“I’ll worry about that when the time comes. Can you find your way back to the linen closet once I’m in with Chuan Ren?”

“Yeah. Assuming Wrathy there doesn’t squash me into an incredibly handsome black pulp.”

“It won’t. It won’t know for sure that Bael doesn’t have a reason for accommodating Aisling.”

“You’ll leave me,” it wailed softly, giving me a pitiful look. “You’ll go off and leave me alone here.”

“Aisling can summon you at any time,” I pointed out.

“Not if I’m imprisoned, she can’t,” Jim said, glancing down the hall to the cell doors. “No demon gets out of those cells unless Bael wants them out.”

“Oh.” I wanted to point out that the likelihood of Jim ending up in a cell was slim, but the worried expression in the demon’s eyes stopped me. “Well, that doesn’t matter. I promise I won’t leave Abaddon until you’re with me again, or safe, OK?”

“All right, but if you forget, I’m never going to let you live it down.”

I patted the demon dog on the head. “I won’t forget. Give me about five seconds before you distract the wrath demon.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were taking lessons from Ash on how to come up with a wacky plan sure to go wrong,” Jim said as I shadowed and slipped across the hall to the far wall.

I crept down the hall until I figured I was just outside of the range at which the demon might see me, holding my breath as Jim sauntered around the corner, whistling a jaunty tune.

“Heya,” it called to the wrath demon, who stood up and glared with suspicion at Jim. “How’re they hangin’? Assuming you got yourself some, that is. I myself have a really nice package. Aisling, that’s my demon lord, says that it’s just lucky that I’m furry; otherwise, she’d have to put a pair of underpants on me, ya know what I mean? Heh-heh-heh.”

I gave a mental eye roll at Jim’s choice of distracting topic, and moved into the shadow world. I’d never been in the parts of the shadow world where it touched Abaddon, and was taken aback for a moment by just how radically different it was. Whereas the normal shadow world was a slightly off version of the real world, the Abaddon-tinged version was a dark place that seemed to be made up of the memory of nightmares, with objects twisted in a parody of the original.

The wrath demon, oddly enough, didn’t look any different in the shadow world, although there was a black corona that surrounded it. I was careful to avoid touching that as I squirmed past it, opening the cell door that was locked in the real world.