"Okay." 

He thinks she's in what they call Hell.

I gathered that. I'm gonna look.

Mahdi steps a bit out of her way.

She looks.

Her mother's in a dark but not pitch-black cell, with dirty stone walls and a dirtier stone floor. She's chained to a wall. There are rats nipping at her bare feet. Her feet have chunks of flesh taken out of them.

"Hey Zales," she calls, "Mom's in hell, you wanna see for yourself?"

"Is she really in hell, or are they just giving you a magic light show?"

"I don't know, do you wanna see or not?"

She comes over. She looks. She doesn't say anything for a while.

They think the scry spell works, right?

Yes. 

Well that sucks. - and it's confusing, right, the crosses and holy water repel vampires, you wouldn't expect the salvation story to be a lot of nonsense. I guess I dunno whether any specific person believes -

But she was as far as you knew Christian?

Yeah. Not Catholic. Very Protestant, I didn't want to tell her I'd converted. But - valid baptism, very concerned about Christian morality, and stuff. Got us all to do neighborhood volunteering. I'd figured she was in heaven.

God's an enormous dick and should be violently shredded into nonexistence, because even the most evil entity in the universe doesn't deserve the kinds of fates he inflicts on everyone else. This is not the time to say that.

I'm sorry.

Yeah. Thanks, I guess.

"Can you check where anyone is? Any dead person?"

"Any person, dead or living. I only prepared it once today and can only prepare it a maximum of twice in a day. It fails around thirty percent of the time for a caster like me in a world like mine, and could fail more or less here. It's less likely to fail if they're in a bad afterlife, because when it fails it's because of their subconscious will and people in bad afterlives have...less of that."

"Could you check where another person is for us?"

"Zales, it's a lot of work, and stuff - "

"I'm not holding a gun to his head. I'm asking a question."

"Maybe. First, you should know that this one's going to go in a couple of minutes and that if you'd like we could try to message her before it does. This fails more often than not, but I thought I ought to at least mention it."

" - yeah. We should do that. I wouldn't know what to - but we should try."

"Hell might cut us off so you should probably not count on a full conversation. You have to decide what you want to say before I can send it."

" - tell her I'm alive. And that dad's dead, I guess, I think she doesn't know. And I'm living with Azalea and we're okay."

Message, he says, and then whispers, conveying from your daughter Karen that she is alive, that your husband is dead, and that she's living with Azalea and okay.

The woman doesn't react.

He repeats himself. 

"I'm sorry. It usually doesn't work."