I don’t know when it stopped. Hours later. Days later, maybe. I was somewhere else by then. I was someone else. The person who had been burned that way, that Bobby, that Angel Doloriel, was gone now beyond retrieval. That person could never exist again. And the thing that remained behind would never stop screaming, I felt sure. Never stop burning.

Eligor carefully picked out a donut. “The last powdered sugar,” he explained. “So, where’s my feather?”

It took a while to form words, although from what I could see of my trembling hands I was whole and unburnt again, as though I hadn’t just experienced a lifetime’s worth of scorching, unholy agony. “Fuck . . . you.”

“Right, then!” he said and saluted me with his World’s Greatest Boss mug as the flames blazed up once more.

He had lots of other ways to hurt me when he got bored with hellfire, some of them quite inventive. I had to watch Caz tortured and raped by Eligor himself and various demons, or at least something that looked like her. Then later I had to watch another version of Caz participating happily, even enthusiastically, in all the same activities, even as my own nerves were stretched and burned and scraped and tormented. Eligor liked to cover all the bases.

I talked, of course. Fuck, yes I did. I told him everything I knew about the feather and everything else. Pain hurts. Pain in Hell hurts even more. And this was personal pain that Eligor wanted me to feel, and he made sure I got every last drop. I don’t think it had as much to do with Caz as it did with me being an annoyance. The fact that unimportant me had managed to waste so much of his precious, infinite time. You’d think he’d have thanked me for the diversion. But no.

It didn’t seem to matter that I was vomiting out every secret I had, though. Eligor went right on hurting me. After the flames I found myself in a place bright and white as an industrial clean room, where men with faces featureless as thumbprints pounded on me with iron hammers, smashing every bone in my body, flattening me like a cutlet. Each blow forced more screams out of my mouth, which changed shape with each strike, so that it was almost impossible to form words. But still they kept hitting me, and I kept screaming out what I knew.

Dark, oily liquid. Writhing things sinking their teeth into my flesh and wrapping around me like sex-crazed eels to pull me down. I managed to kick free just before I drowned and made it back to the surface, gasping out foul, poisoned air and taking in lungfuls of something not much better, only to be yanked down into the darkness again. And again. And . . . you’ve got it by now, right?