Demon Bound (28 page)

He flipped the launcher around and fired.

The missile ripped through the abdomen of one of the falling spiders. Alice dove to the side, barely avoiding its seeking claws. Below them, around them, the tenor of the demons' cries changed from anger to terror.

Faster,
she urged the spiders, and began climbing higher. She dodged more claws, slipped between the trailing silk that sparkled with orange, like a flame trapped inside a diamond thread.
Be hungry.

The missile exploded above. Charred exoskeleton rained down, more that was wet and decaying. Alice fought not to gag, and spun to evade another spider. Through the burning and the smoke, she saw the pocket of deep red.

The sky.

The suffocating bloat around her lungs eased. Jake let out a whoop as they shot through the hole in the carapace, but the sound faded into disbelief when he realized what they'd been inside.

“Holy shit. Those were flippin'
babies
.”

“Yes.” Alice didn't look at the giant corpse they flew over. “They'll be coming out soon.”

“The babies or the demons?”

“Both,” she said, and finally reached the head of the mother. The twisted, hairy legs stretched more than a kilometer in front of them. There was desert here, red sand studded with sharp boulders. Behind them, at a distance too far to calculate, a tower speared into the crimson sky. Lucifer's tower, she thought, remembering the descriptions she'd heard. His cities and the frozen field surrounded it. Somewhere, Belial had his own—smaller—towers, his own cities. She hovered, uncertain. “Where do we go?”

“Alice.” Jake's voice was grim, and she looked in the direction he pointed. Not on the ground, but into the air. Alice's stomach fell as she made out the dark shapes. A company of demons flew in precise formation. The one at the front radiated a brilliant light. “Belial.”

A psychic probe pierced her shields. Alice dropped several feet, gasping at the pain in her head.

Her arms tightened around Jake's bare chest. He was his full height now, but she knew he'd shift into a smaller size again if she had to fly quickly.

“He's seen us,” she said. “Shall we run?”

“We wouldn't get far.” Jake's hand clenched over hers. The pressure of his fingers felt oddly flattened by the scales that were her skin, as if a thin sheet of glass lay between them. “Alice—do you think Belial meant that you can't jump out of the realm, or that you can't jump at all?”

Did they dare risk teleporting? Jake was putting the decision in her hands. Her heart pounded. She stared at the quickly approaching light.

“Surely . . .” Panic lifted through her chest, almost flew away with the words. She battled it, and finished, “Surely he meant the realm.”

“Okay. Think of Hell, then. Think of Hell ... just think of anywhere in Hell but here.” He tugged her left arm up, so that she supported him with her right, and he pressed his lips to the soft scales of her inner wrist. “And listen—don't freak out, but I'm going to bind you to me as close as I possibly can.”

“How—”

Shock stole her breath as his teeth—
his fangs
—sank into her wrist. Like a vampire's.

But he didn't drink; his Gift tore through her, into her, as if her veins were strings that he knotted together—and used to drag her along behind him.

 

How very odd. Jake was shouting her name, others were screaming, and she was falling—

Alice snapped her wings open, and it was the sharp slap of demon wings instead of her softer feathers. Jake's hand was wrapped around her wrist, and he dangled beneath her . . . over a river of bubbling lava.

The heat thickened the air, made it waver and dance, distorting her vision as if she were peering through old glass. And when she saw, she wanted to take it back, to forget.

The humans were being tortured—with contraptions, at the end of demons' blades, with fire. All of them, screaming in anguish, for forgiveness, for it to stop. There was rot here, the acrid stench of burning blood, burning flesh—and a deep psychic stain, evil and dark and agonizing, worse than anything her physical senses took in. She couldn't block it out.

“Alice.”

She tore her gaze from them, looked down at Jake. Not just the air wavering—the moisture in her eyes, too. But even the tears were heating, steaming from her cheeks.

“Try again,” he said, and his voice was hoarse. “Think of anywhere in Hell
except
for the Pit.”

Nodding, she closed her eyes. Not the Pit. That was where the murderers went, the humans with black marks on their souls. This was not where she would—

 

Her hands and knees burned with cold. No sound met her ears, but inside her head they were screaming, screaming.

She was afraid to open her eyes. Her palms lifted to her ears but she stopped before covering them, fearing that she'd trap the screaming inside. The tears on her cheeks were ice now, and she felt one crack and fall, but though she was kneeling on the lumpy, frozen ground she didn't hear it shatter when it landed.

She knew the lumps were faces. She knew their eyes were open, that they could see her. She knew that in the Chaos realm, their bodies dangled from a ceiling of ice, and dragons devoured them.

She knew they were all humans and demons who hadn't fulfilled their bargains.

Then there was warmth against her cheek, a thumb that brushed away a trail of ice. She opened her eyes, but didn't look down. She looked into Jake's face instead, saw his eyes, the bleakness there.

He'd seen. And the tight mask of his face told her it was worse than she'd imagined.

His lips moved. She couldn't hear him, but she knew what he was saying.
Anywhere in Hell but here.

Somewhere no one was being tortured, no one was screaming. Death was preferable to this.

 

She felt Jake's teeth slide out of her wrist. They were falling, and somehow her wings were gone, so she formed them again. Feathers, this time, spreading wide.

Jake's weight was a painful strain on her arm, across her back—and it was an effort to carry him.

Alice sucked in a sharp breath. How could that be? A Guardian could lift his weight a hundred times over.

The ache in her shoulder flared bright as she pulled Jake up and wrapped both arms around his chest to hold him. She looked at the ground far below, the glistening red wet of it, thinking of the symbols carved into her skin, the sword used to make them, and she did not immediately comprehend what she was seeing.

But it was the death she had wanted.

Demons—and what must have been a battlefield. They lay thick on the sand, four and five deep, as if they'd been fighting on top the bodies of their brethren.

No, she realized. They'd fallen out of the sky. Now they all were piled together.

It wasn't silent, however. Enormous hellhounds, several times larger than Sir Pup, bounded across the bodies. Two fought over a demon corpse. Smaller creatures squirmed between broken limbs and peeked out from clean-picked skulls.

“How many?” she whispered.

Jake's voice was flat. “A couple hundred thousand. Half million, maybe.”

Dear God. “I had no idea there were so many demons alive in Hell, let alone dead. And to think that one battle could kill this number . . .” She could hardly conceive of it. How many were left in the cities, in the armies? Millions, altogether? “I think we Guardians are very lucky that more did not escape to Earth through the Gates before they were closed.”

“Yeah.” He stared out over the carnage. “It looks like Lucifer lost this one.”

Yes. Fewer of the dead wore Belial's armor. She let her gaze slide over them all. Shouldn't she have been heartened by this? They were demons. Heaven knew how many she and Jake had killed escaping the prison, how many the spiders had devoured. She didn't grieve for them, and didn't grieve for these. Yet all that she could think was—

“What a fucking waste,” Jake muttered.

“Yes.” It shuddered from her, and her chest was heaving. She bore down against it, feeling as if she was one of those horrid spiders, filled too full, bulging in all the wrong places—and with a shell that would burst open.

Jake turned his head, and she sensed his gaze on her face. He would feel the tremors wracking her, but she prayed he wouldn't comment on them. If they weren't mentioned, she could pretend that he didn't notice.

“Just one more, goddess. That way.” He pointed to their left, where sand and rock rolled out to the red horizon. “Because all of the towers are in the other direction. Okay?”

She nodded, afraid that if she tried to speak, her teeth would chatter, or something vile and huge would pour from her open mouth.

Jake's fingers closed over hers. “Then we'll get on the ground. We're a target up here, too easy to spot from a distance. Belial will be looking for us—maybe Lucifer now, too. So picture us going that way as far as we can. We'll find someplace safe, and hang on until Michael figures out we're missing.”

Was anywhere in Hell safe? But she couldn't allow herself to doubt. His mouth pressed to her wrist again. She stared out over the horizon, and let him take her.

 

Alice's knees buckled as soon as they landed.

Jake caught her before she hit the ground, swept her up against his chest. Her wing tips trailed on the sand until she vanished them. She opened her mouth.

“Shut up,” he said before she could protest, then wished it'd come out gently. Goddammit. Every jump had torn away her strength, stripped her emotional shields. Every fucking jump. But she'd done what was necessary—and so had he. He swallowed his guilt, softened his tone. “Just rest.”

“How dictatorial you are.” He sensed the effort it took her to smile before she laid her cheek against his shoulder. She folded her talons on her lap, and they clinked against her armored thigh. “But as sprawling on my face in Hell is one of my least favorite pastimes, I intended to say ‘Thank you.' ”

“Yeah? You're welcome. Now be quiet.”

“Very well. We do seem to get along best when we don't speak.” Her eyelids were slowly lowering, her voice was thick with exhaustion, and his heart was freezing in his chest.

Guardians could be knocked unconscious, they could drift—release all of the psychic buildup—by meditating, but they didn't sleep and didn't physically tire. And they could sweat, but not from exertion. Only severe emotional distress or sickness could have put that clammy perspiration on her upper lip, on the backs of her knees.

Alice tried to turn her head, and her horns bumped his neck. “Oh, dear,” she said on a sigh. Her eyes didn't open. “I'm still a demon.”

He felt her crimson scales shift into dark golden skin. Her body and her features became her own again. When he realized he was staring at her bare throat, he faced forward.

There'd be no looking down. The demon armor didn't hide as much as her dress—and he didn't doubt that if she hadn't been sick, she'd have already covered up. Taking a peek now seemed like a betrayal of her trust, an invasion of her privacy.

Maybe there was a chance that, one day, she'd invite him to look. For now, he kept his eyes up.

He began walking. The sand was soft beneath his boots. A tall pile of jagged stone loomed in the distance. He mentally marked it as north, set out in that direction. Unless something else inhabited the rocks, he and Alice could hide there, wait it out.

A small creature scurried ahead of him and disappeared beneath the sand. Scaly, with glowing crimson eyes and a long, skinny tail. A wyrmrat, he thought. Lilith had mentioned them before, had said they were mostly harmless. Once, when she'd been trying to frighten him into teleporting, she'd described a giant spider. He'd assumed she was lying.

Now he was trying to remember everything else he'd thought she'd lied about. There were hellhounds, wyrmrats, spiders—all hybrids that Lucifer had supposedly created from creatures in Chaos, because he couldn't control the purebreds. She'd mentioned some kind of snake. A basilisk, maybe. Bats.

He turned in a circle, paused to study a dark cloud in the northeastern sky. Hell didn't have weather any more than Caelum did. Something flying, then. No telling yet if it was demons.

Alice made a soft, agitated noise, and he slanted a glance at her face. Her eyes were still closed. Her heartbeat was quick, but regular. That mattered most. As long as her heart was beating, he wouldn't panic.

She still hadn't exchanged her armor for her dress by the time her psychic scent slid from wakefulness into sleep. She went limp against him. Her breath came in deep, ravaged shudders, like the aftermath of a crying jag.

His jaw clenched, and he trudged on.

 

Walking through hostile territory—always expecting an attack but never knowing when it would happen—had a way of making a man start listing the things he had. Jake didn't know why that was, but he'd done the same before, when he'd been walking through jungles instead of over sand.

And after thirty-eight hours of walking, the list Jake compiled felt pretty damn comprehensive—if not all that impressive. It was one he liked better, though, than the list he'd made forty years ago.

Some things were the same. He had a packet of memories from his human years: Grandma and Granddad, cornfields and tractors, Billy Hopewell and Barbara. Those were mostly good. He'd added to them, almost four decades of doing nothing in Caelum except training, studying, and bullshitting with Pim and the others. Those were mostly good, too.