Page 23 of When Monsters Fight
The mountains rose on either side of us like a stone cage, not that I was claustrophobic or anything. And as the sky darkened and the stars came out to play, the sense of being trapped retreated.
In fact, it was almost pleasant in the valley. The ground was pebbles and earth, but there were bushes hugging the base of the mountains, each dotted with vibrant flora. The smell, sweet and intoxicating, left me a little lightheaded, but not in a bad way.
Kabiel maintained a lead, his large brown wings flaring and contracting like a pulse while the spider legs remained tucked against his back, the taloned tips a foot off the ground.
He lifted his chin, nostrils flaring slightly as he sniffed the air, and a fist squeezed my heart, because in that moment he reminded me of Shem—feral, ferocious, and wild. I blinked back stupid tears and fixed my attention on the ground, anywhere but on Kabiel.
Something white stuck out of the ground. Kabiel walked past it, but the closer I got, the more certain I was that the thing was a bone.
“Bones,” Kabiel confirmed a moment later. “Several piles of them up ahead.”
“That’s not ominous at all,” Gabriel drawled.
We reached the pile of bones, which on closer inspection clearly belonged to two skeletons.
“They look humanoid,” Kabiel said, casually picking up a bone. “This creature was maybe four feet tall.”
“Gehennans?” Asbeel asked.
“Probably.” Kabiel dropped the bone. “Dead Gehennans. Dead for some time.”
And they died here? The beware warning at the entrance seemed more potent than ever now, and my gut told me that if we didn’t hustle, we might somehow meet the same fate as these Gehennans.
Chapter 13
We walked faster after the bone discovery, but the end of the valley still hadn’t come into sight.
How long was this path, and why had Thanatos called it a gate?
The sweet fragrance of the blooms spiked for a moment, filling my head with its delightful aroma.
Moonlight looked good on Gabriel. It highlighted his cheekbones and tipped his eyelashes in silver. Fuck, he was beautiful. I shook off the train of thought and fixed my attention on the road ahead.
“What I don’t understand is why have a world separated into circles?” Yomiel muttered, his sandy head bowed in thought.
“Why do you care?” Asbeel said. “You have the inanest thoughts sometimes.”
“At least I’m able to have thoughts again,” Yomiel retorted. “Better than the constant gnawing hunger for flesh.”
“I’m afraid it might come back,” Kokabel said gruffly. “Idon’t want to be a monster again. I don’t want to remember the things I’ve done.”
“I can’t stop thinking about all the awful things,” Matarel said. “And how much I enjoyed doing them at the time.”
This watcher’s gruff voice was at odds with his lean form which, despite his devolved spiderish form, reminded me more of a bird of prey. He’d kept his thoughts to himself up until now.
They all had.
There was something off about the tone of this conversation. A strange candidness and vulnerability that didn’t sit right with the circumstances and situation.
“I see the end of the valley,” Gabriel said.
It was still far off, but unmistakably the end of our passage because the blue mountains stopped and a gray expanse began. We must be at the midway point.
We walked faster to eat at the distance between us and the exit, and silence enveloped us for long seconds until Jilyana broke it.
“I was told by my mother that our home world had been separated into domains,” she said softly. “Each element had its place, and we did not venture into another elemental’s domain without an invitation. Back then, we had our own god, but disaster and war forced us to scatter. Now my people exist in pockets of reality across the multiverse.”
Wait, was she saying that the world she wanted to go back towasn’ther original world? “Are you saying that our God gave your people refuge?”
