by Mary Calmes
And I had no doubt. Of all of the warders in Leith’s group, in his clutch, Malic was the one I most feared. The others were more refined, sleeker, but Malic was a bull. I had been stunned when I met his new hearth, Dylan Shaw. They were polar opposites, but maybe that made sense.
Malic was hard and scary and cold, Dylan soft and sweet and warm. Malic was not a handsome man, and Dylan was brown-eyed, smooth-skinned perfection. He was one of the prettiest boys I had ever met, and the way he looked at Malic, every time he looked at Malic, left no doubt in anyone’s mind that the big, surly warder was absolutely loved and adored. I didn’t get it, but we had all seen a change in Malic that we liked. He was suddenly part of the whole, like Dylan loving him had fixed whatever was broken. Finding his hearth had rendered the man necessary to the group. He was now needed and depended on, and the fact that Leith would purposely turn to him to help keep me safe spoke volumes. He trusted Malic to eliminate Eric as a threat but not kill him. It was a big step. Things had changed, and I was happy about that until Tuesday morning.
“I hate being here, learning crap I already know,” Chale grumbled.
“I agree.” I smiled at him.
“And this place….” He trailed off.
“This place what?”
“It gives me the creeps.”
“The snow is strange too, right?” I asked him.
“Absolutely,” Chale agreed with me, looking slightly panicked suddenly. “The snow, everything—it’s spooky.”
It was more than that.
We took the main staircase up to the second floor, and when we turned the corner, Chale almost walked into a man standing there in the long hall. I yanked him back because I thought I saw smoke.
It made no sense, thick, gray smoke blowing forward and then instantly gone, not even dissipating, just evaporating. And I was thinking I was seeing things because, even though I felt fine, everyone around me was edgy and freaked. The weirdness was starting to rub off on me, and I was ready to let it go, assure myself I was seeing things, when I realized Chale was trembling.
“What the fuck,” he half yelled, stepping back, bracing himself, feet apart, ready to throw down.
“Gentlemen,” the man said, but the end came out funny, like he gagged or choked.
I stared. Chale stared. Neither of us moved as the man stood there looking back at us. He looked pained suddenly, almost sad, and then his skin started to sag, stretch, and finally drip. I caught my breath at the first plink to the floor that wasn’t water or even blood but was his skin dropping like he was made of wax and he was melting.
“Jesus Christ,” Chale whispered.
I grabbed his arm and ran.
I was not the guy who thought long and hard or turned things over or didn’t just act. So instead of standing there and figuring out what was going on, I bolted. Chale seemed to be of the same mind. Until we hit the end of the hall. Flinging ourselves through the door, we found ourselves on the other side in what looked like a condemned version of the same resort we were staying in.
“What the fuck is going on?” Chale roared at me.
I tugged him along after me, not wanting to get separated, and we ran in and out of gutted rooms that cold wind whistled through, past scorched walls, blackened, peeling paint, and over carpet that enormous holes had been burned in. There were those plastic tarps over spaces where windows had been, and they fluttered in the breeze. All of it, everything we could see, was ready to crumble and turn to dust.
“Simon?” he gasped, and his voice was high-pitched, scared, unhinged, and he clutched at my shoulder as we walked.
I had to get my bearings, but when something flickered on the opposite side of the room, I stopped fast.
“What?”
“Do you see that?”
“Hello.”
We both turned to the voice, and there in front of us was a man. He was tall, classically handsome like a matinee idol from the forties or fifties, with slicked-back hair, dark eyes, and chiseled features.
“Welcome, gentlemen,” he said, and his voice sounded hollow. “I’m Mr. Saudrian, the hotel manager.”
I stared at him because he looked like he was made of plastic.
He smiled, and it was robotic as he reached for Chale.
My new friend screamed, and I grabbed the guy’s wrist, intercepting him.
It was the stranger’s turn to scream.
I didn’t have time to even react before I was jolted, like the jolt you get when you fall in your sleep and it startles you awake. It was like I woke up and I was in a room that overlooked the now snow-covered courtyard.
“What the fuck was that?” Chale roared, staggering back, collapsing onto the overstuffed floral print chair behind him. He dropped down onto it, gripping the arms. “And how the hell did we get here?”
I moved fast, squatting down beside him, my hand on his knee, trying to figure out what was going on. “Are you okay?”
“Not at all.” His voice rose and cracked, sounding frantic.
He was falling apart, and I was pretty sure the only reason I wasn’t was because of Leith and what I knew about his life.
“Just—we’ll figure everything out, okay?”
“Simon?”
I looked toward the door, and there was a man I had never seen in my life looking at me like he was waiting, watchful.
“Yes?” I asked as I slowly rose beside Chale’s chair.
He gave me a slight smile, just a twist of the corner of his mouth, as he levered off the doorframe he had been lounging against.
Some people, the minute you met them, you knew they were wicked and wild. He was tall, strong, powerfully built, with military style, buzz-cut short chestnut-brown hair, dark tanned skin, and smoky topaz eyes. The man just oozed trouble.
“Who are you?” I asked him, wary, as he approached me.
“I’m Raphael Caliva,” he told me as he stopped, close, but not close enough to make me uncomfortable. “And I was asked to check on you by Jackson Tybalt.”
Jackson.
I wasn’t sure I knew Leith’s friend and fellow warder’s last name, but how many Jacksons was I expected to know? And he had said the name like I should know whom he was talking about.
“Who?” I tested anyway.
He arched one thick brow as his eyes narrowed. The man was not handsome in a way that everyone would agree on, but there was something striking about him, something sensual and alluring and fiendish all at the same time. He looked, with his bedroom eyes and the swaggering walk, like the kind of guy who would bring nothing but heartbreak and pain… and heat and sex and lust. You saw him and thought about climbing into bed with him. I was immune, since I only got hot for one guy, but I clearly saw the man’s appeal. Chale saw it as well, if his sucked-in breath was any indication.
“You don’t know?”
I had no idea what we were talking about. “What?”
“How many do you know?”
“What?”
“Jacksons. How many do you know?”
“One.”
He winked at me. “That’s the one.”
I nodded, cleared my throat, and then turned to look down at Chale. “I just need to talk to him for a second, okay?”
“Go ahead,” he told me, pointing to the opposite corner of the room. “Talk over there, just don’t—don’t leave the room. I’m not going anywhere without you.”
I patted his shoulder before walking far enough away from him that he wouldn’t be able to hear every word I said to my visitor. If he really listened, he would get most of it, but as he was working through a meltdown, I figured he had more than just me on his mind. When I stopped and turned, I found myself faced with Raphael.
“Who are you?”
“I told you already.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “What are you?”
“I’m a kyrie.” He smiled, and I saw the extended canines from every vampire movie I had ever seen.
I nodded. �
��You’re the kyrie who saved Malic, right? I heard about you.”
“Did you?”
“Yes,” I told him. “Leith said you drank Malic’s blood.”
“Only a little.”
“And now you’re supposed to be in thrall to him or something.”
He tilted his head and smiled, which made his eyes glow a weird orange color, like he was sitting in front of a bonfire or something. “‘In thrall to’,” he scoffed. “Such antiquated terms your sentinel throws around and so infects his warders and their hearths. I am in thrall to no man.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I was asked, as I said.”
But not by Malic. He wasn’t asked by Malic. “Jackson asked you to check on me. Why?”
“Because he could not come himself first, only second.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
He shrugged like he couldn’t have cared less.
“So Malic has no pull with you, only Jackson.”
“Only Jackson,” he agreed.
“Why?” I pressed him, wanting to know.
“I will simply do the man’s bidding and demand payment.”
“Like what?”
“It’s not necessary for you to know.”
“It is if Jackson’s taking care of a debt because of me.”
“Again, you should not concern yourself with my bounty, only with your own safety.”
“Why wouldn’t Jackson just come himself, or Leith?” I asked, my voice cracking on my boyfriend’s name. I had been missing the man before my world took a turn into the creature-feature nightmare, but now I felt like my skin hurt because he wasn’t there to hold me.
The kyrie looked bored. He even yawned. “Warders can’t cross over through façades, only demons and my kind. They can follow after I’ve found you, use the wormhole I create to reach you, but they can’t punch through a dimensional door. It’s harder than you think.”
“Is Leith coming here?”
“I’m sure he’s trying now even as we speak. He was frantic to reach you but I came alone since, as I explained, I was asked to come look in on you.”
I took a breath and let the knowledge that Leith knew I was in trouble fill me with peace. I should have realized that the man I loved, my warder, would have been worried when he couldn’t reach me.
“Simon?”
But I had more questions. “A kyrie is what, exactly?”
He yawned louder, and his eyes watered. “I’m a bounty hunter, a tracker. Other creatures pay me to find someone or something, and I either kill it when I find it, bring them back a piece to show that it’s really dead, or just retrieve the whole thing still wiggling.”
“What do you need money for?”
“Everybody needs money,” he said with a shrug. “I need it to wave around when I require information. I used to threaten people’s lives, bleed them, but it’s way easier to just slide them over a fifty.”
He was so cavalier about his job.
“But now to you. Shall we go?”
“Wait; make me understand what’s going on.”
“With?”
“Are you kidding?”
He scowled at me.
“With all this.” I gestured around. “What the hell is going on?”
He scratched his head, then rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay, so this is a façade.”
I waited.
“All this that you see”—he waved his hand in the air—“the walls, the floors, all of it is basically an illusion. It was all put up by a powerful demon to lure humans.”
“But none of us were lured here. We came because we had training here. None of us would have picked this place if we’d had a choice.”
“The lure was not for you, Simon Kim, but for whoever decided that your whatever-this-is would be here. Perhaps this hotel was chosen for the price or the fact that it was secluded, or that there were large rooms, who the fuck knows? But whatever the deciding factor was, that was the lure. Don’t believe for a moment that this façade did not do precisely what it was meant to.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why put up a façade to begin with?”
“Didn’t I just answer that?”
“No, you didn’t. What I wanna know is why? Why put up this trap? For what purpose?”
“Oh, well, demons put these up to lure people in,” he said. “Once they come in, they can’t get out. After a while, the façade peels, like this one is, and then it falls down onto a different plane with everyone inside.”
“So you can come in, but you can never leave.”
“Yeah.” He smiled suddenly, waggling his eyebrows at me. “Just like that Eagles song.”
I took a steadying breath, ignoring his attempt at humor. “So this hotel is going to plummet into the pit, into hell, and we’re all gonna die.”
“No, not into the pit; the pit is lower, that’s the bottom of hell. This one is built over a hell dimension. Big difference, believe me.”
“But we’re all still going to die.”
“Probably not die. More subjugation, slavery, degradation, that sort of thing.”
He was much too matter-of-fact for my peace of mind.
“Jesus.”
“Lemme see,” Raphael told me as he sank down on one knee and looked like he was just staring at the floor, examining it. “Okay, so I’m right, this façade is built over a siphon world. So, yeah,” he said, looking up at me. “It won’t be death; you’ll just wish it was.”
“What does that mean?”
He rose in front of me. “That means that this was built by a demonic lord who needs soldiers, so he’s recruiting.”
“Now I’m really lost.”
He exhaled deeply. “Okay, so like I said, a façade is what this is. Humans tumble into them, or get invited, and then they get stuck like you are now. When the façade has been depleted of all its energy, like this one is really close to being, then it peels like an onion, layer by layer, until you have what you and your buddy were running through earlier. What you saw before, that’s what it looks like in here to me now.”
I was stunned. “It looks burnt out and barren like it was gutted by fire.”
“Yep.”
“That’s what you’re seeing right now.”
He nodded.
“Jesus.”
Quick shrug from Raphael.
“How did you know Chale and I saw the façade all stripped?”
“I’ve been here for a bit.”
“Why did you wait to contact me?”
“I was lookin’ around. Plus, I can come in undetected, but when I leave everyone’s gonna know.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just listen,” Raphael sighed tiredly. “You’ve got maybe an hour, maybe less, before this whole place is gonna fall like a runaway elevator and you’re all gonna end up in a siphon world that looks a lot like Death Valley on crack. I’ll bet you it’s hot as hell during the day and freezing ass cold at night.”
“God.”
He grunted.
“And how long would we—how do we get back?”
Quick shake of his head. “You won’t know that until you either find it yourself or you find someone that knows.”
“Find what?”
“The way out, of course.” He squinted at me like I was stupid.
He was really the most annoying man. “Am I looking for a door? A flashing neon sign? What?”
“Well, it won’t be the sign thing, that’s for sure,” he said, grinning wickedly. “But there’s really no way to tell. Sometimes you stumble onto the way out, sometimes you find a guide, there’s no real way to tell until you’re there. It can be words strung together that make something seen that was unseen, I’ve heard of it being an equation––you just don’t know. Only runners have charts of all the hell dimensions and they don’t share well.”
“Is that a kind of demon, a runner?”
“U
h-huh.”
I really couldn’t be bothered with what would happen, though; I needed to know what my immediate future held. “Tell me what’s going to happen once we fall?”
“Well, once you’re there, you’ll get attacked by demons, they’ll bite everyone, and when they do, the true nature of each person will be revealed.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s what a siphon world is; it allows the hidden soul to come bubbling up to the surface. The bite of a lower demon there will either turn you”—he pointed at me—“into a demon yourself, or, if your humanity is strong enough, you’ll remain you, and then you’re dinner.”
I shivered hard. I couldn’t help it.
“But you don’t have to worry about any of that, ’cause we’re going.”
“Why would demons want to turn people into demons?”
“We need to go!” he snapped at me.
“Tell me!”
“Fine. You wanna chat instead of run? We can do that.”
“I need to know.”
“Okay, for one, it’s kinda their deal, right, the corruption of the soul, but mostly it’s just for numbers. On the different planes of hell, there are territories, and demon lords fight battles for resources and land just like people do here on earth. It isn’t any different.”
“And these demon lords need soldiers.”
“Exactly.”
“Does this happen a lot?”
He shrugged. “It’s harder to pull off nowadays, with technology, but c’mon, they still never found those people from the Roanoke colony, right?”
I sucked in my breath, and he winked at me.
“I don’t….” I raked my fingers through my hair. “Shit.”
“Now can we go?” he asked me. The wicked smile was back, and I realized I was being indulged.
“I have friends.”
“No can do, ace. One passenger only.” He yawned, rubbing his eyes again. “Just like warders, I can only move one at a time, and besides, the displacement wave I give off will probably peel the last layer and sink this thing into the siphon. That’s why I’ve been hanging out. I can’t just leave here unnoticed. You don’t want to be here when I go.”