Page 4 of Unholy Bond
The air popped, and Levi tumbled back into the room. He was pale, the bravado gone for once, a confused frown on his face. “She’s not in Hell, either. Not in The Pit, not in The Fields of Fire, she’s nowhere in Boiling Seas. I can’t sense heranywhere.”
I stood, every nerve in my body a live wire. “What did you see?”
He rubbed his hands together, like the act of phasing in and out had left frostbite. “Nothing. Not even a footprint. No trace of her. It’s like she got erased fromallexistence.”
Ian spoke softly. “That’s not possible. Not unless—” He let the words dangle.
Levi filled the silence, and this time he didn’t try to sound amused. “If she were dead, we’d know. We’d all know.”
I gritted my teeth so hard I tasted iron. “She’s not dead. But she’s not free, either.”
The three of us looked at each other, the old triumvirate, each one waiting for the others to flinch first.
Ian finally said what none of us wanted to. “There’s only one place she could be where you wouldn’t be able to sense her. The Black Castle. Lucifer has her.”
Levi let out a long, unsteady breath, then nodded. “Okay. Great. We go and get her. Simple.”
I laughed, a jagged, joyless sound. “You think it’s that easy?”
He squared his shoulders, trying to regain some bravado. “If you’re scared, just say so.”
That did it. I crossed the room and grabbed him by the throat, slamming him back against the bar. Glass shattered, expensive liquor poured down his shirt. He grinned at me, even as my hand closed on his windpipe. The sharp smell of alcohol burning my nose as I bared my teeth at him.
“I missed this,” he said, the words a little choked. “Almost makes you seem human.”
I let him go, disgusted, but not as much with him as with myself. Ian watched us, lips pressed tight. For a second, I imagined the three of us killing each other, here in the high-rise, reducing the place to dust and bone.
“We’ll get her back,” Ian said.
I didn’t trust myself to answer. Instead, I walked away, hands shaking so bad I could barely get the bedroom door open. I closed it behind me, leaned against the wall, and slid down until I was crouched on the floor.
I fished the ring from my pocket. I turned it over in my hand, pressing the cold metal to my lips.
“She’s ours,” I whispered. Not a question, not even a threat. Just a fact, as old and inescapable as gravity. “She doesn’t belong to him.”
When I looked up, I saw my own reflection in the window, superimposed over the skyline. For a moment, I looked almosthuman. The storm outside let up, the rain shifting to a thin, icy mist. Thunder rolled in, low and long, and for a split second, it sounded like someone screaming.
We’d find her or burn eternity trying.
Chapter 3: Evelyn/Lilith
I used to rise at dawn, roused by birdsong and the smell of old hymnals. My mother said I always woke like I’d been waiting hours, eyes already open, hands folded on the blanket. That was Evelyn. The good girl, upright and eager, ready to run herself ragged for the love of the world. I remembered mornings with clarity and the memory twisted every time I looked at the walls of my new room.
Nothing in Hell was ever clean, not even obsidian. And Hellstone morphed, so the appearance of the walls would change under the grime.
I paced barefoot from one end of the chamber to the other, counting steps, a habit from the convent. Fifty paces round the perimeter. Fifty more, if I included the sweep between bed and bath. My toes left no prints on the stone, but static clung to my skin with a constant hum.
There were no clocks here, only the measured slide of color outside the windows. Sometimes the light slanted gold, but mostly it was a horror-movie shade of evening, the hour before any sane person would dare look in the closet. I stopped beside the windows, pressing my forehead to the cool bars. Thoughts of the demons who had become mine in a short period entered my mind. For a moment, I imagined what it would be like if they were here, and I wasn’t Lucifer’s prisoner. They wouldn’t be panicking or worrying. Aziz would make some sort of game outof the pain, or Levi would talk a fallen angel out of his pants, or Ian would stir up a mob of the damned just for the drama of it.
A phantom ache tightened my chest. I missed them intensely. Aziz would have said I needed to fuck it out of my system, preferably with him as an assistant. Levi would have laughed and tried to tease me out of the mood with a dance. Ian would have told me to fight. He’d say I needed to destroy who was holding me before they could do the same to me. Ian always admired destruction more than hope.
I paced my room. Each round bled off some of the itch in my nerves, but not much. My body had recalibrated itself. This Lucifer wasn’t like the one in my memories. I didn’t know how to overthrow him. However, I would find out his weaknesses.
I pressed my hand to the lines on my arm and let my mind wander to apple orchards, Christmas pageants, the heavy, homesick sweetness of being loved by mortals. None of it belonged to Lilith. It was all on loan, a costume the universe forced on me for a season.
Last night, I’d mostly ignored the mirror save for a few brief seconds. It was a monstrosity, ten feet tall and framed in brass that never tarnished. In the convent, we’d covered mirrors with veils during Lent, to remind ourselves that beauty faded. Here, the mirror was uncovered and impossible to ignore. Every time I crossed the room, my reflection tracked me like a wolf, pale and lean and unfamiliar. The glass wasn’t glass. It was some kind of mineral, flecked with gold and deeper bits of hematite, so that my image looked stitched together from a million fractured pieces.
I made myself stop before it. For a moment, all I saw was the new me. My eyes were almost transparent, the blue so diluted it looked like old milk. I didn’t blink. The mirror didn’t either.
