"That's that pitiful look right there." Amanda seemed to relish it. Her tone shifted, going sharper, uglier, and something in her bearing that had nothing to do with humanity bled through. "See, so many men and women just love coming to rescue you. What if I looked like that? Would they come save me? Would they? Tell me. Would they?"
Her voice had climbed by the last syllable into something clipped and vicious.
"So you're the little nobody running the operation behind the curtain. Bold." Bella stepped back through the door, looking at Amanda with the calm curiosity of someone studying an insect.
"A full Hell stench on you—demon, then? Angels have stopped bothering me, so I find it interesting that you, a third-rate demon, thought you could take a run at me. Tell me plainly: which lord of Hell put this whole thing together? I intend to have a very direct conversation with him about terms."
Amanda's eyes fixed on Bella. The hatred in them was pure and layered, the kind that takes time to accumulate. She held it for a moment—then her body dissolved into black smoke and slammed into the door.
Bang. The smoke hit solid and rebounded. She re-formed, involuntarily.
Bella sat down in the center of the room. "You're not a very good demon, are you? Did you really think you were the only one with access to teleportation? I laid a Dimensional Anchor before you arrived. Don't look so surprised—the higher-tier demons use the same trick. I'll tell you a secret: I actually learned it from a Balor."
There was a note of genuine puzzlement in her voice. "You're looking at me like you hate me personally. Did I offend you somehow?"
"She's Amanda," Kim said quietly.
The name didn't land. Bella kept a vast catalog of significant people in memory—but people she'd met once in passing, ordinary civilians, she didn't try to hold on to. The human brain had limits, and forcing it past them created real cognitive strain.
"She's my friend. The one who came to Paris with me."
The information surfaced slowly, like something pulled up from deep water. Bella turned it over. When she had it fully assembled, she studied the woman in front of her with fresh eyes.
"Ah. I see. So the body was buried, but you've come back to it? I do remember—I pulled you out of something once, didn't I? And this is how you repay that?"
She couldn't quite summon full indignation. Even bad people didn't usually turn around and do this. Was this the farmer and the snake, played out for the modern era?
Seeing her escape completely sealed, Amanda's composure cracked and she went reckless: "I'm not Amanda anymore. My name is Ruby. Do you remember Springwood? If you'd arrived just a little sooner, you could have saved me. You could have. Do you remember? You had the power. And you did nothing. You just watched it happen. You know what it was like watching you toy with Freddy—playing with the thing that murdered me—and thinking you were clever? I didn't see someone powerful. I saw someone disgusting. Petty. A peacock spreading its ugly feathers for an audience."
"That's absurd." Bella rejected the accusation without hesitation.
I helped you once. Does that mean I'm obligated to spend the rest of my existence protecting you? Because I'm capable of it, I'm therefore required to save everyone?
She pointed, and ice closed around Amanda—Ruby—from every direction.
"But you're right about one thing: you aren't Amanda anymore. Amanda was difficult. She was impulsive. But she wasn't rotten. The hatred and the torment and the bile of Hell burned through her entirely. What's left is just a demon called Ruby."
Bella's fist closed slowly. The compression tightened. Streams of black mist began to force their way out of Ruby's body—thin, writhing threads, each one a filament of her demonic essence, each one being methodically crushed. Ruby screamed. The sensation was not metaphorical.
"Tell me, little demon—who planned all of this?"
Ruby snarled through clenched teeth: "You can't kill me. You can't read my thoughts. As long as the Will of Hell holds, I'll always come back. A hundred years from now. Five hundred years. I will come back."
Kim had long since passed the point where she could track what was happening. Hell. Demons. A former friend who had become one. Her brain had stopped generating coherent responses.
Bella had no bandwidth to explain it to her—and didn't know where she'd even start. Leave her confused for now.
"'Can't be killed' and 'impossible' are terms with limits. Everything that exists will eventually cease to exist. And you, specifically, are barely worth the effort of a dramatic speech about immortality." She let the pause sit for a moment. "Do you know what separates people from animals? People make tools."
She reached into her pocket and produced a short knife—Dwarven-forged, from the Arendelle smiths.
She began scribing a rune sequence into the blade. Then she produced a Balor's heart and pushed the blade's edge into it—slowly, deliberately—and let it drink. When the color of the flames within the heart began to dim, she withdrew the blade. The steel had gone dark red, as though wrapped in a fire that would never go out.
She used the ice to lay Ruby's body flat, then suspended the knife directly above her chest.
"The Will of Hell makes for a fine shield against mind-reading—you're right about that. But killing you is a different question. A sufficiently powerful demon of Hell can destroy you. Right now, this blade is such a demon."
The knife descended, millimeter by millimeter, into Ruby's chest.
Bella watched her with the patient expression of someone who had all the time in the world. "I'll ask you one more time: who planned this? Not you—you couldn't mobilize vampires. You're not senior enough for that. So who is?"
"I don't know!"
"Good backbone. Keep it up. You have about thirty seconds, by my estimate, before you're gone for good. Your precious Hell isn't close enough to save you. I'll ask you again: who planned this conspiracy?"
"I'm telling you, I don't know! How many times do I have to say it?"
"Ten seconds."
"Please! I really don't know—I've only been back on Earth for a week. I'm a message runner, that's all I am. Let me think—there are humans involved, the Albanians. And vampires—some kind of family, I think?"
Bella tilted her head slightly. "Nothing I didn't already know. Can you give me something I don't have?"
"There's nothing else! Please—Kim, help me! Kim!"
Then, with a concussive crack, Ruby's chest detonated from within. A blast of dark brown flame erupted outward, consuming the body, the knife, and everything else in a single violent flash.
"Hm." Bella studied the ash for a moment. "A mutually-assured-destruction spell, sealed inside the body in advance? Ruthless. Shame about the knife I just made."
Ruby had died without naming the mastermind.
It was possible she was the mastermind herself. It was equally possible she had genuinely not known.
There was no way to tell now.