A Slither of Hope

by Lisa M Basso

  “Oh, darling.” His voice sounded like Dad’s. I turned my head and closed my eyes to stay the tears. “Don’t you wish I had killed him in the first place? It would have saved Daddy so much pain.”

  “You. It was you.” My teeth ground together.

  “Me?” Lucien fluttered Dad’s eyelids and placed an innocent hand across his plaid-covered chest.

  “You put my dad in the hospital!” My short, jagged nails cut into my palms as I made the kind of fist Kade had taught me, with my thumb over my fingers instead of tucked inside.

  “That’s just the beginning of the hurt.” Lucien threw his hand up again, stepping toward Kade. The red lightning sputtered to life again, straight as a tree branch between them.

  Kade crumbled to his knees, his hand slowly sliding down the front of Mom’s headstone. His wings brightened, then dimmed like a light bulb about to pop. He growled, biting back horrific cries of pain. Lucien didn’t stop, even when he blurred out of Dad’s form and into another. He sucked and sucked and sucked from Kade until I feared there would be nothing left.

  I climbed to my feet “Stop!” My scream was lost to the crackling of the lightning and the hum of power. “Stop it you’re—”

  The sand around Lucien hung in the air after he released Kade. The aftermath of the red glow still burned in my retinas. When it faded and the dust settled, what I saw left me speechless.

  I could make out Mom’s long blond hair and her favorite yellow sundress, but everything else was wrong. A blue tint coated her pale skin. Bruise-colored purple filled her cracked lips. Her beautiful eyes were ghost-white and bloodshot. Her slender face was puffy, the perfect complexion I remembered now waxy.

  “The angels did this to me,” Mom said, her voice raspier than I remembered, like she’d spent her dead years, all of them, chain-smoking brimstone.

  I stood there forever. Days. Years. Taking in every part of her, every tiny detail. Tears leaked from my eyes as the shock dissipated. Then the first sob came and ripped me in two.

  “This is what she looked like when I found her.” Lucien’s words came again in Mom’s grating voice.

  I stumbled back, another headstone keeping me on my feet.

  He found her.

  Lucien. It was Lucien, not Mom.

  The fact didn’t sway my hurt any.

  “And you want to help them?” Lucien said through Mom’s dead lips. “The ones that took her away. Over me? I practically gave you life.”

  This lit a fire under me, pushing my anger forward. “My mother gave me life! Not you.” The last tear rolled off my chin and onto my jacket.

  “That may be so, but I’m the only reason you’re still alive now.”

  Lucien, wearing my mother’s dead body around him like a cloak, turned back to Kade and commanded the lightning for a third time. I ducked through the haze of red and the vibrating of skin and bone, running toward Kade who was balled up on the ground. Veins showed through his skin, blue and purple pulsing through what looked like paper. I reached out for him.

  “Don’t touch me!” he ground out.

  Through Lucien’s sand-colored aura, he said, in his own voice, “If I pull much more from him, he’ll be dead. Your decisio-o-o-on.” The vibration around him caught his voice and echoed it through the dark cemetery, illuminated now only by red. Kade’s wings had no silver left.

  I had to do something before Kade faded completely. Go with Lucien or say goodbye to Kade forever. I climbed to my feet and screamed as loud as could, “Stop!”

  The red light bouncing off the headstones faded, leaving the night black as pitch. The clouds above us crackled. Throwing caution aside, I touched the side of Kade’s neck, desperate to feel a pulse. A small jolt of electricity surged from him into me, but I kept my hand in place. Something jumped beneath my fingers. He was alive. I wanted to bend down, to kiss him before my eyes adjusted to the new darkness. I didn’t, though. Lucien had enough leverage on me without knowing my true feelings for Kade. He’d already used Kade against me. I wouldn’t let him get hurt again.

  “If I go with you”—I stood up despite my shaking—“there have to be rules.”

  Walking toward him, I knew I was only getting close enough to fight. He was powerful, but a few good hits could buy Kade and me enough time to start running, and since Lucien didn’t have any wings, it wouldn’t be an unfair race. Unless he had more tricks up his sleeve—which I didn’t doubt.

  This time I would fight, even if it got me killed. This power inside me he wanted so desperately would never be his to control. If I could accomplish only one thing tonight, that would be it.

  Gravel slid under a foot behind me. I startled and turned. In the darkness everything looked the same.

  Lucien’s voice cut through the night, an archaic chant made up of words that didn’t sound rooted in English. I swallowed down a trickle of bile. This specific chant I’d heard before. One that lived in my nightmares. It was the same one Azriel had used to open…

  The ground rumbled, shifting sand and rocks over the toes of my shoes. I locked my knees so they couldn’t melt away beneath me. My breath came quickly. I covered my ears so I wouldn’t hear the continuation of the chant that haunted me, or the ground crumbling away. If only I’d remembered to close my eyes. If only. A bright flash of green shot up into the sky, chasing the clouds directly around it away.

  I would not crumble this time. I would not crumble. I would not.

  In the unending depth of the pit, writhing bodies became shadows against headstones. Lucien stood, his arms wide, waiting to welcome me into Hell.

  Fight him, bite, scratch, kick, do whatever you need to do to get him in that hole. Then grab Kade and run.

  I looked over my shoulder at Kade. He was struggling to his feet, using the nearest grave marker as a crutch. Dust covered his jacket and jeans. The green light bounced off his wings, making his features hard to see, except his eyes. I made sure I could see his eyes, and that he saw me, before I barreled toward Lucien.

  My footsteps were loud, clunky things amidst the freshly disturbed dirt. Lucien waited. I attempted my first jump kick. My foot connected with his chest while he sidestepped. With one downward stroke, he knocked my foot out of the air, locking it between his hands. As I fell to the ground he held fast and twisted, snapping my ankle. I screamed. He didn’t release my leg.

  This was when I remembered Kade’s last lesson. Don’t charge in if you don’t need to. Great.

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” Lucien bellowed. “You may be important, Pet, but not irreplaceable!” He wrenched my foot the other way.

  Kade screamed something I couldn’t hear.

  Panicked cries ripped from my throat, competing with the snap of bone and sinew. I writhed on the ground beneath Lucien, fresh tears streaming from my eyes. My body undulated before him, nothing but agony filling me, expanding my insides so they could be ripped apart by another slow, torturous twist. I bit down on my lip to keep consciousness close, my teeth ripping through the sensitive skin. My head swam in the green light behind Lucien, the shadows of hands reaching for freedom.

  Lucien’s fingertips tightened along the heel of my foot. “It’s a sixty-six day journey to the center of the nine circles. And that’s without having to deal with human limitations like food and sleep. Your injury will make the travel excruciating.” He tilted my foot this way and that, watching with a smile as I curled and groaned. His earlier playful veneer had been scraped away with acid and nails. Lucien was all Prince of Hell now.

  Kade shouted again.

  I couldn’t register his words; I had to focus on staying awake. My enemy was powerful, but I wasn’t out of tricks yet.

  As soon as he laid off on the twisting and the stars from my eyes cleared, I tucked my free leg in, winding up, and kicked my foot against the front of his kneecap.

  Dizzy from the effort, I couldn’t watch his reaction. My vision tunneled. I had to blink several times to stave it off. At this point all I coul
d feel was pain, but my foot must have been freed. No one could have survived that and still be… I blinked and focused to find him still standing above me. Ridges ruffled beneath his widening nose as his nostrils flared. His hands tightened on my foot. That couldn’t be possible. His knee was untouched when it should have been hyper-extended. I wished I could say the same for his ego.

  “That isn’t going to bode well for you, Pet.”

  His nails dug into me, growing in length and width, ripping into my foot. My voice abandoned me, altering my shouts to screeches. I dared to look up, to see how he could possibly be splitting my foot apart. Talons had replaced his fingers. The wide, blunt claws tore deeper into me. The skin along his arm brightened. Hues of purple and green appeared. Scales rippled up from beneath the flesh. Scales. A hint at his true form, not the human pelt he wore. His smile turned to a sneer.

  Kade slid to my side. “That’s enough!” He stumbled, trying to pull himself up. Lucien rammed his steel-toed cowboy boot into Kade’s stomach, sending him back to the ground.

  “Why shouldn’t I kill you both right now?” he snarled, his new second row of teeth sharper than the first.

  The sweat coating my entire body chilled as the unforgiving fall air blew.

  “You need her,” Kade ground out, fighting to regain his breath. “The angels know about her now. If you kill her it will be impossible to find another like her.” He rolled, climbing to his knees and clenching his side with one arm draped across his stomach.

  Lucien dug deeper into me, his claws grazing my bones. He wound his leg back. I tried to warn Kade, but nothing was left of my voice but screams. Lucien’s boot connected with the bottom of Kade’s jaw. Kade never saw it coming. His head flew back. A spray of blood shot into the air. He landed with a thump, flat on his back, sprawled out in the grit and sand. This time he didn’t move.

  I cried out again, this time for Kade.

  “Not impossible,” Lucien said, his voice calmer as he twisted his talons left, then right inside of me. “Now tell me, Pet. Do you want to die?”

  Death would be a blessing after the pain he’d inflicted, but I couldn’t give up. Not when Kade needed me. I gathered my strength, shook my head once, twice, and then dropped it back on the ground, panting from the effort.

  “The…” Kade crawled to me on his stomach. “The angels are on to you now. If you try putting this thing into another human they’ll be ready. Waiting.”

  The twisting stopped. “You have a point. I can always get her to cooperate one way or another.” The purple and green mutated scales on his face and hands reverted to normal skin. His teeth retracted, disappearing into his gums. Lucien released my foot and shoved it to the ground. It bounced off the hard ground, sending fresh shockwaves up my leg.

  I squirmed and cried out, pulling my knee to my chest and rolling to my side. Kade crawled closer, his stomach scraping along the ground. He brushed my hair away from my face, his fingers lingering at my temple. A soft touch to offset a violent one. Blood coated his lower lip, his chin, and his neck. He gently rubbed my back. The pain transported me back to an afternoon on Kade’s bed, when Lee had done the same for Gina. That one almost imperceptible gesture opened my eyes to their relationship, had told me they were more than friends, that Lee would do anything to take her pain away. Fresh tears rippled my vision, but I didn’t need a clear line of sight to know that Kade would look different in my eyes.

  “I’m so sorry,” I managed to choke out.

  His face smoothed out. He opened his mouth, looking like he had something important to say. Instead his fingers squeezed my shirt.

  Lucien circled around, stepping just above our heads. “But what’s to stop me from killing you, Fallen One?”

  “No,” I ground out. “I’ll go with you…”

  “Of course you will.”

  Kade released me, trying and failing four times to get to his knees before he managed it. “Kill me if you want.”

  “What?” I angled my head around to look up at him, the action bringing on a fresh round of pain.

  The smile on Lucien’s face tripled the goose bumps on my flesh.

  “But do it after.”

  Lucien’s eyes narrowed at Kade. “After what?”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “You would sacrifice yourself to the nine circles?”

  “Where she goes, I go.” Kade’s voice was strong, sure.

  Lucien flashed a cold glance at Kade. “I will bring you along, but only because it’s been too long since I’ve enjoyed watching your kind suffer.” Kade slid his hand behind him and removed something from his boot.

  “Holy hell, that’s a huge knife!” I said without really meaning to, the pain making me loopy. There were several spots of something reddish looking along the serrated edges. Rust, I hoped.

  Lucien raised an unimpressed eyebrow and said, “When you Fell and I gifted you with new wings and inserted that heart in your chest, I placed a tiny piece of myself inside you. Does loyalty mean nothing anymore?” His voice tipped in mock resentment.

  Lucien bent down, snatching the knife from Kade so quickly I didn’t see it change hands. He flipped the blade downward, the handle firmly in his grip. Kade leapt for it. Lucien moved, a blur of speed. Kade landed on the other side of him, his hand covering his right shoulder where blood pumped from a fresh wound. Kade lost his balance and met the floor again, half sitting, half collapsed, and half conscious.

  “I am the one in charge!” Lucien bellowed, his cool, controlled façade in pieces around him. His stance was low and animalistic, his eyes wide and wild. “The next one goes in her throat!” He breathed deeply, straightening up, and smoothed the front of his hair down on his forehead.

  I covered my mouth with my hand to keep from screaming, smearing sand over my lips. Kade’s wings had dimmed again, which made him hard to see in the green light.

  Lucien wiped the knife clean on the side of his pants, then wiggled his fingertip in a semi-circle on the knife’s tip. When he was satisfied, he dropped the knife to the side and held up his finger. A puncture the size of a dime had been drilled into it. No blood poured from the wound. It was just an empty, gaping hole, not unlike the one behind him. He squeezed the flesh around his finger. A single reddish-pink pearl of smoke drifted out of the wound. Lucien walked around me.

  He crouched down and set the pearl of non-blood on my shredded foot. I whimpered but kept still, afraid of what he might do next to Kade next if I objected. The smoke hovered there for several seconds before swaying, then floating into one of the many gashes. Instantly the area warmed, reminding me of the day on the roof when a feather from my wings healed my cut and brought my rose bush back to life.

  “You now have more of me inside you than anyone alive ever has, Pet.”

  The wings. The flower. Lucien had been inside me all along. His “gift”, my power, had to have a piece of him in it. And now there was more. So much more. I could feel it healing my foot, snapping things back in place inside my ankle. Living there, mingling with my blood, fusing with my body. I rolled to my side. Sickness churned my stomach and crawled along my skin. No matter what happened, if I was alive, I was a piece of him.

  “Up.” Lucien held his hand out to me. The madness in his eyes left me cold.

  I looked in Kade’s direction, satisfied by a faint twinkle of green reflecting from his wings, before accepting Lucien’s hand. He pulled me to my feet. I hobbled a little at first, testing my leg by putting very little weight on it. I wasn’t wholly healed, but I could limp. Behind me my wig lay on the ground, ripped off sometime when Lucien had claws in me.

  Lucien left my side and cartwheeled over to Kade, his impish behavior back in a snap. “Your sacrifice comes with a price, Kasade. You will be expected to pull your weight.”

  I could only guess what that meant.

  Kade said, “I figured as much.” With one hand still on his shoulder, he climbed to his feet, looking as steady as I was, a tripod missing two
legs.

  “If you step one toe out of line—”

  “I. Get. It,” Kade bit out.

  Lucien grabbed Kade by the jacket and hauled him past me toward the entrance of Hell.

  My heart echoed in my chest, but I followed as best I could. “You can’t let him come,” I pleaded with Lucien in a last-ditch effort.

  “Let him?” Lucien whirled around to trap my wrist in an iron grip. He towed me forward, causing me to stumble.

  “You’re wasting your breath, Ray,” Kade said, steadier than I expected his voice to sound. “No way you’re going down there without me.”

  Lucien released me and stood at the edge of the Earth. “I may be made of time, but I’m out of patience. Pet, do you willingly choose to enter Hell of your own free will?”

  That was right. He had to ask, otherwise I’d die down there. I limped to the edge of the green pit, putting myself between Lucien and Kade. “I…I…have to. So, yes.” I touched my hair, mine, not the wig. At least I’d get to be myself again, if only for a little while.

  Kade leaned in and whispered while he took my hand. “But you don’t have to do it alone.” Looking into his face, I saw more of him than I ever had before. My heart swelled. I squeezed his hand tighter, closed my eyes, and we walked into Hell, together.

  Chapter Thirty

  Kade

  Rayna took the first step. Just like that. Without needing to be prodded or threatened. She kept her head high, her eyes wide open, and willingly walked—limped—into Hell. With our fingers entwined, determined to hold on to her for all sixty-six days of our journey if I had to, I followed her into the green pit.

  The ninety-degree drop-off led to at least a five-story fall. I kicked my wings out and held tighter to Ray. I couldn’t fly, but gliding us to the bottom would save her from more pain. Rayna disappeared over the drop. Her hand remained in mine. Half a step behind her, the world tilted when my foot landed on what should have been the side of the drop-off. Like the staircases angled in all different directions in that famous work of art, gravity had been tweaked. The sides had become the floor.