Ignite (6 page)

The smooth, round onyx stone of his necklace surfaces above his own collar. “Always.”

“Good. To leave,” I instruct, “say
Absum
.” He silently forms the word on his lips and I nod. “Ready?”

He smiles conspiratorially.
Ready
, he says in my mind.

I can feel the anticipation sparking between us like electricity, and I harness the energy for the incantation. I grip his hand tighter and close my eyes. With my free hand, I hold my amulet over the basin.

“
In nomine Lucifer nos postularemus animae. Memoriis mortuorum loquar.”

A violent wind whips around us, and when I open my eyes, the contents of the basin are bubbling higher and higher until it stills suddenly, the liquid smoothing into a tranquil, reflective surface. It looks like a dark, nauseating mirror.

With Azael’s hand in mine, I feel the world shift and fall from beneath us. The clearing disappears and we are momentarily thrown into darkness before we land with a sharp
clack
on a long, tiled corridor. I let my amulet fall back to my chest and smile breathlessly.

It worked!

Azael opens his eyes, his pupils nothing more than pinpricks, and lets a barbed smile spread across his own face.

“We’re in.”

Chapter 5

“It doesn’t look like much,” Azael complains, his voice flat and unimpressed.

Brightly lit black and white checkered tiles run down the middle of the corridor with imposing, glossy black doors lining either side of the hall. The doors stretch father than the light reaches and eventually fade into shadows.

I let go of Azael’s hand and step forward on the reflective tiles, the click of my boots echoing. “Would you like to try a door?”

He makes his way down the corridor slowly, stopping to point at the doors he passes. “Eenie, meenie, miney—”

I shove past him to the first door on the right and wrap my hand around the door handle, pushing into the room with Azael on my heels. The room is cold, quiet, and blindingly bright, even more so than the hallway. My eyes rage against the brightness, making me dizzy as hazy halos of light cling to my eyelashes and stretch into one another. When my eyes adjust, the light distortion fades and I can scan the room.

White walls, white floor, lighted ceiling. Empty.

“No.” I shake my head in confusion, denial. “This isn’t right.”

“Screw up the spell, then? I guess Gus isn’t the great teacher he believes himself to be,” Azael says, leaning against the doorframe.

I shake my head again. “No. No, I did it right. But this… is wrong. It shouldn’t be empty.”

“Then what should it be?” He cranes his neck into the room and peers around the door. “Is it a hospital? I mean, it looks sterile enough to be one.”

“A memory.” I carefully step farther into the room, as though I’m afraid the floor will fall through. “This should be a memory,” I repeat.

The soul holds life. Reanimating like I did is like opening a time capsule. I should be able to pick through each day of their life, each significant event—from birth to death—and live it as though I were there with them. Behind one door may be their first kiss. Behind another, their wedding, their parent’s death, a graduation. It shouldn’t be empty.
This isn’t right.

Something about this room feels wrong, but I can’t put my finger on it. I turn around slowly in the middle of the room. It gives me an uneasy, hollow feeling, like something is missing.
Of course something’s missing. There should be a memory—it shouldn’t be empty.

But the room feels more than empty. It’s like there was something here that shouldn’t have been. An intruder, a stranger to this soul that snatched whatever was once here. There’s a feeling that something was taken, not just misplaced. An electric buzz in the room makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up and my stomach drop. I walk back to Azael, letting my hand skim across the plain white walls.

“It shouldn’t be empty.” I can’t stop repeating myself.
It should be a memory. It shouldn’t be empty.
There are no more coherent thoughts that form in my mind other than these. My head hurts as it spins in circles, trying to find a logical explanation for the nothingness.

“So, what happened?”

“I don’t know.” I run my hand anxiously through my hair, my fingers tripping on tangles. “We have to try another door.”

I grab Azael by his arm and lead him back out of the room, across the hallway, and to another door. I twist the knob and lean into the room.

Empty, again.

Wrong. This is wrong.

We go down the hallway, trying each door and finding each room empty.

Empty and bright.

Empty and bright.

Always empty, and always bright.

The more rooms we find empty, the farther my stomach falls. “It’s not supposed to be like this. This doesn’t happen!”

“Relax, Pen,” Azael says, placing a hand on my shoulder. “They were crazy. Maybe they literally lost their mind.”

“It doesn’t matter. The memory would still be here.” The
mind
goes insane and the
mind
can forget, but not the soul. The hardware fails, not the software.

Frantically, I try another door, but the handle sticks. I shake the handle harder and try to force the door in with my shoulder, but it’s locked.

“Azael!”

He runs up next to me and grabs the handle, trying it for himself.

“It’s locked,” I say.

“Oh really Pen? Do you think?” he asks sarcastically. “Get back and I’ll kick it in.”

I silently move away from the door. Azael steps back and kicks out at the handle with a violent force. The polished surface of the door cracks slightly, but it remains stuck. He steps back again and delivers a second blow. This time, the wood splinters. A third hit of his sturdy boot sends the door swinging in.

Azael holds out his arm and theatrically gestures into the room. “After you.”

I move towards the door and feel my amulet pulsate eagerly around my throat. I clutch the chain and nod to Azael. “Is your pendant…?”

“Yeah,” he says, pulling at the smooth, black stone that hangs around his own neck. “Is that a good sign?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

I tuck the necklace back under my collar and step carefully into the room. Only the small patch of light that filters in from the door offers any illumination. Azael is silhouetted in the doorframe, his dark figure rimmed in the bright light from the hallway. He pulls the door closed behind him, extinguishing the last of the light and immediately plunging us into a darkness so absolute that I can’t discern any shadows.

I squeeze my eyes closed and reopen them, but the blackness remains. I feel, more than see, Az move forward. He grabs my hand and, together, we continue to walk deeper into the darkness. The farther we get from the door, the quieter our footsteps become.

“It’s not nothing, right?” His voice sounds hushed, as if it is being smothered by the dark.

“It’s—I’m not sure what it is,” I answer in a whisper, afraid to break the silence. “I can’t see anything.”

“You’re pendant is glowing.”

I look down at my chest and notice a faint purple glow through the thin cotton of my t-shirt. “Not exactly the best flashlight.” I grip the dark chain and bring the jagged stone over my head. I hold it out in front of me so I can use it to guide us through the darkness. “Shall we?” I ask, stepping forward.

But Azael stops me short, pulling back on my hand so I am next to him again. The glowing purple stone sways erratically back and forth in my fist.

“Wait,” he says under his breath. “Do you hear that?”

I stay very still and focus on finding a noise in the silence. I’m about to tell Azael that I don’t hear anything when suddenly I do. My ears pick up an almost imperceptible rumble. I spin around and hold my pendent out farther, trying to find the source of the sound. I drag Azael forward with me a few steps but can’t see anything. The rumbling increases slowly, and it sounds as if the entire room is vibrating.

“What is it?”

The sound continues to intensify until I am convinced the walls are collapsing in on us. I pull Azael tight to my side as the ground beneath us begins to tremble violently. A severe pressure constricts around us, and I suddenly feel like we are in a very small, confined room.

I have to yell over the commotion for Azael to hear me. “Where’s the door?”

I hold the pendent between us, illuminating the sharp angles of his face. He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something but before he can, a single bloodcurdling scream tears above the rumbling. The darkness explodes into chaos.

The blackness that squeezes in around me shatters with a giant crash to reveal a ruddy sky with a low, swollen and murky moon. I drop my pendant, letting it fall sharply to my chest. The floor transforms from tile into stiff, rocky orange clay. The clay continues to shift unsteadily and my boots slip out from under me, but Azael catches me before I hit the ground and pulls me to my feet.

The room is not a room at all. It’s become a giant, expansive landscape of rocks and desert and everything orange and blood red.

“We have to move!” he shouts, pointing to a giant fissure splitting the ground.

I grab on to his arm and drag him with me as we jump across the swelling ravine. A second fissure rips through the clay, crisscrossing with the first and leaving us on a narrow cliff. We’re not technically trapped; I could fly off of this island of rock if I wanted to, but the sky looks like it’s bleeding and I don’t want to move unless I have to. The rumble fades to a soft hum and the clay, finally, stills.

I break Azael’s grip on my arm and walk to the edge of the ravine. Deep within the gash is a thick, boiling vein of blood. The familiar rusty smell of it allows me a moment of calm and gives me something to hold on to that makes sense. That’s when another smell hits me.

Beneath the metallic scent of blood is the thick and putrid smell of death, old and ancient death, that sets my teeth on edge. I have never felt anything like this since Lucifer fell, and its unexpected presence is unsettling.

“Home, sweet home, Pen. Although, it seems that Hell’s redecorated since we’ve left. I remember it being much colder and much more blue. But I like the change. Red is very in.”

I look back at Azael and see him smiling. He looks almost cheerful, but I can’t find any energy to pretend to be entertained. “This isn’t Hell,” I say.

“Clearly.” He walks up next to me and peers down into the ravine. “But it’s the next best thing. Smells like Hell.”

“A bit,” I say, scrunching my nose.

I close my eyes and take several deep, unnecessary breaths. With each breath, I become calmer. The nerves that spiral through my abdomen slow and my head feels lighter. The scene around me—the noise, the smell, everything—disappears.

At the edge of my consciousness, I feel a malevolent force hanging in the air, but I don’t fight it. It’s not bothersome. Distantly, I detect my pendant vibrating.

I relax into the sensation and notice a thick pressure on my chest. The weight of the pressure spreads through my limbs, bringing with it a wave of strange emotions, like someone else has stepped in and taken over while I’m in this state of not caring.

An intense burn seeps painfully through my veins. The pain spreads slowly to the base of my neck, where it throbs uncomfortably. The throbbing sounds like a quickening heartbeat.

Thump. Thumpthump. Thumpthumpthumpthump.

The feeling within me is foreign. I don’t have heart, not anymore, and certainly not a heartbeat, but I can feel a pounding beneath my ribs. A primitive hunger begins to grow with each pulse until it becomes an unquenchable appetite. I am consumed with the hunger. It hurts, and all I can think about is trying to satisfy the need to… To what?

My throat aches with an implacable need to feed, and I roll my neck slowly in an attempt to numb the impulse. But the hunger remains, thrumming faster and more urgently.

Feed. Feedfeed. Feedfeedfeedfeed.

Blood begins to trickle down the inside of my eyelids like rain on a window and I feel my stomach clench in starvation.

“Pen?”

I ignore the muted voice. The only sounds that exist in my mind is a thick heartbeat, a strong pulsing of blood, and a distant voice—more a feeling—telling me to feed and to spread… something.

Thump. Feed. Thumpthump. Feedfeed.

I feel a hand set down on my shoulder and something in my mind snaps. Without opening my eyes, I swing my elbow back, my blow connecting to what I distantly identify as a jaw. The crack reverberates up my arm to my shoulder, but I ignore it, spin around, and pull my knee up into a rib. A loud gust of air is forced from punctured lungs, and I kick out low, striking a kneecap.

“PEN!” The voice sounds as if it’s traveling from underwater. “Open your damn eyes! It’s me!”

Thumpthumpthumpthump. Feedfeedfeedfeed.

I lunge forward and bite into the soft flesh of a shoulder, my teeth puncturing the skin with a soft popping noise. I feel myself sigh, but before I can drink a drop of blood, I’m thrown back from a kick to my stomach. I fly backwards and crash to the ground, my head cracking painfully on the rocky clay. The power of the blow forces my eyes open.