by R. L. King
“It’s so amusing that you think so,” Archie said. He nodded toward the cage.
Heat seared Stone’s bare feet. He yelped and leaped upward, catching the curved bars at the top of the cage and hanging there as the bottoms of his feet continued to sizzle. Below him, the metal cage bottom glowed a dull orange.
“How long do you think you can hang there?” Archie asked, amused. “Want me to heat up the bars on top too?” He waved his hands, and the bars began to glow.
Stone fought it as long as he could. He gritted his teeth and clamped his eyes shut, focusing his mind on the meditation techniques he used to prepare for rituals. Eventually, though, the searing pain and the sensation and cloying aroma of his flesh sizzling on the metal bars broke even his control. He cried out and dropped, landing hard on the still-hot floor, fighting to remain upright as his feet began to burn again.
Archie let it go for several seconds that felt like an eternity. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the heat was gone.
Stone sank down to the floor, drawing his knees up and wrapping his arms around them, clenching his teeth against the sob of pain he would not give the demon the satisfaction of voicing.
Archie laughed. “Ready to give up already? If you can’t even take that, your skin will be covering my grimoire before the end of the day.” When Stone didn’t reply, he said, “All right, then. You just sit there and think about it for a while. Be ready, though—don’t get too comfortable. I might decide to heat things up for you again. You never know. I’m unpredictable like that. And if you decide you just want to give up, yell. I’ll be around.”
Behind him, several of the sycophantic demon boys guffawed.
Stone remained where he was, head bowed and eyes closed. His hands and feet still throbbed with pain, but he could already feel it dissipating. It didn’t surprise him: it was quite possible to do permanent damage to a spirit, but you had to specifically intend to. He didn’t think Archie would do it, though, because damaging the spirit damaged the body as well, and the demon wanted his body unmarred. On the one hand, that was good—no matter what Archie did to him, it wouldn’t last. On the other hand, it was bad, because the demon could draw the tortures out for a much longer time.
Not forever, though. Eventually, if his spirit remained separated from his physical body for too long, it would die. He wasn’t entirely sure how long that was, since most mages didn’t risk more than brief jaunts, but the literature suggested he’d have a few days before he had to worry. Archie could do a damned good job of making him miserable in a few days. Possibly even miserable enough that he’d give in. His willpower was formidable—it had always been one of his strongest traits when learning and practicing magic. On several occasions in his career, including during his apprenticeship, he’d managed spells and techniques he shouldn’t have been able to perform, largely by applying a dose of sheer cussed stubbornness to the problem. But even he had his limits, and he wasn’t arrogant enough to think he could stand up to a millennia-old demon indefinitely.
Eventually, Archie was going to hit on something that would get past his defenses. In all likelihood, that something wouldn’t be more personal torture, but rather making good on his threats to harm Stone’s friends.
He had to figure out a way out of here before that.
Something poked him hard in the back, and then the cage began first to spin, then to swing wildly back and forth, pitching him forward and backward into the bars.
He hauled himself back to a standing position and scanned the chapel. Archie seemed to have departed, leaving the inmates in charge of the asylum. Three of the larger boys surrounded the cage and were engaged in a game resembling tetherball, where they pushed Stone’s cage around a circle between them. They laughed and grinned as they did it, with several smaller boys cheering behind them. Occasionally, one of them would fling something at Stone—a rock, or a piece of broken furniture—and the cheers grew louder when one managed to hit him through the bars.
Stone braced himself against the cage and did his best to ignore them, taking the time to scan the chapel. Everything looked the same as he’d remembered it: the pulpit still stood at the front, the broken pews were still heaped along the side, and the stained-glass windows—Archie had apparently repaired the one he’d broken—still depicted blasphemous and horrific scenes of torture and dismemberment. The pile of ashes and clothing remnants that had once been his demonic escort still lay in the middle of the floor. His own shredded clothes were still in a heap in the far corner.
Idly, Stone noticed that none of the demons stood near his clothes. In fact, a full ten-foot radius around them was completely devoid of them. Even when they chased each other around the chapel, they steered clear of that space as if it were full of radiation.
Perhaps it is…
Was that where his escort had flung the crucifix before he died? He couldn’t see it, but maybe when they’d taken his clothes and destroyed them, they’d used them to cover the thing so they didn’t have to look at it anymore.
Even if that were true, though, what could he do with the information? He had no magic, so he couldn’t bring it to him. He doubted he could convince any of the demons to touch it, given that doing so would likely kill them.
For now, he filed the information away for later.
Something larger flew through the bars and hit him in the leg, opening up a small gash. One of the demons cheered. “Got ’im!”
Stone snatched up the object—a fist-sized rock—before it could roll back out of the cage. It probably wouldn’t do him any good, but it was the only weapon he was likely to get.
Think. Anything at all could be important. He couldn’t afford to forget any details.
His gaze fell on the bracelet around his wrist. Why had they left it on him? His demon escort had said it was the “reality translator,” helping his mind comprehend the plane as something it could relate to. Clearly Archie had a reason not only for not removing it himself, but for making sure Stone couldn’t remove it either. He tried, slipping his fingers under the leather strap and trying to break it, but it wouldn’t budge. He tapped it again, and once more the strange horizontal-hold effect made the scene shift and buzz. Even whacking the demonic sigil with the rock did nothing more than make his wrist hurt.
“Using your time constructively, I see,” Archie said.
He was back in front of the pulpit. Stone didn’t know how long he’d been there, or even if he’d walked in from some unseen back room or just zapped himself into the middle of the space.
“You didn’t give me much to play with,” Stone said. “I’m improvising.”
Archie leered. “I know what you’re trying to do.”
“Do you?” Stone leaned against the inside of the cage and regarded the demon with a raised eyebrow. “That’d be one of us, then, because I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“You’re trying to stall. You know if you wait long enough, your body will die and then it won’t be of any use to me any longer.” He stepped forward and began pushing the cage, swinging it back and forth as the demons had done. “You know I won’t let that happen, right?”
Stone shrugged. “You can keep on trying to hurt me. You can cut me, burn me—no doubt you can come up with all sorts of punishments that I’d never think of. I’m sure you’re quite creative. But I’m not one of your mundane victims. I know that no matter what you do to me, it’s not real. I think I can hold out for a few days.”
“It’s possible you can,” Archie said. “And I’m sure you know as well that it’s impossible for me to bring your friends here, so I can’t rip them to pieces in front of you for my entertainment.” He stopped swinging the cage and stood below it, looking up at Stone. “But one thing that makes this era much more convenient than the last time I was on earth is your wonderful technology. I can’t bring them here, but I can have my way with them on your plane while filmin
g the entire process. What do you say? Shall we have Movie Night? I’ll even bring the popcorn.”
He gestured, and an old-style film projection screen appeared in front of the pulpit. Another gesture toward the back of the chapel and one of the demon boys flipped on an equally ancient movie projector as the red light dimmed. Images began to flicker on the screen, looking as if they’d been captured by a bad Seventies super-8 camera: Aubrey, screaming silently as demons eviscerated him; Jason, struggling and thrashing as more demons ripped his eyes from his head; Verity and Grace, terrified and backed into a corner as leering, naked demons—
Stone turned away, gripping the bars at the cage so tightly that his knuckles whitened.
“Oh, no,” Archie admonished. “No looking away allowed. These are just the previews. If you can’t even handle these, how will you deal with the feature presentation? Boys, make sure he watches the show.”
Several of the demons hurried forward as the cage lowered until it was only a foot or so off the ground. Each of them pulled out a weapon—some had knives, a couple had swords, and a few wielded pointed wooden sticks— and at Archie’s nod they all began to poke and slash at Stone’s unprotected skin, laughing and joking with each other as they did. One of them grabbed his hair and yanked his head up, pointing it in the direction of the screen. Stone wrestled against them, struggling to find a place where they could not reach him, but the cage was too small.
“Oh, I know what the problem is,” Archie said. “There’s no sound. Let me fix that.”
The air filled with the sound of screaming. Stone could pick out the individual voices: Aubrey, Jason, Verity, Grace. All of them shrieked in incoherent agony, but in between their screams each of them hurled accusations at Stone, cursing him for his cowardice, for sacrificing them to save himself.
“Al, you bastard!” Jason yelled. “If those things hurt V because you’re too chickenshit to be a man, so help me I’ll—”
“Sir, please!” Aubrey cried, his eyes full of terror. “For God’s sake, help me!”
“What do you think, Stone?” Archie asked, swinging the cage again. “That’s just a taste of what I’ll do if you don’t cooperate with me. Sure, you’ll be dead—but you really have no idea what happens after you die, do you? You think it will be over. Why not just give in? It will be easier for you, and you’ll spare your friends a lot of misery.”
Stone gripped the bars. He looked into Archie’s smarmy, sneering face, and suddenly the feeling that filled him wasn’t despair but anger. Rage, even. At that moment, he didn’t care what Archie might do to him—he just wanted to wipe the smile off that maddening, taunting face.
Before he could consider the wisdom of his action, he bent and snatched up the rock that had been rolling back and forth across the cage bottom where he’d dropped it. In one smooth motion, he hurled it with all the strength he could muster directly at the demon.
Stone wasn’t the strongest of men, but some force out there must have taken pity on him. The rock flew cleanly between the bars and smashed into the middle of Archie’s face before he could dodge or get a shield up.
Archie screamed in rage, his hands flying to his face. Blood erupted from the teen bully’s pug nose. “You will regret that!” he thundered. The mask dropped away for an instant, revealing his skeletal, red-eyed form. The chapel faded, reformed, faded again, and finally locked back into place.
Archie raised a hand, and every bar in Stone’s cage turned white-hot.
Stone’s screams rose higher than Archie’s as suddenly he had nowhere to go. The floor and the bars seared his flesh, the heat inside the cage becoming nearly unbearable in only a few seconds. He felt like his body was being consumed from the inside out, the nauseating stench of cooking flesh filling his nostrils. Not…real…he kept telling himself. Not real…not real…
It was getting harder to believe it.
But even if it were somehow real, at least it would be over.
He passed out almost instantly, but not before he noticed something: when the rock had struck Archie and his mask had slipped again—when reality had slipped again—it had been just like the last time.
Both times it had been when Archie had lost control of his temper.
That had to mean something.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Stone awoke to the sensation of his arms being wrenched from their sockets.
Two other realizations came simultaneously: he wasn’t burned anymore, and he was hanging from the top of his cage, his wrists shackled to chains attached to the overhead bars. He quickly scrambled to get his feet under him to take the pressure off his arms, but he still felt like a spider that somebody was trying their best to pull the legs off.
“Back with us, I see,” Archie said. He was once again wearing the schoolboy mask, with no sign of rage or trauma marring his smooth features. He nodded toward the chains. “Sorry about the new addition, but if you can’t be trusted not to throw your toys, then I had to make sure you weren’t allowed to.”
Stone hadn’t thought he could feel any more vulnerable than being stuck naked in a tiny cage within stabbing distance of a room full of demons, but he’d been wrong. “It was worth it,” he said. “You should have seen your expression when I hit you with that rock.”
Around the room, the demons muttered and glared. Some of them still held their weapons, but nobody approached the cage except Archie.
Archie only smiled his smarmy smile. That thing was getting old. “It’s all right. Get it out of your system. By the way, I thought you might like to know that while you were sleeping off your tantrum, I sent my helpers to kill someone else.”
Stone froze.
“Don’t worry,” the demon said. “It wasn’t one of your close friends. That will be next. But I want you to know that you’re the reason she’s dead. I hear she left behind a grieving husband and an adorable little two-year-old daughter. Such a pity.” He pulled a photo from some inside pocket of his stained priest’s robes and held it up for Stone to see.
He looked; he couldn’t help it. At first he didn’t recognize the woman, since Archie’s hench-things had done their usual thorough job: like the others, the body was skinned and drained of blood, though this time they had left her intact. Stone studied her face, while trying not to look at the rest of her, then bowed his head and closed his eyes as recognition came: she was one of the baristas at University Brew, a coffee shop where he often stopped on his way up to campus. Last time he’d seen her was a week ago; she always had a cheerful smile, and remembered the way he liked his extra-strength coffee.
“You recognize her. Good, good.” Archie put the photo back in his pocket. “So that’s another one for your conscience to grind over. How many is that, now? Four?”
Stone didn’t answer. Cheng, the two at Stanford, and now this poor woman—all dead because of him. Because he’d gotten involved in this whole mess. Damn it, he had to get out of here! Cheng and the others were dead—he couldn’t bring them back now, no matter how much he wanted to. But he could bloody well kick his brain into gear and figure out a way to deal with this.
You’ve been saying that all along, said a little voice in his head. Face it—you’ve got nothing. You’re not going to stop him. Look at you. You’re pathetic. Chained up like a prized hog because you couldn’t manage to—
Wait.
He blinked.
Had that been a flash of light, over near the chapel’s back corner where the demons avoided?
He blinked again, certain he’d been seeing things. It had been an illusion, a trick of the weird red glow interacting with the light coming in through the stained-glass windows.
But no, there it was again. A tiny, white-bright glow coming from somewhere beneath the pile of shredded clothes the demons had tossed in the corner.
“Are you going to cry?” Archie asked, and the other demons snickered. �
�Do you need a tissue?”
Strange—none of them seemed to notice the glow. A couple of the sharper ones had even followed his gaze into the corner, but they reacted as if they’d seen nothing out of the ordinary.
The glow brightened steadily. Now it was so bright that it shone clearly through the ruined clothes, like a tiny sun in the middle of the hellish dimness.
How could they not notice it?
He sneaked a look at Archie, who was still watching him as if nothing had happened. The demon held out a dirty handkerchief with a sly smile.
Stone ignored him, bowing his head in frustration. The thing in the corner was Grace’s crucifix—it had to be. He had no idea why it had suddenly begun to glow after all this time, but there was no other reasonable explanation.
But even if it were true, what did it matter? He was stuck in this cage, shackled, without his magic—there was no way he could get to it.
But…maybe there was.
Maybe. There. Was.
He’d have to take a big chance, one that would probably get him killed if it didn’t pan out. But if it did—
There were things about him Archie didn’t know. Couldn’t know.
Maybe he could catch the demon by surprise after all.
He rattled the chains holding his arms up. “I’m not surprised you did this, you know,” he said, injecting as much mocking sarcasm into his tone as he could manage. “I gave you the right name, you know. Archie—the real one—he was just like you. He strutted ’round the school like the biggest rooster in the barnyard, but everybody laughed at him behind his back. Do you know why? Because he was a cowardly little wanker, that’s why. That’s what most bullies are, when you get down to it, aren’t they?”
Archie’s eyes narrowed, and the little red pinpricks flowered in his pupils. “Careful, Stone. You’re hardly in a position to be slinging insults.” His gaze traveled up and down Stone’s body. “I could do all sorts of unpleasant things to you, and you couldn’t do a thing to stop me.”