by Lou Morgan
“You’re late,” said her ex-boyfriend, turning to face her with an icy smile.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Devil You Know
“YOU?” SHE SAID. “You?”
“No need to be rude. You could at least pretend to be pleased to see me, for old times’ sake.”
“Why?! The last time I saw you, I told you to...”
“...to go to hell. Fair enough. Did that, and yet here you are. Anyone would think you were following me.”
“Oh, you’re funny.” Alice brushed her hair away from her face and looked Rob up and down. “So. You’re my guide.”
“Unless you want to go alone? But I’m telling you, you won’t get far.” He nodded in the direction of the gates. They really were very big.
“Wait. You don’t really think I’m just going to waltz into hell with one of the Fallen, do you? Because that’s what you are, isn’t it?”
“Sure. I’ll just go get one of the others. Who’d you prefer? Purson? He’s a big fan of your new friends – I’m sure he’d be thrilled to see you. Or what about Xaph...?” He smiled as she recoiled at Xaphan’s name. “Of course. You two have met already, haven’t you? I forgot.” He folded his arms. “Because that’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s not that you’ve got to rely on one of us for help – and I know that’s got to hurt, right, princess? – it’s that you’ve got to rely on me. So let’s just get this out the way now. Give me your best shot.”
“You’d love that, wouldn’t you? If I made this all about you?”
“Fine. Have it your way.”
He turned away, apparently unconcerned, and Alice’s anger, so well controlled until then, exploded out of her.
“And that’s all you have to say for yourself? I should have known. I mean, I always thought you were just stupid, selfish... pick a personality trait. It never once occurred to me that you were actually out-and-out evil.”
“Evil? Look at me, Alice. Do I really look evil to you?”
He held out his arms and spun slowly round. He did have a point. Rob had never looked particularly menacing. He was as tall and just as skinny as Alice remembered, with a face that could have been handsome were it not so pinched, rather like all the Fallen that Alice had met. Maybe it was a family resemblance. But suddenly, knowing what he was – what he really was – made a lot of sense. He watched her eyeing him. “Let me be clear: I never made you do anything you didn’t already want to do. I couldn’t. Still can’t. That’s not how it works. Think of us as... enablers. We just help people to make the choice that benefits us the most. Don’t take it personally. It’s just business.”
“‘Just business’. I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Actually...”
“Say another word and I’ll kill you,” she snapped, holding up a hand. “Seriously.”
“I’d like to see you try.” There was a taunt in his voice, and she screwed her hands into tight fists, refusing to rise to it. It must have shown in her face, because after a moment, he made a dismissive sound and sniffed. “Whatever. Look, you need me and I’m supposed to help you. So let’s just get on with this, alright? I’m not the bad guy – whatever they’ve told you. Whatever you think you know.” He pointed at the gate ahead of them. “You think this is where I wanted to spend forever?”
“Not the bad guy? Quite apart from being an unutterable shit, are you telling me that you Fell by mistake? All this, it’s just a great big misunderstanding?” Her voice rose and she lunged forward, grabbing his wrist and pulling back his sleeve. She was looking for the brand, but what she saw stopped her in her tracks. “Jesus Christ.”
The ground heaved beneath them, pitching her into him and sending them both sprawling on the frost-covered rock.
“You want to watch what you say down here,” said Rob as he stood up and brushed himself down.
Alice simply sat on the ground and watched as the surface of the stone rippled like water around her. It might have been her imagination, but for a second she could have sworn she saw something there: the shape of a face pressing up from beneath. Either way, it was gone and the rock settled. It was just rock. She pointed at Rob’s arm. “What happened to you?”
“This? Nothing.” He cradled his arm, rubbing at the wrist, but Alice was dragging at his sleeve again.
“Nothing? That’s not nothing.” She jabbed at the place where the brand should be, and which was instead covered by a tangled web of scar tissue. The top of his wrist was swollen, puffed out to two or three times its original size, and blackened, scabbed. The underside of his hand was no better; worse still, an untidy hole had punched through his flesh there, as though a spike had been forced out from under the skin.
He yanked his arm back, pulling his sleeve down to cover as much of it as possible. “Leave it, Alice.”
“I want to know what...” she said, reaching for him again, but he cut her off, drawing sharply away, his eyes narrowed.
“Take your hands off me, half-breed.”
His voice echoed off the gate, off the floor, off the corridor behind her, and she realised he wasn’t Rob-the-ex any longer. He never had been. He was one of the Fallen, and everything had been a lie.
Somehow, it helped.
“Half-breed? That’s really nice. That the kind of man you are?”
“You forget: I’m not a man.”
“No, you’re not, are you. So who are you? Really?”
“Abbadona...” He opened his wings and rattled them at her as if to prove his point. Wings that, she realised, must have been there all along, hidden from her, just like they were hidden from the rest of the world. But now she could see...
“...And here’s the deal: I take you in, you do what you need to do and get out. When you report back to whoever-it-is that’s pulling your strings, you tell them I held up my end. That’s it. You see, you’re my ticket out of here.”
“Am I, now? Pleased to meet you.”
She held out her hand and he laughed. It wasn’t a particularly kind laugh, but it died away when he saw the sigil on the back of her wrist, glimmering and glittering and flashing like fire, even in the cold blue of hell.
“So. You want to get out? Then you’d better take me in.”
And she walked past him, straight towards the gate.
“YOU KNOW, PEOPLE aren’t normally so keen to get in here,” he said, loping after her. He stopped just behind her and she looked up at the gate. And up. And up.
“It does stop, right?” she asked over her shoulder.
He shrugged. “Beats me. Certainly doesn’t open.”
“It doesn’t open? Then how...”
“Magic,” he whispered in her ear. She felt his breath roll across her cheek and she recoiled.
“You’re not remotely amusing. How?”
“I told you: magic.” He pointed ahead to a spot at the side of the gate, where rock met... Alice felt her stomach churn... where rock met bone. The gate was built of bones: thousands of them; hundreds of thousands, stacked one upon another as high as she could see and bound together with rope that oozed unpleasantly. To the right of them – where he was pointing – the rockface was covered in a thick sheet of ice. Although, as they drew closer to it, it looked more and more like it was nothing but ice...
Alice’s jaw dropped. She was looking at a waterfall: a frozen waterfall, and the ice was moving – slowly, yes, but it was definitely moving; flowing down into a crack in the rock in front of her. “That’s the way in?”
“Tell me, Alice, what do you think the gate there is for?”
“To keep the Fallen... to keep you in.”
“Then it doesn’t do a very good job, does it? Who do you think built it?”
“I don’t know.” She fidgeted uncomfortably. She had a nasty feeling she did actually know, but she didn’t want to put the thought that was rattling round her head into words. If she did that, it made this an even worse idea.
“Did it ever occur to you that we might have ma
de the Bone-Built Gate ourselves? And that rather than keeping us in, the whole point of it is to keep the Descendeds out?”
“Not really, no.”
She’d been right: hearing it out loud definitely made things worse. Luckily, he was too busy feeling pleased with himself to notice, running his hand over what looked a little too much like a thigh bone at the edge of the gate.
“The Bone-Built Gate can only be opened by Lucifer, in the flesh, from the inside. And the only way to get inside is through here.”
He nodded towards the waterfall, and as he did, the creeping flow of the ice shifted and pressed towards him. Alice stared as the ice bulged, then began to shape itself into two arms; arms which reached out for the Fallen. It was familiar, too familiar, and Alice felt fear rising in her throat. The arms. Her father’s death. She bit her lip, hoping Rob couldn’t tell what was going through her mind, but he seemed far too interested in watching the hands coming towards him. He let them get almost close enough to touch him, then stepped aside, shaking his head.
“She never gives up. Don’t let her get hold of you.”
“Why?”
“Because she won’t let go again, and then it’s curtains for you” – he drew a finger across his neck – “unless, of course, you can breathe ice.”
He tossed something towards Alice and she automatically caught it. It was a coin. Small, silver. It had obviously once been stamped with something, but the design had long worn off and now the surface was almost smooth.
“What’s this?”
“Pays for your passage.” He threw his own coin into the gap into the rock, and the frozen waterfall peeled away like a curtain. “Should keep her happy.”
He vanished into the ice and it closed behind him, leaving Alice behind. She turned the coin over in her hand.
“This is such a bad idea,” she muttered to herself as she flipped it into the gap.
Just as it had done for Rob – Abbadona – whatever it was he called himself now – the ice opened up in front of her. It looked dark inside, and it was cold; she could feel the chill rolling towards her in waves. As she stepped into it, it snapped shut behind her. There was little light, and what there was was washed-out, dim, but she could just make out a pathway ahead. A step at a time, she edged through the passage, turning slightly to avoid the walls. It was barely wide enough for her to walk through, and the ice creaked alarmingly overhead. She had lost count of the steps she had taken – and there was still no end or exit in sight – when it occurred to her that this could be a trap. After all, she had no idea where she was going and no guarantee she would be safe... but then she remembered the scars where his brand should be. What had happened to him? And what had happened to his brand? It was almost like it had been burned away...
A sudden sensation of deep, deep cold made her turn around, and then leap back. A hand was stretching out of the ice towards her, the fingers curling as if to grab at her hair. Alice squealed and ducked, narrowly avoiding the other hand coming at her from the side. Now on her hands and knees, fingers stinging from the chill of the freezing stone, she slid along the floor, and found herself tumbling out through a gap in the ice and into the light again.
Abbadona leaned over her. “Nearly catch you, did she?”
“You knew that would happen?” Alice scraped herself off the floor.
He shrugged. “I did warn you she never gave up. Charon’s not fond of angels, not even half-breeds.”
“You’re an arsehole.”
“Really?” He shot an amused glance over at her, and scratched his nose. “You’re going to have to do better than that. This is hell, sweetheart. I get called worse things than that before breakfast. Now get yourself together. Where we’re headed, Charon is the least of your worries.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Plains of the Damned
ALICE’S BREATH CLOUDED out of her and hung, a little disconcertingly, above her head, like a halo. It was cold here, so very cold, and her eyes prickled as they started to freeze over. She blinked hard, and tried her best to ignore the quiet crackling sound.
“Of course. This is hell. Why wouldn’t your eyes freeze open?” she muttered under her breath.
Abbadona raised an eyebrow at her. “When you’re done?”
“What? It’s just... It’s so cold.”
“That’s because it’s hell. As opposed to, say, Maui.” He watched as she pulled her coat closer around her, wrapping it as tightly as it would go. “It won’t do any good, you know.”
“What won’t?”
“Your pretty little jacket. This cold, the hell-chill, it’ll get into your bones. Get into your soul, if you let it. The longer you’re down here... well. But they didn’t warn you about that, did they?”
“Would you just shut up? Where are you supposed to be taking me, anyway – seeing as you’re the one with the plan?”
“Down there.” He pointed ahead of them.
They were standing at the top of a cliff that jutted out into an enormous cavern. The revolting bone gateway was some distance behind them, and Alice couldn’t even begin to see where the passage they had taken ended. The tops of the gates were still lost in the space above them and there was no sign of the roof or of the side walls – just the cliff on which they stood and then endless blackness. Except...
She took a few steps closer to the edge of the cliff and peered over. Immediately wishing she hadn’t, she stepped back and tried to clear her head. The drop was staggering – but that wasn’t the whole of it. She had looked at what was down there, and she had seen it. Really seen it. More than that, she had felt it.
Below was the floor of the cavern. It stretched away into the distance and, as far as she could see, it was covered with people. At first, she didn’t know what they were, the shapes on the rock: they ran the length and breadth of the plateau, thousands of them in regimented lines. Hundreds of thousands of them, frozen bolt-straight like an army of the dead. But they weren’t dead, not really. They were alive, and they hurt. For the first time since Mallory’s little boot-camp, Alice’s skin burned. She could feel the fire scratching away inside her, looking for a way out... She could control it now, though; she knew she could. Hoped she could.
“Plains of the Damned,” said Abbadona, leaning over her shoulder. “They go on forever.”
“Who are they?”
“Who aren’t they? All human life is here. Everyone who’s ever ended up in hell – bar a few illustrious exceptions, of course – is here. All getting the five-star treatment. No expense spared.”
“What does that mean?”
“Come on down and take a closer look. I’ll show you.”
Alice shivered again, and she told herself it was just the place, the temperature; the relentless, numbing cold. But it wasn’t, and she knew it: it was his smile. It was the look behind his eyes. It was the way he smiled when he looked at the people below.
She was afraid of him. And worse, he knew it.
“The ones who were taken...”
“They’re here too. Where else would they be? They’re just as damned as the rest of them. All did it to themselves, you know.”
“But you took them. They shouldn’t even be here!”
“Now, you’re assuming that they wouldn’t have ended up here anyway. Which is a mistake.” He sniffed. “Never assume. Didn’t your little angel friends teach you that?”
There were steps. More steps. She couldn’t stop the groan escaping, but he either didn’t hear or he chose to ignore her. He’s enjoying this, she thought, and if it wasn’t for the fact that his brand had been burned off, she might have been even more unhappy about the position she found herself in. But she had agreed – had, in fact, chosen to do this – and he was hoping to get something from her – or from the angels, anyway – in exchange. So she followed.
The stairway was shorter than it had at first appeared. From the cliff, the Plains seemed to start far below, and yet it took a surprisingly short time t
o reach them. Knowing how tricky the Fallen could be – after all, wasn’t that why she was there? – Alice decided to accept that somewhere, there was an illusion happening, and that for the moment she didn’t need to know exactly what it was and where it might be. It would only make her head hurt, and she was already having to concentrate hard enough on not catching fire. The closer she got to the Plains, the more insistent the itching in her skin became and the more she had to concentrate on not noticing it, on balling her hands into fists and biting her lip and breathing, above all, breathing.
She hesitated on the last step. Abbadona turned and flashed that smile of his at her. “What’s wrong, Alice? Worried you’re in a little over your head?”
“Not exactly.”
Her words came out through gritted teeth as she fought to keep control. The ends of her hair sparked gently and she could almost smell the fire. Her head hurt, her body hurt... even her teeth hurt, and there were suddenly voices in her head, chattering in a hundred languages.
“I can’t wait all day. Well, theoretically I can, but I won’t.”
“Really? I thought you were just about made of time.” She swallowed the heat and the pain back down and stepped onto the Plains.
“It’s not time that’s the killer. Not down here, not right now. It’s the others, if you’re seen, and if Lucifer finds out about this” – he lifted his damaged wrist – “you can’t even imagine what he’ll do.”
“I can. I’m picturing it right now, actually,” she smiled sweetly at him.
“Nice.”
“For me, yes. For you? Not so much.”
She batted her eyelashes at him, all the while remembering the red eyes that looked out of Batarel’s face in the churchyard. Abbadona stared at her, and then something seemed to occur to him.
