Page 19 of Hell Sent

The pot on the fire boiled over suddenly, hissing.

In all the confusion, he’d almost forgotten what they’d come here for. Giving the humans a warning glance, he went to the cooking space.

He scanned the bizarre assortment of items resting on the table and on shelves along the wall: bundles of absurdly tiny leaves, jars of some kind of rotten-smelling paste, other jars filled with yellow and red and black dirt, ugly bulbous roots, a large knife that had been set down in the middle of carving those roots into immaculate little squares…

He was annoyed and overwhelmed by it all. Everything in the mortal realm was inexplicable. What was all of this for? What possible need could they have for such excess? Why were mortals so ridiculous? Why had this endeavor—feeding a single small human—become so complicated?

He impatiently grabbed a large, skinned piece of meat still attached to the bone, because it smelled the least bad out of everything, before stalking to the door.

“Human,” he snapped at Raiya, motioning outside. After a moment, he heard her following.

Nine

She trailed after him quietly as he hurried away from the house on the hill. He didn’t know where he was going, except that he was getting away from the house, and he was doing it quickly.

Several hills later, he could still feel Raiya’s eyes on his back. Fearing him. Despising him. Looking down on him.

He didn’t understand anything about this plane.He’d never thought the people in the house would try to fight him. It was a ridiculous, irrational thing to do. How could he have anticipated that?

Maybe it was not possible to predict what mortals would do. They were too strange to him, too different from demons.

He came to a stop and looked down at Raiya. She looked back at him, her face still and thoughts hidden.

She’d tried to stop him from going into that house. Perhaps he should have listened to her. He might not be able to trust her motives, but he could trust that she knew more about this plane than he did.

Setting down the meat he’d taken from the house, he put a hand to his side and began healing his iron-burned wound.

“Iron is poisonous to you, isn’t it?” Raiya said. “That’s why you couldn’t lift the portcullis with your hands.”

His spellcasting hand went still. He looked into her eyes, trying to see through them into her mind. She just looked at his wound, her face crinkling slightly, like she didn’t like the look of it.

“Are you all right?” she asked.Her expression was neutral, her tone soft. For once, there was no fear coming from her while she looked at him. If she were a demon, he would assume she was on the lookout for weakness. Weakness in him would be an opportunity for her to attack.

“It is a flesh wound,” he said finally. Raiya just arched an eyebrow.

When he told her to eat the meat, she refused, saying that it needed to be heated on a fire first, or she would get sick from it. At that point, he suspected she might be making things up just to toy with him, but he didn’t know enough about humans to be certain she was lying, and he couldn’t risk getting her ill. So he quietly made her a fire, feeling foolish as he did so.

After the meat was heated, she chewed dainty, steaming pieces without complaint, finally. Azreth watched her eat, and the nervous coils in the pit of his stomach slowly unfolded. They would survive another day.

“Will you explain something to me?” Raiya’s voice was cautious, but her eyes were daring. “I always thought demons came to our plane because they were mindless creatures hellbent on tormenting mortals. But you are far from mindless, and you haven’t tormented me, at least. So why do you not return to the hells? Heilune is dangerous for your kind.”

Heilune. He turned the word over in his mind. It was the name of this land, he realized, all the way from one ocean to the other, encompassing many mortal races and landscapes.

He stood up, pacing around the fire as she finished eating. “Whatever awaits me in Heilune, it is better than what I left behind.”

She leaned forward. “What is it like there? I have studied much of this world, but not much is known about yours.”

He tried to recall the last time someone had talked to him as much as she did. Even Nariel, who he’d thought was quite a social creature, didn’t ask him questions like this.

He thought of Nariel. The eldresses. The endless red dunes he’d become lost in too many times, and the skeletal trees he’d butchered to make tools and shelters. The venomous blossoms and spiked vines, the slithering beasts he’d had to keep watch for when he went to bathe in the rivers of fire, the wind storms that could blow the skin from your bones. It was all so different from the cool greenness of this plane.

What was it like?He didn’t know where to start. He didn’t know how to explain it to her.

It was an unhappy place.

Avoiding her eyes, he picked up a stick and fidgeted with the fire. “We have talked enough about the hells,” he said shortly, then gestured to her bag. “That book you have. There are runes in it.”

Her lips parted in surprise, and then she frowned. “You searched my bag?”

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