Up the hall towers Aino, a lanky devil dressed in elegant black, its obsidian, globe-like head a distorted reflection of the walls’ dancing sconces. The exposed skin of its neck and hands is a dark red, leathery texture clinging tightly to its bone, and every step it draws with its black-slacked legs is drawn slowly in consideration of the comparatively tiny wraith beside it.

  Running right towards the two is Ruby. An unnerved frustration kills the panic in his face as he scans the demon from its polished dress shoes to its black, velvet jacket. Though it stands ten feet tall, perfectly in his way, it looks far too slender to support its own height or weight, and so Ruby looks to the wraith. “You ran away… to *tell on me*?” he shouts, shifting his left shoulder forward, “that’s rat-like behavior, miss ghost.”

  Her mouth drops open, but nothing comes out. At first, she wants to tell the worthless beetle off, his smirk sending sharp ripples through her swaying, midnight hair. She needs him to know how fucked he really is. How nightmarish it’ll be when he dies a second death. How lucky she’ll feel to watch it all happen. And then, seeing him leap, shoulder first, into the devil at her side, her eyes begin to glow with ten times the rapture her unborn ripostes could have granted.

  He can’t see the web. Its steel strands have him, she thinks as the hall becomes a wind tunnel for no one but Ruby. The very instant his shoulder makes contact with Aino, a gust spawns from the devil’s chest to thrust the addict two meters back like he were a hog-nosed spider to a giant’s careless boot, dislocating his arm and snapping his clavicle in the process. And yet, only for a moment does Ruby fall to his knees, barking from the wretched cocktail of broken bones, a shredded ankle and the thousand-degree heat coursing from one to the other. At this point, his leg has lost so much blood that he can smell its fresh, metallic stench mixing with the air’s formaldehydic poison. It has left such a trail that if one stumbled upon it, they would expect to find nothing more than a brain damaged, slithering corpse at its end. *But still*, he picks himself up, clutching his ruined, left shoulder, and convinces his legs to carry forward once more.

  “Room number?” asks Aino of the approaching, lost fool, speaking with a certain civility that defies the otherwise otherworldly sound of its voice… a sound much like a group of demented whales articulating in a slightly staggered unison. “I am… *skeptical*… you have not already noticed, but you’re in a bad way, welcomed guest. It would be best now, for your… wellbeing, that we get your room accommodations sorted.”

  Ruby stares straight through the devil with disdain, his soul sour from its sickening imitation of human courtesy. “You’re *confused* if you think I’m sticking around here…”

  “Tragically, *there does not exist* a better alternative. Not for you. Not for any other hell-cursed soul who would dare to abandon this house,” Aino contends, but the addict just walks right past it. The sight of blood, gushing from his ankle under the pressure of each departing step, only serves to agitate a suppressed turbulence in the devil’s chest, and grabbing Ruby by his last, good shoulder, it continues, “and you, *no different* than any of these halls’ walking corpses, are leaking far too much filth in the only place left for you to call home.”

  Pulling away, Ruby commands of his body… or perhaps a missing god, take me away from here… back to the red door. Please, just help me run a bit further.

  Aino, however, only allows him a single step more before its wizened, mahogany fingers enclose around his neck. With ease, it lifts the guest four feet off the floor, his legs still swinging from the sudden halt in momentum, his breath taken without a moment’s notice. “A token… square and white,” growls the demon, twisting Ruby to face itself with a mere flick of the wrist, “do you happen to have one on you?”

  Memories of the numbered stone and molten decapitation, they force Ruby’s eyes to ignition. A blinding, red blaze, bleeding from his whites to his grays. And though Ruby knows to exactly which object the devil refers, a defiant shake of the head is all he offers in return. Aino clutches harder, stealing the man’s privilege to breathe, and Ruby reaches for its wrist, a struggle, the embers in his eyes making it hard to see. Once he grabs hold, his hand, too, bursts into a red inferno. Aino’s sleeve catches flame, and it flinches, letting go.

  “Sixteen steps. Cherish them dearly,” shouts miss wraith, snickering as she observes the addict gasp for one big breath, then take off like a bullet. The fiery, dumbfounded glare he shoots back her way thrills her to her core.

  And like clockwork, Aino swipes the handful of lingering embers from its jacket, sighs at the seared velvet, and pursues the runaway with ferocity. Only nine of its strides are needed to prevent Ruby’s seventeenth, his skull slamming to the marble and sliding with a violent screech. In an arm bar, the devil holds him, but he refuses to forfeit escape, not even ceasing when he feels his one good arm break. Aino’s weight shifts, holding his legs in place, and so it falls on Ruby’s chin to continue the struggle, trying to drag himself free like he did in a cat’s rotten tunnel. Into the floor, strain of the neck… only this time, there’s no light at the end for the desperate, broken addict.

  Once more, Aino hoists him in the air, an arm’s length away by the back of his collar. Battered is his face which hangs despondently forward, blood streaming from his nose to his chin to a puddle on the marble. His arms are lifeless while his legs thrash faintly, and every flame conjured by his will has since been killed. “Fuck off,” Ruby breaths, snapping at the demon’s hand, but his head only turns about an inch before his teeth clamp down.

  The wraith’s snicker becomes a laugh, and her laugh becomes a gorgeous, humming song. “Despite *everything* you’ve been put through, you’re still trying to make a meal out of poor mister Aino,” she intones, letting her pitch rise with excitement as her words fall perfectly into the flow of music. But then, staring deeply into the void of the devil’s mask, she sees visions of a dragonfly cutting steel threads with its wings, and her absent heart skips a beat. “You’ll have to put this one down manually for me, kay’ Ain?” she asks with manufactured nonchalance.

  Entirely unnecessary, thinks Aino of Ruby’s now listless corpse, but as if the vindictive addict could hear its thoughts, he jolts back to life, attempting to take another bite and coming a few inches closer this time too. Some irrepressible laughter decorates miss wraith’s song in reaction, while Aino, its turbulent chest pain further enraged, shakes its heavy head in disbelief. “I *do* apologize for the… additional suffering,” it says, bringing its free hand close to Ruby’s left ear. “This is far from the standard with which” *she* had preferred “our guests should be treated, but *you* are not our standard guest, it seems. You’ve *already* forced yourself to ruin… so what’s a little more?” And from its crimson palm erupts a thin, hollow bone, silver and frigid like metal, yet as crooked as the branch of an oak. Shallowly, it pierces Ruby’s ear, barbs extending as he squirms, and a siphoning pressure manifests within, robbing his brain of oxygen.

  It’s not so bad, the darkness coming on quick. It feels as though soon there will be nothingness. It’s what he wanted, after all, what was said to be at the bottom by Kaicif. It’s just a quickened journey to that promised, numb abyss.

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  Like a ragdoll, Ruby’s corpse crashes to the floor, blood leaking from his eyes and ears, his lips stained with a psychotic grin. A few surrounding sconces cease their dance and dim as he fades, an illogical change that unsettles Aino and thrills miss wraith. “I’m almost certain his intent’s not disturbed by this place,” she says in her somber, melodic tone.

  “Quite the opposite,” replies Aino, crouching beside the man to check his pulse and pockets. “And yet, though lacking a token to prove it, if he is *indeed* a guest welcomed by the house, not much else is permitted to be done about the effects of his… ‘intent.’ Not outside the usual, at least.”

  The usual… would be nice. Nothing special, miss wraith assures herself, a roller-coaster of bliss and misery in her eyes as she studies the fallen addict. “But would you tell me… his fire, I mean, his choices-his memories of a life lived… *they won’t* fade anytime soon, will they?”

  Slowly rising to its feet, the devil devours the unstable ghost in its shadow. “It would be in your best interest to forget not your bindings, signee,” it scolds.

  “I only meant-”

  “*You meant* to allude to unsavory habits that’ll put *us both* at far more risk than the lingering will of one…” Aino’s voice trails off, assaulted by its own malicious echo, and for a moment, the devil does nothing more than watch miss signee shiver in the halls’ sole patch of darkness. It cannot help but take a step back so that the dimmed torchlight can reach her again… “for now, just keep watch over the body.”

  “You’re kidding, Ain. Surely the house will crumble if I’m left alone with him,” she mocks with indignation, though at the same time, a warmth swells in her song.

  The devil returns only a slight shake of the head, shifting its gaze to the beautifully carved trims at the base of the walls. Were *she* still here, this situation could already consider itself resolved, it thinks, headed back the way Ruby came. “I’ll be at sorting only briefly. If the corpse… happens to wake before I return, *you will* come find me… promptly this time, please.”

  Right, because I’m just the ~perfect little team player~, signee answers silently as Aino’s steps carry off like a swallow.

  And at last, lowering herself to peer into Ruby’s bloodshot eyes, she can see the dragonfly tangled in spiders’ threads, a weak, heated essence steaming off its wings. Dead, it appears, but somehow undefeated, content to be devoured not knowing it must rise again. Outside of her vision, a scratching joins her song, thorns writhing against wood like children hungry for the spider’s catch. Dance takes her form as it closes in on its prey, but the illusion bursts the very next second, a single cough from a corpse burning it all to ash.

  As bile spatters from Ruby’s mouth, the promised world’s flames erupt to touch the ceiling, blinding miss wraith in a flash of violent, white light. They quell with his inhales and rise with his exhales, scorch marks left behind on the walls like bleeding, black makeup. Signee herself cannot help but move with the breathing hall while the rage of the vines worsens behind the walls. She watches the throbbing dragonfly from the perspective of a spider, wretched drumming in the midnight air as embers set the forest floor on fire.

  “Are you awake?” she whispers, listening intently for his heartbeat, and from the shattered man escapes the word, “Sari,” heavy with guilt and terror as it passes through her core.

  Still, “you don’t really mean it,” signee answers back, “you’re not a man but a cruelty. Cruel in a way that’s more demon than man. *Cruel* for the sake of being cruel. CRUEL because maybe… your existence demands it of you.” Her notes become bitter under the molten pressure of his intent. “So what happened, dear cruelty, for you to turn out like that?”

  Atop cold marble and a burning, grassy patch, the cruelty and the dragonfly’s eyes remain vacant. Their silence, unacceptable, lures the spider closer, and miss signee, an inch from Ruby, just barely grazes the addict’s bloody puddle. She feels it boil at the touch, bubbles surging through the spider’s legs, and like gasoline, the blood ignites, engulfing the wraith in a pillar of dark red flames. Her screams are so brief as she’s torn apart and scattered by the heat that only a faint echo of the spider’s cry carries off through the trees.

  But a swallow was listening. Its breeze flows right back towards her, the forest’s leaves displaced with each stride Aino makes forward. Weaving through branches, winding through white corridors, it arrives at the inferno swirling with signee’s color. A gust proceeds from the swallow’s wings to extinguish the smoldering spider while a gale from the devil’s chest takes the life of Ruby’s bloodfire. With it goes every sconce in a fifty-foot radius, the wraith left in a hundred pieces amidst perfect, freezing darkness.

  “NINETY-THREE,” Aino booms with such vexation that the rattling vines behind the walls come to a complete and immediate stop. Throughout the pitch-black hall, its naturally fragmented pattern of speech multiplies as it bounces between the scattered fragments of the wraith, devastating her world with a choir of a million demented whales. Nauseous, she tries to pull her parts back together, unable to find a start until the devil draws a matchbook from its jacket. The sparks of the first strike capture a single segment’s focus – a core for her hundred more to gravitate towards. One by one, Aino drops a match in each sconce that needs relighting, and miss wraith sorts each flame into her expanding web of vision.

  “Do you care *to know* how excruciating that was for me, Aino… how fucking freezing I-” signee starts before she’s even whole again, tiny clouds of her essence still snapping to her body as she storms towards the demon. Her face is stained with an intense, hurting rage, the unstable shadows of her hair thrashing violently in her wake, but then, seeing Aino peel the addict from the floor, her eyes soften with a longing for tears she cannot produce. “I’m not sure if he ever even woke, but still, I…” couldn’t hear myself scream “…I actually mean to thank you, Ain, for the cold.”

  Yet without a word, the devil almost walks right on through her, dragging Ruby by his collar deep into the white maze. Signee follows closely, spending a few minutes in silence before, unable to hide the desperation in her voice, she blurts, “so is he to be thrown out to the wastes?”

  “No.” Aino stops, turns and stoops to meet her eye to eye. “This one, likely in accordance with one of the supplier’s schemes, was welcomed, *alone*, through the front door.” It hovers its free hand just above her head and continues, “understand, signee, the last time that happened… I was no taller than you.”

  And that was probably ~your beloved Vesca~, she thinks as the devil passes a couple more sconces by, stopping in front of the same room whose gory bed she was flattened against moments before her first encounter with Ruby. “I don’t know Ain… I wouldn’t be too sure he’s following any design but his own. Anomalies aside, does it really seem like he *means* to be here?”

  “No one does… not by their own accord, at least.” When Aino pushes 93’s heavy door wide open, the light flooding in illuminates a long, twin bed suited in spotless, white sheets. Without grace, it discards the guest upon them, observing his glazed, gray eyes for any sign of consciousness, and though his lungs do struggle for raspy, detergent-heavy breaths, the rest of him remains motionless. “To seek this house is to seek out consequence, but those capable of seeking consequence would never be stuck in this house. And even those who *are* stuck… are far better off for it than they realize.”

  Drifting in the doorway, where the hall’s warm light and the room’s dim ambiance collide to make her weightless form all but invisible, signee shakes her head and asks, “but say he were just passing through as a gear in some greater scheme… then why choose *him*? *Who*, exactly, do you think our new guest is?”

  “He’s a mess. One that’s painted our floors red and our walls black. One that’s seemingly *immune* to the will of the house. One that reduced *another guest* to an unresponsive mound on the lobby floor. One that almost reduced *you* to nothing, and one in which… you will take No. Further. Interest. BECAUSE, signee, these walls were not built with such a mess in mind,” Aino commands, shaking as it spins towards her…

  But she’s no longer there, not even a departing hum in the air. And by the time the tall devil slams 93’s door shut, shrouding the room in total darkness but for a nightstand’s tiny candle, Ruby’s sheets are already half-soaked in blood, the greenbrier quick to cling to is wounds and create more.