Page 19 of Unholy Bond
Levi cut in, reaching the base of the gate and running his fingers over the biggest rune. “It’s a simple override,” he said, grinning. “We just need a power source and the key.”
He turned to look at me, and I could see the greed in his eyes. “You brought the key, right?”
Levi held it up and I took it from him. I walked straight to the arch. The closer I got, the louder the hum, a vibration that settled in my teeth and threatened to shake the fillings loose. The central keyhole waited, half-clogged with vines and something that might have been petrified blood. I jammed the key into the slot and felt it bite, the old mechanism shifting like a broken jaw.
The runes ignited, purple and green and sick with light. The air pressure dropped, and the wind went silent, the rain stopping in mid-air like a scene from a busted video game. Behind me, Ian was yelling something, but the noise was sucked out of the world. I heard nothing except the voice of the gate.
Levi shouted, tried to grab my shoulder, but I shrugged him off and pressed my left palm to the activation glyph. I could already feel the skin splitting, the sharp edges cutting into me, but I didn’t flinch. I pushed harder, and the blood started to flow, thick and bright and perfect. The gate wanted blood; it always had.
The archway shivered, the stones vibrating, and the runes crawled up my arm, burning new patterns into my flesh. The pain was hot, almost sweet, and I leaned into it, baring my teeth and letting the old violence surface. “Enough arguing,” I said, the words lost to the void but spoken anyway.
The gate wailed. There was no other word for it. The whole structure let out a sound like a newborn, like metal bent in a vise, like the last breath of an animal before the knife. It rose in pitch, so high and sharp it cut through the jungle and left nothing but silence in its wake. For a second, every insect, every bird, every living thing in a mile radius shut up and listened.
Then the air ripped open. The center of the arch liquefied, became blacker than any night, a hole that led straight through the world. The vacuum tried to suck us in, but I dug in my heels, wiped the blood on my pants, and reached back for Levi.
He tried to resist, but I had the leverage and the rage and the history. I grabbed him by the collar and flung him through the rift. He howled, spinning, limbs cartwheeling, then vanished into the dark. I turned to Ian. He didn’t hesitate, just nodded and stepped through. He disappeared with a pop, the smell of ozone following.
I looked up at the sky, let the rain hit my face, and thought of Lilith as I stepped through the gate.
We tumbled out on the other side, all three of us on our hands and knees on a floor that wasn’t floor at all but a river of black glass. Above us, a ceiling arched so high it might have been sky, streaked with fire and shot through with ribs of smoking bone. In the distance, lights flickered—yellow, orange, blue like a city’s worth of candles burning at the end of the world.
Levi was already up, dusting himself off, his mouth twisted into a grin that said he’d never been happier. Ian stood, wiped a smear of something from his cheek, and looked at me with something close to respect.
The pain in my left hand was still there, but now it throbbed with a purpose. The runes etched into my palm glowed in timewith the heartbeat of this place. I flexed my fingers and felt the promise of violence, the certainty that this time, no one would be coming to save us.
“Let’s go,” I said. “She’s waiting.”
We moved as a unit, three monsters in a world built for monsters, and behind us, the gate shrieked shut, the echo rolling out and back forever.
It was going to be a good day.
Chapter 11: Ian
A trail of black feathers, each the size of a sparrow’s wing and slick as an oil slick, led me deeper into the rat warren of Hell’s Corporate Complex. Each time I picked a new corridor, there was the next feather, drifting out from a doorway or caught in a fracture on the wall. Sometimes they hovered in the air just long enough for me to catch sight, then vanished as soon as I rounded the corner. Sometimes I had to stoop to retrieve one from a puddle of black slime, and each time I did, the slime stung the skin on my fingers and burned.
We’d split up three hours ago, or three Hell hours ago, which ran by a different clock than anything I’d ever seen in the upper worlds. Aziz had gone left, straight toward the main armory, the place he always felt at home. Levi had gone vertical, scaling the office blocks and the comms towers like he expected to find a swimming pool and a cabana at the top. I’d gone straight, and then down, and then, when the floors began to shudder and the walls started bleeding ink, down again. Nobody in their rightmind would follow this trail, and that was how I knew it was meant for me.
I ran a claw along the wall, breaking the crust of runes Lucifer’s architects had slathered on every surface. Here and there, the runes had been eaten away, replaced by cracks that oozed inky black. The Void’s signature. I snorted, ignoring the way my lungs pulled in more poison than oxygen. I’d always been good at compartmentalizing. In my old job, I’d spent centuries learning how to filter out Hell’s ambient evil and focus on the task. Now, with Lilith’s life on the line and the palace in a slow collapse, I should have been able to handle a simple infestation.
But the feathers kept coming. They got bigger as I went, and the spaces around them got smaller. Soon I had to stoop, then crawl, then dig my way under collapsed beams and torn wire. My demon form made it easier. I didn’t bleed if I cut myself, I didn’t bruise, I didn’t even leave much of a scent, which was good because Lucifer’s new guards were everywhere, and they tracked mostly by smell. Still, even in this body, I could tell I was being herded. At the end, the last feather waited in front of a door made of blackened bone. The bones weren’t just assembled for effect. They still had bits of meat and hair stuck to them, and the whole thing vibrated with a low, wet hum.
I pressed my palm to the bone door. It opened at my touch, no resistance, just a sigh of air and the flutter of a hundred more feathers that drifted around me as I stepped inside.
The shrine was a cylinder, walls made of mirrors that stretched to a point above my head, as if the room was a telescope aimed straight up the devil’s asshole and into infinity. The mirrors were old, warped and pitted, some with the silvering peeled back to show the brick beneath. Every surface reflected a thousand versions of me: hunched, blue-skinned, eyes like searchlights,forehead ridged and throbbing. There was no floor, not really. Just a surface of more mirrors, cracked and black, that reflected my feet as a cluster of shattered claws. The air was perfectly still, but the feathers continued to fall, landing on the floor and then melting.
At the center of the room sat a dais. More bone, but this time the bones were arranged in a spiral staircase that led nowhere, just stopped after three turns. On the bottom step, a pile of black feathers heaped around a candelabrum of finger bones. The candles were unlit, but they oozed wax that steamed as it pooled, burning the feathers to cinders.
I waited. My demon heart pounded out a martial rhythm, the kind I’d used to calm myself before every battle since the Fall. Nothing moved. My own face, repeated to infinity, stared back at me with a look I hadn’t seen since I was alive: actual fear.
“Is this it?” I asked the mirrors. “Is this what passes for a trap these days?”
No answer. Only the shifting, almost inaudible tick of the mirrors stretching and relaxing, like the room was breathing me in.
I stepped forward. The mirrors on the wall elongated my body, made me look more like a mantis than a man, all elbows and knees and twitching antennae. As I walked, each step rang with a different sound of glass, bone, water, fire. Nothing about the place was stable, but I pressed on. I was used to shrines, to oracles and prediction rituals, but this was more than just a freakshow. The further I walked, the more I got the sense that the room was remembering me.
When I reached the dais, the feathers at its base parted, revealing the skull of something that was probably once human.The jaw moved, as if working up the courage to speak, but then a cold wind swept down from the mirrors and snuffed out the motion. The wind carried a single word, not in any language I knew, but in the old tongue. The word was a question, and it meant: “Why are you still here?”
I answered in the same language. “Because you called me.”
