Crossed (20 page)

He smiles mirthlessly. “I know what I said. And before you say it, I didn’t lie. My every wicked whim
was
satisfied.” His jaw flexes. “But so were
theirs
.” He looks at me finally and his eyes burn, reiterating the story carved in ridges of scar tissue. “And I was a child among monsters.”

I open my mouth to speak but it’s as dry as the landscape.

“Still want your honesty?” The dead smile is back.

“I—I’m sorry.” Well, damn.

“I don’t want your pity,” he snarls. He drags his mouth into a vicious smile, his eyes lit with a furious light. “Do you know what I traded my soul for? Come, can’t you guess?”

I can’t guess, but the Hunger can. It senses the bloody theme of the as-yet untold story and gives a giddy little shudder in anticipation.

“Revenge,” he says succinctly. “The demons who tortured me, the ones who made me their special pet, became my pets in return.” The sick smile is still in place. “They taught me everything they knew about pain, about terror.” He leans in. “If their screams were any indication, the student surpassed the masters.” He pulls back. “So don’t pity me. I don’t want your pity.” He turns sharply and starts down the road again, leaving me standing there. “Pity
them
.”

Ahead, a bizarre structure arcs over the wide road. A towered and turreted stone building on the left shoots upward then bends over the road where it clashes with a modern-looking disaster made of glass and steel. Where they meet, the castle-looking structure bulges, swelling around the glass. It looks like Hogwarts is attempting to devour London’s Shard.

Armand seems to have wrestled his fury under control, and his words come out clipped, almost emotionless. “These two have been dueling it out for decades,” he says in response to my open-mouthed stare. “Convenient for us.” As we walk beneath it, it creaks ominously and a sprinkle of glass tinkles on the pavement to the left. Armand slows after two more blocks, then cuts down an alley. At its end is an aged door, weathered wood with long, decorative wrought-iron hinges. As we get closer, I notice that instead of forming some abstract filigree or stylized flora, the hinges are enormous splayed hands. The palm is small, delicate, but the fingers are long and knobby, topped with claw-length nails. As I watch one outreached finger lifts and strokes the door like a lover. No door has ever screamed DO NOT ENTER as loudly as this one.

“Go ahead,” Armand nods to Jo without looking at her. “Open it.”

If Jo feels any similar reservations to mine, her face doesn’t betray them. She stalks forward and, with a wrench, pulls it open.

SEVENTEEN

We step into a busy hall, cavernous, and constructed of blue-black marble. Along the wall to either side are more doors like ours, with people stepping through them. The outer walls curve over us to join into entwined twisted fingers over our head. Grasped in the tangled nest of their knobby fingers is an enormous chandelier that looks like a purple octopus with its tentacles splayed wide. Sharp shards of glass protrude from the walls in sparkling clusters, like quarts from a cave wall, except deadly. The crowds is more formally dressed than we saw in the city and move with purpose towards a set of arched doors across the hall, giving the room the feel of a train terminal, one with its older elegance still maintained, like Paddington Station, or Grand Central. Except, of course, evil.

A man materializes in the doorway behind us, and halts just short of running into us, before slipping to the side. He’s beautiful, of course, with the fine-drawn features of an aristocrat. He wears a black satin tux and top hat, but without a shirt underneath, revealing a smooth, muscular chest. Instead of a bow tie, however, peeping between the lapels of his jacket is the rough black of an iron collar.

“A soul?” I look closer and see more collars, carefully, slightly exposed. Understated, but always apparent, if you knew what to look for.

“This is a party for the souls who managed to claw their way to the top. The ones capable of ingratiating themselves to the demons. Souls who have done things, terrible things . . .” Armand shudders slightly. “Well, demons are hard to impress, and most people would squirm, even those who live here, to do what it takes to succeed.” He slants a sideways look at a woman with a sleek, sidling walk that screams
predator
. “In the real world they were wolves among sheep, and they did the sort of things that landed them here. Here they are wolves among wolves . . .” He lets the thought trail, then ends it with a shrug. “Watch yourself.”

“Because I had other plans,” I mutter, eyeing the river of enemies pouring around me. We move towards the big doors. Growing louder as we approach the door is the sound of distant music, sharp laughter, and clinking glasses.

We step through the doorways and the source of the noise becomes immediately apparent. We stand in a large room, like a foyer, with hallways and staircases spinning off in every direction. Immediately to our left, however, the foyer opens into a ballroom. I can’t see the entire length of it, but it’s at least the size of a football field. The ceiling soars skyward, arching into a dome many stories above us. The very center of the dome is glass, revealing a circular patch of yellow sky like a loathsome eyeball looking down on us all. Musicians from different eras play in different corners, and, at the entrance, they clash in a discordant jumble that hurts my ears. All around us demons and the chosen souls who made it to the top dance wildly, writhing and screaming, splashing the drinks clasped in their hands. Androgynous mouthless souls who aren’t so lucky slide between the partygoers carrying platters of food and drink. Their eyes are downcast in a hopeless effort to avoid becoming the focus of the fickle amusement of the trashed demons and monstrous souls.

“Welcome to the Politician’s Ball,” Armand says, not without irony.

“The Politician’s Ball?”

His mouth bends in a mirthless smile. “Of course. Who else would you expect to succeed in hell?”

Jo tosses an arm around my shoulders and opens her mouth, but before she can speak a gong clashes painfully loud and the music grinds to a jarring halt. Jo’s arm tightens on my shoulder and she nods at a grand staircase that wraps the length of the room from either direction, meeting in the center to lead down to the dance floor. At the landing where the two staircases join, there stands the most terrifying creature I have ever seen.

His face is a mass of living, writhing red and black raised tattoos that look like worms wriggling under his flesh. Horns erupt from his skull in a wreath about his crown, the yellow-brown color of rotten teeth. His eyes are solid black and his body, held unnaturally still, is muscular beyond all sense and reason.

This then, was where the popular images devils came from.

But it is more than just his appearance that makes him horrible. It is the darkness in him, as if he swallows light itself, sucks it towards him and devours it like a black hole. He breathes in suddenly, a hissing, rasping sound, and I feel my very soul lean toward him, and I know, I
know
, that he is tasting my emotions and those of everyone in the room. The walls shudder with that terrible inhalation. Beside me, Jo gasps.

My father, my nemesis to date, is nothing. Nothing but a petty, pretty prince compared to this. Laughable that I ever feared him. Until this moment, fear is not an emotion I really understood.

When he speaks, it is a voice filled with echoes. A voice that is deep and layered and packed with such malevolence that I can’t help but tremble.

“Welcome.”

One word, but it is enough to turn my innards to jelly.

“Zi-Ben,” Armand explains, his accent thick, and I know I am not the only one affected. “The ruler here.”

“I gathered,” I say faintly, lacking the courage to imbue it with the sarcasm I intended. Did I really once laugh at the idea of the Mayor of Demonville?

After a dramatic pause, Zi-Ben takes the arm of a withered beauty. She doesn’t flinch when he touches her, but I do. Her eyes, a startling blue, look dead. He escorts her down the stairs and, wordlessly, the crowd splits like water before a ship’s keel, as he takes her onto the dance floor. The woman, a soul by the jeweled choker at her neck, has large sunken eyes and full lips perched between hollow cheeks. Her blonde hair is elaborately arranged in a style that would be at home in the court of Marie Antoinette’s, but the hair is so thin from malnourishment it reveals her shiny scalp.

Her head hangs cocked, limp on a spindly neck. The pale fingers of one hand tangle in the full skirt of her black mesh gown, but she doesn’t lift it up. Her other hand rests in zi-Ben’s hand. The band nearest to the staircase strikes up and zi-Ben whisks her around the floor as if waltzing with the belle of the ball rather than dragging a barely-living corpse.

I stare with a sick fascination, inexplicably drawn to the odd couple. As they sweep by, her eyes flick to mine, as if I’d called her name. Her eyes are bottomless, fathomless. The places she has gone, the things she has done, every clawing step she’s taken to reach her current heights carved out a bit more of her soul. I see nothing there, nothing but a howling emptiness. She blinks, and the vision disappears, the blue orbs nothing but the beautiful eyes of a dead china doll.

“Meda, come on,” Jo hisses and I snap to attention. She tugs me away from the scene to a corner where Chi and Armand wait.

“We should split up, search as fast as possible,” Armand says, voice low and eyes shifting to make sure we’re not overheard. “We’ll meet back here, periodically.”

“What exactly are we looking for?” Chi asks.

“I have no idea.”

“
No idea?
” Jo demands.

“There are
thousands
of souls locked up.” Armand doesn’t bother hide his exasperation. “It’s not exactly going to be inconspicuous. I think you’ll know it when you see it.”

Jo looks like she’d like to return his sarcasm in kind, but, in a rare display of self-restraint, manages to contain it.

I’m leery of separating, but I don’t see an alternative. The building is enormous. Roughly circular, with the Pit at its center, the surrounding building is acres thick and many stories high, with the same hellish architectural style of an Acheron—built to frustrate, confuse and generally piss people off. Rationally I understand that the longer we’re here the more likely we are to get caught, and realistically, even the four of us together don’t stand a chance in a fight against the hundreds of demons, maybe thousands, surrounding us.

Still, as I start up the stairs to my assigned quadrant, I am filled with a misgiving as strong as when zi-Ben appeared on the stairs.

The building is the main administrative building, and the center portion contains the Pit—the day job (if there was an actual day and night) of the demons present—so with all those demons in addition to those sneaking from the party to find some privacy, there are plenty of demons roaming the halls. I put on the kind of expression that says
bother-me-and-die
and stomp through the place like I own it.

I meander through hallways, opening doors, poking in corridors. I remember the way back by blindly memorizing turns as my sense of direction is quickly confounded by the twists, turns and elevation changes that could only be crafted by a creature of hell.

I pull open a rounded door, and the howl and heat coming from the other side is so sudden that if I wasn’t holding onto the handle I would have fallen backwards. It takes only a moment to realize what I’ve stumbled upon.

The Pit.

In front of me is a wide thoroughfare. I’m sure it is rounded around the circle that is the Pit, but the Pit is so large, the curve so gradual, that it appears almost straight. On the far side are arches, like those of an ancient coliseum, providing a view of the scene below. The glow of hellish fire flashes from whatever lies below; the infamous scent of brimstone burns my nostrils.

All along the walkway are demons, walking with purpose, all headed somewhere. It’s a ramp I now see. Reporting to work, maybe?

Unable to stop myself, I creep towards the light, curious to see what torments hell visits on the most unfortunate of its damned. I have half a mind to take notes. I work through the crowd, until I reach the edge and bend, peering through the arch.

I stand on the edge of hundreds of thousands of eternities, all spent beautifully broken, destroyed, only to be brought back and destroyed again. The horror of it flashes in a sticky slideshow of blood and heartbreak, agonies perfectly calibrated for the victim at hand, each one perfectly suited to each individual screaming, crying, cowering soul.

I won’t tell you what I see. My mind won’t go there; it can’t grasp the details without recoiling in horror. I can only say that it’s more horrifying than my imagination, more terrifying than I can find the words to explain.

I can say only that my heart breaks and I am not an empathetic creature. I delight in what makes other people retch, and yet my stomach rebels.

I hate comfortably, destroy easily, drink vengeance like the sweetest wine, and yet I cannot accept, cannot keep in my memory the things I see and continue in any semblance of sanity.

I certainly can’t describe it to an innocent such as you.

For an entirely different reason, I won’t describe my reaction to it. The delicate flower of my dignity, you will recall.

I don’t remember pulling away, I don’t remember wiping my mouth on my sleeve, but a streak of vomit tells a tale. I do remember pressing my back against the solid stone of the archway, warm from the fires below, knowing I should get up. I remember watching demons stride by, wondering how they stand it, then noticing how they keep their eyes straight ahead. A few cast low, furtive glances in my direction, catching sight of my limp, outstretched leg maybe, but not one looks directly towards me. Not one risks catching a glimpse between the fiery arches.

That way leads to madness.

I do remember running like hell when I could. Racing back down to the comfort of the crowded ballroom. I need the sharp practicality of Jo’s no-nonsense comfort, to scrub my brain with Chi’s infuriating goodness or feel the false security of Armand’s arms. I stand at the edge of the ballroom, too raw to even look in the direction of zi-Ben, searching the room for a familiar face, and it’s not long until I find one.

Dear old dad.