Chapter 49
Cal
Petra. Petra. Petra.
Her face. Her eyes. Her hands. The way she smelled. The sound of her laugh. The way her lashes fanned across her cheeks when she slept. The quiet tenacity of her love. An incessant humming sound. Which was what?
Petra. Petra. Petra.
Her name rang through my head as I opened my eyes. I peeled my tongue from the roof of my mouth and winced at the taste of blood that coated it. I was afraid to move.
Petra. Petra. Petra.
“ Fuck ,” I breathed to myself, flopping onto my back. Why had I been afraid to move again? I blinked, realizing I wasn’t in the darkness. The rocky ceiling was illuminated the slightest bit with a dim, gray light. A cave.
The Sanguilite’s Realm .
I shot up, my breath sawing in and out of my lungs as I found Aegrabane beside me, its rubies still glowing in time with my heartbeat.
My surroundings blinked into focus, and it became clear this wasn’t the Sanguilite’s Realm.
This wasn’t a cave, but a passageway. The passageway, the tunnel beneath the Iron Rise that had all but killed me.
Slowly, carefully, I pushed to my feet, running my hands up and down my body.
I seemed to be, somehow, whole. The memory was the only thing that remained of that merciless, all-consuming pain.
I craned my neck over my shoulder, staring into the darkness behind me, and the darkness stared right back.
There was nothing to see, nothing to explain the agony that had just wrecked every part of me and had now vanished.
I was okay. Somehow, I was okay.
Cautiously, I took one step toward the light, then another. I had no idea what I was going to find at the end of this tunnel, but I prayed to the fucking Blood Saints it would be them.
That humming sound in my head increased to a dull roar as the light grew brighter and the tunnel gave way to open space.
I blinked in surprise when the pathway came to an end, because Hell looked a lot like the way we’d left Heaven.
Scorched land that extended as far as the eye could see.
But unlike in Heaven, there was no ocean, no quaint town.
No cottages with horse pastures. Just a massive, yawning hole I had no desire to go anywhere near.
Perhaps the most awe-inspiring sight of all, though, was the soaring height of the castle.
Towers and spires of a glassy black stone sliced an imposing silhouette into a charcoal sky.
I’d bet it could cut the clouds in half, spear the sun on the point of one of its spires.
It was terrifying. And beautiful. A lot like Petra.
And it was all eerily and hauntingly empty.
A looming presence prickled the back of my neck and I whirled to see a massive mountain jutting into the sky behind me.
Gnarled, bare-branched trees jutted from its rocky surface, like jagged fingers reaching out from the ground, ready to snag the leg of an unsuspecting passerby.
Even with the skeletal trees, it looked a hell of a lot like the Iron Rise, with thick clouds of black smoke wafting from its peak.
Did that have something to do with the pain I’d felt?
Had I encountered some pocket of toxic gas deep within its core and hallucinated the entire journey here? Was this a hallucination?
I shook the thought from my head. This was all real until proven otherwise, I decided.
I took a step away from the tunnel, my mind set on the castle in the distance, but my eyes snagged on the pit in front of me.
It’d be easy enough to walk around — the path looked like nothing but flat, blackened ground.
But something about that pit made goose bumps rise over my skin.
That dull roar in my head got louder, and suddenly there was nothing dull about the sound at all. It was a proper roar, a sound that covered octaves from low to high. The rumble of a driva’s growl. The scream of a tea kettle. Everything in between. And it grew louder as I moved closer to the pit.
Everything told me to stay far, far away, but curiosity pulled me closer, beckoning me to the rocky edge. Burnt grass crunched beneath my feet, turning to dust under my weight with each step. Carefully, I neared the edge, peering over and realizing…that wasn’t a roar.
The sound was a symphony of screams. Painful, terrified screams.
I scrambled backwards before my eyes could pick anything out, pick anyone out.
Back, back, back, away from the precipice that separated me from that…
horror. I turned slowly in place, a sourness turning my stomach as I took in my surroundings.
Maybe the Occulti hadn’t bothered to come here after all.
Why the fuck was I surprised? This was Hell. What had I expected to find? The worst of the worst playing cards and tending to their horses?
Was Miles down there?
A familiar chittering sound hit my ears, and my head dropped between my shoulders. Of course the Occulti were here. “Really?” I muttered to myself. “I was having such a nice time.”
I raised Aegrabane in preparation, surprised at how light the blade suddenly felt in my grip. But I didn’t have time to marvel because a throng of Occulti poured out from a copse of dead trees at the base of the mountain, headed directly toward me.
Of course.
Instinct took over and I was sprinting, my eyes set on the castle once again.
Aegrabane seemed to buzz in my grip now, a fervent, swirling energy radiating into my skin.
Hell was Aegrabane’s realm, after all. The castle seemed to be summoning it forward, and Aegrabane was answering the call, pulling me along.
I dared a look behind me and unsurprisingly, the demons were covering more ground than I was. They screeched and whooped, talons clicking and teeth snapping in their true forms. These were not the weakened Occulti in Vacant skins. These were full Occulti, and there was nothing weak about them.
A massive arched door swung open at the base of the castle, its outline the slightest bit blurry.
That’s when I noticed it — the nearly translucent layer of gleaming light surrounding the entire structure, the same barrier Soren had thrown over his own castle.
Four figures rushed out, though they were still too far away for me to make out any of their features.
I didn’t slow my steps before I hit the barrier.
The figures were sprinting down the obsidian steps toward me.
Could they drop the barrier? They were too far away, and without thinking I swung Aegrabane, slashing at the membrane.
Was I going to damage it and let the Occulti in?
Was the whole thing going to pop like a soap bubble and dissolve into nothing?
And what if the Blood Saints didn’t take kindly to my intrusion and struck me down where I stood?
Fuck .
I kept swinging, hacking at the barrier.
It looked like nothing more than a thin layer of glittering light but felt as though I was hacking at metal.
The four figures skidded to a stop in front of me, their features slightly fuzzy behind the barrier separating the horrors of the Occulti from the sanctity of the castle.
They were screaming, their words so muffled I couldn’t make out much, but I heard the familiar cadence of one word.
Hurry.
With a final slice, Aegrabane pierced through completely, and I wrenched the blade up and down, widening the hole before I dove through.
The sheer barricade pulled closed around me — similar to Petra closing a wound — and I kicked and writhed until I hit the stone tile on the other side, Aegrabane still in hand, just as the first of the Occulti slammed into it.
The chill-inducing screech of unsettlingly long fingernails echoed over the castle’s grounds, like metal on glass. Horror froze my muscles as I watched, unable to right myself, unable to slow my breathing.
A hand appeared in my vision and I reached for it without thinking. The man it belonged to wore a frown, the neatly trimmed beard that surrounded it just as white as the furrowed eyebrows over his ocean-blue eyes.
“Let’s get inside,” he urged with a nod, recognizing the look of shock on my face.
His tone was brusque, his tanned skin leathery.
Idros, Saint of Storms, if I had to guess.
The five of us hurried over the cobblestones and up the stairs.
I hardly had time to take in the impressive surroundings nor the appearances of the other Saints as we rushed through the front door and slammed it shut behind us.
“Getting real fuckin’ tired of this bullshit,” a woman muttered, huffing an exasperated breath.
The first thing I noticed were the hands covered in nicks and scars, flexing as they landed on her slim hips.
The contrast of her fitted black leathers against the flaming auburn of her hair was almost blinding.
“I’m Liara,” she offered, extending a hand.
“Saint of Hell,” I replied, still dazed as my palm met hers.
She gave a quick nod before her eyes moved up and down my body, as if she were searching for something. “You wear no shackles. You carry a weapon. You didn’t escape the Chasm. So what the fuck did you do to get here?”
“I entered through the Iron Rise.”
Liara raised a single brow. “Very funny,” she said, but there was no humor in her voice.
“It isn’t a joke, your…Holiness,” I answered, hoping I wasn’t about to piss off the Saint of Hell. “I entered through the Iron Rise, followed the pathway into the tunnel, and came out the other side. I need to find a way to the Darkness Beyond. I need to find Malosym.”
That single brow dropped, the lines of her face suddenly hard. “You didn’t come through the Iron Rise. That’s impossible.”
“Is that…” Another man stepped forward before I could answer, pointing to the blade hanging in my grip. He was shorter than Idros, his face gruff and creased. He reminded me a lot of Commander Summercut. Faldyr, Saint of War.
I nodded. “Aegrabane.”
Liara’s eyes widened as they moved from the blade to my face and back again. I couldn’t read her expression. Confusion? Disbelief? “Where did you get that?” she asked, her tone just as unreadable as her face.
“Noros.” My hand flexed against the grip. Aegrabane seemed to hum in response.
A third man stepped forward, his skin as pale as an Occulti’s, his eyes such a light shade of blue they were almost white. “Noros gave you that sword?” He gestured toward it, a milky-white hand emerging from his black robes. Cyen, Saint of Death. “Or did you steal it? ”
“What? No. Noros gave it to me. I didn’t know he was Noros at the time he gifted it to me. Didn’t know it was Aegrabane, either. The truth was…recently discovered.”
“And you accepted the blade as your own?” Cyen pushed.
“Yes.” What the fuck were they on about? Should I have turned the sword down?
Liara’s hands fell to her hips again. “Well, that answers how you ended up in my realm.”
“It does?”
“You can enter the Holy Realms so long as a Saint’s relic has been bestowed upon you. Now, come along,” she said, brushing past me. “I have some questions for you. And I could use a glass of wine.”