As I watched Hell’s beautiful people go past in ones, twos, and threes, I suddenly wondered whether Caz’s oh-so-attractive appearance wasn’t her own choice but rather something Eligor had insisted on. Certainly there was a fad among some of Hell’s highest to look very human. I’d seen it in Vera’s crowd, and I was seeing it even more clearly here, as Pandaemonium’s best and brightest window-shopped and held little tête-à-têtes at the equivalent of chic little restaurants. I say “equivalent” because, believe me, even a starving beggar on Earth wouldn’t want to eat the swill they served in those places. Doesn’t matter how rich you are, you can’t make anything taste good in Hell because nothing tastes good in Hell. It’s that simple. It may look like fine wine and nouvelle cuisine, but it tastes like vinegar and ashes. The only things that didn’t actively taste foul were the ever-present asphodel flowers, the food of the dead, and they were as bland as poi.

Chateau Machecoul looked no different from the outside than the small, expensive shops on either side of it, a jewelers and some kind of gentleman’s clothiers that seemed to specialize in sharp and pointy outfits that would have made any activity more intimate than waving across a room painful or actively dangerous. The ancient, mud brick buildings were decorated with awnings, window boxes, and swags of lights—electric, of course, because in Pandaemonium, electricity was a sign of wealth. I’m sure generating it involved some kind of hideous torture.

The door of the shop was locked. I rapped on it, and a moment later it swung open, but there was no one on the other side.

Fabric was everywhere inside the shop, hanging in huge sheets like a thousand overlapping tapestries and rolled in bolts in the wall alcoves, an almost claustrophobic array of different kinds of cloth. Headless dressmaker’s dummies—at least that’s what I hoped they were—stood all around me, but I didn’t see any customers, dressmakers, or salesdemons.

“Is anyone here?” I walked deeper into the store, my hand straying toward the pocket where I kept my Night Market knife. It was beginning to smell more like a trap by the second, like one of those Mafia things where the guy looks up from his cannelloni and realizes all the other customers have walked out. When a hand lightly touched me on my shoulder I turned around with the knife out, ready to cut the shit out of whoever had snuck up on me. Except, of course, I couldn’t. Because it was her.

She wasn’t as certain, of course—I didn’t look quite the same as the last time she’d seen me on Earth—but her eyes stayed on mine and she didn’t flinch. “Bobby . . . ?”

I could hardly speak. “Caz.”