I gritted my teeth, unsure what to do next, but sure I was missing some trick.
For God’s sake, wasn’t I always missing something right in goddamn front of me?
I smacked the glass at my waist height in frustration, and something smooth popped up under my fingers.
An ornate gold doorknob. With a sigh, I pulled the knob and walked right in.
As I expected, pounding techno played. Of course it was techno. What else would demons listen to? I tried to look cool crossing the room, blinking hard at the smoke, pretending I belonged there. I wasn’t fooling anybody, but it made the Lenny Kravitz lookalike that I was heading for tilt his head. He didn’t expect me to have any nerve. No one did.
“Witch,” someone spat as I passed. So they could see me for what I was. The Gone, it made me want to use magic, made me feel like taking risks until I didn’t recognize myself anymore.
I stopped inches from the Kravitz, touching his propped-up knee. I looked at his lips because I frigging hated looking at people’s eyes when I couldn’t see them.
His lips begged for kissing. I licked my own. Couldn’t help it.
“You bring the weight of souls here,” he said, his voice a husky, slinky thing that wound around me like a snake on fire.
My put-together act lasted exactly that long because I had no idea what he was talking about. “I’m looking for Lux?”
“Prince Luxuria Asmodeus, you mean?”
“Well. He’s Lux to me.”
“He’s Lux to me, you say?” He snickered smugly, and even that was pretty to look at. Dropping his foot to the floor, he leaned closer to me, his scent like licorice; sweet and bitter and a thing I both wanted and knew I’d hate. “He ran from you, didn’t he?” he whispered. “But you chase him. Why?” His sensuality became tinged with an anger that had me holding my breath.
“Who are you?” I said.
He leaned back again, removing his glasses to reveal eyes so deeply green they seemed alive with—
“Envy,” I whispered. “You’re his brother.”
“He is my brother. Seventh Son, and I’ll be forever in his shadow.” His lips peeled back when he spat, “Do not call me Envy. I am Invidia Leviathan, and nothing less.”
He smoldered, actual smoldering like his skin was just a little on fire. He picked lint off his shirt. I saw weakness and I went for it, because this was The Gone and I needed to use my surroundings like a weapon. After all, I didn’t have stars.
I turned on my heel as if to leave him there, but he grabbed my arm. Just as I’d hoped.
“You would turn your back on me?”
I put on my best poker face, which was probably not very good considering I could lose catastrophically at Uno. “I don’t need you. Sorry. I mean, you seem really great? But I don’t think you know where he is. I don’t think he’d tell you.”
He pursed his lips and looked more like a pouting little boy than the reckless rock star I’d been nearly speechless in front of moments before. His arrogance reminded me of Delcine, and I tried not to smile. He caught it anyway.
“You’re playing me,” he said slowly, as though he were still trying to figure out if he was right.
“Am I wrong?”
Laughing, “No, you aren’t. He wouldn’t tell me. That’s Luxuria. He wouldn’t tell anyone.”
In that statement, so much came to light for me that I had to wonder if it was my imagination creating its own truths or not. But I saw that Envy wasn’t a person as much as he was that one sin with a human face and little else. He didn’t have mixed emotions, feelings to weed through, desires to quench. He had envy, and that was all.
Were his other brothers like that? Were the Royal Demons only embodiments of one sin? One dimensional? That was scary, being driven by only one thing. To have no mixed emotions standing in the way? It was easy to see why demons had become villains to the Elementals. It was too much like looking at themselves.
Lux wasn’t that way at all. My chest heaved at the thought of him in The Gone, different from everyone around him, not stronger for it, but more vulnerable. Yet he’d grown himself into the remarkable creature he was. He healed himself of it.
Maybe if my coven had been more like the Royal Demons, we wouldn’t be so quick to betray each other, lie, hurt each other, and believe in things that weren’t true. I believed in The Chains and the world I protected, because I was afraid to be wrong. I was afraid to think differently.
How would it feel to have no fear at all? This demon in front of me could show me.
Glasses crashed to the floor behind me and I spun to see a handful of black and gold bedazzled demons growling and hissing at each other like animals, hands held up in claws, ready to attack. One motivation. No thoughts of anything or anyone around them except for the attack, triggered by who knows what.
Tables flipped, drinks spilled, creating science-experiment-gone-wrong colors and sounds. Instead of backing away or even joining in, demons watched in stillness, mesmerized. They loved the chaos.
If more of them broke through The Chains, would this be all we’d have?
Both of us watching the brawl, I said to Invidia without looking at him, “You envy that Lux came to The Chains, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“And what would you do if you could go there, too?”
“I would want more.”
“That’s a curse for you, then, isn’t it? That you’ll always want what you don’t have?”
Lux would have said, “Isn’t that a curse for everyone?” followed by some nonsensical rambling to the voices in his head.
“It’s my reason for living,” Invidia breathed, and I could feel the peace that claimed him.
I looked past him into the teeming hall and felt nothing but unrest.
“Help me get to Lux and maybe you can see The Chains for yourself.”
Chapter 25
I wanted to do it alone. I didn’t want to have a personal tour guide through—
“What do you call this place?” I asked Invidia.
“The Lair,” he said, throwing money on the bar and standing. Money was still good in The Gone. Probably at its best.
The glass wall that had served as a door for me simply dissolved in front of Invidia. He walked out without ever looking down. I gasped, waiting for him to fall to the ground, but transparent gray tiles popped up under his feet with every step. Nobody underneath him even looked up. Fish under a glass-bottom boat. I followed as fearlessly as I could, relieved when the tiles appeared for me too, in a shimmering silver. The bustle below was disturbingly ugly. A demon prodding a man on all fours, strapped up like a mule. Belly dancing girls clanging bones between their fingers. Hulking creatures in black leather with vaguely human limbs, as if they’d been Frankensteined together, and fearsome, wraithlike beings covered head to toe in gold chain mail, their faces invisible.
I wouldn’t have made it far in The Lair without Invidia. I’d have been snatched up before I could scream.
Invidia made eye contact with one beast—no, human, turned beastly—and the thing smiled at him as a number five burned its way through his flesh from inside, rising to the surface and melting the filthy skin around it. The creature smiled.
“You….branded….it? Him?” I stuttered, trying to keep pace and not stumble.
“No. I can see their sins so clearly that it pulls them right out of their bones, exposes them.”
“Is that how the Royal Demons keep order?” I swallowed hard, thinking of Lux contributing to such a thing.
Invidia glanced at me, smirking. “Keep order? No. We don’t do much in the way of keeping order. What kind of a hopeless place has order?”
“Lux could heal them,” I said as another brand screamed through a demon’s skin. I turned away.
“They’re not here to heal. They’re here to live with their despair in the open. Besides, my brother lusts after their humiliation and glee.” He stopped and smiled wide. “That’s true l
ove, girl. True love burns to the surface, right through the skin.”
My voice was hoarse, but strong when I answered, “You can see sins, but you can’t see love, Invidia.”
He laughed, and kept walking. “I could almost see you, up there, hiding behind The Chains. It was hard to see anything through the Prince’s rose-tinted glasses, though.”
“I never saw him wear—” Oh. Right. An expression. “What do you mean by that?”
The Envy Demon glanced over his shoulder at me, grinning. “He lusted after you and what you could give him until he was blind.”
I didn’t believe that. He had feelings for me, but I couldn’t believe that he’d forgotten his reason for crossing The Chains. He was too sharp, too single-minded, even through all the minds swimming in his own, and all the voices that came with them.
“He came for me. To protect me and the Poisons from the Elementals.”
“He went to see the stars.”
That pissed me off. He was pissing me off, with his arrogant swagger and the way he talked about his own brother. “The stars are mine,” I snapped. He stopped and spun, and I stumbled back in surprise.
“Foolish little girl. If the Prince of Demons, the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son wants your stars, if he lusts for just a glimpse of them, what do you think he’ll do for them? The Lust Demon has grown tired of never getting what he wants.”
I swallowed back my self-doubt and got right in his face. “It’s me he wants, and he can have me. The stars come with the package.”
His insults solidified what I already knew: I belonged to Lux. There was nothing I would deny him. I was sure he felt the same.
I let out a pent-up breath when Invidia started walking again. I changed the subject. “What did you mean when you said I carried souls with me?”
He kept walking but his shoulders tensed. “Your boyfriend told you what, who, The Chains really are,” he said. Not a question, but a smug pointing out of my idiocy. “Don’t you wish they could leave you?”
The Lair went on and on, and I was following a demon I didn’t trust (obviously), through its depths. I wasn’t sure he was bringing me to Lux, but it was a start. I was still alive and hoped I’d stay that way.
I was immediately irritated with myself for hoping I’d make it through alive. Hoping was Wishing, with less conviction. I wanted to be strong enough to succeed by myself.
“Where are you headed?” I barked at Invidia. The ceiling felt closer the longer we walked, the lighting darker, and there were more wide doorways off the hall, revealing all sorts of different activities. I was glad to be far above the thinning crowd, airborne.
Invidia slowed to walk with me rather than in front of me. I saw this as a personal feat for some reason. “Home,” he said with a shrug.
When I thought The Lair couldn’t get any more desolate and dark, it did. Nobody walked below us any longer, and the doorways were further apart, packed with demons and other monsters I couldn’t name, hollering around pits. I didn’t want to know what was down in those pits. The stench emanating from the rooms wafted our way, and Invidia’s royal head tilted up even more regally at the odor. It smelled like suffering.
The closer we got to where the demon royalty lived, the more dire the circumstances.
“Here we are,” Invidia crooned, with a sweep of his hand, and The Lair disappeared into blackness in front of us, like we’d been dropped in deep space. It took everything in me not to hyperventilate. I reminded myself that I was standing, not floating, but hell, did I feel as empty as the space around me, the lack of The Lair even a loss to me.
“Lux,” I whimpered, and quickly covered my mouth with my hand.
The shimmering outline of a castle appeared out of the void, in the distance. Huge, Gothic, like Dracula’s castle, nearly invisible but for the vague image, black on black. I wanted in, no matter how dark.
The alluring crush of sickly black velvet, hiding treasures and tortures.
I gasped at Lux’s voice in my mind, all around me as if the place lived and breathed him. If I could have embraced it, I would have.
“You can hear him, can’t you?” Invidia asked, snarling at me.
“Y-yes,” I whispered. All I could think was how much I needed to get to Lux. It had nothing to do with bringing him back to The Chains, to a war, and everything to do with his arms around me, his eyes probing mine, his heart beating against me.
“I can feel how much you want him,” Invidia hissed, eyes roaming over my face, down my body, back up.
Oh my God, he’s attracted to me. He’s jealous.
Not jealous; envious.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Wait a minute. No, I’m not.” Idiot, why are you provoking him? “I care about your brother. That shouldn’t make you envy him.”
“Envy… is what I do,” he spat, and his face became less heartthrob and more bubbling black lava monster. I backed away but the midair tiles weren’t there for me, and I fell hard on my back to the floor, my body cracking against the marble, vision blurring with sudden pain. Invidia jumped down after me into a crouch, getting uglier by the second. I crab-walked, scrambling from him, and right through one of the doorways I’d been shrinking from during our little stroll.
A sea of legs surrounded me, hiding Invidia from my view. Nobody noticed me trying not to get trampled—or so I thought.
“What do we have here?” a voice like thorns said, yanking me to my feet by the arm.
I didn’t want to look, but it wouldn’t have made the situation go away. Wasn’t given any choice when two foul-smelling thugs came to stand in my immediate space. They were twins, both heroin-skinny and clammy looking, with barbs for teeth and heads that looked like the pictures I’d seen of embryos.
They drooled as they twisted their heads to see me from all angles.
“Into the pit,” my captor hissed, thrusting me at the twins.
Muscling through the crowd, gripping my arms, the twins were quickly at the edge of the pit and down I went, amongst cries of bestial excitement.
I hit the ground hard, dirt kicking up all around me, making me cough.
“I really can’t take any more falls like that today,” I said to myself.
That was the only moment I could allow myself to escape the horror I was sure to experience. It only took seconds for my mind to devise all the tortures that would be waiting for me, what monsters I’d have to gladiator-fight in the millisecond before I got eaten, what machines were waiting to devour me like scrap metal.
I got to my knees, aching, ready to give up before I even started. With a deep sigh, I pushed the hair out of my face, the yelling from above becoming that much louder, and looked at my opponent.
It was a girl. Just a girl.
A shaking, sweating, cowering, girl.
She was barefoot, brutally skinny, almost naked, showing a disgusting amount of scrapes and bruises. I got the impression nobody had given her the holey cloth around her waist or the sack-like wrappings around her torso, but that she’d found them, made them maybe. A pang of sadness went through me. How had she come to be there? How terrible must her life be?
“Wha—what are we supposed to do?” I mouthed to her. But I’d seen movies. I knew we were supposed to fight. Not that I was much of a fighter, but I’d never lift a finger against her. She didn’t have enough strength to endure standing.
“Move!” one voice shouted through the din from overhead. I had no idea what to do. But like a switch had been flipped, the other girl straightened her back, as much as I think she could in her weakness, and her eyes took on a glint that chilled me through the streams of sweat.
What an ass to think she’d lived long enough in The Lair to look like that, and not know how to stay alive. I’d underestimated her.
Yet she hadn’t made a move. Time to stop underestimating myself as well.
She had no idea who I was or what I was capable of any more than I did of her. Time to work on that poker face.
I cr
acked my knuckles with more confidence than I had, and started circling her from afar, closing in slowly. To do what, I had no idea, but planning wasn’t going to help. No time.
Stay alive.
Waiting never got me anywhere, whether I knew what I was doing or not, so I ran at her. It went against everything that I felt was right when I looked at this stick figure girl, but I couldn’t stop, couldn’t question myself. The Gone was too full of illusions and danger for me to—
Before I got to her, she disappeared. Gone.
The roar from above became deafening, and I spun, searching for her, the knowledge that something terrible was about to happen to me descending like a fog.
“Where are you?” I said stupidly, and my mouth filled with blood, bubbling over and dripping down my chin. “What?” I spat blood on the ground. There was more blood underneath me. I checked my arms frantically, and they were covered in blood coming from nowhere in particular, rising right out of my skin.
I swooned, nauseous, hot.
That was when I got pushed from behind. It was a weak move, like a super skinny girl might do, her bony hands on my back knocking me to my knees again. They hurt like hell.
I crawled away fast and got to my feet again, trailing blood behind me, so lightheaded.
She stood still, watching me, looking as weak as ever but she could do stuff. The disappearing act, the blood she was sucking straight from my body somehow—what else could she do?
Who was she?
Bile rising up my throat, I faltered, tripped over my own foot and a fresh wave of blood squished in my shoes.
I was going to die.
I couldn’t focus my eyes on her as I fell to the ground, but I could make out that she was raising her arms slowly up, like she was—
Summoning something. I’d seen the Elementals do it too many times, my own mother do it. Calling for power.
The Wind Between Worlds Page 19