King Among the Dead (Hell Theory Book 1)

by Lauren Gilley

  Rose heard the quiet sound of an indrawn breath. Beck: he’d sat up straight and stiff; his brow had cleared.

  Castor beamed. “Do you understand, now?”

  Rose searched the edges of the drawn circles with her gaze, followed them in to their center – to the pentagram.

  His hell theory, Kay had called it. Then it was Rose’s turn to gasp.

  “You’re bluffing,” Beck said, voice strained and hoarse. “You don’t have that kind of power.”

  “You’re right. I don’t. But my friend Daniel does.” Castor lifted his arm, twirled the dagger, and offered its handle to the conduit at his side.

  The moment Daniel’s hand touched the hilt, a low pulse moved through the floor; a wall of air pressed Rose back against the column to which she was bound. The guards shrank back against the walls; the one who’d brought Castor the dagger retreated, disappearing from view.

  “Why?” Beck demanded, seething now, struggling at his bonds.

  Rose twisted her wrist, back and forth, back and forth – and the knife in her sleeve finally slipped loose of its sheath. Its point slid down into her palm, slicing her skin – and the rope.

  Daniel regarded Beck with a flat, disinterested stare; an angel contemplating a mortal. The white glow around him swelled. They were all just specks of dust to him; little sin-filled blips of nothing. “The Rift closed too soon,” he said, and Beck stilled, listening.

  Rose listened, too, sawing at the rope as best she could, moving as little as possible.

  No one was watching her, though. Every eye was riveted on the conduit.

  “The day that it opened was to be the day of reckoning. The forces of Heaven and Hell were to converge on the battlefield of this mortal plane. But Hell’s gates didn’t open.”

  “No one to kill but us humans, then,” Beck spat. “You had to make do.”

  “Yes,” Daniel said, without inflection.

  “Being a drug dealer was just a bonus, then?”

  The first sign of expression: Daniel’s lip curled. “Don’t insult an angel with your petty human morality.”

  “Our friend Daniel has the power to open a portal to hell,” Castor said, gleeful, eyes shining.

  “And what do you get out of it, Tony?” Beck snarled.

  The man looked rapturous. “The favor of heaven’s forces. Incredible power. Untold riches.”

  “Yes. Untold riches,” Daniel said, and plunged the dagger into the gangster’s stomach.

  A collective shout went up from all the guards.

  Three of them rushed Daniel – and Daniel lifted his hand, and decapitated all of them with a flick of his fingers.

  He pulled the dagger out, and blood coursed from the wound, spilling down Castor’s legs even as he gasped and clutched at his stomach. The blood ran over his shoes…and touched the stones of the floor.

  The room exploded with light. White, and then red. Rose closed her eyes against it – and against the physical shove of power that blasted out from the center of the circle. It ripped across her like a wind, howling, tugging at her hair and clothes.

  The room shrieked.

  Her right hand came loose, and she lifted it up to shield her eyes, daring to crack them open as the initial flare of light dimmed. She had the sense that shock and fear blurred some of what she was seeing; twisted the impossible into something her brain could process.

  A seething pool of crimson liquid, viscous, dark, and velvet as fresh blood, steamed at the circle’s center, spreading outward by the moment. A tide. A tide of blood. Daniel stood at its center, dagger in one hand, Caster’s throat in the other; the gangster had lost consciousness, but the blood still poured down his body, dripping down into the darker, thicker tide that seemed to boil up through the stones. It swept outward, covering the chalk sigils, swallowing them.

  And from it…wraiths. That was all she could think to describe them as. Indistinct blurs of shadows; the impressions of dragging claws, and reaching arms, and gaping, fanged mouths. One flew straight at one of the guards, and he screamed, and fell, blood spraying across a column in an arc. Others flew up to the burning lamps, and she saw slitted, gleaming golden eyes, and fangs like knives…

  They had to get out of here right now.

  She shook her sleeve knife totally free, gripped its hilt, and reached to cut the rope that secured her other hand.

  A tight grip on her wrist halted her. Warm breath in her ear. A voice, low and urgent: “Wait.” It wasn’t Beck.

  She twisted around to look at him, whoever he was, fighting to get her wrist, and her knife, free. But he held fast, fingers strong, the way he pinched the nerves in her arm sure and effective; her hand went limp, and the knife clattered to the floor.

  It was the death squad guard who’d taken Castor the dagger. The one who’d looked at her before.

  Up close, his features were clean and handsome, his gaze dark, and sparking with barely suppressed energy. He was working very hard not to panic.

  “If you’re going to kill me, make it quick,” she hissed.

  “I’m not.” He shoved his face into hers, his breath hot and quick. “Listen to me. We need to leave now, but we need to close that portal.”

  A darted glance revealed that the blood tide was expanding ever-outward. Castor was paper white, totally bled out. Daniel dropped him, and when he hit the floor, he was sucked beneath the crimson pool and out of sight.

  “How do we do that?” she asked.

  “We have to kill the conduit.”

  “How? Did you see what he did to your friends?”

  His jaw got even tighter. “They’re not my friends. I’m United States special forces. I’m a Rift Walker, and I’m working undercover.”

  Rift Walkers. The elite conduit suppression unit that had sprung up in the midst of the Atmospheric Rift. Most of them former pilots or black ops guys; all of them half-crazy, more than a little suicidal. The best of the best. The worst of the worst.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said, a kneejerk protest.

  “You don’t have to, but it’s the truth.” He huffed out a sigh. “What’s your name?”

  She didn’t tell him.

  “Mine’s Lance du Lac. I’m a sergeant with the Gold Knights. Google it later, okay? But we need to go.”

  Whoever the hell he was, if he could get them out, then she wouldn’t turn him away.

  “Cut Beck loose,” she said, nodding toward him. “I’m okay.”

  He stood and moved off.

  The initial scream of the portal opening had died down to a low roar, one that rattled the floor, the columns – presumably the whole mansion. Rose heard shouts, and low, animal growls she thought must be coming from the wraiths. She sawed at the thick rope on her wrist, sweating, heart pounding, struggling to think. She could keep her cool in a hand-to-hand altercation, but this was pandemonium. This was an angel opening a gateway to hell, and what did anything mean anymore?

  She heard a thump, a curse. Tugged her wrist loose, and scrambled to her feet.

  Lance du Lac, if that was really his name, was sprawled back across the floor, clutching a bloodied nose, but already springing back to his feet.

  Beck–

  “Oh, God,” she breathed.

  Beck was loose, and on his feet, and striding through the widening blood pool toward the conduit at its center.

  “Beck, no!” She leaped to follow.

  An arm hooked around her waist, and dragged her back.

  “No!” She elbowed her captor, and earned a painted grunt. Kicked his shins, twisted, and bucked, and tried to slash at him.

  But he was big, and strong, and competent – a military man, truly, and he had her disarmed and held tight in a matter of seconds. It was laughably easy, in fact. And she could only watch, helpless, as Beck advanced on a creature she’d just seen kill three men with a hand movement.

  Daniel lifted his hand now, fingers poised to flick, expression bored.

  Beck halted a few paces away,
all coiled tension, ready to pounce, his favorite knife held against his thigh. “Are you the Angel Gabriel?” he asked.

  Daniel cocked his head. “Who better to bring tidings of the Lord?”

  “Do you remember my brother?”

  The head cocked the other way. The gaze narrowed. “I don’t remember humans. They’re like flies – they only live a short time.”

  “Beck!” Rose shouted. “Beck, no, please! Let’s go!”

  He twitched; he heard her. But he didn’t turn, and he didn’t back down.

  His knuckles whitened on his knife.

  Daniel’s fingers twitched. “You have some value. You understand why this is necessary.”

  Around them, shadows swept up and out of the blood pool, souls, demons, who knew. Beings that no one wanted loose on earth.

  “Now there can be balance,” Daniel said. “Order. What is good if not for evil?”

  “Dead,” Beck said, his arm tensing.

  About to strike. A strike that would never fall. The idiot, the absolute idiot was going to try to kill an angel with a knife, and he was going to be gutted, and Rose couldn’t breathe, couldn’t claw the arm from around her, couldn’t save him…

  The grip at her back shifted, du Lac laid his arm over her shoulder, and the crack of the gunshot echoed through her head.

  Every sound around her turned to the hiss of static. A muffling white noise. She knew she was screaming, because her throat burned, but she couldn’t hear anything.

  Could only watch as Daniel’s head kicked back, a shower of blood spraying out like wings behind him. Saw the entrance wound in his forehead. Saw his eyes go white, his mouth opening.

  He didn’t fall. She didn’t know that a bullet could bring him down.

  But Beck could.

  He lunged forward, with every ounce of his pantherlike grace, with all his strength and training. He cut Daniel’s throat with his own knife, arterial spray striping his face. And plucked the ruby-studded dagger from the conduit’s fingers; twirled it, plunged it into the conduit’s heart.

  The flash of light was blinding. Rose squinted against it, eyes burning, filling with tears. Another shove of energy sent du Lac staggered backward until he hit a column, dragging her with him.

  As the light faded, all of it shrinking down into the pool of blood, infusing it with its blue-white glow, she saw Beck, still holding the conduit, now dull and wholly human. He turned his head, and found her gaze, his own manic, glittering, lion-gold. He smiled his widest, truest, most maniacal fanged smile.

  Rose found her own answering smile.

  And then the blood on the floor boiled up and took shape. Became a clawed hand.

  She screamed his name, though she couldn’t hear her own voice, fought again, uselessly to get away from du Lac. His grip only tightened.

  The hand of blood moved; it closed around Beck and the dead conduit, closed to a fist, blood spraying out everywhere. It splashed her face, the familiar tang of salt and copper.

  “Beck!”

  The hand drew down into the floor. The blood receded, in, in, in. Faster and faster, tighter and tighter. A whirlpool. And now the energy was tugging them in.

  Du Lac squeezed all the air from her lungs, boots scrabbling on the floor as he fought to keep them from being dragged in. The other bodies were. Abandoned guns; a stray boot.

  Her hearing returned with a pop, and she heard a great sucking sound like a bathtub drain. Heard du Lac panting in her ear. “Hold on,” he chanted. “Hold on, hold on.”

  She didn’t hold on. She didn’t care. Not about anything.

  The whirlpool spiraled in on itself, and with one last, great slurp, vanished.

  There was nothing left. A clean stone floor, the runes and chalk lines swept away. No dead Castor, no dead Daniel. No dead guards.

  No Beck, dead or otherwise.

  Du Lac’s grip loosened, and she staggered to her feet. Unsteady, wavering. Her pulse pounded in her ears, sluggish now. She heard faint, far off screams from somewhere deeper in the mansion. But here there was only silence, and the scrape of her breath, and the quiet swearing of du Lac as he got to his feet.

  In the center of the room, something gleamed. Rose walked toward it, drawn to it, with the surreal knowledge that she had retreated somewhere inside her head, and that she wasn’t sure if she’d ever be able to find her way back out.

  In the heart of the room, on the center stone, rested the dagger. Clean, shiny, beautiful and overwrought in its design, its heft. She knelt down beside it. Took it into her hands. It was warm; warm as skin; warm as blood.

  Footfalls behind her. Du Lac murmured, “Jesus.”

  “Where is this from?” she asked, weighing the weapon in her palms.

  “The conduit had it. He said it came from hell.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Ma’am,” du Lac tried again. “We really should leave.”

  Rose paced the room, trying to recreate the chalk signs in her mind. Trying to remember the sigils – all impossible squiggles and hash marks. She should have paid more attention, damn it. She held the dagger in one hand, tapping the flat of the blade against her thigh. “If this opened the portal once, it could do it again.”

  “Ma’am.” He was starting to sound exasperated. “We have to–”

  “Did he have notes anywhere? Did he write it down?” When she finally lifted her head, she saw him standing with his jacket pushed back, his hands on his hips, expression tense. “Did he?”

  “Did who do what?”

  “Did the conduit write down the sigils?” She gestured to the now-clean floor with the dagger. “The pattern. I need it.”

  His brows went up. “I have no idea. If it was written down, I never saw it.”

  “If he had a room, it might–”

  “The guy had an angel inside him. I’m going to guess he didn’t need to write anything down. But, listen–”

  “I’m sure I can find another spell. It has to be in a book somewhere. Or, there are other conduits. I can–”

  “Ma’am.” Sharp this time. He strode toward her. Put his hands on her shoulders.

  She didn’t want him to, but didn’t stop him. Her own safety was unimportant now.

  “We need to go.”

  Somewhere in the house, something exploded, a low rumble as a charge of some sort went off.

  “Castor’s dead, and his people are going to go nuts. We have to leave.” He gave her a little shake.

  “I have to re-open the portal.”

  “What? No – you – you can’t. Don’t you get it?” Another shake. “It wasn’t just about some chalk and a fancy knife. A conduit opened the portal. You don’t have the power. No one here does, except Daniel, and if he’s not dead, then he’s probably in hell now.”

  “I can try, I can–”

  “You can’t. We have to leave.”

  “But Beck–”

  “Beck’s dead.”

  “No.” Her jaw felt unsteady, so she clenched it; spoke through her teeth. She didn’t have time for an unsteady tongue. “No, he killed the conduit. I saw it.”

  “Yeah, he did, and then a giant fucking hand made of blood dragged his ass down into hell.”

  “No, he…” Her chest ached. She tried to take a deep breath, and couldn’t. “He didn’t…he wouldn’t…he would never leave me. He…”

  His expression softened – it blurred. She blinked, but it was no use. “Look, kid, I feel bad about it, but he’s not coming back. There’s no sense us getting killed by waiting around.”

  “But…Beck…”

  Beck was gone.

  Beck was in hell.

  She couldn’t re-open a portal.

  Beck was gone…

  Her next breath was a sob. The tears broke free, hot and ugly down her face.

  Beck was gone.

  “Come on.” Du Lac shifted and put an arm around her shoulders. “Let’s go.”

  Beck was gone, and nothing else on earth mattered. So she
let him lead her away. Retreated back inside her mind, and nothing made much sense after that.

  ~*~

  The next few hours were a blur. Like bobbing along underwater.

  She was aware of walking a long way down a dark hall. Of being ushered into the passenger seat of a car. She thought there was a blanket – she pressed something to her eyes while she choked, and sobbed, and spluttered. She didn’t want to fall apart, but she had no say in it. Was nearly ill from crying, her chest jagged with pain; she felt split open, and hollowed out.

  Rain struck the windshield. Du Lac talked to someone over his phone. Then she was being ushered into a too-bright, sterile building that overlooked a dense and layered part of the city, one that smelled strongly of lemon cleaner and coffee.

  When she’d dried her eyes – someone had given her a tissue – and glanced up, she found herself in a conference room, three people murmuring to one another at the end of the table. One was du Lac. Another was a man with a bulldog face, and the other was a woman with short hair and sharp eyes.

  All of them turned to Rose as one. She imagined du Lac’s expression to be encouraging.

  “Rose Greer?” the woman asked.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “We have resources,” she said, coolly. “Can you tell us what happened tonight?”

  She blinked, eyes gummy and dehydrated.

  Beck’s gone, she thought. My Arthur Augustus. I was his Rosie, and he’s gone. That was all that mattered.

  ~*~

  She could tell they didn’t know what to do with her. Someone had produced Miss Tabitha’s forged paperwork, and then produced her original paperwork. She was a legal adult. Du Lac vouched for her, and kept her from being taken into custody. She didn’t explain the knives she wore, and no one asked, nor took them from her.