Page 2 of Vengeance and Vipers
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JULES
I wake to a noise I can’t really discern, and it takes me a good few seconds for my brain to play catch up. The last I recall, I was lying outside on wet grass and looking up at the stars.
A pang hits me hard as I recall that Siggy is dead. What follows is confusion when I think about the aftermath. There’s no way I’m remembering what happened during those minutes after Dante killed my friend correctly. It has to be some kind of trick.
I look down at my hands. They look normal. But I turned into something else.
I KILLED DANTE!
And not only did I kill him. I snapped his neck like a carrot.Easily.
That’s not possible. He was like a demon Terminator. No one survived him. Not ever.
This can’t be real. I must have been hallucinating from all the torture.
I shift uncomfortably. I’m lying on something hard, and I’m wrapped in blankets that smell old. I sit up slowly and look around, my heart waking up and beginning to hammer when I see ancient-looking iron bars and a rough floor. I’m on a stone outcropping in cells that look like they’ve been hewn out of the rock.
For a second, I’m sure that I’m still in the Mountain, but there’s a door in front of me that’s wooden with a small, glass window high in the center of it. Beyond it, I can see wine bottles on new-looking shelves, and I know there’s nowhere like this in the Mountain.
I’m somewhere else.
But where?
‘You’re awake,’ a voice close to me rasps, and I jump with a squeal, realizing I’m not alone.
There’s another cell next to the one I’m in, and inside it, there is another prisoner. He’s gripping the shared bars between our cells, grinning maniacally. But as he stares at me, his grin melts off his face.
‘Victoria,’ he growls.
‘How do you know my …’ My mouth falls open. ‘Krase?’
I immediately know with a sinking feeling where I am. The place I fell in love with two years ago. Maddox’s Swiss chateau. Guess I’m not a guest this time.
The demon’s fingers flex on the iron bars, morphing into claws. He gets taller and broader, his skin turning a dark grey and wings sprouting from his back. A long tail thrashes around, inserting itself through the bars and whipping the air as if to strike me, but it’s not long enough by about two inches. I still scramble back, though.
His sudden roar has me huddling in close to the cold stone wall, hiding under the blankets as if he might calm down if he can’t actually see me.
I peer out when there’s no more noise to see him standing at the bars, holding onto them, his gaze on me unwavering. It’s like a weight pressing down on my shoulders, and I shiver, exorbitantly glad that he seems to be as stuck in his cell as I am in mine.
Unless …
I get down from the slab of stone and shuffle across the cage to the door. I pull, and it clanks in the hinge, but that’s it. I’m definitely locked in this place.
Looking down at my arm, I frown at the unblemished skin andnormalshape. The conjure on me is still working, but it only covers scars, not new wounds. I can’t be remembering my final hours in the Mountain right because I’m sure my arm was visibly destroyed by the time Dante had finished his torture games. The pain of his play is seared into my mind.
Isn’t it?
I open the shirt I’m wearing and look down at the rest of me. There are thin, scabbed scratches where I remember him cutting me deeply and yellowing bruises from his strikes while I was paralyzed. None of the marks look anywhere near as bad as they felt when he was hurting me.
Maybe it was a trick? Maybe Dante didn’t really do all those things, and he just made me think he did. But he was one total asshole of a demon. Why wouldn’t he hurt me for real? That theory doesn’t really hold water. Or, perhaps the arania venom made me hallucinate or something?
I peer at Krase, who’s back in his human form, and try not to think about it anymore for now because I don’t have the answers, and it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m out of the Mountain, and the portal is closed for another three months. There’s nothing to worry about besides my current situation, though I hope the Demon King really is dead.
The demon in front of me looks a lot different from the man I knew from two years ago. He kept his curls longish but always clean and tidy. Now, it hangs around his face, greasy and dirty. His beard is long and needs some maintenance as well. His clothes look like he’s cosplaying ‘Russian Political Dissident’. They’re ragged and soiled and smell like they could walk around on their own. But he clearly put some prep in before he came down here because he’s got thermal, warm layers, whereas my own garment is the thin shirt of a dead demon whose body clearly ran hot because I’m freezing my ass off.
I keep my eye on Krase as I move around my cell, but the incubus seems calmer now.
