A fog descended over Jesse's eyes and he finally stopped grouching and complaining, taking a moment to actually process what he was seeing. Confident that the memories I had stolen from Lucas had been firmly implanted in Jesse's brain I dropped my hold on Jesse's mind and let my hand fall back to my side. I also dropped my hold on Lucas and felt myself sag with exhaustion. I'd forgotten that I was functioning on very little sleep, and that little display of power had drained me of pretty much all I had left.

Staggering to the side I sank down onto the floor, bracing my back against the wall and closing my eyes. Silence stretched throughout the room for a few blissful moments, though it came as no surprise that it was Frank who broke it.

"I feel like the voyeur who wasn't allowed to join in the threesome. Mind filling me in on exactly what I just missed out on?"

"Always such a wordsmith," Lucas slurred as he leaned against the wall, his head in his hands.

"Basically I took memories out of Lucas' head and stuck them into Jesse's. That's what all these new powers are supposed to do, it's what we're meant to do. I don't know why I didn't understand that sooner, but that's how it works. This is how we start something."

"Well I can't deny that I'm impressed you finally figured it out, Love. But if that's how it works then it'll take forever to amass enough support for any kind of uprising, took you long enough to get it into his thick skull. And, not to talk bad about my fellow demons and all, but a lot of them aren't exactly the sharpest of tools in the box. Besides, look at the state of you now, you really think you can sustain the energy and power needed to convert all of Hell onto your side? To be honest, Love, I'm thinking we may as well give up and let Lucifer get on with his merry plans."

"Not to mention I think my head will literally explode if I have to go through that again," Lucas added with a groan as he massaged his temples.

If I'd had any energy left I would have rolled my eyes at him, as it was all I could manage was a small sigh. Not only did his sudden willingness to just give up frustrate me, but I couldn't believe he didn't understand his own part in how this would work, Lucas I kind of expected it from, but not from Frank.

Frank, out of the three of them, was supposed to be the one I didn't need to explain things to, I was supposed to be able to rely on him for help and guidance in all of this. The oldest, the most experienced, not to mention the only pureblooded demon in the room. I wondered if our relative safety in that hideaway, isolated from the rest of Hell had him forgetting exactly what we were hiding from. I knew that if my little stunt with Jesse had worked, then we'd need to kick our plan into high gear and soon, before we all grew complacent and quick to give in.

I pushed myself forwards and braced my hands on my knees, glaring hard at the pair of them as they lurked in by the narrow doorway.

"Well now, that would be why I'm lumbered with you three now wouldn't it. Funnily enough I'm not choosing to stick with you guys purely for the shits and giggles, you have your own purpose and that is to amplify my new power, project its reach further than I can manage on my own. I can make it work, but it's a lot of effort and takes a lot of energy, so this is exactly why we needed to get him back. Without all of us together we get nowhere, Lucifer will succeed in his plan to reign supreme over Hell, and in the end it'll be Malick that wins. So it has got to be all of us, all or nothing."

Frank let out a harsh chortle of laughter as he backed into the hallway. "The three fucking Muskateers!"

"I always figured I'd look quite fetching in one of those plumed hats," Lucas muttered in a groggy voice, his eyes still closed but a half smile curled at his lips.

"But there's four of us!"

At those words we all turned our heads, his brown eyes were open again and though his pallor looked slightly green the look on his face was much more recognisable than it had been the last few times we'd locked gazes.

"Well lookie who's back with us," Frank chimed in, his sing-song voice somewhat less grating as I looked into that familiar face once again.

"You said four of us?" I said, pushing myself to my feet and taking a couple of tentative steps towards Jesse.

"Well yeah, how can we be the three Musketeers if there's four of us?"

"There were four Musketeers too, don't you humans read, or at the very least watch films any more." Lucas sounded half asleep. His eyes had closed once again after a fleeting glance towards Jesse the first time that he spoke, none of them seemed to notice the significance of those words he had spoken, but I sure as hell did.

"No. You said four of us! You said us. And by four you are counting yourself in that number?" I said, excitedly. Eager and on my feet again, but remaining cautious until he nodded – albeit looking somewhat puzzled by my peculiar line of questioning.

At the slight bob of his head I grinned and let out an exclamation of victory, stamping the ground in glee and release of all the built up frustrations that had plagued me since we'd dragged Jesse's unconscious body out of Malick's office. Then I rushed at him, throwing my body forwards and flinging my arms around his shoulders, crushing him tightly against me as I all but cried with relief.

"Rayne, seriously you're crushing me, I can't breathe."

"Well I'll be damned, looks like it worked."

"Damn right it fucking worked!" I finally let him go and jumped away, feeling much more elated than I had in such a long time. Maybe we really did have a chance, a real chance to make this work.

"So you really do know everything now? All that we know, the truth about all of this?" Lucas asked, finally looking a little more alert, and yet unable to hide the suspicion in his voice.

"What do you mean now? Everything about what exactly? Have you been working on some plan and left me out of the discussion again?"

I frowned at him, feeling about as much confusion as Jesse had vocalised. "What exactly do you remember?"

"Remember about what?" He tossed the question back at me with growing frustration.

"How about, what do you remember about your time since you got here. What exactly do you remember that's happened since I dragged your sorry behind into Hell?" Even Frank looked quizzical as we all studied Jesse, wondering what effect my new power had really had on his brain. Whilst it appeared initially to have done exactly what I'd wanted it to by getting him back onto our side, what he really knew and what he could remember of our time together remained to be seen.

"Since I got here...uh...I don't know. Um, well I remember you bringing me, I was put in that dark place, with all those passages. It was so dark I felt like I was blind, so many strange noises. I've no idea how long I was there for, nothing changed until... I remember you were there."

He paused, looking up at me though his brown eyes were slightly glazed as he tried hard to recall the memories of the time before he was changed.

"You...you died. We killed you. I can remember the blood, and then it was dark again, for a long time. I was waiting for you to come back, which in hindsight sounds like a really stupid thing to do when the person you're waiting for is dead. But you did come back. I mean I know that's true because I can see you now, but you came back there too, in the darkness, though it wasn't quite so dark any more. You found me there.

"Then...I don't know it all seems kind of hazy and mixed up. We ended up in some kind of office, right? There were books and papers everywhere, and that's where we figured things out, in all those files we found out what Lucifer is planning, what Malick intends to do, and what we've all got to do to stop them. Then...I don't know, somehow we ended up back here, everything went kind of black for a while. Did I get hit in the head or something?"

Jesse looked around at the three of us. His memories were all definitely real, although a mixture of both his own and Lucas' blended together after a fashion into something reasonably coherent and believable.

"Well, that's one version of events," Lucas muttered as he got back to his feet and headed for the door, "I need to go lay down for a while, my head feels like it's been split open."

"Wait, don't we need to figure out where we go from here? What's our next move? Don't tell me you three have figured that out already whilst I was out of it?"

Jesse called down the corridor after Lucas, who ignored him – mind set on nothing but himself and his own needs. I couldn't blame him really, it had been draining enough extracting and transferring those memories from one brain to another, I didn't much like to imagine how it must have felt to have your own thoughts literally ripped from your head.

He turned back into the room and looked at Frank and myself, his wide brown eyes full of eagerness and expectation. "Well, what do we do next?"

"He's keen, I'll give him that, Love." Frank patted me vaguely on the shoulder with one of his huge clawed hands before making his own way out of the small room. "I'll take off too. See if I can dig anything up that might help us out. If we're going to do anything we need to find the best opportunity to make this all work in our favour."

"It also needs to be soon," I added. Our delays in action may well have been down to me and my struggles to get a handle on my new power, but I could feel time breathing down the back of my neck, a constant reminder that it would soon all be gone.

"Don't want much now do we, Love. As ever, I will do my very best."

"Wait, you're not just going to let him go too are you?" Jesse was at my shoulder as Frank's immense form disappeared down the dark tunnel and out of sight.

"It's okay. Lucas isn't much of an ideas person anyway, and Frank is the only one of us who can really wander around up there and find out what we need to know. And he's right, any plan we make must happen at exactly the right time, or we'll blow everything."

I looked at Jesse and felt a very real pang of loss as I met his warm gaze. He really was changed, again, and completely. The Requiem ritual had changed parts of him, but even then I'd still been able to recognise bits of the man he had been before the demon blood infected him. His anger and bitterness towards me, towards this whole situation I'd placed him in, had been real and, although intensified by the demonic power he'd gained, still fully justified. But now all that was gone. It was as if my powers had scraped away those parts of him and implanted there only the things we needed him to know, changing him so he would act exactly as we needed him to. It was good for our mission, but I wasn't so sure it was good for Jesse.

Would there be anything left of him by the time we were done, or would he just be an empty shell; used up and scraped clean of everything that had made him who he was. I'd used him so many times already, and I wasn't sure the guilt of it all would ever wash clean. But I couldn't let it consume me. If I let it drag me down now, the whole of humanity and all of demon-kind would pay the price for it. Better to hurt one and save many, right?

"Come on, let's go look over the files and stuff. Put together some ideas for when Frank gets back. As soon as we know our best opportunity we'll have to act fast. Lucifer can't succeed, and everyone needs to know it."