Page 13 of Unholy Bond
I found a bar three blocks away, the kind of place where no one asked questions. I sat on a stool at the bar, ordered whiskey, and set the key on the bar top. It looked ordinary to anyone else, but every time I blinked, the runes jumped and twisted, a half-step ahead of what my brain could process.
A man two stools down tried to make eye contact, but I shut it down with a look. I didn’t want company. I wanted answers.
I ran my thumb over the key. It pulsed, a slow, steady heartbeat. Every so often, a black shimmer crawled over the metal, coiling around my wrist like a pet snake. The sensation wasn’t unpleasant, but it set my nerves on fire. It was as if the Void wanted to talk to me, wanted to make itself known.
I remembered what Aziz used to say about the old wars: the weapons that won them were never swords or bombs, but artifacts with just enough sentience to love you back, or to hate you forever. I wondered what this key thought of me. I wondered what I’d do if it ever decided I wasn’t worthy.
I drained the whiskey, then slid the key back into my pocket. The bartender eyed me, but I shook my head. Time to go.
On the walk back to the penthouse, I felt it again. The feeling of being watched. But not a watcher, not a human, not even a demon. Something older. Maybe it was the city, or maybe it was the key itself, but the chill at the base of my spine didn’t fade. It grew.
At the penthouse, I set the wards and sat on the sofa, key in hand. I called Aziz and Ian, told them to get here now. There was no more time.
The Void inside the key pulsed a little harder, as if it agreed. I closed my eyes and listened. For a moment, I swore I could hear her, the sound of her breath, the rhythm of her heart.
“Hang on,” I whispered. “We’re coming.”
And in the darkness, whatever resided in the key gave a slight rumble, almost a purr.
Chapter 7: Lilith
Lucifer’s tight grip around my arm was overkill. He could have paralyzed me with a snap or summoned a dozen security golems to frog-march me through the labyrinth, but that was never his style. He liked a spectacle. He wanted everyone to see the legendary Lilith leashed and bound, but more than that, he wanted me to see the way it bruised, to know thathe’ddone that to me. A mark of his control.
We moved through corridors so wide that the far sides disappeared into haze. The floors were black marble, but no matter how often they were polished, it never reflected anything but the overhead lighting and the smudged streaks of whateverorwhomever had been dragged across it last. Above us, arches were ribbed with metal like the insides of a warship, the rib bones of some awful leviathan. Every surface hummed faintly with the faint current of magic and despair.
Lucifer walked with a leisurely, almost bored stride, as if he’d personally designed every inch of this place and was determined to savor its perfection. He’d come for me a few hours after being left in my dank quarters, not saying where we were going as though we were old friends heading off on an adventure. His grip on me didn’t slacken, though. If anything, it tightened as we approached the first of the administration floors.
Here, the real heart of Hell pulsed and groaned. It was like a DMV run by an occupying army, each member thirsty for pain, torture, and agony. Actually, now that I thought about it, that sort of sounded like therealDMV.
Endless rows of desks, each manned by something that was once human but had since been stripped to its bureaucratic essence. They sat slumped, gray-faced and open-mouthed, eyes sunken and rimmed in red, some with patches of hair hanging across their faces like Spanish moss. Their hands moved ceaselessly over forms, stamps, keyboards, and ledgers. Some still bled from the fingertips, leaving pinkish swirls on the paperwork, but most had long since ossified into mechanical routine.
Demons walked around dressed in a mockery of office decorum, striding by in suits and pencil skirts, stalking between the rows, clutching clipboards or tablets, their horns lacquered and groomed to glossy points. Every few minutes, one would pause behind a mortal drone, glance at the paperwork, and then, with zero ceremony, rip out a fingernail, a tooth, tear off an ear or a chunk of scalp, before moving on. The damned human drone cried out in pain before going back to their task. The paperworknever stopped. Even as humans shrieked or convulsed, their hands kept shuffling, signing, filing, as if the body no longer belonged to the mind.
Lucifer always loved paperwork. Still analog for the damned, but now it was digital for him.
“These are the souls of the damned,” Lucifer purred in my ear. “Spending their lives doling out suffering through paper. Those who signed off on unlawful foreclosures and evictions, who repudiated life-saving medical benefits to increase company profits, the ones who delighted in denial.”
We passed a cubicle, and I caught sight of a woman with a pinched face and a cross tattoo on her throat. She looked up as we passed, eyes meeting mine for a heartbeat, and in them I saw recognition. Not of Lilith, because she’d never met me in this form. It was something older, a memory the soul couldn’t shed. I watched her hands as she rubber-stamped a form, accidentally splattering her own blood across the signature line. A demon administrator glanced over, then casually reached into her mouth, knuckles knocking against her teeth as she gagged and cried out. He leered down at her, a look of sexual concentration as he dug his ragged nails into the soft flesh of her tongue. Tears sprang out of her eyes, coursing down her cheeks, her scream muffled but agonized as the demon yanked and clawed at her mouth. With a wet, suckingpophe plucked out her tongue, blood fanning across the floor. He chuckled, lifted a spread sheet and stapled it to the page. Her jaw worked uselessly, spittle and stringing down her chin, but even through her tears and misery she signed the next form in perfect cursive.
I shuddered and tried not to show it. Lucifer noticed anyway. “Home sweet home,” he said, the phrase stretched out like taffy. “Not as quaint as your Boston penthouse, but the view’s better.”
I didn’t dignify it with a reply. Instead, I scanned the floor, trying to memorize the layout, the way the elevators and staircases telescoped in on themselves, the location of the emergency exits, marked in green, which glowed sickly even under Hell’s perpetual red gloom. If I was to be caged, I’d know every inch of it. Survival, in the end, was just a matter of better paperwork.
We passed into a second wing, where the ceilings soared even higher and the desks gave way to long, open tables. Here, the souls were chained to slabs, naked and twitching, cocks and breasts jiggling as they moved, each one threaded with needles, wires, and tubing. Demons in surgical smocks moved between them, siphoning liquids, some yellow, some red, some the color of antifreeze, into labeled vials and then slotting them onto massive, revolving racks. The processed fluids were carted off by pale, bloated things on all fours, who sloshed when they walked and left little wet footprints in their wake. The creatures looked like spiders, but with human feet and legs, their bodies mottled grey, skin oozing thick, gelatinous sweat.
The air was different here. Less sulfur, more formaldehyde, cut with a top note of scorched plastic. I didn’t see Aziz or Levi or Ian among the tormented, but I wasn’t sure if that would have made it better or worse. Aziz would have fought, tooth and nail, refusing to break even as they whittled him to bone. Levi would have smiled through it, taunting the administrators until they lost their cool and made a mess. Ian would have gone limp and sarcastic, bleeding only the minimum required, every insult delivered with a tired smirk. I missed them. The thought hit harder than the stench of death around me.
“You’re pining,” Lucifer said, almost cooing the words, and for a moment I wondered if he could read minds, or if I was just that transparent. He leaned in and sniffed hard, the sound ofa dog catching a scent. “I can actuallysmellthe ache of your pussy, that sweet fluid that lubed your cunt for their cocks. Don’t worry. If your boys are worth the trouble, they’ll find a way here. I’d almost enjoy watching the reunion.” His mouth widened, exposing teeth as white as carved bone.
“Not pining,” I lied. “Just regretting the décor.”
He grunted, steering me down a new passage. Here, the hall narrowed, the marble losing its shine and turning porous. I noticed, for the first time, that the stone was shot through with hairline cracks, not the cosmetic kind, but deep, black fissures that pulsed faintly, as if something below the surface was alive and reaching.
The Void. My first instinct was to look away, but I made myself stare, following the way the cracks spiderwebbed out from the corners, converging at certain intersections, retreating when the overhead fluorescents flared. When Lucifer’s gaze swept a wall, the fissures shrank back, almost as if they were afraid of him. But when I really focused the lines trembled, expanded, bulging out of them in a black mass, and sometimes I could hear a faint hum in my mind, like radio static or distant bees.
One particularly wide fissure curved up from the base of a support column and traced a ragged path across the floor. As we stepped over it, I felt a chill, an actual drop in temperature, and it was all I could do not to shiver.
He must have noticed my flinch. “Sensitive?” he mocked. “You’ll get used to it.”
