by Reine, SM
“Sir,” said a demon waiting in the foyer.
She had been so angry that she didn’t notice that they had company. Belphegor could have passed for a human, though his smooth white skin and bald pate gave him the appearance of bones that had been bleached by too many hours in the sun. He wore a black suit buttoned up to the throat and a necklace of human teeth, which commemorated the passing of his favorite slaves.
He was Abraxas’s right-hand man, and he was obviously trying very hard not to notice the Inquisitor’s wife walking out of the judge’s private quarters with her breasts exposed.
Ariane’s lover moved to shield her with his body, but it was too late. “What do you want, Belphegor?” he asked.
“The Inquisitor has requested additional forces to comb the city for the escaped prisoner,” Belphegor said.
“Send one of my centuriae. Get out of here.”
With a sharp nod, Belphegor left. Ariane arranged the straps of her dress to hide the worst of the injuries and fluffed out her curls to conceal the rest. Isaac never looked very closely. But if Belphegor told him what he had seen, it wouldn’t matter how well she hid her love bites.
The voice emanating from the hood’s depths was strangely gentle. “Belphegor is extremely loyal to Abraxas. He won’t say anything.”
“I’m not worried about it,” Ariane lied. “But maybe I should seek out James myself. He’s smart. He won’t be easy to catch, even for a trained centuria.”
“That won’t be necessary. James Faulkner is no threat. The city will kill him, or I will.” Even though she couldn’t see him underneath the robes, his gaze chilled her. “Regardless, the touchstones will continue to arrive. Mark my words, Ariane—I will have my trial.”
Something was chewing on James’s leg. For a moment, he thought it was a dream—just another torturous part of his lurking subconscious. But then the teeth penetrated his calf, and he jerked awake to see a rat the size of dog hunched over him.
He kicked it off with a shout. Its teeth ripped free, taking an inch of skin with it.
The rat tumbled end-over-end into the wall. As soon as it hit, it sprung to its feet and bared its teeth in a hiss. Its tongue looked like a black slug trapped inside its dripping maw.
It lunged again. James tried to deliver a swift kick to its skull, but it was ready the second time—much too smart for any average alley-lurking rodent. Its mouth snapped closed on his toes and scraped when he jerked free.
He jumped to his feet, and it snapped at his heels as he scrambled to the other side of the narrow alley. There wasn’t far to run—the end was boarded up, and there were six feet of refuse between him and the exit.
James’s gaze fell on a broken bone jutting out of a pile of waste. It was the femur of an animal that had to be as big as a horse.
He jerked it out of the pile.
The rat jumped, and he swung the bone like a baseball bat. The bone connected with a meaty thud, like punching his fist into a wall. The rat fell. James didn’t wait for it to recover. He struck again and again.
Only when it was pulverized—skull flattened, cheek split, nostrils dribbling with ichor—did he drop the bone and fling off a thumb-sized maggot that had been inching toward his elbow.
God, he hurt. The alley was shaded from the worst of the ambient light of Hell’s deserts, but his skin was still drying, still flaking. Every breath dragged sandpaper down his throat. Every blink ached. And he felt so heavy, too sluggish to move. If he hadn’t taken on some of Elise’s strength as a kopis, he wasn’t sure he would have been able to move in Hell at all.
The half-filled water bottle was on the ground nearby. He picked it up, tried to wipe ichor off of the side, but only smeared it. He allowed himself a sip.
The hinges of a door squealed, and James ducked behind the refuse.
A demon lurched out of the apothecary shop. It was a tall, hunched creature with curling horns that spiraled all the way to its fanged mouth. It didn’t seem to have any interest in Hell’s current fashions, so instead of wearing leather or human-like garments, it had a tattered shroud that swathed its entire body.
Such an outfit would have concealed James more than adequately. With a pinch of glamor, he might even pass for a demon.
His hand fell on the broken femur again.
The demon lurched down the alley, muttering under its breath in the infernal tongue. It left the door ajar. James slipped inside the apothecary shop.
Inside, the room was lit by a single oil lamp that stained the walls and smelled like melted fat. Dried limbs hung from every inch of the ceiling, and the walls were packed with shelves of herbs, powders, and gels. The apothecary’s counter was in the middle of it all, where it could watch every inch of shelf space. Judging by the mortar and pestle and bowl of bone meal, the demon must have been in the middle of preparing something when it departed.
There was a back room, too—also empty of life, aside from a cage suspended in the corner with a crow that James thought was dead until it tried to ruffle its sticky feathers. There was a bed, a desk, some books. No windows. The shop didn’t have a door to the main streets.
Perfect.
He caught a glimpse of himself in a piece of broken mirror dangling from a mobile of crow feet. If he had thought that he looked terrible in the airport bathroom, it was nothing in comparison to the effect imprisonment in Hell had had on him. Blood caked the corners of his mouth, and several days’ worth of beard growth shadowed the lower half of his face. His skin was dry, dusty, cracked. He looked gaunt and old.
“Damn,” he muttered, scanning the room for something that he could use to wipe up his face. There were no sinks or other ways to access fresh water—it was too scarce a resource in Hell to waste on cleaning.
The door in the front room creaked. The apothecary had returned.
James pressed his back to the wall by the door, fist tightening on the femur. He listened to the demon shuffle through the shop to its counter. Heard it start humming as it went back to work. Stone ground against stone as it continued its work on the bone meal.
Peering around the corner, James saw that the demon’s back was turned.
He jumped, bringing the femur cracking down on the back of the demon’s horned skull. It didn’t even get a chance to cry out. It staggered and hit the counter, flailed for a grip, found none. The mortar and pestle crashed to the ground with it.
James ripped the shroud from its shoulders, and wrapped it around its neck.
He had seen Elise kill a dozen demons by strangling them, but had never attempted it himself—he hadn’t been strong enough, and didn’t have the resolve. But desperation made it strangely easy to tighten the ligature and jerk back with all of his strength.
It gagged. Clawed at his hands. He twisted the shroud even tighter, and the demon’s thrashing slowed.
James waited until it went slack, and then held for a good minute longer. His burned arm was shaking. The back of his hand was bleeding from being rubbed raw with cloth. But it worked. The demon was unconscious.
He searched the counters until he found a knife. James tried to imagine Elise standing beside him, and thought of what she would have done to kill a demon of unknown origin. Would stabbing it be enough? Slitting the throat? Decapitation?
She had once told him how easy it was to access the heart from between the ribs if you went below the breastbone. And very few creatures could survive having that organ removed.
He rolled it onto its back, stripped off the robes for his use, and pondered its concave stomach. Could James really cut out a heart—even that of a demon?
The apothecary stirred beneath him, eyelids fluttering.
James drove the knife into its stomach. A wet gasp fell from its lips.
He worked as quickly as he could, but it was so much messier than his kopis made it appear. The ichor stung his wounded arm, and his left hand was too weak to do the work, so he used only his right as he sliced through the stomach and felt around for its still-b
eating heart.
Sawing through the muscle was difficult from that angle, especially when he couldn’t see what he was doing. There was barely any room for his hand. Yet he felt the heart’s moorings sever, and he was able to squirm his fingers around it and fight the suction to pull it free, arm black with blood almost to his wrist.
James dropped the heart. The demon didn’t move.
“Good God,” he whispered in the reverent silence of the shop.
It may have been years since Elise had visited the City of Dis, but very little had changed. Every awful thing that she recalled from her childhood was still there: the bleached human skulls hanging over doors for luck, the penned yards where compliant slaves were kept, the slurping and growling sounds of vo-ani sliding off of inhuman mouth-parts. The narrow streets were crowded. Demons bustled, shoved, shouted.
But it wasn’t as horrifying or as nauseating as it used to be. It felt familiar, in the same way that James’s dance studio was familiar—just another place she had been a thousand times before. Almost like home.
Nathaniel’s fear radiated behind her, so obviously human, and so very delectable. “Don’t stare,” Elise said under her breath as she strode down the sidewalk. He picked up his pace to draw level with her side.
“Sorry.” He kept his head ducked, but he still peeked through his bangs. “Are the demons looking at me?”
She shot a glare at a fiend that focused its watery eyeballs on Nathaniel as it lurched past.
“No,” she said when it scurried away.
Nathaniel lowered his voice until even Elise could barely hear it. “Can they understand us?”
“Some of them.”
“What are they speaking?”
Elise pushed him into an alley so that a pickup truck could pass by. “Some of it is the infernal tongue,” she said, keeping him pressed to the wall with a hand in his chest. “I also hear some Latin and Babylonian. But a lot of them speak English. Watch yourself.”
Nathaniel stared after the truck like he hadn’t heard her. She nudged his chin with a knuckle, and his mouth snapped shut.
“Sorry,” he said again.
“And stop apologizing.”
Elise led him down the street once it was clear again, heading for the shimmering glass towers of the Palace of Dis. “Why don’t we just…” He fluttered his hand through the air, mimicking an airplane.
“They’re used to creatures that can phase, so it’s going to be protected with strong wards,” Elise said. “Do you want to phase again?”
“No. It feels like suffocating.”
“Then we’ll walk.”
Elise spotted a meat market ahead and steered Nathaniel to the next street before he could see anything. The meat market looked like any other butcher’s shop; it was impossible to tell the difference between a skinned rack of human ribs and ordinary pork. But not all of the meat had been dressed yet. Elise had glimpsed at least two recognizably human heads with gaping, empty eye sockets.
Rats darted around her ankles as she strode along the street. She kicked them away.
Just a few more blocks until the Palace.
“It might be hard to get inside the walls,” she said softly. “There will be guards. Magic. Trouble. So if I tell you to do something, don’t question me. Okay?”
“Okay,” he whispered back. “What’s the plan?”
Elise didn’t have one. “I’ll tell you when we get there.”
A kibbeth drifted overhead, momentarily blotting out the glow of the fires. Elise kept her head down. Did it belong to the rebellion? Would they try to seize her?
It drifted on.
They reached the walls without being attacked. Elise stretched out her senses, probing for wards.
She didn’t feel anything.
Elise examined the glossy black stones with a critical eye. That couldn’t be right. There was no way that the Palace would be unprotected.
“What’s wrong?” Nathaniel asked as she stepped into the shadow of a statue in the courtyard. It was a gray behemoth with the wings of a bat and magma fountaining from its palms.
She nodded toward the walls. “What do you feel? Do you detect any wards?”
He reached into his pocket and slipped his Book of Shadows out. “Is it okay if I cast a spell?”
Elise glanced around. The courtyard was empty, aside from a few guards in leather that were marching in the opposite direction. The rebellion had everyone drawn to another part of the city. “Be quick about it.”
He ripped out a page and whispered a word. Magic blossomed around her, strange and distorted in the Hell’s heat.
“There are wards,” he said, eyes blank as he stared at nothing. “But they’re broken. There’s a hole in the wall on the other side, so whatever punched through must have destroyed everything they had.” Nathaniel blinked rapidly and shook his head. “There’s a witch working on restoring it right now.”
So they didn’t have much time. Elise waited until he tucked the notebook into his pocket again, and then took his hand.
“This won’t feel good,” she said.
Nathaniel paled, but he nodded.
Elise phased.
She still wasn’t used to the sensation of letting herself melt into shadow, but it was easier in Hell than it had been on Earth. It took almost no thought to wrap Nathaniel tightly in the depths of her body and launch over the wall.
It felt like everything moved in slow motion as she looked over the other side. Elise recognized the gardens from the Union’s diagrams and the layout of the towers. Plenty of demons and humans alike were pacing the grounds, talking amongst themselves in vo-ani and English, and their chatter drifted through her.
“…never had a prisoner escape…”
“Think we’re safe?”
“Are you kidding? We’re in Hell. Of course we’re not safe.”
Elise focused on a dark corner behind the west tower. She dropped Nathaniel and resubstantiated.
He staggered, throwing out a hand as he sucked in a hard gasp. Elise grabbed his arm to keep him from falling.
“You okay?” she asked as soon as she had a proper mouth again.
Dry coughs wracked Nathaniel’s chest, but he nodded.
Elise gestured for him to stay while she peeked around the corner of the tower. The collection of people talking among the flesh gardens was strange—some nightmares, a succubus, a few humans. They all looked more normal than the citizenry of Dis, like anyone Elise might have seen on Earth. But most humans would have been a lot more bothered by the disembodied hands jutting out of the soil.
She stepped back to Nathaniel. He was still catching his breath.
“That hurt,” he whispered. “I don’t like that phasing thing.”
She slapped him on the back. “Stand up straight. Look casual.”
“How?”
There was a reason Elise had tried to avoid teaching the children’s classes at James’s dance studio. “I don’t know. Just…think casual thoughts.”
She peered around the corner again. More of those guards in leather were encouraging the crowds to disperse. Elise recognized a familiar face—a lean female nightmare with sharp features. The last time Elise had seen her, Veronika had been escorting the greatest kopis at the semi-centennial summit. Now it looked like she was working with Palace security.
At Veronika’s direction, everyone left, leaving only security behind. And it was then that Elise realized that she recognized one more person.
He had short red hair, a goatee, and scarred hands. Judging by the badge on his chest, he ranked higher than the rest of security. And he carried himself with the confidence of a man who had never lost a fight—probably because he never had.
Isaac Kavanagh. Her father.
Elise gripped the wall for balance. She had known that her parents were both probably still hanging around Hell, but it hadn’t occurred to her that she might run into them. She hadn’t had time to consider the possibility.
S
he barely breathed as he gestured Veronika to his side. Together, they walked into the shadow of a tower where nobody would be able to hear them. Elise crept closer to hear their conversation, crouching behind a half-wall so she could hear without being seen.
“Something strange happened earlier today,” Veronika said. “The Union transmission channel opened between the usual hours, but whatever they were sending got intercepted.”
“Did you see where it was taken?” Isaac asked. His voice was deep, unemotional.
“One of the desert shrines, but there was nothing there when I checked it out. It makes me think that the rebellion is trying to snatch interdimensional traffic. This might sound like a leap in logic, sir, but there are a lot of touchstones arriving from topside, so maybe the rebellion was hoping to get one. And if the rebels are going after touchstones, then I think it’s safe to assume that Sohigian…”
“Are any touchstones missing?”
“No,” Veronika said, sounding impatient. “But the rebellion—”
“They aren’t my concern. What of James Faulkner? Any sign?”
Elise’s heart skipped a beat. Nathaniel had joined her behind the wall, and his round face was pale. He opened his mouth. She shook her head to keep him silent.
“Not since he shattered the wall and disappeared into the city. We’re still looking for him,” Veronika said.
So he had escaped. Elise glanced back at the hole in the wall and felt the warmth of pride. She could only imagine what James must have done to rip a hole through the Palace wards—it must have been very loud and very bloody. A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
“Redouble our search and prepare a team. I’m going out to search myself. I want that bastard back in my hands,” Isaac said, and Elise’s smile immediately disappeared.
She grabbed Nathaniel’s arm and slipped away from Isaac and Veronika before she could hear anything else.
Her father was out to get James. She wanted to be surprised, but she couldn’t seem to work up the emotion.