Page 31 of Unholy Bond
Chapter 16: Lilith
The corridor in the palace’s north annex had not seen real use in centuries. It smelled of old spells and lemon polish, the kind of place used for hiding mistakes and legacy debts, not for parties or grand pronouncements. I lingered there, one hand braced on the velvet rope strung along the wall, the other fingering the edge of a tapestry so ancient it might have been loomed on the first day Hell was born.
The tapestry showed a war. That was typical, but the figures stitched in black and gold looked more like numbers than soldiers, an endless fractal of columns breaking apart and recombining as the scene advanced left to right. At the far end, the numbers had morphed into serpents, eating their own tails while the background burned in threads of crimson. A metaphor, or a prophecy, or a record of what was happening outside this quiet alcove right now.
I heard Levi coming before I saw him, though the tendrils of void around him would make sure nobody else could see or sense him. Even in demon form, he kept the human habit of walking heavily, telling me exactly who was coming. It’d beennearly twelve hours since he’d fucked me against the wall of my chambers. Maybe he wanted round two. I traced the edge of the war tapestry and waited for him to round the corner.
He wore his business suit, which only made the green tint to his hands more obscene. “You need to see this,” he said quietly. Not a whisper, Levi would never stoop, but a sort of conspiratorial growl.
“Does it have to be now?” I asked, shifting my weight to face him. “I just won my first hour of solitude since—” I gestured vaguely, indicating the entire preceding disaster.
He didn’t bother with a reply. Instead, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder and led me deeper into the palace, past old columns and a row of sconces that cast elongated shadows across the marble. The further in, the colder it got, the less the walls looked like architecture and more like something that had grown here. The hum of Hell’s bureaucracy faded, replaced by the trickle of condensation down the columns and the occasional clatter of something small and alive scrabbling for safety.
We passed another tapestry, this one unfinished. Only the border and the suggestion of a central figure. Nothing was filled in yet.
“Here,” Levi said, stopping at a T-junction where the marble wall had been cracked through in a network of black lines. Not the decorative kind. A real, structural kind, like frost fracturing the windshield of a car. The cracks radiated from a central wound about eye-level, and each line pulsed at the edge, black leaking into the white in a slow, unstoppable creep.
“They’re getting worse.” He rapped a knuckle against the wall. “I’ve been watching. Six hours ago, this was just a hairline. Nowit’s across the corridor. Another week, it’ll break through to the east wing.”
I ran my hand over the surface. The chill bled up my arm, but it was the texture that caught me. The veins didn’t just lie on the stone, they bored through it, opening into tiny, toothless mouths that wept blacker with each pulse. The effect was less disease, more infestation.
“It’s the Void.” I drew my finger through the thickest vein. “Not random, either. It’s mapped to the wards.”
Levi looked at me, eyes narrowed. “Explain.”
“He’s been fortifying the wards around the main wing. Every time he boosts them, it pushes the Void out. The pressure isn’t just holding the Void back, it’s causing pressure points everywhere else.”
Levi clicked his tongue. “Like squeezing a tube of toothpaste.”
“Or a pipe bomb,” I said.
He gave a low whistle. “How long?”
“Depends on how much Lucifer panics. If he throws another ring of wards around the core, the whole palace could fracture. The Void isn’t just leaking, it’s fighting back.”
He nodded, his face all calculation. “We need to see how bad it gets near the source.”
“I thought you’d never ask.” I brushed past him, trailing my arm on his back. The cold intensified the closer we got to the heart of the infestation. The marble underfoot shifted with every step. Sometimes it creaked, sometimes it gave a millimeter, as if the floor had grown a layer of cartilage under the stone. The black veins weren’t isolated anymore. They crawled up the columns,cut through the frescoes, even wrapped the bases of the gas lamps that illuminated the corridor. Here and there, a chunk of marble had fallen out, leaving behind only a cavity of black, slick with the oily residue of the Void.
Levi’s pace slowed, and I could see why. The air ahead of us wasn’t just cold, it vibrated. The smell shifted too, losing the antiseptic tang of cleaning spells and picking up a metallic edge. It stung at the back of the sinuses, a warning even the uninitiated would heed.
We stopped at a junction where three hallways met. The corruption was worst here. The cracks converged at a center point the size of a dinner plate, and from that wound, the Void seeped out in visible tendrils, writhing like worms in a nest. The surface of the wall around it had begun to liquefy, the ornate bas-reliefs drooping, melting, then reforming as if memory and matter had parted ways.
A servant, one of the smaller, batlike ones that cleaned the gutters, hurried past the far end of the corridor, glanced our way, and immediately reversed direction, flapping in panic.
I glanced at Levi. “How many more of these?”
“Counting this one? At least five. One in every major wing. This is just the first to reach—” he gestured at the tendrils, “—visible extrusion.”
I let the word extrusion turn over in my head. The Void wasn’t satisfied with escaping. It wanted to claim space, to assert itself as the new standard. A thought occurred to me. “Step back,” I told Levi and held my hand out to the nearest tendril.
The reaction was immediate. The Void whipped toward me, but instead of lashing out, it hesitated. The tip hovered an inch frommy skin, as if sniffing, then curled back on itself. I thought of a dog, uncertain whether the new visitor was friend or threat.
“Be still,” I whispered, and the words came out layered, doubled, as if something else in the corridor had repeated them.
The tendril stopped. The black veins across the marble pulsed in rhythm with my heartbeat. For a moment, the whole palace seemed to be listening.
I closed my eyes, let the Void into the space behind them. It filled the darkness with shapes. The infinite hallway, the spiral of the first war, the tapestry of images feeding on themselves. I saw, in a way that had nothing to do with sight, the branching network of cracks and the way they reached not just through stone, but through memory, through the old debts the palace was built on.
