Hunting in Hell by Maria Violante Read Free Book Online Page B

be."
    The Mademoiselle preened slightly.   "I make it myself."   Her face grew serious again.   "So what brings you in here?"
    "I'm looking for the Phoenix Well. "   She muttered the last three words, her tones dripping with ominous gravity.
    The Mademoiselle nodded solemnly and matched her seriousness.   " What … is that ?"
    Huh?
    The woman threw her head back and cracked up with jubilant guffaws.   
    What makes her so—hey wait, is her hair blonde?   I'm sure it was red when I walked in.   Flustered, De la Roca cleared her throat.   "I have no idea where it is.   I'm on an assignment, and that's the clue I got from the Angel."
    The Mademoiselle paused to wipe a tear out of the corner of her eye— really?   Is it that funny? —and sighed.   "Okay, I apologize for that, but I just couldn't resist.   Sometimes, you make it too easy, De la Roca."
    The mercenary shrugged.   Humans and demons the world over feared her, whispered tales of her at night to small children and cursed her name while muttering that she was death on the wind.   She wasn't used to being a laughingstock, and she didn't know how to respond.
    "So, the Phoenix Well, huh?   Hmmm, I'm going to have to think about that one."   By "think", De la Roca knew, she meant the curious process of scrolling through the Archives.   She'd only personally seen the Mademoiselle do it once, when they first met.  
    * * *
     
    Shattered by her amnesia and the encounter with the Angel, the nameless De la Roca stumbled her way into Pico by sheer dumb luck.   The Mademoiselle took pity on her and volunteered to search through the Archives for any information that would shed light on the newly freed demon's past or identity.  
    She started by sitting still, her palms held together, and closing her eyes while tilting her head back.    Soon, she was in a trance, one so deep that she didn't respond when De la Roca tapped her.   Panicking, the young demon even slapped her hard in an attempt to rouse her, but the effort was fruitless.   It wasn't until four hours later that the Mademoiselle suddenly blinked, her face becoming animated again.   "You're getting a one-time pass on the slap," she said, "mostly because I didn't find anything useful."
    De la Roca nodded, both relieved to escape punishment and disappointed by the lack of information.   She hadn't really expected any, though.   She had somehow known it would end that way.  
    "Here's an interesting, although somehow unrelated tidbit.   It was foretold you were going to show up."
    "Excuse me?"   De la Roca had been a lot more polite then.
    "A young Mexican man collapsed on my doorstep once.   He had just run the border through the Chihuahuan Desert.   Dehydrated and suffering from heat exhaustion, he made it as far as my Cantina and then just gave out.   It took days of nursing him before he came around, and in the heights of his sickness, he often screamed out in his dreams."
    "So?"   De la Roca didn't see where this was going, although she found it odd that the Mademoiselle would go through the trouble of nursing a human back to health.  
    "Once he awoke, he was convinced, utterly convinced that he had seen demons in the desert.   They haunted him incessantly.   He refused to sleep until his body overruled him, often causing him to pass out in a chair or even just standing in line.   Once, when I had no customers, I convinced him to take a nap in one of the booths in the Cantina.   Not ten minutes had lapsed before I heard him screaming."
    She gave De la Roca a hard stare.   "When I woke him, he said that a demon would come for him, a gunslinger with, as he put it, 'nervios de piedra'—nerves of stone.   He named you 'of the rock', which, although not your true name, probably in some way hints at it."
    "I don't understand."
    "He didn't know your true name.   It's quite possible that nobody does—you don't have to know a demon's name to strip it from them.   But given the nature