by Alcy Leyva
I was alone.
At least I thought so until I spotted the leg dangling over of the arm of the throne.
“Amanda Grey.”
It was the last voice I ever thought I would hear again, but I recognized it immediately.
Barnem the ex-Seraphim brought his head out from behind the throne and smiled so hard his cheeks touched the edges of his eyes. Hopping to his feet, he walked around where I could see him. He was still wearing the armored chest piece from the last time we clashed. His arms were exposed and his left hand sported a silver gauntlet. The white wings on his back had been burnt down to black stubs. Waving daintily, he tossed me a “Wassup.”
“What the hell is going on here, Barnem?”
“What the hell, indeed, Grey. What the Hell, indeed.”
“Where’s Petty?”
He was about to shrug, but I took a step toward him. The ex-angel backed away and laughed. “Okay, okay. She’s not here.”
“Why not? And why are you here?”
Barnem sighed and hopped up on the throne. “You know, when I got here, they wanted to torture me. Because of you, I had my soul tainted by those abominations and got sent down here. Because of you! So I asked to see a manager. And I found myself right down here—in this room which no one in Hell had opened in several thousand centuries—and guess what I found?” He knocked on the throne. “Absolutely nothing. There was no one here.”
“That’s impossible,” I told him. “Someone called Petty down here.”
Barnem waved a finger at me. “Oh, that was me. You see, I couldn’t let an opportunity like this pass. This place was left without a leader. And you know what they say, Grey: ‘Better to rule in Hell …’ etcetera, etcetera. Ooh, hey! Want to check out the new sound system I got hooked up in this place? I use it to drown out all of the human suffering.”
Fetching a tiny remote from his pocket, Barnem pressed a button and the chamber was filled with the sound of death metal blasting through invisible speakers. After a few seconds, he shut it off and looked at me as if I should be impressed.
I shook my head. “You’re the one who’s been fucking everything up down here? You’re the reason why all of Hell’s this way?”
“Fucking every—” Barnem crossed his arms. “Grey, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this is Hell. It’s a haven for the wicked and sullied. All I did was introduce advertisements, civil unrest, and a highly obnoxious font. So what if the whole place just falls apart? Good riddance. I can annihilate Hell and still serve my higher power even if the big wigs don’t recognize it.”
“You haven’t changed one bit, Barnem. You’re still the guy who farts on an escalator. You create the problem and everyone else has to deal with it.”
Disgusted, the angel scoffed at me. “You know what they call me down here? You want to know? A ‘Falling Star.’ Well, fuck them! Let’s see what’s really falling when this whole goddamn institution caves in around them. I mean, that’s what my original plan was. But then….” The Seraph’s eyes locked onto me. “Then I heard your sister was down here and I thought, I might as well torture her while I’m here.”
I snapped my fingers, but no fires started. I tried three and four and five times. Nothing.
Barnem sighed and patted the chair of bones. “Your little lightshow won’t work here, I’m afraid. See, as long as I’m touching this throne, I have the power of the Dark Lord. And I can say you can’t do a damn thing to me and that’s what it’ll have to be.”
“Petty.”
Barnem sneered. “I knew you would come if I took her. That demon friend of yours had called her up, but I called her back down, all the way down, and you took the bait. I had wanted you to void out on your way down, but you are the corn wedged in the gums of my timeline, Amanda Grey.”
I sucked my teeth. “I would typically call that a compliment, Barnem, but now it just sounds like you want to make out with me. So how about this? Powers or not, I’m going to go over there and start punching you. I’m going to continue punching you as hard as I can and for as long as I can until you tell me what you did with my sister.”
“Aha.” Barnem shrugged. “But I’m going to tell you anyway. You see, Grey, that’s the whole point. I brought your sister down here to kill both Greys at once. But then she was called up. She’s not here.”
“Bullshit,” I shouted. “I’ve been through every Circle. I’ve fought every demon and Old God to get down here and now you’re saying she went back up? To what Circle? Who called her?”
The Seraph pointed straight up. “No Circle, Grey. Your sister went all the way up. She went to Heaven. Some may call it a last-minute miracle. To me, it sounded like someone did you a favor.”
I stood there stunned for a few seconds. I looked around. I checked Barnem’s face. Then I just started laughing. That was the only reaction I could anchor myself to, so I just laughed and laughed. I laughed so much my cheeks hurt, that I fell ass-first onto the ground, howling. Soon, my wide-mouth cackling bled into actual sobs. And from those sobs came the tears.
I had survived Hell—survived torture—and seen the destruction of an entire afterlife. I had witnessed the death of my friends—the ones that had taken me an entire lifetime-plus to make. I had missed my father’s passing and had not been there to console my mother. I had even connected with someone (or something?) in a way that made it painful to see him leave. All of this and my little sister was saved in the Eleventh Hour.
The favor. The request I sent with those freaky-looking angels. It had taken forever to kick in, but it had worked. Petty had been saved at the last possible moment. She was safe.
Outside the chamber came the sound of the ice lake splitting. An unstoppable army was on our doorstep.
Barnem blinked. “So I brought you both down here to look into your pained faces as I killed the both of you. But now I can’t. I’ll admit, kind of bummed right now. Talk about a letdown.”
I could hear voices shouting just outside the metal door.
Wiping the tears from my eyes, I gathered myself and crossed my legs. “You know they’re going to kill you, Barnem.”
“Probably.” He looked genuinely unbothered by the idea. Then he held up his hand with the gauntlet and removed the metal glove. There was no hand inside, just a gray cracked stump. Barnem was dying.
“I knew that by refusing to defile myself like the rest, I would have a short time here. That’s why I came down. To make my mark. But then there’s this empty room, this empty throne.” He tossed the gauntlet onto the ground. “I don’t know what any of this means. Or why the Old Gods and the dragons were allowed to battle. Or anything, really. It’s all some bigger plan I can neither see nor give two shits about. It’s all just prophecy wrapped in prophecy double dipped in the chewy nougat of another prophecy,”
“I see you still have that food fetish,” I told Barnem and he just shrugged.
The Furies were giving their final marching orders. I wondered what had happened to D and Cain. Still on the ground, I took some satisfaction in knowing all of this wasn’t a waste.
“You know, Barnem. One of my major takeaways from this whole ‘Hell’ experience is that I’m kind of a fuck up. I say the wrong things; I punch the wrong people. My life is stitched together by one mistake after another. But I can honestly say I’m totally okay with all of it because I’m 2-0 against your schemes.”
Barnem exhaled and sat on the edge of the throne. “If we’re both being honest here, part of me is looking forward to what’s going to happen next. Not for myself, of course. I stand before you hoping to stay alive long enough to see them decapitate you and make blood angels out of your guts. That’s part of me. But then there’s another part of me. You’ve heard me tell you that ‘Hell is other people.’” Barnem leaned his head back and stared into the light. “I was always quick to agree with that statement. Hell is other peopl
e, I thought. Humans, angels, demons … everyone. Hell was everyone else. But that’s not true. Hell isn’t other people.”
Barnem, the ex-Seraphim, stared right into my eyes, and said, “It’s just you. You, Amanda Grey. Because even in the afterlife, you find a way to fuck with my plans.”
With my hand over my heart, I closed my eyes. “Thank you. That means a lot to me. And, since we’re getting sentimental here, and it seems we’re both going to die, what do you say to one for the road? For old time’s sake?”
I flashed him one of my fists.
Something heavy crashed into the chamber door. It was holding, but by the sound of it, the steel couldn’t take another blow.
The Seraph smirked. “The last time I gave you a free shot, you stabbed me in the face. But … what the hell, right?” In a familiar pose, Barnem leaned forward, exposing his chin.
But as soon as I took a step forward to punch him one last time, he yelled, “Sike.”
The ground beneath my feet instantly turned to black tar and ten large arms grew out of the murk. Stretching like taffy, they began snaking up my arms and legs and dragging me into the darkness. I fought with everything I had, but their holds were impossible to break. With my lower half now under, and my mouth clasped shut by one of the summoned hands, Barnem stooped down to where I could see him.
“As much as I want to see you die here, I came up with a better plan. You see, my mistake was thinking Hell would be the perfect place to torture you. But I guess I forgot who I was dealing with here. Not you. Not Amanda Grey.” He smiled. “So I’m sending you to the only place where you will really be tortured. I’m not sending you alone, either. Call it a parting gift between two old ex-neighbors.”
Just as the door to the throne room collapsed and snarling cries filled the chamber, Barnem waved a farewell and I was dragged underneath. All I saw was black.
And then white.
And then green.
Teal, blue, burgundy, tan.
****
Opening my eyes, I found myself sitting in a green chair with a knitted pillow built into the backrest. D was beside me in a seat of his own, looking bloodied and just as confused as I must have looked.
Barnem had sent both of us into a room with four walls. Wood paneling framed the ceiling where a blue sky with white clouds had been painted. There were just the two chairs, a lone wooden door, and us.
The first thing D did when he leapt from his chair was launch into an excuse as to why he left me back in the Eighth Circle.
The first thing I did to shut him up was kiss him.
I can’t say this was the original plan I had when I saw him again, but it was what I wanted. And the two of us stayed there, enjoying the kiss for as long as time would have us.
By my estimate, that was about fifteen seconds.
The wooden door burst open and creatures flushed into the space. Bears that walked upright, people with eagle heads, folks with cat ears and paws. They ran right at us and some of them were armed.
D and I separated in time to start throwing hellfire around the place like it was a performance art project. His chains whipped around in one deadly arc, beheading a few of the bears. This scattered some of the eagle people flying around the ceiling, but I burned them out of the sky and let their ashes rain down on us.
We gutted, beheaded, roasted, and wedgied every single creature that came at us in the small room. Fighting alongside D was definitely not the way I wanted to tell him how I felt about him, but for some reason, it felt like the perfect way, too.
When it was all said and done, the two of us had laid waste to an entire horde of freaks. We had killed everyone except a bear-man whose entire back was currently being eaten by hellfire. He ran around the room screaming, trying to stop, drop, and roll, but finding it impossible with all of the smoking corpses on the floor. He opted for running out of the room and nearly bumped into a man and woman that were walking in at the time.
Rocking nametags with their names written in thick green marker, and with one holding what looked like a vanilla sheet cake served on a pristine silver tray, the two familiar folks stopped just a few feet from us, horrified.
Around us, the room was partially on fire and the air was thick with the smell of burnt feathers and fur.
Donaldson and Petty took off their glittery party hats as my sister cleared her throat.
“Hey … Mandy. Uh, welcome to Heaven?”
The End…For Now
About the Author
Alcy Leyva is a Bronx-born writer, teacher, and pizza enthusiast. He graduated from Hunter College with a B.A. in English (Creative Writing) and received an MFA in Fiction from The New School. Alcy enjoys writing personal essays, poetry, short fiction, book reviews, and film analysis, but is also content with practicing standing so still that he will someday slip through time and space. He lives in New York with his wife and a small army of male heirs.