by SM Reine
“Then why?”
“I think it has something to do with the gods,” she said.
That statement left chills rippling down Seth’s spine. He glanced around the gray banks of the river, half-expecting to see Elise and James walking toward them out of nothingness.
She went on. “I knocked on a door in Arawn’s tower, and they opened it for me. They’re watching. I think they’re pushing now, too.”
“That would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?” he asked. “They’re helping you.”
“Yes…” She ducked her head, removed her glasses, and polished the lenses with the hem of her shirt. “I suppose it would be a good thing. So why am I filled with dread?”
Something soft brushed along Seth’s hand. He looked down to see Marion’s fingers.
She was seeking comfort from him, which he had often given in the past.
But he hadn’t given it when she’d radiated such weakness.
Seth didn’t want to risk getting any nearer to Marion, not when she was so weak and he could feel himself hungering. He didn’t even have words of comfort for her. There was nothing comforting about the horrors of the Nether Worlds.
At the contact, the taste of her sickness rolled through him. Sheol was sucking Marion’s life away, her light flickering on the brink of extinguishment. Every fiber of Marion’s body was suffering in Sheol. Getting away from the harsh, dry air of the hive didn’t help. The fields outside Duat were no more hospitable.
He knew he should have stepped away, but the allure of the illness fixed him where he stood. She was gravity, and he was a helpless star circling the event horizon, only inches from falling over the edge.
Marion’s tongue darted out to wet her lips. The motion drew his gaze to her face. She was staring at him through the glimmering ovals of her glasses.
What was she going to think when she found the Canope, restored her memories, and read the hunger in his mind?
He needed Charity. Not only to get her away from Arawn—who would seriously regret it if he’d so much as cracked one of Charity’s fingernails—but because Seth wasn’t sure how much longer he’d last without talking to her.
“We’re almost out of Sheol. This is going to be over soon.” He pulled his hand away and took a step back. “Drink another potion and let’s go help your boyfriend.”
She did as ordered. Color returned to her cheeks.
“There,” he said. “Better already.”
Marion didn’t smile.
Seth hurried up the field toward the Bronze Gates. She was silent behind him.
The wall emerged from the fog. The Bronze Gates were only a couple of stories high, but they would have been impossible to climb. As far as Seth could see, there was only smooth metal, without a single crack, bump, or foothold.
Seth could make out the lights of a city beyond its top, as though Duat were hovering in the sky beyond. Konig lurked near the base of the wall, having a conversation with an armored demon. The top of its head didn’t quite reach Konig’s shoulders, but the curled horns thrusting from its cracked scalp made it two feet taller.
Konig and the demon exchanged something that Seth couldn’t see. And then Konig was stepping down the hill to wrap his arm around Marion’s shoulders like he always did when Seth was around. “He’ll take us through,” Konig said. “We can go in the back of his truck when they open the gates to change the guards. They’re expecting him to deliver lethe from the hive.”
“What did you give him?” Seth asked.
“I came prepared from the Winter Court.” He took gems out of his pockets—glittering shards of permanent ice, which shone dully with magic suppressed by Sheol.
“And he agreed to trade our passage for something like that?” What the hell was a demon going to do with enchanted ice from the Middle Worlds?
“I’m convincing.” Konig glared, as though waiting for Seth to challenge him.
He didn’t bother.
The weaker Marion got, the hungrier Seth felt, and the worse the distraction became. Marion wasn’t the only one getting screwed up by too much time in Sheol.
You got tired of Sheol’s darkness within a span of centuries, too.
Dammit, Seth wasn’t going to be in Sheol for centuries.
And he wasn’t a demon.
He wasn’t.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get inside Duat and get out of here.”
13
It was strange to be escorted around Duat by a demon Lord of Sheol acting like he was taking Charity on a date. Arawn was charming, gallant, and free with his compliments—offset only by the bleeding gashes all over his body, which didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest.
Stranger still, Charity wasn’t sure how much she was bothered by it, either.
“Duat is a temple transplanted from an undercity that was on Earth before Genesis,” Arawn explained. He held Charity’s hand in the crook of his elbow, forcing her to walk alongside him like some old-time lady.
“What’s an undercity?”
“Demons have long been a chthonic race, dwelling beneath the world that humans enjoy. Every major city once had demon hives underneath them. Some bigger than others.”
“Demons on Earth.” Charity shivered.
She’d known that demons had been around before Genesis—it would have been hard to miss the wars that preceded the void—but it was frightening to think of how long they’d been boiling under the ground, waiting to emerge.
“The Nether Worlds aren’t under the Earth’s surface, are they?” she asked.
“We’ve tried to dig through the roof of our caverns and never reached anything but vacuum. It seems that the gods saw fit to give us our own world.” Arawn scowled. “It’s a compliment, I guess. The gods like demons better than angels so they freed us to this miserable, cramped wasteland. Hurrah.”
What he called a miserable, cramped wasteland appeared to be ancient ruins perched atop a hill in the center of Sheol. The city was surrounded by a wall of shining metal that didn’t remotely match the industrial iron and steel of the hive’s hallways. It was beautiful in a strange way.
It did look like the gods had been trying to do a favor for demons, in their strange way.
“So you used to live on Earth,” Charity said, following Arawn. There was little else she could do. Those scuttling bug-demons were following them again.
“I wasn’t a Lord of Sheol before Genesis,” Arawn said. “I lived in the City of Dis. I worked in the palace. I was an artist before the Breaking, and a guard afterward, all the way through the wars. Do you remember the Breaking?”
It would have been impossible to forget. Charity had barely finished college when giant rifts had been torn into North America, allowing the forces of Hell to spill onto Earth. “Yes, I do. I evacuated to San Francisco. It was far enough from the fissure that things stayed relatively normal until the end. The smoke, though. It was always so bad.”
“It was as bad in Dis. The fissure carved through our world. When the wind blew right, it cleared the air enough for us to see the sky on Earth.” Arawn had stopped walking. He gazed up at the black roof hanging low over Duat. “Eventually, the Dis army was evacuated to Earth. It was raining. There were clouds. And then…”
Arawn drifted in memory. He looked only like an ordinary demon—not so different from a human man—dreaming of better times.
“I saw the sun once,” he said. “Just once.”
“You want to go back, don’t you?”
His black eyes dropped to hers. “I’d do anything for that.”
A greater demon pining for Earth. The twist of sympathy in Charity’s heart was unexpected, but not unwelcome.
“How did you end up as a Lord of Sheol, then?” Charity asked.
He led her down to an open area that might have been considered a garden, if bushes and trees of sculpted iron counted. “I was friends with one of the generals in Dis’s army. Terah taught me how to manage people, how to be a leader. She insp
ired me to rally a gang after Genesis. I carved out a place in the hive, and the other Lord of Sheol let me get away with it because Nyx is sick of the job.”
“She’s the one with the Canope.”
Arawn shook his head. “The Canope’s mine. I cut the deal for it. She’s just been hanging on to it.”
“Possession’s nine tenths of the law.”
“I feel the same. But as any demon who’ll possess a human can tell you, that last tenth is a hell of a lot bigger than you’d think.” Arawn smirked at her as he stroked his mustache thoughtfully. “What about you? What’s your story of transformation? I assume you haven’t always been as fantastic as you are now.”
Charity had once been very much the way she looked when she wore the glamour: a small, unassuming woman much more concerned with her studies than looking good.
She missed it. A lot.
“There’s not much of a story. The Genesis void took me when it took everyone else,” she said. “I came back to a city that was totally fixed. No more ash from the Breaking, no sign of the riots, nothing. It took me a few hours to realize that I had come back almost a month after Genesis.”
“One of the mysterious delayed returns,” Arawn said.
Charity nodded. “It could have been worse. Some people took a whole year to come back for whatever reason.”
“The gods work in mysterious ways.” He laughed as though he’d told the funniest joke of his life.
“Well, a month was long enough that my friends kind of assumed I was dead,” Charity said. “And when I came back looking like…you know, the way I do now, I didn’t bother hooking up with any of them. I only tried to track down my boyfriend from before Genesis. His name was Mike. I wanted him to know I was okay.”
“Mike is a pathetic name,” Arawn said.
Charity caught herself smiling. Mike was a pathetic name. “He came back mundane after Genesis.”
“What did Mike think of you?”
She had never been deluded enough to think he’d want to be with her once he saw her revenant form, but she’d thought he would be relieved to know she was fine.
“He threw things at me,” Charity said. “Said I shouldn’t have come back. So I left, found a witch who could sell me a fancy glamour, and mortgaged my old townhouse to pay for it. I got a job at a hospital and didn’t talk to anyone from my old life after that.”
Arawn took her hand. “The glamour’s a waste of money. Whatever you spent wasn’t worth it.”
“Don’t call me ugly again,” she said. “I’ll scalp you.”
“I’d love that,” he said, as though she’d offered to go down on him. She couldn’t tell if he was serious. “Mike didn’t deserve you. Anyone who doesn’t admire you—the real you—doesn’t deserve to breathe the same air that you do.”
It was perverse how much she liked hearing that. Just as it had been perverse how much she enjoyed sipping on that blood soup he’d given her.
After years of hiding herself away, someone wanted to see her for what she was. He liked it.
Maybe Arawn wasn’t that bad, even if he did have a dining room filled with human meat. It was better than a lot of the online dating Charity had suffered through in the last decade.
Charity touched her glasses. “I’m going to take the glamour off.”
He grinned. “Good.”
She pressed her thumbs to the gems inside her glasses as she removed them.
Charity didn’t need to look at herself to know what was transforming. Her gut was nothing under the hollowness of her ribs. She had claws. Her skin was brittle, deathly pale, dried out.
She looked like something that should have lived in the Nether Worlds.
Once the glamour was gone, she stood even taller than Arawn. He gazed up at her with open adoration.
“You are perfect,” he said.
And she believed that he meant it.
Another demon entered the garden. Charity prepared to put on her glasses again, but then she realized that this demon was as inhuman as she was. Her cloak covered her face, but the hands that emerged from the robes were skinless. She also didn’t seem to have legs.
Arawn groaned. “What do you want, Nyx?”
“I want you to leave Duat,” she said. “I didn’t invite you here.”
“You’ve got my Canope. It means that I have an open invitation to your place until you give my property back.”
“Yet you didn’t seek me out to take ownership of it. You took a woman to view my gardens.” Nyx surveyed Charity. It was impossible to see the face within, but Charity could feel the weight of her gaze. “You’re only here for another distraction, Arawn. You leave the burden of ruling upon my frail shoulders.”
“Of course I do,” Arawn said. “It’s not like I’m going to be in this shitty little pit much longer.”
Charity was surprised. “What?”
“Yes, I’m planning to go to Earth,” he said. “I thought I’d mentioned that to you when I was explaining my Genesis story, didn’t I? As soon as your friends take the Canope, my path will be clear. I’ll see the sun again. Myself, my gang, and a few thousand demons who are as sick of the Nether Worlds as I am.”
“You’ll be interested to know that her friends have arrived outside the Bronze Gates,” Nyx said serenely. “They’ve come for the Canope.”
Arawn beamed at Charity. “And this is how it begins.”
* * *
Seth was surprised—and disappointed—to find that it was even darker in the demon merchant’s truck than it had been in the rest of Sheol. The shadows were absolute underneath the protective canvas. Only Marion’s faintly glowing eyes offered a dim light in the back of the truck, but it was no comfort; that made it impossible to ignore the way that she was still staring at Seth.
Maybe she could already read his mind.
“You okay?” he whispered.
She shook her head.
Marion only looked more miserable as the truck carried them closer to Duat. She was a strong woman—one of the strongest that Seth had ever met, irritatingly defiant yet charming in her willpower. Yet she looked like she was going to be sick all over the back of the pickup.
He wanted to tell her that it was okay to be afraid—that he’d been afraid every single time he’d fought the bad guys, every time he’d hunted a werewolf, every time he tried to save lives. Fear was part of life. Fear kept him safe, strong, and alive.
But there was no time for a pep talk.
The truck stopped outside the Bronze Gates. Seth watched through a hole in the canvas as the merchant talked to a creature wearing layers of black leather and carrying a butcher’s knife. Its face was covered in tattoos, which were clearly Arawn’s work.
“I can’t hear what he’s saying,” Seth muttered. For all he knew, the merchant was selling them out.
“You don’t need to hear them.” Konig was relaxing against the back of the truck with Marion clamped tightly to his side. They were packed in among closed crates of lethe. “He’ll do what I told him if he wants to get the rest of his payment.”
Those stupid frost gems. Every ounce of Seth’s common sense told him that demons would never risk their necks for something so petty. But those ounces of common sense were also telling him how delicious it would be to murder Marion, so perhaps it wasn’t best to listen to himself.
The merchant returned to the driver’s seat. The engine grumbled to life again with a crimson spark of warlock magic.
The truck jerked forward.
Within the outer wall of the Bronze Gates, the dry grass and loam had been stripped away to expose bare stone. Every inch of the ground was coated in warlock runes. They were more jagged than the kind of spells cast by gaean witches or mages. Seth didn’t need to be able to read them to know they were deadly.
According to Dana’s map, there was only a good quarter of a mile between the two layers of city walls, but the pickup trudged slowly across the warlock runes.
“What do we do once we
get in?” Marion asked.
Seth started to respond. “We should get Charity and—”
“I’ll find the Canope for you,” Konig interrupted. “I’ll grease a few palms to find out where it is and cut my way straight to the prize. You’ll have your memories soon, princess.” He stroked the bastard sword jutting over one shoulder, like one giant blade would be enough against the numerous demons of Duat.
“We can’t stir up violence until we’re sure Charity is safe,” Seth said.
“If we find her first, we’ll tip off our arrival to Arawn. He’ll hide the Canope somewhere else,” Konig said. “You think that finding some revenant is more important than the memories of the Voice of God?”
“I think we should be focused on saving lives,” Seth said. “Marion?”
He expected her to agree with him. But she shrunk against Konig’s side and said, “Charity can probably protect herself. She is a—” Howls resonated outside of the pickup. Marion sat upright and clung to Konig’s arm. “What is that?”
The pickup jerked to a stop halfway between the walls. The engine died.
And the howling grew louder.
“I don’t think the merchant cared for your bribe,” Seth said.
Anger flashed over Konig’s face. He dislodged Marion. “It’s more of Arawn’s dogs,” he said dismissively. “I took care of the first in Arawn’s tower, no problem. I’ll get these, too.”
He whipped the canvas aside and leaped out of the truck.
“Wait!” Seth said. “The warlock runes—”
Konig landed outside the pickup. The magic flared around him, and he cried out, legs buckling underneath him.
“Help him!” Marion cried.
Seth rolled his eyes, but he leaped out of the pickup, too. He took care only to step on the marks that Konig had already activated. Like landmines, they could only blow once; nothing hurt Seth the way that it had hurt Konig, writhing on the ground while infernal flame leaped over his body.
Seth stood over Konig, drew his guns, and faced down the howling dogs.
For an instant, he thought that there were werewolves in Duat. They were big enough—bigger than the werewolves he’d known in his youth, in fact. But these animals weren’t as shaggy as werewolves, nor did their fur have the multicolored hues of shapeshifters.