25. Chapter 25 #3
As they loved to fight in life, so they’ll continue the fight through eternity, It said. Malicious people wind up here. The violent and the wrathful can tear each other apart forever for the amusement of the demons. They bet on the outcomes. Fury loves gambling. Fighting, too.
Not all the humans are fighting. I had noted many mud-slicked bodies wallowing at the edges of each pit. I had taken them for lumps of muck until a demon passing by stomped, to a gale of laughter, on one and the protuberance gave a reluctant sort of jerk.
Those who wallowed in unspent rage can continue wallowing for eternity. There are many types of wrath, sweetheart. Some spent their lives seething in silence. You see the bubbles in the mud? The breath of those who sunk so deep they’ll never have a hope of getting to the surface.
I hadn’t noticed until he’d pointed it out, but now I saw bubbles everywhere. Pop pop pop from every angle, from the corners of my eye, at the edges of the demon’s feet. Pop. Glug. How many gagged beneath the surface?
You’re looking for someone. I’d noticed the subtle way he’d been guiding my eyes.
My uncle. I spent a lot of time here with him. But I don’t see him.
They had blades at what seemed like every inch of their bodies, the demons.
They wore no armor or even shirts but decorated themselves with steel, belts slung round hips and crisscrossing the hard muscles of their backs, their hair shorn close to their scalps.
Each bore evidence of fighting, scars thick and ridged as adders or neat white slices.
They paid not a whit of attention to those of us lingering beneath the stone arch of their circle, and I flinched when something poked me in the back.
“Move,” the green-eyed demon barked. “Unless you’d like to join them in the mud?”
I didn’t answer but I moved, guiding Jessa along with me toward the next staircase.
What finger did he jab you with, It asked idly. I want to cut it off.
You hate him that much?
He’s a pathetic asshole who doesn’t have the talent to work in a circle so he lords what little power he’s got over whoever he can, he reeled off.
I don’t love the damned but that’s hardly a reason to knock them around the antechamber.
And he’s not even good at his job if we managed to get to Jessa in the first place.
He accused me of murder not long before I was cursed and I gave him that scar across his face.
Murder?
Do I need to say it? he huffed. I didn’t kill anyone.
The temperature grew colder during the descent.
The torch flames shivered in icy drafts; the stone walls gradually began to glitter with frost. Gooseflesh coated my exposed skin and it wasn’t long before the rest of me pricked up with it, too.
My teeth started to chatter well before the noise of any Frost activity floated up the staircase.
But we had been descending for a while, hadn’t we? Why had no sound reached us yet?
You won’t hear noise from Frost. The damned are denied even the release of weeping in that circle.
The cold felt like needles; needles or knives or fire tearing through my thin layer of insubstantial mortal flesh. The kind of cold that sank into marrow, nestling deep. A bitter chill I didn’t think I’d survive much exposure to.
I doubt they’ll let you freeze.
That seems the most elegant solution. I won’t last fifteen minutes in there. I’ll drop dead and Jessa will be free.
Jessa would be free, but her power may be forever weakened.
She might never know the scope of her own magic.
It forges a strange bond, when a demon’s true name is known to a mortal.
She’s vulnerable now in ways demons rarely are, and if you die in there from spite that bond will turn on her somehow.
You’ll release the girl once you and I are separated.
That’s your barter. It’s the only play you have, and it’s a good one.
But she’ll never be truly free if I know her name.
Do you plan on ever using it to bring harm to her? To make her do anything at all?
Of course not.
I felt him shrug as if I’d proven his point.
Then there you go. It doesn’t happen often where humans learn demonic true names, but whenever the human has been dealt with in a permanent, lethal way, the demon finds him or herself…
lacking. Powers weakened. Stunted somehow.
Powers that go haywire and can’t be accessed reliably, which has occasionally resulted in the death of the demon.
Our older crowd seems to have come to a consensus that it’s just one of God’s cruel jokes.
A punishment for killing one of his pets.
I know her well, and I doubt that’s a risk Frost’s regent will take.
And I’m sure she’ll just take my word for it that I’ll never harm her daughter.
Me, a human she’s never met. The heel of my boot skidded across a thin sheet of ice upon the stair.
I had to reach out for the frozen wall to regain my balance, my heart thudding in my throat. Does this staircase ever end?
But as soon as I’d said it, another landing materialized beneath a frozen archway. The icy gray stone was luminous beneath a pale, phosphorescent glow.