by John Everson
“Now tie another rope around the angel,” Darin said. He paced around the small space as the men cinched the rope. When that was done, he picked up the loose end and handed it to Joe.
“We’re going to let that angel take flight,” Darin said. “When it does, it will probably pull your girlfriend’s arms right out of their sockets. Unless you can hold it back with the rope. Three things could happen here. You could get pulled over the side along with the angel and your girlfriend will get stretched like taffy. Or you could let go of the rope and save yourself. Or… you could hold onto the rope long enough to save both of you.”
“You’re insane,” Joe said.
Darin laughed. “Nah, just trying to have a little fun. Our girl here has proven she’s quite the escape artist. Let’s see how she gets out of this one.”
“Ready?” He pointed to the men who had carried the angel up the stairs and they lifted it once more and staggered with it towards the wall.
“How long do I have to hold it?” Joe asked.
“That’s the spirit,” Darin said. He looked at the watch on his wrist. “Let’s say five minutes. You last that long, I’ll cut it loose.”
He held a knife up in one hand and pointed to the men with the other. “Toss it over and let’s see how strong our boy is!” Then he looked at Joe. “You better brace yourself, my friend. That sucker’s heavy.”
Joe wrapped the rope around his waist and hurried to the wall. He sat down and put his legs against the wall, while twining the rope around both of his hands.
“Good luck,” Darin said, as the men lofted the stone angel over the wall.
CHAPTER 52
THE SKIN TRADER came at her like a bull, angry arms outstretched. But instead of running away, Alex dashed right at him. At the last second, she dove, and slid right between his legs. As he turned around, she rolled to a crouch and bolted out the front door of the skin shop.
Behind her the demon shrieked in anger, and came tearing out of the store. Alex only looked back once, and then she turned on everything she had and ran. “Help me Malachai, give me strength.”
She rounded the side of a building and the street rumbled. Another tremor. Bricks and stone pelted the ground around her and Alex threw herself down a stairwell and covered her head. She struggled with all her energy to shield her thoughts so the demon couldn’t feel her that way. She cowered there in a corner against the wall, praying that the skin trader hadn’t seen her turn. She didn’t know how far behind her he’d been.
The rumbling of the earth stopped after a moment, and then the street above remained quiet.
After a few minutes passed, she relaxed and crept halfway up the small stairwell to peek out at the street. There was nobody in sight. Maybe the small earthquake had sent everyone to shelter.
Alex breathed a heavy sigh of relief. She was free again. But now what?
Somehow she had to find a back door in to one of those portals.
“Use your inner sight,” Malachai said.
“But they’ll see me,” Alex said.
“Be quick. Look for where they are.”
The ground shuddered again, and Alex grabbed at the wall for support. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Do they have earthquakes here every day or something?”
“No,” he said. “Something’s not right.”
“You’re a genius,” Alex said. She closed her eyes and focused, trying to see with her mind’s eye the world around her.
At first it was all just darkness. And little flashes of red and green – the afterimage of the last thing she had looked at. But then the afterimages faded, and she could see a broad horizon of dark.
There were things moving on the periphery. Shapes with burning embers for eyes. Soon she realized that there were hundreds of tiny lights in the dark. They were all around her, but a large group was congregated to her right. There seemed to be a lightning storm there; a thousand flashes of light crashed on the horizon, each one just a tiny bit farther away from the last.
Figures, hundreds of them, surrounded the lightning storm. One of them turned, and stared straight at her. It put a hand out and pointed, and Alex opened her eyes, blotting out her inner sight.
She knew which way to go, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to go there.
“It’s the only way out,” Malachai said.
“It looked like a storm,” Alex said.
“A door between worlds hasn’t closed. The flashes are the Curburide going through.”
“You mean, all of them are going to Earth?”
“And sending people back here to be tortured, no doubt,” Malachai said.
“That’s horrible,” Alex said.
“There has always been interchange between the worlds,” Malachai said. “Doors open and doors close. But a door that stays open…”
“What will happen?”
“Ultimately?” he said. “This world will consume yours.
Everybody that moves through the worlds opens the crack a little wider.”
“How do we stop it?”
“I don’t know that we can.”
Alex saw something move at the end of the street. “Something’s coming,” she said. “Maybe the demon that saw me.”
“Get out of sight,” Malachai said.
Alex ran down a side street, but with her inner eye, she caught glimpses of what lay behind the facades. She dodged down one block and then another, keeping buildings between her and the lights that represented Curburide. Slowly the storm of light grew closer.
Alex darted into an old building that looked like a museum; huge ornate columns flanked the door and gargoyles leered from ledges overhanging the street. As soon as she was inside, she recognized it. “I’ve been here before,” she whispered.
She ran down one corridor and down a flight of stairs. It was a labyrinth, but she knew that Ariana and her had been here in their first hours in this world. This was the way back to the pits where the heads were buried in filth. The corridor to the rains of demon piss. She was close to the place where they had entered. Closer to the door.
Just as she thought that, a door opened just ahead. A large, familiar demon stepped out, directly in her path. His eyes glowed in the shadows. In a heartbeat, he dashed at her and clutched six long fingers around her arm.
“People have been looking for you,” the demon growled. “And I’ve been listening. Someone thought they saw you coming this way. How did you escape the skin traders? Who helped you?”
At that moment, Malachai sunk to the deepest hole inside her, hiding from detection. As he did, the pain from the violation of Melter and Dorado flooded back. Alex had only felt a hint of it earlier; now it exploded in her nerves like a bomb. It felt as if someone had shoved broken glass up between her legs, and down her throat. The shock paralyzed her; Alex couldn’t move a muscle. Her legs locked as Alex opened her mouth to scream.
But instead only a gasp and a trickle of blood came out, and she collapsed, unseeing, into Elotan’s waiting arms.
CHAPTER 53
DESPITE HIS PREPARATION, the weight of the angel still took Joe by surprise. There was no way to brace for the force that pulled him up off the ground. His shoulder slammed with an audible crack into the stone wall. Behind him, Cheyenne shrieked as the statue wrenched her ankles, stretching her whole body in the air. Joe’s grip on the rope took some of the weight off, but not all. They shared the weight of the anchor between them, but it was too much for two people. The weight dragged Joe’s arms up the side of the wall and he struggled to get his feet locked again before it pulled him right over the edge.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Cheyenne was screaming. “It hurts. Holy shit.”
Joe flattened himself against the wall, but it was no good. Inch by inch, his arms were creeping up towards the edge. It would pull him over long before the five minutes
was up.
“If I was you, I’d just let go,” Darin said, strutting back and forth behind him. “Maybe I was wrong, and she’ll be able to support the full weight. She’s a stubborn one, that’s for sure.”
“You’re… a … bastard,” Joe said, gritting his teeth. Spit flew with every word as he struggled to turn his body away from the wall without letting go of the rope. If he could just wrap it around the edge and use the edge itself as an anchor…
Joe’s face scraped against the rock as he hugged to the wall, trying to distribute some of the tension. Cheyenne kept screaming behind him, but she only added to a growing din. There were screams coming from the throng below too, and now and then the earth creaked with its own complaint. The mission vibrated with tremors.
“I will not let go,” Joe murmured, sweat beading and running down his forehead. “I will not. Will not.”
Tears ran down his face as he pushed and shoved and struggled to not be carried over the wall. Something ripped in his back and he felt the rope strangling his abdomen. He gasped and cried and twisted, struggling not to go over the wall. Counting the seconds. Knowing that they had to have become minutes. His vision was a red haze. He couldn’t feel his wrists any longer. But he would not, could not, let go.
“I am amazed,” Darin said. “Truly amazed.”
He walked in front of Joe’s face, slapping the blade of the knife against his palm. “But I’m a man who keeps his promises. I told you I would cut the rope if you lasted five minutes.”
Darin reached over the wall and suddenly the strain on Joe’s body ceased. He fell to the ground at the exact same moment as Cheyenne gave out a hideous, ear-shredding scream. Joe looked up and saw her body stretched taut, the full weight of the statue dragging her joints apart. Darin had cut a rope, but not the rope that held her to the statue. He’d cut the rope that Joe was holding. The rope that was saving her from suffering all the weight.
Joe started to rise, but there was nothing he could do. A fountain of blood suddenly burst from Cheyenne’s shoulder as one of her arms let go.
“Oops, wrong rope,” Darin said, before slicing the rope that had just ripped Cheyenne’s arm from its socket.
The angel fell to the ground below as Cheyenne’s feet fell into the bell shaft. She hung by one arm, the other hung on its own from the rope connecting it to the bell pole.
“That was close,” Darin said. “One more second and I bet we would have lost her.” He tossed the knife to one of the men. “Get her down.”
Joe tried to lunge at Darin but something in his middle wouldn’t let him move. The statue had crushed him. He felt the tears coursing down his cheeks as he looked at the inconceivable. “How could you?” he cried. Tears streamed down his cheeks. “Seriously, God, how could you…”
Arms grabbed Joe and lifted him. He tried to punch at them, but he couldn’t feel his hands. The fingers were purple. He could barely breathe. When they took him through the front door of the mission chapel, Joe saw that the black spot above the mission now covered the whole sky. There was not a star to be seen. Just an inky swirl where bodies floated up, against the law of gravity. Hands pushed him forward, walking around the line of people waiting to be taken up, up, up and away. They all approached a point just beyond the chapel and then were lifted, as if in a slow motion cyclone.
Darin caught up with them a moment later and handed, the limp body of Cheyenne into Joe’s numb arms.
“Hold onto her,” Darin said. “Don’t want to drop her.”
“You killed her,” Joe sobbed.
“Not yet,” Darin said. “They put a tourniquet on it. If you get her upstairs quickly enough, she might make it through the night. Demons can do miracles, you know. If you find a nice one. But you’d better hurry.”
He pushed Joe forward. Hands held his elbows still, propping him up even as he carried Cheyenne.
“Oh, forgot about this. I don’t think you’ll need it, but you never know.”
Darin tossed Cheyenne’s severed arm on top of her chest.
“I gave you cuts in line,” he said.
The hands pushed Joe forward and all of a sudden he felt his feet leaving the ground.
Joe saw figures of other people ahead of him pinwheeling around in the sky. Some of them were screaming. Some were laughing.
Joe couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down his face.
“Alex, I hope you’re up there,” he whispered, as the wind rushed past his face and a cold silken breeze wrapped around his body and tightened like a cocoon around him, taking him through the darkest center of the dark sky.
Then Joe punched through the black and left Santa Fe behind.
CHAPTER 54
“ABOUT TIME YOU woke up.” The voice sounded blurry, but familiar. Everything felt hazy; it was hard to hear, and she couldn’t seem to convince her eyes to fully open. But she tried. The waves of red finally faded.
Ariana’s thin face stared down at her from above. The woman was naked, except for a black collar around her neck with thin straps that cinched across her breasts to hook onto a belt around her waist. It seemed to serve no purpose other than to make Ariana look sluttish. It covered nothing.
Alex opened her mouth to speak, but the pain came back instantly, and she moaned instead of spoke. She didn’t dare move her midsection.
“It’s not nighttime yet,” Ariana said. “You’re going to have to hang on for a bit longer before the sleep that saves. You’ve been through the wringer, huh kid?”
Ariana moved away.
A moment later the face of Elotan took her place. The demon looked even more enormous than she remembered.
“How did she get away?” he asked Ariana.
The other woman shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’d say she fucked her way out from the look of her.”
The demon snorted. “So she’s useless to me.”
“For now,” Ariana said. “You’ve got me for the night.”
“You’ve already ruined your mouth and you have to work tonight,” Elotan said. He bent over Alex and tightened something around her wrists. “It’s time to go. She’s not going anywhere.”
A door closed and Alex was left in darkness, and silence.
“Malachai,” she whispered. “Help me, please.”
The pain eased, but didn’t completely go away. “You’re going to have to get used to this feeling,” Malachai said.
“No, I’m going to get out of here.”
Her answer was silence.
CHAPTER 55
THEY WERE TURNED away at the club door. “Not tonight,” the club owner said to Elotan. “We’ve got lots of fresh flesh. No need for a retread tonight.”
“But you promised me a stage every other night,” Elotan said.
“Things change,” the demon shrugged. “There are new bodies coming through the door every minute now. We don’t need to look at old stuff. Come back in a week and we’ll see.”
Elotan slammed his fist into the wall. The result was a grunt of pain and the emergence of two bouncers who flanked the owner like giants.
Elotan yanked on Ariana’s leash, and pulled her away from the club.
“So now I’ve got two useless bodies,” he complained. “Maybe I’ll sell you both to the blood mines.”
“Won’t you get the same response there?” Ariana asked softly. She didn’t like where this was going. The bloodmines sounded much worse than dancing for demons.
He yanked on her leash and dragged her back the way they had come.
Alex remained where they had left her, chained to Elotan’s bed.
The demon stood over her and looked her up and down. With one hand he reached down and pinched one of Alex’s nipples, hard, between his fingertips.
“Well if I can’t sell the two of you, you’ll just have to make it worth my while to keep yo
u.” He reached up to pull a long-handled whip from a hook on the wall.
“Kneel,” he demanded to Ariana.
She did as he said, and something cold and evil bit into her back. She yelped as it pulled out. He was using the cat o’ nine tails with the metal tips. And he was not in a good mood.
“Oh shit,” Ariana said to herself. The barbs cracked again and again, and she stiffened and cried. But she refused to complain. It would not help. She bent forward and accepted his punishment. Her back felt shredded in minutes.
And then he stopped and dragged her by the hair to a new position. She saw what he wanted instantly. His member dangled in her face like a silent cobra. She could barely open her mouth still from her attentions to that deadly snake earlier today, but she didn’t argue. She knew better. Somehow she let him push past her swollen lips.
Meanwhile, cries erupted from behind her. Ariana dove into her job with new energy. Elotan held Alex down on her back with one hand, while he doled out punishment with his other. The barbs were quickly streaking the girl’s breasts and belly in blood.
Elotan yearned for pain tonight more than pleasure. Alex was definitely getting the raw end of this deal. And Ariana intended to keep it that way.
She sucked the demon dick in deep.
CHAPTER 56
JOE’S LEGS COLLAPSED when his weight suddenly returned.
One moment he’d been freefalling in utter black, and the next he found himself in a red-lit cavern. But he was not alone. There were voices chattering all around and a horde of black-skinned demons standing in wait just a few yards away from where he sat on the ground. Cheyenne’s blood coated his chest in sticky wetness.
“Helone!” he called. “Is Helone here?”
One of the demons approached him and with one hand pulled him up to his feet, Cheyenne and all.
“Who are you that dares to call for the Queen of the Doors?”
“I was sent to find her,” Joe said. “I need her help.”
