"Abel, sweetheart, how do they make this dessert? I've tried to replicate it three times and it never comes out right."
Theresa was holding the half-eaten pastry and examining it with the focused displeasure she normally reserved for problems at work. The pastry had apparently earned a spot in that category.
Abel smiled. "You're the best cook I know. But having something you love that you can't replicate isn't a failure. It's a surprise that stays surprising."
Theresa reached over and flicked his forehead with one finger, the light snap she'd been doing since he was eleven years old.
"Not bad. That's my boy."
He laughed and rubbed the spot. She walked back to the living room with her tea, satisfied.
Abel turned back to the sink. He was rinsing the last bowl when he felt it — a pulse of heat from somewhere outside the building. Not physical heat. Something beneath it, the magical signature of hellfire flaring at a distance of maybe two blocks. He set the bowl down, hands still wet.
The sensation was different from what he'd felt before from Blackheart's lieutenants. That had carried threat, power aimed at something. This was quieter. And the trace of hellfire authority lodged in his own core since the Fiendfyre mutation responded to it with recognition rather than alarm.
Like recognizes like.
He dried his hands, went to his room, put on his jacket, checked the repaired wand in its holster. The silver wire holding the crack in the shaft was still solid. He came back through the living room.
Theresa was on the couch with her tea, the television on low. She looked at him.
"I just remembered something I was supposed to drop off at Sean's," Abel said. "I'll be twenty minutes."
"This late?"
"Sean's place is four blocks. The neighborhood is safe."
"If you run into any problem, call me. Or call the police." She said it without looking away from the screen, which was how she showed she'd decided to trust him even when she wasn't sure she should.
"I know. Back before ten."
He put on his shoes and left.
Johnny Blaze was on his motorcycle across the street, parked in front of a fire hydrant the way only people who weren't planning to stay long ever parked. He wasn't looking directly at the building entrance. He was looking at a spot slightly to the left of it, the studied non-observation of someone keeping watch.
No skull. No flames. Just a man in a leather jacket, jaw set, shoulders carrying the particular tension of someone who had come somewhere to do something difficult.
Abel didn't acknowledge him. He turned left and walked four blocks into the quieter part of the neighborhood — fewer restaurants, fewer lights, the streets wide and still under yellow streetlights. He found the small park wedged between two condemned buildings, the one with the rusted swing set and cracked basketball court, and sat down on one of the swings.
Johnny came through the entrance thirty seconds later and stopped ten feet away, hands in his jacket pockets.
"I know I can't just ask for the Contract," Johnny said. "I know better now. I didn't come to ask. Someone else wanted to talk to you. Not me."
Before Abel could respond, his body ignited.
Faster than before. Three weeks of practice visible in the transition — less resistance, more surrender, the Spirit taking over more smoothly. Skin blackened and peeled back in a wave that moved from chest to extremities, flesh becoming bone in under two seconds. The chains materialized at the skeleton's hips. The leather jacket was gone.
The Ghost Rider looked down at Abel from seven feet of burning bone.
Abel stayed on the swing. The hellfire rolling off the Ghost Rider's frame pushed heat across the distance between them, but it carried none of the threat he'd felt from the earth demon or Aerokon. His own fragment of hellfire authority registered it the way a compass registers north.
"The one who wants to speak to you," said a voice that was not Johnny Blaze's — older, deeper, carrying harmonics no ordinary throat could produce, "is me."
"Interesting," Abel said. "Split personality, or hostile takeover?"
The Ghost Rider paused. Then: "Give me the Contract of San Venganza. Only with the Contract can I approach Blackheart and destroy him."
Abel let the swing drift an inch forward, an inch back. "Walk me through the plan. You absorb the thousand souls, power up, go directly at Mephisto's son." He watched the burning eye sockets. "I've run those numbers. It's not enough." A beat. "Unless you're planning to use the Contract as currency — walk to Blackheart, offer him what he wants, buy yourself access. Which would explain why you came to me instead of just trying to take it." He tilted his head slightly. "Pity about the Earth Demon and Aerokon, though. With you and the Water Demon you'd have had the full elemental set. Wind, fire, water, earth. Very satisfying."
"Mage." The flatness in the Spirit's voice was absolute. "Stop talking. Only with the Contract can I approach Blackheart and defeat him."
"I have a counter-proposal," Abel said. "Do you want to hear it?"
He raised his right hand and snapped his fingers.
END CHAPTER 60