All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (29 page)

The first of the
damned—Poe thought it the one who’d come over the side
to get her—hit the demon broadside and bounced off. Abaddon
turned his attention away from his foe lying defenseless beneath his
foot and drew back his thickly muscled arm to swat away the
disturbing pest, but the rest washed over him like a wave on a
beach.

A hundred damned
souls swarmed over the demon, their collective force throwing him
off balance before he struck back, before he could sink his talon
into Poe’s jugular vein. The mob flowed over the angel, feet
brushing against her arms, her legs, her torso, but none of them
doing damage. Chains clanked and banged, the demon howled, the
damned chanted.

“
P.”

“
Oh.”

“
P.”

“
Oh.”

With effort, Poe
turned her head in time to see the mass of gray bodies topple over
the edge, a few patches of the demon’s black skin showing
through the throng as they rode him into the depths of the abyss.

The chant, the
chains, the demon’s howl receded into the pit.

“
Thank
you,” Poe whispered, her breath stirring dust into the air,
then she lowered her head and closed her eyes.

†‡†

The sky was dark
when Poe woke, darker than before. She lay still for a minute,
listening to the sound of nothingness, breathing quietly through her
mouth. No sounds of feet shuffling, no wings beating the air, no
accursed voices chanting her name. Nothing. After what seemed an
appropriate amount of time and caution, she rolled on to her back
and immediately regretted it.

Every muscle and
joint in her body cried uncle. Her head throbbed.

“
Ohhh.”

The groan escaped
her lips without permission and she squashed it immediately for fear
something might lay in wait for her in the silence, biding its time
until she regained consciousness.

Nothing responded
to her inadvertent lament.

She stared up at
the clouds for a while. Every few minutes, a bolt of lightning
jumped across them, flashing brief respite in the darkness before
disappearing, leaving a green streak in her vision. She breathed
deep, thankful to draw breath, thankful for life in spite of the
pain in her body.

Trevor!

She sat up suddenly
and it felt like her brain slapped against the inside of her
forehead with the movement. Ignoring it, she struggled to her feet.

“
Trevor!”

Poe circled,
shuffling her feet, then remembered where she’d come to rest.
She looked down, located the edge of the chasm, and shambled away a
few steps to a safer locale. The leg of her pants was stiff with her
own blood, the leg beneath stiffer with the gash the demon’s
talon had torn in it. She grimaced with the effort.

“
Trevor!”

Her voice echoed
across the empty plain and disappeared into the distant dark. Panic
filled her head, pushing the pain aside. Concern roiled in her gut,
energized her limbs. She hadn’t wanted the boy to come but,
truthfully, she’d been glad he did. She’d welcomed the
company and the possibility he could convince his father to give up
his silly ideas of coming to Hell to save a few possibly mistaken
damned.

Would he have
knowingly traded his son’s life to save them?

The answer was no,
but he hadn’t brought the teenager, she had.

Her fault.

“
Trevor!”

A flash of
lightning punctuated her words, lit the sky and the bleak landscape,
showed her its emptiness. Her gaze strayed to the edge of the abyss
and she wondered if he’d gone over the edge.

No. He couldn’t
have.

Poe set her jaw,
teeth clenched tight, and limped away from the precipice, injured
leg dragging in the dirt behind her. She didn’t know if Trevor
still lived, if he wandered through Hell or ended up at the bottom
of Abaddon’s pit, but she couldn’t stay here wondering.

If he was out
there, if he lived, she’d find him.

“
Trevor!”

A clap of thunder
echoed across the plains of Hell.

Bruce
Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost

I took a right and
came within inches of walking into a wall at another dead end.

“
Goddamn
it.”

Not the first dead
end I’d encountered since Dominic trapped me in the maze and,
unfortunately, probably not the last, either. I took a step back and
peered along the corridor I’d most recently traversed and
thought I saw movement.

I hurried toward it
and came to another dead end where I stopped and looked at the wall,
touched it, felt the solid stone.

This wasn’t
here before.

A surety that the
labyrinth didn’t play fair rose in me. It moved and changed
behind me, manipulating the path I could choose. No matter what I
did, the maze determined where I ended up.

It was herding me.

I thought back to
the little bit of mythology I’d read—most of it stolen
during furtive trips to the library when I sneaked away from Father
Dominic’s watchful eye. Daedelus built the labyrinth to
contain the half-man, half-bull minotaur kept by King Minos. The
king fed the beast by sending unsuspecting victims into the maze.

I shivered.

No way for me to
know if a minotaur, or worse, lurked somewhere in the twisting,
frustrating corridors, but I needed to get out. Somewhere else in
Hell, my son might be in trouble. Once, not long ago, I’d have
trusted Poe to have his best interests at heart but may have doubted
her ability to keep him safe in spite of her designation as a
guardian angel. Now I doubted both.

I went left—the
only available option—trotted twenty yards, then came to a
fork, deliberated for a second, and took the path to the right for
no deeper reason than I had to go one way or the other. The fork led
to a T, where I went left this time, followed it to a right hand
turn, went ten yards to another right and walked into another dead
end.

Frustrated, I
slapped my hand against the wall and the pain it caused made me
immediately regret the action.

“
Damn
you, Dominic,” I cried toward the gray sky and the irony of my
words perched me on the edge of laughing—I’d already
taken care of that. If I could have sent him to Hell again, I’d
have done it.

The thought did
nothing to make me feel better about Trevor’s safety.

I backtracked, ran
into a wall which wasn’t there before. Left, right, left,
left, dead end.

“
Fuck.”

Went back, took a
left where I’d taken a right before. Left, left, left. A long
corridor of unbroken wall stretched before me. I jogged down it,
ribs hurting with each stride, a reminder of the priest’s shoe
contacting my midsection. The corridor ended in another
intersection. I decided to go left because it worked out the last
few times. I went a few paces and stopped, listening.

Running water.

I thought the sound
came from somewhere ahead but, with so many walls to bounce it
around, the source might have been anywhere. With little choice, I
continued on, the gurgling water making me realize I’d become
thirsty, parched, without realizing.

Every step forward
brought a new level of dryness to my mouth. I licked my lips with a
tongue which felt like a dusting cloth. Swallowing became a labor. I
stumbled down the corridor, pausing each time I came to another
corridor to listen, attempting to discern from where the promise of
water came.

Straight past two
turns, then left. I lumbered fifteen yards and took a right. Each
time I turned a corner and didn’t find water, desperation
built in me. The virtual desiccation of my mouth made me forget
Trevor and his plight, Poe and her possible transgressions. Nothing
mattered in my world anymore other than quenching a thirst which
grew bigger by the second, overtaking everything.

My steps faltered.
My right foot caught up in my left and I fell to the ground, face
first. Dust kicked up and found its way past my lips making my
impossibly dry mouth impossibly dryer. I hacked a weak cough but,
without the aid of saliva, it did nothing to clear the grit from my
tongue. The tiny amount of spit I developed turned the dust to
sticky paste and I climbed to my feet, smacking my lips like a kid
who’d jammed too much peanut butter into his mouth, and
lurched forward.

My head spun as I
tried to remember the last time I’d taken a drink: of water,
of vodka, soda, anything. It had been so long, the memory escaped
me.

Have I ever had
a drink?

I
must have. I wouldn’t have made it to almost forty without
drinking
something.
Whatever I drank, whenever it happened, eluded me completely.

I staggered around
another corner, legs threatening to falter again, and saw it: a
fountain carved of marble, its height and beauty worthy of a palace.
I wouldn’t have cared had it been a urinal.

I stumbled toward
it, fell, swallowed more dirt, scrambled to my feet. The few yards
between me and the water spouting out of the top of the fountain to
careen into the first bowl, then the second and finally the bottom
seemed impossibly far. I willed my legs to push on no matter how my
thighs burned.

Waterwaterwaterwaterwater.

My swollen tongue
sandpapered across chapped lips as I rushed toward the life-giving
liquid without getting any closer. A dust cloud rose around me,
churned into the air by my useless steps. This was exactly what Hell
was about.

I stopped running,
my level of frustration reaching the point of giving up. My eyelids
slid closed and I attempted to breathe deep through nostrils clogged
with dust. It didn’t work, so I opened my mouth and sucked a
breath down my constricted throat.

My tongue tasted
the water.

My jaw snapped
shut, cutting off the freshness that teased me, threatened to drive
me mad. I drew another halting breath, filtering the temptation of
the unreachable water with my teeth. It didn’t help. A
coolness flowed across my tongue with each gasp of air. Behind my
closed eyes, I pictured the mist kicked up by Niagara Falls, a
stream flowing through a forest, a bottle of water which, if you
read its name backwards, spells naive.

My hands started to
shake. My knees quivered. I concentrated on stopping these things
without success; my mind resorted to any vision of water it could
conjure: diving into a pool, brushing my teeth, fishing, flushing a
toilet. In my head, I watched the water swirl around the porcelain
bowl, round and round, until it disappeared and didn’t refill.

“
No,”
I croaked and fell to my knees. “No.”

I tipped forward,
expecting to fall to the ground and suck more dust and dirt into my
esophagus, hoping it would be enough to put me out of my misery.
Instead, my forearms struck a hard surface eighteen inches above
where the ground should have been.