second successful summoning, so maybe not. It only took a few seconds for the process to complete itself. The demon that appeared before us was built like a pit bull, but it was much larger than any dog I had seen. Its shoulders passed the four foot mark, and instead of fur, it was covered in plates of hard scale, kind of like a lizard.

Oversized dog-lizard-thing… That means hellhound, I think? I wondered. Why? They’re hard to control and not very smart, so why would— Whatever, doesn’t matter, this is my ride out of here.

The hellhound shook its head and snorted to clear its senses before sniffing the air. Its head swiveled around to the helpless, bleeding victim a few feet away. It shambled over to the bleeding girl whose sudden screams made me wince. Her courage disappeared in the face of the demon that would kill her. I couldn’t blame her; I was having a hard time with it, and I wasn’t the one a few seconds from being eaten.

I moved to the middle of my cage and concentrated on what I needed to do, while the beast busily ate the screaming girl. I shuddered and tried to block out the noise.

At least the beast killed her quickly, ending her screaming. There are many things in this world that one should never have to experience. This would, I figured, go down as one of the worst.

“Well?” a voice asked. “Want to join her — yes or no?”

I didn’t even look at the man. “Bring it on, cowboy.”

I winced inwardly and thought, Oh, come on, you can do better than that, Stas…

Shrugging, I eased out of my usual senses and looked around with witch’s sight. Raw energy came alive to me, making it look like I had some sort of night vision on. Instead of detecting heat or light, it was magical energy that was added onto my usual vision. It had been a while since I had done this; it was always strange to see magic.

No time to be amazed, girl, Ted’s voice rang through my head in warning. Cast correctly, or you die a horrible death.

Heeding the voice’s warning, I looked around intently. The residue of the summoning spell permeated the area with a dull red haze. I reached out to it, snaking out power gently through the air. I rekindled the spell slowly to avoid Craven detecting what I was doing. I pried open the now collapsed bridge to Hell just a crack, then got ready to rip it open wide.

This is gonna get real interesting in a hurry, I thought with a small grin. The only thing more exciting than almost dying, was the anticipation of trying something that might save my life.

“Your turn, chica. Any last words?” I turned and stared at the man who had asked me that stupid cliché question. He had a video camera on me, ready to film me being eaten alive.

I raised my bound hands up and gave the camera the middle finger. The cameraman grinned at me as he hit the release for the door on my cage. The way out faced the hellhound. Once again, I thought about making some sort of run for it, but they all probably had guns, and unless the demon went berserk for some reason, that wouldn’t work. I had a better idea, anyway.

A harsh, guttural command from Craven made the beast look up at him. Craven pointed at me. The beast’s gaze followed where he pointed. When it looked at me, its hackles rose and its lips pulled back into a snarl, exposing long, sharp teeth.

Right back at you. C’mon, come get me, I thought, enjoying the pulse of adrenaline that came with it.

With witch’s sight, I could see the tendril that was Hell trying to reclaim its own. It was fighting Craven’s summoning spell that anchored the beast to Earth. The longer the beast stayed in this realm, the stronger the pull going back to Hell would get, and eventually Craven’s spell would lose out. It would only last a few hours, I guessed by the looks of it, but I didn’t have time to wait for that.

I took a deep breath and prepared to use the blood staining my clothes to kindle the spell I had prepared in my head. I reached down with my mind towards the blood; I could feel it buzzing alive with energy as I connected to it. I opened my eyes and met the hellhound’s gaze, ready as I was ever going to be.

“Well, come on then,” I growled at the beast.

It let out a hissing noise just before its massive body rushed into motion. I grinned, pushed a bit of power into the blood, igniting it, and began channeling it into my spell in the moments before the beast got to me.

I shoved my arms under the demon’s neck as it hit me, then pushed upwards as its jaws snapped at my face. I flopped my body backward, using the beast’s own momentum to carry it most of the way into the cage and slam its head into the metal bars behind me. It was too big to go all the way past me, leaving me directly under the now dazed monster. With the beast finally close enough, I latched myself physically and mentally to it. I shoved the power from the blood staining my thighs into the almost collapsed tunnel, and hoped for the best.

It should work, I thought in the brief pause. I could feel everything clicking into place, and I knew it was all happening extremely fast, but the milliseconds it took still felt like hours.

“Shoot her! Fucking shoot her!” I heard Craven screaming, but it was too late.

The tunnel roared to life, permeating the area with a dark red haze, and the tendril that was Hell trying to reclaim its progeny strengthened immediately, overpowering Craven’s anchor spell. Large, blood red tendrils surged from the tunnel and wrapped around both me and the demon. I screamed as the beast and I were violently ripped from the cage, into the center of the room, and then with a disorienting lurch, I was surging through a magically formed tunnel on my way to Hell.

It felt like I was tied to the biggest dog I had ever seen, and we were being dragged behind a speedboat that was accelerating at an ever-increasing pace. Instead of bouncing around on open water, we were bouncing around a tunnel approximately six feet wide, and the sides seemed less and less forgiving every time we hit it. Luckily for me, the beast was far too disoriented to try and attack me. Unluckily for me, I was being smashed repeatedly into a wall, and it hurt.

After what felt like the longest and most uncomfortable water slide ride ever, we hit the ground with a thud. I scrambled to my knees, swaying to and fro for a moment. I collected myself hurriedly, knowing I didn’t have much time to enact the next step of my plan.

No wonder demons are never happy after they’re summoned, I thought after a moment, my eyes beginning to focus. Dizzy, dizzy, oh God, I’m dizzy.

I switched to witch’s sight again to take stock of the results: the tunnel to Earth was roaring above, the beast was shuffling around disoriented, and by the looks of it, Craven’s summoning spell was solidly on me; it was a black, shadowy tendril to my sight. I was probably the only human in history to see this end of a summoning spell.

The hellhound snorted loudly, drawing my attention back to it. I kindled the last bit of magic left in my blood, tired but determined. I stumbled over to the disoriented beast and slapped a hand on its side, concentrating hard. I spat on the beast, then pushed the tendril around me to the saliva. It latched onto the beast with a mental click.

A final push of energy into Craven’s summoning spell and the beast was sucked back up into the tunnel, back to Earth. The tunnel collapsed a moment later, the blood I had used unable to sustain it any longer. I just sat back, stunned that I was alive.

“Yeah! Fuck you! Didn’t see that coming, did you?” I crowed, arms raised high. “Sacrifice Staysa Fear to a demon? Fuck all that! Ooh… Dizzy… Tired of being dizzy.”

If the theory I knew of foreign realms was correct, I would soon begin to experience a pull back to Earth; moving the push from me to the beast would only be temporary. It would likely deposit me into a ley-line, from which I could ride to safety, or it might make me switch places with the demon, due to my saliva potentially anchoring me to it.

Only time will tell what happens, I guess, I thought quietly as I tried to keep from puking. Why am I so damn dizzy? C’mon, I didn’t do that much casting… Okay, maybe I did.

“Well, anyhoo, it is time to cheer up, for here we be: Hell,” I muttered to myself, when the world stopped spinning quite so violently. I yawned, stretched, and looked around. “Or maybe I’m just in Arizona. Where am I?”

I was in a desert, just some soft sand and flat ground. It was completely lifeless, not even dead shrubbery. Everything I’d read of Hell said staying still meant certain death at best, with eternal enslavement at the worst, so I set off walking in a random direction.

All in all, my spirits were high, and I could hardly feel the head injury I had sustained a few days ago. My sense of time was more than a little off, but I was somewhat certain it was only a few days ago that I had been kidnapped.

I was walking for only a few minutes before I felt something tap me on the shoulder. I stopped, turned, and all I could think was, That is a really big club.