I Am Satan (Hellbound Trilogy Book 2)

by Tim Hawken

  This was impossible. What had happened? Where was John? Where were Smithy and Mary? I heard Smithy shout and Asmodeus thrust out a fist. Elements crackled from out of his hand, forming a force field around us.

  “That’s close enough, my pilot friend,” he snarled.

  I was shaken, barely able to understand what was happening. I drew into my reserves of power, but they were tapped out. I had used the last of my vitality on making The Fount of Mercy. I was like a ragdoll, helpless beneath a powerful dragon.

  “My dear Michael.” Asmodeus clicked his tongue. “So easy to manipulate, so predictable! You have been so single minded in your task of getting to Charlotte all this time, you didn’t see what was right in front of you. A bishop in Hell. One that stayed human? It’s so ridiculous it’s almost laughable.” He threw his head back in mocking laughter before looking down back into my eyes. “You have grown in power, though, I have to give credit where it’s due. If I had not let you drain yourself making this fountain, you might almost be a match for me. Almost. Your real weakness lies in that dull mind of yours. Do you really think that a path of fate was laid out before you that would lead you directly to both sets of keys? Do you think I wouldn’t know about this way to split the realm’s walls apart? I am the engineer of this universe. I know all the loopholes. Do you think you could achieve something so difficult with so little effort? Oh, I let you stumble on a few hurdles along the way. I helped give you the opportunity to find what has been hidden from me for so long. You did all the hard work for me. It was so perfect! In the end it was Providence which led you here, Michael. It was a fate that I created. The Lord giveth and The Lord taketh away. I’ll take away now, my son,” he growled. “I’ll have my other keys back. I can easily travel through my own realms already, but I do not need anyone else playing God with my creation!”

  Asmodeus kicked me hard in the ribs and stamped his foot downward. A shuddering earthquake shook the ground. I was able to roll over onto my side to see both Smithy and Mary scrambling to keep a foothold. Mary lurched to the side and Smithy rushed in to hold her up. Asmodeus shot from beside me. With unearthly speed, he scooped Mary into his arms and pushed Smithy to the side. She thrashed about, clawing at The Devil’s face. Her fingernail caught his eye and he yelled, throwing her to the ground. She landed only inches away from the pool of deathly gel.

  A fearsome screech sounded above and a blur of green, purple and violet thundered into the body of Asmodeus. He was tossed to the ground as three dark angels rolled about him in a struggle.

  Four other angels slammed down, pounding into Asmodeus, screeching in rage. It was the Pure Seven! They tore at his body with their fearsome claws, ripping at his flesh. He tucked in tightly as they shredded spiked fingers across his back, exposing ghastly white flesh. All seven sinful colors piled on top of Asmodeus, overwhelming him with force of numbers. They were slowly dragging him to the edge of the cliff, looking to throw him off in the water of sleep below.

  I looked on like a helpless child, trying to pull myself off the ground. My legs kept collapsing underneath me. I struggled to sweep the confusion from within me. I tried to gather energizing elements around me, but I had no strength left inside.

  The battle raged on. The seven vengeful demons of truth thumped their wings into the inert form of Asmodeus, biting him, wounding him. Just as I thought they would topple him over the cliff edge, a blue light started to glow from within him. It started warping and growing, the air hissing about him. With a sonic detonation, the blue orb about his soul shattered into a million fragments, sending the angels of death screaming away. Their wings were on fire, burning from the heavenly discharge which Asmodeus had sent bursting from within him. Asmodeus stood up calmly, looking about while he brushed the dirt from his clothes. He spotted Mary, crouched over the still body of Smithy, who must have been knocked out from the blast. In one smooth movement he swooped in and grabbed her by the foot, lifting her in the air, dangling in his grasp. He whirled around to see me, still flailing on the ground. Without even taking a step, he shot at me in the air and picked me up as well. In an instant he had us by the ankles, hanging out over the cliff.

  Asmodeus stood there, holding one of us in each of his powerful hands, his chest heaving. He stood above the turgid green waterfall which roared down to the pool below.

  “Stay back!” he snarled loudly. “All of you who would attack me, cease your assault or I will cast these two into a sleep which will last an eternity. They will never be washed out of the pool. They will be lost to you forever!”

  Hanging upside down, I could see each of the Pure Seven, wings smouldering, their eyes blazing with hate as they looked from us to Asmodeus. Smithy still lay unconscious on the ground behind them. I was powerless to do anything, the waterfall of sleep surging inches below my face.

  “Please,” Mary said weakly, in the other hand of Asmodeus. “Set Michael free. I will give you the key. If you don’t I will drop it in the waters, and even you won’t be able to save it.” She took the key, which was hanging about her neck and held it threateningly ready to drop it into the depths below.

  “You always were one for a bargain,” our captor sneered while he held us. “Compromise is for the weak!”

  Mary let the key slip lower, toward the waterfall.

  Asmodeus threw his head back and laughed.

  “Have it your way, Mary,” he said, and tossed me, like a puppet, skidding to a halt at the feet of the still seething Pure Seven.

  “No,” I managed to say feebly. “It’s our only hope, Mary. Don’t trade it for me!”

  With tears in her eyes, Mary took the key and held it up to Asmodeus. She looked over to me, and mouthed softly, “I’m sorry.”

  Asmodeus snatched the keys from her hand and thrust it into his pocket in an instant.

  “Now what should I do with you, my lovely little whore?” he asked, grinning wickedly down at Mary, who still hung in his clawed fist.

  “Drop me,” she said. “I welcome sleep.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “It would be too good for you, to be reunited with your filthy brother. You should live with the knowledge that you not only caused his demise by leading him to the Monastery of Zoroaster, you have destroyed Michael’s chance of ever seeing his love, Charlotte, again. I’ll let my son deal with you.”

  With a grunt he flung Mary hurtling down toward the banks far below. Two of the angels rushed forward to catch her. The other five screamed in rage and propelled themselves toward Asmodeus. He spun around like circular lightning, whipping his arm around as he did so and imploded out of existence with a loud pop. Five raging demons shot through the space where he had been. Just a small puff of white mist lingered in the air where he had disappeared.

  Asmodeus was gone. He had destroyed any hope of accomplishing what we had worked so hard to achieve.

  I let the darkness rip my mind away from the conscious world.

  PART THREE

  VERITAS

  ONE

  I LAY IN A SOFT BED. Light sheets covered me in the darkness. There was no noise.

  I struggled to remember how I’d come to be there. I stared up into the darkness. With a spark of realization, memory roared over the top of me like a train bearing down on the tracks of time: my promise of freedom to the souls of Hell, our quest for the keys, the betrayal of Bishop John who was not a Bishop at all. My father Asmodeus had taken our one chance at revenge. I sat up gasping. I had fought a losing battle.

  But how did I get here?

  Struggling out of the knot of sheets around me, I leapt up. I fumbled in the darkness, before I had the sense to bring the elements of light around me.

  Familiar surroundings. I was in my bedroom at Casa Diablo which adjoined the war room. I was dressed in a black pair of loose pants, naked from the waist up. I traced my hands over my body, checking for damage. I was clear of any wounds. I was aching all over, but whole. It was my mind that suffered. Everything was lost. The keys we had fought
so hard to find were now lost to Heaven. Our plans to bring down the walls between the realms were dashed. My hope to reunite with Charlotte had been torn away once more.

  I rested my hands on my knees. I was back to the same situation when Asmodeus had first left: no ideas, no plans, just anger and frustration. I now had a choice to make: wallow in that anger as I had done before, or use it to create something. I needed to clear my head. Straightening up, I walked to the bathroom and turned on the shower.

  I stepped inside and cool water washed over me. Closing my eyes, I let the refreshing liquid cover my head. Faces jolted into my mind. Mary. Smithy. Were they okay?

  I punched the tiled wall of the shower hard. Splinters of ceramic stuck into my knuckles as I punched again and again. I had let my friends down. My first thoughts upon waking had been of myself, not of them. Was I so selfish? A well of self-loathing crawled inside me. Leaving the tap running, I stepped out of the shower. Without even drying myself I pulled my pants back on and rushed out of the room.

  As I burst into the war room, Mary and Smithy jumped out of their seats. They were sitting at the large metal table with The Pure Seven. Their presence caught me completely off guard.

  “Michael!” Smithy yelled, running over to me. “You’re okay! We were worried. You’ve been out for days. We’ve been waiting for you.” He paused and looked me up and down. “What are you doing? You look like a drowned rat!”

  I looked at myself. I was dripping in water, in nothing but black pants, blood seeping from my hand. In my haste and confusion I hadn’t thought things through.

  “I’m…” I searched for words within. “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Mary said behind Smithy.

  She got up from her chair and walked over to us. Leaning in she gave me a big hug, not worrying that I was soaking wet. She kissed me lightly on each cheek before pulling away. I simply stood there, dazed.

  “You have nothing to be sorry for. We were lucky that no one was lost. We were even luckier that we have one man with us who questioned what we did not.”

  “What?” I asked, trying to grasp what she was saying.

  “Smithy. Smithy guessed that John was not everything he appeared to be. It was his quick thinking which helped us save one set of the keys.”

  “What?” I asked, the fog of hopelessness beginning to lift from my mind. So many questions came jumbling to the fore. All I could say was, “What?”

  “Well,” Smithy said, puffing out his chest a little. “I told you I didn’t trust him. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but when you were in Zoroaster’s Monastery I started to think about it. It didn’t sit right with me that he had asked both Judas and me to come into the meeting with you at Satan’s Tower. It seemed an awful big coincidence that we happened to be the only two souls out of the group in the foyer who had both committed suicide, yet he had singled us out to join the discussion. How could he know that we would be sympathetic to his arguments?”

  Why hadn’t I noticed that too? I thought. I seemed so obvious now that Smithy brought it up.

  “It wasn’t just that though,” he continued. “There was something about the way he drank his tea that got to me. I really couldn’t understand it. It was only the next time, when we were in the foyer at Magdalene’s mansion, that I realized it. He drank his tea exactly like Satan used to: six spoons of sugar followed by six stirs clockwise, six stirs counter. It used to make my skin crawl watching Satan drink his tea. I got the same feeling from John.”

  “He told me of his suspicions once we landed here at Casa Diablo,” Mary joined in. “While you were talking with John, Smithy pulled me aside. At first I thought he was talking nonsense, but it raised some questions of my own. How had he managed to find you in the monastery? It really didn’t make sense to me, but our focus at the time was on the keys and then Judas. Everything had happened so quickly. Neither Smithy nor I knew what to do about it, though. We had no proof of our accusations. Had we confronted him directly we didn’t know what would happen. You were already involved in making the waterfall with John when we arrived and we thought maybe we could buy some time until later. Then, everything tumbled out of control.”

  I ran events over in my head. I had been rushing forward so hard in my haste that I hadn’t stopped to think about anything else but our goal. I hadn’t given anyone a chance to voice concerns.

  “But the keys,” I asked. “You said you saved the keys. I saw you hand them to Asmodeus!”

  “They were the keys to my hangar!” Smithy laughed. “That old goat was so busy fighting off The Pure Seven that he didn’t notice the keys around Mary’s neck had been swapped for fakes. These are the real ones.” He pulled a jingling ring of keys from his pocket. Singling out two, he pulled them off the ring and handed them to me. I changed my perception and looked down in amazement at the molecules of light shining up at me.

  I looked back to Smithy and Mary in wonderment. I grabbed both of them in a big hug. Possibility and hope rushed into me. Not all was lost! I squeezed the two as hard as I dared. When I had been blinded, these two had been my eyes.

  I pulled myself away from their friendly embrace.

  “So what does this mean now?” I asked. “What’s our next step? What’s best for everyone?”

  “We’ve been talking this over since we regrouped,” Smithy said to me. “And we’ve come up with a plan I think you’ll approve of.”

  TWO

  I WAS NOW FULLY ALERT AND EXCITED at the potential that lay ahead. We might have lost our first real battle, but from defeat had sprung a galvanized unity of purpose I had not ever felt before.

  Smithy stood at the head of the table, mapping out his strategy with Mary, The Pure Seven and me. His act of saving the keys from Asmodeus had given him new confidence. He now spoke to us with the authority of a general.

  “We have to assume that, before too long, Asmodeus will discover that one of the sets of keys he has are counterfeit - if he hasn’t already. He was distracted at the time of his attack, but now he’s back in Heaven we have to assume he has inspected the keys,” Smithy said, his hands clasped behind his back as he paced around the table. “He’ll know that we’re now on our guard for any kind of deception he may throw at us. He would not risk another frontal attack with Michael back at full strength, but we can trust no one. Only we were present at the attack, so only we know what really happened. No one else can be told the truth just yet lest word get to him somehow. I’m sure he has spies placed in Hell. We need to act fast and we need to act in secret. They keys we still have in our possession are the keys to the gates between Hell and Purgatory. Our mission is to journey into the middle realm. Mary and Michael will take the keys and approach Zoroaster with word of the fight we are waging. With his help we’ll unite the souls in Purgatory to our cause and use the keys to tear down the walls between Hell and Purgatory. It will increase our numbers to an army that Asmodeus could never defeat. We will then make a final assault on the walls of Heaven.”

  “So what you’re saying is that we make Purgatory and Hell one realm? We remove the barrier and bring all of the souls there to our side?” I asked, to confirm I had heard correctly.

  Smithy nodded.

  “All in Purgatory want to go to Heaven just as much as we do,” Mary added. “It will be easy to convince them that our fight is a noble one. Zoroaster will also be a powerful ally. Together you two will be a match for Asmodeus himself.”

  “But what if Zoroaster doesn’t take our side?” I said. “What if he’s not even there?”

  “The Master will be there,” The Pure Seven spoke together. “He promised he would continue Mary’s work in the Limbo realm. His word is truth and cannot be perverted.”

  “I believe he’ll help us,” Mary continued. “If we’re honest in our intentions with him then he will aid our cause. He has fought against both God and Satan before. He will continue to oppose them until all is equal. He will help us.”

>   “But if he doesn’t?” I pressed.

  “We need him to. Only he knows exactly how to join the keys together to create the proper block. If he doesn’t then we will have to try to bring the wall down ourselves,” she said fiercely, “but it won’t come to that. I know he’ll help. While Zoroaster may work in absolutes, he understands that action must move ahead in increments. Our worst case scenario is that he’ll remain neutral until he sees we’re working in the right direction. We are in the right here, Michael. You know it and so do I.”

  I nodded and Smithy continued.

  “While you’re gone, I’ll run interference in Hell city. I’ll tell Clytemnestra to spread word that Michael is safe at Casa Diablo and that The Pure Seven are guarding him. I’ll feed her the details of the battle, and say that Lord Michael is planning his next move. This will buy us a few days at least. I’ll ask her to use her contacts to seek knowledge of ways we might be able to return Earth.”

  “Earth?” I asked.

  “It’s a distraction,” he said excitedly. “We spread word that you’re planning to attack the realm of the living. Our hope is that any spies Asmodeus may have here will pass the misinformation on to him. He would never assent to a perversion of his favorite plaything. Just the threat of an attack on Earth will divert any attention away from Purgatory until you’re able to complete your mission.”

  “We do not like using lies as a weapon to pursue truth,” the Pure Seven chorused.

  “We’ve been over this already,” Smithy said to them calmly. “This is war. I don’t like it either, but as Mary explained, to achieve an absolute you must move in steps. These are not explicit lies that will create oppression; they are diversions, which will aid in destroying it. You will not have to lie yourselves; you will only have to keep silent.”