Page 10 of Unholy Bond
“Constantly,” I said. “She doesn’t keep the wrong kind.”
Aziz exhaled, steady. “Then we’re done talking.”
“Agreed.” The grid sat solved behind my eyes. We had a path. We had a problem shaped like a door.
Back in the car, I checked the numbers again. They held.
Angle, then power.
Three points define a plane.
We are the plane. She is the fall.
The Well would learn the difference.
Chapter 5: Lilith
The runes on my door snapped from dull red to a blinding white, flaring bright enough to cast afterimages behind my eyelids. The air shifted from chill to stinging, and every dust mote turned to glass. The hinges, if you could call the mechanisms grafted into the obsidian frame hinges, shrieked their protest and then the door yawned open.
The corridor beyond was already crowded.
Two creatures waited for me. They stood two heads taller than anyone I’d ever seen, and their bodies were a nightmare of interlocking plates, black-green and shining like beetle shells. Their faces were almost human, but the mouths were too wide, and filled with teeth arranged not in rows but in a spiral. Horns spiraled up from the brow, but the bone showed no inheritance from the old stock. I’d seen enough demons to know. These weren’t my offspring.
It was the first thing that truly unnerved me since waking. When I died, every demon in Hell shared at least a drop of my line. If Lucifer had managed to birth new stock while I was out, it meant he’d found a way to breed without me. The thought hit with a violence that dwarfed all the threats I’d faced on Earth. If he didn’t need me, what the fuck was I doing here?
They seized my arms, claws digging into the flesh beneath my new skin. The pain was immediate, sweet and sharp, and for asecond I gave in to it. Sure I could make them release me, but I didn’t need to let them know just how powerful I truly was. If they expected resistance, they’d have to wait for it. The floor burned cold against my bare feet as they half-dragged, half-carried me into the hallway.
The corridor stretched far longer than the geometry of the tower allowed. The walls pulsed with veins of orange light, and I tracked the rhythm as they moved me through. It felt like the heartbeat of something too big to see, maybe even the old city itself. I wondered if the boys would like the upgrade. Levi would call it gauche, Aziz would complain about the paint job, and Ian would find the fastest way to weaponize it.
The trip wasn’t gentle. Every third step, my captors would jerk me upward to keep my toes from catching on the uneven stone. Each time, the tips of my toes grazed the floor and burned anew. I focused on the sensation, let it anchor me, let it keep the panic from blooming. The fear was not for myself, but for the world I’d left behind. I remembered an apple in a Boston market, remembered the laugh of a child whose mother I’d helped, remembered the feel of Ian’s hand on the small of my back, possessive and gentle all at once. The ache was immediate and raw. I missed them more than I missed breathing.
We moved through a sequence of gates, each one more ornate and crueler than the last. At the first, the bars were spaced with skulls and the guards standing at attention didn’t even acknowledge us. At the second, the threshold was scored with runes that twisted as I tried to read them, deliberately occlusive, as if the words themselves were ashamed. The third gate was a pair of mirrored doors that reflected not our bodies but our desires, or maybe our fears. In mine, I saw Aziz and Levi kneeling at my feet, their faces blank, as if I’d lost the ability tobring them joy or pain. The sight nearly buckled me. I wanted to turn away, but the guards forced my head forward, holding it steady until the doors groaned open.
“I demand to know where I’m being taken,” I said at last.
The only answer I received was a savage jerk from one of the demons, shaking my body like I was a rag doll.
The final passage led to the throne room, if you could call it that. Hell didn’t believe in thrones; it believed in platforms, in hierarchies made manifest. This one rose like a tumor from the polished floor, a dais that looked grown instead of built. The columns were carved from single pieces of stone, so tall they disappeared into mist. The ceiling was lost in shadow, but from time to time I thought I glimpsed something moving in the dark up there, a suggestion of wings or worse. The floor itself was a nightmare of polished black, veined with rivers of red. It looked as if the marble had been quarried from a single, monstrous clot of blood.
The demons marched me to the foot of the dais and threw me down. My knees hit the stone with a crack that echoed through the hall. I pitched forward, hands splayed for balance, chin grazing the floor. I let my hair fall over my face, feigning the kind of crumpled helplessness I’d never allow myself in life. The trick was in making them underestimate you. Even the devil himself could be tricked if you played the character right. His own hubris and overconfidence would be his downfall.
For a long time, nothing happened. The room was silent but for the low hum of energy pulsing in the walls. My captors stood motionless, each one a parody of patience. I stole a look up from beneath my hair, searching for a sign of my jailer.
He announced himself with slow, deliberate footsteps.
Lucifer never hurried. Not even when he was angry, not even when his palace was under siege. He entered from a side arch, cloaked in his true form. His skin was the red of a fresh wound, slick with oil and furrowed with old scars. His horns curled back from his skull like the horns of a bison, thick and ridged. His hands were too large, tipped with claws more like talons. His mouth, when it twisted into a smile, was almost beautiful. Almost. The eyes, though, were black, not the color but the substance, like the absence of light you got from staring too long at the sun.
He swept past the guards without acknowledging them, and as he drew level with me, he flicked out a single finger. The motion was so casual I almost missed it.
The demon on my right went limp and crumbled to the floor. The other demon didn’t move. Neither did I.
Lucifer turned, inspecting his kill like a chef might test a melon for ripeness. Then, as if remembering I was there, he stepped in front of me.
He crouched and dipped two fingers in the puddle of blood. When he stood, he gripped my chin painfully. He leaned in close, so close I could see the tiny bubbles of air trapped beneath the membrane of his skin, the way the light refracted around his features. Every line, every proportion, calculated for maximum effect.
He smeared the blood across my lips, pressing the slick pads of his fingers into my mouth. His talons gently clawed at the soft flesh around my mouth. I hesitated. Not out of fear, but because I knew this was a test. I parted my lips, letting him push the fingers in, and closed around them. The taste was salt, copper, a hint of sugar and something rotten underneath. I licked them clean, slow and deliberate, suckling at them the way I wouldhave with the cock of one of my men, then pulled back and met his gaze with all the defiance I could muster.
He grinned, and the air between us shivered.
