by Reine, SM
“Yes, Veronika?”
“A new prisoner is on his way. He’s a human.”
“I’m making progress here,” Isaac said. “Go ask Ariane to take care of this one. She enjoys processing the mortals.”
Veronika glanced at the people watching from the walkway. The bloody sky behind them turned the figures to indistinguishable shadows, distant enough that they would be unlikely to hear anything quieter than a yell. She lowered her voice anyway. “He’s not getting processed. He’s going to court right now. You’ll want to see this personally.”
If the head of security thought that the new prisoner needed Isaac’s personal attention, then it was likely to be the case. He examined his handiwork again. Something besides blood and ichor was dripping out of the megaira’s nose now. Brain matter, perhaps? Isaac wasn’t even sure that the demon had such a thing.
“I’m going to leave these needles in place,” he explained to the megaira, who had replaced the screaming with sweating and panting. “I don’t have any particular desire to remove your thumbnails or cause you further damage, but I will do it when I come back if I must. I hope a few hours of thinking will help you make the right decision.”
He felt another jab of its mind against his. A sharp pinch in his temple said that it had plucked a thought from the undercurrent trickling through his brain.
The megaira labored to speak. Its voice whined around the needle in its nasal cavity. “If you’re not so concerned about your wife…” A cough. A gurgle. “Perhaps I could become carnally acquainted with your daughter’s corpse.”
Isaac sucked a hard breath through his nose.
“I don’t think I want you to talk until I come back,” he said, his voice cracking on the last word.
He selected one more needle and slammed it into the underside of the megaira’s jaw.
Its muffled squeals followed him down the ladder.
The courtyard was quiet at that time of morning; most demons were already at work, so only gardeners wandered through the flesh orchards. They gave the limbs protruding from the earth the occasional jab with a stick to make sure they were still fresh enough to twitch. As Isaac passed, one of the hands failed to react. The gardener jerked it from the soil, roots and all.
Veronika was waiting for him nearby, beside the sculpture of Lucifer. She wore the leathers of Palace security—it was almost like the biker gear that humans wore on Earth. It was a recent change to the livery of Palace employees. The citizens of Dis liked to be trendy and emulate whatever was happening topside, but official garb was slower to update, so the security team had only recently stopped wearing scale armor.
She had her daggers—which were more like butcher knives—sheathed at her thighs, but every line of her body said that she was on edge, as though waiting for an attack. The nightmare’s mouth was in such a severe frown that it nearly bisected her jaw from her face.
“What is it?” Isaac asked, wiping his hands clean on the towel she handed him. The open air of Dis scratched at his raw throat and burned his skin. He failed to suppress a cough.
Veronika headed for the door to the south wing, and he matched her stride. “Bounty hunters, sir. They’re bringing a man down from Earth. He’s scheduled to arrive this morning and will be immediately put in front of the Council.”
“But there were no bounties on any topside humans. I would have seen it.”
Veronika waved her wrist in front of the door, and it unlocked. “The Council already paid a fee to the ones bringing this man in, so they must have put out the call.” She rested her hand on the handle without opening it, as if waiting to see Isaac’s reaction. He gave none. A secret bounty from the Council was interesting, but not unusual. “Abraxas paid in cash. Earth money.”
“How much?”
“Half a million American dollars,” she said. “Taken straight out of our security budget, according to the treasurer—and please keep that to yourself, because I’m not supposed to know.”
Now that was interesting. Isaac struggled to keep his face blank. “What’s his crime?”
“Transubstantiation and violation of The second law. He’s accused of turning from a human into a demon.” Veronika opened the door and he went inside.
“That’s not possible,” Isaac said.
“Yeah, I thought so, too. But James Faulkner is apparently the most powerful witch on Earth, so he must have found a way.”
Isaac stopped halfway into the hall.
“What did you say his name was?”
The ground shifted and swayed underneath James. He could hear the fluid in his skull swooshing from side to side with every motion.
For a moment, he was so grateful to have slept without dreaming that he neither remembered nor cared what had happened to him. It had been days since he’d been able to close his eyes without seeing Elise’s cold, bloodless face on the other side. But the smell of sulfur crept over him, and it was followed by an awareness of his raw nasal passage and his throbbing skull.
Memory returned all at once.
James was in Hell.
He tongued the wound on the side of his mouth. The skin was sticky—he had been bleeding profusely—but it had already clotted and dried into a caked mass on his cheek. The injury must have been hours old.
Forcing his eyes open, he saw a pair of feet. Dainty black loafers. Ankles bound with leather cord.
Hannah.
His blurry gaze traveled up her feet to her knees, and then her face. Hannah was unconscious. Her wrists were tied in front of her, and her skin and clothing were covered in a layer of red dust.
He tried to say her name, but his tongue wouldn’t articulate words. It stuck to his dry lips.
James swallowed, coughed, and cleared his throat. “Hannah?” His voice came out as a croak. The air tasted sulfuric and bitter.
She didn’t respond.
He relaxed into the swaying motion of the floor. It was grainy—some kind of rough reddish wood, although not a wood that he was familiar with. The floor was throbbing. It sounded like wind was rushing outside. Hard orange light shot through the gaps between boards so brightly that it made his eyeballs ache. James’s shirt and slacks were as dusty as Hannah’s, as if he had been rolling around on the surface of Mars.
He assumed that his stiff, unmoving arms meant that he was tied, too, but he felt so strange and disconnected from his own flesh that he couldn’t tell.
James rolled onto his stomach with a groan. Wriggling closer to the wall, he pressed one eye to a slit between two boards.
Whatever he was in, it wasn’t a ship. There were buildings passing by, and the doors and shop fronts resembled the slums of Dubai. A strange language was scrawled across the walls in red-brown paint, but it was gone before he could try to decipher the language.
Dark forms slipped into view and out again. People walking past his transport.
But not humans.
James’s scalp itched and crawled as his stomach knotted. The feelings swelled and then subsided every time he passed another pedestrian. It wasn’t nausea from his head injury—it was the feeling that he got from demons.
He was still in Hell. And judging by the fences, the cement paths, and the iron trees that he glimpsed, he had been taken into the City of Dis.
There were shouts in a foreign tongue, and an explosion thudded in the distance. He squinted through the sliver in time to see a squat creature with a smashed face throw something at his transport.
Something thudded against the other side of the wood, making the entire vehicle shake. James jerked away.
Hannah sat up and pushed her hair out of her face with both hands. The right side of her face was swelling. “Where are we?” She sounded as raw as he felt.
“We’re in Dis.”
“We can’t be in Dis. I have to get home. Nathaniel—”
“It’s better for him to be there than here.” James started wriggling, trying to free his wrists from their bindings behind his back. Every little motion
hurt. “But trust me when I say this isn’t my first choice of vacation spot, either.”
“How can you be joking at a time like this?”
He didn’t respond. Of all the things that he had been through with Elise—being sacrificed and possessed by a powerful demon, the threat of apocalypse, and delving deep into infernal undercities—falling into Hell was just one more episode in his miserable life.
But Hannah had barely been outside Colorado, much less to another dimension. She had certainly never been held captive. And she looked like she was about to hyperventilate from the sulfuric air.
“I’m going to protect you, Hannah. You will get home to Nathaniel, and I will take both of you to safety.”
“Those are some bold goddamn words from the man who just got the two of us dragged into Hell!”
“Relax,” he said. Their vehicle bounced over something, bumping the back of James’s sore head against the wall.
Hannah glared. “Relax? Relax?”
She had found the end of his patience.
“Yes. Relax. Now shut your damn mouth and stop distracting me, woman.”
Fury flashed across Hannah’s face, but she didn’t try speaking again. She lifted her wrists to her mouth and bit at the leather strap.
James concentrated on his own bindings. If only they had tied him in front…but he was confident he could loosen them, if only he could reach the knot with his fingers…
The vehicle jerked to a halt. There was commotion outside. More shouts, more quiet explosions. They were growing closer, like a riot was moving up the street. The next explosion was loud enough to make James’s ears ring and the vehicle shake.
Every hint of anger had vanished from Hannah’s face and had been replaced by fear. A tiny whimper rose from her throat.
James turned his head to peer out of a slit again. There were no shop windows visible now—just a blank wall reflecting the harsh orange-red light.
Nearby voices spoke outside of the cart, jabbering in a rough, guttural language. It was vo-ani, the infernal tongue. He had studied the demonic language for years so that he could study ancient infernal spells, and James considered himself fluent in it. He practiced using it on Earth with demons whenever he had the chance—which was not often, considering that most of his interactions with demons ended in their abrupt death.
But there was a difference between speaking with Earth-bound creatures that had human mouthparts and trying to understand a regional accent in Hell. He only picked up a word here and there: things like “Palace,” “market,” and “bounty.”
Hannah was still whimpering.
He started twisting his wrists harder, flexing his muscles to strain against the leather.
A click, a clatter. The back wall of their enclosure dropped open.
The demon that stood on the other side was like nothing James had ever seen on Earth. A face protruded from its chest. Its eyes bulged, a tongue hung over its missing jaw, and a fall of tattered red feathers coated its arms.
James had seen etchings of such demons before. They were called “brutes.” Something prevented them from being able to breathe in Earth’s atmosphere, so they had never crossed dimensions. It was the first time he had seen such a strange creature in the flesh.
Yet that was nowhere near as strange as the sight beyond the brute’s back. They had left behind the shops that he had glimpsed earlier, and a city block stretched as far as he could see, with towering skyscrapers that wouldn’t have been out of place in Chicago. Red dust blew over the concrete streets.
It was familiar, but just different enough to be unsettling. There were no cars, no streetlights—just a row of mirrored buildings and a mob of demons barely restrained by security guards in leather biker gear. The line of bodies stood shoulder-to-shoulder, trying to hold back the crowd, but they were giving way one step at a time.
“Tika tho ngilo tin?” the brute asked, tongue flapping in the air as it addressed someone that James couldn’t see.
A second demon joined the first, blocking James’s view of Dis. It was tall, broad, and humanoid; judging by the papery skin and the way the corners of its mouth almost reached its ears, it had to be some flavor of nightmare. It wore a leather vest just a few shades darker than its own skin, which was almost peach in color.
“Giho tim,” said the nightmare, and James actually understood that one; it meant, “They want the man.” Its teeth were shattered yellow stubs.
He swallowed and coughed again, preparing to speak. Maybe the dry, horrible air would help with his accent. “I think we have a misunderstanding,” James said in his very best attempt at the infernal tongue. Neither of the demons acknowledged that he had spoken.
Hannah edged toward him. “What are they saying?”
James leaned to the side, partially shielding her body from their view with his shoulders. “I think they’re trying to decide what to do with us.”
“Goha?” said the brute. It sounded more like a wet cough than a word.
The nightmare gave a dismissive wave of its skeletal hand and responded in its more refined dialect, “I don’t need that one. Sell her.”
James hadn’t researched infernal culture beyond what he needed to know for his studies in magic, but he knew that humans were numerous in Hell. And they were almost entirely used as slaves or for food.
Sell her.
He got onto his knees as the squat demon reached a three-fingered hand inside the enclosure. “Don’t touch her!” James said. He didn’t bother trying to speak the infernal tongue. They weren’t listening anyway.
Hannah gasped and slid back, but the demon’s meaty hand closed on her ankle. Her skirt slid up her hips as the demon dragged her into the street.
James lunged after her, jumping out of the back of the vehicle they had been riding in.
His feet connected with the red concrete, and a dizzying wave of energy swept over him, as though centuries of ancient magic shocked through his bones. Earth became sky, the buildings tipped underneath him, and he felt like he was going to fall into the dust-clouded air.
Hannah was shrieking, but he couldn’t see her through his blurred vision. His fingers brushed hers, then slipped. His eyes cleared in time to see the brute wrapping Hannah in a tight embrace, hauling her off of her feet, and dragging her toward the milling crowd.
“No!” he yelled.
The nightmare swung. Its fist struck James’s face, and stars flashed in his vision.
Between the multiple blows and the strange swells of arcane magic, James couldn’t keep his footing. He slipped. Staggered. Flung his hands out to catch himself, and failed. His side hit the concrete. He glimpsed the vehicle that he and Hannah had been transported in—an old, dirty pickup truck that had patches of leather covering holes in the metal—and then his gaze focused on what lay beyond it.
The spires of the Palace jutted into the sky, shining with glass panels and iron arches. The truck was waiting at the elaborate gates separating the demonic city from the Palace itself.
The nightmare was taking James to the Council.
His stomach pitched, and he tried to get to his feet. “Hannah!”
James’s captor drove a knee into his gut, and all the breath rushed out of his lungs. “Easy money,” laughed the nightmare as it tossed James into the back of the truck again.
He heard the door close and latch again, leaving him on the inside, and Hannah on the outside with the riot.
“James!” she screamed, her voice distant in the crowd.
He slammed his fists against the door. The wood rattled, but held strong. The vehicle shifted underneath him as it began to move again, making the bars of harsh light slide across the floor once more.
Then he was inside the gates, and all light vanished.
James wasn’t given enough time in the truck to plot his escape before it stopped again. The back gate opened, and the nightmare blindfolded him before he could see where he had been taken. A cloth was shoved into his mouth and bound w
ith a leather strap. The material tasted like sweat and dust, and he gagged on it.
“Let’s move,” the nightmare said. Its hands dug into his arms as it pushed him forward. He tried to grunt a protest, but he couldn’t speak around the gag. All he could do was walk.
Although James couldn’t see where he was being taken, he could gather some clues from his other senses. The sound of the nightmare walking was joined by another set of footsteps, maybe two. The strides were short and shuffling. Were they more demons, or human slaves? There was no way to distinguish one creature from another. Everything around him felt powerfully infernal, to the point that he thought he might vomit again.
The air turned hotter and drier; the ground crunched beneath his feet. A door opened, a door closed. The air grew cooler.
There was the hissing of steam and the sensation of dropping. He smelled brass and oil, smoke and vapor.
Stubby fingers jabbed him in the spine, urging him onward. And then it was hot again, and he was going down a long set of stairs.
Hinges whined. A hand shoved him in the back, and his knees hit stone.
The blindfold was whipped from James’s face.
He knelt in the center of a stone ring that was as warm beneath his knees as the hearth of a fireplace. The only light came from grates set into the floor—a dim red glow that danced like flame. A smoky haze gathered around the floor, making his eyes sting. Stands loomed over him, like the seats of a judge and jury. Perhaps a dozen of the seats were filled, though there was enough space for a hundred creatures to watch him. Every one of the watchers wore robes that concealed their faces.
He shifted on his knees and inched toward the edge of the ring. Demonic runes were carved into the edge. It stung his knees with heat when he approached, and he shrunk back. The onlookers didn’t react to his weak escape attempt.
The door opened again. A slender woman with a severe face that looked like it had been carved out of wood stepped through. She wore a leather uniform and had a butcher knife strapped to each hip.
