Page 86 of Revelations

“You work for me. Do not forget that. My personal double agent. Or does that make you a triple agent or something?” His fingers intertwined much like a young boy contemplating all the candy that he was going to buy with his twenty bucks from Grandma. “Working for Heaven, Olivier, and now me. Just remember who reallyownsyou. Betray me, even think of it, and you and your friends will regret it.”

Fury brimmed up and she lunged at him. “You lay one hand on any of my friends, and I’ll break through the gates of Hell and rip your throat out myself. Do you understand?”

Lucifer shook his head; not a single strand of hair moved. “So feisty! I adore it! Fine, I will not bother with your little friends, but you…you cannot escape me.”

Backing away, still clutching her bleeding lip, Greylyn calmed outwardly. Inside, she was still a mess. “So what exactly are your terms? If I don’t follow through, you get my soul? Turn me into a dark guardian? What else do you get out of this, besides me doing the dirty work of eliminating your brother?”

“Oh, the possibilities are endless!” His tone left no doubt that he was gleeful at the prospect. No matter how this played out…he won.

Chapter 22 – The Long Road Home

The arrogant bastard had not been much help to her after that kiss; he’d simply shot up into the sky like a reversed tornado and disappeared from sight. She and Thomas were still stuck in the outskirts of Tibet with a dozen or more dead bodies, more maimed and injured, and one spooked woman who no longer seemed capable of speech.Fantastic!

For his brief encounter with the ruler of Hell, Thomas received a concussion. The way that his eyes failed to focus, and the pupils remained dilated, along with an acute case of short-term memory loss…there was no doubt. Physically, he was fine. Not even a scratch on him, but his brain had been fried just enough that he could not recall seeing the Devil at all and he would not be much use counting cards in Vegas for a while—something that Greylyn knew he had indulged in from time to time.

Their hostess sat in a catatonic state in the far corner of her home, rocking back and forth. Thomas voiced his fear for the woman’s current and future mental well-being. The odds did not look tobe in her favor. Many in her small village, including her family and friends, were either dead, dying, or permanently disabled after the events of the day, her own husband included.

Thomas helped Greylyn clean up the mess of bodies outside. Those still alive were unconscious, so they carried them to the porch of the village physician a few blocks of huts over from the butcher shop. At least, they hoped it was a doctor—the faded international symbol for the Red Cross was painted on the door—and that the doctor had not been included in the fatalities lying along the road. A decent-sized hospital would be over one hundred kilometers away, at least. Darchen was not large enough to warrant much more than a small triage clinic, it seemed.

Thankfully, Lucifer had not used his minions to possess everyone in the village; it had just seemed like it at the time. An elderly man with a balding head, sunken eyes with enough wrinkles to rival a shar pei puppy, and a stethoscope around his neck poked his head out of the door. She’d banged on it so hard, it had nearly shattered in two.

To avoid explaining how so many people came to be in such horrific conditions, Greylyn feigned that she did notunderstand Tibetan. She flailed her hands around while she sputtered in broken French, in case the good doctor knew English. The gentleman gave up trying to comprehend her story and went to work on his patients.

Surprisingly, when they returned to the makeshift battlefield, the remaining carnage had vanished. The blood-soaked snow, ice, and slush from minutes earlier was gone—replaced with fresh, pristine ivory snow. The dead were also nowhere in sight. Greylyn could not care less how it happened. It was one less mess to clean up. Besides, explaining to anyone in authority would have been useless. She would have been arrested immediately.

“Now what?” Thomas moaned, holding a hand to his aching head.

“Let’s get out of here…fast. Any brilliant ideas on how to get back home?”

“Well, if we had a phone we could call for help. That is if there’s even cell service up here.”

She shook her head. Somewhere between South Carolina, the gateway to Hell under Mount Kailash, and this small village, they had both lost their phones.

“There’s the relatively new high altitude Gunsa Airport in the Ngari Prefecture of the Tibetan Autonomous Province. That’s our best bet. We could probably hitch a ride to Pokkara in Nepal, but that would take about a day. It’s almost a solid seven hundredmiles. But then we risk running into the pesky problem of not having our passports on us.”

He chuckled, probably for the first time in days. Greylyn was amazed that he could whip up his sense of humor.

“I’m not keen on trying to convince the Chinese government to allow us passagewithoutour passports. And I don’t particularly want to spend the rest of my life laboring away in a Chinese prison.” After squinting into the sun as he contemplated this plan, he added, “Gunsa is small, remote. There’s a better chance of us not being caught if we tried to stow away on a plane. Maybe even snag a helicopter somewhere. It’s a long shot. Unless Kael left us his wyvern to fly us out of here…”

The mention of the dark guardian cut deep. Despite all that they hadrecently gone through, he was most likely being shredded apart by Olivier’s goons at the moment.

Greylyn shook her head hard to dislodge the gory images flashing in her mind. “Great. So how far is Gunsa from here?” Considering thatthere were no sounds of aircraft overhead, Greylyn doubted thatit was anywhere close.

“Oh…only about a hundred and twenty-fivemiles. Driving, we should be able to reach it in just under three hours.” His hazel eyes darted around what was left of the village.

“ONLY!”

Well, they were not going to make it there on foot.

“Guess we need to steal a car.” He shrugged as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

After all thatthey had been through, grand theft auto didn’t sound too bad.

***

One stolen Land Rover and four hours later, due to awful road conditions and a brief blizzard that blew them off of the bumpy pot-hole covered road, they arrived at the edge of a rundown airfield. It was tiny, and there were not many airplanes landing or taking off.

“There’s usually only one passenger flight from Lhasa per day, maybe two on a super busy day, so it should be relatively quiet,” Thomas explained.

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