31. Chapter 31
It took the souls in there a minute to realize what I’d done. His voice sounded flushed, quick and strained. When the fogs inside started thinning with all the fresh air, they all came stumbling out.
I couldn’t find words for a moment, staring off into the wood in blind amazement. You freed every soul damned to the In Between? What, as some kind of protest?
Demon children squealing from somewhere behind me; they sounded like any other children back in Monde’s End. I felt like I was on another planet.
I wanted to get the attention of the asshole who killed my father. I wanted him to come down and do something about the breakout. A humorless laugh. That’s not something they can just ignore. It would wreak havoc. He would have had to come deal with it, and when he came, I’d kill him.
You keep saying come down; come down from where? I asked, but I thought I had an inkling what he was implying.
An impatient noise, the sort he made when I didn’t let him have his way. He’s an angel, Des.
I let the thought clatter to the floor of my mind, feeling starry-eyed with the idiocy, the presumption.
An upsurge of sympathy for the whole impulsive mess of six-years-ago him.
Heedless and angry and shockingly thoughtless.
As if it were so easy to kill an angel. Just cause a disturbance, call him down.
It’s not like they had wings or anything, a quick escape hatch.
I wanted to go back in time and shake him.
Why would an angel kill your father?
I think he saw something he shouldn’t have and would have brought it to the council if he hadn’t been murdered.
He was out in the grounds one night picking a moonflower for his lady of the evening.
Apparently when he came back to give it to her, he’d told her he’d seen signs of an angel down by the In Between.
He’d thought it odd because it was. We run Hell and the In Between, not them.
Then I noticed the coin disparity in the ferryman’s boat and checked the death scrolls in some divine tower this angel keeps.
The numbers didn’t add up. I started keeping a log, documenting everything.
Who even knows how long it had been going on.
The ferryman’s hands were made to handle souls bound for the In Between.
He’d have had to be involved. An angel can’t just pluck up a soul and be off with them, and we’ve always left the In Between to the ferryman.
It doesn’t take a genius and it runs itself, practically.
The doors weren’t kept locked. Only the ferryman or a demon could open them.
I watched a weak breeze thread through grass like a serpent. What would an angel want with souls damned to the In Between? Aren’t they mostly nonbelievers or people not bad enough for Hell?
I think he was picking and choosing who deserved a second chance.
Very specific parameters of the missing souls.
They all came from typical “good, pious” families.
They all had enough money to build fancy little altars to the angel in question.
It’s not up to an angel to decide who gets another chance and who can rot.
They all get another chance or they all walk the fogs.
This is basic fairness, Des; they were all nonbelievers, they all read the same Book, they all discarded it.
He was turning me cold with his anger. Why should some of them be delivered to a new body?
And what happens to the souls who would have been when he forces the stolen ones into an unborn child?
They just get unmade, shoved out? It’s fucking outrageous.
And how do you know for sure this—I cast about for the right words; looked up to find the hellhound’s head tipped toward me, one bright scarlet eye glowing down—this soul-bandit angel killed your father?
His voice was so loud and dazzling in my head I had to fight a flinch. Because I fucking saw it!
Don’t you yell at me. My pulse ticked in my temples. I’m trying to understand, I’m not calling you a liar.
An icy tingle in my legs; he was asking me to stand. Maybe I can show you.
I didn’t move, afraid of being tackled by the hound if I took so much as a step away from the meadow.
We’re not leaving the grounds, he said. Come on.
The hellhound watched as I set off, but it didn’t follow.
Remy led me toward the cliff bank in a long, easy stride that wasn’t mine, along a narrow path hemmed by dead grass near the far edge of Hell, where a steep stone staircase led down to the In Between.
At the bottom, a silver moat met gravel beneath a stone archway, and a set of gates stood just beyond it.
The In Between itself hung off of Hell like some tumorous growth, ugly and lumpy where the dome of Hell was smooth. I had no wish to approach it.
It happened right there, Remy said, pointing with my finger.
Right at the bottom of the stairs. Late, when a judgement session was well underway.
I was in the antechamber and I saw my father pass by, outside the gates.
I meant to catch up to him because I hadn’t seen him all day, but Marcic held me up.
He’s the head of Hell’s guard; he can make life difficult for you if he doesn’t like you.
And by the time I made it outside, my father was already dying.
And nobody else saw this? A whole Hell full of demons, and this had gone unnoticed? It didn’t make sense. Hell should have been in an uproar.
My eyes flicked out of focus and suddenly the world darkened.
A pair of pale hands pulling apart the gates of Hell, slamming them shut.
A voice I’d never heard before calling out across the dark, empty grounds, passing grumbling hellhounds, gaze swinging this way and that as he made for the cliff bank of the river.
From the right, a blaze of blinding light, as if the sun burst through the omnipresent clouds over Hell. It shocked him, brought him up short, his hair blown about in the loud, rushing beats of wind, then nothing. Everything over in a second, less than that.
Blurry darkness, footsteps pounding, stomach swooping, like when you’re going downstairs at speed. Mind emptying at what lay at the foot of the staircase, like a great gale had swept through and cleaned out the cobwebs. It didn’t make sense and then it made the most horrible sort of sense.
The kind of gasp that you know, instinctively and intrinsically, means something has gone terribly wrong.
Shouting that he knew was coming from him but felt miles away.
A rising crescendo of hounds howling in response.
Feet jarring as he jumped the last few steps.
A prone demon on the ground; a yawning chest wound which was somehow leaking both light and blood; a face, death-pale with slow-blinking eyes.
He was trying to speak though nothing emerged from his lips but a dark dribble as the light from the wound shimmered feebly and died.
Don’t move, don’t move, I’ll—then a hand clamping down on Remy’s shoulder. Spinning around, Marcic’s scarless face swimming through the darkness, thick earthworm lips twisting around words that made no sense; what have you done and little bastard and death judgement.
I closed my eyes as the memory melted away, and my mind then conjured some images of its own. Autumn leaves sinking beneath winter snows, springs exploding into summer; all those years curling in on themselves, and he could have told me all this; he could have told me anything—
You should have told me, I thought, startlingly angry. I’m not saying I could have waved a wand and made it better but I’ve had losses, too. You’re not the only one who’s ever found themselves drowning in grief.
And then I blinked into daylight but there was a hand on my shoulder now, and when I turned it was to find Marcic himself leering down at me like the echo of a nightmare.
“Is that why you’re back?” he hissed. “Come to free another crop of souls?”
I was shoving him back before I realized I was doing it; whether from Remy’s compulsion or my own instinct, I couldn’t tell.
A hand scrabbling at the buttons on my chest, plunging in blindly for the blade tucked away, though what use would it be when Marcic was armored?
My best option was to run, though I didn’t get far.
Marcic corrected from his stumble and flew at me, had me flat on my back in an instant.
My bones jarred from the impact with the cliff bank, teeth rattling in my head.
I could hardly breathe, crushed beneath his weight, his heavy armor.
When my hand lashed out, blade aimed for a sliver of throat, the only bit of Marcic’s accessible skin, he slammed my wrist to the earth.
“What will happen to you if I throw her into the river?” he asked through the hellhound jaws, poisonous green eyes boring through mine to glare at Remy. “Maybe you’ll drift like all the damned you let loose.”
I could feel Remy struggling to push him off, twisting enough to see that no help was coming. A hound lurked at the edges of the confrontation, head bowed, though it didn’t seem inclined to intervene. Remy used my tongue to say something to it, and it tossed its head nervously.
“It won’t obey some little bitch it doesn’t know,” Marcic spat.
“My mother will—”
“I’m not afraid of your mother, boy.”
Open air met the back of my head. It dangled off the cliff bank, over the river of the In Between.
If I didn’t die in the water of rapid old age, I would die of frostbite, because I was cold all over from the fight Remy was putting up.
Knee to Marcic’s metal-coated groin, arm struggling out from under his gloved fingers.
But he was limited in my body, his strength at half-mast. Not enough to throw Marcic off.
A bright white crack; Marcic howling with a sudden shock of pain. The side of his face crusted with frost, one eye ice blue and dead-looking. He pulled back enough for me to draw in a deep breath, but my legs remained pinned beneath his weight, the bulk of his heavy armor.
Mother, Remy grunted, as if she were locked up in my head right beside him, if you can hear me—
Marcic’s weight disappeared. It was there and then it wasn’t, and a fresh howl rent the air. An ominous crackling; a whoosh of sudden flame; a well-mannered, black-humored voice calling over the screams spiraling to the sky.
“I’m sorry,” the voice said. “I really can’t allow you to manhandle my brother’s host.”