"Welcome to Hell," the Demon Agares said to Hafiza Elmi as the Vampire Queen arrived in the area called Tartarus, where the worst of the worst are kept. The Vampire took a look at the Demon Lord, who didn't look anything like she'd ever imagined. Hafiza Elmi expected to see fire and brimstone, fire and torment, and eternally wailing souls everywhere, being tormented by the Damned, but saw nothing of the sort...
Hafiza Elmi looked at herself, expecting to be a disembodied, fleshless wraith. Isn't that how it always seemed in the movies? If one has consciousness in the post-death realms, one is a bodiless entity, a ghost of sorts. The Queen of the Vampires clearly remembered dying. She remembered invading her former lover Rufus Moor's townhouse in the City of Durban, South Africa, with a group of Vampires, hell-bent on destroying the traitor.
Hafiza remembered the lethal ultra-violet rays burning her skin, literally making her blood boil. Rufus Moor, the treacherous Vampire who sided with the humans against his own kind had some anti-Vampire weaponry in his own domicile. Thus Hafiza and her Vampire cohorts were literally cooked, along with Rufus Moor himself. Hafiza seethed with rage as she remembered Rufus Moor's treachery. She half-expected to see him in this semblance of an Afterlife, but didn't...
"Not what I expected," Hafiza retorted, and she looked defiantly at the Demon Lord, who appeared to be an old Arab man with a slick gray beard, clad in a crimson toga and ebony cape. Agares, a Demon feared by Jews and Christians since the golden days sat on a throne-like stone chair. Hafiza looked at her surroundings, and saw that she was in a chamber somewhere, a dark place lit only by torches...
"You expected hellish fire and brimstone? Saint Peter and his angels? Or perhaps the Devil himself? Nope, Hell existed long before these rookies," Agares replied, as if reading Hafiza's mind. The Vampire Queen smiled at the ancient Demon, refusing to be intimidated by the ageless monster before her. Hafiza had spent centuries preying on the weak, and she knew intimidation tactics when she saw them.
"Why am I here, Agares? Clearly you want something," Hafiza said, and she stood there, hands on her hips, looking right into the Demon's eyes. Agares laughed as she'd just said the funniest thing ever, and Hafiza watched as he rose from his throne of stone, and walked up to her. Agares stopped about a meter from Hafiza, curtsied, and then winked at her.
"Hafiza, my dear, you died and instead of going to the real hell, you got sent to my personal little private hell, because we got a destiny together," Agares said, laughing merrily. As Hafiza looked on, the Demon Lord snapped his fingers, and a swirling vortex of energy appeared, and when it stabilized, the light coalesced into a rather disturbing image.
"What is this?" Hafiza asked, and even as the words left her mouth, Agares fell silent, carefully looking at the screen as if she weren't even there. Hafiza looked at the portal, and saw her paramour, Salim Berhanu, the last Vampire she'd made, as he killed Elsa Martinez, the last of the Brujas of Havana, Cuba, and stole the legendary Book of Transfigurations. Tall, dark and handsome, with his stylish Afro and predatory grin, Salim looked even better than Hafiza remembered, and she longed for him painfully...
"Ah, my dear Hafiza, your lover Salim is trying to bring you back to life, he's going to resurrect you, and when he does, I'm coming along for the ride, and when we reach earth, I intend on staying" Agares said, laughing. Upon hearing these words, Hafiza looked at the Demon, astonished. In her nearly eight centuries of walking the earth, Hafiza had never heard of a Vampire being resurrected, or of a Demon staying in the world of man.
"Demon, you're deluded, and your plan will not work," Hafiza said defiantly, and Agares stopped moving, and looked intently at her. The Demon began to shift, to change, and this time, he took the form of a large anthropomorphic crocodile, and incredibly, he began to speak. This time, Hafiza heard Agares words in her mind, rather than in her ears, disembodied though she might be...
"Oh, my dear, you don't understand who or what you face," Agares began, and the speaking crocodile winked at Hafiza, pausing for effect. "I am Agares, one of the Princes of Hell, and I once gave nightmares to that old Pope Honorius, separated him from his Guardian Angels, drove him to madness, turned his own people against him, and I will return to the world, to torment mankind once more, in your body."
Having finished his spiel, Agares the Demon looked at Hafiza, and the Vampire Queen did something completely unexpected. Drawing herself to her full height of six feet, Hafiza Elmi, born of the Horn of Africa and reborn as a Vampire in her native Somalia more than eight centuries ago crossed the distance between herself and the crocodile-man. She stood before the monster, her beautiful face inches from its snout, and smiled, flashing her pearly white fangs.