strangers when we met

chapter 1

Hell was different.

Meg could taste it in the air around her, she could feel it deep in her bones. The moment Talbot and her entered it, she knew that it was different.

When it was her home (if that hot place made of brimstone and smoke and fire could be called a home), when Azazel ruled the place, the air was heavy with screams and pleads for mercy from all the tortured souls that had ended there. Back then it had looked like endless rows of sinners hanging from meat hooks, rack upon rack of souls roasting in their own juices. The smell of blood and rotten meat was everywhere.

It was hard to describe hell as a "place", because just like Heaven, it was personalized for each soul. Lucifer couldn't really create anything, just make twisted versions of it, just as demons were deformed versions of the human soul.

"Hell is what you make of it, my child," Azazel had told her soon after she had been reborn to the darkness. "Of course, some demons have the chance to... make others see things their way."

"Like you, father?"

His smile of sharp blackened teeth had almost shone in the dim light.

"Yes. Being King has its perks."

When she was not under Azazel's influence, Hell had always looked to Meg like an extension of barren land and molted rock, a desert where nothing could ever grow and the sun would never set, so it was in a perpetual state of twilight as if the sky itself had been set on fire. The immensity of it had always unsettled her.

There were trees there. Meg figured she must have liked trees when she was human, because there had always been trees in her Hellscape. Not live trees, of course, but dead ones, as black and barren as everything else, with long, twisted branches raising up towards the orange and red above. Souls had hanged from them like some sort of sinister fruit or been melted against the trunk, screaming in agony as they waited for their turn on the rack.

Now there were no souls. The trees were naked an abandoned, and the heated air was silent.

"Where is everybody?" she asked.

Talbot simply shrugged her shoulders.

Neither of them had discarded their meatsuits upon entering Hell. Some demons did, especially the older ones, taking pride in their true forms, the mangled remained of their souls that wasn't smoke and illusions in that place. In a way, it was ironic that Lucifer was called "the Father of Lies". Meg was of the opinion that Hell was perhaps the place where souls revealed their truest selves in all their ugliness and pettiness.

She suspected that Talbot not shaving off the blonde girl she was using more out of sense of practicality than anything else. It must have been a hassle for crossroads demons to find new hosts every time they were invoked. She hoped Talbot suspected that she wasn't discarding her meatsuit for the same reason. Her hand wandered absentmindedly over her stomach. She didn't feel anything, none of the heaviness and dizziness that had invaded her when she was topside. Then again, demons were stronger in Hell.

"So how exactly are you planning to take over Hell, your Highness?" Talbot asked her. Her posh accent made it sound even more sarcastic.

Of course, she was only going along with this because she knew Meg kept an angel blade carefully tucked inside of her jacket's sleeve.

Meg couldn't blame her for not believing her. If she was as young as she suspected, then she probably had been put to work under Crowley's regime. She hadn't met the true leaders of the past, the Princes, or even Lilith.

A strange sense of loss invaded her. Demons couldn't truly form bonds like friendship or family, or at least they weren't supposed to. But Azazel and Tom, whom she'd called brother once upon a time, had been it for her for a time. Even Alastair or Abaddon or...