Faith (Soul Savers Book 7) (6 page)

“Tristan!”
I jumped to my feet and rushed to him, not believing he was really
here, when I’d thought I’d never see him again. He
wrapped me into his powerful arms. My body ached for his touch, but
my brain quickly caught up and took over. “No. Oh, no. You
can’t be here. What are you
doing
here?”

“I follow you
anywhere, even into the dark,” he murmured against my ear. “I
go where you go.”

“No.” I
pushed him away. “You fought so hard
not
to be here.”

“Maybe not hard
enough?” Satan jeered from behind me.

I ignored him, knowing
that wasn’t true, and grabbed Tristan’s face in my hands
to look him in the eye.

“You
can’t
be here. You don’t deserve to be here. You don’t belong
here.”

He pressed his lips to
my forehead. Pleasure shot down between my legs, making me instantly
ready for him. “Alexis, my love, I belong wherever you are.”

My heart melted, and so
did my knees while my breasts tightened with need. When his lips made
it down to my mouth, my whole body tensed and throbbed.

“Why don’t
you two just fuck already?” Satan asked. “I’d be
happy to watch.”

Tristan and I both let
out a low growl. I gave the lustful feelings a hard shove and
returned to my senses.

“You do not
belong
here
,” I insisted. “Not in Hell.”

“Neither do you,
my love.”

“Yes, I do.
I’ve
been sent here.”

The sound of a clearing
throat came from behind me.

“That’s not
…
entirely
true.” Satan’s words came out
sounding like a mix between a guilty admission and pride for his
deceit.

I peered over my
shoulder at him with narrowed eyes. “What is that supposed to
mean?”

He twirled his long
fingers in a dismissive gesture. “It’s called war,
Alexis. You told the Angels you didn’t belong in Heaven, and
they agreed. You were probably supposed to go back to Earth, but
since you seemed a little open to the idea that this was your fate,
my Demon seized the opportunity and brought you to me. Technically,
you really
don’t
belong here. But unlike them, I take
any and all who want to join me. All you have to do is say the word.
Give me your soul, and the world is your oyster. You can have
everything
. The offer stands to both of you.”

I looked up at Tristan,
anger and confusion churning within me, and he gazed down with a
determined love. “Like I said, I go where you go.”

My jaw clenched, and my
nostrils flared. “You will
not
rot in Hell because of
me.”

“I prefer that
you don’t, as well.”

“Then let’s
get out of here.”

Satan blew out a growly
huff. “So be it.”

And with a snap of his
fingers, the luxurious room disappeared, immersing us in the cold
black of Hell’s deepest pit.

“I
was hoping we could reach an agreement and it wouldn’t come to
this.” Satan sighed. “But you leave me no choice. Like I
said, if you wanted mercy, you should have stayed in Heaven.”

His debonair human form
disappeared, and the repugnant beast returned. His red, horned head
fell back, and he opened his mouth as if to scream, but fire blasted
out. As though that had been a summoning call, dozens of Demons
appeared, similar in appearance to Satan, but smaller and with less
vibrantly colored skin shining in the fire storm. And they were
obviously the fighters, not the thinkers. Large swords and maces
swung in the air before they even came close.

Satan’s fountain
of fire that he blew out of his mouth provided one benefit—we
could see our surroundings. When I’d been in the void of
blackness, I’d imagined an immeasurable cell that sometimes
felt as small as a cardboard box and other times as boundless as the
cosmos. Once Satan arrived, I’d imagined a movie studio and his
beautiful parlor was a set with the false window that looked out at a
brick wall, and when he’d made the room disappear, I was left
on the empty, black sound stage. But as the flames from his mouth
spread over a high ceiling as though it were covered in gasoline, I
saw that the space was what I imagined the Devil’s ballroom to
look like.

The room was much
longer than it was wide, with black marble covering every surface—the
ceiling, pillars, walls, and a floor. A long, rectangular pool, also
made of black marble, stretched down one side of the room, and a
black statue of a Demon stood in each end of the empty pool. Unlit
chandeliers made of black crystals hung from the ceiling, and when
the flames reached their chains, they traveled downward, lighting
them up.

Satan turned his head
and swung it around as he shot two additional balls of fire from his
mouth. One sailed to the far end of the pool while the other hit and
entered the Demon statue nearest us. Streams of fire shot out of the
statues’ mouths—a fountain of flames that flowed into the
pool. And as though it had also been filled with gasoline, the pool
lit up, too.

The real Demons carved
their weapons through the fire, igniting them with flames that lapped
and licked at the blades and spikes. Then they swarmed toward us.

Acting on instinct, I
pushed my power at them to shove them away, but instead, I was the
one who flew backwards and slammed into a marble pillar. Pain cracked
through my head and spine, but I pushed past it to shoot a bolt of
electricity at the closest Demon. The blue charge webbed over the
creature’s body, but my power did nothing to stop it or even
slow it. In fact, the Demon’s fat, leathery lips seemed to
smile, reminding me of Satan’s reaction when I’d tried to
fry him. I attempted to shoot Amadis power at it, instead, thinking
it wouldn’t like that as much, but I had none. My time in Hell
must have drained my power. As the Demons flew across the room toward
us, my hand reached for my dagger, but I couldn’t find it.

Satan chuckled. “Your
physical weapons were left behind with your physical selves.”

Panic threw my heart
into overdrive. How could we fight them when we had nothing to fight
with? How could we possibly survive this? Tristan dove for me and
lifted me to my feet. Then he grabbed each side of my face, looking
straight into my eyes.

“You must
remember the pain isn’t real,” he said.

“But I
feel
it,” I ground out against his tight hold on me.

“It’s not
real! Your body’s not here. It’s not in real danger. Just
remember that. It’s all in your head.”

“And your soul,”
Satan offered.

My eyes drifted over to
him, and Tristan gave my head a small shake. “Don’t
listen to him! Listen to me. Focus on what you want. You don’t
want to be here, right?”

“Not if it means
you’re here, too.”

His eyes sparked for a
moment—he didn’t like that answer, but he ignored it. “We
don’t belong here. He admitted it. So it’s all up to you
and me. He’ll do everything to deceive us into staying, but in
truth, it’s our choice. Don’t forget that,
ma lykita
.
We
will
get out.”

I nodded as best as I
could against his grip. “How?”

“We run until we
find our way.” He slammed his mouth against mine, but only for
a moment.

Then he dropped his
hands from my face, grabbed my wrist, and ran. Unprepared, I stumbled
after him at first, and he tugged me back to my feet. Once I gained
my footing, we sprinted for a doorway at the far end of the room, the
Demons chasing after us. Pain seared across my back as a sword found
its target, but the burn felt like a freezer burn with thousands of
icy needles piercing into my skin. My body arched against the pain as
Tristan continued pulling me along. The doorway also filled with
flames when we approached it, and without a glance behind us, we
charged right through. More ice-cold pricked over my flesh and seeped
into my bones creating the kind of ache that made me think I’d
never be warm again.

“Hellfire,”
Tristan groaned as we entered a black corridor. The Hellfire provided
barely enough light to see that the hall went to both our right and
left, but darkness swallowed it up only a few feet away. “This
way.”

Tristan turned us
right, although I knew from his mind that he didn’t really know
which way to go. The marble floor was slick, and when I crashed to my
hands and knees, I realized it wasn’t marble after all, but
ice. Our feet slipped and slid as we tried to outrun the Demons, but
they continued chasing after us, their weapons providing enough light
for us to see a few feet ahead at a time. My broken and straggly
wings were completely useless, unable to lift me in flight, which
could have come in handy against the Demons.

An onyx wall suddenly
appeared in front of us, and Tristan made a sharp right, pulling me
with him. We ran twenty or thirty steps before another wall appeared,
and this time we turned left, trying to avoid circling back to where
we’d started. But it quickly became apparent that we scrambled
like rats through a maze, trapped in the lower levels of Hell. The
Demons backed off, throwing us into darkness again.

Then the same images
and screams that had filled my head before returned, bringing me to a
screeching halt and down to my knees. Tristan gripped his head and
fell into a crouch next to me as his own guilt-ridden memories from
his Daemoni past overcame him. I knew because my mind was open to
his, and I experienced them along with my own. Tristan had already
relived the horrors enough times, though, regurgitating them as a
form of self-punishment. I’d brought him past that, and I
couldn’t bear for him to suffer through them again. Thrusting
them away, I grabbed his hand and squeezed.

“We choose to
leave, remember?” I pushed myself to my feet, pulling him up
with me. Just in time, as Demons flocked at us.

We ran in the darkness
again, although whether we actually made any progress was unknown to
us, our only light still coming from the Demons’ flaming
weapons. They swooped down often, swinging their blades and bludgeons
at us and trying to grab us with their claws. We ducked and turned,
rolling when necessary to avoid the blazing swords and spiked balls
swinging for our heads. One caught the edge of my wing, and my body
lurched forward as I cried out in pain, at first from the cut and
then from the oxymoronic sear as the remaining feathers went up in
flames.

But the physical pain
was nothing. It wasn’t real.

The screaming in my
head, however, was very real, and it lifted louder and beyond my
skull into tortured wails coming from everywhere around us. Long,
nerve-splitting, heart-wrenching howls, hundreds or thousands of them
echoing each other. As we ran, gray-skinned, bloody-nailed fingers
reached out of the darkness for us, but when I slowed and tried to
grab a couple to help, they disappeared into smoke. Yet their agony
remained, filling my nose and mouth with each inhale, slicing down to
my lungs, shredding my heart and soul like sharp talons slicing up
the fabric of life. When I didn’t think I could take any more,
the walls closed in around us, creating a black tunnel, and the icy
floor began slanting upwards.

“Come on,”
Tristan said, pulling me along. “Up must be good.”

The slope was steep and
the floor slippery. We slid backwards several times, barely catching
ourselves before we lost all footing. Although the tunnel was pitch
black, I sensed something undulating in the walls even before the
rumbling started, and then shapes in the walls pushed out at us,
bumping into our arms and knocking us off balance. The ice of the
walls seemed to form like a skin around some kind of Hellish beasts
behind them—or
within
them—that tried to break
free. They growled and snapped at us, their anger growing as we tried
to pass by. I had no idea how close to the top we were when a
head-shaped part of the wall pushed outward and swung toward me,
slamming into my body and throwing me backwards. I rolled end over
end all the way to the bottom. Tristan slid down to help me back up.

I felt as though we’d
been running for hours, maybe days already, and the slope may as well
have been Mt. Everest. And here we were, at the bottom of it again.
Every part of my body ached, and I tried to tell myself it was all in
my head, but everyone else’s screams drowned out my own inner
voice.

Tristan gripped my
chin. “We can do this,
ma lykita
. No giving up.”

But I was so close to
wanting to give up. The tormented screams, the endless running and
fighting the Demons, the inability to know if we were even getting
anywhere or simply providing entertainment to Satan … If
Tristan’s soul weren’t on the line, perhaps I would have
stopped trying. Curling up in a ball and losing myself to the madness
might have been tempting. But his soul
was
on the line, so I
would keep on. For him.