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would do nicely.
    Nyx carefully applied her power to the Hellstone, not to heal, but to separate. Bit by bit she peeled the woman’s soul from the box and took it into her hands. It came off in a jagged chunk.
    Nyx took the stone in her hands and began stretching it. She could feel the agony of the soul within, could sense the unending torment and pain. Because Nyx was at the bottom of the Lake of Fire, she herself felt the pain of what she was doing to the woman.
    She ignored it.
    She reshaped the soul until it became a thin, flexible sheet. It wasn’t thin enough, but Nyx knew she couldn’t do more before putting it where it needed to go.
    The interesting bit will be seeing if I can do it and still stay sane.
    With one taloned hand, Nyx ripped open her own belly.
    Hellfire flooded in, and for a moment the pain nearly drove Nyx back into madness. She clung to her sanity with a will stronger than the Hellstone box she had been caged in. Moving as quickly as she could, she slid the sheet up inside her body, under the rib cage.
    Now… for the tricky… bit.
    She focused on the soul. Since she couldn’t use her hands, Nyx used the force of her mind alone to stretch the thin sheet that was the woman’s soul around the inside of her ribs, encasing them, top and bottom. It would cover her heart, which was the seat of the soul, so that when Lucifer looked inside her body, all he would see was the child-murdering woman. It was a start, but she needed to do more.
    Yeah… because that… didn’t hurt… enough…
    Carefully, Nyx reshaped the soul further, spinning it like thread, and sending a thin line up her spine and into her own skull. The touch of it was agony of a peculiar kind—wretchedness, weakness—and Nyx convulsed. How do they bear being themselves, these lowly souls?
    Still… hurts less than being in that box…
    Nyx stretched out the soul of the murdering mother even more—a slow and delicate process that made the woman shriek and Nyx shriek with her as she accepted each pathetic remnant of the woman’s being into her own Angelic core. When Nyx was done, the woman’s soul also buffered Nyx’s mind inside her skull. Now, any Angel looking inside her mind or soul would see only that of the woman, suffering as she was meant to.
    Nyx’s Angelic flesh healed the hole in her belly, and the pain of having Hellfire inside her stopped. The pain of having another soul woven into her flesh became a dull ache, one that Nyx could manage as long as she simply did not care. The outside of her body and her mind still burned with the punishing pain of the Hellfire, but it was nearly time to end that.
    And now I get to see if this will work…
    Nyx examined the soul inside her more closely. The soul, conscious for the first time in years of something other than loneliness and pain, cowered beneath the scrutiny.
    “Please.” Nyx heard the woman begging from her Hellstone prison. “Please, let me go. I need to find my children…”
    Her name was Aleyd. Her children were from three different men she’d fucked in exchange for food and a place to sleep. She’d stolen food from others like a dog stealing bones. She’d managed to keep herself and her children alive for half a dozen years before the situation in her village became so desperate that no one would give them food or a place to stay. It had been mid-winter when, driven mad from grief and hunger, she lit the fire that killed them all, and burned the feed for half the village’s livestock. Her actions had resulted in the deaths of twenty other people.
    “Please?”
    Nyx winced at the soul’s desperate plea only for an instant. With an effort of will, Nyx crushed the momentary empathy she felt for Aleyd, a woman who had done as Nyx herself had done—who had risked eternal suffering for the chance to save her offspring.
    Not the same, though Nyx, and so she answered the soul’s plea for mercy by allowing it to share in all the pain the Lake of Fire was inflicting