Kayla blinked rapidly, her chest rising and falling in short pants. Lilith pinched her neck a little tighter. “Don’t pass out on me now, Kayla. Fun’s just getting started.” She inhaled the cool air deeply and grinned at me. “First time’s a kick in the ass, isn’t it?”
I shivered involuntarily, trying to shake off the spider-crawling feeling of whatever made this place run. “Where are we?”
“Between point A and point B,” Lilith said. “That empty stretch of road on your way to the crossroads.” She shoved Kayla forward, her heels clicking on the asphalt. “Welcome to the Lost Highway.”
We walked for a long way, Kayla whimpering softly. Lilith whistled a snippet of a song I couldn’t quite place. “I’m guessing Annabelle didn’t tell you the nitty-gritty details. Just that this place was Bad and Wrong and Scary.”
“She just told me you were dangerous and I should stay away from you,” I muttered. I recognized the numbness of shock setting in. When Caleb had sacrificed me and I’d woken up, knowing I was dead but walking all the same, it had taken days for me to accept what was happening and have a breakdown. In the meantime I just moved around doing whatever Gary told me. This time, at least, I had a purpose. I kept the Scythe close. If I lost it, I’d have nothing.
We were closer to the light, and the fog started to peel away, revealing a barren stretch of desert between mountains, moon and stars high overhead, spilling down to the horizon like they only did when you were in pure emptiness far from anything man-made.
“The Lost Highway runs all over this realm,” Lilith said. “It’s how I kept getting the jump on you. Annabelle told me about it. Not recently—hundreds of years ago. Poor dear felt sorry for me.” Lilith chuckled softly. “You really shouldn’t trust the Fallen. You think I’m a survivor—those sons of bitches will sell their grandmother’s kidney for beer money.”
“Can we just get this over with?” I said. The Scythe itched at my leg, shoved into my boot. I tried to walk slowly and not give away any stiffness in my gait. I wasn’t shocked that Annabelle had helped Lilith—she’d screwed me up good with her news that I might possibly be a single soul reborn over and over and that Leo and I meeting meant some dark thunderheads were gathering in the distant sky where both our lives entwined. She seemed like the type who loved to meddle. And who might be a psychopath to boot, always a winning combination.
“You may lack any direction but at least you’re motivated,” Lilith said, then wrapped her hand around Kayla’s throat and jerked her head sideways. A sharp crack echoed in the still air and Kayla dropped in a heap.
I took in a breath and held it. I just had to pretend I was on the leash a little longer.
“You have a problem?” Lilith said. She pulled a soaked rag out of her jacket. I realized with a shudder it was soaked in blood. Clint’s blood, judging by the clove-tinged aroma that thickened the air between us. Definitely not from a human.
“No,” I said. “Just some confusion.”
Lilith knelt in the crusty brown dirt and carefully placed the rag. “Such as?”
I stared at her, and she sighed. “Ava, if the two of us are going to be spending time together you can’t be standing there like you’re growing out of the ground.”
“Why are you doing this?” I said. “I get it, you hate the Fallen, but why open Tartarus? Human souls running rampant won’t exactly be a picnic. I put some of the worst people in there away. I know what kind of vindictive assholes are coming after you if they get out.”
“That’s the problem with reapers and mud dogs like you.” Lilith stood up and brushed off her hands. “You’re loyal as fuck but you fall far short on imagination.” She spread out her arms and spun in a slow circle. “Where do you think we are?”
“The desert?” I said. Lilith smiled.
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You were created by Hellspawn, you’ve lived your life ever since in one’s shadow, and yet you know nothing about Hell. Yes, we’re in the desert. But this desert is special.”
I sighed. “Are we in Nazareth or something? Are we camping in the same manger as the baby Jesus?”
“We’re in Nevada, smart-ass,” Lilith said. “About ninety miles from Las Vegas.” She bent down and rolled Kayla’s body onto its back, tearing the front of her shirt open to the top of Kayla’s bra. “The crossroads are conduits between here and Hell and the Kingdom, yes, but what creates them is destruction, suffering. Natural disasters, wars, death camps.”
Murders of innocent women betrayed by the men they were stupid enough to love . . .
I saw a low row of dilapidated buildings in the distance, lit by the glow of Las Vegas along the horizon, a permanent sunrise from dusk to dawn. Even in the half-light glow, there was something oddly familiar about the row of little clapboard bungalows and rusty, war-era cars and trucks.
Lilith swept her arm at the little fake movie-set of a town and the barren, browned earth around it. “Dozens of atomic bombs exploded less than a mile from here. Makes for one hell of a crossroads.”
That was why all this was familiar. We were standing on one of the unused test sites, from the time when people in Las Vegas would sit on their roofs and watch the flash, the mushroom cloud blossoming in the distance, knowing nothing about the poison wind that swept across the desert floor toward their waiting flesh. Even as a hellhound, I felt my skin crawl being this close.
I tried to jerk away from Lilith when her hand shot out, but she grabbed my hand and sliced her nail across my palm, so deep I felt my fingers go numb as the nerves went dead. My blood spattered into the dirt, and Lilith reached down and stuck her bloody fingers into Kayla’s rib cage. I heard bone crack as she pushed the breastbone aside. Kayla’s heart broke free with a rubbery snap.
My head started spinning. I had to do it now, while she was distracted. Lilith held out her hands parallel with the earth and started to murmur in the hissing, ebb-and-flow language of Hell. The blood droplets rose from the ground, from the rag and poor Kayla and what was pouring out of my hand, like raindrops flowing backward. The dust around us started to rise as well, and I wondered how many radioactive particles I was inhaling as the wind whipped my hair slick against my head.
I reached down and pulled the Scythe from my boot. In another ten seconds, none of it would matter.
Lilith’s hair flowed around her head like a halo, in stark contrast to the body at her feet and the dust storm rising around us. I felt the breathlessness of the air, like the seconds just before a tornado hits. I’d ridden out a few back when I settled in Kansas and Nebraska after the war, sometimes lucky enough to make it to a shelter and sometimes not. The scream is unlike anything else on earth, a sound and a sensation so complete you’d swear the world had ended and the only thing that existed was the wind, drawing up all the sound and air around you.
My hand didn’t shake when I turned the Scythe in my grip. I was within arm’s length of Lilith. It was done.
At least it was until she spun around, grabbing my arm and snapping my wrist in one smooth movement. The Scythe fell to the dirt and I followed it, my hand hanging uselessly.
“Naughty,” Lilith scolded. “I’ve come way too far to have some misguided attack of your conscience throw me off track, Ava.”
“You just want the world to burn,” I said. “I have to live in it. I can’t let you.”
Lilith crouched down. The dust and blood turned around us slowly, and I saw that Kayla’s body had vanished. I was totally alone, totally at Lilith’s mercy. “If you’re gonna kill me can you just do it?” I said. “No monologue about how Hell rules and angels suck cocks in it?”
“I’m not going to waste time killing you,” Lilith said. “Here’s a little history lesson, Ava. I was born into slavery. Azrael was my master, and he was the worst piece of shit to ever fall from the Kingdom. He abused me in ways you can’t fathom, a
nd when we finally got the courage to fight back, those piss-ants tried to throw us into Tartarus.”
She breathed in. The air had changed. I could smell the faint, sweet scent of decay, like a funeral home with the heat turned too high. “Do you know how I learned to fight back?” Lilith whispered. “I met someone, just like you did. Someone who made me believe I didn’t have to live under the heel of the Fallen anymore. And they condemned him for that. They put him in that place, and I’m free, which is so far from how it should be. We lost our ability to enter Tartarus when we expelled the Fallen. Gary and I spent almost a thousand years waiting for this night, and then you came along. You almost ruined everything.”
The earth fell back to ground, and I felt a jolt, as if I’d been riding in a car that had just run over a curb. “I didn’t know,” I said. “Clint told me . . .”
“Clint tells the story he remembers, and it’s the one that makes him look good,” Lilith snapped. “Him losing everything in the crossroads may seem like payback, but it’s not. It’s not even close. He gets to forget what he did to me and I live with it every day. I see the face of the one who saved me every day, knowing he’s in Tartarus, enduring torture, paying for helping me escape Azrael’s abuses and try to stand on my own.”
As the dust settled, I realized we were no longer in the cool, clear air of the Mojave. Things were smoking, and the ground under my feet was a powdery gray mix of ash and lava sand that shifted when I tried to stand up, making me stumble. The stars had blinked out, and all I could hear was the screaming of wind across a vast, empty expanse.
“You of all people should know what you do to reapers and hounds is fucked up,” I told Lilith, coughing as the dust invaded my lungs. “You enslaved me just like Azrael did to you.”
“Reapers and hounds are the Fallen’s bastard creation,” Lilith spat. “You are nothing to me but fodder for the machine of the damned that turns the gears of my home.”
She pointed ahead of us, and through the blowing sand I saw a pair of blank metal doors. They were old, riveted like hatches on a submarine, twice as tall as I was and about five times as wide.
“Welcome to the darkest part of Hell,” Lilith murmured, almost reverently. “The place where I was born, and the place I was condemned to when the Fallen had no more use for me.”
Lilith walked to the doors and placed her hands flat against the metal. I just stood, watching the Scythe in the dirt between us. I wasn’t stupid enough to think she wouldn’t snap me in half just like Kayla if I tried to stab her again. A dog that bites gets put down—Gary had sure drilled that into me.
“You’re breaking open Tartarus to pay them back,” I said. “I get it. But you have to understand that we’re not on the same side and I had to do what I did to try and protect what I care about.”
“I do understand that,” Lilith said as the wheel locks on the doors started to rotate, creaking with a screeching so loud it ground my teeth. “But you don’t understand me at all, Ava.”
“Probably not,” I muttered. Lilith stepped back as the long metal rods holding the doors in place started to rumble back into their sockets, shedding flakes of rust as big as my palm.
“I don’t care about the damned in there,” she said. “I don’t care about Tartarus at all. I’m just here for the Fallen who showed the demons how to be free. He’s suffered for a thousand years for what he did. I think that’s enough.”
“This Fallen is pretty special, then,” I whispered, transfixed by the heaving, shifting darkness contained by the doors. Faint screams, constant and endless as an ocean tide, issued from inside the depths. I saw fences, spotlights, chain link, and barbed wire. I’d seen similar things in Europe after the war, places seemingly designed to contain the whole of human suffering, and then some.
This was worse than any of them.
“He’s the only thing that matters,” Lilith said, twin tears sliding down her face as she stepped toward the open doors of Tartarus. “The only one of the Host brave enough to leave the Kingdom. Brave enough after he left to stand with us.” She stretched out her arms to the darkness. “Lucifer,” she said softly. “It’s been so long, but I came for you, just like I said.”
Like a creature spurred to life by a clap of thunder, lights snapped on along block after block after block of cells inside Tartarus, more lights than any city back on the other side of the crossroads. I stood rooted to the spot, watching the shadows massing on the other side of the fence, which bent and sagged under their weight. Far away, in the depths of the Fallen’s massive prison, sirens began to scream.
As the crowd at the fence broke it, tumbling over the ragged links and stretching the barbed wire beyond, I tried to make myself move. It wasn’t easy. There was a shift in the gravity of Hell, a heaviness not present back on earth that kept me rooted to the spot.
“Lucifer,” I whispered, trying to get myself used to the idea enough to do something about this clusterfuck. A Fallen. The Fallen. Bad enough that Azrael and the others had banished him to Tartarus right along with the demons. According to Clint, anyway. If I went by Lilith, then Clint was definitely the asshole in that equation. Still, Lucifer had been the one to get them all tossed out, if you listened to the human version of things. Odds are, he wasn’t a real people person.
The shadow started to rush past us, and I saw they were people, washed out and bedraggled as any deadhead. Some screamed, or sobbed, or bled from the fatal wounds that had damned them to Tartarus in the first place. The damned were flowing free, a tidal wave building to fill the entire space of the door.
I made myself move, one foot at a time, pick up the Scythe, and got to Lilith’s shoulder. “I get it!” I shouted in her ear, trying to make myself heard over the howling of the damned and the droning wail of the klaxons. “I understand this a lot more than just sowing chaos! But this is insane! If you need the damned, what will you do when Tartarus is empty and the world is so overrun there’s no one to repopulate?”
Lilith bared her teeth. “If you haven’t figured out that my millennium of partying with Azrael drove me a little crazy, you’re a lot dumber than I thought.”
“You love Lucifer, I get it!” I shouted. “But maybe he’s in here for a reason!”
“Oh, most definitely,” Lilith purred. “And when he gets out, he and I are going to clean house in Hell. Then I figure a nice little honeymoon to earth to clear out the dregs of the Fallen. Then, who knows. I heard the Kingdom is ripe for a takeover.”
“Just take Lucifer and go,” I shouted. “You got what you wanted! Take him, close this nuthouse up, and go live your lives together!” I let the Scythe dangle from my fingers, showing I meant her no harm. “I won’t try to stop you.”
“Ava.” Lilith dropped her head to her chest. “Ava, Ava, Ava. I’ve spent a thousand years letting your miserable little realm exist. Letting Hell dissolve into a petty dictatorship without its true leader. Letting you worthless little insects live your worthless little lives. The way I see it . . .” She jerked me close, so I could feel her breath on my face. “The world owes me a favor or two.”
We stood like that, an island in a stream of the damned spewing forth from Tartarus, running past us into the crossroads. I saw things that weren’t human too, things with scales, things that crawled or leaped.
Where are the guards? I thought. What kind of a prison didn’t have a warden?
“No guards,” Lilith said, and smirked at me. “We’re in Hell, Ava. I’m not running on half power anymore. Tartarus governs itself. No one but the inmates has ever gotten in or out until now.”
Ahead of us, the stampede parted and I saw a tall, slim figure, turned into a shadow imprint by the klieg lights burning their bright spots into the ground all around us. Lilith let go of me, rushing forward. A pack of the damned slammed into me and knocked me to the ground. I curled in a ball and tried to protect my head and ribs. I didn’t thin
k they’d be very kindly inclined toward a hellhound in their midst. I wondered how many of these souls I’d sent to Tartarus myself, never knowing or caring what happened once Gary took them to Hell.
Lilith ran to the figure and embraced him, and he pulled her to him, lifting her off the ground. From my vantage he looked like he was ten feet tall, but when he stepped into the light he wasn’t anything so amazing—just a pale platinum blond with the same piercing eyes as Lilith. Honestly, they looked more like brother and sister than anything, which just made the whole thing creepy.
“Who’s this?” Lucifer asked, looking down at me. I uncurled my body as the damned gave him a wide berth, getting to my feet unsteadily. The Scythe was gone, scattered by the gang that had bowled me over. Worst of all, I wasn’t useful to Lilith anymore.
“This is Ava, the hellhound who almost screwed everything for us,” Lilith said. “But she’s redeemed herself. Mostly.”
“Ah.” Lucifer smiled at me. “Allow me to thank her, then.” He wasn’t handsome in the way humans understand it, but there was something about his face that made it impossible to look away. I didn’t have any illusions about what was going on. He was the snake and I was the mouse.
Rather that collapsing like I would have done a few weeks ago I felt angry, my gut churning at the trouble I’d gotten myself into. “Don’t mention it,” I gritted.
Lucifer laughed. “You’re too modest. If I don’t owe you thanks, I at least owe you payback for conspiring to keep me locked up in here.”
He reached for me and I jumped backward. My feet tangled, and I went down hard on the arm I’d torn up in the car wreck. A scream wrenched from my mouth, and that made me even angrier. I’d had enough of looking weak. “You served your purpose,” Lucifer said, standing over me and cocking his head like he was trying to figure out what I could possibly be useful for. “But I think it’s time you were put down.”
A shadow fell over me from the other direction, and Lucifer looked away from me, his jaw tightening at the sight of whoever stood there.
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