by Susan Ee
‘Take the sword,’ I say. We haven’t tested out whether Pooky would take him back. But as he zigzags, avoiding the Pit lord’s charge, I decide this isn’t the best time to test it.
Raffe spins in midair. A wall of fire comes at us as the Pit lord sweeps his enormous wings toward us.
I swing my blade as hard as I can. I can feel the surge of excitement coming through the blade as Pooky gets a chance to cut into a Pit lord.
The blade slices through the fire. A piece of the flames cleaves off and tumbles down.
The Pit lord bellows as he watches a part of his wing crash onto the ground, spraying embers everywhere.
He whips his wings frantically, trying to stay up, but his wings are now uneven, and he begins spiraling. Raffe presses our advantage and flies up to him.
I slice at the first thing I can reach. Another piece of the Pit lord’s wing blazes down.
And he tumbles from the sky.
39
As soon as we land, I start sweating from the heat. I can’t help but cover my nose even though it does nothing against the rotten-egg stench.
The Pit lord has landed and rolled. The fire in his wings has sputtered out, leaving dead-looking wings that are burned to leathery husks. He’s bleeding from both wings.
He yells a command, and the hellions and Consumed gather near him. The hellions watch their master fearfully, looking ready to bolt any minute, while the Consumed seem insanely excited at the prospect of bodies.
Watchers land all around us, forming a protective circle.
They have no weapons, and most of them have ugly wounds, some of them severe, but that doesn’t stop them from looking fierce. To my surprise, Beliel is one of them. He stares blindly ahead, ready to battle for Raffe.
I look at our crew and compare them to the Pit lord’s gang. I give us a good chance of beating the Pit lord, assuming none of his friends are heading our way to join the fight.
‘Oh, I miss my blade,’ says Cyclone, looking at mine with longing. ‘The damage we could do here if we’d only been able to keep our swords.’
‘That’s exactly why the swords have to reject us, my brother,’ says Howler. ‘Nobody wants Pit lords wreaking havoc with an army of Fallen armed with their swords.’
‘You may think you’re stronger, Archangel,’ says the Pit lord. ‘But my Pit lord brethren are on their way right now. They all saw us fighting in the sky.’
‘They won’t be here in time to save you,’ says Cyclone.
The Pit lord makes a noise like a thousand snakes slithering over dead leaves. ‘But if you take the time to fight me instead of flying away, the other lords will kill you,’ says the Pit lord. ‘So we have a deadlock.’
He sweeps his burned and sputtering wings forward, then back, as if trying them out. The cut sections bleed all over the ground. ‘I find that I’m in need of a new pair of wings.’
He looks over at Raffe’s wings, which are magnificent beside the Watchers’ mangy ones. ‘Yours are quite nice. A Pit lord with a set of archangel wings would be both respected and feared. There would be much speculation about how he came to possess them. Care to make a deal?’
Raffe laughs.
‘Think on it. No angel becomes an archangel without ambition. Ambition sometimes requires deceit. Sometimes, it requires an army. I can offer both.’
‘Deceit can be found everywhere,’ says Raffe. ‘And it’s freely given.’
‘But an army – now that’s worth something. I have several for rent. For the right price. Interested?’
‘Not for my wings. No one’s ever taking those from me.’ He doesn’t say again.
‘Perhaps you’ll have something else I might want one day.’ The Pit lord looks pointedly at me. ‘If you’re ever interested in something I can provide in exchange for . . .’ – he shrugs – ‘something I want, just bite into this.’
He tosses a small, round item strung on a thong. Raffe doesn’t bother to catch it, and it lands at his feet. It looks like a strung-up dried apple. Dark and wrinkly. I’m not sure I’d eat it if I were dying of starvation.
‘When you bite into it, it’ll bring me to wherever you are so we can talk details,’ says the Pit lord as he climbs onto his chariot.
Cyclone takes a step toward the chariot. The Pit lord’s hellions and Consumed bare their teeth at him.
Raffe puts out a hand to stop him. ‘We’re not here to fight.’
‘He’s only offering a bargain to save face,’ says Cyclone. ‘He won’t win this, and he knows it.’
‘Neither will we.’ Raffe nods to the sky. Three chariots fly toward us. Behind them is a cloud of hellions.
The Pit lord in front of us cracks his whip at the angels harnessed to his chariot. The Consumed whip heads cut into the angels, who are drenched with bloody sweat trickling down their hard bodies. They take off into the air.
As soon as the chariot is on its way, the Watchers circle Flyer, who is lying on the ground. His back is clearly broken, by the look of the unnatural bend of his body.
His head shifts back and forth on the ground, so I assume he’s alive. But as we lean over him, the shifting motion of his head becomes more and more wrong.
His neck tears, bubbling blood.
I jump back.
Teeth gnaw out from the inside of Flyer’s neck, quickly chewing through. A Consumed whip head covered in blood emerges from Flyer’s neck.
I look away, wishing I could wipe out what I just saw. From the edge of my vision, I see Cyclone grab a rock and hoist it above his head. Then I hear a wet crunch.
Everyone’s shoulders seem to slump at the same time.
‘You have to get us out of here, Commander,’ says Hawk with heavy sadness in his voice. ‘This isn’t how we were meant to die.’
40
We move out of the area before the other Pit lords arrive. Some of us walk, while some of us fly low and scout ahead.
I keep expecting someone to ask about my sword, but no one does. The Watchers seem a little shell-shocked after seeing Flyer die. It’s like tragedy happens too often yet they still can’t accept it.
The broken street we’re on ends abruptly as the town ruins disintegrate into a rocky desert. I keep an eye out for hellions to catch along the way, but I don’t see any. They must have either run off or been recruited to fight for the Pit lords when they were gathering to come at us.
The sky is changing into what I guess is the equivalent of daylight here. Instead of the purple black I’d seen earlier, there’s now a red glow casting a fiendish tint over the desert – not quite night, not quite day.
One of the Watchers sighs beside me. ‘Most of us made it through another night.’
‘Let’s go back into that street tonight,’ says another. ‘Safer there.’
I throw them a sidelong glance. They have fresh gashes across their faces and arms. One of them is limping and bleeding from a missing chunk out of his leg.
‘How long have you guys been here?’ I ask.
The guys give me weary looks as if to say forever.
‘No idea,’ says one. ‘Since before I was born, I think.’
We walk onto an outcropping of rocks. The desert is full of weird rock towers spiraling up to the red sky, twisted and tortured. In the distance, there are ruins of cities. One of them is on fire, with black smoke rising to the sky.
‘What are those?’ I ask. ‘Are they cities?’
‘Once,’ says Thermo. ‘They’re just death traps now. They used to be hellion cities.’
I turn to Beliel. ‘I thought you said the hellions weren’t much of anything before the Fallen came?’
Beliel sneers. ‘You think it excuses their torture of innocent people just because they used to have cities?’
‘They must have had a nice little primitive society here,’ says Thermo. ‘Lucifer and his army put them in their place quickly enough though.’
Things begin to come together in my head. ‘Is that why they love torturing the newly Fa
llen?’
‘Who knows why they do the things they do,’ says Beliel. ‘They should be exterminated, not analyzed.’
‘Whatever they used to be, they’ve devolved into lower-class animals,’ says Thermo. ‘I doubt they have any motive other than instinct.’
‘But the newly Fallen are the only angels or demons that they can torment, right?’ I ask. ‘They’re afraid of the seasoned Fallen, aren’t they?’
‘They’d be afraid of us too if the Pit lords weren’t using them to torture us. If there’s one pleasure the Pit lords give them, it’s the job of tormenting us during initiation.’
I nod. Maybe the hellions were so gleeful in hurting Beliel because torturing the newly Fallen is the only revenge they can get for the destruction of their world.
If this keeps up, I’m going to end up like Paige and start talking crazy about having respect for all living things, even for things as hideous as hellions.
The old Paige, I mean.
I watch the smoke rising above the ruined hellion city and wonder how she’s doing. Is Mom okay? Is the Resistance still holding it together? Will I ever get back to them?
The Watchers look each other over in the brightening light, assessing themselves for injuries. They look the most carefully at Raffe, but not to see if he’s hurt. They seem to just be assessing him.
Raffe is the only one of them who is whole, uninjured, and fully winged with healthy feathers. He stands tall and muscular, with no scars or scabs on his powerful body.
The only thing marring his appearance is the dried-fruit necklace that the Pit lord gave him. One of the Watchers had picked it up off the ground, telling Raffe that it could be used to show that a Pit lord favored him. I think it looks like a dead mouse dangling off his neck.
‘We thought we’d never see you again, Commander,’ says Thermo. ‘We thought we were forsaken.’
‘We always knew we were meant to be forsaken,’ says Howler, ‘but it’s a different thing when it actually happens.’
‘What’s happening topside?’ asks Thermo.
Raffe tells them about Messenger Gabriel dying, Uriel expediting an election by creating a false apocalypse, the invasion on our world, and what happened with his wings.
While he’s talking to them, I watch Beliel. Like the others, he’s handsome, masculine, and torn up. But unlike the others, he looks toward Raffe with a conflicting mix of hope and anger.
‘You’re here to take us back with you, right?’ asks Beliel. ‘We’re not fully Fallen yet. We still have some of our feathers even.’ Some of the others chuckle like that’s a joke.
Beliel strokes the remaining patches of sunset feathers on his wing. ‘They’ll grow back once they can see real sunlight again. Won’t they?’
‘Let us help,’ says Hawk. ‘Give us a mission.’
‘Let us earn our way back, Commander,’ says Cyclone. ‘We’re wasted down here.’
Raffe takes a good look at them. He looks at their tufts of feathers and splintered wing bones sticking out at odd angles. He looks at their skinned limbs and gnarled wounds. I can see in his eyes that it hurts to see his loyal soldiers like this.
‘What happened to the others?’ asks Raffe. He looks at the dozen or so Watchers around us.
‘They have their own journeys to travel now.’ Thermo’s voice holds a world of sadness.
So if we brought them back, it’d be a dozen Watchers against a hundred of Uriel’s angels.
‘Where are the hellions?’ I ask.
‘They’re the least of our worries,’ says Beliel.
I look around at the barren landscape. No hellions in sight. ‘I need them. I might be able to use them to get out of here.’
They all stare at me.
‘Have you even been here long enough to be this crazy?’ asks Little B.
‘That’s how we got here,’ I say. ‘The hellions can jump in and out through my sword, and I grabbed one to hitch a ride.’ I shrug. ‘I guess you guys never held a sword on a demon long enough to do this before.’
‘It only takes a second to kill one,’ says Raffe. ‘No reason to pause before skewering him.’
There’s a moment of silence as they stare at me, then they look at each other.
I brace for the barrage of questions, but all they ask is, ‘Can we catch a ride too?’
I glance at Raffe. He nods. It wouldn’t surprise me if this has now turned into a rescue mission for Raffe as much as a mission to save the angel host back in our world.
‘You don’t really believe her, do you?’ asks Little B.
‘You got something better to do than listen to her?’ asks Howler.
‘I don’t know if it’ll work,’ I say. ‘But if you could help me find hellions and convince them to jump back into my world, then we can all try to leave here together.’
‘She’s as crazy as the rest of them,’ says Little B. ‘No one has ever escaped the Pit without permission from the higher-ups. Ever.’
‘She’s telling the truth,’ says Raffe. ‘We come from a different time, and we came through . . . one of you.’
They all look at each other.
Raffe nods at me, and I tell them my story. I tell them a version of it that I hope is a diplomatic one – one where I don’t mention which of them was the gateway and what condition he was in when we came through. When I’m done telling them about how we got here, everyone is silent.
‘If one of us is the gateway,’ says Beliel. ‘Then that must mean that the gateway Watcher can’t leave, right?’
I drop my gaze. If we manage to get out of here, he’ll be left behind for however long it takes him to claw and connive his way out of the Pit and onto earth. I have no idea how long that will be. But it’ll obviously be long enough to kill off all decency in him.
41
You’d think since we’re in the natural habitat of hellions, the place would be crawling with them. But most of them must be hiding, because we can’t find any. I’ve seen more hellions in Palo Alto than here.
Black smoke rises on hell’s horizon above one of the city ruins. I take a step onto the desert rocks near the sand, wondering how far it is to the nearest city. I have a strange urge to see the ruins. It might be an indication of what my world could be like one day.
‘Stop!’ one of the Watchers calls out just as I’m about to step onto the sand.
A hand whips out of the sand and grabs my ankle.
I scream, trying to yank my foot back. I kick the hand, but it pulls me off balance.
More hands burst out of the sand, reaching for me.
I try to scramble back, but the hand pulls me down.
I get my sword out and frantically slice.
Strong arms wrap around my waist, and a boot kicks the severed hand off my ankle, leaving maggots on my leg.
I shut my eyes and try not to squeal. ‘Get the maggots off me!’
Raffe brushes them off, but it feels like they’re still crawling on my skin.
‘So you do scream like a little girl,’ says Raffe with some satisfaction in his voice. I open my eyes a second too soon, because I catch him tossing the severed hand into the sand.
A forest of hands sprout up from the sand to grab it and tear it to pieces, fighting for the scraps.
I scoot away from squirming maggots. Raffe sees my distress and flicks them off the rock.
‘Maggots are freaky hideous,’ I say, getting up. I try to salvage some dignity, but I can’t help but shiver and shake my hands in the air. It’s an instinctive impulse, one I’m not up for resisting right now.
‘You’ve fought off a gang of men twice your size, killed an angel warrior, stood up to an archangel, and wielded an angel sword.’ Raffe cocks his head. ‘But you scream like a little girl when you see a maggot?’
‘It’s not just a maggot,’ I say. ‘A hand burst out of the ground and grabbed my ankle. And maggots crawled out of it and tried to burrow into me. You would scream like a little girl too if that happened to you.’
‘They didn’t try to burrow into you. They were just crawling. It’s what maggots do. They crawl.’
‘You don’t know anything.’
‘Hard to argue with that, Commander,’ says Howler with a laugh in his voice.
‘That’s the Sea of Killing Hands,’ says Thermo. ‘You don’t want to get near it.’
I can see why they call it a sea. The sand shifts like waves. I’m assuming it’s because of the hands or whatever moving beneath it. I can’t help but see the similarities between the Pit and my world now that Uriel and his false apocalypse are creating things like the resurrected crawling out of the ground.
‘Oh, she could have handled the killing hands like the truest warrior,’ says Raffe proudly. ‘It’s the little naked worms that make her tremble.’
‘Maybe we should call her maggot slayer,’ says Howler.
The others chuckle.
I sigh. I probably deserve this, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Now I know how Pooky Bear feels.
I see a small hellion over the desert, and I point to it, excited. But it flies too close to the sand, and three hands shoot out and grab it. The arms are not the length of a regular arm. They reach up at least six feet to grab the hellion. It screeches all the way down until it gets dragged beneath the sand.
One of the guys points to an outcropping of rocks.
The small hellion that was caught by the hands must have been a scout, because a group of hellions flies toward us.
My sword is up, ready for a fight. ‘Don’t kill them. We need them alive.’
The flying creepies come at us all teeth and claws. They’re as big or bigger than the ones that came after me out of the Pit. There are four of them.
Beside me, Raffe opens his wings and takes to the air over the Sea of Killing Hands. The others do the same. Beliel and I are the only ones left on the ground.
They corral the hellions toward Hawk and Cyclone who catch them.
When they come down, they’ve caught all four. They tie the hellions down with leather thongs that some of them had wrapped around their wrists. Apparently, Raffe had trained them to collect bits of useful items from the local environment whenever they were on a mission.