Page 65 of Hell Sent

He glanced over at Paladin Adamus, who was not moving. There would be no more help from him. Azreth also could no longer sense Raiya nearby. He hoped she had gotten far away.

The demon stood over him, grimacing as the hole in his own chest rapidly closed. He spat blood on the ground.“Why bother fighting?” he asked. “What do you have to gain from prolonging a fight you can’t win? Are you really so foolish?”

His disgust was both so familiar and so foreign.

For all of his life, Azreth had thought it was only natural to be disgusted by weakness. He had perfectly understood why his maker had hated him, because when he saw a creature that was deformed or injured or small, or when he witnessed a display of unguarded emotion, he’d felt the same deep discomfort she had felt.

He had seen himself in those small, vulnerable creatures. He hated himself, so he hated them, too.

The demon leaned closer, as if searching for the flaw that would explain Azreth’s behavior.His nose wrinkled, and he said accusingly, “I know this scent. You smell like desperation and misguided happiness. You’re ill.”

“Perhaps,” Azreth said. The demon couldn’t have understood, and Azreth pitied him. He couldn’t know what it was like to be enthralled. He would never know this joy.

“Can you not see how broken you are?” the demon asked. “Have you no regret?”

“I have no regret for serving the one I love.” Something in his lungs sputtered when he spoke and breathed. He shuddered slightly as he fought to stay conscious.

“If I were kinder, I would put you out of your misery,” the demon said. He waved a short spell over Azreth, healing him—but only barely. Azreth gingerly touched his chest, taking a gurgling breath. The wound was still bleeding, but he did not think it would kill him yet. “Perhaps I should bring you back to the hells to be exorcised.”

Azreth knew it was a false threat designed to frighten him, but a thread of panic still went through him. The demon smirked, taunting him, but he had no idea what the threat truly meant.

Azreth’s mind was the one thing that had always been his own. The idea of the core of his being—his feelings, his love for Raiya and the mortal world—being stripped from him, was horrific. He understood now why the enthralled fought their exorcisms so desperately.

The demon bent to pick up Paladin Adamus in one arm, then took Azreth’s wrist to drag him behind him. “Don’t die just yet,” he said. Azreth could feel him feeding from his agony as they moved down the hall.

Twenty-Five

Azreth swung in and out of consciousness as the demon dragged him through the castle.

After a while, he realized he was no longer moving. Unpleasant sensations told him he was still alive: blunt pain in his abdomen, cold stone on his back, and light pressing against his closed eyes. He forced his eyes open, squinting against the obscene amount of magic in the room. It flowed in glittering rivers through the air, along the walls, through luminescent runes and onward. It originated from a point somewhere beyond his line of sight.

He tilted his head to look around the room. He was in a familiar place. It was the very room where he’d first been summoned. The place of his imprisonment.

The crimson-skinned demon, seated in a chair near him, was looking down at him with a bored expression, as if to convey that Azreth had been too weak an opponent to excite him. He’d healed himself, and probably only the iron-poisoned wound in his back remained.

Azreth saw movement out of the corner of his eye, and he looked up. Nirlan was standing nearby with his back to them, fiddling with something on a table. There was nothing standing between them except the fact that Azreth didn’t have the strength to move.

Beyond Nirlan was the point from which all the magic in the room was flowing: a huge, shining tear in space between this plane and another.

It was a gate to the hells. That was how Nirlan had brought so many creatures here. Azreth wondered whether he’d intentionally brought them here, or if that had just been a side effect of his carelessness in summoning the second demon.

“Azreth,”came a small voice.

He forced his head back to look behind him, though it made the wound in his chest stretch excruciatingly. Behind him on the floor, shakily holding herself up on her elbows, was Raiya.

She was still here.

She hadn’t run.

She was here, in danger, and he couldn’t protect her.

Azreth looked up at the other demon, who was already looking back at him as if he’d read his thoughts. Azreth’s jaw stiffened as he tried to stifle his emotions, but there was no point. The demon already knew his secret: Azreth was enthralled by Raiya. If Nirlan allowed it, he would hurt Raiya just to hurt Azreth. His pain would probably taste exquisite.

Nirlan turned to Raiya, clasping his ugly, rodent-like hands together. His voice was just as insufferably arrogant as Azreth remembered. “I can’t lie—it stings that the first thing out of your mouth when you awaken is another man’s name.”

Raiya bared her teeth. Under the strange light of the gate, they were the same ghostly greenish shade as her skin. She didn’t look injured yet, only weakened, as if by a spell or drug. Nirlan had done something to her. “You said he wasn’t bound to you,” she said, jerking her head toward the crimson-skinned demon.

“And you believed me,” Nirlan said flatly.

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