“Stay where you’ve been put,” he warned her, snarling as he spoke to show off his pointed teeth. He realized that it had been quite some time since he’d fed at the biodome, and found the human before him quite tempting, but he wasn’t about to jeopardize his entire species to satisfy his hunger pangs.
The old woman’s gaze suddenly hardened, and he thought he might need to teach her through pain, but she instead moved herself across the floor to the prone form of Adam lying naked upon the furniture.
“If you’re not meaning to kill him you might want to be a little gentler,” she scolded. She reached into a pocket of the clothes she wore and produced a cloth. Licking the fabric, she proceeded to clean some small wounds upon the first man’s skeletal body.
“Everything is going to be all right,” she cooed to the cadaverous figure. “You just hold on and see.”
Adam remained silent, unmoving, as if dead.
Taranushi was tempted to tell them what their fate would be, but he had already wasted enough time, interacting for centuries with the fragile life-forms that had stolen God’s affections.
Turning toward the lingering aroma, he rushed toward it, eager for his mission to finally be over. After all this time, the pieces had at last fallen into place, and the beginning of the end was about to commence.
At the far end of the basement room the first of the Shaitan stopped before a closed door. He pulled it open to reveal what appeared to be a storage closet. Inside there was an old metal bucket and a mop, and some boxes stained and mildewed from water damage.
Gazing inside, Taranushi felt his smile grow wide with excitement, for he did not see an empty closet; he saw so much more.
He saw through the drifting malodor what had once been there not so very long ago.
Not a closet, but a passage to Hell.
A passage that would soon exist again.
Hell
The entire cave was shaking, the shrieks and moans of a Hell being gradually murdered echoing down the stone passage to where they were.
“It won’t be long now,” Malachi said wistfully, gazing off in that direction. “Changing . . .”
Francis dropped his bare feet down from the stone table to the floor, feeling the violent vibrations increasing in intensity. The entire place—the entire mountain—was just a few minutes away from being shaken to rubble.
The Hellion had risen from where it had patiently lain the entire time he was being tortured—the elder angel rummaging through his brain as if looking for a favorite winter hat. The foul beast paced nervously, glancing toward the sounds of its world being torn asunder.
Francis didn’t know what he was going to do. To say he was weak was an understatement. If asked, Francis would have had a difficult time admitting that he was even alive, but if he wasn’t going to attempt something, who was?
Malachi wasn’t right in the cabeza—a trait that he’d noticed seemed to be quite common in many of the Lord’s more powerful creations of late—and he certainly wasn’t up to anything good. Francis missed being able to pick up the Batphone to give Remy a call. Struggling to stand, he wondered whether Eliza had reached out to the angel, the memory that he had left her one of Remy’s cards, just in case, giving him a warm feeling in his tummy.
Or that just could have been his insides melting to slag.
Maybe Remy would be arriving any minute now, he thought, as the floor of the cave hummed beneath his feet. Flying down the cave corridor, guns blazing—no, Remy would most likely be carrying a sword—sword blazing, coming to save the day.
“You’re smiling,” Malachi said to him, raising his voice to be heard over the commotion outside.
Francis leaned back against the stone table, still too weak to stand on his own two feet.
“Was I?” he commented. “Must be a touch of gas.”
“I thought that perhaps you had resigned yourself to the approaching change . . . a moment of clarity before . . .”
Francis could sense it coming.
“Before what?” he asked, tensing to do something, but what, he did not know.
“Before your usefulness was brought to a close.”
Malachi struck with the speed of a cobra. That fucking scalpel was out again, and whenever that bad boy made an appearance, nothing good followed.
At first Francis thought that nothing had happened, that whatever Malachi was going to do was somehow avoided as the elder stepped back away from him.
But then he followed the elder’s eyes, and felt the growing tightness in the flesh of his stomach.
“You fucking didn’t,” Francis slurred, not wanting to look down at himself, but really having little choice. He leaned farther back against the table and slowly tilted his chin down to see the extent of the damage.
“You have always been a prominent fixture in the visions gifted to me by the fruit of the Tree,” Malachi said.
Francis looked down at his chest, seeing the fine line that started just below his sternum and went down to his groin. Blood had started to seep from the edges, making the line—the cut—that much more noticeable.
“And little by little I figured out why.”
His legs began to give out, and he caught himself on the stone table’s edge, the sudden movement causing the incision in his belly to tear apart, exposing his inner workings to the outside world.
“In using you as their agent, the Thrones provided me with the perfect all-purpose tool for my needs: strong, cunning, ruthless, penitent, and quite resourceful.”
Francis’s hands went to his belly, and he pressed them against the diagonal cut, desperate to keep his insides from sliding out onto the floor.
“And they gave you certain gifts . . . certain useful gifts to make you a better executor of God’s will.”
Malachi retrieved what looked to be a bowl from a collection of crap cluttering a formation of rock jutting from the cave wall used as a shelf.
“One of those gifts is in your blood.”
Someone had pulled the cave floor out from beneath him, and Francis found himself dropping down to his knees. The impact was jarring and he felt what was inside him—what he wanted to keep inside him—press against his hands. He was successful in preventing his inner workings from leaving his body.
But there was nothing he could do about the blood.
Malachi placed the bowl beneath him, capturing the scarlet spill as it rained down from his belly.
“The Thrones gave you the gift of passage . . . the ability to open doorways from here to there.”
Malachi’s eyes looked around the cave, dust and bits of rocky debris raining down as the Morningstar continued his renovation project outside.
“From here . . . to there.”
The elder bent down to Francis’s level, looking at him eye-to-eye.
“The gift is in your blood,” Malachi said as he retrieved the bowl, its contents splashing out over the rim.
The cave shook as if having a fit, huge cracks suddenly appearing in the floor as well as the wall. Unable to stay upright, Francis fell onto his side, his hand momentarily leaving his stomach—the results unpleasant. Despite its anxiety, the Hellion was there to sniff at the bloody innards that had temporarily spilled. The beast growled at him, snapping at his fingers as he attempted to retrieve them and shove them back where they belonged.
Malachi stood there, silently watching as Francis struggled with the beast over a section of his intestine.
“I’m done with you, Fraciel,” the elder announced. “My visions of you end with the collection of your blood, and my escape from . . .”
He looked around the cave again, larger pieces of rock and dust raining down from the ceiling.
“. . . this place. Strangely enough, I’ve grown rather fond of it during the time I’ve waited for your arrival.”
Francis had managed to take back the rubbery piece of his guts, shoving it deep inside his abdominal cavity, while giving everything that he had to remaining conscious.
br /> A large section of rock dropped from the ceiling to land atop the Hellion’s skull-like head. The beast yelped, retreating back toward a patch of shadows along the wall.
The place was coming apart at the seams; it wouldn’t be long now.
Malachi turned his back to him, approaching an area of wall with the bowl of his blood.
Francis willed himself to get up; despite all the pain, and his current opened condition, he forced himself up onto his knees.
Standing at the wall, Malachi casually glanced over his shoulder, smiling as he dipped his fingers in the bowl of fresh blood and began to paint upon the wall.
“I’d like to reiterate how important you’ve been to this entire process,” he said, painting the angelic sigils—the beginnings of a spell—upon the cave wall. “It could not have been done without you.”
The sounds coming from outside were pretty scary, and Francis could only imagine what was happening.
Exactly what’s going to be happening inside not too long from now, he thought, swaying as the cave shook, and the large cracks branched off to smaller cracks that begat even more cracks than that.
A powerful wind rushed through the chamber, traveling down the passage and carrying with it the stink of brimstone and transformation.
Malachi continued to smear the angel blood upon the wall, dropping the still partially filled bowl to the cave floor when finished.
“But now it’s time that I said good-bye.”
The blood sigils had begun to glow with a thrumming black energy—the shapes growing steadily larger, colliding with others and eventually merging to become a single piece of expanding darkness.
Francis could do nothing but watch . . . hold in his insides and watch.
A black portal grew steadily larger upon the wall, an annoying hum of expended magick cutting through the ruckus of the crumbling cave. He thought about maybe using his intestine as a lasso, preventing the elder from escaping, but had doubts about his aim.
Malachi chanced another glance over his shoulder before ducking into the passage to be swallowed up by the bottomless darkness that had manifested there.
So much for that, Francis thought as the cave convulsed fitfully, the walls crumbling, the floor shifting violently beneath him, knocking him back to his side.
For a moment he imagined his situation couldn’t get any worse, but then he noticed the rope of bloody intestine—his rope of bloody intestine—cooling upon the rubble-covered floor.
That isn’t good.
And the crazed Hellion emerging from its hiding place, drawn again by the smell of his exposed insides.
It was totally fucking awesome that life—what little he had left of it—could still manage to surprise him.
The Hellion lunged, opening its cavernous mouth to take a bite from his intestine.
Is it my large or small intestine? the former Guardian angel wondered, before deciding that it truly didn’t matter.
He looked into the beast’s horrible maw, at all its teeth and its fat, sluglike tongue, and hoped that the monster got the nastiest case of food poisoning from him.
Francis watched as the Hellion’s snout dipped down; the front razor-sharp-looking teeth were about to close upon the slimy, dirt-covered piece of flesh when the floor beneath the creature suddenly disappeared, and the beast that was about to nibble upon him was gone.
It was like something out of a classic Warner Bros. cartoon, and Francis actually managed to let loose with a barklike laugh that just about ended his life.
Consciousness leaking away, he watched through dimming eyes as the remaining sections of floor around him continued to fall away, the ground beneath him eventually disappearing as the walls of the cave collapsed, exposing it to the outside world.
To the hell outside.
Francis was falling, the sudden sensation of weightlessness triggering a treasured memory of the last time he’d flown.
Before his fall from grace.
The mountains of Hell were crumbling all around him, clouds of dirt and debris being sucked up into the swirling maelstrom that his broken body had now become part of.
And to think he actually believed he was going to die under the teeth and claws of a Hellion. It just went to show how one could never be sure about anything.
Except that he was finally going to die.
Buffeted and deafened by winds, Francis found himself accepting his fate, letting go as his body drifted upon the currents of air choked with the remains of Hell’s former landscape.
He found that he could no longer breathe, and gave in to the darkness, calling it to him with open arms and minimal regrets, wishing only that he could have seen her again—the beautiful Eliza Swan whose memory had been stolen from him till now.
And sorry that he hadn’t earned the Lord’s forgiveness, even though he’d tried so very hard. He would have also liked to have seen Remy again, but since the son of a bitch never came to his rescue, he could go screw himself.
The sound within the vortex went from cacophonous to silent.
And then Francis sensed that he was no longer alone.
He struggled to open his eyes, and in the eye of the storm a familiar figure floated.
Lucifer was as beautiful as he remembered, and Francis was surprised to see the Morningstar gliding toward him on wings blacker than the darkest nights.
There was a smile upon the Morningstar’s beatific face, and Francis believed that Lucifer actually remembered who he was.
And that he was happy to see him.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Eliza stroked the face of the man who appeared dead, sensing through the tips of her fingers that there was still some life left inside him.
He was holding on for something, and she seemed to know that.
The far corner of the room lit up as if in the midst of a lightning storm, and she looked up to find the monster who had taken her standing in front of an open closet door. The flashes of blue light were coming from inside it.
Memories that had been denied her for so very long suddenly rushed in to fill their places.
This was what Pearly had wanted to save her from—why Pearly had left her, and taken her memories. And now she understood how much he really did care for her.
The light from the closet grew even brighter, more violent, as crackling bolts of electricity shot from the doorway, their intensity driving the monster back.
Eliza thought briefly about running, but then looked at the man lying on the couch. The man called Adam. How could she leave him there, alone with the monster? And she most certainly couldn’t manage to take him with her. So she resigned herself to staying.
“Don’t you worry,” she told him again. “I won’t leave you.”
She knew exactly who he was, and could feel the pain of the life he’d led.
Her own family carried a similar guilt, descendants from Adam’s bride—Eve. But the Daughters of Eve had chosen instead to accept the first mother’s sin and her punishment, and channel their guilt into efforts to do good upon the world. Eliza’s mother, and grandmother, and great-grandmother before her had always believed that God accepted this, and gave them the special gift of longevity so they could continue their work for as long as possible. Even Eliza believed this as she left the protection of her family to spread happiness through her music.
But there were forces that wanted to silence her songs, and others that wanted her—needed her—for something that still remained a mystery.
The lightning was abruptly replaced by complete darkness, as if the storm had passed, and the closet was filled with liquid night.
Eliza watched as the monster crouched at the threshold, peering into the solid shadow, cautiously moving closer, then plunging its many arms into the undulating wall of black. Her captor screamed, tossing back his head in agony, but it did not stop its search.
“I have you!” the creature finally bellowed, and Eliza saw the muscles tense on the monster’s pale back as it yanked
something from the thick pool of shadow, something covered in layers of ice and frost.
Eliza was fascinated by the frozen shape lying on the floor of the apartment, and although she couldn’t ever remember feeling so frightened, she found herself cautiously moving toward it.
“I thought I told you to stay put,” the monster snarled, extending one of its frostbitten arms toward her. A surge of invisible force erupted from its fingers, hurling her backward, where she hit the couch and rolled to the floor, her old glasses knocked from her face.
Stunned, she lay there, watching as the monster knelt beside the shape. The ice was beginning to melt in an expanding puddle on the hardwood floor.
“Master,” the monster spoke softly. “I have you.” It was running its hands over the object, and where it touched, the ice fell away in clumps to reveal a man.
He was dressed in filthy, bloodstained robes, and as he opened his eyes, his gaze fell upon the monster. A smile formed upon his bearded face at the sight.
“Taranushi,” he whispered.
“Yes, my master.”
Suddenly there was a blinding flash, and when her eyes cleared Eliza was shocked to see the robed man standing directly before her, that strange smile still on his face.
“Hello, Eliza,” he said, his voice as smooth as velvet.
All of a sudden she remembered this man. He had come to Pearly’s aid when that thing pretending to be an angel had attacked the club.
“I . . . I know you,” she said from where she lay upon the floor.
And for a moment, she almost believed that things were going to be all right. But the bearded man reached down and yanked her up from the floor by the front of her apron.
“So sorry, but the time for pleasantries is at an end.”
She struggled in his grasp, as he pulled something that glowed as if it were red-hot from within his disgusting robes.
“You have something I need,” he said, his velvety voice now more of a growl, and jabbed that burning something into the middle of her forehead.