Entice: An Ignite Novella (3 page)

I can almost feel what Azael feels—the warmth of Michael’s chest cavity, his still heart brushing past my fingers, the nerves that moments ago sparked with life.

Once, Azael explained to me how to separate soul from body. It’s complicated and dangerous, but with practice it becomes second nature. He said that you have to curl your fingers around the soul because it sometimes fights back, clinging to its vessel, unwilling to let go and accept its death. Then, when you have a strong grip on the slippery thing, you have to detach its tendrils and pry it out of the chest without destroying it. I wonder how many souls were torn to pieces before the angels perfected the technique.

I watch Azael’s face carefully as it contorts in concentration. His brows knit together and he closes his eyes, forming silent words on his thin lips. And then something changes. His lips curl back over his teeth, his eyes squeeze together so hard it looks painful, and his face—I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so pale.

Suddenly, with a low hiss, he jumps back from the body, cradling his arm to his abdomen. He holds it out, flexing his long fingers and cursing at his own hand. There’s a giant, glowing red welt that reaches up his left arm like a hot, vengeful smile.

I rush forward and take his forearm in my hands, trying to focus all of my energy on healing the wound, but he pushes away from me before anything happens.

“What the
hell
happened?” I ask under my breath.

Lucifer grins. “You’ve just used Hell as an intensifier...” He pulls his thin, white fingers through his stringy, white hair. “A fantastic expression. You have skill at turning a phrase, Penemuel.”

Shit.
I chew the inside of my cheek and quietly curse myself for letting Hell slip into my vocabulary. The spark in Lucifer’s flat, blue eyes tells me it’s an expression he intends on employing quite often.

“His soul—” Azael turns away from me to face Lucifer. “It’s too pure. Angels... Their souls are unblemished, pure light, goodness.”

He grimaces, and I can’t tell if it’s from pain or disgust. I wobble forward on my toes before thinking better of going to him. I stand statue-still.

“They’re white-hot,” he continues to explain. “The fire of Heaven spits through their veins. I haven’t had any problems extracting them before, but now that I’ve fallen, my soul has...”—he searches for a word—“
dimmed
, I guess you could say, and is on its way to extinction, so it’s more difficult. It shouldn’t be impossible, but—”

“Then try again,” Lucifer says cooly.

“He’s hurt.” The words grate out through my clenched teeth. “Can’t you have someone else do it?”

“He’s fine,” he answers.

Azael tears his arm away from me. “He’s right, I’m perfectly fine.”

“No, you’re obviously not.” I watch as the welt spreads farther up his arm. It must be excruciatingly painful, but Azael stays silent, simply working his jaw.

“You need to leave, Pen,” he tells me shortly. “Go.”

“Excuse me?”

You’re not in your right mind. Go back to Hell.

I absolutely will not, Az. And since when do you think I take orders from you?

Lucifer steps up to me and takes my hand between his two cold and clammy palms. He squeezes them tightly. I straighten my back, forcing my spine to stay stick-straight and not flinch away from him.

“Are you going to be a problem?” he asks.

I look down at Azael, over to the hoard still waiting at the bottom of the mountain. They’re gathering weapons, removing armor from the fallen and leaving the dead naked. The wrongness of it all screams at me, making my vision blur. How can I look past this, forget the atrocity I took part in?

Half of me wishes I had died on the battlefield. I begrudge whoever saved me.

“You wish to die?” Lucifer’s voice is soft, but Azael hears.

“She doesn’t believe in death,” he laughs from the ground. “If you’ve ever seen her fight, you would think she fears nothing. Pen believes she is mightier than the sword.”

Lucifer purses his lips. “Are you fearless?”

“I fear many things,” I say, pulling my hand from him. “Like corruption, corrosion, other words that start with c...” I list a few in my mind.

“But not death.”

“Not my own.”

He considers my words, and I instantly regret telling him this. It’s too much. After what seems like small eternity, he speaks again. “Go now, Penemuel. You may not take orders from your brother, but you take them from me.”

Do I?
I nearly ask before I bury the thought in my head, deep enough that he won’t hear it.

“Fine.” I hide as much of the venom that leeches from my voice as I can.

I back away from them, from Azael—this stranger who looks and sounds do much like my brother but somehow isn’t. Lucifer turns to Michael again, to watch Azael as he tries to extract his soul again. I throw one last glare at Lucifer’s back, at the hollow point between his imperious wings, before I disappear into the throng of demons returning to Hell, back to the only home I have left.

––––––––

T
HE THING ABOUT
H
ELL IS
, it’s hard to keep track of time. Impossible, actually. The light never changes, the air never shifts. No one abides by typical schedules so all of the common areas are always busy with bodies of green, black, and blue creatures consulting with fallen angels wearing midnight wings. The circles of Hell are stuffed with bodies.

In Hell, one day bleeds into the next. You can exsanguinate a week without even noticing.

Time is a shadowy monster here. It can be chased but never caught. One pause to collect your thoughts kills three days. Spending what feels like years reading or walking in circles around the icy, cavernous halls only passes an hour of your time.

I don’t know how long ago the war ended.

––––––––

I
SHARE A LARGE DORMITORY
with Azael. It’s cold, both in temperature and furnishing. Bare and simple, just two narrow beds pushed up against opposite walls with two plain nightstands.

We’ve divided the room in half, him taking the right side, and me the left. There’s a clear line in the room that separates our two spaces. His is kept orderly and empty—just a neatly made bed and a side table with a drawer full of weapons and empty vials used to trap and transport souls.

My side, on the other hand, is in a constant state of disrepair. The sheets on the bed are twisted and spill onto the ground like a fabric waterfall that usually trips me as I pace the perimeter of the room. Dozens of journals and old history books are splayed around the floor, stashed under the mattress, and stacked haphazardly on the nightstand like some crooked tower. There’s a fat well of ink that I keep next to my bed in case I have the sudden urge to write something down in the middle of the night.

The disorganization drives Azael mad. I think that’s one of the reasons I love it so much. The untidiness is warm to me, whereas the harsh order he prefers looks detached and unfeeling. It’s all severe edges and crisp lines with him; I prefer the blur of shambles.

There’s nothing in this room that is Azael, nothing from our life before. He has become a true soldier and burned away his past to make room for his future and the cause he now serves.

I’ve become intimately familiar with every inch of this room. Since we’ve returned to Hell, Azael has spent nearly all of his time in the company of Lucifer, conferring with him about how best to keep Michael’s soul caged.

There was a story Azael had heard about when we were still in Heaven, a whisper about a box the guardians had constructed that would protect important or injured souls from any outside danger. Protection, however, is handed down with good intentions; imprisonment like this was meant to be malevolent. With Lucifer, he helped redesign the box, twisting it into something darker—a permanent, impenetrable trap.

The box, he claimed, wasn’t enough to hold Michael. So they created a special room, enchanted with curses, to further secure his soul. He called me to help but only let me stay long enough to carve the strongest curses I knew; he handled the rest. The room is to be guarded at all times, by both Greater Demons and hellhounds, and in a concentric circle spiraling out from the prison are traps and binding spells. No expense was spared when ensuring the cell they’d created for Michael would be impervious to attack, no measure deemed too extreme.

I had no further part in the process than the few curses I carved. Seven in total, burned black in the ice. Azael wouldn’t allow me to assist more, telling me to stay away from Lucifer. I was only too eager to listen. I think he’s hoping that if I keep my head down long enough, Lucifer will forget the way I spoke to him on the mountain after the final battle. My mouth can’t get us into more trouble if I keep it shut.

According to Azael, I’m too emotionally unstable to be trusted. He’s worried that my moods swing too quickly from one end of the spectrum to the other. One minute I am fine and quiet, the next I am ready to rip apart everything I own, especially at the mention of Lucifer.

There are times Azael takes my anger as commitment to our new cause; he encourages me to let my rage flame up and consume me entirely. He thinks it will build character and serve as practice for the devastation he’s sure we’ll unleash on Earth. But until I can learn to compose myself and hide my temper under the terrifying mask of calm Lucifer has mastered, it’s best I stay out of sight, tucked away in our small corner of Hell.

He hasn’t yet forbade me from leaving the room—not that I would listen to him if he did—but I don’t find anything of interest down here. The halls and each great room look the same. Icy. Cold. Blue with veins of what looks like blood pulsing through the floor. I’d rather stay here, in my room with my books and words, than be forced to try to make light conversation with the demons and fallen angels that are already so committed to Hell’s mission.

I don’t have the energy to fake the enthusiasm necessary to pass as a compatriot, so I practice my convincing smiles and sardonic commentary in solitude.

––––––––

I
N THE MIDDLE OF THE
night—or maybe it’s early in the afternoon; I can’t tell anymore—someone knocks on my door. When I roll out of bed, fighting off the sheets that scrabble at my ankles, to answer the knock, I find an empty hallway. I lean out of the room, glancing down the corridor both to the left and right, but no one is there. On the floor waits a small page of parchment addressed to me with three words scrawled on it in large, jagged letters.

Presence required. - Lucifer.

I consider crumpling it up and ignoring the summons but think of Azael. I haven’t seen him in weeks—probably—and if he’s there, maybe we’ll get a chance to speak. Maybe I can convince him to stop kissing Lucifer’s ass, trying to get us fancy titles that mean less than nothing to me. I pull the door to my room closed behind me and start walking to meet the King of Hell Himself before I can change my mind.

I follow the twisting passages down, deeper into the ground. Past the dining hall, the great hall, the armory, and the training room, where dozens of demons are gathered to practice combat. Screeches and screams pierce my ears and echo off the icy walls before they are swallowed by distance. I reach the end of a hallway that slopes down to the lowest part of Hell and stop at a pair of giant doors that are fashioned out of bones. My eyes are level with two empty, hollowed orbits of a dark skull.

Two Greater Demons stand guard at the door and stop me from entering. I hold out the parchment letter for them, unfolding it so they can read the calligraphy.

“He’s expecting me.”

They move aside and the doors ease open behind them with a gasp.

Lucifer spends most of his time in the tall antechamber that precedes his own annex, which breaks off into several grand rooms, each ten times larger than the one Azael and I share. The ceiling is hundreds of feet high, with large, dangerous-looking rock formations that drip from the ceiling like daggers. It has been decorated to look like a throne room, a mockery of the one in Heaven. But instead of cream marble swirled with the color of caramel, Hell’s facsimile is flat, blue, shining ice.

The room is surprisingly bright for being buried so far underground. Only the throne, made out of solid black metal that is bent and snarled to look like an army of vengeful wraiths, is dark against the cold blue of the antechamber. Lucifer, with his shockingly white hair and ghost-like complexion, sits casually on the seat of the throne.

He laughs when I enter. “I was wondering if you would show up.”

“I almost didn’t,” I admit. With Lucifer, there’s no point in being anything but unreservedly forthright. He can see everything I hide anyway, can read a lie on my lips before I even have a chance to think of one. I look around for Azael, but he’s not here. “Where’s my brother?”

“Busy.”

“Then so am I,” I say, pivoting on my heel to march back to my room and wait for Azael to return. The two doors slam closed in front of me, locking me in the antechamber with Lucifer staring a hole in my back. I face him again, curling my fingers into my palm painfully to cut my temper off at its knees; my anger cripples before me. I build up my stone wall again—higher and higher. From behind my turret, I present the most convincing pleasantness I can muster. “Perhaps I’ll stay.”
Not that you’ve left me with choice.

Silence swells in the room, pushing up against me uncomfortably.

“I’m assuming you called me here for a reason. What is it you want?”

“I want to trust you.” Lucifer’s voice whispers sharply through the room, but his face is smooth and eerily peaceful. “But I’m finding it difficult.”

I nod and let him interpret the movement as he will. Maybe he sees it as an understanding, an apology, and pledge to prove myself.

“There are a few different ways to come into power. By force or by the willingness of the people. Which do you think I prefer?” He waits, as if he expects an answer, but gives me no time to say anything. “It is so much easier to control those willing to be controlled.”