strangers when we met

2

The work was slow, but eminently satisfying. Hell was big enough that it took a while to hunt down the souls that had run from its punishments taking advantage of the disarray, but they rounded them all up in the end.

"I have done nothing wrong!" they screamed over and over while Meg's demons dragged them up to the dead trees surrounded the castle and hooked them up to the branches. "I don't deserve to be here! Please, stop!"

"Yeah, yeah," Meg said, rolling her eyes every time. "That's what everyone says."

The job was made much easier as the rumor expanded that there was a new sheriff in town and the demons that had fucked off to the edges of Hell to do whatever came back, swearing their loyalty to her and dragging some souls they'd found on the way. Meg took them in every time and evaluated them. She was looking for very specific traits.

"The psychopaths, the serial killers, the ones who are a little too happy with wreaking havoc, we need those working the racks," she told Talbot as she followed her around what Meg had come to call "her garden". The souls hanging from the branches cried and howled as she walked past them. "I don't want the Nazis, though. They tend to get uppity. Do you think we should build dungeons for the ones we're never going to let off the rack?"

"I think that's a marvel idea, your Majesty."

She doubted she was going to find someone like Alastair any time soon. The man was Picasso with a blade: not only did he enjoy torturing others immensely, he had the creativity to come up with new, wonderful ways to inflict pain. He was beyond the mere cutting and carving.

But with time and a little patience, a new master torturer was bound to emerge. In the meantime, she took up that role herself.

"No, no, no," she explained a demon named Leon after he'd carved up at least three people without managing to break them. "You need to start small and then escalate. Go for the teeth, for the fingers. If you bring up the big guns at the first try, what's going to be left for later?" She handed him a pair of tweezers. "Here. Pull off all of his fingernails."

Leon smiled crookedly and got to work as the man hanging in front of him began screaming again.

The people who had got there on deals were better for the psychological torture aspect of things.

"I never knew you could use telepathy like that," Talbot said, stepping outside of Meg's newly built dungeons. Her meatsuit changed: her hair went from brown to blonde again as she rolled down her bloodstain sleeves.

"It's easier here than topside," Meg commented as she rolled towards the next cell. "Hell is where we are at our most powerful, since there aren't quite so many limitations."

Talbot drank up every word she said as if it was the gospel. It was interesting to see just how little these new demons knew about their powers and what they could do with them. Interesting, and sad. They had no idea the havoc they could wreak, the way they could manipulate reality around those who were damned.

They had a lot to learn, certainly. Meg started selecting her entourage between those who wanted to grow in power, but more important, those who wanted to find out exactly what being a demon was about. She didn't expect loyalty from them, it would've been naïve to do so. But she knew that if she gave them enough to learn, enough to cling to, they would at least think of her as someone they didn't want to mess with for their own sake. For Hell's sake.

And of course, it helped to make them a present now and them.

One afternoon, while they were walking through the garden (that resembled more and more a kind of twisted woods with each passing day) and taking notes of the state of the different souls, Talbot halted. It was so sudden it took Meg a few seconds to realize she was rolling alone and turn her chair around.