by Ivy Sinclair
This place might have been untouched until recently, but this had been the site of a battle many years ago. I could also tell that the demons crawling out of Hell weren’t always friendly to those of their kind. There were fundamental blood feuds between various factions of demons, and those hadn’t gone away as they were each released from their prisons in Hell. It just gave them another opportunity to go after their sworn enemies. There were fresh bodies littered everywhere underfoot.
The sense of oppression in the room was linked to the amount of blood and death that had occurred there. How fortunate that death was my specialty.
“Rise, and take down those that stand in our way,” I sent out as my call to action. “You will fight for us.”
The screech of anger and pain began almost immediately. I felt Paige’s grip tighten around my fingers. “I can feel what you are doing,” she breathed. “It is…amazing.”
Amazing wasn’t the first word anyone used to describe what I could do. I could feel the push of many of the demons fighting against me. That was normal, but now it was just another thing that siphoned my energy away from the goal at hand. We needed the distraction for me and Paige to make our way through the fray.
I opened my eyes and focused my attention on the ground immediately below the ledge. Bursts of dirt shot up in the air as corpses in various stages of decomposition emerged from the cavern’s floor.
“This isn’t going to be a soft landing. You need to get on your feet as quickly as possible,” I said. I wasn’t giving Paige any time to react, but that was the way it was in the midst of a fight. You had to make a decision and do it. There wasn’t time to think about what happened next.
As soon as I saw a reasonably sized space open up as my reanimated army of demons cleared a path, I let go of Paige’s hand, and I jumped. I pulled my feet up against my chest so that I landed low to the ground. The impact jarred my bones and sent a ripple of agony through my body from the wound that I already had, but I ignored it. I had to keep an iron hold on all the corpses around us. Just like in the church, which seemed like years ago, I extended my reach to every demon that went down in the fight and yanked its essence into my chokehold of a command. I figured that for as many soldiers as I lost, I was gaining at least twice that because corpses didn’t feel pain. They could do nothing else other than what I commanded of them. And my command was to kill.
I didn’t see Paige’s jump, but I felt her presence as she landed next to me. She rolled to her side and was up on her feet with the relic held high a moment later. I saw a tentacle swipe out toward her torso, and I launched the knife that I had been holding ready. It sliced the air past her and nailed the tentacle into the stone wall behind her.
The only sign that Paige gave that she even noticed was a slight duck to the left that put her safely out of its reach. Our eyes locked, and she nodded to me. She saw the clearing in the mass of bodies in front of us, and she immediately moved toward it. I did notice though that she had a slight limp to her gait. I realized that she had likely twisted her ankle in the jump, but it wasn’t something that either one of us could tend to now. We had to get to the gate.
“Keep them away from us,” I commanded my undead army. “If any one of them touches us, I’m going to send all of you into the ether forever. If we close this gate unscathed, I will allow you to return to your slumber unharmed.” It was a far better deal than I had ever offered a demon that I pulled back from the dead.
The answer was a loud cacophony of moans in my head, but I dismissed them. Demons were inherently a whiny bunch. But I saw the opening in front of us widen, and Paige plunged forward. I was on her heels ducking to avoid the random swipes from longer than normal limbs that happened into our path.
It seemed like it took hours instead of minutes to cross the room. I was amazed that we were still in one piece when we got there. Even with the threats that I made to the undead, I knew that I had handed them a nearly impossible task. As the gate loomed large in front of us, Paige came to a stop.
“Do I see what I think I see?” How I heard her voice at all was a miracle.
The shimmering gate had turned completely red, but I could see swirling shapes of black that appeared to be on the other side.
“Reinforcements,” I said. “We gotta get that gate closed.”
“I don’t know how,” Paige said. Her voice held a note of barely controlled panic.
I stepped forward so that I was slightly in front of her between her body and the gate. Then I held out my hand toward hers that held the relic. “Use me to find the answer.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Riley. I don’t know what touching this will do to you.”
“I trust you,” I said. “You’ll keep me safe. You’ll keep both of us safe.” I looked behind her. I could see that the path that would take us back to the ledge was starting to close. At the same time, the shapes on the other side of the gate in front of us were starting to take sharper focused form. All hell was literally about to break loose.
“You gotta try, babe,” I shouted to her. “You’re the only one who can do it.”
Her face turned grim, but she nodded once. As she pushed the relic into the palm of my hand, and our fingers joined into a fist around it, she shouted back. “We’re the only ones who can do it.”
Instantly, I felt the taint of the relic on my tongue. It was a putrid taste that made me want to spit it out, but I held steady. I put my other hand up so that it was only an inch away from the gate’s surface. I took a deep breath. I could feel Paige’s energy building already. I was her conduit, but I also had to maintain the control I had on the troops around us.
I heard Paige begin to speak, but the words were a language that I couldn’t understand. I focused on her face. I tried to send her silent words of encouragement and love. She was my everything. I would do anything for her. If that required my life, I would accept that.
Her face paled as I felt the magic begin to course through my body to the gate. It was like nothing I had ever felt before. I heard the screams then, and they weren’t inside my mind. I didn’t know how I knew it, but whatever Paige was doing was killing the demons who had already escaped the gate. She was solving more than one problem in one fell swoop. Bodies began to fall to the ground all around us, but I barely noticed.
Sweat poured down my face as I struggled to keep my body upright. Between the expulsion of my energy and the full flood of unleashed magic that was coursing through me, my physical body, which was already wounded, was starting to falter. I remembered when Alice was training me how she warned about pulling too much magic beyond what could be controlled. It would overwhelm you. That was what would have happened to Paige if she had tried this on her own. I was sure of it.
I saw then that the edges of the gate were starting to darken and turn gray to match the stone walls that surrounded it.
“It’s working!” I shouted. I wasn’t sure if Paige even heard me. I didn’t see the arm that emerged from the gate’s surface until it was too late. It latched onto mine and, in one swift motion, yanked me through the gate.
I heard Paige’s cry as our hands unlocked and then the sense that I had of her was gone. I was looking at her from the other side of the gate, and Bruno Proctor stood in the space that I had just exited. His hand slammed down on top of Paige’s completing the connection I had just had with her. Before I could react, the shimmering surface of the gate was gone. I stood there staring at a stone wall.
I turned around, and found a horde of demons waiting there who had clearly been ready to enter the gate to move to the other side.
There was no doubt about it.
I was in my own personal Hell.
To be continued…
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Protect Her: Part Eight
By Ivy Sinclair
Copyright 2015 Smith Sinclair Books
ebook Edition
Cover Design by Mihaela Voicu
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CHAPTER ONE – RILEY
Hell is one of those places that you hope you never end up in any lifetime. The irony of the fact that I was making my second visit there in my short twenty-eight years wasn’t lost on me. When you dance with the devil to pay the bills, eventually you’re going to go dark. My past was littered with bad decisions determined by what jobs would put the most bucks in my bank account, followed by horrible mistakes that I’d never be able to go back and fix. It had always been in the back of my mind that when my time came, I’d wind up here.
But it wasn’t supposed to be today. Not when Paige needed me to stay in one piece. Not when I felt like the world as I knew it hung by a thread that was about to be cut. The stakes were too high for me to be stuck in Hell.
Those were the thoughts running through my mind as I faced a sea of demon faces. My back was against the wall that, just moments before, had been a portal into the realm where I belonged. On the other side, I had watched Bruno Proctor take my place to magically bond with Paige over the relic and complete the closure of the portal. He switched sides of the portal with me and left me to rot here. If I didn’t feel the sear of the mixture of anger and anguish twisting my guts, I’d probably realize I was more than a little impressed by the move. No matter what we did, it always seemed as if the bastard was one step ahead of us. That meant that I needed to get smarter. That was if I lived through the next few minutes.
It was the hardest thing to do considering the situation, but I closed my eyes. I could practically feel the press of contorted bodies moving closer to me in an attempt to overwhelm me. Demons knew what I did to their kind. The reputation I spent ten years building was about to come back and bite me in the ass. The feeling of sudden helplessness was suffocating and panic inducing, but I didn’t open my eyes. Not yet. Because I knew a thing or two about Hell. Things that those who ruled it didn’t want the common folk to know.
Hell was what you made of it. It knew all of your deepest, darkest secrets. Every feeling of self-loathing, guilt, and shame was brought to the surface. Those things that haunted your nightmares were manifested into physical form, and there was no way to escape because you were trapped inside the horrors of your own mind. Hell was literally the ultimate mind fuck.
When I stood on the other side of the portal, I thought I saw shadowy forms moving on the other side. So when Proctor pulled me through, I expected to see an army of demons waiting for me. That was the shitty thing about Hell. It was more than happy to serve up whatever fresh images your mind could come up with to twist your perceptions and make them real.
There were real demons crawling around Hell; no doubt enough of them to fill cities across the world. But they didn’t have to be here with me. Not if I didn’t give into the fear. That’s what Hell was about: pain, fear, torture, loss, grief, sadness, and your bleakest despair. All of the emotions that tore up our souls and took us to the deepest recesses of the blackest parts of our minds. Demons like Bruno Proctor pushed those emotions along and kept them festering and fresh. That was part of their job. Lure new souls in by making them do terrible deeds on earth that marked their souls, and then they got to spend the rest of eternity torturing them.
It wasn’t possible to make Hell a garden spot; that was for damn sure. But it was possible to bend the rules of what it served up to you when you got there. You just had to see through your mind’s illusions. That’s the idea that I kept repeating over and over again in my mind. Alice had taught me how to concentrate even when the rest of the world around me was in a panic. It was critical to my line of work. It was what allowed me to control a host of dead, reanimated corpses in the midst of battle. I was able to separate what was happening around me with what I was doing in my mind.
I felt the movement of air again that indicated the demons were closing in on me. I could feel the hot, rancid air of their breath scorching my skin and searing my nostrils. My body felt exhausted trying to stay upright under their weight. I steeled my mind against those thoughts and forced it to think about different ones.
Inevitably, my thoughts turned to Paige. But I couldn’t think about her being in Proctor’s clutches once again. I could only imagine what kind of perverse image Hell would serve up for me then. Instead, I thought about her smile and the way that her head often cocked slightly to the side when she laughed. I thought about getting lost in the depths of her blue eyes. I thought about the smell of her hair and how it tickled my bare chest when we slept with our bodies intertwined. I thought of how lucky I was that she had told me that she loved me.
I had no idea how long I focused on those thoughts of Paige, but the silence was what eventually cracked through my consciousness. Throughout the fight across the cavern to the portal and in those first moments in Hell, it was as if a thousand voices pounded around inside my head along with mine. It was jarring and unnatural. Combined with the external noise of teeth gnashing, bones breaking, and roars of success and defeat, it was overwhelming.
But now there was nothing but silence. It was time. I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. The space around me was different now. I was in a simple room. It appeared to be a long rectangle because I couldn’t quite make out the other end of it. I whirled around and found that the wall at my back was wooden panels, not stone. Wherever I was, this was not where I had entered Hell. I slammed the palm of my hand against the wall in frustration. I hadn’t anticipated that my tactic to save my skin from the demons would result in putting me even further away from Paige.
“Riley, you have to calm down.”
My breath caught in my throat. The voice was achingly familiar. I knew that I should be happy to hear it, but it was highly likely that this was the new version of Hell I was about to contend with. Hell didn’t like those that inhabited it trying to change the rules. It always found a way to try to bring you back into its chokehold. I didn’t expect it to adjust so quickly, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was Hell, after all. My only consolation was that I wasn’t planning on staying there for long.
I turned slowly and found my mother standing several paces away. Her expression was one of anxiousness, and I saw that she was twisting the ring on her left hand. She still looked just like I remembered her. She wore the same V-neck rose colored blouse and jeans that she had on the day that Proctor supposedly killed her. My mother was always the most comfortable in jeans and casual clothes. The only thing that was elaborate about her attire was her wedding ring. For my mother, it was big and ostentatious, and yet she never took it off.
My father left her high and dry when I was just a baby, but she still wore the damn thing every day. Still, when she was upset or unsettled, she played with it like she was now. It was one of those unconscious ticks that made her human.
I wanted to rush to her and scoop her into my arms. Until just a few days ago, I thought that she was dead along with my sister, Gabrielle. Five years ago, Proctor supposedly killed them in front of me to punish me for trying to double cross him. In actuality, he hadn’t killed them at all, but just tucked them away for safe keeping until he could drag them back out in front of me again. He had used them to get what he wanted from me, which was agreeing to assist Paige in retrieving the relic.
Being imprisoned in Hell should have been the worst thing that happened to them, but Proctor had also tortured them with the worst violation of all. My mother and sister were demon possessed. I had no idea how long they had shared their bodies with the despicable souls of Proctor’s worst demons. It really didn’t matter. Once posses
sed, it was a long road to recovery for even the strongest of human wills.
What had it done to my family? Would they ever be able to be sane, normal people again? Those were questions that I was afraid to find out the answers to.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Her voice carried a sharp edge to it now, and her mouth settled into a thin frown. “I didn’t think that I raised my children to be so impolite.”
I felt a swirl of emotions and memories and then I couldn’t contain it any longer. I moved toward her and pulled her into a bear hug. It was a brief moment later when I felt her arms wrap around my shoulders. I was almost twice her size, and I wished for a moment that it was back in the time of my life when my mother’s hug seemed to solve every problem. That ended for me when I was a teenager the first time I saw a dead person, but I could wish for it nonetheless.
“Mom, are you okay?” It was a stupid question. She was in Hell possessed by a demon. Of course, she wasn’t okay, but the question was automatic. There was one thing I did know. If there was anyone who could survive that kind of experience, it was my mother.
Over the years, I had gleaned information about small parts of my mother’s life before she got married and had me and my sister. She was one of those rare mortals who knew about both realms. She and my mentor, Alice, had been best friends in their youth. Something happened to them when they were teenagers that changed the course of their lives forever. Alice became a nun but dedicated her life’s work to finding out everything there was to know about magic and the creatures that existed in both realms. She had the power of her faith and her church to protect her from the less savory elements.