Asmodeus just looked at me, his hand still outstretched. “It is my ring. I created it, and it was taken from me. Return it to me, now.”

Jim suddenly started humming under his breath. I shot him a curious look and was interested to see that he looked thoughtful, not terrified or worried, as I expected. And that got my own mind working—why was Asmodeus asking me to give him the ring? Why did he stop his bouncers from taking the ring (and my hand) for him? If I were the boss of hell, you can be sure that I’d be throwing my weight around wherever and whenever possible, including bypassing all the trouble it took in order to reason with someone who had an item I wanted.

“Huh.” I smiled and held my hand close to my chest. “You know, I don’t think I will give it to you. As I said, it kind of likes me, and I have a feeling that it’s not going to like being forcibly taken from me.”

Asmodeus didn’t react; at least there was no expression that clued me in to what he was thinking. His bouncers, however, looked at him with surprise, which verified my speculation.

“I will take it from you if I must,” he finally said, in a manner that implied I was too boring for words. “If you insist on destroying yourself in the process, then it is no concern of mine.”

Huge leap of faith time, I told myself, and held out my hand. “Okay. Go ahead and take it. If you can.”

Asmodeus looked at my hand, his own fingers twitching a little, little black tendrils of electricity snapping around him. Even as he looked, the ring grew warm on my finger and started to glow with a blue-white light. He narrowed his eyes at that; then suddenly he turned around and stomped off in the opposite direction.

“Take them to a cell,” he ordered as he left.

“Ha!” I gloated, relief swamping me as he left the ballroom. A tiny fraction of the doom that his presence had caused to squash me lifted, enough so I felt like I could take a deep breath. “I knew it! You can’t take it from me, can you?”

The nearest bouncer growled at me, a low, ugly, feral sound that had me shivering despite my newfound confidence. The second grabbed me painfully by the arm and commenced to haul me out of the ballroom, Jim following behind with his own bouncer.

He bitched the entire time it took for the two demons to take us down a couple of flights of stairs and lock us into a small windowless room. It wasn’t, as I assumed, a dungeon, but more like an unused room in the cellar.

“Well,” I said, examining the situation. The room had a dirt floor, wood walls, and a lone naked lightbulb that swung from a cobwebby wire from the ceiling. There was also the faint smell of mice that left me jumping at every shadow. “Now what do we do?”

“First of all, you change me back to my proper form. Then you use your magic ring to get us out of here,” Jim said, giving me the king of all disgruntled looks. “Unless, of course, you get your jollies out of seeing me starkers.”

I averted my eyes from his nakedness. “In your dreams. I just couldn’t remember the name of the breed you like.”

He glared at me. “Newfoundland. It’s not that hard.”

“I know, I know, but I was under stress, and I suffer from test anxiety.” I took a deep breath, fixed my eyes on his, and said loudly, “Jim—”

“Effrijim.”

“Sorry, Effrijim, as your official demon lord, I order you to change back into the Newfoundland dog form that you like. The one with the white spot on the chest.”

“And the big noogies.”

“And the big…” I stopped, giving him a look. “Just resume the form you like best.”

Naked man shimmied into the shape of a large black dog, at which point Jim sighed a happy, happy sigh and plopped his butt down onto the floor. “At last! Sheesh, beginner demon lords are harder to deal with than I thought.”

“I don’t need any lip out of you,” I told him sternly, then considered my hand. “Just how am I supposed to use the ring to get us out of here? Is it like a transporter on Star Trek? Can I just zap us somewhere else?”

“Dunno. It’s your ring.”

“Fat lot of help you are,” I said, giving him a little frown before holding out my hand and saying, “Ring, please take Jim and me somewhere safe. Preferably Aisling’s house.”

Nothing happened. The ring didn’t even so much as glow; it just sat there on my finger being a ring.

“Well, that’s disappointing,” I said, and gnawed my lower lip a bit while I thought.

“Anticlimactic,” Jim agreed, nodding.

“Okay, maybe the transporter request was too much for it. I’ll try this instead.” I placed my palm on the flat, cold surface of the door. “Open sesame!”

Jim rolled his eyes. “Seriously?”

I slapped my hand on the door. “It has to be the intent behind the words that powers it, right? So it shouldn’t matter what I say. Dammit, door, open up!”

The door, like the ring, remained annoyingly inanimate. I tried everything I could think of for three straight hours, from vaguely remembered incantations used in popular movies and TV shows, to suggestions from Jim of archaic Latin commands. None of it did anything but leave me hoarse, frustrated, and more than a little worried.

We dozed for a bit and lost track of time. I had no idea how many hours had passed when I gave in to the dark thoughts that had been growing ever more persistent as each minute passed. It could have been the following morning, or a week later, for all I knew. Time seemed to blur in Abaddon, which left me feeling even more at sea.

“What if Asmodeus finds a way to get the ring off me?” I said, slumped into a corner, my knees to my chest, with Jim pressed against me for comfort. “What if the way he does that is to leave me here to starve to death so he can just pluck the ring off my cold, lifeless fingers? What if I spend the rest of my life trapped in this dank, dark hellhole, kind of a modern-day man in the iron mask, only without the mask. I’ll end up an old, old lady with crazy hair and crazier eyes until one day, I’ll just topple over and die.”

“You’re a wyvern’s mate, babe. That means you can’t die unless someone lops off your head, or cuts out your heart, or something like that,” Jim said in an obnoxiously cheerful voice.

I lifted my head from where my cheek lay on my knee and gave him a look that I felt he deserved. “Great. So now I just get to be perpetually old crazy lady in a cell that no one remembers.”