by SM Reine
But as James watched Zettel slipping behind the booths unseen, he felt no sympathy.
“No,” James said. “We should hurry.”
He climbed down the spine. A platform had been built over the vertebrae so that they could be used as a path between the pelvis and ribcage, and James didn’t look down as he walked briskly along it. Shadows writhed around the spine in the corners of his vision.
The ribcage was filled with what looked like homes, if rotten pits inside of stone slabs could be considered homes. James avoided them and climbed down to the arm stretching over the chasm. A dusty wind whistled around their legs as they hurried down the humerus.
James jumped off of the wrist bones and heard Nathaniel hit the dirt next to him.
“Smooth sailing, right?” Nathaniel said. “Can you get this spell off? It’s weird how you won’t look at me.”
“It will fade on its own soon,” James said, shielding his eyes from the dust as he searched for the sunken head that would lead into Coccytus. There was a dark shape on the far end of the desert. “I think it’s over there.”
They walked across the wasteland. After the claustrophobic brambles growing among the bones of the city, it felt unsettlingly empty, much like the desert outside the City of Dis.
The distances were longer than he expected, and it felt even longer after all of the running he had done in the last few hours. Their escape in Reno, being chased through Zebul, the flight through Haven, climbing over Malebolge’s bones—even walking across a flat plane of empty land made James feel as though his feet weighed a thousand pounds.
“Could you summon more water?” he asked, his tongue thick and heavy in his mouth.
“I didn’t tag anything else,” Nathaniel said from behind him. His voice was ragged. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” James said. “Not much farther.”
That was probably a lie, but he needed to say it.
As they approached the dark shape in the desert, James realized that it wasn’t Malebolge’s skull. It was another half-wall surrounding a small settlement.
“Is that a village?” Nathaniel asked.
James crouched behind the wall. The clay buildings inside were much more ordinary than those in Malebolge. Creatures walked the streets between them. Even though they had physical forms, unlike the demons within Malebolge, it was too dark to see them well. He could only tell that they were humanoid.
“What is this?” James breathed, squinting into the smoke.
A light appeared in the settlement.
An angel walked among the squat structures, so much brighter than his surroundings. His wings were exposed. He vibrated with cool energy that was totally foreign to Hell.
It was Metaraon.
James held his breath, waiting for the angel to see them. But Metaraon stepped around a building again, oblivious to their presence.
“Are those angels?” Nathaniel asked.
His son wasn’t looking at the place that Metaraon had disappeared. He was staring at a line of the other creatures as they passed nearby.
Up close, what James had assumed to be demons looked much more like angels, but with a few wrong details. They had red skin, black hair, black eyes, and massive wings. And they were carrying swords. Why would Metaraon be visiting a hidden outpost in Hell occupied by these strange creatures?
Almost as soon as James thought the question, he knew the answer with absolute certainty: this was not a settlement, but a base. Metaraon was building an army.
James flashed back to the Palace of Dis, when the Council had been slaughtered at high trial. Metaraon had brought cherubim to seize Elise, but there had been one other creature there—a monstrous breed of angel that James had never seen before. It had been brutal and deadly. These creatures looked just like that monster.
They were hybrids, but not Gray. Instead, these were a crossbreed of angel…with demon.
The implications of it were dizzying.
In order to have adult hybrids, Metaraon must have begun dismantling the Treaty of Dis years before James suspected anything was happening—maybe even decades. And if there had been nothing to prevent angels and demons from interbreeding, then what other laws had been long since shattered? How much damage could Metaraon have done?
And what was he going to do with such an army?
They had to warn someone.
“No,” James said slowly. “They’re not angels.”
“What are those?” Nathaniel asked.
“I don’t think there’s a word for them anymore. There haven’t been hybrids like these for—for over two thousand years.”
“Hybrids?”
“Hybrids,” he confirmed. “Could you take yourself back to Earth from here?”
“Yeah, but I’m not—”
“Shut up and listen to me.” He reached out to seize his son’s shoulders and found them more by luck than design. “This is bigger than us. Bigger than Elise. Someone needs to know that there’s an army of crossbreeds before it’s too late.”
“Who?” Nathaniel asked.
James’s mind raced. Who could he trust to take action on such a thing?
“Lucas McIntyre,” he decided. “You’ll have to start with him. He’s the kopis in Las Vegas, and he knows most kopides in active service. Tell him what you’ve seen. If Elise and I don’t come back, he’ll figure out what to do.”
“I’m not going to leave,” Nathaniel said.
“The Treaty of Dis was formed explicitly to prevent creatures like those.” He jabbed a finger toward the wall, and the army beyond. “Without the treaty, they could scour the face of the Earth. They could kill every single human. They could—”
As soon as James realized what he had been about to say, he stopped speaking.
“What?” Nathaniel asked.
They could kill God.
Was that the purpose of the army? Did Metaraon plan to march on Araboth and use them to assassinate Him if Elise failed? Or had she already failed? Was she even alive anymore?
“We need to warn someone,” James said. There was no hiding the desperation in his voice. “I know you’re angry, Nathaniel, and I know you hate me, but I need you to do this. Please.”
The long silence that responded worried James. But eventually, Nathaniel spoke.
“I don’t hate you,” he said.
“Will you do it?”
“Okay. But I’m going to get you into the garden first. You won’t find the fissure out of Limbo without me. Deal?”
“Deal,” James said.
XX
James and Nathaniel skirted around the settlement without being seen. The pit leading into Coccytus lay just beyond. Cold air hissed out of it. All of the moisture evaporated the instant it touched the dry air of Malebolge.
The shoulders were so far in the distance that James could barely see them, and the disproportionately long neck bowed into the earth. There was no path on this portion of the spine. James and Nathaniel had to climb down the vertebrae, each as large as a house.
Coccytus was a second cavern, smaller than the one above it, and James immediately regretted leaving his shirt behind. He shivered as they descended toward the cold blue flames at the bottom of the pit.
The skull itself, half-submerged in a frozen lake, was grotesquely huge. Light smoldered inside the ice like fires in the deep, and James could make out the hazy silhouettes of fangs. The skull had three faces—and two of them were frozen. “Ba’al,” he said softly.
Nathaniel flickered in the edges of James’s vision. The spell was beginning to wear off. “What?”
“This body must have belonged to Ba’al,” James said. “He was one of the earliest demons, and he had three faces. He was known for his hatred of traitors.” In fact, he had devoured several of his legion that had betrayed him in ancient wars. Some of those shattered bodies may have even still been frozen in the two mouths on either side.
“Traitors like you,” Nathaniel said, putting voice to wha
t James had been trying not to think.
James jumped to the next vertebra. “So where’s the fissure to Limbo?” he asked, clenching his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering.
Nathaniel spoke from ahead of him. It was still hard to focus on him, but James could see his hazy outline against the glow that came from Ba’al’s skull. “I think it’s inside the mouth.”
The idea of jumping into a mouth that had once devoured traitorous legions was not appealing, but there was nowhere left to go but forward.
They clambered onto the skull’s chin. It was warmer closer to the fissure. Flames licked the edges of the fangs, leaving them glossy after centuries of being baked. James peered carefully over the edge. This fissure looked less like sunlight and more like the surface of the sun itself.
“So there it is. All we’ve got to do is jump,” Nathaniel said. As if it were simple, inconsequential, to willingly plunge into the deepest fires of Hell.
“And then what?”
“Then we walk to the other fissure. Don’t worry. I’ll jump back to Earth before you go through.” Nathaniel sounded so reassuring, like he was the adult and James was the one who needed guidance.
Yes, all they had to do was jump, and take a walk across a wasteland outside of time. But then they would be in Araboth. What had seemed like a distant “maybe” that James could worry about later had become an impending, ominous “soon.”
He would walk in the shade of the Tree again. He would tear Elise free.
And they would have to kill God—together.
“Ready?” Nathaniel asked. James could barely hear him over the song that poured from Ba’al’s maw, chillingly beautiful and strange.
The answer was no, of course. James could never be ready to return to the garden, especially not when it meant trying to murder the most powerful entity in existence.
He opened his mouth to reply.
A gunshot rang out behind them.
Nathaniel jerked with a gasp, clutched his chest, and the fading glamor vanished in an instant. He was suddenly visible.
And bleeding.
His feet slipped on the edge of the fang. James snagged him out of the air and dragged him to safer ground. But Nathaniel was heavy, and it was all he could do to keep from dropping him.
James slid to his knees with his son in his lap. Nathaniel’s hands fell away, and he saw the bullet’s exit wound—a perfect circle that had punctured a lung at best, and punched through his heart at worst.
Gary Zettel stood on Ba’al’s horned chin, both hands still grasping the gun. His face was smeared with blood, dirt, ash. If not for the flak jacket with a UKA logo, James might have thought him to be any one of a million tortured souls that had wandered from Malebolge.
The gun slipped from his hands. Clattered against the bone.
“My God,” Zettel said.
Zettel must have meant to shoot James, but Nathaniel had been standing behind him while he looked over the edge. And he had still been half-invisible from the glamor. Zettel wouldn’t have had any idea that he was there.
It was an accident. A cruel accident.
And yet it wasn’t James’s blood puddling over Ba’al’s chin. It wasn’t James gasping for breath, drowning in the fluid that filled his lungs. It wasn’t James with a fearful stare and shuddering body.
Nathaniel was dying in James’s lap.
“What have you done?” James asked, lifting his eyes to the commander.
Zettel floundered. “I didn’t—you weren’t—” He lifted his hands, which shook wildly. He had finally caught his quarry and had missed his one shot. Whether the tremors were due to physical weakness or nerves blown by a trip through Hell didn’t really matter.
Nathaniel stared up at James, incapable of speaking. He looked so afraid.
“Help me!” James called to Zettel. “He’s dying!”
It was a stupid request. There was nothing the kopis could do—there was nothing that anyone could do. James hadn’t been able to tattoo any healing spells on his body, Nathaniel had emptied his Book of Shadows , and there were no healers or hospitals in Coccytus.
But James was the most powerful witch on Earth, for fuck’s sake, and he had already lost Hannah, he had lost Elise, and now he was going to lose his son, too. It wasn’t fair.
Zettel bent to pick up his gun, then seemed to think better of it.
“I can’t,” the kopis said. He shook his head. Scrubbed a hand down his face. “I can’t.”
“Don’t you dare run, you—you goddamn coward.”
But Zettel was already backing away, scrambling for the horn that he had climbed to reach them.
One more time, he said, “I can’t.”
Then he vanished down the ridge, headed back up the spine to Malebolge.
Nathaniel tried to speak again. Blood bubbled over his lips, staining the spaces between his teeth.
Maybe if the wound hadn’t been so dire, James could have found a way to heal him. As long as Nathaniel’s heart beat and his blood flowed, he could be healed. But James would need to find ingredients, cast a circle, perform a ritual. All of that took time. More time than Nathaniel had.
James couldn’t use magic. They needed a miracle.
He ripped the leather glove off with his teeth. Elise’s mark was healing well on his palm, despite the abuse it had taken on their flight through the dimensions. The seam was fading along his thumb already. It was far from completely merged with his body, but it was good enough—it would have to be.
He pressed the mark to the star-shaped scar on his shoulder without letting go of his son. And for the first time in many, many years…James prayed.
The air around him thrummed with power. A chorus of bells shattered over them as a thick fog gathered around James and Nathaniel. Combined with the song drifting from the maw, a mixture of sharps and flats, it formed a foul discord that was like razors raking down James’s spine.
Metaraon stepped from the radiance as calmly as he might step through a kitchen door.
“I didn’t expect you to summon me anytime soon,” the angel said coolly. He glanced around Coccytus with an amused tilt to his mouth. “Especially not down here.”
James lifted Nathaniel’s body a fraction of an inch. “He’s going to die,” he said.
“Why do you think this is any of my concern?”
“Because he’s my son, goddammit!”
The change in demeanor was immediate. “Your son, is he?” Metaraon asked, gazing down at Nathaniel with an impenetrable expression. “Interesting.”
“Save him,” James said. He was begging. He knew he was begging, and he knew that it wouldn’t impress Metaraon, yet he couldn’t stop himself. “He’s just a child.”
“Hardly,” the angel said. “A grandchild of mine is not ‘just’ anything.” He sank to his knees in front of James, holding his hands over the wound. Metaraon considered him for a moment. Then he nodded. “Very well. I will rectify this.”
Metaraon scooped his arms underneath Nathaniel’s knees and neck, lifting him effortlessly. James battled with the wild urge to stop him, to rip Nathaniel from his grip. Metaraon was responsible for Hannah’s death. More than that, he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of humans—and there would only be more to come. Surrendering Nathaniel to him hurt, as if James had been the one shot in the chest.
Metaraon turned to walk back to Malebolge.
“Wait,” James said. “What’s going to happen to him?”
Metaraon barely spared a glance for James. “He will live. He’s too valuable to die.”
The angel strolled away, and James stared at his bloody, trembling hands.
Losing Nathaniel meant that he wouldn’t be able to find his way back through the dimensions, much less open the doors, yet he couldn’t bring himself to care. Not now. Being trapped in Coccytus seemed like such an insignificant thing in comparison to what he had just done to save his son’s life.
Maybe it was just the light in Hell—a s
trange trick of the fires that boiled beneath him—but James almost thought that Nathaniel’s blood was tinged with silver.
Metaraon only took a few steps down the skull before stopping. As if a thought had struck him, he turned back again. Nathaniel looked pale in his arms, shrunken, like a much younger child.
“I was skeptical when Landon told me of you,” Metaraon said, “and more so when you vanished with the Godslayer. Yet you delivered a finely honed weapon to us, as promised. You gave me the knowledge I needed to motivate her. Now I hold the first natural born mage that has been birthed since the formation of the Treaty. I am grateful to you, my son. You seem to have served your purpose.”
Metaraon approached him, and James drank in the sight of Nathaniel’s face: the pale lips that were shaped very much like Hannah’s, the dimpled chin, the round cheeks.
Then the angel planted a hand in the center of James’s chest…and shoved.
His feet slipped on the edge of the fang. For an instant, his arms spun through the air, seeking balance. He failed.
And James fell.
The flames at the bottom of Ba’al’s maw couldn’t have been farther than a hundred feet below, yet James felt as though the fall was endless. The air was hot—so impossibly hot for such a cold place—and the last thing that he was able to see with mortal eyes was Metaraon with Nathaniel limp in his arms.
James loathed the righteous satisfaction in the ice shards of Metaraon’s eyes.
I shouldn’t have given him my son.
But after everything else, what was one more life surrendered to God?
James fell so slowly. Memories slipped through his skull, like wisps of smoke from the fires below.
Time reversed.
Nathaniel took the bullet in the chest again. The jerk, the tiny gasp, the wide eyes—it was just as terrible to behold a second time.
But then he was whole again, and they climbed through the new Haven together. The rocks scraped James’s palms and knees as he climbed after Nathaniel. The Union soldiers’ distant shouts were only susurrus on the breeze.
His memories blurred, skipping backward faster as he approached the flames.
He walked through an empty, dusty Motion and Dance, thinking of Elise. He found the warding rings under the piano.