Chapter 34
ONE FOR SORROW
SOMEHOW, SUYIN HELPED A DISORIENTED, UNSTEADY Murmur climb to his feet and find his way to her bedroom, where he immediately collapsed. The wounds on his torso and forearms had already started to heal, she noticed. The cuts were closed and already fading.
He really was alive.
He was shivering, so she pulled the blankets over him. He curled up on his side, hair over his face. She reached out and tucked it back, swallowing the lump in her throat. She hadn’t forgotten his betrayal, but she couldn’t be cold toward him right now. Not when he was like this.
Assuming he was asleep, she was just about to step back from the bed when he mumbled, “Am I dead?” His eyes opened a crack, and it seemed a great effort for him to focus on her face.
“You’re alive, Murmur. I brought you back.” Against her better judgment, she stroked back another lock of silvery hair.
“I must be dead,” he said, closing his eyes again. “That’s the only way I could be here with you. That’s the only way you would be comforting me instead of sinking a blade into my chest.”
She swallowed. She didn’t know how to respond to that.
His eyes opened, and he stared ahead but didn’t seem to see her. “But I can’t be in Heaven. Not after what I did. So this must be Hell. The Nine Rings. Which level am I in? The ninth, I’m sure. The deepest circle, reserved for the treacherous, the worst of all sinners—”
“Murmur, you’re not—”
He sat up with a jerk and lurched away from her. “Don’t touch me. Torture me however you will, but don’t use her face. I’ll survive anything but that—”
“Murmur, just listen to me—”
He closed his eyes again, slumping against the headboard. “But I deserve it, don’t I? I suppose I’ll have to spend eternity in this room, reliving what I did. I’ll be forced to face my worst—”
“You’re not in Hell!” she shouted just to get his attention before he fell any farther into his delusion.
His eyes opened once more.
“You’re not in Hell, Murmur. You’re on Earth. In my bedroom. You’re alive, okay? You were dead, but I brought you back to life.”
He stared blankly at her, and she wondered if any part of him understood what she was saying.
And then he began to shake, and he grasped his arms as if freezing cold. “The things I’ve done,” he mumbled, dropping his head. “Terrible things. Unforgivable things. I deserve the worst. I must be dead because I can’t be here. I can’t be free of the voices. I can’t—”
“Murmur—” Fuck, her heart hurt, and unshed tears blurred her vision.
She could barely stand to witness this. She couldn’t imagine how much worse it would feel to experience it firsthand.
She shifted forward on the mattress, lifting the blanket and trying to draw it up to his shoulders.
“Just lie down and get some rest, okay?”
Gripping his arms, she tried to guide him back down to the pillows. Remarkably, he let her, sliding down the mattress until his head rested beside her lap.
“Stay with me?” He was obviously exhausted. His eyes were closed, and his breathing was already deepening.
“Yes, I’ll stay,” she whispered through the tightness in her throat. “Just go to sleep. I’ll be here, I promise.”
“I’ll face the pain when I wake. Let me pretend … a moment longer …”
His voice trailed off, and his muscles relaxed.
She blew out a breath and swiped at her eyes. He was the Necromancer, and evil backstabber or not, she hated seeing such a powerful force reduced to this. She allowed herself one last moment of weakness and stroked a final piece of silver-white hair back from his pale face.
And then she stood and backed away. She would keep her promise, but she also needed to protect herself. She sank to the floor on the opposite side of the room, back against the wall.
Murmur was asleep in her bed. Because he was traumatized after having been brought back to life. Because he had been dead for nearly two days.
What the hell was her life? It was insane. Madness.
She tried to block the sympathy that filled her. She had to harden her heart.
She had cut people from her life for far less than what he’d done to her. She never forgave and she never gave second chances. She’d always been that way, and she wasn’t ashamed of it. The world was a cruel and lonely place, and she’d learned to protect herself before anyone else.
Iris had warned her that Murmur was a liar, and she had learned firsthand how true that was.
She would never be able to take him at his word again without wondering how many different ways he could twist it.
Even if he swore a vow, she could never trust him not to find some minute loophole and exploit it the second it suited him.
When he was awake, they would go their separate ways. While he’d been dead, she’d been heartbroken, and she’d let go of her anger and been willing to forgive him.
But he was alive again, which meant she wasn’t forgiving shit.
Belial landed back in the summoning seal in his office on Earth, fighting to get the rage under control. He hadn’t willingly surrendered to it in a long time. It was only his shock about what he’d just witnessed that gave him any power over it at all.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t come back as a flaming tornado, because he did. He punched several holes in the walls and swept all the contents of the desk onto the floor.
He’d just picked up said desk and hefted it overhead, ready to throw it into the punctured drywall, when Ash and Raum came bursting through the door.
He hadn’t even realized they were here. His brothers were like stray cats. He fed them once, and they just kept showing up unannounced. Luckily, it appeared Mist and Meph were elsewhere, so he only had to deal with two of them for now.
“What the hell is going on?!” Asmodeus shouted.
There was a whole lot of commotion, which Bel mostly tuned out as he threw the desk into the wall and watched it crumple, the decorative legs snapping off as it crashed back onto the floor.
And then a bucket of ice-cold water hit him in his face.
Always Raum with the goddamn water. Still, it did the trick.
Bel blinked and found himself standing in carnage, his wet hair dripping in his eyes, his brothers staring at him. He slowly regained his normal height and state of mind.
“Fuck,” he said.
Asmodeus nodded knowingly.
“What happened?” Raum asked, lowering the bucket like it was a weapon at the end of a battle.
“Murmur called in his first favor.”
Asmodeus and Raum exchanged looks. “What was it?” Raum asked.
Murmur’s stupid fucking letter hadn’t said Bel couldn’t tell anyone what he was up to after he completed the task, so he went right ahead and told them. “Remember how you used to be afraid of what would happen to demons who evolved after death?” Bel asked Asmodeus.
His brother nodded warily.
“Well, I just learned the answer to that.”
“What? How?”
Bel took a breath and started at the beginning, explaining everything—Murmur’s letter, the empty library, the portal, the stone door with the broken seal.
He told them about the Nine Rings, and the prison he’d opened.
He explained how the trapped souls had whooshed past him on their flight to freedom, and as they touched him, he’d seen glimpses of their lives and memories.
“They were all demons. I even knew some of them.” He dragged a hand through his sopping hair, pulling it back from his face.
He was glad he’d left it long after his last rage.
That would have been a waste of a haircut.
“Lucifer was keeping them trapped in the Nine Rings, locked behind some kind of seal. I think he must have been using them as a power source, feeding off them.”
“Thank fuck we didn’t die,” Raum said unhelpfully.
Bel shook his head. “Murmur wanted to kick off a war. Why else would he have had me open the door? He knew Lucifer would be able to sense me in his territory and would retaliate.”
“Fuck,” Ash said.
“But why would Murmur do that?”
“Who the fuck knows what that creep gets up to? But …” Bel looked out the window. “I felt them. The demon souls. They were miserable. And Murmur freed them. I could almost respect him for that.”
“Maybe that’s what he was really trying to achieve.”
Bel shook his head. “Guess we’ll never know, seeing as he’s probably dead now.”
“Yeahhh, about that.”
They all looked over as Meph’s head popped into the door-frame, and the rest of his body followed shortly after.
“I couldn’t help but overhear this highly stimulating conversation as I walked in the front door,” he said. “And I came because I have some news to deliver.”
“What,” Bel growled, already sure he wasn’t going to like it.
“Murmur isn’t dead. Well. He was dead. But he isn’t anymore.”
“What?” Ash, Raum, and Bel said simultaneously.
“Yeah, I just got off the phone with Iris. Suyin enlisted her and Lily’s help in a resurrection spell, and they actually pulled it off, those crazy bitches. They necromanced the Necromancer right back from the dead.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope.” Meph shook his head. “Wish I was.”
Forget respecting Murmur. Bel wasn’t free from his goddamn second favor. He wasn’t free of the fucking virus of a demon that kept popping up at all the worst times and making everyone’s life difficult. Never mind the sense of relief Bel had felt after completing Murmur’s final wish.
“I’m gonna kill that zombie freak,” Bel snarled. “And this time I’ll make sure he stays dead.”
Murmur awoke to unfamiliar smells. And quiet. The quiet was so penetrating, it stirred him from rest. It was so quiet, it felt somehow loud.
His body was surrounded by softness and warmth. The air smelled fresh, and there was a subtle scent surrounding him that was both familiar and comforting.
But the quiet. There were no screams. No voices. No fingernails scraping against the chalkboard edges of his mind. Those screams had been his constant, undying companion for millennia—as far back as his memory extended. The sudden absence of them now was disconcerting, to say the least.