(Part 17)

Maybe it was Dante's presence in the mission. Maybe it was the fact that all the demons that passed me totally ignored my presence as if they couldn't see me or feel. All demons in the castle I saw were almost literally flying towards the front gates where Dante probably still was, stuck with the sheer number of them.

I breathed a small sigh of relief when I saw that there were not too many high-level demons flying through the hallways. Either they hadn't been activated yet, or they were already engaged with Dante, pushing his fight quickly to an end. But still, I prayed that the son of Sparda knew his own limits. I wouldn't expect him to be able to single-handedly thrash the entire horde of demons that I'd seen at the front gates, combined with all those that I saw steadily streaming towards him.

Still, he was welcome to give me a pleasant surprise, though I wouldn't judge him at all if he didn't finish all of them off. Maybe 50% of the demons would be a norm. Considering Dante was a lazy ass, then maybe 25% of the demons.

Very occasionally, one or two demons slowed down in their quest to the front gates, turning to look at me. I guessed those were the rare demons who were wired to actually be able to sense out humans. Still, they were luckily all low-levelled demons that I shot dead easily without much of any problems at all. Getting to be able to kill some demons without any consequences was a great refresher after taking a break that was almost a month and a half long.

That wasn't including the time I spent with Dante here in Hell, which I had no definite measure of how much time we had actually spent. I guessed that Hell didn't exactly have time the same way that was measured in the two human worlds, which meant that Dante and I could have been here anytime from three days to three weeks.

I tried not to imagine how things might have changed in the three days-or-weeks that we had spent trying to get to Mundus's lair, remembering the instructions from Azazel. He had made it sound so easy –to look for the door with the bloody handprint.

Yeah, it would be easy if not for the fact that Mundus's castle had probably a few hundred doors. It didn't help that the lighting inside the castle was particularly horrible and not very beneficial for the lousy human eyesight. I had to squint against the partial-darkness to look for any tell-tale handprints at every door, which slowed down my progress greatly.

By the seventieth door, I was beginning to get a little irritated. By the hundredth, I was already jumpy and annoyed as hell. That was when I decided that the room with the bloody handprint had to be the most obvious, most conspicuous. It was the keys' room, after all. Demons probably had eyesight problems as well since they couldn't see a very-human me running past them, and if they needed to get some keys, they probably had to go there as well.

Going by that faulty, and rather shoddy logic, I cleverly skipped through the more mundane doors, only stopping by to look at doors with more ghastly decorations. Some had skulls hanging on them, others had bones and whatnot hanging from doorknobs. Some doorknobs were shaped like skulls, and a few other fancier ones shaped like bats.

It turned out that I didn't need much looking at all, because I eventually ran down this hallway where no rooms hung on either sides. For some strange reason, the candles hanging on the walls in this particular hallway were particularly bright, and I saw the blood handprint even from a distance away.

Sighing internally at my effort wasted squinting on the mundane doors, I ran down the relatively empty hallway –and was almost beheaded when a scythe swung down from a mechanism from the ceiling. Thank goodness for my knee-jerk reaction to step back, I narrowly avoided rolling heads at the cheap but extremely dangerous Halloween trick.

I don't know if Mundus expected for his infiltrators to be extremely dumb, or if it was just his limited creativity in creating traps. As I progressed from trap to trap, dodging flying arrows and swinging axes that came flying out from hidden mechanisms along the walls, I realized that I was beginning to find myself in some sort of an Indiana Jones movie. The problem?

I was probably the Indiana Jones of Hell. But female version. Huh, Tomb Raider of Hell, perhaps? I always fancied myself a bit of Lara Croft during my growing up days, but never imagined being put in this kind of situations.

While I shook head internally at the cliché-ness of Mundus's traps, I had to admit that they were rather lethal. All were aimed at killing me in one blow and so I did my best to save my own life. One by one, I cleared it all until I reached the door. I was almost sure to get electrified when I touched the doorknob, but at least it was one cliché that missed Mundus's mind.

Remembering the fact that an alarm demon was placed inside the keys' room, I palmed the innocent looking hair-stick in my hand, and slowly turned the doorknob. The demon looked surprisingly human-like, and it even had a neck that was prime target. Thankfully, it seemed to be rather fixated on a screen (which made me extremely surprised to find electricity here in Hell) that showed a live feed of Dante kicking ass at the front gate while I sneaked silently into the room.

All was going well, until, in the most crucial moment, my gun fell out from its holster. It had probably gotten loose with all the jumping, shimmying and dodging I did in the hallway earlier, and chose the right moment to lodge loose from its holder. The loud clatter was the loudest sound I had ever heard, and the demon spun around in the same time it took for me to curse once in my mind, and look up to meet surprisingly-human eyes.

Time went in slow-motion as the demon opened surprisingly-human mouth.

I staked all of my being in the most amazing dive I invested my body into doing, my arms stretched outwards, and the hair stick being the most undeadly-weapon I had seen in my whole demon-hunting life held tightly in my hand.

Heaven must have been on my side, because my desperate lunge somehow made contact despite the distance that was initially between us. I felt my hair stick meet some sort of resistance, and put more force behind it, hoping that it was the throat that the tip had buried itself into. I sure was glad to hear a strange-ass gurgling noise that was disgustingly wet when I landed on the human-figure of the demon.

Disgusted that I had literally thrown myself on a demon, I scrambled to get up quickly, relieved to find the demon struggling to get rid of the hair stick. To make sure nothing like that happened, I kicked its hand away, ran to get my fallen gun, and shot at its hand a few times for good measure. Its red eyes glared at me with a force, and I returned the favour by stepping on the hair stick, shoving it further up its throat.

And, just when I was beginning to be convinced that Eva had given me the most useless weapon ever, the hair stick began to glow. The demon seemed to know exactly what it was that I had put inside its throat, because red eyes no longer seemed angry, but desperate as it tagged on me this time. The wet gurgling sound became a little louder, as if it was trying to plead for me to remove the weapon from its throat.

I shook my head firmly, and watched as the hair stick's glow get brighter. The demon squeezed its eye shut, and the smell of rot came to my nose. A strange sizzling filled the air, and I looked down in horror to see demon skin melting. Think about how ice melts when heat is placed on it. Then imagine that metaphorical 'ice' being skin-coloured, and pierced by an innocent-looking glowing hair stick.

I guess I was a rather kind soul when I put the barrel of my gun on its chest, and emptied my magazines.

The sizzling still sounded even though the demon was dead and gone. And even though I'd seen some real weird shit during my days as a demon huntress, this probably shot its way quickly to the top of that list. One way or the other, I fought to keep my bile down my throat, and looked around for any sign of keys.

"What the f-" Absently censoring myself, ignoring the images of Dante kicking some major ass at the front gates, I busied myself cursing a certain angel of Death once more.

Behind where the demon had been sitting was a wall of keys. Literally, every inch of that wall was nailed with hooks, and one key sat on every small hook. There had to be a few hundred there, and each key held a little trinket to define which door it opened. In the human world, prisoners had serial numbers to differentiate one from the other.

In Hell, prisoners had only one thing tied to their key to differentiate. There were a few hundred little trinkets –some had little pieces of what-I-assumed-to-be-skin hanging on the key rings, some had funny looking keychains. The fancier ones had keychains that actually looked rather normal, and other keys had different coloured strings tied to them.

There seemed to be no form of a systematic approach to the keys at all, and I stepped back with rising frustration to scan every row of the wall. What had Azazel said Sparda's key was?

It will be the one with a single strand of white hair tied to it. It is Sparda's hair.

Right. White was awfully hard to look for against the abnormally strong fluorescent light that blasted from a single bulb hanging on the ceiling of the small keys room. Utterly convinced now that Mundus was out to make infiltrating humans like me get myopic vision from squinting too much against bad lighting, I scanned through rows after rows.

It was a mind-numbing job, and it almost made me want to volunteer changing roles with Dante at the moment. Who the hell sent a puny human like me down here to look for a key with white hair?

Right, Azazel. That bastard angel of Death was probably enjoying himself right now in the Heavens with a tub of popcorn, scorning at my humane 'stupidity' or something.

You know the feeling of when you are looking for something in a hurry, and you can't find it all no matter how hard you look?

Imagine that, times a hundred when I realized that I had finished scanning the last row, and still could not find Sparda's key.

And then, imagine the same feeling again, times a thousand when I scanned through the whole thing a second time, and still couldn't find the key.

I admit that I'm a sore loser, but I was in the middle of my rage-quit when I came across Sparda's key by total accident. Basically, my upset had inspired a series of table wrecking and wall-slamming, making the keys rain down from the hooks on the wall. I took more satisfaction when more keys fell, and I deliberately kicked at them to mix them all up, feeling utterly evil. Things probably didn't work the same way in Hell, but someone had to be responsible for putting the keys back up one by one.

I stomped over to the table where the demon had been, messing everything up there. I flipped files upside-down, inside out, tore papers out of their binders and littered them happily on the floor. Basically, I was being a messy little bitch and being satisfied about it after having gone through some mind-numbing search.

To be rather honest, now that I look back at my actions, I was pretty idiotic and childish.

Then again, no one was around to judge me, so I did everything according to my will, and messed up more papers. It was a pity that there weren't any shredders around –though up till now I still wasn't very sure why Hell needed papers for administration. Maybe Hell reflected more of the human worlds than I thought.

That was why my hand hit something cold, and it clattered noisily on the floor beside my feet –rather like a metal key striking cold concrete. By pure instincts and luck, I looked down to see what had dropped and saw the key lying innocently there. I squinted (once more due to the lousy lighting) and realized that the key ring held one strand of what-looked-like-hair. And sure enough, when I raised it up against the amazingly-lousy light, it was white.

I wasted more time than I should cheering about my find. Dante was probably still fighting his ass out while I danced my crazy victory gig in the keys' room. I didn't check on him through the live feed though, because he was supposed to be the son of Sparda. That man could survive starving for one year and three months. Demons were a piece of cake to him, weren't they?

And so I rushed through the only other door that led from the keys' room.

I know in horror movies, when there are dark shadowy cells on both side of a narrow hallway, the main character would slow down and be timidly looking into them to find out what had been caged. Then the cheap shock factor would come when whatever that was locked in would pounce at the cell door and shock the main character to death or something.

It should have happened, but it didn't because I wasn't the main character of a horror show. It didn't happen, because I didn't slow down. It didn't happen, mainly because I didn't give a single hoot about what other creatures that could be locked up in these cells. I felt a little sad that I wasn't giving them time to fulfil their potential of scaring the life out of some poor timid little human, but I was a demon huntress. This kind of cheap trick wasn't going to make a difference to me.

And so, despite them trying to scare me with their lousy tactics, I just jumped over their distorted hands and charged straight ahead.

It was a long hallway, and it even led to a flight of stairs. It wasn't something that Azazel mentioned, but I guessed that structural changes must have happened since the last time Azazel checked. One way or another, I charged up the stairwell until I came to a spacious landing facing a single door.

The air was immediately different here.

The rushed atmosphere, the unspoken and unmentioned stopwatch that I had been operating under since I walked through Mundus's front gates seemed to seep away almost immediately. As if the time that I had been allocated to reach my destination had finally been put on a pause, I felt the urgency leave me in a single span of a moment.

You could say I reached a state of nirvana internally as I calmly inserted the key into the hole, turned until I heard a click, and opened the door. As Azazel had warned, I wasn't surprised to find another door a short distance away from the first. What I was sure to do, though, was to close and lock the first door behind me, because I remembered what Azazel said.

The second door needed a little of my blood, but there was little need for me to be shedding blood now. I had to open the doors for Vergil and Leah later on, so I didn't want to waste any opening the door now only to use more blood opening it again later.

And so I stood, finally aimless, in the small space between the first and the second door.

I wrecked in my mind for something to do, trying to recall what I might had missed from Azazel's instructions. But there was nothing to recall. I had done all that I was supposed to do perfectly.

All I needed now was to wait.

I sighed, sat down and leaned against the wall, trying my best to not develop claustrophobia thanks to the small space given to me. I was in one of the safest place in Hell right now, and the key to the door was with me.

I know I was supposed to be alert and all, considering that I was, no matter what, still a human in Hell. My parents would probably die again wherever they were in the Otherworld if they knew what I was doing now.

I swear, I didn't mean it.

But I fell asleep waiting for Dante or Vergil and Leah to show up.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

"Knock knock." I was awoken by a sing-song, bored-as-hell voice that came from the other side of the door. It was a voice that I recognised, but it came a little muffled and strange through the closed door. It didn't help that the door didn't have a peephole, so I couldn't be sure if it exactly was him, or a demon sounding very much like him to lure me out.

"Who is that?" I asked cautiously, but he didn't seem very interested in answering me properly as well.

"Your friendly neighbourhood Spiderman."

I suppressed the urge to open the door and slam it to his face in annoyance, deciding to ask another question just to make sure he was the right person to open the door for.

"What's my name?"

"Bitch." His first answer didn't seem to need considering over, and my silent frown at the door must somehow have been conveyed to him, because he tried again without my prompting. "Slut? Gold-digger?"

"Answer me properly, Dante." I sighed, then corrected myself, "If you are Dante, I mean."

"Stop being a bitch then and let me in, Justine. If you are Justine, I mean."

"I'm not." I answered easily, finally finding something I could use to punish him for calling me the wrong name over and over again. "I'm not Justine, so I'm not letting you in."

"What kind of a stupid name is Max anyway?" He yawned loud enough to be heard from the other side of Hell, and I guessed that he was stretching from the other side of the door. "Even if you wanted to name yourself, you could have taken something better. Like Justine. Or Alex."

"It was supposed to be short for Maximum. But Maximum sounds stupid, so I cut it down." I explained, not sure why we were doing this in Hell, and with a door between us.

"Your name just gets stupider and stupider with more explanations." His blatantly honest answer was a fresh change. There was probably no other man who dispensed with niceties as much as Dante did. He was honestly the only man that I'd met in my whole life who had told me straight in the face what he thought about my name. "Justine is still better than Max."

"But I'm not Justine."

"Look, just let me in, and we'll talk about your name after that, okay? The demons are trickling in, and I'm really bored."

I started in surprise. I hadn't heard any sounds of fighting at all from the other side of the door.

"There are demons on your side?" I asked with surprise, hesitating to open the door a little.

"You think? You've been snoring for some time now, and I'm tired of killing demons silently so you can catch your 'z's. Now open the damned door and let me in, or I'm busting my way through." Dante grunted, and I rushed to unlock the door.

The sight that met me outside the first door was utterly different from the one I experienced when I first stopped at the landing of the stairs.

Demons, blood and dust littered almost every inch of the floor, and I opened the door to see Dante kicking the dead bodies of some down the stairs to clear a small walking space at the landing. He turned around to see me peeking out the door, then made a face.

I don't know what was more surprising –the fact that he had killed so many demons without waking me up, or the fact that he didn't look like he had received any injuries at all. Sure, he seemed to be dirtied and covered in blood. But none of the blood looked like his, as he scowled and picked his way through to the door.

He pushed me back into the small space we had between the first and second door, closed it and locked it behind him.

"You killed quite a fair bit." I tried to make myself sound conversational, when in actual fact my mind was reeling from the number I'd counted just from what I could see. How many demons had he kicked down the stairs that I couldn't count? How could he had killed them all without making a single sound? Wait, how long had he waited for me to wake up?

Dante made a noncommittal grunt as he rested his sword against the wall, then wiped his bloody hands on his trench coat, his back to me. I guessed he was pissed that I took so long to open the door. I would be pissed too, if I were him. Besides, I hadn't expected him to be so sweet to kill demons silently so I could sleep-

My thoughts stopped there when he spun around and closed the distance between us in one millisecond. One hand of his –now partially cleaned of demon blood –twisted around the front of my shirt and pulled me to him in a rough movement. The other hand grabbed the back of my head and pushed me towards him.

And he kissed me once more, this time hungrier than ever before.

I admit shamefully; I succumbed to his hunger and returned the favour as well. I had never been much of a sex maniac, but being around Dante must have influenced me in ways more than one, because I found myself kissing him back passionately. In fact, I was so passionate in the kiss that I failed to realise that his hands were going to places that were rather suggestive. Pressed against him, I felt something hard prodding at my abdomen, and flushed when I remembered that the male anatomy had an extra bone when a guy was excited.

"Some sort of 'Angel' you are... huh... You're in the same league as those succubae... making me horny when I'm around you." He muttered as his lips moved from my lips downwards to my neck, his hands already rolling up the hem of my shirt. Was he seriously planning to do me here, between the locks of two doors? His father could be listening intently three doors away if he boned me right here!

My shameful reluctance was shown through my breathless protest as I weakly tried to push him away. His shoulders were extremely resistant against any force I tried to put against them, his lips as if magnetised to hollow of my collarbone, licking... kissing...

"Open the damned door, Dante." A voice came from the other side of the door, accompanied with a series of no-nonsense knocks on the door.

My yelp probably answered whoever who was outside, waiting, as Dante froze in his act of venturing downwards to the top of my bra. With a sigh (a warm breath that tickled sensitive area), he leaned his forehead on my chest for a short moment. I suspected he was enjoying the aerial view of my breasts from his position, but I was too frozen in shock to berate him.

"Go away, Vergil. I left a sock on the door knob." Dante raised his voice to be heard from the other side of the door as my racing mind caught up with the situation. We had almost... until Vergil arrived. I hadn't even heard footsteps at all, and still Dante's twin was here at the other side of the door.

"You did not." Vergil's sharp tone threatened a word full of torturing if Dante didn't comply, and still the younger brother didn't seem to care at all, not moving and trapping me where I was. "Open the door."

"That's one way to greet your little brother. What? Not even a hug of reunion? We have more than five years of kisses and hugs between us, Brother." Dante's sarcasm.

"It will turn into bashes if you do not plan on opening the door soon." The evened tone of voice that replied was definitely scary, and even though I had heard so many embarrassing stories about Vergil being totally not the badass demon hunter that he was supposed to be, I still couldn't imagine how Dante was withstanding this obvious threat.

"How do you even know that I'm here? It could be a demon pretending to be your little brother." Dante finally leaned back, but not before he brushed a quick kiss on my cheek as if in promise of something in the future. "For all I know, you could be a demon pretending to be Vergil."

"You and I will find out the truth once you open the door." Vergil wasn't even fazed by the question, and I heard the distant voice of a woman giggling from the other side of the door. Was that Leah? The way I heard in stories from Marielle, Leah and Vergil were virtually an inseparable couple.

"How about you give me five more minutes? I promise you I'll be done by then." Dante bantered, which totally made me wonder where the man who had been waiting for his brother had gone. Wasn't this guy the same Dante who didn't seem to be able function well without his brother? Here his brother was at the other side of the door, and he didn't want to open it? What kind of a reunion was Dante looking forward to?

"Dante, open the damned door!" The feminine voice wasn't giggling now, but plainly scolding. "The demons are still coming, and I'm going to get pissed soon! You won't like me when I get pissed, because your brother's going to be doubly pissed!"

"Boohoo, my little sister's trying to threaten me into opening the door. How about you grow another two years on us before you try busting your way in, Leah?"

"Do not talk to your sister-in-law that way." Vergil's sharp tone spoke of his utter loss of control, as I blinked in surprise. Dante seemed to start at that sudden comment as well, before he wrenched the door open before either of us could compute his actions. Sticking his head out and blocking the rest of the opening of the door, I could only see the top of Vergil's head from the slit on the door.

"You really put a ring on her? That little girl who couldn't help but almost pee her pants the first time she was in Limbo? That woman with the 'oh my god, I think Vergil hates me!' the last time she was here?"

I guessed it had to be something that went on between Leah and Vergil the last time Leah visited Limbo, but it seemed as if Dante's twin didn't appreciate the refresher, because the door was suddenly slammed open. I couldn't stop my shriek of surprise, and Vergil's eyes went up immediately at that sound, piercing through me.

I think my heart stopped for a beat with fear as I pressed myself against the wall uselessly.

"Who is that?" The caution was easy to detect, but the frown was what made me wonder if Vergil was going to kill me.

"My girlfriend." Dante declared almost immediately, and my fear was forgotten instantaneously, replaced by a whole load of shock. Girlfriend? When was I...? I don't remember Dante ever asking me to be his girlfriend! Vergil looked equally taken aback as well, which only went to say how much Dante was not expected to have adopted a girlfriend with his useless lifestyle.

"What? Just because you've engaged yourself to Leah doesn't mean I'm going to be alone forever."

"Why is she here?" Vergil asked further, pushing Dante back and stepping in. Along with him came a beautiful woman who seemed slightly younger than us, looking beautiful as Dante's sister, as Vergil's wife. There was no mistaking this couple; it was the same that I had seen in the pictures that Marielle showed me. I still remembered that picture of them at prom –Leah dressed in a stunning blood-red off-shoulder dress that swept the floor, and Vergil in a tuxedo that made him look lethal.

"She's the reason I'm here. She's also the reason why I can open the door. She was here first." Dante answered with nonchalance as he sauntered back to my corner of the small space, Vergil slamming the door behind Leah and locking it for good measure.

"This 'She' has a name." I piped up to remind them that I was still around, but it seemed like Vergil and Dante didn't care.

"She is not part of our family. How is she, a mere human, down here in Hell? And why do you have my amulet? I left it with Marielle for protection." Vergil continued as if I hadn't spoken, which I found was rather rude. Maybe it was a Sparda thing. My high hopes for a better version of Dante didn't seem to be meeting rather well.

"What; just because she's a human, she can't come here? Look at your Leah. She's here and she's supposed to be human." Dante argued back, and I guessed it was their way of a strange reunion. I sighed, and realized that I heard an echo of my own sigh shortly afterwards. Turning to the only other woman in the small confined space we had, I made a friendly smile and tiptoed quickly over to her side.

"Hi, I'm Max. Max Cartwright. You must be Leah Cartlier." I introduced, hoping the woman was as friendly as her sister made her out to be.

"It's nice to meet you, Max. Are you really Dante's...?" She drifted off in obvious curiosity, and I suppressed a laugh.

"Of course not. Dante's just protecting his ego."

"Then why are you here?" She asked softly, weakly gesturing that she meant no insult or harm.

"Actually," I grinned, "I tried to find you and Vergil in your world. I've met Marielle, and she told me many things about you. I'm here now because I'm part of the mission to save Sparda as well. I don't know why, but your mother and Azazel recruited me to save your father. Things happened, and here I am, stuck with Dante... and well, your husband."

"Fiancé," Leah corrected with a small smile, "Vergil is not usually like that, but Dante tends to bring out the worst in him."

I chuckled, watching the men pissing each other off with insults and digs.

"It's a Dante-thing. He brings out the worse in everyone."

This time, Leah laughed with me.

"It's definitely a Dante-thing."