Hell On Wheels

by Rhyll Biest

‘She disinherited your brother, and she married you off to me without a second thought. What wouldn’t she do to secure her throne?’

  Thrown, Valeda looked away for half a second, long enough for Adriel to register her uncertainty before she raised her chin.

  ‘I can see how those things might look to an outsider, but don’t presume to understand my family and don’t underestimate us.’

  Even while he admired the way she applied her family reputation like a joint lock, attemping to twist his thumb and manoeuvre him, he shook his head. ‘You’re the one who underestimates your mother. She views you as expendable. Why else would she marry you to me?’

  She recoiled at his carefully chosen words, the blossoming doubt in her eyes proof he’d shaken her to the core. As she reeled, he pinned her and applied an unshakeable hold. ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t count on her to protect your sisters one bit.’

  It was ruthless, yes, but the stakes were too high for anything less.

  Her shoulders slumped. ‘Fine. What do you want to know?’

  He should have felt satisfaction, so why did he feel none? ‘Everything. I want to know everything about your brother.’

  She flinched and fresh navy blood welled at the corners of her eyes. ‘That could kill me.’

  ‘No it won’t. All you have to do is let me in, all the way in, so I can heal you.’

  An expression of stark horror filled the oceanic depths of her eyes.

  Chapter 8

  Adriel wiped his sword on the hem of his tunic before raising his head to scan the empty battlefield. Instead of bodies and carnage, however, he saw Valeda’s face.

  His difficult, intriguing wife.

  She was close to breaking point and yet still resisting him with every fibre of her being. She’d allowed him to stem her nosebleed but had demanded time to consider his offer to heal the wall. Her willingness to consider it gave him some hope. Some. For her, that was progress, and no-one understood better than he that the things inside a demon could be more dangerous and difficult to face than external enemies.

  But he still had his doubts about whether she would honour her word. Treachery was an old friend, and he couldn’t imagine her simply putting aside that friend for acquaintanceship with trust.

  His fascination with her grew.

  She’d lost consciousness after he’d healed her nosebleed, the nosebleed he had caused, and she hadn’t woken before he’d left for the battlefront. Instead of sleeping, he’d simply sat and studied her, trying to work out what it was about her that dug at him, got beneath his skin. She was no seducing siren, so what was it about her that drew his thoughts again and again to her? The graceful line of her throat as she refused to speak? The way her slim shoulders squared for battle when she saw him? Her small but haughty breasts? All of those things and none of them.

  Perhaps it was more than just desire. He did respect her for the ocean of courage swelling beneath her mask, that fierce sea reflected in her eyes. On the surface she was all ice, but he’d glimpsed the currents swirling beneath. The two times he’d extended tendrils of power beneath her skin to heal her wounds he’d received bright flashes of memory—Valeda’s memories. One was of her in battle, a lethally sharp sword of ice in her hand and a handsome, bronze-eyed demon by her side. Adriel had recognised who he was on sight—Valeda’s lover.

  Possessiveness flattened its ears inside him.

  He’d also glimpsed Paimon, his eyes eerily similar to Valeda’s but grey, fighting against her. Brother and sister had been at war before. Why had Valeda not told him? Or was that memory hidden behind the wall and something she didn’t remember?

  Had her brother hurt her?

  He backed away from the question as the curse within him stood and paced, made restless by the promise of rage.

  ‘How many dead?’

  He started. How long had Hakan been standing by him? He studied his brother’s face but couldn’t read anything beyond tiredness and dirt. ‘Half a legion.’

  Hakan grunted, face set as hard as the grey batholith stone underfoot. ‘Make her talk. Make her.’ He left without another word.

  Adriel didn’t blame his brother for being angry. Every soldier lost was a soldier known to them, and they were drowning in dead.

  A wave of dizziness rocked him and he hunkered down in a crouch, the dead eyes of a fallen soldier watching as Adriel convulsed, the storm inside him intensifying.

  How did he help anyone when he couldn’t help himself?

  Darkness.

  A vision.

  The landscape blurred and became a sigh, a silence that wasn’t, before the world was reborn into a tapestry of scents. Each scent twisted around the other and yet his nose and brain untangled them with ease. He jumped to his feet and lowered his muzzle to the ground. Footprints, some old, some new, belonging to four different demons, himself included. He raised his head and sniffed the air, then he set off in pursuit of the smell of snow at a lazy trot. In the distance was blood, fresh blood, but it didn’t interest him. Instead he lumbered past the dead pool, his paws sinking deep in mud. He was eager to escape the pool’s stench. By a fallen tree trunk he paused at the sound of a rush of wings and a shrill caw. He ducked, dodged the horror bird’s razor-sharp beak as it clacked shut by his ear, then leapt and caught it.

  Prey. Chase. Kill.

  It fought, breathing fire, talons and beak slashing, but his scales were thick, and placing one giant paw on its head he shifted his weight and snapped its neck.

  He sheathed his fangs in flesh and blood.

  ***

  Valeda woke alone, feeling as if an abused soccer ball had taken the place of her head. She rubbed her temples. Why had she let the captain question her about her brother? And then agreed to let him fumble about with her brain to heal her nosebleed? The thought of him seeing her memories, her pain, all her private thoughts, made her innards coil. She didn’t want to be known; she wanted to be safe.

  If only Cinna would aim for safety once in a while too, instead of putting herself in danger, as if wading into war was nothing. Now it fell to Valeda to make sure she didn’t die, and that complicated things.

  Unsure when the captain would return, and whether his torturous questioning would resume, she opted for a walk—a long one. Perhaps she could walk all the way back home.

  She stepped out of the tent. Moloss greeted her with a wag of his stubby tail.

  Or not.

  At least a walk would help her to avoid the captain’s presence. He was not her enemy and yet he was. Not only was he hindering her escape, but the time she spent with him muddied things, diminished the clarity of her goals. That was the problem with familiarity: it could do strange things to you, like leading to friendship and other types of feelings. Feelings that, like an invisible leash, allowed others to control you.

  She looked down at Moloss. ‘Come along, rat, walkies.’

  A worn path encircling the camp led her to a stone canyon with an unexpected surprise at its north end. A rotting stench slammed into her, burying into her nostrils like an obscene leech. As she neared the source it grew stronger and was accompanied by a wet pop of bursting bubbles playing a melancholy tune.

  She paused as the dead pool came into sight. Here and there a hand or forearm frozen in rigor mortis reached from the black depths like a gnarled tree branch. It was a good thing the liquid filling the dead pool was as thick and black as sump oil, otherwise she might have glimpsed a face or two—the faces of those being reconstituted into more useful things—and recognised someone.

  Which would be unpleasant.

  Almost as unpleasant as the stench. How Cinna could bear to work with the dead pools was beyond Valeda. Even Moloss looked offended by the smell.

  A sudden movement made her glance at a clump of weeds. What was that? She crouched by a boulder to get a better look. No bigger than her hand, the bulbous-eyed creature stared back. She’d never seen anything like it before, and she was quite the keen naturalist in every dimen
sion.

  Resting a hand on a rock for balance, she bent to inspect it. The silver-skinned amphibian rolled at her a black eye flecked with gold, but it stayed put. Above the plum-shaped eye, a hard ridge of horned flesh jutted. The ridge made complete evolutionary sense to her—a protective protruberance for keeping the creature from getting its bulbous eyes gouged out. Neat.

  It stared back at her, its squat, rotund body propped on long legs folded at an odd angle beneath it. Long legs meant it liked to get around. But it wasn’t really built for speed so what was its defence against predation? Fangs? Poison? Spam emails?

  Moloss whined, uneasy.

  She glanced at him. ‘What’s your problem?’

  He looked abashed and she forgot about him as she prodded the squat creature with a twig.

  It hopped sideways to face her and she jumped. Moloss gave a sharp bark.

  Did she detect a baleful gleam in the creature’s inky eyes? ‘Think you can take me on, huh?’ She leaned closer to examine the two hollow points behind its eyes. The holes went deep, almost as if …

  ‘Aiiiiiii!’

  She reared back as a cloud of needles pierced her nose, cheeks, lips and brows. Fire lashed her skin. Her hands flew up but the damage was already done, her face a screaming, throbbing mess of pain. Was her skin peeling off? It felt flayed raw, burned, as if she’d been cremated alive. Moloss danced around her in a barking frenzy.

  She opened one eye and cringed as something snapped off in her eyelid. She hurriedly closed it again. From a distance, somewhere far beyond the forest fire consuming her face, boots thundered towards her.

  She opened her eye a mere crack, just in time to see the amphibian hop, plonk-plonk, behind a rock, leaving the ground behind it littered with tiny glittering needles.

  A strong pair of hands gripped her by the arms. ‘Are you okay?’

  The captain. She pushed him away. ‘Don’t touch me; I’m a walking pincushion.’

  There was a suspiciously lengthy silence before his hands rested on her shoulders to turn him towards her. ‘Princess, did you poke the slezak?’

  Something bubbled beneath his earnest question. ‘I don’t know. What’s a slezak?’

  ‘The thing that just rained pain on your face.’

  Was he laughing at her? Now? While her face was on fire? She seethed within her blindness. ‘I never poked it. I was just looking at it.’

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t poke it a little?’

  ‘All right, fine, maybe I poked it once but nobody warned me about the animal that SHOOTS FRICKING SPIKES. Seriously?’ She turned her head to glare at him with her one good eye. ‘No-one could have warned me about that?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Adriel shrugged. ‘The former rulers were big on biological experiments. The horror bird is one of them, the slezak another.’

  ‘Are there any others I should know about?’

  A moment of silence as he thought. ‘Just the spitting spiders.’

  Her head threatened to explode. ‘Spitting spiders? What kind of Lilith-forsaken place has spiders that spit?’

  He frowned. ‘I’m sorry, I should have warned you about the spiders, and not to poke the slezak, but sometimes I forget that others don’t know about them.’

  Others. She’d been reduced to ‘others’. ‘Right, well, once one has a face full of slezak quills, what does one do to unfuck the situation?’

  Surprise, heavy as a pelt, thickened the air around them. ‘Did you just say “unfuck the situation”?’

  ‘I’m going native. I thought you’d be thrilled.’

  ‘Hmm, well, as saucy as I find it when you swear like one of my soldiers, let’s remove the slezak from your face before the quills begin to fester.’

  ‘Fester!’

  ‘Shh, stay still.’

  Be still? As if she could move more than a wriggle with the hold he had on her. ‘Hurry up!’

  ‘I’m doing it but you have to stand still.’ His grip tightened and she was reminded once more just how insanely strong he was. She let out a slow breath to calm her panicky body. ‘Okay, I’m standing still, really still, so pull them out. NOW.’

  He tugged his gauntlets off and rested them on a boulder. That done, he gripped her jaw with a warm, heavy hand. ‘It’s going to hurt, so close your eyes and distract yourself by telling me something.’

  ‘Like what?’ She was already pretty distracted by the huge hand cupping her jaw, the blunt digits resting near her throat. How much more distracted could she get?

  ‘Whatever you want.’ He squeezed her shoulder. ‘Ready?’

  A tug followed by searing pain speared her cheek. Holy crap-cakes, that hurt like a … like a face full of slezak quills. Distract yourself. ‘Okay. You know what Lore says the universe smells like?’

  ‘Nope.’ He pulled another one out.

  ‘Geraniums.’ Zap! Pure energy trickled down her spine.

  ‘What’s a geranium?’

  ‘It’s a topside plant with flowers.’ Zap! She held her breath, pain interweaving with the pleasure of juicing up and his warm hand resting heavy on her back to steady her as he pulled out the quills.

  ‘Keep breathing, you’ve got to breathe the pain out; it’ll hurt less that way. Can you describe the smell?’

  How to describe geranium? ‘It’s a fresh smell. Tart, but kind of earthy.’ Zap!

  ‘Ah, a bit like you then?’

  ‘Bite me.’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask.’ His voice, husky with a tinge of humour, caressed her. But how dare he laugh at her when her whole face was on fire. One, two, three more quills came out. Owwwwww. Her sinuses stung but she refused to produce tears. She’d sooner poke out her eyes than cry. A princess of Hell never cried.

  ‘What do the flowers look like?’

  She focused on answering. ‘They’re radially symmetrical—’ Zap! ‘—with long, palmately cleft leaves.’ Zap!

  ‘Careful, you know that words with more than three syllables excite me.’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’ Four, five.

  ‘How do they reproduce?’ His fingers were surprisingly gentle.

  Six, seven. ‘Propagation is by seed, cuttings or division.’ Zap!

  ‘No geranium orgies?’

  Eight, nine, ten. Her eyes watered. ‘No, no geranium orgies.’

  ‘Why’s that, do you think?’ He pulled the quill in her eyelid free. Eleven.

  ‘Geraniums are shy.’

  He laughed. ‘All done, you can open your eyes now.’

  She opened them and found herself staring into eyes the colour of smog and sin.

  ‘Did that teaching opportunity give you enough energy to heal yourself if I remove the collar, or will I do it?’

  Remove the collar? Yes, yes, yes, yes. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘For this collar to come off, I need your word that you won’t disappear on me.’

  She ignored his stern look but nodded. ‘I promise.’ Anything to get the hateful thing off. She closed her eyes and held her breath. As his hands brushed the underside of her jaw to unlock the two iron halves, her skin prickled with awareness.

  With a clank, the collar dropped to the rocky ground and the maleficence in her veins surged free. She drew on the small amount of energy she’d built to heal the surface wounds left by the slezak quills. A tide of coolness swept in to flood her burning skin with healing and wash away the pain. Once finished, she opened her eyes, pleased to have performed the repair herself, to have exerted a modicum of control over her environment, over her own body. The illusion of frost, her old friend, settled on her skin like an embrace.

  ‘How’s the face now?’ He brushed her cheek. The collar hung from his belt.

  ‘Only a little sore,’ she grumped. One question nagged at her. ‘How did you find me so quickly?’

  He looked shifty and her eyes narrowed. ‘Were you following me?’

  ‘No. But you know what my hearing is like; I heard your cry followed by Moloss barking. And then I tracked you by sc
ent.’

  ‘By scent?’ She frowned. ‘How do you know my scent?’

  He gave her a deadpan look and in a flash she connected the dots. He not only heard far too well for her liking, but he had a nose like a bloodhound. Lilith save her.

  And what exactly was he able to smell of her? The scent of her skin? Her hair? Her pheromones, sexual and other?

  An odd heat snaked through her and she stiffened. No. She had to deny it, utterly. If fuelled, desire would be her undoing. ‘What a complete and utter violation of my privacy.’

  He smoothed her hair, his hand lingering. ‘If it’s any consolation, you smell quite delicious, like freshly fallen snow.’

  How she loathed being known, in any way. ‘And you smell like a thousand unwashed goats. Only the fact that you just pulled quills out of my face is stopping me from giving you a hearty slap.’

  To her chagrin he simply grinned. ‘Well, allow me to deter you from violence by educating you about the slezak. Their bladders are in their heads and they squirt each other in the face with urine when they fight. They save their quills for overcurious princesses. Obviously.’

  Stop! His feeding her facts was more sensual than any touch. Did he know that? Did he know it and was using it against her? And why did his face have to be so bold, so breathtaking, and his thumb so gentle on her cheek? She hated the way his touch, no matter how slight or impersonal, always left her wanting more. And having to hide it. ‘Fascinating,’ she managed to mutter after far too long a pause.

  He smiled. ‘Now for the bad news. The quills they shoot are coated with their urine and if you’re allergic to the toxins in that urine—and most are—in a few hours you’re going to feel really unwell, and my healing will only be able to reduce the severity of your reaction.’

  She shrugged. ‘I’ll survive.’ But her legs already felt unsteady. Not a good sign.

  ‘Yes, but it’d be better if you didn’t ride for a bit. Because it would be a great shame if you dropped like a stone from your dread mare and were trampled by my legion’s mounts.’ He took her hand.

  She grimaced. ‘What are my options if we suddenly have to move camp?’

  ‘I could carry you or you could ride with the supply train.’