by Ivy Sinclair
The thought that Hell could be safe for anyone was amusing to me for some reason. I pitched my voice equally low. “Then I want to get him away from here.”
“There is no escape for him or for you,” Joanna said. Her facial expression fell to one of distant neutrality. “I’m allowed to nurse him only because Bruno isn’t ready for him to die quite yet.”
“Why would he keep him alive?” I decided to play dumb. I was sure that if Joanna knew what Bruno wanted to know, he would have found it out already. He had Joanna and Riley’s sister, Gabrielle, in his clutches for the last five years.
“Secrets upon secrets,” Joanna said. Her voice was distant, and her eyes glassed over. “Everyone’s got their secrets. Don’t they?”
It wasn’t safe to talk to Joanna. I had no way to tell if there was still a demon inside of her. It was easy to forget, but despite the relatively normal appearance of the surroundings, we were in Hell. There were things lurking in the shadows that would swallow me whole if I let my guard down.
“I’d like to get back to Riley,” I said. I moved past Joanna and stood in front of the door. “This is where I’m supposed to be.” I wasn’t surprised when the guards moved to open the door again. This was where Bruno expected me to be, and so even if Joanna tried to take me somewhere else, I had no doubt that this is where I’d end up. It was comforting to know in a way, because it was also the only place that I wanted to be.
“He has done nothing but suffer since the day he met you,” Joanna said. Her voice had hardened once again. “Is this how you show someone that you love him? By continuing to make him suffer? How long do you think it will take him to realize that and for him to decide he wants nothing more to do with you? Why make it harder on yourself when you know that is the inevitable end?”
I escaped inside the room and pulled the door shut behind me. I wasn’t going to let her see how her words had affected me. I put my hand on my stomach as I bit my lip to hold back the sobs. I was breaking. I didn’t have it in me any longer to be so cruel. It wasn’t who I was anymore, and she was right. Riley had done everything for me when he barely knew me. He had been better off without me. I knew that. It was just a matter of time before he figured it out too.
I saw his still form on the cot, and I moved to cross the room to go to him. A shadow detached itself from the wall and drifted in front of me. I stopped as I saw the glowing eyes materialize just before a pretty face that so closely resembled Riley’s that I knew her immediately even though I had only seen her once before. I sucked in a breath. It was Riley’s sister Gabrielle, but she wasn’t alone in her body. For a moment, I wondered how she had gotten into the room. I had been just outside the whole time. Then I remembered that I wasn’t dealing with a normal human. I was dealing with a demon-possessed human, and that was a completely different ball game.
“What do you want?” I asked. I forced my tone to be even. Without the ability to access any magic, I was a sitting duck if she decided to attack me. My hands curled at my sides. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I’d find a way to defend myself if I had to.
“I wanted to check on my brother. I heard that here was here, and he was sick,” Gabrielle said. Her voice contained a grating edge that carried with it an age far beyond her years.
“I don’t believe that he is your brother,” I said. “Do demons even have siblings?”
The woman blinked, and the glowing orbs disappeared to be replaced by jade green eyes that matched Riley’s. It crossed my mind that Riley and his sister must have inherited that physical trait from their father, because Joanna’s eyes were chocolate brown. “Are you even going to lecture me on the topic of kin? You left your family to die while you ran away. You didn’t even try to save them.”
Images rose in my mind unbidden. They were fragments of memories that I had blocked out for years. I remembered the ugly yellow Formica floor and the tired table and chairs that sat in the corner of our small kitchen. I came home early that spring afternoon. I wasn’t feeling well, so I decided to skip my after school soccer practice. The first thing that registered were the red drops on the floor that started near the kitchen sink and moved across the room to the other side of the refrigerator near the door to the basement. I remembered seeing my father’s torso lying on that ugly floor as his body was pulled through the door. His eyes caught mine in those last moments before his body disappeared, and he mouthed one word to me.
“RUN.”
The next thing I remembered, I was out in the heat of the setting sun wondering what had happened. I blocked it all out. The screams. The howls of something completely unholy as it did things to my parents. Those sounds haunted my nightmares for years.
I found the note in my pocket hours later when I stopped at the convenience store across town wondering what had happened and what I was going to do next. It was a simple note in my father’s scrawl, but it sent chills down my spine.
Don’t you dare come back here. Ever. You can’t help us. You will only end up dead or worse. Call Greg. 754.325.4402 He will help you. No matter what, know that we will always love you. We always did.
It was the last message I ever received from my parents. I was fourteen years old. Homeless. Defenseless. Rudderless. Somehow I defied the odds and survived, but that survival came at a high cost to my sanity and my soul.
I couldn’t help but wonder if my parents’ souls had taken up residence somewhere in Hell that day. They might have tried to make it right, but for the first part of my life they had planned to give my body to Eva. That was twisted shit. But after everything I had done since that day, surely mine was damned to spend eternity there as well.
CHAPTER FIVE – RILEY
People always wonder if Hell is real and what it is like if it is. My first visit left me burned out and blackened. Bruno Proctor took my family away from me in the most painful and tortuous way. I would have gladly taken their place, but he wouldn’t let me. It was as if he was on some kind of personal vendetta to make sure that I suffered, and hearing their screams and watching them writhe in pain accomplished that mission. Some nights it was still hard for me to sleep.
But if Proctor thought that he broke me, he couldn’t have been further from the truth. It was because of him that I spent the last five years perfecting my craft and exploring every dark angle of my talents. Just because I was mortal didn’t make me weak. That was for damn sure.
Fortunately for me, there were no shortage of demons to experiment on through the course of my work. I knew that the self-righteous angels took offense to my methods, but I always got the job done. It hadn’t ever bothered me. I figured the world was a better place because there was one less demon to contend with in it when I sent them to the ether.
Occasionally, I ran across a human whose soul I figured was even blacker than that of a demon. Those fuckers deserved a one-way ticket to the ether. Child molesters, murderers, and any other bastard who reveled in inflicting pain on others didn’t find any mercy at my hands. I played judge, jury, and executioner, and I didn’t lose one iota of sleep over it. I straddled two worlds, and so the whole moral and ethical code was more than ambiguous when trying to cross between the two. Ultimately, I made up my own rules, and that was okay by me. Who was around that was going to make me do anything different? Who was in a position to play judge and jury on my actions?
There was a little voice in the back of my mind that occasionally surfaced. It would whisper that I had lost my way. It said if I didn’t change my ways, then I risked becoming someone no better than those I tortured and banished to the either. Because whether I was willing to admit it consciously or not, I found that I got a sick thrill out of the hunt and the interrogations. Without any bumpers or guideposts of morality around me, it was often possible to feel omniscient. That feeling was addictive as hell.
It was an unsettling feeling when I stepped out of that persona and remembered that I had once held myself to a far nobler purpose. It snuck up on me when I wasn’t paying attent
ion. It was a part of me that I had never fully banished no matter how hard I tried.
It was that part of me that answered the call of Paige’s scream the night I found her being attacked by the Tiphon demon in the cemetery. I remembered emerging from the tomb after having just banished another demon to the ether. I knew that Calamata Island was showing signs of a demon infestation, and Paige’s scream was the signal that the creatures that were supposed to be invisible in the human world were on the prowl. They hunted and would take down anyone in their way.
My first instinct had been to help, not look the other way. Even after finding Paige, when I should have dropped her off to Sheriff Halpren, collected my fee and been on my way, I kept pressing forward to help her. She tried to shake me, and I wouldn’t let her. I had insisted that I was the only one who could help her. I was the only one who could save her. I got caught up in the idea that we were reincarnated souls of two extraordinary beings whose lives had been intertwined a thousand years ago. I bought into that line of bullshit hook, line, and sinker.
That small voice in the back of my mind had already started to question if I was overreacting, but I stuffed a sock in it. There was nothing normal about my life. Upholding certain values or traditions, like waiting years before making it official that you wanted to be with someone forever, seemed silly and unwise. I could possibly die at any moment. In fact, with the way I felt right now, it seemed clear that could be sooner rather than later.
It was as if a black cloud settled over my mind. The one good thing about it was that it distracted me from the fact that I had been effectively shut out the first time I had ever even come close to proposing to a woman. It figured that she was entirely noncommittal. I wasn’t really marriage material. It had been stupid of me to think I was. Marriage and the requisite two point five kids were for normal people. Paige and I weren’t normal. Not by a long shot.
Maybe that was why she turned me down. Without the relic, Paige was vulnerable to Eva’s possession. The idea that she would be able to use it against Eva to push back the Goddess’s foothold in this world had been a long shot from the get go. But it seemed like pretty much everything we did was a long shot. Proctor said that he didn’t want Eva to come back. It seemed like the easiest way to negate that threat was to kill Paige outright.
I barely registered when Paige and my mother left the room. I hadn’t been listening to whatever it was they were talking about anyway. Between my shock and hurt at Paige’s deflection and the rolling racks of physical pain that had begun to sweep my body, I was surprised that I had the ability to form any coherent thoughts at all. At least I did know the reason behind that.
About a year after I thought Proctor had killed my family, I found my way to a remote village in the Alps of Tibet. I sought a man who was the underworld’s foremost expert on pain management. His name was Herold Calvin. It took me a week and the payment of a small fortune in small bills to convince his handlers to let me talk to him. It took me another week of not-so-patient constant cajoling to get him to agree to take me on as a student. I spent another month there partaking in the most unusual teaching method I had ever experienced.
I felt another spasm of pain shoot up my side, and I let my mind close in on those memories.
“You flinched.” Herold’s voice held a distinct note of disappointment.
“I didn’t,” I said through clenched teeth. The knife that had so neatly sliced between the two vertebrae of my forearm disappeared in a flash of light. “Son of a bitch,” I gasped. I had worked with Herold long enough that I should have been prepared for the lace of white hot pain that drove up my arm. He used magic to ensure that his students didn’t bleed out during the lessons, but he also didn’t have a problem leaving behind a fresh remnant of the pain to keep you on your toes.
“You’re still blocking yourself,” Herold said with a sigh. He stood up from his seat across the room and moved to the fireplace. He took the poker from the side of the mantle and used it to jostle the dying embers of the fire.
I stiffened in my seat. I had both arms spread out on small tables on either side of my chair. My torso was bare. My feet were strapped tightly against the legs of the chair. Herold told me that he learned long ago that controlling flailing limbs was often one of the more difficult challenges that his students faced. It was also a safety measure. Although Herold kept a safe distance most of the time during the lessons, sometimes his lesson plans required a more ‘hands-on’ approach.
Herold Calvin had been one of those souls that spent most of his years as a human inflicting some of the most horrible pain on other human beings. He went to Hell, and then had some kind of epiphany about his life’s work. He finagled a ‘Get out of Hell’ free card and got spit back out into the human world as a demon. Except he decided to set-up shop teaching others how to mitigate the effects of torture and pain at the most extreme levels. When I decided to go up against Proctor again, that was the kind of skill I needed to have.
It was twisted when you thought about it. Herold had figured out a way to keep feeding his addiction, and people like me actually sought him out and paid him to do it. It was frighteningly brilliant, but based on the testimonials I had heard, also extremely effective. There was no one better to teach me. So while I loathed the bastard, I also needed him.
“I didn’t flinch,” I stubbornly repeated. We had been at it for almost three hours. While Herold had healed my wound every time, my arm still bore a blossoming bruise as a reminder of it. Herold said as long as there weren’t any visible puncture wounds, my body could heal the rest. He had limited healing powers on the best day, and so he kept his efforts at a minimum.
Just before the point of the heated poker split the skin of my sternum, I managed to take a deep breath and stiffen my torso. I expelled the breath even as I felt it ram through me and lodge somewhere inside of me closer to my spine. My eyes never left Herold’s. I watched a slow smile spread across his face.
“Better,” he said with a nod.
“Be less predictable,” I said. The sparring with Herold helped me detach myself from the physical pain that spread through my body. I reached down and grabbed hold of the slim rod and yanked it out of my sternum. I kept my breath steady and focused on the simple inhale and exhale of my breath. Then I dropped the poker onto the floor where it landed with a heavy clang. I returned my hands to the small tables at my side.
“How do you feel?” Herold asked. He stepped closer to me, and I watched his eyes moving up and down my body. I wondered how many times he had asked that question of some poor schmuck while he had been alive. He was practically licking his lips.
“Pissed off,” I said truthfully. “Like I’m being yanked around by some prick who likes to play God.” I leaned over in the chair and pulled on the buckles that held my ankles. As soon as my feet were free, I stood up. Then I allowed myself to look down my chest. The wound was completely closed, and there was nothing but a small drizzle of blood to mark where it had been. “You’re supposed to ask me before you heal me,” I said.
“That wasn’t me,” Herold said. He looked like a fucking Cheshire cat. “I think you’re ready to progress to the next level.”
I frowned. “I don’t have any healing magic,” I said. “How could this be healed if you didn’t do it?”
“It’s an interesting question,” Herold said. He moved quickly to his desk, and I watched as he started to scrawl notes on his pad of paper. “It’s one that I’ve often wanted to study, but there are very few individuals who can actually achieve the kind of control that you just displayed.”
“I’m not controlling anything yet,” I said. “I still feel it every time you decide to poke, prod, crush or hit me over the head with something.”
Herold turned to me with a thoughtful expression. “But yet, when your instinct told you that I was going to attack, you were able to detach yourself from it. That detachment made the whole incident basically cease to exist; thereby it had practically no actual
impact on your body.”
I rubbed my face. It had been a long day, and I wasn’t in the mood for Herold’s fanciful preaching and bullshit theories. “Break it down to actual words that make sense for the common man, Herold.”
“You didn’t require healing because as far as your body is concerned, the wound never happened.”
My jaw went slack. “Come again?”
“This is the pinnacle of anything you could learn from me,” Herold said. “I can teach you how to mitigate pain, but you’ve taken that leaps and bounds further. If you can do what you just did on a regular basis, you’d be practically invincible.”
I stayed with Herold for two more weeks after that, but I wasn’t able to replicate what I had been able to do that one day again. I had no idea how I managed to do what I had done, and I watched as Herold grew increasingly frustrated with me when I couldn’t produce the same effect. We parted company, and I forgot about it.
It was Herold’s lessons that allowed me to keep going, even when wounded, when I knew I needed to fight. As I laid on the cot and felt myself growing weaker by the minute, I couldn’t help but think of the irony. I had known exactly what Benjamin was going to do when he went after Paige. That’s why I had thrown myself in front of her. I willingly took the knife for her to protect her. If I had been able to figure out how to control my body’s reaction like I had done that day with Herold, I wouldn’t be in this mess.
“Riley?” I heard Paige’s voice penetrate my thoughts. I felt the brush of her hair tickle the side of my face as she leaned over me. She smelled like cherry blossoms. “Can you hear me?”
I kept my eyes closed and my breath even. If she thought that I was passed out, hopefully, she’d leave me alone.