by A. K. Koonce
The sixth circle of hell?
He sits on the chair that Professor Shade used, one shadowy leg crossed arrogantly over the other as those bottomless pits of eyes regard me with piteous amusement.
“Gets rather boring after a while, though.” He heaves a sigh and throws one smoking arm across the back of the chair. “The start of the torture is fun, but such repetitiveness… eventually the victims end up slobbering on the floor, traumatized.”
“It was an… illusion…?”
“Do try to keep up, dearest. For being a spawn of hell you’re rather slow. Can’t blame you, though. Your father’s fault. Never really liked children. Just wanted to wreak chaos across the world...”
“Tell my father he can go to hell. I’ll never sit at his side.”
The shadow looks bored with my pronouncement. “‘Go to hell’? Really? Sweet human child, he already is in hell. It’s not as bad as many think. We have our amusements…” His gaze slides to the floor and my eyes followed to where the bodies of Malek, Saint, Syko, and Phoenix are piled on top of each other. He steps carelessly over them like they’re just another stain on the tile.
I quickly look away.
Just an illusion, just an illusion.
“Who the fuck are you?” I snap, braver than I actually feel.
In a blink, his smoking form is gone. In another, he’s before me. Shadows swirl over his head to form the image of a top hat he takes off and bows. “Forgive my manners, princess. I am Osmodeus, ruler of the sixth circle of hell. Welcome to my domain.”
My brain racks through all the information I got from Mr. Toad’s class on Prodigiums. We studied all types. Banshees and bullhorns and shifters.
And then I remember.
Osmodeus, a higher demon of hell, one of Lucian Morningstar’s loyal followers and my father’s as well, apparently.
The bastard.
“What do you want from me?” My voice shakes, but I search inside myself for the power of my Prod.
I’ve spent too much time here already.
“A little torture of your human mind for starters. Maybe submission.” He plops back onto the chair and the smoke rolling off of him disappears into little wisps. “Answers to a couple of questions.”
“Questions?”
“I want to know why you are trying to escape hell when all you could ever desire is down here?”
I look around with a raised eyebrow. “You think I desire some two-cent academy ripoff?”
A trickle of laughter flitters from his throat. “My, but you are amusing. Is the decor not to your liking? This is where you were trying to escape to is it not?” When I don’t answer, his fingers wave me off. “Doesn’t matter where you go. You cannot escape, and I plan on keeping you here until your father comes for you.”
My hackles rise. He wants to keep me caged in here, his to torture until the Messenger can find me. But I am not a slave, and my Prod doesn’t like this asshole one bit. “There’s only one problem with that, Osmodeus.” I stand up in one fluid movement, feeling power surge through me. I’m almost scared to wield it, to let my power have control, but this had all been an illusion. A figment of my imagination or his, threatening the foundations of my sanity. My men aren’t here, I can’t kill them.
And so I let her loose.
I smile as my wings tear from my back and spread wide. “I do not want to stay here.”
And then I charge at him, hands outstretched, ready to tear his ass up into smoke or dust. I don’t give a fuck which.
A gaping hole for a mouth smiles widely and just as I reach him, power within my grasp, his form changes into one I’m familiar with.
“Will you really kill me?” Saint’s face looks at me, his voice questions me.
I freeze before those bright blue eyes, fear thrumming through me. I can remember the life leaving him as I kill him, over and over again. The memory is vivid enough to be raw and aching.
“Don’t kill me, Izzy, please.”
Tears stream down his face, and the heartbreaking sobs rising up his throat cleave me in two.
“Saint…” I take a staggering step back.
And then Saint smiles and the illusion cracks, but the heartbreak is still there.
“You are so easy.” Osmodeus’s voice echoes cruelly out of Saint’s lips. “You are weak and so, so easy to manipulate.”
A sob rises in my throat. An illusion, it was just an illusion. But the past few hours, days, however long it was, choke me with emotions. It all felt so real. He feels so real.
“You’re not real, you’re not real…” I take a staggering step back, clutching my arms around myself as if that can somehow steady me.
And Osmodeus looks at me with Saint’s face and I almost believe it’s my boyfriend standing in front of me with that cruel look in his eyes.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I want to sink to the ground and bury my head between my knees and sob. Instead, I try to remain strong in the face of this illusion, even if it threatens to cripple the very foundations of my mind.
“Isn’t it obvious?” His voice and his face contort into someone else’s. Into Malek’s. He takes a prowling step forward and when he speaks again, it’s in the accented, soothing tone of my wolf. “This is to make you stronger.” He changes again, into Syko this time, with white feathery wings bursting from his back and laced with trickles of blood. “Don’t you want to be stronger?” He takes another step until we are face to face and he assumes Phoenix’s skin.
The redhead incubus looks at me, cocking his head to the side. I almost ache to touch him, but this isn’t Phoenix at all.
The black of his pupils swallows the green of his eyes and spreads like ink spilling against a blank page. Veins spider web in dark cracks along his skin, and he looks every inch the soulless demon I let myself love.
“Or do you want to stay a useless feck all your life?” His fingers brush across my collarbone and up my neck. My pulse thrums against his touch and he smiles knowingly right before he wraps his fingers around my neck and chokes me.
I gasp for breath as he lifts me up. My legs dangle uselessly beneath me and I kick out at him, claw his hand with my nails, but he is strong. And trying to kill me while he wears Phoenix’s face.
But I imagine Phoenix here now. I imagine the way he invaded my dreams in confinement and chased away illusions and shadows. Chased away my fears.
“You want so badly to escape, but hell will always follow you. He will never stop hunting you. Stop trying to flee from your destiny, little princess.”
Since I arrived at the Academy I had people, teachers, everyone telling me left and right what my fate would be. Reform or death. I was feck. I was Prodless. I was uncontrollable. For so long, I’ve fought against what everyone says I am instead of embracing the wilder part of me.
I’m too afraid.
Too emotional.
And for that, I will always be too weak.
But not any longer.
I’m sick of teachers, people, and mother-fucking demons telling me who I’m meant to be, or what my future will be.
It’s time I start forging my own path. My own future. Here and now.
I press my hands against the demon’s face and he laughs as my fingers explore. Like I’m pathetic. Like I’m nothing.
He tried to bring out my worst nightmares, but little does he know, I’ll be his.
I dig my thumbs into his eyes, hard and deep. He screams, tightening his grip around my throat, and I feel his warm burst of blood that looks more like smoke dribble against my skin. I dig in and he cries out, and the illusion of Phoenix shatters until he’s that same smoking demon from before.
“You bitch!” he hisses.
“No…” I choke out and let my powers sing.
Osmodeus screams then as my magic consumes him from the inside. The blank holes where his eyes should be fill with the power of my fire. It expands inside him and ripples out to make him bleed. Red slides from his eyes like blood an
d trails down his mouth in rivers of unfathomable pain.
He releases me and I drop to the floor, heaving painful breaths into my lungs. When I look up through the strands of hair plastered against my face, it’s to watch Osmodeus claw at his rippling body and scream in agony. Smoking fingers try to capture the fire spreading through his insides.
But it’s useless.
I stand up on shaking feet. “You will die today,” I rasp through the pain in my throat. I tilt my head and watch as he drops to his knees and writhes.
“You—bitch!”
And I smile maliciously down at the King of the Sixth Circle of Hell and say, “No. As you said, I am a Princess of Hell.”
Osmodeus lets out a final scream before his body explodes into wisps of twirling gray smoke and he disappears for good. The illusion of the Academy around me shatters.
With him gone, a shimmering portal appears with a bold number five above it. Images flicker on the other side, but none I can really make out.
It doesn’t matter.
Anything is better than staying here.
And I’m not going to let another demon fuck with me again.
So I take a breath, and I jump through the portal.
Five
Syko
The faculty housing resides on a slight hill just behind the elite’s dorms. The fine brick estate looms over the others and I’ve never wanted to throw a brick through a window as badly as I do right now.
The shining metal plate just beneath the key card lock lists each teacher’s name and their apartment number, which seems like an incredibly stupid thing to state out in the open with an academy full of criminals.
Not that I’m complaining at the moment.
“Professor L. Shade Room 606 B,” Saint says, his finger trailing along the gold plate just near the door.
“So... we just going to… break the door down?” I give the metal handle a pull and it’s locked, but nothing’s ever really locked, is it?
“Yes,” Phoenix says but then Saint’s shoving his chest so hard that they both go tumbling down into the billowing green bushes to the left.
“What the fuck?” I look to Malek and when he looks at me, his gaze drifts to something behind me, and then he too dives into the thick tangle of greenery.
My palms lift in confusion but when I turn on my heels…
Shit.
“Syko, sweetie, what are you doing out here so late in the middle of the night?” Professor Henn hums my name as her glossy eyes rake down my body with so much slowness that my cock tells me I’m a dumb fuck for not making a jump for it when I had the chance. Seriously, fuck the three of them and their amazing sense of hearing and smell.
“I was just—” A crazed bird like noise chirps at me from the bushes. I glance to Saint and he does an extensive head bobbing motion to the plump woman in front of me before extending his neck toward the locked door. He. Does. It. Four. Fucking. Times.
I am not an idiot.
Thank you.
“I—I was really just hoping you had some alone time. I’m feeling—” my gag reflex kicks up but I force myself to follow through— “I’m just feeling vulnerable right now, Professor Henn.”
Her lips part and her blurry eyes get a bit starry.
She’s drunk. Did someone spike the punch?
Christ, what am I signing up for right now?
“Syko, please call me Harriete.”
Harriete. Great. Yeah, I’m not calling her that.
Her warm palm brushes my bicep and it plants there like a fungus that’ll never leave.
The moment she swipes her card through the lock and the little green light pulses I almost consider shoving her back and keeping her out just to put some hard metal locks between her hungry eyes and my terrified cock.
“Come in, sweetie. Let’s talk.” She holds the door open with a bounce of her ass but I pull it back from her and motion her inside with a sweep of my hand.
“After you, Mrs.—” The glare she throws at me stops that rasping sentence. My gaze flickers down to her dry lips that are coated in her heavy, sour breaths. “Harriete.”
The giggle that stumbles out of her mouth is like a beastly growl threatening to disembowel me.
She dances haphazardly down the dark hall and my foot holds the door until Saint’s cool fingers slide around my wrist and his breath hits my ear. “Show her a good time, Syko Sweetie. We have it from here.” His taunting amusement is followed by a conflicting kiss against the line of my jaw that tingles through me.
The asshole.
“Fuck you. I’ll meet you at room 606 B in five minutes.”
“Five minutes. You’re better than that. At least give her something to talk about with the other faculty members.”
I’m sure she’ll have something to talk about. It just won’t be sex with a nephilim.
A kiss on the cheek and enough cauldron cookies to last me a month. That’s what sexy plans Harriete Henn had in store for me. She’s a weirdo, but she’s a kind weirdo. Even if she does have filthy fucking thoughts running blatantly through her mind. Thoughts she whispered like weird, dirty foreplay while she added honey to my mug of milk. Milk I didn’t touch because of the suggestive way she stirred and murmured over it.
“Make sure you don’t eat them all at once,” she says with another giggle that scurries down the dark hall as she lingers for a long, long time in her doorway.
“I won’t.” I won’t eat your love spell cookies at-fucking-all.
I nod to her, gripping the metal tin and glancing down the hall at the stairwell.
It’s been at least fifteen minutes.
What if Izara’s not okay?
What if Phoenix couldn’t get to her?
What if I wasted too much time flirting with Harriete Henn instead of finding my girlfriend?
Another dry kiss scrapes across my cheek and I do my best not to flinch back from her.
“Thank you,” I stride down the hall away from her and when I look back, her gaze lifts and darts dramatically up to my face.
And my stomach feels queasy all over again.
I have to slow my pace and linger at the entrance before she finally shuts her door.
And then I’m flying up the stairwell, tossing the cookies to the side. Fuck taking the steps two at a time. My wings burst out and I’m soaring in a matter of half a second. I spiral past the first five floors and I’m running down the sixth floor hall before a breath even hits my lungs.
I pass the doors without even glancing at the little golden numbers that are glinting in the overhead light.
Because a door is slightly ajar just ahead, and I know it’s his just from the hushed growls that are crawling out into the hall.
“I know you fucking know. Tell me where she is.” Malek’s tone is a shaking thing and when I slip inside, long black talons are slicing through his fingertips.
“Down boy,” Saint whispers.
It does absolutely nothing to calm the wolf.
The three of them stand around a small armchair and when I walk closer, I find Shade sitting there casually, his fingers steepled in front of his dark hair as he looks up at the three furious men surrounding his little coffee table.
“I told you, her tracking bracelet is off the map.” His palm gestures down to the glowing gold lines and drawings filling the air between them.
It’s a translucent thing. Buildings etched of elaborate threads show an identical layout of Academy of Six. Tiny dots litter the magical page and when he zooms in over each one, a name fades into sight.
Our names appear like star dust in the air between us, hovering just over the thin lines that make up the faculty housing building.
Saint Von Hunter, Malek Ramirez, Phoenix Rutherford, and Syko Sovern.
“We’ve searched each name listed individually and she’s not here,” Shade explains.
“Then search farther. Search hell. She’s in hell,” Phoenix growls, his arms shaking at his sides as his finger
s bite into his palms.
“We do not have the funding to extend our maps into the bowels of hell, Mr. Rutherford.”
Of course they don’t.
“Then I’ll find her myself.” Phoenix spins on his heels as if the entrance to hell is somewhere right in front of us and everyone just forgot to tell me.
My hands lift and for a moment we just stare at one another. The demon and the nephilim. We don’t interact much. But we have more in common than just Izara.
“That’s a stupid fucking idea,” I whisper.
“Fucking around for over an hour while she’s in hell isn’t any better,” he bites back.
“You and I both know I’m not legally allowed to let you go to hell, Mr Rutherford.” A steady voice calls to us from behind the fuming demon in front of me.
“Good thing I didn’t fucking ask then,” Phoenix says under his breath.
He pushes past me but the professor stands at once, the map dissolving into thin air the moment his strange eyes settle on something I can’t see.
“You four need to leave. Right now!” He pushes at Malek but the wolf shoves his hand away with a snap of his sharp teeth. “Go. Now,” Professor Shade warns.
But it’s too late.
Storming boots thunder the halls and then the door bursts open like a gust of heavenly winds. A dozen armored guards fill the small living room and stinging pain cuts into my side as I fall to the floor.
Shade stands watching us all and trying to calm the men who keep lashing out at us. It’s all a chaotic sound of churning words and aggressive sparking weapons.
“Breaking into faculty housing is unacceptable,” one of the dark masked men says as he stabs Phoenix with the weapon in his hand. “Confinement. All of you.”
The men lash out at us again with their magical clubs.
Malek fades away first with the burning scent of magic clouding the air.
And then Saint with a scowl and crude words filling his mouth.
And then Phoenix with nothing more than hate in his eyes and a well of panic that I feel echoing inside my own chest.