by SM Reine
“Let’s find Arawn,” Seth said.
Marion only took two steps down the tunnel before her knees buckled. She struck the ground on all fours.
She coughed. Seth smelled her blood before he saw it, and the coppery scent was stronger than the metallic tang suspended in Sheol’s air.
The hunger roared through him.
The need.
His human instincts were, for the moment, stronger than the inhuman ones. Coughing blood might not have been worrying if the amounts were small. But when he kneeled to help Marion, he saw splatters the size of a fist. It looked like she’d regurgitated coffee grounds.
Internal bleeding.
She turned pained eyes on him. “Seth?” And then those eyes unfocused, rolling into the back of her head.
Marion stiffened. Fell over. The bow bent strangely under her, but she didn’t respond to being jabbed in the side by the stave.
She began to shake.
Seth moved on instinct—making sure the space around her was clear as she seized, ensuring her airway was clear—but there was another instinct that was far too interested in the wavering jitter of her heart. An instinct that told him she was dying. He didn’t even need to hear the raspy, labored intake of her breath to know that.
It was Agent Hanes all over again. He was frozen, knowing that he needed to resuscitate her, but without a clue as to how that should happen.
“I’m going to look for a doctor,” Charity said, grabbing the map. He hadn’t realized he’d dropped it.
She ran off before Seth could tell her to stop. They weren’t going to find a doctor in Sheol other than Seth.
He clutched Marion’s shoulders and focused on teleporting back to Earth, where they had come from. Back to Marion’s home. Back to mage-friendly atmosphere and medical care.
Nothing happened.
He’d never been stuck before. It was like the ability simply wasn’t there anymore.
Charity raced back toward him. “There’s an apothecary down by the butcher. I don’t see anything like a hospital.”
An apothecary. Leave it to demons to have some archaic Dark Ages shit in their new version of Hell when Marion was going toxic. She needed real medical care. Not an apothecary.
Seth gathered her into his arms. She was his height in bare feet and continuing to tremble, so it was awkward hefting her. He held her tight. Refused to let go.
Her heart was speeding, but erratic.
I never should have let her come.
Charity raced down the tunnel, glancing over her shoulder to make sure that Seth was keeping up. “It’s around the corner,” she said.
Marion went limp. The sticky black blood was caking her chin, her chest. Her skin was colorless.
They rounded the corner to see a milling trio of insect-like demons. One clung to the wall. They all looked at Seth with bulging stares that were too human to match their segmented carapaces, as though someone had yanked eyeballs out of a human body and hot-glued them to giant beetles.
The two on the floor skittered forward. They must have smelled the death on Marion, just as Seth did.
“Get out of my way!” he roared.
They clicked to each other. The sounds that came from their mouthparts didn’t resemble human language, but Seth understood it.
It’s them.
Go get the guard.
He was so shocked to understand that he missed a step. “What?” He stumbled, clutching Marion tighter to keep from dropping her body.
The demons dispersed, vanishing into burrows in the lava rock. If they’d been hoping to get to the Canope without being spotted, they were out of luck.
A bell tolled over the apothecary’s door when Charity shoved it open. The sound was heavy with power.
The shop was clean but cramped. Shelves had been built out of scrap metal, displaying books, glass jars, a few body parts that might have come from creatures similar to the ones outside.
“We need help!” Charity cried, running toward the back of the shop. It seemed to have been fit into one of those burrows, so it curved toward the back, preventing Seth from seeing through to the end.
He shoved a few boxes off of the counter next to the register, laying Marion’s body where the space had been cleared.
There was no longer a pulse of energy under the semi-translucent skin of her throat. There was blood flowing underneath, but it was too slow to resemble life.
Charity returned moments later. “I found the shopkeeper.”
A woman drifted toward them from behind Charity. At least, Seth thought that it was a woman. Her face was a skinless skull with exposed teeth, hollows where her eyes should have been, and wisps that resembled hair. Her waist was tiny, her legs misty. She dragged a cloak of shadows behind her.
The instant that she spotted Marion, she stopped.
“Mage.” The word slithered through yellowed teeth. The hollows of her eyes turned on Seth. “And…you.”
She swept through the shop, shadows billowing around her, and reached for them. She stopped an inch in front of him, shoving her face into Seth’s. Her eye sockets weren’t empty after all. Smoke stirred within their depths, tickling along the upper rims of bone.
“So this is when it began,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Seth’s shoulders were so tense that the muscles could have ripped his spine apart. “Me?”
The door slammed open again. There was no chime of a bell this time.
A demon appeared in the archway. He was tall and tusked, much like Dana’s girlfriend Penny, and he had a long-legged dog on a chain. It snarled, lunging and snapping at Seth’s legs.
“They’re here!” the demon shouted.
And then there were more of them—five, six, a dozen—and they were all jamming into the shop. They looked like a biker gang on Halloween. The leather they wore wasn’t all in shades of black. Some of it was pink, olive, brown. Nothing that looked like it could have come from animals.
They were carrying chains and blades.
Seth jerked his Beretta out of the holster, but he didn’t even know where to begin shooting with that many demons coming toward him.
They encircled him. They reached for Marion.
“Get back!”
He fired one shot directly into the face of the nearest demon. Its head snapped back. It stumbled, smashing into the demon behind it. They fell like dominoes into a shelf. Glass sprayed across the floor.
Seth looked to see if the apothecary would attack him for it—but she had vanished.
In his instant of distraction, two demons grabbed his arms.
“Arawn’s going to be excited to see you,” one of them wheezed down his neck, its breath hot.
Arawn?
Charity grabbed her glasses as though she were about to remove them.
“Wait!” Seth said. “We’ll go peacefully!”
She stared at him. “We will?”
“Yes,” he said, “we will.”
The demons laughed as they dragged them out of the apothecary. They didn’t seem to think that Seth had any choice but to be taken peacefully—not surrounded by so many enemies.
He could have figured out how to take them. It wasn’t like they could kill him. Given infinite time, Seth could have handled infinite demons.
But he wasn’t alone.
One of the demons had scooped Marion off of the table. She hung over its shoulder limply, smelling of blood and death.
Seth would go anywhere they took her. Literally anywhere.
Luckily, the demons were taking them exactly where he wanted to go.
He was carried on a tide of the gang’s bodies, shoved down the halls of the hive, helpless to fight back. That long-legged white dog nipped at Seth’s boots, snarling and drooling. “Give me the word,” Charity said, bumping against his side. “Just tell me when.” The guards weren’t watching her as closely as they should have. They had no clue she was anything strange.
“Do you still have t
he map?” he asked.
“Yeah, why?”
Because they would need to find somewhere to hide soon. The demons were taking a revenant straight to their leader, Arawn—the guy who had bought Marion’s memories.
Seth didn’t doubt he could steal the Canope. But he didn’t know how to get back to Earth if he couldn’t teleport.
The demons carried their party through so many twisting corners of the hive that Seth lost track of direction. They passed pools of bubbling magma, open fire pits surrounded by shadowy forms, rooms that were webbed over with sticky gray fiber.
Then they arrived at a tunnel that turned vertical at a ninety-degree angle. Seth gaped up at it. Insect demons scrambled up the rock surface as far as he could see—at least a few hundred feet before foggy darkness concealed the upper levels.
“Welcome to Arawn’s tower,” said Seth’s captor.
That was when he noticed there was a door by the tunnel’s juncture. It was surrounded by demons lounging on crates wrapped with barbed wire, forming makeshift barriers.
They kicked the door open and shoved him through.
He found himself in a tattoo parlor.
There was a demon lying in a chair that looked like it belonged in an old-fashioned dentist’s office. The chair was upholstered with red leather and lifted on gears of shiny gold to make the demon’s arm accessible to the man who sat beside it.
That man was holding a tattoo gun, its spiraling cables vanishing into the darkness behind the table. He was etching occult symbols onto the demon’s fragile, papery flesh. The lines tore cuts into its arm and ichor dribbled onto the table.
The demon had the ugly, stretched features of a nightmare. All nightmares looked like they had been sculpted from putty by someone who’d only ever heard humans described in loose terms. It must have been powerful to have substantial human-like form, even if the tattoo gun did shred its skin.
But the nightmare wasn’t the guy in charge.
There was no power resonating from the tattoo artist. None at all. He looked like an ordinary mortal man wearing a tight-fitting laced leather jacket and boots that would make him too tall for the hive. His skin was human brown. His hair was twisted into black dreads.
The fact that Seth felt no power from him at all meant everything.
He was the leader because he was strong enough to hide it.
“Arawn, sir,” said the demon gripping Seth’s shoulder painfully tight. “We’ve got prisoners for you.”
Unsurprisingly, it was the tattoo artist who responded. “I don’t want them.” He wiped ichor off of the nightmare’s arm, exposing an illustration of looping, interlocking circles that radiated dashed lines.
“Then what should we do?”
“Kill them,” he said without looking up.
Marion was limp in the arms of the demon beside Seth. She didn’t react to the threat.
“Okay,” Seth said.
That was the only word Charity needed.
She ripped the glasses off of her face, disabling the glamour spell that made her look human.
The revenant emerged.
For all the horrors of Sheol, there were none quite like Charity. She seized the nearest demon by the throat and smashed his face into the wall. Her serpentine tongue wrapped around another demon’s head, and the texture was so coarse that it stripped the flesh right off of its skull. Her claws gutted a third before the second had time to scream.
The guards exploded into chaos.
“Seth!” Even though he knew Charity well, the sound of his name coming out of a revenant’s maw made his heart skip a beat. She thudded toward him, smashing through the guards effortlessly.
Arawn finally lifted his gaze from the tattoo. He flipped his magnifying lenses onto his forehead to expose eyes that were nothing but pupil—endless, inky black.
First he focused on Charity. Admiration curled his lips into a big smile, and his short-trimmed mustache bent along with his lips. Arawn had jackal features, stretched and mean.
Then he looked at Seth and Marion, and the smile turned into surprise.
“Wait!” he yelled to his guards. “Don’t kill them! And you—get off of my table.”
The nightmare sat up, twisting his arm to look at it. “You’re not done.”
“Get off of my table!” Arawn surged to his feet so quickly that his stool fell over. His jacket flared behind him. The tattoo gun clattered to the floor.
Charity had cleared a path to Seth, breaking at least a half-dozen necks on the way. She plucked Marion away from a demon and shoved the mage into Seth’s arms. “Get out! I’m right behind you!”
Seth gripped Marion to his chest and bolted.
He didn’t even make it to the door. More of Arawn’s gang swarmed in.
Charity cried out. Not a battle shriek, but a shriek of pain.
Arawn had seized her. In her exposed revenant form, he only came up to her chest, but he’d caught the bony spurs of her elbows in both hands. He locked her in place. Grinned up at her with that cruel jackal face.
“Stop breaking my toys,” he said.
He slammed her into the dentist’s chair, holding her down with one arm though she thrashed. And a thrashing revenant was nothing that Seth would have ever screwed with.
Guards swarmed Seth and he dropped Marion.
“No!”
He had both handguns drawn instantly, bringing them to bear. But his wrists were caught. Twisted behind his back. He was disarmed and hurled against the moldy, peeling linoleum an inch from Marion’s blood-crusted face.
“Take them upstairs,” Arawn said.
“Which ones?” asked the demon with a boot planted squarely in the middle of Seth’s back.
“All of them. And be nice.” He howled with delight. “These are our guests!”
* * *
Marion dreamed of war. It wasn’t the first time she’d had that dream. It wasn’t even the first time she’d had it that week.
She walked the streets of Victoria and found it as ravaged as Leiptr in the Winter Court. She stepped among the broken bodies of innocents and children, all of who had faces like Ymir’s, a little frost spirit waiting to become a giant.
He would never grow up, and it was because of the war.
The sky wept crimson rain. Magic burned over it all.
Marion’s magic.
But it was only a dream, just as it had always been. It faded away and her senses returned.
Reality was not much more pleasant than what she’d been dreaming.
A man sat inches away, his face shoved into hers. He had a black goatee, dreadlocks, and goggles that had been pushed onto his forehead. Red rings encircled his black eyes. “I wasn’t sure that would work,” the man said.
Marion tried to jerk away from him, but she had nowhere to go. She was in a bed crammed into a tiny metal room. Ichor dripped from a cracked pipe thrusting out of the ceiling. It dribbled by the wall at her elbow, and she cringed away from that, too. “Who are you? Where am I?”
“I’m Arawn, Lord of Sheol, and you’re in my tower.” He sat back with the creaking of leather. The man wore so much of it that he must have killed an entire herd of cows to dress himself for the day.
Gods, Marion hoped that reddish leather had been made from cows.
Her eyes burned, as though her contacts had dried out and adhered to her irises. Marion felt like she needed to firehose eye drops onto her face. For now, she settled for blinking repeatedly as she struggled to focus beyond Arawn.
She was so confused by the strange setting—the skulls mounted on the walls, the patchy rug, the dripping ichor—that for a horrible instant, she thought that she’d lost her memories again. Then she saw Seth in the corner, arms folded tightly across his chest, holsters empty.
Marion hadn’t forgotten Seth. She’d never forget Seth.
“Sheol,” she said. The man had said his name was Arawn. She sat up straight. “You have the Canope. My memories. You bought them.”
“Looks like you’re not brain dead. Hurrah.” Arawn rose from the chair beside her bed. “She’ll be fine for a few hours, but humans have a hard time acclimating to the Nether Worlds. She’ll likely need another dose of this by the time the clock strikes twelve.” He shook a vial of red jelly at Seth.
Marion instantly knew the red jelly was the reason her mouth tasted so disgusting. He’d fed that to her. And it had revived her.
Seth reached out to take it, but Arawn pulled back.
“I don’t think so,” Arawn said. “I don’t want the two of you trying to run off.”
Two of you. “Where’s Charity?” Marion asked.
“Elsewhere. Think of her as additional leverage.”
“For what? What do you want from us?” Seth asked.
Arawn ignored the questions. “I expect you’re here for the Canope. You can’t have it. I paid for it, fair and square, and it’s mine. You’re now my guests and absolutely will not leave this room until I say that you can.” He rattled it off rapidly, as though reciting a short monologue that he’d practiced.
He headed for the door. Seth barred his path.
“Why do you want it? Her memories are worthless to you,” Seth said.
“The memories of a mage?” Arawn cackled. “If you think those are worthless to a demon, then you’ve got no imagination. Anyway, they’re mine. You can’t have them. And now you’re my guests.”
“If I’m a guest, then have someone attend to me,” Marion said, gathering her strength to sit up straight. “I need to wash. I need replacement clothes as well. And this room will not do—not at all. Do you realize how filthy it is?”
“You don’t get to make demands here,” Arawn said. “You’re in my world now. Both of you are.”
He brushed Seth aside and left.
A heartbeat after the door shut, Seth tried the handle. “Locked.” He pounded his fist into the wall.
“We’re so close to the Canope. So close.” She patted the bed around her. “My bow and quiver—”
“Taken,” Seth said. “They’re probably with my guns. We’re totally disarmed.”
She tried to get out of bed, but when she moved, everything hurt—her lungs, her knees, her back, her skin. She gasped for breath. Sat back on the mattress. “Gods, I wish I had water.”
