Digging to Hell (The Gravedigger Series Book 3)

by Willie E. Dalton

  “Hi,” he said, with a smile to rival my own.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Just a little room I found down below the pit. Most of the other demons don’t know it’s here, and when the flames are burning you can’t even see it,” he assured me.

  “So we’re safe?”

  He nodded.

  I didn’t feel safe. What happens when we want to leave this room? I had so many questions for him, I didn’t know where to start.

  He touched my face, and looked relieved when I didn’t flinch or pull away. “My Hel,” he said softly as he stroked my hair. “Did you really come here to save me?” He sounded so surprised. “How did you know where I was, and how did you get here?”

  Apparently he had as many questions for me as I did for him.

  I wiggled my body in closer to his. “We’re safe for a while?” I asked once more, ignoring all of his questions.

  His breathing was suddenly more controlled, and his eyes were locked on mine. “Yes, until we leave this room.”

  I had him—I had him back with me. Even if it was only for a little while, I had found him and he was here with me now, and what happened after this was something to worry about another time. I leaned in and gently pressed my lips to his.

  He tensed, but didn’t move. He let me kiss him, but didn’t touch me or kiss me back.

  I pulled back just enough to say, “It’s OK, I want you.”

  This time when I kissed him, he opened his mouth to me and wrapped his arms around my back, gently holding me and rubbing my skin.

  I was suddenly aware I was still naked, as his fingertips traced my curves underneath the soft blanket.

  I couldn’t decide if I wanted to push him away, or if I couldn’t get all of him against me fast enough.

  This time he pulled back and looked at me. “Are you sure you want to do this, with me, here?”

  The first time we had ever made love was at my cabin. He had been just as sweet and considerate then, asking me what I wanted, if I was OK—making sure I felt safe and comfortable with everything that we did together.

  “Yes. I’ve never been more certain of anything,” I said.

  Raphael kissed my mouth like he was starving and I was his favorite food. He kissed every scratch and bruise that the other demons had left on my body.

  When my mind tried to guess why Raphael was a demon, I pushed those thoughts far, far away, and told them they could come back later.

  By the time he was finished kissing all of the areas he wanted to kiss, my body was a wet, writhing mess.

  “Enough!” I gasped as his face emerged from underneath the blanket. He kissed my mouth, and I could taste myself on his lips and tongue. For some people that was repulsive, but I found to be a huge turn on. I felt the same way when a guy pulled me in for a passionate kiss after I had been going down on him. I understood how it might bother germaphobes, but I tended to enjoy the kinky, dirty parts of sex.

  “You have to be inside me, right now,” I demanded in a voice nearly breathless with need.

  “I wanted to stretch this out, enjoy as long as we can,” Raphael said, the tip of him pressed against me—he was teasing.

  I shook my head. “I have been waiting for you much too long for that. We can go slow next time.” I wrapped my arms around his neck and pushed my hips up towards his. “I need you, Raphael.”

  He slid inside of me a little deeper and faster than I was prepared for, and I cried out against his chest, digging the fingers of my uninjured hand into his back.

  “I’ve been needing you for so long,” he said.

  I was snuggled in against Raphael’s chest, wrapped around his body so that every part of me was touching some part of him. I had been without him for much too long. In life, I had never been the clingy type, but if he wanted rid of me now he’d have to pry me off with a crowbar, and I told him so.

  He had laughed a sincere, rich sound. “I don’t think either of us will need any alone time for a long while. Be as clingy as you want to be.”

  We laid in silence a while, and then he said, “Tell me everything I missed.”

  “Starting when?” I asked. “When I died?”

  He shook his head and sniffed. When I looked up at him, he was crying.

  “Raphael,” I touched his face.

  “No, not that. I still can’t bear it. I was so close and couldn't save you.” He was still shaking his head.

  It wasn’t my favorite day to talk about either, but in no way could I have blamed him for all the things that went wrong the day I died. So I told him about waking up in the field, and pretty much everything that had happened since. I left out the fact that I’d sought comfort in the arms of Boude, and my strange relationship with Soren. That wasn’t pertinent right now.

  “You dug me up when I died?” he asked.

  “I did,” I took a shaky breath, “and I lost you all over again.”

  He hugged me tightly. “After all that, you still looked for me.”

  We hadn’t said it, even though I was pretty sure we had both felt it from the first night we met. “Of course. I love you,” I told him.

  He kissed the top of my head, and then my lips. “I love you too.”

  I had never been so happy to hear those words. As much as I loved Raphael, there was always a part of me that was scared that he didn’t feel the same way. Knowing now that he did, that he wanted me just as much as I wanted him, I thought my heart would burst.

  “I want to know everything that happened with you after I died,” I told him. We were on our sides face to face. I was playing with his long black hair, twisting it through my fingers. “Actually, after I was buried. I don’t want to hear about the pain my death caused you.” I closed my eyes, fighting back a few tears.

  He rubbed my arm as he spoke. “Well, I left. I went out west and took pictures, and tried to find anyone who could tell me why the people I loved kept dying, or leaving. I saw psychics, and shamans, and people who did all kinds of strange things. Most were con artists, but a few were insightful, talking about souls, and how sometimes a soul couldn’t complete its true mission in the world of the living. Sometimes karma had to be paid in death itself, or in the afterlife. He said people who are surrounded by death in such a way are being prepared for what’s to come.” Raphael’s voice was steady as he told me the story.

  “That’s not creepy at all,” I interrupted.

  He nodded, and continued, “It wasn’t long after that meeting that I died. My heart just stopped—I felt it. I don’t know if there was some underlying medical reason it quit on me so young… or if I had just hurt too much for it to stand.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I told him.

  He kissed me. “I’m not.” Raphael went on, “The next thing I knew I was wandering around these lush green fields talking to people who were just as lost as me. I was there for a while, and it was peaceful.” There was longing in his eyes.

  I finally asked him the question I wanted to ask, and dreaded to ask. “Raphael, how did you get here? How did you become a demon?”

  He bit his lip and looked away from me, blinking back a few tears. “I was walking by myself, something I did all the time, and a man came up to me from out of nowhere. He wasn’t very tall, but wore glasses and fedora; he had a deep accent, and a strange name.”

  “Thaddeus Broche,” I said.

  Raphael’s eyes widened. “That was it! He told me I was sent to that place by mistake, and he was there to take me back to the right part of the underworld. He told me someone was waiting for me. You were the only person I could think it might be, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up,” he smiled. “He told me about how a crazy vampire had messed with a lot of souls and sent them to the wrong places, and said that’s what had happened to me. He told me he had to make a few stops as we went along to collect more souls to take back. He said he had already taken a few back to the main area of the underworld, but that it was taking too long to make that many tri
ps. So we went in and out of several different afterlives. Most of the gods weren’t pleasant about the misunderstanding, but didn’t want to keep souls with no desire to serve them. They turned over the souls, and we were on our way.” He sighed. “Hell was supposed to be our last stop. Negotiations were taking longer than expected, since Lucifer didn’t care if the souls had been sent to him by mistake, and Thaddeus knew he would be in trouble if he returned without all of the lost souls. We were safe, or so we thought, waiting in an abandoned area for Thaddeus to take us where we belonged. There were maybe a hundred or so souls. Then Thaddeus didn’t return from his meeting with Lucifer. A bunch of demons came in and captured everyone. We were told Thaddeus had been called away suddenly and was unable to take us with him. The way Lucifer saw it, we were his now.”

  Raphael stopped for moment, and I watched him shudder as he recalled what happened next.

  “We were given options: we could join him; we could remain prisoners, open to whatever sadistic fun the demons wanted to have with us, in hopes that we might one day be rescued; or we could jump into the pit and let our souls be burned up forever—true death.” He blinked and looked away. “More than you would have thought made that last choice.”

  I imagined watching people purposefully jump into the pit of fire to meet their end, so they didn’t have to endure or inflict torment for eternity. I did understand their choice, but I didn’t think I could have made the same one; no matter how bleak things were, I had always tried to hold on to that spark of hope.

  “You joined him,” I said. There was no judgment in my voice; there were no “good” choices to make in that situation. I wouldn’t have condemned him for any of them.

  “I’m a coward,” he said, and I saw so much anguish on his face. “I’ve tortured people so that I didn’t have to endure the pain myself,” he said.

  “I don’t believe for moment that you aren’t torturing yourself.”

  He rolled his eyes and wiped away a few tears. “I’ve grown cold to it—I don’t even hear the screams anymore.”

  I pictured Raphael standing over someone strapped to a table, like I had been, covered in their blood, numb to their suffering. It should have scared me—it should have broken my heart. I hated it, but I was just so glad I had found him—glad he had saved me.

  “You aren’t a monster, Raphael. You did what you had to do to get through this,” I reassured him.

  “I’m not the same person you knew, Hel.”

  “I’m not either,” I said. “But let’s figure out how to get out of here, and we can get to know one another again.”

  Raphael went still beside me and didn’t say anything.

  “What?” I searched his face, and asked, “Will we ever be able to get out of here?” while questions like, Are we just delaying the inevitable? Are we going to have to jump into the pit to escape this place? ran through my mind.

  “I will find a way to get you out of here, I promise,” he said.

  “What do you mean, ‘get you out of here?’ You have to come with me, or I’m not going.” I awkwardly crossed my arms across my chest and winced. Stupid bandage.

  “Helena, the things I’ve done are too awful. This is where I deserve to be now.”

  “Bullshit. If you stay, you’ll just end up doing more bad things. Stop it, you are coming back with me.” This was not up for discussion. “If I leave here without you, this was all for nothing. Do you really want that?”

  He rolled onto his back and rubbed his face. I sat up and leaned over him. “Do you want me to have been tortured for nothing?”

  He opened his eyes. “Of course not, but how I can face others knowing the horrible things I’ve done to people?”

  I shrugged. “I can’t answer that, but you won’t figure out how to make it better by staying here where it all happened, and will most likely happen again.”

  He pulled me down to lay on top of him, and I kissed along his neck and collar bone. He sighed, and squeezed me. “Getting out of here is going to be tough. Whenever Hades opened all the doors, Lucifer had this one sealed back up in seconds, but a few managed to escape anyway. I’m sure he put up extra precautions to make leaving even more difficult now.”

  “Do you know of any ways to get out—at all?” I asked.

  “I’ve heard that in his personal chambers, there’s a hidden door or way out.”

  “I’m guessing even getting inside there is almost impossible,” I surmised.

  “It is heavily guarded by high-level demons.”

  “Of course it is,” I said. “Is it dangerous here for you now? I mean Jake and Zeke know you helped me escape. Will the other demons be looking for you?”

  He shrugged. “Eh, I can handle them. I’ll just say you told me who you were, and that you were sent by Hades to discuss a matter with Lucifer, and I had to let you go.”

  “Will they believe that?”

  “As far as they know, I’d have no reason to let you go. I’m just as sadistic as they are, remember?” Raphael gave a half-hearted laugh that didn’t sound amused at all.

  He had been playing the role of a sadist, and I tried not to cringe too hard thinking about the fate he had saved me from. A part of my brain kept repeating, But he did do that to other people. I tried to find any other thought to focus on, but that one insisted on being heard. Sometimes fighting the bad thoughts and painful memories made it worse. If you could stand it, and just let it play through, it might go away for a little longer.

  Raphael put his hand on top of mine. I had been absentmindedly rubbing the bandage around my wrist. Little streaks of crimson had blossomed on the white cloth.

  “Shit,” I said, “I reopened it. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Raphael sat up and took my arm in his lap. Gently, he unwrapped the rags he had used, and wiped away the fresh blood.

  I had to look away to keep from getting sick. I’d never been good with blood, which most people found strange for the amount of dead bodies I had seen. But the corpses I dealt with had been embalmed: no blood, no mess.

  “How bad is it?” I asked him.

  “Zeke cut deeper than he needed just to skin your arm. Idiot,” he breathed as he looked more closely.

  I fought my gag reflex at the “skin your arm” comment. I hated that I knew what they were planning to do to me; I hated worse that Raphael was the one who told me. I heard it again in my head like I was back on the table, “If we don’t open your arms up, how are we supposed to hang you up by your tendons and ligaments?”

  Instinctively, I jerked my arm out of his grasp and cradled it to me, not caring that I was getting blood all over my chest.

  The surprise on Raphael’s face was clear. “Did I hurt you?” he said, placing a hand on my leg.

  I took a slow breath, and was quite embarrassed I had acted that way, like he would hurt me. I knew that he wouldn’t, that he had to fake it in front of the other demons in order to get a chance to save me. I still couldn’t help that those words stung, on a deep level. And at the time, I hadn’t been sure that they were lies.

  I knew that telling him what was wrong would hurt him. One of us hurting was enough. “Yeah, sorry,” I said, placing my arm back in his hands, “it just really hurt for second.”

  “Sorry, baby. He probably got a couple of nerves.” Raphael rewrapped my wrist with a clean cloth. “Try to keep it still. It would have been better if we could have stitched it, but you don’t want to keep tearing it open.”

  I looked at my arm, and the cloth he had wrapped with so much care. “Thank you,” I said, and leaned in to kiss him.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, and kissed my lips, then my forehead.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now we need to try to get out of here, and into the Devil’s bedroom,” he said with a grin I wasn’t expecting.

  “Why are you smiling? We might not make it through this.”

  “If we don’t, we’ll die together; and if we do, we’ll have a fucking awesome
story to tell.”

  I shook my head at him—but if those were our only choices, I’d take them.

  We didn’t make it far out of our hidden paradise. Hell was crawling with demons, all looking for Raphael and me.

  I was right when I suspected that Zeke and Jake would run their mouths to everyone about how Raphael had betrayed them and escaped with a prisoner. Raphael had immediately given his spiel about how I was there as a messenger from Hades, and how Lucifer would be upset if I was tortured. Most of the demons thought he was lying, but enough of them found it feasible enough not to haul me off and finish what they started.

  They put Raphael on his knees and bound his hands behind his back with the same awful wire rope they’d used on me. He was smart enough not to test it’s give. They made me get on my knees beside him, but didn’t tie my hands. I guess I didn’t seem very threatening.

  When I say a lot of demons were looking for us, I wasn’t just referring to the pretty ones. As I looked around, I saw horns of varying lengths, growing not just from their heads, but from various areas of their bodies. On some there were snouts where noses should have been, and fangs snarled at me from otherwise beautiful faces. A clip-clopping sound made me look for the source, and I saw three or four creatures walking up on cloven-hooved goat’s legs. The ones that bothered me the most, though, were the ones crawling on their bellies, with arms and legs so close to their bodies that I thought they were slithering at first. Their faces were almost childlike, with chubby cheeks and full round lips; some had hair, and others were bald, only increasing the resemblance to infants. One crawled up to me, and to my horror, it stuck out a forked snake’s tongue and tasted me. Thankful to at least be wearing a long shirt Raphael had given me, I still jerked back, almost falling over in my unstable position on the ground. The child/snake demon rolled its eyes up to look at me, and smiled before going back to its fellows.

  “So what do we do with them?” a demon that I couldn’t see asked from somewhere in the crowd.

  Most of the suggestions were not things we would enjoy, but that wasn’t surprising.