Page 18 of Unholy Bond
“We miss it,” Ian corrected, “we arrive off-cycle and paint the floor with our organs. Roof gives us a clean line to the Well. Levi turns the key on the flash. I peel the wards. You break whatever’s still standing. We’re in and out before the Council finishes its third refrain.”
Levi’s mouth quirked. “So we crash the meeting.”
“We steal its shadow,” Ian said. “They won’t feel us until it hurts.”
I closed my hand around the duffel, heard the knives settle like a promise. Third Watch. Council singing to itself while we ghosted their palace. I could live with those odds. I could kill with them.
“Hell’s expecting us,” I said. “You don’t think they’ve set up a kill box?”
“They have,” Ian said, rolling his sleeves. “But the best way to break a kill box is to be more suicidal than the idiots who set it up. You two are the only people I trust to make that calculus.”
Levi laughed, a sharp bark that sounded like it belonged to a different person. “And what about you, Ian? I always figured you’d jump ship if things got too hot.”
Ian grinned. “I’ve got too much invested. Besides, I want to see the look on his face when we punch a hole into his kingdom.”
Another lightning strike, another boom. The lights flickered, and for a second we were all shadows. I could smell the charge in the air, the tang of metal and magic and human fear. My heart hammered so hard I thought it might split my ribcage.
I hefted the duffel, let its weight anchor me. “Then let’s get this over with.”
Ian passed out the amulets, one for each of us. They were battered old things, but he’d burned a sigil into the back, a mark that would burn hotter than holy water if it came in contact with demon flesh. It was a good thing that we weren’t demons. Levi put his on, grumbling, but I could tell he was relieved to have it.
He set three slivers of blackened bone on the bar. The guard-brothers’ index keys, lacquered in soot. “We’ll fall between the stitches of Lucifer’s ward. For sixty-six heartbeats, the castle will read us all as nothing.”
We didn’t say goodbye to the penthouse. There was no point—none of us expected to come back. As we walked to the elevator, the windows groaned again, thunder echoing through the bones of the building. I pictured Lucifer on the other end, watching us through a hundred eyes, savoring the spectacle.
Ian said, “Once we hit the portal, it’s point of no return.”
I nodded. “Then let’s make it count.”
The elevator doors opened on the roof. Rain lashed at us sideways, and I could feel the city vibrating beneath our feet, a million souls all dreaming of apocalypse.
Levi took the key from his pocket, held it up to the sky, and waited for the lightning. When it struck, he jammed the key into the lock of a maintenance door and turned.
The air ripped open. The storm was nothing compared to the suck of the portal, the wind dragging us forward even as our bodies tried to resist. Levi whooped, Ian cursed, and I just held on to the duffel and followed them in.
We’d aimed for the seam, not directly for the hall. Lucifer’s wards netted the surface; but the Void ran through it like marrow. Slide in with the marrow, and the net doesn’t catch you.
I landed in Hell with a slap. For a few seconds, I couldn’t see or hear or even think. My lungs filled with steam, my skin crawled with biting cold.
I rolled onto my side and forced my eyes open. The ground was less ground and more ancient compost, sinking and sucking at my elbows. For a second I thought the portal had glitched, dumped us in a random hellscape, but then the geometry resolved, and I saw what we’d come for: the gate.
It rose from the earth like a bone working its way out of a wound, old stone fused with something darker, veins of black iron shot through the surface. It was at least ten feet tall, and twice as wide as I remembered from the diagrams in Ian’s notebooks. Vines clotted its base, flowers the size of infant skulls crowding up the flanks, but no matter how much the forest tried to bury it, the structure remained. The arch was engraved on every inch with sigils, so old they looked eroded, but the moment I tried to readthem my vision doubled, the lines crawling like worms beneath my eyelids.
Ian landed next, scraping his palms on the rocks as he tried to push up to his knees. He didn’t bother dusting off his clothes, just grabbed a handful of the mud and smeared it on his bare forearm, using the mess to draw a rough grid. He muttered under his breath, a litany of numbers and letters, like he was solving for X and the X was hidden somewhere in this mess.
Levi, of course, landed like a cat: on his feet, hair already retying itself, a smear of green on his cheek. He looked around, saw the gate, and immediately started circling it. “It’s bigger than I thought,” he said, not even a trace of awe. “Bet you ten bucks the hinges are fused.”
“Not hinges,” Ian said, “there’s a pivot here. The runes control the angle. If you force it, you risk—”
Levi snorted, pacing out a semicircle. “You always want to do it by the book. Sometimes you just have to pull the trigger and pray you don’t lose a hand.”
“It’s not your hand on the line, you dumb bastard,” Ian shot back, wiping rain from his face. “We mess up the sequence, and we’re stuck here. Or worse.”
I forced myself upright, the duffel bag a dead weight across my back. Every muscle in my arms felt strung with barbed wire, but I got to my feet. The heat was a living thing, sweat pooling at the base of my spine, my shirt already glued to my chest. The gate’s runes were brighter now, a faint pulse in the purple-blue between flashes of lightning.
I stalked toward the archway, ignoring the bickering. “Ian, you got the ward ready?”
He nodded, pulling a strip of parchment from his belt. “Yeah, but I still say we should probe for traps before—”
