Hell Raising and Other Pastimes

by Jayce Carter

  She lifted it to her lips and blew, the flame shifting like a blowtorch.

  I covered my face with my arms—a useless reflex—but nothing burned.

  I turned to find Gran between us, but she didn’t look like the old woman I knew. Instead, it was the glimpse I’d gotten before, her pointed ears, sharp cheekbones and bright green eyes. She held a hand up that diverted the flame around us both even as the air turned stifling and hot.

  Lilith stopped and took a step backward. “Why am I not surprised to find you in my way?”

  Gran dropped her hand. “You know better than this. I warned you about this!” Her voice was that of a much younger woman, so different I’d never have recognized it as Gran. Still, it fit with her true face.

  “You told me nothing, like you always tell people nothing.”

  “I told you what you sought would destroy you and everything you wanted.”

  “But even you don’t know what your foolish, vague prophecies mean. You’re a fate, not a god. You can only see the picture, not the pieces.”

  Gran shook her head. “Your pride has always been your biggest problem. You’re too afraid of looking weak to ever find real answers.”

  “And you’re always standing in my way,” Lilith shot back. “This time I won’t go easy on you. I did before because Lucifer would have been furious if I’d hurt you, but I don’t care what he thinks anymore. My work is too important. Step aside.”

  Gran didn’t move. “No.”

  “You’ll risk yourself for some freak of nature that never should have existed?”

  Gran spread her arms out, the clearest I am not moving motion I’d ever seen. “You’re right, Lilith. I can see the puzzle but not the pieces. I saw the chaos you’d bring so long ago, saw the fear in you, but I had no idea this would be how you’d do it. I also saw the part Ava had to play, even if I didn’t know exactly how.”

  “Well, then you’re more blind than I ever thought, because you dying isn’t going to change a thing.” Lilith lifted both hands and struck, a mixture of fire and smoke flinging toward us. Gran moved, rising her hands to shield us as she had before, but there was so much more this time. The magic reminded me of what the other Older One had used to drive Lilith out of the tent what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  She pulled her hands apart, then shot a blast of power at Lilith, knocking her back.

  A shout from outside echoed in, a roar I recognized, but the door wouldn’t budge.

  Lilith pushed herself away from the wall. “You’re stronger than the last time we did this. Not that it matters.” She went back and forth with Gran, both taking strikes, both tiring, but neither getting an upper hand. I stayed by the door even as they shifted, dodging and blocking each other’s blows.

  Though, it seemed clear Gran was tiring quicker.

  A hit from Gran sent Lilith tumbling into a table, the furniture shattering beneath her.

  Lilith growled, a sound that had no business coming from a body that look like a young beautiful woman, before she shoved herself upright. “Enough!” Her gaze moved from Gran to me, her lips curling. “I don’t need to beat you,” she said. “I just need to take out the thing in my way.”

  She lifted her hand, and I knew it was over. She was done playing, done talking, done waiting.

  A blast of that hellfire left her and sailed right for me.

  A split second before the fire hit me, something stood in the way.

  No, someone.

  A cry left Gran’s lips as the hellfire struck her instead of me. She didn’t block it or divert it as she had before, but consumed it. In fact, when it hit her, it seemed as if the entire flame were sucked inside her, taken right from Lilith’s palm.

  The door didn’t open but exploded inward, shards raining through the room, leaving tiny cuts on my bare arms.

  Lucifer walked through the debris, his eyes a swirling mixture of red and black. He’d never appeared so monstrous before. He lifted a hand and Lilith was pinned to the wall by an invisible force. “You,” he said in a voice I’d never heard.

  His smooth, deep voice was replaced by something that echoed, something old and evil and terrifying. It was the voice I’d expected to hear call from the abyss, but it left his lips all the same. “You dare to create this sort of chaos in my home?”

  Lilith grabbed at her throat as if she could pry off whatever held her in place.

  He let out a growl before she dropped to the ground in an unceremonious heap.

  “I expected one of my wayward offspring to be behind this, to betray me, but you? The first? My favorite?”

  She lifted her gaze to his, the same defiance there I’d seen in his. They were related—there was no doubt about that. “You made me knowing I’d never fit with Adam, that I’d never be what he wanted. You created me to fail. It’s your own fault.”

  Lucifer lifted his hand as if to grab her again, but Lilith reached into a pouch on her thigh and withdrew a small orb. It looked like the one that had transported me before.

  She slammed it against the ground, shattering it, and she was gone, disappeared as if she’d ever been there at all.

  It left just Lucifer, me and Gran’s unmoving body.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I’d never realized pain this deep could exist, that a person could be entirely hollowed out. I’d suffered before in my life, but they had always been my suffering. They’d been times when life hadn’t gone the way I wanted, when I hadn’t gotten what I needed, but in the end, they had been my pain.

  Staring at Gran’s still body, stretched out on a stone slab in the courtyard beneath the large branches of the tree, was a whole different sort of pain. I could endure anything, it seemed, but loss.

  No matter how much I’d shaken her, when I’d screamed and cried, she hadn’t moved. Her skin had grown cold, her lips still and lacking the smile I’d known most of my life.

  It didn’t feel possible.

  “Ava?” Troy’s voice was careful, as if unsure of his welcome.

  I didn’t answer.

  I didn’t have it in me to answer.

  It all seemed like too much work, like effort toward something useless. I’d pressed forward, I’d done what I was supposed to and in the end I’d failed. Lilith was gone, I had no idea how to proceed and now the one person who had known me the longest was dead.

  Even without my answer, Troy came up beside me, a still and steady presence I hadn’t realized I needed.

  “How can she just be gone?”

  She’d seemed so full of life, so impossible to end. Gran had been the moon, something that I expected to always be there.

  The fact that she wasn’t shook me to my core.

  Troy took my hand in his and squeezed, not offering any stupid platitudes, any ‘I’m so sorry,’ bullshit that didn’t mean a thing.

  He left me alone after a minute, and even though the others filed in, even as Kase, Hunter and Grant stopped by as if to remind me that I wasn’t alone, even if I wanted to be, nothing took away the sting, nothing fixed the foundation that was broken. It felt as though forever I’d trip over the cracks made by losing her, as if I’d never getting my footing again.

  I knew what I was, but the one person I wanted to talk to about it, I couldn’t. The one person who made sense of everything was gone.

  Lucifer came up to me, and when he spoke with his normal voice, without the horror I’d heard in that room, it felt disingenuous. “I may not have always gotten along with Gran, but I respected her. I can’t say that about many people.”

  “Don’t you talk about her,” I snapped, not caring that I was speaking to Lucifer, that he could do anything he wanted to me. “This is all your fault. You think I haven’t figured it out? You wanted me here, you knew what I was and you put that reaper there to draw that out of me. You did it all just so whoever was behind it would target me, right? You used me as bait, and she paid the price for your stupid plan.”

  Lucifer didn’t deny any of it. How c
ould he? I was right, and he didn’t regret any of it. The asshole was an ‘all’s well that ends well’ sort of egomaniac.

  “She died protecting you. She would have been happy for that to be her ending.”

  I turned away from her to face him, to find him dressed in all black other than a red rose pinned to his jacket like some funeral wear. “She shouldn’t have died at all! Don’t you get that? She wasn’t supposed to die.” I planted my hands on his chest and shoved, wanting to hurt him, to hurt something if it would just make me feel a little better.

  Maybe if I did that, some of the pain inside me would dissolve.

  He didn’t move, as solid as ever. “Yes, I used you, because I had to. I needed to know who was behind this before it was too late.”

  “Don’t you talk to me about the greater good.”

  “Why do you think Gran was here? She came to hell because she knew what needed to be done. She did nothing without knowing the consequences, but still she came. She made the choice to save you because you are the only person who can stop Lilith. Gran was a fate, able to see how choices fit together, and she decided that your life was worth more than hers.”

  “Well, she was wrong,” I whispered, crossing my arms and turning my back on Lucifer.

  “I’ve never known Gran to be wrong before. Do you know what she told me the first time we met? She was a child then, an outcast from her people because of her gifts. She came up to me—I could travel to Earth back then—and she knew what I was. Her eyes turned white and she said, ‘You will give up what you need for what you think you want.’ I should have heeded that warning, but I didn’t, and she was right. Thousands of years later, I lost the thing that mattered more to me than anything else just as she said I would.”

  “If you’re expecting sympathy for your little sob story, you’re going to be waiting forever.”

  “No. My point is that Gran knew nearly everything. She sacrificed herself to put you where you needed to be, and you lack the luxury of falling apart, Ms. Harlin. You do not get to mourn or pity yourself or lament your place.”

  “Fuck you,” I spat. “Fuck you and your daughter and this whole fucking place!”

  “So you will allow Gran’s sacrifice to be in vain? You’ll let Gran throw away her life for nothing because of your own short-sided stubbornness?”

  I shook my head, trying to see Gran past the tears in my eyes, trying to spot the woman I’d relied on so much inside that corpse. Her spirit, like all immortals, was gone, snatched away, and it left me with nothing.

  “Death is always in vain,” I whispered before leaving. Lucifer could go to hell—or stay there, in this case—because I was out.

  I’d followed this damn mystery. I’d done what I was supposed to, and what did I have to show for it? Lilith was clearly stronger than I was. She’d killed Gran—the only family I had—and if Gran couldn’t stand up to her, what chance did I have?

  I reached my room again, exhausted and wanting nothing more than to sleep for…well, ever. Or at least until the world ended and I didn’t have to care about anything anymore.

  I lay on the bed, curling in on myself as if I deflated. How had I not realized how much Gran had meant to me? She was the only person in my life who had always been there. As it turned out, even when I was just a baby, she’d been there. She was the only good constant thing, and now she was gone.

  Something tugged at my senses, an all-too-familiar sensation that made me want to cry. I was so sick of everything wanting a piece of me, of everything wanting something from me.

  “Go away,” I whispered to the room, to the thing that watched me. When it didn’t, I opened my eyes. The darkness, the same one I’d seen in my dreams, the one that had chased Lilith away when she’d been a shadow in my dreams stood in the room as if waiting on me.

  And, for the first time, I realized exactly what it was.

  A reaper.

  It stared back at me, still as if trying to get me to understand something.

  That felt like my whole life. The universe trying to tell me shit without coming right out and saying it. I was forever trying to keep up, trying to decode it.

  Even so, the reaper stared.

  I didn’t sit up, even as I snapped, “What do you want from me?”

  Just as last time, it didn’t respond.

  I pushed myself upright, wishing I had that other power again, that I could blast this reaper as I had the last. When I couldn’t seem to do that, I went with trying to use my sharp words to disintegrate it. “If you want something from me, how about you actually do something? Say something. Stop being so goddamned cryptic!”

  Even as I screamed, it didn’t move. It tilted its head, the only sign it heard me at all.

  I leaned forward, bent over and carded my fingers into my hair, frustration eating away at me. “All I want is to get to see Gran again. I did what everyone wanted me to and I still lost, and now I don’t even have someone to help me figure out what to do. I can only take so much…”

  The reaper came closer, doing that same thing it had before, as if leaning down to look into my eyes for a moment before it disappeared.

  Great. Alone again.

  As quickly as it happened, the reaper was back and beside him?

  Gran…

  Or, not exactly. I could see through her—a spirit? I’d never seen any type of immortal spirit.

  Not that it mattered. I went forward and tried to touch her, tried to wrap my arms around her, but I passed right through her.

  It made me despair again. So close, but always out of reach from what I wanted.

  “Well, I didn’t figure I’d see this place again.”

  I could have cried at the sound of her voice. Oh wait, I was… “I’m so sorry—”

  She cut me off with a wave of her hand. “Oh, you hush. I don’t have much time, but if I expected you to be sorry, I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “Why did you? I’m not ready to be on my own.”

  “Of course you are. You were where I was headed my whole, very very very long life. You think I didn’t know? That I didn’t see this? Of course I did.”

  I wrung my hands together, wanting to stay right here, in this moment, the place where Gran was still here and everything wasn’t falling apart. “I can’t do this, Gran. I can’t lose you—I can’t beat Lilith.”

  Gran moved over and sat on the bed—or at least it looked like that, since she wasn’t really there. She patted the spot next to her until I sat as well. “You can beat her. I’ve seen it—the first thing I ever saw, back when I was a kid. You’re the only one who can.” She shimmered, fading.

  “Don’t go,” I pleaded.

  “That isn’t up to me. In fact, I can’t believe I’m here at all.” She glanced over to the reaper who stood there, waiting. “Your buddy here tore me from another place, from wherever I was. Even I didn’t know that was possible.”

  “How?”

  “I think he knew you needed it.”

  I thought back to when it—he?—had helped me before, back when he’d helped me understand how to save Troy, when he’d shown me my mother. “Who is he?”

  She shrugged. “Even I don’t know everything, and it’s time for you to stop asking me. You don’t need me to tell you what you need to know, what you need to do. You already know it.”

  I hated how much like goodbye that sounded. “Please, don’t do this.”

  “It’s done. I’ve tried to teach you this and you’ve never accepted it. Sometimes things just are. This is one of those things. You can’t lie down and stop just because you don’t like it. You’ve been pushed out of the plane, and you can’t stop it, now. You can’t stop moving, but you can decide where you’re going to go, now.” She faded again, and the reaper came forward.

  He reached out, and when he made contact with Gran, she disappeared, leaving the room silent and feeling empty.

  Still, the reaper remained. It waited, watching me, as if to see what I would do now.

>   I wanted to curl back up and fade away like she did. I wanted to give up, to make this all someone else’s problem, but the reaper stayed. It watched me. It reminded me of exactly what Gran had said, her parting words.

  You can decide where you’re going to go now.

  “I can’t just stop, can I?” I asked the reaper as if he would answer. “No matter how tempting it is to give up, I have to keep going.”

  He remained almost deathly still other than the floating of cloth around him, as if I knew damn well what the answer was without him.

  A knock on the door came, and it opened without me having to answer. Funny that I had thought I was alone, because Troy, Kase, Grant and Hunter walked in. It was written in their expressions that they’d given me a little time to myself, but they were done letting me suffer alone.

  The reaper remained, and while they caught sight of it, it must have been my lack of fear that made them not react.

  “So, what’s the plan?” Hunter asked.

  And there was only one answer. After seeing Gran, after being given that last moment with her, after pulling my head out of my ass, I had only one direction I could go.

  Lilith had better watch out, because I was coming for her, and I was going to bring hell down on her when I found her.

  She’d fucked with the wrong reaper.

  Want to see more from this author? Here’s a taster for you to enjoy!

  Sun, Sea and Sinful Delights

  Jayce Carter

  Excerpt

  This dildo is way too big.

  Jennifer had thought that plenty of times when a client asked her to make something well outside her personal comfort zone, but the payment had always been more than worth it.

  Still, when the toy dwarfed the soda can it sat next to, she winced.

  No one needs that much.

  If any man came at her with that, she’d run in the opposite direction. There really could be too much of a good thing.

  She snapped a picture, then finished packing everything into the box. A quick tape job before she affixed the label, and she was done.

  Despite their odd proportions, she did love taking special requests. There was something fun and creative about working on a product for a specific client, a challenge that her mass-produced items lacked.