Hell Bent

by Cate Corvin

  Ereshkigal didn’t taunt me or torment me. She just picked up her wine glass to sip, and I moved around the table to pour Satan’s drink.

  He’d completely missed out on everything that had transpired, but his eyes had been full of sadness when he came across me next.

  Even now, as I turned away, I felt his gaze lingering on the scars on my back.

  He was becoming someone else rapidly. All I could was hope Nergal would gain the upper hand and pray he didn’t come across Vyra.

  I didn’t want even the sight of her to stir up old memories or hunger.

  The dining hall was eerily silent without Ereshkigal trying to needle at me. I stepped back into the shadows, waiting to be beckoned and holding the wine bottle.

  From the corner of my eye, I watched her eat a piece of raw meat, still dripping blood. She licked her claws, then paused, sitting there and flexing her fingers in midair.

  She twisted her hand around, looking at it like she’d never seen it before. The light shimmered on her lacquered talons, and she waved her fingers, watching the light dance.

  The Queen was completely silent as she did it.

  Without meaning to, I caught Satan’s eye. He stared back at me with avid eagerness over the rim of his goblet.

  What the Hell was wrong with her?

  Ereshkigal abruptly lifted her other hand, cocking her head to the side as she examined them side by side, still wiggling her fingers.

  There was something so eerie and alien about the way she was moving that I couldn’t stop myself from stepping forward, hoping to put a stop to it. “More wine, my Queen?”

  She lowered her hands to the table as she looked up at me, her expression utterly blank.

  A beat passed where neither of us said anything.

  “Yes,” she finally murmured, and I poured once more, ruby droplets splattering on the table when she suddenly yanked the goblet away and raised it to her mouth.

  I almost cringed. It was the kind of offense that would’ve gotten me beaten bloody a week ago… but she just emptied the entire glass into her mouth, licking her lips when it was gone.

  One of the dining hall doors swung open. A little light came back into her empty gaze as a guard marched in, followed by… Vyra.

  All the blood drained from my face. She was only feet away from Satan, even paler against the pitch-black bundle of fabric she held.

  “My Queen,” she said softly, leaning into a flawless bow. “I’ve done as you asked.”

  When she straightened up, her eyes met mine, full of apology.

  She carefully shook out the cloth, letting it spill to the floor like a waterfall of ink.

  Vyra had made a gown. Against rivers of black silk and lace so fine it might have been made of spiderwebs, she’d sewn my feathers.

  They glinted with violet iridescence from a thousand different angles, from her arms to the floor. A collar of feathers rose above the neckline, each one selected for its perfection.

  My stomach turned. My wings, turned into this beautiful but useless garment…

  The light in Ereshkigal’s eyes brightened. She finally smiled, the first real expression I’d seen on her face this morning, and there was a cruel streak in it I didn’t like at all.

  “Well, I can’t say you were lying,” she said, rising from the table. I moved back swiftly before she stepped on me with her clawed feet. “They are a thousand times more beautiful in this form than on the worm’s back.”

  She strode around the table, and Vyra lowered her head as she offered the dress to Ereshkigal.

  Satan began to turn in his seat, and I almost lunged across the table in my haste to refill his cup, gazing into his eyes.

  I wouldn’t be able to stop him from coming across her forever, but maybe I could buy just a little more time. A minute, an hour, even a day…

  Satan caught my wrist before I could pull away. He ran his thumb over the network of tendons and blue veins that stood out beneath my skin, a touch that was full of promise, before he released me.

  I backed away. My heart pounded in my throat, but Ereshkigal hadn’t seen. She was holding the dress of my feathers up to her chest, watching the way they flowed over her in an ebony and violet stream.

  “What do you think, worm?” she asked. Her hips swayed as she walked towards me. “An improvement, yes?”

  I swallowed my rage and pride. “Yes, my Queen.” The bland reply almost choked me.

  “I think she’s earned a place in my court. What a lovely little pet.” Ereshkigal stroked the front of the dress, still clutching it to her chest. “Come, little one. Receive your collar and attend me.”

  She swept out. I met Vyra’s eyes for only a split-second before she hurried to catch up with Ereshkigal.

  Leaving me alone with Satan.

  I dropped the bottle on the table with a loud thunk. “Where are Lucifer and Belial?” I demanded, glaring down at him. “Where did they take them?”

  He looked at me under dark eyelashes and picked up a fork, spinning it around in his fingers. “They’re unharmed, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “You know damn well what I’m wondering.”

  Satan speared a chunk of Ereshkigal’s raw meat on the fork’s tines, holding it up to the light. The blood dripping from it was beginning to look a little gray. “They were taken to the Irkallan guards’ quarters. My wife is growing tired of her pets. They’re too willful, too headstrong…” He flapped his hand disdainfully, mimicking Ereshkigal talking.

  I dropped into the Queen’s chair, heedless of what she’d do to me if she caught me in it.

  Probably flay the rest of my skin off and have Vyra turn it into a dress. Why wouldn’t she?

  “And what is being done to them?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm.

  Satan lowered the fork, looking at me over the table. “Isn’t it pleasant to sit like this, and talk like friends? Like… equals.”

  I stared at him. “Please. If you want any cooperation from me at all, it would be best to leave the bullshit for another time.”

  He dropped the fork entirely and put both elbows on the table, bracing his chin on his hands. “Nothing is being done to them, Melisande. She wanted them out of the way, hoping you would break over the loss of all your mates, but you haven’t. Now she has a shiny new toy to distract her, and things are not quite right in that fucked-up head of hers. Doubtless they’ll walk out later today and she won’t even remember sending them there at all.”

  “What was that?” I lifted a hand, mimicking her strange movements from earlier. “She didn’t look like she was conscious of herself at all.”

  A satisfied smile spread across his handsome face. “That was the beginning of the end… or so I hope.”

  “The beginning of the end? You mean…” It was too good to be true. I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud and jinx the possibility.

  “I mean the end. Since she swallowed a Prince of her bloodline, she hasn’t been right. Maybe she should’ve thought twice before attempting to consume a power that had grown beyond her.” He waved at the dining hall and the ebonite sphinx statues watching us from their alcoves. “She’s ancient, but she hasn’t left this city in eons. Meanwhile, her bloodline was out in the world, learning, growing… while she stagnated here in the darkness.”

  “A lot like you, then,” I said.

  Satan cut me a sharp look. Only a small sliver of black remained in his left eye.

  “I confess. Is that what you want to hear?” He lifted one broad shoulder in a careless shrug. “I took the body of a dragon and sank into its baser desires. It was a primitive, stygian mind, and I reveled in it until it ate me alive. Until I stagnated. Now that I’m back in a man’s body, with a man’s mind, I understand my mistake.”

  I narrowed my eyes, leaning back in the cool velvet of the chair. “It’s a little rich to call it a mistake, given how many women you’ve killed.”

  “It’s a little rich for you to judge, given how many d
emons you’ve killed,” he countered smoothly. “Did you ever consider that perhaps you’re not just the hero of your little story, but a villain? Or… maybe that wasn’t demon blood I saw on your teeth. Maybe I didn’t see you celebrating their deaths at your hands in the Seventh Circle. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.”

  “I did celebrate. I won’t apologize for it. The choice was to kill or be killed.”

  He raised an eyebrow in skeptical condescension. “Was it? Maybe you should try thinking on a larger scale, Princess Wrath. You’re not a Prime power. Your existence isn’t bound to a set of cosmic laws that define your soul. When I was created, I was made as the counterbalance to all the light in the world. What we do is by nature—and I can’t apologize for my own nature either, any more than you could.”

  “What does your nature want out of this, then?” I felt the way my scars rubbed against the back of the chair. It wasn’t painful, not with my newfound healing abilities.

  It was just a massive crack in my armor, one Ereshkigal would squirm through with ease.

  And now the enemy of my enemy must become my friend.

  “Leave my nature to me. I said you weren’t a Prime, not that you couldn’t become one. Her sister has already reached out to you to form a bond. This matters, Melisande. More than you could know.”

  “How so?”

  Satan lowered his arms, idly tracing circles on the table with one forefinger. “When you take a power’s place, you become bound by those cosmic laws as well. Consider my wife. She wasn’t just born from the primordial abyss of death and its accompanying peace—she is the abyss, the physical representation of the concept. Just as I was created from the dark and lies. We are who and what we are.”

  “Her sister was the goddess of war and love. Two opposing sides of the same coin. Now, imagine—and I know it won’t be enough, because you have lived the life of a mayfly next to us—imagine one side of that nature becoming dominant. Imagine it being fed constantly, becoming the beast that consumes the other half of your nature. You are the representation of the thing, therefore you must be it.”

  Satan’s blue eyes bored into me. “Do you see it? What if war was the half of yourself that took over, and by the laws of the world, you must commit to making war with your every breath? I can tell the truth, of course, but my inherent nature is to spread discord and lies. Ereshkigal’s nature is the void and peace of death, but in time, as she stagnated, the void took over. It became the dominant half that ate everything.”

  “I think I have enough love in me to resist that.” I refused to look away, though my lungs had tightened painfully. It felt impossible to draw breath.

  Satan smiled, but it was tight and didn’t reach his eyes. “Well, consider it more often when you feel like throwing out flippant insults. In twenty thousand years, when another Earth has risen and fallen, when its inhabitants have made sacrifices to you for the gift of war… if you are still yourself by the end, by all means, come find me and boast about it.”

  I finally looked away. I could neither forgive nor forget his crimes, but I couldn’t imagine millennia of feeding the raging beast inside myself, either.

  I wouldn’t be the same Melisande at the end of that, and I knew it. Not when war was what I’d been raised from death for.

  “Nothing will come of it regardless. I’m hardly more than human now.”

  Satan tossed his hair back and shook his head. “You’re thinking small-scale again. Do you think the universe gives two fucks about your wings? No. You’ve already died once. Gabriel ripped your soul from Death and shoved it in a new body. You’ve already undergone the transmutation from mortal to immortal. From immortal to Prime is just another, larger step.”

  I’d had no idea that being brought back from the dead was a form of transmutation in itself. Perhaps, like Tascius, my physical form was already primed for it, having done it once. But… “How did you know about me and Gabriel?”

  “Lucifer told me a lot of things during our father-son trip into the world,” he said with a genuine grin. “What with his mind being wide open to me.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Well, I enjoyed hearing all about it.”

  I sneered at him. “Speaking of Lucifer, I noticed that the soul-bond is still on him. You couldn’t keep your end of the deal, so I don’t know why we’re speaking at all.”

  “As if you were going to keep your end of the agreement,” he said, giving me a withering look. “Do you think I don’t know a lie when I hear one?”

  I raised my hands and spread them wide. “Oh, no. I’ve been found out.”

  “I can’t break the soul-bond, not without the risk of killing him. You can choose whether to believe me or not, but I am fond of my son. I wasn’t the Dragon when I adopted him as my own. It is in both of our best interests not to do anything that might destroy him. If we continue as we are, it will eventually fade on its own. You did enough damage to it.” Satan’s grin had faded. I found myself believing the stern, hard expression, whether he was the Father of Lies or not.

  I had so much to think on. If it was still possible to continue the transmutation, or to borrow more of Inanna’s power, should I do it?

  Or would I just become a creature like them, cosmically bound to represent love and war in the world, and eventually all of what made me Melisande would fade?

  If war was the side that was fed, if it took over and was all that was left… maybe it would better if I didn’t touch that borrowed power at all anymore.

  I couldn’t imagine myself being that powerful, but I tried to picture it: myself as a goddess of war, demanding blood in a temple under the sun. The polar opposite of Ereshkigal, but still a never-ending force of hunger.

  “Then we’ll just let the soul-bond fade. Either way, I’m done making deals with you.” I stood up and grabbed the wine bottle that needed to be shelved. “You should go.”

  Satan raised his brows but left his seat, taking the goblet with him.

  He strode around the table as I gathered the plates and empty cups, and when I straightened up, he was at my ear.

  I almost jumped out of my skin at the feeling of his body heat so close to my own skin, to the scars on my shoulder blades.

  “Oh, and don’t think I didn’t recognize your little friend,” he said quietly. “Here’s a deal for you: make nice with me, and she stays alive.”

  He vanished, leaving me to shiver for a long moment before I could move again.

  I had the oddest feeling that the entire time, Nergal hadn’t been part of our conversation at all.

  Only Satan.

  21

  Melisande

  My hands shook so badly that all the plates and glasses I held clattered against each other all the way down the hall to the kitchen.

  The handmaidens didn’t notice or care, but one of the guards scoffed at me as I passed. “What use does she see in you?”

  I kept my mouth shut, half because I didn’t care, and half because I was puzzling through it all.

  It was perfectly clear to me, no matter how much I disliked it.

  The only way out was to finish the transmutation that had already begun. Inanna had created the bond between us, and now I had to find a way to complete it.

  Even halfway between life and death, she had still been a goddess, a Prime power. I could take one of the knives from the kitchen and cut her body to pieces right now, but that wouldn’t finish it. She would either knit back together, or the last vestiges of her power would just remain in the parts.

  It was a job that required the Spear of Light, which was so far out of reach I couldn’t even contemplate using it.

  There had to be another way.

  I dumped the dishes in a deep sink full of bubbles, ignoring the handmaiden scrubbing at them with automatic motions.

  My collar was itching furiously. I slid my fingernails under the edge and scratched at my skin, wondering if Vyra was having her own collar melded around her neck right no
w, a pretty leash to keep her chained down.

  It was the sound of distant shouting that distracted me before I could scratch through my own flesh to the muscle below.

  I tore through the halls, skidding to a halt and ducking into a dark corner before I reached the great hall. An ebonite sphinx with a raised paw provided me with enough shelter to watch, far enough from prying eyes.

  Or almost far enough.

  Satan leaned against a statue yards away from me, his blue eyes crinkled in a smirk when he caught me watching.

  Fucker.

  Lucifer and Belial were out of the dungeons and surrounded by guards. They looked a little battered, but unscathed besides that.

  And Lucifer was on his knees in front of the Queen’s throne.

  Ereshkigal sat on it imperiously, wearing the dress of black feathers that fit her like a second skin. She stroked the feathers, looking like her old self again.

  “How dare you,” she whispered. A small degree of alarm finally crept into Satan’s expression, and his brow creased.

  Belial snarled from the grip of several guards. They’d bound him with ebonite chains, preventing him from shifting into his lion form.

  “How dare I?” Lucifer laughed, tossing back his blond hair. “I’ll dare it every time, you shriveled hag. It’s like covering shit in the diamonds: it might sparkle, but in the end, it’s still shit.”

  My brain quickly connected the pieces. Of course Ereshkigal would be wearing the remains of my wings and gloating about it.

  Apparently insults about her appearance were her breaking point. Although I had to agree with Lucifer; my wings looked much better on my own back.

  I couldn’t let her hurt him. I was the reason they were all here.

  I stepped out from behind the statue. Vyra was at Ereshkigal’s side, hidden in the shadow of the throne of bones, her eyes wide; she was about to get her first taste of what it was like to truly piss off Ereshkigal. And, almost shockingly, Michael had been moved to my old cage, which hung near her throne.