~~David~~

  “How… How dare you.”

  Jes and David traded gnces.

  “Uh, what?” he asked.

  Moriah pushed herself up onto her elbows. Elbow. She hissed and let her bad arm go limp.

  “You fed me demon resonance.”

  “Well, I mean, yeah. Laoko said you can’t have human.”

  Moriah eyed the tetrad. “I cannot have human.”

  “Then you have to have demon, right? Or a fruit, but we don’t have any of those, and—”

  “Do you not see what happens to the souls in Hell who eat demon hearts? Do you not see how rabid and violent they become? How bloodthirsty? A hunger for carnage not even their marks can justify.”

  “I… I mean, I’ve seen they get a strong kick out of demon hearts. They get stronger, too. I don’t know, but I don’t know why any of that happens. Doesn’t seem to happen to me at all.”

  She set her burning gre on him. “You don’t?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  The damn woman’s face might as well have been carved out of stone, gre unrelenting and permanent.

  “You aren’t human.”

  “I’m getting that. Doesn’t change the fact I’m trying to help everyone, and that includes you. Now, if you can’t eat demon heart, what can we do?”

  “I can eat demon. But the…” Sighing, she nodded toward Jeskura. “Give it to me.”

  “Can you feed yourself?” David asked.

  “Of course I can feed myself.”

  This woman was a colossal pain in the ass. Of all the angels to come after David, of all the angels he could have saved and try to make peace with, why’d it have to be this girl?

  She pushed herself up along the crater until she sat back against a tombstone. No one tried to help her. She held out a hand to Jes, gring, and Jes put the heart in the girl’s hand. And then yanked it away.

  “You are ten times the bitch Acelina is. High and mighty angel can’t even sit up, but has the fucking nerve to be a lippy shit. Lilith fucker.” She dropped the heart in the girl’s hand. It rolled off, nded on the dirt and white stones beside Moriah’s leg, and Jes made no effort to pick it back up.

  Moriah glowered, leaned over, bit back what must have been a nasty scream, and picked the heart up. She didn’t look at her. Eyes locked on the rest of them, she bit down a piece of the heart, but something inside broke her gaze. She clenched her eyes, and her legs shivered.

  “Vile, sinful resonance.” She gred at the heart in her hand, but bit down another chunk. And another. It was a big heart, probably from a brute. How’d Jes and Caera take down one of those juggernauts?

  “Tastes almost as good as human,” Jes said. Lips in a snarl, she squatted down beside Dao and watched the angel. “So what now?”

  “Give me a few hours,” Laoko said. “The angel—”

  Moriah aimed her shotgun gre at Laoko. “Enough, tetrad. Do not speak like you know us.”

  “I know angels better than you wish I did.”

  “Expin.”

  “No.”

  Snarling, Moriah took another bite. The wound in her shoulder partly closed in front of their eyes, burned and split flesh pulling over the ssh like a stretched bnket. That was some powerful healing, but the new skin looked thin and frail. Her life wasn’t in danger, and she might be able to use the arm soon, but the girl was still weak. The wing stump closed off with skin and short feathers, but no more than that.

  “How long until you can fly?” David asked.

  “I… don’t know.”

  “If we feed you more, will you heal faster?”

  Moriah aimed her gre back at him, but at least some of the fury in it had died. A bit.

  “Perhaps ter. Now I need time.”

  “Time,” Caera said, “is not a luxury we have. We have to get moving, soon, and—”

  “What is this?” Moriah gestured to David with her wing. “You wear clothes? You… wear the potram rune?”

  Much as she was probably looking for a fight, Caera didn’t take the bait. She rolled her eye and sat with David.

  “I am,” David said. Caera y on her side, facing the angel, set her head on his p, and he slipped his fingers between her bull horns.

  “Last I saw of your sister, she…” Sighing, Moriah finished the st bite of her heart. Again, something strange sparked in her eyes, and she clenched them. Whatever it was, it was gone when she looked at him again. “You steal our runes.”

  “Hey I didn’t steal shit. I don’t know what the runes are, or what they all mean. But—”

  “Don’t,” Jes said. “We don’t need to tell her everything.”

  “It’s literally an angel rune, Jes. I think she—”

  “No, no. You’re gonna let this bitch go once she’s healed, and it’s better she doesn’t know any more than she does. Or did you pn to tell her every goddamn thing?”

  “I’d kinda hoped I could, if we could convince her—”

  Jes whip cracked her tail. “You trust way too easily.”

  “Indeed,” Acelina said. “If you wish to py diplomat, then py diplomat, boy. Tell her only what benefits us for her to know.”

  As much as he hated that idea, pying the sneaky diplomat who only spoke in half truths, the girls had a point. Dumping all his information on Moriah could backfire. He was so damn desperate to get her to believe him, he could feel the impulse to tell her everything in his fingers and tongue, like some sort of compulsion. If everyone could just fucking believe each other, and understand, and—

  No. Jes was right. Acelina was right. And much as they weren’t saying it, Caera and Dao were right, too. He was being na?ve, and he had to grow up. The angels weren’t perfect, pure beings. They were warriors, and some assholes had sent them to murder him.

  Fuck, he hated this.

  “Fine,” he said. “Moriah, I’d love to tell you everything. But I won’t.” He gestured around at the girls. “But if I can at least convince you I’m trying to help, that’ll be something, right?”

  The angel’s red eyes stared at him, into him, but she looked away and at the girls.

  “What do you pn to do with me?”

  “What? I said—”

  “I mean logistics, unmarked. You journey to the bailiff of this region. Do you really think Timaeus will simply let me be? He will desire my heart, as will all the other demons and Cainites we run into.”

  They all looked at Laoko.

  “She does make a good point,” Laoko said. “If we can reach Timaeus, I can convince him to keep us protected, but there are many factions in the Grave Valley. Even if we reach Azailia, these groups will lie in wait outside the spire until we depart. Ambushes will become a nightly concern.” The tetrad stood up and tested her wound. Healed over, but she didn’t heal as fast as the angel, the comparatively minor wound pulling some hisses and winces from her.

  “I’m not letting her die,” he said. “She comes with us. And if I have to shatter another forest to do it, I will.” He bit into the heart Jes gave him, and ignored the nasty memories that came with the delicious taste. Tingling warmth spread out through his limbs, and the sinking hole in his gut quietened. Even his inner fingers stopped aching so much, far faster than they had in the past.

  How many demons had the two girls fought? Did they sneak up on some demons with their betrayers and slit their throats? Or just catch a small group about to eat their meal, kill them, and get two meals for the price of one? He didn’t ask.

  They ate in silence for a bit, and David let his eyes settle on the angel. Long, smooth bck hair, tan skin, and red eyes. No, not red. Ruby. Something about the way they sparkled insisted ruby was the right word; the first two angels he’d met in Hell had been the same: bronze and obsidian eyes, not brown and bck.

  She had the body of an athlete, with a narrow waist and moderate breasts that highlighted the rge curve of her ass. Much as it was pretty fucked up to notice all that right now, the white silks she wore demanded it. Sexy clothes, with obvious intent to be sexy, same as his. She was just as tall as Jes, too, and just as lean.

  The two of them—

  Dao elbowed his side, and he snapped his head up out of the gutter.

  “Sorry. It was the heart. It’s… spicy.” Damn aura.

  She giggled, rubbed her closest horn against his head, and finished her meal. The Las did, too, chirping and nodding, and with a full belly apparently clouding her judgement, Laara crawled forward on her talons toward the angel.

  Moriah waved a wing at the little dy, and Laara skittered back.

  “Leave me be, vermin.”

  “Laara want to talk with angel.”

  “This angel has does not wish to speak with Laara.”

  Laara frowned and squatted at the angel’s feet. Wing-striking distance, but she risked it anyway.

  “Laara is sorry about… other angels. Even the mean one, in the mountain.”

  David raised a brow. Jes and Caera raised a brow. Acelina and Daoka aimed their eyeless gazes. Laoko looked back long enough to raise a brow before peeking between the tombstones. The other Las approached and squatted behind their friend, four sets of little wings, two sets of talons, two sets of hooves, all girls watching the angel with their big, red eyes.

  They could be so damn adorable when they weren’t behaving like swarming piranha.

  “A demon, sorry?” Moriah snarled at the creatures and swung her wing at them again. “Ridiculous.”

  White feathers put the dies on their asses, but they didn’t scurry away. Determined, they got back up and resumed their positions. Moriah gred and swung her wing at them again. This time they got on their elbows and knees and covered their heads and horns, like diving to avoid a bomb. Wing past, they got back up and snuck in a little closer.

  “Angels scary,” Lasca said.

  “But pretty,” Latia said, and she tapped a hoof on the ground. “So pretty.”

  All four little dies stared at the wounded angel with wide, open eyes, and their jaws dropped slightly as they looked her up and down. Demons may have thought humans were the most sexually appealing of the species, but angels were beautiful in an epic, and dare David think it, biblical way. Her white silk toga, not even a toga, wasn’t much more than a few straps of white wrapping her breasts almost like a revealing criss cross halter top, crossing the chest and behind her neck. Her skirt was long on one side and left the entirety of her thigh exposed on the other. Only a thin loin cloth underneath covered her bits.

  To top it all off, she wore gold jewelry. A couple gold rings, gold wrist guards, a gold neckce, a gold chain that hung from one hip. Even the straps of her gdiator sandals had gold trimming. There was no gold in Hell. No wonder the Las were enamored.

  If it weren’t for her injuries, David’s aura would have fred up. But the injuries — plus the fact she hated him because he’d killed her friends — was a wet bnket on any arousal. Thank god. He was damn horrible, thinking horny thoughts right now. Had to be the heart.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  “This way,” Laoko said, and she dipped around a tombstone bigger than any others.

  Behind it, a valley swallowed them, a dip in the ground that was smooth walking. Shattered tombstones decorated the ground, but as long as David kept an eye aimed at his feet, walking on them wasn’t much harder than walking on a sidewalk and avoiding the cracks.

  “Don’t step on a crack,” he said, “or you’ll fall and break your back.”

  “Excuse me?” Acelina said. For a single moment, she paused at the back of the group and aimed her eyeless gaze at the ground. Groaning, she shook her head and followed them. “A ridiculous notion.”

  The Las giggled and hopped side to side, throwing their weight from foot to foot or hoof to hoof as they avoided cracks. Dao did too, giggled, and fell in beside David. High spirits. Jes and Laoko walked ahead, and David and Caera with the angel on her back, walked in the center of the group.

  “We want to go into a canyon?” Caera asked. “If we’re found out…”

  “There’s a church built into a crevice,” Laoko said. “We can sleep there, and then it will be a full day’s march to reach Timaeus.”

  The demons whined. Long distances and all that.

  Miraculously, they reached the church with no encounters.

  “I’m surprised no one’s down here,” David said, and he gestured around. The canyon was easy walking, not super deep, and the walls were soft dirt. “I’m surprised we didn’t run into anyone on the way here, either.”

  “The Grave Valley,” Laoko said, and pushed open the rge bck wood door, “is formed of pockets of activity. Hunting grounds, and the groups that fight over them. There are many pces between these pockets where we may hide and sleep, more or less in safety, but finding food is problematic. Each hunting journey means hours of travel, sometimes days.”

  The group followed her in. Just like st time, it really did look like some kind of church, except this time, it had no windows. Built into the slope, the stone walls merged with the canyon, and small tombstones outside decorated the ground.

  Everyone got back into their usual positions. All in all, not much done today, except for save an angel’s life. An angel who hated him.

  Moriah dragged herself off Caera’s back, accepted no help from the Las, and sat in the pew closest to the pulpit.

  “Resting in an abomination. This building is an affront.” Sighing, Moriah touched her wound and hissed. Partly skinned over, plenty of it not, David could almost see the bone. “You all travel together and sleep together every night?”

  “Not every night,” Jes said, sitting on the short stage and facing the angel. “We’re too busy and tired to fuck that much.”

  “I… meant literal sleep, demon.”

  “I know what you meant, bitch. Yes, of course we sleep. The fuck did you think we did?”

  “I don’t understand how any demon can sleep, knowing another of their kind sits beside them, ready to devour them the moment they close their eyes.”

  Daoka clicked at the angel, stomped up to her, gestured around and at Jes, and clicked some more, with a full-on sneer at that. It was enough to make Moriah pull her head back.

  “Exactly,” Jes said, pulled on one of Dao’s back spikes, and sat the girl beside her. “Just because demons can be violent doesn’t mean we always are. And who the fuck are you to talk? I’ve had three encounters with angels in my life so far, two from you, each one violent. At least in my first encounter, they weren’t trying to kill us.”

  Moriah raised a brow, but didn’t ask.

  “Angels are warriors of God. We are violent because we need to be.”

  “Yeah, well, st I checked, God left, right? You said it yourself. A forlorn tower. So how about you fuck off and—”

  “I obey the will of the council.”

  “Yeah?” Jes fred her wings. “The fuck did they say?”

  “The unmarked must die.”

  “Why?”

  Moriah gred. “The humans have a saying, paraphrased from a poem. It is not theirs to question why.”

  “But to do and die?” David said. “That’s a horrible expression!”

  “It is the rock angels stand on, the foundation. Faith. Demons would never understand, vermin who scurry and fight tooth and cw for every scrap of food you can find. You kill each other—” She stopped. No one said anything. Silence dragged on, and the angel looked down as she set her hands on her knees.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Jes said. “You don’t understand us at all.”

  “No one understands anyone,” David said. “That’s kind of what I’m trying to fix. Let’s all just calm down, and—” Every woman looked his way, eyes stabbing, and he put up his hands. “Bad choice of words. I’m just saying, none of us know anything about what Heaven’s like, and I’m getting the impression angels haven’t exactly tried to learn what Hell is like, beyond the surface stuff.”

  “Some angels have,” Laoko said. “As you have no doubt surmised, I have known angels before. They sneak down here sometimes, avoiding the judging eyes of their comrades, and experience life down here in the trenches.” Trenches. Laoko had seen a few scrying pools.

  “I’ve never seen one,” Caera said. “I mean, other than Galon and Yosepha.”

  “Yes, Galon. I have met him before, and some friends of his.” Laoko paced the isle between the pews, twisted a few times, tested her wounded sided, and hissed down at the off-shade of dark red where she’d been cut. “More angels than this one would like to admit come to Hell to experience a different floor of the Great Tower. Everything is not well in Heaven.”

  Moriah watched Laoko from the corner of her eye, but her serious expression turned somber, and her eyes fell.

  “Is that why you’ve kept me alive? So you can learn of Heaven? I will tell you nothing.”

  David sat on Dao’s other side, shaking his head. “I’ll learn anything I can, but if you don’t wanna talk about Heaven, fine.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine,” Jes said, snarling.

  “Fine,” Laoko said, voice smooth, complete with a small grin.

  Sighing, David looked to Caera. “Then I guess we just… sleep again.”

  Caera nodded, took watch at the door, as did Acelina, and everyone else cast a second gnce at the angel before closing their eyes. This was going to be a long, painful journey. And the fuck was he going to do once she was healed enough to leave? Let her go? That was the pn, but the na?ve fg waved in his face every time he thought about it.

  But he’d told her that’s what he’d do. That’s what he’d do.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  ~~Day 55~~

  ~~Mia~~

  They had sex again, st night. Julisa had been right. Damn it.

  She enjoyed it. No denying it. No getting around it. She really enjoyed the way the boys all came to her, once they’d found a dry spot to sleep. It gave her a thrill, the way they got all growly and hungry for her, surrounded her, and held her down, and did things to her. If she’d said no with any seriousness, they would have stopped; if they didn’t, Kas and Adron would make them. But it never came to that. She melted into six pairs of hands, and let them fuck her.

  Kas and Adron first, because they were her friends and deserved to be taken care of. Then the incubi. Kas and Adron didn’t just watch, though. They rubbed their dicks on her and cum on her while Mia took care of the handsome near-human boys. And again, the incubi all got inside her at the same time, and again, her body had stretched to fit them. Like st time, she’d made sure to ask each demon if they were satisfied, and to her delight, they were.

  Romance? Romance could come ter.

  Yeap, this was pretty much the thing she’d been in denial about. She didn’t really like the mental image of being a slut, but that was old her being an idiot. This was Hell, things were done differently down here, and David was probably doing the same thing! Knowing that dumbass, he was using his aura to seduce every set of tits in a ten-kilometer radius. That gorga who’d saved the two of them from falling into the canyon had been beautiful, and spicy.

  Of course, Vinicius hadn’t joined them. He’d fucked Julisa. And like the night before, he’d fucked her long and hard, to the point Mia had asked her if she was okay, because it looked like she was going to break. She didn’t respond, just ughed between her groans and moans. And when they were done, Vin sat off to the side a bit, and slept. He didn’t seem to care about Julisa, but then again, the incubi didn’t really care about Mia, either, not emotionally. And Adron and Kas, she still wasn’t sure.

  But that was st night. It was a new day! A new day of aimlessly wandering a giant underground cavern someone or something had pulled them into. But at least she had tonight to look forward to.

  Mia got up, did a little stretch, made sure her flimsy red silk dress was on right, and looked at the boys. They put their armor back on — they’d taken it off for the sex — and checked their weapons. She smiled and squirmed a little, remembering not only what it felt like to have all four incubi fight for space inside her, but the way it’d looked. They were all so cssically handsome, and seeing their abs and muscles flex as they moved their cocks in different rhythms—

  She spped her cheeks. Was David this bad? Because this was fucking bad. Surrounded by doom and death and here she was having the best sex of her life and embracing it.

  Well, it wasn’t like it wasn’t a fantasy she hadn’t had before. Her, on a journey across a fantasy world with a group of men, her protectors, that she’d satisfy sexually every night. What girl didn’t want to be the center of attention of an orgy of handsome, muscur, deadly men? Just, in that fantasy, she’d been a wizard or elf princess or something, and they’d fuck in inns, or in cute tents near a campfire. Down here in the trenches of Hell, there was considerably more blood and guts than she wanted.

  “I wonder,” she said, and she tugged on Adron’s tail as the man finished strapping on his armor bits. “If I can really do things to Hell, maybe I can change it in a big way. Not more firestorms, but make a pce that’s softer, cleaner, no remnants, no rocks.”

  “No pce like that in Hell,” he said. He shifted around, adjusting more of his armor, and his tail pulled at her grip. A big, heavy tail, with some bck spikes along its top that worked up to his spine. She squeezed it, and Adron chuckled. With his skin dark red, almost bck in some pces, it was like squeezing a baseball wrapped in dense leather. Firm. She held on, both hands.

  “I figured, that’s why I’d make one.”

  “You can make stuff?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe? I can summon stuff, move stuff, and I think… maybe… I don’t know. I just know that, much as all this sex is great, it’d be better having it somepce less gross. Without remnants.” Not that there were many remnants down in the caverns. Most seemed to grow above, in the swamp. “Without blood and guts and stuff.”

  “Heaven,” Kas said, and he squatted beside her.

  “Heaven? Oh, you mean the actual pce. I uh, I don’t think so. That pce was beyond beautiful, but that’s not what I’m aiming for. I’d like some pce kinda like a spire, maybe? Sure, it had remnants, so we’d have to get rid of those. But otherwise, it was pretty badass in there. The bone furniture was a bit much, but still. I liked the red silk bnkets.”

  Faust hooked his sword on his armor and joined them. “Maybe when we’ve saved the world, we can visit the Scar. More incubi and succubi than you can count, and plenty of them making silk.”

  “That could be fun. Fashion! I never really indulged in fashion much on the surface, not as much as I’d have liked. Maybe—”

  “You are all ridiculous,” Julisa said, and she started the march.

  The four incubi rolled their eyes and followed. Mia looked back at Vin, but the four-armed goliath avoided eye contact. Sighing, she set a hand on Kas’s shoulder and climbed up on his back. Forward march, it was.

  They found another forbidden tree growing on the ceiling a few hours ter, and Mia again plucked the strings and made the tree drop its fruit. Everyone ate some, Mia and Vin especially, and resumed the march. For the first time in a while, she wasn’t feeling hungry. She actually felt good, healthy, and her inner fingers didn’t ache at all anymore.

  “It’s gotta be because of the remnants,” she said.

  “What of them?” Kas asked.

  She patted his shoulder. “Grems and imps eat remnants, right? Because they have a tiny bit of resonance still in them. The swamp above us is growing remnants and churning through them with those bone grinder things. All those guts and stuff is… fertilizer, I guess? For Hell? So it can grow forbidden trees in pces that’ll let them, like weeds in the sidewalk. And because demons can’t fly, no one can get to them.”

  Kas nodded slowly. With his body forever leaning forward, huge tail behind him counterbancing him, Mia sitting on his back was easy, almost like riding a horse, and she held onto some of his back spikes like a horse's reins. It was even easy to keep her egg nice and snug in its shoulder wrap against her belly. And fortunately, she didn’t have balls to crush from riding bareback.

  “Is that why we’re down here?” Locutus asked. “Someone or something pulled us down here, to feed us?”

  “Or maybe to hide us from the monsters,” Oudoceus said.

  “Maybe there’s something down here waiting for us,” Gallius said. “Someone who wanted us fed and wanted to save us from those monsters?”

  Hearing demons call things ‘monster’ was weird. She was literally riding a monster. A sexy one, but still, a monster with a ft shark head, no eyes, big bull horns that came out the sides of his head, and a dinosaur body with big arms. But her brain did think of Kas as ‘demon’ instead of ‘monster’, while it thought of those squid-faced, human-ish things as monster, definitely.

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too,” she said. “The monsters, I mean. They started off kinda invisible, right? And got more form to them as we fought.”

  Adron nodded. “I’ve seen the scrying pools enough to recognize a squid. They had faces like squids.”

  “Yeah, they did. Not at first, though. It was like, as they fought us, they adopted a shape. But the shape they found isn’t… unique, I guess. It’s a shape a lot of humans have seen before. I mean, maybe not that creepy, but still. It was like… like someone had wrapped them in human skin, and gave them a squid face, too. All the wrong color though, dark blue, right? Like, dark greens and blues and… definitely like something that crawled out of the ocean. Like, something that crawled out of the deep, deep ocean.”

  “Where are you going with this?” Julisa asked.

  “On the surface, humans have this idea of what things might look like if they came from another… dimension. Like, if there were some alien race, lurking in a dark dimension, waiting to consume Earth or people or whatnot, it’d probably look something like… those things had.”

  The demons stopped and traded looks. Not good looks. The incubi looked concerned, checking with each other before looking down. Adron looked up and stroked a horn. Kas grunted.

  “Aliens?” Adron asked.

  “I don’t know. I mean, maybe? That’s… That’d be pretty weird, right? Aliens, in Hell?” She shook her head. “No, I’m thinking… Well, I mean, maybe aliens, but not like aliens from another pnet or something. Something that came to Hell, and it adopted a new shape. If it just showed up looking like a Lovecraft monster, I’d think maybe some kinda eldritch monster, but it didn’t. It showed up without a form, and kinda built one as we were fighting, and…” Shrugging, she rubbed her egg and watched the creature inside shift, shades of bck and red barely moving against the dark leather shell. “All I know is, when I saw its eyes, it reminded me of the canyon that tore open under the spire. This… endless void, but alive.”

  She looked back at Vin, but the dragon was looking down. They all were.

  “Nothing,” the titan said at st, “ever, in the history of the Great Tower, has ever happened like this.” He shrugged and nodded forward, the weight of his words crushing them all. “So we keep moving.”

  The demons grunted, nodded, and pressed on. Even Kas and Adron nodded, as if Vin had just bestowed infinite wisdom. If you didn’t know what to do, what could you do but keep moving until you found an answer?

  It was a good thing David wasn’t here. That way of thinking would have driven him insane.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Some more hellbeasts ran past them, but they didn’t look emaciated or hungry, and they went on by. They had to be eating something. Maybe some hellbeasts could scale the cavern wall? Probably. Maybe some could climb a ceiling while hanging upside down? Probably not. They were eating souls, or demons.

  Turn around? No, this was, as best they could figure, the counter-clockwise direction they needed to go. If the cavern was slowly turning, they didn’t notice. Best they could do was press on like Vin said, and just hope something came up.

  Something came up.

  “What the fuck,” Mia said. The incubi grunted agreement.

  A pit opened up before them, maybe ten meters deep, a crater that spread out what had to be a kilometer in all directions. Several pilrs dotted the crater, thick stone that reached from ceiling to floor; probably the only thing keeping the weight of the swamp above from colpsing the whole cave. Blue fires danced above the pit, lighting the ceiling in far greater number than before. It almost looked like an array of chandeliers of blue candles.

  The crater wasn’t empty. Statues. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of statues, bck with hints of bronze. Meera metal, and maybe some other stuff from the ground? Whatever they were made of, every one of them was naked, and fighting each other. And every one of them was as big as Vinicius.

  “Children of the Old Ones,” Faustinus said, and he stopped at the edge of the crater.

  With a heavy growl, Vinicius started down the gentle slope into the strange, wide pit of ancient violence. From the way he walked, he was trying to make himself look bigger, as if the statues were to be challenged.

  “I don’t understand,” Mia said. “What’s this about? Why are all these statues fighting? It’s almost like a scene from Pompei, like they were actual demons and got fsh frozen in metal.”

  Adron and Kas followed the big guy, and Mia shivered the moment Kas took the first step into the hallowed ground. Hallowed? More like unholy. They walked past the enormous statues, and Mia sucked in a breath each time they got a little too close to one of them. Some had four arms. Some had two, but also had wings. Some were male or female. Every one of them had faces a little more alien or dragon-like than other demons.

  Maybe older breeds had more inhuman faces? Julisa’s face was ftter than a human’s, nose subtle, alien-like, and oddly exotic and beautiful. Kas had a shark face, so maybe his breed was super old, too? Whatever the reason, walking near a statue felt all too simir to what it’d felt like to first time she’d stood in Vincius’s presence, a bound, twelve-foot-tall titan of power and rage.

  She was scared.

  Adron walked close to Kas’s side and patted her leg. He even winked at her, too. Or blinked. One eye and all that.

  “This,” Julisa said from behind, walking with the incubi, “is a monument grown by Hell. I have seen them before.”

  “Grown by Hell.” Mia set her eyes on a statue and reached out with her sixth sense. Julisa was right. These weren’t bodies that’d been cast in meera metal, but more statues grown like the ones she’d already seen. But the music note to touch them was like some kind of thick bass string. She wasn’t plucking that anytime soon.

  Vin stood in front of a statue and growled at it.

  “An abdarin,” Julisa said, joining him. She touched the statue’s giant arms with hers, and chuckled. “Bringing back memories of Belor, Vinicius?”

  The titan snorted at her and moved on.

  “An abdarin?” Mia asked.

  “A child of Abaddon, like Belor.” She shrugged and circled the statue. Twelve feet tall like Vin, but with only two arms. Wings and hooves but no tail, he almost looked like a korgejin, the two tetrads who’d worked for Zel, but his face was decidedly more… demony, a cross between skull and dragon. Combined with four giant bck horns and two bck tusks, he looked very imposing.

  “I’ve heard of these sites,” Locutus said, following after Vin. “Giant rooms filled with statues of the children of the Old Ones. If I had to guess, they used to get into big brawls like this and fight for the right to own a spire?”

  “Yes,” Vin said. He didn’t look back.

  “They killed each other off?” Mia asked. “I mean, if there used to be plenty, but now there’s just Vin, they killed each other off and no new ones were born?”

  Julisa shrugged. “You’re asking questions we cannot answer. These things happened millennia ago, and though some of us may be centuries old, memories don’t st forever.”

  Memories don’t st forever. That was bone chilling, and Mia shivered and rubbed her arms.

  She knew Hell grew things to echo the past. Areas where a lot of death happened had more decorations to mark that. But growing complete statues in actual battle positions, fighting each other, some with fangs bared, some grabbing and cwing, was not something simple or easy. This was eborate, specific, and oddly beautiful.

  Kas followed, taking Mia with him. He stepped around statues, coming a little closer than Mia liked, but once the first half dozen statues didn’t strike out and attack her, she risked touching them. Solid metal. Maybe not as detailed as a professional sculptor on the surface could have managed, but still, damn detailed, and she yanked her hand back in case her touch awoke its long slumber. It didn’t.

  They were all naked, and while none of them were having sex or had their dicks out, their naked bodies were a sight to behold. Muscle, tight stomachs, breasts of all sizes. She was surprised some of the more alien female ones didn’t have four boobs, but nope, they all sported two.

  “Hell’s history,” Mia said. “It’s all just violence, isn’t it?”

  “Is the surface much better?” Julisa asked.

  “Yes, it is. There’s a lot of violence, sure, but we’ve had a lot of moments of greatness, too. Lots of peaceful moments, lots of progress toward making lives better. People only notice the bad and only record the bad. They never notice the good.”

  The demoness snorted but didn’t argue, opting to walk alongside Vinicius instead. Maybe she had a disdain of humans in general, and not just Mia?

  “Demons,” Kas said, “are pathetic.”

  That got her attention. Julisa snapped her gre back and snarled at the sarkarin.

  “You are a demon.”

  “Am I?” He gestured to the statues with his big, ft head, and his two bull spikes swung with it. “I would take peace over this.”

  “Peace? You do not want peace. Demons crave violence. Even the soft incubi crave it.”

  Mia looked at the boys. They didn’t deny it.

  But Kas snarled back at Julisa and clicked once in his throat.

  “I’ve known Kas a while,” Adron said, “and he’s got good reason to be sick of this shit. I’m sick of this shit.” He gestured to the burn marks covering half his body. “You might be happy to lose things if it means indulging in more death, Julisa, but some of us aren’t. Not anymore.”

  Kas grunted. Julisa scoffed. Mia caught Adron’s eye, and smiled at him. Hopefully, he noticed.

  “Then perhaps,” Julisa said, “when we find Romakus and the rest of the Damall, you can all speak with Yosepha. I’m sure she will happily whisk you away to Heaven, where the lot of you can share your new found pacifism with the souls and angels above.”

  Adron looked down, and the incubi sighed.

  But the tetrad wasn’t done. “For all your desires to change, you are demons. You will crave bloodshed until the day you die. And we’re all the better for it! Or did you not notice that the souls sent to Hell are the most loathsome, despicable, deceitful creatures the surface produces. What better target for our hungers.” She held out her hands and squeezed the air, like she was sinking her cws into a fruit. “What is this truly about? Is it the unmarked? Is it as simple as meeting a girl, the first soul you have ever encountered, who is not a monster deep in their hearts? Pathetic. Abandoning who you are for the soft skin of a soul, who in any other circumstance, would be food or a betrayer sve.”

  Mia gred. Why did the woman have to be so fucking mean?

  She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She looked to Adron, but the man set his eye on the ground in front of him and refused to look up. The incubi looked ahead, and while they traded gnces with Mia, she couldn’t find any meaning in them. Kas didn’t grunt or click, and kept walking.

  Julisa had made a point, and it’d resonated with them.

  “Yosepha and Galon came down from Heaven to visit, on their own,” Mia said. “I bet you thought angels were all righteous, pompous, demon-killing warriors until you met them.”

  “What is your point, unmarked?” Julisa asked.

  “My point is, the angels weren’t nearly as simple as you thought they were. They had more going on in their heads than you figured. And I bet there’s more going on in demon heads than you’re considering, yours included. I bet there’s lots of demons out there who don’t like fighting nearly as much as you think. I bet there’s lots of demons out there who, yeah sure, still have that instinct to fight and hunt and kill, but still want to have a peaceful pce to rest their head, and socialize with other demons. I bet—”

  “Demons are not humans. We are simple creatures.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  Julisa gred back over her shoulder at Mia, and Mia met her gre with her own. This was a strange argument. Maybe it was being surrounded by the statues of ancient beings that put them in an existential mood. Whatever the reason, Mia knew Kas was an angry, bitter demon, who’d suffered something in his past that’d turned him off to the careless violence so many other demons indulged in, sometimes with suicidal recklessness. And Adron had liked Hannah, probably more than he admitted to himself.

  The incubi? She wasn’t sure about them. They seemed to be mostly along for the ride.

  And Vin. There was something going on in that demon’s head, and much as Mia couldn’t put a finger on it, she knew it was there. Sighing, she touched her neckce, the leash that bound him, and watched the titan’s tail sway as he walked. Maybe…

  Vin stopped. The group stopped. There was something white in the distance.

  Mia held her breath, and the group went silent. Not a sound, no movement. Everyone stared past the statues to the white, and waited. But the white didn’t move.

  Vin moved first, and the group followed. Closer and closer, past dozens, maybe hundreds of the titan statues, until the things in the distance came into view.

  White, big, feathery wings. From a distance, only the white had been visible, but red came into view, glistening in the puffs of blue fire above. Red on corpses.

  “Oh god!” Mia hopped off Kas’s back, ran past Julisa and Vin, and fell to her knees beside the angels. A couple men and a couple women, all in their potram clothes, and all dead. They were covered in cw marks, head to toe. Their chests were ripped open, too, or cut open, and hearts removed.

  “They died recently,” Kas said, squatting beside her. A few days was all it took for a corpse’s flesh to melt away in Hell. Far less for a remnant. And blood only took hours.

  “Someone closed their eyes,” Adron said.

  Mia blinked at the bodies. “What?”

  “Their eyes. It’s rare to die with closed eyes. Someone closed them. And the cut marks on their chests. Only a sharp bde can do that.” Adron drew his sword and showed the edge to Mia. Scratch, dented, and half blunt.

  “So an angel sword?”

  “I’m guessing. It could have been an aera weapon, but then why close their eyes?”

  Sighing, Mia set a hand on an angel’s shoulder and stood up.

  “For a second, I thought it might have been Yosepha. But…” But Yosepha had no wings and wouldn’t for weeks, maybe months. “What does this mean?”

  No one said anything.

  She examined the bodies further. How much she’d changed, from barely being able to watch David’s autopsy, to literally lifting bloody silks to look for more wounds. The bodies were not in good condition. Mangled, twisted, broken, and covered in blood.

  “The scratch marks seem… kinda small?”

  Kas checked another corpse. “Yes, but this one’s arm and leg are broken, and”—he pressed a giant hand against the woman’s side—“many ribs are broken. They were mauled, and beaten to death.”

  “Beaten? What kind of demon does that?”

  “None,” Faust said. “No hellbeast, either, not like this.” He checked another body. “Throat cut, but I don’t think it was deep enough to kill. Whatever fight happened, it wasn’t a normal fight. Something grabbed them and threw them around. The cw marks are incidental.”

  “They fought something,” Gallius said. “A group of angels? Four died. Their fellow angels cut out their hearts so no one else would eat them? They—” He squatted down and tilted an angel’s head. “Oh. Move their hair.”

  They moved the hair of each corpse.

  “The fuck is that?” Mia asked, staring at what could only be a small hole punched into the angel’s skull. Not big enough to be obvious, but big enough to coat the side of the skull in blood, almost hiding the hole. “Is this how they killed the angels?” If blood only sted a few hours in Hell, then either the fight was super recent, or the corpse was leaking blood.

  “Stabbing the head or the heart will kill anything in Hell,” Adron said. “But this is pretty weird. It’s… I’ve never seen a wound like this. No hellbeast. No demon.”

  Everyone stood up straight and stared at each other.

  “If this is all weird and new,” Mia said. “Then, maybe, it’s those monsters?”

  Kas snorted. “Down here?”

  Adron thudded his tail on the ground. “It would expin why we saw those hellbeasts fleeing. Hellbeasts almost never flee.”

  Kas gestured with his horns. “And the battle raged.”

  They looked around. Raged was right. Dozens of the statues had been destroyed, ripped apart by some explosive force. The ground was littered with giant scars, torn up rock everywhere. Some scars ran long along the floor. Some cut deep into the massive pilrs holding the pce together. And squinting exposed some more giant scars on the ceiling. The angels had fought, used their holy beams, and had lost?

  Mia stroked her egg and joined Vin.

  “Any ideas?”

  Vin shook his head. “We keep going.”

  Keep going, they did. If the corpses still had their hearts, then maybe they’d have collected them, but otherwise the corpses would be gone in a few days, with only their bones to tell the tale of what happened. Even if they’d still been wearing their batm runes, the demons wouldn’t be able to take and wear angel armor or weapons. Mia could read those runes now, understand them, and they told her the armor and weapons manifested by them couldn’t be removed and wielded by someone else.

  Angels were efficient in every way, top to bottom. And they were deadly, deadlier than demons by a rge margin. If a single angel could beat a tetrad, then what happened that’d killed four? Killed four, and probably fought other angels, if other angels removed the dead angels’ hearts and closed their eyes? There had to be more angels around somewhere.

  The crater came to an end, and the cavern continued on, adopting new shapes, winding, twisting, and turning. All sense of direction was gone, but it had no forks to get them lost. Just, whether they were heading counter-clockwise was a mystery, and she had a feeling once they got topside again, they’d be wandering around a gross bck swamp for weeks before they got some clue again.

  The cavern tunnel went down.

  “That… is a deep slope,” Mia said.

  “It is,” Adron said, and he squatted down at the edge. “I think the tunnel’s been taking us deeper, very slowly. This, not so slow.”

  “Uh, I’d prefer we didn’t keep going down. Up sounds better, right? Maybe—”

  Vin half turned, sank some cws into the dirt, and let gravity drag him down. So damn heavy, his cws and talons left a trail in the ground, and he slowly descended into the dark depths below.

  Julisa snorted, shook out her arms like she was starting a workout, and followed. She faced the group, lowered, sank all four sets of cws into the ground, and climbed down.

  “Hang on,” Kas said. Gulp. Mia clenched his back spikes tight, and the big shark dinosaur followed their example.

  It was darker. Tiny veins of amber ran the walls, but no more puffs of blue fire. Whatever gas the amber veins lit up from the swamp to make that color, they were too deep for it now. Fifty, a hundred, maybe two hundred meters of solid rock over their heads. Not even rock. Death’s Grip had been made of rock. The cavern walls were darker, ceiling too, and probably more durable. More like pure bckstone.

  At the bottom, they found yet another tunnel, and did the only thing they could do. They followed it.

  The air weighed on Mia like a gross wet bnket. Every breath made her nauseous. The amber veins provided enough light to see, but barely, and she squeezed Kas’s spikes like he might trip and fall and send her flying.

  More battle scars. No dead angels this time, but great lines of destroyed rock cut the walls and ceiling, and some stactites had fallen and shattered or stabbed the rocky ground deep.

  Kas approached the wall and followed it, now low, and Mia pressed on his back to keep from falling forward.

  “Battle,” he said. “It moved down the tunnel, the way we’re going.”

  “We’re following a battle?” Mia asked. No one answered, and she took advantage of the silence and cupped her ears. “I don’t hear anything. Maybe it’s over?”

  “Maybe.” He pushed on, undeterred, but Adron and the four incubi drew their swords.

  Once every ten billion years, a bird pces a small twig on a branch to create a nest. After a thousand tiny branches, the bird finds a mate and ys eggs. The eggs hatch and fly away. The nest breaks. The cycle repeats. And after a million generations of birds have come and gone, the birds finally stop. That, was only a sliver of the eternity the next three hours Mia’s journey took, as the group carried on in absolute silence, into the darkening, shrinking tunnel covered in battle scars. Desperate to hear something, but only hearing each other. It was like someone was stalking them with a balloon ready to pop, and they were waiting for it.

  The tunnel opened up, and the group stopped, overlooking a deep pit so dark it might as well have been a ke of shadow.

  “Deeper?” she asked.

  “Deeper,” Vin said, and he climbed down the wall down into the pit.

  “Uh, we sure we want to just… keep going down? How about we don’t? Because that looks an awful lot like some pce we’ll have trouble seeing.”

  Julisa ughed and climbed down after her boy toy.

  “No choice,” Kas said, doing the same.

  Whining, Mia wrapped an arm around as much of Kas’s thick neck as she could, pressed her body and egg into his back, and held on for dear life. It was a straight drop.

  Her eyes adjusted. The deeper they went into the bowels of Hell, the darker it got, but there was always an amber vein or two in the shadow. If amber veins were va, why weren’t there more of them down here? It had to be because of the pce. This cavern didn’t feel natural. What the fuck natural meant, she didn’t know, but something told her it wasn’t. More of that sixth sense.

  She reached out with her mind. If she had a sixth sense, might as well use it, or learn how to use it, right? But all reaching out with it did was tell her they were surrounded by rock. She couldn’t even get a fix on the shape of the rock, just that they were surrounded by it. Echolocation, her new sense was not.

  They found a bottom, and continued on in the new level of darkness, only the occasional amber vein on the walls or on a pilr they almost walked into.

  “Need me to walk?” she asked.

  “No,” Kas said. “I can see better than you.”

  “Because of this?” She tapped her knuckles on the top of his forehead. It was ft, solid bck, and had no eyes, but she knew he saw through it.

  “Yes.”

  “Like, you can see fine?”

  “No. It is dark.”

  He didn’t have echolocation either. How did the eyeless demons see, then? Maybe their whole bck foreheads were actually eyes, protected by a thick yer of bck skin or something. But Kas had said the eyeless liked to speak Hellian instead of Estian, clicks and chirps, because Estian words bothered their vision. Strange anatomy.

  A puzzle for David, and for ter.

  Vin snarled, and the sound of rocks hitting rocks echoed in the cavern. He turned and sank his cws into rock and ground before gravity again pulled him down. That was almost a tumble, and with how big Vin was, tumbling wasn’t a minor inconvenience.

  Another slope to go down. They followed.

  “We go any deeper,” Adron said, “we’ll start running into va streams.”

  “You’re right,” Mia said. “I can… feel them, beneath us.” Lava, like the veins of Hell. Runes in her mind aligned and pointed at other runes. Hellfire was connected to the va, like they were sisters, Hell’s blood and the pure destructive force of hellfire. An ecosystem that absorbed essence and resonance, and… and did what with it? Turned into the flesh of Hell? Lava, and rock and stone, and swamps and fire skies?

  The walls rumbled. Bass poured through the ground. The pilrs shook, and dislodged pebbles rained down around them.

  “What was that?” Faust whispered.

  Vin and Julisa crouched low and pressed on. Slowly, like she might wake the dead, Julisa drew her four swords. Everyone did the same.

  “Now,” Kas whispered, “might be a good time to—”

  “Yeah.” She climbed off and fell to the back of the group with the incubi.

  She could fight, right? She could summon the batm rune, wear it, and protect her body with angelic armor. Maybe not exactly angelic, but sorta. She could summon a weapon, and with it, she had an easier time focusing on the strings to py the music. She could rip down the walls around them, break the pilrs, or maybe something less suicidal, like summon spikes of bckstone up from the ground. Maybe. Possibly. Hopefully.

  The egg in her sling stirred, and she stroked it. If she had to do that, fine, but for now, let the demons handle it.

  They pressed on, and again a bassy rumble vibrated the cavern. It hadn’t been there before, but thirty seconds ter it happened again, almost like the cavern had breathed upon noticing them.

  She breathed deep and scrunched up her nose. Iron? Her sense of smell had been overwhelmed by the scent of metal when she’d first arrived in Hell because of all the blood, but she’d adapted fast. Now, as the rumbling summoned a gentle, warm, moist breeze that slipped past the darkness and the pilrs of stone, the smell tickled her sinuses, and she wiped her nose.

  The smell of blood, so strong it stood out from the rest of Hell.

  More pilrs decorated the tunnel, and the group stepped around them, silent hunters prowling the bck. Mia walked on the balls of her toes and made sure each step was careful. If she had to ditch her sandals to be quieter, she would, but for now she risked it and followed the pack toward the rumbling noise ahead.

  Quiet chanting joined the heavy rumbling. A few voices, then more, until the sound of what could only be humans humming and mumbling a ritualistic chant joined the rumbling cavern. Not a hellquake, but vibration flowed up Mia’s feet into her skull regardless, and she gulped down the rising panic in her guts. The demons pressed on, and Mia followed.

  On the list of bad ideas, this was at the top, but what the fuck else were they going to do?

  Past a maze of pilrs, light opened up. Not amber, but fire. A burning bush. A dozen burning bushes, spread out in an enormous circle, and a pile of skulls in the center. A towering pile, hundreds of thousands of skulls of all shapes and sizes, piled on top of each other, with a host of naked humans wandering around and carefully setting them.

  The souls stopped and looked at the demons, each with 666 etched into their foreheads. Skinny, stomachs sunken, ribs exposed, and empty eyes.

  “They’ve come,” a soul said, and she adjusted a skull that’d rolled down the pile. Another skull rolled down, and she put it back on the pile. Another rolled, and she put that one back, too. No matter how many times she put the skulls back, more skulls rolled down, and the group of Sisyphus wannabes did their best and tried again. Their best wasn’t very good, slow, lethargic movements, complete with the occasional stumbling. They were starving to death.

  “Who’s come?” Julisa asked.

  The soul shook her head. “The unmarked.”

  “Of course.” Growling, the tetrad looked back at Mia.

  Mia was well and good staying in the back of the group with the incubi, where she didn’t have to come close and see what the fuck was going on. But the demons stepped aside for her, and she walked forward, one hand resting on her egg in its sling. Of course, something like this would happen, and of course she was the reason, directly or indirectly.

  The burning bushes burned, and she covered her eyes as best she could while still looking around. The souls weren’t a threat. They wandered the colossal pile of skulls, continued their work, and only a few bothered looking Mia’s way.

  “You knew I was coming?” Mia asked.

  The woman nodded. “Follow the light. The master is waiting. He summoned you.”

  “Master?”

  The woman didn’t respond. She picked up a skull, and with shaking fingers, put it back on the pile.

  Growling, Vinicius walked around the pile and pushed on through the pit of shadows. With burning bushes lighting up pilrs, the pce had erupted with a million shadows, and Mia shivered. They danced with the flickering fme, pretending to be monsters hiding around corners and rocks.

  They found another pile of skulls only a minute from the first. It, too, was surrounded by burning bushes. They pushed past it and onward to another pile of skulls, bigger than the first. Two dozen starving souls circled it, performing the same task.

  “Where is the master?” Adron asked a soul.

  They spared only long enough to point in the general direction the group had already been moving, before they lifted what had to be a brute skull back onto the pile.

  Adron shrugged and gestured to Vin and Julisa. The two big demons took the lead again and pushed on through the swirling shadows.

  More heavy rumbles continued, flowing in the same cadence but growing ever louder as the group came closer to whatever awaited them. If it was the master making the sound, that wasn’t good. It couldn’t have been an unmarked, making a noise like that. But someone who could touch the strings had pulled them down under the swamp, so who or what was it?

  “Look,” Faust said, and nodded to the side. Another tunnel. Same on the other side of the cavern, an opening showing another tunnel. “Looks like all the tunnels lead here.”

  All roads lead to Rome.

  The next pile of skulls drew them all to a stop. It was bigger than all the previous piles combined. Hundred of souls knelt around it, some bowing and worshiping, others working in the light of the burning bushes to keep the pile from colpsing. A never ending effort to stack the skulls higher, from shaky hands and arms of skin and bone. Each soul was numbered 666, and each soul looked on the brink of death.

  Remnants grew nearby. The group hadn’t run into any for a while, but down here in the maze of pilrs, remnants half crawled up from the ground. They were quiet. With broken fingernails and shattered teeth, they cwed and bit at the rock they grew from, but none of them screamed.

  The darkness boomed. “Come forth,” it said, and Mia squeaked. With all the rumbling bass of an avanche, the sound vibrated through her skull, and she took a step back and clutched her egg.

  The skulls rolled down their pile, and the souls, even the worshiping ones, pushed themselves back to their feet and resumed their task. Skulls on skulls.

  The voice had said come forth. Mia’s demons looked at her, and she shrugged and looked back at them. What else could they do but go forth?

  “Um, where is forth?” she asked.

  “The visitor’s chair before you. Climb.”

  She gulped. Visitor’s chair? There was no chair. There was only the pile of skulls.

  Growling, Vin stepped aside and motioned to the pile. He looked angry. Did he know what the fuck was going on? Julisa turned, too, but she looked just as confused as everyone else.

  Apparently, only Mia felt absolutely terrified, because Adron, Kas, and the incubi looked more curious than anything. They gazed around in the darkness, trying to spot things in the bck where the flickering firelight couldn’t reach, while Mia couldn’t stop staring at the skulls some disembodied, booming voice had just asked her to climb.

  She squinted up past the skulls, at the bck above. Something moved up there, but the burning bushes were too bright. Like trying to see into a dark forest at night while sitting around a bonfire.

  “Adron,” she said. “Take the egg.”

  Adron took the egg without a word, the sling too.

  Deep breaths. Don’t panic. Panic accomplished nothing. They were trapped underground, pulled down by this thing, and if they didn’t py ball, there was a good chance they weren’t getting out alive.

  Or maybe it was all smoke and mirrors? Maybe whatever this thing was, this master, they weren’t a threat? Maybe… No. It, or he, was literally being worshiped by a host of betrayers. It wasn’t a trick.

  Mia climbed. The skulls didn’t cooperate. Her sandals sent more skulls sliding down the wall of white bone, and the souls below slowly but surely put them back, some reaching high, some working from the bottom. None of them looked at Mia. None of them frowned. With empty expressions, the dying piled the skulls. How’d they pile them so high?

  So very high. Mia climbed. Some skulls were lodged in pce and made good anchors. More were not, and the pile disagreed with every second step and pulled out from under her. But she climbed. She loved climbing, and she was light, but every meter she made pulled her stomach out through her throat. Soon she was higher than Julisa. Soon higher than Vinicius. The pile was far wider than it’d seemed at first, the burning bushes unable to illuminate its proportions.

  It wasn’t a pile of skulls. It was a small hill of skulls. Millions. Maybe tens of millions of skulls.

  She climbed.

  Panting, she stopped at the top. Standing was impossible, each skull twisting and rolling underneath her. She sat, spread her weight out on her butt and legs, and looked back down below her. Ten meters high? Twenty? How the hell had the souls piled the skulls up this high? How—

  Movement in the darkness shut up her, and she sucked in a breath.

  “So it is true,” the darkness said. It was roundish, whatever it was, and it shifted slightly like something alive might, but the details were lost in shadow. The light of the burning bushes couldn’t reach it. “The unmarked have come.”

  “I… um… yeah.” Gulping, she tried to stand again. No good. Without wings and a tail for bance, no human was standing on an unstable pile of spheres. “I don’t understand. Who are you? Did you pull us under the swamp?”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “A plot has begun, and I had to make sure. Chaos reigns above. Angels swarm on orders from a broken council, and the invader has penetrated the cracks of this Great Tower. I had to know.”

  Oh god oh god oh god.

  “Who… Who are you?”

  The rounding shape came closer, and closer, and closer. A head? It had spikes on it, like a demon, but it looked so… fucked up. Shoulders were connected to it, and a torso, but the shape of what had to be a face looked malformed.

  It came closer, and Mia lost all sense of scale as it brought in the side of its head to her. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, the burning bushes below and out of sight, and she squinted at the entity.

  Almost half of its face was missing, but otherwise, it did look like a demon. It had a snout, and red and bck eyes, and horns, but the simirities ended there. It had multiple rows of teeth, but not like a shark. It was like it had one mouth on top of the other. It had six eyes, and that was on the side of the head she could actually see, the side that was missing enormous chunks, as if something had cwed them off.

  A single eye was as big as her whole body.

  “I am Asmodeus.” He spoke slowly, the act of moving his lips an effort unto itself.

  Ice ran through her veins. Asmodeus. One of the names she’d read in Lucifer’s book, back at the Death’s Grip spire.

  “One of the Old Ones.” She stared, and her eyes drifted down from its head over its body. Most of its form was hidden in a ke of bck shadow, but hints of it were visible. It wasn’t just the face the creature was missing a chunk of. Its mangled body sat in a pit, deeper and wider than the cavern where Mia and the other demons waited. They’d traveled a tunnel, and the piles of skulls were just… decorations along the path that connected to the main chamber. A chamber big enough to hold fucking Godzil.

  She couldn’t make out the shape right, just that pieces were gone. Seven legs? A tail? Three tails? A wing? The bckness hid it all. But Asmodeus wasn’t whole. That much was clear.

  “You are journeying to meet the creator,” Asmodeus said.

  “The creator? God?”

  The creature snarled. Hot air gushed over Mia, and the pile of skulls trembled, shortening underneath her.

  “God is not my creator. Lucifer is.”

  “Oh. Um… I don’t know? I—” She bit her tongue. Tell it? Him, according to the worshiping soul earlier. “I… don’t know how much I can trust you.”

  The Old One leaned in closer, close enough she could have reached out and touched a tooth of his half mangled, short snout. Sensory overload. She should have been screaming and cowering in fear, but she wasn’t.

  “The angels know your plot. I would know more.”

  “You… spoke with the angels?”

  Asmodeus pulled his head back, stirred in the bck, and two limbs came up from the depths of shadow. They moved slowly, weighed down by gravity, but with time the Old One brought two of his smaller arms up. One pressed to the ground beside Mia’s skull pile. The other brought its fist in near. A torn limb, with bone exposed, and a little too insect-like for Mia’s liking. They stuck out from Asmodeus’s chest, and a squint revealed a dozen more of the small — still gigantic — limbs twitching on the monster’s front torso.

  It opened its palm, peeled away a dozen bck cws, and revealed two angels within. Alive, bleeding, with eyes open and wings shredded.

  She knew these two angels. Azreal, and Noah. They’d tried to kill her, and Vin. She’d saved their lives from Vin.

  “What… Why do you have two angels?” Don’t say their names, don’t say their names.

  “I devoured the others.”

  “What?”

  “I heard your note on their bodies, these two. They were with other angels. I drew them down here to deal with the invaders, pests that lurk in my tunnels and my shadow, learning, analyzing. The invaders heard your note on their bodies, and came for them. They fought.” Asmodeus aimed his shadowed, Godzil gaze down at his palm and the two broken angels inside. “Many angels survived their encounter with the invader. I killed the survivors and ate them, insects against my hunger. But these two, your note still resonates. A whisper, but I heard it. I spared them.”

  Asmodeus had pulled angels down here for pest control? Why were they down on Hell’s surface at all? They’d fought the monsters, lost four comrades, and then took the hearts of their dead friends. They didn’t want others getting them. Or, it was so they had something to eat, since they couldn’t eat human hearts. Like Galon had asked before he died, for Yosepha.

  And then the survivors ran into Asmodeus.

  “My note?”

  “You, and the other unmarked. You walk on the strings, and make distinct songs all your own. A note. A key.” Key? Like, a song key? “One of the unmarked died to an angel weeks ago. That was when I became aware of this… plot.”

  Far be it from her to call him out on it, but Asmodeus was being very forthcoming with information. Possibly a good thing. Probably a bad thing. He likely thought they weren’t leaving, and wanted answers before he killed Mia and the others, too. Fuck.

  “There was a group of angels on the ground?”

  “There were. Twelve. They were searching for you. Other angels roam the sky in numbers I have not heard since my kin and I fought the archangels. But twelve came down. I think these two had some idea of your journey, and had wanted to speak with you, away from their armies.” He chuckled, and the bassy rumble shook the cavern. Mia almost rolled down her macabre hill. “They told me the council desires the death of the unmarked. But these poor fools know not why. Angels, forever pathetic, and mindless.”

  How the Old One had gotten information out of them, she didn’t want to know.

  “I still don’t understand. You pulled me down here for answers?”

  “Indeed. We pary.”

  “I… guess.” This was cssic vilin behavior. Yeap, they were fucked if they didn’t figure something out. But what could she do? She was feeling healed since the battle in Death’s Grip. If she had to, maybe she could py the strings again hard enough to summon whatever she’d summoned st time.

  “You journey to the Unholy Lands, in hopes it will have the tools to ferry you to the Frozen Heart.” False Gate, and the Forgotten Pce. He knew the original names. Mia gulped. “You will find what you seek.”

  “Oh. Oh! That’s good!” Mia risked a peek down behind her at her demons. They all stood around her hill of skulls, far below, some with dropped jaws, all lit up by the flickering fme of the burning bushes. They wouldn’t be able to see shit down there, but they’d be able to hear every word, hers included. “And, um… why are you telling me?” Please don’t eat me.

  “The invader is here. It has found our forlorn tower, and it has come seeking the strongest notes in the dark. It draws ever closer, and strikes out with its tendrils in the bck, trying to hit the instruments of our music. It will find the Great Tower, it will find us, and your existence has only expedited our doom.”

  Jesus fucking christ. Mia stared at the colossal creature in front of her, and then at the two angels in his palm, both broken, but both alive. If she could save them, that’d be great, but she couldn’t do that if she was dead. And the longer the conversation went on, the more that sounded like the inevitable conclusion.

  “The invisible monster is the invader?”

  “The invader,” Asmodeus said, “struggles to adopt a form. But it must, if it wishes to battle in our world. It has found its form. It struggles to complete it, to provide it depth, detail, and nuance, but it will finish soon. And our world, my world, will swarm with its cold cws and empty eyes.”

  “Your world?”

  The Old One growled, and its throat shook. “My world. God is gone. Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel lie dead; as dead as an archangel can be. Lucifer is bound for all eternity, deep in the Frozen Heart, punishment for their war. I am this world’s new god, and when I am free, all will bow to me.”

  Megalomaniac, much?

  “I… I don’t know anything. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know—”

  “I imagine you do not. The woman said as much.”

  “Woman?”

  “In aera armor. The counterpoint to the roaming one. You call him the rider.” Asmodeus withdrew his head, and most of it disappeared back into shadow, but he kept his palm out beside her. “She warned me, you see. Warned me, that if I ever wanted my freedom, that I ever wanted to complete my regeneration, I would need to let you pass by. Untouched.”

  Oh no.

  “But…”

  The demon chuckled. “But you can py the strings, can’t you? You walk on them, move through them, but you can py them as I can.”

  “I… um…”

  Two more arms raised up from the pit. One was skin and bone, but the other was a muscled thing, and he set both hands against the outer cavern walls. Each hand was bigger than a bus.

  “The battle in Death’s Grip. The carnage. The song. I can hear it, little vibrations that tingle through my sin, miles and miles away. A song of terrible power. Did you craft it? Did you compose it?”

  “I… did.”

  Again, the kaiju chuckled. “You did not.”

  “What?”

  “You can touch the strings. You can py the music of the world, unmarked creature. But you are but a ripple in an ocean. No, you did not py the song, not completely. You summoned Her, didn’t you?” Gulp. “You summoned Her. She listened to your song.” Asmodeus raised his head and came closer, forcing Mia to look straight up. “She listened to your song, but not mine?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know what—”

  “She listened to you, some unmarked abomination! She listens to your music, but not mine!?”

  The Old One roared, and Mia screamed and covered her ears. Asmodeus’s smaller hand threw the angels aside, and their limp bodies crashed into nearby pilrs and fell to the ground. His two much, much rger hands moved down from the distant walls and found ground nearby to pnt his weight, and the titan moved forward.

  Mia’s bone hill could take no more. The vibration turned the skulls into rolling pebbles, and everything fell, Mia included. Her screams might as well have not existed against the roar of the Old One, and gravity lost all meaning as she rolled with tens of millions of skulls.

  Something slightly softer than the ground caught her. She opened her eyes and stared up at the big chest and arms of a demon who hadn’t been very nice to her tely.

  “Vin, I—”

  Vin turned and ran. The others turned and ran, and Mia sucked in a breath and looked around for her egg. Adron had it.

  “Unmarked!” Asmodeus yelled, and again she covered her ears. “I will devour you, unmarked! I will consume your soul, your sin, your grace, whatever powers an abomination such as you, and your song will be mine!”

  The betrayers scattered. They tripped over rocks and skulls, and many broke bones with impact. None of them screamed, even as they disappeared under the rolling waves of bone. Not enough weight to crush them. More than enough weight to trap them.

  Pilrs ahead of them crumbled, and the shadow of the Old One moved above, burying them in new shades of bckness. Head, neck, torso, it was all a blur, lost in shades of bck as amber veins disappeared under clouds of dust and crumbling pilrs.

  The demons ran, hopping left and right, over rocks, around tumbling mounds of skulls, and past the worshiping souls. Some of the poor fools reached out, as if they could catch a demon. Julisa was not kind, and she took lead and cut the souls into pieces with her four swords without a sound. Everyone was in run mode.

  Mia was in panic mode. She held Vin’s chest as best she could, but all she could do was stare up at the Old One trying to eat her. It lumbered over them, movements slow and heavy, but still somehow faster than the pack of demons scurrying along the ground like ants. The Godzil comparison was too apt.

  Mia looked back. Azreal, and Noah, where were they? They’d come to talk to her? Broke away from the army? Did they want to kill her, like everyone did apparently, or did they actually want to speak with her?

  They were going to die if she left them down here.

  “The song, unmarked!” A giant arm smmed down in front of them, and scooped across the ground toward them, smashing through pilrs, destroying bone piles and burning bushes, and squashing souls beneath its dark red skin. “Your song will be mine. Your power will be mine. You and all the unmarked!”

  The arm was too big. Vin and the rest of them tried to get over it, but it came at them like a truck, and hit them as hard. Everything went bck. The only sensation she could wrap her brain around was said brain colliding and ricocheting inside her skull. Gravity took them. The ground took them next.

  Something wrapped her body, far harder and bigger than Vin’s grip. Seeing stars in the dark, her head lulled side to side, and gravity found her again. Pain found her a second ter, a screaming headache that ripped through her mind, and from her arm.

  Broken. Her arm was broken. And a hand bigger than the one that’d held two angels now held her, with far too many fingers.

  “Understand, unmarked. With your power, She will bend to me. I shall py a symphony, and She will answer. Hell will be mine. The vortex will be mine. Heaven will be mine. The Great Tower shall be mine. And all will bow before the psalm of Asmodeus!” Hate, rage, and pure condescension rolled from the monster’s broken mouth like he’d spoken the words a million times before.

  Was this the origin of overly verbose vilins? She half smiled between the waves of pain. David would have liked that joke.

  She opened her eyes. The monster had pulled back to his pit, leaning over where the mountain of skulls had once been. Now the ground was covered in bones, and hundreds of souls y buried underneath them. Some pushed themselves up from the mess, most did not, and even with broken limbs, they again resumed their work, pushing skulls back into piles.

  “These others you have brought will be food for my betrayers. But you, unmarked, I will know you. I can smell Her on you. I can hear Her in your veins. And I will know the depths of you, in the way only She can.”

  Know?

  Roars and snarls forced her head up from the heavy darkness trying to pull it down. Vin and Julisa. Adron and Kas. They struggled in the monster’s grip, and Vin and Kas both bit on what flesh they could, but their teeth couldn’t penetrate the nigh bck skin of the Old One.

  Where were the incubi?

  “A ragarin,” Asmodeus said, and he lifted Vin up closer to his colossal head. “How few of the children still live. Fewer still are born. And it is a child of Belial that stumbles onto my doorstep?” The beast ughed, and the cavern ughed with him, trembling bass ripping the ground out from under the sving souls beneath. “Failures. All failures. Our flock. Our soldiers. But when we were struck down, what did you do? You did not free us. You did not help us recover from our wounds. You fought amongst yourselves for Lucifer’s spires. And you!” He squeezed, and Vin’s roar rose an octave. That was almost a scream. “Belial can rot for all eternity for all I care. I will take pleasure in torturing his children wherever I find them.”

  Belial was alive? Another half roar, half scream tore through the cavern, and Asmodeus squeezed.

  Mia forced her eyes away, and they fell on Adron. He didn’t have the egg.

  No. No no no. Mia ground her teeth and clenched her eyes until her face ached. Dark weight pulled at her eyelids, brain throbbing in her skull, but she pushed against it and set her gre on the old monster. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. She had to do something.

  She reached for the strings inside her—

  And Vin unleashed a wave of hellfire on the Old One. Asmodeus shrieked and pulled his head away from his hand, a massive distance, but Vin breathed hard and shot the hellfire like a stream from a fmethrower. It crashed against the monster’s face and neck, poured over his shoulder, and new light lit up the dark cavern.

  Asmodeus didn’t let go. Screaming, two mouths open and unleashing multi-yered roars of gargled, distorted sounds, the Old One set his dozen eyes down on Vin, and squeezed again. Vin’s hellfire stopped. His glowing spikes died. The tiny dragon’s voice came to a halt.

  “I have wielded the hottest hellfire from Her depths themselves. I have wounded the archangels. I have served at the right hand of Lucifer! And a useless child of the deceiver dares to attack me? You shall live, ragarin. You shall live for centuries as I tear away each piece of your flesh. You shall live for millennia, and know what it means to have each of your bones removed and forced down your gullet. You shall know—”

  A gold beam shot out from the darkness and joined the flickering red light of hellfire. It crashed into one of Asmodeus’s eyes, and again the two-mouthed beast unleashed a godly shriek of fury and pain.

  Only one thing made a beam like that. Mia looked down into the bck, and glowing weapons lit the darkness, far off to the side. An angel’s sword, and an angel’s huge shield. And four other shapes stood behind them, with short horns and skinny tails. The incubi.

  One of them held her egg. Her pupper was alive.

  Mia found the strings and hit them as hard as she could. Not a mindless sound this time, but a specific note, and a specific song. She needed to move rock, and move a lot of it, but she’d struggled before to make a small tree shake. That wouldn’t do. She needed to move the rock. She needed to move all of it.

  Something in the depths listened to her. Something in the ocean with her heard the note, and echoed it a million times louder than she could.

  Py me a song, child. I will py with you. I will dance for you.

  “I hear it,” Asmodeus said, slowly turning his eleven eyes to gre down at them and the angels. “I hear Her. I hear—”

  Mia pyed the song, and the ceiling opened above them.

  Asmodeus froze. Mouths open, ready to bite down on someone, anyone, the colossal distance between his head and his own limbs was the only thing that stopped him before he noticed the ceiling opening up. It cracked apart and rocks rained down, but boulders nding on Asmodeus were pebbles compared to him. Mia did her best to split the ceiling nicely over where her and the demons — and angels — were, but giant boulders fell down around them, nonetheless.

  The bck swamp fell upon them like an opening curtain of ooze. Far far above, the valley split apart and revealed its dark fog to them, lit only by puffs of blue fire, and cracks of amber in the canyon walls. Hell shook, an unending hellquake that forced even the titan to tremble, and the vibrations pulsed down his limbs into Mia’s body. But she pyed the song, eyes set on Asmodeus.

  Rumbling, the Old One reached up with several more limbs, and pushed himself to standing. They were beyond deep in the ground, and even standing, the kaiju-sized monster could not reach the top of the canyon. Mia spread the canyon further, until Asmodeus couldn’t reach both walls at once, and the long creature standing on his many legs fell forward, and pnted a half dozen arms against one of the great walls.

  They were still trapped in his grip, and if they didn’t get out, Asmodeus would just climb out and eat them. Or eat them now before he even tried. She had to get them out, get her egg, get the incubi, and get the angels.

  She called on the batm rune. Potram faded, and hard bck metal repced it. Pain scorched her mind as something snapped the bones of her broken arm back into pce. Something filled her palm. Her staff, with its glowing amber jewel.

  She reached down with the song, found deeper notes, heavier notes that changed the sound. And she summoned hellfire.

  “Unmarked,” Asmodeus said, “you dare—”

  The ground shook again. She’d done this trick before. The ocean sang to her, danced for her, and bathed her mind in the brilliant chaos of swirling reds and yellows, and death.

  Hellfire erupted from under the monster. It tore up from the depths, swirling in a spiral as it ripped through rock, melted it, and cleared a path. The pit of Asmodeus’s chamber was deeper and wider than they could have known, but Hell’s reach was far deeper, deeper than the Old One’s song could reach. And Mia drew up hellfire and drowned the creature’s belly in destruction.

  He let go. Shrieking again, the beast twisted and turned in the growing bath of amber liquid and fme. The hellfire crashed against his belly, his legs and tail, but the swirling waves could not burn through his hide. No wonder this creature had survived this long.

  Mia fell. Her demons fell. A growing ke of hellfire waited for them, and Mia called on the song. Rocks shot out from the ground, from beneath the tens of millions of skulls Asmodeus had collected, and shot to the sky. Being gentle was not possible. Mia’s feet crashed against stone as it rose up, and a dozen other wide pilrs of rock skyrocketed with her and her companions.

  She unched them up and over the canyon edge, past the falling streams of remnant guts and bck ooze, and into the Bck Valley. Harnessing a song moving a scale of rock she could not imagine left no room for nuance, and tiny bodies, hers included, were thrown to the muck with the grace of a child throwing a handful of sand into water. They scattered, rolled through the bck, and somewhere in Mia’s mind, something told her she’d just broken a leg.

  She couldn’t feel it, not yet, not while the ocean enveloped her and she swam within its currents. Her armor snapped the bone back into pce. She didn’t care.

  She stood up and cast her gaze at the canyon she’d opened up a hundred meters from her.

  A hand the size of a building reached up from the canyon, followed by another, and the head of a two-mouthed dragon with twelve eyes, one of them bleeding, ascended.

  “Unmarked! I will have my song, unmarked!”