Father never went into depth about what happened if I woke up, unable to remember how I’d died, but most definitely in the hands of those not selected to have s’mores and sleepovers for all of eternity.

There is a rule in Hell: Don’t trust anyone who takes time out of their day to help you.

Clinging to the rags I had left, I gazed out upon the full breadth of the Furnace and shook at what I saw.The world had been wiped clean of all trace of humanity. Sharp sandstone peaks protruded into the gray sky like a humped backbone, spilling into vast seas of sand on either side. Boulders and driftwood, the castaways of some bygone mountain, cast the only disruption upon the land. And I realized—no sun crossed the sky; there was only constant, lingering grayness.

I blew a strand of black hair from my face. “A demon treating another with kindness is something I have yet to see.”“Careful,” the demon whispered. “You may have already seen the rough shape and form it takes in this world, and yet you do not recognize it.

In a world of fog and gray, the youth is a shining being dressed in dark violet, his golden-flecked hair smoothed back from his bronzed temples. He resembles a human, but no man I have ever seen holds himself like a king, like a gleaming statue chiseled from topaz.I swallow. I am standing before a demon, the most beautiful being I have ever seen, and I can’t run. I can only stand in the hushed glade and stare, snowflakes falling in the space between us.

Behind lay loneliness and delusions. Ahead lay answers, and yes, Riley. So bent double beneath my load, but naked no longer, I followed the two demons deeper into Hell.