by Reine, SM
It felt so very, very strange to see them in Hannah’s car.
“We’ll have to tell the coven what happened as soon as possible,” she said. “Landon will need to take action.”
“No, I’m not ready to discuss it. Especially with Landon.”
“Unfortunately, James, this isn’t just about you.”
The city that he had left behind so many years before blurred past him. James hadn’t given any consideration to how it might feel to return, but he probably would have guessed that he would be sad. There were a lot of sad memories in Colorado.
But he wasn’t sad. Not about the town, not about his dead sister and aunt, and certainly not about what he had left behind with Hannah. There was no room for any more sadness inside of him.
“What’s the coven been doing lately?” he asked.
She turned the wheel to the left. The car banked around a curve. “How much do you really care?”
James clenched his hands in his lap. “Is every conversation between us going to be an argument for the next few days?”
“If it has to be,” she said. “Don’t forget, I can still smell your bullshit. You’re not saying what’s on your mind. You don’t care about the coven, or Landon, or anything else around here.”
“That’s not true. I care about you—and Nathaniel.”
She gave him that look again. The Hannah look. Her eyes were off the road for only a moment.
James glanced back at the freeway before she did, so he saw the person standing in the left lane a half second before they hit him.
“Watch out!”
Everything moved in slow motion.
She slammed on the brakes and tried to swerve.
The body connected with their bumper. The impact made the entire car shudder, and rubber squealed.
The windshield spider-webbed with cracks and bowed into the passenger compartment as the person they hit bounced over it. Hannah screamed as the thudding traveled over the roof of her car, struck the trunk, and slid off of the back.
Another crunch, another shock. The seatbelt snapped tight over James’s chest. His head whipped forward.
The car skidded across the lane as the truck that had bounced off of their bumper squealed to a halt. Vehicles blew around them, blasting their horns and skidding on asphalt.
They finally stopped moving.
James’s head was spinning, but it was no longer from grief. He couldn’t focus on the dashboard in front of him, and he could barely make out the median on the other side of the shattered windshield; they had been spun forty-five degrees and hit concrete.
He took a short inventory of his injuries. The seatbelt had cut into his neck, but it had saved him from being launched out of his seat. His upper lip was damp. He wiped blood off of it and stared at the glistening crimson on his fingertips. His face was bleeding—why was his face bleeding?
“Are you all right?” he asked Hannah. Her hands were welded to the steering wheel. Her hair had fallen out of its clip. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out.
The engine ticked as it rapidly cooled.
“Mother Goddess,” Hannah finally breathed, “I think I just killed someone.”
James released his seat belt with a hiss of pain, rubbed his collarbone, and shoved his door open. “Stay here,” he said, stepping onto the sliver of space between the side of the car and the median.
Traffic on the freeway was stopped in the lane behind them. People were still going around the other side, inching along and staring through rolled-down windows. Horns filled the air.
James’s shoes crunched on broken glass as he made his way around the trunk to search for a body.
He found a smear of blood on the top of the car and down the trunk. He found the dent where the body had bounced. He also found a red-brown puddle on the asphalt behind their rear tires and a pickup truck a few feet away. The driver looked as stunned as Hannah.
But there was no body.
“What the hell?” he whispered. Had the body been thrown?
Something tickled the nape of his neck.
James slapped at it and spun to search for what had touched him, but there was nothing there. The sensation didn’t alleviate when he turned, either.
The creeping feeling traveled into his hairline and down his spine. It rippled over his bones. With a cold wash of fear, he realized that he wasn’t being touched—he was feeling infernal power. A lot of it.
Red light flared under his feet. He lifted a shoe to see that he was standing on a blazing crimson sigil, which quickly spread over the asphalt and illuminated the shards of glass like fairy lights. An invisible hand drew the line in a wide, sweeping circle that encompassed James and the entirety of Hannah’s car.
A massive demonic rune.
He leaned into the open door of the car again.
“We have to run!”
Hannah hadn’t released the wheel. “Is he dead? Did I kill him?”
He punched the button on her seat belt to release it, grabbed her arm, and dragged her across the seat. “Get out of there, it’s a trap!”
James wrenched Hannah from the car and wrapped his arms around her, hugging her to his chest.
The sigil exploded.
Her car leaped into the air as though blasted by a bomb. It flipped end-over-end, and James couldn’t see where it landed.
The red light surrounded them with leaping flames. His skin boiled.
Beneath their feet, the road vanished, and the sky disappeared a moment later. James felt a wrenching sensation in his gut.
They wheeled and tumbled through black void. His chest hitched with the effort it took to breathe.
And then they hit.
Hannah’s shrieks suddenly cut off. She lost her balance and slipped from his arms, sprawling on the ground.
Being teleported by external forces should have been easier after all the times that James had done it in recent weeks, but it wasn’t. His body rebelled at the change, even before his senses could process what had happened. Nausea swept from his toes to the ends of his hair, rippling down his shoulders and blurring his vision.
He doubled over, braced his hands on his knees, and vomited. James hadn’t been eating much since Elise had died—he’d just had a handful of nuts and black coffee that morning, and a salad the night before. It splattered on the ground in a half-digested mess.
By the time he wiped his mouth clean and had recovered enough to see, Hannah was still on all fours. She flexed her fingers in fistfuls of orange-red clay.
There was no red clay in Denver.
James’s senses finally caught up with him. The air burned his throat with the taste of sulfur, bitterly dry and scraping his mucus membranes with every inhalation. As he bent to take Hannah’s arm, he noticed that it was harder to move, as though he were pushing through fluid. He felt weak. Heavy.
He looked up. They were in a forest, but it was unlike any forest he had ever seen. Iron branches reached for a red sky that roiled with smoke. There was no sun. No moon.
A cry echoed through the air—a scream of absolute despair, like the sounds that he heard in his worst nightmares of Elise’s death. James spun to search for the source of it, but all he saw were the thick black trunks of iron trees as thick around as his body.
Another scream followed from his other side, and then another. They echoed off of the metal trees.
Hannah was hyperventilating. She clutched at her throat with hands that had been stained by the clay. “Where are we?” she gasped. “Who is screaming? I can’t breathe—”
A powerful feeling of wrongness shivered in his stomach, tickled at the back of his neck, made his skin crawl like he had fallen into a pit of snakes. Demons. Infernal energy. It was everywhere—in the forest, the ground beneath his feet, the very air, woven into the fabric of existence in a way that he had never felt on Earth.
He reached out to touch one of the trees. It was hot, as though warmed by fire deep within the earth.
Except
that they weren’t on Earth. Not anymore.
Something huge soared overhead, blotting out the red sky. It was bulging and blimp-like, but there wasn’t enough light in the crimson twilight to make out any other detail.
James wrenched Hannah to her feet, and the gesture made his muscles ache. “We have to move.”
“What’s happening, James?”
“I don’t know.” He pulled her through the trees as a chorus of screams floated over the forest. A piercing cry shattered the air beside them.
Hannah broke free to step around a tree, and her eyes widened at what she saw on the other side. Her cry joined the others’.
There was a body in the branches, stretched between the brittle fingers of the tree. It had two legs, two arms, a head, male genitals. But if it had once been human, there was no longer any way to tell.
A y-incision down its torso had been peeled open and the skin had been pinned to the branches, as if the tree had cracked open the body’s abdominal cavity. A stuttering heart spit blood with every pulse. But the body was alive—dear God, it was alive—and its head was thrown back in a scream that James could see trembling in its exposed lungs.
The swollen form floating overhead passed again, casting a shadow over Hannah and the body.
“Don’t stop,” he said, pulling Hannah away from the corpse.
“That body—the screaming—”
Her panic irritated him. Elise would never have panicked.
James shook her arm. “Focus. I think that thing is after us. We must keep moving.”
Hannah stared around the trees, twitching and trembling. “What thing? The bodies?”
“No. That.”
He pointed to the sky. That shadowy blimp was still following them, drifting slowly overhead. It was lower than it had been before. Perhaps just a few dozen meters above the tops of the trees. It looked like it was at least as large as the airplane that James had taken into the Denver airport, but with legs on its underside.
Hannah looked pale, like she might faint. But seeing the hovering creature was enough to get her to shut up and follow him.
James focused on the soft earth beneath his feet and avoiding the tree trunks. Lifting his feet was too difficult, too slow. Running in the iron forest was like trying to jog through sand. Screams chased them.
Hannah shrieked. Flapped an arm. Blood had dripped onto her hand.
There were another two bodies stretched out in the branches of the trees, and they were definitely demons—most likely nightmares. Their skin was slick and transparent, and they made his senses jangle like a cracked bell.
“Keep moving,” he said, pushing her ahead.
The blimp descended, and James got better glimpses of it through the trees as he ran. Those were definitely legs, like those of an insect. Its body was semi-translucent and filled with swirling gas.
James had no idea what it was, but he definitely didn’t want to find out.
“Faster!” he yelled, even though he couldn’t move faster. He was too weak to gain any speed in the dense atmosphere.
A leg swept through the trees and swiped at him. It whistled through the air.
Rough skin brushed his neck. The skin sizzled.
James tried to dodge and stumbled through the trees, breaking out of the forest into empty space—and almost fell off a cliff.
The ground crumbled beneath his feet. He threw himself backwards, landing hard just as the place he had been standing vanished.
A vast desert wasteland filled the space between James and the sliver of black mountains on the horizon. Gashes in the ground exposed bleeding, flaming pits that guttered red flames and spewed smoke.
To his right, the skyline of a city loomed high over plains, as though they had grown out of the earth and had been baked into black arches and peaks. It was hard to tell at that distance, but the city had to be huge—bigger than Reno, bigger than Denver, bigger than both of them combined. He could only see the farthest edge of it. It stretched endlessly beyond the mountains.
And at the center stood a palace. A single tower rose above it all, surrounded by rings of spires and a wall of sleek, towering stone that looked utterly unclimbable.
James had seen illustrations of that palace in ancient books, but never expected to make a firsthand visit. Or, more accurately, he had hoped that he would never visit.
Hannah and James had been sucked into Dis—the sixth level of Hell.
“James!”
He twisted. The blimp-like creature had descended, and one of its long, twisting appendages had curled around Hannah’s arm. The touch of its rough red flesh seemed to burn her. It pulled on her arm and jerked her off of her feet.
“No!” he yelled, scrabbling onto his knees.
He leapt and caught her feet, wrapping his arms around her legs. Hannah’s scream reached a new pitch. But he couldn’t hold on. He slipped and fell.
James hit the dirt again.
He fumbled at his pocket, trying to pull out the notebook. He didn’t know if he had a spell that would help—he didn’t even know if magic would work in Hell. Then he heard shuffling footsteps. Someone approaching from behind.
James rose to his knees, twisting and lifting his fists in defense, but something heavy connected with the back of his skull.
He blacked out before he hit the ground.
II
In the center of the Palace of Dis, on a platform raised above the courtyard, stood the torturing room.
Its current occupant was a megaira. Slender, beaded serpents draped from its skull and hung limply over the demon’s shoulders. Black brands marched down its bony collarbones and imprinted on its sagging breasts, including two centered directly over its pale brown nipples. Though watery blood coursed over its flesh and needles had been driven underneath its thumbnails, it was still trying to laugh.
Unlike their frail cousins, the succubi, megaira couldn’t bleed to death, and they delighted in the taste of aggression, rather than sex. Torturing them required someone who didn’t get aggressive, emotional, or angry while inflicting pain.
Isaac Kavanagh was perfect for the job.
He paced in a circle around the megaira, cupping a fistful of silver needles the length of his hand. He had started the day with forty-eight needles; now he held thirty-six. The others were buried in the megaira’s various body parts. Two in the thumbs, of course—that was a given. One in the hollow of the collarbone. One through the navel to pierce its shriveled womb. One for each toenail—that was another eight.
What next? The underside of the jaw was always a good place to pierce, but it made speech difficult, and pain was only the secondary goal of the interrogation.
“Weak,” said the megaira. “You are weak and puny.”
Isaac didn’t reply. He could feel it attempting to probe him with its energies, searching for weak points, the things that would make him angry. It was like being jabbed in the forehead with doughy fingers.
“Take an eyeball!” called a nightmare from the opposite walkway, skeletal fingers curved around iron columns as it watched him work.
Another passerby suggested, “Up her quim!”
Isaac was accustomed to having admirers suggest ways to coerce his subjects into talking, but he didn’t pay them any mind. They were too emotional about it. Too excited. Their aggression could feed the megaira and let it heal.
He stopped behind the demon and tipped his head to study it. As with all prisoners kept in the Palace, the demon was naked so that it couldn’t conceal any tangible weapons. The sharp lines of its hipbones jutted out under its ribs like the ears of a cat. The arms were jerked over its head by an iron chain, and blood trickled from its thumbnails to its wrists. It had started its day standing, but those two needles alone had made its knees give out.
The kneecaps. Hmm.
“I will ravage your wife and shit on her face,” said the megaira in the infernal tongue.
Isaac’s mouth twitched at its attempted threat, which was as clo
se to laughing as he ever came.
“I think I’m going to drive a needle up your right nostril next,” he replied in the same language that the demon spoke, almost smoothly enough to pass for fluent. It wasn’t a threat. It was a statement of fact. “By law, I am required to explain—again—that you can belay this act by surrendering the information desired by the Council and naming the leader of the rebellion.”
The megaira’s skin flickered, baring the curves of its bones underneath. “My serpents will violate your wife’s every orifice and impregnate her with venom so that she dies from a rotting cunt.”
Isaac gripped the demon’s chin in one hand while onlookers cheered. His subject attempted to squirm away, but the chains had little slack. Its stubby feet slipped on the tile. One end of the needle was blunted, making it easy to thread the point into one nostril and shove with the pad of his thumb. He met resistance and pushed through.
That made the megaira stop talking and start screaming. Inky blood dribbled down Isaac’s thumb as tears squeezed from the corners of its eyes. He barely heard it wail over the delighted cries of his audience.
He shoved the needle deeper, until the end barely stuck out from its nostril, and then wiped the blood on his hand onto the demon’s shoulder.
“By law, I am required to warn you that my next action will not be to insert another needle, but to use the two in your thumbs to peel off the nails,” Isaac said. He doubted the demon heard him, since it was still screaming, but that wasn’t his concern. “You may belay this act by naming the leader of the rebellion.”
The trap door to his left groaned open. The head of security, Veronika, stuck her head through without climbing onto the platform. Her arrival was met with disappointed shouts from the walkway. They knew what her presence meant.
She had to catch her breath before speaking. “Inquisitor?” One of Veronika’s many jobs was to escort people to Earth, so she spoke smooth, perfect English.
Isaac flicked the needle in the megaira’s nose. That light touch drew a reaction down the entire body of his subject. An arched spine, gritted teeth, another wail bubbling in its throat. Good.
