by Dianna Hardy
He took a last look at his wings, knowing they would be burnt away. He didn't yet know how he was going to get back – flying would not be an option.
He hesitated for a second. This was life-altering. Overwhelm gripped him. Then Mary's face filled his mind – the look on it the minute she understood her pain had gone, the minute she had realised peace was possible amid her darkness. Her eyes had met his, and he'd been stunned into stillness, at the absoluteness of the trust and faith he'd seen there. She had trusted him, and had found herself within that trust. And then he'd left her here…
The rumble of fury began again in the pit of his stomach.
"Abaddon," he hissed. And then he jumped.
Book Three: The Demon Bride
For you, m’angeal.
Prologue
Her fingernails dug into his wrist, as her scream pierced the air.
“God damn it!” he cursed. “Don't you let go of me – don't let go!”
But this was a battle they were both losing. The pulsing abyss beneath her was relentless, swallowing everything too close to it, like some ominous, living black hole, and she was more than too close to it – she was dangling above it, her feet touching the hungry darkness.
Terror gripped her – an unforgiving fear she'd never known, and she'd known a lot of fear.
For a second, exhaustion took her over, and her fingers slipped a little.
“No!” he shouted, and squeezed his hand in a tighter vice around her wrist. His other hand – the left one – was buried in the earth. He had pegged himself into it in an attempt to stop their forward movement. He had his legs entwined around a tree trunk, but the tree was now coming up at the roots, bowing to the force of the suction. Every muscle in his body was straining, bulging unnaturally – she wondered if he'd ripped any yet. Hell, he was strong – but not strong enough.
She looked up, forcing her head to move against the pull of the abyss, and met his eyes. Steely grey, and usually so steady, they were now marred with panic and anger. But still he held her gaze, and still – despite the horror of what was about to happen – she found a semblance of peace within his presence.
“Let me go,” she whispered.
Her answer was a tenacious growl.
“It'll pull you in if you don't. It doesn't want you, it wants me. Let me go.”
He tightened his hold on her.
Damn it! She won't risk him. Not now, not ever.
She spoke to him in the Old Tongue. “I’m not supposed to be here – it was always going to be this way.”
Determination hardened his features.
My God, he's stubborn.
“I love you,” she whispered, and let the truth of her words touch him, seep into him, through the all-consuming connection they shared – one which she suspected was about to be ripped to shreds.
He was momentarily stunned at the weight behind her words. She had him off-guard, and in that split second, with a strength she didn't know she possessed, she brought her left hand up, fighting against the vacuum with all she had, and tore into his cheek with her nails.
Startled, his grip loosened, and it was enough.
She yanked her right hand out of his.
His look of shock quickly turned to one of both rage and desperation when he finally realised what she'd done.
Blood seeped through the cuts on his cheeks. Her own face stung in response.
“Forgive me,” she pleaded. “You mean too much to me.”
Tears welled in his eyes.
Tears? Oh, no, m’angeal, don't cry. I'm not worth your tears.
“I'll find you, I swear it,” he choked out.
As the abyss closed up around her, she uttered a prayer, and she had no idea whether she was praying that he would, or that he wouldn't.
Chapter One
Mary jolted awake, then moaned as the pounding in her head dominated all her senses. A nightmare? No. This pounding felt like normal pain – the kind you had when you hit your head, not the type of pain that seared her during her nightmares.
What had woken her up? A dream? But she didn't have dreams – not normal dreams, anyway...
She tried to grasp at it and failed, the throbbing in her skull preventing her from going in too deep.
And she was hot – too hot – baking hot.
Where the fuck am I?
And far too quickly, she remembered her encounter with the monster in the prison, and being dropped into the hole in the ground. A portal of some kind? The memories rushed at her – they came so quickly, she thought she might puke. Ugh. She remembered being thrown down and cracking her head on the cement.
Shit. She hoped she didn't have concussion.
Gingerly, she tried to move and realised that something was crusted onto the left side of her face, which smarted big time – she guessed it was her blood. Her face felt mangled. She must have done it when she'd cracked her head. A glance down at herself told her she was naked. That meant she'd been undressed.
Fuck.
She mentally assessed her body, trying to figure out if she'd been messed with in any way. It felt the same as usual, apart from her arms. Looking up with effort, she could see that her hands were tightly secured above her head in metal cuffs, each attached to a stone wall by short, linked chains.
She gave her hands a little wriggle. Pins and needles shot down to her elbows, which ached. She winced. Could this be any worse?
“She awakes,” came a voice, low and soft, to her right.
It just got worse.
Without really wanting to, but knowing that avoidance was futile, she looked towards the voice. A man sat on some kind of stone tablet. He wore nothing but skin-coloured leather trousers.
Seriously? Maybe she'd woken up in an eighties porn film – a really bad one.
Then she saw his wings. They were the colour of midnight, and rose up behind him. They looked like they were covered in some kind of oily substance. His hair was the same colour as his wings, as was the close-cut beard that he wore. His eyes, a piercing blue, caught hers, and a very unwelcome feeling that she couldn't quite name unfurled in the pit of her stomach.
“Who are you?” The first words she uttered came out hoarse. Her throat, she suddenly realised, was completely dry. How long had she been down here for?
The man – or whatever the hell he was – smiled. “Straight to the point. I would expect nothing less of you, Ymari.”
Who? Although, the word rang with startling familiarity.
“I'm your saviour,” he said.
“I really doubt that, somehow.” She should probably shut up. Bravado never knew good timing.
He chuckled – a low and threatening sound that had her recoiling – then, without warning, he sprang up from his seat and was standing in front of her in the blink of an eye, his enormous wings blocking out the firelight from the torches that lined the stone walls.
Annoyingly, her breath caught in her throat as her fear threatened to choke her.
“You should be afraid, Ymari,” he said, his quiet tone washing over her like a deadly caress. “Once your transformation is complete, I won't take so kindly to your back-chatter.”
Transformation? Oh, that did not sound good. She suddenly decided she didn't want to know about her 'transformation' just yet. In fact, she was pretty damn sure anything that would delay her transformation was the best option. “You seem to be confusing me with someone else. My name's Mary.”
“Ymari is Mary in the Old Tongue.”
Oh.
“How long have I been out?”
He shrugged. “I don't know. Time doesn't exist down here. Back in the human world, it could be two days, it could be two years…”
Two years?!
And then the terrifying realisation set in: nobody knew where she was.
For the first time, tears threatened to well up in her eyes, but she quickly willed them away. This bastard wouldn't see them fall.
“I've got friends that will come for me
.” Even to her own ears she didn't sound convincing.
The man tutted at her, as if telling her off for her lie. “Nobody comes down here – except the scum of mankind … besides, you have no friends, Ymari, everyone knows that. You were born alone … but you won't die alone. In fact, you'll never die.” He reached up with a finger and trailed it down the torn side of her face, digging in deep and scraping the bloody scab off as he went.
She yelped when her skin tore anew, then gasped in horror as her body responded to the pain in the only way it knew how.
Oh, God, no way…
His smirk was sure and knowing. He withdrew his finger, which shone red with her fresh blood and placed it in his mouth, sucking hard. His eyelids fluttered shut, and he groaned in pleasure.
A shudder of revulsion ran through her. It was one thing to be trussed up naked; it was another to have him take pleasure in her blood. Somehow, that seemed even more of a violation than if he had touched her.
“Do you know how long I've waited to taste you again?”
Again? “Not long enough... And I still don't know who you are.”
He ignored her and leaned into her instead, pressing his body against hers. She fought the urge to throw up. He also had a raging hard-on. Great. That would be the bloodthirsty angel gene shining through.
She briefly wondered if Gwain would hear her screaming his name from all the way down here, wherever 'down here' was.
He rubbed himself against her hip, like a cat on a post. The leather he wore felt softer than she'd expected.
“Do you like the pants?”
He wanted to talk about his wardrobe?
Talking's good, reasoned her inner-voice. Keep him talking for as long as possible.
“No, I don't.”
“Shame … he really liked you.”
“Your clothes have personae?”
“This item did… John, I think his name was…”
Oh, GOD, no— “No!” She bucked, trying to get him off her … too late. She swung her head as far as she could to the left, no longer able to control her guts, and vomited.
It was surprisingly difficult to heave whilst chained upright to a wall.
His laugh was deep, cruel and goading. “Here.” He fumbled behind him for something and came back with a wet rag, which he stuffed into her mouth and squeezed. “Rinse.”
Stale tasting water surged over her tongue, choking her as she tried not to swallow.
He pushed himself off her and strode away.
Mary spat the stuff out. Stay calm – none of this is worse than your nightmares.
“You're lying,” she croaked, her voice tight from retching. “The police have his body.”
“Not anymore.”
Shit. “Why?”
“Why what? Why kill him?”
So he had killed him. She nodded.
“Because he touched what's mine. You are mine.”
“He never touched me!” And finally, anger rose within her, overtaking the fear.
“He thought about it.”
“And that was enough for you to murder him?” Sicko. “What about Sophia, and Leonard? Think they wanted in my knickers too?”
“First of all, I didn't murder him. I don't go up there… Well, sometimes I do, but not as a general rule. I have humans I call on to be on mutilation duty,” he grinned.
“Minions?” she spat out.
“Something like that – madmen and lunatics; those that the rest of the world think need to be sectioned; demons that scare the crap out of people…”
She thought of the walrus-monster that had captured her, then gingerly looked around to see if it was lurking.
“Now, Leonard McDonald … he was one evil son-of-a-bitch through and through. Don't think for one second he doesn't deserve to burn in Hell because he does.” He leaned forward towards her, and even from three feet away, she felt intimidated.
“He liked little boys,” he whispered, as if that excused him being tortured and murdered à la Death By A Thousand Cuts. He shook his head and sighed. “Leonard was one big coincidence – he had nothing to do with anything. He just happened to live in that building; his time was up, that was all. And God wouldn’t take him. I get all the rejects – lucky me.”
“And Sophia?” she asked through gritted teeth. God, she wanted to kill this nutter … this … angel? She examined his wings. Was he even an angel? And how did one go about killing them?
Gwain's name was on the tip of her tongue – he'd probably know how to kill him – but there was no way to call it out without Sicko hearing it, and she didn't want Gwain to end up a pair of pants.
“Sophia…” His grin disappeared. “Face of a child, but not a child. Sophia is not human – she's a Totilemi, and she's not dead. The body they have is an illusion; human minds are so easy to bend. I'm still trying to extract information from her.”
Totilemi. One of the seven demon tribes, she recalled. But which one? The one whose gift was knowledge, if she remembered correctly. “So, the murders … they were all killed the same way. You staged them? To get me into that jail?”
“Very good!” he smiled. He genuinely looked proud of her. It did nothing to ease Mary’s feelings of fucked-upness about him. “Gateways to here are temperamental – they move about – but one had just aligned itself with the prison.”
Holy crap. “And you… Who are you?”
“Oh, Ymari,” he shook his head. “You're asking the wrong question.”
She paused. “Okay then… Who am I?”
He beamed another smile, and she suddenly got the feeling she'd just agreed to play a game in which she didn't know the rules. Fuck it.
“Let me tell you a little story…”
She looked up at her arms and wondered what happened to limbs if they stayed numb for too long…
“Once upon a time, before even time itself, there was no separation, no duality, no wrong or right, no dark and light. There was only chaos – primeval chaos: a mass of dark matter with no sense of structure. It’s also known as ‘what came before’.” He studied her closely. “Enter God, with his entrepreneurial ideas, and his creativity. He split the chaos in two and shone his light on one half. Bathed in his light, chaos could see what it couldn't before, and chaos was moulded into order. Duality was created. One half of existence remained chaotic and dark, the other half was transformed into order and light, and all of Creation was birthed in the light.
“But chaos is what chaos does. It had been torn apart; separated from its original state, and its energy was incomplete, unruly and wild without the other half of itself. Every now and then, a little bit of that dark matter that God had rejected, would hurtle across The Boundary into the light, in order to seek that half which had been stolen. The Boundary was the line that now kept order and chaos separate, and all were forbidden to cross it.
“Millennia passed, or the equivalent of – there is no time in Heaven – and then Eden fell.”
He stared at her, or maybe through her, as if he were chasing a memory.
“Man fell because of one bright spark who thought it acceptable to cross The Boundary. You know him as Adam. It’s said that he found Eve on the other side, corrupted by ‘what came before’ … but no one really knows – no one else was there. Regardless, God cast all of mankind out of Heaven, and Eden was no more. Eden became Earth. From that point on, God deemed man incapable of making decisions for themselves, so did it for them—”
“With the Witching Pen,” she interrupted.
He raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “Angels became split in their alliance, some choosing to fall and aid mankind, and when that happened, Ymari, that is when I came into play.”
His eyes gleamed as if he were getting to the juicy part of the story – maybe he just really liked to talk about himself.
“I was the first being that God created from the emergence of order and light. I was the first angel.”
Oh, no!
Her breathing turned sha
llow. The first angel.
Her mind raced back to what Katarra had told them the last time her life was semi-normal:
“…Satan was the first angel, and the only one God trusted to remind humans of the consequences and responsibility of having free will…”
Oh, my God – this was Satan. That meant, that this was Hell. And not the lesser hell dimensions that demons inhabited, but actual Hell.
What am I doing in Hell?
“When God understood that the fallen angels were encouraging humans to use their free will, he ordered me into the bowels of the human dimension to oversee their choices, to be ruler of their sins, purveyor of the consequence for every decision they make.
“I pleaded with him not to send me on this dark mission – I am made of light for heaven's sake. To be cut off from God and order so entirely – I couldn't bear the thought of it. So he seduced me with a proposition.”
He – Satan – made his way towards Mary once more, all his attention focused solely on her now, as he stood directly in front of her. “God took me to The Boundary, reached into the very centre of it, and pulled out the nucleus of primeval chaos – the very source of its existence. In front of me, he cut it in two, gave half to me, and kept the other half for himself. He told me he would form it into light and order, just as he had done in the beginning, and whenever I felt lost, I was to reach for my half and remember my connection to God; that I was holding the other half of his light. He vowed that when the race of man was no more, I could rejoin him in Heaven. Well … how does one say no to God?
“I conceded. He stripped me of my title and put me here.” He waved his arms at his surroundings, and his expression grew angry. “In the meantime, he created another angel to take my place – the last angel he would ever create – one who would be so pure, so strong, so dedicated to God's mission… I was spitting mad and running on bitter jealousy – that was my seat next to God, it didn't belong to some child, some golden do-gooder taking my place as I became cut-off from Heaven … from everything God is.” He stepped into her space and placed both hands on the wall either side of her head. “Don't you see, Ymari, I was the one who gave God everything. I was the most loyal of all his angels.”