Chapter Eighteen
I’d walked between worlds once before, but I wondered if you ever got used to that feeling, like falling into icy water.
A moment later, I was wishing for the cold again as suffocating heat clawed at me.
I breathed in the thick, burning air, and it was like swallowing fire.
I stood there for a moment, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the utter darkness.
But gradually I became aware of the landscape around me.
Dead trees were starkly outlined against the red sky.
A vast pale moon hung low in a starless sky, and it washed the whole scene in light the color of old bones.
The heavy, humid air stank of shit and blood and death, and I heard human sounding screams from far away, filling the putrid air.
Someone was standing near me. I could barely make him out in the near stygian darkness but I somehow knew he was there.
“Who is it?” I called out, and I heard a soft, sinister chuckle in reply.
He took another step out of the deepest shadows, and I was able to see him, though his image was so terrible, I was immediately sorry I asked.
It wasn’t that he was ugly—indeed, he was a handsome, dark-haired man with fire in his eyes.
But he had small flames spilling from his lips and curling around his chin as he laughed and tiny wisps of smoke coming from his nostrils.
“W-who are you?”
“If you didn’t want me here, then why did you ask to come?”
“I don’t even know where this is or who you are!” I cried.
“Don’t you? Some call it Tartarus. Others call it Naraka or Jahannam or Hades. Maybe you know it as Sheol or Hell.”
“Are you…the diabhal?”
He laughed again, with horrible effect. “I’m one of them, boy. Your grandmother knew me well. I am Zaguel.”
I knew the name all right, but I’d never seen him before or even heard a description.
He was the man who came to my grandmother at her cottage in the woods, night after night, until she put a stop to it by saying the words the priest told her to say.
He had ruined her life. He was my mother’s father; he was my grandfather, and he was a fucking, filthy demon.
“Do you want to see her? Your mother? I can take you to her if you like?” He reached for me then and I jerked my hand away, trembling so much I could hardly breathe. Some instinct told me that if he touched me, I would die here in this horrible place and never be able to leave it.
“No. This was a terrible mistake, and I want to go back.”
“Oh, it’s far too late for that.”
But suddenly, from behind me, I heard a loud, fierce shout.
“Get away from him, you monster!”
Zaguel reeled back a few steps in surprise as my lord Fionn burst through the portal that had opened up behind us, wielding his sword with a fierce and savage look on his handsome face. He sprang to stand between me and the demon and he snarled.
“If you try to touch him, you’ll lose your fucking head!”
A furious Zaguel recovered quickly and perhaps would have fought my lord, but for the men who came spilling through the portal behind him, all of them brandishing swords, shields and battle axes.
Demons are basically cowards and this one shook his head in angry disbelief, retreating back into the shadows.
Fionn backed away, crowding me into his soldiers so they could surround me, and we all fell back a few steps into the portal. The oppressive heat melted away and the darkness shattered. We came out on the other side of the portal into the cold darkness.
The entrance and exit must have been mismatched because we all fell several feet and I landed hard, falling to my knees, with someone falling on top of me.
I could breathe again though, and I sank down to my stomach in relief.
I felt hands on me, but I was sick with exhaustion and fear from one narrow escape, only to plunge immediately into another.
I thought perhaps they’d kill me now, and I didn’t want to be around to see it.
Gasping for breath, I closed my eyes and knew no more until I became aware of being lifted onto Fionn’s saddle, with him swinging up behind me.
He made a clucking noise to his horse and called out to his men. Sweat was on his brow, and his hair was damp and heavy, his beautiful features etched with pain and exhaustion.
The next thing I remember was being on his horse, with his arm around me, pulling me back against him. We came out of the portal, on the road to Gorias and back in Otherworld. Neither of us spoke at all. Perhaps there was nothing left to say.