Chapters (60)
- DAW Books Presents
- HAPPY HOURINHELL
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Dedication
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- prologue
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- interlude
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- interlude
- thirteen
- fourteen
- interlude
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- interlude
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- forty-one
- forty-two
- forty-three
- forty-four
- forty-five
- forty-six
- forty-seven
- forty-eight
- epilogue
Things got worse from that point. My demon hide was healing so quickly that flesh had already grown over the crude stitches, so I had to cut through my own skin just to reach the knots before I sawed them open. Riprash’s knife wasn’t the sharpest, either, and what I was doing set the intracubus into a panic of claws and teeth. I’ll let you imagine the details for yourself.
It’s for Caz, I told myself as the worst of the pain shook me like a million volts, but what really kept me going was another, much darker thought: Fuck you, Eligor. The only good thing about Hell is knowing you’re in it forever.
I kept pouring Riprash’s booze over the wound as I worked. I’m happy to say that the intracubus hated the stuff, but that only made it struggle harder. I came close to passing out several times before I finally got my fingers around the horrible, horrible little thing and yanked it out—it felt like I was taking half the insides of my head with it. After that I did go black, but only for a short while.
When I came back to reality, the intracubus was struggling to escape across the muddy bottom of the ravine on its dozen little barbed legs, still trailing several of my nerve fibers. I guess I didn’t need any of them too badly, or at least not enough to notice in the midst of so much fucking pain. I poured a last dollop of ogre booze into my breached skull and shook my head from side to side to swirl it around in the baseball-sized wound, then I got up on very shaky legs, found a large rock, and carefully ground Eligor’s minion into a scummy smear. Its shrill screams, brief as they were, made little bubbles in the slime.
Oh, but it felt so good to have nothing in my head but my own dubious ideas, I can’t tell you. I even licked the knife clean. Hey, it was my own blood, and I couldn’t afford to waste any more of it.
Niloch and his lynch mob hadn’t waited while I performed self-surgery, of course. Some of the hounds sounded like they’d already found their way down to the bottom of the ravine, which meant they were only a few dozen yards behind me. At least now, when the commissar and his penis-pups caught me, I would have the small pleasure of being able to scream out every secret of Eligor’s I knew.
Yes, I was finally beginning to feel at home in Hell.
I clapped a hand over the hole in the back of my skull to keep inside what brains I still had left, then I began to run again.
forty-two
this lousy t-shirt