Page 57 of Not Today, Satan
“Does that make you Dante?”
He stares over my head, eyes far away. “Maybe.”
I focus on the water and shiver. The look in his eyes mirrors their depths. Calm on the surface, but there’s darkness below ready to pull him under.
It’s a darkness that lurks in me, too.
Which means that if we cling to one another, we’re both going to drown.
“Hey, Dev?” he asks, his gaze still focused beyond the waves.
“Yeah?”
“If I’m dead on Earth, and we get out of here, what happens to me? Like, am I going to have to reinhabit my body and claw my way out of my grave? Or will I walk around like a zombie craving the brains of everyone I see?”
I cock my head, considering. “I have no idea. No one’s broken out of here before. Your afterlife body is as real as your body was on Earth. It’s designed that way so that you’re able to feel pain or pleasure, depending on where you end up. But my textbooks didn’t exactly teach me how to send people back. Only how to punish them while here.”
“Huh.” He mashes his lips together, then shrugs. “I suppose it could be cool to be a zombie. It’s still better than Lot Thirteen.”
Studying him for a moment, I shake my head. I don’t know what a zombie is, but if he’s okay with it, I am, too.
A mass of land appears ahead, and I decrease our speed. The shores surrounding us are covered in sparkling white puffs.
Nate blows into his palms and rubs them together. “If I knew Hell really was gonna freeze over, I would’ve stopped at the souvenir stand and grabbed a scarf or something.”
I peel my eyes from the water and scowl. “Souvenir stand?”
“It’s where you buy trinkets from the places you visit. You know, like T-shirts that say, ‘I went to Hell and all I got was this lousy T-shirt,’ or ‘I heart HELL’ bumper stickers.”
I wrinkle my nose. “We don’t have anything like that.”
“I’m aware.” He sighs, and snowflakes drift from his hair to his shoulders, melting on his shirt like stones into lava.
We slam into the shore and pitch forward. I curse as the steering wheel digs into my gut. Once we’ve come to a stop, I pull the lever until the boat clicks off.
“We’re here,” I announce in a cloud of white breath, rubbing my stomach where the wheel gouged me. I cough, then spread my arms in an overdramatic fashion. “Welcome to Nix, the city of ice.”
XXVI.
We stash the boat behind a snowbank, then kick snow over our tracks.
The white builds around our ankles as we trudge inland, the crunch of our boots and whistling wind the only soundtrack. I turn and scan the water one last time. No other boats burst out of the storm, and I exhale a white puff of air that clouds my vision before it floats over our heads. The snow will provide decent cover till we get to a place where we can rest.
Here’s hoping it’s still there.
Nate’s teeth chatter, and he hugs his arms around his frame, then glances my way. “Aren’t you cold?”
I shake my head and hold out my bare arm so he can see the flakes fizzle and disappear as they hit my skin. “I’m my father’s daughter, remember? I have fire in my veins.”
“I wish I had a bit of that myself right now.” He blows into his hands before pointing to a glittering gate of ice to our left. “Okay, so inInferno, ice was the worst of the worst. But here, the worst are in my lot. What’s in there, then?”
Following his gaze, I frown as I picture the map of Hell hanging in the Welcome Hall. I hadn’t actually thought we’d get this far, so I’d skimmed it.
“Nix houses those who committed the sin of sloth.”
He furrows his brows, and I resist the urge to roll my eyes. “Laziness, Nate. Um, I think those are the spiritually lazy—you know, claimed to believe in stuff but never followed through. Ahead are those who were environmentally lazy, and on the other side of the city are the apathetic and the hypocrites. None of them should cause a problem. All the lots are separated and locked here, and we can go through the city without entering any of them. The worst we’ll battle is this storm.”
I rub my aching thigh muscles, and grimace when my dress pulls from my skin with a sucking sound. The cold may not affect my body temperature, but the storm isn’t making our trek easy. We should get out of it soon. Besides, Nate may not be able to die again, but he’s starting to resemble an ice sculpture more than a human.
