"So now we got a mission from God," I say, clapping my hands and rubbing them together. "Sounds awesome to me. All right, so where do we get started?"

"I'd say 'just head out the door,'" Corbin says, "but first, I'll have to remove all those other illusory castles from your path. And foremost, you need to know exactly where you're going. I love that Bass kid, but he doesn't know how to write a halfway decent map."

"Bass wrote this himself?" asks Joe.

"The poor kid fancied himself an artist at some point," Corbin says with a breezy sigh. "No, but as the son of the lady responsible for cutting the thread of life, he's inherited her poor creative abilities. Let me help you guys out..." He looks up and down his shelves, then snaps his fingers and beckons something we can't see. That something turns out to be a scroll not unlike the one on which Bass' map is printed, but more new-looking. Not to mention more neat-looking, especially when he gives me the scroll and I unravel it, revealing a far more legible layout of the Underworld.

But then Corbin swipes his thumb over the surface, like he's looking through the camera roll on his phone, and the layout changes completely.

"The layers of the Underworld," he says. "You need to find your way up, layer by layer. Right now, we're on the third - the Roosters probably would've buried you on the ninth, if they had their way."

"Good thing they didn't," I say, copying his thumb-swiping and restoring the original "third layer" map.

"Like I said," Corbin chuckles. "A lesser pantheon. Smaller in every imaginable meaning of the word."

I cycle through the layers myself, discovering no less than nine in total. Guess Dante was right about the number of circles of Hell - or, technically, the Underworld. But hey, let's not mince words here. This place is Hell, or at least the closest we'll ever get to what I was taught about it. And at least I'm probably in a shallower layer than the one Crane's deranged "sin eater" son locked me up in...it was him who trapped me down there, right? I get the details of my cuckoo-bananas Witness career mixed up sometimes.

"Thank you," I tell Corbin. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Joe and Nikki nod along with me.

"Don't thank me yet," Corbin says with a wry grin that feels less like him and more like George Clooney. (Which now begs the question - is Clooney secretly God too? Jenny could give you a good argument in favor of that conclusion.) "You gotta get out of the third layer first. Then the second. The first, though, should be a piece of cake after the second. But only because the second is so hard."

"We'll take your word for it, old man," Joe says. "Uh..."

"No, don't worry," Corbin laughs. "Everyone calls me 'old man' at some point or another. Even if I don't happen to resemble their quote-unquote 'old man.'" He shakes hands with us all - no hugs this time around - and waves us off before disappearing into an alcove at the far end of the room and sitting with a pristine-looking hardcover of a book I'm pretty sure isn't even out yet - The Hate U Give. "Oh, and one more thing," he adds before we leave the room. "Beware of Roosters, capital R, of course...but lowercase? Don't forget to try the roc at Vulcan's Roast House. You'll never look at plain old chicken the same way again."

"Vulcan cooks?" I ask.

"He had to take up a second job after smithing stopped paying the bills." Metaphorically speaking, I guess.

With a shrug, I lead the others out the door and out of the castle. The rest of the circle surrounds us still, but only for a second or two before they vanish.

I consult the map, locate us, and point ahead on the path. "Onward and upward, kids. And unless we get any money along the way, let's not eat at Vulcan's, okay?"