Hell
“There are nine circles of Hell, each one more deadly than the last. I’m taking you to the first circle. The others will likely kill you from your first breath. Stay close, Lynher dear. The shadowroad will consume your mind should you stray from its path.”
I couldn’t see a path, or a road of any kind, just boiling purple shadows. Lilith’s voice and her cold hand were my only beacons, and I clung to both, trailing Rafe behind me, and then I was out of the horrible shadowroad, raining sparks off my skin and gasping in the oily, bitter air.
“Take a moment to acclimatize,” Lilith was saying.
A moment wouldn’t do it. A lifetime wouldn’t either. I stood still, focusing on filling my lungs while I watched silent lightning split the black clouds tearing the night sky in two. This land was jagged and harsh, made of strange black glass. Some of that glass jutted out of the ground, reaching for the skies. Every splintered edge glinted, as though each stone would slice any touch in two.
Rafe shimmered to my right. He’d dropped my hand, so Lilith didn’t see, but I ached for his touch. This world felt wrong, the same as when I’d left Lilith’s care all those years ago, like I’d had my insides turned outside and part of me emptied out and put back wrongly. It wasn’t an ache or a physical pain. I couldn’t find its source. It was everywhere, as though the air itself were rummaging through my soul for trinkets it could rip free. The sensation almost dropped me to my knees.
This was necessary.
I would survive.
And I’d get my station back.
All I had to do was breathe…
“Come now, let’s get out of the open before we are seen.”
I followed her voice, even as I heard other growls at the back of my mind. Strange voices whispered secrets to lure me away. The voices told me Raphael was lying. They told me Lilith was escorting me to my death. They said Gerome’s death had been my fault. The station was dying because of me. Kensey despised me. Etienne wanted me dead. On and on and on until I stumbled over my feet and clutched at Lilith’s arm, needing anything or anyone to keep me afloat inside the madness.
“They’re in my head. Is it… always like this?”
“Everyone’s experience of Hell is unique,” Raphael answered, sounding hard.
When I looked up, his entire outline glowed ice blue, crackling with power, and atop his head, resting behind his horns, a crown of electric thorns hissed and sparked. I blinked, and the bright sparkling effect vanished. He was Rafe again, but with his face guarded.
“Humans don’t last long,” he warned Lilith.
“Do not underestimate her, Raphael. Come, girl, your prize is ahead.”
My prize? Oh yes, I’d come for Ghost.
He’ll kill you. The voices persisted, growing louder with every step. He despises you. You trapped him here. A worthless, filthy human trapped the queen’s Chosen. If he does not kill you, she will. He is her tool. Release him and she will follow. He will fuck you and feed from you and bleed you dry. You should not be here. Frail, filthy, weak thing.
“Don’t listen to them,” Rafe hissed in my ear.
I snapped my head around, but he stood several feet away, his chin up, shoulders back, wings proudly clamped. He looked almost… regal.
I’d heard him speak, hadn’t I? Or had that been a lie too?
I couldn’t be sure.
I should have drowned you both as babes, mon chère.
I gasped and stopped on the cracked road. Gerome’s voice had cut through all the others, landing like a bullet to the heart.
“No, no,” I moaned.
“Lynher.” Raphael clasped my face in his warm hands. He didn’t smile. His all-black eyes were cold and flat. “The voices are your fears. They are not real. They can only hurt you if you allow them purchase.”
Right. Not real. None of this was real. It was all in my head. All I had to do was keep moving forward, like I had after the bloodfarm. Keep one foot in front of the other. I’d survived vampires, I’d survived phantoms, and I’d survived all the Dark Ones who had thought me weak. Now all I had to do was survive myself.
“The girl… in a silly dress… playing with monsters.”
Jack.
Oh, that was a voice I knew well, although it didn’t sound like him. His words had always been eloquent and smooth, like an artist’s brushstrokes. The voice I’d heard was brittle and sharp.
I locked my fingers into fists and forced myself to look beyond Rafe and into the distance where the road snaked toward jagged hills.
A figure limped toward us. Silent lightning cracked the sky behind him, setting his outline ablaze before plunging him into almost darkness again, but not before I’d seen his face. He’d smiled the way he had in my dreams, like he’d always known I’d come for him, like he knew everything. His skin had pulled tight over bones. His clothes hung off him, worse than after the bloodfarm.
In a blink, he was behind Rafe. “Look out!”
Jack’s silver eyes shone. Lightning highlighted two pairs of fangs.
Rafe shoved me back and spun, his wings flaring, blocking Jack’s line of sight to me. Lilith’s grip claimed my left arm, keeping me from falling or running.
I shook her free. Raphael’s right hook planted the vampire on his ass. His tail looped around Jack’s throat, holding him down. Rafe hit him in the face again, flattening Jack onto his back. He didn’t move.
Jack’s fingers twitched. I waited for him to spring back up and tear Rafe’s throat out, but he didn’t move, didn’t breathe; he just lay there.
Rafe grinned, his wings relaxing. “Taking out the trash.”
I slowly approached the husk of a creature Rafe towered over.
Wants you dead. Will feast on your soul. Has all the secrets you don’t want to hear.
Mere days had passed since I’d banished him here, but in that time, he’d lost all semblance of being human. His skin hung off his bones, his cheeks and eyes had sunken in. He looked like a ghoul. What if he was too far gone to control anything?
Rafe scooped up the limp vampire and tossed him over his shoulder like he was nothing but a bag of trash.
“Right, let’s go before—” He froze, eyes widening.
You’re a dead thing now, the voice in my head said with glee.
Demons, hundreds of them, swarmed from behind the towering glass structures. Wings and claws and teeth. They filled the road and emerged from the undergrowth, morphing from the dark like they’d been a part of it all along. We’d walked right by them.
“Mastema comes…” one of them growled.
Lilith flung her arms around me from behind, and with a gut-wrenching swirl of movement and pressure, we reappeared on the street outside the station, the fat moon lighting our way. I gasped in precious, clean air, then coughed up half of it again. “Rafe!”
“Here.” He sauntered out of a sparkling tear in reality, Jack draped over his shoulder.
“What were those things?” I panted, my head spinning from the oxygen overload and the sudden acclimatization of the startling soft world I called home.
“Family,” Rafe grunted. “Always best avoided.”
“We must find somewhere to hide,” Lilith suggested. “We are not safe outside the station. Any one of those demons could follow us here.”
“Lynher has somewhere.”
“What?” He couldn’t mean the hotel? “No. We can’t go there. It’s not for Dark Ones.”
Rafe shrugged and started toward Angelo’s hotel sanctuary. “There’s a basement. I scouted it out last night. They don’t use it. May not even know it’s there. It’s accessed by a back door. The vampire can be restrained there.”
“What? No!”
“Where did you think you would hide a rabid vampire, Lynher?”
I hadn’t thought I’d need to. We would have a conversation about souls and deals and Jack would come willingly. I hadn’t expected him to be so far gone in just a few days.
“Rafe, we can’t take him there.” Gods and spices. “If Angelo discovers me with two demons and a vampire, he’ll burn us at the stake. As much as I hate it, I need him. My people need him.”
Rafe hesitated. “Far be it for me, a lowly incubus, to question your plan, darling, but our options are your friend’s basement, the station overrun by ghouls, or back in Hell. Besides, when your vampire wakes up, he’ll need blood. Unless you want to give him yours, you’d better come up with a solution to that too.”
I’d known that, of course. I just… I hadn’t seen any small game, and I hadn’t planned for this. “Blood?”
“Yes, darling…” Rafe purred. “He is a vampire, not a puppy.”
“It’ll be easy enough to charm one of this Angelo’s flock,” Lilith said, striding by me in all of her demon glory.
“What?” I hurried ahead and blocked Rafe’s path, pulling Lilith up short behind him too. “There can be no charming of anyone. Angelo’s people aren’t to be touched, do you understand? I’ll find a way to fix Jack.”
The two demons looked at me with bored expressions. Gods, what was I doing?
“I mean it. Angelo and his people must never know what we’re doing. Do not charm them in any way. If we hide Jack in the basement, you must promise me here and now that neither of you will hurt anyone while we’re there. Promise me.”
Lilith flicked her claw-tipped fingers dismissively. “Fine.”
“Rafe?”
“And if I’ve already charmed a few?”
Oh gods and spices, seriously? “You have not—”
“Just a few of the ones who needed someone to warm their lonely beds at night. They don’t remember anything, just a few erotic dreams.”
Had he ever done that with me? No, the station mark would have stopped any ill-intent. I knew what he was—I’d always known it—and I knew how he fed, but now I knew him, and the reminder he was a Dark One was not a pleasant one. “Raphael, you will uncharm anyone you’ve already charmed. I can’t risk Angelo suspecting us.”
“Fine,” he huffed.
“And wear your Average skin, please!”
Rafe’s appearance shifted as he walked on, and Lilith wrapped all her demon-ness up in a woman who would have looked more at home inside the Night Station than roaming Rome’s abandoned streets, but it would do. We trudged on toward the bleeding city skyline.
Dawn would soon herald a new day, one with two demons and a vampire in the hotel basement. I hoped it wouldn’t be my last day alive.