by Lisa M Basso
Fornicator fished in his pocket and handed me a foil-wrapped protein bar. One-half of my usual “approved” diet. It was either this or MREs (dehydrated meals ready to eat). And water, but I’d be happier not knowing where exactly Hell got their water supply. Especially since there were people trapped under the ice outside.
“We’re not to be left waiting!” This voice I recognized. Lucien.
Shirtless grabbed my arm and half-lifted me through the next threshold. This room was three times longer and twelve times wider than the entryway. The carved ice pillars were pushed out toward the walls, leaving a free and open feeling. The two men already inside the room gave the opposite feeling.
I shoved the unopened protein bar in the borrowed shirtsleeve.
Lucien stood maybe twelve feet from the man dominating the huge seat carved of ice. Despite the wet sheen coating everything inside, this man’s chair looked as fresh as if it was still a part of a solid glacier. His graying hair swept across a weathered forehead much the same way Lucien’s did. The same side part, on opposite sides. His nose rounded to a narrow hook at the end, emphasizing the fullness of lips so dry they almost looked blue between the cracks.
Instead of worrying and wondering, I jerked my arm out of Shirtless’s grip. Behind him, I spotted Fornicator and two more waiting by the door.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said through tight lips.
“You’re right,” the older man said to Lucien, leaning forward to stretch his tattered black wings behind him. “She isn’t boring.”
Anger burned like acid in my chest.
“A true flush. I haven’t seen that for myself in thousands of years.” His teeth were small and flat, just like his eyes.
Please don’t let this be who I think it is.
“Is this where I die?” I surprised myself by asking.
“That depends on you,” Lucien said.
My head dropped down. Tired. I was so tired of all of this. But if this was how it had to be, then I’d make the most of it. “Then tell me why you brought me here, because it was one hell of a hike.”
“Turn around, girl,” said the older, scarier version of Lucien from his throne of ice.
Defiance crossed my mind and lingered there for a moment before I did what he asked. Choose your battles. It was something Kade told me that reminded me of a speech Dad had given ages ago. Turning in a slow circle showed more of the room, wet patches running down the wall and pooling on the floor beneath the wall-mounted torches, more Fallen guards in the doorway we entered through, and a second doorway in the darkened back corner of the room left unguarded.
His gaze lingered on my shoulders and my small, gray wings. “You are the one my son has been prattling on about. If hearsay of your power is true, why do I not have at least a dozen angels by my feet?” His voice was deep, ancient, yet clear. The sound turned my stomach to jelly. He was most definitely who I had hoped he wasn’t.
“She’s only recently begun to try, father.”
“And whose fault is that?” Lucifer snapped, voice booming before he calmed himself. “Perhaps you weren’t ready for such a large task.”
“We’ve been making progress. There was a slight mishap. She was injured, fatally. I had to dispense more of my essence to keep her alive.”
“Is that how we treat our guests?”
“She refused to cooperate. She’s human, after all, and my essence runs in her veins from birth. Again, she, uh, had an unfortunate mishap just before coming to Hell, where she needed my assistance. She could have died without it. My theory is she may have too much inside her now. It may be hindering her power.”
Lucien conveniently failed to mention I’d used my power shortly after my most recent spasm with death. I wondered why.
“Why would you not tell me this before?” His calm was almost worse than the yelling.
“I have it under control, father. I didn’t want to worry—”
“And what is your suggested solution since you are so obviously wasting my time?”
A chill skittered through me.
“My theory is, if we bleed her, really bleed her, to the point just before death, most of my essence will have worked its course, and then we can try again.”
Lucifer looked me in the eye for the very first time. Deadness loomed in his. “I want to hear from her.”
Lucien eliminated the distance between us in only a few steps and slammed his hand into my back, sending me tumbling forward to my hands and knees. “The King of Hell is speaking to you, and you will respect him!”
Over my shoulder, with my snarled hair blocking all but my view of his mouth, I snapped, “I don’t know what to say!” Then, to Lucifer, I barked, “What exactly do you want me to say? Do I think bleeding me dry—again—is the best solution? Of course not!” Anger, adrenaline, and fire burned through me, purifying so much of what Hell had taken away. A new modicum of strength helped me push myself to my feet.
Lucifer chuckled. “Well, you’ve obviously yet to break her spirit. Show me your power, girl. Use it now.” He reclined back in his seat.
“Now?”
“No time like the present. If you wish to keep your fingers. I assume you won’t need those to manifest this power.”
“Fingers I like,” I said quietly to myself, looking down at my hands. Life, on the other hand…
“Father, if I may.” Lucien approached Lucifer’s throne and spoke in low, quiet tones. “She may be capable of using the power at any moment. I suggest we detain her, store her somewhere close where she can’t hurt anything while we prepare.”
Prepare for what? My heart double-timed in my chest.
Lucifer lifted his head a fraction of an inch. “Done.”
Lucien motioned for the two Fallen to escort me toward the back door of the room.
“And in the future,” Lucifer added to his son, “if you give your opinion when I don’t ask for it again, it will be the last time you speak with that tongue.”
That I liked. Being dragged further into the melting ice castle I could do without.
With one last splash of vigor, I called over my shoulder, “I’ll never do what you want! I’ll die first!”
“Oh, you’ll do exactly what I say, on this I promise.” Lucifer’s voice carried through the long hallway, coated in so much more than threats.
Chapter Seven
Kade
My head throbbed like it had been trampled by a thousand horses. My neck snapped and popped, the bones and muscles fusing themselves back into working order. Nothing in my head worked right. All I could remember was dirt and pain.
My sword clanged in battle, the sound drowned out in the raging battlefield, lost among the thousands fighting for mankind. And against it. Another demon swooped at me. Its long talons caught my left shoulder blade. My wing faltered. The ground met my knees faster than I had anticipated. The next blow came from above, raking across my ear. The ground came up on me again, and again too fast. Dirt coated the wound. The screeching of so many demon cries made me glad I only had to hear them from one ear.
Sandal-clad feet kicked more dirt in my face. Human feet. Drawing my sand-peppered vision up, I stopped at the calves. Black feathers hung behind him. The Forsaken. The sandals kicked again, crushing the bones in my hand until I released the sword I forgot I was holding.
“Warrior,” he said.
“Bastard cast from Heaven,” I fired back.
“Those will be your last words, angel.”
I curled my uninjured wing in front of my body, the gold of the sun reflecting off the brilliant white of my feathers like a patch of still water in an oasis. The killing blow never came. When I opened my eyes again, a brother in white offered his hand, the blade he held red with Forsaken blood.
“Thank you, brother.” I extended my own hand, pulled myself to my feet, and returned to battle.
Brother. Warrior. Angel.
Fallen.
I growled low in my throat. The memories retur
ned in rocket punches to the cerebral cortex.
After good won that battle the world underwent a shift, an undeniable change. Battles dwindled, eventually fading. Which left me, a Warrior angel, with no purpose. Abandoned on Earth, cast off, and resolved to simply watch time pass.
Eventually, after several dozen lifetimes, a woman entered my life, one I could call friend. Her humanity set me afire. I let her too close. Everything inside me switched on only to feel her rejection. Desperation pushed me toward the biggest mistake of my life.
Blackness consumed me. Pain flared in my chest. My back was peeled open. Everything changed when I regained consciousness and peered into a mirror. New scars. New wings. A new life.
Trapping myself in a meaningless existence. I fought for nothing except staying out of their reach. Lucifer. Lucien. Enemies? Brothers? I couldn’t be sure.
Then there was the hunger. So many humans, existing in my life only to sate the hunger. Until a girl emerged, drawing me out of the darkness. Not just a girl, the girl.
Cam, Kay, Azriel, the girl; it was always about the girl.
I was doomed from the start.
The healing pain dulled as the rest of the memories, the unimportant ones, filtered in around the corners of my vision.
To my right a Fallen spoke. “Welcome back. Got all your memories back yet?”
I cleared my throat. Since he wasn’t trying to kill me, I figured this was a safe enough space. For now. I grunted and shook my aching head, such a small movement he wouldn’t have seen it if he wasn’t focused on me.
“It takes a while, or so I’ve heard.”
A scream pierced the darkness. I angled my head toward the sound. Through the gates of our small box, I watched countless people suffer at the hands of a twisted, monstrous creature.
Torture. Screams. Hell. The first trip down had been bad enough. The disturbing images had been among the worst I’d ever seen, and I’d seen a lot.
The circles of Hell had proved themselves far worse than their descriptions. Chaos, torture, and madness ruled here. None of the stories came close.
The third level was fear. I could taste it in the very air.
I gripped the bars surrounding us. The curves and smoothness … femur bones. I released them, but refused to back away, caught up in the torture and screaming from the red-lit level in front of us.
We should be on foot, walking back to the ninth circle, not coasting down in some bone cage.
“You did well up there.”
Up there. Earth? Had I been topside and let it slip away? Some memories still hadn’t returned, but instinct told me enough to know I should be playing along, not fascinated with where we were—and how we’d gotten here.
“If that’s true then why am I back here?” I asked, rubbing my neck.
“You did a little too well. Almost got us caught. We’re trying to blend in up there, assimilate with the humans. But I get it. First taste of freedom in a while. First drink. You’ll still have to answer to Lucien.”
Lucien.
I craned my neck to look up at him. Night black wings, a runner’s frame, short dark hair. No name formed in my head, but I’d seen this face before.
To his right, in a sheltered corner of the contraption, a hint of movement drew my attention. Since the Fallen was studying me, I didn’t dare so much as squint to investigate.
“Is that why we aren’t walking?”
He swallowed. Was that a flash of irritation, or nervousness? “We aren’t walking because you nearly got your head taken off and I wasn’t about to carry you. Same goes for flying.”
“You could’ve had help.” There had to be at least one more of them up there. Even if I’d been lost in a feeding frenzy, I wouldn’t have been snapped up by the likes of him alone. I’d been doing this for too long to be taken out by a single Fallen.
When he didn’t answer, I stretched my neck to the right and then the left, and tried my hand at standing. I had to cling to the femur bars, but managed okay.
Any more questions would only make him jumpier. Which made me think he hadn’t been prepared for me to wake so soon. That could mean maybe I was somewhere I shouldn’t be, looking at things I shouldn’t see. And that probably included whatever had moved in the darkened corner.
The gears screeched as our cage shifted, throwing me into the bars. The red light in the cart faded to blue. In this new light I could make out whatever had moved in the corner. Something very large. A green and purple tint coated its skin. Huge hands wrapped around a lever jutting out from the floor. Even bigger arms bulged from the strain of holding that lever, suspending our descent. The creature was a demon if ever I’d seen one—and according to my piecemeal memory, I had. I followed the thick lines of the demon’s body up. It would tower over the roof on this cage if it hadn’t been hunched forward.
“Brother,” the Fallen warned.
He may or may not have been the one to snap my neck before. Either way, he wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.
I took the warning at face value and turned around to face the sights of Hell again. The elevator resumed its descent. A new scene played itself out. Rain poured down from the blackened ceiling onto the buried heads of souls.
Each circle of hell was more horrifying than the last. That much I remembered from the first trip down here. This level, the fourth, was a special place in Hell for traitors; those who backstabbed their friends, family, entire civilizations. Here you would find Brutus, Benedict Arnold, and probably a few U.S. presidents. Not necessarily the power hungry, but the ones that utilized a different kind of human shield.
“This one’s my favorite,” my companion said. “This is one of the only circles that’s subjective. Most other circles you either committed your crime or you didn’t. Here is the place where you can find some of the worst with some of the best. Word has it there’s a former priest in here somewhere. After raising a particularly entertaining cult he was shot and killed in a police standoff before the Vatican could send in one of their men to save his soul. Now he’s shuffled back and forth between here, the second circle, and the sixth.” The second circle. For thieves. The sixth. For sexual crimes. “Point, Hell.”
The femurvator shook again, shuddering under the no-so-gentle touch of the demon sending it down the shaft. A secret shaft. This had to be Lucien’s secret, how he could meet us near the surface so quickly.
A secret not many knew about. Because it could lead to a way out of Hell.
The bones creaked beneath my tightening grip.
“Careful, brother.” The Fallen’s hand tensed behind his shoulder where he must have had a weapon stored.
His warning burrowed into me. I was unraveling. My truth showing.
“I want to go back up.” I said, disguising my eagerness to leave with an eagerness to feed, both of which raged like wholehearted truth inside me.
“You aren’t ready.”
Five years inside Hell, tortured and used, burbled up in me with the heat of magma. I had never been more ready for anything in life. Spite and agony thundered out in my scream. “I wasn’t done!”
The downward spiral of our bone cage stopped.
“Done is exactly what you will be if you don’t enjoy the ride, Kasade.”
The Fallen’s name came to me, right on the back of my favorite one. But I couldn’t think about her right now. My time was better spent calming down, focusing, playing the game. “Tartys?” I gripped the bone railing again. “What happened up top?”
The tension in his shoulders unraveled. Our elevator resumed its downward curve. “You did well, but lost control. It took four of us to hold you down.”
Good.
The remainder of the ride passed in silence. I turned my back on the remaining circles, doing my best to drown out the screams, each worse than the one before. When the femurvator jolted to its final stop at the bottom of the ninth circle, I had to wait for my surroundings to change before I allowed myself to believe it. Tartys unlatched a fem
ur on the front right side, closer to the creature still cloaked in shadows, and waited for me.
I stole one final glance into the shadows. The demon hunched over against the top of the elevator, the ceiling hitting his shoulders, forcing his neck and part of his back to hunch forward. His head was a yellowish tint, wider than a human head. His nostrils were two slits at each end of his flat, wide nose. Two sets of eyes, the first black and almond shaped, the second set stretching wider below them. Pinkish spots dotted his face and neck, different altogether than the purple spines on his arms. The demon had to be another of Lucien’s pets, if he worked the elevator.
My feet kicked up the sandy ground surrounding the entrance of the ninth circle. I moved slow, hoping Tartys wouldn’t find a reason to reach for the blade strapped beneath his clothes again. He followed me out and turned to latch the gate closed behind him. Even with the shadowed demon no more than ten feet away, I knew if Tartys was suspicious—and if he was smart, he would be—this was my only chance.
I slid toward him, but a noise stopped me. Something deep and reverberating. Nothing I’d ever dare dream of hearing in Hell—let alone the ninth circle.
The faint pounding of drums.
“Good. We’ve arrived just in time for the festivities.” Tartys cleared the latch, and the elevator disappeared. It didn’t wind up the spiral gears, or even move too fast to see. It simply vanished into the bedrock wall.
When Tartys turned, he clapped a hand on my shoulder and spun me around. “It seems you’re in for a treat. Lucien has quite the surprise.”
I stumbled forward purposely, jarring Tartys’s hand loose from my shoulder. With the edge of my wing, I swept his leg out from under him. He hit the floor and immediately moved to stand, but I was already behind him.
“He’s not the only one.” I twisted his neck to the right, then snapped it to the left.
Tartys’ body went limp. I patted him down, finding his weapon tucked closely to his back. I freed the blade and went to work on freeing him of his heart as well.