Flames leapt from her hands. Fire caught on the beast’s limbs, spreading up, until the whole of the monster burned. It thrashed around, nearly striking her and Bram. Roaring, it collapsed, turning to smoldering carbon.

Bram followed her example. He ducked past the beast’s limbs, then stuck his sword into its chest. As Bram pulled his blade free, the creature’s woody flesh ignited. It flailed for several moments, but the fire crept inside, and glowing red appeared in cracks in its body. Bram struck with his sword again. The monster shattered in an explosion of charred debris.

Ash dusted Bram’s shoulders and streaked his face, and there were rips in his coat, yet he appeared largely unhurt.

“Bastard doesn’t fight fair,” he muttered.

“Neither should we.”

They took up their chase. For a man more familiar with books and the corridors of power, John proved himself remarkably fleet. He kept ahead of them. Energy gathered between his hands. She knew the words his lips formed, recognizing the spell. But not in time. He wildly flung bolts of violent energy from his hands. Livia and Bram dodged as they ran, trees and earth exploding all around them.

“Damned tired of this,” Bram said through gritted teeth.

“This must stop.” Fury coursed through her. “It can only end where it truly began.”

Bram kept John in his sights, but he was a wily bastard, weaving between the trees and holding them back with a mad barrage of dark, jagged flame.

As he and Livia ran, he felt the change before he saw it. The trees turned white, the rough texture of their bark becoming fluted as their trunks straightened. Branches disappeared. The wood turned to marble. The trees were now pillars. Roman pillars.

Dread scraped down his back. They looked distinctly familiar. He realized where he had seen them before: at the ruined temple, the place where he and the other Hellraisers had freed the Devil.

He glanced at Livia. She murmured words in Latin, and she glowed with power. This was her doing.

“You couldn’t bring us to the temple. So you brought the temple to us.”

And that’s precisely where they were. The forest that bordered St. George’s Field had become a Roman ruin. Some of the columns stood upright, whilst others had toppled. Weeds choked what had once been a tiled floor, and everywhere hung a low mist, just as it had on that night months before. The ruin itself stood atop a steep knoll. Its solidity was deceptive, however. The true temple was within the hill. On that fateful night, Bram, Whit and the others had discovered a heavy stone door leading beneath the hill’s surface. Like starving wolves lured by a fresh kill, they had followed. Straight toward their doom.

It would have been their doom, had not a headstrong Roman priestess not intervened.

In an eerie echo of that night, Bram saw John at the entrance to the underground temple. Unlike the first time he and John had been here, though, there was no hesitation in John’s step as he hurried below, disappearing beneath the hill’s surface.

They had to pursue.

Voices stopped him and Livia before they could give chase.

“We gather again.” Whit led Zora, Leo, and Anne up the hill. Blood crusted along Whit’s temple, Zora walked with a slight limp, Anne’s once-tidy hair was wild, and half of Leo’s coat was missing. Yet they were here.

“Courtesy of our sorceress,” Whit added.

Livia tilted her head, regal, though she swayed with weariness.

“He’s down there?” Leo nodded toward the entrance to the subterranean temple. “Why corner himself?”

“Desperation,” Bram said.

“There’s yet more power he can summon.” Livia looked grim.

“Enough chatter.” Bram strode toward the entrance to the temple. “This fight ends now.”

No sooner had he taken a step, however, than the hill began to shudder. The marble columns shook like the trees they had once been, and pieces of stone rained down as the pillars cracked.

Demons clambered up the hillside. Each of them stood as tall as a man, with long bodies and stinging tails like scorpions, but having human torsos and heads covered in an insect’s glinting armor. Pincers rather than hands snapped at the ends of their arms.

The monsters appeared on all sides of the temple, scuttling up, their legs making clicking sounds and shaking the ground with every step.

At once, Bram, Livia, and the others faced this new threat. They formed a ring, weapons and magic at the ready.

Seeing the Hellraisers positioned to make a stand, the demons shrieked and brandished their claws. One snapped at a nearby column, and the stone pillar shattered. Venom dripped from the creatures’ stingers. One sting, Bram knew, meant death.

He glanced quickly at the entrance to the temple. It had been dark below, but now an unholy light glowed. John had to be the source, summoning more demons—or worse.

Looking back to the massive, crawling demons encircling the Hellraisers, Bram cursed, and Livia echoed his sentiment. Costly time slipped away.

“Go.”

Bram scowled at Whit’s directive. “A damned poor friend I’d be, to abandon you to this.”

“It’s not abandonment, but strategy. A veteran like you knows that.” Whit jerked his head toward the entrance to the temple. “You and Livia. Send that bastard to his deserving reward.”

“Most eagerly.” Bright streaks of magical energy danced along Livia’s fingertips.

“And you?” Bram asked.

Leo grinned like a fiend. “Fighting is the only vice left to us.”

“No more carousing,” said Anne.

“Or wenching,” Zora added.

“Don’t deny us our final pleasure,” Whit said.

Bram gave a clipped nod. If this was how the Hellraisers were to meet their end, so be it. All of them fighting to their very last exhalation, without regret.

“Time to redeem the Hellraiser name,” he said. He turned and, with Livia beside him, sprinted toward the temple entrance.

Carved stone steps led from the surface to the underground chamber. Bram took the lead, his sword drawn, whilst Livia kept sharp vigil at his back. They cautiously descended the stairs, and he was struck with a sense of symmetry, time folding in on itself. When last he’d walked down these steps, he’d no awareness of what awaited him. He had been driven by a compulsion he hadn’t understood, a force outside of his will, and a dark, grasping hunger.

The Devil’s pawn. It maddened him now—how easily he and his friends had been manipulated, how ripe they had been for the plucking. For all their claims of jaded sophistication, they had been no better than rustics at a fair, gaping in wonderment at a magician’s tricks as an accomplice lifted their purses.

He’d grown wiser since then. Humbler. Yet more certain. This was the moment he needed all of his wisdom and confidence.

Livia’s hand pressed between his shoulder blades, anchoring him.

They delved further down the stairs until they stood in the underground chamber. It looked precisely as it had months past. A large room had been carved out of the rock—walls, floor, and ceiling all made of stone. Torches set into the walls threw shuddering light. At one end of the chamber rested the skeletal remains of a Roman soldier still in his armor. The intervening months and exposure to air had hastened the skeleton’s decay. Bones had turned chalky, and the once-pristine armor had dulled, the leather rotting. Whoever that soldier had been, he’d given his life to guard the Devil’s prison.

The skeleton rested near a stone altar, and Bram heard Livia’s shaky inhalation as she beheld the place where she had performed her greatest sin.

They had both done much sinning in their lives. Here, ultimately, they must undo their wrongs.

John had no such intention. He stood before the altar, arms flung out with his back to Bram and Livia. Seething red light eddied around him. The chamber itself felt like an inferno, the air sizzling in Bram’s lungs and sweat dampening his back. John chanted in a foreign tongue, but his words stopped abruptly and he whirled to face Livia and Bram.