by S. M. Reine
“How do you know that?” Elise asked.
The demon’s smile slipped off of his face. He pointed at the gates with his cane. “Sunday is coming. I can show you where the slaves are kept, but you’re going to owe me.”
She clenched her jaw. Elise didn’t trust him—not at all. But he had given them passage across the desert, and disguises, and had shown no inclination of killing them. That was probably as good as it got in Hell.
“I still can’t do anything about the Palace for you,” Elise said.
“We can discuss how you’ll repay me if you survive the House. We’ll have a chat in the Nether Palace afterward. But you must promise me one thing: that you’ll kill as few of Abraxas’s soldiers as possible, and only take away one slave. Agreed?”
Elise frowned, but nodded. “Agreed.”
Hyzakis gestured, sweeping his hand through the air. “Come closer. Come.”
Reluctantly, she stepped forward, and bent over when he gestured again. His gnarled hand brushed over her forehead. A chill settled over her flesh.
Elise’s mind opened to his, and she saw the Nether Palace’s location with sudden clarity. It was only a glimpse before her mind soared back to the House of Abraxas, its castle, the barracks, the formations of the centuria. She saw the kennels and the naked humans penned within.
And she saw how she could walk in without being touched.
“Fly, daughter of Yatam,” Hyzakis said, thin lips curled into a wicked smile.
Her body unraveled, and she flew.
James mostly kept his head down as the fiends led him up the path to the House of Abraxas, but he couldn’t resist sneaking a few glances at the stronghold. Where Dis reveled in mocking the uglier sides of Earth’s major cities, Abraxas seemed to revel in Hell’s heritage instead; there was no hint of mimicry in his architecture. The beautifully ancient buildings were spindly mixtures of iron, hardened magma, and black bricks. It looked like viewing Heaven’s ruins through a distorted mirror.
The House itself was huge, but the fiends didn’t take them to it. They skirted around the landscaping—iron trees transplanted from the desert forest—and went to the buildings behind it.
The slave quarters were not so grand. They were simple concrete boxes with large doors, big enough to drive a truck through—or march several lines of humans inside at once.
Cages lined the walls of the kennels, like James had seen before at animal shelters. They were small enough that only one or two people could fit in them at a time, and only while sitting. A strange, hollow wailing filled the cavernous building, even though he couldn’t see anyone actually crying. It was too dark to make out the slaves beyond the first few rows.
The smell of effluence and sweat slapped him in the face as they took the stairs down to a lower level, where the people inside the cages were denser and the cries were louder.
The building was obviously designed to isolate humans from one another. Dispirit them. Make them feel like animals. And the sounds the slaves made were so far from human that James was confident that it worked. They weren’t even trying to escape, even though the cages weren’t locked—just tied shut with leather cord.
Short-fingered hands seized his elbow and steered him toward an open cage. He balked at the entrance, but the fiend shoved him in the back. He stumbled into the cage.
There was already someone else in there—a skinny black man that stunk of ammonia. He was curled into a ball at the back, and he didn’t react to having James pushed in with him.
The door slammed shut. Clumsy fingers tied the cord.
A low moan rose from the cage next to him, and a hand prodded at him through the chain link. James tried to squirm away, but there was nowhere to go. The neighboring slave kept scraping at him. In the dim light, he could see fingernails chewed to the bloody quick.
The fiends shuffled away with the remaining slaves. Doors slammed.
After a moment, the noises subsided.
“How long have you been here?” James whispered to the other man in the cage. “Why don’t you try to escape?”
“Belphegor,” he whispered, punctuating it with a shudder.
“Belphegor? What’s Belphegor?”
The slave was shaking too badly to speak. His teeth ground together, and the sound made the hair on the back of James’s neck stand up.
“Have you seen a blond woman brought in?” James asked. “She’s short and thin…”
“Belphegor,” said the slave again.
So much for that.
James didn’t feel any fiends nearby, so he grabbed the knotted rope that was holding the cage closed and began to wiggle it loose.
A raw voice exploded from the back of the cage. “No!”
The slave lunged at him, and blows rained on James’s shoulders and arms. He kicked out, striking the man in the face, but it didn’t stop the attack. He bit James’s foot.
With a cry, James shoved him to the back of the cage, opened the door, and tumbled out.
The slave slammed the door shut and clung to the bars. “Belphegor,” he hissed. “You idiot !”
And then he receded into the darkness at the back of his cage.
James didn’t bother inspecting the injury on his foot—it was throbbing, but what was one more wound among all the others?
He staggered between the cages, peering into the darkness. The only light came from a single lamp at the end of the hall. The shadows were too deep. “Hannah? Hannah, are you in here?”
The only response was more cries.
He took the stairs down to the next level, and the next, but nobody in any of those kennels responded to his calls, either. The bottommost floor was totally empty.
Which left him with nowhere to go but up.
James peered over the top step before climbing onto the ground floor of the slave quarters. There were no fiends watching the cages. They weren’t even stationed at the door leading outside. What the hell could Belphegor be that was terrible enough to keep all the slaves willingly locked away?
“Hannah,” he whispered, creeping down the aisle.
A small voice responded near the door. “Who’s there?”
He scrambled over to the cage at the end and peered inside. A woman sat cross-legged at the back, head tipped back so that she could stare at the ceiling. Blond, slender, graceful—Hannah. As soon as her gaze fixed on James, her entire face lit up.
Hannah scrambled to the bars and pushed her fingers through. All things considered, she was in much better shape than James. “How did you find me?” she asked as he touched her hands.
“Magic, naturally,” he said with a small smile. “Let me untie this knot…”
She craned her head around, trying to see the door. “How did you get rid of Belphegor?”
“What in the world is Belphegor?”
“You mean he’s still out there?” Hannah gave a low, desperate groan. “Shit .”
He loosened the ropes and opened the door. “You’re welcome.”
Hannah crawled out, motions stiff and slow. He had to help her stand. Once she was upright, she hugged him tightly. “I thought I wasn’t going to get out of there,” she said, and then she released him and slapped his arm.
James shirked back. “What?”
“You got us dragged to Hell!”
“And now I’m going to get us out,” he said, grabbing her arm and hauling her to the door.
She dug her heels in, but she had been confined for too long to struggle against him. He pulled her outside into the hot air. “But what about Belphegor?”
He didn’t get a chance to ask again.
There was a commotion near the gates at the bottom of the mountain. The entire centuria was gathered near the entrance, protesting in garbled voices. James was grateful for the distraction—until he realized what was upsetting them. Isaac Kavanagh strode up the path, flanked by two members of Palace security armed with bludgeons. Isaac’s eyes skimmed the property as he rubbed a hand over his beard.
“Wrong way,” James said, turning Hannah around to steer her back to the other side of the kennel before they were spotted. He wasn’t fast enough to keep her from seeing who had come searching for them, though.
“Was that Isaac Kavanagh?” Hannah asked. “That couldn’t have been Isaac.”
“That was Isaac.”
“This just keeps getting better. How are we going to get out of here?”
He cast a glance around the mountainside. There were only so many places they could go: back into the kennels, or down the path toward the centuria. The face of the mountain behind them was sheer.
More noise from the gates. It sounded like Isaac had pushed through the centuria.
“Climb,” James urged, pushing Hannah toward the cliff.
He tried not to look down as he forced his hands into tiny crevices and sought footholds. His injured arm wouldn’t support his weight for long, so his ascension was painfully slow. Hannah climbed a little faster while muttering under her breath, but she didn’t complain. Her eyes were fixed on the few inches of rock in front of her face.
James’s toes slipped on the slick, sharpened rocks, and he lost his grip.
His belly slid down the rocks. He didn’t have far to go. They hadn’t made it very high.
James flopped onto his back, rolled, and found himself stopping in front of a pair of booted feet.
Hatred blackened Isaac’s features. The blond streaks in his goatee looked like shocks of lightning framing his mouth. “You should have run as far as you could instead of coming back,” Isaac said. “At least you could have died in the desert instead of burning for eternity.”
He heard a feminine shriek. One of the Palace guards had thrown a rock and knocked Hannah off of the cliff.
“Got another runner,” said the female nightmare, dragging Hannah over to Isaac by the ankle. It was the same woman that had stripped James in front of the court. “Did we want this one?”
“She’s not mine,” Isaac said. “Go find Belphegor.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
James wasn’t sure when it happened, but another demon had joined them behind the kennels. He wore a slim black suit, which offset his colorless skin and milky eyes. He stood as stiffly, as though his spine was made from a steel rod, with his hands folded in front of him.
Belphegor.
He didn’t look frightening enough to keep slaves in unlocked cages, but James had seen more unassuming things turn out to be horrible. The only difference was that Belphegor didn’t feel like anything powerful, either. In fact, he didn’t feel like a demon at all. James felt nothing from him—total silence.
“Isaac, you rat bastard, you know me!” Hannah yelled, struggling against the guard’s grip as she was offered to Belphegor. Falling a few yards off of a cliff didn’t seem to have even winded her.
Isaac finally glanced at her, but it was with total disdain. Like checking a piece of shit stuck to his boots. “What’s your point?”
“My point is…” She searched for words, but couldn’t seem to find any. Hannah finally settled on shouting, “You know what? Fuck you!”
Belphegor took Hannah’s hand more like he was greeting royalty than seizing a slave. The color drained from her lips. “Let’s go back now,” he said. His voice echoed a little, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a deep grave. It sent visible shivers through all of the humans watching. James, Hannah—even Isaac.
James used the moment of distraction to drive his elbow into Isaac’s solar plexus. The other man grunted and doubled over, and James ripped the knife from his belt.
“Hannah!” he yelled, throwing it to her.
She slashed clumsily at Belphegor’s face, but he didn’t attempt to dodge it or even flinch. The knife’s blade shattered on his cheek.
Isaac rounded on him.
Cries split the air at the bottom of the mountain and echoed off of the cliffs. The fiends had begun to shout in their garbled, barely-coherent language. James understood a couple of words—like father , and run .
Isaac obviously understood more than James did, because he stopped in mid-stride to stare at the gates. “What ?”
The gates slammed open, and shadow waited beyond. The city had disappeared.
James blinked hard, but it didn’t change anything. There was a wall of lightless fog beyond the walls, towering and huge. A dust storm?
Belphegor stepped forward. “Please watch her,” he said, handing Hannah to Isaac. “I’ll take care of this.” He drifted down the path, spreading his arms wide as if to greet the fog. At Isaac’s nod, the two Palace security guards followed him. “You don’t have permission to enter.” His voice was calm and quiet, the kind of tone one might use while having a conversation over lunch, but it resonated over the entire House of Abraxas.
The fog didn’t respond. It blew through the gates to occupy the bottom of the street.
A finger of black mist swarmed the closest fiend, jerking it into the shadow. It disappeared with a muffled yelp.
Everyone was staring at Belphegor and the darkness—Hannah, the fiends, Isaac. James realized that he was staring, too, instead of trying to escape.
He swung at Isaac again. This time, the man didn’t let the blow land.
Isaac released Hannah and sidestepped James’s attack, whirling through the air to slam his own fist into James’s belly. James rolled with the punch and struck back.
They exchanged a flurry of blows. James was taller and much stronger than he used to be, but not strong enough—and his hundreds of play-fights against Elise could never have prepared him to fight against the man that had trained her.
Isaac was dizzyingly fast, and his form never faltered. Some distant part of James almost admired him. He seamlessly blended so many forms of martial arts. The man didn’t need knives or swords, like Elise did; his body was a weapon all its own.
James didn’t stand a chance.
But he also wasn’t alone. Hannah jumped onto Isaac’s back, locking her arms around his throat and squeezing. “I never liked you,” she growled. “You goddamn—”
He threw himself against the cliff and smashed Hannah’s head into the rocks.
She didn’t even cry out before going unconscious.
“Hannah!” James yelled, but he could barely hear his own voice. A wind had risen. Pebbles showered against his legs.
The centuria were disappearing one by one at the bottom of the mountain, sucked into the darkness as it rolled over the ground. And still, Belphegor walked calmly towards it. “This is your last chance,” he said in that enormous, resonant voice.
No response.
Isaac shoved Hannah’s limp body off of him. There was blood on his lip. He wiped it away and glared at James. “Maybe I’ll just kill you, after all,” he said.
That was when Belphegor became a colossus.
The creature in the suit was suddenly massive—as tall as the tallest tower of the House, each limb as long as two men. His skin didn’t seem to grow with him. It thinned and gapped, baring bone underneath. His cheeks ripped into a skeletal grin.
His massive hands plunged into the fog, and the groan that spilled from his chest was a thousand times louder than his words had been.
The shadow began to shrink.
A small figure darted out of the fog with a battle cry. It wasn’t one of the fiends—it looked human. James glimpsed black hair, a round face, glasses. He thought that he recognized that face.
Magic slammed through the air, making the mountain shiver. Rocks bounced off the cliff. The ground gave a mighty crack , and Belphegor staggered back. A foot the size of a small car landed near James, bouncing him off of his feet.
Something popped, and then the foot was gone—and everything attached to it.
Belphegor had vanished with a clap of thunder, and the air rushed to fill the void left by his body.
The shadow had already eaten half of the centuria. The other half were fleeing, scrabbling up the mountain, scr
eaming as they ran. They blew past Isaac as he advanced on James again, and one of them clipped the Inquisitor, sending them both to the ground.
James tried to shield Hannah from the stampede with his body. Fiends bumped into him, and an elbow connected with his temple. They were still on steep ground, so one blow was enough to make James slip. Light flashed through his vision, blanketing everything in an agonizing red haze. The pain followed a moment later, like an ice pick through his temple.
His hands almost lost their grip on Hannah, but then he caught her wrist. Rocks scraped down his belly as he slid several feet, dragging her with him.
They rolled onto the path. Isaac struggled to get through the rushing fiends, but their bodies pushed him back. “Faulkner!” he roared.
James pulled Hannah into his arms and staggered to his feet. He wobbled on unsteady legs. Too many falls and not enough water had left him weak and dizzy. It didn’t matter, though, because there was nowhere to run—the wall of shadow had almost reached him.
He had come so far only to fail.
Three steps down the road, his knees gave out. He had enough strength to make sure that he fell backward and didn’t land on Hannah. She slipped from his arms and fell into the edge of the looming fog.
“No!” he cried, reaching out, but the shadow didn’t take her.
Piece by piece, the darkness coalesced into a human figure. A pair of legs appeared, and then a pale face, full lips. She crouched over him. “I’ve come for you,” said the darkness.
He blinked. His vision blurred. “Elise?”
He passed out before he could hear the response.
III
Secrets and Mistakes
Untitled
March 1984
James finally got to kiss Hannah after they won the blue ribbon at an international ballroom competition. They were only fifteen and seventeen, respectively, but they were no longer permitted to compete against other adolescents; parents had complained, the planning boards agreed that it wasn’t fair, and they were required to compete with adults who had been dancing for longer than either of them had been alive.
