by Eve Langlais
“What about what Helen wants?” The devil turned to her. “Tell me, little angel, do you want to go back to Heaven? You still can.”
Her lips parted. “Go home?”
“They’ll kill her.” Julio huffed.
“Why does it matter to you what happens to her?” the devil asked, and he wasn’t the only one who stared at Julio for an answer.
Julio lifted his chin. “It matters ’cause she’s my wife. And I’ll not let anyone reap her soul.”
Helen liked the answer enough her arms went around Julio’s midsection and she hugged him. Julio’s arm and cloak curled around her protectively.
“Tell us what we can do to keep Helen safe.” Julio fell into Lucifer’s trap.
Wearing his finest salesman smile, Lucifer said, “I’m glad you asked, because I have an idea that helps us both. Your problem is you need to go somewhere no one can find you, and lucky you, I know just the place.”
With a theatrical swirl that got no love, Lucifer had them standing in what remained of the eighth ring, now only a few strides wide. The fog creeping and stealing land showed no signs of slowing.
Was it time to check on the source of the issue himself? To venture into the mist that none returned from?
Nah. That was what minions existed for.
Julio took one look at the roiling fog and shook his head. “You want us to go in there? Are you fucking nuts? I’ve heard no one who enters ever comes out.”
Lucifer shrugged. “Thus far it’s been an issue, but given you’re both special, and determined, I know you can fix it.”
“Why the fuck would I agree to a suicide mission?” Julio snapped.
“Because if you succeed in finding and stopping this fog that’s eating my kingdom, I’ll bestow upon your angel my official Satanic blessing and solve your Heaven problem.”
“Why not just give it to her?”
“Because you mistake me for someone benevolent and kind. You scratch my hairy back, I’ll scratch yours. Piss me off, and I’ll set you on fire. Not to mention, you both owe me a favor, and I’m calling it.”
Helen ventured to ask, “Is it dangerous?”
“Undoubtedly.” Lucifer smiled, his best shark version. “No one has returned yet, but I believe in you.” One of these times when he said it, it would actually be true.
“Fuck you. You have no idea what’s in there.” Julio bristled.
Helen tilted her face to look at Julio. “You don’t have to go.”
“If we don’t, then you’ll be hunted.”
“Exactly. It’s me they’re after. Maybe I should just turn myself in,” Helen offered.
Lucifer almost gagged at the martyr act. It pissed off Julio, too.
“Shut up, Curls.” Julio growled. “I’ll handle this.”
Wrong choice of words.
Lucifer conjured some popcorn to watch the fireworks as Helen found her spine and said, “I won’t shut up. Because, apparently, I don’t have to. That fog is too dangerous. I won’t have you hurt because of me.”
Lucifer took a sip of soda and a bite of licorice as she called Julio’s bravery into question.
“You think I’m afraid?” Julio’s cloak swirled in agitation. “I fear nothing. I’m already dead. It’s just a mist.”
“If it’s so benign, then why are you refusing to enter it?” Lucifer taunted, joining the argument.
Julio glared. “I was busting your balls.”
“Not very well. Didn’t feel a thing,” Lucifer declared. A good ball busting would have had him cringing. Gaia knew how to have them hurting so good. He’d miss her when the babies sent her over sanity’s edge. It had happened before, although with Muriel, it took a few years before she snapped. Mother Nature didn’t handle postpartum very well.
“If I go into this fucking fog, will you go the fuck away?” barked Julio.
“You really need to work on your ass-kissing skills because my hairy buttocks are not feeling any love. And you should really make up your minds because this”—the devil held up a cellphone that rang stridently—“is Heaven calling again and one guess as to what they’re going to demand.” The phone calls always started with a demand for Lucifer’s capitulation to Heaven. He’d refuse, it would get ugly, and usually it ended in Heaven hanging up with the angel on the other end claiming they needed to bleach their ears.
Julio sliced a hand through the air. “We’re not handing Helen to the angels. Or going into that deadly fog. Have you never read that Stephen King short story titled ‘The Mist’?”
“Saw the movie and the miniseries. Do you think he’s behind it?” Lucifer brightened at the thought. He did so love a good horror story.
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Helen softly said. She glanced at the mist. “I guess the question is, will the fog kill us?”
“I don’t know.” Lucifer shrugged. “Let’s ask my eight ball.” He pulled it from a pocket and gave it a shake. “Looking cloudy with a chance of showers.”
“Could you give a straight answer for once?” Julio grumbled. “I’d just like to know if I’m going to die in the next thirty seconds.”
Lucifer shrugged. “No idea. I can’t see inside that space. It’s hidden from me. You might stop existing the moment you step in, fall into a pond of liquid shit, or you could end up in paradise.”
“And this is supposed to convince us to go in?” was Julio’s sarcastic drawl.
Helen grabbed Julio’s hand. “I have faith.”
“In what? And if you say your Father…” Julio threatened.
Her lips twisted in wry amusement. “I was going to say I have faith in you, in us.”
Julio sighed. “Fuck me, we’re an us. Guess we’re doing this together. Ready, wife?”
She nodded.
“Let’s go.”
Julio pulled her into the mist, and Lucifer could sense them no more.
Fuck a duck.
He really hoped they hadn’t bitten the dust.
21
A good thing Julio held on to Helen, because two steps in and they were enveloped. Smothered head to toe in fog, sightless, soundless. The falling ash stopped. Only mist loomed all around, and he’d have sworn it cried out, which was really disturbing even to someone like him. It was solid underfoot, and yet he couldn’t clearly see the ground. The smoky air covered it.
What was happening here? Why did it feel so…dead? No, dead wasn’t right. He knew death. This place had a nothing feel to it. As if empty of everything.
And he didn’t like it one bit.
“Julio?” Helen’s clutched at him, the only thing of substance, and he welcomed the touch.
He drew her close, and his cloak flared around them, clearing a space. “I’m here.”
“I’m scared. This place… It feels wrong. Did we die?”
He wanted to say no, but he stuck to the truth. “I don’t know.”
“What should we do?”
“The only thing we can if we want the Dark Lord’s help. We have to find the source of the fog.”
“How big is this mist?” she asked as they walked through the gloomy space.
“I’m not sure. I expect it to be pretty vast. The fog started in the Wilds and seems to have swallowed part of Hell’s eighth ring and all of its ninth.”
“So we’re in Hell?”
“Maybe?” Not exactly a great reply.
“If I had to guess, I’d say no,” she mused aloud.
“Why?” he asked even as he agreed.
“It doesn’t have the same feel.”
“Meaning?”
She rolled her shoulders. “In Hell, there is a certain hot vibrancy in the air. So many smells and textures. Living chaos.”
“So, this place is more like Heaven?”
She shook her head. “Not exactly. In Heaven, it’s sterile smells and smooth spaces. Organization and structure. This place… it’s as if it has yet to decide what it wants to be. As if it is the absence of all. You said it began in a wild place?”
Rather than ponder if he’d end up excreted into a latrine, he walked hand in hand with Helen for a long time.
A long.
Long.
Time.
Long enough he finally growled in frustration.
“There’s nothing here.” Nothing to sight on. Nothing to explore. They could be moving in circles and never know.
“There has to be something in here somewhere.” She leaned into him, tucked under his cloak. In this place, he wasn’t about to let her go. They might never find each other again.
“I think we should take a break,” he suggested.
“Here?”
“You know of a better spot?”
She shook her head. As she crossed her legs to sit, his cloak slithered to land beneath her and spread to accommodate them both. He lay on his side by her, comfortable enough to put his hand on her belly, knowing she wanted to talk by the expression on her face.
“What happens if we can’t find anything?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t call a doorway.” He’d tried. Something jammed his access.
“We’re stuck with no supplies. Will we get hungry?” She asked some of the same questions he pondered with no answer.
To his surprise, she was the one to offer comfort as she whispered, “At least we’re together.” Then she kissed him. Touched him. Demanded his passion.
They made love in that nothing place, him on the bottom watching her as she rode him, her wings flaring with a silver glint as she came.
His angel.
His wife.
“I love you,” he whispered as she snuggled in his arms after her climax.
“I love you, too.” Whispered a moment before she fell asleep and he soon followed.
Julio didn’t know how long he rested before he woke. Helen squirmed to get out from under his arm and cloak.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, groggy still.
“Apparently, even in a nowhere place, I have to void myself.”
He snorted. “Then that makes two of us.”
“Where am I supposed to do it?” she asked.
“On the ground.”
“Where we slept?” she asked in shock.
“Yup. It’s what you do when there’s no toilet. Try not to splash your feet.”
The noise she uttered had him chuckling. “It’s not that bad. Here’s something to wipe with.” He tore a strip from his shirt.
She eyed him and the fabric then sighed. “Don’t watch.”
“I’d rather not lose you because I took my eyes off you.”
She grimaced.
“How about I stand right behind you, facing away, would that help? I’ll pee, too, if it makes you feel better.”
“Not really. You’re much better equipped than I am for projectile fluid release.”
He chuckled. “Do you have penis envy, Curls?”
“No! Although it is rather remarkable.”
His chest swelled. “You’re the one who is amazing.” Funny how quickly he’d come around to liking his angel. To loving her.
“I shall void, but you shan’t watch. And that goes for your cloak, too.”
“Fine. But stay near.”
Back to back, they pissed on the ground, or so he assumed since he still couldn’t see his feet, but in good news they didn’t end up in a warm puddle. It was the first time since their arrival that they weren’t touching.
As he finished up and started to zip, he heard her say, “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what, Curls?” He finished straightening his clothes and turned around to see her walking away from him, her head canted.
“That song. It’s beautiful.”
“Where are you going, Curls?” He reached for her, but she slipped through his grasp before he got hold.
“I have to find it.”
He still couldn’t hear whatever sparked her interest, but his cloak must have sensed something amiss because it fluttered and rippled at his back, agitated. He aimed it for Helen, and the edge of it curled around her ankle.
Helen paused and turned a puzzled expression in his direction. “It stopped.”
“What about now?” he asked. On a hunch, he removed his cloak from her leg.
“It’s calling me. I must answer.” She took a step, and he grabbed her again. Worried.
Once more she halted. “I can’t hear it anymore.”
“I think my cloak disrupts whatever spell is in this place.” It would explain why he remained unaffected.
She chewed her lower lip. “Maybe I should follow it.”
“No.” He didn’t want her bespelled. But on the other hand…
“We have to. It’s the only clue we’ve got to possibly get out of here. Just be sure to keep me in sight.” She shoved free of his cloak.
He didn’t have to ask if she heard anything. She began to walk again, faster this time. He took long strides to keep her in sight, but he didn’t grab her. Whatever siren song she heard didn’t affect him, but she was correct. While he hated using her as a lodestone, it gave them a direction finally in this sightless and soundless place.
They didn’t have to go far as it turned out.
Without warning, in a spot where the fog was so thick he could barely see his hand in front of him, she dropped to her knees. The space in front of her was clear as she reached for a strange sphere, no bigger than a lemon, buried in the smooth ground. It pulsed, the waves of it wrong, discordant. Soundless. Lightless. Yet vibrating Julio’s very essence.
Before she could touch it, he wrapped his cloak around her, snapping her out of the spell.
She took in a deep breath. “That was very strange.”
“Has it stopped talking to you?”
She leaned her head. “Not entirely. Can’t you hear it?”
This close to the object, he could, faintly, but he ignored it. “I don’t know what that thing is, but it feels wrong.”
“It wants me to touch it.” She hummed softly.
Before Julio could stop Helen, she leaned away from him and placed a hand on it. Immediately, her body went rigid. Her head fell back hard enough it knocked her halo askew.
Not liking that one bit, he whipped his cloak around her even more securely, hoping to counter the spell. It did nothing, so he used his arms, hugging and tugging her backwards.
She whispered, “It wants me.”
“What does?” he asked as he tried to peel her away.
“The egg. It needs.”
“Needs what?” he asked, grunting as he pulled harder and got nowhere.
“Me.” She cast him a glance, her expression drawn.
Her statement had him on his knees, renewing his efforts to remove her hand from the egg, but it was as if it were glued in place. No amount of yanking freed her hand, and she began to moan, leaning forward as if being drawn into the stone, the lines of her body blurring.
Panicked, he pulled forth his stave, which appeared dull in this gray, lifeless place. Being careful of the hand cradling it, Julio jammed the pointed end into the egg, and it emitted an angry wave, hard enough that Helen fell back with a gasp.
Julio immediately wrapped his cloak around her as he faced off against the sphere, which began to pulse visibly enough to be seen. And heard. Its jangling scream brought a wince.
Which was when he decided enough was enough. He raised his weapon and brought it down, only to have it bounce off the hard surface.
The blow angered the egg. It vibrated faster, putting out a call even he could almost hear. Entities answered its siren pulse, suddenly rushing in from the mist. An imp that leaped into the egg and was absorbed with
an ecstatic cry. Then a damned soul.
The egg acted as a vortex, sucking them in. An alien thing that had no place here in Hell or anywhere and he had no idea how to stop it.
Meanwhile more bodies hurtled through the mist, all on foot, but it was from above the largest beast appeared. A giant pink dragon circled overhead. Perhaps it would save Helen again.
The dragon dove for the sphere, and as it arrowed, he heard a squeal. A second later, he saw the child perched on the beast’s back.
“No. Turn away. It’s dangerous.” Julio waved his arms, knowing who the little person had to be.
Lucifer’s granddaughter. He couldn’t let the egg swallow her.
The dragon opened its mouth and inhaled.
Oh fuck.
He wasn’t sure what the handbook said about reapers getting engulfed in dragon breath. Didn’t really want to find out.
Julio grabbed Helen and dove with her, covering her body with his as they hit the ground. He waited to be crisped by the dragon.
Instead he heard a light thump. A peek showed the beast had landed, and Lucinda slid from its back with a joyous, “Wheeeee!”
She wore running shoes that sparkled with lights as she walked. Pigtails and coveralls of pink over a gray T-shirt. Big eyes with a spark of Hell’s flames perused him. Then a sweet girlish voice said, “Hi, I’m Lucinda. Lucifer is my grandpa. You’re a reaper. You collect dead people. Can I play with your big knife?”
“Uh.” He didn’t actually manage a reply, but Helen did.
“No sharp things for children.”
“But I like sharp things.” Lucinda pouted as she turned to Helen, who sat on her heels, shocked and staring.
“They’re dangerous,” Helen reminded.
“You’re an angel!” The little girl clapped her hands. “Like Daddy Auric.”
“Your Father is an angel?” Helen asked.
Lucinda nodded. “I have two daddies. Daddy David is a kitty.”
Given Helen’s confused look, Julio jumped in to explain. “Lucinda’s mother, Muriel, is the Dark Lord’s daughter and has multiple mates.” Then to the girl. “She will be pissed you are out here. It’s dangerous.”
The little girl blew a wet raspberry. “No, it’s not. It’s just a funny rock.” She reached down and plucked the large egg-shaped stone that seemed to somehow shrink as she grabbed it.