5. The Fortress
THE FORTRESS
Seraphina
We anchor at the harbor, and as soon as everyone has finished throwing up, the three demons remove the other nephilim’s chains from their wings.
“Don’t try anything stupid,” Zaheer says to one of them, loud enough for all to hear.
His fingers are curled around the thickest bone of her wings, where they fuse beneath her shoulder blades into her back.
She’s shaking under his touch, and I want to slam Katana down on his wrist. “Unless you want the three of us hunting you down under the crimson sun, I suggest you glamour your pretty little wings away and keep your feet on the ground.”
“I won’t,” the female promises, and the terror in the eyes of everyone else is likely confirmation enough that they will heed his warning too.
Zaheer nods, then leads the way, heavy iron chains hanging over his shoulder.
We disembark into a harbor market, the most chaotic one I’ve ever seen. So many demons everywhere.
Some tall, some short, a mix of young and old. Some are horned, with reptilian wings on display, others are human looking, and I can't decide which is worse.
Among the crowd are wagons and market stalls lining the black, uneven stone ground, streaked with molten veins like scars from past volcanic eruptions. They remind me of the patterns on the silent demon's skin when they aren’t glowing.
It’s so loud, with merchants shouting all sorts of things over the clash of drills coming from the beach further along the shoreline. From bartering over their goods, to praise for our captors like they are a big deal around here, or at least respected.
The laughing demon falls into step beside me, his left arm skimming my right, making me bristle. Then he pulls down his hood and I wince. A line of brutal scars mars the skin on his face, covering his entire left cheek.
You are hardly in a position to judge someone for their scars.
“Oh, don’t mind that,” he laughs, catching me looking.
“Ravi got excited. She was only a pup at the time.” A pup?
I frown up at him, trying to work out what kind of pup could cause so much damage.
Is he talking about the same ‘mutt’ he was so desperate to get home to?
“Still is really. She didn’t know any better yet. ”
“Like fuck she didn’t.”
The voice is new, a low tone, full of annoyance. I realize it belongs to the silent demon.
I glance at him to see if he looks like the Devil I picture him to be, but find he hasn’t made any move to pull back his hood like the other two have.
“Give her to me and I’ll have the bitch tamed in a day.”
Here I was, waiting for him to say something loud enough for me to hear. Now I wish he hadn’t bothered.
“Yeah, yeah. I know,” the laughing one replies. “You’ve said it a hundred times, but luckily for Ravi, I would never be so cruel.”
I rub at my temples. Everything about the demons since we came through the hellgate has been… confusing, at best. To make things worse, aside from the scars, dare I even think it… the laughing demon is… handsome?
For a demon.
His hair is curly, kept in place by a leather ribbon he’s tied it back with, and his physique reminds me of my seraphim half-brothers. Tall and broad and chiseled like a weapon that’s ready to be wielded at a moment's notice.
Unlike my half-brothers, who are pale like their mother and wear linen tunics of earthy greens, beiges and white, he’s dressed in all black leather, with golden brown skin and dark smoke-like runes decorating the parts of his arms that are showing.
I shake my head, halting the thoughts in their tracks.
“Ravi?” I ask, clearing my throat when my voice breaks.
He grins and his eyes, a warm swirl of milk chocolate brown, swim with obvious pride. My stomach twists in a way that I’m not even close to comfortable with, and I picture non-existent jagged horns on his forehead instead, which seems to do the trick.
“Yes. Ravi, or Ravioli, in full,” he clarifies. “Hounds are much easier to deal with than women, you see. Even the bitches. Trust me.”
His eyes search the stone wall beyond the crowd until his face truly lights up.
“Ahh, look, here she comes now.”
Following his gaze, I swallow.
Hard.
I’ve heard stories of hellhounds. Monstrous beasts with eyes like burning coals and breath that smells of brimstone. They’re said to hunt souls and devour anything in their path, dead or living.
So, when I see one leap over the stone wall that marks the edge of the harbor market, I have to rub my eyes with the backs of my hands because they must be deceiving me.
Then my blood turns to ice.
The demon called her a pup, though that does little to calm my thumping heart.
The creature has limbs like a dog but is the size of a small cow.
It’s wrong in every possible sense of the word.
Its fur shimmers black and red, as though fire burns beneath its skin.
Its teeth would fit better in the mouth of a monster that lives in the sea.
It’s a wonder the dripping wet tongue hanging from its jaws isn’t sliced clean off.
Smoke curls from its paws each time they strike the bumpy stone ground, and the crowd scatters in an instant.
People shriek, stalls topple, baskets of fruit roll away in every direction. I should run too, but my legs won’t obey.
Instead, I stand frozen, watching as the deadly hell beast bounds straight through the chaos, tail whipping behind it like a torch in the wind, heading our way.
It darts between barrels, skids under a cart, and, to my horror, snatches something from a merchant’s stall.
The merchant yells, shaking his fist. “Yuvi, put that damn hound on a leash!”
A leash? A cage forged of iron wouldn’t hold it.
“Sorry, Shiv!” Yuvi says, then holds up his hands in front of his chest. “Easy girl. Easy. Slow down. Slow down!” Then looking at the no-longer-silent demon, he shrugs. “She’s missed me, that’s all. She’s excited.”
I don’t miss the sweat on his brow or the nervous edge to his voice.
Rather than argue, the other demon takes a silent step forward, cutting directly into the hellhound’s path to its owner.
He holds up a hand.
Ravi stops dead in her tracks.
They stare at each other for several long seconds until Ravi drops the stolen pheasant at the demon’s feet.
He kicks it away, back toward the grateful looking merchant, then drops into a crouch and begins to… I blink, because surely he isn’t scratching the beast behind the ears?
There’s no way the soft purr of a laugh that comes from the demon’s chest is not a figment of my imagination either.
“Good girl,” the hellhound whispering demon murmurs under his breath and lets out that rumbling chuckle again.
When he stands, and Ravi moves, everything has changed. She walks with calm controlled purpose, her teeth covered, her tongue no longer dangling out of her mouth.
Masking the fear coiling inside me as the hound brushes past me to Yuvi, I force my shoulders to straighten, but feel the journal suddenly move at my hip.
Don’t fall. Don’t fall.
I bend over like I’m going to throw up again and mutter something about sea sickness as I tuck it back in.
“You do look like shit, to be fair,” the I-wish-he-was-still-silent demon says.
Charming.
I ignore the insult. It isn’t important. My father needs to hear about this, and the journal is the only way. I have to tell him about the nephilim being sold, about my suspicions of the Sisters. The island, the hellgates, keeping hellhounds for pets.
All of it.
Hell has many gates.
We just walked through another of them, only this time it was a solid metal one at least.
Vulcaris’ interior is nothing like what the brutal climb to it had foreshadowed.
From the ship, the mountains had seemed more modest, but their semi-circle around the island proved to have been very deceptive from sea. With every step closer, they’d somehow stretched both taller and farther away.
Zaheer told us we would be heading for the two volcanos in the middle of the island, flanking the red sun that melted the fortress beneath it. He’d warned about the ash too, how it came down thicker the closer we got to Vulcaris.
“Completely harmless,” he’d said.
Despite his words, I still flinched every time a fleck of it landed on me.
It didn’t matter that it didn't burn, that it was already cool by the time it reached us—it was still a constant reminder of how far I’d come from home.
And it was everywhere, too, covering the paths between tents, the bridge, Vulcaris itself, turning everything into a strange, shimmering silver-black.
I spent a lot of the hike silently observing the eleven nephilim and trio of demons, keeping half an eye on their movements and listening to their conversations.
Unlike the nephilim, who spent the hike looking like they were permanently on the brink of passing out, the demons were unnervingly graceful, hardly breaking a sweat despite passing eleven sets of heavy iron chains between them for the duration.
The hellhound on the other hand... she was plain unnerving.
For some unknown reason, Ravi had taken to walking beside me no matter how many times Yuvi called her to heel, much to my horror and the other two demons' amusement.
I tried to pretend she wasn’t there and fixated on the red sun, watching how it slowly slid toward the Western volcano as the evening approached.
I’m not looking forward to that, to the darkness that will come with it, but as we’d crossed the bridge, the setting sun and shadow from the volcanoes were a welcome respite from the suffocating heat.
As much as it pains me to admit, the bridge itself was kind of incredible. An expanse of black stone, impossibly long and straight, as though an ancient God had laid it down with a single precise gesture.
At the end of the bridge, we walked through towering iron gates and the fortress had fully revealed itself. Vulcaris’ walls stretched on for miles, so seamlessly fused to the volcanic cliffs that I hadn’t been able to tell where crafted stone ended and living mountain began.