by SM Reine
Real demons carpeted the floor in a seething mass. It was more of the army that had attacked them above, led by Atropos. Many of them were too large to fit into the narrower reaches of the magma tubes underneath Dis. They must have been waiting for Atropos to emerge and give them guidance.
“We’ll have to go back,” Abram said.
Ariane’s mouth dropped open. “Go back? But—”
“Into Eden,” Abram said. It was the only way that they could hope to get out now.
But it was too late to backtrack. Noises echoed up their tunnel.
They were being followed.
Abram stepped in front of Ariane to protect her. His hand automatically went for his holster, now empty.
Fiends rushed up the tunnel.
He braced himself for the attack, mind whirling. No weapons. Nowhere to run.
This is going to be ugly.
Then arrows whistled from the darkness, thudding into the backs of the fiends’ skulls, iron points protruding from their foreheads. Their bulbous eyes went blank. One by one, they skidded to Abram’s feet, arrow fletching stained with their blood as they twitched out their last moments of life.
His heart didn’t beat as a woman stepped out of the tunnel carrying a crossbow, armor clanking together. Blood was smeared over her hands and lower jaw. She looked all too pleased with herself.
“Who are you?” she asked them, casually lifting the crossbow to her shoulder.
Abram opened his mouth to respond, but Flynn spoke first. “We’re Elise’s friends.”
“She has any surviving friends?” The demon sounded far too casual about that question. Abram assumed it was hypothetical. “Well, my name’s Terah, and I’m here to save your useless mortal lives. I can take you to safety.”
A fiend darted toward her from the depths of the tunnel. She backhanded it without dropping her gaze from Abram’s, sending it flying into a wall.
His eyebrows lifted. “Okay.”
Terah strode back up the tunnel, and they followed her in silence to yet another branch of the magma tubes, where it was hotter still. This one was almost vertical. Impossible to climb. But an iron chain dangled down the wall, and when Terah tugged on it, someone at the top lowered it a few more feet.
“This leads to the surface,” she said. “They will pull you out.”
“They?” Flynn asked.
Terah’s teeth gleamed in a smile. “Don’t you trust me?”
Probable death versus possible death, Abram reminded himself.
He grabbed the chain, wrapping it around his forearm. Whoever was on the other end lifted. Metal rattled against stone, and his feet lifted off the ground. He watched the faces below him until the tube curved and blocked his view of them entirely.
The darkness inside was softer than it had been in the other tunnels, and it only grew lighter as the chain continued to lift him.
Abram emerged on the slope of the mountain, hot air pushing down his throat, burning his lungs. He was greeted by the sight of more demons. These ones wore black leather body armor with red pinstripes at the hips, which was the same uniform that Abram had always seen on Elise’s army when they visited the sanctuary. They were allies, or something like it.
They didn’t attempt to kill him, which was definitely an improvement to the conditions below.
He stood back and let them drop the chain down the tunnel again.
Abram shielded his eyes from a windy blast of dust and ash, looking up at the peak of the mountain. He hadn’t been to Dis very often, but he remembered Mount Anathema having a tall, sharp peak, like a knife cutting into the sky.
Now it looked like the stone had been blasted away. The jagged peak belched black smoke. Rivers of lava flowed down the slopes, the nearest of them searingly hot on his arms. His arm hair was curling from the temperature.
He suddenly missed the sheltered darkness below.
Yet there was salvation nearby. The stone turned to carpet further down the slope.
Carpet?
Abram rubbed the smoke from his eyes to look again.
That was definitely carpet a few yards down. And it wasn’t just carpet; there was also a swiveling office chair, a trashcan, an empty desk. None of them were marked by ash. In fact, they all looked kind of wet, as though the sprinklers from a fire suppression system had recently drenched everything.
It looked like someone had abandoned a thirty-square-foot patch of office building on the side of a volcano.
Another sinkhole to Earth.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Terah asked. She had appeared behind him without the help of the chain.
He had no idea if she meant the mountain or the sinkhole. “What happened?”
“Belphegor.” She gestured impatiently to the demons. “Faster. Before the portal closes.”
Ariane and Marion emerged next, clutching the chain. Instead of Flynn following, though, it was Abel. He clambered from the tunnel under the power of his own muscles. He was soaked with blood and ichor, and he rolled onto the surface rather than getting to his feet. But he was alive.
Abram was surprised when he actually felt relieved to see him. All that time he had spent talking to Levi about how he wished Abel would vanish—violently or otherwise—and now he was actually glad to see the asshole.
He helped Abel to his feet. “Levi?”
“He’s survived,” the Alpha said. “He’ll be up.” He didn’t manage to sound like he was all that happy about it, though.
Flynn’s face appeared over the lip of the tunnel. He gripped the chain in both hands, arms scraped from the ascent up the stone. He wasn’t as hardy as a kopis or a werewolf. It looked like he’d been run over a couple of times.
When he tried to stand, Mount Anathema pitched underneath them.
Abram shouted, trying to brace himself against the yaw of the ground.
Once it began tipping, it continued to shift until it was almost vertical, and he couldn’t help but slip.
Demons tumbled down the slope. One of them slammed into Ariane, knocking her back into the magma tube with Marion.
The rest of them weren’t so lucky.
Abram gripped stones jutting from the ground in both hands, fighting against the overwhelming dizziness that struck him as he watched the sky slide under his dangling feet. Smoke billowed over the stones. He gagged on it, struggling to breathe.
Magma gushed over the side of the mountain. Rivers turned to waterfalls as the slopes tilted. A spurt poured toward that desk on Earth, and the metal began to melt.
His fingers slipped. With a shout, he fell.
Abel tried to grab him, but Abram bounced off of the rocks and out of his reach. The sharp jab of the mountainside into his ribs sucked all the breath out of his lungs.
He couldn’t even cry out again as he tumbled.
Hot air turned cold. The magma vanished.
Abram slammed into a half-wall partition and knocked it over, rolling twice before coming to a halt on the carpet.
He looked up to find that he had fallen straight out of Hell into that office building on Earth. It was a large room filled with cubicles, desks, and whiteboards, and it looked like they’d had time to evacuate; none of the electronics were still around.
The roof of the building was missing, though. He could look straight up into the rainy night and see Mount Anathema erupting above his head. His stomach churned at the sight of it.
A hard thump, a jangle of metal, and Terah slid across the floor beside him.
She immediately stood. Her scowl could have curdled milk. “Damn,” Terah said. “I tried to grab the others, but couldn’t reach. The mountain threw me before I could.” She clenched her gauntlets into fists.
Did that mean everyone else was dead? Abram watched the empty, dark office building for signs that others were following them through the sinkhole, but saw nothing.
Fighting back a surge of despair, Abram stepped away from the cubicles. The whiteboards mounted on the walls were still cove
red in marker. The nearest of them had a simple black logo on the bottom corner that said “OPA.”
He’d landed inside a building belonging to the Office of Preternatural Affairs. They were supposed to be the legitimate governmental branch of the Union, the assholes that had pushed for preternatural registration before the Breaking.
Maybe he was lucky to have been tossed back to Earth like that. If he were in an OPA building, then there would be weapons somewhere, along with cars and other supplies.
But just as soon as Abram started to get excited, he realized he had no idea where he would drive a car filled with weapons and supplies. Summer and Nash were still back in the Himalayas. He had to be somewhere in the United States.
“Can we get back to Hell?” Abram asked.
Terah was already searching. She climbed on the nearest desk and felt around in the air. “Give me a few minutes.”
Then Hell came to them.
The side of the building ripped away with a roar, as though a bomb had detonated underneath them. But the floor didn’t collapse. The rubble didn’t fall. Abram’s jeans flapped around his ankles as the wind sucked everything into the air, swirling toward Mount Anathema in the dimension high above them.
The smoke from the volcano was spiraling down, too. Magma looped through the sky in a long stream, bridging the space between universes in a line of fire.
Abram stumbled to the edge of the broken floor, watching more bricks and dust drawn upward.
The structure they were in was breaking down, but it wasn’t the only one. The entire campus of office buildings was decaying. Trees ripped from the soil and shot straight up into the sky. A heartbeat later, Abram stopped feeling the rain on his face—that, too, was moving against gravity.
Everything in Hell and Earth was being drawn toward a central point in the sky that he couldn’t see through the smoke and clouds. Belphegor? A black hole? A hungry demon?
His feet lifted an inch from the ground. He shoved himself back from the wall, grabbing one of the few remaining pillars. It wouldn’t hold him for long, he knew, but he stayed on the ground for now.
“Everything’s falling apart!” He had to shout now for Terah to hear him. The wind was like the shriek of a massive train.
“I see that,” she said.
A car smashed into the side of the building before vanishing into the smoke as well. The floor cracked underneath the carpet. The whole building bowed.
The center of the black hole grew so large that Abram could finally see it, and it was worse than he’d expected. It bent all light around it. All of the debris vanished on contact. He thought he could see starlight at the center—like glimpsing an entire universe through a window the size of a football stadium.
It was still growing. Quickly.
Abram didn’t know where to run. There was nothing to attack.
He turned to Terah, and judging by her pallor, she was thinking the same thing. “What was that you said about saving our pathetic mortal lives?” he asked.
Her lips thinned. “I might have spoken a little too soon.”
Suction wrenched Abram off of the floor. He swiped for a desk, but it was lifting too, and he found himself dragged into the air along with the furniture, the walls, the remaining scraps of roof.
The entire world flipped dizzyingly around him. The office building cracked, groaned, and tore free of its foundations.
Below him, the shattering city looked like nothing but scattered puzzle pieces. It was Los Angeles, he realized. He’d never been there, but he’d seen it in enough movies to recognize the Hollywood sign as the wind ripped him past it. Palm trees flipped through the air.
Terah tumbled ahead of him, spinning head over heels toward the vortex. Her mouth was open in a battle cry that he couldn’t hear.
She faced the oncoming darkness as a warrior.
A sudden shift in gravity yanked her into the depths of the black hole, making her vanish.
Abram was buffeted by a few more seconds of breathless turbulence—a few more seconds where Earth and Hell rolled around him. The debris swirling toward the dark heart of the void looked like a galaxy, in a way. Broad arms of stars and solar systems whirling around a center point.
It was kind of beautiful, all those pieces of Mount Anathema and Los Angeles intertwined in a spiraling dance.
Then he was caught in a well of gravity, too, and yanked laterally toward the same darkness as Terah. It grew to consume him. He couldn’t breathe enough to cry out.
Abram entered the void.
He felt nothing.
Abel didn’t have any warning when Mount Anathema inverted from a vertical face of stone to flip completely upside-down, but he still wasn’t very surprised. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole place had burst into flames and vanished, either.
It was the end of the world. The end of the universe.
There was no way it could get any worse than this.
He’d been hanging onto the chain Terah’s demons had affixed to the ground, but the second lurch of the mountain made him lose his grip. The chain slid through his fingers.
Abel fell. Demons dropped around him. Ariane screamed and clutched at Marion as they, too, slipped from the magma tube and began to plummet.
Earth hurtled toward them.
A body slammed into Abel’s, and he only realized that he hadn’t bumped into one of the others when the person he’d hit didn’t let go. Arms wrapped around his chest. Feathers whirled around them as pumping wings dragged Abel back to Earth through a nearby sinkhole.
Cold air blasted around Abel, shocking the breath from him.
He was back over the snowy Himalayas.
Nash dropped him about ten feet above the ground, and Abel hit an instant later, slamming onto his back.
“Fuck,” he groaned.
The angel didn’t bother apologizing before wheeling around to return to Hell.
Going from Dis in the midst of a volcanic eruption to an icy mountaintop threw Abel’s body into instant shock. He shivered hard as he rolled onto his hands and knees, trying to regain his bearings.
Earth was lightless. Abel could barely see the ice underneath him. The wind blew stronger, too, and it instantly froze the sweat under his arms and on the back of his neck.
There was something wrong with that darkness, and with the wind. The roar was unnaturally loud. Maybe not a wind at all.
Squinting through the night, he recognized the sharp slope of the crevasse that sheltered Lilith’s statue. The resort where they’d been keeping Rylie’s body would be somewhere past it. Probably Summer, too. Wherever Nash was, Summer couldn’t be far.
Abel got halfway up the crevasse before Nash deposited Ariane and Marion alongside him.
“Was there anyone else?” the angel asked, looping around them.
“Abram and some kid with an afro that Elise brought down.” After a beat, Abel reluctantly added, “Also, Levi.”
Nash was gone again in a flurry of feathers.
Ariane clutched her daughter to her chest, trying to shelter her from the cold as they struggled up the mountain.
She stopped when they reached the top of the slope.
“Oh no,” Ariane said.
It took Abel a minute to figure out what had upset her. He couldn’t see much of anything around them, even though werewolves had awesome night vision. The mountain that they were standing on was only a shade lighter than the black sky, and the mountain beyond that was so dark as to be nearly invisible.
Then he realized that the mountain beyond—what little he could see of it—was vanishing.
A dark line crept over the ridge, turning it the same shade of impenetrable black as the sky beyond, which wasn’t sky at all. It was the source of the roaring noise.
Something was coming at them. Or maybe it was more like nothing was coming at them.
A void.
Abel rushed inside the resort to find Summer, pale and unsmiling. She only managed a weak hug in greeti
ng, and she felt almost as cold as he did.
“The rest of the pack went to investigate what’s happening out there, with that big wall of darkness that’s creeping in.” She swallowed hard. “They never came back.”
Ariane set Marion down on one of the supply crates in the center of the room. “I don’t think they will.”
Abel clenched his hands into fists. He was hovering over Rylie’s shrouded body, trying to protect what remained of her, even though he had no idea what he was protecting her from, and he was pretty sure that she was far beyond being hurt.
“Why aren’t they coming back?” he asked. “What is that out there? Is this another demon army or something? Because tell me where to go, and I will fuck them up.” The spirit wolves felt weak inside of him, drained by the earlier battles, but he wasn’t going to let anyone mess with his pack.
“There’s nothing we can do.” It was Elise’s young companion. He had appeared in the doorway to the bathroom, and there was a strange light in his eyes—something that looked a lot like hope. “That’s the end of this journey. The destination. You guys don’t need to fight it.”
Summer took a step toward him, staring hard at his face as though she recognized him. “The end? You mean, apocalypse?”
“Genesis.” He sounded giddy. “Nobody dies here. Everything ends, but Elise will bring you all back. Everyone survives. You’re all going to be okay.”
“If Belphegor allows it,” Ariane said.
His smile faded a fraction. His gaze went distant. “Yeah. Elise still has to beat him. But…” He pressed his knuckles against his forehead. “There are a lot of possibilities. I don’t know.”
“Who the hell are you?” Abel asked.
“Just call me Flynn,” he said. “Or don’t call me anything at all. Forget you ever saw me.” He turned to Marion. “I need to go home.”
She brushed her hands off on her skirt and jumped off the crate.
Ariane wrapped her arms around her daughter. “No.”