Entice: An Ignite Novella (9 page)

“Better not to have a sword than mishandle it,” I add with a crooked grin at Azael. He seems pleased to have me playing along.

“So true, Pen. But the lack of weapons says something on its own, don’t you think?”

“Weapons can only do so much, Azael.” Naamah reaches out a hand to pinch Az’s chin. He freezes under her touch, and I can practically feel his hatred rolling off of him like blasts of cold air. It makes my bones feel stiff. His eyes tighten, along with the muscles of his jaw, and I wait for the explosion I’m sure will follow. “It’ll be almost too easy to beat you. You’re so young, naïve. Your vessels suit you perfectly in that regard.”

A wad of expletives rolls around in Azael’s mouth, but before he has a chance to unleash them at Naamah, Gus slides into view, accompanied by a stranger with a wispy silhouette and skin the palest shade of gold.

The woman is tall, even taller than Gus, and has feline eyes that flick curiously over the four of us. Her hair is a wild shade of auburn so voluminous with curls that it dwarfs her small-featured face. She walks with a slinky gait, as though silently stalking prey. I’m immediately intimidated by her, though I have no idea who she is.

“Glad to see you’re all on time,” Gus says with a sweeping gaze.

“I’m sure we don’t have to remind you how much hinges on your success,” the stranger adds.

Who’s the golden goddess?
Azael asks in my mind.

I bite the side of my cheek and try to find a name to match with the face.
I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced.

That is a shame.
Azael steps forward with a nefarious grin. “Please excuse Gus’s terrible manners.”

“Gus?” The stranger tips her head to the side and appraises Az with pursed lips.

“Gusion.” He waves away his name as if it’s a formality. “The audacity he has to not introduce us. But, no matter, I plan to rectify his oversight. My name’s Azael, and this is my sister, Penemuel.”

“Pen,” I correct under my breath. Only Botis seems to hear me.

“I know who you are,” the stranger responds flatly.

Azael beams. “Of course you do. You’ve heard of my part in the war—”

“Actually the reputation of your temper far overshadows the rumors of your...” She struggles to find the word, tying her eyebrows together before the right letters form on her tongue. “Recklessness.”

“
Rumors
?” The word sounds like a burn in Azael’s mouth, and he spits the coal to the ground, stepping back into line with the rest of us. “What I did was no rumor, nor was it a reckless act. It was intrepid, valorous.”

I raise my eyebrows, surprised at Azael’s vocabulary. Either I’m starting to rub off on him or he’s trying to impress the beautiful stranger. I’d guess the latter.

“I helped Lucifer
win the war
, or doesn’t that mean anything anymore? How quickly everyone has forgotten about what we fought for, how we got here.”

Again, Gus intervenes. “The war is only half fought and half won. We still have a lot of progress to make. In Eden.” He gives Azael a look I know is probably meant to calm him but will more likely fire him up again. “Which we are all here to deal with. Valafar is Naamah and Botis’s advisor. We’re both here to consult with you before you leave.”

I meet her dark, feline eyes and she smiles, revealing a pair of sharp teeth that pierce her lower lip in place. Fangs?
Of course. She’s a shapeshifter.

So, basically a female Botis?

Different species, so to speak. Valafar. I’ve heard of her actually. She can take the shape of a lion. She can’t divine, like Gus. She’s more...militaristic.

Think she has a tail?

“Just a few minutes of your time and you’ll be on your way,” Gus says, grabbing me and Az by our shoulder and guiding us away from Valafar and her team.

I shake his hand off of me and turn around to see Naamah laughing at us. I have never felt so juvenile. The three of them, huddled together in a cluster of gold, red, and brown, seem older and more experienced. They have a manner about them that shrinks me down.

Azael crosses his arms. “Your five minutes started two minutes ago. If you’ve got something you need to say, you better spit it out before time’s up.”

Gus stops us at the icy wall and paces, back and forth, back and forth, cutting across the other team and blocking me from their stares for seconds at a time. “This is the last time I’ll tell you to listen to me. I know what I’m saying, and there’s nothing you can do against them that will succeed. Your one hope is to work as a team, to share the glory instead of be buried under the backslide of failure.”

“They’re using an
apple
for God’s sake,” I answer in a huff of exasperation.

“Leave God where he belongs,” Az retorts. “Hidden away in some secret corner of Heaven. He has no part in this.”

“It’s an expression.” I push my hands through my hair and adjust my belt again. I’m getting antsy, my limbs tingling with pent-up nervous energy begging me to move, run, fight. “I’m just saying that all they have is the fruit.”

“From the Tree of Knowledge, which is forbidden and extremely powerful.” Gus nods. “I’ve seen it. If Adam takes a bite from fruit of the forbidden tree, then he will be directly disobeying the order of the angels. One bite and he’s sinned. That’s all it takes.”

“I already know that.” I cross my arms over my chest. “They can’t exactly force him to eat it though. Shoving it down his throat wouldn’t quite be Adam’s doing, now would it?”

“No,” Gus concedes. He takes the notebook from his back pocket and punctuates his sentences by tapping his pen on the page. “But there are other means of persuasion. They’ll tempt him with—”

“How about this?” Azael interrupts, grabbing the notebook and pen. He scribbles wildly. “We’ll give him no other option. I’ll curse the soil, destroy anything he can eat, and Pen will do what she does best.”

He flips the page back to Gus and I catch what he’s added to the notebook. It’s a crude illustration of a garden with tall, twisting hedges with shriveled fruit hanging, wilting off of dying trees and plants. The ground looks black, and carved into the trunks of trees are letters.

He’s even added us to the landscape, over-accentuating my tangled hair and the angles of his face. We look menacing, crazed, and I wonder if this is how he sees us.

“She’ll write.”

The possibility of covering the Earth with as many words as I know does something to calm me down. Excitement beats out terror in the waltz as I picture a ground covered in stories, trees marked with prose. Man will see the words, and though he won’t understand them all, he’ll know. Some part of him will recognize our story, will remember it. I bounce on my toes, ready to start.

Gus studies the picture, flips to the back of his notebook to consult a blank page, and then snaps it closed again. “It. Won’t. Work.”

“We’ll see.”

I pretend I can feel my heart hammering in my chest.
I’m going to bury Eden under my words.

––––––––

“I
T
’
S TIME
,” V
ALAFAR CALLS OVER
to us.

Gus wages a silent war with himself, rocking back and forth, as if the argument in his head is tipping him just ever so slightly off balance. I’m half tempted to reach out and shove him over but decide to keep my hands to myself. Without another word to us, he turns around and stalks back to the other group.

Naamah and Botis look smug, their lips pressed into tight smiles, their eyes glinting with victory. It’s as if they think they’ve already beaten us at some sick game. More than anything I want Azael’s temper to flare up so he can slash those stupid expressions from their faces. And that thought alone sends ice shooting through my veins.

The old me would never have thought something like that, but now, the annoyance twists so furiously in the pit of my stomach that I could scream. I feel like I’m on the verge of something terrible, glancing over the apex of a mountain into a dark abyss. I wonder what it is that will finally push me over for good.

Hell is changing me faster than I expected it to.

Maybe I’m just going stir crazy from being underground for so long. I’ve grown so accustomed to the round, carved ceilings of Hell that I’ve almost forgotten what the sky looks like. Almost. The blue expanse of day and the blinking lights of the night stars still burn behind my eyelids when I try to sleep, but they’re hazy.

I don’t have time to consider my temperament long before Valafar and Gus are doling out instructions and expectations.

“Be unobtrusive, unassuming...” Valafar counts off every word she knows hooked onto the prefix ‘un-.’ I, for one, am
un
impressed.

Gus steps in after she runs out of adjectives. “Discretion is paramount. We don’t need the angels to realize what’s happening until it’s too late to intervene.”

“Got it.” Azael nods his head and rolls his hands, as if he can make Gus talk faster if he gets antsy. “Don’t let the white wings catch wise. Anything else?”

Valafar smiles slowly, her lips pulling back over her teeth until I can see her molars. They look like they’re too big to fit her jaw, and I wonder how she has any room for her tongue in her mouth. “Your overeagerness will be your downfall,” she warns him.

“Hate to break this to yah, sister...” He leans forward, as if he’s about to reveal some huge secret. I bite back a smile when I notice Naamah and Botis leaning slightly forward on their toes to hear better. “I’ve already fallen.” He throws his head back, laughing as his wide, dark wings flick out behind him.

“I don’t think you fully grasp the severity of your task—” Gus fumes, obviously embarrassed at his lack of control over Azael. I wonder what Valafar thinks of him, of us. I’d be curious to see what she reports back to Lucifer after we leave.

“We get it, Gus. You’ve said the same thing to us a hundred times already.” I cross my legs. My arms. Uncross my legs, my arms again. Bounce on my toes. I’m anxious and excited and just want all of this to be over with. “We’ll be shadows, nothing more. That human won’t know what hit him.”

Valafar leads her two pupils away from us, closer to the gate. She gestures at them with small, quick movements. Her words are so quiet, I don’t think they could properly be called a whisper.

“
Adam
.” Gus rubs away an invisible headache sitting on his forehead. He turns away from us and goes to join the others. “That human’s name is
Adam
.”

I shuffle the skirts at my ankles, ball the fabric into fists. “I remember. I just don’t care.”

––––––––

T
HE FIRST THOUGHT
I
HAVE
when we leave Hell is: It’s warm. It’s green and bright and smells like flowers and sugar and rain and churned dirt and it’s actually warm. The heat feels like it’s enveloping me in a cocoon, like I’ve been wrapped up by the reaching sun and lulled into a dreamy sleep. But I’m more awake than I’ve been in days, because we’re not in Hell anymore. This is Earth.

“It’s warm.” I say it out loud, mostly because I have to. Because it’s been so long since I’ve been warm that it’s strange, uncomfortable, noteworthy... I don’t know if Azael doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

Az flexes his fingers in the golden light of the just awoken sun. “Damn, I’ve missed the warmth.”

My eyebrows reach my forehead. I didn’t think Azael missed anything from before. The mere fact that he does—that he actually cares about something, even something as trivial as the weather—gives me a modicum of hope. There’s still something left of his old self.

“It’s too hot,” Naamah complains to Botis. His forked tongue tastes the heat and his eyes scan the Earth around us. “I’m wearing too many clothes.” She bends over and lengthens the rip in her dress to her hip. Azael watches appreciatively until I jab my elbow under his ribs.

A man can look.

Except you’re no man.

Point taken. So let me rephrase that... A powerful demon in Hell can look.

You are nauseating.

You are no fun.

“I taste him,” Botis mutters, his face twisting around the words like they make him sick. “He’s sour, pungent. Humans will be foul creatures; Earth will be utterly uninhabitable.”

“Right, as opposed to the delightful smell of death, blood, and sulfur of Hell,” I scoff under my breath. “I’m sure man will be absolutely revolting in comparison.”

As a group, we move farther into the greenery. The leaves stretch out, beckoning us toward the twisting dirt path of spindly trees shrouded in heavy green and orange coats. I reach out and trail my hand across a thick hedge and am surprised by the slipperiness of the leaves. It must have rained recently, because when I pull my hand back, my fingers are wet.

At the end of the path, where the dark brown dirt rips apart to fork around a tall tree covered in pink flowers, Naamah stops short, spinning around to face us. Azael, still appreciating her bare legs, nearly falls into her chest, but Botis slams his hand on his shoulder, shoving him back. I bounce back on my heels as Az’s head snaps up to glower at Botis.

“Hands off, snake boy.”

A lazy smile slithers across Botis’s burgundy face, cocky and derisive, but he drops his hand silently.

“This is where we leave you,” Naamah says, uncoiling the whip from her arm.

“We’re supposed to work together,” I say halfheartedly. I figure I at least owe Gus the effort of trying to partner with these two.

In all honesty, though, I can’t wait to further myself from Naamah and Botis. There’s something about them that makes me feel restless. I think it’s the way they carry themselves, like they’re always only a moment from attack; it reminds me of how Azael’s learned to hold himself, and the comparison troubles me. I don’t want any more of their habits rubbing off on him. I also feel like I continuously have to be on alert around them. Keeping my muscles tensed and ready for whatever they’re about to do or not do is exhausting and uncomfortable.

“Gus—
Gusion
said that the only way to succeed was to form an alliance.” I watch them exchange a sideways glance.