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search for her, he would be able to track her down easily enough. The thing was, if he wasn’t looking for her, Lucifer would know she was in Hell, but not where, no matter how close she stood to him.
    As long as he didn’t recognize whoever stood beside him as Nyx.
    It would not be enough to take another form. She would need to build an entire life inside herself, for when Lucifer looked at her, he would look beyond her physical self and into her soul. He would see the true form of her being long before she came close enough to drive her sword into him.
    Unless it isn’t my soul he’s seeing.
    Nyx stopped letting the currents drag her and crawled along the bottom until she fetched up against one of the walls of the Lake of Fire. From there she began crisscrossing the lake, moving as fast as she could, and hoping no one would notice her movement reflected in ripples of Hellfire above.
    She ran into, grabbed, examined, and discarded a hundred souls as she crossed back and forth across the lake. None of them would do. She also ran into a hundred Angels, chained to the bottom of the Lake of Fire and driven mad by it. As soon as she touched these, she shied away. None reached for her or seemed to recognize her. All were too wrapped in their own torment.
    Lucifer’s doing. Probably they were loyal to me despite him.
    She considered helping them break free but knew that it would do no good. If she released them, they would be caught and tortured until they told Lucifer how they escaped—which would fuck up her plans—and then they would be chained again. So she left them in their agony. When she had Lucifer’s still-screaming head dangling from her fist, she would have time to bring them out of the lake and let them regain their senses.
    Finally, on the bottom of the deepest part of the lake, she found the Hellstone box in which she had been imprisoned.
    It was more than just a box. It had been chained shut with great Hellstone chains, made of links as thick as her arm. Each chain ended in an enormous Hellstone boulder, large enough that it had sunk into the bottom of the Lake of Fire.
    Each link, every stone, and the box itself were made from the remains of tortured human souls. All Nyx needed to do was find the right one.
    More hours passed. Nyx poured what power she could into the box without risking succumbing to the Hellfire again. Not healing, this time, but seeking.
    Every one of the souls was vile. There were rapists and murderers, pedophiles and poisoners, wicked men who cheated others out of their livelihood, and evil women who used their wiles to destroy others’ lives. Nyx looked into each soul and left it where it was. None of them would suit her needs. Then she found it, the right one.
    It was a woman, a mother driven to desperation by cold and by hunger, living in a brutal community that would give her neither help nor support. She had watched her youngest child die first, starving and freezing, and watched as rats swarmed over a body that no one would bury. Her other children were on the brink of death when she decided she would give them all a last bit of warmth before they died. Gathering the mauled body of her dead child and dragging her two cold, starving children with her, she had snuck into the community hay barn. There, shivering with the frigid cold and watching her desperate children trying to eat hay to fill their swollen, starving bellies, she had taken up her only possessions—a flint and a striking iron—and applied them to the hay piled around her pitiful family. Then she pulled her children, living and dead, close to her and felt warm for the first time in years before the smoke and fire overcame them all.
    Her children were in Heaven, Nyx was sure. The woman was a cursed murderer, and Lucifer had placed within her a driving compulsion to be forever hungry, forever cold, and forever searching for the children she had killed. She had wandered Hell for a hundred years already, searching.
    She