That was what I wanted.
That is not what happened.
“You go, I go,” he replied.
I offered a small smile that tried to say how sorry I was for doing this to him. How grateful I was that he remained here. How much I loved him, no matter what was about to happen. How that one kiss from him had been worth a lifetime of kisses from someone else.
He squeezed my hand and the time for hesitating was over. The portal would only stay open for as long as the fire burned. And the flames were dwindling with every second that ticked by.
My foot lifted off the ground, Jet mirrored me.
We stepped through the portal.
And landed right in the middle of Hell.
Chapter Fifteen
The first thing I noticed was the heat.
It felt like a billion suns were shining their rays directly onto my skin. Every moment burned like I would be nothing but crisp bacon any second now.
The heat wrapped around me like a suffocating cocoon. I was in the middle of an oven, roasting like a Sunday dinner. All my insides were going to liquefy – if I didn’t melt into a puddle first.
My hands were so sweaty they had to really work to undo the buttons of my coat. Jet already had his off by the time I was on my second button.
“Here, let me help,” he said, shooing my fingers away. He undid each button in turn, helping me to finally shrug out of my jacket only seconds before it set me alight.
“Thanks.”
“I had hoped I would be undressing you under different circumstances.” His cheek dimpled when he smiled. I was so grateful for his presence there with me.
“Keep dreaming,” I replied, unable to keep the grin from my face.
After we stripped down to only the barest of clothes – Jet in his shirt and boxers and me in my singlet, bra, and jeans – I finally looked around and took in our surroundings.
It was worse than the heat.
The wall we had stepped through had vanished.
There was nothing but plains of desolation and desert in every single direction. They went on forever with nothing more than heavy rocks and boulders to dot the landscape. There would be absolutely no respite from the harsh heat.
“Which direction?” Jet asked, holding a hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun that wasn’t actually anywhere. His white shirt was clinging to the muscles of his chest. Under other circumstances it would have been highly distracting.
Now, I just tried my best to avoid looking at anything below his face.
I closed my eyes for a moment, wondering if I would be able to sense Kostucha. I felt nothing. Which shouldn’t have surprised me. It wasn’t like we had a psychic bond or anything. He was a demon, I was a girl who saw dead people. That was the extent of the connection.
I shrugged. “No idea. I guess we just start walking and hope we get lucky.”
“As good a plan as any.”
There was no way to tell north from south or east from west. Not that it really mattered. As long as we weren’t walking around in a circle, we were doing well.
One foot in front of the other. That’s all I needed to do. The dagger in my sweaty hand felt reassuring. I didn’t need to wonder whether I would be able to put it through the demon.
I knew I would.
Without hesitation.
My mission was clear cut. There was no time to be squeamish or question my morals. Kostucha was a demon and he had to die. I would plunge the blade into him until he was gone. It was that simple.
I suddenly stopped.
“Did you hear that?” I tilted my head, straining to hear what had stopped me.
Jet’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “Hear what?”
“I thought I heard voices.”
No, I had heard voices.
Not just one, but many. So many they were indistinguishable, just a mass of noise that was speaking nonsense. It had whispered past me and was gone again in a heartbeat.
I shook my head, it had to be the place playing tricks on me. I couldn’t see anything but sand and rocks. There was nobody to speak or whisper or beg or plead.
We started walking again. I couldn’t let the place get to me. We were in Hell, there was no telling what kinds of tricks the place would play on us.
“Please… Help… Me...”
That was not my imagination.
In the blink of an eye, they appeared. We were instantly surrounded by thousands of people. Most were sprawled on the ground in nothing but tattered rags. Their skin clung to their bones like they hadn’t eaten in years, leaving their eyes popping out in large spheres.
Their eyes were the worst.
They betrayed all of their emotions. Despair. Pain. Hopelessness. Agony. They had given up on finding peace or a way out of Hell.
I wondered what all these people had done in their lives to end up in a place like this. Were they murderers? Did they abuse kids? What kind of horrible acts did they do to deserve this punishment?
Then I remembered all the innocent souls Kostucha had dragged into Hell with him. Perhaps these people had done nothing wrong in their lives. Perhaps they attended church every week, helped the unfortunate, obeyed every single rule ever written.
I wanted to drop to my knees and cry. I wanted to scream and yell about how unfair all this was. That even the worst of souls were surely capable of redemption and they shouldn’t have to suffer like this for eternity.
Jet’s hand was on my back, centering me. “Can you see them?” I asked, my voice barely more than a whispered croak. Partly from lack of water, mostly from horror.
“All the people? Yeah, I see them,” he replied, in a tone of voice that told me he was screaming with the same thoughts I was.
“Help me.”
“Get me out of here.”
“Please, help.”
“I can’t… breathe.”
“I’ve been here too long.”
“We’ve all been here too long.”
“We need to keep going,” Jet said, keeping his hand on me and gently pushing me forward. He was right. Jet was always right. If I listened to him more often, I might have been more sensible.
I might not have run off to Hell.
I’m not even sure how my feet managed to move but they did. We walked through the bodies, sometimes even having to step over them to keep going. They were nothing more than piles of bones, held together in a skin bag, and tied with teeth that opened only to scream.
“Is this what the spirits look like?” Jet asked after we had walked in silence for too long.
“No, not like this. This is… wrong.”
“Describe them to me.”
He was purposefully distracting me but I let him. I needed to be distracted.
“They look like normal people, just like they did when they died. Sometimes I think they’re all real until I remember the Event.”
“How can you tell the difference then?”
“The spirits are slightly see-through. They also shimmer with the tiniest of lights when they move. Plus, they can’t hold anything so they go through walls and stuff.”
“That must be weird to watch.”
He had no idea.
I let out a laugh, despite myself. “Yeah, it’s weird. None of this is exactly conducive to sanity.”
“I guess not.”
The landscape stretched on forever, the ground littered with souls of the damned. If Kostucha was here, he could be anywhere. For all I could tell, we might have to walk until our feet were mere stumps before finding him.
Perhaps not even then.
The whole concept was hopeless.
I stopped, letting my body sag with the full weight of the despair filling me. Jet stepped in front of me, resting a hand on each of my shoulders. I didn’t want to look at him because I knew what he was going to say but there was nowhere else to look without seeing something twisted and horrible.
He was like a vision of an angel in amongst demons.
“We have to keep going,” he said. “If we stop we’re going to drop down and never get up again. That is what’s happened to all these people. They’ve given up. We don’t have that luxury.”
“We’re never going to find him.”
“Yes, we are. You said it yourself, there is no other option here. We find Kostucha and we kill him.”
It sounded so simple.
No other option.
I wished someone would tell my body that.
My mouth was so parched and dry that it barely worked. What I wouldn’t do for even a drop of water. I had to lick my lips just to get them moving. “So we just keep walking?”
The sweat was trickling down the side of his face, creating a streak of moisture that I envied. “We keep walking. We don’t give up.”
“Please… Help… Me.” The spirit by my foot reached up and grabbed my leg. His fingers gripped me so tightly I couldn’t move. His hazel eyes were nothing more than colored hollows.
I tried to shake him off but couldn’t wrench out of his grasp. “Let me go. I’m trying to help everyone, okay? But I need to go.”
“I want to go home.” Every word cost him a breath he didn’t have. If his lungs burned even half as badly as mine I could understand.
Jet went to step between us but my arm shot out to stop him. Instead, I crouched down by the man’s side. “I want to go home, too. Believe me. But I need to find a demon first. Do you know where Kostucha is?”
His eyes roamed everywhere, travelling a thousand miles before they returned to me. “He’s been here before. He’s a speck in the dust. They call him the Eater, he twists in the knife and doesn’t let go.”
“That sounds like the demon, where can I find him?” I tried to keep the impatience and urgency out of my voice. Failed miserably.
“He’s everywhere. He’s nowhere.”
“He has to be somewhere.”
The man’s hands left my leg to cover his eyes as he started rocking back and forth violently. Whatever he could hear, it was painful and turning his brain into mush.
I’d seen that kind of behavior before.
Which meant Kostucha was close by.
The demon enjoyed hurting people, especially the seemingly corrupt souls of adults. He always messed with sound waves, tuning into a frequency only those over the age of eighteen could hear.
I turned back to leave and almost fell over Jet. He was doubled over, covering his ears as his face twisted with pain.
“Jet!” I bent over him, my hand on his back as I tried to rub away the pain. It was completely useless but there was nothing else I could think of to help him. “What can I do? Tell me what I can do!”
His teeth clenched together as he tried to breathe through the pain inside his head. I could only imagine the kind of hurt he was experiencing.
Looking around, all the souls were doing the same thing. Lost in a world of their own while they tried to survive the agony. Jet tried to stay on his feet, swaying against me. He was eighteen, no longer immune to the weapons of Kostucha.
My heart broke for them all.
It strengthened my resolve. If the demon was trying to scare me off, he had failed. I was on his trail and I was going to hunt him down until only one of us survived.
Whatever noise was holding them all hostage suddenly released them. The souls slumped to the ground, trying to pull their bodies back together again.
Jet’s hands rested on his knees, holding himself up as he gasped to fill his lungs with oxygen. There was no air around us, everything felt stale and dry.
My hand continued to draw circles on his back. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
He shook his head in response.
I waited like a useless piece of clay.
We stood there for an interminable amount of time. Not because it was hot or boring. But because the noise must have hurt Jet deeply for him to admit his need to recover.
He finally stood, nodding his head and wincing from the effort. “I’m okay, let’s keep going.”
“We don’t have to. We can wait, rest.”
“No, we have to go.”
I didn’t argue. We started walking again, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other until my body could do it automatically.
Jet’s hand rested in my own, reminding me I wasn’t alone. Every time I stole a glance at him he looked troubled. We were both sweaty but we didn’t mind. In a place like Hell, you didn’t want to be alone.
We may as well have been on a treadmill for the amount of progress it felt like we were making. The scattering of bodies all looked the same, the landscape never changed. If Hell was walking in a hamster wheel then we were there.
“Wait a second,” Jet said in the silence. He took his hand back and pulled off his soaked shirt. Tucking it into the waistband of his boxer shorts, he took my hand back again. “That’s better.”
Jet with a shirt was distracting enough.
Jet without a shirt was like looking at the sun.
The heat was stifling though. If we were taking the opportunity to strip down then it had to be my turn. I peeled off my jeans, they clung to my skin the entire way down.
Standing there in only my blue singlet, bra, and panties, I felt naked. But it was so much cooler I didn’t care. If we kept going for much longer, naked might even be a perfectly reasonable option.
Jet grinned, all kinds of wicked thoughts running through his head. “Much better.”
“Quit looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
I rolled my eyes and we started walking again. It didn’t take long for my naked legs to feel too hot again. Still, it was a thousand times better without the jeans.
We passed a set of boulders so large we couldn’t see over the top of them. The largest stood at least a foot taller than Jet. My hopes soared with the thought that there might be some shade behind them, even though there was no actual sun causing the heat.
The pace stepped up as we moved around them, Jet just as excited as I was at the prospect of having somewhere to stop and rest for a moment. We had to have been walking for at least a day. If not longer.
It felt like weeks.
Months.
Years.
There was a body sprawled along the bottom of the boulders. She was smaller than the ones we’d been stepping around. Her long hair covered her face as she lay in the fetal position, holding her knees underneath her arms.
She was lying so still I would have thought she was dead if I didn’t already know she was. Her little body was no bigger than that of a child. What could a kid have done to end up in such a place?
Evil reigned supreme.
It had to for tragedies such as this to be present.
Her fingers twitched as we approached. I didn’t want to disturb her from her own private hell but we did need to rest. Jet slumped against a boulder until he was sitting on the dirt floor.
I couldn’t stop staring at the little girl. She was like an abandoned doll, lying there alone with nothing and no-one. She was the absolute portrait of desolation and hopelessness. I wanted to hug her, whisper that it would be all right, and give her all the comfort I could possibly give.
She shifted, a shudder running through her skinny body. She was wearing a pink T-shirt that was far too big for her. It was more of a dress, really. Her feet were bare and her maple syrup colored hair was messy and strewn with dirt.
She had been there a long time.
The girl released her legs and stretched them before rolling onto her back. One arm went up to cover her eyes from a sun that didn’t exist. Her hair fell away from her face.
I gasped.
I recognized her.
She was my sister.
Chapter Sixteen
“Faith?” Her name stuck to my mouth, caught in my throat. I didn’t want to let myself believe it was her.
But I would recognize my sister anywhere.
The little girl opened her eyes, blin
ked up at me like she couldn’t work out what I was. I had never seen her look that way before, she was so… vacant, distant.
Gone.
“Faith, it’s me, Everly. I’m really here.” The words sobbed out of me like an icy river.
Her pink tongue skimmed her lips, first the top and then the bottom. “Everly?” Her voice was barely audible, nothing more than an expelled breath.
Jet crawled over, his gaze going back and forth between us like we were playing tennis.
“Yeah, it’s Everly.”
She tried to sit up, her bones creaking with the movement. I was instantly at her side, helping steady her until she was leaning against the boulder. It took all the strength she had left.
“Are you okay?” I asked. It didn’t seem appropriate. Clearly, she wasn’t okay. But I didn’t know the extent of her condition, I wasn’t sure exactly how long she had been there.
“It hurts,” she whispered. I had to lean in closer just to be able to hear her. Jet did the same until we were at risk of crowding her. Considering I wanted to wrap my arms around her tiny body and never let go, we were doing well.
“I know it does,” I said, my heart finding a whole new way of breaking. “But I’m here now and I’m going to stop the demon that is hurting you. Okay? I promise you I’m going to make it better.”
She nodded her fragile little head.
“How long have you been here?” I asked. It was only the first of hundreds of questions I had for her. I was going to have to ration them.
“I… I don’t know. It feels like forever.”
“I’m so sorry you are going through this.”
Her cracked lips formed only the barest of smiles. “It’s okay.”
It wasn’t okay.
It wouldn’t be until I killed Kostucha.
Faith’s gaze wandered from me to Jet. She blinked a few more times before she could really focus on him. “I know you.”
He cleared his throat before speaking so gently my heart swelled for him all over again. “I was there when you…”
“When I died,” she finished. “Yeah, you were. I remember your eyes, I remember thinking how kind they looked. They were the last thing I saw before I went.”
We Are Always Forever Page 15